© Numero Unoma
Less than a decade ago, on the day on which Ethiopia celebrates its new year, a date that has in recent times been overshadowed by the bringing down of the Twin Towers in New York, the UN General Assembly on September 11 2015 unanimously adopted the resolution that proclaimed 9 December the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but basically it’s all about restorative justice and atrocity prevention.
In a recent Guardian article covering the 27 November opening of a Lagos exhibition that was unimaginatively titled ‘Asaba Memorial’, and featuring a wholly predictable theme image of dripping blood, the journalist Gregory Austin Nwakunor termed the Nigerian Civil War to have been ‘fracticidal’, as though it were Igbos killing other Igbos. I mean, who else would our brothers be? A lot of grammar is blown about “the healing process associated with a regenerative spirit” and “the emotional complexities of a forgotten peaceful community”, but the article seemed to glorify what feels more like a fund-raiser and a book plug than a serious stab at the subject of truth and reconciliation surrounding of the atrocities committed in Biafra, which were condoned, in part even instigated by the Global North, aka the West.
Today I write on the one hand as a Nigerian who lives in fear of the insecurity on every street corner. The spectre of kidnapping and killing haunts us all, with the life of even the most ordinary Nigerian in a most ordinary situation being threatened by the ubiquity of insecurity. We are a traumatised people, and trauma should not be underestimated for its impact on individual, group and generational behaviour. Trauma is transferred and handed down, or on, in many ways, sometimes even genetically. More on that later.
I also write as an Igbo woman of Anioma descent. One whose great uncle died after being shot in cold blood by the Nigerian army during the Biafra War, in the run up to the Asaba genocide. Even my younger siblings and cousins remember the air raids, and running to take cover, and they remember the relativised normalcy of eating akamu under the bed. I also know of the hatred and despite that has often been directed at me at the sound of my undeniably Igbo name, not just in Nigeria, but also in the Caribbean where one of the strongest rumours about the Transatlantic slave trade is that it was Igbos who were the slave traders.
The older I get, the more apparent it becomes that we have a lot of baggage to unpack before we can make true progress. We, being Nigerians, we, being Africans, and also we, being Black people in general.
The story of Nigeria’s civil war is not just a tale of the Igbo holocaust. Uwem Akpan’s “New York, My Village” brings to the fore the perspective of non-Igbo peoples in the territory that we call Biafra, who were caught quite literally in the cross fire. A New York Times article feels that his novel “succeeds in making the too-rare observation that identity exists not as a fixed, individual thing, but in relation to others”, and it is exactly this yet amorphous relativity that continues to plague us Igbos to this day. No ethnic group in Nigeria has ever been villified, oppressed and persecuted like the Igbos. Furthermore, despite many truths being more recently unearthed and even acknowledged by non-Igbos, nothing has been done to reconcile the genocide of millions of civilian Igbos during the war.
Call me cynical, but memory practices such as the aforementioned exhibition often seem to be more rooted in exploitation than they could be considered even a feeble attempt at a band-aid prescription for healing. On the subject of the glaring absence of a truth and reconciliation event surrounding Biafra, I read an interesting scholarly piece in The Conversation, which asserts that “The same exclusionary political structures that led to the political crises and massacres across Nigeria in the 1960s have remained firmly in place.” Furthermore, it posits that “It has continued to reproduce the kinds of ethnic politics and violence witnessed since Nigeria’s “independence” from Britain.”
The authors of the piece, Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba and Benjamin Maiangwa, both professors at Canadian Universities, provide links to academic papers they have co-written on Biafra, in which they protest the memory-as-remedy approach, and question the absence of Biafra in the field of genocide studies. In another compelling article titled “Moving Beyond Semantics”, Amarachi Iheke postulates that “It appears academia has been focused on interrogating the Biafran claim, placing the burden of proof on Biafra to evidence its victimhood.”
In general it is difficult to address this subject without making reference to historical antecedents like Germany’s Nuremberg trials and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (now the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation), which took differing approaches, the former towing the line of retributive justice and the stamping out of Nazi-ism, and the latter taking a more reconciliatory approach to restorative justice, that included amnesty for the perpetrators.
As one seeking lessons to learn, I would say Rwanda is the closest parallel to Biafra. Moreover, both the conflict and its resolution have been comprehensively documented and dissected by indigenes, unlike that of Biafra. There is an interesting 4-part series of articles in The New Humanitarian that was published to mark their 25th commemoration in 2019.
“Members of Rwanda’s post-genocide generation have inherited a legacy of trauma that, a quarter century after events they never experienced, is leaving an estimated hundreds of thousands with undiagnosed symptoms such as anxiety, depression, and self-destructive behaviour, says Vincent Sezibera, a psychologist at the University of Rwanda and director of the Centre for Mental Health. Sezibera explained that “intergenerational trauma is possible either through transmission from parent to offspring or if it is embedded in a story of historical violence.” While genocide-related trauma may be secondary, the trauma felt can be equally terrifying, he said.”
In part 3, titled “A genocide forgiven, but not forgotten” the focus is on the children born during and after the genocide, who cannot have any living memory of it. The interviews vividly demonstrate different ways in which trauma is passed down to generations born in the wake of genocidal events. Inherited fear is a thing, a real thing. Biafrans were not afforded the luxury of even acknowledgement, let alone therapeutic healing. Their consolation prize was a meagre twenty pounds labelled “no victor, no vanquished”. Now dust yourself off and get on with it.
In Rwanda organisations like Never Again Rwanda actively engage the role of youth in ending hate speech as a basis for the Rwandan model in upholding unity and sustainable peace.
We need to join a bunch of dots in Nigeria. Like how there were pogroms inflicted on the Igbo even before independence, in the 1940s and 50s, for which there were no consequences for the perpetrators. Like how Biafra set the tone for subsequent dominoes of African genocide in Zaïre and Congo, Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, and Dafur. Most recently the dots connect Ethiopia backwards to Biafra. Obasanjo who mediated the latest ceasefire in Ethiopia just last month, has over the years been heavily invested as an apologist vis-à-vis Biafra, and even created the Oputa Panel the minute he took off his military uniform to don civilian presidential robes, yet the investigations of the panel did not include his own years in the military. Granted, he has always stood for the unity of Nigeria, though one cannot help but wonder how come it never so much as occurred to him to hold a truth and reconciliation process on the issue of Biafra.
As a creative myself, I am obligated to commend the Lagos exhibition on Asaba, even though I feel it to be both inadequate and contrived.
The inclusion of Professor Soyinka’s albeit well meant platitudes about it never being too late to forgive or too early to heal, on the Asaba memorial website, seems like just another sales prop for the work of a couple of foreign late-stage academics with access to USF grant money and the need for a riveting tale to tell. As for the condescending claim to “Arguing that events in Asaba were much more significant to the progress of the war than was previously understood”, I can only roll my eyes. Soyinka knew very well the significance of Asaba when in 1967, assisted by the Sea Dogs, his first stop on the way to meet Ojukwu, was Asaba, a journey for which the Nigerian government consequently threw him in prison.
If you really want to experience compelling creative work about African genocide, tragedy, triumph and healing – btw made also by foreigners – go and watch War Dance, and while you’re on the www, check out the maker’s website at shineglobal.org to see, or learn, how to make a real impact on the lives of the traumatised.
I hope that whoever takes the helm in our country in just a matter of weeks, will finally unpack Biafra, and tangibly put Nigeria on the road to healing.