Audio War

Having mandated me to proclaim on your behalf, and in your name, that Eastern Nigeria be a sovereign independent Republic, now, therefore, I, Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, Military Governor of Eastern Nigeria, by virtue of the authority, and pursuant to the principles, recited above, do hereby solemnly proclaim that the territory and region known as and called Eastern Nigeria together with her continental shelf and territorial waters shall henceforth be an independent sovereign state of the name and title of The Republic of Biafra.

THOSE WERE THE words we heard from my father’s prized radio on the morning of  May 30, 1967. I still remember it vividly because it was my twelfth birthday. I was in Standard IV. That morning, as a matter of fact, I was clad in my white short-sleeve shirt and sky-blue shorts, my calf-length socks left unrolled at the ankles so that their fold touched the foot openings of my patched sandals. It was not the day to think about war. My head was preoccupied with the possibility that my father would point at one of the roaming chickens and say, “Grab this one for my son’s birthday celebration.” Something like this did not happen. 

“War is coming.” It was Uncle Jata, my father’s close friend, who said that, and my father agreed with him, by half. The atmosphere didn’t give a good mood to the adults.

A man like Uncle Jata (calling him Jata without the Uncle attracted beating because he was really old enough to be an uncle) was never to be unreasonably disputed. He was the one who had predicted, years ago, that the country’s independence was on the horizon, and he was right. The white faces handed the whips to the black faces, and the relay of corruption continued. Uncle Jata called it neocolonialism, though I did not understand what that meant.

A coup had happened in January the previous year. Some revolutionary soldiers from the Western and Eastern Regions had plotted and executed the coup that claimed the lives of several notable people in the country, most of whom had been from the  Northern Region. Later in July of that same year, a counter-coup was staged by  Northern soldiers. The country was slowly dividing, whiffs of war in the air. 

“Our country is too young to fight.” My father turned off the radio and clamped down on the telescopic antenna of the harmless set until it came to a height no taller than two fingers put together. He bent it into its burrow and hissed, placing the radio aside. “May the war not come. Nigeria is too young a country.”

“Any country old enough to be involved in corruption is old enough for war,” Uncle Jata said.

My father tried to rebuke Jata’s pessimism with stories of peace and unity. It was more to convince himself than Uncle Jata whose mind was made up. I heard him mention late-minute reconciliations by nationals, but Uncle Jata saw no prospects. He claimed that if the Aburi Accord, which he had always been doubtful of, could not quell the volatility of the nation, nothing could. Later that day, I was word-mining, forming words out of NIGERIA—an activity I enjoyed doing as a child—and I got the bad word: R-A-G-E. I covered the letter “e” with my right middle finger and got R-A-G, which was better than rage.

My father’s wish for peace and unity failed to materialise when the war came. The Nigerian Army took the war to the Biafrans. At our home in Taraku, a little above the Eastern Region in the Middle Belt, life was a bit normal. The remarkable normalcy was also being experienced in parts of the Western Region and the capital territory of Lagos. The rifles were pointed to the Eastern Region, and the air-bombers urinated over the Biafra-marked locations. We heard stories of the Asaba Massacre, the destruction of bridges, and the execution of allies-turned-traitors. There was a war, but it was an audio war to me. None of us in Taraku experienced it directly; none that I overheard of. We only heard and lived to hear and imagine.

As time passed, we, the children, began to act out War Plays based on the things we heard, either on the radio or from the adults who came every evening to have quality time with my father on our veranda. Mr Akule was one such adult, a vendor of gossip. Perhaps, it was that he loved being in charge of every discussion, dispersing pieces of information on what had happened, where and who was involved. But Uncle Jata’s presence was always a hindrance—they did not get along well. The Akule-Jata hostility began a year earlier when Akule, the village champion, was wowing this small crowd of people who were fascinated by his assortment of information. He was narrating to them how Queen Elizabeth II was driven around Nigeria in Ojukwu’s father’s car on the day of Independence. 

“It was a very colourful event,” he had said, making the listeners’ eyes flash with happiness and awe.

“Nonsense! Rubbish! You are lying,” Uncle Jata countered, emerging from a corner. “Queen Elizabeth the Second did not attend Nigeria’s Independence Day Ceremony. It was Princess Alexandra of Kent who attended. Stop misleading the ignorant. A man with one eye becomes a king in the land of the blind. But it’s unfortunate for you that there are men in this neighbourhood with three eyes.” He sounded as though Nigeria were still stagnated because the Queen had sent a proxy, instead of coming down to the Race Course herself. And of course, he had insinuated that he was king with three eyes, publicly humiliating the figuratively one-eyed Akule.

When my father heard the story later in the evening, he told Uncle Jata that he shouldn’t have urinated on Akule’s parade in that manner. “When you want to correct a lie, Jata, you do it softly. You do not kill the demon by burning the possessed on a stake.”

The plays we performed were always what we heard about the war. For instance, when the news was about the corpses of soldiers, we acted out a war film by shooting ourselves with moulded or carven guns—contraptions made from clay or tree bark. There were always two sides in the war, and because I loved the sound of Ojukwu, I told my comrades-in-arms to be calling me that. The other side had a Gowon. Neither of us ever fought in the war; we sent people to go and kill and be killed for the cause of freedom. We would position, strategise and then wait till we heard news of who was winning the war, after which the leader of the losing side would run away to avoid getting killed like his army. When the news shifted from corpses strewn on blood-soaked battlegrounds to the malnutrition of people, especially children on the Biafran side, we switched too. Now we rolled rags into balls and put them under our shabby T-shirts to take after malnourished children suffering from kwashiorkor. The fake hunger bumps we carried, at some point, tickled us, and we would laugh as though kwashiorkor was not as real as the war on the other side of the border.

One evening, I heard from Uncle Jata that some women were giving birth in the war. It baffled him that men still had sexual desires at such a time, as though he was certain that the women would not have chosen to put their bodies under such conditions in a fight for survival, but he did not think that. “It is indeed true that the penis has a mind of its own,” he had said, as if he read my thoughts.

That same evening, Abel and a boy we called Mr Die (he loved telling people to fall down and die during our War Plays) acted as a woman in labour and a doctor on duty, respectively. Abel lay on the ground supine and was receiving instructions from the doctor. “Scoot down. Scoot down again. Open your legs. Push!” There were gunshots amidst the childbirth. We could not suppress our laughter, tears flowing from the corners of our eyes. Abel made for a terrible woman in labour.

 We tried to act out a sex scene, but the rod was not spared at all. One of the adults had caught us, and we all ended with cane lines on our backs and haunches.  The next day, we acted in moral roles. There was no point doing what the adults judged wrong, though they had not judged the play killing immoral.

We heard a lot about the war we never experienced. The more intense it got, the more audio it was to us. Over time, we would hear unusual war planes and jets flying over our heads, some carrying relief, others dropping shrapnel and bombs. The signs that there was a war were very clear to us. We dubbed the planes Iron Hawks. Anytime a number of them flew past our heads, we knew more Biafran chicks would be devoured. On some occasions, newspapers got to our end. Even now, I can not tell how my father managed to have them, but a few copies kept coming in, and when dad was not around, I went into his room to pore over the black-and-white photos of soldiers—with rifles resting causally across their shoulders, some slung over their backs—and children sporting looks that seemed to be saying: We are scared. We are hungry. Please, end the war now.  I remember one afternoon, I went to steal a look at the new arrivals. There were sordid pictures on the pages. On the front page of the newspaper, I saw a capitalised line whose words stung me like a bee.

 War is war. In war, nothing is wrong. The words verified some of the rumours I had heard: soldiers raping women and pilfering through villages. Some of such pictures I saw changed my perspective. I stopped using the war to act. Those were my peers, dying and starving; children like me. Many lies were told. The Biafran lies versus Nigerian lies. There were foreign collaborations. There were fabricated stories. Uncle Jata had a name for it: propaganda. At first, we found it challenging to pronounce the name, but later it became our plaything, and Uncle Jata was happy we were picking up his words like our lives depended on them. Propaganda!

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TWO YEARS INTO the war, some people in Taraku began to enlist in the armies and choose sides—Biafran or Nigerian. Where one chose to give their support was based on one’s convictions on the facts and events that led to the war. There was a neighbour we had whose tribe I didn’t know, and I still do not know. But he was from far Northern Nigeria. Mai Shai—so we called him—had a big zabiba on his forehead, and was always with a prayer mat. He was married to an Ibo woman. They had two children in our play group: a boy and a girl. Mai Shai and his wife argued over who was right or wrong in the war frequently.  Their family was torn in two. The Northerner husband against his Southerner wife. The boy child went with his father; the girl child sided with her mother. The audio war was now under our noses. One afternoon, Mai Shai visited my father and was candid enough to admit that the war was in his matrimonial home.

“This war is the problem,” he said, his thick accent tinting his words. Dis wo is za fuloblem.

The kids who laughed were lashed.

Unlike Mai Shai, who fought the war in his house, Uncle Jata’s younger brother, Shija,  joined the war on the Nigerian side. To him, the bigger side in any war was always the right side, and such logic pained Uncle Jata that he asked so many questions. The hawk was right while the chick was always wrong? The elephant was right while the tortoise was always wrong? David was wrong while Goliath was right? I didn’t have an answer to any.

The week Shija left, I had a horror dream. I wandered through an abandoned village, where ghostly echoes of war filled the air. Broken toys, bullet shells, and bloodied rags were scattered across the ground. Shadows of bullet shells and corpses whispered haunting accounts. I saw people trapped at the dizzying depth of a pit, their desperate cries merging with the wail of unseen air raids, closing in on me. When I woke up, the wails and gory images refused to get out of my head.

After two years, going to three, the war came to an end on January 15, 1970.

I, Major-General Phillip Efiong, Officer Administering the Government of the Republic of Biafra, now wish to make the following declaration: That we affirm that we are loyal Nigerian citizens and accept the authority of the Federal Military Government of Nigeria. That we accept the existing administrative and political structure of the Federation of Nigeria. That any future constitutional arrangement will be worked out by representatives of the people of Nigeria. That the Republic of Biafra hereby ceases to exist.

The Nigerian government responded. The war ended, but Uncle Jata’s brother never returned. Later in the evening, on the day of Peace, the streets were filled with merry people. They were celebrating the end of the war. They said the end of the war was a wide door beckoning at unity. To the people, it was unity. To me, it was audio unity.

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Ornguze Nashima Nathaniel is a Nigerian writer and editor. He is a major in mathematics and loves writing speculative fiction through “Acheyinka,” his coined literary style that blends the clarity of Achebe and Wole Soyinka’s lyrical, strange ways of depiction. 

Cover credit: Ebumnobichukwu Agu.