White Corpses

The war came because the white freebooters had neglected the divisive fissures between the North and the South. They had come like a thief in the dead of the night and hauled people diametrically different from each other into one scanty space and slapped a name and a language on them. Then they incinerated the cultures of the people and planted compradors in each division hurriedly drawn by them. They didn’t know the country would one day be caught up in the web of Sophie’s choice. Perhaps they knew but didn’t care a bit. After all, Nigeria was a mine, and its collapse would not be that of London. So, when the war began, the remaining colonial masters left as they had come, and stayed afar to watch as their former vassals would do it.

At the beginning of the war, Uzor left Onitsha for Asaba, his hometown. It was better to die in one’s land than in what seemed like a borrowed home. For him, the colonial masters had shaken the jar and run away just the way he always felt God had created the world and left humanity to handle its troubles incommunicado.

“The MacPherson Constitution started this very mess,” he said to himself, packing his travel bag.

He had to leave because people were leaving, and his family—especially his seventy-year-old father—was on his neck. Also, his business partner, Okpara, had moved with his family into Dahomey the previous day. 

Before Uzor left, he went to their electronic shop to properly close the windows and spread sheets on goods that needed protection against dust. The uproar would not be that long; they would come back and continue as soon as Ojukwu had come to terms with the federal side. After all, there were speculations that more post-Aburi peace talks were underway. The fire was definitely going to kiss the waters of genuine reconciliation.

Outside, he looked at the shingle and lipped the inscription: O & U Electronic Shop. Then he sighed and entered into his Volkswagen Beetle and hit the road to Asaba. Close to the Niger Bridge, he picked a family of four. They were also leaving for Asaba. Tensions were high and people were at their wits to avoid sorry stories. It was good to be optimistic as much as it was to be pessimistic. Ojukwu had already declared war, and anything was possible at this point.

“You are leaving without your family,” the man asked Uzor.

“Yes.” 

“Why?”

“Well, I have no family here. My only family here is my business.” He watched the children in the rear mirror. The boy was still while the little girl hummed a song.

“Better. I know that things will be fine soon. But it is more appropriate to be cautious.”

“Exactly,” Uzor said, staring at the vast spread of the River Niger. “None of us has the eyes to see tomorrow, so we can only employ care when we do not feel safe.”

The man, sitting in front of the car with the seatbelt on, agreed with Uzor. They drove in half-silence while the little girl kept hushing the soothing but unrealistic lyrics of Nigeria We Hail Thee. Her voice was faint, but the lines filled the car, flying out of the open windows, onto the wings of the wind, and into the indifferent river. That was the destiny of the country peeling off. The words pierced the hearts of the adults in the car. When her father told her to stop singing, she bit her nails and began to cry.

“Don’t cry, beautiful girl.” Uzor was now halfway on the bridge. “What is your name?” He changed gear, making the car jerk.

“Elizabeth.” She didn’t look up.

“Can you sing for me, Queen Elizabeth?”

She beamed, and then looked from her father to her mother and began to sing the stanza she knew best:

Nigeria, we hail thee,

Our own dear native land,

Though tribe and tongue may differ,

In brotherhood we stand

Nigerians all, are proud to serve our sovereign Motherland

Uzor had known a day like this would come; it was just a matter of time. During his stint in Kano as a child, where he was born and raised, he saw the squalid face of segregation. Even as a boy, the streaks of hostility were evident for him to notice. His parents lived there for over two decades. Since his father was one of the few educated Westerners at the time, he had moved to the North to work as a waterworks superintendent. There were many job opportunities in the North because there had been a strong aversion to formal education. But the people’s implicit obedience to the shenanigans of the white man would cause the colonial masters to focus their developmental strides there. They had few schools but many factories and companies that depended on workers from outside the community to thrive. In other words, the North was more or less the “greener pasture” of the Nigerian nation-space. The only issue with it was the problem of assimilation. First, the North was not in support of the welding—not wedding—of 1914. They wanted to be alone and free. But since it was easier to rule the people as a unit, the white man defied all odds and turned the country into a motley amalgam. Things became challenging for the unhappy couple. There was a climate of hate and fear. In the Western region, Easterners had fully integrated into society. They lived alongside the Yoruba, participated in social events together, and their children attended the same schools. However, in the North, under the influence of local rulers—and with no objection from the British—Southerners from both East and West were confined to Sabon Garis, which were considered special settlements for strangers and were located outside the main city walls. The plain name for these so-called “special settlements” was ghetto (the den of kafirs). Life within these ghettos was vibrant and full of energy, but interaction with the Hausa population was limited, as the Hausa preferred to keep their distance. Education and religion were separated by group, and the two distinct communities—like negros and whites—existed side by side with no British effort to promote unity or integration.

In 1959, the last year of explicit colonialism in Nigeria, Uzor’s father lost his sight and decided to move back to Asaba with his family. At this time, Uzor was around nineteen years old, and his kid sister was fourteen. Since he was already done with secondary, he went ahead to join the pioneer set of UNN and study engineering. It was at this time that he met Okpara (not Michael Okpara), and together they started their Electronic Shop business. The growth of the business was slow, but they kept the embers alive (even when Okpara put a lady in the family way in his final year) and finally graduated to the excitement of their families.

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Uzor arrived early but was held down by his village acquaintances in a mum-and-pop palm wine shanty close to his father’s house in Asaba. These were his new companions since he had parted ways with the family he had given a lift to at Onitsha.

“Uzor, Uzor,” Okpeheye, the revered grammatical drunkard in the neighbourhood, hailed Uzor, almost falling as he spoke. “The war has brought you home, abi?” He sputtered. “Should I say war is good? Yes—oh yes, war, in parts, is good. If not for it, I wouldn’t have seen you this time.”

Uzor laughed and patted the bench for him to sit and share his wine and bush meat.

“This is a complete you, Uzor,” the drunkard continued. “Last year, there was a massive exodus of Southerners from the North. They couldn’t stand the massacre. There were nonsensical killings of people, and they had to leave. Some came back without legs. Some didn’t make it home. Some were brought back without heads. I even know of one traumatised mother who returned with just a bowl in her lap, containing the head of her child, which had been chopped off in her presence. I praise God that Uzor, even though not returning from the North,”—he snapped his fingers to emphasise distance—“has come back whole and healthy.” 

“God is great,” Uzor said.

“When did you come?”

“I just arrived.”

“That is good.” He sputtered again. “I will not touch your wine nor your meat. It is this thing that is bringing issues in Nigeria.”

The people around laughed.

“Who is there?” Okpeheye asked, turning his head round. “Bring a keg of palm wine and the waist of that your male grasscutter. Uzor will pay. You don’t know him? He is an exporter and importer of all kinds of electronic contraptions.”

“You cannot be eating that much when war is coming,” someone said.

“Who is speaking?” Okpeheye snapped. “Are you here to fetch water? Nooooo. You are here to eat and drink. Are you not aware of the imminent war? Now, let me tell you, boy.” He coughed and patted his chest as though something was burning there. “As far as hunger is not a respecter of the mood of the nation, the hungry one must keep eating and drinking. Is that clear?”

“It is clear,” the scrum in the shanty shouted in agreement.

At last, Uzor was free from the grip of the shanty. He drove home and met his parents in the house. His mother was happy to see him. She danced in circles and went into the kitchen to make his favourite dish. By evening, they had dinner and plunged into a night of lamentations. The condition of the country worried Pa Uzor. He had wanted his daughter to come home, but she insisted the atmosphere in Lagos, unlike in the Eastern Region, was sober. All seemed to be well.

“She will be fine,” Uzor assured his father. 

“Amen oo,” the mother punctuated.

“Ojukwu shouldn’t have made the pronouncement. He ought to have waited for a while.”

“You may be right, Papa. But the fact is that Ojukwu did what was right for the moment. When a people cannot get safety from a place that is supposed to be home, then they shouldn’t be blamed for leaving. It is better to leave where living is only a bequest for a particular section of the country.”Pa Uzor actually saw the point. Secession was the necessary evil the Easterners needed. The piquant anti-Igbo pogrom of 1966 was still fresh in the hearts of the people. Many graves were still yet to bear grass.  The Easterners had endured the pains over time and, through Ojukwu, made their voices clear in all peace confabs, especially the two-day accord in Aburi, Ghana. The welding the British government did had failed and snapped open at the same place where the wires were hurriedly joined. What remained was for the threads to shrink. The Eastern end—much more vulnerable—shrank into the cosy acropolis of what it named Biafra. Then, as if a proxy of the gone colonial government, Yakubu Gowon rushed in with a Bible and a Quran to renew the vows of an ill marriage. We are one Nigeria. Let’s not dash our wedding rings into the receptacle of history. This was the voice of the priest behind the federal pulpit. But enough seemed to be enough for the abused partner.

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Uzor arrived in Asaba on May 30, 1967, the day Ojukwu had made a grand pronouncement on the status of Biafra. And since he arrived, each passing day seemed to be more glorious than the present one. The possibility of peace was diminishing at a neck-breaking speed. Between July and August, the infant of the national discord had metamorphosed into a full-fledged war. The most horrible news that got to Uzor—in the months the federal side had not started launching full-scale offensives—was that his shop in Onitsha had become a makeshift prison for sabos (a corruption for saboteurs), and it was actually there that, according to his source, Wole Soyinka was detained for hours before he finally had access to the Biafran warlord. Wole Soyinka? he had thought. He knew him. That slim intellectual with a voluminous afro hairdo needed no introduction. Uzor, though an engineer by training, had read Wole’s books, notably A Dance of the Forests and The Lion and the Jewel. In the former book, the prophetic sabo did warn against all that was happening at the moment.

“Things are getting disastrous by the day,” Uzor told his father when he finally had his audience later in the evening of the day the shop news reached him.

By August, the Biafran side had taken over more or less the whole of the Midwest Region. They flooded Benin City and stayed in control until the federal troops came and started to repel them. At last, the Biafran side was pushed back to the shores of the Niger. To be safe, the Biafrans severed their end of the Niger Bridge to hamper the federal troops from infiltrating Onitsha, which at the time was the heartbeat of the Biafran cause. To be sure the enemies were flushed, the federal troops trailed the Biafrans into Asaba. They got to Asaba on August 5. Unable to cross the broken bridge, the Nigerian army decided to vent its anger on the innocent dwellers of Asaba. First, they accused the people of siding with the Biafrans. Second, they said the residents were harbouring the enemies of the country. Upon these premises, the abuse of human rights began. They went about sacking houses, beating people, raping women, and shooting whatever they wanted. Residential buildings and trader shops were raided. What happened to a resident depended on the mood of the trigger-happy killers in uniform. If you were Igbo, death was certain. To be Igbo was to be Biafran. And to be Biafran was to live under the threat of torture and death.

The soldiers operated into the night and resumed the next day. On this very day, Pa Uzor’s house was also stormed. One lanky soldier slapped Pa Uzor across the face. How dare the old man stare at him while he was talking? That was a blind man, old enough to be the father of the abusive soldier.

“His eyes may seem intact, but he doesn’t see. Why slap him?” Uzor spoke from where he was forced to kneel with his mother.

“Shut up,” one of the soldiers commanded. “No be us be the cause of im bad sight.”

The lanky soldier cocked his gun. “You dey speak turanci.”

“Neither is my father the cause of the palaver in Nigeria.” Uzor rose to his feet and started working towards his father, who was now lying supine on the veranda.

“Get down or I shoot you.”

Those were the last words Uzor heard and could remember when he finally woke from his trance. The lanky soldier had cracked Uzor’s head with the butt of his gun. The throbbing headache would not leave him. His parents were also recovering from the horror of the previous afternoon. The next morning, Uzor heard the residents of Asaba were going out for a peaceful march against the uncalled-for brutality of the Nigerian army on innocent citizens. Even in his condition, he tagged along, literally walking turkey. The Peace March was a just cause. To miss it was a shameful thing to do.

The streets were filled with people dressed in white, singing One Nigeria at the top of their lungs. Uzor was in his white three-piece flannel suit, chanting and calling for the termination of the army’s untoward operations in Asaba. At one particular junction, they encountered a group of soldiers. But the stream of demonstrators continued with the march and the peaceful call for peace in their town. One Nigeria. One Nigeria. They thought this would calm the federal troops. It boomerang instead. The soldiers hijacked the crowd and started to divvy them into groups of ten or twenty people, especially men and boys, who were then shot and killed in the open glare of the rest of the people. The soldiers were heard mocking the civilians. Some threw the mockery jibes at the people in Hausa. Dan banza. Uzor heard all of it because he had lived in the North.

“Please, we do not want the war,” one boy in the crowd said.

“Who just talk now now?” one soldier asked.

“Una no go talk?” another one asked, cocking his gun.

The crowd had to push the boy to the front.

“Na you no wan war, abi?”

He nodded, his body shaking.

“What do you want?”

“Peace,” he answered.

He was indeed given permanent peace.

The massacre peaked at the Ogbe-Osowa Square, where the federal troops decided to mount a machine gun in an open-back truck. Dissolving the crowd was a waste of time, so they preferred mass shooting. At the nod of the military potentates, fire was opened on the civilians. There was commotion. About ten bullets or so were lodged into Uzor’s left thigh. Due to his state of health and the new bullet wounds, he was trampled upon in the crowd and was trapped beneath the corpses of fallen civilians. The square was littered with corpses and bullet shells. Some people died with their eyes still open. Close to where Uzor lay, there was the corpse of a young girl. She looked like Elizabeth. Even in death, there was a smile on her face, which faded as quickly as the consciousness of Uzor.After four days in a coma, he regained consciousness in a dingy hospital room. His head was pounding and his vision was blurry. He could see, not too far from his sickbed,  his kid sister talking to a man in white scrubs, a stethoscope dangling from his left hand. They were talking about him, but in low tones. From where he lay, he could hear words like serious and amputation. Uzor rubbed his eyes and looked at his bandaged thigh—numb and bloodied. It wasn’t just him, but Nigeria, too, needed an amputation.

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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.