See
Colin Legum, The Observer,
London, October 16, 1966, 2 days
after my 2nd Birthday [below.]
As Federal Finance Minister of
Nigeria in 1968, Chief Obafemi
Awolowo, later a contender for the
Presidency of Nigeria, stated:
"starvation is a legitimate weapon of war,
and we have every intention to use it
against the rebels." At the peace talks
in Niamey, Niger in August 1968, Nigeria
refused to consider the opening of a
monitored food corridor to allow food
relief for starving civilians in Biafra
including children and the elderly. Under
the provisions
of Appendix D, Article
2 of the United Nations Convention,
"deliberately inflicting on a group
conditions of life calculated to bring
about its physical destruction in whole
or in part" is qualified as genocide and
whether carried out in time of peace or
war is qualified by the convention
as a punishable crime under
international law. The irony, of course,
is that although the death toll in Biafra
topped 1 million in 1968 thanks in large
part to Chief Awolowo's policy of
strategic starvation, the United Nations
reported "no genocide" in Biafra.
- My heart goes out to the mothers,
the wives
Who bear when the hawk snatches its game at dawn.
My heart goes out to those whose
sorrow mops the pavements of the blood of their own, those
whose tears wet the streets
daily, whose souls sorrow weighs
down like stone on a mule,
whose tears must now mingle with
mine;
A prodigal sings your pain, mothers.
- Oguibe, A Song from Exile, 1990
The human stampede that ensued with the atrocities was quickly crushed, bridges blown up or cordoned off, so that all who were unlucky enough to remain behind the curtain of death which their erstwhile neighbors and countrymen set up overnight, perished with all that they had, their children, and their children's children, their cattle and their sheep, all that was living among them. In the face of it all those who survived sought refuge in their homeland in the east, where they decided they had a duty to protect themselves. In 1967, they founded their own nation, and what a day before was one country, overnight became another. Because we had been treated like people from another country, we indeed became another country. Biafra.
War followed, a long and
bitter war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, a war that ran
with the collusion or indifference of the world, a war in which, perhaps
for the first time in the history of warfare, starvation and famine
where engineered and employed as instruments of war.
Those who were spared death from the sword fell to the blade of hunger.
Those who survived the bomb raids on marketplaces died on their own doorsteps
from lack of nutrition. We moved again, myself and my family, and again,
farther and farther from the theaters of war, part of a seemingly endless
exodus, till we were sandwiched between the sea and death, and the theaters
of war were brought home to us. My father, though a clergyman who in his
youth had failed voluntary recruitment into the military because he was
adjudged unfit, and was officially exempt from military service because
of his calling, was never-the-less drafted into the dwindling rebel army.
Upon his departure there was left myself and a little sister, barely walking,
a disabled and aging aunt who even in the face of soldiers' guns and the
pounding of mortars and bombs, vowed never to move from the spot where
she had lived for forty years. Most of all, there was a young woman, a
mother with two children who in the midst of war had no respite or refuge.
There is little that the child's eye can recognize, yet there is so much that the child's mind registers. Amidst the horrors that I witnessed and the traumas that I endured as a war-child, the mutilated bodies of youth on the sidewalks and the terrors of bomber aircraft all of which left me with five straight years of daily nightmares, I carry with me to this day one memory deeper than all, the memory of the day when we feared that my mother had died in a bomb raid. To raise a family of two young children and several extended family members she had taken to trading behind enemy lines, and upon securing her goods, would travel long distances to market them. In the midst of war when most men had been taken to the front, only women were left to keep families alive. On that occasion my mother traveled several dozen miles, a long trek of several days, to a popular market where, on the day of her arrival, the Nigerian Air Force decided to drop their bombs. The news came on the radio that a slaughter had taken place, that pregnant women had been cut in half and their fetuses hauled through the air, that others had been buried in the rubble of their own stalls, and little children had been sighted crying beside the mutilated bodies of their mothers. My mother was there. We waited and wept, and prayed, then despaired. Suddenly the war was ours, my family's and mine, the loss was in our midst, and no loss has greater meaning than the one that is yours.
Several days later, my mother returned, a wreck but alive, her mind and soul shredded by what she had witnessed. Inside she bore her own wounds, the terror of standing face to face with death, the anguish of the thought that she would never see us again, that her children would grow up, or indeed perish, without a mother, without her presence and her loving care, the agonizing trepidation that in sojourning to find us food, she had also abandoned us. I know no terror worse than these, no horror more devastating, no anguish more corroding than a woman's fear that she might never again see her young. To survive that moment was a wonderful miracle, yet we may never survive the acid that it left in the crevices of the heart.
Such was my people's fate, and my former country's gift to a child. Such was the fate of my mother, and of several other mothers whose teenage sons were taken to the front never to return, whose husbands were taken, leaving them with fatherless children, who were violated and watched their own children being violated, who watched their suckling die at their breasts. Such was the fate of mothers in Biafra.
In a poem from his award-winning book, Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems, the great novelist Chinua Achebe describes a Mother's Day in Biafra:
No Madonna and Child could touch
that picture of a mother's tenderness
for a son she soon would have
to forget.
The air was heavy with odours
of diarrhea, of unwashed children
with washed-out ribs and dried-up
bottoms struggling in laboured
steps behind blown empty bellies.
Most
mothers there had long ceased
to care but not this one; she
held
a ghost smile between her teeth
and in her eyes the ghost of
a mother's pride
as she combed the rust-coloured
hair left on his skull and then
-
singing in her eyes - began carefully
to part it ... In another life
this
would have been a little
daily
act of no consequence before
his
breakfast and school; now she
did it like putting flowers
on a tiny grave.
After three years of bitter warfare, the few of our kin that survived surrendered the dream of a secure homeland, and once again pledged allegiance to the flag of the conquerors. After a long rendezvous with death and dying, we chose life. Several years later, as an artist and a man, I returned to Biafra and the traumas of my childhood. But memory was still too heavy and the wound too fresh to open. What became of my mother's wound I could never know.
The world remembers Biafra as a weary, bony mother with a dying child, captured in a grainy news shot. More than twenty five years on, in 1994, those images returned, this time to represent Rwanda, a country several thousand miles to the east where, as in Biafra, slaughter and exodus had ruined families. I was in Australia, an African among the natives, and as is the fate of strangers, was made an instant spokesman for my continent. For different people Rwanda meant different things. For some it was evidence of the primitivism of a race, yet we have seen that primitivism-- the primitivism of war and mass destruction-- among other races. For others it was proof of the persistence of savagery in Africa, yet in our century, we have seen even greater savagery outside of Africa. We saw it in Bergen-Belsen and we saw it in Bosnia- Hetzergovena. It is there in Oklahoma as it is on the streets of London. For, though savagery may not be the condition of our species, as William Golding suggests in Lord of the Flies, it is nevertheless a part of our common nature, what the writer Nadine Gordimer has described as our "natal sin". Rather than distinguish one race or people from another, then, it is on the contrary a trait that taints us all.
For others still, the tragedy of Rwanda was the tragedy of politics, the politics of ethnicity and otherness. It was the tragedy of the postcolonial state. Rwanda, however, meant much to me than politics. It meant much more than the return or persistence of savagery, much more than evidence of residues of the colonial scar. As I contemplated the images of children lost amidst the exodus, children crying by the bodies of their dead mothers, mothers watching their children die in their arms without a place to bury them, I saw myself, and my mother, and I remembered a Mother's Day in Biafra. Memory is a keloid; it may cease to hurt but it never disappears. Like the wound that created it, it demands to be nursed. When I think of strife and the atrocities of war, I feel the keloid of my childhood and the agony of my mother. I think of the agony of a thousand women cowering or marching boldly, sheltering their children from harm or watching them march off to fight, and die.
In same manner that savagery marks us, people of all races, black and white alike, so does its terrors unite all those who suffer. Which is why there is a bond between the American mother whose child follows his country's call and the fever of the flag and marches off to Vietnam to die, and the Vietnamese mother whose child falls on the opposite side; a bond between the mother of the Gulf War veteran who now must sit disabled in a wheelchair, and the Biafra mother whose son lost an arm. In the end, there is a lot more that marks us together than marks us apart, and one mother's loss is every mother's tragedy.
The wages of our natal sin, Gordimer writes in The Essential Gesture, is "the burden of responsibility," the duty to account to ourselves and our kind for our actions as a species. In most societies this burden is projected on, or voluntarily assumed by the figure of the artist. Not only is the artist expected to produce beauty, to create a semblance of order and harmony from the chaos and detritus of nature and our inclinations, it is our expectation, also, that she remind us of where we have been, what we have done, how we have triumphed or failed. In the face of all that we inflict upon ourselves, and all that we suffer, all the tragedies and cruelties that we produce or witness, we seek salvation in the miraculous gift of the artist to discern, always, and to give meaning, as it were, to our existence. "I have come to believe", a romantic Sir Herbert Read wrote in Annals of Innocence and Experience, "that the highest manifestation of the immanent will of the universe is the work of art." The vast perimeters of this will not withstanding, our faith in the artist hinges on a simple understanding, namely that there is an essential beauty at the heart of our being unsullied by the savagery of our natal flaw, and that even as she records or reflects upon the terrible consequences of this flaw, the artist more than anyone else is able to lead us back to that core of beauty.
The tragedies of Biafra
and Rwanda, and Congo and Zaire after it, are part of our common heritage.
They are part of the collective history of the human species. The anguish
and terror that they produced in those who suffered are ones that all of
us, at one time or the other, have faced and suffered, and the flaw at
the core of the human soul that wrought them is one that we all harbor
within us in spite of our claims to civility. It is a terrifying thought,
yes, yet each day our capacity to produce such tragedies and to bring suffering
to our kind manifests itself anew. In reminding us of these human tragedies
then, and of the terrible cost we pay, the greatest responsibility of the
artist is to remind us, also, of our shared capacity to bring them forth,
and of the need therefore, that we constantly reckon with the vagaries
of our own souls.
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