Biafra is back in the news in a big way, thanks, in large measure, to the death of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. In a bestselling authorized biography written by Walter Isaacson, we learn that Biafra had something to do with Mr. Jobs’ renunciation of Christianity.
To paraphrase the story: as a 13-year-old, the late inventor extraordinaire had confronted his Lutheran Church pastor with a photograph of two starving Biafran children on the cover of Life magazine. The young Steve asked his teacher whether God was aware of the plight of the children. Once he was assured that divine omniscience implied that God had such knowledge, Steve Jobs, there and then, announced his divorce from Christianity.
I have seen that picture that drove an impressionable teenager to sever ties with his Christian faith. It is near-impossible to look at it and remain composed or untouched. The eyes of the famished Biafran babies are particularly disconcerting. In fact, there is a certain desolate impression etched on the subjects’ faces.
To view that picture – which has been widely shown on TV and circulated on the Internet in the brouhaha generated by Jobs’ death – is to gain a glimpse into the ways in which the violence of war ravages the innocence of children, terrorizes the most vulnerable, and upends humane values.
There is, I think, a paradox in the way that Steve Jobs’ death has resurrected Biafra in the imagination of the global community.
That paradox lies in the fact that, as the world was once again tuning in to the bloodiest tragedy in Nigeria’s history, Nigeria seemed determined to persist with its willed amnesia. That amnesia has a long history.
At the end of the war, with the federal side’s superior firepower triumphing, then Head of State Yakubu Gowon declared that there was no victor, no vanquished. That announcement, seen by some as an uncommon act of magnanimity, earned great adulation for Mr. Gowon. He also impressed the world by proclaiming that the war-scarred country would embark on rehabilitation, reconciliation and reconstruction. Few of Gowon’s admirers were detained by the fact that his (victorious) government’s actions were often at odds with its avowed policy of nurturing healing.
Two examples of this gap between precept and practice should suffice to underscore the point.
One was a policy that enabled the government to strip the erstwhile Biafrans of their wealth. At the end of the war, the Nigerian government implemented a policy that gave each Biafran adult twenty pounds as so-called ex-gratia payment. This would have been a commendable policy had the payment been designed to assist cash-strapped Biafrans to re-enter the Nigerian economy. Instead, the government decided that the paltry sum served as full redemption for any financial assets owned by individual Biafrans prior to the war. It was a self-evidently unjust policy of expropriation, and it dealt a crippling economic blow to the guts of a people who had paid a devastating price, with their blood and limbs, and who needed to be bolstered in their desperate effort to re-start their lives.
There was also the issue of abandoned property, a notion that matched – if not surpassed – the ex-gratia policy in odiousness, illogicality and patent injustice. In a move that exposed the hypocrisy of its avowed policy of reconciliation, the Nigerian government declared that Biafran citizens who owned property in parts of the country outside the formerly secessionist territory had effectively “abandoned” those assets.
What emerges, then, is a portrait of a nation caught pants down at critical moment indulged in dishonorable acts.
In one breath, it was proposed that the preservation of Nigeria’s corporate unity was an idea worth spilling more than a million lives for, and the maiming of even more. Yet, in another breath, the same Nigeria demonstrated unwillingness to extend economic justice to those who had sought to leave the union. We were told that “to keep Nigeria one was a task that must be done.” But – that task accomplished – we were told that the erstwhile Biafrans, now forcibly re-“Nigerianized,” were not entitled to the ownership and enjoyment of their property and income.
A central tragedy of Nigeria is that it has continued to carry on as if it never fought a war – as if its very viability as a proposition had never been contested in a war that cost more than a million lives, limbs, and extensive wreckage of its physical space. As Dr. Louis Okonkwo stated during the session earlier in the day, Nigeria’s history is donut-shaped – with a huge hole in its middle. This hole represents all the tragedies that we repress, attempt to erase, or refuse to acknowledge. Besides, owing to the existence of this donut history, Nigeria constantly slips and falls through the gaping hole.
There is no question that federal troops massacred hundreds of innocent, unarmed civilians in Asaba in the heady early days of the Biafran War in October, 1967. Many other nations have witnessed similar callous, shocking events in their history – and often on a larger scale. We have Pol Pot’s murderous reign in Cambodia, a pogrom in which approximately twenty percent of the Cambodian population perished; Hitler’s campaign to exterminate the Jews; the My Lai massacre of some 500 Vietnamese perpetrated by American soldiers, and less than a year after the Asaba massacres; the hundreds of thousands who perished in Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge in the late 1930s; and the huge socio-economic disruptions as well as human rights abuses that accompanied – or marked – China’s cultural revolution in the 1960s.
Africa has been both stage and victim of great acts of genocide. For more some three centuries, a consortium of European nations laid siege on Africa and carried out the capture, sale and enslavement of Africans, as well as the appropriation of Africans’ land and other resources. Adam Hochschild, in his book titled King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, offers us a grimly fascinating exploration of the savage violence that accompanied and was authorized by imperialist incursions into the Congo.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Africans and the world were horrified by the use – in, among other places, the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Sudan, and Rwanda – of rape, enslavement, and the amputation of limbs as modes of war.
It is not widely recognized that those shocking acts were virtually lifted from the bloody manual of King Leopold 11’s gruesome and sickening pillaging of the Congo’s human and natural resources. If this fact is not general knowledge, it is in part because, both among Africans as well as Europeans, some of the horrendous depredatory practices fomented and fertilized by Euro-imperialism remain unknown or unspoken.
In an effort to maximize the harvesting of wild rubber that fed King Leopold’s depraved appetite for profit, the Belgian potentate’s operatives were authorized to kidnap children and women, who were then ransomed back to their disconsolate fathers and husbands in exchange for ever increasing amounts of rubber.
Hochschild writes that, “Like the hostage-taking, the severing of hands was deliberate policy…If a village refused to submit to the rubber regime, state or company troops or their allies sometimes shot everyone in sight, so that nearby villages would get the message.” Hochschild then makes the point that “As the rubber terror spread throughout the rain forest, it branded people with memories that remained raw for the rest of their lives.”
It is important to underline, then, that the massacre in Asaba was far from exceptional. The critical difference between Asaba and, say, My Lai, is that there was some gesture to investigate what happened in Vietnam. Ultimately, the outcome of the My Lai investigations fell terribly short of expectations. Still bogged down in a war that baffled the best of its military tacticians, the United States’ was far from prepared to fully expose its unattractive underbelly. There was no doubt that the American public was horrified by the mowing down of defenseless Vietnamese men, women and children, even if the soldiers who wielded the guns were spared any sanctions.
In the case of the massacre in Asaba, the Nigerian state’s recourse to silence is indefensible. At minimum, the government should admit that its soldiers committed a gruesome act.
Even so, we must state that no amount of cash can redeem a life, or fully atone for the torment faced by survivors of casualties – those whose lives were unjustly taken. A deeper act of restitution is called for. And that is why the project to erect a permanent monument to the victims of the massacre is of utmost importance.
Until and unless we provide a space to honor the memory of the innocents executed in cold blood, for no just cause, we condemn ourselves to the fury and bitterness of the unappeased.
(This column is the first part of Ndibe’s keynote at the Asaba Memorial Park Symposium in Tampa, Florida)
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