Biafra

by Chigozie Onwuneme (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

I didn't expect to find Nigeria

“Biafra.” I had never heard that word before. As far as I knew, there was no place or thing. Yet the old man in the red and white striped hat had corrected me when the lady behind the counter had inquired about my accent. “My family’s from Abia State, but we live in Denmark”, I had answered. “This is my first time in Nigeria.” “Are nọ na Biafra.” You’re in Biafra. He was sitting at a little round table with two other elders. These sorts of groups were inescapable in the village square, setting up shop outside the small kiosks. While the other two were engrossed in their game of checkers, he had taken notice of our conversation, swiveling his stool around to interject. His voice was clear, matter-of-fact, despite the drained bottle at his feet. His gaze was steady, challenging even, and only shifted from my confused expression when the cashier handed me a flimsy plastic bag containing my haul. She smiled kindly as I ambled away, sidestepping a man leading a goat towards the marketplace. As soon as I got into the rusted blue car which had been idling nearby, my father, hands on the steering wheel, asked for the chewing gum which he had asked me to buy. Despite having lived in Europe for over 15 years at that point, his accent was still heavily Igbo. His e’s turned into i’s, so it sounded like ‘ching gum’. He popped two in his mouth and put the car in reverse. The small kiosk and the old men soon faded away, enveloped in the cloud of red dust left in our wake. As we rode along the well-trodden footpath to his ancestral home, my father would gleefully point out various landmarks from his childhood. He had not been back to the village since he and my mother had left it all those years ago. There was the river that he and his eight brothers would collect water from, hauling large buckets back to their home at dawn. “Buckets bigger than me”, he laughed, prominent dimples creating tiny valleys his cheeks. There was the tree from which Uncle Chidi had fallen. He gestured at a palm tree to his right. Standing over twenty feet, its leaves were so vividly green, they looked almost artificial. Chidi had been trying to tap the tree for its wine. I took note of it all, but I was still thinking of the man at the shop. “Baba”, I interrupted. “What is Biafra?” As soon as I asked, he fell silent and ceased casting about for things to point out to me. His eyes became sternly focused on the path ahead. It was a while before he spoke. “Where did you hear about that?” “At the market”, I replied. “Igboland”, he finally answered. “Biafra was our country.” “But it’s not anymore?” “No.” He momentarily took his eyes of the road to look at me. “You are Nigerian.” We drove the rest of the way in silence. The topic didn’t come up the whole rest of that summer and I had pretty much put it out of my mind until a few years later, when upon choosing Nigeria as the subject for a geography assignment, I happened upon the name ‘Biafra’ while researching my homeland’s history. I had been shocked to learn that ‘Biafra’ was the name that the Igbo tribe had called its land when they seceded from Nigeria in the late sixties. An ensuing civil war had cut its independence short; the nascent country had barely reached 3 years. The war had ravaged its proponents, and embargoes starved its people. My father had been caught in the crossfire. When I asked him about the war, I learned that, as a boy, he had been taken to fight for Biafra at the front lines. Put in the back of a pickup as his mother cried, soldiers drove him through dense forestry to their makeshift base. “It was hell.” He had looked on as, hourly, stretchers would return the mangled bodies of boys no older that himself. One night, he had escaped the camp, running barefoot through burning villages until somehow, he made it home.