‘New York, My Village’ arrives Ibadan Saturday as Uwem Akpan reads at RovingHeights, Bodija

By Anote Ajeluorou

IN the second leg of his book tour in Nigeria, Uwem Akpan will read from his critically acclaimed work New York, My Village in Ibadan, the city famous for its ‘running splash of gold and rust’ (JP Clark) and ‘brown rusted roofs’ (Abimbola Adelakun). Joining Akpan in Ibadan to moderate the reading conversation is Tope Eni-Obanke Adegoke. His publisher Azafi Omoluabi will also attend, as well as members of the media and Ibadan literatti and culture personalities.

Indeed, Ibadan is an interesting stop for Akpan’s reading tour for New York, My Village. Although no part of the book is physically set in Ibadan, but momentous events that happened in Ibadan in 1966 inevitably spiralled into the bloody war that had dire implications for Akpan’s minority people. After the January coup that saw Major General Aguyi Ironsi becoming head of state, events quickly turned ugly on his state visit to Col. Adekunle Fajuyi in Ibadan where both men were murdered in cold blood in what became the July counter-coup staged by Murtala Mohammed and Theophilus Danjuma who would install Col. Yakubu Gowon in power to replace Ironsi, and who would inevitably plunge the young country into avoidable civil war.

In a sense, Akpan’s is the first book on the Nigerian Civil War that will be read in the historic city, and will serve as both commemorative and homage to the two soldiers who tragically fell in the quest for nationhood that continues to elude Nigeria.

And last Saturday at RovingHeights in Lagos, Ijeoma Ucheibe engaged Akpan on the volatile subject of the Nigerian Civil War that his book is about. It afforded Akpan the opportunity to explain some behind-the-scene complexities of the war as it impacted minorities in the Niger Delta who changed hands between the Federal and Biafran forces with dire consequences. It took Akpan over a decade to research the book and write authentically about what Niger Delta minorities suffered, as the war raged over the oil in their land over which the war was fought in other guises.

“My mother always told me about Biafra,” Akpan began, as he explained innuendos that would later fuel his curiosity and which would come to a head as he became a seminarian in Benin City. “My two grandfathers and grandmothers too. I was born in 1971, a year after the war. One of the things I heard most in my childhood was that there was so much food. Every time we were eating, they would say there is so much food. So it took me a while to realise there had been starvation and a lot of children died. By the time I was six, when I went to primary school for the first time in the next village, there was a mass grave behind that primary school.

“We used to wrestle there. It was a grave of Biafran soldiers, about 150 of them were buried there. Your shorts or shirt would stick on something and then there would be a bone. That was my first experience of human skeleton. Then if you were felled in wrestling they called you Biafran, and you’d cry the whole day, even as children. It was that bad.”

Unlike the Igbo, Akpan said minorities hardly talked about the war, noting that it’s a tragic episode they want to quickly forget on account of the trauma it inflicted on them, as innocent bystanders of a tragedy that happened in their land, as two elephants fought.

“Minorities don’t talk about the war the way Igbo people do,” Akpan told his audience. “I knew nothing about the war until I joined the Society of Jesus in Benin City. I went from Akwa Ibom to live in that seminary for two years and Benin people were talking about it. The Americans who were the priests had only heard of the Igbo perspective before meeting someone like me, a minority. To them, minorities don’t even exist, so how can you talk about your perspective.”

Akpan said Igbo’s strength as a large ethnic group in Nigeria helped in promoting their cause to the global audience unlike the minorities who might not be found on any map.

“The Igbo were lucky,” Akpan stressed. “They were already a big ethnic group before the war. The Hausa-Fulani are the masters of the Sahel. The Yoruba have also made their marks. So when they say Nigeria, they are talking about these categories of people. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was written before the war, and the whole world, because of that book, respected Africa. So Achebe had already put Igbo on the map. The first black man to win an Olympic gold medal, Emmanuel Ifeajuna, was an Igbo man.”

Uwem Akpan autographing copies of his New York, My Village… in Lagos

Writing the minorities of the Niger Delta from their obscurity into light, especially their own important but little known perspective about the war became a burden someone had to bear. The Catholic priests in Benin City prodded Akpan to the historic duty of doing the job. What he heard as he made the rounds a trainee priest was mind-blowing and set his imagination wild.

“For the minorities, it is a mountain to even exist,” Akpan declared. “The American priests, when they heard my view, they felt it was someone like me that should talk about the war. By 1991, I went to work at the leper colony. Even in that place, there was this story that the Biafrans came to Benin City on their way to Lagos. They stayed there for six weeks. They raped a lot of the women and killed many people. Mind you, the Benin were neural.

“We used to go around to give communion to sick people. After about a month, one old woman suddenly said to me, ‘you are Biafran, you raped me!’ So, I said I was not a Biafran. I introduced myself, and she started telling me how she was raped. And that was how I started asking Benin people what happened during the war.”

Akpan recounted how the Bini and others became so angry with the atrocities being committed by Biafran soldiers that “they constituted a force of 600 young men and women to fight and defend themselves. But the Biafrans infiltrated and slaughter them. They were forced to join Biafran forces. Murtala Mohammed was leading Nigerian forces into Benin City and started pushing the Biafrans back to Asaba. That journey was a very bad for the minorities on that road. Biafran soldiers were taking the minorities as (human) shields and a lot of them were killed. Hundreds were drowned.”

Akpan will treat guests to the Ibadan reading to more war expose and illuminate an important but less known aspect of the war that is yet to enjoy history space in Nigerian schools. Many critics have argued that a lack of closure for the war by the Nigerian authority is reason why the civil war does not enjoy pedagogical space in school curriculum. However, while successive governments prefer to adopt hushed tones to the war and fails to make narrative flair from it like Rwandans have done to assuage the affected, younger writers like Akpan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) and Chigozie Obioma (The Road to the Country) are delivering the history of the war in credible, believable fiction that challenges the taciturnity of officialese. Whether these writings will one day challenge the authority enough and force them to bring closure to the war is a distant possibility that can only be imagined for now.

Meanwhile unofficial history lessons from the war can be gleaned from the pages of New York, My Village in Ibadan this Saturday at 2.00pm-4.00pm at RovingHeights bookstore, Bodija, as Akpan reads and holds conversation with Adegoke.