When does a civil war end?: What Nigeria’s recent war literature says

* Uwem Akpan, Sam Omatseye to Uche Nwokedi and Chigozie Obioma latest civil war writers

By Anote Ajeluorou

FOR those who are familiar with Nigeria’s war literature, it has been quite a prodigious amount of writing since the war ended in January1970, some 54 odd years ago. Yet writers from all across the divide, so to say, have continued to write about that war as if it ended only yesterday or just a few years ago. And so for 54 long years, the Nigeria-Biafra war or simply the Nigerian Civil War has continued to rage and elicit fictive, imaginative offerings. And each piece sheds new light on that infamous, preventable war. However, what has remained a constant is that the ghost of that war has refused to go away, to be buried. What then is so fascinating about the war that it has remained an unfinished business for writers? Why has the war continued to occupy such literary centrepiece of Nigeria’s imagination? When will its undying ghost ever be laid to rest? In other words, when would closure ever come for victims of that genocidal war?

The answer to these questions may be hard to find. Suffice it to say that as the years since the war recede, the war continues to assume a life of its own in the fictive imagination of writers who keep exhuming its ghost buried in shallow graves in one fictive form or the other. Since the publication of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun in 2006 (made into a film in 2013), there has been a flurry of creative activities around the war literature. But before Adichie’s tomes and tomes had been published about the war, whether as memoirs or fiction, from Chinua Achebe (Girls at War – collection of short stories) to Chukwuemeka Ike (Sunset at Dawn), to Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo (Roses and Bullets), Onuorah Nzekwu (Settled Dust), among several others. In 2013 lawyer and playwright Uche Nwokedi put on stage Kakadu the Musical, a deeply moving stage dramatisation of the horrors of the war that also toured South Africa. Journalist and writer Sam Omatseye published My Name Is Okoro in 2016 to add to the already swollen Nigerian Civil War literature.

But the war never ceases to fascinate and tickle the imagination of writers. Kakadu was not the only war literature Nwokedi would write before his sad passing early in the year. Last year he came out with his civil war memoir A Shred of Fear (Narrative Landscape Press, Lagos) that documents his experiences as a 7-year old boy who saw the devastating war from a childhood gaze. And two years ago University of Florida professor of creative writing Uwem Akpan whose short story collection Say You’re One of Them dazzled the world a few years ago (made it to Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club) came out with a massive tome on the war entitled New York, My Village. Although the title may not be related to the Nigerian Civil War, the war occupies a central place in that vastly sweeping epical narrative. In fact like Omatseye, Akpan adds or completes the missing or some part of the missing narrative about the war: minority voices that have been smouldered by the war narrators who had been mostly writers of Igbo extraction who bore most of the brunt of the war, as it was fought in the Eastern Nigerian enclave for 30 long months.

Uwem Akpan

However, in their narrative vision Omatseye and Akpan sought to correct the popular error that allocates victimhood solely to the people of South Eastern Nigeria. So, from My Name Is Okoro to New York, My Village, these two writers from Nigeria’s Niger Delta minorities rewrite and upturn the dominant narrative and apportion as much victimhood to the Niger Delta minorities that was a much contested ground for the war. While in My Name Is Okoro, the minorities of the Niger Delta are lumped with people from the South East as the same and visited with the same evil, New York, My Village takes the matter differently. In it Akpan is unsparing about the atrocities Biafra soldiers committed in the few months they held sway in minority areas of present day Cross River, Delta, Edo, Bayelsa, Rivers and Akwa Ibom states. While Omatseye argues that a name like ‘Okoro’ is enough to make anybody from the south to be categorised as an Igbo man, Akpan catalogues the war crimes Biafra soldiers committed in non-Igbo territories that they occupied before being pushed out by the federal forces.

So that while other narratives mostly by writers of Igbo extraction catalogue the evil federal soldiers inflicted on hapless Igbo civilians (bombing of school buildings, hospitals, markets, etc), Akpan’s work similarly accuses Biafra soldiers of similar or worst war crimes that range from rape, sodomy and sheer bestiality and holds up a mirror for them to see just how bad they were in their relationship with the civilian population of minority areas they occupied. If Akpan’s account is fictional and perhaps liable to being contested, the account of 88 years’ old medical doctor Dr. Albert Ekop in his war memoir (The Tailor) that details his work as military surgeon during the war irrefutably puts that argument to rest, as the community he worked in narrowly escaped being massacred by Biafra forces, because a conscripted native was able to send out a warning. Nestor Udoh’s recently published Civil War Child, launched in Uyo on October 25, 2024, is another memoir that bears witness against the atrocities of Igbo-dominated Biafra army. Indeed, the war ghost has remained a restless muse stirring afresh dark memories of the war.

Obioma’s The Road to the Country (Masobe, 2024, Lagos) is obviously the latest offering on the Nigerian Civil War. In it Obioma takes the reader deep into the warfront than any other writer has ever done. As he noted in an Instagram interview, he’d read just about any and everything on the war, but he’d always felt a missing link in the war narratives that needed be filled: actually going into the trenches with the soldiers and offering the war’s visceral aspect that others chose to look away from! That way he’s able to bring the war alive in a lush, intriguing prose. Though written by a writer of Igbo extraction, Obioma deploys a fascinating trick: makes a non-Igbo the protagonist! This deft stroke of narrative vision sets the book apart from any other and wittingly co-opts or drags the rest of Nigeria into it. Obioma gives Kunle agency to tell the story of an avoidable war, and by so doing, the rest of Nigeria sees themselves mired inextricably in it. His Akure birthplace gives Obioma this cross-cultural and national vision as he makes a non-Igbo to inhabit a disintegrating territory and fight a war not exactly his own (his mother is Igbo, his father Yoruba).

And it begs the questions many have asked since: why are there no war writers, whether fictional of non-fiction, particularly from among Northern soldiers whose rank and file majorly prosecuted the war? Apart from some officers from the South West (Yoruba) like Olusegun Obasanjo, Adewale Ademoyega who wrote personal accounts about the war, it draws blank from a section of the country that felt offended by the coup event of January 15, 1966 that led to mass killings in the north and then the war. Why has there been this shroud of silence from officers and men from the north? Pogroms or wanton killings in the north led to the mass exodus of south easterners from the north to seek a country away from the one that could no longer protect them. Also, officers and men from the Middle Best, for instance, fought bravely in the war. Why is their perspective missing from the war literature? Is it that victors don’t bother to tell tales other than victories? Does this not subvert the tale of the hunt?

Whatever the reason for the taciturnity from the ‘victors’ side, 50 years and counting are long enough period to lift the lid of silence. If anything else, one officer from the North for whom the war still raged in his head 51 years after was former president Muhammadu Buhari who made the infamous “dot in a circle” statement (June 10, 2021) while referring to IPOB, and by implication the South East. Never mind the ‘No Victor, No vanquished’ slogan declared by the Yakubu Gowon (he too hasn’t written or cause to be written about the war) government in 1970; the famous ‘3 Rs’ of ‘Reconciliation, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction’ never happened till date. Therein lies the undying ghost of the war, why the war does not seem to end in the fictive imagination of writers, mostly by those who didn’t witness the war but who became fertile inheritors of the war’s horrific stories.

Chigozie Obioma

And so just when you think you’ve read it all, another telling tale pops up and the war ghost assumes a new resonance, and supposedly ‘buried’ memories are exhumed. And then a country trying desperately (the Nigerian Civil War is not in history books for children to learn about their country’s past, rosy or ugly) to forget the war through the backdoor since she finds it hard to boldly confront it and truly bury its roving, menacing ghost. Now that ‘history texts’ is denied narrative accounts of the war, literature is lush with the stories, as warrant a full a 3 credit course on it by any university adventurous enough to put war literature in its syllabus. Perhaps, to finally bury the war’s undying, ugly ghost some sort of atonement would need to be made that takes into account the ‘3 Rs’ in a symbolic way that is truly meaningful, truly cultural, and truly wholesome for the emergence of a true nationhood.

Rwanda fought a bloody civil war in the 1990s, but the country has since forged an enviable nationhood from the ashes of that ugly war, and has become a model country. Nigeria fought a civil war much earlier, but has remained stuck in the trenches of that war ever since without a sense of nationhood. Nigeria is a country continually plagued by civil war ‘victor’ mentality that sees others as a ‘conquered’ or ‘vanquished’ people. A true nation cannot emerge from that mindset. Confronting the ghost of the civil war is perhaps the starting point. Until then more literature about the war might still be written, whether for our collective edification or damnation, only cultural historians will perhaps have the last verdict, and the last laugh!