A Collage of Sensibilities

Okechukwu Uwaezuoke reviews Through the Eyes of the Child, an Anthology of the Nigerian Civil War edited by three lawyers- John Mozie, Charles Spiropoulos and Edozie Ezeife, which would be launched in Abuja this Friday, August 27

Through the Eyes of the Child – the latest addition to the Nigerian civil war narratives – pieces together shards of haunting childhood memories retrieved from a painful past. A joint editorial collaboration of three lawyers (John Mozie, Charles Spiropoulos and Edozie Ezeife), published by Scribblecity Publications, it also includes additional contributions from 19 other eyewitnesses of the 30 month-long war who were born between 1952 and 1964.

Subtitled “Anthology of the Nigerian Civil War”, the 453-page collage of sensibilities – expressed mainly in prose form with token interpolations in verses – does a great job leveraging juvenile perspectives of the conflict as its unique selling point.

As the editors put it: “It is simply their stories, in their own words: what they saw, what they felt, what they experienced, what they heard, and the very spirit of a child’s life in the drama of war.”

Indeed, these are purely human-interest accounts, which concern themselves less with the pre-war political upheavals that eventually culminated into the protracted conflict. Events, which are mind-boggling in their dreadfulness, leaves the uncomprehending reader aghast and even questioning the mechanisms of Divine Justice.

For how could Divine Justice have allowed presumably innocent children to experience all this? And to think that the chroniclers are among the lucky survivors since many children perished under different circumstances during the war!

Through the accounts of these “innocent” eyewitnesses, details of man’s depravity and appalling ignobility emerge from both sides as misery descended more oppressively upon the part of the country that once declared itself the Republic of Biafra. Besides the devastation and horror unleashed upon a hapless civilian population by the Nigerian federal troops, the war also exposed the wickedness of many of the so-called victims.

Take a scenario in Fidelis Atuegbu’s “Biafran Childhood 1966-1970”. How does one begin to wrap his head around the puzzling hostile reception the author’s travel-weary family members met upon their late-night arrival in their hometown, Adazi-Nnukwu? “A relative, wielding a machete, accosted us and vociferously insisted that we were to return whence we came,” Atuegbu narrates.

“That was an unexpected reception, and it quickly degenerated into a spectacle as the rukus [sic] awoke neighbors and they all congregated in front of my grandfather’s compound. People were pleading with this relative to let us come into the compound, but all to no avail.”

Indeed, not even the imminent end of the subsequent infernal years awakened stirrings of true humanity in many. As Okey Ndibe in his “My Biafran Eyes” narrates: “My father had arrived in Amawbia to a shocking sight. Our house had been razed; the fire still smoldered, a testament to its recentness. As my father stood and gazed in stupefaction, the truth dawned on him. Some envious returnee, no doubt intent on equalizing misery, had torched it. War had brought out the worst in someone.”

Contrast this with the author’s account of how Ndibe’s father, who had elected to remain in Yola after sending his family home to Amawbia as the conflict brewed, was saved by the timely intervention of the Lamido of Adamawa, who would brook no shedding of innocent blood under his jurisdiction.

Obviously, thought-forms of good or evil thrust themselves upon willing human tools wherever they found homogeneous species regardless of geographical locations. Even as atrocities outdid themselves in their depravity, isolated deeds of kindness and heroism still managed to gleam here and there.

Arthur Harris-Eze’s “Surviving the Civil War” shares a heart-warming tale of children, immediately after the war, playing with friendly Nigerian soldiers, who “were mostly Northerners and Muslims” at the then Government Trade Centre (now Federal Science and Technical College) in Awka. Still about the latter, he adds: “They were friendly… and courteous to the community, elders and children. This must have rubbed off from their Boss, Major Muhammadu Buhari, who displayed exceptional humanity and respect for both Municipal and International Law with regards to his prosecution of the war as it related to his Command.”

Still on Buhari, who has since become a second-term Nigerian civilian president, he writes about his humane treatment of Awka indigenes who remained in their homes after the city fell to the federal forces. “When the Nigerian Army captured Awka, under the command of Major Muhammadu Buhari, they set up camps on the grounds of St. Paul’s School and across the road at GTC,” he recalls.

“Major Buhari brought all persons found to remained behind and camped all of them at St. Paul’s. he fed, clothed, and took care of them. As time went on, he started paying them stipends. He finally encouraged those with skills or occupations to carry on with their trade…”

Meanwhile, even as the dense dark clouds shrouded those years, eloquent accounts of human resilience and courage emerged. Indeed, living through the mind-numbing atrocities and dehumanising scenarios of the civil war attested to the indomitability of the human spirit even in the most deprived conditions. The invisible weavings of fate corralled the authors through the purifying mills of the Divine Creative Will irrespective of their external circumstances. Hence, hope subsisted in the apocalyptic scenario that reigned during that period.

Of course, the anthology is not only a harvest of gloomy tales. Deftly woven into these narratives were idyllic recollections of childhood, which elicit indulgent smiles from the reader. Raymond Mbamalu in “The Bombardment of Enugu” was kept distracted from the war-time tension by his pet dog, Kelly, which was eventually put to sleep after it contracted rabies from a stray dog. Roz Amechi, in “The Green Men”, was obsessed by these bogeymen, witnessed a possible elopement of her childhood nanny Chinyere with one of them and continued to dream about them even after she relocated with the rest of her family to London without her dad.

Then, Godwin Meniru writes in “My Biafran War Time Experience”: “I was the first grandchild of my mother’s family, so I was doted on by all members of the family. I was frequently invited to meals as I perambulated the various compounds of the extended family. Such was the high degree of trust we had in each other in those days. Aunts and uncles watched in benign amusement as the erstwhile prep school child went native.”

Accounts like the above help the reader look beyond the tales of ruthless indiscriminate bombings and air raids by the Nigerian Air Force, forced conscription of Biafran teens into the army, malnourished children with bloated stomachs and skeleton-like bodies, families depending on hitherto unthinkable plants and animals for nourishment and bloated corpses, among others.

Engaging, though the narratives are, the book, whose foreword was written by the former Ohaneze Ndigbo President, Chief Nnia Nwodo, could have used more painstaking editing. Besides its apparent vacillation between the use of British and American spellings, such howlers like “towed the line” (rather than “toed the line”), “badge in” (rather than “barge in”), “enroute” (rather than “en route”), “spotted bushy beards” (rather than “sported bushy beards”) and “Coupe d’état” (rather than “Coup d’état”) are hard to ignore. Ditto a tautological expression like “grateful ‘thank you’”, the confounding allusion to an “oldest late brother…, who was barely twelve or thirteen years [when he] was conscripted” and the incorrect pluralisation of “Faunas and floras”.