Biafra and blackmail of the North

Biafra is like that murdered sibling killed by members of a family, for being a black sheep, to keep the house together; it’s like that sibling whose cause of death is never discussed in the open, over at the dining and at reunion parties; because it bears a horrifying story, a dark secret. But as days run into weeks, weeks into months, months into years, a puzzled generation emerges, anxious to understand the whole story, vengeful and even threatening to retaliate.
The new generation of Eastern Nigerians grew up in a house where the death of Biafra is hardly, perhaps never, discussed by the conspirators and in all the times the questions of Biafra arose, there was a seeming justification of the murder. Upsetting, that was, and is. But the killing of Biafra is dangerous if told or learnt from one point-of-view.

This challenge to re-understand the story of Biafra intensified on the release of Chinua Achebe’s infamous last book, “There Was a Country”, which detailed the conspiracies that led to the murder of Biafra from an Easterner’s perspective, enraging the northerners who felt unfairly portrayed and blackmailed, even though the book was cleverly introduced as “a personal history of Biafra” to vaguely present it as subjective. But Achebe was not just a man, he’s Achebe!
In recent years, no book highlighted the divides among the Nigerian intelligentsia as much as Achebe’s. While a side dismissed it as the man’s most atrocious book, and an undesirable seal of his legacy, another embraced it as the best book since Bible. For some of us who had the luxuries of gallivanting on the social media, the experience was terrifying. We watched how objectivity was given a different meaning by foremost public intellectuals whose polarising views were promoted as unassailable by their loyal followers. Similarly, some robotic northerners, reacting to the Igbo intellectuals, couldn’t tolerate any story of Biafra that didn’t chronicle the events that preceded 1967, that didn’t mention Sir Ahmadu

Bello, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, those unforgettable gods!
Debating the facts and myths of Biafra War, especially if you’re from the “villainous” North, is an incursion into a dangerous phase of our history, as it awakens and highlights the things that tear us apart – and for these, the northerner is always blackmailed, the sins of the past visited upon him, and expected to apologise and swallow even sentimental misrepresentation and distortion as unchallenged fact.

Sometime last week, my self-admitted Biafran brothers got emotional in recounting the events that led to the killings of their kinsmen in the north. While a pogrom of any degree, whether indiscriminate or systematic, is unjustifiable, I observed, we should all learn to start telling the story of that mistake of our power-brokering elite whose power games started the fire that consumed not just members of the smartly played underclass but themselves, from the beginning, where things really fell apart, just to forestall any rise of mis-educated avengers.
“Why would the north kill those many Igbos?” One asked.

“Some northerners, not THE NORTH, were responsible for that,” I corrected. “I’ve met some old Igbo folks who told me touching stories of how they and their families were taken in and protected by their northern/Hausa/Muslim neighbours during those dark years of the nation.”
“I agree with you,” he said. “We’ve the good and the bad everywhere.”
For every northerner against an Easterner, there are many indifferent to ethno-regional stupidity; many northerners who only want to live, co-exist, earn, make love with their wives, raise their kids and oversee the ways and fortunes of the heirs… Really, that simple!

What led to Biafra was a mistake in which many, northerners and and easterners, Muslims and Christians, Hausa and Igbo, are culpable. Nzeogwu’s coup was carelessly planned, and their excuse that it’s just coincidence that the plotters were mostly Igbo, was just lame. In a country this polarised, this unpredictable, this silly, even then, a revolutionary with such audacity and ambition ought to know the psyches of the loyal underclass, robots to whom political representatives, the elite killed, were regarded as gods…
Where I fault the north again is this uncritical followership, which is why a people would embark on killing innocent countrymen on crimes committed by the tribesmen they didn’t even know… Yes, I agree, the north is a dangerously built society, but this too is a shameless stereotype.

We should mourn, and sympathise with the families of, all the innocent killed and destroyed by our foolish allegiances to tribal, regional, political and religious collectivism, but no citizen should be stereotyped based on evils committed by members of his/her community.
A thousand blames don’t solve a real problem. And as 2015 approaches, we really need to begin amplifying communications amongst our people. Nobody deserves to die for merely being a Nigerian. It’s hypocritical for me to apologise for what Soldier Dantala and Soldier Gyang and Soldier Ndanusa of the north did in the short-lived Bight of Biafra, what’s expected of my generation of northerners and easterners and whatnots are more frequent applications of wisdoms and brains in allying and sensing and condemning and forestalling identified and potential dangers: divisive politics, religious extremism, ethnic bigotries, name it. May God save us from us!