Introduction

Two concepts – memoirs and objectivity – provide the major thrust for this discourse and as such delimit the boundaries of our probe of the two authors whose works are under examination. However, these two words are meaningful only if discussed in the context of historical writing about the Nigeria-Biafra War. It is imperative that our convenient takeoff point should be to know what history is and what it takes to write a work that could actually be regarded as an intellectual historical piece, as this line of action would establish which of the two works is more objective. An important question for us here would be to ask if we are talking of history as a body of knowledge existing on its own, or as a discipline. In the case of the latter, we are concerned with the reconstruction of the past by the use of existing knowledge about that aspect of the past that caught our interest. This demarcation is necessary because, as Colin Wells would always caution, ‘history, the discipline, goes beyond the simple past’ and that it goes beyond ‘official recordkeeping and even palace chronicles’. Wells argues:

The above observation by Wells creates a distinction between history as a discipline and history as the ordinary past. A probe into history as the ordinary past and its meaning and relevance as a body of knowledge yields the summation below. History is the memory of human group experience. If it is forgotten or ignored, we cease in that measure to be human. Without history, we have no knowledge of who we are or how we came to be, like victims of collective amnesia groping in the dark for our identity.

Introduction

Between 1970, when the Nigerian Civil War ended, and today, there has been (and continues to be) a plethora of publications that seek to understand and explain this dark moment in the history of the nation. Two distinct groups can be discerned: the academic and non-academic. Within these two broad groups lie various genres of writings on the civil war. In the academic group, writings critically examine the causes as well as the effects of the civil war, and they draw conclusions to serve as lessons for the future.

In the non-academic category, four main genres of writings can be identified. The first are novels and stories. These works of fiction have invented characters who narrate their viewpoints of the events surrounding the emergence and prosecution of the civil war. The second genre encompasses memoirs and personal accounts in which authors seek to present their work empirically, having experienced, witnessed, and/or participated in the prosecution and resolution of the war. The third genre is social media writings – including blogs and opinion pieces as well as feature articles in newspapers and magazines. Social media has blossomed in the last few years as a result of the combination of renewed interest in the story of Nigeria by a younger generation as well as rapid advances in information technology. The final type of work in this genre, following the popularity of documentaries and full length motion pictures, consist of theatrical/movie scripts on which plays as well as movies about the war are based.

It is important to state at the outset that although most of the works within the non-academic category are fictional in nature, they do not depart in their accounts from the various propositions made by the materials that fall within the academic literature of the war. Chimamanda Adichie and K. Okpi are a good example of the crossover between fact and fiction. In Okpi's words, ‘some of the characters and events … are fictional, some are not. Its background, however, is a matter of historical records … and [the] fictionalised telling is an honest reflection of [the] civil war.’

The objective of this chapter is to address two questions in relation to the existing literature by local authors on the Nigerian Civil War.

In 1969, American political scientist Rupert Emerson summarized one of the key debates shaping the course of the Nigeria-Biafra War:

In this reflection, Emerson gestures towards the fact that the secession’s leaders cast the geopolitical territory initially under their control – the ‘whole former Eastern Region’ of Nigeria – as a cohesive ‘unit’ with the right to self-determination. Opponents of the separatist effort, on the other hand, not only denied the territory's people the right to self-determination but also contended that the secession was at its core an Igbo nationalist project. If the latter argument proved correct, then the region's minorities would necessarily be second-class citizens in the new nation.

Given the heatedness of this debate, amidst a host of political, economic, social, and other factors, minorities’ loyalties became ‘sharply divided’. Being 40 percent of the Biafran population and possessing well over half its land, eastern ethnic minorities such as the Ijaw, Efik, Ibibio, Ogoni, Annang, and Ikwerre would play a significant, potentially decisive, role in the conflict. With the battle for minorities’ support as a growing undercurrent of the Biafran War, official anti-secessionist rhetoric portrayed Biafra as an ethnoculturally grounded Igbo nation, from which ethnic minorities would ultimately be excluded, while official secessionist rhetoric depicted the fledgling nation as civic-territorial in its ideology and therefore ethnically inclusive in scope.

In various genres, from propaganda posters to scholarly works, stakeholders on both sides of the conflict frequently reiterated these depictions of Biafra. Novels would seem to provide an especially useful opportunity for Biafra's sympathizers to make their case, given their widely noted capacity to imagine a ‘unified and coherent’ civicterritorial nation and thereby obscure significant ethnic differences or tensions. Although some Biafran novels completel y sidestep the issue of minority inclusion within the secessionist nation, others assert Biafran nationalism as primarily territorial (and therefore ethnically inclusive), including Eddie Iroh's Toads of War and Cyprian Ekwensi’s Divided We Stand.

The idea of Biafra resonated in Ireland for a variety of reasons and, in the late 1960s, Biafra was a constant presence in the Irish media. In this chapter I will consider the representation of the war and famine in Biafra in Irish fiction, with a particular focus on two texts: the novel, An End to Flight (1973) and the play, Black Man's Country (1974). These two substantial texts from Ireland describe how the situation was experienced by the Irish people who stayed in Biafra after secession, and thus provide an alternative perspective on the war. Nigerian authors produced many works of fiction describing the events in Biafra, both during and after the war, but these two fictional works, written primarily for Irish audiences, demonstrate an interest in and familiarity with the events that is perhaps unexpected from a small, geographically distant, European country. The existence of these texts demonstrates awareness of the short-lived Biafran state and the war and famine, but it also raises questions: do these works provide a commentary on Biafra or merely an account of Irish men and women abroad? Do these writings explain or elaborate on the Irish relationship with Biafra?

Ireland's relationship with Biafra was ambiguous – the popular and official responses to the breakaway republic were at variance. The Irish government never formally acknowledged the existence of the Republic of Biafra, but the Irish people spoke about and thought of Biafra as a real nation. In official documents, it was carefully noted as ‘Biafra’ or the Eastern Region of Nigeria, but in the print media quotation marks were never used around the name. In popular discourse the Biafran state was accepted as a legitimate and real entity; there was no uncertainty or ambiguity about its existence. It was accepted that ‘there was a country’.

Ireland's relationship with the African continent had developed during the twentieth century as a result of religious missions to convert Africans to Christianity:

Introduction

‘We remember differently’. Such were the words Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie used in her review of Chinua Achebe's very last literary work, There Was a Country. Indeed, when it comes to the tragic and painful events that culminated in the civil war and their aftermath, we hardly remember the same way, due to our differences. The critical questions, in my opinion, are the following. How have and why do we remember differently? Is it a case of differences in perspective? Or, is it because of some ulterior motive, which might be sinister and/or self-serving – in other words, a deliberate attempt to rewrite history? This underlines the importance of memory, which shapes the nature of and trend in one’s knowledge, understanding and interpretation of the past and its meaning, particularly as we are essentially what we remember and know. In other words, while what has happened cannot be changed, through controlled measures its meaning can. This is so because the power to remember in particular ways lies within humans, and narratives are the primary forms and means through which to achieve this goal.

Writing on wars has always been fashionable and attractive for many writers all through the ages, and the Nigeria-Biafra War is clearly not an exception. From the period leading to the end of that war to the present day, there has been a flurry of literature – histories, biographies, autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, political accounts, newspaper stories, etc. – by diverse writers who have produced both fictional and presumably ‘factual’ accounts of the war. For instance, Laurie Wiseberg noted that from 1968 to 1969, many speculated on whether more blood or more ink was being spilt on the battlefronts. The result is not surprising, as polemic flows more swiftly and more voluminously than actual scholarship. Aptly underlining the nature and importance of this seeming ‘scholarly tragedy’ that has befallen the Nigeria-Biafra War historiographical narratives, Gavin Williams appropriately opined that