There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (33 page)

Source
: People’s Liberation Army; www.people.ucsc.edu/~myrtreia/essays/PLA.html.

40.
Zdenek
confirms this: “The behind-the-lines guerrilla forays were led by hand-picked members
of the Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters (BOFF). . . . The recruits were young
[and] had been screened for character and high motivation.”

Source
: Zdenek
.
The Nigerian War, 1967–1970: History of the War: Selected Bibliography and Documents
(Bonn, Germany: Bernard & Graefe, 1971), p. 141.

Traveling on Behalf of Biafra

1.
Introduction of the francophone literary movement known as
La Négritude
; www.French.about.com/library/bl-negritude.htm.

2.
Ibid. Heather Carlberg, “Negritude. Political Discourse—Theories of Colonialism and
Postcolonialism”; www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/negritude/html.

3.
La Négritude
; www.French.about.com/library/bl-negritude.htm.

4.
Based on events I witnessed and some I was told about; also see www.oikoumene.org//.

5.
“Another Try at Biafra Talks,”
Miami News
, May 27, 1968.

6.
Local St. Simons, Georgia, lore. Also extensively documented in history books.

R
EFUGEE
M
OTHER AND
C
HILD (
A
M
OTHER IN A
R
EFUGEE
C
AMP)

1.
Chinua Achebe
, Collected Poems
(New York: Anchor Books, 2004).

Life in Biafra

1.
Sara S. Berry, George A. Elbert, Norman Thomas Uphoff; reply by Stanley Diamond.
“Letters: An Exchange on Biafra,”
New York Review of Books
, April 23, 1970.

2.
The material from the following section is adapted from “Chinua Achebe on Biafra,”
Transition
, pp. 31–38.

3.
Resurgence
2, iss. 11 (1970); see also the editorial, “In the Curve of Africa, Fear, Relief,
Surrender,”
St. Petersburg Times
, January 13, 1970.

The Abagana Ambush

1.
“Smash Biafra” was a term used widely during the war.

Sources
: “On September 3, Nigeria was preparing an air, sea and land offensive in a drive
to smash Biafra”: Ms. Kalindi Phillip on behalf of
African Recorder
6 (New Delhi: Asian Recorder & Publication, 1967); also see
The Spectator
, vol. 244 (London: F. C. Westley: Literary Collections, 1980): “In public the British
Labour government claimed that it armed Nigeria to forestall the Russians; in secret
a junior British minister wrote to the Nigerians ordering them to purchase Russian
siege artillery in order to smash the Biafran army.”

2.
Norman Tobias, “A-I Skyraider-Acre, Siege of, 1799,”
The International Military Encyclopedia,
vol. 1 (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1992); Colin Legum and John
Drysdale,
Africa Contemporary Record: Annual Survey and Documents, Vol. 2
(Oxford, UK: Africa Research Ltd., 1970).

A
IR
R
AID

1.
Chinua Achebe,
Beware Soul Brother
, African Writers Series (London: Heinemann, 1972).

The Citadel Press

1.
Ernest Emenyonu, ed.,
Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe
(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003).

2.
Achebe, “Chinua Achebe on Biafra,”
Transition
, pp. 31–38.

Staying Alive

1.
Chinua Achebe and Dubem Okafor, eds.,
Don’t Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo
(Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1978).

2.
Achebe, “Chinua Achebe on Biafra,”
Transition.

3.
In a story by Tony Edike on June 29, 2009, in the
Nigerian Vanguard,
we are informed:

About 183 different types of unexploded explosives recovered from nine states affected
by the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War were yesterday detonated by the Ministry of Defense,
39 years after the war ended.

Two of the bombs dropped during the war were recovered from the residence of a renowned
author, Chinua Achebe, according to the experts.

The exercise, which took place at Onyeama Hills on Enugu-Onitsha Expressway and witnessed
by the Minister of Defense, Dr. Shettima Mustafa, the Enugu State Deputy Governor,
Sunday Onyebuchi, and members of the armed forces and representatives of the United
Nations, was handled by a team of experts under the Humanitarian De-Mining project.

4.
Achebe and Okafor,
Don’t Let Him Die
.

Death of the Poet: “Daddy, Don’t Let Him Die!”

1.
Achebe and Okafor,
Don’t Let Him Die
.

2.
Achebe, “Chinua Achebe on Biafra,”
Transition.

3.
Ibid.

4.
Achebe and Okafor,
Don’t Let Him Die
.

M
ANGO
S
EEDLING

1.
Chinua Achebe,
Collected Poems
(New York: Anchor Books, 2004).

Refugees

1.
Interview with Professor Christie Achebe, Brown University, Rhode Island, April 2010.

2.
A wild-game hunting enthusiast’s information guide provides this startling information
about hunting bullets:

The [VLD wild game bullet] penetrates up to 3 inches before it starts to expand. This
delayed expansion results in a wound channel that is deep inside the vital area of
any big game. After the bullet starts to expand it will shed 80% to 90% of its weight
into the surrounding tissue, traveling as deep as 18 inches. This results in a massive
wound cavity that creates the greatest possible amount of tissue damage and hemorrhaging
within the [organs]. This massive and extensive wound cavity results in the animal
dropping fast.

Source
: Long Range Store, Best of the West Productions; www.longrangestore.com/Berger_VLD_Hunting_Bullets_p/70100000.htm.

3.
A
Time
journalist who toured the children’s hospitals at Okporo and Emekuku had this to
say
:

In villages that are nearly deserted, old men and women, along with sickly children,
die quietly in their huts. At the missionary hospital in Emekuku, a mob of starving
children gathers at the door. The hospital has room for only 100 of them: the strongest-looking
children are taken in, and the least hopeful cases turned away. “This started out
as an epidemic in March,” says a London-trained Biafran doctor, Aaron Ifekwunigwe.
“Now it is a catastrophe.”

Source
: “A Bitter African Harvest,”
Time
.

4.
Dan Jacobs,
The Brutality of Nations
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).

5.
Goetz, “Humanitarian Issues in the Biafra Conflict”; see also Caroline Moorehead,
Dunant’s Dream
(New York: HarperCollins, 1988), pp. 615–16.

W
E
L
AUGHED AT
H
IM

1.
Chinua Achebe
, Collected Poems
(New York: Anchor Books, 2004).

The Media War

1.
Achebe,
The Education of a British-Protected Child
.

2.
House of Lords official report, August 27, 1968.

3.
Hugh McCullum provides this perspective: “For the first time in history and just
by accident, the mass media zeroed in on an African humanitarian disaster. New technology
and a new generation of young, bright, media-savvy church people and NGOs made this
possible.”

Source
: McCullum, “Biafra Was the Beginning
.”

Narrow Escapes

1.
In
Social History of Rape
, Paul Tabori confirms this abomination:

A young British doctor who worked in the pediatric hospital told the reporter: “The
soldiers on duty in the area of the pediatric hospital at Okporo were such monsters
that I never let the nurses go anywhere without an escort. Especially the white ones. . . .
Two Biafran nurses who would only give their names as Theresa and Caroline said they
were raped several times.”

Source
: Paul Tabori,
Social History of Rape
(London: New English Library, 1971).

2.
“Elephant Grass: Common Name: Napier grass, Uganda grass; Genus: Pennistum; Species:
purpureum; Parts Used: leaves for animal fodder. . . . In the savannas of Africa it
grows along lake beds and rivers where the soil is rich. Local farmers cut the grass
for their animals, carrying it home in huge piles on their backs or on carts.”

Source
: www.blueplanetbiomes.org/elephant_grass.htm.

V
ULTURES

1.
Chinua Achebe,
Collected Poems
(New York:Anchor Books, 2004).

Part 3

The Fight to the Finish

1.
Captain Steve Lewis, “Che Guevara and Guerrilla Warfare: Training for Today’s Nonlinear
Battlefields,”
Military Review
(September–October 2001), p. 101 Also, interview of retired Nigerian and Biafran
Army officers © Achebe Foundation 2008-2011; See also the military theory, theorists,
and strategy Web page of the Air War College. This is the intellectual and leadership
center of the American air force. http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/awc-thry.htm.

The Economic Blockade and Starvation

1.
Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu.
Biafra: Selected Speeches and Random Thoughts of C. Odumegwu Ojukwu
(New York: Harper & Row, 1969).

2.
Metz,
Nigeria
; Forsyth,
The Biafra Story
; de St. Jorre,
The Nigerian Civil War
; Akpan,
The Struggle for Secession 1966–1970
; Amadi,
Sunset in Biafra
; Falola and Heaton
, A History of Nigeria
; Madiebo,
The Nigerian
Revolution and the Biafran War,
p. 14; Ademoyega,
Why We Struck
; Effiong,
Nigeria and Biafra.

3.
Seymour M. Hersh,
The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House
(New York: Summit Books, 1983), p. 136.

4.
“Negotiators who have been meeting for four weeks in Addis Ababa made marked progress
in clearing the logjam holding up large-scale relief. Meeting with Emperor Haile Selassie,
moderator of the talks, they agreed to create both air and land corridors for shipments
of food to Biafra’s starving civilians.”

Source
: “Nigeria: Biafra’s Two Wars,”
Time
, August 30, 1968.

5.
Writing for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ series, New Issues,
Professor Nathaniel H. Goetz of Pepperdine University succinctly captures the complexity
of the standoff:

Politically, the possibility of a land corridor seemed impossible. One of the many
disagreements between the warring parties was simple, yet it illustrates both the
mistrust and complexity of what was occurring: Ojukwu forbade the necessary food to
reach the country through a neutral corridor for fear Nigerian troops would poison
it. . . . On June 5, an ICRC DC-7 aircraft was shot down by the Federal air force
over Biafra, killing the three aid workers onboard. Because of this incident, serious
disputes over the conduct of relief operations arose and the airlift was again suspended.

Source
: Goetz, “Humanitarian Issues in the Biafra Conflict.”

The Silence of the United Nations

1.
Hammarskjöld was “a Renaissance man,” reportedly with interests as varied as banking,
economics, literature—he loved the work of Emily Dickinson and Hermann Hesse—politics,
Christian theology, fine art, linguistics, gymnastics, outdoor sports such as skiing.

Source
: “Dag Hammarskjöld—Biography”; Nobelprize.org, December 14, 2011; www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1961/hammarskjold-bio.html.