Biafra: We Remember and We Pray #Ozoemena

(By Emmanuel Iduma) – ‘Gone Like a Meteor’: Epitaph for the Lost Youth of the Biafran War

In 1967, Nigeria had been an independent country for just seven years. The declaration of secession that year by an Igbo majority in the southeastern region of Nigeria, and the war that followed when the federal government decided to keep the country as one, was already the culmination of a bloody sequence of events. By May 1967, two coup d’états had taken place, and the Igbos of northern Nigeria had been killed in the tens of thousands. 

The Biafran War, otherwise known as the Nigerian Civil War, lasted from July 6, 1967, until January 15, 1970. The men who led each side—Yakubu Gowon on the federal side and Chukwuemeka Ojukwu of Biafra—were in their mid-thirties. Boys, some barely teenagers, volunteered to fight for the breakaway Republic of Biafra. Many of the civilian casualties were children: in September 1968, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that almost ten thousand people died daily from starvation caused by Nigeria’s blockade of Biafra. An entire generation was wrenched from the future.

Mazrui Got It Wrong on Okigbo, Ekwe-Ekwe

The Day Prof. Ali Mazrui Cried

Prof. Mazrui

Kwaheri, Mazrui arap Mombasa.

You reached your destination-

A thousand miles beyond the boundary.

I was a witness.

Now, you’ve set forth

On a trip across the sacred cloud.

Sorry, I couldn’t deliver

"The Trial of Ali Mazrui"

Before the bracket closed.

But you can be sure

It has set sail,

Far beyond the bondage

Of our triple heritage.

As we mourn the passing of a great African intellectual, Prof. Ali Mazrui, I present to you a 2007 dispatch from Christopher Okigbo International Conference at Harvard University.

Before then, I had met and interviewed Professor Mazrui twice. But on that day, I saw an Ali Mazrui that I had never seen before.

For many scholars of African literature, Ali Mazrui was an outsider who crashed into the African literature party on the wings of Christopher Okigbo. His one and only novel, “The Trial of Christopher Okigbo,” made him a factor in literary discourse.

With notoriety comes despise. Mazrui is so despised that more scholars are not on talking terms with him than those who are.