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jmoigbokwe@3web.net Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

"SURVIVING IN BIAFRA" - A REVIEW

The book, Surviving in Biafra ALSO SEE: SurvivinginBiafra.COM

ou are a mother, savaged by war. Famine and starvation threaten death on your family! You face two hard, unpleasant choices: stay home and watch your kids starve to death or enter harm's way in a risky search for provisions available only in a war zone. You choose to risk your life for your family. And so off, you take to the warfront, mindful of the probability of ruin. An irony of fate ensues. You experience ruin, but not the kind that lurks in your thoughts. It is the ruin you have sought to escape from!

This is one of the many powerfully poignant scenes of survival so masterfully painted in "Surviving in Biafra". A mother with a baby finds her self in a battlefront. Enemy federal troops have a Biafran company almost encircled. Sniper fire rains all around in deathly succession. A baby tucked secure on its mother's back rattles from the violent whiz-bang of gunfire and breaks down in horror, adding to the din of gathering catastrophe. The danger multiplies! Thoughts race faster than reading eyes to wonder how the trapped company resolved the dilemma of the crying baby. How should a soldier resolve this catch-22 and still serve his country? The crushing resolution will shock and leave you with profound moral questions!

Attempting a review of "Surviving in Biafra" is a tall order, especially if you have read the entire 247-page work and seen the integrity of each written word. The book is a tome like none before it! It is an opus rich in bright, sunny patriotism, of the kind rare in a time of crisis. From the shattering loss of innocence of an impressionable six-year-old, to the mafia-like military slaughter of non-combatant clans, on to the donation of two teenage sons to a war of survival, and the harrowing search for a lost child, the book provokes a gamut of emotions that are at once as painful as they are uplifting.

The story begins in the urbane cosmopolitanism of a Lagos that had sheltered tolerance and diversity. Riveting and powerful, the narrative takes you from the deterioration of harmony to the setting in of treachery, sucking you into the author's boyhood perplexity at how a Hausa former best family friend repeatedly sought the unwarranted spilling of his father's blood. On what he aptly called "the altar of ethnic loyalty". Unmistakable is the heartbreak from compelled evacuation and the concomitant riving of a family by the need for its safety and a father's unwavering faith in the unity of his disintegrating land. Amidst this chaos, a cherished daughter and sister boarded at school, her fate precariously hanging in the uncertain balance of evolving reality. The harrowing tale of her miraculous return to the East through blockaded roadways that claimed many co-travelers sears at the reader's heart and leaves the reader wondering how she could've made it through the tightening noose of blood-thirsty evil.

Culture shock seems unreal to who has not experienced it! Not a city-born kid used to the creature comforts of city life. Forced relocation thrust him into new realities. His was a mixture of harsh and hopeful and then even harsher experience as makeshift provisions replaced familiar conveniences and new friendships quickly dissolved into devastating departures to foreign climes and premature capitulation to deadly kwashiorkor! The story of Augustine breaks your heart! His became the yellowed face of the killer-consequences of Nigeria's food-as-a-weapon-of-war policy that murdered thousands of innocent children! The toll of this roller-coaster instability on the formative mind of a young Alfred is beautifully told in masterful prose by this Architect-turned Engineer-turned Author.

"Surviving in Biafra" chronicles, among many others, three prominent tales of uncommon titanism. You read the first in the endearing exchange between a father and a son, passionate about justice and national service. Enter Fidelis Ikechukwuka Uzokwe, eldest brother of the author. Seventeen years old and student at the Merchants of Light School, Oba, he was certainly not war material at the outset of hostilities. Yet deep yearning to serve rose inside him like a flame seeking to light the dark paths of others! Feel his love for justice, his passion for service and his loyalty to the young Republic of Biafra. Read about the powerful argument of young Fidelis, which disarmed his father's initial reluctance and won his support needed for his teenaged enlistment in the war. Fidelis' volunteerism came at a time when older men loitered in the rear of village security and when Biafra clearly had no need for child-soldiers. His sacrifice symbolizes the purest form of patriotic vanguardism in Biafra! His story, from start to finish keeps the reader at the edge of his seat! It is the powerful portrait of defiance of conventional wisdom and of a family's private agonies that melted into first-grade patriotism!

The second is not unlike the first, except that the drama featured the same father with his second son, Emmanuel, then fifteen years old. The family had seen members wiped out in the Asaba slaughter. The eldest son of the family was in the warfront, his whereabouts unknown. Biafra was in dire need of fighting manpower and so was conscripting. Able-bodied men still dodged the draft in the rafters of rural dwellings. And here was this father, bruised and battered still offering his underaged kid to the Cause! A less patriotic man could easily have pointed to the draft-dodgers and spared his teenage son. Not Sylvanus Uzokwe! He gave more than he had to Biafra! What motivated a man, who had suffered and sacrificed so much to want to suffer and sacrifice some more? "Surviving in Biafra" not only brings the reader into his beautiful mind, it also draws him into the epicenter of powerful family emotions as a mother fought, and surrendered to the higher call to service to the Fatherland! Heart-warming!

The third is Lilian and her Uzoma Maternity Home, a home of miracle and succor that started without a home. The titanism of Uzoma's war efforts arises from her self-denying, tireless contributions to the defeat of Nigeria's goal in the war. Nigeria had waged the war with an uncoventionalism aimed to obliterate and wipe out the Igbo nation. As it decimated Biafra's menfolk in battlefronts, it simultaneously blockaded food supplies and medicines from reaching its womenfolk and children. The resulting condition became a hellhole of pitiless self-centeredness in which parents fought with their kids over scarce rations. Dreadful medical oddities like protein-deficient kwashiorkor set in with the pervasiveness of a plague. A race against time effectively commenced. Every body was under this threat and everybody cared more about her own. And here was this gentle giant dispensing not just free medication and advice to threatened populations. Uzoma delivered Biafra's babies for free! She treated without pay, children bloated and misshapen from disease. She gave free medicines to destitute, malnourished expectant mothers discharging the noble responsibility of self-preservation. And she did all these in the terrible, harsh circumstances of war when selfishness had become every victim's god! The reader feels the stoicism of this warrior's unrelenting replenishment of Biafra's human stock, until now, one of the greatest untold stories of survival in Biafra! He feels the purity of her patriotism. He appreciates the heroism of her sacrifice. And he concludes that here is one of the finest daughters of the Igbo nation! A true veteran and heroine of Biafra! The complete story of the courage of this agent of life so captivates any reader would want to possess it, treasure it, and retell it.

"Surviving in Biafra" also tells of tragedy that seared the minds of victims. The reader feels the full blow of the infamous Asaba massacre in the perceptive recall of 7-year old Alfred, who captured his crushing emotional reaction in these lines:

"..when I saw (my mother) crying, with people trying to console her, I knew that something terrible had happened and my heart skipped. My first thought was that Fidelis had been killed.. I then heard that my mother's father and several other relatives had been summarily shot by federal troops. The news hit me like a thunderbolt; it was like a nightmare and I was hoping to wake up

"..a little while before that day, my mother had said that her first priority after the war would be to go to Asaba and reunite with her father and others. Now her hopes would never be realized…I was exceedingly embittered…and hated the Nigerian Head of State, Yakubu Gowon..his commander Theophilus Danjuma and the so-called black scorpion Brigadier Adekunle

"..I pitied my father..he had his hands full; he did not know how to start consoling a woman who had just lost her father, brother, uncle and several relatives. His prayer that night was the most passionate I have ever heard some one offer; it was full of questions to God, why, why, why, why Lord? Why have you forsaken your children Lord, why?"

Against this backdrop, the reader proceeds with trepidation into the author's account of his 1982 chance encounter with Brigadier Adekunle inside the scorpion's own lair. The imagery is both superb and magnificent in one sweep!

References to the Asaba mass-murder in other published works on the Civil War have implicated former military ruler Murtala Muhammed in the tragedy. Muhammed was the GOC at Asaba and thus the callous supervisor of the butchery. This is missing in "Surviving in Biafra". But then the book is not about the frontline executors of a wicked policy of annihilation. It is all about how a boy and his family survived the grueling ordeal of everyday life inside a nation under siege!

Refreshing scenes with lighter shades of Biafra-era harshness also adorn the pages of "Surviving in Biafra". One of those was the deep, touching canvass of motherly love, which bore the maternal genius that downsized outgrown adult trousers into "jump ups" for her son and his sibling. From the saloon of a jobless village tailor, a father's unusable trousers transformed into an overstitched "patchwork" of "collarless shirts" and pants bringing joy and pride to a boy who couldn't wait to show off his "brand new" clothes to his friends. The love in this depiction pulls at your heartstrings! Rich echoes of country music hit singer Dolly Parton's "Coat Of Many Colors".

Other flashes of beauty in the book shone on the tragi-comedy in which new recruit, Emmanuel Uzokwe, fell from the force of muzzle velocity, nearly killing his trainer and the three-day savaging that followed; the glib stories of Biafran stragglers who told of phantom warfront heroics to mask their desertion from service; the initial widespread stigma that followed those Igbo girls who married Hausa soldiers and the sense of utter shock and betrayal in Igboland when news broke of Azikiwe's "defection" to the federal side.

Still others include the hilarious sojourn of village conscript Ogbonta, who jittered from war, hid up a tree, slept and fell off at night, breaking both his body and spirit; the kidnap-conscription of a man right at his wedding reception in church and the sense of deep violation of witnesses; the palliative bomb shelter that attracted a venomous snake and Paul, the boy-soldier who lost his hearing in war. For many readers, "Surviving in Biafra" will be the book in which they read first hand how Biafra initially armed her self-defense against oppression. Powerful narratives of beautiful acts of surviving in Biafra!

The Republic of Biafra was a great nation that died too soon! But while it lived, it elicited the best spirit of nationalism in a preponderant number of her citizens. The Voice of Biafran Revolution (VOBR), until now perhaps unheard of by many, was one of the brightest lights in Biafra! Get into the nocturnal life of this troupe of young entertainers as it visited company after company of soldiers, entertaining and giving musical relief to wounded warriors. Alfred, the author, an active member of VOBR brings you into his world with first-hand gripping tales of heroism, missing body parts and bandaged heads. Among VOBR's entertainers were Biafra's youngest, most unsung heroes!

From the pages of "Surviving in Biafra", images of frantic Biafrans clutching at distant realms for answers to difficult realities lift the reader into a world of beliefs that was not at all esoteric in Biafra. The reader enters this sphere in which the commercial town of Nnewi shares a Biafran commonality with the Abiriba people of Igboland, the bowl of blood and Johnny, the B26 Pilot? Nnewi's sense of impregnability under its blanket of protective sea meets the headless, sword-wielding hands of Abiriba's supernatural invincibility. Johnny, the bomber pilot jams up with a bowl, which turns from water to blood depending on developments in the war theatre and the fate of dear relatives. The revelation is that in times of great bleakness, desperate folks sustain hope on all kinds of myths. The author serves a delightful sampling of popular Biafra-era myths in this well-written book.

Of the scenes from the book though, the one that most tears you up emerges from the account of the lonely search by author's mother for her son, Fidelis. It is at once very powerfully painful and heart-warming. The reader finds himself riding the same emotional roller coaster as the woman in the story. You feel the sense of betrayal as trusted friends preyed on open anxieties peddling falsehoods and phony sightings of a missing son in exchange for money from a grateful mother. You travel with her to desolate parts of bombed-out Biafra seeking to confirm clues. You feel the silent hurting of a husband, who held a divine revelation glummer than his wife's predicament, but would not let out for fear of exacerbating alarm. You experience the unbelievable fortitude of a mother who withstood day-long hunger in the vain hope her next turn at her next destination would crown her search with the tight, material embrace of a son so beloved. Drained and weary from yet another futile search in a rickety boat across a turbulent River Niger, you suffer this mother's heart-breaking resignation on a deserted riverbank when she called out to her lost son saying: "Fidelis, if you are still alive, please return. I have traveled far and wide to search for you to no avail. My feet are tired and sore and my mind is weak. I can no longer go on. If you are no longer living, I assure you that in my next lifetime, I will be your mother again, because you made me proud. God speed you." But then the near-finality of this resignation still failed to provide the closure necessary for moving on. And so you hang on with her to a hope, which to her husband had long become a fata morgana.

Closure eventually came when mother had an encounter with divinity, an encounter almost identical to her husband's many years back when the young warrior fell. In this trance, Fidelis appears, leaving his mother doubtless about the finality of his fate. In the author's gripping detail, the reader feels the palpitant throb, the grip and the pull of the story of the tearful soul-baring meeting at which husband and wife decided to affirm closure with an unnatural funeral without a body. The reader now understands why the father had seemed unenthusiastic about her wife's arduous searches for their son. From grateful parents, proud of their son's supreme sacrifice, the reader enters the most fitting funeral tribute to a great Biafran war hero. A very moving account of therapeutic unwinding!

"Surviving in Biafra" is a book of many parts. It is a page-turner, a fine work of literary architecture and a most refreshing take on life inside besieged Biafra. But it is much more! It is also a multi-level opus, which defies the strait jacket of categorization. It can appeal to all ages, gender, economic and social class and even creed. This makes it a must-read for all! Touching all the vital nerves of the Biafran nation, it leaves no one in doubt about what is needed today to make the war worth the harsh experience, for all the protagonists on both sides of that horrible fray.

I have read many books on the Civil War. Most have been written by self-interested participants eager to sell biased, self-serving accounts of bloated heroism. Engineer Uzokwe's book is many notches above the pack. There is this edifying quality to "Surviving in Biafra" that no objective reader will miss. The prose is delectable, the flourish of grammar, impeccable. This is one book both old and young folks would enjoy reading several times over. It is now my first real introduction to Nigeria for my Philippine-born daughter. Every household with kids of school age should grab a copy or more of "Surviving in Biafra". It is thoroughly entertaining no child will regret the ride through it!

"Surviving in Biafra" will go down in history as one of the purest, most refreshing records of life inside Biafra!

I am recommending this book to all Nigerians and to all citizens of countries who have known and experienced the fratricide and privation of war. But more than to these, I am also recommending the book to all peoples from countries that never had to suffer the scourge of war. At a time the World verges on the brink of yet another conflict, "Surviving in Biafra" can serve as a timely reminder of the wastefulness of needless aggression.