Biafra Blues: A Childhood Caught In Nigeria’s War
The Day the Headmaster Said “War”
THE Nigerian Civil War — fought between 1967 and 1970 following the secession of the short-lived Republic of Biafra — is often flattened into a simple contest: East versus the rest, heroes versus villains, patriots versus rebels. It is never simple. It is rarely dispassionate. And it remains, even now, deeply personal.
I was a child in Benin City when the war broke out.
The day our headmaster assembled us and announced that Nigeria was at war, I wet my shorts. I was convinced the world was ending. War, to my young mind, meant death — immediate and universal. I did not want to die without seeing my parents again.
Fear became the air we breathed.
Occupied City
For a brief but unforgettable period, Biafran forces occupied Benin City. Gunshots punctured the night. Houses were shuttered. Streets emptied. We waited for something — soldiers, bombs, an explanation — but mostly we waited for news of our parents.
My father was away. A member of Nigeria’s elite Mobile Police Force, he was trained for combat in unrest zones and “liberated territories.” His work had always frightened me. This time, he was stationed in Asaba when Biafran troops ambushed his unit.
They beat him severely. They broke his bones.
But he survived.
When he told the story later in life, there was no hatred in his voice. There was respect. “They were brave fighters,” he would say of the Biafrans. Feisty. Determined. Men fighting for something they believed in.
My mother, meanwhile, had travelled to the village to bury her father when the war erupted. My brother and I had been left behind for school, staying with relatives. Suddenly we were two small boys stranded in an occupied city.
My mother feared she would never see us again.
A Mother Running Through the Market
A relative smuggled us out in a mammy wagon — one of those lumbering public transport buses that carried everything from people to goats to sacks of grain. We escaped Benin and reached our village on a market day.
Someone must have spotted us at the motor park and run ahead to alert my mother.
I remember seeing her from a distance — running toward us, falling, rising again, running and falling. When she reached us, she said nothing. She just held us and grinned. I have never seen joy like that before or since.
My father arrived later, riding in on a motorcycle, balancing with one good foot. He had to be lifted off the bike.
Broken, but alive.
Aftermath: The Red Cross and the Taste of War
When the war ended in 1970, I entered secondary school. The International Committee of the Red Cross visited, declaring us traumatized children in need of aid.
Perhaps we were.
They brought wheat, dried cod — stockfish so hard it felt like chewing stone — and powdered milk in sacks. We experimented with the wheat, but it was no substitute for garri or yam flour. The milk sent us sprinting to the latrines. That was how many of us discovered we were lactose-intolerant.
The war had ended, but scarcity lingered. Hunger lingered. Memory lingered.
Names, Songs, and Ghosts
The war lives in fragments.
I remember the names whispered in barracks and homes: Carl Gustav von Rosen, Joseph Achuzia, Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle — the “Black Scorpion.” I remember the music of Celestine Ukwu and Rex Jim Lawson drifting from radios, melodies soaked in longing.
Most of all, I remember the images of children with distended stomachs. We knew kwashiorkor long before we encountered it in textbooks.
Many Igbo men in our barracks left for the East and never returned. I still wonder what became of one in particular who had been kind to me.
The Middle Ground of Suffering
The war is often narrated as a binary tragedy. But minority communities like mine were trapped in between. In the old Midwest region — from Benin City to Asaba — atrocities were committed by both Federal and Biafran forces.
The massacre of Asaba’s men remains one of the war’s darkest chapters.
Women and children suffered most. The East endured starvation and bombardment. But across the country, scars formed in quieter ways — in families divided, in communities mistrusted, in children made older overnight.
The Danger of Forgetting
Recently, I met a 35-year-old Igbo man who told me he had never heard of Biafra.
I was stunned.
Hundreds of thousands died. How does a nation forget that? Nigeria lacks a comprehensive, well-funded museum dedicated to the war. History was once removed from school curricula, institutionalising amnesia.
When a country forgets its trauma, it risks repeating it.
Biafra may have been militarily defeated in 1970, but it remains alive — in memory, in inherited grief, in songs, in questions still unanswered.
War ends on paper. Memory does not.
