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"Biafra: A People Betrayed" is an article first published in April 1970 edition of McCall's and reprinted in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons in 1974.

Summary[]

Starved girl

Young girl suffering from kwashiorkor

Although older maps by white explorers show the existence of a "Kingdom of Biafra", no information about it survives. The modern Republic of Biafra, however, lasted less than three years in its attempt to separate from Nigeria, a country aided by the Soviet Union and Great Britain. Mainly Christians, the Biafrans were dismissed by many as simply a "tribe" which speaks English and practices "small-town free enterprise". Its national anthem was based on Sibelius' Finlandia, since the Biafrans admired the Finns ability to fight for and win their independence. Vonnegut visited a few weeks before their surrender in January 1970, arriving along with relief supplies in a plane chartered by the Catholic charity Caritas, and leaving on the last plane that was not fired upon. While there, Vonnegut attended a play set far in the past when the moon had not been seen in months, the crops had failed, and a sacrifice to the goddess of fertility was refused since "[t]he people were not sufficiently unselfish and brave". The drama opened with the national anthem played on an ancient marimba by a composer who also possessed a doctorate from the London School of Economics.

Vonnegut traveled to Biafra from Kennedy Airport on New Year's Day with Miriam Reik, the sole member of a pro-Biafran committee that had paid for trips by several writers. She said other pro-Biafran groups were filled "with people who were kinky with guilt", while it was the greatness of the Biafran people that impressed her, and she hoped they would somehow get more weapons to keep the war going. The two picked up the novelist Vance Bourjaily in Paris and, with bags of food from America, landed at the nation's final remaining airport, "a stretch of highway" that was only briefly illuminated for their landing. Nearly all the white people they met were doctors or Holy Ghost Fathers, who built churches and schools until they were deported by the victorious Nigerians for "compassion in time of war". In Awo-Omama, they found children stricken with kwashiorkor, a once-rare condition caused by a lack of protein. However, an educated Biafran they spoke to objected to viewing them as "a dying nation" when it was only because Nigeria had used "every diplomatic and military move" to starve them to death.

Freedom Square Owerri

Freedom Square, Owerri, 2020

Biafra was home to perhaps one-third of Africa's black intellectuals and its well-educated people were often resented in the rest of Nigeria. Now Biafran soldiers lacked ammunition and food, while refugees were captured by Nigeria, the men, women, and children separated. The then-capital Owerri had in fact been lost to Nigeria, only to be retaken in Biafra's one great victory. Although the oil industry, especially British Petroleum and Shell, is clearly part of the reason for the war, the government in fact never nationalized it. In the capital, the three met with the nation's leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu, a graduate of Sandhurst, now criticized for not dying with his troops. Both he and second-in-command Philip Effiong exhibited gallows humor, which Vonnegut himself would employ often during the trip, since joking is a response to misery over which we're powerless. Ojukwu also indicated that the enormous extended families of the people allowed them to endure for so long. His own was about three thousand members, all of whom he knew by face, name, and reputation. More typical families still have several hundred members, and instead of orphanages, old people's home, and public charities, families took care of their own. Adults came together to vote on family matters, such as who would fight if war came, or who would attend college and what they would study. This "mania for higher education of all kinds" many have doomed the Biafrans more than petroleum, since after independence they got many of the best jobs in industry and civil services, furthering the resentment.

Chinua Achebe, 1966

Chinua Achebe, 1966

Although Owerri seemed peaceful, the capital and the nation as a whole was in the process of almost silently falling. For days, officials continued to smile, such as the chief of protocol in the Ministry of Affairs, Dr. B. N. Unachukwa, who sent a car with a guide every day until one day it simply failed to arrive. While waiting, the group spoke with the writer Chinua Achebe who happened by. When pressed for news, he dryly told them of the uncovering a mass grave near the prison, a remnant of the period of Nigerian occupation. The only writing he said he was doing was a "dirge in Ibo". A young zoologist, Rosemary Egonsu Ezirim, next arrived and told them of her project to turn streams into fish hatcheries, which had been "suspended temporarily". Now she was writing poems, which Achebe said was all any of them could do. Leonard Hall of the Manchester Guardian later arrived, noting the world's indifference to Nigerian atrocities and saying Biafra was like the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews knew they would be killed no matter what, so they died fighting.

They asked Rosemary about her button reading "Daughter of Biafra", a group of women who would comfort, and sometimes scold, the troops as well as engage in guerrilla warfare. She said when the situation gets truly bad, the women will have to fight, since they are stronger and braver. She invited Vonnegut and Bourjaily to her dormitory room, which was then also housing five younger siblings who came to visit for the Christmas holidays. They still had plenty of yams and palm oil, one of the two commodities that induced European colonization, along with human slaves. Rosemary's sister hair was "splendidly complicated, like a Russian Easter egg", which she said took her relatives an hour to do each morning. Their village had not yet been overrun, nor their family separated, and they considered themselves "the luckiest people in Biafra". Over the radio, Vonnegut recently heard that the Nigerian takeover was accompanied by a great deal of rape, and one woman who resisted was set on fire. Since returning home, Vonnegut has cried only once about Biafra, making "grotesque little barking sounds for about a minute and half". Reik says she hasn't cried at all yet, while Bourjaily did so at the time, when "little children took hold of his fingers and stopped crying".

A dinner party was held later that evening, hosted in their honor by the commissioner for education, Dr. Ifegwu Eke, and his wife of four days. The two of them, along with the five other guests, all had doctor's degrees. There were canapés, brandy, and Mantovani music while everyone avoided talking about what was actually on their minds. Faced with an exhausted Dr. S. J. S. Cookey, former administrator for Opobo Province, Vonnegut found himself frozen by his desire to ask if the war the result of the arrogance of the intellectuals and if General Ojukwu was truly a great leader or simply charming. That night, while Vonnegut, Reik, and Bourjaily sat in their room, General Effiong arrived, talking for three hours of how the Nigerians had broken through all their defenses and that Biafra would soon be "a tiny footnote in the history of mankind" that had attempted to produce "the first modern government in Africa". Despite his prediction that the world would be disappointed in Nigeria, there was in fact little global reaction. The next day the sounds of nearby weapons were heard and people began evacuating. After a long wait to be taken to the airport, Dr. Unachukwa finally arrived with his eight-year-old son in his personal car, crammed full of boxes. The Biafrans fought well, and perhaps all nations are "great and even holy at the time of their death". When asked about Biafra now, Vonnegut simply replies that it was an internal Nigerian matter, and that no one should come to hate Nigerians now "in order to be up-to-date".[1]

  1. "Biafra: A People Betrayed", Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, pp. 139-158.