Interrogating Nigerian Civil War, plight of minorities in Akpan’s New York, My Village

To the author of New York, My Village, Uwen Akpan, the stories of Nigerian Civil war between 1967 and 1970 is incomplete without the narratives and travails of minorities.

Speaking during a book reading held in Lagos recently, Akpan shifted focus of his war story from the Biafran and Nigerian accounts to minority communities caught in the middle of the conflict.

The novel addresses the experiences of descendants of those who lived through the war, how they managed with lingering memories, and deal with the silences and competing narratives around the war.

To Akpan, “minorities don’t used to talk about the war the way Igbo used to. My mother always told me about Biafra. My two grandfathers and grandmothers too.”

Born in 1971, a year after the war, he recounted childhood memories where people talk of so much food at home.

He said, “every time we were eating, they would say there is so much food. So, it took me a while to realise there had been starvation and a lot of children died.’ By the time I was six, I went to primary school for the first time in the next village. There was a mass grave behind that primary school. We used to wrestle there. It was a grave of Biafran soldiers; about 160 of them were buried there. So from time to time, your shot would stick on something and then there would be a bone. So that was my first experience of human skeleton.”

As a child growing up, he added if someone calls you Biafran, you’ll cry the whole day. Travelling from Akwa Ibom to live in Society of Jesus Seminary in Benin City further shed more light on what transpired during the war.

He noted, “the Americans who were the priests at the Seminary had only heard of the Igbo perspective, so, meeting someone like me, a minority, was a surprise. To them, minorities don’t even exist, so how can you talk about your thing.”

Describing the Igbo as lucky, he said they were already a big ethnic group before the war. The Hausa/ Fulani, he added, are the masters of the Sahel. On the other hand, he observed the Yoruba have also made their marks. To him, “so, when they say Nigeria, they are talking about these categories of people. Things fall Apart was written before the war, and the whole world, because of that book respected Africa. So, Achebe had already put Igbo on the map. The first black man to win the Commonwealth gold medal, Emmanuel Ifeajuna was an Igbo man. For the minorities, it is a mountain to even exist.”

pContinuing, he said, “the American priest, when they heard my view of the story, they felt it was someone like me that talk about the war. By 1991, I went to work at the Leper Colony. Even in that place, there was this story that the Biafrans came to Benin on their way to Lagos. They stayed there for six weeks. They raped a lot of the women and killed many people. Mind you, the Benin were neural.

“We used to go around to give communion to sick people. After about a month, one old woman suddenly said, you are Biafran, you raped me. So, I said I’m not Biafra. I introduced myself and she started telling me the story of how she was raped. And that was how I started asking the Benin what happened during the war. The Benin and Urhobo were so angry at what they were seeing that they constituted a force of 600 young men and women to fight and defend them. But the Biafran infiltrated and slaughtered them.

The Benin joined Biafra full force. Late Murtala Muhammed was leading Nigerians into Benin City. By the time Biafran made up their minds to go to Lagos, they got to Ore. They started raping. But the Murtala led team started pushing the Biafran back to Asaba. That journey was a very bad for the minorities on that road. Biafran was taking the minorities as shields and a lot of them were killed. Hundreds were drowned and killed. I spoke with Odia Ofeimun who was a young journalist then. He wanted to join the Nigerian army, but they said he was a minor, so, he became a journalist. We never shared what Biafran were doing on that road to minorities.”

Humorously, the novel also delved into unimaginable issues, like bed bugs in New York, apartment culture, American passive-aggressiveness, landlords and others.

Coming from a small ethnic group, the US embassy refused him visa on the accusation that he had invented a fake ethnicity. His attempt to get a visa quickly becomes an unpleasant experience of embarrassment and rejection simply because of his ethnicity. But, after the humiliating embassy hurdles, he arrived in New York City for a stint at a high-profile publishing house.

A native of Ikot Akpan Eda in the Niger Delta Region, Akpan’s collection of stories, Say you are one of them won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize African Region, the PEN Open Book Prize and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award, and was the 2009 Oprah’s Book Club selection.

He currently lives in Gainsville, Florida United States.

Source: The Guardian