Forty-five years after the Nigerian civil war, which saw the country almost torn apart, Agozino Agozino makes a retrospective trip on the roles played by writers and intellectual for the Biafrans struggle.
ALL through ages, across the globe, writers have had to pay unusual prices for writing unusual books. Similarly, many societies pay dearly for having some creative minds in their midst. It is just like the tale of a crazy, strong-breed that, sometimes, turn out equally weird narratives.
Many writers are so hot for their abode that they just have to keep living in exile. Some meet with harsh fates like Walter Rodney, the famous Caribbean writer who wrote the classical work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, who was said to have been assassinated because of the text.
Similarly, some authors have a penchant for frequently writing books or posting works that attract controversies from religious or political sections of society, as if they are signposts to hell.
Some writers are just crazy. And nature seems to have a way of making crazy things happen around them
When the Nigerian civil war of July 6 1967 to January 15, 1970, broke out, the writers’ brotherhood played significant role to the extent that many of them almost lost their life, while others were on exile. Here are some authors and Biafrans intellectuals that were soaked in controversy during the war.
As soon as the war began, civil defence activities in Biafra were held at Nsukka dubbed ‘University of Biafra’, before the administration ordered the evacuation of Nsukka for a major offensive. In four days, Nsukka was clawed by federal troops. Chukwuemeka Ike, co-author of The University of Nigeria Nsukka 1960-1985, An Experiment in Higher Education calls the institution, a “university on wheels,’’ adding that when Nuskka fell, the university moved to its Enugu campus. It later moved to Umudike near Umuahia, where Biafrans also pitched their headquarters. But official addresses remained University of Biafra, Nsukka.
From there, the writers’ brotherhood, intellectuals and students, met to support the cause of Biafra. Cyprian Ekwnesi, a veteran novelist, emerged the Directorate of Biafran information. Ekwensi once issued a release on 27 June 1967, “That Biafrans should be ready for an invasion on June 29 since ‘‘He was alluding to the day northern officers, led by Major T.Y. Danjuma, seized Gowon’s predecessor, Major-General J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi and killed him in a forest outside Ibadan
Novelist and broadcaster, Chinua Achebe, belonged to this brotherhood. In fact, Achebe recounted that the Rev. Victor Badejo, the Director-General of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), where he worked, warned him to stop coming to the office, because some soldiers came had been there to look for him. But why? Because his latest novel A Man of the People predicted the coup, which took place in 1966, the year the book was published. Achebe fled and later played significant roles in Biafra.
Prof. Ikenna Nzomiro, a radical sociologist and Marxist scholar, as well as eminent scholar and Emmanuel Obiechina, belong to this guild. They later teamed up Achebe and produced what became known as the Ahiara Declaration book, which spelt out most of Biafra’s ideology.
The Biafran Story is well written, with the graphic simplicity and factuality that foreshadowed Forsyth’s literary career. The book gives a heart rending account of the 1966 coups; the massacre – indeed, genocide – of Eastern Nigerians, the pulsating operations in the theatres of war and the kwashiorkor that brought Biafra to her knees.
Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, (leader of the secessionist struggle) was no less a small figure, when it comes to literary works. Ojukwu, who raised fund and financed the war efforts from the wealth bequeathed him by his father – Sir Louis Ojukwu – noted, as the richest in post-independence Nigeria, was a prolific writer and reader. Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna (alleged leader of Nigeria’s first military coup) and Ojukwu were two of the first university graduates commissioned into the army. While Ojukwu finished from Oxford, where he studied history, Ifeajuna was a product of University of Ibadan.
The spirit of the writers’ brotherhood was also alive in the work as enshrined in the Republic of Biafra’s National Anthem, Land of the Rising Sun. Ironically, the song was adopted from a poem of the same title, which Nnamdi Azikiwe, father of Nigerian nationalism, had composed, inside Biafra in 1968, after Claude Mckay’s American race conflict anthem If We Must Die (1919).


http://dailytimes.com.ng/remembering-biafran-pen-brotherhood-2/