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COPYRIGHT 2008 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
Eddie Iroh made the observation that writers of his generation, who had lived through the Biafran conflict, were too close to the suffering to write the definitive accounts of the war, and that the task would fall to later generations. This essay looks at three later accounts--Dulue Mbachu's War Games (2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Uzodinma Iweala's Beast of No Nation (2005)--to assess the war's impact on Nigerian cultural expression in the twenty-first century. As the eldest of the three writers, Mbachu lingers more on the war itself than do the other two, but far less than its contemporaries like Achebe. Adichie portray the war as a backdrop for interpersonal ethical questions, and Iweala, as an unnamed conflict that stands in the place of all such juggernauts against the poor, and especially these days against child soldiers.
Darkness descended on him, and when it lifted he knew that he would never see Kainene again and that his life would always be like a candlelit room; he would see things only in shadow, only in half glimpses. (Adichie 430)
This is a fact--and worries me--if you see too much death, then death begins to lose some of its reverence, or whatever it is. ("Chinua" 35) (1)
Heraclitus wrote that "a man's character is his fate" (On the Universe), but how is one to know what that character is if one is still a child? Following on Heraclitus, Georg Lukacs writes that "situations arise in which a man is confronted with a choice; and in the act of choice a man's character may reveal itself in a light that surprises even himself" (22). But how is a child to choose, if the options are to shoot one's friend, or be shot by one's commander? "To believe," writes Lukacs, "means that a man consciously assumes an irrational attitude toward his own self--Let's be clear about it: there is not rational tragedy, because all heroism is irrational" (Kadarkay 203). But how can one believe in a cause that one cannot comprehend, that is irrelevant to one's complete lack of agency in the choice of one's fate? What prospects are there for an "authentic subject" when the context for his or her "creation" is irrational, premature, violent, homicidal? These questions intend to weave a philosophical net in which the following discussion is suspended, since in doing so they foreground the central aporia of the child too quickly coming of age in a time of war.
The Federation of Nigeria gained its independence on October 1, 1960, and two years later its constitution was adopted and it was admitted to the Commonwealth. Such marks of stability papered over essential disparities in this most populous of African countries: 140 million people; more than 250 ethnic groups (most prominently: Hausa and Fulani, Yoruba, Ibo, Ijaw, Kanuri, Ibibio, and Tiv; religious diversity (50% Muslim, 40% Christian, 10% of indigenous faiths). In the Biafran secession these counternational forces broke through the cardboard scenery. As Basil Davidson pointedly puts it, the "nation" that follows colonialism is usually not much of a gift; throughout Africa, in fact, it has been more akin to "the black man's burden," a problematic assemblage of peoples who frequently enough have little more in common than proximity. Reflecting on this irony, Imre Szeman notes that "the central insight into the phenomenon of the nation that is shared by all of the recent critical writing on the subject has been that all nations must be seen as essentially arbitrary configurations of culture and power, which the phenomenon of nationalism tries to obscure and make timeless and natural" (117). And within the notion of nationalism, the injustices of pitting one ethnic group against another that became a central modus operandi of colonial government, in subsequent years continue to undermine the chances for stability and healing in a newly colonializing world. South Africa's controversial Truth and Reconciliation Commission is one way of taking the decision to move beyond the complex, rhizomatic context of guilt and recrimination that otherwise would threaten to mire subsequent generations in the earlier history of injustice. In the Nigerian context, no similar forum has been found to refashion a nation after the horrors, self-inflicted and nurtured from abroad, that tore the country apart so soon after supposed independence. Contemporary fiction, though, suggests that time, and art, may by default have become the only effective means to digest the poison of the past, and to slowly heal from within the damage that has been done.
Just seven years after the country's nominal independence, the Nigerian Civil War extended from July 6, 1967, to January 13, 1970; the rest of the world watched it unfold, as it watched Darfur, Rwanda, and other such conflicts. Only Tanzania, Zambia, Gabon, South Africa, and the Ivory Coast recognized Biafra as a new state; by the end of the war, over three million Ibos had fled to the east, and thereby bolstered ethnic division of the country. Up to the same number died, either from the fighting itself or from starvation and disease. The details of the struggle, however, are not the focus of this essay. Today's Nigeria is a young country in several striking ways, and the most telling is the age of its people: well over half are less than thirty; an amazing forty-four percent are under fifteen years of age. The Biafran War ended thirty-seven years ago and so was not experienced by most living Nigerians; indeed, for many Nigerians it figures much as "Vietnam" does for most Americans: as a symbol of a bad time that our elders went through; a wound that disfigures our self-reflection.
It was not always this way. Some of those closest to the Biafran fighting wrote scathingly and with immediacy, naming names and particular places as if the writers were reporters seeking to draw the world's attention to an ongoing injustice that had to be attended to and stopped now. For them, this...
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