Achebe and the Igbo narrative: not a single story

“Shege Inyamirin, arne kawai!” the man screamed at me as I sprawled on the red earth, my 20 litre water container, which a few moments ago was balanced on my head as I hurried across the railway track, was not too far away. I looked from the container,  which jerked as it expelled the water I had just fetched from Isa Kaita’s Dutse Close home, to the snarling man that had just pushed me, wondering why my being Igbo merited that much callousness. I looked towards my father’s chemist shop a few metres away, more worried about what he would do if the container was broken than going back to the long queue of people waiting their turn at the tap Alhaji Isa Kaita (CBE) had graciously provided for the public inside His expansive compound. Yes, the man had pushed me, and beyond his expletives that can only be summarised as "Igbo infidel", he offered no explanation and people around did not ask. Surely, why he pushed me, hampered as I was by my large container, was a question that should have been asked, especially as I had not impeded him, or brushed against him. My crime was having tribal marking beside my eyes that identified me to be Igbo, an ethnic group that everyone not Igbo seemed to hate—at least that was what my young mind felt then.

The event above happened about two decades ago in Angwa Shanu, a town in Kaduna North LGA, Kaduna state. It was one of several instances where my siblings and me were singled out and abused because we are Igbo. I recall it here to buttress the point that the Igbo have not had it easy in post war Nigeria and that the hate for the Igbo runs deeper than many care to admit. However, we do not need anyone to admit anything, that we know this fact is what is important, to us that is.

Growing up, I can’t recall my father telling us to be cautious, or to deny our Igboness, but we knew the ability to survive in a society hostile to our kind is our only defence. So, we learnt Hausa, learnt to recite the more common Islamic creeds and learnt to deny our Igboness. To avoid the Igbo stigma, we became Southern Kaduna, Benue, Cross River, Bendel or any other grouping, but never Igbo if we could help it.

We survived, but then there were instances where those who aim to punish the Igbo, who are mostly in the minority, an ill-informed minority, like the man above, saw us, knew, and gave us the treatment reserved for the Igbo—contempt. These experiences were not peculiar to my siblings and me. Many Igbo, especially those who live outside the Igbo home region, faced something similar or worse. Igbo bore the brunt of ethno-religious conflicts in the North, even though they more time than not live peacefully with their neighbours. Across the north, once bloodlust runs high, our businesses are targeted, looted and burnt, our women are raped and killed, our brothers die, our fathers die, our mothers die, the Igbo die.

We run back to our ancestral homelands after the fact, licking wounds, wondering why we sojourned in a land that has become the graveyard of our kind, but then, we go back again, only to repeat the process.

I used to blame people who engage in this cyclic movement, but one only has to spend time in the Igbo homeland to understand. The Nigerian government, perhaps to punish us for being so bold as to want to leave an European creation, treated the Igbo same way we treated our outcasts. The government engaged in an unwritten policy of ensuring the Igbo makes little headway economically and otherwise. We were denied schools, denied infrastructure and our people in the civil service were suppressed.

While many other ethnic groups would have fallen to bits in the face of such oppression, the Igbo looked within, and rediscovered that thing that made them formidable enough to elicit the envy many Igbos feel the other tribes have for them, their drive to succeed despite the odds, a drive that is both good and evil--as many would recognise. The astonishing number of community primary and secondary schools in the South East attest to this fact, as does the markets across Nigeria, to which our people transferred to when education and a job in the civil service stopped being a viable option for the Igbo, and the factories in many Igbo towns that survive without much government help. 

Despite the common narrative when people talk about the Igbo, we did not abandon education. I bet you you'll hardly find and Igbo shop keeper anywhere that can't read and write, but that is story for another day, a story of stereotypes. However, the story of people who were kept off the Nigerian Defence Academy, the Police Academy and most federal employment opportunity in the years following the Civil War, is one I have heard about, witnessed, and lamented upon time and time again. I know of brilliant people who could not make any headway in their career because they are Igbo, I recall how until recently it was impossible to think of an Igbo head of the Army, Police of any armed service. I recall my father saying Igbo are usually giving challenging position that others find difficult and still look at the names of those who occupy positions that require more than political connection and wonder at his words.

Now, the truth is that in the Igbo heartlands and elsewhere, the Igbo too are known to discriminate against people not of their race and even fellow Igbo. This narrative however focuses on the Igbo narrative, because that is the experience I know, that is the experience Achebe and other Igbo writing about this current controversy know. We ask for our views to be respected, and that is not too much to ask.

As for the Civil War, the fact that Nigeria chose to ignore it meant little to the Igbo. My father died proud to have fought for Biafra, and every Biafran soldier I have had the honour to meet feels same way. We grew up with their stories; we didn’t need history books to know about what happened in Abagana, or how markets were bombed by war planes, or how girls were carried away by randy Nigerian soldiers. We know the massacres, we know of those promising young men who died in the war, we know of relatives, too young to fend for themselves, who died of starvation. Every village in Igbo land has a story, and none of it is a story of gratitude to the people who led Nigeria during the war. You will also find that the story is one of pride, pride of place, of being of a people who repeatedly defied enormous odds.

Somebody used starvation as a weapon of war, he supported a policy that blockaded aid meant for a starving population and defended that action, which invariably led to the death of millions, and people are up in arms because someone else gave and opinion as why that someone would have approved of such drastic action. The questions that beg answers are these: were the Igbo not intentionally starved during the war? Did that policy not led to acute suffering and loss of life—over two million babies, women, young children and other civilians? Is intentional starving of a civilian population not a war crime? Is the man that formulated and saw to the implementation of that program not culpable if it is indeed a war crime? Has the Nigerian state ever truly worked to reintegrate the Igbo into the country? How can people justify the payment of 20 pounds to every Igbo with a bank account no matter how much they had in the banks prior to the war?

The reason for all this yarn is to point out that the issues arising from the war is personal to the Igbo, we lived it and are still living it, no one can tell our story better from our point of view. Also, I can’t recall markets in Lagos of Kaduna getting bombed during the war, or girls in Ibadan dragged screaming into jeeps in the aftermath, or the smell of rotting corpse pervading Maiduguri, or the people getting hurt by unexploded ordnance in Akure forty years after the war.

The Igbo has come of age and we claim the right to be respected too.

Pa Achebe, May the Gods of our fathers bless his soul, has said his own, in a book that I am eagerly looking forward to read. Those who played a part in the war, who are still alive, should say their own.