Dear Readers: Anthonia Kalu begins our Blog posts on the Nigerian/Biafran war, resulting from our conference in October at the University of Ghana, Legon. Kalu traces both the erasure of the Biafran/African “archive” by colonialism, and the necessity of its full recovery if “the nature of the distress that leads to wars in African states” is to be understood. She also notes both the misery and necessity of subsuming Igbo sacred spaces and practices in favor of turning to Christian (and other) aid-givers during the war. This is compelling reading — we look forward to your comments.
by Anthonia C. Kalu
Although the 1648 Peace of Westphalia established the idea of sovereignty among major European states at the time, its provenance does not carry over to those nations’ ideas about subsequent colonization of African nations. Historical discussions and records skirt around issues of African nations’ sovereignty by focusing on Europe’s development agenda and the ability of European nations to fend off attacks from each other in African territories. During the slave trade, the placement of the cannons facing the Atlantic Ocean in Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle, for example, reveals that Europeans saw African homelands as lacking sovereignty, but also as contested territories/property among the European states. This means that from European perspectives, sovereignty is differential in its meanings and practice. Its determination is always external to the places and peoples whose rights are seen as residing outside of the spheres of influence of the bearers of power in a given location. For example, in order to keep other European nations away from Africa, what was significant for the owners of European cannons along the West African coastline was the restructuring of Africa’s indigenous socio-political reality, existence and self-determination. In that regard, Africans entered the already articulated international arena and discussions about sovereignty as subjects of various European states. During that period, European colonizers did not deem it necessary to know the nature of African nation’s self-determined locales or relevant peacekeeping strategies.
Throughout the colonization period, the cost to Africans of European industrialization was clouded by a veil of silence, and African suffering was subsumed under Europe’s successful use of force to dominate African sovereignties in the effort to build and sustain industry in Europe. Today, frequent references to Africa’s poverty in discussions about failed leadership and states tend to point toward distemper, indigenous discontent, uprisings against the state and African people’s inability to govern themselves. What is not always addressed is the fact that the Westphalia approach assigns sovereignty to the state, thereby making all its aspects accessible only to the nation through those who govern it. For most African nations, sovereignty is not assigned to the state because African peoples perceive and practice governance as accessible to all citizens. In other words, sovereignty is vested in the individual, who, through an elaborately designed kinship system is an extension of the community, ethnic group and nation.
The Biafra-Nigeria war, moving from a newly independent One Nigeria to a newly formed Biafra, seemed to add another layer of meaning to current understandings of sovereignty, state and Igbo humanity that overlay the already conflicted constructions of the concepts of ‘sovereign’ and ‘human’. Since independence connotes and denotes sovereignty, the frequent loss of both in the Biafra-Nigeria situation was begging for some form of humanitarian intervention. Consequently, recognition of Igbo people’s humanity by European humanitarian NGOs necessitated a closer examination of our overall Igbo identity. The word for human in Igbo is ‘mmadu’ (two linguistic particles: mma – beauty; and ndu – Life); that is, the beauty of life/life’s beauty. Philosophically, this Igbo word embeds views about life and humans that encode and assign sovereignty within humanness, and therefore human beings, human works and art; the Igbo polity. There is a way in which, for the Igbo, being Igbo is synonymous with having life and having beauty. And when both are present, no force except that of the Supreme Being can abrogate one’s rights to either Beauty or Life. This idea is encapsulated in the Igbo saying, ‘Igbo enwe eze’ – the Igbo have no king. The saying goes that anyone who wanted to be a king of the Igbo was required to first pay off everyone’s debts; a condition that simultaneously protected individual sovereignty and rights to group belonging and participation.
During the Biafra-Nigerian war, what was significant to those of us who witnessed it was the regularity with which we could not find refuge or defend ourselves within structures that were designated ‘Igbo’ or ‘African.’ Whenever a warfront dissolved as a result of takeover and occupation by the Nigerian forces, the only place people could seek and find certain refuge were the churches but never in an Igbo-defined sacred place like a sacred shrine or grove. In other words, there was no nso-ala to be observed during that war because there were no commonly recognized social or spiritual grounds that mediated the knowledge or practice of the sacred between the Igbo and the Nigerian forces. And, although in communities that found themselves near warfronts, people found it necessary to stop attending church services because of aerial bombardments and other wartime afflictions, the idea of church buildings as sacred places gained more credence and dominance as people on both sides of the war arrived at the understanding that those who were serious about survival had to find ways to accept European cultural intrusions and modes of survival. From the point of view of the general population: one day, we were an optimistic group of people building a new nation from nothing, and the next day, we were seeking aid and recognition in our homeland from outsiders. To their credit, those Igbo elders who were not required to put on soldiers’ uniforms worked hard to both help people keep whatever dignity they had left and to not let Nigeria win the war for the Igbo soul.
A significant part of the wartime dilemma involved how to convince people who were used to fending for themselves from fertile ancestral lands to accept foreign aid. But, while the young and able-bodied had gone away to defend Biafra and the Igbo, the problem of how to keep those who were left behind alive escalated. So, as death from Nigerian bullets and Kwashiorkor became daily realities, local chiefs and their agents began to go from one compound, homestead and kindred group to the next to tell people, especially women, to make the shame-filled journey to the Christian Mission or Village Square for the gift of a few cups of cornmeal, a cut of wet salted codfish, a cup of dried egg yolk, the occasional Aspirin or Excedrin, second-hand clothes or just bandages. For most people in Biafra, that was the worst part of the war with Nigeria.
However, and eventually, the incredulous burden of hope that the relief-givers (which included the Red Cross, CARITAS, and others) brought with them began to seep into our lives and the message was disseminated, mostly as questions, not by the churches, but by the elders, the new home guard. Who were these people that flew into Biafra with airplanes filled with food and medicines from abroad? Were they the same people who owned and flew the airplanes with the bombs and bullets? How could they, simultaneously, want us to live but still support efforts to destroy us? In other words, what was the nature of humanitarianism?
In several discussions about humanitarian action, the question of productive and positive involvement of the local people remains an issue. Most of the discussion revolves around the recipients of aid being included as participants by humanitarian organizations. Although that is an important concern, mere participation is not sufficient. While the humanitarian movement emanates from the principle of European individualism, which asserts that “all human beings are of equal moral significance… it was [also] the disregard of that significance which constituted the abuses against which the movement was directed.”[1] And, while almsgiving is part of both Christian and Islamic engagement, traditional African thought does not have any known doctrinal opinions about almsgiving because most African religions revolve around the notion of extended kinship systems; and, for the most part, gifts within those systems are not regarded as aid but as part of the kindred’s obligation to ensure group survival. This last idea from African socio-religious thought is most clearly stated in the IsiZulu idea of Ubuntu – “I am because we are.”
Understanding the nature of the distress that leads to wars in African states requires a clear knowledge of what is archived in a given African location. It mandates constant and frequent reenactments of memories of ancient freedoms and sovereignties in that location. It requires a persistent and competent call to all expressive African locations to reactivate and maintain the memories of the sovereignty of their people as a collective that colonialism tried to erase. During the colonial period, the European archive, constructed through photos, letters written to the colonizing homelands, and stories told about their successful missions, ignored the nature, process and function of African archives about indigenous African life and living because it did not record the fact that Africa’s geographic locations (also known as African states) are also archives of the realities of human existence. That, as archives, those locations contain the smiles, the dances, the music and other collective expressions of individual sovereignty, without which, the polity does not exist or function. And, without recognition, those locations become identified by the nakedness and emptiness that has become the hallmark of different African regions.
It is still difficult to know how many people, young and old, experienced a loss of dignity during the Biafra-Nigerian war; and, no known socio-cultural, political or religious processes seems adequate to heal the individual and collective Igbo soul. However, having entered the community’s archive, it is difficult to address the existence of this anomaly in a meaningful way unless it can be talked about openly by all Nigerians in ways that will enable the Nigerian state to begin to resolve the continuing problem of rampant insurgency that seems to have become a national past-time.
Anthonia Kalu is a professor of Comparative Literature; and, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her collection of short stories, Broken Lives and Other Stories (Ohio University Press, 2003) about the Biafra-Nigeria war examines the experiences of women and children during the war.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarianism#Individualism