Persecution in Igbo-Nigerian Civil-War Narratives

Home , Half of a Yellow Sun, The Sun (Nigeria)

Matatu 49 (2017) 241–259

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Ignatius Chukwumah Federal University, Wukari, Taraba State, Nigeria [email protected]

Cassandra Ifeoma Nebeife Federal University, Wukari, Taraba State, Nigeria [email protected]

Abstract

Sociopolitical phenomena such as corruption, political instability, (domestic) violence, cultural fragmentation, and the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) have been central themes of Nigerian narratives. Important as these are, they tend to touch on the periphery of the major issue at stake, which is the vector of persecution underlying the Nigerian tradition in general and in modern Igbo Nigerian narratives in particular, novels and short stories written in English which capture, wholly or in part, the Igbo cosmology and experience in their discursive formations. The present study of such modern Igbo Nigerian narratives as Okpewho’s The Last Duty (1976), Iyayi’s Heroes (1986), Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), and other novels and short stories applies René Girard’s theory of the pharmakos (Greek for scapegoat) to this background of persecution, particularly as it subtends the condition of the Igbo in postcolonial Nigeria in the early years of independence.

Keywords

Festus Iyayi – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Ben Okri – Isidore Okpewho – Half of a Yellow Sun – Heroes – Nigerian Civil War novel – persecution in African literature – René Girard – the pharmakos …

War produces a pathetically lame and rudderless polity in which all man- ner of shameless treachery and scams and skullduggery become a way

of life. The whole moral landscape in its deracination and its encourage- ment of wholesale subversion of justice anticipates the present national circumstances of Nigeria in its amorality and aconscient insensitivity.1 ∵

Introduction

A fraction of the Nigerian novel of violence has been dubbed ‘war novels’, given that such narratives aim at re-imagining the Nigeria–Biafra War (also known as Nigerian Civil War or the Biafran War) (1967–1970). In Nigeria, as in any nation that has experienced civil strife, the scars of this war on the Nigerian psyche are as indelible as they are still evident in the contemporary Nigerian body politic.2 True to the palpable feeling throughout sub-Saharan Africa, Nigerians were agog with jubilation when the Union Jack was lowered and the green-white-green flag of newly independent Nigeria was hoisted on 1 October 1960. Exactly three years later, in 1963, it became a republic, indicating that the Queen no longer served Nigeria as Head of State. All this took place after the British policy of divide and rule had already created deep-seated suspicion and greatly damaged whatever fabric of unity there was among the common people. What seemed to have been patched up since 1960 manifested itself in the open on 15 January 1966 when a military putsch overthrew the democratic government left in place by the colonialists. This was followed by the slaughter of some 50,000 Igbo in Northern Nigeria after a counter-coup in July 1966. Nursing their bruises, pain, and trauma, the Igbo, whose ancestral home forms the greater part of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, declared their secession from the Nigerian state. The consequence was a brutal civil war that cost some three million deaths. The rest is history, but painful relics stare us in the face. Since the Nigerian Civil War historically ended in 1970, a considerable number of Nigerian narratives have explored it; these fall into three broad categories: biography, the novel, and short stories. This essay will exclude the first,

1 Chimalum Nwankwo, “The Muted Index of War in African Literature and Society,” African Literature Today 26 (2008): 7. 2 Iniobong I. Uko, “Of War & Madness: A Symbolic Transmutation of the Nigeria–Biafra War in Selected Stories from The Insider: Stories of War & Peace from Nigeria,” African Literature Today 26 (2008): 49.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/29/2021 (2017) 241–259 05:45:57AM via free access persecution in igbo-nigerian civil-war narratives 243 not because biography does not capture the Igbo experience or is not mainly the work of Igbo writers, or does not account for the point of view of the persecuted. Rather, it is that there are so many biographies and memoirs, most cleav- ing much closer and more clinically to historical discourses. In other words, the ‘factual’ narratives are so heavily burdened with the quest for exactness that their quotient of literary imaginativeness yields little fruit in a brief project such as this, devoted as it is to narratives very much distanced from history and devoid of close correlation with past historical data. Thus, we are left with Igbo-Nigerian Civil-War novels and short stories; they are called this because these narratives, written from the point of view of the persecuted, whether by Igbo themselves or by literary artists sympathetic to Igbo suffering, portray in imaginative terms the Igbo experience of suffering, endurance, and the hard work of navigating the exceptional quotidian.

Complementary Perspective

The novel treating the war includes but is not limited to Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty (1976), Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982), Festus Iyayi’s Heroes (1986), Uzodinmia Iweala’s Beast of No Nation (2005), Dulue Mbachu’s War Games (2005), and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), while the category of short stories covers Achebe’s Girls at War and Other Stories, the anthology The Insider: Stories of War and Peace from Nigeria, by Chinua Achebe et al., Flora Nwapa’s Wives at War and Other Stories, Ben Okri’s “Laughter Beneath the Bridge” in his collection Incidents at the Shrine (1986), Chimananda Adichie’s “Ghosts” in her collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and Ifeanyi Ajaegbo’s “The Spoils of War” in Dead Man Walking and Other Stories (2008). The present essay will focus mainly on Iyayi’s Heroes, Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, and a couple of short stories, while making incidental reference to other works not mentioned above, depending on the gradient of representation of persecution and, ultimately, on what we term the presence of the pharmakos or scapegoat. Heroes and Half of a Yellow Sun capture in subtle but emphatic fashion the representation of persecution, not only as context but also in its far-reaching impact in moulding and re/unmak- ing the protagonists. Not far from asserting the obvious, Gbemisola Adeoti declares that Heroes commemorates the soldierly bravery of the rank and file on both sides of the war, Nigerian and Biafran.3 Soldiering also preoccupies

3 Gbemisola Adeoti, “Narrating the Green Gods: the (auto) biographies of Nigerian military

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Fírinne,4 who shows how Iyayi’s imagination alters the conventional narrative paradigm of the war as historical discourses presented it to the world in the late 1960s. For Fírinne, political debates then and socio-economic experiences in Iyayi’s days back in the 1980s—the coups, the military highhandedness, the imf loan palaver, and the nationwide strikes at the time in which he was a major player—could have served as the muse and creative spirit behind Heroes, given that Iyayi did not directly experience the war in a magnitude qualifying to be so called. Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, for its part, won the Orange Prize for Fic- tion in 2007 and other prestigious awards. Written under what appears to have been the imprint of Chinua Achebe, the novel, Adichie’s best show of adept literary craftsmanship,5 exemplifies, among other things, the intricate implications of child soldiering in contemporary Africa.6 It ushered in the need to recall the past in making meaning out of the present’s uncertain and nebulous realities.7 A goodly number of scholarly works have focused on suffering, from various perspectives. Daniela-Irina Darie analyses suffering and its repercus- sive trauma, not only with respect to characters in Half of a Yellow Sun, but also in Adichie’s other works.8 These characters, for Darie, do not just idly bemoan their fate; they make concerted efforts to navigate their suffering by diverse means. For De La Cruz-Guzman, this navigation in Half of aYellow Sun is under- taken using indigenous knowledge.9 Suffering, as it affects textual characters, is evoked in Virginia Dike’s essay, where Ugwu and Baby’s growth is examined as

rulers,” in Intellectuals and African Development: Pretension and Resistance in African Politics, ed. Björn Beckman & Gbemisola Adeoti (Dakar: codesria, 2006): 50. 4 Ní Chréacháin Fírinne, “How the Present Shapes the Past: Festus Iyayi’s Heroes—The Nigerian Civil War Revisited,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27.1 (1992): 48–57. 5 Elleke Boehmer, “Achebe and His Influence in Some Contemporary AfricanWriting,”Interven- tions 11.2 (2009): 141–153; Brian Doherty, “Writing Back with a Difference: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘The Headstrong Historian’ as a Response to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,” Matatu 45 (2014): 187–201. 6 See, for instance, Eleni Coundouriotis, “The Child Soldier Narrative and the Problem of Arrested Historicization,” Journal of Human Rights 9.2 (2010): 191–206. 7 Aghogho Akpome, “Narrating a New Nationalism: Rehistoricization and Political Apologia in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun,” English Academy Review 30.1 (2013): 22– 38, and “Focalisation and Polyvocality in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun,” English Studies in Africa 56.2 (2013): 25–35. 8 Daniela-Irina Darie, “The Beheaded Child: Trauma and Resilience in Adichie’s Novels,” in Identities in Metamorphosis: Literature, Discourse and Multicultural Dialogue, ed. Iulian Boldea (Tîrgu Mures: Archipelag xxi Press, 2014): 1036–1046. 9 Marlene De La Cruz-Guzmán, “Trauma and Narrativity in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun:

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/29/2021 (2017) 241–259 05:45:57AM via free access persecution in igbo-nigerian civil-war narratives 245 having been distorted by the harshness of a crisis-ridden environment.10 Inter- estingly, these latter studies hammering away at the suffering that characters undergo fail to recognize the potential of these narratives for presenting the broad spectrum of persecution and the resonant and impressive pharmakos figure that emerges from the milieu of suffering. Reading Half of a Yellow Sun against Heroes, one might ask: what forceful figure of suffering in the form of persecution emerges from its pages? What remote base instincts give rise to the text’s war experience? Lastly, with the emergence of one more novel of war in Half of a Yellow Sun, the latest in a clutch of twenty-first-century Nige- rian war novels that includes Uzodinma’s Beast of No Nation and Mbachu’s War Games (at a time when one would have thought that it was all over for Nigerian war narratives) in addition to the older, seminal ones, what possible crimes/offences, before and during the war, could the Igbo, the persecuted in all three of the texts just mentioned, have been adjudged to have committed that would warrant the purging, coldblooded murder, and pogroms, and how can these offences be somehow accounted for theoretically? In attempting to proffer answers to these questions, this study will draw on René Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. Crisis constitutes the context or pretext for the mob’s choosing as the pharmakos marginalized or inferiorized persons who have already been deprived of their cultural context or nurturing environment.11 This background lays the foundation for the surfacing of the first pharmakos, a member of a group of people, who is chosen for typically unjustified suffering and persecution through acts of violence in consequence of the signs he bears. The signs may be physical: “sickness, madness, genetic deformities, accidental injuries” and general disabilities; cultural: belonging to an ethnic minority; religious: belonging to a sectarian or religious minority; or social: being a “well known stranger.”12 He may, without bearing any of the above signs, still be identified by the mob, who feels that the pharmakos has contaminated society. Whereas it is possible to find these victim signs in one individual, as in Okonkwo in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, their unequal distribution among individuals is possible. The signs

Privileging Indigenous Knowledge in Writing the Biafran War,” in African Intellectuals and Decolonization, ed. Nicholas M. Creary (Athens: Ohio up, 2012): 37–65. 10 Virginia W. Dike, “Growing Up on the Hard Side: Male Adolescent Experience in Contem- porary Nigeria,” Sankofa 7 (2008): 23–31. Dike also examines Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation and Chris Abani’s GraceLand. 11 René Girard, The Scapegoat, tr. Yvonne Freccero (Le bouc émissaire, 1982; Baltimore md: Johns Hopkins up, 1986): 14. 12 Girard, The Scapegoat, 15.

Matatu 49 (2017) 241–259 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 05:45:57AM via free access 246 chukwumah and nebeife enable the pharmakos to emerge in distinct form not only in Western literature, but, as we shall see, also in contemporary Nigerian war narratives. Some remarks about the mob. This has become urgent, owing to the prime place it occupies in the radius of persecution, it being the mobile force and agent of violence in such times and by virtue of its heterogeneous nature. As the short arm of society’s retributive instincts, it is only fully visible at the point at which it crowds in physically on the persecuted, the pharmakos. In Half of a Yellow Sun, the mob is within the army; for the Biafran civilian population, soldiers constitute a mob in matters of conscription, rape, robbery, theft, sabotage, and desertion. Heroes questions the morality of the crisis, of the civil war itself; interrogates the basis for the war; and lays its cause squarely at the feet of the ruling class of the time. In Heroes, the leader of this mob is, interestingly, a person in authority, President Gowon, one from whom orders trickle down to the polity, especially the armed forces. Once an order is given, the troops must obey. When this mob gets down to business in Heroes, the Federal troops in Benin must fabricate pretexts for punishing transgression. The crimes of which it accuses its victims are those considered to involve the strictest taboos before and during that period of crisis (though not originally existing in the cultural mentality of the people—in the case of individuals like Ade’s Bini landlord, he is accused of hiding Biafran friends, who are said to be ‘soldiers’ to make the allegation weighty enough). Examples of transgression are aiding and abetting the rebel forces or enemies of the state, who are invariably bent on destroying the nation. The victims, identified by manifest ‘victim signs’, all of these associ- ated with the three stereotypes of the pharmakos identified by Girard, are done away with. Yet these ‘soldiers’ had been the victim’s friends and compatriots a short while before. How do they fit into and extend the semantic ramifications of the term ‘mob’? Of course, the element of spontaneity seems to be missing in the eruption of the Federal troops as a mob. It nonetheless possesses vital definitive characteristics of the mob—it emerges from the background of the blurring, through crisis, of the cultural divisions that had once held order in place. In quest of a new dawn, away from the atmosphere of occupation and seeing things for himself, like Richard Churchill in Half of a Yellow Sun, Osime in Iyayi’s Heroes realizes that the war is much more than has been reported all along. Heroes and Okpewho’s The Last Duty present gripping accounts of the civil war from the Nigerian end, with a large touch of sympathy for the Biafrans. However, whereas Heroes is much like a chronicle of events of the war, three years after it began, The Last Duty pictures the war as a backcloth for a domestic tragedy involving a Biafran woman, around whom the events

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/29/2021 (2017) 241–259 05:45:57AM via free access persecution in igbo-nigerian civil-war narratives 247 revolve. As soldiers, the mob in Heroes has the blessing and sponsorship of the State under whose auspices it operates and charges at the enemy. Consider the beating of Osime before Salome, Otunshi’s wife, intervenes. Osime sums it up—“These people are not to be trusted with anybody’s life”13—and frames their mobbish nature as “bastards” and a “crowd of butchers.”14 In Okri’s short story, the mob is called “a wild bunch of people.”15 There is changeability and fluidity in the constitution of the mob in Adichie’s Half of aYellowSun and “Ghosts,” where they are articulated as “vandals.”16 First, the mob is the Hausa/Fulani in the North and, later, the authority in Lagos abet- ted by an international consortium of interests underwriting Gowon’s mobship in ammunition, cash, and kind in the quest to annihilate Biafra. Here, the mob sprouts from a strange arena, an untraditional sphere heretofore unknown for mob activity. Gowon, representing the entirety of the Nigerian nation and society, leads those other members of the mob that includes representatives of their countries. He thus constitutes a very rare instance in literature in which nations assume the character of a mob. In The Last Duty, the Nigerian troops are almost anonymously neutral, presenting themselves neither as a mob nor as a deliverer, although a cursory reading would suggest that they are, paradoxically, both. But what they lack Odibo and Toje supply, becoming the first crop of civilian members of the mob group to torment and incarcerate Oshevire, dispossess him of his land, and slake their lust on his wife. As Fírinne rightly observes,17 Iyayi’s Heroes is an exception from the body of works written mainly by Igbo literary artists. Along with Iyayi we can include at least two other sympathetic non-Igbo writers, Ben Okri and Isidore Okpe- who. To convey their sympathy, these writers present characters who are either in love with Biafran women or have been born to Biafran mothers. Focusing on a protagonist sympathetic to Igbo suffering, the narrator can hardly avoid being compassionate. In Heroes, the protagonist is in love with a midwestern Igbo woman, Ndudi, the daughter of his landlord; he is a journalist, a profession that should conventionally expect him to be nosing about for pieces of informa- tion and relaying the same as objectively as he can to those who are ignorant; he experiences on his body, at first-hand, the brutality of the war, which stiff-

13 Festus Iyayi, Heroes (Lagos: Longman, 1986): 32. 14 Iyayi, Heroes, 33, 34. 15 Ben Okri, “Laughter Beneath the Bridge,” in Okri, Incidents at the Shrine (London: Vintage, 1993): 1. 16 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Lagos: Farafina, 2006): 280; Adichie, “Ghosts,” in Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck (Lagos: Farafina, 2009): 67. 17 Ní Chréacháin Fírinne, “How the Present Shapes the Past,” 48.

Matatu 49 (2017) 241–259 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 05:45:57AM via free access 248 chukwumah and nebeife ens his resolve to write the truth, both the ugly and the beautiful. Okpewho’s narrator tells the story of how a Biafran woman married to a Nigerian is drawn into sexual relations with her husband’s incarcerators. Besides Okri and Iyayi, whose works represent the war from the vantage point of compassion, some works, such as Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2006), present only con- textual hints about the war, thanks to its representation from the persecutor’s perspective. The narrator tells of the assassination of Balewa and the seces- sionists, the rejection of secession by Federalists, and the British support for Nigeria. But then it quickly proceeds to report a conversation arising from an unsympathetic context:

For a while the palaver had stopped, and now it seemed the Biafrans were trying to split our country in two. Uncle Fatai broke the silence. “Hope our boys finish them off.” “What the hell are you talking about?” Uncle Alex asked. “They want a fight,” Uncle Fatai said. “We’ll give them a fight.” Uncle Alex prodded his chest, almost toppling him over. “Can you fight? Can you?” My father tried to intervene but he warned, “Keep out of this, Sunny.” My father eventually asked Uncle Alex to leave. He patted my head as he left and we never saw him in our house again. Over the next months, I would listen to radio bulletins on how our troops were faring against the Biafrans. I would hear the slogan: “To keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done.” My father would ask me to hide under my bed whenever we had bomb raid alerts. Sometimes I heard him talking about Uncle Alex; how he’d known before hand there was going to be a civil war; how he’d joined the Biafrans and died fighting for them even though he hated guns. atta, Everything Good Will Come 13–14

Another character, Uncle Akanni in Everything Good Will Come, relates stories to the narrator for the purpose of entertainment—of “how Biafran soldiers stepped on landmines that blew up their legs like crushed tomatoes; how Biafran children ate lizard flesh to stay alive.”18 With childish inquisitiveness, she listens with elation to yarns by adult males, oblivious to the meanness adult life offers her innocent soul.

18 Sefi Atta, Everything Good Will Come (Northampton ma: Interlink, 2005): 15.

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In all the above narratives, irrespective of the mode and perspective of representation, the heavy blows of war are magnified; to what extent these blows inflicted on the Biafrans amounted to persecution—group or individual—is the chief object of the present discussion.

“This is War”—Crisis as Context

The narratives under study uniformly represent a period of intense dishar- mony. This can be gleaned from the words spoken by many of the characters. Starting with short stories: Ndie’s mother in Ajaegbo’s “The Spoils of War” describes the period as “hard times” in which they “have to survive.”19 Her husband has just died, possibly from the war, and here is Haruna, a soldier in the Federal/Nigerian army occupying Ndie’s part of the country, enmeshed in a shameful love relationship with a woman psychologically vulnerable to his advances. Yet Biafra is not far away, for Ndie says: “Soon I would become a soldier in the Biafran army, and I would stop that man who always came to our house at night. […] I would kill that man.”20 Ndie is an adolescent and the claws of the times, evident in the elimination of known and operative cultural divisions sustaining order, have already been sunk deep in her, as shown in her resolve to seek revenge. Morality and respect for one another are also already jettisoned. Ndie and her mother belong to the “majority,” a group among the conquered people but hardly part of the active minority (a class of trained men willing to defend their homesteads, who can ably dispel any external aggres- sion). In Adichie’s “Ghosts,” we encounter a recollection of wartime in peacetime, some thirty-seven years later. The memories are crystal-clear, bringing back the harsh realities of the dark period of the war at the Biafrian end. The narrator describes the crisis-ridden day: “we evacuated Nsukka in a hurry, with the sun a strange fiery red in the sky” (61). The narrator’s flat and its surroundings bear all the signs of destruction: “the landscape of ruins, the blown-out roofs, the houses riddled with holes” (65). In an apparent display of disregard for cultural divisions, the militia, on seeing a professor’s vehicle, promptly “stopped us and shoved a wounded soldier into the car” (65). In peacetime, some modicum of civility, a request to render help from a total stranger, or an appeal to his

19 Ifeanyi Ajaegbo, “The Spoils of War,” in Ajaegbo, Dead Man Walking and Other Stories (Ibadan: Kraft, 2008): 106. 20 Ajaegbo, “The Spoils of War,” 101.

Matatu 49 (2017) 241–259 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 05:45:57AM via free access 250 chukwumah and nebeife sense of charity, would have been made. In any case, an ambulance would have been sent for. But none of these is the case; the atmosphere is disjointed, makeshift. The first line of Okri’s “Laughter Beneath the Bridge” describes the frenetic period of emergency as “long day,” where the narrator, whose mother is a Biafran, and another boy await the fall of bombs in the premises of a school. Some persons are scattered though the school compound, “searching for those of the rebel tribe.”21 The blare of sirens and fire engines gives everyone the impression that a weird feast is going on in the country. A mob gets hold of a man and beats him up; “in a riot of vengeance, they broke sticks and bottles on his head,”22 even as the narrator and two other schoolchildren are separated from their parents, who have probably run for safety on the eve of the outbreak of the war. “There were a hundred checkpoints. The soldiers at every one of them seemed possessed of a belligerent vitality,” the child narrator reports.23 And the repercussions of the crisis include families trudging great distances through empty wastes, while children straggle behind, “weeping without the possibility of consolation.”24 Somewhere, they encounter the surprising cir- cumstance of a shibboleth, where they have the double task of speaking their own language and reciting the Hail Mary. In Iyayi’s Heroes, the context of crisis is also evident; we observe it through the protagonist’s eyes. At first, he, Osime, has noble feelings about the war, reasoning that the country must not be split. But soon events erode this confi- dence. The first event is his being coerced to keep vigil every night in a neigh- bourhood watch group called “civil defence” (12). Next is the beating he receives at the hands of the soldiers at the stadium. A fully accredited journalist with a seat assigned him on one of the marked platforms, he is turned back. When he objects, he is given the beating of his life—an indication of the looming disor- der and absence of accountability. Salome, a former love, comes to his rescue. The soldiers have this to say about journalists, his ilk:

“Do you want me to tell you what we have done to journalists in this war? […] Journalists like you we have first of all shaved and whipped before shooting. Now go away.” iyayi, Heroes 28

21 Ben Okri, “Laughter Beneath the Bridge,” 1. 22 Okri, “Laughter Beneath the Bridge,” 3. 23 “Laughter Beneath the Bridge,” 5. 24 “Laughter Beneath the Bridge,” 5.

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Killing journalists—for what reason? Because cultural categories and ethics have been overturned and the nation is topsy-turvy; from now on, his hopes begin to fade. The critical situation has also affected military discipline and respect for seniors. When Osime confronts the captain in charge of the military post at Hillside with firm evidence of the cold-blooded murder of his landlord, Mr Ohiali, when in fact he was required to come and register, he replies that no clearance was sought from him and no such order to kill was ever issued. Seeing the alarm on Osime’s face, the captain lamely declares: “This is war” (24). In effect, even the army, noted for discipline and order, is having its own fair share of anarchy. Discipline has been shattered, and no officer, including a captain like himself, can remedy the state of affairs. It dawns on Osime that he is in the midst of a new dispensation:

I am learning. I am learning that the war changes people, that you doubt others to survive, that war destroys trust, that it brings out the animal locked up in the human heart. […] The war is the great excuse for our natural vices, or how else could we haveshotOhialisocold-bloodedly?Howelsecouldwehavedrivenlongsticks through women’s vaginas and watched their eyes come out of their heads? We are wicked and barbaric deep down.Yes, war provides a measuring rod of our decency, of our humanity. Why, the law provides that we must be decent, civil to one another in time of peace and to make sure that we are, we get punished when we break the law, when we misbehave. We keep within the bounds of civility out of fear of the law, out of fear of punishment. But in time of war, there are no laws any more. We are strictly on our own, we are answerable to ourselves then. And see what happens. […] We loot, we burn, we rape, we murder, lie and steal […]. iyayi, Heroes 94–95

This much is hinted at in Chimalum’s remarks concerning war, and Osime’s account fits into Girard’s second stereotype.25 Nevertheless, this crisis is occa- sioned by the identification of individuals or a group of individuals for persecution as pharmakos, the second stereotype. The Nigerians and their mob believe the Igbo have become extremely harmful, not before but after declaring the State of Biafra. Hence, a certain phraseology has developed to capture the taboo

25 Girard, The Scapegoat, 7.

Matatu 49 (2017) 241–259 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 05:45:57AM via free access 252 chukwumah and nebeife broken by the Igbo, for which they must be severally punished. No better work in the Nigerian literary tradition captures this than Heroes, a novel depicting the conduct of persecution from the Nigerian side, where deep resentment of the mob is palpable. Of course, other works also showcase confected transgres- sions that run the risk of being hurriedly dismissed as exaggerated and exasper- ated fallacies. In consequence of such identifications, the Igbo in Heroes are accused of daring to besmirch the sanctity of the indivisibility of Nigeria as a State, a transgression greatly exceeding any sins the pharmakos could possibly be accused of in Girard’s scheme. There is a relentless logic to the war: to keep the nation whole is a task that must be carried out, and no sacrifice is too much to achieve a “united Nigeria.”26 In the following dialogue, Osime tries to prob- lematize the logic with which the mob, the Nigerian army, is wired to prosecute the war:

“The real enemy are the top army officers, they caused this war […].” “No,” Obilu disagreed, “the pogroms in the North started this war.” “Rubbish!” the soldier Musa said heatedly. “Ojukwu started the war when he announced a Biafran republic.” “It was Aburi, the breakdown of the agreement reached at Aburi that caused this war,” Patani told them, handling a gun to Osime Iyere. “Listen, listen,” Ituah admonished them, “Let the journalist finish.” “Yes, I will finish it,” Osime promised and pressed the trigger of the gun and it shook him although he had knelt on the grass to fire it. They all looked at the faraway wall. There were no marks on it. […] “As I was saying,” he began again, “why don’t you ask yourselves why there was no killing of the Ibos in the North five years ago?” […] “The coups,” Ituah offered. “The coups are not enough. The point is that certain people in high running positions used the ordinary people against each other for their selfish ends.” iyayi, Heroes 130–131

The accusation levelled at the Igbo as a group in Half of a Yellow Sun is not as straightforward as in Heroes; it comes in layers and overlappings. First, it is the coups, as Ituah declares in Heroes, but this text does not sufficiently flesh out what he means by “coups.” It is, rather, tagged as an “Igbo coup” by the bbc, a foreign news organ, for the logical-enough yet unsound reason of the death of

26 Iyayi 8 and Atta 13.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/29/2021 (2017) 241–259 05:45:57AM via free access persecution in igbo-nigerian civil-war narratives 253 the Sardauna, Prime Minister Balewa, and a select number of northern officers in the national army.27 During the pogrom in the North, the mob keeps chanting: “Igbo must go. The infidels must go. The Igbo must go” (147), while some members also bel- low: “Araba, araba!” (Hausa for separation and secession, 147). In the above instances, before the war itself, two cases are highlighted—the religion-tinged outbursts and the political desire for independence. An infidel, for Muslims, is someone who does not believe in Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. The other term denotes separation and political independence from the Nigerian federation. For the first time, the North hints at what it secretly desires to achieve but which never found an occasion for expression until the moment of crisis arises—to invest the Igbo, the North’s neighbours, with the image of the pharmakos. The two most grievous mass killings carried out by the Nigerian side against the Igbo have different causes—accusations—but are closely related. In the North, where the mob cried ‘araba’ and called the Igbo infidels, not much mention is made of the first coup (as reported by the bbc) that killed northern military officers and the Sardauna, the most dignified of the lot, whose killing might be viewed by the Hausa as having broken the strictest taboo of all. Again, there has been talk of Jihad and the mention of “the Igbo people taking over the civil service” in the southern part of Nigeria (136). In Lagos, huddled in motor parks on their way to Eastern Nigeria, the Biafrans, besides being blamed for orchestrating the coup, are booed at and taunted: they should go back to their eastern homeland so that garri (processed and fried cassava, a staple in Southern Nigeria) will be cheap once more and the owning of shops and houses all over Lagos by Igbo will cease. With the killings by the Nigerian government troops unrestrained and uncurtailed, especially in the North, and most of the victims wanting never to be hurt again, the Igbo announce and bequeath their mandate to Ojukwu to declare their secession from Nigeria. Translating their hopes into images, they dub their homeland “The Republic of Biafra” (161–162). This they do with little knowledge of the full implications of the cost, human and material, and bitter politicking that are bound to follow. The majority see the declaration as the first step towards achieving the ideal they yearn for, and everywhere hope is in the air. But how mistaken they are. Yet, paradoxically, it is this secession, this noble assertion of the right to survival, to the exercise of free will, and to the release of the spirit to pursue

27 Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 132.

Matatu 49 (2017) 241–259 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 05:45:57AM via free access 254 chukwumah and nebeife one’s happiness, irrespective of place, time, and age, that contravenes the dictates of Nigeria. Secession has provoked the base instincts for degrading murders that form the last stage of the events that triggered the civil war. The Igbo are accused of having breached the strictest taboo the Nigerian state holds sacred, unity. This explains why the Biafrans, as a group, are killed during the war. In fact, it is from here that what is mistakenly left over, in terms of surviving lives in the pre-war riots, would be topped up and made to overflow with the fullness of wrath and punishment at the hands of Nigerian State forces. Thenceforth, Biafrans, singly or in groups, have no valid reason to live if the task of keeping Nigeria whole is to be achieved. Biafrans thus epitomize contemporary peoples caught in the net of bloody political brinksmanship and the unpardonable destruction of valuable lives. The form of the pharmakos in Nigerian–Igbo War narratives is already emerging from the foregoing. But one point remains for this picture to fit correctly—what immanent signs are responsible for the Igbo being identified as victims of violence throughout the duration of the riots, unrest, and, ultimately, the war? The poor child’s wonder in Mbachu’s War Games about what he “had done to deserve such hatred” could be responded to with the simple words “I was an Igbo.”28 But why the Igbo and not any other ethnicity? What does it mean to be Igbo? Of the victim signs identified by Girard, the exquisitely oxymoronic social category of being a “well-known stranger” is prominent, as mentioned above.29 Nonetheless, this is often inadequate, as the mob resorts to several other ethnic terms such as ‘Nyanmiri’ in Heroes and Half of aYellow Sun; racial features such as inspecting the complexion of one’s skin; and testing shib- boleths in asking would-be victims to say ‘Alahu Akbar’,as we have it in Half of a Yellow Sun, reciting some parts of the Qurʾan, or, as happens in Heroes, to speak in one’s language to identify whether one is (not) a Biafran. Another sign is the Igbos’ being mostly wealthy or living mostly comfortably. In a nation riddled with corruption, scanty and broken infrastructure, and widespread poverty amidst fat oil revenues—supposedly the envy of surrounding countries—the Igbo have always demonstrated a tendency to survive well in whichever part of the country they may be found trading. Thus, they are, everywhere, well-known and prosperous. ‘Nyamiri’, a term used in the North and the Midwest in Heroes, pertains to the civilian and military linguistic rapporteur in both texts. It is used in identifying and killing Uncle Ibezim, Aunty Ifaka, and Arise in Sabo Gari by

28 Dulue Mbachu, War Games (Lagos: New Gong, 2005): 17. 29 Girard, The Scapegoat, 15.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/29/2021 (2017) 241–259 05:45:57AM via free access persecution in igbo-nigerian civil-war narratives 255 a mob, a member of which is Mohammed, a close friend of and neighbour to the murdered. The mob is described thus:

The smoke was thickening around her so that she was not sure if the crowd of men drifting into the yard were real or just plumes of smoke, until she saw the shiny metal blades of their axes and machetes, the bloodstained kaftans that flapped around their legs. […] “We finished the whole family it was Allah’s will!” one of the men called out in Hausa. […] They drove in a frenzied silence, past policemen in blood-splattered uniforms, past perched by the roadside, past boys carrying looted radios […] adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 148

This is at the city centre of Kano. Here, policemen not only serve as passive spectators but also as active participants in the ongoing orgy of killings. Some- where in this foul milieu, “nyamirin” and Allahu Akbar, as racial and religious signs, are both adopted in the airport scene where Nnaemeka, the customs offi- cial, is murdered:

The first soldier waved his gun around. “Ina nyamiri! Where are the Igbo people? Who is Igbo here? Where are the infidels?” A woman screamed. “You are Igbo,” the second soldier said to Nnaemeka. “No. I come from Katsina! Katsina!” The soldier walked over to him. “Say Allahu Akbar!” […] he would not say Allahu Akbar because his accent would give him away. […] the rifle went off and Nnaemeka’s chest blew open, a splattering red mass. adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun 152–153

On another occasion, the epithets nyamirin (Igbo vermin) and araba (seces- sionists) are applied to Igbo, who have already boarded an airplane to flee, as they are dragged out and shot dead. In Heroes, Osime is reported by the soldiers because his ‘wife’ (a term Osime uses at every checkpoint to bestow legality on his love relationship with Ndudi) is all the same a nyanmiri, whether from Oganza, a non-Biafran part of Nigeria, the Midwest, or anywhere else. In a tense journey to Oganza while taking the body of his landlord and would-be father- in-law for burial, he is once again stopped and made to undergo a shibboleth test:

Matatu 49 (2017) 241–259 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 05:45:57AM via free access 256 chukwumah and nebeife

“Which part of Midwest did you say you come from?” Osime told him. “You are very fair-complexioned.” “My parents.” “They are not here for us to see. Can you speak your language?” “Yes,” […] “Okay then, say something,” the sergeant ordered and Osime looked into the dark face of the man, the eyes that were red and blood shot, at the green and yellow steel helmet, the whole six feet of the man. “I feel like spitting into your face,” he said in his language and the sergeant smiled. He did not understand. “Why did you say that?” one of the other soldiers asked and Osime turned and saw the man standing away from the rest at the edge of the road, one the other side. “What should I have said?” […] “Something better,” he said now. “I want to go,” Osime said. “You’re delaying me.” “We delay you for your own safety.” “Aidenoje,” the sergeant called and the soldier came over […]. “What did he say?” “He is from our area, sir,” the man Aidenoje said. “He wants to take the risk.” iyayi, Heroes 69–70

With Biafrans bearing such victim signs, they would attract to themselves, if inadvertently, the violence generally due the pharmakos and would face unjustifiable brutality—ranging from physical harm to death—at the hands of the mob on the Nigerian side. These signs complete the stereotypes framing the pharmakos, either in the group or individually. Even so, the mob through whom violence is visited on the pharmakos, with its conspicuous signs, harbours some problematic features. Ndudi will be raped in Heroes; the young men in Oganza will be killed by merely peeping from windows; Oshevire’s wife will be sexually assaulted in The Last Duty; Ndie’s mother, Mama, will be sexually enslaved and violently treated as a woman belonging to a conquered territory ‘captured’ by Haruna, a soldier of the Fed- eral army, in “The Spoils of War.” These signs could possibly have encouraged the soldiers in “Laughter Beneath the Bridge” to rape a “light-complexioned woman,” this being a racial index to Biafran identity, as evidenced in the above instance of the interrogation of Osime on his way to Oganza in Heroes. And to give credence to the belief that defeating a rebel tribe or capturing rebel ter-

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/29/2021 (2017) 241–259 05:45:57AM via free access persecution in igbo-nigerian civil-war narratives 257 ritory heightens one’s sexual propensities, the soldier who encounters Monica in “Laughter” first of all reduces her to a Biafran by exclaiming that she is a “Yamirin” (Okri’s variant of Adichie’s “Nyamiri” and Iyayi’s “Nyanmiri,” 52; Okri 16), despite her protest that she is from a Nigerian town in a non-Biafran territory. After he “looked at her breasts and then at her neck,” he asked her to “come closer” (15). The victim sign is also responsible for the murder of Mr Ohiali without following due process at the Hillside military station of the Fed- eral troops in Heroes. In Half of a Yellow Sun, it caused the wiping-out of Uncle Ibezim’s family and many Biafrans in Sabon Gari, the murder of Igbo military officers, who were all summoned by the beagle and were picked off one by one by other non-Biafra officers standing beside them, and the loss of prop- erty belonging to Biafrans, as is evident in the takeover of Kainene’s hotel in Port Harcourt, and, finally, the needless massacre of Igbo nationwide. In view of Girard’s pharmakos theory, the Igbo manifestly qualify as pharmakoi, fitting the frame theoretically set up for it as one who suffers unwarrantedly and inno- cently. Herein resides the monumental contribution of Nigerian war narratives in echoing the devastation of the human person with little or no cause. This wreckage has been brought about in diverse ways but with similar structures of occurrence. Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, for instance, re-creates the past in the present—that which will not cease to take place in the future. Despite the massive fall, collapse, and surrounding debris, she asks that one dusts his buttocks, like Odenigbo, who makes a fresh start in receiving a replacement for his burnt books and cleans his apartment for a new beginning. Hope is the word.

Conclusion

In sum, the pharmakos, an impressive figure of suffering embraced by persecution theory, has a monumental presence in Nigerian war narratives written by Igbo artists or those in sympathy with them. It acknowledges the potential of these narratives, especially Iyayi’s Heroes and Adichie’s Half of aYellowSun, presenting us with a broad range of persecution and the resonant and impressive figure that emerges from the milieu of suffering, along with the alarming base instincts that gave rise to and sustained the war. At this juncture one enters a cul-de-sac: there seems to be not one genuine reason for why thousands must die for asserting their God-given right to self-determination and exercise of free will. This lack of rational cause will remain an inexplicable, hovering presence for a long time to come, not only in the history of Nigeria but also in that of Africa as a whole, none of which subtracts from the many insights

Matatu 49 (2017) 241–259 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 05:45:57AM via free access 258 chukwumah and nebeife the application of persecution theory has engendered in the reading of Heroes and Half of a Yellow Sun.

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