Biafra and Abuse of Power in I.N.C. Aniebo's Rearguardactions

Matatu 49 (2017) 280–292

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Biafra and Abuse of Power in I.N.C. Aniebo’s Rearguard Actions

Obari Gomba University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria [email protected]

Abstract

The Nigerian civil war has left a lasting impact on the politics of Nigeria. It has also provided material for I.N.C. Aniebo’s Rearguard Actions. Given the prior success of his novel The Anonymity of Sacrifice, this collection of short stories expands his creative portfolio on the subject of war. Over and above the predilection of Biafran discourse for blaming others for Biafra’s failure, Aniebo’s depiction of the war calls attention to the failings of Biafra itself. On the strength of Aniebo’s stories, this paper seeks to examine the nature of the abuse of power in Biafra and to show how such abuse helped precipitate the collapse of the breakaway nation-state.

Keywords

Biafra – abuse of power – Aniebo – Nigerian Civil War – Nigerian fiction

Introduction

Chinweizu apocryphally observed that “it must be a strange war indeed which fails to produce literature.”1 War is always a traumatic experience, and writers can hardly ignore the effects of war on the society in which they live. Chinyere

1 Quoted by Chinyere Nwahunanya, “War as Communal Tragedy,” in Nigerian Literature in English: Emerging Critical Perspectives, ed. Onyemaechi Udumukwu (Port Harcourt: m&j Grand Orbit Communications, 2007): 108.

Nwahunanya states succinctly that “writers in the countries that have been involved in war have used the conflicts and their aftermath as source material for creative literature.”2 Nigeria is in the league of countries whose writers have shaped literature—narratives, plays, and poems—out of the chaos of war. The Nigerian–Biafran Civil War was a period of pain and loss: truly one of the darkest points in the socio-political history of the country. No wonder it has become a recurrent motif in Nigerian literature. I.N.C. Aniebo’s Rearguard Actions is an example; a representation of the Nigeria/Biafra crisis, it is a high- quality addition to the corpus of works on that conflict. Aniebo deploys a well-practised sleight-of-craft, to the end that art annexes history. Rearguard Actions is not fashioned in the mode of historia. It is the fabula praetexta, the technique by which art marks its borderline. Yet it comes close—very close—to factual truth. The situations are true to context. And the characters are recognizable—what Arnold Bennett calls “the convincingness of characters.”3 Seiyifa Koroye has observed that Rearguard Actions “is a major story-telling achievement.”4 He argues that “the stories suggest allegorical parallels with unresolved issues in the relationship between power centres and margins.”5 To build on Koroye’s insight, it is proper to examine details of the conflict between the power-class and the common folk in the stories.The three parts of the study, in turn, briefly establish the historical context, discuss Nigeria’s replication in Biafra, and discuss the devolution of abusive power across centres of influence and control.

The Motive for Biafra: A Brief History

It is important to keep history on its own footing before discussing the text as a self-sufficient entity. Biafra’s declaration of independence owed a lot to the nature of Nigerian politics. Nigeria is actually a ‘motivation’ for Biafra. Biafra’s secession stemmed from a perverse struggle for power, for the apparatus of con-

2 Chinyere Nwahunanya, “War as Communal Tragedy,” 108. 3 Cited by Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), in Approaches to the Novel: Materials for a Poetics, ed. Robert Scholes (San Francisco & Scranton pa: Chandler, 1961): 187. 4 Seiyifa Koroye, “Aniebo and Biafra: The Meaning of Rearguard Actions,” in Woman in the Academy:FestchriftforProfessorHelenChukwuma, ed. Seiyifa Koroye & Noel C. Anyadike (Port Harcourt: Pearl, 2004): 388. 5 Koroye, “Aniebo and Biafra,” 388.

Matatu 49 (2017) 280–292 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:30:26AM via free access 282 gomba trol. The struggle sparked a series of clashes resulting in dire actions and reac- tions. The immediate provocation for secession was a pogrom. Wole Soyinka states:

The Northern Mafia got together with the Lagos counterparts and con- tributed the necessary investment for self-preservation. Cold-bloodedly the pogrom was planned, every stage plotted, and the money for oper- ation distributed to the various centres of mayhem, the Ibos, twice victims, were again the most obvious, the most logical victims of this profit- motivated massacre.6

It was a bleak moment in the nation’s history, a high-point in the crisis that had rocked the country right from its formal inception at independence. After the first coup, in 1966, a plan was hatched against the peoples of Eastern Nigeria, particularly against those of Igbo ethnicity, who suffered terribly from a situation that bore all the features of genocide. In spite of a second coup, by which political power was seized by Northern military elements, the pogrom continued. Nigeria became a theatre of insecurity and death—unsafe and loathsome for the Igbo and other peoples of the Eastern region. This disaster bred to further tragedy when full-scale civil war broke out in 1967. Was it fortuitous (or should we say unfortunate?) that Colonel Chukwue- meka Ojukwu was the epicentre of power in Eastern Nigeria (which became Biafra) at the time? Would things have fared differently if it were someone else? Was he people-centred? He declared the Republic of Biafra, and the Nigerian State launched a war to reclaim the breakaway territory.But to what extent were secession and war avoidable? Soyinka says: “I am willing to concede that his hand was forced; even so I think he was clever enough to have found a way out. If he really wanted.”7 On both sides, the motives for the war were highly questionable and hardly in the interests of the people at large. Nigeria went to war against secessionist Biafra, not for love of the citizenry, who were never prioritized by the circles of power in Biafra. As Major Philip Alale tells Soyinka, the war was profit-driven:

we thrust soldiers today into the field with just the slogan Kill-Yamirin or Kill-Hausa. And for whose benefit? The damned bourgeois capitalists who have already begun to lap up the profits of a rising war industry.8

6 Wole Soyinka, The Man Died (1975; Ibadan: Spectrum, 1985): 177. 7 Soyinka, The Man Died, 178. 8 Soyinka, The Man Died, 179–180.

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Aniebo’s Rearguard Actions depicts this point, showing how the mighty waged war for power and the material gains that accrued from it.

Biafran Power as a Nigerian Replica

The Nigerian State apparatus is oppressively pervasive in Aniebo’s Rearguard Actions. Its odious system is foundational and embedded in the matrix of the ‘new’ Biafra. Biafra is not depicted as seceding from (the order of things in) Nigeria but as a miserable, pitiable replication of Nigeria. Its power-brokers are shown as former Nigerian ‘big men’ who have been forced by the incongruities of the Nigerian State to create another nest-egg for themselves. And they salt away that nest-egg after the Nigerian model. Biafra’s situation in the war was that of pitiable self-flagellation, only that the common folk were made to take the lashes for those in power. The ills of Nigeria were not exorcized from Biafra—new altars were built for those ills by the officers of the ‘new’ state. Biafra became the triumph of powermania over the people. The people are sacrificed on the altars of power in all of the eight stories in Aniebo’s collection. Whereas Nigeria’s predatory warfare against Biafra may be understandable (true to form), it is the attitude of the “power-figure” and his “cult of the powerful” that is shocking. In Aniebo’s “The End of the Beginning,” the secretary to the Head of State unwittingly reveals the ugly face of abusive power in Enugu— the Biafran capital and seat of power, from which everything percolates to the component units. The flux reigning in Enugu is given detailed representation in Aniebo’s “The End of the Beginning.” The story opens with Nduka Ojuonu, who had been Permanent Secretary to the Nigerian Ministry of Defence before the upheaval. The story begins with his induction into the higher cadre of the Biafran civil service, the administrative framework of the ‘new’ country. He is at first uneasy with the tradition of indolence shown by the ‘big shots’; seemingly unaware that they are running a country in crisis, they turn governance into a kind of jamboree. They leave their offices quite early and go to the Sports Club to fraternize and idle away the time with sex and expensive booze. Nduka Ojaonu himself is not averse to getting a bit of the sleaze in a country that does not seem to know it is a territory at war. On the face of it, Ojaonu is determined to make Biafra work; he has come to expect so much from the breakaway new state. He is given higher responsibil- ities as Acting Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Private Affairs, but this portfolio has a somehow suspect name. Whose private affairs is he to manage?

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He soon finds out, when the secretary to the Biafran Head of State clarifies his role for him:

The Nigerian Army is no more. It has disintegrated. We need something to take its place. We need to build up an authority, a power from which all orders will emanate. The more infallible we make the power the better. As you know, people respond more to myths than reality. You are charged with the creation of this myth for the sake of our people.9

First, there is a weak grasp of reality here. Of course the Nigerian Army has bastardized itself through repeated coups and bloodletting, but it is still better positioned than the Biafran Army. Could this faulty assessment of Biafra’s military capability, in comparison to Nigeria’s, have accounted for Biafra’s losing the war? And why does a new state decide to ignore reality in pursuit of myth- making? Apparently, Nduka Ojaonu takes to heart a charge whose true import he fails to discern. Biafra is depicted as too eager to set foot on the same quick- sand of deceit for which Nigeria has been long known. While the Head of State continues to undermine any good judgment shown by the civil service and in the war effort, it takes Ojaonu a little while to find out the sad truth:

It took him time to get over what he regarded as a misuse of power. The abrupt removal of the head of the army made him feel that he was not alone. He thought that if the ‘power’ could do that to a colleague, who, it had been said, merely disagreed on procedural matters, who was he, Nduka, to complain? It seemed that informed dissension was not allowed anymore. Nduka felt somewhat guilty of having helped to create what seemed to be fast becoming a megalomaniac monster. Rearguard Actions 43–44

In the face of war, the Biafran system sets the myth of infallibility stoutly on its feet. As those in the centre of power toy with the business of government, the guns get louder, drawing ever closer to Enugu.The Nsukka front—quite close— is already counting its losses: officers, soldiers, civilians, property. “Enugu fell not long after […]. No shots were fired in its defence” (57).

9 I.N.C. Aniebo, Rearguard Actions (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1998): 37. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text.

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The Head of State epitomizes the egoistic urge to power in Aniebo’s story. The resulting system is insupportable, with hardly any room for constructive criticism and/or evaluation. Deaf to the truth, governance is exposed to abuse, the leaders alienated from the suffering masses. There are historical accounts that corroborate Aniebo’s narrative. Phanuel Egejuru says:

It became clear […] that the Biafran leader was purposely setting up parallel bodies that would more or less balance each other, and leave him completely free to do as he pleased. He was known to play one body off another. For instance, if the military complained, he would tell them that they were not the government, and if the cabinet complained, he would say they didn’t know how to fight.10

Egeguru’s view is in line with that of Chinua Achebe, who was chairman of the National Guidance Committee of Biafra, one of the many roles he played on behalf of Biafra. He was a vital force behind Biafra’s programmatic Ahiara Declaration, for example. Achebe states, in a conversation with Egejuru, that when Colonel Ojukwu “realised that people were going to take him up … he began to arrest the very people” who should have helped the state.11 Good judgment was rare in the governance of Biafra—rare in high places, in the corridors of power. And the people bore the brunt of a system which thrived on deceit and empty bravado. People were arrested, and some killed, for being at odds with the Biafran leader or his lackies. A new country was built on the doomed foundation of high-handedness and murder. Death wore diverse faces and grief became a constant rite. The people were prey to both the megalomania of Biafran power and the marauding Nigerian army. Whereas the common folk died at both the front and the rear, the power circles fêted themselves from one centre of control to another.

The Devolution of Abusive Power

The rear and the front are both significant in Aniebo’s stories. But the rear appears to be more significant as setting and as context. The rear is the base of power where the altars of control are built, and where the fires are stoked.

10 Phanuel Akubueze Egejuru, Chinua Achebe: Pure and Simple (Lagos: Malthouse, 2002): 44. 11 Cited by Egejuru, Chinua Achebe: Pure and Simple, 48.

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The commissions and/or omissions at the rear affect the situation at the front. With the fall of every front, the contiguous rear becomes a front in whose conflagration the common folk perish. This becomes a constant pattern, such that the rear and the front become a single theatre of corruption, chicanery, repression, and mass death. Even in this time of daily tragedy, power is seen to ‘homogenize’ itself. Ludvík Vaculík says that it is in the nature of power to devolve itself and to effect its replication on other levels:

Power is forever homogenizing itself, getting rid of everything alien to itself till every part is an image of the whole and all parts are interchange- able so that each peripheral cell […] can for practical purposes deputise for the centre and you can swap those cells around […]. The apparatus of power goes on functioning undisturbed, because it is really not intended to react to changes in the environment at all […]. Or rather, it is intended to react to everything in the same way, by adjusting these different envi- ronments to suit itself, by making them so identical […].12

Vaculík gives a clear description of the devolution of power, and this applies to the recurrent motif of abusive power in Aniebo’s stories. Power is obdurate and oblivious to the fate of citizens from one story to the next, from one rear to another, one front to another. This situation frustrates the genuine efforts of the people. Take Aniebo’s “Getting Ready,” for example. In this story, Commander Philip tells his men that the rearguard is the vanguard. He believes in his mission and shares his insights with his soldiers: “That’s why I want you all to be aware of the importance of our mission here. We are […] guarding the rear and protecting the front” (2). Philip and his men, though dedicated to their task, are already drastically undermined by the ineptitude of their superior officers. Zeal alone will not avail in the absence of matériel:

the men had become a well-oiled machine, almost as clean and friction- less as the two dozen rifles they shared among them. With four platoons in the company, the Commander gave each platoon four rifles. Rearguard Actions 4

12 Quoted in Dušan Hamšik, Writers Against Rulers, tr. D. Orpington, intro. W.L.Webb (Spiso- vatelé proti moci, 1967; New York: Vintage, 1971): 184–185.

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Commander Philip and his men endeavour to give their best to the war effort in the belief that the power-brokers are as committed as they are to the well- being of Biafra. Their confidence is misplaced. The power-class (as in Nigeria, so in Biafra) has always been a handful of self-seekers—ever given to fraud, to betrayal, and to any conceivable vice. Take the example of Dr Kerule Peter example in the same story. Peters deserts Biafra and pitches his tent with Nigeria. He must have read the scale of profit so well that he is amply rewarded with the position of a Federal Minister. The system of power rewards/promotes betrayal and subterfuge, and punishes good conscience and good work. On the one hand, it is easy to accuse Peters of betrayal; on the other, it looks as if he is discerning enough to escape a collapsing house (particularly as he believes the Biafran state is a violation of his ethnic interests). If Peters’ actions are placed beside Commander Philip’s, the later appears naive for believing that Biafra is worth his devotion. And before it is assumed that this devotion is questioned by Biafran authorities because Philip has allowed Peters free passage to Lagos, it is important to note that the greater problem is with the sense of judgment of Biafra’s topmost leaders. There is much insight in what the Army Commander in Enugu tells Philip:

I must be frank with you, I do not know why you have been recalled. In fact, I am surprised you are here. I only knew of the recall cable after it had been sent. You did such a wonderful job in Port Harcourt […]. But apparently, a more powerful person thought otherwise. Right now, I don’t know what to do with you.Things are in such a state of flux nobody knows or wants me to know what will happen tomorrow. Rearguard Actions 27

Given the chaotic state of affairs in Enugu, it should have been clear that a power structure that undercuts its own army and civilians is doomed from the start. With the fall of Nsukka and Enugu (in “The End of the Beginning”), a pattern of loss is established. What follows is the relocation of the seat of government and the displacement of the citizenry. The deeper the people burrow in their flight, the more relentlessly the conflict pursues them. And the “megalomaniac monster” splits into multiple cells—and continues to proliferate—as the war spreads. This proliferation gives rise to diverse grotesque faces of power. Society yields up its control switches and safety valves to men and women who, to use Vaculík’s words, “are equipped with brute strength based on ownership of capital, or possession of weapon, or family influence, or industrial monopoly,

Matatu 49 (2017) 280–292 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:30:26AM via free access 288 gomba and so on.”13 Those in power also use false information as a weapon against the unsuspecting and helpless. In Aniebo’s “Rearguard Actions,” the title story, Colonel Nweke (the Direc- tor of Military Intelligence) and Major Okafor (the Commandant of Military Police) ‘sexploit’ women who have been made vulnerable by war. These highly placed Biafran officers fail to focus on the sensitive demands of their positions. They waste time and energy on the cravings of their libido, going to any lengths to get women into bed. A certain Rivers man is framed and beaten: “Colonel Nweke’s men had beaten him [the Rivers man] badly, but had luck- ily only broken his ribs. The swollen face and arms would heal with time” (107). The real target is his wife, whom he loses to Colonel Nweke. This is not an iso- lated case: just as Nweke uses falsehood as a weapon against the Rivers man, Okafor attempts to use false information “to force [Colonel] Nweke to give him the Rivers man’s wife” (107). What Major Okafor loses in the Rivers man wife, he gets in Corporal Ike’s wife May. He is adept at setting traps for women and their husbands/lovers. But he is unintelligent in expecting all his victims to be tame and cowardly. Intoxicated with power, he becomes reckless, defaulting on a vital law of power:

there are […] different kinds of people in the world, and you can never assume that everyone will react to your strategies in the same way. De- ceive and outmaneuver some people and they will spend the rest of their lives seeking revenge.14

Corporal Ike has a fighting spirit regardless of his earlier scheme to evade the front by pushing May under Major Okafor’s nose. If a man who is unwilling to fight for Biafra is willing to fight for his woman, it tells us a lot about that man’s perception of the war. Corporal Ike is piqued when Major Okafor becomes interested in May. May refuses to sleep with Okafor on the first night. For that, Major Okafor sends her husband (Corporal Ike) to the Aba front. May gives herself into Major Okafor’s hands on the promise that her husband will be recalled from the front. Major Okafor does not honour his side of the agreement. Somehow, Corporal Ike returns through a contrived leave. He kills Major Okafor and other key officers in the camp. There is a ‘spark’ in Corporal Ike’s action—the knowledge that the enemy is not only the Nigerian Army at

13 Dušan Hamšik, Writers Against Rulers, 182. 14 Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power (New York: Penguin, 1998): 137.

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/29/2021 (2017) 280–292 03:30:26AM via free access biafra and abuse of power in i.n.c. aniebo’s rearguard actions 289 the front but also the Biafran power circles at the rear. The foot soldiers in Aniebo’s “Business as Usual” also come to this realization. There is a series of violent revolts against the power structure. In “Business as Usual,” soldiers, in search of food, crash a lavish party thrown by Brigadier Amala to mark the christening of his son, and attended by the high and mighty. The party is certainly ill-timed and ill-conceived:

It was true, troops were starving at the front, some companies having only a dozen or so palm kernels as a day’s ration for each soldier taking part in assaults, reconnaissances and ambushes lasting several days. The setbacks the Biafran army suffered were mostly caused by hunger as well as lack of ammunition. The Food Directorates seemed unable to send enough food to the front either in raw form or in drypacks. Rearguard Actions 141–142

There could hardly be a starker contrast that that between the soldier’s priva- tions and their officers’ heedless and irresponsible indulgence. No wonder the soldiers storm Brigadier Amala’s party. Perhaps they are lucky to get away with their action, having caught their superiors red-handed. But the soldiers who are led by Nene Udofia’s boyfriend are not lucky. Nene Udofia states:

His men mutinied just before a major battle because he had not been making sure they were fed regularly, so the Army Commander threw his entire battalion into detention. They’re awaiting trial. Rearguard Actions 134

Brigadier Amala is an example of the war-profiteering of some Biafran leaders; he is not alone in “Business as Usual.” Dr Obi Oriagu (right-hand man to the Biafran Head of State) and Sam Ugo (Dr Oriagu’s friend) are in the same league. The former siphons off money and labour from the war effort to build a lavishly furnished mansion and the latter fills a “fat” bank account from a fraudulent supply of food. Sam Ugo’s

convoy of three dozen lorries, laden with yams, and sacks garri, often “supplied” three, sometimes four Food Directorate depots with the same yams and garri. Every yam, every bag of garri got paid for three or four times […]. The non-existent food in the stores were quickly shipped to non-existent units at the front. Real units got no food because very little food was really available. Rearguard Actions 135

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This goes beyond corruption; this is wickedness, profiting from the death of others. The common folk—soldiers and civilians alike—soon begin to see through the smokescreen of the republic. The chicanery fails to mask the corruption and mass death. As the entire war effort is undermined by highly placed Biafrans, the number of casualties mounts alarmingly, and the people become disenchanted with the war. There is evidence of this disenchantment in Aniebo’s “In the Name of the People,” where the power class continues to conscript soldiers from a popu- lace that is embittered and unwilling to make further sacrifices to an abusive and dysfunctional system. The army’s Depot Commander has to lean on his recruiting team:

You must all fill your quotas, or be used to make up the numbers we send to the front. Of late, you seem to have forgotten how important recruits are. Let me remind you, without them, you will not be sitting in this room listening to me. You will be in the bush, listening to the message of death from Hausa guns. Rearguard Actions 75

The message is clear. It means get someone else to die in your place. The power circles know that the front is not a place for the defence of Biafra. It is, rather, the place for certain death. And the more they get the common folk to die there, the more relentlessly they maintain their grip on power. The narrator of “In the Name of the People” indicates that no adequate preparation is made to equip the soldiers going to the front:

Many young men found themselves with shaven heads overnight, and doomed to dangerous, exhausting two-week training. It would have been all right if at the end they went well-equipped to the front. But this was rare. As […] they found themselves wishing they had been allowed to take the carved sticks they trained with to battle. It would have been better than their empty hands. Rearguard Actions 77–78

A state that conducts warfare in this manner is doomed to fail. Of course, it is easy for the leadership to contrive all sorts of excuses. But victory is about results, not excuses. Thus, people begin to question the war effort and its justification. For instance, Ogbuehi Elenmuo queries the recruiting team: “If you people are tired of fighting this war, why don’t you stop it? You started it, why drag everybody into it?,” adding: “If we had started this war, we would have

DownloadedMatatu from 49 Brill.com09/29/2021 (2017) 280–292 03:30:26AM via free access biafra and abuse of power in i.n.c. aniebo’s rearguard actions 291 stopped it long ago. It is taking too many lives” (85). Note the antithesis between you people (the power class) and we (the common folk). At this point, it has become clear to the common folk that the war is being fought at their expense. But the power class will not stop the fighting. Biafra implodes, becomes a self- devouring snake. People begin to unleash their predatory instincts at will. The home-front becomes just as vulnerable and dangerous as the war-front. There are no borderlines to the reign of chaos. Two hungry soldiers rob and kill an old woman (Mary) in “The Day of Judgment” (89–103). Ahudie upsets Okonkwo’s family with false new of Patrick’s death (“The Inheritors,” 58–74). This gives rise to a chain of events which climax with Patrick’s return from the front. Mentally impaired by the injuries he has sustained at the front, he brings the war home to his own family, killing his sister Eliza for getting involved with (and pregnant by) Echezona, and also killing Echezona’s wife and children. Hell is let loose.

Conclusion

The war rages until there is no place to hide for either the powerful or the powerless. The power class runs out of steam as they run of “human sacrifices” for the front. In fact, the rear and the front become one. When power is abused, it is in the end good neither for the powerful nor for the powerless. General Ogwuzie, in “The Last Days of the Eclipse,” decries “the Biafran elite, who, thinking the war stalemated to permanence, had begun to share the spoils in the form of high government positions” (148). Note that the Biafran elite do not share the spoils of Nigerian territory; they share the spoils of Biafra because the power class has come to exploit the suffering of the people. Nigeria is a grim additional factor in the conflict. This truth dawns on General Ogwuzie: he feels bad, and muses on the facts of the war

as events were beginning to show that the ‘declaration’ had not been inevitable; that the war was more the result of the conflict and rivalry between two peevish men, than the anger of a people; that […] the Igbos would be set back—farther back than they had ever been. Rearguard Actions 154

This capacity to rise above mass hysteria in his analysis accounts for why he, too, is known to have suffered at the hands of the Biafran establishment. As the Nigerian Army overruns Biafra—overruns the separatist power class—the people count their losses. They realize that Biafrans, made in the

Matatu 49 (2017) 280–292 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:30:26AM via free access 292 gomba character of the very state they are opposing, have fallen into the trap of foster- ing violence against its own people. No one who fights evil ever prevails over evil by the enthronement of evil. The people are not deceived. Biafra fails with all its ill-trappings of power, but somehow the people prevail. They are deci- mated, wounded, and cheated in the deal-making of power and the enterprise of war, but they live on. They survived the attack unleashed on them by Nigeria before the war. So, too, have they survived the combined attack unleashed on them by the power classes of Biafra and Nigeria in the war.

Works Cited

Aniebo, I.N.C. Rearguard Actions (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1998). Egejuru, Phanuel Akubueze. Chinua Achebe: Pure and Simple (Lagos: Malthouse, 2002). Greene, Robert. The 48 Laws of Power (New York: Penguin, 1998). Hamšik, Dušan. Writers Against Rulers, tr. D. Orpington, intro. W.L. Webb (Spisovatelé proti moci, 1967; New York: Vintage, 1971) Koroye, Seiyifa. “Aniebo and Biafra: The Meaning of Rearguard Actions,” in Woman in the Academy: Festchrift for Professor Helen Chukwuma, ed. Seiyifa Koroye & Noel C. Nwadike (Port Harcourt: Pearl, 2004): 388–399. Nwahunanya, Chinyere. “War as Communal Tragedy: The Nigerian War Novel,” in Nigerian Literature in English: Emerging Critical Perspectives, ed. Onyemaechi Udu- mukwu (Port Harcourt: m&j Grand Orbit Communications, 2007): 108–133. Soyinka, Wole. The Man Died (1972; Ibadan: Spectrum, 1985). Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), in Approaches to the Novel: Materials for a Poetics, ed. Robert Scholes (San Francisco & Scranton pa: Chandler, 1961): 188–225.

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