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

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Biafra and Abuse of Power in I.N.C. Aniebo's Rearguardactions Matatu 49 (2017) 280–292 brill.com/mata 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. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/18757421-04902003Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 03:30:26AM via free access biafra and abuse of power in i.n.c. aniebo’s rearguard actions 281 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 vic- tims, 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. 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 283 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 pow- erful” 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.
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