Soyinka reveals his role in Nigerian civil War

• His arrest for treason

By MERCY BERNIE

Notable stakeholders in the Nigerian project have continued to stick their belief in Biafra as a political entity that has come stay.  Professor Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate, has articulated Biafra has not been defeated 50 years after the civil war ended. Nobel laureate revealed his role in the Civil War which he was arrested by the Nigerian government for treason.

In his opinion, his speech about Biafra which could not be defeated was branded a treasonable statement.

In his recent article, Soyinka argued that though the war was won in the battlefield, the Biafra dream is still alive. This, he said, has been proved by the renewed Biafra Movement in the country by even youths who were not born during the Biafra war.

Soyinka’s narrative read:

 “On July 6, 1967, civil war broke out in Nigeria between the country’s military and the forces of Biafra, an independent republic proclaimed by ex-Nigerian military officer, Odumegwu Ojukwu, on May 30 of that year. The war killed more than one million people, many of whom died from starvation. It ended in January 1970 with the reintegration of Biafra into Nigeria. “Malnutrition, Red Cross, kwashiorkor, relief flights, genocide, the Uli airstrip used by Biafran planes to elude the Nigerian blockade, mercenaries, the Aburi accord that broke down and led to war—these are some of the memory triggers of the Nigerian civil war of secession that we would like to re-assign.

“Over a million lives perished—a shameful proportion of them children—mostly through starvation and aerial bombardment. The Nigerian federal government, committed to the doctrine of oneness, had boasted that the conflict would last no longer than three weeks of “police action.”

“We had learnt much from the politics of other nations, but apparently not from history; the war lasted more than two years.

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“Tormented by the image of a herd of human lemmings rushing to their doom, as a young writer, I made the “treasonable” statement warning that the secessionist state, Biafra, could never be defeated.

“The simplistic rendition of that conviction in most minds—certainly in the minds of the then-ruling military and its elite support was that this applied merely to the physical field of combat. Thus, it was regarded as a psychological offensive against the federal side, an attempt to demoralize its soldiers while boosting the war spirit of the enemy.

“That “enemy” had also boasted that no force in black Africa could defeat them. My visit to the Biafran enclave in October 1966 resulted in arrest and detention. During interrogation, I insisted that my statement was meant as a counter to the surge of emotive nationalism and a slavish sanctification of colonial boundaries.

“Biafra was, therefore, an expression of that rejection and its replacement with a people’s self-constitutive rights. This specific challenge owed its genesis to memory at its rawest, the memory of ethnic cleansing, whose remedy could not be sought rationally in a campaign of subjugation against an already traumatized community.

ADVERTISING inRead invented by Teads “One question, rhetorical in tone, stuck in my mind for long afterwards. It went thus: “Why should you take it on yourself to make such a statement? Is it because you’re a writer? Who are you to take a contrary stance to the government?” I replied to myself that I had learned to listen. The young man countered that he was on the side of history, and Biafra would be crushed. Not quite, as it turned out.

“The Biafrans were, indeed, defeated on the battlefield, but crushed? Today, most Nigerians know better. Biafra has not been defeated. If anyone was left in any doubt about this, the last work of my late colleague, Chinua Achebe’s There Was A Country, has left us re-thinking. “New generation writers, born long after that brutal war, have inherited and continue to propagate the Biafran doctrine, an article of faith among the Igbo populace, even among those who pay lip-service to a united nation. Millions remain sworn to uphold it. “Many have died at the hands of the police and the military as succeeding guardians of that legacy troop out to reclaim it in defiant manifestations. Amnesty International estimated that at least 150 pro-Biafra activists have been killed since August 2015.