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Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. If he had slowed down and allowed some people who were with him to advise him properly, we would have come out better than we did.
Felix Nwankwo Oragwu, scientist. He was a physics lecturer at UNN when the civil war began. For the next 30 months, he headed the Research and Production RAP group comprising Igbo scientists from various fields. Its primary responsibility was to provide technological support to the Biafran army, which was poorly equipped. The RAP's most notable product was the "ogbunigwe", a weapons launcher of remarkable and devastating effect which influenced the outcome of many battles in Biafra's favour, according to historical reports.
They only had knives and cutlasses. No gun, no bomb, no nothing. In the aftermath of the war, the Nigerian government did not want to impose any form of collective punishment. Nevertheless, the Igbo faced some devastating consequences, particularly economically as the Biafran currency that people had accumulated became worthless. Many Igbo still feel sidelined in Nigerian politics, as since the civil war no-one from the ethnic group has become president.
Increasing cries of marginalisation have led in recent years to the emergence of Igbo groups agitating once again for secession, particularly the Indigenous People of Biafra Ipob , formed by UK-based British-Nigerian Nnamdi Kanu.
Mr Oragwu wishes that the Igbo had paid less attention to the scramble for power at the centre, and instead distinguished their region by advancing the technological gains of the war. By this time, we would have been competing with at least South Korea. The scientist's wartime accomplishments had caught the attention of the Nigerian authorities and he was invited by the government to pioneer a special science and technology programme for the country.
He was behind the setting up of four universities of science and technology in different regions of Nigeria and after retirement he published Scientific and Technological Innovations in Biafra, a book he hoped would inspire young Nigerians. Edna Nwanunobi, teacher. She was teaching English and French in a secondary school in Port Harcourt in southern Nigeria when the civil war began.
But English was more widely spoken in Biafra, so translators were needed whenever French officials visited Ojukwu. Ms Nwanunobi joined the Biafran ministry of foreign affairs as part of a handful of translators who worked directly with Ojukwu. These were people who were doing all sorts of things and the war forced them out of their positions. She enjoyed working directly with the Biafran leader, whom she and her colleagues fondly referred to as "Brother OJ".
If any meeting lasted more than two hours, he wouldn't be party to it. Her most memorable assignment occurred after the Biafran military captured six Italian oil workers employed by the Nigerian government. This ahistoricism follows us around in the physical and virtual worlds. But for Biafrans, it is not so easy to delink his words from history. After all, 50 years ago, Igbo women were being passed around in the military camps set up in captured Biafran towns, in open-air markets, on the street or in their own homes, as their children and husbands were made to watch.
Decades after Biafra, we have witnessed this past replicate itself in mini-episodes such as the Odi Massacre in and Zaria Massacre in And just like the Biafran Genocide, the memories of these gruesome incidents are forgotten quickly, erased and distorted, downplayed by the media, and the perpetrators are never held accountable. But the truth is, it is impossible to erase the past, at least not completely.
We may try to distort it, pretend that it never happened, but it will always be there. And for people like my father, the war will forever give shape to their lives — splitting it into a before and an after. Immediately after the war, the Nigerian government made it a point of duty to instil a spirit of nationalism in the hearts of schoolchildren like my father. But these children had already seen first-hand what comes with challenging the notion of one Nigeria. Unconsciously, my father passed this fear on to his children.
We have learned to perform our nationalism in public, to avoid speaking our languages, to show our most Nigerian selves. My father died last year, after years spent battling health problems in a country where he could not access quality healthcare. But his life, and the memories he shared with me during years of conversations in our parlour, has left behind glimpses of a history we must never forget.
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