I returned from Kigali a few days ago. The highlight of my trip was a harrowing visit to a museum commemorating the million or so Rwandese people who were slaughtered during a genocide that shocked the world in 1994. Two hundred and fifty thousand victims of that vicious Tutsi/Hutu conflict are buried on the premises, so it’s a cemetery as well as a place of remembrance and learning.
I will never forget my totally stressed mother, Anne, driving my three siblings and me out of Port Harcourt in the family’s grey Ford Cortina as Federal troops advanced on the city we called home. Biafra was the world’s first fully televised war and a very big deal. Between one and three million Biafrans died, mostly from starvation.Images of hollow-eyed youngsters with distended bellies filled TV screens across the globe. Many of us heard, for the first time, about kwashiokor – a form of malnutrition caused by protein deficiency.
Yes, we lost the war – another vivid memory that will never leave me is of my father waking me and my sister up to tell us that the war was over and consoling us as we wept inconsolably. The vindictive branch of the Nigerian establishment goes out of its way to punish Igbos for daring to rebel half a century ago, while the more benign elements just want to brush Biafra under the carpet and label it as an unfortunate episode that is best forgotten.“As my new novel shows,” says Obioma, “when a war begins it never truly ends. It continues over generations in small and invisible ways.