Nigeria: The Men Died

7 November 2017
opinion

I lived in the Biafran enclave during the Nigerian civil war until our part of the world was liberated by Nigerian soldiers. The transistor radio was my inseparable companion as it was the companion of most of our people during that war. We needed to hear from the radio where we were in the shifting map of the war so that we would know where to run to next. But you could never be sure of the information you got from your radio because propaganda was an important part of the war. A lot of the information we got was simply passed from mouth to mouth and in the process the meat of the message may be mangled or messed up entirely. So information was one of the casualties of the war. But even after the end of the war we did not fully understand what went on at other theatres of the war. That is how the horrendous massacre of close to 1000 people at Asaba in Delta State, South South Nigeria remained unknown to most of us who were not close to the place of that pogrom.

In the last few days I have visited a few bookshops looking for a book that has given life to that mass murder. The book titled, "The Asaba Massacre: Trauma, Memories and the Nigerian Civil War" is jointly authored by an anthropologist, Professor S. Elizabeth Bird and a historian, Professor Fraser M. Otlanelli, both of the University of South Florida, USA. It is a book of history, 50 year old history of something that happened which should not have happened and which could happen again if we do not learn the lessons that we need to learn.

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