9 - Romances from the Nigerian Civil War: Veronica's End

Summary

Onitsha pamphleteers were among the first to fictionalise the Nigerian Civil War. Unlike their plays about Lumumba, Awolowo, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and other deposed African leaders in the 1960s, national heroes were largely absent from creative writing about the Civil War. If anticolonial nationalism provided a vantage point for pamphleteers seeking forms of Cold War non-alignment in political dramas about African crises in the early to mid-1960s, as described in the previous chapter, the war confused authors’ loyalties and muddied the nationalist solution to postcolonial crises.

‘Biafra's history is short’, writes Samuel Fury Childs Daly, but ‘it would shape Nigeria's politics long after 1970, both for what it taught the country's leaders and for how the public remembered it’ (2020: 6–7). Creative writing is fundamental to this process of public remembering and interpretation. The pamphlets discussed in this chapter are among the earliest in a long tradition of Civil War literature by Nigerian creative writers that continues to the present day and includes Flora Nwapa's Wives at War and Other Stories (1980), Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra (1982), Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1985), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo's A Million Bullets and a Rose ([2011] 2022), among many others (see Coundouriotis 2014). The women writers on this list – Nwapa, Emecheta, Adichie and Adimora-Ezeigbo – all focus on the experiences of women caught up in the conflict, while the anti-war writers, including Nwapa and Saro-Wiwa, use fiction to try to seek ‘humanity in a world gone mad’ (Nwapa 1975: b.pag.). Other authors have been more politically partisan. In his collection of poetry, Nigerian Civil War Soliloquies (1977), the anticolonial leader, first president of Nigeria, renowned nationalist newspaperman and Igbo ‘son of the soil,’ Nnamdi Azikiwe, described the leaders of the federal government as ‘scapegoats of history’ and attempted to use poetry to reinstate a Nigerian national identity (v). By contrast, in his 2013 memoir, There Was A Country, Achebe maintained a clear pro-Biafran perspective consistent with his wartime work for the Biafran Ministry of Information as a diplomat and fundraiser in Europe.