September 1968: the city falls
After Port Harcourt fell in May 1968 the federal Third Marine Commando Division pushed north through the delta. Aba fell on 4 September. Owerri fell on 16 September 1968. The refugees who had crowded into it from Port Harcourt and Aba moved again, north toward Umuahia and Orlu, into an enclave that was now smaller than Imo State is today. My grandmother's family was among them, on foot, with what they could carry.
The siege
Then something happened that the federal side had not planned for. The Biafran 14th Division under Colonel Ogbugo Kalu cut the roads behind the federal brigade holding Owerri and besieged it. Through the rainy season and the harmattan of 1968 and into 1969 the federal 16th Brigade sat inside the city, supplied by air, while Biafran troops closed in from the villages. On 25 April 1969 the federal troops broke out south along the Port Harcourt road, the road my family's house stands on, and Biafra retook Owerri. It was the largest Biafran victory of the war.
The last capital
Three days before Owerri was retaken, Umuahia, the Biafran capital, had fallen. So the government of Biafra moved into the city the federal troops had just left: the ministries into the schools and mission houses, the radio into a building I have walked past a hundred times, Ojukwu into a compound outside town. For eight months Owerri was the capital of a country of a few thousand square kilometres, thirty kilometres from the Uli airstrip that kept it alive. The Ahiara Declaration, Biafra's statement of what it was fighting for, was made in June 1969 at Ahiara, a village east of the city.
For eight months my city was the capital of a country. Nobody told me at school. I found out from my mother, and then from a book.
January 1970
The end came fast. The federal Operation Tail-Wind began in late December 1969 and cut the enclave in two. Owerri fell on 9 January 1970. Ojukwu flew out of Uli on the night of 10 January. Philip Effiong announced the surrender on 12 January and signed it in Lagos on the 15th. The people who had fled Owerri twice in sixteen months walked back into it a third time, to houses that had been fought through twice, and began the fifty years of quiet.
What is left
Very little that is marked. There is no museum of the war in Owerri and no monument to the siege. The road my family lives on, the Port Harcourt road at Obinze, is the road the federal brigade broke out along in April 1969; the checkpoint where soldiers made me lie on the ground in 2017 for a check of my phone is, as far as I can tell from the maps, within a few kilometres of the line. Nobody who stops you there knows that. I did not know it until I was twenty-five.
That is what the silence does. It takes a city that was a capital and makes it a place where a boy can be searched for a flag on the exact ground his grandparents fought over, and neither the boy nor the soldier knows.