What my mother told me
She told me about hunger the way other mothers tell fairy tales: at bedtime, in the dark, in a voice for small children. Relatives who went into the bush and did not come out. A cousin's child with the swollen belly. Twenty pounds. The word abandoned on a house that was not abandoned. She never told these stories with hate. She told them so that I would know what my grandparents had paid for me to be born at all.
When we wrote Biafra Rising together, I finally heard them in full, as an adult, and understood that I had grown up in a country that had done this to my family and then made it illegal to remember.
What I saw
I grew up with soldiers at the roundabouts. I have been made to lie on the ground on the Port Harcourt road for a check of my phone. I have watched boys my age beaten for a flag on a keke. I have lived through Mondays when a whole region went silent and nobody could say whether it was out of belief or fear, and then I have read the killings of those weeks attributed to us, all of them, by a government that has never counted its own.
You cannot ask a people to forget a famine and then punish their children for remembering it.
What I want
- A referendum. The people of the south-east, and any neighbouring peoples who wish it, asked one question with a pencil, the way Scotland was asked and Quebec was asked. Whatever the answer, it would be ours.
- The release of Nnamdi Kanu and of everyone held for years without conviction. A man kidnapped from Kenya cannot receive a fair trial in the country that kidnapped him.
- An end to the killings on every side. By soldiers at checkpoints, by unknown gunmen, by anyone enforcing anything with a machete. I do not accept a Biafra built on the bodies of Igbo boys.
- The war taught in schools. Every one of them, in every state.
- A Biafra that has room for me. A nation born of the demand to be treated as human cannot then choose who counts as human.
On being gay and Biafran
Some in the movement say that homosexuality is un-African and that people like me have no place in the republic they imagine. I answer them the way I answer the church: count. Count the boys who marched with you and are now in London or in the ground. Then read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is the same document we quote when we ask for self-determination. It does not have a paragraph that stops at us.
I stand for Biafra because I was raised by it, because it was wronged, and because a people who were starved for asking to govern themselves are the people most able to understand what it is to be told you do not exist. I am asking them to understand it about me.