Python Dance
The army is in the south-east. Kanu's house was raided. A court has called us terrorists. In our house, my mother is telling the old stories again.
Soldiers on the Port Harcourt road all week. They call the operation Python Dance, which tells you what they think of us. Checkpoints at Obinze, at Nekede, at the airport turn. They stop the keke and make the boys get down and lie on the ground and go through their phones for the flag, for the songs, for anything Biafra. I was made to lie down on Tuesday. It was not the worst thing. It was the ordinariness of it, the soldier's boredom.
Last week the army went into Nnamdi Kanu's father's compound in Abia and there was shooting and nobody can say how many died. Now the news says a court in Abuja has declared IPOB a terrorist organisation. Terrorist. My mother, who has never held anything more dangerous than a kitchen knife, is by that definition a supporter of terrorists, because she has a flag folded in the wardrobe under the wrappers.
Tonight she took it out. She did not unfold it. She just held it on her lap and told us, all four of us, about 1968 again, the year she was small, what her mother did to feed them, and this time Papa did not tell her to stop.
I am gay and I am Biafran and the state of Nigeria has now put both of those things on the same list. I did not choose either. I am starting to think I would not give either back.