I’m sitting across from my mother right now as I write this. Her hands are shaking – not from age, though she’s in her sixties now – but because we’re doing this again. We’re going back to Biafra. We’re going back to 1967, to the hunger, to the death, to the moment her childhood ended.
“Tell them about Nkem,” she whispers, her voice cracking. “Tell them about your uncle Nkem.”
My fingers freeze on the keyboard. I don’t want to write this. But she’s looking at me with those eyes – eyes that have seen too much, survived too much – and I know I have to.
The Boy Who Stopped Crying
My uncle Nkem was six years old when the war started. My mother, twelve, was supposed to protect him.
“He cried every day at first,” Mama says now, tears streaming down her face. “Every. Single. Day. He was hungry. We were all hungry. But he was just a baby.”
She pauses, wipes her eyes with the edge of her wrapper. I reach for her hand. She squeezes mine so tight it hurts.
“Then one day, he stopped crying. I thought – thank God, he’s being brave now. He’s being strong.” Her voice breaks completely. “But Ifechi… he didn’t stop because he was strong. He stopped because he didn’t have the energy anymore. His body was eating itself.”
I can barely see the screen now. My own tears are blurring everything.
The Morning That Changed Everything
Mama describes the morning in detail – too much detail. The way Nkem’s belly was swollen, tight like a drum. The orange tint in his hair that shouldn’t be there. His skin, papery and thin. His eyes, so big in his tiny face, staring at nothing.
“Mama – your grandmother – she was boiling tree bark. Can you imagine? Tree bark. Trying to make something, anything, to feed us.”
She’s rocking now, back and forth, the way she does when the memories are too heavy.
“I held him that morning. He was so light, Ifechi. Like holding air. And he looked at me and whispered, ‘Dede, I’m not hungry anymore.’ And I… I was happy. I thought he was getting better.”
She can’t continue. I can’t write. We just sit there, two generations apart, bound by a pain that never really heals.
The Silence After
“He died three days later,” she finally says. “Mama wouldn’t let him go. She held him for hours, singing to him, telling him stories like he could still hear. Papa had to… he had to pull him from her arms.”
They buried him under a mango tree. No coffin. Just a small body wrapped in what was left of a bedsheet.
“I don’t even know if that tree is still standing,” Mama says, looking past me, past the walls, past everything. “I’ve never gone back to look. I can’t.”
The Relief Worker She’ll Never Forget
My mother’s voice changes when she talks about Sister Margaret. The Irish nurse with the Red Cross who came to their camp.
“She had these bright blue eyes,” Mama says, and for the first time today, she almost smiles. “She would hold the children – even the dying ones that no one else would touch – and she would sing to them. Irish songs. We didn’t understand the words, but we understood the love.”
She stops, her smile fading.
“One day, Sister Margaret just collapsed. Just… fell. She had been giving her food rations to the children. She was starving herself to save us.”
Mama’s crying again. “She survived, thank God. But I think about her every day. A white woman from far away who loved us more than the people who were supposed to protect us.”
The Night Mama Lost Herself
There’s one story my mother has only told me twice. She’s telling it now for the third time, and I wish she wouldn’t.
“There was a woman in the camp,” she begins, her voice barely audible. “She went mad from grief. She had lost all five of her children. All five. And one night, she started laughing. Just… laughing and laughing and laughing.”
Mama’s hands are trembling violently now.
“I remember thinking – that’s going to be me. If I lose one more person, that will be me. I could feel it, Ifechi. I could feel my mind starting to crack. Like glass with too much pressure.”
“Mama, we can stop—”
“No.” Her voice is firm. “People need to know. They need to know what war does. Not just to bodies, but to souls.”
Writing This Is Breaking My Heart
I have to be honest with you, reader. I can barely do this. Every word is like pulling thorns from a wound that never closed. My mother is suffering as she tells me these stories. Her blood pressure is probably through the roof. She’ll have nightmares tonight – I know because she always does after we do this.
But she insists. “Write it,” she tells me. “Write it so people remember. So it never happens again.”
The Question I’m Afraid to Ask
“Mama,” I say, my voice shaking. “Do you… do you ever wish you had died too? Back then?”
The silence is deafening.
Then she looks at me – really looks at me – and says: “Every single day of that war, I prayed to die. Every single day after the war, I thanked God I didn’t. Because I got to have you. I got to have your siblings. I got to live.”
She touches my face.
“But Ifechi, I need you to understand something. Part of me did die in Biafra. The part that trusted easily. The part that felt safe. That twelve-year-old girl who loved dancing and dreamed of becoming a teacher – she’s buried under that mango tree with Nkem.”
Why Am I Doing This to Her? To Us?
Because silence is worse. Because forgetting is unforgivable. Because three million people died – three million – and the world moved on like it never happened.
My mother is sitting here, reliving her trauma, so that maybe – just maybe – someone reading this will understand. Will care. Will remember.
This Is Not Just History
Biafra isn’t just a chapter in a history book. It’s my mother’s trembling hands. It’s the way she hoards food even now, fifty-plus years later. It’s the panic in her eyes when my little sister skips a meal. It’s the nightmares she still has where she’s twelve years old and starving and watching people die.
This is our story. My mother’s story. And I’m honored and devastated to tell it.
For every child who died hungry. For every mother who buried her babies. For my uncle Nkem, who never got to grow up. We remember.
Written with tears and love, sitting beside my mother who survived the unsurvivable. May we never forget. May it never happen again.
BiafraWar #BiafranGenocide #NigerianCivilWar #Biafra1967
