“It wasn’t easy getting the food and drugs to the people that really needed them. There were ‘attack’ traders who would rather buy off whole consignments and resell at incredible prices. Sometimes, they succeeded. Some other times, it took someone like me to foil their plots. But it was a battle that would not go away. A lot of our people had fled Eastwards with only a bag of salt and rice. Of course, much more was required for sustenance – and wartime has never been the time for cultivation. So, the relief agency was like a traveling salvation. Sometimes, we had too little to give out, but even that always loomed large to the receivers. When our people speak of eating sand as the worst form of poverty, it is an idiom with an added story behind it.

“In that fashion, I traveled all over Biafra. It was like going from one horror chamber to another. In one village, a furious hail of bombs had sealed the mouth of a bunker in which a number of families had taken refuge. By the time an excavation succeeded, all those sheltering in the bunker had been asphyxiated. In another village, a furious strafing had caused an epidemic of ‘artillery shock’ or partial deafness. In another, food had become so scarce that the villagers feasted on nkakwu, the shrew, and on almost every other thing – both living and dead. By the time we arrived, brutally raped mothers were giving birth to ‘bush babies,’ more or less. Some types of shock had become paroxysms of madness. A masquerade carrier, stunned by the extinction of his family, put on the village’s night masquerade and appeared at noon in the village square; he collapsed there. Another man tried to bring down a warplane with a catapult; a direct hit scattered him, in morsels, over the face of a scoured earth, leaving behind his catapult and a niggardly testimonial of unspeakable pulp. A militia actually brought down a plane with the local ogbunigwe bomb, but a few of the men were so consumed with fury or overtaken by excitement that they could not keep away from the consequent conflagration. We were like missionaries in a hooting apocalypse traveling from one disease pandemonium to other forms of evil deaths.

            “The only people who appeared to be sitting pretty were the foreign mercenaries, who fired a few shots a week and spent the rest of the time polishing their boots or calculating their profits. They even had drinking clubs that were soon, and easily, converted to flesh markets. Starvation has never been a worthy haggler.

“It was the most horrible of times. I saw too many simple dreams beheaded, buried in the dust and passed over; heard too many cries for aid that curled like smoke towards a shut heaven’s gate; listened to too many stories that told of renewing and sundering scars. Still, we advanced, beating our heads against the narrow path between the impossible and the improbable. When we finally got to Sa’ra, the horror exceeded itself. We didn’t know, and could not have known, about the plan by the federal troops to assassinate Ojukwu. Their attempts at Umuahia, our wartime capital, had failed. For some reason, they believed Ojukwu was in hiding at Sa’ra at the time. And they figured that the best way to kill him was to wipe out everyone within the vicinity. Until then, Sa’ra was one of the places still spared of the widening horror, so the villagers were more relaxed than people in many other places. They figured they were too deep in the forest for the war to show up without a mask.

“One morning, the entire Nigerian air force – or so it appeared – descended on the village, determined to bury it and everyone within. The strafing was the most concentrated in the war. By the time the planes finally left, the village was wet with blood, and about half of our people were dead. That is why there is no family in Sa’ra that came out of the war complete. Ojukwu himself was safe; he had only passed through Sa’ra.       

            “We arrived in time for the burial. Many of those who had fled deeper into the bush or into the bunkers stayed right there, only venturing out briefly to ferret for any kind of food. Until then, no one in Sa’ra ate dogs; they were considered filthy for the soup pot. But quite a number of them survived the bombing, and even the ones that did not seemed better fare under the circumstances than human flesh. They were the choicest food available, and I believe some of them were actually eaten raw by men and women half-crazed by starvation. Our provisions arrived rather late, and virtually no one was inclined to take the risk of venturing towards us. They couldn’t be sure we were not another face of death. We built one monstrous grave and buried the dead within. There were so many that we had to keep expanding the size of the grave, always with an ear attuned to any danger signals in the sky. In between the scares and the dashes for shelter, the burial took a whole day and night.

“Something very unusual happened afterwards: no grass ever grew above that grave until the end of the war. There are many conjectures, but perhaps the truth is that some of the villagers took care that the earth above the grave remained fresh. That vast grave is the desert that the villagers speak of as the one that our ancestors crossed into Sa’ra. And Sa’ra is an abbreviation for Sapara, to merge or bond or cling, not the Sahara desert. It is a way of retelling a deeply painful story to take away the edges of the pain. It was the desert that crossed our people instead. When they speak of the wild dogs that ran around the desert, which our ancestors curried with spices, they mean the dogs that pawed that huge grave in those wild days, the dogs that became like wartime spices. Because we cannot forget, we invented a way of remembering. But, as you know, our people would rather not speak of these things at all. Speech is good, but it has its own terrors.

            “The war ended for me in Sa’ra. It was the place that I once more dreamt the Christopher dreams. In one, the grave spewed out the dead, armed with spectacular guns and singing menacingly the song that Christopher especially loved to sing at Opi – about shooting down Gowon, the Nigerian leader, from the sky. He would sing that song, with his gun aimed at the sky and with Achike mimicking the relay of anti-aircraft gunfire. In the dream, the guns actually explode, and warplanes rain down from the sky. But then there is my missing arm, and the dogs of Sa’ra – what they became – to remind me that it was indeed a dream, even with Christopher directing. And there is usually Christopher’s voice reciting mournfully, above the din:

            The arrows of God tremble at the gates of light,

            the drums of curfew pander to a dance of death

            “It took another year for us to accept that we had lost the war. I couldn’t bear to return to the North, so I came to Lagos with Achike, carrying the suspended price on all our heads. I no longer have the Christopher dreams, but I have not altogether outgrown the shivers down my spine. I still think of Christopher, what could have been, and the unkindness of war. A war never ends, son. The first bullet echoes forever, ricocheting from the noise of old wars to the fury of ones foretold. Sometimes, the sound peters out, but the guns continue to smoke nevertheless.”

            We sat in silence for a long time. It was as if I had looked deeply into his eyes and seen with a haunting clarity the turmoil that still tormented him.

“‘Not for telling sake,’ you said,” I managed to say eventually, from a hazy distance. “What is left?”

            “There are no easy choices as such. I have now opened the door to a memory of things that should never be forgotten – and isn’t best remembered the way that Opio does. What do markets speak of after the buyers and sellers are gone? That was something that Christopher said to me the night before he was killed. He was speaking of the market of spirits and memories. He always saw the world as that kind of widening marketplace. I do too, even more so now. Life!”

            His voice, which had been breaking, finally cracked, and he got up and hurried out, his missing arm glowing in my imagination as it had never done. I had never known him like that, but then I had never known the gravity of the story that he had kept bottled up within him all these years. I sat alone, brooding, for a long time. The clock chimed midnight, and I was no longer only flesh. I was in a tumultuous ghost land tormented both by biting snakes and abbreviating air raids, in the thick of the fighting and the different stages of dying as well, wondering: what does one do with such a heritage of memories? That night still grows in me.

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The poetry excerpts in the story are from Labyrinths; with Path of Thunder by Christopher Okigbo. But the Christopher in the story does not embody the true story of the life and death of Christopher Okigbo.