Even the heavens wept

On October 7, 1967, a detachment of the Nigeria Army under the overall command of Colonel Murtala Mohammed massacred three generations of men from Asaba in present day Delta State. Some of the people who were present on that day survived the bullets. This is the story of the day as told by one of them...

“ Ku diba su goma goma, ku je chikin chan de chan, kwu yi aiki de su” in Hausa that means “ Take them in tens into those corners and work on”. These are words that will live with me for the rest of my life. It was then it dawned on the group of men and boys gathered that afternoon of October 7, 1967, in Ogbeosawa – about two thousand strong – surrounded by a detachment of the Nigeria Army carrying sub-machine guns, that by that pronouncement, we had all been condemned to death.

I was standing with my elder brother Emma at the edge of the crowd. He was holding my hand. I had always been Emma’s little brother, shared his bed with him every night until he died. Even onto death, he felt his duty was to protect me. Emma was the very first person to be dragged by the soldiers. As they took him, he let go my hand and pushed me further into the crowd. I saw Emma struggling with one of the soldiers and another one shot him from behind at point blank range. He fell to the ground with the blood from his back forming a pool around him. His shattered vertebrae exposed in the afternoon gloom, the first victim of the massacre that followed.

As soon as Emma fell, all hell broke loose. A good number of the men and boys on seeing the first death began to flee into the surrounding bushes, and the soldiers began firing. Many of those trying to flee were cut down as they fled. The rest of us fell to the ground in utter hopelessness. I lost count of time. The soldiers turned their guns on those of us lying on the ground and the staccato bursts of bullets continued into the late evening. To this day, I live with the smell of the blood of my brethren that died that day, with the cries of those of them who had lost hope and stood up and begged the soldiers to end it all. Maybe they were the ones who saved the lives of those of us who survived the slaughter, because as they begged to be killed and the soldiers obliged them they disrupted the flow of the massacre as the killers now concentrated on them.

Finally, the bullets stopped. The heavens opened up and a light shower came forth. Even the heavens wept for the victims of that holocaust. I thought everybody was dead.

Then, I began to hear voices – the cries of the injured struggling to live, the regrets of some who had their limbs battered and were in need of help. It seemed to me that I was the only one who came out unscathed. Lying close by was a cousin of mine who had a bullet hole on his head and the middle finger of his right hand was shattered. He was alive, and lives to this day. My father was lying not too far away. I did not know where the bullet hit him, his eyes were open as if he was staring at me, his favourite son, he was dead.

I could not get up and escape into the bush as soon as we knew the soldiers had gone because there was no way I could go without my cousin who was injured. So we waited until it was dark then I helped him along and we found our way to my grandmother’s house.

The next morning, my mother came looking for us. There were five of us from my family – my father, my brothers; Paul, Emma and Gabriel, and I – who had been taken by the soldiers to the killing field. She found only me. Quickly she arranged for my sisters, my little brothers and I to escape with other people to Achalla, a few kilometres from Asaba. Latter she went to look for the bodies of my father and brothers. She found only my father and Emma. She put them in a wheel barrow and went to bury them. The body of Paul was never found. He was only twenty-four. For several years, we lived with the illusion that he must have escaped somehow and found his way to Biafra. But we had to accept that somewhere in Asaba, like several others, lies the body of Paul in an unmarked grave. We found Gabriel in Achalla. He was shot in the waist, but somehow, the bullet missed his spinal cord. He had eight bullets in him. The last of them was extracted at Igbobi Hospital in 1978.

Postscript: the man who told this story insists that he has no bitterness in his heart. He went on to have a family of his own, and only tells this story because he is afraid that such an event could reoccur in Nigeria.

Chxta agrees with him. Sometime ago, Chxta listened in horror as a 'lowly' gate-man described all of his employers neighbours. The gate-man is of Igbo origins. The neighbours respectively are Mr. K, Mr. O (who are both Yoruba), Mr. O (who is from Benin), and Mr. A (who is from Eastern Nigeria). The gate-man described these people as follows: 'Onye Mgbati, onye Mgbati na nu onye be anyi, onye Idu and onye be anyi'. In the Igbo language, the meanings of these descriptions are fairly obvious. Mr. O from Yoruba land is married to an Igbo lady, hence the description, onye Mgbati na nu onye be anyi (the Yoruba man married to our home girl).

At first glance, those descriptions may appear harmless. But thinking deeper into it, that is ethnic profiling. The gate-man has profiled his employer's neighbours by their ethnic groups. If there is trouble tomorrow, he would have no problems pointing out people who can be massacred. Chxta now look at the plebs around Chxta askance. Chxta does not know which of the 'lowly' persons around Chxta has profiled Chxta simply because Chxta is of Igbo origins.

Let us not kid ourselves, there is the potential for trouble as Nigeria has a large pool of idle people who have nothing better to do with themselves, and who even worse, are all too ready to blame people from other ethnic groups for their travails. We can only pray that such an event as October 7, 1967 and the subsequent massacres of the Civil War never happen again. In the language of my fathers, ozoemena.

Recommended reading: That we may not forget, Biafra