By Anote Ajeluorou
WRITING is not an innocent act. This much Uwem Akpan told his audience at his Ibadan reading on Saturday, July 5, 2025, when he said, ‘Biafra made a mistake to treat the Italian oil workers as if they were minorities of the Niger Delta’. He noted that killing the 11 oil workers undid Biafra, as the white world rose against the head of state, Odumegwu Ojukwu. Akpan also said the much-respected Chinua Achebe, who he admires for writing Africa out of the darkness Europe had condemned her failed to humanise the plight of minorities of the Niger Delta, but rather romanticised Biafran soldiers. And for Chimamanda Adichie, Akpan said she committed the sacrilege of calling minorities ‘saboteurs’, and would rather her single, one-sided story of suffering in Biafra be the only story of the war worth telling to the world. Akpan said such a position is disingenuous for a writer of her genius.
According to the author of Say You’re One of Them and New York, My Village, “Chinua Achebe wrote There was a Country; go and read it. The documentation of what Nigeria did to them, to the Igbo is endless. And in three places, he also said Nigeria did (bad) things to the minorities. Three places. Our pain is: Achebe, it’s not only Nigeria that did this to us. Why did you protect your own and now blame the other? That’s where the problem usually comes from. You can write and not just mention minorities; we as writers know what we are doing; we know when to shut the door in a very emotional way, and you won’t know when this is going, because you’re carried away by the force and the emotionality of the story. So Achebe could have done much better with his book, open up so that minorities could feel they belong…”
Akpan was responding to an Igbo young man who recounted how his father never spoke about the war and the internal struggle within him each time he was asked about what happened. Another fellow also said his father-in-law was most taciturn about his involvement in the war. They fought as child soldiers.
“What is wrong by saying Biafra did this,” Akpan continued his criticism of Achebe’s whitewashing of Biafra soldiers. “So, Biafra did not even do anything bad in Igboland? How is that fair? Okay, leave the minorities alone. Show me a place where Achebe said child soldiers like your father were recruited into the Biafran army? And all these people looking for Biafra, have they come out to say they honestly didn’t want Biafra? They’re not saying it. They’re making it sound as if everyone was for it. That’s not true. I know that many Igbo men ran and hid in the forest.
“In There Was a Country, Biafran soldiers didn’t do anything wrong. Can you imagine an army anywhere in the world that is innocent? In Achebe’s book, the Biafrans are too innocent. So I felt very traumatised from someone I admired too much or so much.”
Akpan said the Biafran leader Ojukwu overplayed his hand by killing the Italian oil workers and brought the full wrath of European politics on the young country struggling to stand, and recalled the chilling global political interplay that led to the end of the war.
“The only time Achebe says Biafra did something wrong was when they killed the 11 Italian oil workers,” he said. “Biafra slaughtered 11 Italian oil workers, and that was what ended the war. The white world then said Biafra had to be deleted. All the while the white world didn’t pay attention; they were drilling the oil. Odumegwu Ojukwu overplayed his hand in May 1969; he sent commandos to kill the oil workers, and said they were saboteurs. You know how it is when you kill a white person, just like President Trump is trying to do to South Africa – telling all sorts of lies.
“The Europeans then began to pay attention to the war. That was how the power structure changed. And the decision was made by the Europeans. And for one month, Ojukwu made broadcast, saying that the Europeans were reacting because of the death of 11 white men whereas millions of black people were being killed daily in Biafra and they did not intervene. And I think he arrested about 19 white men and put them on death row. And so the white world left those who had died and started pleading for those who were alive; they considered this a serious humiliation. And after a month, Achebe, who was the international war propagandist or publicist for Biafra, was begging Ojukwu to release the white prisoners. That was in June 1969. And after six months, there was no Biafra again, because they blocked black market for weapons to Biafra. The Europeans shut down the weapons market; they felt nobody could kill their people like Ojukwu did. This was what ended the war.
“If you read Achebe’s book and Brigadier-General Godwinp Alabi-Isama’s The Tragedy of Victory, you’d see this play out. It was not as if the white world said they’d killed each other too much. No, no, no; Ojukwu touched their own. They mounted pressure on Nigeria to put an end to Biafra, and within six months, they planned for exile for Ojukwu in Cote d’Ivoire.”
Lawyer and award-winning poet who was in the audience, Tade Ipadeola corroborated Akpan’s narration about the end of Biafra, when he said, “I’m actually Biafra, and I actually want a Biafra to exist, because, come to think of it: Nigeria is too unwieldy, but it must be on the terms that must be negotiated like Akpan outlined: you must discuss with me first before pronouncing me one, so I know what I’m getting into. When Nigeria goes wrong, the whole of Africa goes wrong. The Anang are 4 million people; enough to become a country. People in Luxembourg, Iceland, Greenland, and Finland are far fewer in population than the Anang people.
“If you read the book, The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War, 1976 – 1970, written by a professor at Princeton University, John Stremlau, you’d see how the killings of the Italians ended the war.”
Akpan said Adichie openly oppressed minorities of the Niger Delta by calling them ‘saboteurs’ in Half of a Yellow Sun, saying by so doing she was further denying them a voice in their voicelessness.
“Chimamanda Adichie gives minorities maybe one page in her Biafra novel, Half of a Yellow Sun,” Akpan noted. “Maybe she did not want to touch minorities’ story, but we are categorised as saboteurs in the book. That’s oppressing me in your story. See what I mean? You could have written your story, but when you make the minorities worse than they need to be, there is a problem there. So we should not rely on them (Igbo or Nigeria) to tell our stories. Now you’re calling me a saboteur with all these things Biafra soldiers committed against my people? We are not saboteurs; we are freedom fighters! Did Adichie know what our situation was? I don’t know. That’s the thing. When you’re writing about other people who have no voice, and you write in such a way that their situation becomes worse, there is a problem there.
“My Anang people were forced to speak Igbo at checkpoints. That was oppression. This is why we say what happened to us was worse. Why should I be forced to speak Igbo when you say I’m supposed to be part of that country? Have you heard about Biafran soldiers raping our women and telling them that their children will be Igbo kids, because it’s patriarchy? Did they say that to Igbo women? No. The New York Times of 1969 said our people were being used as human shields against the advancing Nigerian army. Did they tell you this? No! You see that discrimination. Nobody is saying the Igbo didn’t suffer. No. But minorities also suffered in the hands of Igbo-dominated Biafra army.”
Audience members at Uwem Akpan’s reading in Ibadan
Akpan went down memory land to dredge up the oppression of minorities in Eastern Region way before Nigeria gained Independence. In 1954 when Obafemi Awolowo pulled the rug off the feet of Nnamdi Azikiwe in the Western House of Assembly and Azikiwe ran to Enugu which had a minority Iyo Eta Iyo holding sway and pushed him out, adding, “This was an important crack between the Igbo and minorities in the Eastern Region at that time. When Azikiwe took over power, he wiped off all minority presence. It used to be three to four cabinet members from Calabar-Ogoja-Rivers – COR. When Azikiwe got into power, he stopped the minorities from electing their people; he reduced the spot to just one and gave it to the uncle of the current Senate President Godswill Akpabio. So the minorities from that point said they didn’t want to be part of the Eastern Region any more, since they were not allowed to vote who to represent them. And by the time Biafra came, there was this huge division.”
While hunger was declared a legitimate weapon of war by Awolowo, Akpan said it wasn’t only people in Biafra that died of hunger, as minorities also died. A week earlier at the Lagos reading, Akpan had told his audience how his mother used to tease that there was too much food, which often made him to wonder. He would later realise his mother was referring to how hunger decimated many people in Anang during the war.
“Now, you do not also hear that minorities of the Niger Delta died of hunger during the war,” he said. “Yes, we died, a lot of our people died. You will not also hear that Nigeria’s offer of 20 pounds also applied to minorities of the Niger Delta irrespective of what they had in the banks. That tells you how much we’ve been written out of the civil war story. And the worst of it all was that the Igbo called us saboteurs! That because we didn’t want Biafra was the reason they lost the war. Up till now they still call us saboteurs. And what was the punishment for saboteurs? Instant death. I came to the seminary here in Ibadan and the Igbo seminarians were still calling me a saboteur in the 1990s.”