Akeem Lasisi
Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has revisited the question of the Nigerian Civil War.
This he did in connection with the need to teach history and inculcate the lessons it harbours
According to him, the renewed extreme agitation the country is witnessing is due to the fact that there is a gap in history.
Speaking in an interview on ‘Channels Television’ on Monday, Soyinka said the agitation by a group like the Indigenous People of Biafra is avoidable but understandable on the basis of the trauma Igbos went through during the strife otherwise called the Biafran war.
Recalling his experience as he took the risk of travelling to the East and other parts of the country during the crisis – which led to his imprisonment by the Gowon government – he said it was a wrong war in which Igbos experienced genocide.
Soyinka said, “I was very desperate to stop the war because it was a wrong war. A war is wrong, to start with. But this one was particularly bad because what Igbo people underwent, no question at all, was a genocide.”
He noted that such a traumatising experience could simmer for some time, but it could later rear its head because the idea has taken hold, with the danger being that some of the people it has taken hold of are too young to understand the full history of it.
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“So, when I said the other time that you cannot defeat Biafra, many people took a simplistic view, thinking of the battlefield. It is about the idea that has taken hold of people.”
The legendary writer, however, noted that as far as the war was concerned each party had its blame, saying the Igbo too had theirs.
He said, “Igbo people too were not blameless. When I met (Chukwuemeka Odumegwu) Ojukwu, we spoke very, very frankly because mistakes were made. When I met him again in Ivory Coast, I asked him, ‘Why did you shoot Banjo and others?’ and he gave his answers.”
The Nobel laureate further noted that in a project on the Journey to Biafra on BBC, he interviewed key players in the war, including Yakubu Gowon and Ojukwu. He said tapes of the interviews were still available for the purpose of history.
To forestall a repeat of the strife, he added, there was the need to learn and imbibe the rational lesson of history.
