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Why young Africans need to know their history
Fifty-three years ago, a political decision changed the course of my life and I wasn’t even born when it was made.
After several bouts of ethnic hostilities in Nigeria during which thousands of Igbo people were murdered and chased out of cities, back to their ancestral communities in southeastern Nigeria, leaders from the southeast declared on May 30, 1967 that the region would breakaway from Nigeria and form the Republic of Biafra.
Diplomatic efforts to unite Nigeria failed; war spilled out and continued pouring out atrocities for three years.
The land of my birth- southeastern Nigeria- collapsed into a battlefield: Nigeria versus Biafra. Most of the Biafrans were like me, Igbo.
My mother, an Igbo woman, was a six-year-old child when she ran away from a city in central Nigeria where Igbo people were being “slaughtered like chickens,” as my grandmother told me.
Mom journeyed with her mother and siblings from one town to the next, fleeing Nigerian soldiers. She ended up in a camp where children died of malnutrition everyday.
