“Hausa abatago Awka” – Back to Aburi

The "Wall of Names" at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre

Today yet again I visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre and as it happened in the past, the visuals and audio narrative of the genocide lunacy resonated with me and my country.
It is unfortunate that we don’t have a Biafran Genocide Memorial (different from a War museum). In fact we have a swathe of Nigerians who either deny that the genocide ever took place, insist that the number of victims of that genocide and the ensuing war where inflated or believe that the Easterners / Igbos deserved it and that Igbos should be held responsible for the genocide of their own people.
As Obi Nwakanma wrote in his piece in the Vanguard Newspaper of October 21st 2012 titled 'Denying the Genocide'….“The late Agwu Okpanku was in fact detained in 1970 for his piece in the Renaissance titled, “Killing Biafra.” Strenuous effort was made to erase the war from Nigerian public memory – to squelch, harass and intimidate every attempt to bring to light the issue of genocide and war atrocities. Achebe has been lambasted for bringing up the issue of Biafra, and for resurrecting old animosities. Soyinka’s book, “The Man Died” was banned when it came out by the Gowon administration. Judith Herman’s book, Trauma and Recovery situates the reason for such a move: “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.” But horror- atrocity is impossible to bury or forget. To keep denying Igbo genocide is to create oblivion, that indescribable state between intermittent and episodic amnesia. Nigeria needs to heal” – to stop its culture of violence”.
In that piece Obi Nwakanma had earlier ascribed the tradition of public lynching in Nigeria (with special reference to the Aluu 4) to the fact that ‘the Nigerian psyche has been shaped by public violence from the street killings of “Wetie” in Western Nigeria, to the violent coups of 1966 and the genocidal war against Biafra’….. ‘We have lived in denial and in complicity, to the extent that Nigerians have become increasingly numb to the nature of violence. It is called repression. It is the product of unhealed trauma’.
In essence, the Biafran genocide was systemically suppressed and those who participated in the killings ultimately perceived this as a normal route to justice. So anytime we feel shortchanged by people of another ethnic extraction or religion....we simply massacre them! No one will be brought to book, no one will be prosecuted...just another Nigerian 'riot'.
I will recommend that the average Nigerian spends some time in Kigali or any part of the world where a genocide was perpetuated and whose people have chosen to genuinely chosen to learn from their tragedy
Rwanda today collectively remembers that day in April; Remembers the elite whose hate speech lead to the dehumanization required for a genocide; Recollects the sporadic ‘pogroms’ that preceded the main genocide; Teaches this aspect of their history across the spectrum of their populace and all levels of the education system; Have identified the structural issues that led and encouraged the genocide in the first place and have systematically learnt from it.
Nigeria and a swathe of Nigerians (especially the elite) still live in Biafran Genocide denial; Have refused to acknowledge the over 1 million people that died as a direct result of the conflict and genocide and the over 2 million that died from the Nigerian blockade of the Biafra secessionist territory that led to unprecedented starvation.
“Hausa abatago Awka”, roughly translates to “Our town (Awka) has fallen to Hausa soldiers”. The phrase implies the epitome of desolation, utter disaster, hopelessness, the end/death, and encapsulates the impending threat of massacre and genocide once the town people realized that Awka had truly fallen to Nigerian troops. If in doubt, ask the people of Asaba what happened when a Biafran town/city or a town/city perceived to be sympathetic to the Biafran cause fell.
In early October 1967, four months into the Nigerian Civil War, federal troops massacred hundreds in Asaba, a town in southeast Nigeria on the west bank of the Niger. While ethnically Igbo, Asaba was not part of Igbo-dominated Biafra. What did these people do to deserve death?http://vimeo.com/71894404
Today, standing before the “Wall of Names” at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, reading some of the names of the over 250,000 Rwandese buried at this location (victims of the genocide against the Tutsis) then going round the various historical milestones at the Centre, I again insist that Nigeria is where we are today because of our Biafran genocide denial. The genocide was precipitated by certain structural issues as encapsulated by the Aburi Accord, yet not one of the issues identified and ostensibly resolved at Aburi have been put to bed, not one! Incidentally all of those issues are today part of the discourse at the ongoing National Conference and without a doubt, “Boko Haram”, “Federal Character”, Power Shift to the North” etc are all symptomatic manifestations of Genocide denial and Aburi Amnesia
We need to resolve the structural and socio-cultural issues that led to the Asaba massacre and the Biafran Genocide, we need to acknowledge the genocide and resolve Aburi. Without that, pre or post 2015 will be another watershed in our history.
What can I say but that “Hausa abatago Awka”?





Jekwu Ozoemene