Ifiok Essien
Biafra: The Horrors of War, The Story of a Child Soldier, Okey Anueyiagu, Brommel Publishers, pp. 277
When Okey Anueyiagu wrote Biafra, The Horrors of War, The Story of a Child Soldier, it struck a nerve in the readers. It became a storytelling so critically assuring and involving that it has become difficult and hard to imagine anyone reading it without being mesmerised. This book provides a genuinely radical new highlight and insight into that sordid war and fits so tightly with great illumination at this riven and pivotal moment in the history of Nigeria and of the world.
Living with that war and actively participating in it, breathing it and sucking in all the evilness of it exposes Okey to all the pulses of his life and the lives of the millions that perished in that war with immense and indescribable relevance and indelible memories. Okey Anueyiagu has pulled off something remarkable, something unmissable, unforgettable, timely and timeless.
This book portrays a classic case of one generation’s cry from the heart to another’s elusive quest for a life of bliss and tranquility, a breathless nuance of sadness, bitterness, cries and soullessness. From reading this book, one walks away with exhilaration, questioning ourselves about, and of a story we have long thought we knew, but knew only a little.
The book begins with the author’s childhood in the ancient city of Kano, Northern Nigeria, and ends in Eastern Nigerian villages and towns with the attendant loss of 3 million Igbo and Biafran lives in the bloodiest war in recent modern times. In illustrating a vast chronicle of events in the author’s early school years, the 1966 military coups and his conscription into the Biafran army, the author uses mesmeric cadences in outlining and holding sweet and horrific experiences captured with meticulous attention to every shift in this endless story.
In conjuring all the intricate narratives culminating in the crisis and ultimately leading to the civil war, Okey Anueyiagu cleverly creates with a moody melancholy, a narration of events as if they needed to be captured and secured before they would crumble. From the beginning of this book, the author starts to weave the story with such interconnectivity prowess linking yesterday’s events with tomorrow’s outcome, with many of the themes and dynamics of the events in such dexterous and intriguing styles. I find the narrative to be so swift and engulfing as I follow the author and his family as they flee Kano, escaping certain death, and from one crisis to another.
It is, indeed, a positively propulsive book intended not only for those who lived and died through and in the harrowing experience of the war, but for the rest of Nigerians and the world who are wondering and worried about what is happening and become of our world today, and may never have felt the fear, the agonies and desperation in their own bodies like the Biafrans did.
Dr. Okey Anueyiagu has written a great book, a masterpiece that beckons its real and imagined ghost into the reader’s real body, flesh and soul. His book has filled me up with sorrow that has changed the texture of existence for me. I had never thought or imagined anything like this story before.