War is a terrible thing, and my country has been ravaged by it. One morning I got up and my parents told me that our country was no longer Nigeria. Now, we lived in Biafra. I didn’t understand then why they changed the name, or why some of my friends were now our enemies, or why father seemed so worried all the time. But I understood soon enough. In Enugu I saw men, thousands of them, parading through the streets of the place they now called Biafra. These men were dressed in soldiers’ uniforms, and carried big guns. They even had rocket launchers to kill our neighbours with. Our brothers and countrymen, our sisters from the same region, the fathers of our nation and the mothers of hundreds of poor children just like me. We were always poor, even before the war, but poverty didn’t mean terror, or death, or violence. We were happy, in our way. I was never scared of going to bed at night and waking up to find my parents dead. I was never scared of stumbling over my cousin’s body when I played in the street? I was never scared of starving to death. I wasn’t scared of dying at all, really. I just lived like a child, and I liked it that way.
One day, a man woke up – some general, I suppose – and decided to split the country in two. This general wanted to make the part of the country I’m from into an independent nation: Biafra. I live in a country where the men and women are all Nigerians: the Hausas are Nigerians, the Yoruba are Nigerians, and the Igbo are Nigerians. Then one began to turn against the other, and the others decided to go to war. Mother says that it’s normal, and that it had to happen this way. Father says that we are all still brothers, and that it wasn’t the people’s fault. But the people are angry, and don’t seem to understand. We have not stayed brothers. The British and the Americans gave weapons to the people who were angry. Father says they’re evil. Mother says they’re opportunists. I don’t know what that means, but I hate the foreigners who gave guns to Nigerians. It’s like poking a mean dog; it just makes things worse and get him angrier. I don’t like stray dogs; they scare me. But not as much as the men in soldier’s uniforms who stalk the streets of Biafra.
A man came to take my picture one day when I was peeling cassava. Why did he want a picture of that? He was a white man with a fancy camera. He spoke English, and he had a big moustache. He seemed to think I was cute. He didn’t understand that I felt insulted. I'm not cute – at least, not like the children in his country. I'm not happy, not well-behaved, not nice. I was angry and afraid, like I have been since the outbreak of the war. I didn’t want people in his country to see my picture in the paper. I didn’t want them to pity me and say “Oh, the poor dear.” I didn’t want their country to give guns to Nigerians to try and make things better for me; that would be the worst of all. So I started crying. He gave me a piece of chewing gum; I chewed it all day. It tasted of mint. It tasted like somewhere else, a rich place where you ate things that weren’t for eating, not even to filly your belly or to stop you dying of hunger, but just for pleasure – just for the taste of mint. And I supposed that somewhere, far away from here, children would look at my photo while chewing gum and wouldn’t give it a second thought.
Alan Alfredo Geday