Walk
with me down memory lane. The time: 1968. In 30
months, one million dead. The setting: a dusty camp in
Biafra
where survivors waited and hoped for peace. The
survivors: Refugees fleeing from the “Dance of
Death.” My mentor: One of the refugee camp
directors, whom I called “Teacher” out of respect.
“Martin
Luther King has been killed,” Teacher said, with a
pained voice and vacant eyes. I looked towards
Teacher, wondering: “Who is Martin Luther King?” I
was a 13-year-old refugee in the west African nation
of
Nigeria
,
a land then called
Biafra
.
Martin
Luther King. What did that name mean?
Eight
out of ten Biafrans were refugees exiled from their
own country. Two years earlier, Christian army
officers had staged a bloody coup killing Muslim
leaders. The Muslims felt the coup was a tribal mutiny
of Christian Igbos against their beloved leaders. The
aggrieved Muslims went on a killing rampage, chanting:
“Igbo, Igbo, Igbo, you are no longer part of
Nigeria
!”
In the days that followed, 50,000 Igbos were killed in
street uprisings.
Killing
was not new to us in
Biafra
.
I
was 13, but I knew much of killing. Widows
and orphans were most of the refugees in our camp.
They had survived the Igbo “Dance of Death” –
a
euphemism for the mass executions. One thousand men at
gunpoint forced to dance a public dance. Seven hundred
were then shot and buried en
masse in shallow graves. When told to hurry up
and return to his regular duty, one of the murderers
said: “The graves are not yet full.”
A
few days later, with only the clothes on our backs, we
fled from this “Dance of Death.” That was six
months before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Teacher and I were eventually conscripted into the
Biafran army and sent to the front, two years after
our escape.
After
the war, Teacher –
who had taught me the name of Martin Luther King – was
among the one million who had died. I –
a child soldier –
was
one of the fifteen million who survived.
Africa
is committing suicide: a two-decade
war in
Sudan
,
genocidal killings in
Rwanda
,
scorched-earth conflicts
in
Ethiopia
,
Somalia
,
Uganda
,
and
Liberia
.
The wars in modern
Africa
are the largest global-scale loss of life since the
establishment of the Atlantic Slave trade, which
uprooted and scattered
Africa
’s
sons and daughters across the
United
States
,
Jamaica
,
and
Brazil
.
Africa
’s
wars are steering the continent toward a sea of
self-destruction so deep that even the greatest horror
writers are unable to fathom its depths. So, given our
circumstances, Martin Luther King was a name unknown,
a dead man among millions, with a message that never
reached the shores of
Biafra
.
Neither
did his message reach the ears of “The Black
Scorpion,” Benjamin Adekunle, a tough Nigerian army
commander, whose credo of ethnic cleansing knew
nothing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s movement: “We
shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces
move into Igbo territory, we even shoot things that do
not move.”
As
we heed Martin Luther King Jr.’s call, and march
together across the world stage, let us never forget
that we who have witnessed and survived the injustice
of such nonsensical wars are the torchbearers of his
legacy of peace for our world, our nation, and our
children.
