From Okwe Obi, Abuja
Roz Amechi is a lawyer, chartered accountant and contributor to the upcoming book, ‘Through the Eyes of the Child,’ which chronicles the personal experiences and journeys of 25 writers who were children during the Nigerian Civil war. In this interview, she discussed the impact the crisis had on her and other children who lived through that war. According to her, the pogrom, bombings and starvation were harrowing and traumatic. Amechi encouraged those who experienced the war to share their experiences, to help them heal faster. She also advised those are beating the drums of war today to desist from doing so, stressing that they should rather seek more diplomatic measures to resolve disagreements. The book would be launched on Friday, August 27, 2021, in Abuja.
How personal was the civil war for you?
For anybody who lived through it, I would say it was personal because we all had personal experiences, even those of us who were very young at the time.
How old were you?
When the war started, I was about four years old. When it ended I was almost eight years old. I was a young child. But the traumatic experiences that we had stayed in our memories and prevented us from forgetting. When I look back on my childhood, those memories remain the most vivid. As children, we saw things that we should not have seen.
Has the experience shaped your relationship and interaction with other ethnic groups in Nigeria?
I would not say that it has because at the time we were children and did not understand anything about the war or tribes. We did not know what it was about; we just knew that we had to run to the bunkers because bombs were falling from the sky. We didn’t know who was dropping them. There was no understanding of why anything was happening. So, it is only now as adults that we can bring tribe or anything else into it, but as children, we did not have that knowledge or understanding. So, no, I would not say the war has affected my feelings about other tribes because, at the time these things were happening, I did not know anything about tribes. The only thing I know about tribes now is based on my adult experiences and that is what would have shaped my opinion of other tribes, not necessarily the war.
During the war, did your parents ever sit the children down to explain what was happening? Did they ever explain the war to you?
Not during the war. When the war broke out, we packed the things we could pack and started running.
If you read the stories, you would see that most families moved from one place to another. We kept moving. So, the whole focus at that time was staying alive and surviving. I would be surprised if any family sat down with their children to start explaining what it was about at that time. There was no time. So, no; at that point my parents did not sit me down to discuss the war. We were very small, don’t forget. They did not even expect us to remember and nobody expected it to go on as long as it did. I know for some people their parents even told them that they were going on holiday. Of course, it turned into a nightmare of a holiday. For us, nobody told us anything, we just jumped into the car and off we went. And from there, we literally became displaced people or refugees.
Can you remember how you felt as a child being taken from the place of comfort to being on the run? Were you depressed?
I would not say that I can remember how my mind processed the movement from that comfortable home to being on the move. It was something that just happened. We were children and we took each blow and change in our stride. There was no time you stopped to think, “why am I not in the house I was in before?” So, we moved from Port Harcourt, where we were in this comfortable home living a relatively luxurious life, and then, before we knew it, we were guests in somebody’s house. Then we were in the village in our grandfather’s house. With each move, our circumstances deteriorated more. But there was no time to stop and think, “how did I end up like this?” Firstly, we were too young to process that thought and, secondly, there was no time. You were just caught up in this whole movement and you did not get the chance to actually go through the whole process and even be depressed about it. I would not tell you that we were depressed. To be honest, we were not, as children. The adults were certainly worried because they had families to protect. The only thing we could tell you that we really felt uncomfortable about, even then, was the bombing. The bombing was constant. As soon as the sirens went off, we would be running to the bunkers. It became part of our lives. So, every single day, several times a day, we were running to the bunkers. You could feel the fear, pain and the panic. That is something that has not left me. So, now when I hear loud noises, gunshots or knockouts, I can’t take it. It fills me with that fear and panic. I remember all my old fears. Even fireworks that people enjoy, I do not enjoy it. It frightens me because you see that spark in the sky and the accompanying loud bangs and it just triggers all those memories.
Do you remember back in anger that your childhood was taken away from you in the civil war?
I never felt anger. As a child, you are just dealing with each step as it comes. When you come to the end of it, you feel joy that it is over. I remember then the general greeting was “happy survival.” For a few years after the war, whenever you saw someone you hadn’t seen since the war, the greeting was “happy survival” and there was so much joy that it was over. The trauma was inside us and it stayed inside us. When I was writing “The Green Men,” my contribution to the book, I realised how much trauma I had bottled up inside. I would be writing and crying at the same time. I had never given myself the opportunity to think in such detail about what happened and how it affected me as a person. It was when I was writing that I felt it and some parts of it really made me cry. I also understood other aspects of my experience better by writing about it now.
Did you as children interact with other children, and were you thinking that a bomb could go off at any time? Did you as children discuss it among yourselves?
In the beginning, when we moved, the bombing had not actually started or we hadn’t started feeling the pressure and we interacted with other children. We knew something was going on and there was a lot of sadness around us. But as children do, we ignored it and just played with each other when we could. It was when we got to the village that our lives changed; there was hunger, there was bombing. That was when we could say we actually felt it. But I do not really remember at any time having any conversation with another child about our circumstances. We just took it in our stride and it became our lives. So, there was no time I sat down with another child and said, “what is this thing happening to us?” I’m sure the adults had those conversations but we, as children, just got on with it.
Did you ever nurse the fear that your parents could die at that point in time?
As we grew older and our understanding increased, yes, the fear was there. At a certain point, we left Nigeria and went as refugees to the United Kingdom. And at that point we did not know what was going to happen to my dad, because my dad was not allowed to go. So, we nursed the fear throughout that period that he could die or we could lose him. We always had that fear. Whenever we received a letter from him, it was confirmation that he was still there. But there was a period at the end of the war when we didn’t hear from him for months. I don’t know why, but it took a while for letters to get to us and we were scared. We thought he had died. We didn’t know whether he was still alive or not. But when we finally received a letter from him, we were so happy that he had survived the war.
Looking at Port Harcourt through the eyes of a child then and now, how would you compare your childhood before the war and your flight, is there any nostalgia?
To be honest with you, not really. All I remember in Port Harcourt was the home we left. I remember it vividly. I even remember the day the secession was announced so clearly because I remember sitting on the balcony and the people were running down the street, shouting with leaves in their hands. I remember that flat as being a place of comfort and that memory has stayed with me. Now, as I look back on it as an adult, I realise that the reason I remember that flat as a place of comfort is because it was the last place we were actually safe and relaxed until after the war.
How did you get these people who were children then and are now adults and grannies to tell their stories?
What happened was that a group of three fellows who are the authors (John Mozie, Charles Spiropoulos and Edozie Ezeife) were talking about the war. You know that, among Igbo people, it is a conversation that we have every now and again. Immediately after the war, we used to have that conversation a lot and for years it would be a dominating conversation; how we survived the war, the experiences we had during the war. Now, at some point, three of them were talking about the war and thought it would be interesting if they got people who were children during the war to write their stories and publish it as a collection of stories. So, they put out an advert and asked people to write about their experiences. They got an overwhelming response. The book is a compendium of 25 stories written by people who were between the ages of three and 15 years during the war. Each person traced their family’s journey during that three-year period and it is a very interesting read. I think many people should read this book because it is so easy to say ‘let us go to war,’ if we cannot agree. But how many people are thinking of the impact on children? And that impact on children is important because any trauma experienced as a child stays with the person forever. Maybe now when children experience war or any sort of trauma, they receive counselling and some sort of healing process. For us, we didn’t have any of that; our parents just tried to get their lives back together and move on from it. In those days, there wasn’t anything like counselling. So, none of us received counselling. To some extent, many of us are walking around with that trauma inside us that has not been dealt with. People really need to understand the impact of war on children.
How would you respond to some critics who question your memories of the civil war?
I get a lot of people asking me how I was able to remember because I was just four at the time the war started. And then I ask them if they can remember anything that happened to them when they were four and they would start relating all sorts of things that happened to them. So, I say to them, if you can remember that, why can’t I? This was a traumatic experience in my life so of course, I remember.
For some people, their memories are better than others. There are some people that would tell you that they don’t remember anything about the war. And what it means is that there is a mental block. They have blocked the horror out. I remember having this conversation with my cousin and she said she couldn’t remember much about the war. She is the same age as me and she was amazed I could remember so much. But then, when we were watching a programme and they were singing one of those songs that the Biafran children used to sing to mock the Nigerian soldiers, she knew the words and she sang along. She remembered because hearing the song triggered the memories. Those memories are there inside you. It is up to you to allow those memories to come through. I find that confronting those memories helps you to heal. When I started writing, there were incidents that I had actually forgotten but they began to come back to me. And at the end of it I felt as if I was relieved of a heavy burden. So, even if is not being published, I would encourage anybody to write down their experiences of the war. You would be surprised how much trauma you are harbouring inside of you. It is there; it is just that you have not dealt with it, but many people who experienced the war have it.
So why The Green Men?
When I think about the war, what I remember mostly is the green men. When I was a child, what I saw was these men in green. They had green hats and their clothes were green. In my childish mind I thought that even their skin and everything about them was green. And I used to call them green men.
My memories about the war were mostly about these green men running through the bushes. And I had an experience with one of them, which was what shaped my memory of the war.
What makes your book, ‘Through the Eyes of the Child’, different from what other people have written?
We have several accounts of the war out there. But what is different about this is that it is neither accusatory nor attempting to justify anybody’s actions during the war. It is not delving into the political side of it or trying to determine who was wrong and who was right. It is not blaming anybody; it is simply the account of people who were children at that time and their war experiences as they saw it as children. It is limited to the knowledge that they had at that time when they were children. So, it has no political undertone. It has no bitterness or anger; it is simply accounts of what happened to people and their families when they were children.
It is therefore a totally different angle to other stories out there about the war.
When did you start writing this book?
I think we started before the lockdown, if I remember correctly. It was about a year ago. But I think when we first started writing it was probably during the lockdown.
Some people will argue that bringing out this book at this time when the call for Biafra is high would increase the tension and the fear. Do you share that sentiment?
I am not sure what fear it would escalate. I think that most people who read the book will arrive at the conclusion that war is not good. And that we need to consider the effect of war not only on the economy and infrastructure but also on the children. Most times, when people sit down and talk about going to war, they do not consider the impact it would have on the children. It is not a primary consideration and yet they are major victims of any war. So, what I expect to be the reaction to the book is not for us to be angry with any group of people for whatever reason. Everybody has, by now, their own opinion of why the war started and what they think happened. And our opinions differ. I don’t know of any book that will be written at this stage that would change our opinions which are now quite entrenched and they usually run along tribal lines. However, for the purpose of this book, it is irrelevant why the war started. The message from the accounts in this book should be the impact that war has on children. And if ever we were to consider war again, we should be thinking about this. In fact, this should deter us from ever considering war as a solution. There are several ways to resolve conflict. War does not necessarily need to be one of them. And if you are beating the drums of war, my message to you is, think about the children and the impact it would have on the children all over the country; not necessarily in the East or in the West or North, all over the country. That is the important message here.
•’Through the Eyes of the Child’ is available to purchase through https://paystack.shop/scribbleurbane?product=through-the-eyes-of-the-child-rmnqaw