Atrocity and Memory

The events of that terrible day, October 7, continue to have reverberations which time has done little to mitigate. Lives lost to unsparing brutality, communities shattered and trust in government destroyed. Of course, all of those sentiments apply with force to October 7 2023 and the Hamas attack on southern Israel. But on this occasion, I refer to October 7, 1967 and the events in the Nigerian city of Asaba.

It was the early stages of the civil war in which the largely Igbo-led Biafran army fought for independence from the federal Nigerian state. Asaba is the capital of the oil-rich Delta State and lies on the western bank of the Niger river. Federal troops, mainly from the Hausa ethnic group, pursued the Biafran army and entered the town. Over three days, they massacred at least a thousand citizens, leaving Asaba in ruins and a generation of survivors traumatized. It was the single worst atrocity of the three-year civil war.

Why am I writing about this little-known tragedy now and does it have any relevance to the more recent October 7 and its aftermath which the whole world knows about ? Advocates for Israel frequently - and with some justice - complain that the media is unduly obsessed with the Middle-East to the exclusion of appalling crimes committed elsewhere. The atrocities being perpetrated daily in the Darfur region of Sudan and in the Democratic Republic of Congo garner a fraction of the attention which the killings in Gaza do.

There are reasons for this imbalance and, sadly, one is the fact that Africa traditionally attracts little focus unless Western rock stars mount a global charity concert to raise funds for famine relief. Thus, outside of Nigeria -and even within that vast populous country - the Asaba massacre is not well-known. In 2017, there was a 50th anniversary remembrance event attended by the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, but although the state governor was present, nobody from the federal government participated.

Chuck Nduka-Eze, the Isama (the titular equivalent of a chief) of Asaba, whose mother was one of the victims, said : “ This is really the first ethnic-based massacre in sub-Saharan Africa which is still distinguished by silence nearly sixty years later ”. Two American academics lifted the veil a little in a book in 2017 and this October in London, a documentary film, Asaba Massacre, will be premiered at the Africa Centre, along with an art installation titled “Never Again”. It is not true that time heals all wounds but generational distance may help a considered reflection on issues such as memory, justice and accountability. And that observation applies equally to the ‘other’ October 7.