by Sarah Jilani.

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In the 1960s, Nigeria was no stranger to “foreign white wives: expensive, unfriendly, infertile and transient”. So writes Rosina Umelo, née Martin, who was decidedly unlike such “Nigerwives” of the time (a “Nigerwife” being a non-Nigerian woman married to a Nigerian man). She and her husband John met in the late 1950s on a London tube platform. By 1965, they were married with three children, and they decided to settle in Enugu, Nigeria. Both working class, the Umelos never socialized in the expatriate world of “the club” (though life as a white English teacher in Enugu still came with colonial advantages). Rose Umelo led “a quiet and contented life with babies and books” until, in 1966, talk of secession and reports of killings began.

Edited and annotated by the anthropologist S. Elizabeth Bird, Surviving Biafra derives from Umelo’s account of living through the three-year war that began after Eastern Nigeria declared itself the independent Republic of Biafra in 1967. Bird contextualizes Umelo’s story with an accessible historical overview, explaining, among other things, how the British colonial strategy of “divide and rule” left Nigeria segregated along ethnic lines, with most of the Muslim Hausa and Fulani in the North; Yoruba in Lagos and the South; and the predominantly Christian Igbo in the East. She also explains how two coups in 1966 led to the killing of 30,000 Igbo in the North, sparking the East’s secession. The well-trained Nigerian Federal Army received arms from Britain, whose leaders wanted to ensure that oil operations in the secessionist East remained under Shell-BP. The Soviets also supported the Federals, fearing a destabilized West Africa. Biafra, outnumbered, was cut off from food and supplies. Images of Biafran children with severe kwashiorkor (a form of protein malnutrition) galvanized some humanitarian action from the West, but also, for some, became synonymous with “Africa”. Hostilities ended in January 1970 with a reunified Nigeria. Two million Biafrans had died.

As a white foreigner, Umelo did not experience the war as her fellow Eastern Nigerians did. She gradually “became” Biafran, however, accepted by her husband’s Igbo community, as everyone helped each other through three years of hardship. Umelo’s harrowing account does not exoticize: she often simply details daily life under extraordinary circumstances: harvesting, mending, care-taking and sometimes fleeing. She captures the reality of living in Biafra – from the early excitement to the bitter end. Surviving Biafra takes its place in a valuable corpus of grassroots accounts of the war that include novels such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun(2006) and Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982). Putting ordinary people to the fore, it reminds us that women often pay the greatest price in war.

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