BIAFRA FALLEN HEROES
Biafran flags - an iconic red, black and green with a rising golden sun - make appearances on the front of buildings and hardline separatists still demand independence.
While in the rest of Africa's most populous nation many know little about the history of Biafra, in the former capital of the self-proclaimed state at Enugu the memory of those years lives on.
The security forces - deployed heavily in the region - are quick to stamp out any clamour for a new Biafra.
55 years ago (1966) 50, 000 Igbos and other Easterners were murdered within 3 weeks in Northern Nigeria with the supreme support of the then Federal Government chaired by them. It lasted for months. During the gruesome dastardly pogrom (massacre), the Governor of Eastern Nigeria then - Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu sought for diplomatic ways to end the carnage. He sought for help from the international community, and the African Union. Eventually a reconciliatory meeting was held in Aburi Ghana (the famous Aburi-Accord) by the then president of Ghana.
Agreements were reached to resolve the crisis for each region in Nigeria to control its police and its God given natural resources, aptly a confederation. When they came back from Ghana, the Northern Nigeria chaired military government reneged the agreement with the advice of the British government that if he agree with such, that the Northern Nigeria will lose its hold of subjugation of the Eastern Nigeria.
Which is blessed with everything you can think of on earth - (crude oil, coal, arable land, industrious and ingenious people). In 1967 when the brutality, the killings and the first pogrom in the world continued, Ojukwu by the advice of the council of elders from the Eastern Nigeria declared the Republic of Biafra to protect his people from the dastardly wanton killings by the people they share same passport with. After few months of the young but promising Republic of Biafra, the Nigeria government declared war on Igbo people and the entire Eastern Nigeria.
Between 1967-1970 more than 3.5 million Biafrans were already murdered by the then USSR, Britain, Egypt, Arab Nations, Nigeria and US by proxy). The Easterners were at that time the most educated race in Africa with their abundant natural and human resources they were in the fore front of becoming the first developed African nation.
At the end of the war in 1970, Nigeria's war leader Yukubu Gowon famously declared there would be "no victor, no vanquished" as he sought to reunite his shattered country.
The leader of the breakaway Republic of Biafra, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, went into exile for 13 years before being pardoned. He returned to Nigerian politics but was detained for 10 months in prison.
Leading Nigerian intellectual Pat Utomi says that many Igbos - the country's third biggest ethnic group after the Hausa and the Yoruba - still feel marginalised.
One key event was when current President Muhammadu Buhari - then a military chief - seized power in 1983, and stopped the only Igbo aspirant to get close to leading Nigeria since the war from becoming head of state.
"In the early 1980s, people had forgotten about the war, but this succession of poor leadership brought bitterness among the new generations." Utomi said.
'More divided'
Nowadays any incident - from the closure of the only airport in the southeast last year to the sacking of Igbo shops by customs officials in economic hub Lagos - can cause grievances to flare.
"It's important to deal with history, to write it down. In Nigeria, we try to cover it up." Utomi said.
"We are more divided today than we've ever been before the civil war. We learnt nothing from it."
In order to try to heal the rifts, Utomi helped organise a "Never Again" conference aiming to bring together key cultural and political figures to discuss the lessons of the Biafra war half a century after it ended.
He is also a patron of the 'Centre for Memories' in Enugu, a combination of a museum and library where visitors can come and 'dig into history.'
'History is essential'
History itself has been absent from Nigerian schools.
The current government reintroduced it only from last term as an obligatory subject for pupils aged 10 to 13, after more than a decade off the curriculum.
"Teaching history is essential to build our identity as a country, and defend our patriotic values," said Sonny Echono, Permanent Secretary at the Education Ministry.
But schools still remain woefully short of qualified history teachers and there is no unified narrative about the civil war which does not figure in the lessons.
"We need to teach the war in our schools," said Egodi Uchendu, a history professor at University of Nsukka, in the former Biafra territory.
"Eastern Nigeria is completely different from how it was experienced in other parts of the country. We need to bring in the different angles to it."
Chika Oduah, a Nigerian-American journalist, has crossed the country to collect hundreds of testimonies of the victims and combatants of the Biafra conflict which she publishes on her website Biafran War Memories.
She says that for many of those she interviewed it was the first time they had retold the horrors of the period.
"A 70-something former soldier… broke down crying, when he told me how he lost his brother during the war," she said.
She herself only learnt at the age of 17 that her mother as a child spent two years in a camp for displaced people.
"Our parents wanted to move on, not look at the past." Oduah insisted.
But we need to talk about it, otherwise we won't heal.
Ozoemena!
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