Drama of My Life – Through Youth and War: A Survival Against All Odds

By Lawrence Ahuruonye

The story in this book is an account of my life encounters. It is a story of an individual, myself, who was born into a polygamous family and had to struggle to overcome life obstacles and human hardship. In 1947, when I was born, basic public amenities were lacking in my village. I drank my first near-clean water at the age of seven.

Illnesses were treated with herbs and plant roots, which medicine men and herbalists provided. Beliefs in ancestral spirits and the worship of deities controlled lives. The vanity of those beliefs came to light as I got older and I debunked them all.

The greatest challenge my life faced was the Biafra/Nigeria war, which tested human desire to survive, especially, for those from Eastern Nigeria at the time. The atrocities of that war and human suffering they generated, are testimonies to how the human spirit could absorb the most penetrating shocks. That tough human spirit found ways to preserve me, as well as chart a course for the realization of my life dream. That dream turned out to be the American dream, which I believe I have achieved. Thanks to some unseen hands that made everything possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514406571

Lawrence Ahuruonye

Lawrence Ahuruonye was a high school teacher in Nigeria before he migrated to the United States of America. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Mass Communications and Master's in Management and Human Relations. A trained investigator and retiree of the New York City Human Resources Administration, Ahuruonye is also a committed community organizer. He resides in Stockbridge, Georgia, with his children and enjoys challenging the conventional.

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Copyright © 2015 by Lawrence Ahuruonye.

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Rev. date: 09/23/2015

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Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

PART 1

My Birth

The Early Stages

My Childhood World

Feeding My Sisters

More Childhood Memories

The Houses I Grew Up In

Polygamous Family Arrangement

Amazed That I Am Still Here

PART 2

The Sixties

Early Education Years

Leaving the Village

Living With the Ibe Family

Conversation with My Father

PART 3

The January 1966 Coup d’État

The Aburi Summit

Schools Closed

Joining Civil Defense

Nigerian Army Enters Port Harcourt

The War Is Now in My Neighborhood

My Father and His Large Family

The Journey Away from Home

Baba Is Captured

Life as Refugees at Umuaro

PART 4

The Meeting

The Journey Back Home

Life in the Bush

Baba Returns

Explaining Apparent Humane Treatment from Nigerian Soldiers

The Abuses and Violations

Life Returning to Normal

A Guerilla Attack

Ee Is Shot

Akanu Ngwa Is Evacuated

PART 5

Ee Was About to Die

BOFF Training Paid Off

War Ends

Guided by the Igbo Spirit

Kate Was Gone!

Serving in the North

Leadership

Teaching Experience

Planning Ahead

A Family Concern

PART 6

Arrival in America

Getting Down to Business

Time for Nwamara to Join Me

Nwamara Goes to Her Sister in California

Meeting Berna

Living in Fear

Berna Back to School

Close Calls but Still Here

Reflection

Notes

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the following people whose positive actions made a difference in my life: my parents, Mazi Abraham Ahuruonye Adindu and Mama Jane Amaefu Ahuruonye, who taught me humility and kindness to others. Mazi John Onwuamaghienyi Ahuruonye, my only surviving brother, who sacrificed his own comfort so that I can be educated. Mrs. Eunice A Imoh, my sister, who took care of me when sickness came close to neutralizing my life.

Last, but certainly not the least, are Chief Gregory Ibe (late) and Lolo Florence Ibe, whose acts of kindness and care for the less privileged were instrumental in the construction of the path that led to my success.

Acknowledgements

I like to thank my niece, Ms. Inemesit Imoh, who inspired me to write this book. Ms. Imoh sent me a copy of Chinua Achebe’s book, There Was A Country, and after reading that book, I felt that the events of the Biafra/Nigeria war in the Port Harcourt/ Aba areas needed to be exposed. My thanks also go to Mazi Sunday Abakwue, author of many books, including Heaven At War, whose experience in book authorship enriched my efforts to have this book published. I must express my gratitude to Mazi Brown Ogwuma, a friend and someone I call brother, author of three books, including Playing God. I tapped into Brown’s pithy knowledge of whom we are as Nde Ngwa and Ndi Igbo to make this book whole at various stages. Ms. Comfort Nwankwo, a friend, who enjoys relishing in Ndoki/Ngwa/Igbo philosophical oratory, reminded me that truth telling, its virtues notwithstanding, requires the application of wisdom. I am thankful to my children, Chimeziri, Ndubuisi, Nneoma and Udo, who provided the technical support I needed in packaging the first manuscript. Finally, my Maker has all the glory.

PART 1

My Birth

F rom the information I have pieced together, my plausible year of birth is 1947. My place of birth, Akanu Ngwa, a village in Ugwunagbo Local Government Area (LGA) of Abia State, Nigeria, had no birth registry when I was born. However, my father kept a written record of the birth dates of his children. My parents were not members of any church then, and so no church records about my birth existed. I did not personally see the records my father kept, but I remember hearing him talk about them when I was young. On the day of our exodus from our village during the Biafran/Nigerian war, it was not clear who carried the box that contained our father’s vital documents, which included the birth records. That box was lost in the confusion and dislocations of the war, along with its contents.

My half brother, Mark, told me after the war that he had seen the birth records. He was the one that stated my year of birth. He said he had taken note of my birth year because I followed him directly in the family lineage. As for the birthday and month, he said he was not sure because he had confused them with those of the other siblings on the record. Mark added that the rivalries, fights, and competitions I always had with him when we were young had raised his curiosity as to our age differences. He found out I was three months younger than him, he told me. I asked him if he remembered his own date of birth. He said, December 1946. That information put my month and year of birth in March of 1947. In order to find out the possible day of my birth, I went to my mother and tasked her recollection. She said she could not be certain but added that prior to my birth, about two years had passed since some of our men had returned from World War II. One of those men from my village was Mazi Abel Omelazu (DeeAble), who had the nickname Government Man because he told everyone that the government owned him. This idea of the colonial government owning him sounded like the American government issue (GI) equivalent. DeeAble was a tall light-skinned man from the section of our village called Amawom. I still remember him and a few of the war stories he often told.

My mother also stated that she remembered taking me to the farm in my ugbo (wooden baby carrier) because crop-planting season was in full swing. Those statements gave credence to the plausible month and year of my birth. With regard to the particular day of my birth, she said she remembered that at least three weeks (izu ato) had passed in the month of my birth.

That put the day around the twenty-fourth. In those days, eight markets in Igboland constituted eight days of the week. For an attractive day of my birth, since I had to find the last piece of the puzzle myself, I looked at the horoscopic chart, and March 23, Aries, matched my characteristics. That was how my plausible birthdate came to be March 23, 1947.

When Mark told me I was three months younger than him, I felt so good remembering the turnaround I made on him during those early years when he always picked on me, beat me up, and often challenged me for a wrestling bout. He had fun doing this because he always had my back on the sandy ground anytime I wrestled with him. Wrestling was a popular sport in our communities in those days. The sport allowed the youth to demonstrate strength, agility, courage, and athleticism. But something happened one afternoon as we played on our compound ground. That incident made Mark never challenge me again.

I do not know from where the courage came or how it got into me. All I can remember was that on one sunny afternoon, as we were finishing our street soccer game, Mark came to me with his usual boast of how he would smash my back on the ground if I dared challenge him for a fight or wrestling. This was the usual tactic stronger siblings or kids from neighboring compounds used to lure the weaker or younger ones into a fight, and if not smart enough, the younger ones foolishly fell to the bait so as to avoid being called a coward. Although I fell to the bait, I also strangely felt a new courage and strength in me that afternoon. With that new vigor in me, I turned to Mark with the meanest look on my face, and from nowhere came the words from my mouth: Bie m aka ma hu whe ng’ ime ghi (Touch me and see what will happen to you). Mark, the one who believed he could win any duel with me anywhere, anytime—someone I had never dared to challenge—was surprised. In a careless dismissal of my threat, he laughed out loud. Then he asked if I wanted him to introduce a pinch of sand in my eyes. In reply, I told him to try and see what will happen to him, adding that I would be the first to get the sand in his eyes if he was not careful. Oh, that ticked him off! He lurched forward toward me with his usual full strength and expectation of picking me up and throwing me hard on the ground. What he did not know was that I had other plans for him.

As he came close to grab me, I swiftly bent down, and his whole trunk rested on my upper body. That was a wrestling move we generally called evuruevu. I threw him hard on the ground and punched his face mercilessly. I held him down until all the other kids in the compound had had a chance to witness the new dispensation. When I finally let him get up, he wiped off the grains of sand that his sweat-wet body had picked up from the ground and went home to his mother, ashamed to admit that younger half brother had beaten him up. From that day, Mark never picked on me or challenged me in a duel. Rather, I was the one that began to play the reverse role of taunting and throwing fight baits at him. He never fell for any of them. The repercussion of doing so was clear to him. This rivalry was normal for kids growing up in those days. No guns, other dangerous weapons or police were ever involved. The fights often ended on the streets that formed part of our large compound. Our parents rarely took sides in our childish quarrels. Rather, they always instructed us to love one another, band together to ward off external aggression, meaning bullies from other villages, and try to respect one another. In later years, Mark and I became very close relatives. Together, we hunted game and harvested palm fruits. He owned two dogs that were extremely masterful in sniffing out rabbits and other cunning animals. The devotion and honesty those dogs unconditionally showed proved that dogs are truly man’s best friend.¹

The dogs never hesitated to follow Mark and me to the bush for a hunting exercise. It did not matter what the weather condition or time of day was. They followed us in the rain, during a sunny afternoon or a dewy early morning. Their honesty always showed when they pursued a game far in the distance, caught up with it, and subdued it. But instead of making a meal out of the killed rabbit, for example, the dogs picked up the animal and returned it to us far from the killing spot. In fact, I remember using the examples of the dogs’ sense of devotion and honesty to teach children the virtues of good conduct during one of my Sabbath school classes in the 1980s. The dogs were lost during the war. Soldiers made meat out of them at the height of the starvation that followed the Nigerian total blockade of Biafra during the war.

When I left my job at the home of Mr. Mbelediogu in Port Harcourt, in 1965, I introduced Mark to my boss, who employed him as a replacement.

Mark was one of those that helped me financially through college during my third year at College of Education, Rumuolumeni, in Rivers State. He himself did not have the chance to complete elementary school education before the war. But afterward, he embarked on self-education and was determined to be literate. When I visited him at Aba in 1977 or so, he was reading and writing at a college level. Mark had educated himself. I was so proud of him. The love we have for each other has endured till today.

The Early Stages

J udging from the level of my maturity in 1955, when I started primary school, and the fact that I was placed in class 2 instead of class 1 during the first term, I am inclined to believe that the 1947 year of my birth was accurate. I also believe that my mother’s recollection of a historical event and season that coincided with my birth helped to narrow down the most plausible date. Prior to the advent of the modern calendar, my people counted the beginning of a new moon to the end of a new moon as one calendar month. Twelve full moons made one calendar year. Our four major markets of Eke, Orie, Nkwo, and Afo and their minor markets of Eke nta, Orie nta, Nkwo nta, and Afo nta formed a week of eight days.

Since we did not have a written language until colonial time, tracking birth dates in numerical form was cumbersome. Consequently, birthdates were tagged to major events—human, natural, seasonal, or the markets. That is why we have names like Nwaogu (child born during battle), Nwagha (child born during a war), Nweke (child born on Eke market day), etc. My mother tagged my birth period at the end of World War II.

The end of World War II in 1945 and the fact that the month of March in my area of Igboland was a crucial planting month provided helpful clues.

However, my birth date of record came to exist sometime in 1981, when I was completing my American university admission forms. At that time, I had asked my brother John (Mmii) to furnish me an affidavit of birth since a birth certificate was not available. The affidavit he prepared reached me from Lagos, where he was working, only a few days before my application deadline. To make matter worse, there was an error on the affidavit. My plausible year of birth was wrongly stated. The year 1952 was recorded instead of 1947. I called him and reported the error. He regretted the mistake, which he was not sure if it was his or the court clerk’s. He said he was going to provide a corrected replacement. Finding out that his fieldwork in Northern Nigeria would not allow him to do it promptly and lacking any waiting time, I forwarded the application along with the available affidavit. My intention was to correct the mistake upon arrival in the United States. I just never got around to doing it. This is how my birth date of record came to be 1952.

Since 1981, when I started carrying a birth date that did not reflect a plausible chronological age, I have tried to ensure that I did not benefit from the discrepancy. I have looked back to all the opportunities I have had to see if any was predicated on that five-year age difference. I have not observed any. My life insurance is not predicated on any age advantage. Regrettably, I will be receiving United States Social Security payments five years later than I should have. And I have been missing some goodies that come with American senior citizenship, like receiving discounts from restaurants, stores and barbershops. Having said all that, I must admit that I should have made the correction long time ago. I would submit that other survival contingencies in America got the better of me. I apologize.

In 1955, when I started primary school, school officials generally were not asking for birth records because they knew most kids of my generation did not have any. The measure of acceptable school age was the length of a child’s hand. If a child’s hand was long enough to go across his or her head and touch the ear, that child was old enough to start school. In my own case, my hand not only went across my head but also touched the upper part of my neck just below the ear. I was more than ready for schooling. This was another useful clue to the accuracy of my 1947 birth year.

My Childhood World

I n 1947 or so, when I was born, most African countries were still under colonial rule, as we all know. Europeans were in our lands dictating and controlling basically every aspect of our lives. Europe, North America, and Japan were already developed or considered developing. World War II had ended two years earlier in 1945. Most African countries were just waking up to begin the fight for political independence.

I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s experiencing what I now know to be human hardship. The phrase human hardship is used here retrospectively. This is because my childhood experiences were mostly pleasant. I did not grow up seeing myself or my family as living in poverty. This human experience of living in a not-so-great condition without realizing it seems to be a universal gift for those who find comfort in the little things they possess, especially, when they are shielded by circumstance or proximity from ill-timed exposure to information about other people’s better fortunes. I believe this reality holds true for poor people in different parts of the world. Almost as I was going through this kind of experience in my small village in West Africa, Charles M. Blow, author of the book Fire Shut Up in My Bones and op-ed columnist at The New York Times, blazed through an almost similar circumstance in his hometown, Gibsland, Louisiana. Mr. Blow was on the American MSNBC show The Last Word on October 2, 2014. The host of the show, Mr. Lawrence O’Donnell, was discussing Mr. Blow’s book. During the discussion, I heard Mr. Blow articulate his childhood experiences that resembled mine in some ways. He said he had grown up in poverty without knowing it, just like I had. This was because the information media we have nowadays did not exist in his time (nor in mine), and so he was not bombarded with corrupting messages of things his family could not afford at that time. Additionally, no one tried to express self-pity or bemoan prevailing family situation, no matter what it was. Consequently, he grew up holding his head high, though not without moments of displeasure, when he was called that hateful six-letter-word name. His part of experience that is not in my own frame of reference would be that vicious name-calling because no one had ever addressed me that way before I came to the United States. But each time any brother or sister was called that name in America, it reverberated across the Atlantic, slamming the African coastlines in the most negative way, causing the spirits of our African ancestors to yell out loud in disapproval!

In my culture at that time of my birth, wealth was measured by the ability of a family to adequately feed itself. My family had plenty of rich farming lands, and my parents worked hard to produce food crops from those lands. It is true that sometimes the kids missed their meals when their parents were not available to cook. Missing meals occasionally was not a sign of poverty. Nonetheless, the way we lived was not easy. Our daily activities were handled in crude and difficult ways. For example, getting around was primarily done on foot. There were no cooking ovens. Our cooking was done on a wood fire that burned in the middle of a tripod, on which a clay pot sat. The firewood was collected sometimes from distant farms or bushes. Cooking during the rainy season was always a misery because wet wood does not burn well. I remember sometimes when our eyes would turn watery and reddish and the shape of our mouth slightly bulged out like those of giant rats (ewita, dike) with mouth-filled nuts, as we constantly blew the fire.

I call some aspects of my childhood experiences hardships because somewhere else in the world at that time, some kids of my generation were growing up experiencing a less hard life. Elsewhere in the world during my childhood, some children had better-balanced food to eat and cleaner water to drink than I did. The major food I often ate consisted mostly of cooked cassava starch. Fortunately, vegetables were plentiful without us realizing the enormous advantage it provided in our meals. Meat was available, but the quality as well as its quantity was usually inadequate. Meat we produced from the animals we hunted was limited, and having more mouths to feed than available meat was always a problem. The chickens, goats, and sheep my parents raised were primarily for the markets. Even for the New Year’s celebration, my parents always found it difficult to slaughter one of those animals. And when finally one was killed, everyone in the immediate and extended family got a piece. By the time the meat from one sheep or goat reached everyone, those at the bottom of the family lineage could only hope for just a tiny piece. And that small piece of meat always carried with it a lot of gratitude and contentment, nonetheless.

Growing up, I never had milk to drink, except the natural one from my mother during my infancy. Actually, I still remember my mother carrying me on her lap when I was about five years old, while I enjoyed natural milk from her natural milk reservoirs. Being on my mother’s milk even at five earned me a lot of teasing and name-calling. But I ignored them all until my teeth started turning brownish. Then I was made to stop. The first factory-produced milk I ever attempted to drink came from one of those foreign food donation agencies in 1956 or so. One evening that year, the village messenger had gone around with his drum and announced that large quantities of powdered milk had been donated to our primary school for the students. We were instructed to come to school the next

Reviews for Drama of My Life – Through Youth and War

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