Book Review
THE NIGERIA - BIAFRA WAR LETTERS; A SOLDIER'S STORY (Vol. 1):
Brig. Benjamin Adekunle a.k.a. The Black Scorpion
Compiled and edited by
Abiodun A. Adekunle
By Gaga Ekeh

--"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."
Genesis: Chapter 6, verse 4

You shall immediately agree that anger is not the garment worn with which one dances with angels. So I urge you now to reverse course. Imagine this city to be a figment of your imagination, a result of the psychosis brought about by torment, sorrow and rage, and go away in peace. Please. But that you wish to continue is evidence that you wish to assert your freedom. You wish to be free to speak in those tongues that only your soul can understand because only your soul knows the chains that have shackled your liberty. Then, dear friend, you will be free.

The war did not end. But the battleground has shifted. Dynasties in this day are rare but certainly not unheard of. The most visible, to be sure, is that of the family of George Bush, and that story is, as yet, the clearest indicator of why dynasties exist. But what, the sceptic might ask, shall we determine to be a dynasty? I will tell you a thing, and it is this. When the progeny of one who pursues and controls an agenda are vested with the power to maintain control of the agenda, dynasties are born. And though many will profess the belief that the war ended, though many will suggest that they are fully aware of what, in effect, the war was truly about, though an uneasy silence today reigns in the heart of Bonny, a man, known to the initiated as "the Dean," has fired a shot that is sure to be heard around the world. And the world is taking note.

The war, our war, projected at the behest of complex competing interests, will be viewed by the more careful amongst us as a war to determine the manner in which two independent black nations might seek to determine their destinies against the backdrop of colonial insistences, the ramifications of which had yet to crystallize when the first shots were fired. It is a dangerous world in which we live, but the poet's weapon is the book of life, and Abiodun Adenkule's entry into the Nigerian chapter is a most welcome addition.

The day is the modern era, the scene is a nest in the Ancient City of Atlantis. Two poets sit down over a barrel of beer and begin to discuss many, many things. And yet, ultimately, one thing is the thing that what they discuss is. The war. Our war. While Oxford will codify the malady of a befouled mob of naked African souls in rhetoric suggestive of the psychological trauma effected by the war upon the denizens of our forest, while Berlin will, with the curiosity of a child, stare at your cousin and attempt to localize, to analyze, to methodologically identify the actual thing that is wrong with the one whose head is not correct, those who know know that our war was merely the inevitable projection of a disagreement between two very tall men who live in the land where giants roam. Those understand what the quiet sage meant when, and without the benefit of his glass of Chardonnay for just one instant, he proposed that a war is never truly won. A war is never truly won. And so, these two poets, they speak of a nation called Nigeria and its significance in the grand scheme of matters. One of the poets, let us, for the sake of argument, say he is me, he is at once sceptical and appreciative of the other poet's perspective. The hey day of the anti-Abacha protestation is barely just over, and the temptation to lash out at men in uniform as uninformed goons, zombied morons who do the bidding of the Master for a mere thirty barrels of oil, is mighty. But when one speaks with the Dean, one captures the quiet sense that there is always more to the story than meets the eye. And there is no need for conspiracy theories here. There is, indeed, more to the story.

For, this is not a story about oil. This is not a story about atrocity. Neither, in fact, is this story about that aburo of mine, who, in his sun-drenched delirium, is infested with an unyielding zeal to impose Baal, by any name, upon the infidel pagans of the forest. The infidel pagans, surely you have heard of them. These are the people whose subordination was ordained by a scholar from the Royal Geographic Society and his counterpart, a turbaned zealot who, though supposedly defended by the hand of an angel, acts out in mighty fear of the Jinn from Gogobiri. No, my friend, the story is about a man who was one day called the Are Ona Kakanfo--the bird whose eyes can see the truth, the star whose glow bathes a nation, the magician by whose hands the history of a people at war is written.

Oba-oba once told me that it is the one who does not have eyes at the back of his head that does not understand what the drum is saying. By this logic, and in the spirit of being one's brother's keeper, it is the duty of the wise to watch the back of those who cannot see into history, to protect the people from the Myrmidons of darkness. But when those saddled with this responsibility turn their guns on their own people, when the depth of power is harnessed to strip the sons and daughters of a land of their dignity, then it is time for a festival of national self-reflection. And this festival requires no magnificent stadium. All that is requisite is the most sublime intuition which does not trivialize the spirit of a culture forged from the beat of a drum, a notion of why the African mind must be wise, intelligent, savvy, in the face of cohesive interests that require the depth of African foolishness for the maintenance of the sort of blindness that drives subservience. There are many to thank for this moment in our history, few more poignant than the general in history whose name rings forth from shore to shore, a man known to many as the Black Scorpion.
 
The Black Scorpion. Divorced from its more humble beginnings as a compassionate octopus, it finds itself a dramatic appellation. African warriors are famous for emphasizing their prowess with such invigorating poetic sojourns. Not most will forget the crazy chicken who ate the entrails of his enemies after pecking them to death, leaving death and destruction in his wake... or something the like. To be sure, those who had the misfortune of answering to Wazabanga did not take his title so lightly. But his ultimate demise was not merely the image of a dishevelled, disease-ridden fugitive, forever bursting into tears at the betrayal of his subjects, but instead his cautionary tale in the African book of life as the warrior who was too foolish to understand the intent and scholarship inherent in the poetry of the great white man. What then ought we to conclude about our own controversial warrior, the Black Scorpion, Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle?
 
I must inform you that Adekunle's letters have provided an invaluable service to those who have for long wished to understand the psychology of the Nigerian ruling elite in the formative years of our forest. But for those who wish to understand the unique particulars of a Yoruba General, this excursion is priceless.
 
Now, if it is surprising that a review of Abiodun Adekunle's Book is couched as a foray into the mind of a Yoruba General, it is only because the book is about the mind of a Yoruba General, and those, in history, have rarely had the opportunity for their story to be told in their own words. It is, in fact, a marvellous state of affairs. You see, dear Akhenaton, a wholly detribalized approach to our war trivializes the complexity of the Nigerian, nay, African identity and puts in danger those who carry the torch of our people in their heart of darkness. In choosing to look through the eyes of Baba and render an opinion on a scion of the Holy City near Modakeke, I have pitched my tent with the rhythm of the drum. Only good Africans, then, will understand what it is that the drum is saying.
It was important to speak first of dynasties, for we must immediately tackle the notion of agendas. There is no gainsaying the fact that many will be those who question the motivation behind Abiodun Adekunle's revelations. Is it a family affair? Such questions will not fizzle out even in the event that the General's letters speak for themselves. What the letters tell us, in fact, is more about a greater war than was fought on the soil of children of our land. The modern letters of this African General speak, to my mind, about global power and how a people failed to understand its utility. Perhaps they were too illiterate to read the manual. Perhaps the words were too big, constructs extending towards the sky of a complexity befuddling to villagers. Perhaps they should have gotten celebrated scholars, experienced in these matters, to explain it in pidgin. "Na like so we for do am." After all, the reason we have read all these books is to understand why we continue to fire our most potent guns at our own children while cavorting and smiling with members of the Academy, whose societies are invested, by the power of inertia, in maintaining the status quo. Perhaps Abiodun Adekunle's book will open many eyes. But before the elders jump up and down in glee and proclaim my friend, the Dean, to be the Messiah Nigeria has been waiting for, I must live up to my duty and explain, in trenchant and relevant terms, what I believe the Dean's motivation might be. It is, you will concede, the right thing to do. You will concede.

If it is true that truth often escapes in the presence of a barrel of beer, then I contend that many are the times when truth was in the presence of myself and the Dean. We are all political scientists because our country does not live off its own resources. Beyond that, we are all patriots. And Abiodun Adekunle is not the least of them. But this should come as no surprise to anyone. Surely, the offspring of the elite have often been derided for a lack of appreciation of the state of affairs, but youth dies when wisdom beckons, and today it beckons to all the children of Nigeria.

The landscape of Nigerian dreams is littered with brilliant patriots willing into manifestation the day when the African mind will be put to the service of a worthy African leader instead of whiling away in the luxurious gulags of modern nations, contributing their quota to the advancement of societies that discovered the secret of how to use power. There is a relevant adage which I will quote in Yoruba and it goes thus: "Awon to ga ju, ‘won o ga to." A transliteration in pidgin which captures the spirit of the letter would be something along the lines of: "The people wey sabi book pass, dem never sabi book reach." And this, indeed, is the reason we must explain to our grandmother why, if we are so intelligent, we have not discovered the secrets that lead to order and harmony. What then, Prof, have we been studying all these years? Extracting order from chaos is a problem-solving task, but is it not? Please be sure to appreciate that this truth is self-evident. That we are endowed with the natural right to demand a representative government presupposes that we have expended the energy necessary and sufficient to reify our identity--a synergy of nationalities, clans and families who own the land upon which oga forced Mazi Effiong to negotiate our non-negotiable unity. Leave oga alone to battle evil spirits and attract foreign investors. We do not need his permission to actively identify and articulate the interests and aspirations that we share. But we must, without the slightest hesitancy, begin the process of codifying these aspirations in so far as they are the tangible evidence of a people united. Let history not declaim that only the Ogoni had a language. There are few options available to leaders who ignore the perceptible voice of a sovereign identity instantiated. None of them is attractive. I repeat, none of them is attractive.

Verily, many are such who will suggest that pragmatism is in order--that we must understand the dynamics of history and do what we can under the prevailing circumstances. If such are the people who are dancing to the beat of this gbedu, then please allow me to explain what thing that Baba taught me. This thing, he must have wanted us all to reflect upon in the solemn manner of wise wizards of the Niger, the evening of whom is the echo of the moon against a hill in Enugu beside which a mighty iroko tree once stood. And it is this: It is because of our shared history, not in spite of it, that we ought to be more intelligent than men and women ever were. Yes, yes, it is because of our shared history, not in spite of it, that we ought to be wiser than men and women ever were. Indeed, Chief, it is because of our history, not in spite of it, that we ought to be the ones whom, when the story is told, are known as the sages who taught mankind why man must be as intelligent as he is moral. We are the ones entrusted with this paradigm, to convince history that in the beat of this drum is an ancient wisdom which must not be allowed to die at the hands of proxies of the Royal Geographic Society, minions whose ultimate claim to prose consists of an incoherent clamor for a fellow tribesman to sit at the helm of power, the fabric of which this African nation has neglected to grasp.

What Abiodun Adekunle has presented as an incipient interjection in the African discussion must not be misconstrued as an opportunity to open up old wounds or even one in which to set the record straight. Aside from the outcry that will almost certainly erupt over the spelling of a certain word, what we have here is a precious opportunity to peer into history after which we may silently meet in a particular quiet space--the quiet space where our Father, that wise man who wore shining mirrors upon his cap, resides, awaiting the day when the children of that soil will gather and understand a thing that the bird of war has said. If the muse of cowardice and iniquity prevents us from convening a legitimate national conference of qualifiable representative constituencies on earth, then the wise will have one in the heavens. Have faith. We will caucus in that solemn location that you can see because you are wise, that place where, and just for a moment in time, the mind of the Ancient recalls the depth of our insight and hastens to exemplify the richness of our occasion upon the soil that nourishes an angel with seven seals.

So long as that my aburo continues to fear a mere Jinn from Gogobiri, we stand the risk of maintaining our status as the world's underclass. The time, then, has come for us to consider carefully the implications of this war. If you take these words seriously, then it is from this space that a great nation will be born. For, in that quiet place, away from the bickering and pontificating, away from the chaos of a nation gone mad, is the silent beating of a drum. This drum, it is the language of our Father. And in that day, when you have read Adekunle's book, and when you are tempted to join the chorus of the tortured souls whose only voice is spoken in anger or rabid excitement, think carefully about those who have chosen, instead, to pursue somber rumination in a very particular place in the heavens, and wonder what it is they are discussing. It is the concluding call to those who heard the trumpet sound. Do not let it pass you by.

I could speak of many things. I could speak of oil and foreign interests and titillate you with juicy innuendo about General Jack or horrify you with images of big-bellied children. But these matters, even for those who once saw our land as the playground of the powerful, are less significant than the effect they will have on the reader. Let the eagles arise who have earned their wings. When we meet in that silent place where we no longer are content to vilify each other because the pain we feel is a consequence of history, not of the inability of a General to redeem himself from the bondage of the Royal Geographic Society, then we ought to realize that, yes, it is a family affair. And that family is our nation.

And for this very reason, that this occasion has given us the opportunity to see a thing which only the wise can see, we must thank Abiodun Adekunle. The sword of the wise is the most valuable currency in the history of our people. We ought to take advantage of the moment.