IN WAR SITUATIONS, EVEN LIZARDS ARE SCARCE!!!

...would hear as well as see gun fires from the top of the concrete water tank.


We used to watch the ‘air-raids’ as they were called until one particular raid happened.

By this time, my elder brothers and uncles were hardly seen at home. I later got to know that they were not usually at home because they were hiding from soldiers who wanted to force them to join the army.

Eventually, two of my brothers, some of my uncles and my sister Meg ended up in the army!

The particular raid that happened was so devastating that the crater the bombs created is still there.

It was a Friday morning, I remember because usually more people used to go to the market, especially Seventh Day Adventist Church members who would want to dispose of their farm produce before the Sabbath.

That morning, we were at my grandparents’ house. Many people queued up to buy Akidi from my grandmother, so she had not gone to the market. If she had gone to the market, maybe we would not have seen her again after that day.

Suddenly, before we could even hear the sound of the aircrafts, we heard a very loud bang that shook the ground and everything on it!

People started running aimlessly all over the place, in a frenzied panic. I heard my grandmother screaming ‘run to the backyard!’ We did and took cover under cocoyam plants!

We heard the aircrafts fly bye this time, and a second big bang.

Under the cocoyam plants, we heard something drop. When everything became quiet again, we were asked to come out. Then we noticed that the thing we had heard drop, fell very close to brother Kanayo’s head. It was bomb fragment!

My mother was then around, and she was crying.

When we got to front of the house, we saw people trooping to and fro the direction of the market; weeping, wailing screaming.

The bombs had landed in the market, killing countless number of people, turning their bodies of those that still had what could be called bodies black!

I know because, we eventually followed people to go to see what had happened.

There was a very big crater where the bombs landed. Some buildings in the market were still burning when we got there, with bodies and human limbs mostly indistinguishable from those of goats and cows, except for obvious parts.

The crater was between the railway station and the market. Maybe they were intending to bomb the railway station.

The concrete tank where the big guns were had been badly perforated by shells, and there was nobody on it.

The market and the main means of people earning a living even under the circumstances had been destroyed.

Omoba has never recovered from that destruction, as that was the point at which people who were from other the Ngwa speaking environs started living to go back to their towns and villages, because of their losses with most never returning even after the war. So, Omoba has remained a shadow of its former glory, especially with the collapse of the rail system in Nigeria.

From that day, everything changed because the air-raids became regular.

Our daily routine changed.

My mother would wake up very early, cook food, park the food for us to take into the forest where some kind of makeshift shelters had been provided by the elders, and we would be there for the whole day, returning home only in the late evenings.

Then, we would play war games in the nights under the moonlights instead of the traditional moonlight stories that normally would happen.

No school.
Many refugee camps suddenly developed around us. People queued up to receive corn meal rations, with milk and sometime stock fish and salt.
People hunted lizards like they were hunting antelopes!
Not very long, salt became very scarce and expensive, families had meals without salt.
And with the want tank destroyed, we had to trek to fetch water from stream in villages far away from Omoba. With the intensified air-raids, it even became impossible to go to some of those streams. We had to go to fetch water from rainwater ponds, and my mother would ground alum to put in the water to cause it to change colour, to become clearer like clean water and the sediments go down, before we could use the water, including for drinking. It usually had a heavy sour taste...

----BIAFRA:LEST WE FORGET!