...I could not sleep that night; I desperately wanted to see my elder brother, at last, a member of my family after so long that I had been alone.
By this time, I learnt the war had ended.
The next morning, I was the first one to get up, ready for Udara picking, for a very different reason!
And as we got there, lo and behold, my brother Sunny was there!
I ran to him, and held him firmly, he too held me.
I narrated to him, all that had happened, and that I did not know where my sister Meg was, after she left me in the house in Owerri to say she was going to the war front.
All the same, I was so happy seeing my brother. But I noticed he was not wearing army uniform. The last time he came home to visit in Omoba, he was smartly dressed in his uniform, shinny boots and all.
But here, he was wearing some funny looking outfit. He asked me to go get my things that we had to go home.
I was very happy as ran off to get my things. I said goodbye to everyone, and went back to the Udara tree, to meet him.
As I got there, he checked the content of the bag, took one of my sister Meg’s dresses, a gown, and wore it over what he was putting on, and we set off.
As we got to the centre of the town, there were a different type of soldiers all over the place, they were Federal soldiers.
Some of them were just shooting into the air.
They were stopping people and searching them. There were many checkpoints as we walked towards the outskirt of the town.
At some points, the soldiers would stop all the men. Whenever they stopped my brother, I would stopped and stay with him, they would ask me to keep moving, I would start crying, not moving. Eventually they would ask my brother to take me away, and go.
At one checkpoint, they stopped all the men and were asking them to pull their trouser up above their knees. They would also check their elbows.
They were asking some of the men to move to one side and sit on the ground.
They asked my brother why he was wearing a woman’s dress. Fortunately for him, the person that was searching him spoke in Yoruba to another soldier, my brother responded in Yoruba that the dress was all the he had to wear, that it belonged to our sister. The man was surprised, he asked us to wait a while. They were actually going to ask my brother to join those that were being asked to wait; he had some bruises on his knees, which was why they sent him to this particular soldier.
I said fortunately earlier, because, what happened next was terrible.
After a while, the soldier that spoke in Yoruba came to us and asked my brother and me, to quietly enter the bush and go, when the other soldiers were not looking.
So after a while, there was some kind of commotion, and the soldiers shot one man, the Yoruba soldier asked us to go into the bush and go away.
As we did, we could see from inside the bush, they turned on all those that they had asked to sit down on the ground, and shot them!
We kept going inside the bush for a while, walking through farmlands and bushes, not really forest. As we walked, my brother explained to me that why they were looking at the men’s knees and elbows was because; they wanted to identify those that were soldiers. He said bruises at the knees and elbows meant the men must have been crawling during combat, that if that soldier had not asked us to go, that he also would have been shot with those other men...
----BIAFRA:LEST WE FORGET!
2 comments:
That was terrible...Really terrible indeed...What would have been done to the poor little boy if his brother had been killed... innocence might have been killed also... Thank God it didn't happen that way but what next???
Well, I thank God that I live to tell the story, but are we learning, are we listening???
Post a Comment