By Isidore Emeka Uzoatu
The Nigeria story tells like a fairytale. Right from how the territory was acquired and recovered to how its name was coined and by whom, one cannot but be astounded by the many twists and twirls it has meandered en route to who-knows-where. Mention must be made of the amalgamation of its North and South, the centenary of which was marked last year under leadership of GEJ. Independence was to come some forty-six years later, followed hot on the heels by a thirty-month civil war.
O yes, by this time in 1967, the secessionist enclave of Biafra was neck deep in trouble for daring to sunder what God had used Lord Frederick Lugard to put together in 1914. While the weighted battles raged, many an unverifiable tale was told about transpirations at the war fronts. Among these was how the poet Christopher Okigbo was killed while fighting on the rebel side. According to the apocryphal anecdote, he was felled by an exploding grenade hauled by either him or a colleague that had rebound off a palm trunk, thus having him – as he would have put it in a veritable fable – hoist with his own petards. The truth remains that the victim neither participated in the war nor wrote any line of poetry thenceforth. As for the war, it neither paused nor waned on its account. It waged on as though nothing happened, spawning heroes with abandon.
