War and Peace, Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, entitled his historical classic.
It called to the honour, and the glory and the folly of war in Czarist Russia; with the young and vain Czar Alexander locked in mortal combat with peacocky French Emperor, Napoleon, and his formidable La Grande Armée.
That was the first two decades of 19th century (1805-1813).
Sam Omatseye’s fiction, based on the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), he called My Name is Okoro. But Omatseye may well have called his own novel War and Love.
It was war, all right: a Nigeria, under Yakubu Gowon, fending off secession from a Biafra, under Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. War — the celebration of the most pernicious hate.
Yet, from the coupling characters, Okoro, the protagonist, and Clara; Abdullahi and Nkechi; and Nneka, Okoro’s war-lost wife and Captain, came something tender. Terrible beauty of wartime liaisons?
Okoro, went in search of Nneka, his pregnant Igbo wife, in her native Umueze. But he got trapped in Umunze, a captured territory, with a camp for war refugees, under the command of Lt. Abdullahi.
Fate pushed Okoro into the bosom of Clara, another war refugee, from riverine Okolu, near Port Harcourt, in the aborted Republic of Biafra, but outside the Igbo heartland.
Clara lost, to the war, her sister’s tot, Florence; with her when she fled, with Nigeria fiercely battling Biafra, in Okolu.
Florence was smothered. With a Nigerian battalion nearby, and insect-bitten Florence screeching, the rattled adults decreed the baby must die, for them to live! Cruel logic of war?
But Clara found another abandoned boy, 10 months old. With the boy, named Victory, Okoro and Clara made a war “family”, though initially, they were no more than co-refugees.
With bouts of coitus wetting their perched bodies and gnarled soul, however, they would became a war couple. That was an open secret in their Umunze camp.
Meanwhile, Nneka had, with her mother, fled Umueze. That drove her into the arms of a man Nneka, only in passing, called Captain. But even with the war-time anomie, Nneka’s pregnancy for a man, not her husband, sounded her mother’s death knell.
The moment her daughter told her about the pregnancy, she died; and was hurriedly buried in a bush grave, never to be identified again. Yet, it was doubtful if Nneka and Ifeanyi, her son by Okoro, would have survived the war without Captain’s protection! Another painful wartime pathos?
Meanwhile, as Okoro eventually united with his wife and son, he also got gifted Precious, his wife’s love child with Captain. Even though the author was coy about it, creatively floating the idea, Okoro too probably had a love child with Clara; for when Clara re-joined her folks, she was also vomiting, a sign of morning sickness and putative pregnancy!
A two-some that would never know their two parents, as hundreds of other wartime babies?
But the most dramatic of the war love stories would appear that of Abdullahi and Nkechi.
The story opened at the height of the pogrom in Kano, with Abdullahi leading a prowling band, hunting down the Igbo in the North. The band ordered Okoro to pronounce Toro, three-pence in the pre-Civil War Nigerian currency of Pounds, Shillings and Pence.
Though Okoro sounds a generic, if pejorative, name for the Igbo of the defunct Eastern Region, this Samson Okoro (pronounced differently) was Urhobo from the defunct Mid-West (now Edo and Delta states).
His Toro was linguistically permissible — it didn’t sound Igbo — since Okoro’s American accent came to his rescue. He had an American foster father and had just returned to Nigeria to invest and re-settle shortly before the war. He escaped with a savage slap from Abdullahi. But he retched at the slain and gorged all around him.
Okoro’s lot was the tragic neither-nor that plagued many Midwesterners during that war. Abdullahi’s mob could easily have killed him for being Igbo, if he had not claimed he was American, supported by his sweet accent.
But even in Igboland, in search of his wife, he was fair game for Biafrian brutes. The first time, a Biafra band rid him of his car and fulsome provisions for darling Nneka. The rascals said they needed everything for the service of Biafra! Much later, another band seized his haul of roasted python meat, which he and Clara had hoped would give them animal protein for weeks!
Brig-Gen. Godwin Alabi-Isama (rtd) echoed a similar identity crisis in his own Civil War account, The Tragedy of Victory. Born of a Midwestern father but raised by a Yoruba mother from Ilorin, Alabi-Isama could probably have been neither-nor in both Nigerian and Biafran camps — but for his Yoruba acculturation! He was raised in Ibadan.
Between the pogrom and Okoro’s second meeting with Abdullahi in Umunze, the lieutenant had morphed from the brute of the pogroms and merciless rapist of the early seasons of the war, to something close to the quintessential officer and gentleman.
He could have had Nkechi, 19, the Umunze belle before whom every man literarily drooled, since he ruled over her village. But instead, he professed to her his undying love.
With that package came generous provisions and protection for the Nkechi household, comprising Ngozi, her mother, Chioma 17; and Ifeoma 15, her no less ravishing sisters, all living in the household of Chief Agwudagwu, Nkechi’s father’s friend; who was out at war, and no one knew if he was alive or dead.
Why, Abdullahi even agreed to circumcision, to prove his good faith. But all came to tragic naught, for Nkechi took her own life on the eve of consummating his love for the love-torn soldier, who she often humoured as “My General”.
She was too much of a Biafria patriot, a proud Igbo girl who would not pawn her innermost treasures for any subversive generosity. But Abdullahi was something close to Barnabas, the tragic hero in Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. He was disappointed, the only time he was earnest.
My Name is Okoro speaks to collective and individual tragedies. Take Udeze, Nneka’s younger brother. He symbolized the sudden flicker, and even more sudden extinction, of the Biafra flame.
He piloted his mother to safety from Kano, even when younger brother, Okey, was martyred by cruel Hausa weapons, bent on looting his family’s patrimony. He was there, in those halcyon days of Biafra’s group-think, when emotion rushed to war but reason, viciously shouted down, dictated otherwise.
He was there at Ore, when disillusion started setting in; and even had to shoot Chukwu, a friend who had boasted he would rather take his own life, than fall to the bullets of Ndi Hausa.
His last gambit was a failed spyng mission, to poison the water supply of the dreaded Third Marine Commando, under Benjamin Adekunle. Yet, at the end of it all, all he felt was emptiness!
War is no tea party. But for man’s seeming eternal insanity, it is best avoided. That is the grand message from My Name is Okoro.
