No entity can thrive without memory, be it human, national or institutional. Some of us would have watched movies where the main character has lost their memory after a major trauma, and wanders around clueless, much to the distress of friends and family who have suddenly become strangers. Shared memories and celebrations are what build family life, community, nations, and even companies. The biblical patriarchs of old were always erecting memorials where significant events had taken place: a life-changing meeting with the Almighty, the site of a mighty miracle or battle won. Indeed, remembrance and commemoration were an integral part of life in both the Old and New Testaments.
Waveline Growth Partners, the micro lender I have been running for over 2 years, held its first AGM recently. I have shared this and other milestones on social media, conscious of the need to build institutional memory. Recall First Bank ‘s 125-year tag line from 2019: Woven into the Fabric of Society. Also last year, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines celebrated 100 years and much of its inflight programming was a walk down memory lane of how far the airline had come since 1919.
The United Kingdom are masters of the art of remembrance. Not a month goes by, it seems, without a commemoration of some battle in the First or Second World War, some tragedy, triumph or ancient landmark event. In 2015 they commemorated the signing of the Magna Carta 800 years before! It is clear that these memorials are instrumental in moulding the identity of this island nation to succeeding generations.
Nigeria, by contrast, does its best to run away from its past. 2014, the centenary of Nigeria as an entity, passed with barely a whimper. Commentaries, such as they were, mainly seemed to express regret at the Nigerian experiment, blaming Lord Lugard and his masters at the Colonial Office in London for our plight. But however ambivalent we may feel about the Nigerian project, the fact remains that this country had existed continuously for a century, and more should have been made of it. Commemorations cannot only be about the good times. Indeed, less savoury events may provide deeper opportunities for reflection and course correction. And now, 50 years after the most momentous event in our history, the Nigerian Civil War, it is entirely possible to live in this country and be totally unaware of the fact. Kudos to Channels Television for featuring the war this week, to mark 50 years since the war ended on January 15, 1970.
If I didn’t catch coverage of the “Never Again” conference on TV, I could have forgotten about this anniversary entirely. Kudos also to Business Day, which published a piece relating to the civil war on January 15. Until this year I had no idea that Armed Forces Remembrance Day coincided with the day the war ended all those years ago. In this year’s commemoration in Abuja, I don’t recall any reference to the war in the President’s speech. There is a loud silence from the Federal Government, which has encouraged a deliberate policy of turning its back on our history.
I heard the alarming statistic this week that only 9 percent of Nigeria’s population was alive during the Biafran War. I was a young girl at the time, but that statistic makes me feel ancient! My family was in Lagos, far away from the theatre of war, but I have vivid memories of wartime propaganda on TV, the “to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done” slogan, and relatives returning from the warfront greeting each other with “Happy Survival “. That statistic says a lot about our burgeoning youth population. It also makes it all the more imperative that we consciously seek to engage with our past: we need to confront it, speak the truth about it to ourselves, learn its bitter lessons, and move forward to build a stronger foundation for our continued coexistence. South Africa had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help heal the wounds of the apartheid era; Rwanda had a similar body post the 1994 genocide. Nigeria, by contrast, has resolutely refused to engage with its past, the good, the bad and the ugly. And because we refuse to do so, blocking the study of our history in schools, it keeps coming back to haunt us like an angry ghost.
The fact that 50 years after, we are still having Biafran separatist movements, tells us loud and clear that something is not right somewhere. Official response to these agitations is often brute force; this is akin to shovelling a few spades of sand on a corpse and expecting the stench not to rise up and assault the senses a few days later.
Every American child is drilled with the history of its founding fathers. It is unthinkable that their UK counterpart would not be familiar with how Britain, standing virtually alone for a season, repelled Hitler in the darkest days of the Second World War (some may argue that this is so much a part of the national consciousness that it helped to fuel the nationalism that gave rise to Brexit). But it isn’t only the victors who confront their past. Japan regularly remembers the devastating atomic bombs that were rained on them, the only victims of such unspeakable horror. The atomic bomb played a large part on their conversion from a warlike imperialist aggressor to the pacifist nation that emerged after WW2. On a recent visit to Germany, I was pleasantly surprised that those I met were more than willing to discuss the Nazis and that sorry chapter in German history, and even admit the Nazis leanings of some family members.
Fifty years ago, there ended one of the defining wars of the 20th century, and it was fought right here on our soil. I understand that war led to the founding of the Nobel peace prize winning Doctors Without Borders. I learnt this from the Channels coverage. How many of us know this, or that up to 2 and half million Nigerians are said to have lost their lives? As with the civil war and other aspects of our history, we must own our past.
Commendable as the commemorations in the press and civil society have been (to even acknowledge “Biafra” this year), the government must lead this engagement with the past if we are to build a strong united nation and forge a Nigerian, as opposed to our prevailing ethnic, identity. The thinking may be that this will harm nation building and needlessly reopen old wounds. But what if those wounds have not healed in the first place, and that the passage of time has just acted like a band aid? On the contrary, we must own our past and courageously confront it if we are to build, in the words of our old national anthem, a nation where in brotherhood we stand and no man in oppressed. As the saying goes, those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. May this not be our fate!
Taba Peterside
