From Atane via Dynamic Africa:
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A few people have asked me what my uncle kept inside for years in this post.
My uncle has now passed away (nothing to do with Biafra), but he kept a lot of things inside. He was in the civil service in the 60s and he was sent to Kano. A lot of Igbos were in the north because of civil service jobs.
Life changed in 1966 when the anti-Igbo pogroms started as a result of the assassinations of Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa.
People were marking homes that belonged to Igbos and were attacking and killing them, and my uncle was no exception. He escaped by hiding in a pit littered with corpses for 3 days. He managed to make his way to Lagos when the killing had subsided (because there was no one else to kill my mother said he told her). He made it out thanks to the help of a Hausa lorry driver who had been smuggling Igbo people out of Kano. Many Igbo people survived thanks to these lorry drivers. There had been many northerners who were not only smuggling Igbos and various southerners out, they were also hiding them in their homes.
Anyway, my uncle lost his house, his savings, his career, basically everything he had. Apart from the filthy clothes on his body, he had nothing, but he was happy to be alive.
When speaking to those who survived the pogrom (those who can speak, some still can’t), they all say the same thing. The worst part wasn’t that they lost their homes and material things, it was that some of the people killing them were civilians and in some cases, their neighbors. These were people they knew, not the army or police. It’s not that it would be right if it was the military, but the military wasn’t known for kindness or empathy so they expected cruel behavior from them. What they couldn’t (and still can’t) understand was why they were paying the price for a military coup that they had nothing to do with and why regular people were attacking and killing them in the process, people they often knew or saw around town.