Ben Egbuna by Barth Ikiebe

EGBUNA
‘Pungent and lucid, the 388–page book is
Beginning from today, we begin a serialisation of excerpts from BEN EGBUNA’s riveting memoir, ‘A Destiny Fulfilled’. It is a study in the development of an individual and the institutions destiny took him through, filled with candid close-ups on leading names in the media and politics of his era and a lot of behind-the-scene happenings in high quarters in public service.’
July 21
 “The civil war was for most Biafrans a collective struggle for survival as a nation and as a people. It was also an individual struggle for existence. Biafra lost the war and that collective loss left the individual stranded, alone, in a fresh and equally difficult struggle for rehabilitation, despite the victor’s “no victor, no vanquished” mantra. There was no “authority” to speak for, or represent the interest of the defeated Biafrans. Those who wielded power in Biafra had either bolted out to escape the obvious repercussions of defeat or had melted into the civilian population in anonymity. Now we were all on our own; every man, every family to themselves; a situation akin to the Biblical “To your tents, O Israel!” [1 Kings 12:16] but which, in this instance, many adapted to: “To your tents, O Biafrans!” Post-war rehabilitation of self was the business of the individual, to devise and manage within the economic and social measures announced by the federal government for the defeated secessionists. 
    I was twenty-and-a-half years old and I should have completed my secondary education three years earlier in 1967, but as at January 1970, I had not. Yet I had gone through situations and acquired experience that I might, under normal circumstances, not have had at my age. I had gone through military training and orientation; I had slept in trenches, in the bush for weeks and even months; I had crawled in muddy water, gone without food for days involuntarily; I could handle weapons – rifle, machine-gun, grenade, – and I had learned skills for physical combat. I had been a trainer of soldiers, an infantry officer leading men much older than me in battle. I had seen people die violently in battle, and human corpses lying unattended; I had experienced the brutality of war. I had lived independent of my parents, far away from their oversight and control. I now smoked cigarette. The tough and difficult times in training and in the battlefield, seemed to have imbued in me emotional and physical strength and wisdom beyond my age. I had become street-wise, transformed from the pampered, city-bred lad that I had been. Those thirty months of the civil war had not only disrupted my education, they had impacted on my total being. They had exposed me to experiences I might never have had in my lifetime.”
-A Destiny Foretold, Chapter 1.
 
There’s a lot more to read in A Destiny Fulfilled…..
 
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