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Okeoma had brought his lanky cousin, Dr. Nwala.
"He's a chief medical officer at Albatross Hospital," Okeoma said, introducing him. Dr. Nwala kept staring at Ola
Ugwu heard the sound just before they cut their cake in the living room, the swift wah-wah-wah roar in the sky. At first it was thunderous, and then it receded for a moment and came back again, louder and swifter. From somewhere close by, chickens began to squawk wildly
Somebody said, "Enemy plane! Air raid!'
"Outside!" Master shouted, but some guests were ru
The sounds were louder now, overhead.
They ran-Master, Ola
Okeoma yanked off his uniform shirt, buttons flying off, and wrapped it around Ola
"The planes were so low," a boy said excitedly. "I saw the pilot!"
Master and Okeoma were first to walk out to the road. Okeoma looked smaller wearing only a singlet and trousers. Ola
Smoke rose from a compound near the corn-grinding station a street away. Two houses had collapsed into dusty rubble and some men were digging frantically through the jumbled cement, saying, "Did you hear that cry? Did you?" A fine haze of silvery dust covered their entire bodies so that they looked like limbless ghosts with open eyes.
"The child is alive, I heard the cry, I heard it," somebody said. Men and women had gathered to help and to stare; some dug through the rubble too, others stood and looked and still others shrieked and snapped their fingers. A car was on fire; the body of a woman lay next to it, her clothes burned off, flecks of pink all over her blackened skin, and when somebody covered it with a torn jute sack, Ugwu could still see the stiff charcoal-black legs. The sky was overcast. The wet smell of coming rain mixed with the smoky smell of burning. Okeoma and Master had joined in digging through the rubble. "I heard the child," somebody said again. "I heard the child."
Ugwu turned to leave. A stylish sandal lay on the ground and he picked it up and looked at the leather straps, the thick wedge heel, before he left it where it had been. He imagined the chic young woman who had been wearing it, who had discarded it to run to safety He wondered where the other sandal was.
When Master came back home, Ugwu was sitting on the floor of the living room, his back against the wall. Ola
Master poured himself a glass of palm wine. "Did you listen to the news?"
"No," Ola
"Our troops have lost all the captured territory in the midwest and the march to Lagos is over. Nigeria now says this is war, no longer a police action." He shook his head. "We were sabotaged."
"Would you like some cake?" Ola
"Not now." He drank his palm wine and poured another. "We will build a bunker in case of another air raid." His tone was normal, calm, as if air raids were benign, as if it were not death that had come so close moments ago. He turned to Ugwu. "Do you know what a bunker is, my good man?"
"Yes, sah," Ugwu said. "Like the one Hitler had."
"Well, yes, I suppose."
"But, sah, people are saying that bunkers are mass graves," Ugwu said.
"Absolute nonsense. Bunkers are safer than lying in a cassava patch."
Outside, darkness had fallen and the sky was lit once in a while by lightning. Ola
"Nkem!" Master went after her.
"Can't you hear it? Can't you hear them bombing us again?"
"It's thunder." Master grabbed Ola
He held her for a while longer until, finally, Ola
He argues that Nigeria did not have an economy until Independence. The colonial state was authoritarian, a benignly brutal dictatorship designed to benefit Britain. What the economy consisted of in 1960 was potential-raw materials, human beings, high spirits, some money from the marketing board reserves left over from what the British had taken to rebuild their postwar economy. And there was the newly discovered oil. But the new Nigerian leaders were too optimistic, too ambitious with development projects that would win their people's credibility, too naive in accepting exploitative foreign loans, and too interested in aping the British and in taking over the superior attitudes and better hospitals and better salaries long denied Nigerians. He gestures to complex problems facing the new country but focuses on the 1966 massacres. The ostensible reasons-revenge for the "Igbo coup," protest against a unitary decree that would make Northerners lose out in the civil service-did not matter. Nor did the varying numbers of the dead: three thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand. What mattered was that the massacres frightened and united the Igbo. What mattered was that the massacres made fervent Biafrans of former Nigerians.