Being "Other"

Today I ran across an essay that I wrote some years ago, and I find that it resonates with the current state of the world.

Being "Other"

Armed Conflict through the Eyes of an Eight Year Old Child

As a child, I found myself in the rather peculiar position of living on a university campus in post-colonial Nigeria, in the mid-1960s. At the edge of my little girl consciousness, there was a military overthrow of the government, and sometime later the Eastern Province where I lived, seceded from Nigeria and became Biafra. I was eight years old at the time, and to say that the events that ensued left their mark on my life would be putting it mildly. It was in this setting that I first became aware of Others. This was not only due to the fact that I was very obviously Other to my peers at the small University elementary school. It was also the fine nuances of Others within the Nigerian population.

            From a sociologist’s point of view, some fifty years later, I find that I am still asking the same questions. What is the mechanism that allows people to justify the use of violence in order to maintain their rightness? Is being right more important than anything else? Does being right trump all the other characteristics of one’s humanity? And, how do people who engage in that kind of behavior manage to survive afterward? Do they simply believe that the Other is so undeserving that treating them in a violent manner is actually justified in their own minds?  I still do not understand.

            Nigeria, as we know it today, is comprised of three very different ethnic/religious/language groups; Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba and Ibo. There are natural physical territories created by the Niger and Benue rivers. These three groups of people were bound together by the European lines drawn on a map. In 1886 the British Royal Niger Company was chartered, and in 1900 the territory came under British control. The British remained in control until Nigeria gained its full independence in 1960.

When I moved to Nsukka in 1965 I met Susie. She was my best and only real friend in Africa. She was the other American girl on campus; seventeen days older, blond, fearless, and we were usually inseparable. On Saturdays I often asked our cook, Samuel, to make us some peanut butter sandwiches. He wrapped them carefully in wax paper and we packed them, some fruit and two cokes carefully into her green knapsack. We climbed to the top of the tallest hill overlooking the campus and had ourselves a picnic.

            As we walked up the well-trodden path towards the top of the hill we were talking, laughing and singing.

            “I love to go a wandering…” at the top of our lungs. “Across the mountain side…” watching our footing as we walked up the steep path. “Val-a-rie, Val-a-rah, Val-a-rie, Val-a-rah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…” Sometimes singing in rounds so that there could be a constant ha-ha-ha-ing as we sang and laughed.

            Susie always went first, she was braver then me. I watched the frayed ends of the straps on her knapsack sway like a metronome as she walked in time with our song. I could never tell if she was really singing along with me, or just half-heartedly saying the words to keep me happy.

            Ibo men worked the fields, planting cassava in neat rows that curled around the hillsides. The men were shirtless, wearing khaki shorts and sandals as they wielded sharp blades of metal tied to well-worn hand carved wooden handles. They looked up at us as we passed and smiling at us, nodded their heads in our direction. I wondered what they thought about these two crazy little white girls marching purposefully up the hillside. Did they resent our carefree lives as they toiled under the sun to dig their livelihoods from the red rocky soil? I wasn’t sure of anything except that I was Other.

            In 1956 oil had been discovered in the Niger River delta by Shell-British Petroleum. The first oil production began in 1958, two years before the country gained independence. Oil exploration continued and in 1965 the Eti/Asasa oil field was discovered off shore, south of Warri. Production from this oil field has been the foundation for Nigeria’s position as a major oil producer. The oil fields are located in the Niger River delta area, which has traditionally belonged to the Ibo people of the Eastern Province.

            Under colonialism the British had set up the seat of government in Lagos, which is located in the Western Province. The Hausa/Fulani in the Northern Province have traditionally had a strong governing system, and they were well loved by their British colonizers, who appreciated the Hausa sense of order. They also had the largest population. Unfortunately the British choice of Lagos as the capitol left the resources in one region, the population in another and the power structure in the third. Others forced to pretend they were not Others. When the British left, they were kind enough to have poured all the ingredients for a political and human disaster into the pot. When the dish was served, it had, as its main ingredient, the lives of between 150,000 and three million Biafran men, women and children.

            The story of this conflict has been told from many different views, usually connected with different ethnic affiliations. Except for the story from the view of an eight year old American girl caught in the middle. I heard about the military coup on January 15th of 1966 at the dinner table, my parents speaking in hushed and worried tones of the effects there would be on the fledgling University of Nigeria in Nsukka. An Ibo General had been appointed head of the government. The next day in school I once again became aware of my Otherness as the American girl in the school yard where the Nigerian boys boasted of great feats of war as they kicked the soccer ball across the red clay playground. Should I be afraid? The boys assured me that the Ibo were the mightiest of warriors with unfailing courage, it was only right that an Ibo be in power. In reality Otherness became a major factor in our lives, with any Other but Ibo becoming an enemy, one to be scorned, hated, and even killed. Again, I was reminded that I was the Other, not an Ibo.

            Unfortunately this was also the case for the Hausa in the North, only it was the Ibo who were the Other. In September of 1967, after a summer of rumors and reports of violence in the North against Ibo living there, matters came to a head. Some 30,000 Ibo were massacred, and over a million fled back to the East and to their ancestral homes. The story of the “Massacre Express” reached my schoolyard, as one of my classmates related the scene at the Enugu Train station where he had gone with his mother to meet relatives arriving from Kano. The train arrived ahead of schedule, packed with mutilated and tortured bodies, only the conductor left alive. Was this story true? It didn’t matter. It was true enough for the children in my third grade class. In the telling I witnessed my classmates’ transformation with that story from the innocence of childhood to the fear of an unknown future. The fear of being Other.

            Shortly after that incident, I began to see strange pictures in the doors of shops, on trees and in cars and lorries. The sign said, “Have you seen this face?” and had drawings of five men’s faces, each marked with the traditional marking of Nigerians who were not Ibo. Below the pictures the signs said, “Report them immediately”. The physical identification of Others. You have that mark on your face, you must be an Other, and an enemy; less than I am and evil.

            I have a vivid memory of a trip to Enugu being cut short by a soldier with a gun at one of the many check-points along the way. He demanded that my Mother, an American woman in her mid-thirties, put one of these signs up in our car. My mother refused, turned the car around and drove back to our house on campus. She was really angry, livid in fact. Feeling her mood, I sat quietly in the back seat of that old Peugeot all the way back. I didn’t understand. After she finished a heated conversation with my father where she related what had happened, I found the courage to ask why they wanted us to put that sign in our car. She explained to me that because of the problems, the government was looking for people they thought might be a threat. But that our faces were also different, and that no one should be persecuted on the basis of their face alone. We were a different kind of Other.

            On May 30^th, 1967 Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu announced the formal secession of the Eastern Province of Nigeria and the creation of the independent nation of Biafra. My parents had a short wave radio in their bedroom, hidden under a specially carved wooden box, and the conversation with the American Embassy in Lagos that day included both the news of the secession, and the order that we prepare to evacuate all women and children. That afternoon my mother supervised as we loaded up our smallest bags with essentials for the trip home. My father rode his little Honda 50cc motorcycle around to tell the staff personally, and ensure they understood the need for calm.  By July the Nigerian Federal Military Government sent troops into Biafra and full scale civil war ensued.

            The American, British, Indian and Dutch women and children were evacuated from our little campus in Nsukka. Our own household staff said good-bye to us as we left the house. With all the foreign families gathering at the University Continuing Education Center early in the morning, hundreds of students, staff, villagers, farmers, and their children came to witness our departure.  All along our long trip to the airport in Port Harcourt tear streaked faces came out of the bush and lined the roads. I will never forget as hour after hour our caravan of cars passed people who had heard we were leaving, many who walked for miles to wave good-bye, and be witness to the sign. This sign was the beginning of the end for many of the people who had stepped out of the bush to pay their respects to us as we fled back to the safety of America.

A Nigerian Federal blockade was used as the weapon of choice in a country where the population relied on food imports to survive. The Federal Military Government was supported diplomatically by the British and amply supplied weapons by the Russians, strange bedfellows during the cold war. The United States adopted a policy of non-involvement however continued to recognize the Nigerian government. Unfortunately for the Biafrans, the most powerful ally they had was the South African Apartheid government, who was not exactly popular with most of the other governments on the planet. Others recognizing Others.

 Outnumbered and outgunned, the Biafrans fought to hold on to their resources and eventually just to their lives. In a time before the word was popular, in this genocide, the Nigerians waged and won this war by starving their Biafran neighbors to death. As in any time of nutritional crisis, it was, naturally, the most frail who were the first victims of this act, young children and the elderly. The Biafran soldiers in this conflict were not the target of the Nigerian military, it was their parents, grandparents, nieces, nephews and infants. These children were targeted because they were Others, and would grow up to be Others. So in the end, while around 100,000 soldiers lost their lives, hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of civilians paid the ultimate price.

            The British Colonial system had combined three peoples and declared to them, “You are now one” when they all knew they were not. Were those who drew the lines on the map and put these people together aware of the differences when they made that fatal mistake? Could the British have remained ignorant of these differences after they had been there? Did they simply ignore the differences, or did they assume that the Others could work it out on their own when the British abandoned them? Or did the colonization of this part of Africa simply reinforce the Otherness that had been in place for centuries? What would the outcome have been had they drawn different lines on that map so many years ago, or would these Others have come to blows anyway?

            Oddly, even when we returned to America, I never got over feeling that I was Other. I had lived in Africa, where I most definitely was Other. And because I had lived in Africa I was the Other to my schoolmates in America. But unlike any of my classmates at the Nsukka campus elementary school, I had been spared because I was a particular Other.

One day, several years later on the television I saw pictures of sad-faced children with distended bellies and flies circling like vultures. I felt a strange sensation of unity with those children; they might have been my classmates, my friends, my peers. In that instant, I was suddenly transformed from the Other to membership in the group of people who had lived in Biafra.

I have long since accepted the notion that I am Other, and will always be Other. And in the same breath, I have membership, and am one with all the peoples of the earth. Since spending my formative years in Africa, when some one asks me where I am from, I remember being Other, and I always respond with, “Earth. You?” For we are all Other, and that itself is what makes us one.