Articles about the killings of the Asaba Massacre and memorialization.
For almost a decade, we researched what happened in Asaba in 1967, examining documents and interviewing survivors and witnesses to those terrible events. We presented this research in a book, The Asaba Massacre: Trauma, Memory...
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‘Creating sites of memory assumes – indeed requires – the pre-existence of a will to remember’ (Dr Andy Pearce writing about Holocaust memorialization in the UK). But memory of conflict is invariably contested, with one side erecting monuments to its victories, the...
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One of the most profound moments of the public hearings of the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission (also known as the “Oputa Panel”) in Enugu in April 2001 was the testimony of Dr. Uriah, a medical practitioner and a native of Asaba. He had been called to...
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My earliest memory of the civil war started with the Biafran invasion of the Mid West Region. I was still at boarding school at Government College Ughelli. I remember the Biafran soldiers walking around the main administrative building of the school. We were...
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"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the Morning. We will remember them" For the following brief commentary, I have not chosen a title. I am...
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The mind of a nation is its history, history is the mind of a nation. Like individuals a sound mind is important for well being, mental health matters to humans why not to nations. To be bereft of your mind is a tragedy that no one wishes or could possibility inflict...
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How much of the past should we forget? Is it weakness or bitterness to remember? Does the death of many at once bring us regret? Is it painful or vengeful to remember? Do we have a morbid attachment to the past? to that deep loss that defines us at last? Our lives...
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The land in Igbo cosmology is unqualifiedly sacred and in the pre and early colonial Igbo societies elaborate rites must be performed for cleansing whenever it is violated by certain egregious human misconducts like murder. Otherwise, the particular community in which...
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The Asaba massacre was a watershed moment in the Nigerian Civil War and in the history of modern day Nigeria. On 5th of October 1967, Federal troops entered Asaba and began ransacking houses and killing civilians. Over a period of 3 days more than a...
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