Walk with me down memory lane. The time: 1968. In 30
months, one million dead. The setting: a dusty camp in Biafra where survivors
waited and hoped for peace. The survivors: Refugees fleeing from the “Dance of
Death.” My mentor: One of the refugee camp directors, whom I called “Teacher”
out of respect.
“Martin Luther King has been killed,” Teacher said, with a pained voice and
vacant eyes. I looked towards Teacher, wondering: “Who is Martin Luther King?” I
was a 13-year-old refugee in the west African nation of Nigeria, a land then
called Biafra. Martin Luther King. What did that name mean?
Eight out of ten Biafrans were refugees exiled from their own country. Two years
earlier, Christian army officers had staged a bloody coup killing Muslim
leaders. The Muslims felt the coup was a tribal mutiny of Christian Igbos
against their beloved leaders. The aggrieved Muslims went on a killing rampage,
chanting: “Igbo, Igbo, Igbo, you are no longer part of Nigeria!” In the days
that followed, 50,000 Igbos were killed in street uprisings.
Killing was not new to us in Biafra. I was 13, but I knew much of killing.
Widows and orphans were most of the refugees in our camp. They had survived the
Igbo “Dance of Death” – a euphemism for the mass executions. One thousand men at
gunpoint forced to dance a public dance. Seven hundred were then shot and buried
en masse in shallow graves. When told to hurry up and return to his regular
duty, one of the murderers said: “The graves are not yet full.”
A few days later, with only the clothes on our backs, we fled from this “Dance
of Death.” That was six months before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Teacher and I were eventually conscripted into the Biafran army and sent to the
front, two years after our escape.
After the war, Teacher – who had taught me the name of Martin Luther King – was
among the one million who had died. I – a child soldier – was one of the fifteen
million who survived.
Africa is committing suicide: a two-decade war in Sudan, genocidal killings in
Rwanda, scorched-earth conflicts in Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, and Liberia. The
wars in modern Africa are the largest global-scale loss of life since the
establishment of the Atlantic Slave trade, which uprooted and scattered Africa’s
sons and daughters across the United States, Jamaica, and Brazil.
Africa’s wars are steering the continent toward a sea of self-destruction so
deep that even the greatest horror writers are unable to fathom its depths. So,
given our circumstances, Martin Luther King was a name unknown, a dead man among
millions, with a message that never reached the shores of Biafra.
Neither did his message reach the ears of “The Black Scorpion,” Benjamin
Adekunle, a tough Nigerian army commander, whose credo of ethnic cleansing knew
nothing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s movement: “We shoot at everything that
moves, and when our forces move into Igbo territory, we even shoot things that
do not move.”
As we heed Martin Luther King Jr.’s call, and march together across the world
stage, let us never forget that we who have witnessed and survived the injustice
of such nonsensical wars are the torchbearers of his legacy of peace for our
world, our nation, and our children.
Excerpted from
a speech delivered by
Philip Emeagwali
at Morehouse College in
Atlanta, Georgia at the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of
Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. The entire transcript and video
is posted at
emeagwali.com.
Philip Emeagwali has been called “a father of the Internet”
by CNN and TIME, and
extolled as “one of the great minds
of the Information Age” by former U.S.
president Bill Clinton.
emeagwali.com
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