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Somebody said, “Enemy plane! Air raid!”

“Outside!” Master shouted, but some guests were running into the bedroom, screaming, “Jesus! Jesus!”

The sounds were louder now, overhead.

They ran—Master, Olanna, holding Baby, Ugwu, some guests—to the cassava patch beside the house and lay on their bellies. Ugwu looked up and saw the planes, gliding low beneath the blue sky like two birds of prey. They spurted hundreds of scattered bullets before dark balls rolled out from underneath, as if the planes were laying large eggs. The first explosion was so loud that Ugwu’s ear popped and his body shivered alongside the vibrating ground. A woman from the opposite house tugged at Olanna’s dress. “Remove it! Remove that white dress! They will see

it and target us!”

Okeoma yanked off his uniform shirt, buttons flying off, and wrapped it around Olanna. Baby began to cry. Master held his hand loosely over her mouth, as if the pilots might hear her. The second explosion followed and then the third and fourth and fifth, until Ugwu felt the warm wetness of urine on his shorts and was convinced that the bombs would never end; they would continue to fall until everything was destroyed and everyone died. But they stopped. The planes moved farther away in the sky. Nobody moved or spoke for a long time, until Special Julius got up and said, “They have gone.”

“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. Olanna continued to sit on the ground holding Baby, the camouflage-print army shirt wrapped around her wedding dress. Ugwu got up and headed down the road. He heard Dr. Nwala say to Olanna, “Let me help you up. The dirt will stain your dress.”

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. Olanna was picking at a piece of cake on a saucer. She was still wearing her wedding dress; Okeoma’s uniform shirt was neatly folded on a chair. The guests had all left slowly, saying little, their faces shadowed with guilt, as if embarrassed that they had allowed the air raid to ruin the wedding.

Master poured himself a glass of palm wine. “Did you listen to the news?”

“No,” Olanna said.

“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?” Olanna asked. The cake sat on the center table, whole but for the thin slice she had cut off.

“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. Olanna suddenly jumped up from a chair and screamed, “Where is Baby? Ke Baby?” and started to run into the bedroom.

“Nkem!” Master went after her.

“Can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear them bombing us again?”

“It’s thunder.” Master grabbed Olanna from behind and held her. “It’s only the thunder. What our rain-holder kept back is finally unleashing itself. It’s only the thunder.”

He held her for a while longer until, finally, Olanna sat down and cut another slice of cake for herself.

4. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died

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 naïve 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.

PART THREE

The Early Sixties