There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra Read Online Free PDF Page A

with the dining prefect, and we noticed that he
     was now in the food equivalent of heavyweights, receiving more food than his classmates!
    There was a strong culture of meritocracy and a very high quality of instruction at
     Umuahia. I quickly noticed that there were very bright boys in my class, yet there
     was a sense of friendly competition that pervaded our academic life. I made friends
     gradually at school, at first mainly with pupils I met in the dormitory, then with
     a number of others in the classroom, through partnerships that the class master set
     up for assignments and projects. Benjamin Uzochukwu became one of my closest friends
     at the beginning of the first semester; he later qualified as an engineer, after studying
     in Great Britain, and became the director of the Federal Department of Public Works
     in Lagos.
    Ekpo Etien Inyang was another close friend. He was one of my most brilliant classmates—he
     became a physician—but unfortunately he later committed suicide. We had very different
     backgrounds, especially in terms of religion. When he arrived at Umuahia, the school
     officials discovered that he had not been baptized. Most of us did not ask fellow
     pupils whether they were baptized or not; one just assumed that if you were a Christian
     you would have been. But Inyang’s father was not a particularly religious person.
     So when he became an upperclassman Inyang decided to be baptized, and after subjecting
     himself to the religion classes and preparation that were required, he asked me to
     be his godfather. So I had a godson who was the same age as me. That was quite an
     extraordinarily moving gesture on his part, to ask me to step in on his behalf in
     this capacity.
    Six of us, including Inyang and me, were promoted to the second-year from the first-year
     class during our second term at Umuahia. Students with a record of excellent work
     and who were the best performers in their respective years were combined into a larger
     second-year class. It was an honor, but it also meant that I began to see a large
     majority of my contemporaries from my first-year class less often, including my close
     friends Ben Uzochukwu and Chike Momah.
    English was the language of instruction at Government College, Umuahia. It was at
     Umuahia that I first truly understood the power and importance of that unifying language.
     The schoolmasters, well aware that Nigeria had over 250 ethnic groups, had very carefully
     enrolled students from every nook and cranny of the nation, where possible. While
     African languages and writing should be developed, nurtured, and preserved, how else,
     I would wonder later, would I have been able to communicate with so many boys from
     different parts of the country and ethnic groups, speaking different languages, had
     we not been taught one language?
    Many of our teachers at the time were alumni from Cambridge, the University of London,
     and other major British institutions of higher learning. They included A. P. L. Slater,
     who was fondly called “Apples” by his close associates and a few of us who were his
     former students. Shortly after I left Umuahia, the duo R. H. Stone, a biology instructor,
     and A. B. Cozens, a onetime principal of the college, arrived. Together Stone and
     Cozens published a very famous biology textbook called
Biology for Tropical Schools
that was used throughout Africa and beyond.
    It was at Umuahia that I continued the introduction to the work of William Shakespeare
     that my father had first made possible, as well as to Booker T. Washington’s
Up from Slavery
, Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
, Dickens’s
David Copperfield
, and Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
. We were blessed to have had energetic, egalitarian principals such as the Reverend
     Robert Fisher and W. C. Simpson, who created and encouraged, respectively, the “textbook
     act”—a time between 4:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M. when all textbooks had to be put away and novels picked up