Rebuilding

A Real Coming to America

They knew they were black. My parents migrated to the United States in the 70s. In younger pictures of my parents, uncles, and aunties, and larger kin networks, their hair was cropped closer to their heads or in intricate threading styles. However, as young adults, there was an addition of big afros that screamed James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m proud.”

Looking at old pictures of aunties and uncles in Umunam and Emii, they were wearing big bell bottom pants, high platform shoes, dashikis, and “up and down,” for Igbo women a blouse on top and on the bottom, a wrapper of the same material tied so it would not budge. My baddie aunties wore ridiculously short dresses even as they refused to smile in pictures, looking down as submissively as possible. The same aunties berated us for our own revealing clothing.

There was so much optimism as anti-colonial movements-- often linked to challenges to “free-range” capitalism benefitting Europeans and their settler colonial descendants—swept throughout the world. This included the United States, in which “internal colonialism” was a way of referring to the condition of Blacks Americans.

Like much of the world, they had been witnessing African liberation movements across the continent. Great Britain merged three companies into a bricolaged Nigeria. But Europe and the United States had decided that they did not want another Japan, but this time in Africa. Japan had limited the presence of Christian missionaries and prevented the proliferation of Western capitalist markets in favor of their own form of mercantilism for decades. (Well situated, upper class) Japanese got rich off of Japan, unlike other non-Western countries in which the shot callers were not homegrown, but the puppets were. Too young to completely understand, my mother recalled waving the new Nigerian flag as a child once they thought they were free from Britain. She did not know that the national anthem she learned was written by a White man. She still doesn’t know the “new song” written by an actual Nigerian. But in a twist of colonial fate, the new song has become the old song.

Flag of Nigeria from 1914–1960

The Official Nigerian Flag  

When ethnic differences turned into ethnic tensions, the military was an important site for murder within its ranks. These turned into pogroms in the northeast and in various parts of the country to the point that the southeast had decided to secede from a Western-supported Nigeria. Although France was initially interested in supporting the secession of the southeast from the bricolaged state that England had woven together, the other nations would not have it. The Queen and other global leaders— wanting to maintain artificially inexpensive access to oil and other resources in the southeast—helped supply weapons to the Nigerian army. When civilians were starved out and the Nigerian government kicked out the Red Cross, Irish pilots dropped food on the malnourished people of Igboland and its surroundings.

In the battle of “whoever has the most bullets wins,” the new nation of Biafra did not stand a chance. When the Biafran independence movement began conscripting child soldiers, my widowed grandmother refused to allow her only son, her youngest, to train on the wooden guns young boys were provided. Instead, she took him to hide in the forest, the bush, with his unmarried sisters and other kin. Once, his Big Uncle sent him and a bunch of other boys to collect roofing materials, but my father did not feel like it, deciding to go fishing instead. When he returned, the Nigerian soldiers had killed the other boys. As a girl, my mother said that she was sent to walk the equivalent of Bryn Mawr on the Northside all the way down to the Southside to get food for her family. Presumably, she was too young to be “rapable” by soldiers that teenage girls and adult women would come across. Presumably.

They must have known that they were black because the world looked away when the civil war turned into a genocide. Some things never change.

Then the war was over. Rebuilding began.

By the time my parents arrived in the United States in the late 70s, they had survived the Civil War that starved them out as children, many had fought in, and taken many of their friends’ and family members’ lives. When my father migrated to the United States for college, Third World liberation movements was where the party was at, although the DJ was playing the last song of the night and the lights had come on. The Nigerian government paid for him to attend school at Michigan State, where Auntie Ndawi and Magic Johnson were also studying. Our own coming to America.