Lawrence Akpu is an ex Biafran soldier who had a bullet in his chest!
Sixty-six-year-old Lawrence Akpu is sitting on a black wheelchair which
makes squeaky sound at each move – a sign that it’s in a very bad shape.
Hanging on the wall are black and white picture frames and calendars of
Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, leader of the defunct state of Biafra who led
his people exactly fifty years ago to a three-year full blown-bloody
civil war against the Nigerian government following the massacre and
genocide of about 50,000 easterners in the north after the counter-coup
of 1966 by General Yakubu Gowon. One of the calendars of Ojukwu on the
wall read “Historic day: Proclamation of the Republic of Biafra by the
military governor, Lt Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu, 30th May, 1967”.
There
is a picture of Lawrence too in his army uniform hanging on the wall.
It was just 10:30am and the tick-tock of the wall clock was heard in the
background. Close to Lawrence’s picture was a calendar of Jesus Christ
during transfiguration with the inscription “Our father in heaven”. A
14-inch coloured TV set was standing on a side table with an antenna on
top of it. The room was well illuminated as a result of the mid-morning
sun that had just begun to shine. The building has not had light for the
past six years since it was constructed.
He lives in darkness.
One of the pictures of Col Ojukwu in a calendar hangs on the wall
“Daddy when are you going to get up from this chair (wheelchair)?” his six-year-old grandson, Chinecherem innocently asked him.
“Very
soon my dear,” he replied, giggling while adjusting his position on the
wheelchair to have a balance. “That’s the question he usually asks me
whenever he brings me out from my room. He is just a boy, I don’t blame
him”.
“He was our hero,” he said pointing to one of the pictures
of Ojukwu when he was speaking to a cross section of foreign
journalists, perhaps during the declaration of Biafra on May 30, 1967.
“He took us to war because of the killings and victimisation of our
people. We were happy to have stood by him with our lives,” he said
nodding his head at the same time.
For the past fifty-one
years, Lawrence has been sitting in a wheelchair, being moved from one
position to the other, all day, all year round, except when he wants to
sleep or use the convenience. He said he bought the wheelchair after the
one given to him by social welfare under the ministry of health in 1975
had damaged beyond repair. He has since used three different
wheelchairs.
“My whole life has been in the wheelchair after the war except when I want to sleep,” he told YNaija.
The unknown bullet
Mr
Lawrence, a native of Mgbagbu Owa in Ezeagu LGA of Enugu state, is one
of the dozens of abandoned disabled Biafran veterans after the civil
war, languishing at a small village resettlement camp in Okwe, Onuimo
LGA of Imo state. He was hit by an “unknown” bullet from the back,
piercing his chest during a fierce battle on April 13, 1969, in Abia
state. He never stood up nor went back to the battlefield ever since. He
was paralysed from the bullet injury. His spinal cord was affected.
“April
13, 1969, was terrible. The battle was intense on that day. The bullet
was in my chest,” he recalls while unbuttoning his shirt to show me the
scar of the bullet and how it perforated his chest. “I ran out of ammo
during the assault at Uzuakoli sector in Abia state. We were only given
five bullets each; I exhausted mine during the battle,” he said.
“When
we ran out of ammunition, I started running with an injured soldier who
was shot in the leg I was carrying. It was in the process that a bullet
hit me. I didn’t see who shot the fire. I fell to the ground. I was
groaning, I was in pains,” he said, remembering how he lost
consciousness afterwards before his fellow soldiers came to pick him up.
He only found himself at the hospital when he regained consciousness.
After
the bullet from nowhere had struck him, he said his fellow soldiers
helped to load him into a waiting truck to the hospital.
He never returned to the battlefield until the war ended.
Lawrence Apku doesn’t regret fighting alongside Ojukwu, his hero
Lawrence
said his mother objected to his decision to join the army at that time.
But he insisted he wanted to save and defend his land. He explained to
her that his friends would deride him should he fail to turn up at the
recruitment camp. “She was devastated when she heard about it and said
over her dead body. I told her I would be a coward if I do not join, my
friends would laugh at me. I needed to protect her and my siblings,” he
maintained.
“When the war ended and she didn’t see me, she became
sick and thought I was dead. I came back one year after the war and she
became well and started jubilating,” Lawrence said while drinking from a
plastic cup his son had used to fetch water for him.
Fifty years
ago, Lawrence, was just sixteen years old when he joined the Biafran
army as a recruit on August 19, 1967, following the declaration of the
sovereign state of Biafra by Colonel Ojukwu. He joined so he could fight
side by side with his comrades to hold their land, to fight for their
children and the ones yet unborn. And at the end of the bloody three
years civil war, more than three million people, mostly women and
children, died of starvation, kwashiorkor and diseases.
“I was
living in the north before I came back to the east in 1966 due to the
massacre and killings of the Igbos after the coup,” he said placing his
hands comfortably on his wheelchair. “They killed mercilessly at that
time”.
Prior to the civil war of 1967, there were reported
massacre of people from the eastern region in 1966 in the north
following the counter-coup. Many survived while many died. As for
Lawrence, he was lucky. “When we ran from the north and got to Gboko,
Benue state, we met a blockade and they started again, killing people.
We luckily escaped,” he recalls with nostalgia.