| Chapter : | Introduction |
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reinvent themselves and their communities after cataclysmic events (such as war and genocide), questions that ask who appropriates the story of the event and who propagates the tale. Important also are the ways people live with the consequences of such events and why many countries cannot lay the past to rest.61 Landmarks and memorials in a landscape, overt or discreet, play a powerful role in communicating people’s values, history, struggles, and successes.62 The absence of postconflict public discourse and memorialization projects in Nigeria is not surprising because the eastern region lost both the war and the political and economic advantages its people had enjoyed before the war. Forty years after the conflict, the power relationships between the federation and the Igbo ethnic group remain unsettled.
The emerging public memory of the Nigerian civil war in recent years is an attempt to individually and collectively update and reconstruct the Nigerian past. This includes the need for memorialization through public commemoration, museums, and monuments. However, discourses on the Nigeria-Biafra War and its centrality in the history of modern Nigeria have been lacking. A systematic attempt to forget the war has been made even though the conflict’s aftermath still shapes a large part of Nigerian national life today. This is a common practice, but here peculiarities emerge from the Nigerian condition. A notable exception is the Asaba Memorial Project and Archive, inaugurated October 9, 2009, at the University of South Florida. It seeks to document and memorialize the mass killing of civilians that took place in October 1967 when federal troops entered the town of Asaba; one of the project’s goals is to reclaim the history of the event.63 Such a memorialization project aims to locate the massacre at Asaba in the context of national history, but initiatives of this kind have largely emerged from the Nigerian diaspora in the United States—not in Nigeria itself.
Other groups, such as the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), have used both conventional and unconventional means to develop alternative frameworks for recording the Nigeria-Biafra conflict in public memory. Lebel Udi has argued, referring