How Silly Of Me To Write A Letter

I was fond of Virginia Blakeslee, who was the mother of a high school friend.  When Virginia died, my high school friend went through her mother’s belongings and found a letter that I had written to Virginia when I was living in Nigeria.  Virginia had kept the letter for forty-five years:

DEAR VIRGINIA,

How silly of me to write a letter; all the post office employees were killed last night. 

I live in the North and many Ibo people have moved up here from the South to take skilled jobs because they are generally more educated than the Northerners.  But last night a massacre targeted people of the Ibo tribe.  

I was lulled to sleep by the rhythm of gunfire, and woke up to hear the homes across the road being ripped open and looted.  My dog and I spend the day watching furniture being carried through my back yard. 

Only now have the cheers stopped --- it seems that the arrows and stones finally reached the five Ibos hiding on the roof of a building down the street from me. 

Many are dead now, and some streets are so slippery with blood that cars cannot pass.

Back home in the United States: leaves are turning color and falling, houses stand to face another winter, and the wind is cool and reminiscent of your frailty.  And I wonder why I came five thousand miles to confirm that mankind is rotten. 

One by one, man is a marvelous thing; in groups, as he is prone to be, mankind is pretty dumb.

                                                                                         Sincerely yours,

                                                                                         DOUG SCHNEIDER

I look at my letter now and remember that I wrote it to keep my mind busy while so much was going on around me.  I look at my handwriting and remember that I was twenty-two years old when so much was going on around me.  I see that I addressed my letter to Virginia, and remember that I deliberately did not tell my parents about what went on around me.

Mostly the letter reminds me about how utterly powerless I felt that day in 1966.

The events did not happen in a vacuum.  In 1965 I lived through a coup d’état where the democratically-elected prime minister of Nigeria, who was a Northerner, was shot and his body was left by the roadside --- and an army general, who was an Ibo, declared himself the head of state.

Things were tense but calm until the Ibo head of state declared that the regions would no longer have their own civil service; there would be a unified national civil service.  In Nigeria, this was an inflammatory proclamation.  The Ibos were much better educated than the other tribes in the country; under a unified civil service, the Ibos would dominate the entire nation.

Once a unified national civil service was announced, the killings began.

Many Ibos moved back to the South, to their own corner of the country, and declared themselves to be the independent Republic of Biafra.

When I arrived in Nigeria, it was a stable country under a democratically-elected Prime Minister.  Within a year of my arrival, I was about to see the country I was living in erupt into civil war.

-.-.-.-.-.

The three photos above were taken by me.  

Photo #1 shows an Ibo's shop in the Sabon Gari Market after the massacres of 1966.  

Photo #2 shows General Ironsi's entourage (he was the Ibo who declared himself head of state) rolling past a line of horse guards when Ironsi visited the palace of the Emir of Kano in 1965.

Photo #3 shows me at age 22, standing by an anthill in northern Nigeria in 1966. 

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com