Who Gets Opportunity?

A Nigerwife’s Story

My friend Liz Bird recently published Surviving BIafra: A Nigerwife’s Story, with Rosina Umelo. She spoke about it at the Igbo Conference in London in April, which I was sorry to miss this year.

Rose, a British woman, met her husband John, an Igbo man, in London. They married and moved to Enugu in eastern Nigeria in the early 1960s. They were in Biafra, as I was, at the time of Biafran secession, and moved, as I did, to the husband’s village.

Rose stayed throughout the war, moving from place to place as the war advanced. I was more fortunate than Rose as we never had to leave Clem’s village. And I didn’t stay until the end but left in September 1968 when the war had been going on for just over a year.

After the war Rose turned the notes she’d kept into a narrative. Now she and Professor Elizabeth Bird have turned the narrative into, Surviving Biafra. The publisher says, “Rose’s vivid account of life as a Biafran ‘Nigerwife’ offers a fresh, new look at hope and survival through a brutal war.” I’ve just bought the book.

Use of Available Resources

Liz just posted what she called “a simple, though remarkable, document” from the book.

She says, “This typed letter . . . renews Mrs. Umelo’s teaching contract. It is dated Dec. 1969, not long before the final surrender [January 1970]. It is remarkable in that it shows the way the Biafra government and bureaucracy continued to function in the most difficult circumstances. With no official document paper left, the letter is typed on lined paper from an exercise book.”

I remember my mother-in-law building an oven out of mud so she could bake bread with the substitute flour Biafra was producing. My friend Jean learned to make a substitute for Quaker Oats with the local grain.

Liz’s post reminded me of the small paper bag I found in my basement cleaning. It’s made from a single sheet of the results of the JAMB, or Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, exam results. It lists 25 students’ names and their scores, information we in the US would consider private. But in Nigeria exam results are public, or at least they were.

When I read about Rose’s contract letter, I looked at the bag. But it’s from 1990, so not related to the war. Except maybe it was an enterprising Igbo woman who had lived through the war. Perhaps she had learned to make use of available resources to sell her goods in the market!

Guatemala and American Women

Did you see the piece in The New Times by Mia Armstrong? She won Nicholas Kristof’s prize – the opportunity to travel and report with him. She returned recently from Guatemala.

Olga Marina Mendoza Raymundo, Photo by Daniele Volpe for The New York Times 

Mia opened with this stark contrast:

“When I was 15, I started to learn how to drive a car.

When Olga Marina Mendoza Raymundo was 15, she got married.

When I was 16, I took the SAT.

When she was 16, Olga gave birth to her first child.”

Olga was never able to attend school after 2nd grade. Her husband died in an unexplained accident nearly a year ago, so now she struggles to support herself and her three children.

Mia says, “It’s easy for a successful American to look in the mirror and feel proud of the hard work that engendered that success — and then you meet Olga and realize that what really nurtured that success was being born to opportunity in the right family in the right country.”

How many people, especially women, around the world have the same talent as Mia, but never the opportunity to nurture or use that talent? In this country too, how many women don’t have the opportunity of someone like Mia with her excellent education and family support?

Mia saw evidence of humanitarian and government programs. Family planning, keeping girls in school, vaccines and other preventive health care make a difference in women’s lives, she says.

I look forward to reading her next article.

The Impact of Racism

Mia’s article makes me think of the barriers to opportunity faced because of race in the US. Though most of the barriers are no longer legal, their aftermath lives on.

I watched the Henry Louis Gates’ program on Reconstruction last night. For the first decade or so after the US Civil War the newly-freed slaves registered and voted in record numbers. They elected Grant president because he had encouraged their participation on the side of the North in the war. He supported government intervention to prevent violence against them by frustrated southerners.

Yet northerners eventually tired of trying to secure the rights of Blacks against the opposition of the south and decided to let states handle their “problems” themselves. The Ku Klux Klan grew stronger, lynchings became more common, and Blacks were intimidated from voting.

We have not recovered. So I ask, how many people of color have the same talent as Mia but have been denied oppotunity by our systemic racism?

Wealth built on free slave labor was accumulated by the white plantation owners but also by industrialists, bankers and merchants. Opportunity to accumulate wealth was given briefly after the Civil War, but then taken away again!

As I’ve said before, I support some form of reparations. How else can we address the gross inequality, created by slavery and fostered by the Jim Crow laws, that still exists today?