Paper short abstract:

My paper attempts to provoke historiographical discussions on the nexus between memory and trauma by examining mental disorders among former Nigeria-Biafra civil war combatants and the ways in which those convalescing from the injuries of warfare both remember and forget the war.

Paper long abstract:

Pa Uche sits on a low bench; his crutches lean by his side while he stares into nothingness. Struggling with impaired hearing, insomnia, slurred speech, and looking visibly depressed, he points to his amputated left limb, a grim reminder of the viciousness of war, and mumbles absentmindedly. Deserted by his relatives, socially isolated, and forced to relocate to a segregated residential hall for incapacitated former civil war fighters who are being cared for only by willing passersby, Pa Uche becomes one among vulnerable disabled Nigeria-Biafra civil war combatants whose lives bear similar burden of mental and physical illness.

The bloody Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967 became a paradigm for mental disorder for combatants and survivors in varying degrees. The inadequacy of the Nigerian government’s post-war rehabilitation policy become even more relevant in the company of individual psych trauma resulting from the civil war.

Using the aged interlocutor’s lived war experience as a point of departure, my paper attempts to shed light on war's non-visible wounds - the significant mental dent it leaves on former Biafran fighters who lived through and after this event in postcolonial Nigeria. Here, I argue that while former civil war combatants like Pa Uche consistently struggle to internally suppress the horrors of the Nigeria-Biafra war, their physical disabilities, in addition to a lack of national aid or protection and legal recognition forces them to remember and sink them lower into the ocean of acute depression. Ultimately, these factors affect how they remember and forget the civil war.