Word: umuahia
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Once again, thousands of civilians took to the roads and the bush, fleeing before the new offensive, and towns like Aba, Owerri and Umuahia were choked with the homeless, the destitute and the starving. Yet somehow the Biafrans continued to hold on against superior forces and firepower, training with sticks, fighting back with the motley array of weapons they have managed to pick up from European arms markets in recent months. They fared less well on another front: there was still no agreement on relief measures for starving Biafrans. As a result, hundreds, perhaps thousands died every day, and their...
...walled villages, the crisis is worse. When one of the Catholic priests visits he is immediately surrounded by haggard faces begging for medicine, food, anything. At the Seventh-day Adventist Hospital in Okpala, a sign at the gate reads "No Vacancy." At Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Umuahia, the largest in the region, doctors one day recently counted 1,800 patients suffering from kwashiorkor: during the whole of 1963, the same hospital treated 18 such cases. At the military hospital in the same city, Major David Ofomata, chief medical adviser, tells visitors that everything from antibiotics to catgut is needed...
...teen-agers were killed instantly. After the raid, as I walked through the heart of Umuahia's residential quarter, a Ministry of Works dump truck had begun plying the streets to collect other victims...
...scene I witnessed at Umuahia's Queen Elizabeth Hospital following the air raid was repeated in nearly every Biafran town I visited. Under tall shade trees outside an already filled mortuary lay a score of corpses, including pregnant women and months-old babies, charred, disfigured and mangled. Amid the tearful cries of keening women, workers carried into the morgue mashed human fragments piled on stretchers, and limbs and torsos balanced on shovels. The next morning, clutching handkerchiefs over nose and mouth against the stench and carrying freshly sawed unpainted wood coffins, the families lined up patiently under the trees...
Since the air war can only be waged with outside aid, Biafra's Oxford-educated leader, Lieut. Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, 34, is understandably outraged at the Russians and Egyptians. When I met Ojukwu on the evening of the Umuahia air raid in his closely guarded stucco house atop a hill outside town, he spoke of the "hot and cold flashes that go through my mind" when he sees the air raid victims. "Viewing their mangled remains on a mortuary slab," he said, "I feel anger with those who made devastating weapons available to primitive men. I even find myself...