There is a special irony in civil war. Men on both sides know each other well. Outsiders are caught between their friends. Somehow everyone is a traitor to someone else. The Nigerian civil war is no different. Sam Agbam was a light-skinned Ibo who worked in Nigeria's Ministry of External Affairs as an expert on other African countries. I first met him in 1962 when he and his wife and their first child returned to Nigeria from graduate study in London. Although Agbam was lbo, he had spent very little time in Eastern Nigeria, the traditional home of the Ibos. He left it as a boy to go to secondary school in Warri in the Niger Delta. Then came courses for a degree at the University College of Ibadan, graduate study in London, and government work in Lagos. As a government worker, he always seemed very British, very elite, very diplomatic with his deliberate way of speaking and his meticulous, London-cut suits. His British ways no doubt troubled him. At home, he sometimes slipped off his London suit and changed to a sport shirt and a long Ibo skirt, looking a little out of place and character...

related Stanley Meisler articles by topic: