AS he marks his 80th birthday, reading Professor Chukwuemeka Ikes Sunset at Dawn (1976), one does not know how to understand it. Is it a historical piece of writing, a fictionalised history, or both What is however clear in this seeming dilemma of choice is that Ike does not want the gory experience of the Igbo to be understood as fiction, hence the real names, dates, and verifiable accounts included. He is however mindful of the vehicle in which all of these must travel fiction, not journalism, not history; but each will constitute his content, but not his conveyer of them.The University Press edition of 1993 of Sunset at Dawn has a subtitle: A Novel of the Biafra war. It is virtually a blow by blow account of the novelists following and understanding of the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967 to 1970. It is the story of war in all its shades and shadows; in all its human bestialities and possibilities. It is the story of different peoples response to a collective decision, or to a decision they were forced to live with. It is also a story of how the attitude people bring into it can make or break them.It is a story of war seen through one major family: the Kanu Onwuibukwo family. It is essentially the story of Dr. Amilo Kanu, a detribalised Nigerian and patriot who will not yield to becoming a Biafran from his Ibadan, Western Nigeria base as a foremost medical doctor at the university. He is tricked home on the false news of his fathers death; where he is forced to go to Biafra to see things for himself. The state of things in Biafra his geographical ancestral home consumes him, and he is forced to change nationality. As he is wont to, he throws himself wholly into it, becoming the Director of Mobilisation and Recruitment, a job he does with so much admireable panache. His return to Biafra however does very little to change his previously estranged relations with his parents, as he remains largely alienated from them by work, and perhaps, by nature.Fatima, Dr. Amilos doctor wife from northern Nigerian, a product of an earlier Nigerianess, is totally irreconcilable to her new Biafra environment she isnt used to. This educated doctor of a liberated feminist kind, chooses to be alienated from her husbands people until she experiences a softening through the personal response, suffering and tragedy of Halima, an Hausa like her. Shes married to an Igbo, a Biafran whose losses of husband and children she will not allow sever her bond with her late husband, her surviving son and in-laws. The turning point however for the nutritionist Fatima Amilo like Halimas, is the point at which she loses her own first son in Biafra from the Nigerian attackers, she also loses her husband who upon the loss of a child, chooses to up his game against the killers of his son by moving from being an administrator in Biafra to moving into the battlefield against the entreaties of even the Biafran leader, H.E.Fatima, overcome by the kindness in material support given to her by Biafra, couple with a renewed understanding of the motivations of her husband against all entreaties, in the words of her husbands closest friend Akwaelumo, she has becomea fully fledged Biafran woman, as Biafran as H.E himself. It is such a conversion and transformation of this former sceptic and bystander that is the silent thrust of this novel; such that Akwaelumo wishes that Amilo Kanu the husband will be a witness to this sea change: Amazing woman ... What an irony that Amilo is not alive to receive his transformed wife .... So changed is she that it takes the combined pleadings of her close friend and father-in-law to have her return to Libreville where she has been engaged in restoring Biafra children back to health from kwashiorkor. The war nonetheless ends with Biafra losing out to a well-aided Nigerian side.In telling this story, Ikes narrator is so amazingly rich in information that it is difficult to tell if he should be seen as a journalist, a historian, or a researcher. A reader is overwhelmed by his big nose for news and information to its minute and most illustrative details. He almost seems a talebearer in its village and city colourations, understanding and describing things and situations that never escape his telling prowess. We however notice that the narrator is so close to the theatre of war, it sucks up his ability to be distant from it in his telling. We read for instance his sympathies for Biafra: It seemed that the vandals, having tried all the tactics planned for them by their overseas advisers without gaining an inch of ground, had borrowed a leaf from the tortoise (p166).As it is in every conflict or state of war, truth is often the first victim. As it is with the narrator taking sides, so it is also with the neutral-oriented nature of the profession of journalism. The narrator reminds us of how Radio Biafra behaves during the war. The daily War Report, a programme always anxiously awaited by every Biafran every day, had been off the air since the beginning of the evacuation of Enugu. The narrator observes all the same that the Radio has taken a discernible pattern: it was better to be silent in moments of serious military reverses than to broadcast lies. The people have however come to see No news had become bad news . And in fact where Radio Biafra ends is where on such occasions, the Voice of Rumour immediately took over....The narrator unwittingly gives us what must have been the true character of Radio Biafra in his postscript of January 14, 1970. Radio Biafra broke the onerous silence. The voice was unmistakeable. It was the voice which would have obliterated the entire Nigerian army at one blow if invectives could kill.So the narrative voice and Radio Biafra are as much victims of war, denying the required neutrality as every wars capacity to disrupt and destroy due processes of things.What one however enjoys so well in this narrative is the tonal emotional switches of the narrative voice and how it punctuates our feelings and understanding of the story. Brilliant paragraph openers like: Enugu changed hands with hardly a shot fired in its defence. Then Port Harcourt, the Garden city, was suddenly snatched from Biafra (p164). And then the rhapsody that follows the loss: with it went Biafras only remaining seaport and all the hopes of importing tons of ammunition and essential requirements by sea. With it went the only petroleum refinery in the country. With it went... and with it went Biafras last international airport (p164). Quite clearly, Chukwuemeka Ike is not just writing lifeless pieces of information, he is rendering moving emotive lines that not only gets at the head of the reader, but at his or her feelings also!The characters in Sunset at Dawn are difficult to understand as fictive without a feeling that they are personages of the civil war. They are many; and so the writer struggles to make them distinct and memorable. But how can we readily forget Duke Bassey the rich business man who after dumping his pan-Nigerian Agbada or Babaringa voluminous robe, from an old habit, cannot get over packing it together into a slim whole to enable him sit comfortably long after he stopped wearing it.How do we forget what the war does to his entire family as victims of family jealousy at the hands of a saboteur How do we forget Chief Ofo, the chief of Obodo who will not offend tradition even at the cost of his life during the war just because he must not leave his palace for anywhere else This cost him a beheading. Or forget the character of a war scene well-captured:it was at the front of the house that the war planes scored a bulls eye. Five Biafra Red Cross workers were killed; one of them who had been standing beside a pillar was neatly chopped in two. A woman caught running down the external staircase had been disembowelled, and fell with her intestines spread over the staircase....No doubt, Chukwuemeka Ikes Sunset at Dawn is a most comprehensive storyteller handbook on the Nigeria-Biafra war told largely from the defeated or victimised angle. It is a compression of history into a literary cloak.Ofili, author of The Weight of Waiting, has been the Chairman, Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA, Lagos.
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