Читать книгу The Extinction of Menai - Chuma Nwokolo - Страница 7

Prologue

Notes from the National Historian

Nigeria Archives, Abuja

6th March, 1990

Today, six Menai children died from the effects of the 1980 Trevi inoculations in Kreektown. A half-naked procession of a few hundred men and women carried their dead twenty kilometres to the Sontik State capital in Ubesia. Police trucks arrived to keep order, pouring out dozens of armed men, but the topless mourners were tragic, not threatening, and they flowed past checkpoint after checkpoint, chanting Menai dirges, provoking sympathy from policemen and an unprecedented empathy from the public, so that by the time the six bodies were laid out by the gates of the Governor’s office in Ubesia, the numbers of topless mourners had swollen into the tens of thousands. . . .

No mass hysteria of this nature had ever been reported in Nigeria before, or since.

22nd April, 1990

An attempted coup led by Major Gideon Orkar failed to unseat the government of General Ibrahim Babangida, which had been in power since 1985. It was the bloodiest coup attempt in Nigerian history. Many of the plotters were from Sontik State in the Niger Delta region of the country, and the coup had been inspired by the feeling of exploitation of the region’s minority ethnic nations. After the failed coup there was increasing talk of secession in Sontik State.

17th May, 1990

Denying any connection with the coup of April 1990 or the secession agitations, the government established several commissions and enquiries to attend to minority issues, including the Petroleum Communities Development Fund (PCDF), the Department of Research and Cultural Documentation (DRCD), and a certain Psychiatric Enquiry by Dr. Ehi Fowaka. . . .

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