I saw an old friend a few days ago at a conference in Georgia. He reminded me of a story I had forgotten I had told him, about the former president of Nigeria.
In the late 1960s, when I was a teenager, my best friend J and I determined that we should participate in the Walk for Biafra. Our purpose was to raise money for the people of the new state of Biafra, which had seceded from Nigeria and was under seige by the Nigerian Army. As the conflict had continued, the people of Biafra had begun to starve. J and I were deeply concerned by the photos of rail-thin, hungry children that began to appear on television and in the local newspaper. We couldn't imagine how someone could be so evil as to inflict this harm on helpless people. For weeks, she and I collected pledges from friends and family members for our upcoming Walk.
The Walk proved to be very long, and our feet were sore and blistered by the time we finished it, but we felt proud to have helped a suffering people to stand up against their oppressors. At least, in the face of the immensity of this horror, we had helped them a little.
Many years passed, and I became a Peace Corps trainee, studying fish culture extension at a Peace Corps training center at the University of Oklahoma. One day, a delegation of Nigerians arrived, led by their former president, Olusegun Obasanjo. They stayed with us for a few days. President Obasanjo had recently retired from office and moved back to his farm in Abeokuta. If I remember right, he was the first military ruler of an African state to voluntarily cede power to a civilian government. Now he was traveling in the US to learn as much as he could about US farming practices, hoping to bring the best modern techniques back to Nigeria.
Because the Nigerians took their meals with us, we had a chance to talk with them, and along with a few other trainees, I breakfasted with President Obasanjo on most days of his visit. Our conversations ranged widely, from current affairs and culture in West Africa (I was soon to be posted to Senegal), to aquaculture and farming, to philosophy.
One morning, I was startled to find out that he had been a Nigerian Army officer leading the siege of Biafra. I described the troubling news coverage of that conflict that I had seen, and asked about his point of view.
He explained what I hadn't known: that Biafra had seceded from Nigeria very soon after vast oil reserves had been discovered in that region. Naturally enough, from President Obasanjo's point of view, the rest of the people of Nigeria could not allow a small group to take the country's one substantial source of wealth and its best hope for the future. To his mind, the humanitarian tragedy in Biafra was deeply regrettable, but the Biafran cause was unjust and the fight against them unavoidable.
In the years since I was a teenager, I have come to appreciate the immense complexity and messiness of the human condition. I don't know enough about the Nigerian civil war, or President Obasanjo's actions in it, to say whether he was right or wrong. All I can reasonably believe is that he was sincere in his own point of view, and how, then, could I think him evil as I once did?