DEBUT NOVEL · FROM THE WATERSIDE
Stories that carry the weight of memory.
Comfort Briggs-Anigboh writes from Buguma and the waters of Kalabari land, fiction rooted in the Nigerian Civil War, written to remember and to reclaim.
Comfort Briggs-Anigboh writes from Buguma and the waters of Kalabari land, fiction rooted in the Nigerian Civil War, written to remember and to reclaim.
A "Pitakwa" girl shaped by the waters of Kalabari land and the energy of Port Harcourt, writing, at last, the story she long postponed.
Comfort Abiye Briggs-Anigboh was born in Buguma, in the lush, river-laced heart of Nigeria's Niger Delta. Raised between the waters of Kalabari land and the vibrant city of Port Harcourt, she came of age during the Biafra War, a time that split her childhood in two, and later shaped the stories she tells.
Educated in Nigeria and the United States, she spent decades as a journalist, scholar, and teacher before turning, at last, to fiction, a lifelong calling she had long postponed. Her writing is rooted in memory, sharpened by politics, and lit by the lyricism of everyday life.
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Told through the eyes of Boma, a young girl growing up in the riverine town of Buguma during the Nigerian Civil War, this novel reveals how war slowly upends everyday life, bringing fear, hunger, loss, and resilience to a child whose world was once defined by the rhythms of the waterside. Personal memory meets imagination in a deeply cultural telling of a chapter of Nigerian history rarely seen from this angle.
Boma knew that there had been a coup d’etat on January 15, 1966, and a few important people, mostly politicians, had been killed and that Nigeria had gotten a new Head of State, General Aguiyi Ironsi. It never really meant much to her except that she had to memorize the names of the new Military Governors. The former Premiers, Okpara, Akintola, and Ahmadu Bello were all gone, replaced by these new military officers. She learnt that the new leader in the Eastern Region was Lt. Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. What a mouthful, she thought, and certainly much more difficult to remember and spell than Michael Okpara.
The politics surrounding the first and subsequent coup, six months later, on July 28, 1966, was beyond her comprehension. All she heard were the rumors. According to the gossip mill, the first coup was meant to wipe out all the leaders of Nigeria who were seen as very corrupt and driving the country backward. The second coup occurred because no Igbo leader was killed as planned, and Igbos were rejoicing and singing Ewu ne ba akwa,1 by Rex Jim Lawson, As far as Boma was concerned, the coup made no sense and only meant she had to work harder at studying. She was miffed that she was still trying to memorize the names of the Military Governors, but now, barely six months later, they have been changed and she would have to memorize the names of the new set of governors. The fact that a military government, as opposed to a civilian government, took over the affairs of the country made no difference to her.
The first hint Boma had that all was not well in her world was when her uncle, Tonte, returned home from Kaduna with his family. He had lived and worked there for more than ten years, and rarely visited home. Yet there he was, with nothing but a few clothes and almost no money. She had overheard her parents discussing him. Then, a few days later, another relative, a cousin, Peter, who was a military officer, also showed up under the same circumstances. ’Brother,’ as the children called him, had never visited without wearing his well-pressed uniform with all the medals and shiny military boot, he always looked all spic and span in his uniform. Boma had once fantasized that she would marry a soldier when she grew up because ‘Brother’ and his fellow officers always looked so fine in their dazzling uniforms. Yet, on this trip, his clothes were worn and dirty and he was without his shiny boots, ‘Brother’ looked dejected! She thought something was certainly wrong, but she couldn’t find out what it was, because her parents always sent her out of the room when they talked to Uncle Tonte and ‘Brother’ Peter.
When she returned to school, she noticed even more puzzling incidents. During the first assembly, the Principal, Mrs. Dorothy Chukwurah, informed the students that there were some new girls in their midst who were refugees, they had escaped the pogrom in the North. Boma had never heard the words, ‘Refugee’ and ‘Pogrom,’ so she decided to look them up the dictionary. Her small dictionary did not have these strange words, so she checked in the big dictionary in the school library. When she read the meanings, she was horrified. Then she understood why her Uncle Tonte and ‘Brother’ Peter ran away from their homes in the North. Life must have been terrible for them!
The reality of what was happening around her hit home again when Beatrice Okoye, one of her best friends and classmates, confided in her that she may not come back to school the next term. Because Betty’s parents had lost everything they owned in the North, they could only afford to put one child through school.
Boma had not gotten over the fact that Betty might not be around for the next school term when she got another bad news. Ngozi Dike, one of the youngest and sweetest girls in her dormitory was being forced to quit school to marry a supposedly rich chief. He had promised to help resettle her parents! The day Ngozi packed her bags and left the school dormitory was one of the saddest days in Boma’s life. She could never get it out of her head that a girl, younger than herself, had to leave school to marry a man old enough to be her grandfather so that her parents could survive!
And this was because some soldiers did not kill any Igbo leader in the coup. Why should her relatives, friends, and colleagues suffer for the decisions of others? Boma questioned. Must people be killed for a coup to take place? If soldiers wanted to take over the government, why didn’t they just arrest the politicians and kick them out of the government houses? Why must Northerners start butchering Easterners as if they sent the soldiers to kill their leaders? Why must there be bloodshed? Why? Why? Why? Thousands of unanswered questions haunted Boma as the number of displaced students began to increase, and their stories became more and more bizarre and frightful.
Meanwhile, the school authorities, for reasons best known to them, would only divulge as little information as possible to the students. They told them that Nigeria was only going through a very difficult time and there was no need for anybody to be afraid or worried. In no time, the dormitory became a minefield of rumors, gossip, half-truths, and outright lies. The situation was further exacerbated by the fact that there were no mass communication media like radio, television, newspaper, and telephone. The students were starved of news and completely cut off from the outside world. Their only links were the letters from parents, relatives, and friends. These became their only source of news.
Letters were distributed only once a week, after breakfast on Saturdays. Impatiently, students began to count the days and hours to Letter Day. They would harass the Dining Room Prefect so that she would dismiss them early. They looked forward to the letters even though most of the contents were stories of personal tragedies or regurgitated bad news. A typical letter would narrate the demise of some relatives and the destruction of their properties in the North. Saturday mornings, which used to be full of good cheer, were now filled with cries. Girls, upon reading their letters, would throw themselves on the floor, wailing “Ha gbuola mo; Nde Hausa e gbuola mo.”2 It was doom and gloom everywhere; students ran helter-skelter, and they cried on each other’s shoulders as they sought comfort and solace. A deep sense of loss overshadowed the whole school, many were depressed, and the tragedy in the country affected everybody. Even those without relatives or friends in the North (and they were very few), were not spared from the horror.
It was then Boma realized that more than half of the student population in her school had parents living in the North. She recalled that when it was holidays, they would board trains going to the North (the school being located close to a train station.) Only a few of the girls, like herself, took the southbound trains towards Port Harcourt. The Northbound trains went to places like Kaduna, Sokoto, Kafanchan, Kano, Lokoja, Kaura Namoda, Nguru, Maiduguri, Bauchi, Jos, Minna, and even further North. The names of these cities had sounded exotic to Boma, and she often wished she could spend one holiday in the North with her uncle Tonte who lived in Kaduna, but the opportunity never came.
Boma was also intrigued that none of her friends whose parents lived in the North ever talked about visiting their hometowns or villages down South during the holidays. Although she loved living in Port Harcourt, the Garden City as it was called, nothing could compare with the excitement of boarding the engine boat at the wharf to travel to her hometown. Her parents took her either to Buguma to visit with her maternal grandmother, Nene, or to Abonnema to meet her paternal grandfather, Opupapa.3 They would journey by engine boats down the rivers and creeks to the delta of the River Niger. How the boat drivers were able to navigate the labyrinth of the delta would remain a great mystery to Boma. The boatmen did not use any maps or compass or any other nautical tool, yet somehow, they knew which tributary would take them to the home of her grandparents.
While Boma was pondering all these things, the carnage in the northern parts of the country continued, and more and more Southerners fled, leaving behind shattered lives and properties. The parents who were able to escape had to deal with settling down in their new places. Many of them struggled to survive, and being impoverished, they could no longer afford to put their children in boarding schools. In their scale of preference, eking out a living became paramount while the education of their children, especially the female ones, was no longer possible. Then a steady withdrawal of students from schools started, and as the students’ population dropped precipitately, Boma was alarmed that she might lose more and more of her friends as many more girls packed up and left their dorms.
Even as war loomed, and the country seemed broken beyond hope, the leaders of the country were immersed in negotiations for peace. While the details of the talks and peace efforts eluded Boma and her friends, the rumor mills continued to churn out stories and half-truths They heard that Ojukwu had rejected the leadership of Gowon because Ojukwu was a senior officer. Another story had it that because of the massacre of Igbos living in Northern Nigeria, the Igbos had decided to break away from Nigeria to form their own country, with Ojukwu as the President.
This talk of the proposed nation frightened Boma a lot. Afterall, she was not sure if the new nation to be formed by the Igbos would include people like her and her friends; Ekaete and Mmayen because they were not Igbos. When she asked her dormitory Prefect, Nkiru Kanu, she tried to allay her fear by telling her that the new country would be for everyone. Despite Prefect Nkiru’s words, Boma was not convinced because she remembered how some of her Igbo friends had derogatively called her “Onye mba miri”4 because she came from the Niger Delta. They had asked very dumb and annoying questions about her hometown. Some wanted to know if her people lived under the sea, like fishes; others surmised that people from the Delta lived on top of mangrove trees due to a lack of dry lands to build houses. Anytime Boma reported such stories to her father, he would laugh and tell her that her friends had very vivid imaginations. He advised her to invite one of them to travel home with her. But she was too young to get the necessary permission from any of her friends’ parents before they trooped back to the North at the end of each term. Even those living in Port Harcourt had never been to the watersides; they had never traveled by boat and had a morbid fear of water.
Boma also recalled that her friends always asked for her Igbo name and seemed perplexed whenever she told them that she had none. Since most of them had Igbo names like Ngozi, Chinyere, Amaka, Ifeoma, Chika and others, that were apart from their baptismal names, they pestered her to no end about the meaning of “Boma” and whenever she told them, they would tell her to go by the Igbo equivalent, which she refused to do. She could not understand why her numerous explanations that she was not Igbo and that her people neither spoke nor understood the Igbo language fell on deaf ears. Boma concluded that she was not Igbo and did not want to be an Igbo girl.
During the Christmas holidays, Boma and her family stayed back in Port Harcourt, no travelling this time around. Her father said he wanted to monitor the situation in the country. Everybody was on edge as whispers of secession became louder. So, it was a great relief when the New Year opened with another attempt at reconciliation. From January 4 to 5, 1967, the Supreme Military Council consisting of General Gowon, the four Military Governors, representatives from the Armed Forces, the Police, and other top officials, met in Aburi in Ghana to talk about the future of Nigeria.
Upon returning to school after the holidays, Boma and her friends repeatedly heard: “On Aburi, We Stand!” Although they had no idea about the origin or meaning of the slogan, it was the slogan on every lip. Not much explanation was given to the students, except that Gowon had reneged on agreements reached with Ojukwu in Aburi. With so little information, the rumor mills, again, went into overdrive. Some were saying that Ojukwu used his smartness to bamboozle Gowon, Ojukwu being an Oxford graduate while Gowon merely graduated from high school. One rumor was that Gowon had repudiated the agreements because he was no match for Ojukwu’s acumen. Another said that the Northerners who installed Gowon advised him not to give in to Ojukwu’s demands. The students also speculated much on a supposed March 31st deadline before the East would be pulled out of Nigeria.
All the talks and tales succeeded in making Boma very nervous and confused, especially because she could not really understand the complicated situation and there was nobody to answer the questions in her heart. Even her parents didn’t help her situation; they wrote her letters but never mentioned anything regarding the happenings in the country. Her friends were as clueless as she was, and the school authorities also revealed very little. The disconcerting state of affairs was enough to drive the poor girls crazy even as they only wished that whatever was hidden from them at that time would not affect them in the near future.
If Nigeria were to break up into two million parts, that should not stop them from continuing their education, right? After all, they had foreigners in their school, in her class alone, there was the trio of Iyabo Williams from Sierra Leone, Christiana Wilson from Ghana, and Michelle Ojong from Cameroun. If these girls, though foreigners could study in the school, would it really be a big deal if the Eastern Region broke away from Nigeria and became a new country? Non-Easterners would just be foreign students like Iyabo, Christy and Michelle. Oh! If only Ojukwu and Gowon would stop quarreling and say sorry to one another, things would be back to normal.
However, things never went back to normal. Instead, they became more complicated and so much worse that on May 27, 1967, news hit the school that Gowon had created 12 States out of the four regions. The former Eastern Region was divided into three States; East Central, Southeastern and Rivers. Going by the new creation of States, Boma realized that she belonged to Rivers State, her Calabar friends became Southeastern State, and her Igbo friends were East Central State.
Boma had always known that she was different from her Igbo friends. The Federal Government’s action sort of made the differences in the Eastern Region clearer, and it was a bittersweet moment. Boma recalled when she overheard her parents talking about the Riverine people needing their own Region, and now it had become a reality. At the same time, she felt she was going to miss being part of the Eastern Region because to fit into that milieu, she had become a little fluent in the Igbo language, not like a native but enough to get by. Although she would never be “Onye Igbo,”5 she understood more than she spoke and had passed her Igbo language subject. The worst part of the whole scenario was, she had to learn the names of the governors of the twelve states instead of four regions. “When will this confusion end?” she pondered.
Three days later, on May 30, 1967, the devastating shock that would affect Boma’s life occurred, and from that point, her life would never be the same again.
1 [The goat is crying] a song sang by Nigerian highlife music idol, Rex Jim Lawson.
2 They have killed me; the Hausas have killed me
3 Big Daddy
4 “Onye mba miri” means water dweller
5 Onye Igbo — Igbo Person
Boma's story continues from the waterside, through the war, and back again.
The past held in rivers, songs, and a child's watchful eye.
The Nigerian Civil War, told from a riverine town rarely centered in the record.
Fear and hunger sit beside tenderness, community, and everyday grace.
A girl's world upended, and rebuilt, one waterside season at a time.
Comfort Abiye Briggs-Anigboh was born in Buguma, in the lush, river-laced heart of Nigeria's Niger Delta.
Raised between the waters of Kalabari land and the vibrant, bustling city of Port Harcourt, she proudly claims her place as a true "Pitakwa" girl, shaped by the rhythm, resilience, and energy of the Garden City. She came of age during the Biafra War, a time that split her childhood in two and later shaped the stories she tells. This, her debut novel, is a return to that haunted ground, told through the eyes of a young girl not unlike the one she once was.
Educated in Nigeria and the United States, Briggs-Anigboh spent decades as a journalist, scholar, and teacher before turning, at last, to fiction, a lifelong calling she had long postponed. Her writing is rooted in memory, sharpened by politics, and lit by the lyricism of everyday life. She writes to remember. She writes to reclaim. She writes, finally, for herself.
Comfort joins Beat FM Lagos to discuss Boma's story, her own journey to writing, and how the Kalabari culture and memory of Buguma shaped a novel that reveals the Nigerian Civil War through a child's eyes.
From the Waterside as it's being read, shared, and talked about online.
Scenes from the From the Waterside book launch, readings, and performances.
Leave any question pertaining to her book. This circle is public, everyone visiting the site can read what's shared here.