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Perhaps you were not even born or perhaps merely a baby during the World War Two, 1939-45. But I can proudly tell you that I was six years old when the war broke out in September 1939. I was at my last year in what was then called infant school, hoping to go the primary school in January 1940.

In March 1940, we suddenly received a visitor at our village school. He was a white man, dressed in a white shirt and brown shorts. He was wearing a heavy oblong-shaped helmet on top of his head. He was also wearing shoes and long brown socks that looked like they were folded backwards down his legs. A tobacco pipe was tucked inside the socks between his legs. Our headmaster assembled the whole school to receive this very important visitor.

This white man, whom I later learnt to be the D.O (District Officer) from Nnewi, the headquarters of Nnewi district in the then Onitsha province of Eastern Nigeria. The D.O started to speak to us about the war and the headmaster was translating all he said to us in Igbo. The D.O said that the war had broken out between Britain and Germany and that everybody was required to contribute something to the war efforts to enable Britain to win the war. Our own task was to go to the bush and gather palm fruits and palm kernels which we would crack and sell to the Niger Company at Onitsha. The palm fruits at that time were overripe and fallen from the trees because the young men attending them had either joined the army or were engaged in other essential activities.
After we had gathered the kernels, the headmaster taught us a song that we sang as we crack them, which ran as follows:-

Piam piam piam ka'yi n'eti a---ku
Ayi genweta ozo ayi g'ele
Ayi geti ya mgbe nile
Ayi geti ka akpa 'yi we ju
Ka'yi we nye aka nidinotu merie agha!
Piam piam piam…

The English translation goes like this:

Piam piam piam we crack the ker---nels
So that we get more to sell
We crack them all the time
We crack them 'till our bags are full
Just to help the Allied Nations win the war!
Piam piam piam….

One day, as we were returning from this palm kernels gathering expedition, army trucks full of soldiers were passing through the trunk road from Onitsha to Port-Harcourt for hours on end. The convoy might have come from Kaduna in northern Nigeria or from Enugu which was the regional capital of Eastern Nigeria. The soldiers were singing merrily as the passed through our village and we started to wave at them. Suddenly one of them threw something near the bush where we were standing and we rushed to search for what had been thrown to us.

"Here it is," said one of the boys.

"What is it?" I asked.

"It is cond beef," he replied.

"What is cond beef ?" I asked.

"I don't know but it is clearly written on the tin, C O R N E D B E E F, cond beef," he spelt out loudly, at least to show that he had mastered his spellings in English.

"OK let's take it to our teacher."

On our return to the school, we showed our booty to the teacher. "Oh yes this is corned beef. Corned beef is made from cow meat mixed with some herbs and oil to prevent it from decay. You can buy it from the Niger Company or G B Olivant at Onitsha if you have the money. How did you come about this?"

"It was thrown to us by the soldiers passing through the trunk road," the boy replied. "It is a good gesture from the soldiers and it will cause no harm. There is a little hole at the side where you fix in an iron to open it. Unfortunately, this iron has fallen off. Wait a minute." He went to the school store, fetched a medium-sized nail, and opened the tin there and then. He shared it amongst the pupils and it was the first time I tasted corned beef in my life.

At home, my parents were very proud that they had sent me to the Mission School. My father would boast amongst his colleagues at the slightest opportunity that he had sent his son to school despite the prevailing hardships caused by the war. That made them jealous and even encouraged them to send theirs too.

On Friday evenings, my mother would prepare some oranges, bananas, coconuts and vegetables which we would take to Onitsha and sell at the Allahambra market. Allahambra was a big German company, which had been allotted a piece of land at Onitsha to set up their company there. But when the war broke out the Colonial Government confiscated the land and detained the operators as prisoners of war. They abandoned the project and the empty land was used as a market place for people coming from the surrounding villages to sell their wares. Hence, it was called the "Allahambra market".

Anything that my mother prepared for the market would be taken to Onitsha early on Saturday mornings. Onitsha is 20km from my village and we always went there in groups. We would assemble in the house of someone nearest to the trunk road on a Friday night and start our journey at 5am. We would arrive at Allahambra at 8am when the market was in full swing.

After selling our wares, we would go to the Church Missionary Society (C.M.S) bookshop, 1km away from Allahambra market to buy our school books and stationeries. At the bookshop exercise books were sold at 2p each, rulers 1p each, English Oxford readers, book one or book two, 1 shilling each (if available), and pencils, erasers, drawing books could be obtained there as well.

In December 1941, I finished my primary ll at my village school and in January 1942, I went to Nnewi Central School, which was the only school that had classes up to primary VI in the whole of Nnewi district. That meant that pupils came from as far away as 15km to attend the school. In my own case the school was about four km away from my village, which meant that we had to get up at 5am and do our domestic work before setting off to school. The domestic work included sweeping the compound and fetching the water from the stream for boys and helping in cooking and other household chores for girls. Any boy or girl in the village who finished his or her tasks early and prepared for school would alert others before he or she left for school because we always went in groups. There was always competition going on amongst us to be first to be ready for school.

At my first day in the Central School, the big boys who left primary VI in December 1941 were being interviewed for military services by a new D.O, another white man. If the candidates were successful, they would join the West African Frontier Force (WAFF) which had its headquarters in Gold Coast, (now Ghana). There were no classes that day and we were told to come back the next day. On our way home we went into the forest and collected some deep-blue wild flowers. At home we ground them, squeezed them to produce a local ink, which we put into our old inkpots and used the concoction for our school work. It was not as good as the inks imported from England but because of scarcity, we used this type of makeshift ink throughout the war years.

In 1944, things were so scarce that the C.M.S bookshop started to allocate schoolbooks and stationeries to divisional schools rather than selling them direct to the public. One day our primary V teacher brought 9 new English Bibles that he said were allocated to our class of 31 pupils. That meant they should be distributed by ballot. Fortunately, only 15 of us could afford to take the Bibles at 2 shillings each. So the teacher wrote out 15 pieces of paper on which 6 were marked zero and the rest marked with nos. 1 to 9. He folded the papers, put them on the table, and summoned 15 of us to pick one each. When I opened my own anxiously, alas, it was a zero; I just broke down and cried loudly in front of the class.

The next day news reached my auntie Rosalyn, (bless her soul) who was the wife of a headmaster teaching in another school north of Onitsha. At about 5am the following Monday, my cousin Agnes came to our house and said that she had a message for me. "What is the message?" I asked. She was smiling and handed over to me a brand new English Bible given to me by Auntie Rosa. Tears of Joy started to run down my cheeks. When I arrived at the school the same morning, I was displaying my new Bible and when the pupils asked me how I acquired it, I told them it was a gift from the Lord.

1945 was my last year at Nnewi Central School. It was also the year that the war ended. One Saturday in June that year, I went to the Onitsha main market to buy my school needs. As we were coming out of the main market, we saw a van with a loudspeaker announcing that the war had ended and that Adolf Hitler had been captured. He would be brought to Nigeria in a cage for every one to see this monster. I began to wonder how this white man would look in a cage. The news spread like wild fire and everyone looked forward to see the monster Hitler brought to Africa in a cage. My expectation was still very high up to early 1946, in my first year at the Secondary School in Onitsha. But that never materialised.

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