Chinwe Uwatse

Biafran Survivor


Chinwe Uwatse, 40

The child -- Understanding what happens when grown ups play with guns.

Name: Chinwe Uwatse
Occupation before the war: Child / Present: Artist and General Manager of Bang and Olufsen
Age when war started: 7 / Present: 40
Marital Status: Not Applicable / Present: Married (Known as Chinwe Uwatse)
Number of Children: None / Present: None
Place of Residence: Port Harcourt (also known as Garden City) / Present: Lagos
Reason of Relocation: War

In 1967, Chinwe Uwatse was 7 years old and in Primary 3. Then, her older brother was 9 years old and her younger brother was 1 years old. Her youngest brother was born in 1968 in Port Harcourt during the war. Also in 1968, her family left Port Harcourt to a village near Owerri called Mbieri. Her family stayed in Mbieri for a few months and moved to another village, Urualla because the Nigerian soldiers had advanced into Mbieri. Her family remained in Urualla until the war ended in January 1970. During the war, Chinwe's father worked as a civil servant with the Biafran Civil Service. Her mother enrolled them in an Igbo speaking schoolwhere she was a school teacher and she remains so till today. Chinwe remembered that as a child growing up in Biafra, she heard a lot of air raid. The air raid became part of her psyche that even after the war ended, whenever she heard an airplane, she would immediately take cover. It took a year to get that out of her system.

Reflection: It is like "A person crying inside the belly"

Venue of Interview: I spoke to her in her home in Lekki, Lagos while she was preparing the supper.

At a tender age of seven when most children are preoccupied with playing with their friends and bragging about their latest accomplishment, which might be getting their parents to take them to an amusement park, war is the last thing on their mind. That was not the case for Chinwe Uwatse. Perhaps, one of the most crucial development for children, she had to grow up fast and taste a bit of the adult world that is often time not rosy. Her family moved around a bit during the war-- from Port Harcourt, Mbieri to Urualla.

Chinwe is forty years old and married. She lives in Lagos and is the General Manager of Bang and Olufsen. She is also an artist.

The impressions children get during their childhood can have a dramatic effect on them. Depending on the experience, the child would adapt in accordance to those experiences. In this particular case, I am not sure whether it was experience that made her an artist but one thing is clear, Chinwe Uwatse is a no nonsense woman who voices her opinions as often as she needs to. Uwatse's experience differs from all the women because of her age but at times, their stories seem to be similar to each other. Though her experiences differ from those women, they are still important. She was being cared for by her parents and her age did not warrant her to do all those things other women had done. During our conversation, Chinwe recalled the numreous moves from one place to another as an adventure and assumed that the family would return home to Port Harcourt at the end of it all. But that adventure proved to be a dangerous reality in which her childlike longings of home were shattered by bombs and shelling of the war. Her family moved far away from their home in Port Harcourt and ended up in Enugu. Excitingly, she remembered the lesson about the trenches and what people did when the shelling started. But during this time, she also said that when the bomb was dropped, it was scary. People were confused and did not know what was going on. They were running, trying to hide. A lot of people were separated from each other. Children had to look for their parents. Chinwe remembered this and other trying times. The war also disrupted their education but fortunately it was continued through the efforts of her mother who enrolled them in a primary school where Igbo was the language for instruction. That helped Chinwe and her brothers strengthen their language skills. The school was the best thing for her because it was there that she learned how to speak Igbo very well. At that school, some of the teachers also made mistakes which she knew the teacher did. But when she corrected the teacher, she would be reprimanded for her action.

After the war, her family moved to Onitsha. Chinwe stayed with her mother while her brother departed with their father to Enugu.

Chinwe's stories diverts attention from a woman's perspective to that of a child. It can be said that during that time Chinwe experienced a lot of things that her young life had not prepared her.

Audio Files

Uwatse's Story 1

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