The most famous images of the Biafran war were of children with distended bellies and haunting eyes, most often lining up at refugee centres and feeding stations. Even so, this is a passage that caused me some uncomfortable self-reflection as well. Richard can perhaps wriggle off the hook. Perhaps he had sounded surprised, now that he thought of it, but it was the same surprise he would express if a similar discovery were made in England or anywhere else in the world. It was wrong of Okeoma to assume that he was one of those Englishmen who did not give the African the benefit of an equal intelligence. It was the look in Okeoma’s eyes that worried him the most: a disdainful distrust that made him think of reading somewhere that the African and the European would always be irreconcilable. When Richard later mulls over the conversation, he decides that Okeoma is wrong to think him condescending: It’s typical of this fine novel that the scenario isn’t entirely black and white. But hasn’t he here just revealed himself to have the condescension and arrogance of the British colonial mindset? Has he been thinking of these people as somehow lesser than himself? Later, he will long to be accepted as a Biafran. Richard, who has been eating hot pepper soup, can feel himself burning up both literally and metaphorically. And when Richard says “what?”, he goes on: “You sound surprised as if you ever imagined these people capable of such things.”
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