This Thursday, May 30, 2024, I am supposed to step out to perform my self-imposed obligation, a 10 kilometer walk in honour of Bruce Mayrock for his service above self. The event has now become a yearly event since it kick-started in 2020. This year’s edition will however hold on Saturday, June 1, 2024 for some obvious reasons.
Born 1949 and died May 30, 1969, the story of Mayrock has not left my memory since I learnt about his activities and efforts to call the attention of the then world leaders to the plight the entire Igbo people, especially women and children were being subjected to in Igboland during the Nigerian civil war.
It was simply horrifying. Apart from dropping rockets and bombs on civilian population, starvation was also deployed as a weapon of war by the federal government. Tens of thousands of women and children were systematically wiped out in the process. Many of us who are over 55 years of age and who are alive today would have been among that number recorded as victims but for God’s grace and mercy.
Bruce Mayrock, 20, a student and photo journalist in his second year at the Columbia University, was so disturbed and worried that there was no end in sight to all of those atrocities and therefore staged a one-man protest to draw the attention of the world community to save the people of Biafra where even the ones remaining alive had turned into mere skeletons as a result of hunger induced kwashiorkor epidemic.
Mayrock was struck by anger and heartbreak following the perceived international conspiracy to overlook the genocide going on in Biafra during the Nigerian civil war. Women and children were worst hit by the hunger and deprivation that ensued. The entire world was not moved. There was no interest in bringing the carnage in Biafra land to an end, nor was there any discussion at any international diplomacy level towards resolving the conflict.
Meanwhile, on that same day, May 29, 1969, world leaders had gathered at the UN building in New York for its meeting covering a number of subjects on world affairs. Biafra was not on the list of those issues to be discussed despite its critical importance. One person saw that as wickedness and insensitivity on the part of those world leaders. That person was Bruce Mayrock. For him, it was a conspiracy of sort. To draw the attention of the dignitaries attending the UN assembly to the disturbing deliberate and systematic annihilation of people of Biafra, Mayrock set himself ablaze, with a placard on his neck clearly stating the reason for his action. Concerned onlookers and security men pursued him to a corner in the precinct of the yard, extinguished the fire on him and rushed him to a nearby hospital where he was confirmed dead on May 30, 2024.
Mayrock’s unexpected action leading to his death as recorded brought shock to the world. His action cannot be claimed to have caused the end of the war some seven months later, but it certainly caused the world to look at, and rethink Biafra.
In his book, Biafra: The Making of an African Legend, Fredrick Forsyth’s account of the activities that ensued in Nigeria between June and December 1969, for me, suggested that there were some efforts to help end the war. Indeed, those efforts resulted in the war ending the way it did, no victor, no vanquished on January 15, 1970.
In the thick of the civil war period, my late mother had taken me along to sojourn with her at Ufuma where we got engaged in farming activities. By November 1969, I found myself among those taking food supplies from a location at Ufuma in today’s Orumba North, to a sector of the war called Inyi Na Achi, some kilometers away, now on the southern part of present Enugu State bordering Anambra. Carrying these supplies on head, and trekking all the way from Ufuma to the war front was not a small job, yet the selected young lads did it with fun, completely oblivious of the risks associated with such operations.
These and other activities together with the engagement of young and under aged people in the execution of the war must have added to Mayrock’s concern and frustration. We create awareness about the supreme sacrifice he made, even as a distant and completely unaffected party whose only interest was on how to save the suffering children and women of Biafra including me.
Join this commemoration event scheduled to take place at Ekwueme Square, Saturday, June 1, 2024, starting from 7am.
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