The last duty, the last lesson, by Folorunso Adisa
Isidore Okpewho, to me, remains the most fascinating of all the Nigerian novelists who have written about the Biafran war. His remarkable novel, The Last Duty, is one of the most accomplished African novels of conflict and memory.
Okpewho was not simply telling a war story. He was distilling anguish into art. His mastery of the Queen’s language, joined with techniques perfectly suited to his themes, produces what I call a “fictitious truth.”” Within those pages lies the agony of womanhood, the plight of victims, the cruelty of witch-hunts, and the bitterness of rivalry.
As Drumbeat observed of The Last Duty: “Even an infant would have known what the woman had been put through… that what brought two men to fight with a machete over a woman was not a decent affair… that when that woman wept so long and disconsolately on the ground at the feet of her man, it was not so much from joy of reunion as out of a remembered shame. Inexorably, inevitably, the Nigerian civil war laid its imprint upon the lives of six characters (honourable and contemptible, guilty and innocent ) and nothing was ever the same again.”
That is the truth of every war: no one emerges untouched. Wars are never picnics; they are games of death. You shoot me, I shoot you. Victory goes to the one who fires first and most accurately. Where both are snipers, they end up together as corpses on the cemetery table of alien lords. War is no child’s play. War is no movie.
And yet, even as we look back at Biafra through Okpewho’s lens, we cannot ignore Gaza. There, in real time, another generation of women and children, guilty of nothing more than being alive, are being crushed under the machinery of endless conflict. The images of flattened schools, weeping mothers, and lifeless infants carry the same echo of Okpewho’s fictitious truth, except this is not fiction. This is our world today.
It is why the recent moves by Canada, the UK, and other nations to recognise Palestinian statehood are not only diplomatic gestures but moral necessities. Recognition does not erase the rubble, but it affirms the humanity of a people too long treated as political pawns. It signals that the international community must begin to imagine peace, even in a theatre of blood.
Literature, like Okpewho’s, tells us that war is not about abstract borders or slogans; it is about human beings, their shame, their survival, their dignity. The same lesson confronts us in Gaza: history will not remember the accuracy of missiles but the measure of compassion, or the lack of it, that the world showed.
War dehumanises. Recognition restores. If The Last Duty teaches us anything, it is that the scars of war last far beyond ceasefires. And if Gaza teaches us anything, it is that recognition and justice are the only foundations upon which peace can ever be built.
