Africa and World War: Biyi Bandele’s Burma Boy
Burma Boy is set in the Second World War. Biyi Bandele presents the comic tale Burma Boy, a novel that tells the story of Nigerians that fought in the Second World War as part of the Burma campaign of 1944. In the novel we meet Ali Banana, a thirteen-year-old former blacksmith’s apprentice who lies about his age to join the army. He becomes the youngest member of the D-Section Brigade, a group of Chindits, an unconventional and quick strike special division whose job it is to go behind the enemy lines of the Japanese. Besieged with ambush after ambush and attack after attack the Brigade, led by the one-eared veteran Samanja Damisa, make their way to a British stronghold where from there a routine troop, a ‘floating’ exercise leads to a fatal conclusion. Bandele’s novel is inspired by his father’s participation in the war. His father, Solomon ‘Tommy Sparkle’ Bandele Thomas was once a proud member of the Signal Corps of the Nigeria Regiment of the Royal West African Frontier Forces in 1943. Burma Boy is dedicated to his memory.
Biyi Bandele combined childhood memories of his father's tales of "carnage, shell-shock and hard-won compassion" with biographical research into the lives of Orde Wingate and other Chindit leaders, and further studies of the Second World War's "least documented and most brutal theatre". Yet there is no whiff of the lamp about this taut, tense and utterly riveting tale of comrades-in-arms undergoing conditions of such adversity as to defy belief.
The novel has two heroes: Wingate himself, for whom the saying about genius being akin to madness might have been invented, and the scarred Sergeant Damisa, a veteran of Wingate's Gideon Force in Abyssinia (where he lost an ear in hand-to-hand fighting against the Italians), who takes the novel's protagonist, 14-year-old Ali Banana, under his wing. Bandele's portrayal of the manic, bearded, Old-Testament-prophet-like Wingate is as vivid and compelling as everything else in this novel. He prefaces the Chindit story with a graphic account of a suicide attempt by the (then) major during a bout of malaria in Cairo. Many officers who later served under Wingate in Burma may have wished it had been successful, since they were deeply offended both by his attitude to the wounded and his often unflattering remarks about their beloved troops. For every one who thought him a genius there were others who dismissed him as a charlatan whose strategy was not as original as he liked to make out.
But such historical controversies are outside the scope of this book, and Bandele's account of the way Wingate's sudden death in an aircraft crash orphaned the Chindits is absolutely authentic. As for the Gurkhas, they are known in the novel as "Thik Hais", from their constant use of the Urdu phrase for "all right", and feature only as sure-footed walkers who provoke the Africans' curses as the latter try to keep up with them on gruelling forced marches.
Ali Banana is one of the reinforcements flown in to shore up the besieged "White City" fortress against frantic assaults by the Japanese. After enduring weeks of bombing raids by Mitsubishi Zeroes and suicidal mass attacks on foot and by tank, "the stronghold had turned into a purgatory... being inside the block, or anywhere near it, was like being trapped inside an airtight canister filled with methane". When they set out on a mission, Banana's comrades are delighted to leave this hell- hole that is a paradise only for vultures and flies. But sadly for them, it is a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire. Burma Boy explores to the full the inhumanity of modern warfare while celebrating the humanity of warriors caught up in it. It gave the unheard West African Chindits a voice of their own.
CONCLUSION
It is clear that wars are not good experiences to humanity. It diminishes human integrity and arouses man’s animalistic nature to the extent of destroying feelings and fancy. In The Last Duty, we see Africans fighting each other against the backdrop of immoralities. Many people are victims of the war because of fabricated facts. The civil war in Nigeria provided a lot of traumatic facts in the development of this novel. In Burma Boy, we see innocent Africans as victims of wars they never caused. World War 11 was a training ground for blacks in the atrocious wars man had caused for himself. Although written several decades after the Second World War, Burma Boy reveals that the effects and experiences of war are not easily forgotten memories. It lingers because of the scares and the endless pains. Chimamanda Adichie wrote Half of a Yellow Sun, the story of Nigerian war, after three decades of the war.
It seems to be a new literary development. It is expected that these new literary developments will force writers to become more experimental in motivating character, in fashioning new techniques in the fictional use of history to portray the evil effects of war on ordinary lives, and more war novels will focus on the common soldier or civilian rather than the general on horseback. The great war novels in this trend deal with ordinary heroes such as the recruit soldier in Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice, and in Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, the man of integrity and the defenceless forlorn woman in Okpewho’s The Last Duty, and the ordinary country girl in Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. War has been portrayed variously as a heroic and glorious adventure, as an evil that destroys and kills, and as bringing out the best and the worst in individuals and societies. It has been described as an inevitable manifestation of natural human, aggressive instincts.
SUMMARY
There exists in almost every part of the world a vast body of literature on war. From the primordial tribal wars, the Greek/Trojan wars, the Israelites' wars with their neighbours, the Chinese Civil war, the American Civil War, the Vietnam War, World Wars I & II, the Nigerian Civil War - to the recent wars in Algeria, Sudan, the Congo, the Burundi-Rwanda Civil Wars; the list is endless and continues to expand by the day. Almost every society has one war story of some sort to recount in history books and in fictional works. War has been an ever- recurring theme in human affairs all through the ages. Myths, legends, epics and other manifestations of oral and written literature bequeath to us traditional stories of war in ages past. Many of the world’s notable philosophers, statesmen and writers have had one thing or the other to say about man and his numerous wars.
A tragic conflict such as war must give rise to stories because it is an event that is capable of altering the human situation drastically and completely. War is one man-made tragedy, a primitive monster, very ubiquitous and invincible even to modern man and his superior intelligence. Rulers prosecute it while political philosophers rationalize it. Even the law under certain circumstances justifies it. Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince (1513) – one of the influential pioneering treaties on political science – asserted that the principal duty and profession of a ruler is the prosecution of warfare. He recommended that the ruler should apply himself exclusively to war and to the regulations and training it requires: War is the sole art looked for in the one who rules, and is of such efficacy that it not merely maintains those who are born princes, but often enables men to rise to that eminence from a private station; while, on the other hand, we often see that when princes devote themselves rather to pleasures than to arms, they lose their dominions. And as neglect of this art is the prime cause of such calamities, so to be a proficient in it is the surest way to acquire power (37).