One evening during the lockdown, out of nowhere, my mum told us the story of her brother who fought in the Nigerian Civil War.

He was too young. They begged him not to go but he insisted and marched in with other young men of his time.

When the war ended, they waited. And waited. But he never came back.

The war had swallowed him whole.

There was something about the stillness of that Covid lockdown, the slowness it forced on us all, that opened up space for storytelling, for the surfacing of memories that had long been buried.

Listening to my mum explain her loss sent me down a rabbit hole, diving even further into history and self-reflection.

Chinua Achebe’s memoir There Was a Country, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, and raw first-person accounts from Biafran War Memories — and many more pieces of research, and photo archives were helpful resources.

But what stayed with me wasn’t the war itself—it was what came after.

A people lost 20% of their population to war, hunger, and disease. Their economy destroyed. And yet, from that rubble, they rebuilt. They restarted businesses. They began again. What Harvard Business Review would later call a relatively stable economy grew from the ashes.

There’s a deep confidence that comes from that kind of resurrection, a reminder that one has a deep resilience that has withstood the highest form of destruction. And that this resilience and capacity to rebuild from scratch is not an individual trait but a quality baked into our way of life.

This isn’t unique to southeastern Nigeria. You see it across Africa as well, in the legacy of Harambee in Kenya. In Southern Africa, through the spirit of Ubuntu.

But somehow, we’ve forgotten. And now, when we need to overcome difficulties, we often look outside for imaginations of the future when we should instead look within and remember where we're coming from.

In my new essay on Substack, I reflect on the patterns of how we’ve built, rebuilt, and pursued development time and again through memory, resilience, and a culture of self-determination and community.

If there’s one piece of mine I’d ask you to read and share, it’s this one.

​Please read it here and share!

Till next time,

Henry

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