Gulag Archipelago was a book written by a Soviet Noble Laurette of the '70s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I do not only have a rare copy of this work of opposition but also it's sequel, The First Circle!
I remember a discussion I had with an old Professor and writer of excellence with over fifty books in his repertoire. Somehow Sozhenitsyn was mentioned and I told him I had his books. He laughed so hard in dismissal and then challenged me to go get the books. I did, same day. It took him time to recover. When he did, he offered mouth watering sum to buy the books off me. Of course yours sincerely.... When I got home and told Madam the tale she could not believe that I did not part with the books for the huge sum offered. Of course I slept in the couch.
But the true gist is this, the famed author described how the huge Soviet Union was nothing but a Gulag, a prison that perfected all types of human degradation. Yet despite every prison, every Gulag, the people's will was never broken. For Sozhenitsyn who spent over thirty years in various prisons across the Archipelago, every attempt to break his spirit failed.
What even piqued his jailers, the government, wasn't their inability to break him but that despite their TOTAL CONTROL, even prison wardens still subverted the government by providing pieces and scraps of papers for Sozhenitsyn to write. Reminds me of The Man Died, the prison notes of Wole Soyinka.
Nigeria at fifty nine and infact all through these fifty nine has been one huge Gulag Archipelago.
While our homes and the streets have become prisons, have always been, we seem to have forgotten the special popular prisons of the past, our Lubyankas. Lubyankas for these generation DSS men and women was the major Soviet Union Gulag.
This Nigerian Gulag has seen it all. It used to be kirikiri Maximum. For years, when it was the pride of the Nigerian governments, it never broke the spirit of the people to protest. There was the infamous Ikoyi elites prison and ofcourse the Ikoyi SS detention center. The entire Apapa military camps at a point where all gulags. Yet the people's will remained resolute.
There was also Saint Obasanjo's special Island prison - Itaoke, inhabited by prisoners , snakes and crocodiles. These perculiar animals, definitely not man's best friends, were the prison guards. But we survived.
This DSS and this diabolic Government now with Abuja as our new Gulag, be rest assured we will survive you. And like the old witch, the Soviet Union that met it's demise in glansnot and perestroika, and freed the inmates of it's Gulag, this FULANDIA will meet hers sooner that later and the gates of the Gulag will burst open... Independence!
Oluchi Ibe
(Biafra Writers of Conscience)
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