A Day in the Life of a Child Soldier. I was a child soldier on the Biafran side of the Nigeria Biafra War, a war that raged during the last 30 months of the 1960s, a war that was described as Africa’s bloodiest war, and a war in which one in fifteen Biafrans died. My journey to my invention was a twenty-year long journey that began at a war front in July 1969 and ended, twenty years later, at the frontier of knowledge on the Fourth of July 1989. The turning point in my journey to the frontier of the most massively parallel supercomputer occurred twenty years before my experimental discovery of the massively parallel supercomputer that, in turn, occurred on the Fourth of July 1989 and occurred in Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States. In July 1969, I was conscripted as a 14-year-old soldier and sent to the Oguta War Front, Igbo Land, Biafra, West Africa. I was conscripted at gun point into a war that was on par with the American Civil War or the Spanish Civil War. I was the youngest soldier at the Oguta War Front, Biafra. That war turned my ancestral hometown of Onitsha (Biafra) into Africa’s bloodiest battlefield. I arrived at the Oguta War Front and arrived a few days after 500 Biafran soldiers fell on the ground. Five hundred soldiers fell as if they were dry leaves. I was conscripted to replace one of the 500 men that died. At the Oguta War Front of Biafra, they were more guns than pens. That 30-month-long war ended on July 15, 1970 and ended with the defeat of Biafra. In mid-1968, my postal address was the refugee camp at Saint Joseph’s Secondary School, Awka-Etiti, Biafra. My family of nine lived in a tiny classroom of Saint Joseph’s Secondary School. In Biafra, West Africa, all schools were closed from June 1967 through early 1970. Schools in Biafra were closed because they were either located at the war front or closed so that refugees like those of us that fled from Asaba and Onitsha could live in its classrooms. In Biafra, all school classrooms were reconfigured as living spaces for refugees and soldiers. The refugees at Saint Joseph’s had no chairs, no tables, no beds. Refugees slept on a mat that was spread across a concrete floor and many slept on bare floors. My father, Nnaemeka James Emeagwali, who was appointed our refugee camp nurse, said that most refugee children, including my youngest brother, had kwashiorkor. Kwashiorkor is a nutritional disorder that is caused by the lack of protein. Kwashiorkor was prevalent in famine stricken Biafra. At Saint Joseph’s Refugee Camp, there were days I only ate palm kernels and fried cassava flakes called garri. By mid-1970, and six months after the war has ended, I was still living in refugee quarters along Port Harcourt Road, Fegge, Onitsha, East Central State (Nigeria). Each morning, I took an empty bucket to fetch water from the eastern bank of the River Niger. Port Harcourt Road was a short walk from the banks of the River Niger. Fast forward four years from that refugee quarters in Fegge (Onitsha), I was in Monmouth, Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. 2.7.5 Philip Emeagwali Religion I was asked: “What were the religious influences on your contributions to science?”

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

Transcript

Related