Written, composed and read by Louis Chude-Sokei
You are listening to the national anthem of a country that no longer exists. According to my late mother who survived its rise and fall, this country was murdered. It was called Biafra, and I was born there the month war officially began, July 1967. The murderer was the Nigerian Government, freshly independent from the British Empire in 1960 but still dependent on it, hence the support it got from their former colonial masters. This civil war ended in 1970.
Called “Africa’s first televised war,” the violence was targeted against my ethnic group, the Igbo people from East and Southeastern Nigeria. The National army triggered the war via a series of brutal pogroms throughout the North. Thousands of Igbos were massacred. The Igbos then seceded in the East. The National Government declared starvation a weapon, setting up a blockade, preventing food, charity, and medicine from reaching the new Nation. Up to two million died, mostly children.
It was not the first genocide in Africa. That would be the genocide of the Namaqua and Herrero peoples by the German Military between 1904-1907 in colonial Namibia. Much of what would be deployed during World War II was first present in this earlier mass violence—for example, concentration camps, medical experiments and new technologies. This is why it is not too much to claim that genocides inform each other, expand each other’s possibilities and make recurrence seemingly eternal.
My mother escaped to Gabon with me strapped to her back, and then to Jamaica where she was originally from. Jamaica is where I learned to listen, particularly to echoes. To voices lost but not forgotten. And it was Jamaican sound culture that inspired my practice of listening.
This practice was the reason I was invited to talk in Nuremberg, Germany in 2019. The chance to listen to the architecture of fascism in its monumental spaces was irresistible, though I initially balked at the opportunity. It was not my diaspora. But just as all genocides inform each other, all diasporas intersect. And Nuremberg produced echoes that engulf us still. If the state owns the ruins, we own the echoes and echoes implicate all of us.
I made several trips to Nuremberg, cherishing my status as outsider and eavesdropper. The challenge of listening to its Nazi architecture wasn’t technical. Nor was it political. Germany’s still-fraught relationship to its recent history was evidenced by an elaborate, state sponsored culture of memory. I had much respect for that. My challenge was racial and ethnic. As a Black listener, an Igbo listener, my motives could too easily be assumed as rooted in resistance. But “resistance” as well as “protest” are often obligatory and compulsory for people like me, and so they can become burdensome expectations and fashionable cliches. I work towards something more than merely symbolic and empty gestures that drown out memory or distort political activity. After all, history sides with no one.
So, what to do with echoes?
My first attempts in Nuremberg featured me listening to the ruins, for their history and of course for its present—which try as the city might, has never been erased or rendered mundane. Even the American fast-food joint at the Nuremberg Parade Grounds vibrates eerily, no doubt due to the still visible National Socialist signs behind the corporate logo. Perhaps out of humility, my approaches were passive. It was one of my collaborators, the African American sound artist, Keith Obadike (also of Igbo descent) who suggested that Nuremburg could be instead a place to listen from.
Listening became easy after discovering the space in Nuremburg with the most incredible chaos of echoes: the “Golden Halle,” or Hitler’s “Golden Chamber.” This massive, yet intimate marble and gilt sequence of rooms lay behind the platform where Adolph Hitler delivered his iconic speeches. The rooms were where he met with dignitaries and high-ranking figures. There, just a word or whisper carried far and returned at times louder than the source.
On my final trip to Nuremberg, I decided to use the Golden Chamber as a receiver. I listened to the voices of Igbo resistance, from there, singing their National Anthem, found on an ancient and ragged vinyl record in my mother’s collection pulled from the ruins of the Nigerian Civil War. The lyrics were written by Nnamdi Azikiwe who became the first Nigerian Head of State. The melody was appropriated from Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’s nationalist tone-poem, “Finlandia,” by the leader of the Biafran army, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu.
I allowed dead voices to succumb to the dense tapestry of echoes that rendered them muffled and inaudible but always potent, in the way that anthems are meant to be. Felt as much as understood. To allow echoes to become central is to allow space to reshape the moment of utterance, to be stained by traces of the past. That too I learned in Jamaica.
Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, known as the King of the Igbos even though Igbos famously have no kings, was my Godfather. I was lucky to spend time with him a few years before he died. He did what he always did when we were together, kept insisting that there must be a way for me to return permanently to Nigeria. On my last visit he’d figured it out. Because I’d become a writer, I could take up his dream of a memorial for the millions of Igbos killed due to the War. The challenge would be the resistance of the government, ever worried about the divisiveness of those memories and his still significant political power. The fact that a new, radical Biafra movement had triggered the government to violent action was also on his mind.
But in listening from Nuremberg, I began to wonder if a sonic monument would be possible. One that because it was crafted entirely in sound could evade the censorship and anxieties of the government. One that could be as powerful and enduring as brick, marble and stone. This recording, stained by the echoes of The Third Reich, overwhelmed by the distorted echoes of voices that refuse to be forgotten and the ambient sounds of Hitler’s rooms and of Nuremberg itself, this recording is the first stone towards such an edifice.
Land of the Rising Sun.
Land of the rising sun, we love and cherish,
Beloved homeland of our brave heroes;
We must defend our lives or we shall perish,
We shall protect our hearts from all our foes;
But if the price is death for all we hold dear,
Then let us die without a shred of fear.
Hail to Biafra, consecrated nation,
O fatherland, this be our solemn pledge:
Defending thee shall be a dedication,
Spilling our blood we’ll count a privilege;
The waving standard which emboldens the free
Shall always be our flag of liberty.
We shall emerge triumphant from this ordeal,
And through the crucible unscathed we’ll pass;
When we are poised the wounds of battle to heal,
We shall remember those who died in mass;
Then shall our trumpets peal the glorious song
Of victory we scored o’er might and wrong.
Oh God, protect us from the hidden pitfall,
Guide all our movements lest we go astray;
Give us the strength to heed the humanist call:
To give and not to count the cost’ each day;
Bless those who rule to serve with resoluteness,
To make this clime a land of righteousness.
*Made with Processed field recordings, Biafra anthem taken from original 1968 vinyl recording and speeches by Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu.
(c) 2026 Louis Chude-Sokei