Escape from Nigeria: A Memoir of Faith, Love and War chronicles the life of Angelina Ihejirika, a young mother who struggled to protect the six small children her husband had left her with while attending a university overseas, just before the Nigerian-Biafran War erupted in July 1967. When the Eastern Region seceded from Nigeria and became known as Biafra, Angelina and her children were marooned in the war-torn, famine-ravaged Biafra, her husband far away in school at the University of Fourah Bay in Sierra Leone. Neither Christopher nor Angelina knew if each other were alive for more than two years, the war cutting off all communication between Biafra and the outside world.
Then, an Irish nun in Angelina's village, among the few missionaries who remained during the war and tried to help Biafrans' who were being massacred and starved, asked Angelina what was gnawing at her soul. Learning of her fate, the nun set off a chain of miracles by asking Angelina to write a letter to her husband at Fourah Bay, which the nun would smuggle to Ireland via her own mail, then on to Sierra Leone. The letter would eventually travel around the world, finding Christopher in the United States, where he had gotten a scholarship from Fourah Bay for graduate studies in finance at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
In the U.S., not knowing the fate of his family had begun to affect his studies, and like Angelina with the nun in Biafra, Christopher too was sent an angel in the form of his college dean and mentor. After querying Christopher about his own troubled spirit, the dean got a few friends together in a desperate effort to locate Angelina and her six children if indeed they were still alive in Biafra, and bring them to the United States. It would involve recruiting both ordinary and extraordinary people, U.S. congressmen, and the leader of Biafra itself, and eventually raising enough money to pay for the escape of Angelina and her children from war ravaged Biafra to the United States in June 1969.
Product details
- Publisher : Red Sea Press,U.S.; First edition (April 26, 2016)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 162 pages
- ISBN-10 : 156902488X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1569024881
- Item Weight : 9.3 ounces