I Am Still With You

A powerful, personal investigation into the Nigerian Civil War by Nigeria's most gifted young writer.

Emmanuel Iduma has never met his uncle - his father's favourite brother, and the man for whom he is named. The elder Emmanuel left home aged 25 in 1967 to fight in the Biafran War and has not been seen since. The war lasted for three years, with young Igbo men volunteering to fight for a republic free from British and Huasa rule. Around one hundred thousand others who fought in the war share a fate like Emmanuel's uncle, but there are no official records of these losses ...The tensions that gave rise to the conflict remain live and sometimes threaten to bubble over; in this climate there are no monuments or graves, but instead a largely silent collective remembering.

The younger Emmanuel left Nigeria in 2013 to study in New York. As a result he is not fluent in Igbo, the language of Igboland where his wider family lived. But Emmanuel knows that he must return to this place, to make sense and uncover the truth of what happened to his uncle.

Combining memoir with history and travel writing, I AM STILL WITH YOU is a deeply humane and personal portrait of one family's involvement in conflict. Travelling along the route that was the heartland of the Biafran War, Iduma searches for markers that the violence left behind - in people's memories, in the land and in the ideals held by a new generation of young Nigerians.

Told by a young Nigerian returning from his place of birth, I AM STILL WITH YOU explores the unspoken mysteries of war that haunt this landscape and its people.