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'CHILD
OF BIAFRA' CHILD OF BIAFRA is inspiring, challenging, horrifying, exciting, highly amusing, desperately moving and generally takes the audience on an emotional roller coaster, with wonderful music, searing archive photographic images from the Biafran War, and breathtaking true-life testimony from Ben Okafor. The audience will leave feeling inspired, angry, enlarged, motivated to commit themselves to being better informed about the world around them and to campaigning for peace and justice. The play also shares on a very intimate level the deepest emotions and experiences of Ben’s spiritual journey so that God’s Spirit will touch and delight and disturb and invade the souls through this performance – raising a challenge to all. Politically the play is controversial and unapologetic, since it addresses the unacknowledged genocide (President Nixon’s word for it in 1968) perpetrated by the Nigerian military machine against the peoples of eastern Nigeria/Biafra. "Child of Biafra" is written and performed by Ben Okafor and co-written and directed by Justin Butcher. * Songs from the stage production are available on Ben's new "Child of Biafra" CD (released 23rd July) which is available for pre-order in our on-line shop. www.planktonrecords.co.uk Featuring songs from the stage production, 'Child of Biafra' is the stage dramatisation in words and music of Ben Okafor's own childhood experiences of the Nigeria-Biafra War, during which he was a child soldier. These songs reflect the origins of Ben's musical career, his early childhood and his early journey through the fields and fortunes of war, and the influences of these experiences on his artistic and spiritual vocation to date. The musical arrangements and performances are poignant, earthy and acoustic based and truly reflect the African heritage from which they draw. The CJAM Choir (conducted by Segun Gilbert) add a further dimension to the CD in both their wonderful augmentation of Ben's songs and in their performances of traditional Igbo pieces. track listing: (approximately 58 minutes)
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