By MICHELE ALPERIN Special Writer
In 1966 Robert P. Criso, a social worker at Princeton University Health Services, arrived in the remote village of Ishiagu, Nigeria, as a Peace Corps volunteer to teach at a boarding school. It was a great gig — motivated students, camaraderie with the Igbo teachers, and immersion in a culture right out of National Geographic.
By July 1967, however, Bob Criso found himself huddled in his house with two fellow Peace Corps volunteers, awaiting evacuation orders as a mob gathered outside.
Mr. Criso and his colleagues did make it out, barely. “The able- bodied men eventually fled from certain death and the women from rape,” he says. He assumes that his students, of conscription age, were probably all killed during the war.
Mr. Criso has always wanted to return to the village but was told it was too dangerous. So when he heard about a trip with armed guards, organized through a group of former volunteers, he signed up, then added an escorted side trip to Ishiagu. Through his November trip Mr. Criso hopes to reclaim and confront the tragedy he lived through.
The civil war that engulfed Nigeria was also a tribal conflict between the Hausa in the north and the Igbo in the east, where Mr. Criso lived. A democratic government had been installed after independence in 1960, but it was soon followed by a series of military and tribal coups.
After an Igbo coup, riots broke out in northern Nigeria, and stories filtered back to Ishiagu of Igbos being hacked to death. Refugees flooded back, creating a panic. “People returned with horrific stories,” says Mr. Criso. “We never knew what to believe. Even with shortwave radios and newspapers, we never knew what was reliably the truth.”
Even after the Hausa students in his school had to be secreted out in the middle of the night, Mr. Criso did not follow up on the Peace Corps’ offer to leave. “I stayed because I was happy and felt no immediate threat,” he says. In case of emergency, though, the Peace Corps gave him a van, with instructions to pick up five other volunteers if the situation deteriorated.
Biafra seceded from Nigeria on May 1, 1967, and soon the reality of war hit Mr. Criso’s idyllic village. Two jeeps filled with Biafran soldiers pulled up to his school, announcing that it was closed and would be used as barracks and ordering students to return to their villages within 24 hours. Even the stalwart Mr. Criso was worried and, having heard nothing from the Peace Corps, decided on his own to pick up volunteers living in nearby Afikpo.
As soon as he hit a paved road, Mr. Criso noticed that all signs had been removed, in fear of an invasion, he assumed. At numerous roadblocks he faced distrust and paranoia from local militia armed with machetes or clubs made from tree branches. “They had heard rumors of whites serving the federal government as mercenaries and of white spies posing as missionaries,” says Mr. Criso.
Mr. Criso and his fellow volunteers, Tom and Karen, made it back to his house, but soon a menacing crowd gathered. After Mr. Criso refused to let people search his house, the three Peace Corps volunteers watched as two men rolled a 50-pound, rusted blue drum filled with kerosene and left it directly under Mr. Criso’s wooden house.
Karen became hysterical: “Bob, they’re going to kill us.” Tom was shaking, unable to move. Mr. Criso himself was envisioning a headline in his hometown paper, the Staten Island Advance: “Peace Corps Volunteer Killed in Nigeria.” “I remember thinking to myself,” he says, “‘So this is how I’m going to die.’”
Luckily a confluence of two events quieted things down. First a village elder got up on a tree stump, addressed the crowd, and vouched for Mr. Criso, citing his contributions to the community. At the same time, what had been a light rain became a downpour, and for whatever reason, the crowd thinned out.
That evening three of Mr. Criso’s fellow teachers stopped by to apologize for the mob’s hysteria, and they agreed to transport Tom and Karen to a train station so they could apprise the Peace Corps of their predicament. Mr. Criso decided to stay. “I felt responsible with the van and other people needing to be picked up,” he recalls. “I didn’t know if it was safer to leave or stay.”
Mr. Criso remained alone for another day — even the houseboy had taken off — until two military jeeps arrived, carrying Biafran soldiers and Barbara, the Peace Corps nurse. She quickly instructed him: “Let’s go — no packing. We have to pick up Dave. Everyone else is gone. There’s an Italian mail boat waiting at the coast to evacuate us.”
Getting to the coast, even under the protection of Biafran officers, was not easy. At one roadblock they were asked, “How do we know you’re not imposters?” At others the militia refused to let them pass, and Mr. Criso had to drive around the roadblocks, once under fire.
They did manage to pick up Dave and make it to the coast. “The boat was for any foreign nationals left in the country,” says Mr. Criso. “It was the last boat out of hell.”
Mr. Criso finished his Peace Corps commitment in Somalia, taught for a year on Staten Island, and eventually earned a master’s degree in social work at Rutgers University.
In the early years he communicated with Karen and Barbara in hopes of confirming his own terrible memories, only to find they had seemingly repressed the worst moments. His experience was later validated, however, by the Peace Corps director who had been told of their ordeal.
For Mr. Criso, confronting the reality of those years remains important, and that is what fueled his upcoming trip.
“I’ve been waiting to go back,” he says. “After the trauma passes, you begin to introspect. I couldn’t believe that it had happened, and I wanted to go back, see the school, my house, what it looked like now, and to see if anyone remembers me or remembers the story.”

