This article appears as part of the Lessons to Learn newsletter.

As many of you know, before becoming a journalist I spent more than ten happy and successful years teaching English.

In Scotland, that means having near total freedom to build a curriculum for your students and, influenced by those who taught me, I have always believed in presenting challenging literature and new writers that students might not have encountered before.

One such author was Chinua Achebe, who is best known for his seminal novel Things Fall Apart, which remains the most widely translated and studied novel to have come out of Africa.

But Achebe wasn’t just a novelist. During the Biafra war – a brutal and too-often forgotten conflict in which more than one million people were starved to death in a besieged and blockaded territory – he wrote poetry that was subsequently published as a collection entitled Beware, Soul Brother. Although many of his poems are extremely powerful, there is one that stands out more than others: Refugee Mother and Child.

The text offers a vivid and brutal snapshot of the plight of the Biafran people, distilling their suffering into the experiences of a young mother caring for a starving child “she soon will have to forget”. Amidst the horror of a refugee camp she holds a “ghost smile between her teeth” as she tends to the “rust-coloured hair left on his skull”, an act carried out “like putting flowers on a tiny grave”.

It is, above all, a stunning representation of pure love, dedication and dignity in the face of unspeakable pain.

When teaching this poem I would very often use a photo by Don McCullin to help students fully develop their understanding and responses. Taken in 1968,

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