Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War 9781847011442, 1847011446

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Writing Nigeria-Biafra war_PPC_33mm v9_B+B 01/06/2016 17:01 Page 1

Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Ogechukwu Ezekwem is a PhD student in the Department of History, University of Texas at Austin. Cover image: Niger Delta Militancy II. Mixed Media. 2011 (24"x30") by dele jegede (reproduced by kind permission of the artist © dele jegede)

JAMES CURREY an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com www.jamescurrey.com

ISBN 978-1-84701-144-2

9 781847 011442

Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War

The recent high profile fictional account by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Half of a Yellow Sun was preceded by works by Ken Saro-Wiwa, Elechi Amadi, Kole Omotoso, Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Chukwuemeka Ike and Chris Abani, and strongly convey the horrific human cost of the war on individuals and their communities. The nonfictional accounts, including Chinua Achebe’s last work, There Was a Country, are biographies, personal accounts and essays on the causes and course of the war, its humanitarian crises, and the collaboration of foreign nations. The contributors examine writers’ and protagonists’ use of contemporary published texts as a means of continued resistance and justification of the war, the problems of objectivity encountered in memoirs and how authors’ backgrounds and sources determine the kinds of biases that influenced their interpretations, including the gendered divisions in Nigeria-Biafra War scholarship and sources. By initiating a dialogue on the civil war literature, this volume engages in a much-needed discourse on the problems confronting a culturally diverse post-war Nigeria.

Edited by FALOLA & EZEKWEM

The Nigeria-Biafra War lasted from 6 July 1966 to 15 January 1970, during which time the postcolonial Nigerian state fought to bring the Eastern region, which had seceded as the State or Republic of Biafra, back into the newly independent but ethnically and ideologically divided nation. This volume examines the trends and methodologies in the civil war writings, both fictional and non-fictional, and is the first to analyse in detail the intellectual and historical circumstances that helped to shape these often contentious texts.

Writing the

NigeriaBiafra War

Edited by TOYIN FALOLA & OGECHUKWU EZEKWEM

Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War

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Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War Edited by

Toyin Falola and Ogechukwu Ezekwem

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James Currey is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) www.jamescurrey.com and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue Rochester, NY 14620–2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com © Contributors 2016 First published 2016 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library ISBN 978–1–84701–144–2 James Currey (Cloth) This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Typeset in 11/12pt Photina by doubledagger.co.uk

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Contents

Notes on Contributors List of Abbreviations Timeline Map of Biafra 30 May 1967 – 1 May 1969

1

viii xv xvi xx

Scholarly Trends, Issues, and Themes Introduction TOYIN FALOLA AND OGECHUKWU EZEKWEM 1

Part I

ON THE HISTORY OF THE NIGERIA-BIAFRA WAR



2



3

Connecting Theory with Reality Understanding the Causes of the Nigeria-Biafra War OGECHI E. ANYANWU 40



4

The Ahiara Declaration and the Fate of Biafra in a Postcolonial/Bi-Polar World Order RAPHAEL CHIJIOKE NJOKU 62

Background to the Nigerian Civil War

G.N. UZOIGWE 17

Ahiara Declaration: Polemics and Politics 5 The AUSTINE S.O. OKWU 81



Part II 6

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CRITICAL DEBATES ON THE NIGERIAN CRISIS

Beyond the Blame Game Theorizing the Nigeria-Biafra War BUKOLA A. OYENIYI 111

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Contents



7

Confronting the Challenges of Nationhood in Pre-Biafran Texts Newspaper Narratives on the Eve of War WALE ADEBANWI 130



8

Literary Separatism Ethnic Balkanization in Nigeria-Biafra War Narratives AKACHI ODOEMENE 166



9



Local Writers and Commitments to Ethnic Sentiments

OLUKUNLE OJELEYE 194

Part III

THE WAR IN FICTION, MEMOIR, AND IMAGINATION

10

Memoirs and the Question of Objectivity Revisiting Alexander Madiebo’s The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War and Robert Collis’s Nigeria in Conflict CHRISTIAN CHUKWUMA OPATA 209



11

‘War is War’ Recreating the Dreams and Nightmares of the Nigeria-Biafra War through the Eyes of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy CYRIL OBI 230



12

First, There Was a Country Then There Wasn’t: Reflections on Achebe’s There was a Country BIODUN JEYIFO 245



13

Ethnic Minorities and the Biafran National Imaginary in Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun MEREDITH COFFEY 265



14

Biafra in the Irish Imagination War and Famine in Banville’s An End to Flight and Forristal’s Black Man’s Country FIONA BATEMAN 284



15

Magical Realism or Science Fiction The Nigerian Civil War and Ali Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo ADETAYO ALABI 314

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16

Biafra, an Impractical Mission? Revisiting S.O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun and I.N.C. Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice ODE OGEDE 328



17

Neo-Colonialism, Biafra, and the Causes of War as Imagined in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra FRANÇOISE UGOCHUKWU 361



18

No, This is Not Redemption The Biafra War Legacy in Chris Abani’s GraceLand HUGH HODGES 380



Part IV



19

Gender and the Construction of the Nigeria-Biafra War Scholarship EGODI UCHENDU 403



20

What is the Country? Reimagining National Space in Women’s Writing on the Biafran War JANE BRYCE 423



21

Female Participation in War and the Implication of Nationalism The Postcolonial Disconnection in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra OFURE O.M. AITO 454

LOCATING GENDER IN NIGERIA-BIAFRA WAR LITERATURE

Select Bibliography Index

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477 486

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Notes on Contributors

Adebanwi, Wale, Associate Professor in African American and African Studies, University of California, Davis, holds doctoral degrees in Political Science and Social Anthropology from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and the University of Cambridge, UK, respectively. He is the author of Authority Stealing: Anti-Corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigeria  (Carolina Academic Press, 2012), and Yoruba Elite and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and Corporate Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2014); also co-editor with Ebenezer Obadare of Encountering the Nigerian State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Nigeria at Fifty: A Narration in Narration (Routledge, 2011), and Democracy and Prebendalism in Nigeria: Critical Interpretation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Aito, Ofure is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University, Lokoja, Kogi State, Nigeria. She holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Mass Communication, MA in Literature in English and PhD (University of Lagos, Akoka). Her research and teaching interests include African Literature, Gender Studies, Contemporary American Literature, War Literature and African Cultural Studies. She has attended a number of International conferences and presented papers and has been a recipient of an American Fulbright Summer Fellowship (2007). She has published several articles in journals, both international and local, and has chapters in books on gender studies and poetry for conflict resolution. She currently has on Amazon.com and Morebooks. com a book of essays: Female Identity: The Dynamics of Culture in African Women-Authored Novels. Among her essays is ‘The Poet as a Town-Crier*: Poetry as Conflict Resolution in Okigbo and Ojaide’ in BRNO Studies in English (2014). She is also the editor of HIRENTHA: Journal of the Humanities. She is currently working on a documentation of the ‘Edo Pantheon of gods, Rituals and Female Worshippers’. Alabi, Adetayo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, where he teaches and researches world literatures and cultures in English, particularly African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean. He studied in Nigeria and Canada and obtained his PhD from the University

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Notes on Contributors

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of Saskatchewan. Before joining the University of Mississippi, he taught postcolonial and international literatures at Millikin University in Illinois and at the University of Windsor in Canada. He is a former editor of The Global South, a journal published by Indiana University Press, and the author of Telling Our Stories: Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Other publications have appeared in books and journals. Anyanwu, Ogechi E. is Associate Professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University. He received his PhD in African history from Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He also holds a Master’s degree in International Affairs and Diplomacy and a Bachelor of History degree, both from Nigeria. Anyanwu’s research interests and focus have been on Africa’s intellectual history, criminal justice system, and identity formation with particular focus on Nigeria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of The Politics of Access: University Education and Nation Building in Nigeria, 1948–2000 (University of Calgary Press, 2011), and co-edited the anthology, (Re)tracing Africa: A Multi-disciplinary Study of African History, Societies, and Cultures (Kendall Hunt, 2012). Among other publications, his articles have appeared in several peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Law and Religion, International Journal of Social and Management Sciences, Journal of Nigerian Languages and Culture, Journal of Humanities, International Journal of African Studies, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History, Journal of Nigerian Studies, History of Education, and the International Journal of Igbo Studies. Anyanwu serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Retracing Africa, devoted to deconstructing the prevailing myths, stereotypes, and misconceptions held in the western world about Africa and Africans. Bateman, Fiona is based at the National University of Ireland Galway, where she teaches in the discipline of English and on the MA in Culture and Colonialism, and coordinates the MA in Public Advocacy and Activism. Her research has focused on Irish popular history and writing in the twentieth century, especially issues of identity, race, and modernization, as well as the Irish missionary movement and its texts. She is also interested in postcolonial writing generally, and specifically from Africa. She wrote her PhD thesis on Ireland’s foreign missions to Africa in the twentieth century. She co-edited Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2011). Her postdoctoral research on ‘Ireland and Biafra’ is ongoing: one article which draws on this work is: ‘Ireland and the Nigeria Biafra War (1967–1970): Local Connections to a Distant Conflict’ (New Hibernia Review, 16: 1, 2012). Bryce, Jane is Professor of African Literature and Cinema at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill. Born in Tanzania, she was educated there and in the UK before gaining her PhD in Nigeria. She has been a

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freelance journalist and fiction editor, and has published in a range of academic journals and essay collections, specializing in popular fiction, contemporary African fiction, representations of gender, cinema, and visual culture. Her current research focuses on popular cinema in different parts of Africa, as well as new publishing platforms and outlets for creative writing in Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria. She also writes creatively and is working on a memoir of colonial Tanzania. Coffey, Meredith is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation focuses on nationalism, globalization and resistance in contemporary Nigerian fiction. Ezekwem, Ogechukwu is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, University of Texas at Austin. She obtained her Master’s degree in History from the University of Texas at Austin and her Bachelor’s degree in History and International Studies (First Class Honors) from the University of Nigeria where she received the Best Graduating Student award in the department. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the politics of midwifery and reproduction in colonial Nigeria. She also works on issues regarding gender, medicine in Africa and the African diaspora, wartime medicine, international involvements in the Nigeria-Biafra War, and African Diaspora in the United States. Falola, Toyin is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Author and editor of over a hundred books, he has honorary doctorates from Monmouth University, Lincoln University, City University of New York, Staten Island, Lead City University, Adekunle Ajasin University, and Tai Solarin University of Education. His memoir, Counting the Tiger’s Teeth (University of Michigan Press, 2014) recounts the story of his life as a teenager. Hugh Hodges is Associate Professor of English Literature at Trent University, Ontario, Canada, where his research focuses on African and West Indian literature. His publications include ‘Fela Versus Craze World: Notes on the Nigerian Grotesque’, in Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (eds) Litpop: Writing and Popular Music (Ashgate, 2014); ‘Beasts and Abominations in Things Fall Apart and Omenuko’ (Ariel 43:4, 2012), ‘Marley at the Crossroads: Invocations of Bob Marley in the Poetry of Geoffrey Philp’ (Review 81, 2010), ‘Writing Biafra: Adichie, Emecheta and the Dilemmas of Biafran War Fiction’ (Postcolonial Text 5:1, 2009), and Soon Come: Jamaican Spirituality, Jamaican Poetics (University of Virginia Press, 2008). Jeyifo, Biodun is Emeritus Professor of English at Cornell University and Professor of Comparative Literature and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He was educated at the University of Ibadan

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(BA First Class Honours in English) and New York University (MA, PhD). He has taught at the University of Ibadan and the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, both in Nigeria, and at Oberlin College and Cornell University in the United States. He has lectured widely in Africa, Europe, North America, and Asia. He has also served as an External Examiner in several African, European, Canadian, Caribbean, and South Asian universities. Professor Jeyifo has published many books, monographs, and essays on Anglophone African and Caribbean writings, drama, Marxist, and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), won one of the American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Texts awards for 2005. The two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, coedited with Professor Abiola Irele, was published in 2010. Professor Jeyifo is presently completing a monograph on ‘Nollywood’, the national video film industry of Nigeria, and editing some documentary shorts that he has written and produced in the last few years. Njoku, Raphael Chijioke graduated with a first class honours from the University of Nigeria Nsukka and was Nigeria’s sixteenth Rhodes Scholarelect in 1992. He received his PhD in African history from Dalhousie University Canada in 2003. Previously, he had earned a doctorate in Political Science from Vrije University, Belgium in 2001. His research specialty is African history, politics, and culture, including the intersection between literature and African studies. He has also been working on themes related to international studies since 1997. Njoku is the author of Culture and Customs of Morocco (Greenwood, 2005), African Cultural Values: Igbo Political Leadership in Colonial Nigeria 1900–1966 (Routledge 2006), and The History of Somalia (Greenwood, 2013); co-editor with Chima J. Korieh of Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa (Taylor & Francis, 2007) and African history (2010); with Toyin Falola of War and Peace in Africa (Carolina Academic Press, 2010); and with Hakeem Ibikunle Tijani of Africa and the Wider World (2010). He has also authored 35 scholarly articles in international journals and edited volumes. Some of his awards include: Eleanor Young Love Award for Distinguished Scholarship (2006), Distinguished Research Award in the Category of Social Sciences (2009), Indiana University Library Residency Award (2009), Victor Olurunsola Endowed Research Award (2007), and the Schomburg Center award for Research in Black Studies (2006–07). Njoku is currently the Director of International Studies and Chair of the Department of Languages and Literature at Idaho. Obi, Cyril is currently Program Director at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and leads the African Peacebuilding Network (APN) program. He is also a Research Associate of the Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria, South Africa and a Visiting Scholar to the Institute of African Studies (IAS), Columbia University, New York. Dr Obi

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is widely published internationally. His publications include, The Rise of China and India in Africa: Challenges, Opportunities and Critical Interventions (Zed, 2010, co-edited with Fantu Cheru); Oil and Insurgency in the Niger Delta: Managing the Complex Politics of Petro-Violence, (Zed, 2011, co-edited with Siri Aas Rustad). He has also recently contributed chapters to the following books: ‘Oil as the “Curse” of Conflict in Africa: Peering through the Smoke and Mirrors’, in Rita Abrahamsen (ed.), Conflict and Security in Africa (James Currey, 2013); ‘Africa’s International Relations beyond the State: Insights from Nigeria’s Niger Delta’, in Tim Murithi (ed.), Handbook of Africa’s International Relations (Routledge, 2013); and ‘ECOWAS-AU Security Relations’, in James Hentz (ed.), Handbook of African Security (Routledge, 2013). Odoemene, Akachi holds a PhD in African History from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and is currently an Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Postdoctoral Fellow (2013–2015) at University College, Oxford. His current research focuses on African Social and Cultural History, Urban History, Ethnic Studies, and Peace and Conflict Studies. He was the Hewlett Visiting Scholar at the Population Studies and Training Center (PSTC), Brown University, Providence, USA (2012), and also a 2009 African Humanities Program (AHP) Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). In 2012–2013 he held the Research Fellowship of the African Peacebuilding Network (APN), Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the South-South Research Grants (the Africa/Asia/ Latin America – APISA/CLACSO/CODESRIA Collaborative Program) respectively. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and International Relations, Federal University, Otuoke, Nigeria. Ogede, Ode is Professor of English at North Carolina Central University and author of Helping Students to Write Successful Paper Titles (Peter Lang, 2013), Intertextuality in Contemporary African Literature (Lexington, 2011), Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2007), Achebe and the Politics of Representation (Africa World Press, 2001), Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast (Ohio University Press, 2000), Art, Society, and Performance (University Press of Florida, 1997), and Teacher Commentary on Student papers (Greenwood/Praeger2002). Ojeleye, Olukunle currently teaches African History at the University of Calgary, Calgary Alberta Canada. He has also worked as a management consultant in Nigeria, United Kingdom, and Canada. His research has focused on globalization, resource control, governance, development, conflicts and conflict resolution in Sub-Saharan Africa. He has published on such topics as reintegration of militarized combatants into post-civil war African societies, migration, and the African diaspora. His most recent book is the Politics of Demobilisation and Reintegration in Nigeria (Ashgate, 2010).

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Okwu, Austine (Augustine) was, during the last few years of the British Colonial Administration in Nigeria, an Assistant Divisional Officer. He was a senior diplomat in the Nigerian Foreign Service, serving in Nigerian High Commissions in London, Accra, and Ghana; in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania as Nigeria’s Acting High Commissioner and Nigeria’s first diplomat in East and Central Africa; and at the Embassy Washington DC. During the Nigeria-Biafra War, he was Biafra’s pioneer Special Representative in the United  Kingdom, Ambassador in Dar es Salaam, and Special Representative in East and Central Africa, achieving the epic distinction of securing two of the four recognitions for Biafra by African nations. Now he is an emeritus college administrator/professor at Bloomfield College New Jersey; Naugatuck Valley Community College, Waterbury, Connecticut; and State University of New York, Oswego. He has a PhD in History from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, MA from Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven and BA (Durham) from Fourah Bay College Freetown, Sierra Leone. He is published in learned journals both in Europe and the United States and is the author of The Igbo Culture and the Christian Missions 1857–1957 (University Press of America, 2009), and In Truth For Justice And Honor: A Memoir of a Nigerian-Biafran Ambassador (Sungai, 2011). Opata, Christian Chukwuma (PhD) is Economic Historian and Lecturer in the Department of History and International Studies, University of Nigeria. He is the author of many articles in academic journals and book chapters. His published book is Igbo Entrepreneurship: A Study of Night-Time Road Transportation in Nigeria, 1970–2000 (Lamb Lambert, 2012).His published research is on traditional Igbo economies; traditional medicine; risk and quality control management; slave studies; the role of incarnate beings, deities, and ontological forces in the regulation of economic activities among the Igbo; the connect between extinct industries, cultural practices, and women who through titles transformed themselves into men, among Nsukka communities. Oyeniyi, Bukola is Assistant Professor of African History at the Missouri State University. He has published on social and cultural history of Africa, conflict and peace building, Yoruba dress and identity, national and international migration of African peoples, and on African historiography. His recent essay on terrorism, entitled ‘One Voice, Multiple Tongues: Dialoguing with Boko Haram’, appears in Democracy and Security Journal, 10:1, 2014. His current research focuses on conflict memories, sacred spaces, and on the history and trajectory of the growth and development of the Nigerian state. Uchendu, Egodi is Professor of History at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, with special interest in women’s history and lately in emerging Muslim communities in Eastern Nigeria. She has worked as a researcher

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in the USA and several locations in Europe between 2001 and 2015 funded by the Fulbright Program, AvH (Germany), A.G. Leventis Foundation, and others. Her researches revolve around women in conflict situations, men and masculinities and their relation to women, African historiography and emerging Muslim communities among the different ethnic groups of Eastern Nigeria. Her publications include Women and Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War (Africa World Press, 2007) and Dawn for Islam in Eastern Nigeria: A History of the Arrival of Islam in Igboland (Klaus Schwarz, 2011). Among her edited works are: Masculinities in Contemporary Africa (CODESRIA, 2008), New Face of Islam in Eastern Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin: Essays in Honour of Simon Ottenberg (Aboki, 2012), and as chief editor with Pat Uche Okpoko and Edlyne Anugwom, Perspectives on Leadership in Africa (Afro-Orbis, 2010). Further details on her publications, projects and awards are available at www.egodiuchendu.com. Ugochukwu, Françoise, habilitée à diriger des recherches and a Chartered linguist, has been lecturing in Higher Education in Nigeria, France, and the UK for more than 40 years. An Africanist affiliated to the Open University, UK, a Senior Research Fellow, IFRA (Nigeria) and a collaborator to the Paris CNRS-LLACAN, with special interest in Nigerian and Intercultural Studies, she is the author of the first Igbo-French dictionary (a Franco-Nigerian joint venture), and of several books and some hundred book chapters and articles in journals worldwide. Her qualifications, professional career path, and areas of expertise have placed her at the crossroads between language studies, literature, translation, anthropology, and cinema. She is a member of several learned societies including the Chartered Institute of Linguists (UK), the African Studies Association of the UK, the Société des Africanistes (France), and a Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy. Her pioneering work in the field and her longstanding contribution to the strengthening of cultural and educational ties between France and Nigeria awarded her the national distinction of Chevalier des Palmes Académiques in 1994. Uzoigwe, G.N. (DPhil, Oxon) is Emeritus Professor of History. A widely published scholar and university administrator, he has authored and edited several works on modern Nigerian history including History and Democracy in Nigeria; Foundations of Nigerian Federalism, 1900–1960 (Esther Thompson, 1989); Inter-Ethnic and Religious Conflict Resolution in Nigeria (with Ernest Uwazie, et al., Lexington Books, 1999); Troubled Journey: Nigeria Since the Civil War (with Levi Nwachuku, University Press of America, 2004); Visions of Nationhood: Prelude to the Nigerian Civil War, 1960–1967(Africa World Press, 2010). he is a fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria and a former president of that Society.

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List of Abbreviations

AG NCNC NNA NNDP NPC OAU RAL UPGA

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Action Group National Council of Nigerian Citizens Nigerian National Alliance Nigerian National Democratic Party Northern People’s Congress Organization of African Unity Research in African Literatures United Progressive Grand Alliance

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Timeline of Nigeria’s Political History, 1900–1970

1900 – The governance of Nigeria passes from the Royal Niger Company to the British Crown 1906 – (1 May) – Amalgamation of the Lagos Colony with the Southern Nigeria Protectorate 1908 – German-owned Nigerian Bitumen Company begins search for petroleum off the coast 1912 – The establishment of indirect rule by Lord Frederick Lugard, Governor of Northern Nigeria 1914 – (January 1) – The amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria under the leadership of a governor-general, Lord Frederick Lugard 1923 – Clifford Constitution is created Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) is formed by Herbert Macaulay 1928 – (April) – Britain begins direct taxation in Nigeria 1929 – (November) – The Women’s War, a widespread revolt against taxation, begins 1931 – The Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) is founded 1936 – Nigeria Youth Movement (NYM) is created 1937 – Shell D’Arcy Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (later Shell-BP) granted rights to explore petroleum in the country 1940 – Northern People’s Congress (NPC) was organized 1944 – Nnamdi Azikiwe “Zik” founds the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroun (NCNC) 1945 – A countrywide general strike as a result of government’s refusal to review its African workers’ welfare package First Ten-Year Plan for economic development adopted 1946 – Nigeria experiences growing nationalist sentiments Promulgation of Richards’ Constitution Richards’ Constitution splits the Southern Region into Eastern Region and Western Region

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1950 – McPherson’s Constitution comes into effect Aminu Kano, one of the founders of NPC breaks away to found the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU). NEPU forms a parliamentary alliance with NCNC Intensification of ethnic cleavages in Nigeria’s political scene throughout the 1950s 1951 – The National Council of Nigeria and the Camerouns (NCNC) proposes independence by 1956 (March 21) – Action Group (AG) is founded by Obafemi Awolowo 1953 – (March 31) The motion for independence by 1956 proposed in the House of Representatives by Anthony Enahoro receives support from the Action Group (AG) and NCNC; Northern People’s Congress (NPC) recommends a delay (May) – Kano Riot, a crisis between the North and South 1954 – The colonial government enacts Lyttleton’s Constitution that firmly establishes the federal principle and paves way for independence 1956 – Shell-BP discovers major oil deposits at Oloibiri and Afam 1957 – Constitutional Conference 1959 – The first national election is held to set up an independent government; the North wins majority of seats in parliament NCNC becomes National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) after Southern Cameroon opted to leave Nigeria and merge with French Cameroon 1960 – Nigeria’s first constitution, Independence Constitution, is enacted Tiv Uprising (October 1) – Nigeria gains independence from Britain with Nnamdi Azikiwe as Governor-General and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as Prime Minister 1962 – Action Group crisis Controversial census leads to regional and ethnic tensions (May 29) – State of emergency is declared in the Western Region and the regional government is suspended 1963 – The 1963 Constitution makes Nigeria a federal republic (June) – Mid-Western Region is formed 1964 – Samuel Akintola breaks away from AG to form Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), named after Macaulay’s 1923 political party Another Tiv uprising over self-determination (June 1–13) – General strike over workers’ wages (30 December) – Parliamentary election is marked by violence

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Timeline of Nigeria’s Political History, 1900–1970

and manipulations, bringing ethnic sentiments to the fore; NPC dominates the parliament. 1965 – Western Region election 1966 – (January 15) First Military coup; end of the First Republic (January 16) – The Federal Military Government is formed and Aguiyi Ironsi becomes Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Federal Republic Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu becomes military governor of the Eastern Region (May 24) – Unification Decree (June to October) – Massacre of Eastern Nigerians in the Northern Region and mass exodus of easterners from the North (29 July) Ironsi is killed in a counter coup and is succeeded by Yakubu Gowon 1967 – (January 4–5) Negotiations between the Federal Military Government and the Eastern Region result in the Aburi Accord (May 27) Nigeria is restructured into twelve states (May 30) The Eastern Region secedes and the Republic of Biafra is declared (July 6) Nigeria invades Biafra (July 14) The university town of Nsukka falls (Late July) Bonny Island in the Niger Delta is captured by Nigerian troops, putting the control of Shell-BP facilities in Nigeria’s grasp (August 9) Biafra forces occupy the Mid-West (September19) Biafran military administrator declares the Republic of Benin in the Mid-West, with capital in Benin City (September 22) Benin City is retaken by Nigerian soldiers (October 1–4) Fall of Biafra’s capital, Enugu (October 4–12) Onitsha is invaded (7 October) Asaba Massacre (October 17–20) – Operation Tiger Claw. Occurred in Calabar (November) – Relief supplies from the Red Cross are received in Biafra 1968 – (January 2 to March 20) – Onitsha is invaded a second time (March 31) – Abagana Ambush in which Biafran forces rout Nigerian troops (May 19) – Port Harcourt falls to Nigeria (September 2) – Operation OAU in Owerri, Aba, and Umuahia, resulting in Biafraan victory (November 15) – Operation Hiroshima, a failed attempt by Biafran troops to recapture Onitsha 1969 – (April 22) – The new Biafran capital, Umuahia, falls (April 25) – Biafra regains Owerri

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(May) – Expatriate personnel are captured in Kwale oilfield (June 1) – Ojukwu’s Ahiara Declaration, setting out the principles of the Biafran revolution (November 25) – John Lennon returns his Member of the Order of the British Empire (M.B.E) decoration to Queen Elizabeth II in protest against British involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra war (December 23) – A major push by Nigerian forces splits the Biafran territory into two 1970 – (January 7) – Final Nigerian offensive, Operation Tail-Wind, is launched (January 9) – Owerri is captured by federal troops Ojukwu hands over power to his second in command, Philip Effiong, and leaves for Ivory Coast (January 11) – Uli, Biafra’s airport town, falls (January 15) – Biafra surrenders; the war ends

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Map of Biafra 30 May 1967 – 1 May 1969 (drawn by and reproduced by kind permission of Joseph Sloop and Pam Hurst)

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Scholarly Trends, Issues, and Themes Introduction Toyin Falola and Ogechukwu Ezekwem

An Intellectual History? The central premise of intellectual history is that ideas do not exist in isolation but are shaped by the lives and outlooks of the people who created them as well as the cultural, social, political, and historical contexts in which they were produced. It is not just a study of intellectuals but of their opinions and the specific time and space that influenced their views. Its distinctiveness lies in the aspect of the past that it aims to illuminate, rather than the possession of any exclusive evidence. For the purposes of this book, we examine specific authors as well as particular themes and trajectories in the Nigeria-Biafra literature. Civil wars are prime candidates for intellectual analyses because they are in themselves contentious and cannot be abstracted from their historical setting. They also resist reifications and extend into technical discourses and non-expert exchanges. Analysing the Nigeria-Biafra war literature within the parameters of its social, political, and cultural contexts provide insight into the bases of the strife that plague this historical event and its consequent body of knowledge. The Nigeria-Biafra War, which lasted from 1967 to 1970, has remained a divisive issue in Nigeria and in scholarly circles. There is a plethora of literature on the war; yet, no book has comprehensively analysed the nature, background, and sentiments that shaped the construction of these often contentious texts. This kind of analysis is especially crucial because war literatures are shaped by various experiences, group affiliations, and biases. In chronicling warfare, writers, historians, chroniclers, combatants, and victims, among others, are confronted with making sense of war, the shades of violence associated with it, and the overall consequences. The literatures also deal with the problem of apportioning blame, giving voice to trauma, and evaluating the war’s overall impact. There is also the difficult issue of trauma and memory, which shape narratives of war-related experiences. Many cultures and individuals who experienced traumatic events during wartime suppress these memories in their efforts to cope. Writers are, thus, not only faced with these silences but also the physical impact on their subjects who relive their 1

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experiences in the process of recounting it. Then, there is the problem of data analysis. There are those silences or manipulations that result from the inclination to bend stories to suit the agendas of government and other political groups. Records of wars can be manipulated by those with vested interests in presenting specific opinions and narratives. Historians and writers can also manifest biases in their interpretive frameworks. In many cases, writers’ accounts are influenced by their sentiments and affiliations. In the light of all the aforementioned problems of understanding and studying wars, this book examines fictional and non-fictional accounts of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict as well as newspapers and primary documents related to the pre – and post-war periods. Our goal is to determine and understand the nature of those fictions, non-fictions, and primary documents, and the circumstances that underlie their construction. Thus far, no book on the Nigeria-Biafra conflict has comprehensively analysed the nature, background, and sentiments that shaped the construction of these often contentious civil war texts. This volume, therefore, offers an expansive evaluation of the intellectual and historical circumstances that shaped the creation of Nigeria-Biafra war literature. It discusses trends and methodologies in civil war writings, such as the techniques that novelists adopted in fictional recreations of the war, the gendered nature of research and authorship on the war literature, and ethnic sentiments wielded in fictional and non-fictional representations of the war. The volume also addresses the pre-war foundations of the Nigeria-Biafra War especially in newspaper publications. Several authors connect narrative patterns in works of fiction to contemporary challenges and prospects in Africa. They also contemplate the limited analyses of events that culminated in the Nigeria-Biafra conflict and scholars’ approaches to critical debates. By initiating a dialog on the civil war historiography, this book engages a much-needed discourse on the problems confronting a culturally diverse post-war Nigeria. It is an intellectual project with consequences for our understanding of politics and society as they were shaped by the war. In Nigeria, the government controlled the organization of the civil war records, thereby curtailing the kinds of conversations in which the society could engage. Books that confronted issues surrounding the war were discouraged during the country’s long military regimes. Most books were, therefore, published abroad. However, fictional accounts became prominent in the period following the war, and they depicted the daily traumatic and socially destabilizing experiences of civilians during the war. The condition of the archives and the government’s treatment of the civil war affected the nature of publications within Nigeria, though the emergence of collections in foreign countries partially augmented these situations and pushed research on the war beyond the traditional ‘causes and course’ literature. Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War provides a reminder that wars are both political and

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human and should be approached from a cultural, social, intellectual, and political framework.

Historiographical Trends Books on the war can be grouped into fiction and non-fiction. The first category, though fictional, captures the war’s horrific impacts on individuals and communities.1 The non-fictional group mostly comprises biographies, personal accounts, and essays on the causes and course of the war. There are many publications by foreigners who had been in both warring camps. This collection of essays not only considers the course of the war but also draws attention to the war’s humanitarian crises and the collaboration of nations such as Britain in escalating the conflict.2 1

An impressive array of fictional works exists on the Nigeria-Biafra War. One that has become quite popular and subject to analysis is Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (New York: Anchor, 2007). It draws attention to women’s contributions to fictional accounts on the war. Other notable works of fiction, some of which are examined by various authors in this book, include Chinua Achebe, Girls at War and other Stories (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1972); Chukwuemeka Ike, Sunset at Dawn: A Novel of the Biafran War (Glasgow: Collins Harville Press, 1976); Kole Omotoso, The Combat (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1972); Elechi Amadi, Sunset in Biafra (London: Heinemann, 1973); Cyprian Ekwensi, Divided We Stand: A Novel of the Nigerian Civil War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980); Ekwensi, Survive the Peace (London: Heinemann, 1976); Kalu Okpi, Biafra Testament (London: Macmillan,1982); and Buchi Emecheta, Destination Biafra (London: Allison and Busby, 1982). Another group of fictional works focuses on certain individuals during the war. It is to this class that Ali Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, J.P. Clark’s Casualties, and Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died belong. Incarcerated by the Nigerian government for alleged collaboration with the enemy, Soyinka’s The Man Died is a personal account of his experience in prison. It is also a condemnation of injustice and corruption in the Nigerian government. Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo is a fictional account of a trial of the famous Igbo poet, Christopher Okigbo, who died in defense of Biafra at the onset of the war. In this trial, Okigbo is accused of abandoning literature and the arts to become a Biafran soldier, thereby betraying the vision of a united Nigeria. J.P. Clark’s Casualties is a collection of poems written in honor of the victims of the NigeriaBiafra War. 2 Some of the foreigners and journalists who published works on the Nigeria-Biafra War include Frederick Forsyth, John de St. Jorre, John Hatch, H.G. Hanbury, Geoffrey Birch, Dominic St. George and Walter Schwarz. Forsyth, a notable foreign journalist who published several works on the War and was a close friend of Colonel Ojukwu, spent most of the war years in Biafra. During this period, he was a correspondent for Time magazine and Daily Express, and he wrote extensive accounts of Biafra’s experience. In The Making of an African Legend: The Biafra Story, Forsyth explores the background to the civil war and reasons that prompted Biafra’s secession. He clearly indicates that his story is told from the Biafran perspective. He traces the background of the war from the colonial era to independence and post-independence. He casts Nigeria as an untenable British creation whose citizens soon discovered that their differences ran deep. He also examines the nature of the Biafran federation and gives an account of the war on the Biafran front. Another issue that he addresses in his book is the role of foreign nations, notably Britain, France, Russia, and the United States. Forsyth’s other book, Emeka, is a biography of the Biafran leader, Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. Another popular book in this category is John de St. Jorre’s The Nigerian Civil War. He visited both warring factions

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Currently, there is no comprehensive book on the intellectual history of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Some works that offer limited intellectual analysis of the literature are Marion Pape’s Gender Palava: Nigerian Women Writing War and Craig W. McLuckie’s Nigerian Civil War Literature: Seeking an ‘Imagined Community’.3 Pape’s book analyses fictional accounts of the war from a gendered perspective and compares male and female writers’ portrayal of women. She draws attention to women’s contribution to the Nigeria-Biafra war scholarship, a realm that was significantly dominated by men until recently.4 Similarly, McLuckie studies fictional accounts of the war and their depiction of Biafra’s nationhood. The literary works that he examines are Kole Omotoso’s The Combat, Cyprian Ekwensi’s Survive the Peace, S.O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun, I.N.C Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice, and a number of writings by Wole Soyinka.5 Through these works, McLuckie reflects on literary devices as a channel for art and activism, divisions within Biafra as reflected in novels, and the depiction of ordinary people in the war stories. Another work that has contributed to knowledge on the nature of the war literature is Chinyere Nwahunanya’s A Harvest from Tragedy, which considers the place of the civil war texts in Africa’s political and literary experience.6 Like McLuckie and Pape, Nwahunanya’s book tilts towards fiction; however, there are interesting chapters that consider drama and memoirs. Notwithstanding, the scope of the works explored are limited and mostly comprise earlier publications. Academic works on various themes surrounding the war are also not examined in any depth. However, all of the aforementioned works are limited in their

in the course of the war. Like Forsyth’s book, The Nigerian Civil War traces the background and course of the war. Other books in this category, for instance, H.G. Hanbury’s Biafra: A Challenge to the Conscience of Britain; Geoffrey Birch and Dominic St. George’s Biafra: The Case for Independence; and John Hatch’s Nigeria: Seeds of Disaster, mostly have a unified objective of drawing global attention to the humanitarian crisis of the civil war, and arguing for Biafra’s right of independence. They also vilify British involvement in the war and its support for the Nigerian federation in Biafra’s suppression. 3 Craig W. McLuckie, Nigerian Civil War Literature: Seeking an ‘Imagined Community’ (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1990); and Marion Pape, Gender Palava: Nigerian Women Writing War (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher, 2011). 4 Pape’s evaluation of the place of gender in the civil war writings suggests that the war has since shifted to a gender war, hence the importance of examining gender in NigeriaBiafra scholarship in Part IV of this volume. 5 Omotoso, The Combat; Amadi, Sunset in Biafra; Ekwensi, Survive the Peace; S.O. Mezu, Behind the Rising Sun (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1971); and I.N.C. Aniebo, The Anonymity of Sacrifice (Ibadan: Heinemann Education, 1974). Some of Wole Soyinka’s works that McLuckie examines are Soyinka, Season of Anomy (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1980); The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979); and Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 6 Chinyere Nwahunanya, ed., A Harvest from Tragedy: Critical Perspectives on Nigerian Civil War Literature (Owerri: Springfield, 1997).

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scope; they focus mostly on aspects of fictional accounts.7 This volume, however, covers fictional and non-fictional genre and considers varying issues in the civil war literature, such as gender, archives, personal accounts, ethnic sentiments, and authors’ backgrounds. It is the first attempt at a comprehensive analysis of the civil war writings. There are other works that offer a degree of intellectual analyses on the war. Chima Korieh’s The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory comprises a collection of essays that not only examines the non-military aspects of the war but also evaluates scholarly discussion on genocide against the Igbo and prior to and during the Nigeria-Biafra War.8 Though the focus of Korieh’s volume is not an intellectual analysis of the war literature in its entirety, the appraisal of the conversation on genocide highlights the intricacies of writers’ judgments and the importance of examining circumstances surrounding scholarly ideas. Brian McNeil’s ‘The Nigerian Civil War in History and Historiography, 1967–1970’ offers an overview of trends in the war literature with especial emphasis on themes and questions addressed in these texts.9 Though he offers no detailed intellectual analysis of themes in the Nigeria-Biafra war literature, McNeil emphasizes the importance of the civil war in global history and the need for a re-examination of issues surrounding the war, which is a goal this volume undertakes. Through an overview of ideas surrounding the causes of the war and its impact on post-war Nigeria, McNeil emphasizes the need for historical reevaluation of many assumptions commonly held about the war and its effect on society.10 Authors in this volume – G.N. Uzoigwe, Ogechi Anyanwu, Bukola Oyeniyi, Ralph Njoku, and Austin Okwu – address some of these issues.

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There are several scholarly analyses of fiction on the Nigeria-Biafra War. Some exemplary representations are Hugh Hodges, ‘Writing Biafra: Adichie, Emecheta, and the Dilemmas of Biafran War Fiction’, Postcolonial Text 5:1 (2009), 1–13; Ugochukwu, Françoise, ‘A Lingering Nightmare: Achebe, Ofoegbu, and Adichie on Biafra’, Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society 39 (2011), 253–272; Bernard Dickson and Kinggeorge Okoro Preye, ‘History, Memory, and the Politics of National Unity in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun’, International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature 2:5 (May 2014), 81–89; and Niyi Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past and Still Counting the Losses: Evaluating Narratives of the Nigerian Civil War in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra’, Epiphany: Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies 5:1 (2011), 31–51. 8 Chima Korieh, ed., The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory (New York: Cambria Press, 2012). 9 Brian McNeil, ‘The Nigerian Civil War in History and Historiography, 1967–1970’ in Africa, Empire, and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A.G. Hopkins, edited by Toyin Falola and Emily Brownell (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2010), 541–554. 10 Ibid., 541. See also Osarhieme Benson Osadolor, ‘The Historiography of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970’ in The Nigerian Civil War and Its Aftermath, edited by Eghosa E. Osaghae, Ebere Onwudiwe, and Rotimi T. Suberu (Ibadan: John Archers, 2002), 88.

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The Nigeria-Biafra War: Overview and Issues The Nigeria-Biafra War highlighted the volatile nature of Africa’s colonial legacy. At the end of colonial rule in 1960, Nigeria was a conglomeration of various ethnic nationalities whose loyalties lay with their various ethnic groups. The country was carved into three regions – North, West, and East – with three dominant ethnic groups – the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo, respectively. Thus, political consciousness developed along ethnic lines. Lacking a strong national consciousness, the first post-independence government was overthrown on 15 January 1966, in a coup led mainly by Igbo officers. Some Northern leaders interpreted the coup as an eastern attempt to dominate the nation. In July 1966, Northern officers staged a counter-coup accompanied by several massacres targeting the Igbo that also affecting many other Eastern Nigerians residing outside the Eastern Region. In defense against the killings, which the Eastern leaders condemned as genocidal, the East seceded and formed a new nation, Biafra. Nigeria’s attempt to force it back into the country plunged the two camps into a war that lasted from 6 July 1966 to 15 January 1970. Until the Rwandan genocide, the NigeriaBiafra War was the most reported war on Africa in contemporary media. By the war’s end, images of starving women and children had become synonymous with Africa and African conflicts. During the Nigeria-Biafra crisis, publications were censored. Most published texts were either printed abroad or written by foreign journalists. Significant individuals or intellectuals who could write or express strong opinions on the war were monitored closely or thrown in prison. One notable case was Wole Soyinka, who, though he did not belong to the Biafra camp, criticized the Nigerian Government and supported Biafran struggle. Government censorship of intellectual production on the Nigeria-Biafra crisis was not just limited to wartime but also post-war. Besieged by changing military regimes from 1966 until the 1990s, public opinion and freedom of expression were circumscribed. The situation was worsened by Nigeria’s ‘no victor, no vanquished’ policy; as a result, the war was treated as if it never happened. Successive military governments suppressed discussions and information on the war, thereby hampering any detailed research. The government seemed to believe that distancing the nation from any dialogue on the war would shelve the issues at stake. Amid this context, the archives on the civil war were formed. One finds in Nigeria’s national archives few official documents on the civil war. Archival records from the Nigerian warring camp remained limited through the war and afterwards. Biafra newspapers were preserved, however, and remain vital to the study of the conflict. This situation meant that the Nigeria-Biafra War has largely been studied from the perspective of Biafra and rarely from the dimension of the Nigerian experience.

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The unwillingness to engage on a national discourse regarding the Nigeria-Biafra conflict has persisted into the present times. The war remains a very sensitive subject in the country due to the clear ethnic divisions associated with it. The most recent depiction of this issue was the delay in Nigeria to grant permission for the release in Nigerian theaters of the civil war movie, Half of a Yellow Sun, based on Chimamanda Adichie’s novel of the same title. The movie tracked the impacts of Biafra secession and Nigeria-Biafra War on two lovers, Olanna and Odenigbo, who were forced to retreat from the University of Nigeria to their rural villages in Biafra. As a result of the war, their relationship and moral values were threatened. Nigeria’s censorship board attributed the delay in approving the new movie to unresolved issues. Their stance was interpreted as discomfort about raising the topics of the war in a national magnitude, through a medium that was accessible to literate and non-literate Nigerians. Several scholars in this book analyse circumstances surrounding the Nigeria-Biafra War as well as some primary documents that formed the core of wartime propaganda. G.N. Uzoigwe’s ‘Background to the Nigerian Civil War’ (Chapter 2) explores the reasons behind Nigeria’s implosion shortly after independence, despite the country’s enormous caches of resources and potential. He also considers scholars’ approaches to this history, arguing that most literature focuses excessively on the war, ignores its philosophical backgrounds, and validates stereotypes. In Chapters 4 and 5, Ralph Chijioke Njoku and Austine S.O. Okwu examine the political document The Ahiara Declaration, which was issued by the Biafra leader, Col. Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu on 9 June 1969 to bolster the plunging morale within Biafra. The document included some socialist ideologies that resounded in a world split by a Cold War struggle between socialist and capitalist forces. Njoku and Okwu consider the dynamics of this document as well as its local and global implications. Okwu especially critiques the relevance of the Declaration to Biafra in light of the document’s significant correlation to Tanzania’s Arusha Declarations. Through his personal experience as a Biafran envoy, he provides insight into various factors that influenced as well as mitigated the impact of the Ahiara Declaration on the Biafran people, on the one hand, and the international community on the other. Premised on the belief that newspapers shaped the tone of the debates that preceded the war, Wale Adebanwi analyses newspaper accounts of the ethnic and political predicament that plunged Nigeria into war in Chapter 7. He argues that newspapers, through their interpretations of circumstances in Nigeria on the eve of war, fired the first shots of the NigeriaBiafra crisis. His examination of newspaper narratives advances the understanding of the war’s escalation.

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Theories of War Peace and conflict studies experts approach conflicts through various theories that have the potentials of both limiting and expanding understandings of war. Scholars in this volume utilize some of these conflict theories to analyse the circumstances of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Ogechi Anyanwu builds on Uzoigwe’s argument that writings on the war have considered its causes rather narrowly. He uses theories of societal conditions, human nature, and natural circumstances to analyse the complex causes of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict. His Chapter 3 emphasizes the influence of natural, environmental, and political situations alongside other multiple factors on Nigeria’s history. A similar contribution by Bukola Oyeniyi in Chapter 6 uses social and economic conflict theories to shed light on civil wars. He applies these various theories to his evaluation of the Nigeria-Biafra War in order to determine to what extent circumstances in Nigeria justified the decline to war. Despite his application of these theories to the Nigeria-Biafra crisis, Oyeniyi states that they may not necessarily be the touchstone explanation to the war but do facilitate better understanding and provide a common framework for the evaluation of civil war accounts.

Nigeria-Biafra War Writings and Ethnic Sentiments A significant root of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict lies in the pervasiveness of ethnic sentiments within the Nigerian Government and political structure. These sentiments are reflected in written accounts of the war, thereby shaping the narratives about the war and influencing the depth of analyses reflected in these texts. Several authors consider the phenomenon of ethnic inclinations within civil war texts. Akachi Odoemene in Chapter 8 examines ways Nigeria-Biafra war literature has been articulated and disseminated over time. He gives particular consideration to the roles of ethno-centrism and other motives in the war accounts. By providing insight into various authors’ motives, he re-examines some contentious aspects of the war. Odoemene argues that the memory of the war is grounded in ethnic differences, leading to competing discourses that continue to shape the war’s public perception. He observes that a major divide in the literature emanates from the Nigerian and Biafran camps, and from within the Biafran camp itself. These differing claims and conclusions across various camps are also reflected in works by foreign authors, who often leaned to one side or the other based on their alliances, acquaintances, or historical bonds. Odoemene studies these ethnic and other biases, how they influenced the wartime accounts, and how they reinforced divisions and distrust among Nigerians. Like several other authors, he points out that events culminating in the conflict were more complicated than existing explanations seem to portray.

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Similarly, in Chapter 9, Olukunle Ojeleye evaluates a cross-section of works on the Nigeria-Biafra War published between 1970 and 2013 to determine how authors’ values and personal inclinations influenced their statements. He argues that actions and inactions in a multicultural society like Nigeria are viewed through the lens of group and ethnic affiliations, which result in blurred boundaries between facts and falsehoods. Under such circumstances, Ojeleye asserts, the goal of objective histories by indigenous authors becomes mostly impossible. Cyril Obi takes a different tack in Chapter 11 on the theme of ethnicity by exploring the roles of ethnic minorities in the oil-producing Niger Delta region in civil war texts. He analyses Ken Saro-Wiwa’s novel, Soza­ boy, an account of a young male resident of a village in the Niger Delta who sought to assert his manhood by joining the army. In doing so, he lost his innocence and experienced the harsh realities of war, including the loss of his family and community. Through the analyses of Sozaboy, Obi draws attention to personal and communal aspects of the war that are largely ignored in the accounts of the conflict: for instance, the reality of the war for ordinary people and how some individuals profited from others’ wartime misfortunes. Obi concludes his chapter by connecting these wartime memories to the current position of the Niger Delta in Nigeria and the need to reflect on past events.

Archives and the Endurance of Memoirs and Fictional Accounts No other genre on the Nigeria-Biafra war literature rivals memoirs and fictional depictions in capturing the social upheavals wrought by the war. Due to the suppressed nature of the Nigerian Civil War records, many publications focused on the causes and the course of the war. Few dealt with the individual experiences of people.11 Thus, fiction became a key means for civilians to express their feelings about and share the hardships they experienced during the war. More than any other literary medium, it became the outlet that captured the dislocations experienced by families, the violation of women and girls, and the incessant murder that occurred during this period. Thus, fiction is an important part of studies of the civil war, and its separate consideration in this book embodies not just peoples’ experiences but also gender politics and other dynamics. Though historians may argue differences between fact, as reflected in official records, and fiction, as embodied in novels, this body of literature is indispensable in understanding the various strata

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Some books that overcome this ‘causes and course’ trend and actually reflect ordinary peoples’ encounters include: Axel Harneit-Seivers, Jones Ahazuem, and Sydney Emezue, A Social History of the Nigerian Civil War: Perspectives from Below (Hamburg: LIT, 1997); Egodi Uchendu, Women and Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War (New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2007); and Korieh, The Nigeria-Biafra War.

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of the Nigeria-Biafra crisis. It is largely based on real situations and experiences. Several essays in this collection examine characterizations of Biafra, wartime violence and trauma, and depictions of neo-colonialism and nationalism through fiction. The authors explore various uses of evidence and themes evident in an expansive body of fictional works about the conflict. They pay particular attention to the ideologies, political views, and experiences that shaped these narratives. Meredith Coffey in Chapter 13 considers Chimamanda Adichie’s depiction of the NigeriaBiafra War’s social complexities in Half of a Yellow Sun, an acclaimed civil war novel that highlighted the ethnic basis of the conflict. She compares her analysis of Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun to that of Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn. Coffey focuses on the position of ethnic minorities within these two novels, arguing that the tensions surrounding the inclusion of ethnic minorities have remained unresolved even in fictional accounts. Like Coffey, in Chapter 17, Françoise Ugochukwu studies Buchi Emecheta’s contemplation of ethnicity and the role of neo-colonialism in the Nigeria-Biafra conflict in Destination Biafra, a ‘historical fiction’. Ugochukwu highlights that Emecheta’s work on the Nigeria-Biafra War is largely ignored as opposed to her other novels on the domestic sphere, for instance marriage, children, and women’s lives. Fiona Bateman in Chapter 14 offers an international perspective through her examination of Irish writers’ works set in Biafra. She shows how Biafra represented for the Irish a nation struggling for freedom, and mirrored Irish struggles for nationhood. The extensive media coverage of sufferings within Biafra evoked an emotive response that resulted in massive fundraising on a scale hitherto unseen in Ireland. Events in Biafra also shaped the Irish government’s attitudes about international aid and human rights. Thus, the Nigeria-Biafra War and its representation in the Irish imagination highlight a moment in history when Ireland’s struggle for nationhood and history of famine was reflected in its perception of Biafra and pervasive images of starving women and children. Some of the books that Bateman examines to highlight this Irish affinity with Biafra are Desmond Forristal’s play Biafra: Black Man’s Country and Vincent Lawrence’s novel An End of Flight. Adetayo Alabi brings an interesting touch to this volume in Chapter 15 with his analysis of Ali Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo. Okigbo was a renowned poet who joined the Biafran war effort early on as a soldier and eventually became a war casualty. Mazrui’s book is cast as an afterlife trial of Okigbo for abandoning his responsibilities as a poet to become a soldier. First, Alabi argues that Mazrui’s text, set in the surreal, is only possible through his reliance on magical realism and science fiction. Alabi then relates the context of Okigbo’s trial and defense in Mazrui’s text with the Nigeria-Biafra War and its aftermath. Through an assessment of Okigbo’s trial, he contemplates the extent to which this trial could resolve issues surrounding the civil war in any

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meaningful way. Based on the premise of Okigbo’s trial – his abandonment of poetry for war – Alabi extends the conversation to African development, pondering if any form of African growth is sustainable in light of the compartmentalization of roles and responsibilities. Similar to Alabi’s chapter, Biodun Jeyifo in Chapter 12 considers Chinua Achebe’s final book There Was a Country. He connects it to broader issues in Nigeria. Jeyifo confidently writes that Achebe’s novel is not just about Biafra and the war with Nigeria but takes Nigeria back to its very shaky foundations and summons Nigerian writers and intellectuals to action. As part of the book’s aim of stressing some circumstances that influence writers’ of war, in Chapter 16 Ode Ogede examines two works that he considers the most impartial narratives on the Biafran venture: S.O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun and I.N.C. Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice. Ogede argues that these two authors wrote their texts before a time when partisanship shadowed various accounts of the civil war and were, therefore, able to provide a balanced account that separates facts from illusions in ways that were both candid and sensitive. Ogede considers how these authors’ approaches imparted a special significance to their accounts. Hugh Hodges discusses in Chapter 18 the significance of the NigeriaBiafra War in Chris Abani’s GraceLand. In order to provide sufficient insight on the influence of Abani’s experiences and inclinations on his fictional work, GraceLand, Hodges analyses Abani’s fictional autobiography. He argues that Abani’s representation of the Nigeria-Biafra War is highly connected to his invention of an abject and heroic past for himself in his autobiography. In ‘Memoirs and the Question of Objectivity’ (Chapter 10), Chukwuma Opata examines two contradictory accounts of the NigeriaBiafra crises as recounted in Alexander Madiebo and Robert Collis’s memoirs. In The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War, Madiebo, an Igbo general in the Nigerian army, provides a first-hand knowledge of the events that led to war.12 On the other hand, Collis, an Irish medical doctor who worked in Lagos in the years after independence and up to the civil war, offers another account whereby he clearly indicts the Biafra camp for the war.13 Opata examines the historical sources employed by Madiebo and Collis to determine the validity of their interpretations and the potential biases they bring to their various positions. He considers this type of evaluation expedient because the plethora of works on the Nigeria-Biafra War are prone to sentiments and highly subjective viewpoints, thus making historical objectivity a formidable goal.

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Alexander Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishing, 2000) 13 Robert Collis, Nigeria in Conflict (London: Secker and Warburg, 1970).

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Toyin Falola and Ogechukwu Ezekwem

Gender in Nigeria-Biafra War Literature Gender remains an enduring issue in conflict and post-conflict eras as well as in the scholarship about the war: it plays a significant role in the study of conflicts. The historiography of the Nigeria-Biafra War reveals a discrepancy in the study of African women in conflict and post-conflict eras. Numerous books have been written on the war, focused on the war’s causes and course, but women’s roles in sustaining the war and post-war reconstructions, as well as their place in the scholarship, are largely ignored.14 Jane Bryce considers in Chapter 20 the place of men and women in the study of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict. She argues that, until recently, there was a dearth of women writers studying the civil war, and attempts to uncover the reasons behind this masculine domination of the war. To address this issue, she examines the meaning of the war for women and whether their need for survival displaced nationalist concerns. She considers the possibility that the concept of patriotism may indeed be a masculinist response to political crisis. She compares the works of post-war female writers such as Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Rose Njoku, and Rosina Umelo to more contemporary works by writers like Sefi Atta and Chimamanda Adichie to ascertain trends in these literatures. With a slightly different approach, Egodi Uchendu examines in Chapter 19 the actual infusion of women’s wartime roles into texts on the Nigeria-Biafra War. She describes the Nigeria-Biafra conflict as one of Africa’s most studied historical events and a subject that has seen more academic and non-academic interests in the twenty-first century. Alongside this continued interest emerged a body of literature on women’s wartime efforts. Uchendu undertakes a textual survey of the war in order to trace this infusion of women in the war narratives. In ‘Female Participation in War and the Implication of Nationalism’ (Chapter 21), Ofure Aito observes that conflicts stem from cultural differences, economic dominance, political manipulations, and religious intolerance. To reconcile these differences, she argues that a more integrative partnership that transcends patriarchal structures must be adopted. Aito examines Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra and her account of a woman who acted as negotiator between ethnicities submerged in the crossfire of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Aito argues that this fictional representation offers a platform for the redefinition of female identity in Nigeria and the female potential not just as victim and participant in war but also as negotiator in internal politics and conflict resolution. 14

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The twenty-first century saw an increased interest on women’s place in the civil war. Some of the outstanding academic works on women in the Nigeria-Biafra War are Uchendu, Women and Conflict; Pape, Gender Palava; and Karen Okigbo, Ghostly Narratives: The Experiences and Roles of Biafran Women in the Nigeria-Biafra War (LAP Lambert, 2012).

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Scholarly Trends, Issues, and Themes: Introduction

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The literature on the Nigeria-Biafra War encompasses scholarship on wide-ranging genres, such as novels, drama, memoirs, oral histories, and academic texts. These works take various approaches as they attempt to comprehend the war. The chapters in this volume offer historical surveys of the Nigeria-Biafra war literature, the potential biases and personal experiences that influence fictional and non-fictional writers’ texts, a reassessment of the war’s causes, and the ways that gender features in the scholarship. Authors also connect trends in the literature to contemporary issues in Africa’s development. The cumulative achievements of this volume include the highlighting of challenges encountered by writers of violence as they make sense of scale, language, logic, experiences, and affiliations. The writers, works, and ideas analysed in various chapters are reminders that wars are constant in society and will continue to initiate critical debates. By examining the construction of the Nigeria-Biafra war literatures and the sentiments and circumstances that influenced them, this book emphasizes the intricacies that dictate civil war archives and memory, and consequently, the scholarship.

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Part I ON THE HISTORY OF THE NIGERIA-BIAFRA WAR

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Background to the Nigerian Civil War

G.N. Uzoigwe

Introduction The American historian and public intellectual, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once observed, with much propriety, that the historian suffers from an occupational disease, namely: a passion for tidiness – an obsession that stresses the importance of tidying past events in order to understand the present and, hopefully, be better prepared to face the future. The non-historian but distinguished novelist Chinua Achebe made a similar point in There Was a Country, his memoir on the Nigeria-Biafra War, published just before his death. ‘An Igbo proverb’, he wrote, ‘tells us that a man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body’.1 Both Schlesinger and Achebe believe – as does this author – that a historical event cannot be fully comprehended unless serious attention is paid to its antecedents. Much of the writing about the Nigerian Civil War tends, unfortunately, to treat its causes in a perfunctory, pedestrian manner. Beginning in media res, as it were, it suffers from a palpable lack of tidiness, pays no attention whatsoever to the conflict’s philosophical underpinnings, endorses generally erroneous stereotypes, and tends to be more concerned with the war itself than what brought it about. Thus, no proper lessons are learned from it, and consequently, mistakes of the past are continually repeated. It is surprising that the civil war is not made required reading in Nigerian colleges and universities, a palpable omission that should be corrected. Using various archival and contemporary sources, oral interviews, published official documents, and some relevant recent publications, this chapter analyses the major reasons – remote and proximate – why the most populous African country, one with enormous potential and much promise, imploded within six years of independence and, to the disappointment of many, plunged itself into a disastrous civil war from which it has not fully recovered. The methodology is historical, and the conclusions are derived from a careful study of the available evidence.

1

Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin, 2012), 1.

17

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Collapse of the First Republic The collapse of Nigeria’s First Republic on January 15, 1966, sent shock waves across the globe because it was generally believed that Britain’s administration of its former colonial estate was exceptional. However, serious students of Nigerian colonial history knew that the euphoria that followed the new nation’s independence needed careful political and socio-economic re-engineering to ensure that the wobbly and complex edifice erected by Frederick Daltry Lugard and many others would not unhinge. As some feared, the indigenous rulers of the country failed woefully in this assignment – not because they were incompetent, evil, or stupid but because the task facing them was Herculean. This task was clearly captured in the first national anthem which spoke of the determination to foster national unity and territorial integrity even though ethnic groups and tongues might differ. The crucial questions, then, are: Why did the great promise of Nigeria implode, within six years of independence? Why did the Igbo who, arguably, were the greatest proponents of Nigerian unity, secede from the country they loved so much and had contributed enormously to build up? Why, given the nature of Nigeria’s colonial history, was the fall of the First republic destined to so end? Was the civil war inevitable? Historians naturally may differ in their answers to these questions.2 Nevertheless, they are questions that merit thoughtful consideration. This chapter attempts to answer these questions by analysing three broad propositions. Proposition one: British colonial policy unwittingly sowed seeds of disintegration This proposition is generally accepted by historians of Nigeria, but they also admit that Britain’s colonial stewardship is laudable for some great achievements. However, there are also those, especially the disciples of Lugard, who believe that given the colony’s vastness and complexities, Britain’s stewardship was exceptional, but they remain largely silent on the negative aspects of British rule. Whatever may be the case, there is no doubt that Britain handed over to the indigenous leadership at independence in 1960 a country that had serious, largely prefabricated, internal problems that eventually led to its collapse in 1966. Some 60 years of intensive colonization created a new society, through both dictatorial action and sometimes painful compromise, that was revolutionary in all its ramifications: military, economic, political, and social. Britain was only able to hold its huge and complex colonial estate together by imposing its will as it deemed fit ‘like a great steel grid’, 2

For one historian’s view, see G.N. Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood: Prelude to the Nigerian Civil War, 1960–1967 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011), a detailed study of what caused the conflict.

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believing that it was only through muscular, autocratic rule that the internal peace that was the sine qua non for the achievement of colonial ends was possible.3 Lugard’s attitude toward those he regarded as troublemakers was ‘Thrash them first, conciliate them afterwards’. 4 Indeed, ‘The present unity of Nigeria as well as its disunity’, it has been written, ‘is in part a reflection of the form and character of the common government – the British superstructure – and the changes it has undergone since 1900.’ 5 While this policy served Britain’s colonial ends admirably, it was impossible to implement it in an independent Nigeria whose leaders were up to their eyes operating a badly skewed democratic federation. The problems of this federation may be discussed at several levels, but four may suffice. Composition of the military: this was to become a source of instability, though such issues were not anticipated at the time. This military grew out of the West African Frontier Force (WAFF), which was created at the close of the nineteenth century to conquer and pacify areas allocated to Britain at the Berlin West Africa Conference. The area comprised overwhelmingly Hausa-speaking peoples of Northern Nigeria who have been described as possessing ‘sturdy, military virtues and simple loyalty to their officers’; in addition, Britain was in ‘no great hurry to ‘spoil’ these [Hausa] soldiers by too much education’.6 This composition did not significantly change by 1960, although by then the relatively small officer corps was mostly southerners. Among this class the Igbo dominated, but the most senior officers remained British.7 Ostensibly, this military was comprised of patriotic Nigerians who did not interfere in the turbulent politics of their country. Rapid promotions of men from the North to the officer corps that occurred at the expense of southerners were intended to reduce the regional imbalance in that class. It did bother some of the southern officers, though most understood the political reason for such an action. What concerned the most radical of them, however, was the failure of the great promise of Nigeria, the so-called giant of Africa and expected pride of the Black world, to actualize that promise. They attributed this failure particularly to growing corruption, ethnic chauvinism, religious intolerance, lack of justice, and poor political leadership.8 3

See Margery Perham’s Introduction to Joan Wheare, The Nigerian Legislative Council (London: Faber & Faber, 1950), x. 4 Cited in G.N. Uzoigwe, ‘The Evolution of the Nigerian State’ in Foundations of Nigerian Federalism, 1900–1960, edited by G.N. Uzoigwe & Jonah Elaigwu (Abuja: National Council on Intergovernmental Relations, 1996), 7. 5 James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Benin City: Broburg & Wistrom, 1986), 45–46. 6 Cited in Uzoigwe, ‘The Evolution of the Nigerian State’, 7. 7 The first Nigerian General Commanding Officer of the Nigerian Military was Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi. 8 See Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu’s National Broadcast, 15 January, 1966.

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Fearing that these evils would ultimately destroy the country, the radicals overthrew the government in 1966. All but one of these young officers were Igbo from the East and the Mid-West; the other was Yoruba. Unfortunately for them, they could not control the entire country. Under the leadership of Johnston Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo, their efforts were foiled, but Nigeria’s First Republic came to an end nonetheless. Interestingly, no-one mourned the brief life of that republic, even though of the 16 Nigerians who lost their lives during the coup only one was Igbo. The dawn of a new Nigeria was anxiously expected. As events unfolded, the coup, which was initially very popular in the country, began to lose support. Many Nigerians came to believe – rightly or wrongly – that what happened was the result of a calculated Igbo coup that actualized their master plan to dominate Nigeria because of their belief in their own exceptionalism.9 Ironsi’s Unity Decree easily lent credence to this belief, although no documented evidence of collusion between the Igbo and the coup makers has been produced.10 Moreover, an interregnum military government operates best, for obvious reasons, under a unitary administration, and there was no reason to treat Nigeria as an exception to the general rule. Nevertheless, the Nigerian military easily allowed itself to become as ethnically divided as Nigerian politics, demonstrating that their so-called Nigerian patriotism was only skin deep. The result was the vengeful killings of Igbo civilians and soldiers particularly in the North between May and October 1966 that international observers were convinced reached genocidal proportions. The killings resulted in the secession of the Eastern Region and its invasion by Nigeria.11 The archives at Kew Gardens (London), Rhodes House Library (Oxford), Nigerian National Archives, and published official documents, it is important to note, contain no evidence of any serious efforts made by the governments of Nigeria and Britain to stop the carnage, in spite of accounts written by respected foreign correspondents from prominent British, European, and American newspapers.12 Particularly worrisome was the deliberate silence of the government of Britain during the massacres, whether they were genocidal or not. None of the perpetrators, including the military and northern politicians who paraded themselves in public, were ever brought to justice. Nigeria made it clear that it would not brook any foreign interference in its internal affairs. It is also true that Ironsi did not bring the coup leaders to justice, but the reason was because the terms of their surrender granted them amnesty. 9

For details see Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 69–76. This Decree is reproduced in full in S.K. Panter-Brick, ed., Nigerian Politics and Military Rule: Prelude to the Civil War. London: Athlone, 1970, Appendix. 11 For details see Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, Chapter 6. 12 Ibid., 100–112. 10

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The coup and the counter-coup as well as the major massacres of July 29, September 29, and October 29 in 1966 completely destroyed the military’s esprit de corps. Economic character of the society: this became a contentious issue quite early, especially in terms of fiscal relations between the regions. After the arbitrary division of Nigeria in 1906 into North and South, it soon became clear that while the Southern Protectorate enjoyed surplus economic revenue, the Northern Protectorate accumulated deficits that necessitated financial subsidies from the South and London. To remedy this situation, the British government decided on the ‘union’ of the two protectorates so as to legally justify the use of surplus southern resources to partly offset northern deficits. This administrative or paper union was, indeed, more an economic than a political act imposed on Nigerians for legal and colonial ends. The civil service, the judiciary, and the police force were not included in the unity decree.13 This anomalous interregional allocation of revenues was sanctified by Lugard’s Amalgamation Decree of 1914 and remained in force throughout the colonial period, leading to constant friction that continued after 1960.14 An issue that has received wide publicity but one which is not based on any official documentation whatsoever is that Ojukwu urged the East to secede because of its enormous oil deposits.15 Nothing could be further from the truth. We now know from the sources that even before the start of the civil war, Shell-BP was aware that Nigerian oil revenues from the East would double by 1970 but hid the fact from both Lagos and Enugu.16 Indeed, the extent to which oil played any role in the politics of secession was Gowon’s arbitrary Decree No. 8 which, without consulting the East, carefully carved out most of the oil-producing areas of Igboland and included them in the newly created Rivers State.17 For the Igbo, this poke in the eye had two consequences: it made the Igbo a minority in the East, and denied them access to the sea. These outcomes constituted the needle that broke the camel’s back and a point of no return that the Igbo believed was a calculated move by the central government to drive them out of Nigeria. In other words, ‘the East did

13

For the Amalgamation Decree, see Public Record Office (PRO) London, C.O. CMD 468, Report by Sir Frederick D. Lugard on the Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria, 1912–1919. 14 For details, see Adedotun O. Philips, ‘Inter-Governmental Fiscal Relations, 1900–1960’ in Uzoigwe and Elaigwu, Foundations of Nigerian Federalism, 139–161. 15 This unfounded assertion is given wide publicity in Ali Mazrui’s The Africans: A Triple Heritage documentary series. 16 The document is reproduced in Michael Gould, The Biafran War: The Struggle for Modern Nigeria, Foreword by Frederick Forsyth (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), appendix 2, ‘Document confirming the potential doubling of Nigerian oil revenue by 1970’, 17 This Decree is substantially reproduced in Panter-Brick, Nigerian Politics, 45–46.

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not secede’18 but it was forced to secede, their leaders strongly believed. Gowon, on his part, stated that he needed dictatorial powers to prevent the East from seceding.19 Political structure: the new society was politically and administratively divided because the 1914 Amalgamation confirmed the idea of two ‘Nigerias’, thus making nonsense of the very essence of amalgamation. John Flint wrote: ‘Indeed, the ‘Amalgamation Report’ discounted amalgamation in practice. Lugard proposed the complete amalgamation of only the railways, the marine department and the customs service.’ To which I.F. Nicolson added, ‘the most remarkable thing about Lugard’s amalgamation is that it never really took place’.20 For James S. Coleman, ‘The fact that the northern and southern protectorates were never effectively united has tended to perpetuate the sharp cultural differences between the peoples of the north and the south’.21 Uzoigwe stated: For some inexplicable reasons it did not occur to colonial administrators in Nigeria (both North and South) and the British government, to attempt to reconcile the much vaunted administrative excellence of the Northern Protectorate to its glaring economic backwardness. Nor did it occur to them to examine the real significance of the amalgamation, especially its impact on the rest of Nigeria.22

Looking back at some of these issues, Flint provided this sober reflection: British officials never seriously discussed how conflicting policies, in the two Nigerias might be harmonized, how the rapidly growing individualism of the South, with its cash crops, its rapidly expanding mission schools, its growing wage-earning and clerical class, its African entrepreneurs and petty capitalists, can be blended with northern feudal conservatism, Muslim Law and self-sufficiency.23

Britain’s colonial government also faced two other dilemmas of its own making: direct rule versus indirect rule and centralism versus federalism. Scholars have studied these dilemmas extensively. In the final analysis, the so-called difference between direct and indirect rule with which early Nigerian scholarship was enthusiastically concerned 18

See Paper No. 3 submitted by the Biafran delegation to the Addis Ababa Peace conference, 1968 reproduced in Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 264–266. 19 See Walter Schwarz, Nigeria (London: Pall Mall Press, 1968), 229–230. 20 John E. Flint, ‘Nigeria: The Colonial Experience from 1880 to 1914’ in The History and Politics of Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1914, edited by L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan (Cambridge: The University Press, 1969), 256; I.F. Nicolson, The British Administration of Nigeria: Men, Methods and Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 201. 21 Coleman, Nigeria, 46–7. 22 See Uzoigwe, ‘Evolution of the Nigerian State’, in Uzoigwe and Elaigwu, Foundations of Nigerian Federalism, 25–26. 23 See Flint, ‘Nigeria: Colonial Experience’, 255.

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23

turned out to be a colonial red herring and a myth. The brutal fact is that, in any part of colonial Nigeria, the colonial government was the alpha and the omega since all the precolonial rulers had ceded their sovereignties to the British Crown at the time of conquest. Given the vastness and diversity of Nigeria, too, it was clear that a confederal or perhaps a federal arrangement was most appropriate. However, aware that such a system of government was fraught with problems in a colonial situation, Britain chose to speak from both sides of its mouth and became ridiculously incoherent, because colonial Nigeria was ruled neither as a unitary state nor as a federal or confederal state. Thus, the period from the Lord Selbourne Committee Report of 1898 to the Macpherson Constitution of 1954, which was intended to minimize Nigeria’s emerging ethnic politics, was a time of constitutional incoherence and uncertainty.24 Nor, indeed, did the Independence Constitution of 1959 – an object lesson in what a federal constitution should not be – settle the major issues at stake.25 Another problem was the retention of the official lopsided demarcation of Nigeria in 1939 between North and South whereby the North controlled two-thirds of the country’s landmass and more than half of its population, creating an imaginary line of demarcation that made no historical or geographic sense.26 Since then, this line has become a sacred cow for northern politicians. But it is an axiom among federation scholars that in a federation no country should be so divided that a single part can control the whole. The division of Nigeria’s four regions in 1966 into the current 36 states – 19 in the North and 17 in the South, plus the Abuja Capital Territory in the North – clearly has not solved the demarcation issue. Given all the issues raised above, it becomes clear that Nigeria’s First Republic and its opponents were faced with an impossible political task. Therefore, it also becomes clear that Britain’s stewardship of its colonial estate needs a serious re-examination, one that may result in jettisoning the popular view that scholars should stop blaming postcolonial problems in Africa on colonialism. In any case, let it be made clear, here and now, that no serious historian can study these problems outside of the context of the consequences of colonial administrative policies in Nigeria. Let it also be understood that the function of the historian is not to blame or praise anybody but rather to analyse and interpret events in light of available evidence.

24

For Selborne’s Report see G.N. Uzoigwe, ‘The Niger Committee of 1898: Lord Selborne’s Report’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, IV:3 (1968), 467–76. 25 See S.E. Majuk, ‘Independence and the Triumph of Federalism, 1954–1960’ in Uzoigwe and Elaigwu, Foundations of Nigerian Federalism, 295–300. 26 See CO 583, Vol. 244, Memorandum on the Future of Political Development in Nigeria, 1939.

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Social transformations: colonial Nigeria was transformed into a ‘tribalized’ society. The concept of ‘tribe’, a European invention, was alien to pre-British Nigeria, but under colonialism it became an important tool for achieving a divide-and-rule policy that was used to attain colonial ends.27 Under British rule, therefore, some 250 independent nationalities were forced to metamorphose into ‘tribal’ societies ruled by ‘barbarous’ chieftains said to be perpetually warring among themselves, a sort of Hobbesian society from which the people were happy to be saved by the benevolence of the British Leviathan. ‘The greatest contribution the British have made to Nigerian unity,’ it has been claimed, ‘is the pacification of the country’.28 This may be so, but the perpetual warring among nationalities that came to be called Nigeria that is often implied in the pacification enterprise is a historical fiction. Conquests, usurpations, and reconciliations did occur among some of those nationalities, as in all countries around the world, but there is no evidence that suggests that what occurred before the British conquest was extraordinary. Nevertheless, a common joke among British officials in Nigeria during the nationalist period was that if the British left the country abruptly the North and the South would go to war, a prediction that actually came to pass, but ironically, as a consequence of colonial policies that these officials were hired to execute. Also, among Nigerian peoples, British political officers had their pet ‘tribes’, the obedient ‘noble savages’ of the North (the good ones), and the recalcitrant, uppity ‘tribes’ of the South, the Igbo especially (the bad ones). Lugard described Southern Nigerians as generally being ‘of a low and degraded type’29 whose mode of government filled him ‘with something very close to disgust’.30 Yet: ‘Educated Africans made him uneasy in public and irrational in private.’31 He therefore imposed on the North a rigid conservative system of governance to shield it from contamination by educated Southern Nigerians, which resulted in the rise of a northern patriotism that was uncompromisingly assertive that the South was not sufficiently united to reciprocate. 27

The word ‘tribe’ does not exist in any Nigerian language. Its origin is Hebrew and Latin and simply meant community (tribus); but while Hebrew society was organized in 12 tribes, ancient Roman society was organized in 193 tribes. With the transition from tribe to monarchy beginning with the Books of Samuel, Hebrew tribal organization was deemphasized. In Roman society, too, the transition from republic to empire under the Principate of Augustus saw a similar de-emphasis. Unfortunately, Western peoples have used the word ‘tribe’ since the seventeenth century to describe ‘other cultures’ they believe are not as civilized as theirs. Unlike Westerners neither the Hebrews nor the Romans used the word tribe pejoratively. 28 Coleman, Nigeria, 45. 29 Cited in Flint, ‘Colonial Experience’, 256. 30 Margery Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority, 1898–1945 (London: Collins, 1960), 422. 31 Flint, ‘Colonial Experience’, 256.

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It was also a society that was allowed to develop along religious lines. In the North, the emirs, supported by British political officers, vigorously fought against the promotion of Christianity and Western education because they feared, correctly, that they would undermine Islam. The South, unable to fight off these forces, in the end, enthusiastically embraced both, resulting in the educational imbalance between the two ‘Nigerias’ that was to favor the South and was to become a source of friction in the postcolonial period. The great influence of Britain’s ‘prancing proconsuls’ during the conquest period and its curiously self – ‘tribalized’ political officers on-the-spot during the evolution of colonial policy was, for the most part, deleterious and fatal to unity. Proposition two: Conflicting visions of Nigerian nationhood in the early postcolonial period led to constant frictions that eventually ended the First Republic The question was whether the First Republic could have survived despite serious issues. This is a difficult question to answer. Although the foundation of the Nigerian state was unstable at independence, the managers of Nigeria’s postcolonial state failed to re-engineer it in such a way that the foundation would be firmly secured, because it inherited a very difficult task and had conflicting visions of what Nigerian nationhood meant. What concerned them most was which among the regions would dominate the country. The political alliance between the North and the East, the implosion of the Western Region, and collusion of the alliance to carve out the Mid-Western Region from the West took the latter out of contention early – but only temporarily. In 1959, Samuel Ladoka Akintola, the deputy leader of the Western Region’s Action Group (AG), became Premier of the Western Region. Serious disagreements between Akintola and Obafemi Awolowo, the party leader, led to requests by Awolowo’s supporters for Akintola’s replacement as Premier in 1962. Akintola’s refusal to resign resulted in an uproar in the Western Regional Assembly and the declaration of a state of emergency in the West. Akintola was restored to the premiership while Awolowo was imprisoned by a federal government that was more amenable to the former. Seizing this opportunity, Akintola and his supporters from the Action Group formed a new party, the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), and developed alliances with the ruling Northern People’s Congress (NPC). The rise of Akintola, the unofficial ‘dissolution’ of the uncomfortable alliance between NPC and the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) opened the way for Akintola to pivot the West towards the North, representing a masterful stroke that put the West back in contention in the struggle for dominance in Nigeria. The loser this time was the East. The East’s political difficulty was worsened by the eastern minorities demanding the creation of their own state, a demand that the NCNC rejected. Thus, the struggle for dominion eventually was reduced to a contest between the Igbo and

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the North. The NCNC – previously the only truly national party – was now practically reduced to an Igbo party and left out on a limb.32 This led to ‘pogroms’ or ethnic cleansings against the Igbo that drove them to secession and declaration of the Republic of Biafra. Fearing that Biafra’s independence would be fatal to Nigeria’s existence because other powerful groups might follow the Igbo example, the federal government declared war on Biafra, accusing the Igbo of breaking the socio-political compact. The Igbo leadership dismissed the fear as essentially bogus because no other Nigerian group was being ethnically cleansed. Thus, the two sides justified their actions by appealing to the idea of governance as a socio-political contract between the ruler and the ruled, leading to both calling each other rebels. Both argued that for any state to endure, each side must fulfill its role in this contract. Achebe stated: patriotism, being part of an unwritten social contract between a citizen and the state, cannot exist where the state reneges on the agreement. The state undertakes to organize society in such a way that the citizen can enjoy peace, and the citizen in return agrees to perform his patriotic duties.33

G.N. Uzoigwe added, ‘failure, then, by the ruled to obey the constitution [the socio-political contract] means rebellion; failure by the ruler to act according to the tenets of the constitution also means rebellion, and consequently the dissolution of the original association’.34 The collapse of the First Republic, therefore, would not necessarily have led to secession and war had the federal government protected the lives and property of the Igbo, a situation that drove them to seek survival in secession. The colonial government clearly understood its responsibilities in this respect and took no action against any group that might be considered genocidal. Nigeria and Britain, however, denied that any genocide occurred and demanded that the Igbo must renounce secession or face the consequences of their illegal action, but felt no obligation whatsoever to say what the horrendous massacres should be called. This idea of government as a socio-political contract has a long historical pedigree. Founded on the political ideas of classical and medieval Europe, it was only in the early modern age that the very talented trio – Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – brutally articulated the concept and concluded that the only reason why an individual or a group would agree to surrender some of their cherished civil and natural rights to a state is for the protection of their lives and property by the state, stressing therefore that failure by the state to offer this protection for whatever reason renders the contract moot. 32

The NCNC was founded in 1944 under the name, National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons. This name was changed to the National Council of Nigerian Citizens after Southern Cameroon voted to merge with French Cameroon. 33 Chinua Achebe, The Problem With Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1983), 15. 34 Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 148.

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Hobbes, who was distressed by the horrors of the English Civil War through which he lived, wrote ‘The end of obedience [Achebe’s patriotism] is protection.’ Locke and Rousseau, too, were much troubled by the socio-political crises in their respective countries that ended in revolution and brutal wars. Although, the contract idea has been criticized over the centuries, it has survived proudly in various forms in the writings of Thomas Hill Green and Herbert Spencer, and in the written fundamental laws of modern democratic states, starting with the American Constitution. Locke and Sir Ernest Barker have effectively demolished the opposition to the contract proposition.35 In a telling passage, Locke wrote: ‘Who shall be judge whether the prince or legislative act contrary to their trust?’ He concluded emphatically: ‘The people shall be judge.’36 Thus, the Nigeria-Biafra conflict is far from being unique and should be studied thus. The collapse of the First Republic and its aftermath should also be studied as a shared responsibility between Britain and its indigenous successors in 1960. Proposition three: The secession of Eastern Nigeria and the civil war were inevitable Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu led a coup on January 15, 1966 that opened a Pandora’s Box of sectarian and other problems that had been festering in the colonial period but had been pushed under the rug. These problems were exposed by several issues. First, the North-East alliance initially placed the West at a political disadvantage. The 1962 crisis in the Western Region led to the implosion of the AG and the rise of Akintola. The national census (1962–1963) crisis pitched the North against the East, leading to hateful and outrageous outbursts by northern politicians against the Igbo that portended the massacres of 1966. The preposterous and rigged 1964–1965 federal elections that were boycotted by the East practically ended the North-East alliance, thus paving the way for a North-West alliance – the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) – and ensured that an East-West alliance, dreaded by the North, did not materialize.37 Akintola used the election to demonize the Igbo and invigorate his base to vote for his party so as to put to an end to Igbo domination of the West that he believed would result if the AG won.38 This ugly and fraudulent election, ‘won’ by Akintola’s NNDP, 35

See Ernest Barker, ed., Social Contract: Locke, Hume, Rousseau (London: Oxford University Press, 1946). 36 John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, edited by J.W. Gough (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956), 121. 37 For details see Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 25–33, 35–52; cf. G.N. Uzoigwe, ‘Prelude to Secession and War: The Nigerian Census Crisis, 1962–1963’, Mbari: The International Journal of Igbo Studies, 2:1&2 (January 2009), 9–24; Schwarz, Nigeria & K.W.J. Post and Michael Vickers, Structure and Conflict in Nigeria, 1960–1966 (London: Heinemann, 1973). 38 For details See Victor Ladipo Akintola, Akintola: The Man and the Legend, Enugu: Delta, 1982; cf. Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 53–63; Post and Vickers, Structure and Conflict;

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had the slogan ‘Operation Salvation for the West’. Far from achieving those ends, it led to the breakdown of law and order, leading to the federal government belatedly declaring a state of emergency in the West. This was the proximate cause for the collapse of the First Republic. It should be noted that Balewa waited to act until his new ally, Akintola, was in power because Sarduana of Sokoto and leader of the NPC, Ahmadu Bello, ‘would not hear of Samuel Ladoke’s humiliation for the protection of [Michael] Okpara’.39 Okpara was Premier of the Eastern Region and the United Progressive Grand Alliance, which caused Bello nightmares. Schwarz pointed out appropriately that Bello and his NPC were too shortsighted to realize ‘that the political advantages that would arise from the fall of Akintola were far less serious than the general calamity which now promised to overtake the whole regime [of Akintola]’.40 The ascendancy of Akintola and the NNA, the fall of Obafemi Awolowo and his AG, and the reduction of the NCNC to the status of a regional party, led to an unbridled Northern arrogance that seemed to care more about the North than the rest of the country. Viewing what happened, considering that the North controlled the federal government, one may concur with John Locke that the contract of government was practically ended, the general will of the country had become ‘mute’, and leaders on all sides were guided by secret motives. Given such a situation, the federal government as sovereign could no longer honor its trust to protect peoples’ lives and property. The result was that the Nigerian state was headed for trouble because it was maintaining ‘only a vain, illusory, and formal existence’. 41 Nzeogwu and his group, indeed, did the First Republic a favor by terminating its short life. Unfortunately, the Ironsi regime made matters worse. Another issue that complicated the situation was that no major Igbo politicians or top military officers were killed during the January 15 coup. This brought to the fore some of the sectarian problems raised above. The lack of convincing explanation for the absence of Igbo casualties was to cause the Igbo and Ojukwu infinite trouble throughout the Nigerian crisis, especially from those Nigerians who harbored a pathological distrust and suspicion of the Igbo. Nzeogwu’s rather lame explanation that while some of his soldiers ‘carried out our assignment, others did not’42 failed to change their mindset. Nor were they satisfied with the reasons the soldiers provided for their putsch, principally to change ‘our country and make it a place we could be proud to call our home, and not to wage war … Tribal considerations were completely out of our minds.’ 43 Schwarz, Nigeria. Akintola, Akintola, 105 40 Schwarz, Nigeria, 189. 41 Locke, Second Treatise, 112. 42 Quoted in Schwarz, Nigeria, 191. 43 Quoted in ibid., 194. 39

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Some writers have pointed out that the public jubilation of several Igbo in the North following the death of Balewa and Ahmadu Bello in particular and Ironsi’s actions during his short stewardship as head of state convinced many Nigerians that what happened was a planned Igbo coup that the North believed attracted justifiable reprisals.44 The findings of these writers may well be correct. However, no justifiable explanation has been provided why the killing of six prominent Northerners led to the continued killing of thousands of Igbo domiciled in the North between May and October 1966. At the same time, the northern political leadership, the federal government, and the British government, which was later adamantly opposed to the secession that followed, did nothing to stop the carnage, especially since the July 29 counter-coup in which thousands of Igbo soldiers and civilians lost their lives – the so-called ‘return match’ – had firmly returned political power to the North. An Eastern Nigerian publication made this point more poignantly: If revenge was the motive behind what happened in May and the even more deadly counter-coup in July, then why was the September-October holocaust necessary? … When will the North ever be satisfied with its ‘revenge’ for the attempted coup of 15th January? How many Easterners must die before the six Northerners out of the fifteen who lost their lives in the 15th January incident are avenged? Until the power of the North is enthroned again in Lagos? Or until the North seceded? … The East does not agree that the price it must pay for the life of its people is the acceptance of domination in Nigeria.45

Several writers on the Nigeria-Biafra conflict have totally ignored this point. They have also failed to examine seriously the belief that the January 15 incident was a calculated Igbo affair to actualize their domination of Nigeria. But they know, or ought to know, that the Igbo had neither the manpower in the military, nor the political alliance in the country, nor the population, and not even the financial resources needed to achieve such an ambition. Indeed, those who have looked closely at what happened have debunked the Igbo coup thesis.46 The easy readiness of the proponents of the Igbo thesis, without authenticated proof, is a function of the sus 44

See, for example, J. Isawa Elaigwu, Gowon: The Biography of a Soldier-Statesman (Ibadan: West Books, 1986), 39–47; N.U. Akpan, Struggle for Secession, 1966–970: A Personal Account of the Nigerian Civil War (London: Frank Cass, 1976), 3–11, 30; Schwarz, Nigeria, 203–205; Panter-Brick, Nigerian Politics, 23–30; Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 67–76. 45 See Eastern Nigeria (Ministry of Information), ‘Nigerian Pogrom: The Organized Massacre of Eastern Nigerians’, Crisis series, vol. 3. (Enugu: Ministry of Information, 1966), 25–26. 46 Lloyd, ‘The Ethnic Background to the Nigerian Crisis’ in Panter-Brick, Nigerian Politics, 10; cf. ibid., K. Whiteman, ‘Enugu: The Psychology of Secession, 20 July 1966 to 30 May 1967’, in Panter-Brick, Nigerian Politics, 116; Geoffrey Birch and Dominic St. George, Biafra: The Case for Independence (London: Britain-Biafra Association, 1968), 4.

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picion of Igbo motives mentioned earlier, thus making it quite comfortable for them to show no compassion whatsoever to the perilous plight of the Igbo. K. Whiteman, a Briton, wrote: Visiting Nigeria in November 1966, I was conscious of the extreme gulf between the attitude towards the massacres in the East and in the rest of Nigeria. It was astonishing how many people, not only in Kano and Kaduna but in Ibadan and Lagos, merely commented that it was very sad, ‘the Ibos [sic]47 had it coming to them’, and that, despite evidence that the massacres were planned by political groups for political ends, they were somehow ‘God’s will’. I was told in Kaduna that several expatriates had to threaten to resign before the Northern Government laid on a most modest airlift to help evacuate Easterners. There were also many gravely troubled by the events, including those who had helped Ibos to escape, who seldom voiced their concern publicly, and it too often seemed to the East as if they were faced with callous indifference, if not murderous hostility.48

He also observed: After the worst round of massacres of all, at the end of September, which precipitated the massive exodus of Easterners from the North, the expectation of secession was inevitably intensified…. All those in Enugu who went to the station to see the refugees arriving, some bandaged and maimed, were horrified, as I was when visiting hospitals there a month later. [49]… If it had been possible to avoid the September massacres, it is hard to see how secession could have been staged, in spite of the existence of elements in favour of it among the elite. The massacres have provided the weightiest moral argument in the Biafran case and it is still difficult to find satisfactory excuses for them in Lagos.50

The refugee problem in the East was enormous, the likes of which the African continent had never experienced before. Colin Legum compared the exodus to the East to ‘the gatherings of exiles into Israel after the last war’.51 Yet both the federal government and the British government – great exponents of Nigerian unity – were incredulously unconcerned. Had the massacres of the Igbo taken place a generation later, the reaction of the international community may have been less favorable to Nigeria. The 1960s, however, were a different age. The fragility of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), Cold War politics, Britain’s still significant diplomatic influence, the relative underdevelopment of communication systems, and the absence of anything like the still-to-come 47

Some works quoted directly in this and other chapters use the non-standard/colonial spelling ‘Ibo’, and these are rendered as in the originals, marked by [sic] at the first use in each chapter. Otherwise ‘Igbo’ is used throughout. 48 Whiteman, ‘Enugu’, 116. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 See Colin Legum, The Observer, London, October 16, 1966.

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Internet were factors that significantly influenced national and international reactions to the massacres against the Igbo that occurred from May to October 1966. The survival of Nigeria and the fate of the Igbo were in the hands of the OAU and the big powers. Whatever decision they made was destined to have grave repercussions. Faced with this agonizing burden, they chose to turn a blind eye to the disaster the Igbo were experiencing. Their attitudes were based not on the contract idea, ethical and moral grounds, or justice but on geopolitical and economic calculations, as well as on a hard-headed assessment of the likely outcome of any conflict. Since it was believed that without the support of the rest of Nigeria, OAU, and the big powers, the Igbo had no chance in a conflict with Nigeria. Africa and the big powers decided to abandon the Igbo to their fate. Take the OAU, for instance. Created some three years before the 1966 massacres began, it was still fragile. It was feared that support for the Eastern Region, even if its case was justified, would endanger the OAU’s existence because such action would undermine the two major principles of its charter. The first was the provision that the inherited colonial boundaries should be left intact (even if they make no geographic or ethno-cultural sense), and the second that no member of the organization shall interfere in the internal affairs of other states (even when such a grave crime as genocide was committed by any member state). Support for the East, therefore, was out of the question because it would destroy the young organization. The Islamic factor within the organization was also significant. The entire world of Islam gave Nigeria unqualified solidarity and paid no attention whatsoever to what happened to the Igbo in Northern Nigeria between May and October 1966.52 Pan-Africanists too, strongly opposed to the balkanization of any African state for any reason, urged the Igbo not to take any action that would lead to the disintegration of Nigeria. They regarded what happened to them as their sacrifice for the greater cause of African and Black solidarity, but they failed to call the federal government to stop the carnage. The Igbo, therefore, were faced with a triple whammy. What to do in such a situation was determined by realpolitik and by the psychology of both the Igbo people and their countrymen and countrywomen. Above all, however, Britain was the driving force against the impending secession. A study of the papers left behind by policy makers at the Commonwealth Office and Downing Street reveals that, from start to finish, Britain’s ‘official mind’ towards the Igbo leadership was unrepentantly hostile, brazenly one-sided, and indeed dishonest. Harold Wilson, British Prime Minister at the time, disregarded the pre-war massacres of the Igbo and gave no help to Yakubu Gowon, the Nigerian leader, to end the massacres. By persuading Gowon to renege on the 52

See NAL (London), FCO 65/248, 1968, Confidential.

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Aburi Accord53 that would have prevented the Civil War, and promising Gowon a supply of arms that encouraged him to invade Biafra, Wilson and his government must bear some responsibility for the civil war.54 Britain’s hostility toward the Igbo in general has a long history that has been well documented.55 Suffice it to say here that the image of the Igbo – true or false – that British colonial officials in Nigeria transmitted home during the conquest era (and throughout the colonial period) caused policy makers to be suspicious of Igbo intentions.56 Indeed, one of Britain’s first acts after the conquest of Igboland was to stop, for a short while, Igbo expansion into neighboring territories that had been going on for centuries. It is also generally believed that Britain refused to hand over political power to the South at independence, especially to the Igbo. It was determined at independence to leave the affairs of Nigeria in ‘in a safe pair of hands’, meaning Balewa and the North.57 Francis Cumming-Bruce, British High Commissioner, and his successor, David Hunt, both disliked the Igbo intensely. As far as Bruce was concerned the Igbo ‘were too clever by half ’ and Hunt thought little of Igbo military prowess.58 Walter Schwarz observed: The Igbo is quickest to learn [of all Nigerians]: he is at home in an office, a factory, a Rotary Club or a ballroom. Yet in the social and political arts of living with other people in a federation, without getting himself heavily disapproved of, he has failed totally and disastrously.59

Current developments in Nigeria seemed, therefore, to have brought back bad memories of the past, stoked particularly by Igbo frontline radical leadership during the independence struggle and led to fears that the Igbo would undo over 60 years of Nigerian state development. 53

This Accord is reproduced in full in Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, Chapter 10; and for Wilson’s action regarding it see Stanley Diamond, Who Killed Biafra? (London: Biafra Association of Europe, 1970), 8. 54 Dan Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 12; cf. Tobe Nnamani, ‘Biafra in Retrospect’, in Chima Korieh, ed., The Nigeria-Biafra War (New York: Cambria, 2012), 145. 55 See, for example, Adiele E. Afigbo, Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Culture (Ibadan University Press, 1981); Don C. Ohadike, The Ekumeku Movement: Western Igbo Resistance to British Colonial Conquest of Nigeria, 1883–1914 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991); S.N. Nwabara, Iboland: A Century of Contact with Britain, 1860–1960 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977); Sylvia Leith-Ross, African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria (London: Faber & Faber, 1939); cf. Uzoigwe, ‘The Igbo and the Nigerian Experiment’ in Against All Odds: The Igbo Experience in Postcolonial Nigeria, edited by Apollos O. Nwauwa and Chima J. Korieh (Glassboro, NJ: Goldline & Jacobs Publishing, 2011), 17–22. 56 See ibid. 57 Gould, Biafran War, 44; Trevor Clark, A Right Honourable Gentleman: The Life and Times of Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (Zaria: Hudahuda, 1991), 405–406; cf. Majuk, ‘Independence’, 300–302. 58 See Gould, Biafran War, 52. 59 Schwarz, Nigeria, 251–252.

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It was not that British officials hated the Igbo as a group as some Igbo scholars seem to imply; on the contrary, the Igbo-British relationship may be characterized as love-hate. Uzoigwe wrote: By the 1940s and 1950s the Igbo had come to admire what they perceived to be the British ideal of fair play, and how they rewarded hard work, honesty, and excellence. However, for the most part, they never bowed their back to their new rulers in obsequious humility. The British, although they never really liked the Igbo for this and for other reasons, did reward them when they felt that it was fair to do so; however, the infrastructural development of Igboland and the East generally did not seem to have been a major concern of the colonial administration.60

As long as the Igbo did not upset the status quo in independent Nigeria, all was well, and Britain was determined to keep the apple cart intact at all cost. Thus, official British policy as revealed during the civil war was simple: Biafra must be crushed because ‘the Ibos took matters into their own hands and resorted to unilateral action when they seceded in May, 1967 [but] if the two sides can agree that Nigeria should remain a single country, as it was when we brought it to independence, we should gladly support this’.61 This became the centerpiece of British policy throughout the conflict. Because Gowon agreed with this policy and Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, the Biafran leader, did not, Harold Wilson’s administration launched an unprecedented global diplomatic campaign that brought both the big powers and the OAU, the Arab League, the Islamic world, India, the West Indies, South America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and all the smaller European countries together to support British policy on Biafra.62 Britain, of course, did not incur the huge financial expenses that this diplomatic onslaught involved because of a love of Nigeria or for the preservation of constitutional integrity but essentially to protect its huge investments and other interests in Nigeria as well as to retain its influence. All the other countries involved, too, were also driven to do what they did to protect their respective national interests as they saw them, despite the fact that, in most countries, public opinion was sympathetic toward the sufferings of the Igbo. Their interests included economic, religious, neo-colonial, and Cold War considerations.63 Why then did the Igbo, after seeing this handwriting on the wall, still favor secession? In his speech at the Addis Ababa conference in August, 1968, Ojukwu, following the European contractarians, supplied this answer: ‘In the northernmost parts of Nigeria they [Northern 60

Uzoigwe, ‘The Igbo and the Nigerian Experiment’, 19. NAL, CAB 151/83. Brief No 20, 1968. Nigeria; Some Questions and Answers. Confidential. 62 NAL, FCO 65/248, July 28, 1968. Confidential. 63 See Rhodes House Library (RHL), Oxford – Papers of Sir Miles Clifford’s ‘Friends of Nigeria’; cf. Gould, Biafran War, xvi, xviii, 54. 61

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Nigerians] started slaughtering our people. We kept running, running, running. Having crossed a line, we called it home. That is what Biafra is – an end to a journey and an end to flight.’ 64 While we may quibble as much as we want about the number of Eastern Nigerians who were massacred or fled to the East for safety, nobody denies that the numbers were sufficiently large to have created a psychology of fear and distrust among those affected directly or indirectly. The available evidence demonstrates clearly that (i) the Igbo were specifically targeted and openly eliminated while the government did nothing to stop the massacres, (ii) that no other ethnic minorities domiciled in the North were so targeted and killed, and (iii) that the death of several non-Igbo during the massacres was purely accidental. This is the context within which the actions of the Igbo leadership should be evaluated. What happened to the Igbo, in their view, was a genocidal act. International newspaper correspondents who witnessed some of the atrocities agreed with them.65 Even so, had the massacres in the summer of 1966 sufficiently satisfied northern vengeance, it would have been difficult, as mentioned earlier, for the Igbo leadership to successfully ask their people to vote for secession. The British and Nigerian official views that Ojukwu was a sort of Adolph Hitler who did as he pleased are not based on any serious evidence. Like Gowon, Ojukwu was keenly aware of a palace coup that would overthrow him. However, his deliberately cultivated public posture did portray him as an intimidating figure, very much unlike Gowon’s seemingly amiable and, frankly, more likeable image. However, these images should be separated from the facts on the ground.66 One of these facts is that the continued and by far moremassive massacre in September-October 1966 made it much easier for the Igbo people to opt for secession.67 Walter Schwarz, a distinguished British newspaper correspondent, described what happened as, a traumatic event in Nigerian history. It destroyed the illusion that tribal rivalries could be dismissed as growing pains in a new nation and laid the foundation for the secessionist feeling that was to become an irresistible force in the East. No accurate figure for the number who died is available. The East’s first claim, made at the Aburi conference three months later was 10,000; the official figure given later was 30,000. Whichever figure is more accurate, no one disputes that it was a pogrom of genocidal proportions.68

Whiteman, writing a few years later, concurred:

64

See Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 155 for complete quotation. See some of these gruesome accounts in Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 100–114; cf. Uzoigwe, ‘Forgotten Genocide’, 73–78. 66 For a portrayal of Ojukwu’s and Gowon’s characters see Gould, Biafran War, 152–157. 67 See Uzoigwe, ‘Forgotten Genocide’, 67–73, especially the interview he had with General Gowon. 68 Schwarz, Nigeria, 215, emphasis added. 65

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The main point about the September killings was that they affected the mass of the people and created a sort of an emotional climate in which secession was possible. The argument about numbers (whether it was 5,000 or 30,000 killed or whether there were 700,000 or 2 million refugees) is irrelevant. Whatever the number, it was sufficiently large to create a trauma of considerable proportions, because it affected so many families and stretched through society.69

Two other actions of the federal government fortified the Igbo’s belief that secession was the best option for them. The first was Gowon’s decision to renege on the Aburi Accord that he willingly signed. He did so because federal permanent secretaries as well as the British government convinced him on his return from Aburi that the Accord was a confederal arrangement that would eventually lead to the disintegration of Nigeria.70 ‘On Aburi we stand’ became, therefore, the official policy of the East, and a rallying point for the Igbo.71 Had the Accord been given a chance to work there is no doubt that there would have been no secession and no civil war. The other reason they believed that secession was inevitable was Decree No. 8 of 1967 that, as stated earlier, made the Igbo a minority in the East.72 Uzoigwe wrote: first the Igbo now controlled only one of the twelve states, becoming even a minority in the East … the Hausa-Fulani controlled four of the five northern states; the Yoruba controlled all the three Yoruba states, Lagos being, for all practical purposes, a Yoruba state; Port Harcourt which the Willinck Commission of Inquiry declared to be an Igbo city, was now carved out of Igboland and made the capital of the new Rivers State; also carved out of Igboland were most of the oil-producing Igbo subgroups including Obigbo [literal translation, ‘Abode of Ndigbo’] and thirteen oil-producing communities of Egbema which no one ever doubted to be Igbo as well as all the Ikweres, a sub-Igbo group.73

He went on: The Igbo now denied access to the sea on all sides, and trapped, to borrow Jonathan Swift’s felicitous, even if morbid, description of himself, ‘like a poisoned rat in a hole’ were clearly in trouble. The issue was, as Igbo leaders confided in N.U. Akpan, ‘the honour of their race,’ asking how ‘anyone’ could ‘dare … even conceive that Ibo blood could be shed in such a wanton way, and imagine that nothing would be done about it – impossible!’ – What was Ojukwu to do now that Gowon had called his bluff?74

69

Whiteman, ‘Enugu’, 116. Elaigwu, Gowon, 29–30. 71 Ojukwu’s administration reproduced the Accord in twelve gramophone records. 72 For details of this decree see Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 117–120. 73 Ibid., 120. 74 Ibid. 70

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Schwarz accurately captured the dilemma of the Igbo when he wrote: ‘To the East, the arbitrary division of its territory into three leaving even Port Harcourt a predominantly Ibo city outside the Ibo state, was an open challenge to secede. But by that time the die was already cast.’75 There was unbearable tension and fear among the Igbo and the East generally. N.U. Akpan, an Ibibio and head of the Eastern Region Civil Service, later wrote that since it was known in official circles in the East that he was against secession, he was kept in the dark about what the East was planning to do.76 Akpan was in a very difficult position. The whole country, too, felt much apprehension. There were, indeed, some Igbo people who might not have been quite comfortable with secession for various reasons but because they were unable or were afraid to present an acceptable solution to the dilemma had no choice but to go along with the overwhelming majority view who said that they had been subjected to too much humiliation and suffering in Nigeria and could take no more.77

The Igbo leadership was in such frightful mood that they bluntly told Obafemi Awolowo, who had gone to Enugu to de-escalate the tension, ‘that the place of meeting between the people of the East and those of the North would be the battlefield’.78 The die, then, was cast. Precisely at 2:00 a.m. on May 30, 1967 – the anniversary of the May massacres – Ojukwu, after receiving the mandate of the Eastern leadership, made this historic declaration of independence: Fellow countrymen and women, You, the people of Eastern Nigeria, conscious of the supreme authority of Almighty God over all mankind, of your duty to yourselves and posterity; aware that you can no longer be protected in your lives and in your property by any government based outside Eastern Nigeria … unwilling to be unfree partners in any association of a political or economic nature … now, therefore, I, Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, by virtue of your authority and pursuant to the principles recited above, do hereby solemnly proclaim that the territory and region known as Eastern Nigeria, together with the continental shelf and territorial waters, shall henceforth be an independent sovereign state of the name and title The Republic of Biafra.79

Following this declaration, federal soldiers invaded Biafra on July 6, 1967, confident of reducing it back to obedience in a matter of weeks. The civil war had begun; it lasted for 33 months. 75

Schwarz, Nigeria, 230. See Akpan, Struggle for Secession, xiii-xviii. 77 Cited in ibid., xiii. 78 Cited in ibid. 79 The declaration is reproduced in full in Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 121; cf. also Schwarz, Nigeria, 229–230. 76

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The public discussion of what happened to the Igbo between May and October 1966 and its aftermath has tended, unfortunately, to be characterized by palpable flippancy and unwillingness to carefully study the available evidence. The public has also failed to read the works of those who have attempted to interpret the events and to subject them to serious critical analysis before making pronouncements. Given the situation described above, did the Igbo leadership overreact? If so, what should it have done? Recall the Leaders of Thought whose deliberations were terminated because of the major massacres of September and October. Should they have been recalled, who would have enforced any agreement reached, especially as the international community appeared to be unconcerned? On the one hand, opponents of the secession roundly reject the Eastern Region’s action. On the other, they show an unquestioning readiness to accept the federal government’s and British government’s denial that no genocide ever took place. Two British journalists noticed this tendency at the time. Colin Legum of The Observer noted: For fear of promoting an even greater tragedy, the Nigerians have been sheltered from knowing the full magnitude of the disaster that has over taken the Ibos in the Northern Region. The danger is that the truth will not be believed, and so no proper lessons learned, once the horror is over … While the Hausas in each town and village in the North know what happened in their own locations, only the Ibo know the whole terrible story from the 600,000 or so refugees who have fled to the safety of the Eastern Region, hacked, slashed, mangled, stripped naked and robbed of all their possessions.80

The other journalist, Walter Partington of the Daily Express wrote: Nigerian and British diplomats are playing down the full terror, apparently to prevent panic among Europeans and what Ibos are left, and to keep Nigeria from crumbling into anarchy if there is secession from the Nigerian Federation by the embittered Eastern Region … The Northern government has done its best to play down the four-day carnage which I am the first Fleet Street reporter to see.81

There is also no evidence to show that Gowon was in a strong enough position to enforce the verbal guarantees he made to the Igbo for their safety. The dilemma of the Igbo was, indeed, very clear and, believing that they were despised and unwanted in their own country, they made the choice to opt out of Nigeria for their own safety. This is the Igbo case, simply put. Surely, the dilemma of the Igbo, for them, was clear; and those who blamed, or still blame, the East for seceding are responsible

80 81

Legum, The Observer, October 16, 1966. Partington, ‘The Carnage I saw’, Daily Express, October 6, 1966.

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for providing answers to the above questions, but somehow they have not even raised them, let alone answered them.

Conclusion The rabid historicist is free to argue that this visitation gives too much credit to human agency in directing the course of historical events and neglects those immutable and cyclic laws said to govern these events. What is undeniable, nevertheless, is that in Nigeria’s colonial and early postcolonial history, the imprint of the human agency both in its laudable achievements and failures is writ large. Britain and its administrators forged a new country from hundreds of sovereign nations and called it Nigeria. They ruled it autocratically for some 60 years in amazing stability, and made commendable achievements in educational, economic and social development by the time of independence. However, some problems of this ostensibly stable country that were swept under the carpet erupted soon afterwards. Because their Nigerian successors failed to address these problems successfully, given the system of a curious democratic federation that they inherited, Nigeria collapsed, and the aftermath was a series of events that ended in secession and civil war. To blame the conflict solely on Ojukwu or the Igbo would be both simplistic and unhistorical. What also happened had precious little to do with the laws of historicism. The duty of the historian is to provide a critique of how the human agency handled its awesome task, for good or ill.

Postscript It was generally known that since the OAU, Britain, and the United States were on Nigeria’s side, Biafra was doomed. Within Britain, indeed, Nigeria won the unsolicited but grateful support of an influential group of individuals made up of captains of industry and commerce, and significant politicians of the Labour and Tory parties in both Houses of Parliament; they were headed by Sir Geoffrey Miles Clifford. Their ostensible aims were to counter what they called ‘Biafran propaganda’, to complement Wilson’s diplomatic efforts and present the ‘true facts’ of events in Nigeria to the world. They called themselves ‘Friends of Nigeria’ and they hired an influential public relations firm, Galitzine & Partners for this purpose.82 A case of the kettle calling the pot black! There was also a less influential group of individuals in the British Isles made up of intellectuals, radicals, missionaries, newspaper correspondents, and philanthropists who supported Biafra’s cause. They called themselves

82

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Their papers are deposited at Rhodes House Library (RHL), Oxford.

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the British-Biafra Association who, too, claimed to possess the ‘true facts’.83 When the state of the war showed beyond doubt that Biafra was a lost cause, the global community, led by Britain, turned attention to stopping the war through diplomatic negotiations within the context of one Nigeria, providing relief supplies to the starving population in Nigeria by international organizations, and ensuring that after the expected Nigerian victory the Igbo people would not be exterminated. Naturally, Gowon accepted these actions. Not surprisingly Ojukwu and the Biafran leadership adamantly refused to return to the Nigerian Commonwealth under the above conditions because to do so implied that the East had no reason to opt out of Nigeria in the first instance; that all the sufferings, humiliations, and deaths of their people would have been in vain; that might was right; and that the contract of government was a useless document.84 Consequently, Wilson blamed the crisis on Ojukwu, including starvation in Biafra, and stated: The Federal Government is glad to have our help in co-operation with the International Red Cross. It is Colonel Ojukwu who has spurned our offer of relief supplies … If he were to compromise, he could stop the war tomorrow and open the way to unimpeded operations to save the refugees. It is up to the Ibo leaders to save their own people, having got them into this terrible plight.85

It is an assumption that is difficult to prove. He denied that any genocide was committed against the Igbo, citing the report of a group of international observers invited by Gowon to the war zones that found no evidence of any genocide but refrained from considering contrary evidence available to him.86 He rejected outright the accusation that some Britons in Northern Nigeria encouraged the 1966 massacres, continued to supply necessary arms to Nigeria, and supported total embargo of such supplies to Biafra. These policies were considered necessary to expedite the fall of Biafra and to save lives.87

83

Their papers are also deposited at RHL. These include two boxes containing hundreds of revolting photographs depicting the atrocities visited on the Igbo. Cf. Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 281–334. 84 For the position of Ojukwu, see Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 223–245. 85 NAL, CAB 151/83. Brief NO. 20. Confidential. 86 For this contrary evidence see RHL Mss AFr. s 2399; Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 281–334; S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser Ottanelli, ‘The History and Legacy of the Asaba, Nigeria, Massacres’, African Studies Review, 54:3 (2011),1–26. 87 NAL, CAB 151/83. Brief NO. 20. Confidential.

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3

Connecting Theory with Reality Understanding the Causes of the Nigeria-Biafra War Ogechi E. Anyanwu

Introduction The Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–1970) was a defining event in the history of postcolonial Nigeria. Nigeria’s independence in 1960 marked the beginning of attempts to build a strong, united, and prosperous nation in Africa’s most populous pluralistic country. Yet the tension arising from the conflicting interests and aspirations of the country’s diverse ethnic groups intensified. The British had made little effort to unite the different ethnic groups in a collective consciousness during the colonial period. Its indirect rule system of administering Nigeria undercut any chances of promoting social solidarity among various ethnicities. Worse still was that the forced amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates of Nigeria in 1914 was not successful in narrowing the entrenched historical, cultural, and religious differences in the country. Due to the mistrust and fear of domination and deprivation that dominated Nigeria’s politics during the colonial period, it was only a matter of time before the country’s fragile unity would be tested. That test came at independence. The inability to resolve the disagreements between the federal government, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, and the Eastern Region, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Emeka Ojukwu, compelled the latter to secede from Nigeria by proclaiming the independent Republic of Biafra on May 30, 1967. Swiftly, the federal government declared a war designed to keep the county together. A civil war ensued, lasting from July 6, 1967 to January 15, 1970.1 One of the subjects of unending scholarly debates about the NigeriaBiafra War has been its causes. Much of the scholarly writing on the causes of the war has taken a narrow view of the war, often inspired by loyalty to an ideology or ethnic group. This chapter applies the theories of societal conditions, economic conditions, and human nature as explanatory frameworks to analyse the dynamic and complex causes of 1

Various scholars have acknowledged the devastation of the war and its impact on Nigeria’s postcolonial politics. See Eghosa E. Osaghae, Ebere Onwudiwe, and Rotimi T. Suberu, The Nigerian Civil War and its Aftermath (Ibadan, Nigeria: John Archers, 2002); A. Adejoh, The Nigerian Civil War: Forty Years After, What Lessons? (Ibadan: Aboki, 2008).

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the war. Through analysis of mostly primary sources acquired from the National Archives, London (UK), this chapter argues that the NigeriaBiafra War represented a predictable convergence of domestic mistrusts and rivalries that British colonial rule consolidated with broader neocolonial British interests that the Cold War era politics facilitated. The war was a logical manifestation of unaddressed ethnic tension that typified Nigeria’s colonial society. It shows that even after achieving political independence, the tension refused to disappear but was rather sharpened, making war inevitable. As demonstrated in this chapter, the historical causes of the Nigeria-Biafra War can only be fully understood in the context of several processes that include the prevailing attitudes and relationship among Nigerian peoples and societies; the competition and fear over the control of the country’s natural resources, especially oil; and the mindset of major actors in the conflict. By exploring the subject from a perspective that incorporates multiple forces that created the underlying conditions for the war, this chapter provides a much more comprehensive understanding of the war’s significance in Nigeria’s history and a valuable window into not only the current problems of Nigeria but also the remedies. This chapter shows that the theories of societal conditions, economic conditions, and human nature are crucial to any understanding of the dynamic and complex causes of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Many scholars have blamed societal problems for conflicts, wars, and many other ills afflicting societies. Jean-Jacques Rousseau sees the ills as emanating from the dynamics existing within a society. For him, exploitation and domination of others reflect human enslavement to their own needs.2 As the history of the Nigeria-Biafra War reveals, the undercurrents of Nigeria’s pluralistic society made it likely for the country’s diverse ethnic groups to either attempt to dominate others or avoid domination. Nationalism, described as an adulterous religion, often leads to war. Every nation ‘has its own rose colored mirror’, and members, when threatened, opt to defend themselves even with violence.3 There is no mistaking the fact that the millions of Igbo people, who put up a gallant fight in the face of Nigeria’s superior military power, loved their nation; so did the Nigerian forces that fought to keep the country united. Unjust rule marked by dictatorship and tyranny often lead to conflicts and wars. For Immanuel Kant, absence of democracy creates the atmosphere in which war could be possible.4 The heated undemocratic political environment in which the Nigeria-Biafra War occurred supports Kant’s positon. Related to the theory of societal condition is that of economic 2

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (New York: Dutton, 1950). Frederick H. Hartmann, The Relations of Nations (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 32. 4 Immanuel Kant and Carl J. Friedrich, The Philosophy of Kant: Immanuel Kant’s Moral and Political Writings (New York: Modern Library, 1949). 3

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conditions. Economic conditions create an incentive to fight. According to John Locke, the desire for land and resources or the need to avoid deprivation of those resources typically leads nations to war.5 The uneven spread of resources creates the urge to fight neighbors more naturally endowed with these.6 Lenin sees cutthroat capitalism as the culprit.7 No observer of Nigeria’s political scene in the 1960s would ignore the role played by the struggle to control oil revenue in both contributing to the war and influencing foreign involvement. The popularity of oil as a major export earner and its uneven location in the South emboldened Biafran leaders to engage in the war with a full understanding of the economic viability of the new country. It also made the idea of keeping the country united an overriding economic imperative, from the perspectives of the Nigerian and British governments. A full understanding of the war is impossible without analysing the mindset of major players during the war. The theory of human nature therefore provides a clue as to the causes of the war. Saint Augustine blames human nature for wars: according to him, all human beings are flawed due to the original sin committed by Adam and Eve.8 Plato sees humans’ feverish drive for worldly possession as a reflection of human defect that naturally leads to war.9 For Sigmund Freud, humans are born with a death wish that is often redirected to other activities such as war.10 Thomas Hobbes notes that human beings possess a natural tendency to fight endlessly but the existence of government acts as a moderating influence.11 Overall, the imperfection of the world, as evident in numerous wars, according to Hans Morgenthau, ‘is the result of forces inherent in human nature’.12 In Nigeria, the mutual distrust and resentment between the North and the East that manifested prominently in the relationship between Gowon and Ojukwu contributed to the war significantly. Whether focusing on the ethnic, economic, political, or external dimensions of the war, the history of Nigeria in the 1960s continues to occupy the attention of scholars.13 This chapter shows 5

John Locke, The Second Treatise on Civil Government (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986), 6–8. 6 Richard A. Falk, This Endangered Planet (New York: Vintage, 1973). 7 Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982 [1963]). 8 Saint Augustine, quoted in Thomas M. Magstadt and Peter M. Schotten, Understanding Politics: Ideas, Institutions, and Issues (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 440. 9 Plato, The Republic, edited by G.R.F. Ferrari and translated by Tom Griffith (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 10 Sigmund Freud and A.A. Brill, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York: Modern Library, 1938). 11 Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, edited by A.R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 63–5. 12 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1967), 36. 13 G.N. Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood: Prelude to the Nigerian Civil War (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2010); Alexander A. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran

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that the Nigeria-Biafra War was only possible because of the complex interactions between leaders unwilling to compromise and trapped in a winner-takes-all mentality, a historically divided country assailed by fear of domination and deprivation, and a lopsided economy that lent itself to unhealthy competition between the major ethnic groups.

Nigeria Before the War Following years of treaties signed with local rulers – and shortly after the conclusion of the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 – Britain established a colonial administration in Nigeria. It carved out three territories: the Colony and Protectorate of Lagos (1886), the Niger Coast Protectorate (1893), and the Northern Protectorate (1900). The Niger Coast Protectorate was merged with the Colony and Protectorate of Lagos to become the Southern Protectorate in 1906. Modern Nigeria emerged in 1914 when Britain amalgamated northern and southern protectorates, bringing together diverse peoples, cultures, religions, and languages. The unification of the two areas with incompatible and conflicting histories and aspirations was made for the administrative and financial interests of the British. According to Osadolor, Lugard considered it unnecessary to carve up a territory undivided by natural boundaries, more so since one portion (the South) was wealthy enough to commit resources to even ‘unimportant’ programmes while the other portion (the North), could not balance its budget necessitating the British taxpayer being called upon to bear the larger share of even the cost of its administration. This partly explains the amalgamation, an act which provoked bitter controversy at the time, arousing the resentment of educated elites and of some British administrators.14

The amalgamation of the two different areas saddled postcolonial Nigeria with a difficult problem of building a nation out of the component nationalities. Thus the relationship between the North and the South since amalgamation has been contentious. As early as 1944, the Daily Service newspaper predicted ‘an era of wholesome rivalry’ among War (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980); Chinua Achebe, There was a Country: A Memoir (New York: Penguin Books, 2013); Chima Korieh, ed., The NigeriaBiafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2012); John de St. Jorre, The Brothers’ War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1972); E. Wayne Nafziger, The Economics of Political Instability: The Nigerian-Biafran War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983); Michael Gould, The Struggle for Modern Nigeria: The Biafran War, 1967–1970 (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012); Morris Davis, ‘Negotiating about Biafran Oil’, Issue: A Journal of Opinion 3:2 (Summer 1973), 23–32; Suzanne Cronje, The World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of the Biafran War, 1967–1970 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972). 14 O. Osadolor, ‘The Development of the Federal Idea and the Federal Framework’, in Federalism and Political Restructuring in Nigeria, edited by K. Amuwo, A. Agbaje, R. Suberu, and G. Herault (Ibadan: Spectrum, 1998), 35.

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the three dominant ethnic groups in Nigeria: Igbos, Yorubas, and Hausas.15 Adeyemo Alakija, the president of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa (a pan-Yoruba organization in the West), declared that the Yoruba people ‘will hold their own among other tribes of Nigeria’ and resist being ‘relegated to the background in the future’.16 Nnamdi Azikiwe urged Igbos to assume the leadership position they truly deserved.17 The problems resulting from the amalgamation of 1914 have been the subject of what is dubbed ‘The National Question’. This question became important because Nigeria comprises many groups at ‘different levels of development hence the need to solve these problems and find an equitable basis for the peaceful and harmonious co-existence of these groups’.18 Finding a common ground to work together was never easy as each ethnic group often viewed national issues from a purely narrow-minded, self-centered standpoint. Nigerian leaders acknowledged the absence of national cohesion in the country. Speaking on the floor of the Federal House of Representatives, Lagos, Tafawa Balewa, who later became the country’s first Prime Minister insisted: ‘Since the amalgamation of southern and northern provinces in 1914, Nigeria has existed as one country only on paper … It is still far from being united. Nigerian unity is only a British intention for the country’.19 Obafemi Awolowo echoed Balewa’s sentiment when he wrote: ‘Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no “Nigerians” in the same sense there are “English” or “Welsh” or “French”.’ The word Nigeria was merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who lived within the boundaries of Nigeria from those who did not’.20 With these public assertions of the absence of a national spirit by regional politicians, distrust naturally characterized interregional relationship. The misgivings between the North and the South manifested more prominently during the constitutional conference of 1950. Delegates from Nigeria’s three administrative areas (Eastern, Western, and Northern regions) gathered in Ibadan to reform the Richards Constitution. They unanimously agreed on greater regional autonomy organized around a federal system of government. In that system, each region would send representatives to the national congress in Lagos. The desire of the regions to protect their independence was a step in the unending and unhealthy competition that contributed in undermining the 15

Daily Service (Lagos), October 17, 1944, 2. Minutes of the first inaugural conference of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, June 1948, cited in James Smoot Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1958), 346. 17 West African Pilot, July 6, 1949. 18 Education Sector Analysis, Historical Background on the Development of Education in Nigeria (Abuja: Education Sector Analysis, 2003), 14. 19 Ahmadu Bello, My Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 160. 20 Obafemi Awolowo, Path to Nigerian Freedom (London: Faber & Faber, 1947), 47–48. 16

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prospects of nation building. Although the three regions agreed on regional autonomy, they differed on the ratio of regional representation at the national assembly. While delegates from the East and the West demanded for equal representation, delegates from the Northern Region demanded for a 50–50 representation ratio between it and the two other regions in the South combined. Demand by the northern delegates was born out of fear of potential domination by the more advanced South. As Mallam Sani Dingyadi, a spokesperson for the North, stated, the North has a different religion and different standards of education, so the North must stand alone by itself. Therefore, in any matter of importance one would find the East, West, Lagos … on one side leaving the North on the other side. Therefore, I do not think it is fair and cannot tolerate it that equal representation should be given to each region. What we would recommend is at least one-half representation for the North and one-half for what I call the South.21

Obanikoro and Alvan Ikoku, who spoke for the West and the East, respectively, insisted that the North’s proposition, if allowed, would translate to ‘placing the fate of the two regions at the mercy of the North’.22 In their words, ‘the population of the North is larger than that of the other two regions. But if the principle is one of federation and not of domination, the basis of representation at the centre must be regional.’23 At the end of the conference, the North’s preference prevailed without which the Emir of Zaria threatened to ‘ask for separation from the rest of Nigeria’.24 The autonomy enjoyed by the regions led to unhealthy rivalry which compromised attempts to build a united nation. Balewa registered his concern over the influx of southerners in the North which he believed threatened to displace less-educated northerners.25 Because of the superior educational attainment of southerners, the Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo newspaper echoed Balewa’s sentiment when it warned in 1953 that if Britain grants Nigeria early independence, southerners would run the country. According to him, ‘it is the Southerner who has the power in the North. They have control of the railway stations; of the Post Offices; of Government Hospitals; of the canteens; the majority employed in the Kaduna Secretariat and in the Public Works Department are all Southerners.’26

21

Proceedings of the General Conference on Review of the Constitution, January 1950 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1950), 46–47. 22 Ibid., 52. 23 Ibid., 22. 24 Ibid., 218. 25 Legislative Council Debates, Nigeria, March 4, 1948, 227, cited in Coleman, Nigeria, 361. 26 Editorial, Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo, February 18, 1950, cited in Report on the Kano Disturbances of May 1953 (Kaduna: Northern Regional Government, 1953), 43.

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The fear of southern domination and strong negative sentiments against the Igbos persisted among all classes of people in the North. For instance, according to Martin Arnold, the Hausa people on the street despised the Igbos for disrespecting authority, laughing at their prophet, dismissing Hausa people as stupid sometimes because they could not speak English.27 In a letter to a newspaper editor, a northerner wrote: ‘We were conquered by the white man, but he did not enslave us, and now those who did not conquer us will enslave us. Editor, lead us. God, show us the way.’28 With the mutual distrust of each group during the colonial period, it was not surprising that it was only a matter of time before Nigeria’s fragile unity would be tested following independence. The country’s failure to pass the test contributed to the Nigeria-Biafra War, the causes of which can be fully understood when societal, economic, and human elements are analysed and connected.

A Society Ripe for Change Postcolonial Nigeria inherited a colonial arrangement in which three regions were created along ethnic lines with three dominant groups: Igbo in the East, Hausa-Fulani in the North, and Yoruba in the West. The adopted federal system of government gave a measure of financial and political autonomy to the regions with a weak federal government. No political observer in the early 1960s would escape the feeling that something was wrong with Nigeria’s nation-building project. The Nigerian society in the 1960s was ripe for change. The contested census results, the coup and counter-coup, the killings of Igbos in the North, and the inability of the regionally minded political elites to reach a compromise in addressing contentious issues all made the Nigeria-Biafra War predictable. Before independence in 1960, and in the years following it, fear of domination and deprivation had shaped interregional interactions. To allay the fears of each region, Nigeria’s independence constitution maintained the regional autonomy established by the Macpherson Constitution in 1951. Yet the fears remained. For instance, the census conducted in 1962 was cancelled due to disagreement over regional population. Even when another census was conducted in 1963, the South disputed the result of 25.86 million for its area and 29.80 million for the North.29 It accused the North of attempting to dominate the country’s politics by inflating its population numbers. Because population determined federal financial allocations and the number of political seats assigned to 27

Martin Arnold, ‘Ibos Noted for Strong Will, Which Some Denounce’, New York Times, January 14, 1970, 17. 28 Arnold, ‘Ibos Noted for Strong Will, Which Some Denounce’. 29 Federal Republic of Nigeria, Population Census of Nigeria, 1963 Volume 111 (Lagos: Office of Statistics, 1963). S.A. Aluko, ‘How Many Nigerians? An Analysis of Nigeria’s Census Problems, 1901–63’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 3:3 (Oct. 1965), 371–392.

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each region at the federal legislature, the controversy was not surprising.30 The main issue surrounding the census crisis was ‘which section of the country – the North or the South – should exercise veto over the future of Nigeria … And the 1962–1963 census resolved it, at any rate temporarily, in favor of the North. But almost absentmindedly, Nigeria’s ethnic politicians were cascading their country toward a precipice.’ 31 To many in the South, the 1962–1963 census, ‘provided further evidence of the ability and determination of the North … to maintain its population majority and the political power that it conferred’.32 Before 1966, Nigeria had four regions: the North, East, West, and Mid-West, the last having been carved out from the West in June 1963. In these regions, ‘three major national groups – the Hausas, Yorubas and Ibos [sic] – each dominated their own region, while at the same time they engaged in a bitter struggle for power at the Federal center’.33 The Hausa-Fulani controlled the center. According to Walter Schwarz: ‘The federation has never achieved the balance of interests that it has in America or in India. In practice the arrangement has been that the winner takes all. The Northern People’s Congress effectively rules the whole country.’34 The census crisis coincided with the disputed elections of 1964 and the allegation of corruptions levied against political leaders at the federal and regional levels to drive a military coup in January 1966 which saw the assassination of mostly prominent northern politicians, including Balewa. The leader of the coup was Kaduna Nzeogwu, an Igbo officer. An Igbo-led coup that saw the lopsided killing of northern politicians aggravated existing ethnic mistrust. Although the coup was unsuccessful, the North was apprehensive of southern domination, as Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo man, who was the top-ranking military officer, became the head of state. Northern misgiving was confirmed when Aguiyi-Ironsi’s government introduced a unitary system of government for the country, a system that ended regional autonomy.35 Losing power to a southerner, afraid of competing with the much more advanced southerners for educational opportunities, and unsure of the consequences of the new unification policy, northern restlessness heightened. Although the North was bigger in size than the South, as Welch and Smith put it, 30

See Eghosa Osaghae, The Crippled Giant: Nigeria since Independence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 31 G.N. Uzoigwe, ‘Prelude to Secession and War: The Nigerian Census Crisis, 1962–1963’, Mbari: The International Journal of Igbo Studies 2:1&2 (January 2009), 22. 32 Rotimi T. Suberu, Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2001), 29. 33 Colin Legum, ‘The Civil War in Nigeria: Pattern for a New Nation’, The Observer Foreign News Service, September 26, 1969, in Foreign and Commonwealth Office 65/446 (hereafter FCO 65/446). The National Archives, London, United Kingdom. 34 Walter Schwarz, ‘The Next Escalation’, (FCO 65/446). 35 Federal Republic of Nigeria, Decree No. 1, 1966; Daily Times, 29 January 1966.

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Ogechi E. Anyanwu the North feared the southern regions. This fear sprang largely from the limited educational and economic opportunities in the region. Preference for recruitment into the Northern Civil Service was given [to] Northerners, even with lower educational qualifications. Abolition of such preferences would close the major avenue by which Northerners could advance themselves.36

The fears and uncertainty of the unitary system of government under the control of an Igbo man, combined with Aguiyi-Ironsi’s delay in punishing those who executed the first military coup, brought uneasy feelings in the North. Because they were fearful of losing the independence and privileges they enjoyed previously, the North backed another coup that overthrew Aguiyi-Ironsi’s regime on 29 July 1966, six months after coming to power. Gowon, one of the leaders of the coup that resulted in the assassination of Aguiyi-Ironsi, emerged as the new leader. He acted swiftly by suspending unitary decree, unconsciously sending a message that the basis of Nigeria’s unity was absent. Ojukwu, the Military Governor of the East questioned the legitimacy of Gowon’s authority, especially since the circumstances surrounding Aguiyi-Ironsi’s death remained unclear. The assassination of mostly northern political leaders in the wake of the Nzeogwu-led coup saw retaliatory killings of mostly Igbos living in the North. Such killings started when Aguiyi-Ironsi was in power and increased in intensity when Gowon became the head of state. The systematic slaughter of Igbos living in the North not only provided eastern leaders part of the justification to secede from Nigeria but also made it easy for them to sway the public in the East in favor of war. As the political elites in Nigeria discussed the future of the country following the two coups, Igbos living in the Northern Region were systematically killed. Between May and October 1966, over 30,000 Igbo people living in the North were brutally massacred.37 Mobs in many northern cities, mostly with active assistance of local officials, carried out the killings. Gowon’s inability to end the killing of Igbo people in the North caused the Igbos to question the validity of the country’s nation-building project. In fact, the consensus at a meeting between George Thomas, the minister of State for Commonwealth Affairs, and the Nigerian High Commissioner in London was that the major cause of the crisis that led to the war ‘was the massacre of eastern Ibos in the north in the aftermath of the coup’.38 The fear of further genocide and the desire for 36

Claude E. Welch and Arthur K. Smith, Military Role and Rule: Perspectives on Civil-Military Relations (Belmont, CA: Duxbury, 1974), 128. 37 Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood. 38 ‘Record of a Talk between the Minister of State for Commonwealth Affairs, Mr. George Thomas and the Nigerian High Commissioner at the Commonwealth Office on Friday 28 April 1967’, Prime Minister’s Office 13/1661 (hereafter PREM 13/1661). The National Archives, London, UK.

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survival of the Igbo ethnic group played into the hands of leaders in the East as they galvanized the public against the federal government. They made the people believe that the choice available to them was either secession or death. Choosing the former, therefore, was only logical. Colin Legum, the chief correspondent for Africa for The Observer Foreign News Service, noted: It is almost impossible for the Federals to reach the minds of the mass of Ibos within Biafra to persuade them that genocide is not what lies in wait for them if they abandon secession. The Biafran leadership’s efforts to keep the fears of genocide are naturally greatly helped by memories of the ghastly massacres which occurred in Northern Nigeria in 1966, when large numbers of Ibos as well as other Nigerians died.39

Ojukwu was accurate when he said that the Igbos were ‘the foremost champions of unity in Nigeria’ but ‘that unity has, however, proved through so many crises, to be a costly mirage’.40 The killings of Igbos in the North weakened their commitment to Nigeria’s unity. Ojukwu exploited the prevailing public mood in the East to justify secession and attract support for it. This is because, as Achebe saw it, ‘a strong sense [prevailed] that Nigeria was no longer habitable for the Igbo and many other peoples from Eastern Nigeria’.41 Framing secession and the war that followed as a struggle for survival was especially appealing to the easterners. Ojukwu felt justified since the war was aimed at saving his people from complete annihilation.42 The consolidation of two competing nationalisms in the mid-1960s in the aftermath of the Igbo killings further poisoned the political and social landscape of Nigeria. For those in Biafra, strong nationalistic cohesion and sentiments were forged due to the hatred and bitterness engendered by their common suffering. For Nigeria, despite the differences among other ethnic groups, it was united in the shared fear of potentially losing its share of the oil wealth. United by shared sorrow, nationalism among Igbos surpassed in strength the sense of 39

Colin Legum, ‘The Civil War in Nigeria: For Biafra, A Gamble Against Slow Death’, The Observer Foreign News Service, September 24, 1969 (FCO 65/446). 40 Letter from Odumegwu Ojukwu to Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister, May 30, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). 41 Achebe, There was a Country, 86. 42 In a BBC interview in 2000, Ojukwu argued, ‘At 33 I reacted as a brilliant 33 year old. At 66 it is my hope that if I had to face this I should also confront it as a brilliant 66 year old … How can I feel responsible in a situation in which I put myself out and saved the people from genocide? No, I don’t feel responsible at all. I did the best I could.’ Insisting that the major issues that led to the civil war remain unaddressed in post-civil war Nigeria, he said that the Igbos have remained excluded from power, which will remain a source of instability in the country. As he noted, ‘None of the problems that led to the war have been solved yet. They are still there. We have a situation creeping towards the type of situation that saw the beginning of the war.’ See Barnaby Phillips, ‘Biafra: Thirty Years On’, BBC, January 13, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/596712.stm (accessed August 20 2014).

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nationalism in Nigeria. The strength of that nationalism was reflected in the people’s support for a separate country and determined fight to maintain their independence throughout the war, notwithstanding the superior military and financial advantages Nigeria enjoyed. Although the Economist noted in 1969 that ‘the wrongs done to the Ibos did not justify this secession’, it acknowledged that ‘[s]ince the massacre of Ibos in the north in 1966 and throughout the war, Biafran solidarity has showed no signs of cracking’.43 The real or perceived militarization of Nigeria and the Eastern Region made peaceful resolution of the conflict impossible. Gowon believed that Ojukwu’s attempt to increase the Eastern Region’s military supplies to withstand potential federal attacks would enable the East to maintain its independence and thus control the lucrative oil installations in the region. Gowon’s reactive efforts to procure arms from Britain heightened the existing tension, hardened federal attitudes toward Biafra, and made a showdown inevitable. In his letter to the British Prime Minister, Gowon expressed worry that ‘the illegal regime at Enugu’ had acquired ‘offensive military aircraft,’ ‘at least one B26 bomber’, and ‘a number of military helicopters’.44 He therefore requested Britain to supply it with ‘12 Jet fighter-bomber aircraft, 6 fast seaward defense boats capable of at least 30 knots per hour and fully equipped, and 24 anti-aircraft guns’.45 A.M. Palliser, a British diplomat and private secretary to the British Prime Minister noted that Nigeria’s request for ‘patrol boats would greatly increase their ability to enforce a potential blockage of Eastern ports’.46 The arms race by both sides further undermined chances of peaceful resolution of the crisis. Ethnic conflict in Africa’s most populous state was a potential magnet for the Cold War rivalry. Gowon exploited the situation to his advantage. Gowon had sensed that since Britain was pushing for a peaceful resolution to the conflict they would be reluctant to supply weapons to Nigeria or send troops to the country. Yet he was mindful and fearful of the potential military capability of Biafra. To force the hands of the British, he played the Cold War card. In a letter to the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, he stated: ‘if for any reason Her Majesty’s Government is unable to help, you would understand, I trust, why I must seek the necessary equipment from any source whatsoever that can help as we desire the equipment strictly on commercial [basis].’ 47 Gowon was diplomatic enough to assure Britain of Nigeria’s willingness to continue its friendship with it. He further noted that ‘nothing we do in this regard 43

‘Ojukwu has made his Point’, Economist, August 30, 1969. The paper wondered if ‘the Biafrans demonstrated that their claim to a separate state is as strong, as say, that of the Irish?’ 19 (FCO 65/446). 44 ‘Text of Gowon’s message to Prime Minister’, July 1, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). 45 Ibid. 46 ‘Nigerian Request for Arms’, A.M. Palliser Telegram, July 2, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). 47 Gowon to Prime Minister July 1, 1967.

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should be construed as affecting in any way the traditional policy of Nigeria of non-alignment in the issues that divide the military and ideological camps in the world’.48 Despite the urgency expressed in Gowon’s letter – and in spite of the subtle threat implied – Britain was unpersuaded to act quickly. Nigerian officials were disappointed, especially when they believed that Biafran secessionist  state had been acquiring offensive weapons. Sir David Hunt, a British diplomat and the High Commissioner to Nigeria between 1967 and 1969, sensed the disappointment among some high level officials of the federal government who he said ‘have been hinting they would ask Russians for military assistance’.49 He added: ‘I am not sure whether they did make this request or whether they are only trying to frighten us but if they did I think it likely Russians rejected it.’50 Britain’s initial reluctance to supply arms to Nigeria ultimately gave way to increased military cooperation when the war became unavoidable, and when Britain determined that it was in their best interest to back Nigeria or risk losing their investments to rival powers, especially in the Eastern bloc. The escalation of ethnic tension, the 1966 killings of Igbos in the North, and the arms race between Nigeria and Biafra were societal conditions central in understanding the causes of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Alone, these societal factors are inadequate to explain the causes of the war. Economic conditions are just as important. The uneven location of oil wealth, the sudden and increased importance of oil revenue, and the scramble to control the revenue are equally compelling forces that contributed to the war. Oil revenue, more than any other factor, strengthened the resolve of officials in the East to secede from Nigeria, the determination of Nigeria to respond militarily, and the desire of Britain to see a Nigeria united as an economic necessity, especially in the context of the Cold War.

Oil, Money, and Power Politics The financial and administrative autonomy enjoyed by the regions coincided with the growing national dependence on oil revenues to embolden leaders in the East and harden the attitudes of officials in Lagos. The contribution of oil wealth to the country’s national revenue rose from 1 percent in 1960 to 18 percent in 1966.51 By 1965, the oil sector employed over 17,178 Nigerians with salaries estimated at £3.6 million), generated up to £15.8 million in tax revenue to the federal government, paid £2 million in harbor fees to the Ports Authority, and 48

Ibid. ‘Telegram from Sir. D. Hunt to Commonwealth Office’, June 2, 1967’ (PREM 13/1661). 50 Ibid. 51 Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Annual Statistical Bulletin, 1994. 49

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provided up to £30.3 million in foreign exchange. Excluding oil, revenue from other sources during the 1965–1966 fiscal year was £172 million, but projected revenue from oil alone was estimated at between £75 million to £115 million by 1970.52 Given the statistics and potential economic importance of oil, it was inconceivable for any politician to ignore the central role oil would play in the country’s politics. Because the majority of the country’s oil reserves were located in the East, it was not surprising that the federal government resisted any threat of secession from the region. The centrality of the oil revenues to the conflict was evident even before the outbreak of the war; it dominated the thinking of key officials. Uncertainty over who should receive the oil revenues heightened the tension between both sides and made peaceful resolution of the crisis impossible. By seceding, Ojukwu was confident that his new country would be economically viable given the strength of its human and natural resources. In a letter to Harold Wilson, Ojukwu touted the potentials of Biafra: Its population of 14 million contains a very high proportion of trained personnel in business and industry, administration, science and technology. Our area of about 30,000 square miles supports an agriculture buoyant in the production of food crops, copra, cocoa, rubber and oil palm, large mineral deposit such a limestone, iron ore, lead zinc, coal, oil and natural gas.53

Eager to raise money to fulfill his financial responsibility to his new country, in June 1967, Ojukwu announced a decree that required oil companies operating in the Eastern Region to pay royalties and other revenues from oil operations to the Biafran government. Ojukwu understood that the control of oil money would not only provide the finances to prosecute a possible war but would also make the new country economically viable. He united the collective conscience of the people against Nigeria by playing the oil card. According to him, ‘Gowon is determined to come into our home and destroy us in order to carry away what belongs to us.’54 Even though Ojukwu indicated other natural endowments, it was clear to any neutral observer that oil revenue was a significant variable. By early 1967, with the two sides of the conflict unable to reach an understanding, money became central to their calculations. As noted by the US Ambassador to Nigeria, ‘FMG [Federal Military Government] and Eastern Government are both becoming increasingly aware of

52

W. Ehwarieme, ‘The Military, Oil and Development: The Political Economy of Fiscal Federalism in Nigeria’, in Fiscal Federalism and Nigeria’s Economic Development, edited by E. Aigbokhan (Ibadan: Nigerian Economic Society, 1999), 57. During that period, the Pound Sterling was worth approximately 15 times its value in early 2016, and £1 was worth about $2.4 US Dollars of the time. 53 Ojukwu to Wilson. 54 ‘Text of Ojukwu’s Speech’, June 30, 1967 (PREM 13/1661).

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critical importance of control of public revenue’.55 Revenue control put the oil companies, especially Shell-BP, the main exporter of oil from the Eastern Region, in a tricky position. In view of the existing agreement between Shell-BP and the federal government, Ojukwu’s decree threatened oil business, particularly as the federal government was unwilling to back down. Gowon quickly sent a telegram to London requesting the Prime Minister to mount pressure on the oil companies to fulfill their contractual obligations to the federal government. In it, he acknowledged that ‘the British Government has a controlling voice in the affairs of the British petroleum … [and therefore insisted] that royalties due in July should be paid by Shell-BP promptly to the Federal Military Government’.56 The letter warned strongly that payment of royalties to Ojukwu ‘will make a peaceful solution of the crisis and the avoidance of violence, especially in the area of oil installations, very difficult’. 57 The implication was that the federal government was prepared to go to war if the revenue from oil went into the account of the Eastern Region. To that end, it advised the British government to ‘urge Shell-BP to do nothing which will be against the interests and wishes of the Federal Military Government of Nigeria’.58 Threat to oil production and supply heightened the tension and carried the potential of hurting not only the investments oil companies made in Nigeria but also the British economy. The British government that had relied on oil revenues suddenly found itself in a difficult situation as oil supply from the Middle East declined due to regional conflict. Open support for either Gowon or Ojukwu would have threatened oil supply and potentially caused Britain to suffer from balance of payment difficulties. As Hunt argued, ‘whatever decision is taken, the flow of crude will be stopped either by Ojukwu or Gowon, whichever we offend’.59 He sensed, however, that it would be ‘slightly more serious to offend Gowon because to collaborate with Ojukwu would prejudice us [Britain] with other African states with memories of Katanga’.60 Britain’s eventual support for Nigeria, driven by selfish economic interest, emboldened Nigerian officials and made them less enthusiastic about making compromises that would have averted the war. Although Hunt cautioned Shell-BP against making any payment to the Eastern Region, he advised that ‘even if they eventually decide it is in their best interest 55

‘Text of United States Ambassador’s Assessment of Current Situation’, February 20, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). 56 ‘Text of Letter from M.E.A.’, June 28, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Hunt to Commonwealth Office. 60 Ibid. Western Support for the secessionist Katanga region in the newly independent Republic of Congo (capital Léopoldville, now Kinshasa) created violent unrest in the country which saw the assassination of the first democratically elected government headed by the Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. Events in Congo became a public relations nightmare for western countries during the Cold War.

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to pay to Eastern authorities instead of F.M.G., they should at least put off the evil day by fourth week of July’.61 Despite the dilemma ShellBP faced before and during the civil war, its operations witnessed little interruptions throughout the war period. Eager to protect its economic investment, the company remained loyal to the federal government while secretly satisfying the financial demands of Biafra – until Nigeria retook former Biafran territories in which major oilfields were located.62 Gowon’s attempts to undermine Ojukwu’s control of oil installations in some parts of the East further worsened the relationship between Nigeria and the East. Decree No. 14 of 1967 that Gowon promulgated divided the country into 12 states. Nigeria now moved from four regions (Northern, Eastern, Western, and Mid-West) to 12 states: six states carved out of the Northern Region (North-Central, North-Eastern, North-Western, Kano, Benue-Plateau, and Kwara); three were carved out of the Eastern Region (East-Central, South-Eastern, and Rivers); two were formed out of the Western Region (Lagos and Western); and the Mid-West Region became the Mid-Western State.63 This decree aimed at empowering minorities within the Eastern Region and isolating the Igbos. By this decree Gowon believed he had removed ‘any fear of domination throughout the Federation’ by creating 12 states.64 But Ojukwu accused Gowon of insincerity by creating states ‘without consultation and at a time when it could only further increase tension and fear in the country’.65 Denied of the right to oil installation, Ojukwu resisted the geopolitical changes the decree brought, arguing that it was the responsibility of the regions to create states. These changes, however, did not prevent Ojukwu from pursuing the region’s secessionist agenda. The economic benefits of one Nigeria made the idea of Biafra unacceptable to both Nigeria and Britain. This economic dimension made Nigeria’s readiness to fight and keep the country together and the British willingness to assist in that endeavor coincide. As British Member of Parliament Winston S. Churchill noted, ‘one Nigeria makes economic sense, both from the point of view of Britain, which has substantial investments throughout the federation, and of the Nigerians themselves. The northerners need the access to the sea and a share in the affluence of the oil-producing south.’66 The real fear of potentially losing their investments and increasing sources of revenue in oil were respective motivations for Nigerian and British involvement in the war.

61

Ibid. See The Times (London), July 3, 1967, 9; July 6, 1967, 5; July 7, 1967, 1; July 8, 1967, 1; and New York Times, July 8, 1967, 2. 63 Federal Republic of Nigeria, Decree No. 14 of 1967. 64 ‘Letter from Yakubu Gowon to Harold Wilson’, June 2, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). 65 Ojukwu to Wilson. 66 Winston S. Churchill, ‘Can the Nigerian Crisis have a Military Solution?’ The Times, March 6, 1969. 62

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The emergence of oil as a major contributor to the country’s economy in 1966 and the lopsided location of oil installations in the East added a new dimension to the conflict. The East suddenly realized that it would survive outside Nigeria. Nigeria realized that it needed the East to remain in the country as an economic necessity. Dealing with a united Nigeria in order to protect their investments became an imperative for the British government and companies. The realities of oil money as a crucial element in Biafra declaration, Nigeria’s readiness to wage war to maintain control of the oil revenue, and Britain’s support for Nigeria created an environment in which political leaders and advisers on both sides exploited the situation.

The Hype, Hypocrisy, and Hysteria of Political Leaders The attitudes, words, and actions of principal actors in the conflict are crucial in understanding the causes of the war. Since the coup that brought Gowon to power, Ojukwu had always been critical of what he described as the ‘illegitimate’ government in Lagos led by Gowon. The inflammatory speeches made by both Gowon and Ojukwu promoted a climate that minimized the chances of peaceful resolution of the crisis. The conscious or unconscious misinterpretation or non-enforcement of the agreement reached at a meeting of Nigerian military leaders at Aburi, Ghana, between January 4 and 5, 1967, further poisoned the relationship between Nigeria and the East. Trust, necessary to narrow differences between the two groups, diminished and paved the way for the war. Owing to mutual fears existing among leaders and the eagerness to avert war, a meeting was convened at Aburi to, according to Ojukwu, ‘establish a working basis for solving the country’s problems’.67 Delegates at the meeting agreed to renounce the use of force, end arms purchases, stop recruitment into the army by both parties, and establish an Area Military Command in each region under regional governors. They also agreed to abolish the post of Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, empower the Supreme Military Council to control the army, repeal all decrees passed since January 15, 1966 that denied each region the autonomy they enjoyed under the 1963 constitution, and pay salaries of displaced persons following the disturbances in the North.68 By March, two months after the Aburi agreement, Gowon had not started implementing the resolution and, as Achebe puts it, ‘there was growing weariness in the East that Gowon had no intention of doing so’.69 More worrisome was that ‘the inaction around the refugee problem amplified the anger and tension’ between Nigeria and Biafra.70 67

Ojukwu to Wilson. Ibid. 69 Achebe, There Was a Country, 86. 70 Ibid., 85. 68

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Telegrams from American and British diplomats to the Commonwealth Office unanimously agreed that Gowon was listening too much to civil service advisers who ‘had been pointing to consequences of decisions reached at Aburi and were persuading Gowon to back down on some of them’.71 What confederation meant, and its practical outworking in Nigeria especially concerning power sharing, was subjected to different interpretations by Nigeria and Biafra. As Achebe observed, ‘there was not as much rigorous thought given by Gowon’s federal cabinet and the powerful interest in the North. The two parties therefore left Aburi with very different levels of understanding of what confederation meant and how it would work in Nigeria.’72 In many of his speeches, Ojukwu warned Gowon against taking unilateral action and demanded that he should honor the agreement signed at Aburi. One month before he declared Biafra, he argued that the ‘disregard of the Aburi agreement is only the latest in the exhibition of bad faith that has characterized Lt. Col. Gowon handling of the crisis since he installed himself in Lagos.’73 Eager to start implementing the agreement in the East ‘from March 31, 1967, if by that date he himself fails to do so,’ he insisted that ‘any economic blockage of Eastern Nigeria’ arising from his action would be ‘tantamount to pushing her out of the Nigerian Federation’.74 When Gowon imposed the blockage, Ojukwu immediately announced Biafra. The economic measures taken against the Eastern Region when Ojukwu took over most of the federal functions in the region was a major source of tension that made the war inevitable. In a speech on June 30, 1967, one month after declaring the sovereign state of Biafra, Ojukwu claimed he had ‘conclusive evidence that [Gowon] and his Northern bandits have now finalized their plans to attack us in our homeland’.75 Preparing the minds of the people for war even when Gowon has not declared one, he further stated: Fellow countrymen and women, we have arrived at zero hour … The psychological warfare and lying propaganda calculated to promote alarm, frighten our people and sow dissention among us has failed completely … I want you all to remain calm and determined as you have been. Our soldiers are ready.76

Ojukwu’s speech, which was broadcast on radio, understandably attracted Britain’s immediate attention. Hunt sent a telegram to the Commonwealth Office in which he argued that the speech

71

Telegram No. 286, March 1, 1967 and Telegram No. 267, February 20, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). 72 Achebe, There Was a Country, 86. 73 Ojukwu to Wilson. 74 Ibid. 75 ‘Text of Ojukwu’s Speech’, June 30, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). 76 Ibid.

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could be interpreted as either meaning he believes that a Federal attack is imminent or that he intends to seize the initiative and attack Federal troops. Latter should not be excluded, as he is supremely confident … I think, however, that this justifies asking for Credence Forces to be brought to higher degree of readiness.77

British readiness to evacuate their nationals indicated their understanding that war was looming. The uncompromising nature of the political elite on both sides of the conflict during the 1960s made war highly likely. Even after Gowon had promulgated a decree on March 17, 1967, changing the constitution to reflect the pre-1966 regional autonomy, Ojukwu remained suspicious of the federal government and insisted on the ‘right of separate existence for Eastern Nigeria as a sovereign unit’.78 More troubling to Ojukwu was the aspect of the 1967 decree that gave the federal government the power to declare a state of emergency in any region of the federation, an act Ojukwu felt violated the principles of greater regional autonomy that the Aburi agreement provided. Ojukwu’s ultimatum to Gowon that the East would begin full implementation by 31 March attracted federal government economic sanctions, forcing the East to secede on May 30, 1967. As anticipated, the federal government declared war on July 7, 1967. With two opposing views for Nigeria strongly held by Gowon and Ojukwu, a showdown was not surprising. Hunt assessed the potential threat when Biafra declared that the only option of preserving Nigeria’s unity would contain a violent component. For Hunt, force was necessary ‘to remove Ojukwu’ and ‘if Gowon were to decide against this I think he might himself be removed by force’.79 That Gowon would lose power if he failed to remove Ojukwu underscores the powerful forces around Gowon that resolutely favored maintaining the status by all means. Ojukwu enjoyed public support in favor of acting to ensure the survival of Igbo people. Even before the declaration of Biafra, public sentiment in the East favored separation from Nigeria. At the Eastern Consultative Assembly on May 26, Ojukwu presented the delegates with three options. While the delegates booed at the options of accepting Gowon’s terms or continuing the stalemate, they enthusiastically cheered at the option of asserting autonomy.80 This response was not surprising because the killing of Igbos in the North in 1966 and ‘the subsequent exodus of the remaining Ibos back to the East [had] left extremely bitter feelings’.81 Public opinion shaped by a sense of insecurity within Nigeria largely underscored ‘the Eastern Region’s demands for autonomy within a much looser Federation or, if necessary, outside 77

Hunt to Commonwealth Office. Gowon to Wilson. 79 Hunt to Commonwealth Office. 80 ‘Eastern Consultative Assembly’, May 26, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). 81 ‘Nigeria’, May 25, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). 78

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it’. 82 The leaders had no choice except to respond to the people’s wishes. At the assembly, Ojukwu encountered, as Achebe observed, ‘leaders of an emotionally and psychologically exhausted and disillusioned Igbo people’.83 The inability of Gowon’s government to allay the fears of the East or narrow its differences with it after they declared Biafra directly led to the war. Against accusation that the declaration of Biafra was born out of Ojukwu’s personal agenda, Achebe writes: the decision of an entire people, the Igbo people, to leave Nigeria, did not come from Ojukwu alone but was informed by the desires of the people and mandated by a body that contained some of the most distinguished Nigerians in history: Dr. Nnandi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s former governor-general and first ceremonial president, Dr. Michael I. Okpara and Sir Francis Ibiam, former premier and governor of Eastern Nigeria respectively, and Supreme Court justice Sir Louis Mbanefo. Others included: the educator Dr. Alvan Ikoku: first republic minister Mr. K. O. Mbadiwe; as well as Mr. N.U. Akpan; Mr. Joseph Echeruo; Ekukinam-Bassey; Chief Samuel Mbakwe; Chief Jerome Udoji; and Margaret Ekpo. 84

Both sides of the conflicts miscalculated and misjudged the intentions of each other, a factor that contributed to the war. According to Churchill, Ojukwu evidently hoped that Biafra could gain its independence without a costly war and that many states would grant it recognition. The federal government, for its part, disastrously underestimated the military capacity of the Biafrans in imagining that the war would last only a matter of weeks and would end in victory with little bloodshed.85

When Ojukwu declared Biafra, the federal government immediately prepared for war notwithstanding its public proclamations of seeking a peaceful resolution of the crisis. Gowon released a statement immediately condemning Ojukwu’s announcement as ‘ill-advised’ and describing it ‘as an act of rebellion which will be crushed’.86 On the day Biafra was declared, Hunt met with Gowon and left ‘with a definite impression that Federal Military Government are planning to take military action against the East’.87 Gowon had invited Hunt and the American ambassador, Elbert G. Mathews, to Government House to discuss the nature of assistance the federal government needed from Britain and America. Gowon’s request for ‘military assistance’, ‘air reconnaissance’, and ‘fighter cover 82

Ibid. Achebe, There Was a Country, 88. 84 Ibid., 91. 85 Winston S. Churchill, ‘Can the Nigerian Crisis Have a Military Solution?’ The Times, March 6, 1969. 86 ‘Text of statement by Federal Military Government’, May 30, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). 87 ‘Telegram from David Hunt to Commonwealth Office’, May 31, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). 83

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and ships’ from the United States and the United Kingdom was politely turned down even when Gowon asked if their ‘answer would have been different if British/American [oil] interest in the Eastern Region were threatened’.88 Hunt stated that Gowon’s ‘thoughts revealed frightening absence of any sense of realism’, a factor that Ojukwu pointed out in many of his speeches about Gowon.89 In fact, in a letter to the British Prime Minister, Ojukwu wrote that Nigeria and Biafra ‘have reached the parting of ways [because of] the uncompromising attitude of the authorities in control of Lagos under the direction of Northern Nigeria and their refusal to implement agreements’.90 He insisted that federal attempts to withhold funds due to the region coupled with the massacre of Igbos in Northern Nigeria were ‘aimed at annihilating the entire population of Eastern Nigeria’.91 Although the economic measures taken against the Eastern Region escalated the conflict, it was Ojukwu’s insistence on the right of secession and the federal government’s unwillingness to allow it that made peaceful resolution of the conflict beyond reach. Ojukwu made real his publicly declared threat that if the federal government imposed a blockage on the Eastern Region they would secede from Nigeria. Such a blockage threatened Biafra’s right to independence. Suzanne Cronje argued: The Nigerian war was fought over one issue and one issue only: Biafra’s right of secession … If the basic issue was Biafra’s right to live apart from Nigeria, British suggestions that peace could be achieved ‘if only’ Ojukwu were to be a little more flexible and agree to accept Federal authority amounted to an invitation to the Biafrans to surrender … The only possible compromise – a loose association between Nigeria and Biafra entailing close cooperation between equal partners on a voluntary basis – was unacceptable to Nigeria and did not receive British support.92

The easy availability of foreign, self-serving military assistance not only served to entrench foreign involvement in Nigeria’s domestic scene but also provided the impetus for war. Walter Schwarz noted that if Nigeria won the war ‘with oil money and Russian planes and European pilots, Nigeria’s borders will have been maintained, as they were drawn in the first place, by foreign interest’.93 Biafra had built up its air force largely through buying surplus French air force stock as well as the purchase of a dozen Super Constellations from Spanish, Portuguese, and French civil airlines.94 Weapons easily made available by shady 88

‘Telegram from David Hunt to Commonwealth Office’, May 30, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). ‘Telegram from David Hunt to Commonwealth Office’, May 29, 1967 (PREM 13/1661). 90 Ojukwu to Wilson. 91 Ibid. 92 Cronje, The World and Nigeria, 66, 68, and 70. 93 Walter Schwarz, ‘The Next Escalation’ (FCO 65/446). 94 Ibid. 89

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European individuals with the cooperation of like-minded Nigerian characters reflect a human problem that hardened minds on both sides of the divide. Civil war, or the prospect of one, provides a profitable source of income for a small group of individuals involved in the underground arms trade. When a civil war breaks out or is impending, according to Sunday Times, ‘most western governments are happy to leave arms sales to the “independents”’.95 As early as 1966 that newspaper reported an ‘illicit arms deal between a retired French policeman named Paul Favier and an anonymous group of Nigerians in Geneva’, stating that ‘the laws preventing such traffic were evaded by fraudulent use of an import certificate innocently granted in London by the Board of Trade’.96 As a new market for arms dealers, arms business in Nigeria gathered momentum after the January 1966 coup. The paper noted that since the coup, the Hausa in the North have been terrorizing the Ibo from the East of Nigeria’s Federation. They blame the Ibo for the killings, so the Hausa want weapons to attack the Ibo, and the Ibo want weapons to protect themselves. Favier seems to have been the first man in the arms business to exploit the situation.97

The ready availability of weapons made the slaughter of easterners in the North easy and resultant tension and war certain. There is no denying the fact that the tension generated from the killings united the public in the East against Nigeria and made the civil war a war not only to establish a separate country but also to ensure survival of the Igbo people.

Conclusion The Nigeria-Biafra War was one of Africa’s bloodiest postcolonial wars. The war threatened to tear Nigeria apart. The politics of exclusion, the fear of domination, and deprivations that dominated the history of postcolonial Africa lay at the root of many wars on the continent, including this one. Understanding the causes of the war requires a thoughtful analysis of the prevailing nature and conditions of Nigeria’s peoples and societies, the country’s uneven spread of natural resources, and the uncompromising attitudes of leaders. Aoy Raji’s and T.S. Abejide’s argument that ‘oil served as an underlying factor why Biafra wanted a separate republic’ ignores the complexity, history, and context of the war.98 This chapter has used the theories of societal conditions, eco 95

Sunday Times, October 23, 1966. Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Aoy Raji and T.S. Abejide, ‘Oil and Biafra: An Assessment of Shell-BP’s Dilemma during the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970’, Kuwait Chapter of Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review 2:1 (July 2013), 15–32. 96

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nomic conditions, and human nature to analyse the complex forces that coincided in 1967 to cause the Nigeria-Biafra War. It deconstructs the argument that Ojukwu’s declaration of the war was motivated simply by the prospects of controlling the revenue from oil wells situated in the East, or to realize his personal ambition. Placing all the societal, economic, and human variables at the center of analysis of the causes of the Nigeria-Biafra War, as demonstrated in this chapter, provides a much more comprehensive understanding of its complex causes. Nigeria’s public mood between 1966 and 1967, especially between the Northern and Eastern Regions, hardly lent itself to compromise. The Igbo nationalism that the 1966 killings consolidated, the emergence of a volatile and uncompromising public mood that Gowon and Ojukwu’s words and actions emphasized, the easy access to military support that foreign involvement guaranteed, and the possibility of establishing an economically viable Biafran nation that the oil revenue promised, made the declaration of Biafra irresistible, federal response predictable, and war unavoidable.

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The Ahiara Declaration and the Fate of Biafra in a Postcolonial/Bi-Polar World Order Raphael Chijioke Njoku

‘Proud Biafrans, I have kept my promise.’ Gen. Emeka Ojukwu, June 1, 1969

Background to the Declaration In order to properly understand why the Igbo leadership considered the Ahiara Declaration a necessity, it is vital to briefly highlight the tide of the civil war on the eve of the historic announcement. But first, it must be underlined that the notion of a ‘civil war’ is a myth for there were no wars in the postcolonial era that did not include multiple foreign involvements.1 The Nigeria-Biafra War lends credence to this theory in many ways. Both sides in the combat had external support, but the nature of the support was unbalanced and varied. Threatened by starvation, Biafrans received humanitarian aid from different agencies like the Red Cross and Caritas, individuals, and foreign governments, including the United States, France, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Ireland and Israel. The Nigerian federal government received huge supplies of weaponry and hardware and technical and logistics support mostly from Britain and the then Soviet Union. Egypt sent pilots who flew attack planes against the secessionists. These supplies, whether in the form of weapons, material, logistics, food, medicine, or simply unquantifiable moral and diplomatic assistance, contributed in prolonging the conflict which claimed an estimated 1.5 million easterners, most of them Igbo.2 The spike in civilian casualties between 1968 and the first half of 1969 was mainly as the result of aerial bombardments and humanitarian blockades imposed by the federal government. This required that the Biafran leaders speak to the people about the state of things in Biafra

1

Elsewhere I have underscored this point. See Raphael Chijioke Njoku, ‘Nationalism, Separatism and the Neoliberal Globalism: A Review of Africa and the Quest for Self-Determination since the 1950s’, in Secession as an International Phenomenon, edited by Don Doyle (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 338–380. 2 Alain Rouvez, Disconsolate Empires: French, British and Belgian Military Involvement in Postcolonial Sub-Saharan Africa (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994), 147–149.

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and reassure them about their future.3 Also, given that every secessionist conflict involves territorial claims and resource control, the Biafran soldiers in 1969 appeared to have somehow started to slow down the advancement of the federal troops though they had altogether lost a good chunk of the original Biafran territories.4 As a recently declassified US memo noted, in late 1968, the secessionist soldiers were still controlling about 10,000 square miles of the Igbo country.5 This translates to approximately 62 percent of the estimated 16,216 square miles of the Igbo homeland. Alluding to the successes made by his troops in his speech, the Biafran leader reminded the audience that in the Onitsha front of the war, for instance, his ‘gallant’ soldiers contained the advance of the federal troops who first took control of the town 15 months previously.6 After the better-equipped federal troops attempted to enter Onitsha in October 1967, the ragtag Biafran soldiers resorted to guerrilla tactics, blowing up the Niger Bridge, which momentarily frustrated and slowed down the progress of 12th Brigade of the federal soldiers. Being a commercial hub of Igboland, Onitsha held great strategic interest for the Nigerian military in the quest to stop Biafra. In other words, for Biafra, the inability of the federal troops to a gain an absolute control of the town since October 1967 was, in itself, a form of victory. In the Awka, Okigwe, Umuahia, Ikot Ekpene, Azumini, and Aba sectors of the war, the story was similar. In the Awka district for instance, Ojukwu reported that the ‘enemy is confined only to the highway between Enugu and Onitsha, not venturing north or south of that road’.7 In the Okigwe front, the progress of Nigerian troops was hampered by landmines laid by the Biafrans, which made the highway leading from Okigwe treacherous. It was also true that the Biafran forces had regained some grounds along the Owerri/Port Harcourt area.8 3

This fact has been emphasized by Elder Ugoeze Onyekwere who watched the speech live at Ahiara village from midnight when it started to 4 a.m. on the fateful day. See Report by Chika Abanobi, ‘Ahiara: 42 Years after Ojukwu’s Biafra Declaration’, Daily Sun, April 15, 2013. 4 For a timeline on the fall of Biafra’s territories, see, for instance, Ntieyong U. Akpan, The Struggle for Secession, 1966–1970: A Personal Account of the Nigerian Civil War (London: Frank Cass, 1972), 134. 5 US Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968 Volume XXIV, Africa, Document 398 (hereafter FRUS). Memorandum From Edward Hamilton of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow), 1 (fn1) Washington, August 12, 1968. See also Ini Ekott, ‘U.S. Blames Ojukwu, Gowon for Biafra Starvation Deaths’, Premium Times (Lagos), October 12, 2012. 6 Emeka Ojukwu, ‘The Ahiara Declaration (The Principles of the People’s Army) by Emeka Ojukwu General of the People’s Army’, Ahiara Village, Mbaise, Biafra, June 1, 1969, 2–3, in Francis Ayozieuwa Joseph Njoku Personal Collections (hereafter FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA). 7 Ibid., 2–3. 8 Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (London: Penguin, 2013), 217.

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After recapturing Owerri in April 1969, Biafran troops continued to make a bold push towards Port Harcourt which had, on May 19, 1968, collapsed under the ferocious and no nonsense command of Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle (1936–2014) of the Nigerian army. The capitulation of Port Harcourt, which occupied the core of the conflict because of its immense oil resources, constituted a huge setback for Biafra; hence the frantic effort to recapture it. It was in the midst of the battle for Port Harcourt in June 1969 that the controversial seizure of 18 European oil workers of an Italian company happened. In his Ahiara discourse, Ojukwu had claimed that these were foreign fighters aiding the Nigerian army to kill Biafra.9 Additionally, as Ojukwu observed, the Biafran Air Force, towards the end of May 1969, had made a ‘dramatic re-entry into the war’.10 Eyewitness, Michael Draper, documented the performance of Biafran Air Force during the war. He revealed that the Air Force was reconstituted from makeshift procurements, which included hijacked and abandoned aircrafts and helicopters, a handful of purchases from questionable sources: some civilian planes converted to military use and others personally flown by the Swedish nobleman and friend of Biafra, Carl Gustaf Von Rosen.11 It is remarkable to note that the fortunes of Biafra had changed from the initial air advantage that it held at the start of the war to a rapid decline by the beginning of 1968 when Russian fighter bombers had taken a heavy toll on Biafra. The effort to reconstitute Biafra’s air power in 1969 was due to the realization that there was no future for the movement without its Air Force. Ojukwu noted in the Ahiara Declaration: In four days’ operations, eleven operational planes of the enemy were put out of action, three control towers in Port Harcourt, Enugu and Benin were set ablaze, the Airport building in Enugu, and the numerous gun positions were knocked out. The refinery in Port Harcourt was set on fire. And, more recently, three days ago, the Ughelli Power Station was put out of action.12

While the Biafran leader touted all these as victories, it must be acknowledged that throughout the war, the battles were fought on Igbo territory and the damages to infrastructure actually hurt the easterners more than the federal side. Given that the Ahiara Declaration was intended to shore up morale, Ojukwu declared his ‘feeling of pride and satisfaction’ in the accomplishments Biafra made as a people; he praised the people’s ‘indomitable will, our courage, our endurance of the severest privations, our resourcefulness and inventiveness in the face of tremendous odds and 9

FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 5. Ibid., 3. 11 Michael Draper, ‘Biafra’s Air Force’, Aircraft Illustrated (November 1969), 436–439. 12 FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 3. 10

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dangers’. While congratulating his fellow Biafrans both at home and overseas, Ojukwu affirmed those famous lines: ‘Proud Biafrans, I have kept my promise.’13 Meanwhile, a more strategic aspect of the speech meant for the international audience – including both enemies and sympathizers of Biafra – needs to be highlighted. This is important because there has been no successful secessionist movement in the postcolonial world order without international support. More specifically, without the endorsement of the Western world, nearly 99 percent of secessionist movements around the globe have either failed or suffered a stillbirth. Two African examples prove the point. Eritrea’s separatist war with Ethiopia lingered from 1961 to May 29, 1991, when Western powers eventually endorsed Eritrea’s right to self-determination. But this was only possible after the thaw in the Cold War from 1989–1990. Similarly, the southern Sudanese civil war continued for over 53 years until 2011, when South Sudan was recognized by the United Nations Security Council.14 In apparent realization of the critical role that the international community plays in every secessionist movement, Ojukwu expressed his appreciation for the sympathy and support from Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, Oma Bongo’s Gabon, Houphoüet Boigny’s Ivory Coast, Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia, and François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s Haiti: To the growing band of men and women around the world who have, in spite of the vile propaganda mounted against us, identified themselves with the justice of our cause, in particular to our courageous friends, officers and staff of the Relief Agencies and humanitarian organizations, pilots who daily offer themselves in sacrifice that our people might be saved; to Governments, in particular Tanzania, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Zambia and Haiti. I give my warmest thanks and those of our entire people.15

Biafra’s ‘Real’ Struggle: The International Dimension The short list of poor and practically powerless countries on the Biafran side buttresses the argument put forth that the ‘real’ struggle that Biafra confronted and that culminated in its demise was the inability of its leaders to win the backing of at least one of the most powerful foreign governments in the 1960s – specifically Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. None of the openly declared friends of Biafra possessed any substantial or symbolic political clout in the international arena. They had neither the personnel nor resources to support Biafra, 13

All quotes from ibid., 4. United Nations Security Council Resolution S/RES/2032 (2011) dated December 22, 2011. 15 FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 2. See also CWC 1–5, Civil War Bulletin of Pamphlets, Books, and Speeches, 1966–70, in National Archives, Ibadan (hereafter NAICWC 1–5). 14

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nor did they have regional influences within such bodies as the Organization of African Unity, which could have halted the war. Yet, except for the impoverished and isolated Haiti, the friendly countries had just started to break free from several decades of European colonial domination. As a result, their vulnerability as independent nations in the perilous game of international politics was obvious. Pertinent questions arise as to why the three most powerful and influential superpowers – Britain, United States, and the Soviet Union – chose to either openly side with the Nigerian federal government, as was the choice of the Soviet Union and Britain, or pretend to be neutral in the war, as was the policy of the United States. In a Cold War era, when the Western capitalist bloc, led by the United States, and the Eastern bloc, headed by the now-defunct Soviet Union, habitually disagreed on every issue pertaining to international politics, the question becomes even more critical as to why the superpowers were united in their objection to the Igbo cause. This was the real obstacle the Biafrans could not overcome, and it demands a prudent investigation. The United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain understood the incidents of human rights abuses and genocidal practices of the Nigerian state against the easterners. In particular, throughout the duration of the war, Britain and the United States were under pressure from the British and American masses to intervene in favor of Biafra. The most potent pressure came in the form of an outpouring of European public opinion around a conflict Europeans have come to understand in religious terms: persecuted Christian Biafra versus a leviathan Muslim Hausa-Fulani-dominated Nigerian Federal Military Government. The primary concern for both the Eastern and Western powers was that the phenomenon of separatism or political divorce in an unstable immediate postcolonial world order was an anathema. Secession posed a real and serious strategic danger to the superpowers’ vested economic, political, ideological, and cultural interests around the world. In the Ahiara Proclamation of June 1969, Ojukwu described Bolshevik Russia as a late bloomer in the race for World Empire since the end of the world wars. According to Ojukwu, Russia was frantic in its quest to establish a foothold in Africa, in realization that the continent occupies an important position in the quest for global power.16 To support his claims, Ojukwu cited Russia’s growing alliance with leaders of North African states such as Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser and Algeria under Houari Boumediene. These Arab leaders were moving their respective countries towards state communism. Perhaps encouraged in part by the bold but truncated efforts of communist ideologues like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (1909–1972) and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo (1925–1961) to establish Soviet-like political systems in their 16

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FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 16–17.

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respective countries, Ojukwu asserted that, from North Africa, Russia had started to speculate on gaining more territory in Sub-Saharan Africa.17 In light of this, Ojukwu claimed that the Nigeria-Biafra struggle provided the Russians an opportunity to try to reestablish a foothold in West Africa. In Ojukwu’s view, Russia’s involvement in the Nigerian Civil War was a tactical maneuver aimed at countering entrenched Western influence in Sub-Saharan Africa. Forcing this perspective, Ojukwu cites the linkage between Hausa as a lingua franca for the majority in West Africa and how it serves as a viable tool for spreading Islam combined with Bolshevism.18 When Russia gives the Nigerians Illyushin jets to bomb us, the MiGs to strafe and rocket us and AK-47 rifles to mow us down, we should see all this in proper light that Russia, like other imperialist powers, has no regard for the Negro. To her, what is important is to gain a vantage point in Negro-land from which to challenge American and western European world power and influence. The Arabs also in this find further attraction in that it gives to them a back-door entry eventually into Israel.19

While all these charges might hold some validity, there is no evidence to believe that Islam and Communism are compatible bedfellows. As the failure of Bolshevism under Siad Barre’s Somalia has shown, Islam and Communism are not mutually agreeable.20 All things being equal, the ‘Principles of the Biafran Revolution’, as disclosed by Ojukwu, could have appealed to Russia, given its more communist than capitalist economic ideals. Ojukwu had stated: ‘In the New Biafra, all property belongs to the Community. Every individual must consider all he has, whether in talent or material wealth, as belonging to the community for which he holds it in trust.’21 While clarifying that this idea does not suppose an end to personal property, he added that it implies that the State, acting on behalf of the community, can intervene in the disposition of property to the greater advantage of all. Over-acquisitiveness or the inordinate desire to amass wealth is a factor liable to threaten social stability, especially in underdeveloped societies in which there are not enough material goods to go round.22

According to Ojukwu, unbridled individual acquisition creates a problem of lopsided ‘development, breeds antagonisms between the 17

All the African leaders who had embraced communism as a strategy for moving their respective countries forward met stiff opposition from both within and outside and often untimely deaths. 18 FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 17; NAI, CWC 1–5. 19 FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 18. 20 See Raphael Chijioke Njoku, The History of Somalia (Westport: ABC-CLIO Press, 2013), 115–132. 21 FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 32–33; NAI, CWC 1–5. 22 FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 32–33.

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haves and the have-nots and undermines the peace and unity of the people’.23 Ojukwu further contended that a society where this is allowed is doomed to rot and decay. Moreover, the danger is always there of a small group of powerful property-owners using their influence to deflect the State from performing its duties to the citizens as a whole and thereby destroying the democratic basis of society. This happens in many countries and it is one of the duties of our Revolution to prevent its occurrence in Biafra.24

Given the apparent inclination towards a socialist state system, which was a source of concern for many Igbo ‘moneybags’ who willingly supported secession with their personal resources, one would have thought that the Soviet Union would embrace Biafra as an ally. The salient fact underlining the Soviets’ opposition to Biafra substantially rested on the potential harm that aiding a secessionist movement overseas might bring to the unity of the restive units of the Union whose Constitution of 1936 contained a secessionist clause. Article 72 stated, inter alia: ‘Each Union Republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the Soviet Union.’25 Consequently, any conduct of Soviet foreign policy that implied support for separatism would have sent a dangerous message to the restless ethnic groups within the federation. Although its huge economic interests in the conflict outweighed other considerations, Britain faced a similar problem of a potential irredentist backlash within and outside the United Kingdom. At home, the Scottish and Irish questions remained volatile in the 1950s through to the 1970s. For example, the Scots, whom the Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka wittily described as the ‘most tribal society in the world’, have been contemplating independence over the past 170 years, as underscored in the September 18, 2014 referendum that narrowly stopped the quest for an independent nationhood.26 Similarly, the question of self-rule in Northern Ireland has remained very explosive. It might be recalled that it was precisely in 1968 that Northern Ireland’s Catholics organized a large demonstration protesting discrimination in voting rights, housing, and unemployment. A brutal police repression sparked several months of fighting and a re-emergence of the Republican movement.27 In the United States, the memories of a brutal secessionist war (1861–1865), lingered alongside with US colonial interests in the Philippines, Guam, and Panama. Additionally, the respective governments 23

Ibid.; NAI, CWC 1–5. FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 32–33. 25 Constitution of the USSR, 1936. See also Articles 73 and 76 of other editions of the same Constitution. 26 Scottish Independence Referendum Act of 2013. See ‘Scots’ Day of Reckoning’, The Herald, September 18, 2014, 1. See Graham Fraser, ‘Nobel Laureate Lauds Federalism’s Ordinariness’, The Globe and Mail, October 8, 1999, 1. 27 See Tim Ito and Aileen Yoo, ‘Ireland’s Troubled History’, Washington Post, April, 1998. 24

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under Presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963–1969) and Richard M. Nixon (1969–1974) were preoccupied with the Vietnam War (1954–1973) while further struggling to clear up the racial bigotry from the legacy of Jim Crow laws – segregation laws enacted between 1876 and 1965.28 In light of this, it was not feasible for the United States to become embroiled in the Nigerian Civil War at this time. These were some of reasons why it officially observed a policy of neutrality, believing that the conflict was ‘essentially a Nigerian, African, and [British] Commonwealth matter’.29 However, US involvement in the conflict was more complex. Despite an arms embargo prohibiting military assistance to either side, the US government continued to recognize the federal Nigerian government as the legitimate authority while providing humanitarian relief for the Biafran people. As Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs William B. Macomber Jr. explained to a congressional inquiry in 1969, ‘this conflict has its roots in tribal and regional animosities which cannot be exclusively blamed on either side’.30 In leaving any military intervention to Britain, the US policymakers jostled with the competing diplomatic and humanitarian demands that the conflict posed.31 For France, which played an ambiguous role of support for Biafra and subversion of the Nigerian state, its primary strategic interest in West Africa was an attempt to break up the unity of Nigeria’s conglomerate ethnic groups in order to diminish its seemingly immense political and economic dominance in the region. A divided Nigeria would no longer have the capacity to intimidate the 15 weaker Francophone countries in the West and Central African sub-regions, including Nigeria’s immediate neighbors: Cameroon, Niger, Benin Republic, and Chad. In other words, the French Government’s touted support for Biafra at various times during the conflict was not essentially for its love of the Igbo, but to help accomplish a policy envisioned to enhance France’s neo-colonial designs in West Africa. Similar points have been made by Alain Rouvez in his Disconsolate Empires, which analyses how former colonial powers France, Britain, and Belgium have preserved or mutated their levers of influence in their erstwhile African colonies since the 1960s. This thought-provoking book, whose lessons are relevant in understanding Euro-African relations, is an authoritative study of decades of complex political and military relationships involving Europeans and their former African dominions.32

28

For details, see, for instance, Jerrold M. Packard, American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002). 29 FRUS, Reel 3, Frame 0549. 30 Ibid., Reel 6, Frame 0176. 31 US State Department Central Files, Biafra-Nigeria 1967–1969 Political Affairs, A UPA Collection from LexisNexis (hereafter USSDCF). 32 Rouvez, Disconsolate Empires, 147.

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Altogether, Biafra’s diplomatic efforts aimed at attracting the vital international support for secession failed, but not because the Igbo had no legitimate cause. The incidents of alleged genocidal practices against the easterners dating back to 1945, charges of Igbo destruction based on Muslim versus Christian interests, and claims to self-determination on the condition of avoiding forms of illiberal ideologies often associated with Islamic states (as alleged by Ojukwu) were of concerns to the United States, Britain, and France, as well as among other established Western democratic countries such as Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria. However, these issues weighed lower on the scales when compared with the more explosive nature of secession as a political phenomenon in the immediate postcolonial international politics controlled by Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union.

Revolutionary Jingoism and the Ire of ‘Superpowerism’ Despite the common grounds on which the Eastern and the Western Blocs in the Cold War struggle were vehemently opposed to Biafra, it is noteworthy that prior to June 1, 1969, when the Ahiara Declaration was announced on Biafra’s radio, there had been some hesitancies on the side of the superpowers as to how much support they should be giving the Federal Government of Nigeria. In the US House of Legislature for instance, some politicians had questioned their government’s entire role in the conflict. In 1968, a group of senators passionate about saving Biafra’s malnourished and endangered population requested that the government intervene, at least on humanitarian grounds.33 The result, as reported by the Harvard Crimson of January 25, 1969, was the constitution of a six-man fact-finding mission sent by the State Department early in January 1969 to ascertain the needs of both Nigeria and Biafra and to make recommendations to the U.S. government about the necessary forms and amount of possible aid. Senator Charles E. Goodell (R.-N.Y.), accompanied by his administrative assistant – Charles W. Dunn – was in charge of the mission’s diplomatic aspects.34

A similar report published in January 1969 by Time magazine captured an increasing feeling of foreboding among the Americans. The report talked about ‘pictures of starving [Biafran] children, their eyes bulging, their bodies bloated or matchstick thin’, which haunted many concerned Americans. ‘Most Americans ask indignantly: Why has the U.S. not done more to relieve such suffering?’ With an appropriate loading of sarcasm, the Times reporter concluded that the

33 34

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USSDCF. Jeffrey D. Blum, ‘Who Cares About Biafra Anyway?’, Harvard Crimson, January 25, 1969.

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answer, of course, is that starvation has been a calculated weapon in the civil war between federal Nigeria and secessionist Biafra. The Nigerians are fearful that arms will flow into Biafra under the cover of relief shipments and therefore insist that aid be shipped in under their supervision. The Biafrans reject such terms because they fear foul play.35

A month after the Ahiara Declaration, yet another report published in August 1969 noted that the conditions were worsening in Biafra as concerned Americans started to publicly protest its government’s inaction. Outside the White House last week, a group that called itself Concerned Citizens of Rochester marched with a 7-ft. poster bearing the words: Biafra Postcard. Staring out from the poster with baleful, bulging eyes was a starving child, his ribs protruding and his limbs shriveled. On the reverse side was a message urging President Nixon – who was not at the White House but in California – to act on the concern he voiced during last year’s presidential campaign for the Biafrans’ plight.36

These rising voices of sympathy for Biafra complemented the dedication of the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive, a non-governmental organization founded to keep Americans apprised of the enormity of sufferings going on in Biafra.37 In Britain, strident opposition to the government’s anti-Biafra policies began to gain momentum. But as Peter Sedgwick, a self-declared British Marxist, has noted, the British Left did little to save Biafra from the stranglehold of British self-interests in Nigeria.38 As in the United States and other parts of Western Europe, the opinion of the masses on the war differed sharply from that of their governments. In fact, one of the most dramatic events of the emerging positive outlook of things for Biafra was the action taken by John Lennon, a member of the legendary Beatles band, who was awarded the prestigious Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) four years earlier on October 26, 1965. Because of Biafra, Lennon returned this award to the Queen of England on Tuesday November 25, 1969, with a letter stating: ‘I am

35

All quotes from ‘Biafra: More Help from the US’, Time, January 3, 1969. ‘Biafra: Worsening Conditions’, Time, August 29, 1969. 37 See Stanford University Libraries, The Inventory of the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive, 1967–1970, No. 71031, such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Government of the Republic of Biafra, and the Government of Nigeria; press releases from the United States Department of State, American congressmen and women, and Markpress, Biafran Overseas Press Division; clippings; periodical literature; and audio-visual materials relating to the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–1970. 38 Peter Sedgwick, ‘The Appalling Silence and Inactivity of the British Left as Biafrans Face Death and Starvation’, transcribed from Socialist Worker by Ted Crawford, Marxists’ Internet Archive, July 10, 1969. 36

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returning my MBE as a protest to Britain’s involvement in the NigeriaBiafra thing.’39 In France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Belgium, the Catholic Church relentlessly mounted pressures on the various governments to save Biafrans. In a milestone statement explaining why France supported Biafra, issued on July 31, 1968, the French Council of Ministers explained: The government considers that the bloodshed and suffering endured for a year by the population of Biafra demonstrate their will to assert themselves as a people. Faithful to its principles, the French Government therefore considers that present conflict should be solved on the basis of the right of peoples to self-determination and should include the setting in motion of appropriate international procedures.40

These Western voices of sympathy for Biafra – voices of ordinary people – could have possibly prolonged the life of the secession or even ensured its eventual survival had the Ahiara Declaration avoided much of the explosive themes it emphasized. This view is also shared by Ntieyong U. Akpan. Early on, in 1966 when he was serving under the Biafran leader as a diplomat, Akpan stated: ‘In modern times of international power politics, no great power can succumb to threats of intimidation.’41 Akpan continued on to narrate how he disagreed with most of the contents of the Ahiara document and how this nearly cost him his life. For its enemies, the Ahiara Declaration was misinterpreted as a declaration of war against the great powers: United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. The Biafran leader started off the speech with an attempt to connect with the West around Christianity: ‘We have fought alone, we have fought with honour, [and] we have fought in the highest traditions of Christian civilization. Yet, the very custodians of this civilization and our one-time mentors are the very self-same monsters who have vowed to devour us.’42 While this part of the speech tried to assert Biafra’s common Christian identity with the West to make the most positive impact on the intended audience, Ojukwu undermined the appeal with a blanket charge against the entire Western world based on what he perceived as systemic racialism and racist attitudes towards Biafra in particular and the black race in general:

39

In a press conference following his action, Lennon reiterated that his action was in response to the role of Britain in the plight of Biafra, which he said ‘most of the British public aren’t aware of ’. This action was also a protest against British support for America’s Vietnam war. See ‘John Lennon – Returning His MBE’, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6m0glhvwhdI (accessed August 29, 2014). 40 Rouvez, Disconsolate Empires, 147. 41 Akpan, The Struggle for Secession, 143. 42 FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 5.

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I have for a long time thought about this our predicament – the attitude of the civilized world to this our conflict. The more I think about it the more I am convinced that our disability is racial. The root cause of our problem lies in the fact that we are black. If all the things that have happened to us had happened to another people who are not black … the world’s response would surely have been different.43

In the next breath, the speech switched to the issue of alleged genocide against the Igbo. Attacks on Igbo elements residing in Northern Nigeria began as early as 1945, and one of the most disturbing attacks occurred in 1953. The bloody riots of that year revealed that the difficult task of getting the three diverse regions (North, West, and East) to work harmoniously in any close-knit federation proved more difficult than anyone acknowledged. But, instead of confronting this problem then and perhaps coming up with a solution in advance, the excitement to gain independence from Britain hindered careful thought on the matter. Eventually, the 1966 attacks became the spark that ignited the civil war. Reflecting on the violent Igbo-Hausa-Fulani relations, Ojukwu noted that, in 1966, some 50,000 of us were slaughtered like cattle in Nigeria. In the course of this war, well over one million of us have been killed; yet the world is unimpressed and looks on in indifference. Last year, some blood-thirsty [sic] Nigerian troops for sport murdered the entire male population of a village. All the world did was to indulge in an academic argument whether the number was in hundreds or in thousands.44

Once again, the legitimate argument based on genocide was misplaced on two crucial points. First, Ojukwu cited the arrest of 18 ‘white men’ who were purported to be fighting along with the federal army. ‘Today, because a handful of white men collaborating with the enemy … were caught by our gallant troops, the entire world threatens to stop. For 18 white men, Europe is aroused. What have they said about our millions? … How many black dead make one missing white?’45 Reacting to this charge on Friday June 13, 1979, Time magazine noted: The voice of General Odumegwu Ojukwu, carried by Radio Biafra, vibrated between impassioned outrage and constrained eloquence. The 18 men that Biafra’s boss referred to – 14 Italians, three West Germans and a Lebanese – were employees of the Italian government’s oil combine, ENI.46 43

Ibid.; NAI, CWC 1–5. FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 5. 45 Even this was more than evident when the Declaration stated: ‘The mass deaths of our citizens resulting from starvation and indiscriminate air raids and large despoliation of towns and villages are a mere continuation of this crime. That Nigeria has received complete support from Britain should surprise no one. For Britain is a country whose history is replete with instances of genocide’. 46 ‘Biafra: Reprieve for Eighteen’, Time, June 13, 1969. 44

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Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI) S.p.A was incorporated in 1953, forming a leading oil and gas conglomerate. The predicament of the oil workers in the hands of Biafran soldiers was bad public relations for the beleaguered Igbo people. Meanwhile, the most vexing and explosive part of the Ahiara Declaration remains its characterization of Britain as the worst offender of genocidal practices in the world. To prove his point, Ojukwu highlighted Britain’s history of brutal colonial practices around the world. ‘If the white race has sinned against the world, the Anglo-Saxon branch of that race has been, and still is, the worst sinner of all.’47 Ojukwu went on to cite a long list of British encounters with indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Caribbean, Tasmanians of Australia, and the native Maoris of New Zealand. Moreover, as the speech insinuated, Britain further led the genocidal attempt against the Negro race as a whole. Today, they are engaged in committing genocide against us. The unprejudiced observer is forced in consternation to wonder whether genocide is not a way of life of the Anglo-Saxon British. Luckily, all white people are not like the AngloSaxon British.48

The dark parts of British imperial history are not very desirable, and Britons do not encourage anyone, especially a fearless 36-year-old radical, to remind them of this history. While parts of Ojukwu’s speech concerned with genocide and Arab imperialism gained some sympathy from the international community and could easily have resonated with the masses in the Western world, the tone of the speech and the boldness with which it reminded Britain of its imperialist sins came across to the British lawmakers such as Prime Minister Harold Wilson as indicting, confrontational, audacious, and condemnatory. It would have been a folly of romanticism on the part of Biafra not to expect consequences from Great Britain. Similarly, America in the 1960s was not the best place to curry for sympathy based on racial injustices. Using the phrase ‘The myth of the Negro past’, after Melville J. Herskovits’ study commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation in 1938 that focused on the Negro in the United States, Ojukwu charged that the Biafran struggle had far-reaching significance.49 He charged: It is the latest recrudescence in our time of the age-old struggle of the black man for his full stature as man. We [the Igbo] are the latest victims of a wicked collusion between the three traditional scourges of the black man – racism, Arab-Muslim expansionism and white economic imperialism. 47

FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 18. Ibid., 18. 49 See Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper, 1941), ix. 48

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Playing a subsidiary role is Bolshevik Russia seeking for a place in the African sun.50

The inability of the Nigerian state to overcome its multitude of problems, including state corruption and social decay, has often been blamed squarely on the British colonial and neo-colonial interests that forced hundreds of ethnic groups with diverse cultures into a common union.51 In his speech, Ojukwu claimed that the Biafran Revolution was ‘a total and vehement rejection of all those evils which blighted Nigeria, evils which were bound to lead to the disintegration of that ill-fated federation’.52 He claims that Biafra was ‘a positive commitment to build a healthy, dynamic and progressive state, such as would be the pride of black men the world over’.53 According to him, Nigeria was a classic example of a neo-colonialist state. After the end of colonial rule, Britain changed its colonial tactics by installing the ignorant, decadent and feudalistic Hausa-Fulani oligarchy in power … Owing their position to the British, they were servile and submissive. The result was that while Nigerians lived in the illusion of independence, they were still in fact being ruled from Number 10 Downing Street. The British still enjoyed a stranglehold on their economy.54

The failure of the Africa postcolonial state to sustain a progressive and stable political order has been a sore point of criticism for Africans and grounds for racist attacks. In light of this, Ojukwu declared that the Igbo cause was a rejection of racial chauvinism, ‘in particular against that tendency to regard the black man as culturally, morally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically inferior to the other two major races of the world – the yellow and the white races’.55 Like the earlier generations of black intellectuals and pioneers of modern African thought, such as Alexander Crummell (1819–1898), Edward Blyden (1832–1912), James Africanus Beale Horton (1835–1883), and W.E.B. DuBois (1868–1963), to mention a few who have articulated similar race theories, Ojukwu asserted that this ‘belief in the innate inferiority of the Negro and that his proper place in the world is that of the servant of the other races, has from early days coloured the attitude of the outside world to Negro problems. It still does today.’56 This assertion recalls Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, in which he proclaimed that ‘the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line – the relation 50

FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 7. See, for instance, Uche Chukwumereije, ‘Ndigbo: The Sacrificial Lamb of a Deformed Nation’, in Against All Odds: The Igbo Experience in Postcolonial Nigeria, edited by Apollos O. Nwauwa and Chima J. Korieh (Glassboro, NJ: Goldline & Jacobs, 2011), 57–72. 52 FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 7. 53 Ibid., 7. 54 Ibid., 15. 55 Ibid., 7–8. 56 Ibid., 7–9. 51

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of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and islands of the sea’.57 Using this statement to underline the negative connotation the term ‘blackness’ has come to represent in the last century, Du Bois explains the meaning of the emancipation in America and its lingering effects on his race. A modern history graduate and alumnus of Oxford University, Ojukwu criticized the now discredited Hamitic hypothesis to further support his points. The proponents of the theory, among its other variants, postulated that the Negro African is mentally inferior and questioned the humanity of the Negro. As Ojukwu stated in his speech, some European theorists had variously identified the Devil as the first Negro, linked the Negro with the cursed progeny of Ham, and also questioned whether the Negro ‘had a soul; and if he had a soul, whether conversion to Christianity could make any difference to his spiritual condition and destination’.58 In conclusion, Ojukwu charged: It is this myth about the Negro that still conditions the thinking and attitude of most white governments on all issues concerning black Africa and the black man; it explains the double standards which they apply to present-day world problems; it explains their stand on the whole question of independence and basic human rights for the black peoples of the world.59

At a time the civil rights movement in the US was intense, lawmakers and the powerful dominant majority were very suspicious of any speech that used race as a talking point. Further commenting on the legitimacy of the Biafran struggle as a movement of self-determination, Ojukwu claimed that the revolution was a movement based on democratic ideals, human rights, and selfdetermination: ‘When the Nigerians violated our basic human rights and liberties, we decided reluctantly but bravely to found our own state, to exercise our inalienable right to self-determination as our only remaining hope for survival as a people.’60 These ideals, in the views of many white powers, he charged, are good only for whites. Attempts by the Biafran leaders to claim it, according to Ojukwu, were ‘considered dangerous and pernicious: a point of view which explains but does not justify the blind support which these powers have given to uphold the Nigerian ideal of a corrupt, decadent and putrefying society’.61 To the Western powers, genocide is an appropriate answer to any group of black people who have the temerity to attempt to evolve their own social system … Yet, because we are black, we are denied by the white powers the exercise of this right which 57

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1903), 5, 16. FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 8. 59 Ibid., 8–9. 60 Ibid., 9–10. 61 Ibid., 9. 58

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they themselves have proclaimed inalienable. In our struggle we have learnt that the right of self-determination is inalienable, but only to the white man.62

Arguing that the Greeks, Belgians, and Central and Eastern Europeans at the end of World War I were all granted independence based on the right to self-determination, Ojukwu wondered why the Biafran cause should be different. When blacks claim that right, they are warned against dangers trumped up by the imperialists: ‘fragmentation’ and ‘balkanization’.63 Comparing the constitution of the defunct Ottoman Empire with the composition of the Nigerian under the British imperial power, Ojukwu further wondered why the restructuring of the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Europe was permitted in contrast to the Nigerian federation.64 On another plane, Ojukwu chided Arab-Muslim states like Algeria, Egypt, and the Sudan for aiding the federal troops in the civil war. In this context, Ojukwu tried to justify the Biafran cause by describing it as a resistance to the Arab-Muslim expansionism in the continent going back to the first quarter of the seventh century when Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula used the Islamic religion as an imperial tool for territorial expansion. After the occupation of North Africa by the tenth century, the Muslims sought a foothold in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in West Africa. While Islam has achieved remarkable success in the Sahel regions of West Africa, the forest regions where Igboland is located have been shielded from Islamic incursion. The European Christian evangelism of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought the entire Eastern Nigeria into the Christian sphere: We came to stand out as a non-Muslim island in a raging Islamic sea. Throughout the period of the ill-fated Nigerian experiment, the Muslims hoped to infiltrate Biafra by peaceful means and quiet propaganda, but failed … The crises which agitated the so-called independent Nigeria from 1962 gave these aggressive proselytizers the chance to try converting us by force.65

To militant Islam, therefore, ‘Biafra is a stumbling block to their plan for controlling the whole continent’.66 Ojukwu went on to articulate in detail what he considered the implicit principles of the Biafran revolution as related to the duties and expectations of everyone:

62

Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 10. 64 Ibid., 10–12. 65 Ibid., 7–8. 66 Ibid., 18–19. 63

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Raphael Chijioke Njoku ‘the farmer, the trader, the clerk, the business man, the housewife, the student, the civil servant, the soldier, you and I are the people … [T]he People are master; the leader is servant. My name is Emeka. I am your servant, that is all.’67

In the context of Biafra, revolution is a forward movement … [meant to improve] a people’s standard of living and their material circumstance and purifies and raises their moral tone. It transforms for the better those institutions which are still relevant, and discards those which stand in the way of progress.68

In the new system, Ojukwu declared that ‘those who aspire to lead must bear in mind the fact that they are servants and as such cannot ever be greater than the People, their masters. The leader must be custodians of social justice and equality of all citizens.’69 Some of Biafra’s principles resonated with the mainstream liberal Western values, others linked with property and community came across as communistic.

The Final Six Months In the final parts of the Ahiara Declaration, Ojukwu reminded the people of the circumstances that had brought about their plight and what they should expect in the coming days and months. He said: We have forced a stalemate on the enemy and this is likely to continue, with any advances likely to be on our side. If we fail, which God forbid, it can only be because of certain inner weakness in our being. It is in order to avoid these pitfalls that I have today proclaimed before you the Principles of the Biafran Revolution.70

As the outcome of events would prove, Biafra’s capitulation had little or nothing to do with any ‘inner weakness’ in the people as Ojukwu alluded. Rather, the position of Biafra would quickly deteriorate soon after the historic speech because of its brashness. Britain and Russia took exceptional offense at the Ahiara Declaration as a proclamation of war against everything the superpowers stood for. They mobilized and deployed enormous resources for what was considered a final and decisive action against the Igbo leadership. The pace at which the condition of life deteriorated in Biafra soon after June 1969 was a subject of serious concern for the Irish lawmakers in a parliamentary debate held on July 9, 1969. Speaking for the greater majority of the Irish people who were on the Biafran side of the conflict, Dr Conor 67

Ibid., 24. Ibid., 27. 69 Ibid., 30–31. 70 Ibid., 53. 68

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Cruise O’Brien had asked their government to offer an explanation as to why it chose to remain silent on the Nigerian-Biafran conflict: We are raising the question of Biafra on the Adjournment and the question I tabled on that subject as a matter of urgent public importance because we see in Biafra at present a rapidly deteriorating crisis, a crisis which was already grave – I hope I can have the attention of the Minister for External Affairs, thank you – and which has deteriorated very rapidly within the past months. We are very anxious to know what the Government proposes to do in this matter which is of very grave concern to many Irish people both in Biafra and here at home.71

The words above best describe the effect of the wrath of Britain and Russia on Biafra after Ojukwu’s Ahiara Proclamation.

Conclusion This chapter emphasizes the influence of the Ahiara Declaration in bringing to an end the Biafran struggle to claim self-determination in the face of what the secessionist leaders had perceived as gross injustice on the part of the Nigerian federal government, which they characterized as genocide – a selective attempt to eliminate the Igbo as an ethnic group. The argument has been made that, despite the fact that in the context of international politics Biafra had a legitimate right to secede, this right weighed low on the scale compared with the prerogative of the superpowers of the immediate colonial order to safeguard their powers and interests. The key antagonists in the Cold War struggle were united in their opposition of Biafra because, among other reasons, they feared that allowing Biafra to have its way would have set a bad example for similar movements around the world, including within the restive borders of the defunct Soviet Union, Britain, and other places. The fate of Biafra would take a sharp turn downward soon after the Ahiara Declaration, which was provocative to the ears of enemies of the Biafran cause in the international arena. Sharing a similar view, on April 13, 2012, the NBF News acknowledged that the Ahiara Declaration was necessary but came too soon for the well-being of the struggle: There were portions of it that weakened the [Igbo] elders, leaders of thought, especially the moneybags in Biafra. The moneybags were those rich people who on their own had volunteered to help the nation and the Army instead of being meant to understand that their wealth belonged to the nation and the government. For instance, the ideas of reminding them to ‘freely’ donate

71

See Republic of Ireland Parliamentary Debates, Adjournment Debate: Nigeria-Biafra Conflict, Vol. 241, July 9, 1969.

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Raphael Chijioke Njoku one van or truck or a house, if they had two, did not go down well with many of them.72

Overall, the various interest groups – notably, the international, African, Nigerian, and Biafran audiences – misunderstood the Ahiara Declaration, and it negatively impacted the fortunes of the young republic. The British and the Soviets, who were already biased against Biafra, perceived it as an insult, a slap on the face. The Igbo elite interpreted it as a threat to their wealth and to free enterprise. While the Proclamation could easily earn high marks as an academic essay, it perhaps only succeeded in explaining to the Igbo people why they should demonstrate love, oneness, social justice, freedom, and security in their lives. Unfortunately, it alienated the rich and the powerful within and without. The consequence was the end of Biafra, six months after the eloquence of Ojukwu captured the ears of the world over the Biafran Radio.

72

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‘Between Ojukwu’s “Ahiara Declaration” and Hitler’s Mein Kampf’, NBF (The National Bonsai Foundation) News, April 13, 2012.

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The Ahiara Declaration Polemics and Politics

Austine S.O. Okwu Biafra had been the former Eastern Region of Nigeria until May 1967 when the Governor, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, and leaders of the state declared it a sovereign and independent nation separate and apart from Nigeria. The region’s separation from Nigeria was a result of the two deadly military coups in 1966 and the massacres of the easterners, especially the Igbo, in the other parts of Nigeria. The predominant ethnic group in the East was the Igbo and the principal minority groups were the Efik, Ibibio, Ijaw, Okrika, Ogoni, Akwa-Ibom, Annang, Oron, Ogba, Ekpeya, and Ngeni. The young nation fought a brave 30-month civil war with Nigeria and lost on January 1970. It secured diplomatic recognitions as an independent nation from Tanzania, Gabon, Zambia, Ivory Coast, and Haiti. By June 1969, Biafra was a physical remnant of Igboland still under the control of the Biafran Army. It consisted principally of parts of Owerri; the adjoining towns of Ogbaku, Mbieri, Ikeduru, Isu, Osu, Obowu, Ahiara, Mbaise, Umuaka, Ihiala, and Orlu; and the famous Uli Airport. The territory was less than 5 percent of the original size of Biafra and constituted mainly of the Igbo and some refugees of the minority ethnic groups of the state.

The First Six Years of Post-Independence Nigeria The Federation of Nigeria, consisting of the three original regions of the East, West, and North became independent on October 1, 1960. It was a day of joy and celebration throughout the country. At midnight on September 30, the British Union Jack, the colonial flag, was lowered throughout Nigeria for the last time. As the Assistant Divisional Officer, Ahoada Division, I was privileged to receive the marchpast by thousands of school children at Elele Catholic School while the Divisional Officer, Anthony St. Ledger, did so at Ahoada town, the division headquarters. The people celebrated and held dances and parties, rejoicing that the domination of the British had ended and that, with independence, life would become better for them. But that was to be a pipe dream, akuko ufere, a story of the wind, a fable. 81

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The three component regions of Nigeria – the East, the West, and the North – were separate and independent of one another and had three different, ideologically entrenched political parties, namely, National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) in the Eastern Region, the Action Group (AG) in the West, and the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) in the North. The country had political independence from its colonial master, the United Kingdom, but was not a nation yet. All of the political leaders – Dr Nmamdi Azikiwe of the East; Chief Obafemi Awolowo of the West; and Sir Ahmadu Bello and Sir Abubakar Balewa, both of the North – were regional leaders with no overall national following. No one leader in pre-independence Nigeria was able to generate followership across his own ethnic frontiers because of suspicion, envy, religion, customs, language, and foreign influence. The lack of concern for the evolution of the Nigerian nationhood during the first six years of independence was not unexpected. There was, for example, no one national resistance movement in which the leaders were all involved. To the contrary, the party leaders represented their own different respective political parties with opposing programs and philosophies. The East and the West, for example, agreed that Nigeria was ready for independence in 1957 when Ghana had its independence but were not in agreement as to whether Nigeria should have a unitary or federal system of government. The North, on the other hand, did not agree that the country was ready for independence but wanted a federation for the country. The differences had to be negotiated, and inevitable compromises by the leaders that made the country’s independence possible were their major contribution, especially considering the odds and the circumstances of the time. The situation was not made easier by the colonial master who foisted an independence constitution on the country that accentuated ethnicity, tribal hatred, and envy in Nigeria. The blueprint for the country’s independence assured and assuaged the reluctant North. It provided a built-in 50 percent representation at the central government that guaranteed the region a permanent majority and control of the Government of the Federation of Nigeria. As the suspicions deepened, awareness of regionalism and protection of sectional rights and privileges, and ethno-centrism manifested themselves in extravagant lifestyles; massive individual accumulation of wealth and real estate; corruption in both high and low places by Government Ministers, Civil Servants, the Judiciary, the Police, Corporation Boards, Commissions, Electoral and Census Boards; disregard for the Public Service Code of Conduct in appointment, promotion, retirement and discipline; and, worst of all, corruption and tribalism in the Nigerian Armed Forces. The emergence of a presumed collective interest in the country’s freedom from colonial domination that resulted in the compromises by the three party leaders and led to the country’s independence soon

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disappeared. The fledgling ‘patriotism’, if ever it existed, was replaced by the rise of unfettered selfish micro-nationalism. Soon after the brief euphoria, unsettling political dynamics in the independent nation manifested themselves in the many major crises that beleaguered the people successively, an ominous indication that all was not well in the country. With the first military coup of January 15, 1966, the lack of any notion of Nigerian nationhood dawned on everyone. The progressives, mostly in the South, saw the putsch as patriotic and long overdue while most in the North saw it otherwise. The vengeance counter-coup of July 29, 1966 and the consequent massacres of Eastern Nigerians, especially Igbos in the North, were expected. The northerner’s superior power structure both in the federal government and in the military had been seriously shaken by the killing in January of Sir Tafawa Balewa, the Prime Minister; Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Premier of the Northern Region; senior army officers from the North; senior political leaders in the South who were friendly or allied with the North, such as the Premier of the Western Region, Chief Akintola; and the federal Minister of Finance Okotie Eboh, who was also known to have amassed considerable wealth. No-one in the Eastern Region was killed, and the military leaders of the coup were mostly Igbo and were perceived to have planned for Igbo domination of the country.

The Counter-Coup Aftermath and Biafra The counter-coup of July 29, 1966, was the predictable result of the January 15 coup elimination of many northerners from top political and military positions, as well as the introduction of Decree Number 34 (Unification Decree) which many interpreted, especially those in the North, as the introduction of a unitary form of government. For sure, the January 15 coup had seriously undermined the power structure of the North in Nigeria. Besides, Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo, had become the Supreme Military Commander of Nigeria and the Head of State of the country. This was presumed as the unmistakable beginning of Igbo domination. Consequently, a month before the revenge coup, a highly organized massacre of Eastern Nigerians, especially the Igbo in the North, was launched. Many graphic reports of the massacre of the easterners have been written. Martin Meredith, a British journalist, reported: another upsurge of violence against Easterners erupted in the North on a far more terrible scale than before, and the purpose now was not simply to seek vengeance but to drive Easterners out of the North altogether. All the envy, resentment and mistrust that Northerners felt for the minority Eastern communities living in their midst burst out with explosive force into a pogrom that the authorities made no attempt to stop … local politicians, civil servants and students were active in getting the mobs on to the streets; Northern troops joined in the rampage. In the savage onslaught that

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Austine S.O. Okwu followed, thousands of Easterners died or were maimed … a massive exodus to the East began, abandoning all their possessions, hundreds of thousands of Easterners … fled from their Northern homes … By the end of the year, more than a million refugees, many of them wounded … sought safety in the East.1

On July 29, 1966, a group of northern army officers led a countercoup that killed Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi and his brave host, Lieutenant Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi, at Ibadan. With the battle cry in Hausa – Araba – ‘Let us part’, they slaughtered soldiers and civilians from Eastern Nigeria at Ikeja, Kaduna, Lagos, Zaria, Kano, and wherever there were army stations. There were neither killings in the Mid-Western Region, where no military camps were located, nor in the Eastern Region where the coup did not take place and where Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu was Governor. Lieutenant Colonel Yakuba Gowon, a northerner of minority-group origin, was chosen by the putsch leaders to be their leader. He, accordingly, assumed power on August 1, 1966 as the head of the Nigerian Military Government. Ojukwu objected to Gowon’s assumption of office as the Supreme Military Commander and Head of State of Nigeria on grounds of military discipline, protocol, professional succession, and the maintenance of the army hierarchy. He proposed three other military officers who were all of southern origin but were not Igbo. They were all senior to Gowon who at that time was the most senior officer from the Northern Region. Ojukwu’s preferred successors to Ironsi were Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe, Colonel Robert Adebayo, and Commodore Joseph A. Wey. None of the three dared to accept Ojukwu’s proposal and the northern coup leaders would not accept anyone else but Lieutenant Colonel Gowon, a northerner.2 The horrible sequence of events that caused the loss of between 7,000 and 50,000 human lives, the murder of Ironsi and Igbo soldiers, the persecutions, massacres, the million and more refugees in the Eastern Region who left their property and businesses in various parts of Nigeria to return to the security of their homeland, and the return of Northerners to power all combined to create an environment of resentment and revenge that culminated in the desire for complete severance from a people and a place that could allow, and probably participated in, such needless inhuman atrocities. The lack of sympathy for a people who were fellow countrymen, and the rejection and/or deliberate misinterpretation of the Aburi Accord January 4–5, 1967 were the ‘last straws’ that broke the bond between Eastern Nigeria and the Federal 1

Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 202. 2 Austine Okwu, In Truth for Justice and Honor: A Memoir of A Nigerian-Biafran Ambassador (Princeton: Sungai, 2011), 241–244, 268–271.

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Republic of Nigeria.3 Exactly a year after the first massacres of Eastern Nigerians began in Northern Nigeria, Ojukwu, on May 30, 1967, announced the creation of the independent and sovereign State of the Republic of Biafra.

The Ahiara Formulations and the Arusha Declaration The Ahiara Declaration was enunciated by General Ojukwu in the town of Ahiara Ahiaizu in Mbaise area about 12 miles from Owerri, Imo State and eight miles from Uli airport. The town, fairly large and concealed, only a few miles from Uli, was considered secure as a hiding place for the Biafran Head of State whose Head of Intelligence and Security was born in that area. In case of escape from the endangered territory, the airport was very close to the Head of State. General Ojukwu formed the National Guidance Committee and charged it ‘to write a kind of constitution for Biafra – a promulgation of the fundamental principles upon which the government and people of Biafra would operate’.4 The members of the Committee consisted mostly of graduates of Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard. Their work resulted in a constitutional framework regarding the Legislature, the Public Service, the Police, the Judiciary, and the Ahiara Declaration. The concept of the Declaration, according to the chairman of the committee, was taken from a similar one produced by President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, called the Arusha Declaration. In fact, by December 1968, I had sent about a dozen copies of that treatise to the Biafran leader at his request. A few copies of the socialist Mao Zedong of China’s The Little Red Book were also sent with the Declaration without any knowledge of the reasons for them. Similarly, in1967, when I was the Biafran Envoy in London, I had also sent him, at his request, copies of The Edge of the Sword, a book by President Charles de Gaulle.5 Following the guidelines given to them, and for incomprehensible rather than obvious reasons, the Committee adopted Nyerere’s Arusha formulations as the model for Biafra. The choice of the Tanzanian prototype without some serious scrutiny gives the clear impression that the Ahiara Declaration was simply a political drama by the General and his fellow Oxbridge intellectual friends. The Committee operated with direct access to the Head of State, an arrangement that seemed to have offended many people in the government and gave the impression that the General was more interested in the seminars and colloquia with the elite group than in paying attention to his senior military colleagues, experienced politicians, and civil servants.

3

Ibid., 235–241. Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country (New York: Penguin, 2012), 144. 5 Okwu, In Truth for Justice and Honor, 278. 4

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The following reasons, and apparently the only ones given by the Chairman of the Committee, for the adoption of the Arusha Declaration as their model for Ahiara formulation would seem to suggest an obvious cursory attitude to the whole concept and articulation of the treatise, which is reproduced here: 1 The importance of Julius Nyerere in Africa at that time was immense. 2 Nyerere particularly caught the attention of African scholars because he stood for the things we believed in: equality, selfdetermination, and respect for human values. 3 I particularly like how he drew inspiration from traditional African values and philosophy. 4 He was admired by all of us not just because of his reputation as an incorruptible visionary leader endowed with admirable ideological positions; but also because he had shown great solidarity for our cause. 5 He was, after all, the first African Head of State to recognize Biafra.6 It is not easy to accept the given rationale as purposeful for the choice of a model for a serious manifesto. It is probable that some of the members of the writers of the Declaration held the view that they were ‘brought up to believe they were destined to rule’.7 They, therefore, produced their all-purpose charter for Biafra’s governance and cultural transformation summarily, without any study of their model and without the consultation and input of experienced and wise politicians, and the counsel of learned constitutional experts. There was no proof or evidence that their model of choice worked in its own home base or served its populace sufficiently well for it to be attractive and relevant to Biafra. General Philip Effiong, the former Chief of Staff of the Biafran Army, who had a strained relationship with President Ojukwu, had serious concerns about the leader’s consuming solicitude for the Biafran literary personalities. The former Chief of Staff stated: ‘Throughout the crisis period and the War, Ojukwu had one basic problem that colored most of his thinking and actions. It was, perhaps, best describable as his preoccupation with chasing after “intellectual knick-knacks”.’8 The Ahiara Declaration, as popular as it might have sounded to the people, seemed like the product of the overindulgence with political games and intellectual exercises that resulted in the selection of a model for the social transformation of Biafra on the basis of emotional and nonempirical considerations. The choice, instead, should have been based on practical and socio-economic reasons such as the cultural, political, 6

Achebe, There Was a Country, 145. Ibid., 108. 8 Philip Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra: My Story (Princeton: Sungai, 2004), 335, emphasis added. 7

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social, developmental, and ethnographical similarities between the two states, Biafra and Tanzania; circumstances prevalent in the two nations; and the empirical evidence of the successes of the preferred model. None of this was investigated, symbolizing that ab initio the concept of the Ahiara Declaration was to divert attention, rather than as a serious treatise for changes in governance, politics, economics, and culture. In the context of this inquiry, the insight of Major-General Effiong, regardless of his possible bias and exaggeration, is fairly relevant to the topic and accordingly is quoted in extenso as follows: [Ojukwu’s] Oxford and Public Schools background was a hindrance as it tended to intrude into his psyche and make him seek for intellectual fulfillment in a situation that required mature military appreciation … [H] e intended to ignore or treat with levity the advice and suggestions of his colleagues … preferred instead, solutions proffered or favored by the more ‘intellectually’ acceptable civilians with whom he surrounded himself ... Debates, seminars and the Ahiara Declaration were some of the results of such indulgence when the collapse of Biafra was staring us in the face.9

The provisions of the Declaration show that the Committee, in obedience to the directives of the Leader, crafted an all-purpose framework – a constitution as well as a blueprint for social and cultural transformation at a time the state had lost over 95 percent of its territory and was on the verge of losing the war. If the whole treatise became, indeed, a reality instead of the stillbirth it was, one would begin to wonder who should in fact defend and support it when the input of the Army and the political leadership of the public were ignored in its production? The rhetorical question is asked simply as a lead to the obvious concern as to its introduction at the time it was launched, and whether in fact the Head of State was ever advised against the obvious unnecessary political, divisive, and diversionary stratagem that had serious emotional impact on the people that he loved so much. There is almost always a reason for everything. So there must be one for the rush in the introduction of the manifesto to the people in the throes of a deadly war of survival. It could perhaps be a political pacifier for the General himself, who, by June 1969, was aware of the inevitable conclusion of the war. In one of the 1969 entries in the Timeline: Key Dates in the Life of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, he observed: ‘But at this time of the struggle, the scourges of war were too telling on every segment of the Biafran society for the Declaration to make any difference.’10 The General obviously had a serious feeling of uncertainty as to the need for, and impact of, the formulation on the people who at that time 9 10

Ibid. Kalu Ogbaa, General Ojukwu: The Legend of Biafra (New York: Triatlantic Books, 2007), xvii.

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had suffered a great deal. His uncharacteristic self-contradiction after the launching of the Declaration was as controversial as it was paradoxical. On the one hand, he acknowledged the severity of the level of misery in the land caused by two years of war, and as such doubted the need for the Declaration at that stage of the war, and yet on the other hand, he had also assured them in his Declaration address that: Today, I am glad that our problems are less than they were a year ago that arms alone can no longer destroy us; that our victory, the fulfillment of our dreams, is very much a sight [sic]… If we fail, God forbid, it can only be because of certain inner weakness in our being. It is in order to avoid these pitfalls that I have today proclaimed before you the Principles of the Biafran Revolution.11

Two important deductions come instantly to mind. By June 1969, the problems of Biafra were really not less than they were in 1968. In 1969, there were millions of refugees from all over the original Biafra territory living in less than one-tenth of the territory. The people had lost more of their farms, businesses, and homes by 1969 than in 1968. Victory was far from sight in 1969. But should the people be told that they were losing the war? It is clear that the Declarations were intended to divert, to comfort, to exhort, and to politicize, that is, to make people think about different things and to take different positions – obviously, some for and some against the Declaration. Such a situation of various opinions in an indefensible war environment would be acceptable to any general. The Arusha Declaration of Tanzania, the model for the Biafra formulation was, however, adopted essentially by the Biafran leader and his Committee to give the crafters of the Biafran treatise some semblance of a serious blueprint for social and cultural transformation. But such was far from the principal objective. Tanzania’s adoption of the strategies of socialism and egalitarianism for the resolution of its real problems were, however, fully adopted by Biafra, while the problems of the latter were not identical to those of its mentor, Tanzania, a real serious indicator of the trifling nature of the Ahiara exercise. Nyerere’s strategies were not formulated for ideological reasons but as real practical solutions to the real pressing social and political problems of Tanzania. The producers of the Ahiara Declaration, however, emotionally adopted socialism and egalitarianism, as if Tanzania and Biafra were one nation with identical problems. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Biafra had neither Tanzania’s problems nor did Tanzania have Biafra’s fortunes regardless of its wartime miseries. Unfortunately, the copycat approach, obviously, gave the highly brilliant General an image of a ‘me too’ political character, an imitator rather than the original thinker that he really was, like those other African leaders who had put their guiding socialist and political philosophies in writing or in slogans. 11

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Ibid., 317, emphasis added.

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African Socialism Léopold Sédar Senghor postulated in his work, Man, that human beings remain the first consideration of government: ‘He constitutes our measure’.12 Kwame Nkrumah’s Philosophical Consciencism accepts some principles of Marxist scientific socialism based on African traditional patterns. According to Nkrumah, the new philosophy will provide the theoretical basis for an ideology whose aim shall be to contain the African experience of Islam and Euro-Christian presence as well as experience of traditional African society.13 Mzee Jomo Kenyatta in his non-ideological stand, promoted the idea of local individuals pulling together in self-help developments: Harambee, a Kiswahili word for ‘pull together!’ Kenneth Kaunda, a Christian of great emotional intensity, in the book, A Humanist in Africa, expressed the love of man and Christianoriented governance system in Africa.14 None of these prescriptions transformed the people of their countries. Nyerere’s Arusha formulations were in response to the social realities and economic exigencies of his country, Tanzania. The nation that he had inherited from Britain in 1961, Tanganyika (merged with Zanzibar to form Tanzania in 1964), was a state in which the majority of the people were poor and uneducated. The few educated and well-to-do were Indian, Asian, Arab, and European-Tanganyikan citizens who looked down on the poor and uneducated African citizens. Tanganyika, like most of the other East and Central African nations, had a large settler population unlike Biafra and the other West African states that did not have that problem. There was also in Tanganyika the issue of Christian and Muslim populations with the latter slightly in the majority and also culturally more dominant and economically better off than the Christian Africans. The stress for Nyerere did not end there. The small African-educated group, mostly Christians, had important government positions. They were, however, drawn from only three out of the over 120 ethnic groups in the country. They were the Wahaya, the Wanyakusa, and the Wachaga with whom the Christian missionaries succeeded, and built schools, while the British colonial government, a reluctant foster father and trustee administrator, neglected to build schools in the country but preferred to do so in Kenya. Tanzania, indeed, was a colonial-deprived orphan. The socio-economic and political situation in Tanzania presented real serious dangers that could be exploited for possible ethnic animosities between the African communities, religious 12

Léopold Sédar Senghor, African Socialism (London and Dunmow: Pall Mall Press, 1962), 64–65. 13 Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism (London: Heinemann, 1964), 70. 14 Kenneth D. Kaunda and Colin M. Morris, A Humanist in Africa (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1967).

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tension between the religious groups, and a racial split between the African and the non-African citizens because of economic and wealth disparities. None of these serious situations existed in Biafra. It was obviously humiliating and self-diminishing, to be a ‘have not’ in one’s own community where the non-indigenous citizens owned most if not all the businesses, and at the same time, or as a result, humiliated and looked down upon the Africans. Nyerere saw this situation in his country. Evidently, for him and his people, egalitarianism and socialism were tailor-made solutions to the problems that he had inherited with the independence of his country.

The Future of African Socialism The study of the Ahiara Declaration makes it necessary to review briefly the appeal of African Socialism to African scholars and some political leaders during that timeframe. By 1969, however, it had become an anachronism to think of socialism seriously as a development ideology anywhere in Africa, much less so in Biafra. Programs highly promoted and based on either the doctrine of Marxist socialism or the Arab Third Universal Theory, Islam and Sharia Law had failed in the Arab Moslem world. The African traditional socialism, such as the incomprehensible Nkrumaism, also known as Consciencism, and Nyerere’s more popular and famous Ujamaa (Swahili), literally familyhood or brotherhood, all were failed theories and programs with little or no benefits for the people they were supposed to develop. The socialist programs failed principally because poverty cannot be cured by poverty or prevented, by spreading its misery around. They failed also because African traditional socialism had its own time and space. It is now in the past and should not be resurrected in its entirety to fit in with people of this contemporary culture, time, and place. It would seem to me that African Socialism, whether of Senghor’s intellectual hue, Nasser’s, Gaddafi’s, Nkrumah’s, or Nyerere’s most acknowledged brand, should now all be laid to rest in peace like feudalism, absolutism, slavery and slave trade, imperialism, and colonialism. They all, except African Socialism, should now remain as sad and unfortunate experiences of the past. African Socialism operated in the small space of the sustenance agrarian culture of the machete and hoe, cut and burn farming system. The tradition of mutual dependence and sharing derived from a number of factors mainly the fact that land was the mainstay of the people’s livelihood, the collective ownership of land because of this role in people’s lives, strong ancestral bond with the progenitors, and the need for survival. It was not possible to live in that community without the community support. The principal foundation blocks for living in that communal culture have been mortally undermined by irresistible forces: mainly

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modernization, Christianization, urbanization, diminished interest in traditional farming, the rise of mechanized agriculture, increasing population, land speculation, mineral prospecting, increasing financial value of land, increasing interest in individual ownership of land, and, above all, the availability of police protection – and with it the diminution of dependence on traditional community security. In the pristine close village community life, the villagers as a whole raised the children, disciplined the wayward spouse, built houses, tilled the soil, fought fires and floods, provided security, built village pathways, feuded, and maintained peace and order; families ate with one spoon, drank tombo (locally made brew) or water from one cup or pot, ate food with each dipping his or her hand in one bowl of soup, and shared the small piece of fish or meat in the soup without quarrelling; children and young adolescents shared sleeping floors with neighbors away from their own homes without harm, neighbors borrowed money without interest and without signed documents, borrowed foodstuffs, clothes, and even firewood from one another, and buried and mourned their dead with one another. These were part of the African traditional socialism. Today it is only in the minds of those who experienced it. They and those they mentor should see the sharing of the rising prosperity as a social, public, and moral imperative. The human-based attributes of African traditional universal familyhood are difficult to replicate in the contemporary community and values. Things have changed considerably. Most Africans now live in culturally mixed urban or semi-urban areas. Attitudes, needs, hygiene, space, and time have changed irretrievably. Africans now live not only in their own villages, but also far from their homes. They own cars and drive, or they walk to work. They have different types of houses from those of their grandparents and great-grandparents. They need more space for their children, for themselves, for their spouses, for their guests from afar, dependent domestic staff, and automobiles. They own and read books and use computers that need space. They also need more time because they have a lot more to do than their forebears who were usually selfemployed in arts, crafts, cattle rearing, trading, and farming. Contemporary Africans work not only for themselves as their forefathers did, but they also serve their employers: the government, business, industry, schools, organizations, and religious entities. These impersonal ‘live agents’ exact and exercise considerable influence on the people different from those of the traditional communities. New times need new strategies to deal with the new and evolving problems and opportunities connected with ever developing technologies and global living, rising and brazen dishonesty, delayed and corrupt justice system in place of instant community justice, irreverence, incivility, and ingratitude. The way to progress is not by putting ‘old wine’ into a ‘new bottle’, but by respecting those human and humane values of old, and by creating a new development ideology that would suite the

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culture and the characters of the present age within the paradigms of organized philanthropy and humanitarianism both in the public and private domains.

Friendly Relationship with Tanzania I lived with my family in Tanganyika/Tanzania, for over five years during my diplomatic assignments: first for Nigeria and then for Biafra. My relationship with President Nyerere, his brother Joseph, and his people and government was excellent. I was always called Ndugu, Swahili for brother, and honored by the Wagogo community. The government gave me two of the greatest achievements in my diplomatic career: the Nigerian Technical Assistance Agreement, which will be discussed later, and Tanzania’s diplomatic recognition of Biafra during the Nigeria-Biafra War. With clarity of mind, I recall how Nyerere told me in December 1962, soon after assuming the office of the presidency, that there was no pleasure in the independence of his country at that time with an important arm of the government still under the control of the former colonial masters and their minions. The Chief Justice of the nation was still British and so were all the judges and magistrates, some of whom were Asians. The promulgations and legislations of an independent Tanganyikan parliament could be struck down at any moment by the Judiciary with the stroke of a pen. ‘Wherein lies your independence?’ Nyerere rhetorically asked. By 1962 there were only three African Tanganyikan citizens who were lawyers in a country of over ten million people and the third largest African country in size at that time. Law, consequently, was by the instruction of Nyerere, the first faculty of the then-new University College of Dar es Salaam. The discussion with Nyerere also led to the Nigerian Judicial Technical Assistance Program for Tanganyika. The Government of Nigeria sent over one dozen young unemployed lawyers from the three regions of the Federation as Resident Magistrates in Tanganyika, and paid part of their financial entitlements. The day the first group of Nigerian lawyers arrived at Dar es Salaam international airport was one of the happiest days in my diplomatic life. Unfortunately, Nigeria cancelled the agreement and withdrew the lawyers, then Resident Magistrates, following the Tanzanian recognition of Biafra in 1968, another occasion of my remarkable diplomatic achievement.15 It is relevant to add at this juncture that I personally witnessed the preparation, the launching, and development of the Arusha Declaration in Tanzania. The Arusha Declaration impacted my Biafran mission, which benefitted, in some ways, because of the kindness of the 15

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Okwu, In Truth for Justice and Honor, 198.

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government. My family and I lived rent free in a new two-story building with extensive premises in a new exclusive development area from 1967 to 1970. My staff of two home-based officers also had a rent-free, three-bedroom bungalow in Oyster Bay, another upscale district. The two buildings were houses seized by the government from Tanzanians who were forbidden to own houses for rental according to the provisions of the Declaration.

The Declaration: People’s Revolution By the time of the Ahiara Declaration, Biafra was, indeed, with the exception of very few non-Igbo, an ethnically homogeneous state whose people were facing the horrible problems and awful hardships of an extremely cruel civil war. There were, however, no internal social tensions among the people who themselves, as Eastern Nigerians were the victims of the northern massacres that preceded the war, as well as the collective targets for the Nigerian air raids, strafing and indiscriminate amateurish bombings. Biafra, especially Igboland, suffered no religious animosities in the state. Overall, there was a stable and cohesive socio-political environment during the war especially by 1969 when Biafra was a shrunk and diminished enclave in Igboland. The Declaration essentially was introduced to the Igbo people. In one of his most controversial statements, General Ojukwu declared that the ‘Biafran Revolution is not dreamt up by an elite; it is the will of the People. The People want it. They are fighting and dying to defend it’.16 He also called the Declaration the ‘Biafran Revolution’. Obviously, he mixed up his cultural transformation vision with the ongoing war of severance from Nigeria, which most people regarded as the Biafran Revolution. The two controversial and contradictory statements, seemingly in error, were deliberately made to provide a political situation for the people’s engagement in their homes and minds. In the environment of the shrinking territory and deteriorating war situation, the Ahiara prescriptions served a useful public purpose as a valuable distraction from daily speculations about the war and its associated miseries. On the occasion of launching the Declaration, the center of emphasis was, of course, the people. For all practical and political purposes, the General, who loved his people, also had to sound populist, and had to ascribe politically, the formulation of the treatise to the people to whom ‘all sovereignty belongs … In Biafra the People are supreme, the People are masters, the leader is servant’.17 The Declaration, he affirmed, was not produced by an elite but by the people. It is evident that the General and his elite committee copied Nyerere in everything for their Declaration. They did not, however, have what 16 17

Ogbaa, General Ojukwu, 295. Ibid., 293.

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Nyerere had: the political party Tanganyika African National Union. The party won independence with Nyerere for their country, and (as the Tanzania African National Union) also produced the Arusha Declaration with their leader, Mwalimu (teacher) Nyerere. General Ojukwu, therefore, by his own political intuition, mere oratory, and proclamation, had to give himself the comfort and satisfaction that the Ahiara formulation was ‘the will of the People. The People want it.’18 The ‘People’ had become synonymous with the ‘Party’ in his mind. But the obvious fact is that the people of course had no input in its formulation. The people might have liked the formulations especially because of his natural eloquent delivery style. The Ahiara Declaration was not produced by an elite, as the General had intriguingly and correctly observed. It was however, the production of the National Guidance Committee that was noted for its elitist membership. Without much of any system of checks and balances, the Head of State accepted the Committee’s treatise. He presented the Declaration in a radio address on June 1, 1969, when he had lost almost all of the Biafran territory, was surrounded by the Nigerian Army, and the people worn out by the miseries of the war. The Declaration was evidently a convenient political sketch conceived for the purpose of luring the suffering war-weary population to an illusion of a false hope of an emerging new state, free from corruption, unemployment, favoritism, a new order in which the state itself would be the Fountain of Justice, and: ‘The rulers must satisfy the People at all times.’19 The General was, however, aware that it would not be so because at that time he was aware of the outcome of the war. It was more opportune to envision a better tomorrow that one was not sure of than to dwell on the miseries of the present that one could not resolve. Indeed the problems of the present were for the General to resolve while the promises of the future were just cheerful presumptions. However, regardless of the known writing on the wall, he went ahead and launched the Declaration. In his political thinking, it would be in the people’s interest for him to do so. Indeed, the people liked what they heard. He cared for them, and he was fighting for them, win or lose.

Ahiara Declaration: Reason for the Timing of the Launch In the second week of July 1969, the Biafran representatives abroad were briefed on the Ahiara Declaration in Paris. At the session, I asked Professor Sylvanus J. Cookey, Biafran Relief Coordinator, who came to do the briefing, to tell us why the Declaration could not be delayed until after the end of the war. With evident hesitation, he pointed out that my question was moot since the formulation had already been launched in 18 19

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Ibid., 295. Ibid., 297–299.

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Biafra. The representatives were only being advised, he pointed out, only for them to use it at their presentations and meetings with their host governments. I demurred and appreciated Professor Cookey’s’ reservation. The war ended six months after the discussion, and I found some support by the comment of Carl von Rosen, a Swedish humanitarian, who, at the risk of his own life, operated humanitarian flights during the war into Uli under the auspices of the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross. He told The Times of London in February 1970 that it was the threatening of entrenched interests by the Declaration that finally led to the deliberate sabotage of the war efforts from within Biafra and caused its fall.20 The General, at his address introducing the Declaration on June 1, 1969, provided the answer to the inevitable question, which most people avoided to ask, about the launching of the program in the middle of a cruel civil war. Here is his reasoning: Are we going to watch the very disease which caused the demise of Nigeria take root in our new Biafra? Are we prepared to embark on another revolution perhaps more blood to put right the inevitable disaster? I ask you, my countrymen, can we afford another spell of strife when this one is over to correct social inequalities in our Fatherland? I say NO. A thousand times no. The ordinary Biafran says no. When I speak of the ordinary Biafran, I speak of the People. The Biafran Revolution is the People’s Revolution.21

Regardless of the concerns and anxieties about the ongoing devastating war with its daily deadly consequences, the General insisted on his formulation to correct the ‘social inequalities in our Fatherland’. He knew Biafra was losing the war and would lose the war in the end. But still he considered the second revolution the right thing to talk about because the ongoing war situation was the opportune moment to correct the social inequalities in the Biafran native soil. To do otherwise, according to him, was to postpone the evil day and to engage in another revolution that would perhaps cause more bloodshed. What was left of Biafra by June 1969 was fairly politically united. By the time the Declaration was introduced there was, however, considerable suffering in the land: hunger, scarcity of food, medicine, essentials such as salt and flour, and living and hiding in the bush to escape Nigerian air raids and strafing. There were refugees everywhere with no privacy and no security, destruction of homes, businesses, crops and plants, sickness especially among malnourished children, abuse of the use of arms/planes for foreign trade by some people with access to the leadership, hoarding of money and foodstuffs and selling them at inflated prices, nepotism and favoritism in the sharing and distribution of the available food and relief-aid materials, and ‘attack-trade’ by some 20 21

Okwu, In Truth for Justice and Honor, 205, 277. Ogbaa, General Ojukwu, 293.

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soldiers who preferred trading to fighting. These were not unusual war problems. Every war has its own problems that should be dealt with administratively. The war complications and suffering should not have been characterized as ‘Nigerianisms’. The irregularities, some by highly placed Biafrans, should not have led to a wholesale cultural transformation treatise. Most of the social inequalities of the period were caused by the war and did not need a more serious and urgent separate program to resolve them than more attention and concentration on ending the war. It was the war that brought about the refugee situation and famine, destruction of farming crops, businesses, homes, and people’s lives. The General, however, had to accentuate the need to end the social evils in order to assure the people of his awareness of their problems. The war was evidently not going well. Biafra and the war only lasted six months from the date of the launching of the Declaration. As the Head of State, he was not to give the bad news that the war was not going well for Biafra. But instead he had to maneuver them to something more palatable and more consoling: the correction of the social inequalities in the land of which most of them were victims. The General affirmed in his speech that the people wanted the revolution, and that they were already fighting and dying to defend what they heard for the first time at that moment in history. It is difficult to comprehend unless one assumes that he had regarded the Ahiara Declaration and the ongoing war to salvage the revolution of the separation of Biafra from Nigeria as one and the same. The obvious controversy over the two separate major developments – the emergence of Biafra and the war that it triggered, and the enunciation of the Ahiara formulation – could be seen yet as another deflection-strategy from the people’s concentration on the miseries of the war, to their fascination for the prescriptions. On the whole, the Ahiara Declaration seemed like a convenient anodyne from the General to the people. He intended at that juncture of the war to lure the suffering people to some sense of comfort and relief, the unrealistic hope of a future state where there were no discriminations based on sex, tribe, religion, or ‘fatherland divisions’, and where there was no corruption, but a State that would be the ‘fountain of justice’ for all and sundry and where the state guaranteed employment to all able to work. The General would want these as his legacy to the people. If he lost the war, as he did, the people would still remember him for the dream. Despite the General’s double entendre, he still tried to reassure the people that the Biafran Revolution, along with the ongoing military conflict, and the proposed cultural reformation were separate and apart. He accordingly affirmed to them that ‘immediate concern is to defeat the Nigerian aggressor and so safeguard the Biafran Revolution’.22 22

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Ibid., 295.

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Obviously, the Head of State thought that the revolution consisted of, first his creation of the sovereign state of Biafra, independent of the corrupt and wicked Nigeria, and second, the establishment of a pristine Biafran culture free from and purified of Nigerianism. In the new Biafra, the people would live in their State where ‘all property belongs to the Community’ and the ‘society is open and progressive’ and ‘is traditionally egalitarian’.23 His reflections in this particular regard were, obviously, contradicted and confounded by his indomitable will and actions: fighting a political war of sovereignty at the same time complicating it with an unnecessary and ill-timed war of cultural transformation. He, however, attempted to justify his action, and in his assurances to the people, he said: ‘It was, and still is, our firm conviction that a modern Negro African government worth the trust placed in it by the people must build a progressive state that ensures the reign of social and economic justice and of the rule of law.’24

The Principles Every war creates its own peculiar problems and human tragedies that need to be addressed where humanly possible by the leadership. The solution to the hardships in 1969 Biafra, obviously, should have been in the realistic appraisal and review of the military strategies and in governmental directives, and targeted actions on those hardship and problem areas. It should certainly not have been by the introduction of the Declaration – the Principles of the Biafran Revolution – a political program equivalent to killing a gnat with a sledge hammer. The promotion and creation of a political and suitable environment for implementation, nurturing support, and dealing with the public response and reaction to the Declaration – the ‘Biafranization’ formula of the people – usually would not be a short-term project but a series of long and arduous experimentations. The fundamental transformation of the culture and lifestyle of a people is not easy. During the war, conditions were in disarray with a complicated and damaged administrative system operated in a makeshift, downgraded, and uncertain environment. The future was uncertain, and the absence of a political party made the introduction of the Declaration difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to implement, if it were a serious formulation and not merely political posturing. One has to be alive first before one can think about an idyllic society and culture. On the whole, the Declaration seemed like dressing up in one’s best clothes with no place to go. In summary, the principles of the Declaration were:

23 24

Ibid., 300–301. Ibid., 281.

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1 Sanctity of human life and the dignity of the human person. 2 Firm opposition to genocide – against any attempt to destroy a people, its security, its right to life, property, and progress. 3 Places a high premium on Patriotism – Love and Devotion to the Fatherland – Biafra. 4 All Biafrans are brothers and sisters and bound together by ties of geography, trade … and their common misfortune in Nigeria. 5 Knowledge of individual’s civic rights and recognition of those of other Biafrans. 6 Sovereignty and power belong to the people. 7 Public accountability ensures that those who exercise power are accountable to people for the way they use that power. 8 A leader must stand at all times for justice in dealing with the people. 9 Social Justice is the cornerstone of the Biafran Revolution. 10 All property belongs to the community. 11 Biafran Revolution is creating a society not formed by class consciousness and class antagonisms. Biafran society is traditionally egalitarian.25 With the exception of socialism and egalitarianism, the Principles of the Declaration were basic, deeply emotional reaffirmations, and political appeals to the people, aimed at renewing their support for the two-year old war with which they had become tired and worn out. The people were to recollect the slaughter of over ‘50,000 of us’ in Nigeria in 1966, the ‘sport’ murder of the ‘entire male population of a village’, the total blockade of Biafra by Nigeria while no ‘white belligerents’ ever carried ‘out a total blockade of their fellow whites during World Wars I and II. Ours is the only example in recent history where a whole people have been so treated.’26 Those impassioned appeals were important and powerful emotional reminders of the bitter hatred that Nigeria had for Biafra. Consequently, the people’s renewed support for the war was an absolute and imperative need to endure its hardships. An all-inclusive love of one another in Biafra as brothers and sisters, knowledge of one’s civic rights and the rights of others, public accountability, and the practice and observance of social justice by public servants and the military were the popular prescriptions for the administrative abuses, acts of malpractice, and nepotism. The proposed counteractive nostrums were, of course, not unknown in Biafra, but it was popular and politically proper for General Ojukwu to repeat them to the fearful and anxiety-stricken people who were, at every moment, receptive to any news about plans that would stop or at least alleviate their misery or give them hope for a better 25 26

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Ibid., 295–298. Ibid., 297.

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future. It also was politically wise to speak about individual rights, usually guaranteed and sustained by the vigilance of the government but often in peril in times of war. The Ahiara Declaration, in this regard, was a step forward for the people, at least in attempting to restore their faith in the government’s belief that they, the people, mattered. The Head of State, the shrewd politician, probably thought seriously about it, and ensured that the Declaration provided for it. Property and the Community The Declaration provided that, in the New Biafra, ‘all property belongs to the Community. Every individual must consider all he has … as belonging to the community for which he holds it in trust. This principle does not mean the abolition of personal property.’27 Many Biafrans, especially the Igbo found the formulation both difficult to comprehend and to accept. However, without any clear evidence to support his apprehension, the General argued that ‘[o]ver-acquisitiveness or the inordinate desire to amass wealth is a factor liable to threaten social stability, especially in an underdeveloped society in which there are not enough material goods to go around’.28 It was these factors, the leader also asserted, that caused ‘lopsided development and bred antagonisms between the “haves” and the “have-nots” and undermined “the peace and unity of the people”’.29 The leaders prognostications seemed highly inauspicious. The fears, however, were not supported by facts. Biafra is the land of capitalism, and Igbo are natural capitalists with no incident of resentment or opposition against any prosperous business person in Igboland – be they indigenous or alien. Also, in the larger arena of Nigeria, none of the eight military coups in the country since 1966 was remotely caused by corruption, nor did rebels mention corruption or excessive accumulation of wealth as one of the reasons for any of the military takeovers, despite the excessive wealth accumulated largely through corruption. Despite the corrupt political and business environment, in 1969 Nigeria had the second highest foreign investment in Africa; in 2014, it had the highest in the continent. The introduction of socialism in Biafra in 1969 by the Ahiara Declaration was an unsuccessful political tactic to assuage the highly disenchanted male population in Biafra, who wanted the war to end so that they may resume their normal lives: to get back to business and making money. The General, in reaction to mounting frustration, was forced to focus his inaugural message on greater recognition for the crooked wealthy man than the honest citizenry who were not so well off.

27

Ibid., 300. Ibid. 29 Ibid. 28

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At the launching of the Declaration, the Head of State condemned the few rich in order to reassure and assuage the majority poor in the society. According to him, ‘the danger is always there of a small group of powerful property-owners using their influence to deflect the State from performing its duties to the citizens as a whole and thereby destroying the democratic basis of society’.30 The pronouncement was, by all accounts, a dangerous utterance that could create class-based conflict between the rich and poor in a population where such hostility had never existed. For the Leader, however, under the circumstances, any and everything that served his political purpose at that stage of Biafra’s existence was proper and acceptable. West Africans believe that the love of money and owning property are the natural pursuits of Biafrans, especially the Igbo. Other Nigerian groups in the region also were, and still are, money lovers. The father of General Ojukwu, Sir Louis P.O. Ojukwu, was reportedly the first Nigerian millionaire. He owned extensive property in different Nigerian cities and towns. The Biafrans, as a result, were uncertain of the intentions of the Declaration. The General’s fellow Biafrans also were hated and murdered in the Northern Region of Nigeria because of their business successes. Was the Declaration a mocking parody of their lives, business styles, and aspirations? Was the Ahiara Manifesto an open repudiation of Biafran entrepreneurship and concealed support for the northerners’ envy and discrimination against the Biafrans in their region? These were and still are troubling questions today. Non-Biafrans as well, were incredulous of the Declaration coming from a government run predominantly by Igbo and by a state headed by an Igbo. The Igbo were regarded as great entrepreneurs, merchants, business people, petty traders, cobblers, taxi owners and drivers, and hoteliers. Indeed, people found them engaged in all aspects of business and industry not only throughout West Africa but also throughout all of Africa. The Biafrans usually succeeded in many activities where others failed. Consequently, some fault finders of the Igbo have, in envy, characterized them as ‘exploiters’ and as the ‘Jews of West Africa’. The question then was whether Ojukwu was supporting the critics and enemies of Biafran successful entrepreneurial spirit or playing politics with the business well-being of his own people. An Egalitarian Society In the words of the Declaration, ‘The Biafran Revolution is creating a society not torn by class consciousness and class antagonisms. Biafran society is traditionally egalitarian.’ The formulation continued: The New Society is open and progressive … We are adaptable because as a people we are convinced that in the world ‘no condition is permanent’ … 30

Ibid., 301.

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In this process of rapid transformation he will retain and cherish the best elements of his culture, drawing sustenance as well as moral and psychological stability from them.31

The Igbo culture has always been open, progressive, and generally inclusive. The formulation’s emphasis on the culture of the ‘New Society’ was, however, a political overreach that underplayed the existent Igbo culture by ignoring it, and by overselling what was hoped for but had yet to be realized: ‘The New Society’. As a result, there was an unnecessary display of concern over giving more social respect to the wealthy crook than the poor honest man. The point that appeared to have been forgotten was the fact that, in Igboland, the people were commonly raised to be honest. Celebrating what was expected, such as honesty, was uncommon. Achievement with wealth, on the contrary, was uncommon. Celebrating it, even when it was tarnished, should therefore be seen for what it really was. It should not be magnified for the support of the majority poor. This cultural irritant should, however, be left for the Ezes – the potentates of the autonomous communities – and for the state governors to resolve. Egalitarian Igboland provides for a fluid cultural structure in which everyone has a share of social obeisance. There are the time-honored acknowledgments for the Diokpa, Opara, Dee, Dede, Nwaada, Ulu, Ndaa, Dada, Oha, Okoro, and Mazi. No well-raised Igbo will call his/her senior in age by his/her first name. It is as reviled as a mark of poor upbringing, but it is a phenomenon that is rising in contemporary Nigeria. The egalitarian Biafra did not imply that the people nurtured antimonarchy feelings. After all, it was an Igbo ex-slave, Jubo Juboha of Amaigbo, Orlu, famously known as Ja Ja of Opobo, who founded the eponymous Kingdom of Opobo at the mouth of the Imo River in the late nineteenth century. The word Eze, or monarch in Igboland, is the epitome for excellence, the best of the land, such as Ezenna, Ezenne, Ezenwa, Ezenwoke, Ezenwanyi, Ezeani, Ezeala, Ezeaku, Ezeako, Ezewuru, Ezewuihe, and Ezebuenyi. Eze, in political and administrative terms, is the person in whom the last decision rests in the community. The statement, Igbo enwegh Eze (the Igbo have no monarch), means that the Igbo, as a group, have no one monarch for all the Igbo throughout Igboland. The concept, form, shape, power, authority, influence, and attributes of monarchs and monarchies differ, as they should, all over the world. Monarchies explain, in most cases, the origin, the history, and the rise of the demesnes and their peoples as well as their character, psychology, attitudes to government, governance, politics, war, peace, physical environment, and the neighbors and the other polities around. Monarchies also have many forms and levels, such as absolute, conventional, hereditary, constitutional, limited, muted, ritual, and even kingless. 31

Ibid., 301–302.

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The Biafran or Igbo concept of monarchy, like several of their other notions and practices, is pragmatic, purposeful, and highly reflective of the Igbo character and psychology. Things are not rigidly set in Igbo culture. The Igbo Eze-ship is similar to the judges of Israel before the era of kings. Eze Igbo, accordingly, varies in grandeur and protocol in the different Igbo communities. The royal authority of the Kabaka of Buganda, for example, differs from that of the Oni of Ife, as does that of the Asantehene of Ashante vary from the Oba of Bini, and the British monarchy differs from that of the Netherlands. The monarchy, in those Igbo communities where it exists, is similar to the Hebrew Judges’ ruling tradition before Samuel, the last of the Judges, anointed Saul as the first King of Israel. The Igbo monarchy is muted in that it is more experienced than expressed and advertised in deference to its deity, Chukwu, who is the king, Chukwu wu Eze. The system began with the Nri religious and moral potentates and exorcists about 1000. With the return and expansion of the émigré Umuezechima (children of King Chima) from Benin between 1300 and 1800, the kingship system mushroomed in many Igbo communities such as Agbor, Aboh, Onitsha, Asaba, Ubulu Ukwu, and Oguta. Other Igbo groups such as Aro, Ndoki, Ikwenga, Egbu, Owerri, Orlu, Emekuku, and Urata also adopted a form of muted kingship system between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because of the problem and prospects of the Atlantic Slave Trade.32 The titled men, or ozo people, are traditionally advisers and counselors to the Eze. The ozo title is highly regarded in Igboland, and accordingly is seriously sought after by the rich in the egalitarian society. The title-taking ceremony is expensive with the result that only the very rich can afford it. This was one of the main reasons the pioneer missionaries opposed it. The rituals and ceremonies associated with the ozo-taking have also led to two major conflicting results. The first, on the one hand, is the celebration of excellence and achievement and their promotion for emulation; and the second, on the other hand, is the rise of corruption in the amassing and displaying of excessive accumulation of wealth and conspicuous consumption. The giving of titles to people of less than sterling character has also emerged. It is, however, neither uncommon nor unusual. It is universal. The knighthood of the famous ‘heroic’ seafaring Englishman, Francis Drake, is not an unimportant part of British history.

32

Augustine S.O. Okwu, Igbo Culture and the Christian Missions 1857–1957: Conversion in Theory and Practice (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009), 13–14, 30–35, 65–68.

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Deductions Essentially, the introduction of the Ahiara Declaration, even as a vision for the expected New Biafra, was simply an unfinished intellectual exercise. It was far from a reasoned and crucial ideology for the cultural transformation, social and economic development for the traumatized populace of Biafra. The deductions derive from the following considerations. 1 By June 1969, Biafra was still in the throes of a losing war, having lost over 95 percent of its territory as well as all its major towns and cities. For whom then was the Declaration since the people would soon be reunited with Nigeria? 2 There was no demonstrated need for the socialist aspects of the Declaration. Almost all aspects of business and industry in the state were already owned by either the Biafran Government and its people or by the Federal Government during the period. General Ojukwu’s administration had of course taken over the University of Nigeria from Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, its founder, early in 1966 to the annoyance and disappointment of the Igbo foremost leader. 3 There were, in fact, no foreign exploiters in Biafra and there was never any incident of resentment or agitation about ‘native’ exploitation in Biafra. The foreign oil companies producing petroleum and gas in Biafra were under the Nigerian Army by June 1969. 4 If there were any noticeable agitations against ‘native’ excessive acquisition of wealth, it could have been in Northern Nigeria against the Biafrans themselves, especially against the Igbo because of their progress and wealth in the Northern Region of Nigeria. 5 General Ojukwu’s father himself had considerable wealth and landed property located mostly outside Biafra. But no one bothered his father and his businesses in the various regions of Nigeria. One therefore might be tempted to ask whether the General was attempting an economic suicide. 6 Biafra and Igboland are the homestead of capitalists. It would have been advisable for the struggling nation to attract badly needed foreign investment to rebuild the war-ravaged economy. Would it not have better served the people if the planners had maintained the people as what they really were, and still are – capitalists – rather than attempt to transform them into what they never were – socialists? 7 The members of the committee that crafted the Ahiara Declaration were recognized inside and outside of Biafra as learned, well respected, and esteemed people. However, it seemed the

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committee did not demonstrate much diligence and intellectual scrutiny in the preparation of the treatise. For example, they had not studied the problems that were associated with the Arusha Declaration. If it had sought advisement, the Biafran Office in Tanzania would have provided the necessary insights. 8 Planning for economic and social development and for cultural transformation would have been better left until after the war when the physical, psychological, moral, and infrastructural damages could have been better assessed and better planned. 9 The failure of socialist-based programs in Africa since the independence of Egypt in 1922 should have served as a red flag to the learned planners of the Declaration. It is a common saying that ‘lunacy is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result’.

Conclusion The Ahiara Declaration embodied the birth, mission, and struggle of Biafra – and the root cause of its problems. These problems included racism, the indifference of the European former colonial powers, the open hostility of Britain, the connivance and participation of some of the Arab and Muslim world, and the wickedness of the revisionist Russian imperialism toward Biafra. Despite the odds and the obvious impending fall of Biafra, six months after June 1, 1969, General Ojukwu remained ambivalent, doubting himself whether the Declaration was purposeful while reassuring the people of ‘our victory, the fulfillment of our dream’ which ‘is very much in sight’.33 He also saw Biafra as one of the modern African states and accordingly launched the Principles of the Revolution, which dealt with issues such as social justice, right to work, sovereignty, brotherly love, patriotism, self-reliance, and transparency and accountability in public service. These political and emotional issues were clearly intended to reenergize the people and rekindle their support for the leader and for the war – a war that caused, and was still causing at that time, unimaginable miseries and prolonged refugeeism, only the first in a long series of hardships in the lives of the people of Biafra. The Declaration should have ended without the enunciation of the Principles of Socialism that were, obviously, not needed in Biafraland – especially at that stage of the cruel war. The General was fully aware of the hopelessness of the war situation at that time. In his 1969 entry in the Timeline: Key Dates in the Life of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, he clearly sums up the situation as follows:

33

Ogbaa, General Ojukwu, 317.

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Hunger, starvation, malnutrition and accompanying diseases take their tolls on people inside the war-ravaged and ever diminishing Biafran territory. The initial spirit of determination and patriotism that sustained Biafra up to this point, despite obvious difficulties, soon gives way to cynicism, fatalism, defeatism, and hopelessness. And thus it becomes very obvious to most Biafrans that their defeat and surrender are inevitable. 34

The Ahiara Declaration with its eloquence and resounding intellectual philosophy was essentially a prescription for a condition that did not exist. It was like dressing up in one’s best fashion clothes with no place to go. Probably, as a result of the Committee’s awareness of the fact that Biafra was the land of capitalism and the people were natural capitalists, its members paid no attention to a pre-adoption appraisal of the successes and failures of the Arusha Declaration before adopting it as their model. They also failed to note that all socialist-based development formulations in Africa had failed since the independence of Egypt. Had the Committee inquired, they would have been advised that their model, the Arusha Declaration, was failing woefully by June 1969; indeed, it was withdrawn three months after the launching of the Ahiara formulations. If the model was failing in a society that was relatively a good fit for a socialist program and that had the support of a one-party government, how would the Ahiara Declaration succeed in a society with no existing party-support structure and a community that was avidly capitalistic? It is clearly obvious that the Ahiara Declaration was essentially a politically contrived intellectual exercise. Ideologically, it was not likely to win friends from the West, certainly not the United States. Britain and the Soviet Union supported Nigeria, and the French were helpless with the oil areas under the Nigerian control. At home, the Declaration caused Biafra the loss of the rich, and the business owners. The Declaration stated: ‘Biafran society is traditionally egalitarian. The possibility for social mobility is always present in our society.’35 Perhaps including egalitarianism in the formulation was merely diversionary. The whole Declaration had, of course, one legitimate objective: appealing to Biafrans for their continued support of the war effort. All other declared subjects mentioned in the formulations were for political and public relations objectives. Personal hubris, intellect over self-assurance, and belief in one’s own destiny of ‘born to rule’ can be dangerous and do not promote good governance, and have usually resulted in negative interpersonal dynamics, ethnic animosities, and disaffection. The danger is that people in leadership positions who hold such attitudes usually want things their own way in every decision and they run roughshod over the truth and facts of events and circumstances. In the post-war period, some well-known 34 35

Ibid., xvii. Ibid., 301.

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and respected Biafrans continued in this manner. In their publications, for example, their names and those of some of their friends and relatives were falsely included as members of the Biafran delegation to the Kampala Peace Talks in Uganda. If this aberrant behavior was not reprehensible enough, that is, the corruption of historical evidence, the names of some of those who were the actual participants, particularly those representing Biafran minority groups, were also excluded. As the former Biafran Special Representative for East and Central Africa which included Uganda, I can personally testify that I participated actively in the Talks and was obviously involved in coordinating contacts between the Biafran delegation on one side and the Ugandan Government, Commonwealth Secretariat staff, and conference organizers on the other. The only members of the Biafran delegation at the talks in Kampala were Sir Louis Mbanefo, Chief Justice of Biafra, leader of the delegation; C.C. Mojekwu, Commissioner at Large and Special Adviser; Professor Eyo Bassey Ndem (Efik), Commissioner for Agriculture; Ignatius I. Kogbara (Ogoni-Rivers), Biafra Special Representative, London; and Austine S. O. Okwu, Biafra Special Representative, East and Central Africa.36 The listing in Africa Contemporary Record, while correctly noting my official title – Special Representative East and Central Africa – erroneously listed my name as B.C. Okwu, the eminent politician from Achi, Awgu Division and famous Minister of Information in the former Eastern Region of Nigeria during the Nigerian First Republic. Authenticity and honesty in intellectual inquiry would suggest that the public should have the true facts. The unfortunate presumption of the absolute ownership of truth, for any reasons whatsoever including acknowledged fame and renown, can, like absolute power, corrupt absolutely. Admittedly, one can tell one’s truth in one’s own way but one, surely, cannot tell lies with brazen impunity and expect to be left uncorrected. In his wise opinion in this regard, the famous Mahatma Gandhi suggested that what one believes, what one thinks, what one does, and what one says must all be in alliance and not at variance. In the public affairs of Nigeria, in my opinion, the lack of adherence to Gandhi philosophy is one of the major causes of what is wrong in the country. The Ahiara Declaration was the work of Biafran intellectual giants. Its ideals were ambitious, eloquent, and lofty, if perhaps a little too zealous for its time and place. As a political and controversial treatise, it served the General well. It helped him transform sullen, grave, and heart-rending moments into passionate inspiration and hopeful reawakening. No-one likes to be the bearer of bad war news, especially generals, who were expected to win wars and lead people to victory 36

Colin Legum and John Drysdale, eds, Africa Contemporary Record: Annual Survey and Documents 1969–1970 (Exeter: African Research, 1970), 554; Okwu, In Truth for Justice and Honor, 216–219.

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– not talk of battles lost and entertain the idea of possible defeat. Such was the case with Biafra’s proud and self-confident General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. Because of the war situation, the Declaration was prepared in haste and without prerequisite investigations. Ahiara’s political objectives and focus were principally to reenergize the people and to redirect them from despair to hope for a new Biafra of new opportunities and new values. Tactically, the formulations should have been limited to those crucial emotional solicitudes of the time. The extension of the prescriptions of the manifesto to socialist and egalitarian ideological pronouncements diminished in many ways the brilliant and original thinking of the Biafran leadership. Clearly, the Declaration won Biafra no friends abroad and lost it friends at home. Predictably, Biafra lost the war six months later. Its overall social and cultural transformative impact and the public reception of and the reaction to it in a civilian and non-military culture and environment cannot be determined since its implementation was aborted by events beyond Biafra’s control.

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Part II CRITICAL DEBATES ON THE NIGERIAN CRISIS

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6

Beyond the Blame Game: Theorizing the Nigeria-Biafra War

Bukola A. Oyeniyi

Introduction On May 30, 1967, when Colonel Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the head of the Eastern Region, declared the independent Republic of Biafra, no-one knew that the resultant war would lead to the death, mostly by starvation, of about a million people. The war, which almost tore Nigeria apart, began effectively in July, almost seven years after Nigeria’s independence from Great Britain. The Biafran forces recorded early successes, but Nigerian troops immediately pushed them back. No sooner had the war started than photographs of starving children with huge distended stomachs adorned television screens and the front pages of newspapers. As studies have shown, the circumstances that led to the war could not be divorced from the spate of violence that erupted between Hausa and Igbos in Northern Nigeria following the first military coup of 1966. The violence prompted thousands of Igbos to flee Northern Nigeria. Nigeria’s military government failed to guarantee security for them and, on May 30, 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, with the active support of other non-Igbo representatives in Eastern Nigeria, declared secession and established the Republic of Biafra. All diplomatic efforts to reunite the Eastern Region with the rest of Nigeria failed, and in July 1967 war broke out between Nigeria and Biafra. As already noted, an initial success of Ojukwu’s ragtag forces was promptly pushed back, and the forces eventually capitulated under superior military strength of the Nigerian state. On January 11, 1970, the Nigerian forces captured the provincial capital of Owerri, one of the last Biafran strongholds. Ojukwu, the leader of the insurgents, fled to neighboring Ivory Coast. Four days later, Biafra surrendered and the war ended. The civil war not only came close to tearing Nigeria apart but also provoked passions in different parts of the world, most especially the United States of America and Britain. In addition to about 30,000 Igbos who were killed in Northern Nigeria before the war, more than 1 million other Igbos died in the war. About another 1 million were either internally displaced within Eastern 111

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Nigeria or became refugees in neighboring countries. Most of the wardead were civilians, with a large number being women and children. Over 30 years after the war, the ghost of Biafra still haunts Nigeria, as the Igbos continue to claim marginalization and humiliation from the war. Additionally, wounded veterans are daily seen on wheelchairs alongside main roads in Enugu, begging for alms. Many of the Igbos also believed that their inability to rule Nigeria since the war resulted from other Nigerians’ distrust of them. The highpoint of most discussions on the war revolves around the role played by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, then Minister of Finance and second-in-command to the Head of State. More recently, Chinua Achebe blamed the death of thousands of Igbos during the war, especially children, on Awolowo. He claimed that Awolowo orchestrated a food blockade that led to starvation and multiple deaths. The eventual loss of the war was also blamed on Yoruba people’s refusal to join the Igbos in seceding from Nigeria. These views, which seemingly resonate with a majority of Igbo, have been heavily criticized as unrealistic and untrue. Odia Ofeimun, for instance, argued that instead of the food blockade and the so-called Yoruba sabotage, Ojukwu indeed led the Igbos into a war that neither he nor his people were prepared for.1 More appropriately, Ofeimun, like many other Nigerians, blamed Ojukwu for unwittingly leading the Igbo nation into an avoidable war. In his defense, Ojukwu noted: At 33 I reacted as a brilliant 33 year old. At 66, it is my hope that if I had to face this I should also confront it as a brilliant 66 year old. Responsibility for what went on – how could I feel responsible in a situation in which I put myself out and saved the people from genocide? No, I don’t feel responsible at all. I did the best I could.2

On the food blockade, Awolowo revealed in a radio and television interview, that when he visited Igboland during the war: I saw the kwashiorkor victims. If you see a kwashiorkor victim you’ll never like war to be waged. Terrible sight, in Enugu, in Port Harcourt, not many in Calabar, but mainly in Enugu and Port Harcourt. Then I enquired what happened to the food we are sending to the civilians. We were sending food through the Red Cross, and CARITAS to them, but what happened was that the vehicles carrying the food were always ambushed by the soldiers. That’s what I discovered, and the food would then be taken to the soldiers to feed them, and so they were able to continue to fight. And I said that was a very 1

Odia Ofeimun, ‘Awolowo and the Forgotten Documents of the Civil War’, Vanguard newspaper (Lagos), October 28, 2012, www.vanguardngr.com/2012/10/theachebe-controversy-awolowo-and-the-forgotten-documents-of-the-civil-war-by-odiaofeimun/#sthash.gNleOOtj.dpuf (accessed November 6, 2014). 2 Barnaby Philips, ‘Biafra: Thirty Years On’, BBC News, January 13, 2000, http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/596712.stm (accessed November 6, 2014).

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dangerous policy, we didn’t intend the food for soldiers. But who will go behind the line to stop the soldiers from ambushing the vehicles that were carrying the food? And as long as soldiers were fed, the war will continue, and who’ll continue to suffer? And those who didn’t go to the place to see things as I did, you remember that all the big guns, all the soldiers in the Biafran army looked all well fed after the war, its [sic] only the mass of the people that suffered kwashiorkor. You won’t hear of a single lawyer, a single doctor, a single architect, who suffered from kwashiorkor? None of their children either, so they waylaid the foods, they ambushed the vehicles and took the foods to their friends and to their collaborators and to their children and the masses were suffering. So I decided to stop sending the food there. In the process the civilians would suffer, but the soldiers will suffer most.3

The tendency to trade blame, which began since the end of the war, continues unabated to date. This chapter, far from apportioning either responsibility or blame, seeks to know whether the civil war was justifiable or not, especially under the circumstance. The war, as many have pointed out, is unjustifiable either for the government or for the Biafrans. If, within a larger construct, civil wars are unjustifiable for government and rebels, why then was Nigerian civil war inevitable? Given the circumstances of its occurrence, was the secession or the resultant civil war avoidable? As extant literature has shown, ‘freedom fighters’ are most likely to argue that certain conditions make civil wars inevitable, while governments consider and treat civil wars as avoidable challenges to sovereignty of states. Hence, Ojukwu and his associates believed that the civil war was inevitable while the military government considered the civil war as unnecessary and Ojukwu and his cohorts as enemies and rebels that must be destroyed at any cost. Given the massacre of the Igbos in Northern Nigeria and the inability of the military government to control the situation, it would be irresponsible of Ojukwu and other Igbo leaders to acquiesce in the matter. For Ojukwu’s camp, objective grievances existed that justified the civil war. For the government, Ojukwu was misguided by his personal ambition. Given these diametrically opposed views, how best do we understand and interpret the Biafran War? In this chapter, I impose three analytical frameworks – the rational choice theory, economic theory of conflict, and social conflict theory – on the civil war in order to examine its justifiability and desirability. While not pretending to provide a one-size-fits-all explanation to the civil war, the chapter uses official documents, participants’ testimonies, and secondary literature to weave a narrative to understand the Nigerian Civil War as a rational and conscious choice amidst many alternatives. 3

Obafemi Awolowo quoted in ‘Response of Late Pa Awolowo to the New Book of Chinua Achebe There Was a Country’, CNN iReport, October 7, 2012, http://ireport.cnn.com/ docs/DOC-854578 (accessed November 6, 2014).

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Structurally, the chapter is divided into five sections, with this introduction, which sets out the basic objectives of the study, as the first section. The second section briefly examines the three analytical frameworks and their relationship to the civil war. As the third section shows, by applying basic insights from the three analytical tools to our understanding of the civil war, the civil war emerges as a rational and conscious choice aimed at attaining a set of objectives that, for both the Nigerian Government and the Biafrans, explains the use of civil war over other alternative actions in resolving the conflict. The fourth section isolates the various issues in the civil war. On the one hand, the Marxist-based social conflict theory locates the civil war within the ambit of relations between social classes in stratified societies where all instruments of the state are geared up toward class domination. The economic theory of conflict, on the other hand, locates the civil war within the ambit of atypical opportunity for profit, which, as the theory claims, impelled the Biafrans to take up arms against the Nigerian state. From this point of view, Ojukwu and his cohorts were not in any way different from bandits and pirates. As inferential motives rather than stated claims point in the direction of the atypical opportunity that the civil war availed them to profit rather than the rhetoric of insecurity within the Nigerian state. The rational choice theory, which is premised on the fact that the Biafrans balanced costs against benefits in order to arrive at the use of civil war among other alternatives as the best means to maximize their objectives, sees Ojukwu and the Biafrans as profit seekers. Overall, the chapter asserts that conditions that make the war justifiable existed in Nigeria prior to the civil war and, based on insights from the three models, the fourth section argues that the use of civil war as a tool in Biafra-Nigeria relations is a rational and conscious choice that must not be divorced from its attendant responsibilities. As the fifth section submits, the use of analytical frameworks in organizing and explaining the civil war helps in isolating basic facts from misgivings that may be premised on ethnic loyalty.

The Political Economy of Civil War: Seeing Through Theories This section examines three conflict theories as analytical frameworks through which conflicts and wars can be explained and understood. These are the rational choice theory, economic theory of conflict, and social conflict theory. The choice of these theories among many others stems, in part, from the fact that they allow an examination of conflict and wars from both the individual and group levels. To begin with, rational choice theory, pioneered by George Homans,4 is a sociological theory, which argues that gains play important roles in 4

George Homans, Social Behaviour: Its Elementary Forms (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961).

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human behavior. In other words, the theory argues that the possibility of making a profit underlies all human actions – seen as conscious, rational, and calculated towards making gains. Although the theory has become increasingly mathematical in recent times, rational choice theory is anchored on individuals’ and groups’ interests, wants, goals, and desires. As it is impossible to attain all human wants and desires, individuals and/or groups, therefore, make choices based both on their goals and the means through which these goals are best attained. In order to do this, individuals and groups must consider results of different lines of action and decide on which would deliver the best results. The products of the conscious and rational considerations are actions and measures that are best capable of delivering the best result and yield maximum satisfaction. Intrinsic to rational choice theory is the belief that all actions and reactions are fundamentally rational; hence, the theory gives no room for any other kinds of actions or reactions except the purely rational and calculated ones. From the smallest changes to complex social phenomena, rational choice theory sees social change as a sum of individuals’ (or group’s) actions and interactions. Therefore, we can understand complex social changes by understanding the behavior of individuals that make up a group. Rational choice theory’s obtuse fascination with individuals’ actions and reactions has been criticized as deficient in explaining collective actions and reactions. Put differently, if individuals’ actions are based on calculations of personal profit, what then explains social norms that impel selfless, philanthropic services? To critics, rational choice theory is a reductionism which is unduly individualistic and fails to account for larger social structures.5 Notwithstanding these and other criticisms, rational choice theory is the cornerstone of game, social choice, and decision theories. As Oppenheimer puts it, rational choice theory is a normative and empirical theory of individual behavior.6 It is also a formalized logical structure which ties individual choices to preferences while underscoring choices as teleological, if not purposeful, behavior. As a normative theory, it sets parameters on how individuals ought to behave, especially in according to prescribed values. On the whole, it explains individuals’ choices as dependent on preferences, with causal linkages to normative presumptions and implications. Although criticized as a form of reductionism, rational choice theory is built on a foundational presumption that explains individual behavior

5

Gary Browning, Abigail Halcli, and Frank Webster, eds, Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of the Present (London: Sage, 2000). 6 Joe Oppenheimer, Principles of Politics: A Rational Choice Theory Guide to Politics and Social Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15.

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as a key to understanding institutions and group behavior.7 Whether individually or in groups, actions and reactions are believed to be products of preferences made in ‘pairwise comparisons’. These preferences are believed to be complete, that is, derived from objective consideration of all alternatives. Individuals and groups are capable of judging whether one item is better than another or whether two alternatives are equally good. Individuals or groups reach conclusions that relate to a certain end or gain. Understood in this way, actions and reactions are scalable variables that can be ranked or ordered according to their ability to produce the desired ends. In this way, individuals and groups are presumed to always choose their most preferred alternatives. Therefore, individuals’ or group’s behavior, actions, and inactions are conscious choices. Irrespective of its flaws, rational choice theory helps explain social change, cooperation, and behavior, the logic of collective action, and the behavior of collective actors, and it serves as a yardstick for measuring political performance.8 The central argument of the economic theory of conflict, also known as the greed-grievance theory of conflict, is that greed, rather than grievance, is the underlying factor underwriting conflict and wars. Greed describes all gains accruable to individuals; grievance includes phenomena such as deprivation, marginalization, inequalities, and the like. Proceeding from these conceptualizations, the economic theory of conflict explains conflict and wars as resulting from the atypical opportunity these events afford individuals to realize and make profit. As Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, Nicholas Sambanis, and others argue, greed and grievance are not competitive explanations for conflict and wars, but are often alternative interpretations of the same phenomenon.9 The pivot upon which the theory rests is the gap between motives and objectives. The theory argues that by examining motives – not the stated but the inferential motives of individuals and groups – conflict and wars become a kind of industry that generates profits. This profit motive consigns agitators to the same pit as looters, bandits, and pirates. Seen in this way, conflict and wars are not explained by motives but by the atypical circumstances that generate profitable opportunities. Thus,

7

Geoffrey M. Hodgson, ‘On the Limits of Rational Choice Theory’, Economic Thought, 1 (2012), 94–108. See also Alfred S. Eichner, ed., Why Economics is Not Yet a Science (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1983); Corry Azzi and Ronald Ehrenberg, ‘Household Allocation of Time and Church Attendance’, Journal of Political Economy, 83:1 (1975), 27–56. 8 Duncan Black, The Theory Of Committees and Elections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958); Gary E. Bolton and Axel Ockenfels, ‘ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition’, American Economic Review, 90:1 (2000),166–93; David Braybrooke, Meeting Needs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Gillian Brock, ‘Needs and Global Justice’. in Soran Reader, ed., The Philosophy of Need (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 51–72. 9 Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis, eds, Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis (Washington DC: World Bank, 2005).

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rebellion assumes different motivations (gains) and different explanations (atypical opportunities). While not discounting the place of grievance in conflict and wars, the theory provides that, for a given level of grievance, it is the atypical opportunity that conflict and wars afford rebels that motivates the onset or outbreak of conflict – not the objectives trumpeted by rebels. In other words, conflict and wars are driven by greed, understood narrowly as the desire for profit, and not grievances, as rebels are wont to claim. This explanation rejects the general argument that conflict and wars occur when grievances are sufficiently acute so that people want to engage in violent protest in order to redress the imbalance. Owing to this, greed is believed to be dependent on preferences, opportunities, and perceptions. While preferences deal with conscious choices made by rebels, opportunities relate to chances that become available as a result of those choices. Perception, as a variable, hinges on the fact that rebels may wrongly perceive not only their grievances but also the opportunities for atypical profit that accompany them. Hence, when grievances and/or opportunities are wrongly perceived, conflict and wars bring either beneficial or non-beneficial outcomes to the rebels. Where rebels wrongly perceive grievances and opportunities, conflict and wars often become possible prospects for either a beneficial outcome, especially if the rebels succeed, or a non-beneficial outcome. Whether right or wrong, it must be noted that perception could create genuine grievances. Irrespective of this, where grievances are exaggerated, opportunities for rebellion are misperceived, or stated motives do not explain the incidence of conflict and wars, grievances are based on faulty assumptions. The import of the above is that conflict and wars may be driven by exaggerated or misperceived grievances; hence, atypical opportunity for gain exists to drive conflict and wars. Where this is the case, conflict and wars would be premised on misperceived agendas. In the light of this, the economic model concludes that objective grievances may exist, but it is the beneficial outcomes and not individuals’ or groups’ stated objectives, mostly presented as grievances, that explain conflict and wars. From the forgoing, it could be argued that the economic model provides a common explanation for conflict and wars: opportunity and viability. Both, as the theory states, may be misperceived or exaggerated. Whichever of the two, stated objectives alone would not explain conflict and wars, even though they are assumed to be well grounded in objective circumstances, such as inequality, marginalization, oppression, and the like. As Collier and Hoeffler noted, conflict and wars may result from factors such as the exploitation of natural resources, donations from

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diasporas, and subventions from hostile governments.10 Where natural resources exist, access and control might lead to conflict and wars. Where a group derives support from another one in the diaspora, conflict and wars might be plausible in much the same way as when an individual or group derives subventions from a hostile government. Put differently, for a certain level of grievance, these different factors provide atypical opportunities for rebel groups to deploy violence and wars in their engagements with either the state or with other groups. As the theory notes, ethnic or religious hatred, political repression and exclusion, and economic inequality provide adequate grounds for objective grievances. More often than not, ethnic and religious grievances are measurable; evidence abounds in different societies across the world where conditions that could stimulate ethno-religious grievances are gradually becoming impossible. For instance, to carry out ethnically motivated violence against another ethnic group, one ethnic group must be big enough to dominate the other, as in Rwanda, where the Hutu ethnic group was larger than both the Tutsi and Twa ethnic groups. The Hutu were able to orchestrate genocide against the Tutsis. The same explanation suffices for religious hatred. Although hatred is immeasurable, it could occur in multi-ethnic or multi-religious societies. However, a group – religious or ethnic – must be big enough to dominate other groups for ethnic and religious hatred to snowball into conflict and wars. From this consideration, the theory posits that ethnoreligious wars could only occur where there are two ethno-religious groups. Therefore where there is ethno-religious diversity, heterogeneity, in itself, undermines ethno-religious hatred. Ethno-religious diversity, therefore, is considered a factor in ensuring socio-religious cohesion rather than causing ethno-religious hatred. In other words, the more heterogeneous a society, the more difficulty is associated with planning, coordinating, and executing religious and ethnic conflicts. This position completely negates the general view that multi-ethnic and multi-religious communities are bedrocks of ethnoreligious conflicts. While the model recognizes the possibility of political exclusion and alienation, it claims that the more democratic a society is, the more difficult it becomes to plan ethno-religious conflict and wars. Poverty, however, could cause economic exclusion and rebellion. However, it works in two ways. On the one hand, the poor may rebel to induce redistribution. The rich, on the other hand, could mount secession in order to prevent wealth redistribution. Unlike both the rational choice and economic theories of conflict, which consider conflict and wars as rational conscious choices, social conflict theory adopts a systemic view to conflict and wars. Derived from the works of the German philosopher Karl Marx, social conflict 10

Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, ‘Greed and Grievances in Civil War’, Oxford Economic Papers 56 (2004), 567–570.

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theory views society as a space where structural inequalities generate conflict and social change. As Marx argued, all stratified societies are composed of two major social groups: a ruling class and a subject class. In pre-modern society, this involved the aristocratic landowners and laborers who work for them. The equivalents in today’s world include company/industry owners and workers, respectively. As Marx noted, the ruling class derives power from its ownership and control of production; hence, it seeks to maximize profit by exploiting and oppressing the subject class. In pre-modern societies, as in modern ones, landowners (including company owners) require laborers (or staff) to work for longer hours and receive lesser wages while laborers desire to work fewer hours and receive higher wages. Given the above, social conflict theorists argue that one can only attain its objective by eliminating the objective of the other. Hence, the theory argues, inequality pervades all social relationships and that all conflicts are about power and exploitation. As Padgitt and Padgitt succinctly put it, social conflict is a result of the strong and the rich exploiting the poor and the weak.11 Moreover, societal institutions like the legal and political systems, including the police and the army, are considered instruments the ruling class can use to dominate the weaker class. Hence, conflict and wars result as the weaker seeks to throw away the domination of the stronger. This view, which was later expressed in purely economic terms by Max Weber, locates conflict and wars within the ambit of the differing amounts of material and non-material resources available to the different social classes within a society. Consequent upon this consideration, social conflict theorists argue that in capitalist society, individuals and groups work in the disservice of other individuals and groups. In addition, social conflict theorists note that aiding social inequality in human society are factors of race, sex, class, age, education, and the like. As Marx puts it, the solution to this problem is a workers’ revolution that would break the political and economic domination of the capitalist class and reorganize the society along the lines of collective ownership and mass democratic control. In contemporary society, social conflict theorists translate this solution to mean finding a balance and building cooperation. What are the basic characteristics of these theories, and do they offer any different view(s) to conflict and wars? With reference to the Biafran War, how do they contribute to knowledge, especially beyond the blame game that pervades previous studies? In subsequent sections, this chapter finds answers to these and other questions while at the same time examining how best to understand the war in the lights of these theories. Before examining what these analytical frameworks

11

S.C. and J.S. Padgitt, ‘Cognitive Structure of Sexual Harassment’, in Journal of College Student Personnel, 27:1 (1986), 34–39.

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contribute to our understanding of the civil war, the next section offers a brief account of the war.

The Nigeria-Biafra War: A Brief Review The story of the Biafran War has been told and retold so that an extensive review of the literature here is unnecessary; however, a brief review is offered. Reports from government sources are combined with reports from Biafra’s main actors to weave a concise narrative that examines the main issues in the war. The general argument in most literature on Nigeria’s nationhood is that the nation was a product of coercive integration of varied and heterogeneous cultural groups who, prior to the amalgamation of 1914, had lived as separate and independent groups. In order to administer the different areas, British administrators fostered a divide-and-rule system, pitching the North against the South; two distinctly different systems evolved in the two areas. In the South, Christianity and Western education (and, invariably, Western culture) spread while the North was insulated against both. The division facilitated administrative convenience as the North, unlike the South, was centrally administered before the colonial intrusion. Divide and rule continued even after independence in 1960. At independence, Dr Nnamid Azikiwe of the National Council of Nigerian Citizens refused to team up with Chief Obafemi Awolowo of the Action Group (AG), both from the South, but preferred the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) from the North. It can be argued that Azikiwe’s decision to align with the conservative NPC, rather than Awolowo and his fellow AG progressives, sowed the seed of discord and disunity in Nigeria. As Nnoli puts it, the new government immediately embarked on the use of the political machinery to pursue their class interests of amazing wealth and privileges rather than embarking on policies and programs that would foster prosperity, unity, and progress.12 Corruption and inept leadership, favoritism and nepotism, ethnicity and abuse of office, among other things, characterized the independence government. To perpetuate itself in office, especially in the face of no meaningful development in the country, government resorted to vote rigging and political violence. It also took advantage of internal crisis within the AG to break the party, establish another political party – the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) which allied with the ruling NPC – and declare a state of emergency in Western Region. At the height of its powers, the government sentenced Chief Awolowo, the leader of the AG, to ten years jail term on treason charges.

12

Okwudiba Nnoli, Ethnic Politics in Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980).

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In further efforts at perpetuating itself, the 1965 general elections were massively rigged. The situation in the Western Region was particularly intriguing, as electoral officers who refused to support the ruling party were either killed or kidnapped. In many places, polling units were deserted by electoral officials in order to avoid receiving election results from AG party officials, appointments of impartial electoral officials were revoked, and certificates of return that were issued earlier to candidates were revoked and declared null and void. In many such areas, NPC/ NNDP candidates were declared unopposed winners. Sections of the electoral laws that allowed aggrieved parties to institute legal measures were revoked. At the height of this electoral travesty, many AG candidates who declared for the NPC/NNDP coalition were declared winners of elections and their erstwhile opponents were quietly dropped. Consequently, unprecedented violence resulted and, as Esko Toyo noted, the general elections whipped up a national crisis of major proportion that brought the nation to its knees, as the coalition of the NPC and NNDP sought to defeat Awolowo and his AG by all means.13 As Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogu, the leader of the 1966 coup, noted, the coup became necessary not only because the political leadership failed outright in uniting the new nation but also because they were leading the nation on the path of a civil war. In addition, the coup aimed to end regionalism and ethnic loyalties, which promoted ethnic consciousness and sectional interests, in order to pave the way for national reconstruction.14 Although the coup failed, the rebels killed more Hausa and Yoruba political leaders than they did Igbo political leaders. This undisputable fact colored the coup as an Igbo coup. Although Major-General AguiyiIronsi, an Igbo officer, was not part of the coup plotters, he nevertheless rallied support of the remaining part of the army and, as Head of State, reinstalled governance. His initial actions were unpopular across the country. He not only remained silent about the rebels, but also posted military governors to the four regions. In addition, he began to canvass for support and loyalty of the northern leaders, especially given their losses in the botched coup plot. These moves, regardless of their intentions, were unpopular in northern political and military circles. The last straw that broke the camel’s back was the Unification Decree. Despite the fact that the decree aimed at unifying the civil service, the people perceived it as Igbo domination, and violence broke out, especially in the North, between Hausas and the Igbos. More than 300,000 Igbos were killed. While both the coup and mass killings were and still are contemptible, Ironsi refused to try the rebels though he did order investigations into the mass killings of Igbo in Northern Nigeria. The situation in the 13 14

Esko Toyo, West African Pilot (Lagos), January 1, 1965, 4. Joe Igbokwe, Igbos, 25 Years after Biafra (Lagos: Advent Communications, 1995), 12–13.

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North grew out of control, and defenseless Igbo people fled in thousands to the East. Ironsi’s inquiry was never held, and he was killed in a bloody coup orchestrated by Hausa officers on July 29, 1966. Ironsi and his host, the Governor of Western Region, Lt Colonel Benjamin Adekunle Fajuyi, were murdered in Ibadan. Following Ironsi’s murder, hundreds of other Igbo officers were savagely murdered in different military formations in Northern Nigeria. Lt Colonel Yakubu Gowon, the new Head of State, immediately called for a constitutional conference in order to rein in the situation, foster unity, and restore the nation. He was, however, unable to control the passion of northerners as more and more Igbo officers and civilians were attacked. Colonel Ojukwu, the Military Governor of Eastern Region who voiced his refusal to recognize Gowon as the new Head of State, unequivocally declared on August 27, 1966: ‘there is in fact no genuine basis for true unity’.15 He subsequently ordered Igbo representatives at the national conference to withdraw. Ojukwu made it clear that given the killing of Igbos in Northern Nigeria and the inability of the government to bring the situation under control, the Igbos would secede from Nigeria. International efforts, especially by the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union) and meetings in Kampala, Adis Ababa, and Aburi, Ghana, failed to bring about peace between Ojukwu and Gowon. Gowon’s refusal to abide by the agreement reached at Aburi, especially the payment of debt owed to the Eastern Region by the Federal Government and the suspension of Decree No. 8, also known as the Constitution Suspension and Modification Decree of 1967, was premised on the fact that majority of the agreements would enhance Ojukwu’s war efforts. It was clear that Ojukwu was already preparing for a war. As later events would reveal, Gowon was also advised by Great Britain and the United States of America against abiding by the Aburi Accord, as Ojukwu was receiving enormous military and other supports from France, Ivory Coast, and other nations.16 Rather than following through on the decisions reached at Aburi, Gowon dissolved the regions and announced the creation of 12 states from the ashes of the erstwhile four regions. In turn, Ojukwu announced the secession of the Eastern Region from Nigeria and announced the birth of the independent state of Biafra. As Karl von Clausewitz noted, ‘war is not merely of itself a political act, but serves as a real political instrument for the achievement of certain ends’.17 For Ojukwu and Gowon, the dissolution of regions 15

A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Source Book, 1966–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 167. 16 Ibid., 197. 17 Clausewitz as cited in Ivan A. Shearer, Starke’s International Law, 11th Edition (London: Butterworths, 1994), 480.

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and creation of states, as well as the civil war, were undoubtedly means to different ends. For Gowon, the creation of states would undermine Ojukwu’s power and the new leaders of the newly created states would cling to their new powers. Ojukwu was unequivocal when he declared, ‘what you are seeing now is the end of a long journey. It began in the far north of Nigeria, and moved steadily southwards as we were driven out of place after place.’18 While for Ojukwu, the civil war was ‘the final act of sacrifice that easterners would be called upon to make in the interest of Nigerian unity’,19 for Gowon, it was a mere police action intended to flush out a rebel group. After an initial success, the Federal forces successfully crushed the secession, Ojukwu fled, and the war ended after some 30 months of action. Important works have come to light on the civil war, with a great majority apportioning blame.20 One question that eludes most of the literature is whether or not the civil war was avoidable. This chapter, far removed from the blame-apportioning literature, seeks to show how best to understand and explain the war. As demonstrated in the next section, the three analytical frameworks discussed in the previous section could help in shedding more and useful insights into the civil war, which go beyond the rhetoric of the various actors and their sympathizers.

Smashing the Ceiling: A Theoretical Explanation of the Nigerian Civil War From the perspective of rational choice theory, the Nigerian Civil War should be seen as a conscious, rational choice that was (i) adopted in the midst of alternatives and (ii) calculated towards bringing its promoters gains. Desire for these gains, rather than the rhetoric of actors and sympathizers, underwrites the civil war. What are the alternatives to war and what are the gains accruable to the promoters? At both the individual and group levels, rational choice theory holds that actions are based on interests, wants, goals, and desires. In other words, actions target the attainment of individual or group desires. Actions are, therefore, products of choices from among alternative courses of action, and individual or group action reflects what is 18

Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria, 197. Ministry of Information, Republic of Biafra, The Case of Biafra (June 12, 1968), 13. 20 Notable examples include Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin, 2012); Alexander A. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 2000); Alfred Uzokwe, Surviving in Biafra: The Story of the Nigerian Civil War – Over Two Million Died (Lagos: Writers Advantage, 2003); Peter Baxter, Biafra: The Nigerian Civil War 1967–1970 (Ontario: Helion, 2014); Phillip Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra: My Story (Lagos: Sungai, 2003); Frederick Forsyth, The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend (New York: Pen and Sword, 2007); Frederick Forsyth, Emeka (Lagos: Spectrum, 1991). 19

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considered the best course of action capable of delivering the best possible result. Given this, two issues have to be determined in relation to the civil war. Firstly, what were the objectives of Ojukwu and the Igbo people? Inexorably tied to this question is the need to ascertain where there could be variance or congruence between a leader’s goal and a group’s goal. One must also be careful not to conflate a leader’s goal with a group’s goal. This is important, as it is common in politics and history for a leader to impose his or her personality, will, and objectives on a group in ways that make an individual’s goal the group’s goal. To this end, what was Ojukwu’s objective? What was the Igbo objective? Could one be conflated with the other? There is no point examining an alternative situation: a situation whereby there is a variance between a leader’s objective and group objectives. Usually, where this happens, the leader loses all power to lead, a situation that was absent in the Nigerian Civil War. The second issue is as complex and nuanced as the first. On the one hand, what alternative course of action was open to Ojukwu, as an individual, a soldier, and as the leader of the Igbos in attaining his objective? On the other hand, what alternative course of action was open to the Igbos in attaining the group’s objective? Where there is a synergy between a leader and a group objective, could the same alternative course of action attain the individual and group’s objectives? Undoubtedly, these questions are complex and not easily answered. While there are indications that Ojukwu encouraged atypical conflict with the choice of Gowon as a Head of State after the coup that ousted Aguiyi-Ironsi,21 there is little doubt that the persecution and death that Hausa/Fulani meted out to Igbo people across Northern Nigeria before the civil war reflected broader aims. Ojukwu’s refusal to recognize Gowon’s leadership shows an individualized goal, which could therefore signify a personal objective. As for the Igbo, persecution and death led to an exodus from Northern Nigeria to the Eastern Region, which created serious management crises for the Ojukwu-led government. The dislocation, insecurity, death, and destruction of the Igbos following the first coup are indicative of an objective grievance. As noted above, Ojukwu’s statement that the civil war was a culmination of multiple activities and an end of a long journey that started in the far North of Nigeria and moved steadily southwards pointed to his conflation of personal objective with the Igbo’s need for security of lives and property following the crises in the North. An alternative reading of this development is that Ojukwu’s objective resonated or coincided with Igbos’ needs. This second reading amounts to a mere excuse: without the crises and persecution of the Igbo in the North, it would have been 21

Toyin Falola and Ann Genova, Historical Dictionary of Nigeria (Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2009), xxxviii; see also Charles Hauss, Comparative Politics: Domestic Responses to Global Challenges (Stamford, CT: Cengage, 2013), 401.

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impossible for them to support any secessionist bid. In other words, the perception that the first coup was an Igbo coup that culminated in the second coup plot created an uncommon situation whereby a leader’s objective coheres with that of his group; hence, it becomes difficult to separate what was a personal issue from a group problem. In this atypical situation, obedience and support for secession seem willingly obtained whereas the objectives were at variance. In relation to his personal objective, were there any alternative courses of action open to Ojukwu other than war? In strict military terms, he had two courses of action open to him. He could resign his position or face a court-martial as his actions, in purely military terms, amounted only to planning a coup, the punishment for which was death. As a young military officer at the beginning of his career, resigning might not be a feasible option for Ojukwu; hence, only secession offers the kind of opportunity that many young and educated men of the time desire.22 As far as the Igbo are concerned, was secession the only course of action? Owing to the fact that the events following the crises in Northern Nigeria are far removed from us today, one could only surmise that secession was not the only option and that there were other alternatives. Contrary to Ojukwu’s sweeping remark that Igbo people were persecuted from North to South, there is no record to support any claim that Igbo people were persecuted in other parts of Nigeria before the civil war except in Northern Nigeria. In fact, many Igbo traders fled to Lagos and Ibadan, among other southwestern cities, and it was, indeed, the secession that led to the flight of many Igbos from the Western Region to Eastern Region. From the above, it could be argued that two clear-cut alternatives other than secession were open to the Igbo. The first was relocation to other parts of Nigeria outside of the Eastern Region. The second was relocation to the Eastern Region. Relocation to the Eastern Region was, undoubtedly, a natural and instinctual reaction, which was borne out of the human need for self-protection and self-preservation through falling back on the familiar. Had Ojukwu not declared secession, a large number of Igbo traders who fled homeward instinctually would still have migrated elsewhere after the initial shock had worn off. In addition, Igbos who fled from the Western Region did so not because they were persecuted but because of the newly created Biafran state. Lurking in between these points is the fact that, for the Igbos, alternatives to flight to the Eastern Region and to civil war existed. It could also be argued that the desire (or hope) for gains accruable from the Biafran state served as an impetus for driving many Igbos from different parts of Nigeria to the Eastern Region and not essentially persecution, which 22

Achebe, There Was a Country, 39–50.

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was limited to Northern Nigeria. Gains, in any newly created state, included new jobs, new political offices to be filled, and opportunities to profit from government contracts. To refine these arguments, one would need more precise statistics about the Igbo population throughout Nigeria. For instance, if the number of Igbos in Northern Nigeria was more than those living in other areas of the country combined, then one could argue that the large number of Igbos who fled did so because of persecution, which was limited primarily to the North. Without population data to the contrary, it is safe to assume Igbos in Northern Nigeria fled for safety and out of a need for security (of life and property); the majority of other groups who fled from other parts of Nigeria may have fled with a mind to gain. Both Ojukwu and Igbo people had objective grievances and also alternative courses of action to civil war. For Ojukwu, his objective grievance was the choice of Gowon as Head of State. What alternative course of action was open to Ojukwu? As noted earlier, he could either resign or face being court-martialed. The former option appeared the better choice for a 33-year-old young man at that point in his career. For Ojukwu, therefore, only secession could deliver him from being sacked and court-martialed, as he had made the initial mistake of voicing his rejection to the choice of Gowon, which, under the circumstances, amounted to mutiny. For the Igbos in Northern Nigeria, the need for security was acute. Unfortunately, first the military government of Aguiyi-Ironsi and later the government of Gowon failed to protect the Igbos in Northern Nigeria. For other Igbos, the need for gain and the atypical opportunities created by the persecution of Igbos in Northern Nigeria and by the creation of an independent state drove their flight. For the first category of Igbos, flight to other parts of Nigeria, including Eastern Nigeria, and secession were alternative courses of action. The fact that the first coup led to the death of political leaders in both Northern and Western Nigeria could necessarily lead to a fear of persecution in the Western Region, but the sheer fact that the Premier of the Western Region did not enjoy the popular support of his people played a major part in the way and manner in which people in Western Region took the situation. There is no doubt that if Awolowo was killed, the whole of Western Region would have erupted into violence, and Igbos in their midst would also have been persecuted. Can we therefore impute to the fleeing Igbos (from Western Nigeria) the fear of a possible persecution over the death of the Premier? While this is possible, it certainly played little or no part, especially given the role Chief Awolowo and a number of key individuals from Western Region played in avoiding the civil war. Ojukwu had a large number of followers, the majority of whom were Igbos. Non-Igbos in the Eastern Region government also supported secession. However, for analytical purposes, the followers and

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supporters do not fit into neat categories. To begin with, there were three categories of Igbos: Igbos in Eastern Region, persecuted and traumatized Igbos from Northern Nigeria, and fleeing Igbos from other parts of Nigeria. As noted above, the experiences and impetus for flight differed remarkably for the last two categories. The first category also suffered from the developments in the North and the flight of others from other parts of Nigeria. As common in all complex humanitarian emergencies, resources quickly ran low, leaving both the returnees and their hosts in abject poverty. Faced with dwindling government support, land and housing were desperately needed. Food resources quickly dried up. Inadequate housing and increasing pressure on land resources presented enormous administrative, social, and economic problems. Ojukwu was not prepared for any of these and his government could not provide any meaningful responses to these problems. As later intelligence showed, rather than using the resources available to him, Ojukwu diverted federal funding and other allocations to the region into preparing for a war. In other words, rather than meeting the immediate needs of the Igbo people, Ojukwu armed them for a war. The result was hunger and death. In other words, food shortages, malnourishment, and death had started killing people even before the war started. The last category, the non-Igbo in the Eastern Region government and House of Assembly who supported the secession, did so for gain. What objective grievance could have impelled this last category to support secession and the resultant civil war? What alternative course of action was open to this last category of supporters? First, they were members of minority groups in the Eastern Region and joining forces with Ojukwu rather than Nigeria would place them in a position of power. Hence, the most logical alternative course of action was to join the group where their interests would best be served than remaining where their minority status was more pronounced. This factor played a vital role in the ease with which these groups capitulated under Gowon. In other words, they realized their gains before Ojukwu’s war started and found it easier to change allegiance once it is clear that Ojukwu was not going to win the war. As far as the Federal Military Government is concerned, AguiyiIronsi, and later Gowon, failed to provide security for the Igbos in Northern Nigeria. After they fled home, Gowon’s government failed to ensure that the immediate needs of the Igbos were provided. Aguiyi-Ironsi left little doubt that he would not wield the big stick by court-martialing those who plotted the coup. This cluelessness and political insensitivity earned him death and created a situation whereby the first coup was seen as an Igbo coup. Gowon, as an individual, may have had other ambitions, but as the processes that brought him into power revealed, he headed a group on a mission of revenge. The primary objective of his government was not only to preserve the nation’s territory, but also to avenge the death of the northern politicians. This objective blinded

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his government to the serious humanitarian crises that resulted from the large-scale movement of Igbos from Northern Nigeria to Eastern Region. From the above, it could be argued that from Aguiyi-Ironsi to Gowon and from Hausa/Fulani in Northern Nigeria to Igbos and their nonIgbo supporters in Eastern Nigeria, the choices made by the various individuals and groups were not in the overall interests of either Nigeria as a whole or of the Igbo people in particular. In the case of Ojukwu and the people of Eastern Nigeria, there was a conflation of Ojukwu’s personal problems with the complex humanitarian situation in Biafra. In other words, the import of Ojukwu’s rejection of Gowon’s leadership played a decisive role in his decision to cede the Eastern Region from Nigeria. Although a clear-cut demarcation existed between Ojukwu’s choice and the Igbos’ choices in the matter, the complex humanitarian situation in Igboland overshadowed any talk on Ojukwu’s personal ambition, especially since he faced a possible resignation or death following his rejection of Gowon’s leadership. The economic theory posits that it is this opportunity to gain or to profit that impels the civil war and not the rhetoric mounted by the various parties. While this is not to discount or deny the objective grievances associated with death, displacement, and the attendant humanitarian crises faced by Igbos in Eastern Nigeria, one particular course of action in the midst of various alternatives is heavily influenced by a rational consideration of which alternative would best generate the attainment of a particular gain or profit. Hence, it could be argued, secession served the interests of Ojukwu and would best deliver his gain over other alternatives. As far as the Igbos were concerned, options abound that could best deliver a range of desired results other than secession. As a refinement to the economic model, the analysis here is that the civil war was a dependent variable; secession an independent one. Therefore, the economic model, as Nicholas Sambanis noted, shifts the analysis from outcome to cause.23 Without the desire for profit or gain, the choice of secession over and above all other options would not have arose. In other words, without the secession, the civil war could have been avoided. Seen in this way, the civil war became a tool that was deliberately used to attain personal and group gains or profits. From this point of view, inferential motives rather than Ojukwu and the Biafran’s stated claims point toward the opportunity that secession provided them for profit rather than the rhetoric of insecurity within the Nigerian state as the primary reason for the secession. As earlier noted, Ojukwu and the Biafrans balanced costs against benefits in order to arrive at the use of secession among other alternatives as the only means to maximize their objectives. Hence, the resultant civil war, 23

Nicholas Sambanis, Expanding Economic Models of Civil War Using Case Studies, www.politics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/4744/ns1110.pdf (accessed January 7, 2015).

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which, for the federal government, tried to preserve the nation’s territory, was just and unavoidable. In the light of this, Ojukwu and the Biafrans could be described as profit seekers who took advantage of a bad situation to realize profits. This bad situation undoubtedly justified civil violence or war if federal and regional governments failed to respond. Just as no nation would watch its territories dismembered, no nation would, by proxy, fund a war to dismember it. To the extent that Ojukwu was preparing for a war, it would be foolhardy for a government to continue to inject resources to the Eastern Region. Just as ineffectual responses to death, displacement, and complex humanitarian emergencies in Eastern Nigeria were critical errors in judgment, the rational and conscious choice of secession must not be divorced from any attendant responsibilities. In the case of Nigeria, these attendant responsibilities include the civil war, starvation, displacement, and death attending the civil war.

Understanding the Nigeria-Biafra War From the forgoing analysis, there is no doubt that circumstances that made civil violence inevitable occurred in Nigeria following the 1966 coup. The circumstances have, so far, been misdiagnosed. The cornerstone of the misdiagnosis deals largely with biases and playing the blame game. To move beyond the blame game, this chapter imposes three analytical frameworks on the crucial issues of the civil war and isolates the fact that, to understand the civil war, analysis must focus on cause and not outcome, independent variables and not dependent ones, secession and not the civil war. Although theories generally have limitations, they help facilitate a better understanding of the issues. In addition, theories provide us with a common framework through which knowledge of any social conflict, not just the Nigerian Civil War, could be best organized. From these theories, the civil war is not explained by the stated objectives of giving people in the Eastern Region a better life, especially following the persecution that followed the 1966 coup, but the disguised motives of the different players. In other words, the situation in Northern Nigeria created circumstances that generated profitable opportunities for individuals and groups in Eastern Nigeria, the culmination of which resulted in secession and the attendant civil war that resulted from the federal government’s efforts to restore normalcy. Thus, the secession assumes different motivations (i.e. gains) and different explanations (i.e. atypical opportunities). Moreover, the theories provide better explanations for both individual and group behavior before, during, and after the war, and therefore facilitate a clearer understanding of the Biafran War.

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Confronting the Challenges of Nationhood in Pre-Biafran Texts Newspaper Narratives on the Eve of War* Wale Adebanwi

Introduction Before the first shots were fired by professional soldiers in the NigeriaBiafra War (1967–1970), the issues at the center of the long-drawn crisis of statehood and nationhood in Nigeria were narrated and contested in the press. This is not surprising given that the press predated the corporate existence of Nigeria by more than half a century. Given the nature of the evolution of the newspaper press in the country and the fact that the key political leaders and public intellectuals who defined and largely determined the character of the emergent modern public sphere in colonial Nigeria were almost always journalists and/or newspaper proprietors, the press has been at the vortex of every important battle concerning Nigeria’s history. Starting from the struggles over the modern urban formation; to governance in Abeokuta, Benin, Calabar, Lagos, and other areas near the coast; the interventions in colonial policies; to the crusades over the proper structural and ideological approaches to the interface of European Enlightenment and African tradition, the early newspaper press in Nigeria could be described as a battleground where ideological, cultural, and political ‘combatants’ took on one another. As Nigeria approached independence between the early 1940s and the late-1950s, all the major ethno-regional blocs and the political parties representing these blocs seemed to have been united in recognizing the important role of the newspaper press in the struggles for ideological and cultural validation and political victories. In most cases, every major political issue was thoroughly debated on the pages of newspapers before they were either adopted or rejected. Examples include the controversies over the best political system for Nigeria (unitarism or federalism), the best constitutional arrangement, the status of the capital city (then Lagos), and the political economy of national unity. It is not a surprise, therefore, that every major political gladiator, ethno-regional *

A version of this chapter first appeared as Chapter 5 in Wale Adebanwi, Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016).

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grouping, and political party in this era had its own ideological mouthpiece: a newspaper. Each realized that the battle for the minds of men and women must be fought alongside other battles. Even though the bayonet and the pen are often contrasted in social history, in this chapter, based on an examination of the newspaper archive, I argue for an approach that takes the pen as ideological bayonet. For many of the political gladiators in late colonial and early postcolonial Nigeria, the battle for the minds of the people was, in fact, the first battle that needed to be won. In the decade before independence, the Northern Region, the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), and NPC leaders, including Sir Ahmadu Bello and Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, had the Nigerian Citizen as their leading ideological warrior. The Eastern Region, the National Council for Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), and its pre-eminent leader Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe had the West African Pilot as their mouthpiece. Azikiwe, owner of the Pilot, later became President of Nigeria. The Western Region, the Action Group (AG), and its preeminent leader Chief Obafemi Awolowo had the Daily Service and the Nigerian Tribune. Awolowo owned the Tribune. In the first decade of Nigeria’s independence, the political turmoil the country experienced was largely defined by the press representing the different groups, parties, and leaders. By this period, the New Nigerian became the mouthpiece of the North, NPC, and Sir Bello, while the Nigerian Tribune became the most important mouthpiece for the West, AG, and Chief Awolowo. The West African Pilot remained the voice of the East, the NCNC, and Dr Azikiwe. In this chapter, I focus on the newspapers’ narratives of interregional, inter-ethnic, and national political relations against the backdrop of the collapse of the First Republic and the tension and contradictions that led to the Civil War. I am focusing on this period to point out the critical role of the press in not only narrating the challenges of national unity but also in constructing, deconstructing, and exacerbating the crisis that engulfed the young nation after some soldiers attempted to seize power in January 1966.

The Nigerian Crisis and the Collapse of the First Republic The Nigerian state after independence was confronted with discomforting realities in the struggle to provide a convergence between state and the nation and the attempt to make the state as much an expression of, as well as a means of becoming, a nation. At independence, the alliance between the NPC and the NCNC produced Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (NPC) as Prime Minister and Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe (NCNC) as President in a Western parliamentary system of government. Chief Obafemi Awolowo (AG), who had been the Premier of the Western Region, left the region to become the leader of the opposition at the Federal House of Representatives. In the crisis that broke out within the AG

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in 1962, Awolowo’s successor Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola and his supporters left the party and formed the Nigerian National Democratic Party, which entered into an alliance with the NPC. The NCNC-NPC alliance also broke down; the NCNC and AG entered into an alliance between 1964 and 1965 called the United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA). The AG crisis led to widespread violence in the Western Region, which in turn led to a declaration of a state of emergency in the region. In the course of all these, Awolowo and his lieutenants were accused of planning to overthrow the federal government and were charged with treasonable felony and later jailed. The national anomie that all these provoked led to a coup by some young soldiers led by Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu. Nzeogwu declared: ‘The aim of the revolutionary council is to establish a strong, united and prosperous nation, free from corruption and internal strife.’1 The coup leader added that the enemies are those who ‘have put the Nigerian calendar back by their words and deeds’.2 The young majors were later rounded up and detained while the Senate president, Nwafor Orizu, who was acting for President Azikiwe, handed over power to the head of the army, Major-General J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi. In his maiden broadcast, Major-General Ironsi announced the suspension of the constitution and some other measures while affirming the regime’s readiness to honor the country’s international commitments. He also asked for the cooperation of Nigerians in the task ahead. In the foiled coup, the Premier of the North, Ahmadu Bello; Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa, Premier of the West; Ladoke Akintola, and some others were killed. While there was widespread jubilation in the West and the East, the North was significantly shocked and unhappy with the loss of its paramount leaders, Bello and Balewa. The introduction of the Unification Decree by the Ironsi government later led to rumors about the return of the much-feared ‘Igbo domination’ of Nigeria in the Northern Region. All efforts by the government to counter this and reassure the people of the region that there were no plans to impose ‘Igbo hegemony’ over the country proved abortive as northern soldiers executed a counter-coup in July 1966, killing the head of state Ironsi and his host in Ibadan, Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi, the Military Governor of Western Region. Subsequently, a northern officer, Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, was installed as head of state. The Igbo-dominated Eastern Region, in turn, felt a deep sense of loss and fear of the return of ‘Northern domination’ when the Military Governor of the East, Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, who was senior to Gowon, refused to accept either that there was a central government in Nigeria or that Gowon was Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. According to a newspaper report, Ojukwu stated: ‘That question is such a simple one and anyone who has 1

Quoted in ‘First Coup: Nzeogwu’s Speech’, Vanguard, February 10, 2000, 30. Ibid.

2

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been listening to what I have been saying all the time would know that I do not see a Central Government in Nigeria today.’3 The massacres of the Igbo in the North that followed this change of government precipitated a crisis that was hitherto unprecedented in Nigeria’s history. This led to mass migration of the Igbo, not only from the Northern Region, but also from other parts of Nigeria, back to their homestead in the East. Several attempts were made to resolve the crisis and bring the estranged Eastern Region back fully into the union. The most significant were the Aburi (Ghana) meetings where the military governors of the regions and Lagos together with the new head of state, Colonel Yakubu Gowon, tried to come to a settlement.4 It is significant that at Aburi, the role of the media in exacerbating the crisis was noted by the military leaders. The following is an example of this: Lt. Col. Gowon (Head of State): On the Government Information Media. I think all the Government Information Media in the country have done terribly bad [sic]. Emeka [Ojukwu] would say the New Nigerian has been very unkind to the East … Lt. Col. Ojukwu (Military Governor of Eastern Region): And the [Morning] Post [owned by the federal government] which I pay for. Lt. Col. Gowon: Sometimes I feel my problem is not with anyone but the [Eastern] Outlook [owned by the Eastern Region Government]. Lt. Col. Ojukwu: All the other information media have done a lot. When the Information Media in a country completely closed their eyes to what was happening. I think it is a dangerous thing. Major Johnson (Military Governor of Lagos): Let us agree it is the situation. Lt. Col. Ejoor (Military Governor of Mid-West Region): All of them have committed one crime or the other. Lt. Col. Hassan (Military Governor of Northern Region): The Outlook is the worst of them. Lt. Col. Ojukwu: The Outlook is not the worst, the Post which we all in fact pay for is the worst followed closely by New Nigerian [owned by the Northern Region Government].5 However, the efforts to reconcile the opposing regions based on the Aburi Accord failed. On May 2, 1967, Ojukwu declared the secessionist Republic of Biafra and the Nigeria-Biafra War started thereafter.

3

Quoted in ‘Attitudes at Aburi: How the Military Viewed Politicians’, Special Review Section, Vanguard, February 15, 2000, 32. 4 Ibid. 5 Quoted in ‘Views and Counter Views at Aburi’, Vanguard, February 17, 2000, 30.

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‘Paper Soldiers’ and the Nigerian Crisis The above conversation among the military leaders before the outbreak of the Civil War further confirms the role of the newspaper press in the events that led to the civil war. Therefore, this chapter argues that it is important to examine newspaper narratives on the eve of the NigeriaBiafra War so as to be able to fully account for the conditions that predisposed the country to war and the role of the newspaper narratives in this context. I undertake a comparison and analysis of the narratives of four newspapers on the eve of the Civil War, that is, in 1966. The narratives in the following newspapers are compared and analysed: the New Nigerian, owned by the Northern Regional Government; the West African Pilot (owned by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe), which spoke largely for the Eastern Region; the Nigerian Tribune (owned by Chief Obafemi Awolowo), which spoke for the Western Region; and the Morning Post (owned by the federal government), which was the mouthpiece of the federal government. The main issues in the newspapers included the change in government that occurred on January 15, 1966, the Unification Decree promulgated by the Aguiyi-Ironsi military regime, the counter-coup led by Northern officers in July 1966, the massacres in the Northern Region of easterners, and the ‘intransigence’ of the Eastern regional government. The Nigerian crisis of the early post-independence years, which the press had helped create and exacerbate through its reporting, put the various newspapers in different camps. Understandably, those whose principals had lost out in the battle that followed the granting of independence were eagerly awaiting a fundamental change that would sweep away their opponents from power. Against the backdrop of the political context discussed above, when soldiers came to power in January 1966, the Tribune and Pilot were jubilant while the Morning Post had no other option than to support the new military regime, which paid its bills. However, the Post was transformed by the coup as much as it remained the same. While it no longer defended some of the issues and policies it had supported under the defunct Balewa administration, the Pilot still supported the power holders at the center. In spite of its earlier glorification and defense of the state of affairs under the old order, the Post ‘join[ed] all lovers of peace in this country in welcoming the Military Government’.6 The Post’s position was based on a simple fact: ‘A people deserve the type of government they get.’7 The image of the politicians for the paper was now that of a most contemptible bunch.8 The Post asked the new regime to be tough and to suspend all political activities: ‘Nigeria at this time deserves a tough and strong hand to 6

‘Road to Survival’, Morning Post, January 19, 1966 [hereafter MP]. Ibid. 8 Ibid. 7

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steer her barque of state; such the Military Government now holds out every promise of supplying.’9 In addition: ‘The new Government must suspend all political activities. Without doing this, it cannot be sure that it will get the atmosphere conducive to the re-planning that lies ahead. The trouble with this country has been over-present surfeit of politics.’10 It took the Post six years to come to this conclusion about ‘over-present surfeit of politics’,11 which incidentally was also responsible for the advent of the paper itself. But in the tradition of going overboard in its support for whoever was paying its bill, the Post sanctioned anything and everything that the military government did or said. The statements of the military head of the regime, Aguiyi-Ironsi, were described as ‘words of gold’12 in the context of the ‘task of nation-building that lies ahead’.13 Tribune seemed to agree with the Post on the prospect of the emergence of a Nigerian nation from the rubbles of the First Republic, given the way the central and regional governments had dealt with Awolowo, the paper’s owner, and his political party, the AG. ‘The spirit of oneness,’ editorialized Tribune, ‘the idea of a united, detribalized country, appears to be having honest expressions in the everyday actions of our military rulers.’14 The Post added to this by describing politicians as the ‘ultimate fraudsters’ whose past actions have to be obliterated so that Nigeria can start on a ‘clean slate’.15 For the Tribune, the assassination of Premier Akintola, its founder’s arch-political enemy, and the collapse of the republic in which Akintola and his principals (the NPC and the Hausa-Fulani political leaders) held sway was a ‘God-send’, given the fact that ‘[t]he new military regime came at a time when the ordinary people of Nigeria were wondering whether God really existed … And so when God struck through our valiant army … the people rejoice[d].’16 While Pilot agreed with Tribune that the Western Region suffered most under the Balewa-led federal government, the latter asked the region to ‘behave’ since it had more to be grateful for that the military intervened. ‘After all, only God knows what would have been the fate of westerners by now if the Army did not halt the events following the last Western Nigeria elections!’17 In all these issues, the New Nigerian seemed not to have reconciled itself – like the northern elite whose views it represented – to the sudden change in government and the killing of the Northern Region’s key 9

Ibid. ‘Best Hope for Democracy’, MP, January 20, 1966. 11 Ibid., 1. 12 ‘Words of Gold’, MP, January 21, 1966, 5. 13 Ibid. 14 ‘Path to True Unity’, Nigerian Tribune, March 9, 1966 [hereafter NT]. 15 ‘Without Bitterness’, MP, February 9, 1966, 5. 16 ‘Forward with Our Army’, NT, January 29, 1966. 17 ‘Help Fajuyi’, West African Pilot, April 7, 1966, 2 [hereafter WAP]. 10

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political and military leaders. The ensuing violent riots in the Northern Region, in which the Igbo and others were killed, were pointedly ignored by New Nigerian.18 However, in such narratives as that on Ironsi’s planned visit to the Northern Region, the position of the North on emergent formations in the country came to the fore: We welcome the decision of the Head of the National Military Government [Aguiyi-Ironsi] to tour parts of the republic … We are particularly glad that the Supreme Commander has found time in his schedule to visit the North. With calls at Kano, Zaria, Jos and Kaduna he will obtain a cross section of opinion in the whole North … He will be able to re-assure any doubts they may have about the effectiveness of recent Government legislation.19

The New Nigerian, by narrating the position of the power elite as that of the ‘whole North’, obscured the relations of domination through conflating a collective and its part. However, the New Nigerian argued for the building of a grand Nigerian nation that could supersede the ‘whole North’. The paper asked that every school should be made to perform the ‘daily ritual’ of saluting the national flag as this will help consolidate the idea of a Nigerian nation.20 The Unification Decree No. 34 of May 24, 1966 promulgated by the Ironsi-led regime, provided a major prism through which the newspapers narrated the tensions and contradictions of nationhood. In his speech announcing the decree, Ironsi stated: ‘The former regions are abolished, and Nigeria grouped into a number of territorial areas called provinces … Nigeria ceases to be what has been described as a federation. It now becomes simply the Republic of Nigeria’.21 Unification, in itself, is a narrative, and a major mode of ideology, as J.B. Thompson argues. As a mode of ideology, narratives of unification, help in creating conditions through which relations of domination ‘may be established and sustained by constructing, at the symbolic level, a form of unity which embraces individuals in a collective identity, irrespective of the differences and divisions that may separate them’.22 One of the strategies by which this is done is through what Thompson calls the ‘symbolization of unity’, which involves ‘the construction of symbols of unity, of collective identity and identification … [which] may be interwoven with the process of narrativization, as symbols of unity may be an integral 18

For instance, the headlines of editorials as late as July 1966 give indications of this. They include, ‘Meeting the People’, July 1, 1966; ‘[U.S.] Independence’, July 4, 1966; ‘Putting Teeth into the Rent Legislation’, July 4, 1966; ‘Get Expert Advice to Build Exports’, July 13, 1966; and ‘Incentive for Self-Help’, July 15, 1966. 19 ‘Meeting the People’, New Nigerian, July 16, 1966 [hereafter NN], emphasis added. 20 ‘A Symbol of National Unity’, NN, July 18, 1966, 6. 21 ‘The Regions are Abolished’, Ironsi’s Broadcast to the Nation banning Political Parties and introducing Decree No. 34, May 24, 1966. 22 John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 64.

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part of the narrative … which recounts a shared history and projects a collective fate’.23 The narratives of the crisis in the Nigerian press in 1966, reflected the mode and strategy of ideology in that they were affirming different kinds of collective identity, national, regional, or ethnic, while simultaneously emphasizing the differences and divisions of the national, regional, or ethnic collective and the imagined other(s). Narratives, therefore, constituted an integral part of the work of the paper soldiers in the period before the civil war. According to the Post, ‘[b]uilding one Nigeria is not an easy task by any means. But it is not impossible either.’24 Therefore, the announcement of the Unification Decree for the Post constituted ‘the first step in a journey that takes Nigeria to greatness’, since ‘it is clear that tribalism or disunity was Nigeria’s greatest bane’.25 While the Post’s position is understandable given the fact that it supported the official line, the Pilot supported the unitary system as a fundamental credo, in part because that was the original position of Azikiwe, the NCNC, and the Igbo political elite before they were temporarily persuaded to abandon this by the federalists by the late 1950s. However, the Igbo political elite remained committed to a unitarist political system in the early 1960s. Against this backdrop, the Pilot saw unification through the unitary system, even before the Unification Decree was formally promulgated, as ‘[t]he coming into being by natural process of a central Government [which] henceforth makes the concept of a Federal Government a misnomer’.26 Pilot hoped ‘that in time, the Military Government of Nigeria would consider the abolition of the word “federal” usually attached to Nigeria’.27 If this was done, the Pilot concluded, ‘[t]he name of the Military Government will be written in Gold as the only Go-Getter Government that brought unity to this country’.28 The paper also praised Aguiyi-Ironsi for bringing a ‘message of hope to millions of our people’, when he stated in his budget speech that ‘[t]he new nation that we are creating will have a place for all people commensurate with their talent’.29 Pilot’s position was a return to the fierce battle on the pages of the leading newspapers over federal versus unitary system in the 1940s and early 1950s. The Pilot, in that period, described the federalists as ‘Pakistanists’. Its editorials on the Unification Decree, therefore, totally ignored the popular resolve in the other two regions – Northern and Western – that Nigeria should operate the federal system. 23

Ibid. ‘One Nigeria’, MP, February 15, 1966. Yet the MP states that the demarcation between Nigerians was ‘artificial’; see ‘This Accra Victory’, MP, February 15, 1966. 25 Ibid. 26 ‘The Budget’, WAP, April 2, 1966. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ironsi quoted in Ibid. 24

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The Northern Region could hardly be part of the Pilot’s ‘our people’ nor could the Western Region given the fact that central to the former’s ‘doubts’ about the new regime was the idea of ‘talent’ which, for the North, represented a euphemism for, generally, ‘southern domination’, and particularly ‘Igbo domination’.30 A signpost of these doubts and ‘fears’ was the piece published in the New Nigerian.31 The newspaper stated that: Many Northerners still need convincing that the regime is a truly national one – and not one out to replace Northern domination of the South by Southern domination of the North. Some are beginning to ask … why the coup leaders have not been brought to trial.32

The narrative then sets the basis for the fear of ‘Southern domination’: The North has both a lower population density and lower educational standard than the South. This leads some of the Northerners to fear that the South will somehow ‘colonize’ them by taking over both the jobs in the civil services and their lands. There is fear that all the current talk about administrative unity, in practice, opens the way to the demotion of Northerners.33

However, the fact that the idea of unification constituted an ideal for the interests that Pilot served was further stated in the editorial devoted to defending it against the attacks and/or ambivalence of the other parts of Nigeria. Contrary to New Nigerian’s fears on the Unification Decree, Pilot stated that that was ‘what Nigerians want’ and that under the system ‘the question of one section dominating the other does not arise’.34 Those who argued to the contrary, affirmed the Pilot, were ‘tribalists’, who ‘could not learn by the mistakes of the past, and even though may like a unitary form of Government, they still want the country to be tied up with the appendages of federalism’.35 Pilot then corroborated the opinion of Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Military Governor of Eastern Region, who stated that ‘the present era was one of unity and solidarity for the whole country in which there were no minority areas’.36

30

As expressed in editorial, ‘Meeting the People’, NN. The article by one Walter Schwarz was supposedly intended to be published in the London Sunday Observer, but this did not happen. ‘Strangers Within Our Gates’, NT, May 18, 1966. 32 Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and the other majors who planned and executed the January 15, 1966 coup in which prominent northern leaders were killed. They had been arrested and detained by the Ironsi regime. Walter Schwarz, ‘Nigeria Back in Politics?’ New Nigerian, May 12, 1966. 33 Ibid. 34 ‘Govt Must Be Firm’, May 31, 1966. 35 Ibid. 36 ‘In the Bid for A United Nigeria … There is No Talk of a Minority – Ojukwu’, WAP, April 9, 1966, 1. 31

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For the Pilot, this was the ‘ideal’ that had to be turned into practical reality. Though not explicitly stated, the idea of minorities in the Eastern Region was an uncomfortable one for Ojukwu and the interests that Pilot represented. As stated by the Pilot: Indeed minority problems arise with the question of federalism no matter by what description. Before the division of the country into states, there was nothing like minority problem. Nigerians want a constitution in which any section should feel at home anywhere in the country and not feel as minorities.37

The Pilot added that nothing short of a constitution that allowed ‘free interchange of abode throughout the country’ will ‘serve the interest of the people’.38 To the Pilot, ‘the people’ were primarily the Igbo, who had commercial interests in virtually every part of Nigeria, particularly Lagos and the major cities of the North. The Pilot’s plan for unification, therefore, was ‘far reaching’ and would help Nigerians ‘evolve a common nationality and end sectionalism’.39 Consequently, the paper urged the ‘Ironsi Regime to carry on since its doings have the unanimous support of the people. We are convinced of our national salvation under the aegis of the new Military Government.’40 Surprisingly, despite the fact that its proprietor was the first and most eloquent of the proponents of a federal system among the country’s founding fathers, the Tribune also shared this position on the Unification Decree, believing that it ‘would pave the way for a great and prosperous nation, which is the hope of everyone’.41 The united nation that might emerge was of interest to the Tribune: If the present army regime within the time-table set for itself is able to build a new Nigerian nation out of the ruins of the past, if it is able to bring together a people torn asunder by tribal trappings and narrow sectionalism which in the day of politicians became worshipped, cherished institutions, then the future of a united and progressive Nigeria is assured.42

Perhaps the Tribune’s position was influenced more by the fact that the new military regime upstaged the political parties and leaders who had ‘conspired’ to defeat Awolowo’s party and jailed the man. At this point, Awolowo was still in jail. However, there was no question for the Pilot that the Unification Decree would ‘bring together a people torn asunder by tribal trappings and narrow sectionalism’. In fact, the adoption of this form of government represented the birth of ‘true Nigeria’.43 The fact that Pilot 37

‘What Nigerians Want’, WAP, April, 19, 1966. Ibid. 39 ‘Recrimination?’ WAP, April 25, 1966. 40 Ibid. 41 ‘A United Nigeria’, NT, May 26, 1966. 42 Ibid. 43 ‘One Nigeria, One Destiny’, 38

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had always desired unitary system was evident in its jubilation at the achievement of ‘one Nigeria, one destiny’ and the ‘wiping out’ of federalism.44 When the unitary system was formally announced, the Pilot editorialized: Today a true Nigeria is born. Federalism has been wiped out. All the equivocation in the past about common nationality is over. Today every Nigerian is a Nigerian no matter in what part of the country he is … The policy of divide and rule introduced by the British Colonial administration and perpetuated by self-seeking politicians is over.45

Also, for the new regime’s mouthpiece, Morning Post, the decision took Nigeria into ‘a new epoch’: This is a thing that all true patriots of this country have eagerly looked forward to … The Morning Post commend[s] the National Government for taking the bold step to erase all the divisive tendencies that had contributed to make Nigerians from one part of Nigeria stranger[s] in another part.46

Where the Tribune hoped that the Ironsi regime was able to perform the recommended task ‘within the time-table set for itself ’,47 the Pilot did not foresee an end for the military regime as the paper announced: ‘Long live Aguiyi Ironsi’s Military Government. Long live the Nigerian Republic.’48 The Pilot could not but wish the government long life given the way it articulated the regime’s raison d’etre on the regime’s behalf: It is the declared policy of the government to build a hate-free, greed-free nation with a contented citizenship provided with all the basic human requirements. It behooves any true lover of this country to bring these facts home to misguided Nigerians. This is the supreme task of one and all, particularly the information media at this time of national reconstruction. Anything short of this is gross disservice to the nation.49

The fact that these newspapers served as the paper soldiers for the ideological and ethno-political struggle among the contending groups was further demonstrated by the way the agendas of members of particular groups were picked up and amplified by their newspapers and how, at other times, the agendas articulated by the newspapers were picked up and amplified by the political leaders. For example, when the Military Governor of the Eastern Region, Ojukwu, ordered that all references to ‘tribe or ethnic group’ be ‘completely expunged in future from 44

‘One Nigeria, One Destiny’, May 26, 1966, 2. Ibid. 46 ‘Civis Nigerianus Sum’, MP, May 26, 1966. 47 ‘A United Nigeria’, The Tribune notes elsewhere, when Ironsi announced that they had prepared a 20-year plan for Nigeria, that ‘this does not fall within the programme of a corrective government’, ‘Twenty Years’, NT, July 22, 1966. 48 ‘One Nigeria, One Destiny’, 49 ‘Government Must Be Firm’, WAP, May 31, 1966. 45

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all Government records’, the Post praised it as a ‘signpost of the future of Nigeria’.50 The Pilot, about five weeks later, asked the central government to follow the Eastern Region Government’s example by expunging ‘from all books and documents the vestige of colonial era regarding “tribe” within Nigeria … Long live Nigeria as a nation.’51 As tension rose in the country, particularly in the disaffected parts of the Northern Region,52 the Pilot praised the controversial decision to rotate military governors among the regions as a ‘blessing [which will] minimize tribalism’.53 It presented the Ironsi regime as one that was ‘marching on’.54 The ‘sixth milestone’ of the Ironsi regime in its ‘mission of salvation’, stated the Pilot, was producing a united country, against the odds, in that ‘in place of division, we are now forging a homogenous whole, instead of sectionalism, the dominant theme is now unity’.55 It is quite significant that the Morning Post and West African Pilot were either completely unaware of the simmering disaffection in the Northern Region or choose to ignore it. To promote the unpopular Unification Decree in the Western and Northern Regions of the country, the Military Head of State, General Aguiyi-Ironsi decided to embark on a tour of the country. Ironsi never returned alive from that tour, which Pilot described as the ‘march to progress … [in the] forging of a homogeneous whole’.56 Disaffection in the army and the political tension in the North led to a counter-coup by northern officers in which Ironsi was killed in Ibadan, Western Nigeria, on July 29, 1966. The Pilot’s somewhat arrogant earlier statement that those who lacked an ‘enlarged vista’ would be swept away became a conundrum of sorts a few days later with the counter-coup. The Pilot, totally impervious to the growing unpopularity of the Unification Decree, had declared a day before the counter-coup that [t]he days when the pivot of nationalism began and ended with one’s small sectional environment are far gone. Now the format of nationalism is broad and all embracing. Only those who are capable of showing an equally enlarged vista on public affairs will survive the clean-up campaign now taking place all around.57

Even on the day of the counter-coup, the Pilot, unaware of what had happened earlier that morning, described Ironsi’s meeting with the Natural Rulers from all over the country the day before as a ‘huge 50

‘We Must Unite’, MP, May 10, 1966. ‘Long Live United Nigeria’, WAP, June 25, 1966. 52 Tribune and Pilot report ‘92 killed … 506 wounded, 300 arrested’, NT, June 2, 1966; and WAP, June 2, 1966. 53 ‘Transfer of Army Governors’, WAP, July 5, 1966. 54 ‘Marching to Progress’, WAP, July 18, 1966. 55 ‘The First 6 Months’, WAP, July 18, 1966. 56 Ibid. 57 ‘Test For Rulers’, WAP, July 28, 1966. 51

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success … in Nigeria’s onward march as a nation’.58 After the countercoup, and at a period when it was not yet clear what direction Nigeria would take, the Pilot still narrated the ‘success’ of the Ironsi regime, asking for peace to save the Nigerian nation: The West African Pilot and all Nigerians for that matter feel very much concerned that there should be trouble in the Army at a time when the national reconstruction program has advanced to very great height … No matter what the source of grouse, no matter how deep and sentimental the cause of difference among the rank and file, we implore them [the soldiers] in the name of Nigeria to cease fire … There is no doubt that up-to-date the National Military Government was riding high in the estimation of the people of Nigeria … In this regard, we call on all men and women of good conscience to throw in their full weight in order to halt the hand of doom before it engulfs our young nation.59

The next few days witnessed a vacuum in power until, eventually, Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon was announced as the new head of state. Though the fate of Ironsi was still unknown, Gowon’s first broadcast included the abrogation of the Unification Decree and the return of Nigeria to the federal system. Given its own opposition as well as the opposition of the Northern Region to the unification process under the fallen regime, the New Nigerian was jubilant when it reviewed the collapse of the Ironsi regime. The paper editorialized that: Nigeria has a new Government. New men have accepted the arduous and difficult task of guiding the nation … For the sake of the country; for the sake of our people and for the sake of our children; the new leadership must be given every support … The unitary system of Government has not stood the test of time. One reason perhaps was that it was imposed hastily and without sufficient thought for the future. Unity is not something which can be imposed by force … It must come about slowly and gradually and be built on goodwill. 60

In spite of the fact that such unity, as conceived by New Nigerian, was yet to be established in Nigeria, the paper saw a ‘whole nation’61 eagerly awaiting the new measures by Gowon. Yet New Nigerian countered any suggestion that the North was jubilant over the counter-coup, because Nigeria ‘fac[ed] a grave situation’.62 In an attempt to conceal its own jubilation, the paper added: ‘Anybody who reports or gives the impression that any section of the community is jubilant is hindering the efforts to restore calm and order.’63 58

‘A Huge Success’, WAP, July 30, 1966. ‘Plea for Calm’, WAP, August 1, 1966. 60 ‘Our Hope for the Future’, NN, August 2, 1966. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 1. 63 Ibid. 59

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Despite the tension, crises, and uncertainties of the post-Ironsi era, the Pilot was still irrevocably committed to the sustenance of Nigeria as one indivisible entity, as it romanticized the idea of an overriding nationalism: Although the armour of our National Military Government has sustained some visible dents at many points, we of the West African Pilot still believe that we can all rally round and begin all over again to mend it in the greatest interest of our national survival … It will be a thing of joy to Nigerians if all segments of our populace will continue to feel a deep sense of national belonging borne out of justified national cohesion.64

However, Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu, the Military Governor of the Eastern Region, refused to recognize the new head of state. Against this backdrop, the Post regarded the divergent positions expressed by Gowon and Ojukwu in the aftermath of the coup as representing the depth of the ‘tribal sentiments in the army’.65 The paper reported that Lt. Col. Gowon said ‘putting all the considerations to test … the basis for unity is not there.’ The same night, Lt. Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu … said just as much, concluding, ‘there are serious doubts as to whether the people of Nigeria … can sincerely live together as members of the same nation’.66

In spite of all these, the Post still advertised its belief that Nigerians can swim together without bitterness and bloodshed.67 As part of the efforts to appease some sections of the country and isolate the Eastern Region, Gowon released all political prisoners, including Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief Anthony Enahoro. This provided another interesting context for hostilities between the newspapers. In its report of the releases, New Nigerian added an exclamation mark to the claim by Ojukwu that the defunct Supreme Military Council headed by Ironsi had earlier decided to release Awolowo, before Ironsi was toppled. The newspaper reported: ‘In the telegram, Lt. Col. Ojukwu said the decision to release Chief Awolowo and other political prisoners was taken by the Supreme Council earlier on!’68 The New Nigerian, which had endorsed the imprisonment of Awolowo and the others, now recalled that the imprisonment had been ‘a source of contention and dissension throughout Nigeria for the past few years’.69 It was evident that with the killing of Northern leaders (Awo’s sworn political adversaries) in the January 1966 coup, the refusal by Ironsi to put Nzeogwu and his fellow plotters to trial, and the Unification Decree, Ironsi would have been even more unpopular in the Northern Region if he had released Awolowo. But given how Awolowo’s release now served the interest of 64

‘Let’s Begin Again’, WAP, August 2, 1966. Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 ‘Ojukwu Congratulates Chief Awolowo’, August 4, 1966, 1. 69 ‘Releasing Goodwill Through the Prison Gates’, NN, August 4, 1966. 65

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the New Nigerian and its backers, the ‘merits and demerits’ of Awolowo’s treasonable felony trial, the paper argued, were no longer important.70 The paper concluded that Awolowo and others’ release should only be ‘welcome and accepted by every Nigerian’ because ‘[t]heir confinement provided a cause and reason for discord and differences between Nigerians of varying political beliefs. The future is more important than the past. The stability and prosperity of our country is more important than old political feuds and fights.’71 The stability and prosperity that New Nigerian emphasized were ostensibly those of the Northern Region-led regime, as Gowon’s statement later confirmed.72 While the Post saw the warm welcome that Awolowo received after his release as his ‘hour of glory’,73 the Pilot narrated the release as ‘the triumph of truth over falsehood and victory of light over darkness’.74 The Tribune reported that the arrival of the 58 year-old Nigerian nationalist, politician, philosopher and idealist [Awolowo] … at this time when the nation and its people are passing through a period marked by certain vital significant [sic] events sharpening all facets of history of our great nation … Therefore, the release of [Awolowo] we hope, marks the beginning of [a] new crusade, of a new social and political force towards building of a Nigerian nation welded together by genuine unity and strength.75

Even though the New Nigerian, in the context of Awo’s imprisonment argued that the past should be forgotten, it returned to that past to rub in the political ‘loss’ of ‘a top leader’ who had for long preached unitary form of government.76 The top leader, who the paper failed to mention, was the former ceremonial president, Nnamdi Azikiwe: About nine years ago, one of the top leaders in Nigeria suddenly discovered that his time-honoured fight for unitary form of government for Nigerian was a lost battle. For almost 20 years, he had advocated a unitary form of government for Nigeria. He even called for 12 states in Nigeria – all of them weak and powerless states – with a very strong centre. But to everybody’s surprise … while in London for the 1957 Constitutional Conference, he cried out that ‘federalism is imperative for Nigeria’. This was a very serious departure from an age long belief in a cause that was very unpopular.77 70

‘Releasing Goodwill Through the Prison Gates’, NN, August 4, 1966. Ibid. This is an example of a ‘euphemization’. The three years that these three men served out of the 10-year (or less) term was described as ‘confinement’, which glossed over the hardship and psychological trauma of imprisonment. 72 This is addressed below. See footnotes 162–164. 73 ‘Awo’s Hour of Glory’, MP, August 4, 1966. 74 ‘Awo at Ibadan’, WAP, August 9, 1966. 75 ‘Welcome, Awolowo’, NT, August 4, 1966. Also see ‘Release for Awo’, NT, August 3, 1966: 1. 76 ‘Federalism Only Answer’, NN, August 10, 1966, 1. 77 ‘Federalism Only Answer’, NN, August 10, 1966, 1. Interesting enough, Gowon later created 12 states and part of the rationale was to break the ‘recalcitrance’ of the East. 71

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This editorial illuminated the indirect way Azikiwe’s and Igbo’s advocacy for unitary form of government connected with Ironsi’s adoption of the same. The newspaper seems to suggest that this connection was in the pursuit of ‘Igbo domination’. Without mentioning any names, the New Nigerian again placed a ‘consistent’ Awolowo against the ‘inconsistent’ Zik: Quite in contrast with this leader, another leader advocated a federal system of government for Nigeria. He did not mince words over it. He emphasized that a country so diverse in culture and traditions – a country with many languages, and with development, educationally and otherwise, so uneven – a constitution that allowed for every region to go its own pace, could only be acceptable to the majority of the people.78

At this point, the Northern Region entered the New Nigerian’s narrative: The Northern leaders of all shades of opinion … remained unmoved in their strong belief in a federal form of government … The North thus became a late starter in the race for self-rule as it was in the race for education. The federal form of government became a blessing. Everybody came to realize that under this system no inequality and injustice could be done to anyone. That every region could progress at its own pace.79

However, there were some crises that confronted the ‘nation’ in the narrative of the New Nigerian. Then the Army stepped in to save us from total disintegration. We all hailed our liberators … Then very soon, many things, apparently nauseating, started to happen. The military power-that-be made the most disastrous and catastrophic slip. Much against the advice of the elders of the country, the authorities decided to abolish the federation and sought to impose unitarism on the people. The result of some arbitrary decisions were chaos and confusion.80

‘The nation’ had apparently now returned to where the newspaper believed it should be. Therefore, the New Nigerian editorialized, ‘[n] othing can be more reassuring than … that this country is to return to the federal system … The decision is wise and sane.’81 Once the interests of the Northern Region were well served, the New Nigerian announced that all was well with Nigeria. This was particularly true if decentralization was encouraged in principle: The people of this country have much in common and at stake. We can survive the strains and stresses of a lasting existence if only we return to a constitution that allows for each and every component section of the 78

‘Federalism Only Answer’, NN. Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 79

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Republic to go at its own pace and to run its affairs in its own manner and light. Lt.-Col. Yakubu Gowon is certainly moving in the right direction.82

For its part, the Pilot, which had earlier celebrated the ‘wiping out’ of federalism, describing the introduction of unitary system as the ‘birth of a true Nigeria’,83 changed gears again, stating that a ‘federal system which should respect the wishes of the majority ethnic and linguistic groupings in the country and at the same time allay the fears of the minorities should appeal to the proposed consultative meetings to be drawn from all over Nigeria’.84 In the new dispensation, the newspaper insisted that the ‘new’ federalism should be ‘true federalism’ because, ‘[t]here is a greater benefit to gain if we still remain one country, instead of tearing asunder by secession’.85 With this, the Pilot reintroduced the option of secession into the narrative, even though it did so by disclaiming it. A few days later, Ojukwu picked this up while rejecting the proposed reintroduction of federalism, because, as he argued, ‘the factors making for a true federation of Nigeria no longer exists [sic].’86 Yet, Ojukwu was reported by Pilot to have reviewed the situation in the country in declaring: ‘The East is anxious to ensure peace in the country and she does not wish for secession.’87 The Post, which had earlier also celebrated the promulgation of unitary system by the Ironsi regime and described it as a ‘bold step’ which all ‘true patriots’ had looked forward to, reversed itself.88 It stated: ‘Perhaps our unity lies through a federal system of government.’89 Two days later, the Post went beyond ‘perhaps’ to state categorically that federalism was the best for Nigeria, even reversing itself again on the question of the abolition of the word ‘tribe’: WE ARE CONVINCED THAT FEDERALISM WOULD SUIT A SOCIETY SUCH AS OURS BETTER THAN A UNITARY GOVERNMENT … We are not ashamed to admit that tribalism abounds. For, we are yet to see a Nigerian who does not see himself only as Ibo [sic], Yoruba, Hausa or Bini. We do not feel this sense of shame, not because we revel in tribalism or clanishness, but because we recognize too well that it is only a natural propensity. We believe every Nigerian is a tribalist. That doesn’t matter. What matters is if tribalism succeeds to lie between Nigerians like a curtain of iron.90

Also, the Tribune had welcomed the ‘administrative, constitutional and geographical reforms’ (i.e. unitary system) in the hope that it would 82

Ibid. ‘One Nigeria, One Destiny’, 84 ‘True Federalism’, WAP, August 10, 1966. 85 Ibid. 86 ‘Factors for True Federation No Longer Exists: Ojukwu’, WAP, August 19, 1966, 1. 87 Ibid. 88 ‘Crisis Nigerianus Sum’, 89 ‘Peace in Our Time’, MP, August 6, 1966. 90 Ibid., capitals in original. 83

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make Nigeria a ‘great and prosperous nation’.91 The paper now argues that there was ‘no doubt’ that a federal constitution was acceptable to Nigerians, given the fact that it was ‘adequate to the exigencies and function of government and of course the preservation of national unity’.92 The paper then rearticulated the fundamental position of its founders: ‘A federal system of administration will help keep the balance of power between the component parts of the federation. Above all we are hopeful that out of all these efforts will emerge a new, powerful, progressive and united nation of our dream.’93 The national conference that the Gowon regime planned to hold to decide the future of the country provided yet another means for the discursive negotiation of power in the troubled federation. As evident in the press, the proposed constitutional talks presented an opportunity for the narration of power from the past, presaging the negotiation of power in the present, which would determine future prospects. The New Nigerian, which earlier stated that Awolowo’s release meant that ‘old political feuds and fights’ should be forgotten because they were not very important, returned to the past in locating the proposed talks in the trajectory of Nigeria’s history.94 The talks reminded the paper of the fears of ‘Igbo domination’ in the few months that the Ironsi regime lasted rather than the accusations of ‘Northern domination’ between 1960–1966 that preceded Ironsi’s era. The paper added: ‘Post-independent Nigeria, unfortunately, was saddled precariously with propensities of some sections of our population to lord it over the rest of the country.’95 Given the balance of power, which favored the North, the New Nigerian argued that such ‘wise counsel’ as existed under the Gowon regime should not be lost for a return to ‘Igbo domination’, as existed under General Ironsi. The paper added, ‘Now that our ship of state has reached another cross-roads at which point wise counsel must prevail, nothing should be done to give room for a recurrence of the events that set our hearts rumbling in January this year.’96 The paper also established a ‘fact’ that revealed a predilection to affirm the supremacy of the North in the area of leadership: ‘Northern Nigeria has been blessed with good leadership at all times and now is the time this leadership must be on show. Our place in the Republic must be unique.’97 Despite the ‘sporadic and tendentious outbursts from certain quarters of the Republic’98 – a reference to the Eastern Region – the New 91

‘A United Nigeria’, NT. ‘A New Constitution’, NT, August 10, 1966. 93 Ibid. 94 ‘Releasing Goodwill through the Prison Gates’, NN, August 4, 1966. 95 ‘The Forthcoming Big Talks’, NN, Aug 23, 1966: 6. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 92

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Nigerian argued that, in the context of the constitutional conference being held, We may end up in a federation or a confederation. But whatever happens the die is now cast and there should be no illusion of what is good for our people. Our [northern] leaders at this week’s meeting must bear in mind that they have the support of some 29 million people [of Northern Region]. They must not fail us. They must not seek concession purely for the sake of unity that cannot stand the test of time. 99

This position of the New Nigerian is very significant in the way it compares to portions of Gowon’s inaugural speech. The conclusion reads as if it was lifted out Gowon’s speech. Gowon stated, inter alia, ‘I have come to strongly believe that we cannot honestly and sincerely continue in this wise, as the basis for trust and confidence in our unitary system of government has not been able to stand the test of time.’100 Published next to this editorial was an opinion piece entitled, ‘A Voice from the East Pleads with Yakubu Gowon – Let’s Part Our Ways.’ It buttressed Gowon’s and New Nigerian’s fears, stating in part: It is not possible for us to live together. The seed of bitterness has not only been sown but has long germinated and the resulting plant is producing its own ripe seeds which are already dispersing and germinating in their own turn. If you [Gowon] really mean to give us peace, the best and easiest way of doing that is obvious. Let each Region go its own way.101

For this contributor, whose position was given prominence in the New Nigerian, the idea of a Nigerian union was vanishing and nothing needed be done to save it: The edifice which was erected by the British colonial administration and which was once asked to take the name of Songhai is now a vanishing fantasy. What now remains only comprises … the clashing cymbals of our time … Therefore there is a great risk in continuing this peculiar political union. The basis for unity as a single nation is [lacking because] … tribal passion die hard. Nigeria was a chance result of British imperial administration connoting nothing higher than common allegiance to the British Masters.102

However, the Tribune was concerned more about the future and the consolidation of the ideal and idea of the Nigerian nation in the paper’s take on the talks. But the paper was also concerned about leadership

99

Ibid. The paper asked that whatever comes out of the talks must be based ‘absolutely on what is good for the people of the North and, of course, Nigeria’, ‘The Issue at Stake’, NN, August 29, 1966. 100 Gowon’s inaugural speech. 101 Raymond E. Okorie, ‘A Voice from the East Pleads With Yakubu Gowon – Let’s Part Our Ways’, NN, August 23, 1966, 6. 102 Ibid.

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among the Yoruba. The Tribune stated that the selection of its proprietor, Awolowo, to lead the Western Region to the talks were vital because Chief Awolowo, as we know him, is a man who has dedicated his energies to the welfare and happiness of the [Yoruba] people and by placing the burden of the leadership of the people on him, he is only being asked to weld together a people once wrecked by feud; and to put into service his personal qualities and decisiveness.103

The paper argued that the constitutional conference was about ‘the nation’s destiny’: This conference is historic, it is significant … It is significant because out of these talks will emerge a charter or a philosophy upon which rests the hopes and aspirations of a people who should live together in a spirit of common belief and understanding; a genuine spirit completely divorced of the past hatred, bias and ill-feelings indeed a spirit cardinally aimed towards one destiny.104

The Tribune saw the ‘charter’ and ‘philosophy’ that would provide the basis for the ‘genuine spirit’105 towards common destiny for Nigerians as being far more elevating than New Nigerian’s ‘no compromise’ stance which Northern delegates were urged to take in matters that, for the New Nigerian, were only of a ‘tenuous unity’.106 For the Tribune, the conference was all about the present and future of Nigeria. Therefore, the paper stated: ‘All those taking part in this ‘people’s conference’… represent the present and the future of the Nigerian nation.’107 Like the Tribune, the Pilot argued that it was also concerned with national unity and not sectional advantage as advocated by the New Nigerian. If every section of the country had a ‘master plan’ like the North, the Pilot wondered whose ‘plan’ would be rejected.108 First, the paper reviewed what was at stake in Nigeria, stated what it assumes to be the truth of the Nigerian crisis, and emphasized ‘what is to be done’: The truth about the country is that we are lacking in those fundamental elements that make for unity – that is to say, DEFENSIVE NATIONALISM and IRON HAND LEADERSHIP. A nation requires … foreign aggression in order to develop defensive nationalism which [represents] a unifying factor … Secondly, to attain unity a nation requires a man on a horse back with a whip to keep the people together.109

The Pilot, unlike the New Nigerian, asked that the constitutional talks in 103

‘A New Chapter’, NT, August 16, 1966. ‘The Nation’s Destiny’, NT, September 12, 1966, 1. 105 Ibid. 106 This position is reflected in ‘The Forthcoming Big Talks’, NN, August 23, 1966, 6. 107 Ibid. 108 ‘The Problem of Unity’, NN, August 23, 1966, 6. 109 Ibid., capitals in original. 104

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Lagos fashion a constitution that would ‘satisfy the aspirations of the various ethnic and linguistic groups in Nigeria’.110 With the contending regions, particularly the Northern and Eastern Regions, taking diametrically opposed positions on the political structure of the country, mass killings erupted in the Northern Region. Against this backdrop, the Post argued that these two regions and the individuals representing them were not greater than the nation. In an editorial, the paper stated: ‘They must all agree that this country, Nigeria, can continue as one indivisible sovereign state.’111 In another, it continued: ‘We must, all of us Nigerians, accept the challenge of the times and rise as one man to the task of binding the nation’s wounds in order to save her from bleeding to death … If this is done, then a Nigerian nation would emerge as a “paradise”.’112 While the Pilot refrained from commenting on the flight of the Igbo from the North in the wake of the riots and the killings, the New Nigerian, in the context of its concern with the themes of unity, used every opportunity to protect the Northern Region’s ‘heritage’ and attacked the Eastern Region and its people. While the Pilot saw the whole crisis in the year 1966 as a ‘great lesson’ that taught the people ‘never again [to] postpone till tomorrow what they have to do today’,113 it added that, in spite of the debacle, Nigerians ‘have every reason to be proud that from the still smoking rubble have emerged a new generation of Nigerians able to face the stark realities of our times’.114 When the Lafia Native Authority in the Northern Region stopped the illegal collection of taxes from fleeing easterners, the New Nigerian used the incident as an excuse to condemn the ‘enemies of a united Nigeria [who exploited the controversy of the illegal taxes] in their campaign of denigration against the North’.115 As far as the New Nigerian was concerned, complaints about the illegal taxes ‘buttress[ed the] stupid demand for disintegration of the country’.116 The paper further characterized the complaints as a situation ‘in which the sins of one “overzealous official” is [sic] visited on a whole government or region’. The paper accused the North of ‘indiscretion and insanity’.117 Consequently, New Nigerian argued that ‘if the communities in this country decide to part their ways, as they have the right to do, they should do so in peace and not in pieces’.118

110

‘The Task Before Us’, Front page comment, WAP, September 12, 1966. ‘The Nation Before Self ’, MP, August 16, 1966 112 ‘Best Yet to Come’, MP, August 12, 1966. 113 ‘The March of History’, WAP, Sep. 2, 1966. 114 Ibid. 115 ‘An Example of Reasonableness’, NN, August 25, 1966. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid. 118 ‘Restraint, Please’, NN, August 24, 1966. 111

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The Post picked this up, asking if there was any need for the constituent parts of Nigeria to separate and remain enemies if, indeed, separation was achieved: There is already deep-seated bitterness among the peoples of this country. But with a little bit of good sense, time, the healer of all wounds, will ultimately ameliorate whatever bitterness may exist among the people … And who knows, Nigeria may yet remain. And if she crumbles, should she do so with former Nigerians becoming inveterate enemies?119

In the wake of the massacre of easterners in the North, the Post asked the government to be ‘ruthless in maintaining peace’ by ‘crushing the saboteurs’.120 The Tribune asked for restraint because Nigeria sat ‘on a tinder box’.121 The paper also echoed the Military Governor of the MidWest, Lieutenant Colonel David Ejoor: Nigeria is now passing through a crucial and momentous stage in her history when different communities have to consider whether they can march forward as one indivisible whole in true mutual affection and concord or whether they have indeed reached the end of a once hopeful experiment in nation-building.122

As the number of the victims of the massacres in the North increased, the Pilot abandoned its earlier pleas for unity, raising what it considered critical questions: The days of wishful thinking is [sic] over … We have long deceived ourselves and no nation based on self-deception can long endure … One of the major issues facing the country today is whether Nigerians can live together as one people, in peace and security … Can Nigerians live together without fear of one section dominating the other? If they cannot then what is the basis of togetherness which the weeping Jeremiahs fancy can be achieved in the country?123

Furthermore, the paper argued that the Lagos talks could not do much in the face of the odds: The facts as they are today, are that Nigerians are haunted by fear of domination of one section by another, by fear of insecurity of life and property, by fear of molestation. These are basic human freedoms which, lacking in a country makes nonsense of united nationhood. Under the atmosphere of apprehension and misgivings, it will be wishful thinking to feel that by a magic wand, the ad-hoc committee on Nigerian constitution meeting in Lagos can manufacture a way in which by tomorrow morning Nigerians 119

‘Freedom of Movement’, MP, August 26, 1966. ‘Crush the Saboteurs’, MP, August 31, 1966. 121 ‘Restraint Please’, NT, August 30, 1966. 122 ‘To Be Or Not to Be?’ NT, August 27, 1966. 123 ‘When Our £-o-v-e Is Tied to The Pound’, WAP, September 19, 1966. 120

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will march along in mutual confidence as one people without suspicion of one another. Togetherness cannot be imposed.124

The Eastern Region Government declared ‘Mourning Day’ on August 29 ‘in respect of souls lost [in the Northern Region] following the events of May 15 and July 29, 1966’.125 The Federal Military Government did not succeed in blocking the ‘Mourning Day’. The event irked the New Nigerian deeply, as reflected in its reaction. Even though the paper found no problem with mourning ‘the death of anybody’, acknowledging what Ojukwu described as the ‘least honor we can do those our sons and daughters now dead’, the New Nigerian went on to assert: Every reasonable and right-thinking Nigerian would loathe the unconstitutional action of the Military Governor of Eastern Nigeria, Lt.-Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu in selecting a day of mourning for the people of his region … There is nothing wrong in mourning the death of anybody. But to do so in circumstances of defiance of lawful authority is to worsen an already bad situation. We dare ask whether those who died during the mad outrages of January this year did not deserve to be mourned.126

What the New Nigerian described as the ‘mad outrages of January’ was the Igbo-led coup of January 15, 1966, in which two prominent Northern politicians, Bello and Balewa, and other northern military officers were killed. The paper eagerly pointed out that the Igbo provoked the killings in the Northern Region by assassinating northern leaders: ‘We are surprised and rightly too, to note that the authorities in the East were so indiscreet as to have singled out the tragic events of May and July 29 as if nothing provoked or preceded those events, tragic as they were.’127 Consequently, the paper concluded: The declaration of a day of mourning was a flagrant incitement and whipping up of irrational emotions at a time when all reasonable people are working hard to find a solution to our present problem … We can now see clearly the designs of the perpetrators of an order whereby only a section of the Nigerian community must have the right to lord things over the other sections.128

Even the 16-man delegation of northerners resident in the Eastern Region, which planned to visit the Northern Region to plead for the safety and security of easterners in the North, were told by the New Nigerian that, even though this was a ‘gesture of goodwill’, it was ‘unnecessary’, because it was ‘a well-known fact that easterners, certainly all non-northerners, have always been given protection in the

124

Ibid. ‘Indiscreet’. NN, August 31, 1966. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid. 125

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North’.129 Yet, contrary to the New Nigerian’s position, it was in the midst of all these ‘hospitable, friendly, sincere and orderly’ people that several hundreds of Eastern Nigerians, particularly the Igbo, were massacred.130 Two days after this narrative of normalcy and order, the New Nigerian itself reported that the military governor of the North ‘gives another STERN WARNING against lawlessness, molestation and acts of subversion’.131 Despite this, the paper insisted that these acts were perpetrated by a ‘small, misguided minority’ of northerners. However, the New Nigerian later attempted to face the reality of the divisiveness and national crisis: We are back where we were. The uncertainties and fears which were brought about by the mad propensity of a few are now being exploited to make the work of national reconstruction difficult. Acts of lawlessness, molestation, intimidation and subversion cannot do this region any good. Nations are never built or sustained by indulging in recriminations, bitterness and rancor … As the Governor of the North [said, we are] most distressed over the action of the small misguided minority.132

This mild ‘internal criticism’ by the New Nigerian would certainly not do for the Tribune, which asked Lt Col Gowon to take urgent action to stop the ‘large scale killings’ in the North, because ‘[t]his is savagery and sadism in their worst form. We condemn, in strong terms, these killings and other acts of lawlessness and disorder.’133 It is worth noting that the New Nigerian did not describe the events as ‘killings’ or ‘massacre’ as the Tribune did.134 The strongest words that the New Nigerian used were ‘acts of lawlessness, molestation, intimidation and subversion’ – ostensibly among otherwise ‘hospitable, friendly, sincere and orderly’ northerners.135 However, for the Pilot, those that Tribune described as practicing ‘savagery and sadism’136 by participating in the killings, were ‘men on the lunatic fringe’137 who could cause the country to degenerate ‘[in]to civil war’, but for the extraordinary restraint of the easterners.138 According to the Pilot, Could we now face the grim realities arising from the disreputable and tragic events of recent weeks. For unless we do this, the hopes expressed both by 129

‘That Delegation from East’, NN, September 10, 1966. Ibid. 131 ‘Lt. Col. Hassan Gives Another STERN WARNING – Against Lawlessness, Molestation and Acts of Subversion’, NN, September 12, 1966, 1, capitals in original. 132 The ‘few’ were ostensibly the Five Majors led by Nzeogwu who masterminded the January 16, 1966 coup. ‘Let’s Watch and Pray’, NN, September 13, 1966, 1. 133 ‘Action, Gowon’, NT, October 4, 1966, 1. 134 ‘What Next, Gowon?’ NT, October 5, 1966. 135 ‘That Delegation from East’, NN, September 10, 1966. 136 ‘Action, Gowon’, NT, October 4 1966, 1. 137 ‘A Daniel, A Daniel’, WAP, October 5, 1966. 138 ‘Hitting the Bull’s Eye’, Front page comment, WAP, October 3, 1966. 130

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Lieutenant-Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu and Lt. Col. Gowon over the weekend will dash to pieces and Nigeria with it … Goodwill messages cannot solve our problems which can be solved by ourselves IF WE APPROACH THESE PROBLEMS WITH TRANSPARENT HONESTY AND OPEN MIND AND STOP PLAYING THE OSTRICH WHILE OUR NATION IS ON THE BRINK OF DISSOLUTION. It is useless to sugar-coat the fact that the calamities we face are unthinkably menacing.139

During airlift of easterners back to their region and Ojukwu’s repeated warning that the Eastern Region might find itself in a situation where it would be ‘pushed out’ of Nigeria , the New Nigerian reminded a fractious country about how the crisis arose. The paper often narrated this so as to emphasize that the attempt at ‘Igbo domination’ represented by the January 15, 1966, coup was the source of all the problems of Nigeria, thereby depriving the Major Nzeogwu-led coup of its historical character. It was as if Nigeria’s history began for the paper on that day. Perhaps, lest people misunderstood the basis for the massacre of the Igbo, the New Nigerian, reconstructed the past through its narration of the ‘genesis of the exodus [of the Igbo]’: The history of the First Republic is written in blood … It stands to reason, therefore, that we should draw some conclusions from and make sober reappraisals of the events that matured into the crisis which now envelops the nation … It is therefore, surprising that there are still some well-placed personalities who abuse their office by whipping up hysteria and indulging in a war of psychosis; by so doing they have unconsciously fanned the embers of hatred to the chagrin of the champions of peace and nation-building.140

In spite of the fact that the paper itself had earlier reported the ‘molestation and harassment’ of the Igbo, it now argued that the exodus of the Igbo from the Northern Region was ‘pre-planned’ and ‘obviously’ had nothing to do with what the easterners experienced in the Northern Region.141 In any case, argued the New Nigerian, the exodus was not only from the North. ‘This is untrue and wicked’, stated the paper. ‘Why should we not summon courage to admit the fact that those so-called refugees have decided to migrate home out of their own volition and that the North as well as the West, the Mid-West and Lagos, have witnessed the abnormal social phenomenon.’142 This narrative is a good example of how relations of domination are established through dissimulation, involving concealing, denying, obscuring, or deflecting attention away from, or glossing over, existing relations of domination and their process as it is expressed particularly 139

‘States For Sale’, WAP, October 3, 1966, 1, capitals in original. ‘Genesis of the Exodus’, NN, September 28, 1966, 1. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid. 140

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in ‘euphemization’.143 The massacre of the Eastern Nigerians was presented as a ‘misinterpretation’, while the flights to safety were described as ‘pre-planned migration’.144 Those displaced individuals who fled for dear lives were described as ‘so-called refugees’ who decided to ‘migrate of their own volition’.145 Yet, the New Nigerian saw in this mass ‘migration’ a meaningless, and thus, ‘abnormal social phenomenon’.146 ‘History’, the New Nigerian continued, provided many examples of how ‘would-be mob leaders’ – ostensibly, Ojukwu – were ‘eaten up’ by the ‘hydra-headed monster’, which they created.147 The Igbo victims of Northern killings – and not the perpetrators – for the New Nigerian, constituted the ‘mob’. The paper added: ‘We pray and hope that after sober reflection the excited and ignited people will rediscover themselves and retrace their faltering steps to the path of rectitude and penitence.’148 Paradoxically, the New Nigerian was ‘consoled’ that a Nigerian nation will emerge in the near future: It is consoling, however, that out of this tragedy has emerged one great lesson and a guiding principle to generations to come. This is that to live as a nation, the maturity of mind, steadfastness and the appreciation of spiritual values are desirable attitude, and that these qualities must form the philosophy on which the new nation must subsist.149

While totally ignoring the devastation suffered by thousands of easterners in the North, including the hundreds of lives lost, and the move towards secession, the mouthpiece of the Northern Region narrates the story of a ‘united nation’: We are happy to note that those who threatened a total disintegration of our national edifice have suddenly seen the wisdom of staying together as one united nation … For the everlasting glory of our nation, let us march forward as one united nation in a federation of common destiny.150

However, the Pilot reported that Ojukwu, the Governor of the Eastern Region, claimed that the credit for the past unity of Nigeria should go to the people of his region. Ojukwu reportedly stated: This is a fact which we ourselves know and which, I am sure, our enemies minimize, but the last thing that this Region would like to do is to help destroy

143

Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 62. ‘Genesis of the Exodus,’ NN, Sep. 28 1966, 1. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid. 147 ‘Genesis of the Exodus’, NN. 148 Ibid. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid. 144

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the edifice which they have made more sacrifice, put in greater efforts and made far-greater contributions than any other section to build.151

However, one of the assumed ‘enemies’ of the Eastern Region, that is the newspaper owned by the Yoruba, Tribune, indeed ‘minimizes’ this ‘sacrifice’. The paper describes Ojukwu’s claim as one that was ‘in bad taste’ which was ‘tantamount to propaganda’.152 Even though the Tribune condemned the killings in the Northern Region and considered the reactions from the Eastern Region, particularly Ojukwu’s, as ‘understandably emotional’,153 the paper’s overriding task was to protect Western Nigeria in the crisis. The paper, unfortunately, reduced the crisis to a fight between the Igbo-dominated Eastern Region and the Hausa-Fulani-dominated Northern Region. Yorubaland/Western Region could be the turf for their mutual war: First, everything must be done … to see that no agent-provocateurs, whether Hausa or Ibo, or their agents … are allowed to spread foul rumors among the people of Western Nigeria. Ibos and Hausas must be warned that neither the government nor the generality of the people will allow Yoruba land to be anybody’s battle-ground [sic] or arena for small skirmishes.154

Despite the magnitude of the tragedy that the country was witnessing, the Tribune was singularly devoted to ensuring that the ‘skirmishes’ were restricted to the eastern and northern Regions – as if the Western Region was not in any way involved in the crisis. The paper assured the Igbo and the Hausa that the Yoruba were ready to defend their land against the outbreak of hostilities between the other two: [W]e would again warn potential trouble-makers, whether Hausa or Ibo and whatever their uniform or smuggled arms, that all Yorubas will rise like one man to defend their land and heritage, and that they will not allow any foolish outsider to poison the calm atmosphere of Western Nigeria.155

The reference to ‘uniform’ and ‘smuggled arms’ were tropes for the northern soldiers stationed in the Western Region and the Igbo’s rumored preparation for secession, respectively. The ‘smuggled arms’ was particularly in reference to the ill-fated aircraft, which was allegedly flying smuggled arms to the Eastern Region in preparation for war.156 Yet, the Tribune picked up the phrase used by the Pilot, regarding the people ‘on the lunatic fringe’, in asking for mediation while presenting the Yoruba as the ‘sober’ and ‘neutral’ group that could save the nation 151

‘We’ll Not Destroy The Edifice We Helped To Build 3,000 Easterners Dead in May Riots – Ojukwu’, WAP, October 20, 1966, 1. 152 ‘Enough is Enough’, NT, October 26, 1966. 153 Ibid. 154 ‘Warning and Vigilance’, NT, October 6, 1966. 155 Ibid. 156 ‘Stop the Gas’, NT, October 27, 1966.

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from war: ‘Yorubas, with other ethnic groups, are destined to restore peace and harmony between Ibos and Hausas. They must not allow people on the lunatic fringe to involve them in the present mass killings and molestation.’157 But the New Nigerian disagreed that the Yoruba had a ‘destiny’ that imposed on them the task of mediation, because the issue was not a clear-cut one between the Hausa and the Igbo. Therefore, the paper objected to those who suggested that ‘the Yorubas should mediate between the Eastern Region and the Northern Region, the implication being that the whole unhappy business is simply a clear-cut issue of North versus East, Hausas versus Ibos’.158 Rather, the paper, without stating so explicitly, would like the matter to be seen as the Igbo against the rest of the country. The New Nigerian continued that the view that the crisis was between the Igbo and the Hausa ‘is not so [because] Yorubas lost their lives in January [1966 Igbo-led coup] as well as Northerners. In addition, we should also remember that the Ibos are leaving Lagos and many towns in Western Region in large numbers.’159 This was clearly an attempt to isolate the Igbo and present the Western and Northern Region as a bloc united against the Eastern Region. Interesting enough, whereas it never used the word ‘killings’ to describe the massacres of the easterners in the North, when a broadcast on Radio Cotonou (Republic of Benin) announced that northerners were being killed in the Eastern Region, the New Nigerian used the word ‘killing’, even though ‘some [of the reports were] confirmed, [and] others yet unsubstantiated’.160 Still, based on these unconfirmed and unsubstantiated reports on the killing of a few northerners, the paper declared: ‘The nation trembles on the brink of anarchy and despair … A full-scale civil war of the most awful kind is a prospect that must be feared and avoided at all costs.’161 For the New Nigerian, the massacres of the Easterners did not provoke similar ‘trembl[ing]s on the brink of anarchy’. However, about one month after this, the New Nigerian asked northerners to heed the appeal by the Head of State, Lt Col Gowon, for an end to the riots and killings in the North, given the fact that northerners ‘have always prided themselves on their respect for constituted authority and for the maintenance of law and order’.162 This was after the mass murder of hundreds of people. In the same edition where the paper echoed Gowon, the latter’s speech addressed directly to Northerners was also published. Gowon stated that ‘We [northerners, including himself] are known as peace-loving people and we must do everything 157

‘Warning and Vigilance’, NT, October 6, 1966. ‘Not Such a Clear Cut Issue’, NN, September 29, 1966. 159 Ibid. 160 ‘Peace – We Must Find an Answer’, front page comment, NN, September 30, 1966. 161 Ibid. 162 ‘Above All Keep Calm’, October 3, 1966. 158

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in our power not to allow this good reputation to be soiled.’163 The very instructive appeal stated further: Fellow Northerners … You all know that since the end of July, God, in his power, has entrusted the responsibility of this great country of ours, Nigerian, to the hands of another Northerner … Right from the beginning of politics in this country, up to this date, whenever complications arise, the people of the North are known to champion the cause of peace and settlement. Once the North remains peaceful it is easy to settle disputes arising from any other part of the country … I receive complaints daily that up to now, Easterners living in the North are being killed and molested, their property looted.164

The Pilot was very charitable in its reaction to Gowon’s call, in spite of Gowon’s ‘glorification’ of the northerner. The paper stated that Gowon deserved ‘the praise of every Nigerian’ for calling a halt to the ‘hell let loose by men on the lunatic fringe’.165 It even describes Gowon as a ‘Daniel’, adding: ‘All along, the sincere patriots of this country have been looking for a Daniel to come to the rescue of our bleeding nation.’166 This was an expression of an unusual restraint after an orgy of violence, particularly in Kano, where even the indulgent New Nigerian stated: ‘The bullet holes in the airport buildings and the dark, ominously significant stains, are a reminder that blind ignorance and prejudice can have no place in a nation aspiring to greatness.’167 However, the exceptional nature of the massacres in Kano in October 1966 affected the outlook of the New Nigerian. In a somewhat contrite manner, after the Kano killings, the paper narrated a rare ‘moment of truth’ in Nigeria’s history: A moment of truth has been reached in Nigerian history. A moment when we have no alternative but swallow our pride and acknowledge our failings and our guilt. The legacies of hate, mistrust, bitterness and prejudices inherited from the past have exploded in our face and we now see the prospect of utter and complete chaos confronting us.168

Even though the paper screened off the killings that preceded these massive Kano killings, it stated that the ‘proud history’ of the ‘great city [Kano]’ had been stained. Instructively, the New Nigerian did not use the words massacre (or pogrom) to describe what happened in Kano, nor did it expressly accuse the northerners of being the perpetrators. 163

‘Appeal by Gowon. North’s Role in Peace Moves’, NN, October 3, 1966. Gowon could have added, ‘after the last Northerner in power, Balewa, was killed by the Igbo’, He did not cite even one example of when the North had compromised its position in the interest of ‘peace and settlement’. Ibid. 165 ‘A Daniel, A Daniel’, WAP, October 5, 1966. 166 Ibid. 167 ‘On the Spot Report: Kano – A City of Hurt Yet New Hope’, NN, October 4, 1966, 1. 168 ‘Moment of Truth in Our History’, NN, October 4, 1966. 164

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Instead, the killings were described as ‘black and terrible’ and ‘full [of] horror’,169 phrases which did not immediately suggest that the killings were against a particular group. This strategy of symbolic construction of domination has been described by Thompson as passivization in that it ‘delete[s] actors and agency and … tend[s] to represent processes as things and events [that] take place in the absence of a subject who produces them’.170 The paper stated: ‘Only those who were in Kano over this last black and terrible weekend know the full horror of what took place. It is a memory that will remain for years to come. A memory besmirching what, in the main, has been a proud history of a great city.’171 In spite of the magnitude of the killings and its own acceptance of complicity in the crisis, the New Nigerian still offered a defense of the North, even while it avoided mentioning the ethnic/regional group to which the victims belonged (easterners/Igbo), describing them rather as ‘those who suffered’: But with the same sincerity and intensity with which we now express our sorrow and sympathy with those who suffered we ask that there should be no outright condemnation of the North. It is true that there have been mistakes. All of us – including this newspaper – must share some degree of blame for seeking to exploit prejudices of one kind or another. But now, albeit tragically belated, a true appreciation of the road to national suicide on which we have embarked, has been revealed in a way that we cannot, we dare not, ignore.172

However, beyond the sorrow and sympathy, the paper still saw the possibilities of national redemption. Thus, it appealed ‘to everyone with a true understanding of the situation … that if we must survive as a nation we must learn to live together … and work selfishlessly [sic] and honestly towards rebuilding a better and happier nation’.173 Perhaps to ensure that this ‘rebuilding’ was accomplished and that the Eastern Region did not surprise the rest of the country with secession, the New Nigerian constantly focused on what the Eastern Region was up to in the aftermath of the massacres. For instance, the paper asked, ‘Why … should Lt.-Col. Ojukwu … be at pains to reiterate that the East is not hell-bent on secession when her every move seems in that direction?’174 Later, New Nigerian returned to the issue again and again stating in one instance that nothing had happened in Nigeria to ‘push’ the Eastern Region out of the country, as Ojukwu alleged:

169

Ibid. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 66. 171 ‘Moment of Truth in Our History’. 172 Ibid. 173 Ibid. 174 ‘Why Not?’ NN, October 15, 1966. 170

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Which prompts us to repeat the question we asked the other day: What is the East up to? Does she mean what she says or is she playing for time? Lt. Colonel Ojukwu tells foreign diplomats that his region has no intention of seceding from the rest of the federation – not unless it is ‘pushed.’ And the East is behaving as if she is being pushed. We ourselves have not seen any evidence of this effect.175

As far as the New Nigerian was concerned, the East could only suffer more if it decided on secession: ‘We can’t understand why the East is so apparently intent to inflict more hurt upon [itself]. It is in the interest of the East for her to declare right now, without further prevarications, exactly what her intentions are.’176 Another major indication of the role of the newspapers in the crisis as ideological soldiers for the different groups and regions was that, a few days after this editorial, the New Nigerian – which had, two weeks earlier, announced that ‘in spite of the crisis it continues to be widely circulated in the East [with] its delivery vans [going] unmolested’177 – was ‘warned’ that the paper should no longer be circulated in the Eastern Region.178 On its part, Tribune more or less agreed with the New Nigerian on the implications of the statements credited to Ojukwu concerning the Eastern Region’s position on the crisis. The Tribune stated: After strenuous denials in the past about the intentions of Eastern Nigeria to secede from the federation, the Eastern Governor has now said that the East ‘might suddenly find’ that it has nothing more in common with the other regions. And the question that arises from the statement is: what next?179

For the paper, this only deepened the crisis and isolated the Eastern Region, because ‘[i]n our view, we cannot solve our problems by ignoring them. The problem of the East today is at the very top on the list of our national problems. It must first be solved before we can go forward.’180 The Tribune then suggested ‘the solution’, going even further than New Nigerian to request a military solution: ‘The Nigerian Tribune urges the Supreme Commander [Gowon] to recognize that the time has come for a firm solution of [sic] the Eastern problem. If we have the force and the will to bring the East into line by armed intervention, let it be done with dispatch.’181 175

‘What is the East Up to? (With No Apologies for Repeating the Question)’, NN, October 21, 1966. 176 Ibid. Incidentally, Zik had also warned the North in 1953 that secession would be ‘calamitous to its corporate existence’, ‘Dr. Zik Warns the North Secession Prophets and Propagandists: It Would Be Capital Blunder’, WAP, May 15, 1953, 1. 177 ‘Footnote: On the Spot Report’, NN, October 4, 1966, 6. 178 ‘Motor, Carrying New Nigerian Turned Back at Onitsha’, NN, October 28, 1966. 179 ‘What Next?’ NT, December 14, 1966. 180 Ibid. 181 Ibid.

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The Tribune disagreed with the Pilot that the proposed meeting of the army chiefs be held in Accra, Ghana, rather than in Lagos. The Tribune’s position was a self-interested one. Ojukwu’s only condition for attending the meeting in Lagos accorded with the wishes of the Yoruba people: That Northern troops in the Western Region be withdrawn to their region and replaced by Yoruba troops.182 Therefore, when the military governor of the Northern Region, Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Usman Katsina, stated that he would not support such withdrawal, the Tribune came down heavily on him: ‘We … consider the statement credited to the Military Governor of the North as extremely provocative. For who does this young aristocrat in military uniform think he is to seek to draw the whole Yoruba race in battle against him and Hausas?’183 The paper claimed the ‘Hausa troops’, who were described as ‘foreign troops … not averse to rape, murder and high-handedness’, were threatening to turn Yorubaland into an ‘occupied territory’. Tribune then announced the resolve of the Yoruba, who were ‘determined to see that their fatherland is not turned into an “occupied territory”’. As these narratives show, by this time, the newspapers had reached a level of such divisiveness and even hate that soldiers who were compatriots were seen as ‘foreign troops’ as well as threats to certain parts of the country. That was not all. Governor Katsina would be mistaken, the Tribune averred, if he thought that Nigeria would continue to exist if ‘the East secedes or is forced to secede’:184 If the Northern Military Governor does not know it, he can carry this fact away: The people of Western Nigeria and Lagos have taken an irrevocable decision – if any part of Nigeria opts out of the federation, Yorubas reserve to themselves the right to determine their own future in any association.185

It is significant that the Tribune did not see a contradiction in this and its earlier position in the December 14, 1966 editorial in which it asked that ‘armed intervention’ be used ‘with dispatch’ to ensure that the Eastern Region did not secede. In the middle of all of these, the Pilot was not ready to let go of Lagos and refused to accept that the city was a Yoruba city. While reviewing the state of the union after the collapse of the All-Nigeria Constitutional 182

Ibid. Ibid. 184 Ibid. Tribune which had earlier asked that the East be brought into line by force changes tone, asking: ‘Will Nigeria continue as a political unit? If so, in what form? To assume that these questions do not arise since Nigeria MUST remain one is to fly in the face of the facts … The truth we now face is that Eastern Nigeria is gradually breaking its links with the rest of the country. There are powerful elements in the Region who advocate its complete secession from Nigeria. Equally, there are powerful elements in Northern Nigeria who are anxious to see the Ibos out of Nigeria. How do we reconcile these opposing forces?’ The paper then calls for reconciliation rather than ‘forcing’ the East back into the union. ‘Wanted: A Happy New Year’, NT, December 31, 1966, emphasis added. 185 Ibid. 183

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Conference, the Pilot, which again abandoned its support for federalism, stated that We whole-heartedly endorse a confederal system of government for Nigeria at least so that the inveterate enmity and bitterness existing between the North and East can be healed by time … In the absence of a federation we support the suggestion of Eastern Nigeria for a Council of State, comprising equal representatives from each state or region to serve as a weak glue to hold the country together.186

However, the Pilot added that, since ‘Lagos is jointly developed by all regions of the federation, we suggest that All-Nigeria Constitutional Conference should meet soon to decide the question of Lagos during the short spell of confederation.’187 The Pilot, as it did throughout the preindependence period, stood resolutely for an independent Lagos. The rejection by Oba Adeyinka Oyekan, the Oba of Lagos, of the planned merger plan with the Western Region was given prominence in Pilot. Oyekan stated, ‘we shall fight to the last’ because ‘our tradition is different from that of the West’.188 Even though Lateef Jakande, the leader of the Lagos delegation to the Lagos constitutional conference, described Oyekan’s statement as ‘reckless’,189 the Pilot editorialized: ‘The people of Lagos have the right to self-determination. It is their prerogative to decide whether the federal capital should be merged with the West or whether it should remain free from the region. This is perfectly the people’s choice through a referendum.’190 However, Pilot did not leave the matter entirely to a referendum: ‘We urge that Lagos should be a Federal territory in case the country retains its federal status. And in case of a confederation Lagos should be the country’s political capital. In other words, Lagos should be a separate entity.’191 Such territorial narratives were usually directed against rival regions. While the Pilot fought for Lagos, the New Nigerian also promoted minority agitation in the Eastern Region where ‘the people of Calabar and Ogoja Provinces’ suggested a strong center with ‘states created on the principle of ethnic grouping’.192 While it promoted such agitation in the Eastern Region, the New Nigerian considered the ‘appeal’ led by Josiah Sunday Olawoyin for a merger of Ilorin-Kabba province in the Northern Region with the Western Region as ‘irrational emotions’ and a ‘nefari 186

‘Nigerian Confederation’, WAP, November 22, 1966. Ibid. For more on this, see Wale Adebanwi, ‘The City, Hegemony and Ethno-Spatial Politics: The Press and the Struggle for Lagos in Colonial Nigeria’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 9:4 (2004), 25–51. 188 ‘We Shall Fight Against Merger With West’,WAP, November 28, 1966: 1. 189 ‘”Oyekan’s Attack is Reckless.” Jakande Defends Lagos Delegation’, WAP, November 29, 1966, 1. 190 ‘Lagos State?’ November 30, 1966, 2–3. 191 Ibid. 192 ‘Calabar, Ogoja Want A Strong Centre. New Memo to Ojukwu’, NN, November 24, 1966, 1. 187

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ous and treacherous design to sabotage the efforts of the [constitutional conference]’, something in which ‘right-thinking people’ ought not to engage.193

Conclusion As paper soldiers, the newspapers in the period before the civil war were not unaware of what they were doing. They realized that in the ensuing battle, the soldiers wielding the pen were as critical as the actual soldiers who would eventually bear arms at the outbreak of actual hostilities. Therefore, the journalists and their media institutions regarded themselves as critical to the resolution or exacerbation of the Nigerian crisis of nationhood. Interesting enough, New Nigerian noted the central role of the press in the crisis engulfing the country by ‘observing’ the tendency of Ojukwu ‘to use the press … as a vehicle of negotiation’.194 Yet, even the New Nigerian confessed in an earlier editorial that it too was an instrument of the negotiation of power and relations of domination by the Northern Region: The New Nigerian seeks to be read throughout Nigeria but it has never lost sight of the fact that it was brought into being primarily to serve the North. It is because it considers it in the immediate as well as longer term interest of the North that it feels obliged to comment on those misguided people – we will put it no worse than that – whose actions are destined to bring nothing but dishonor and disaster to the North.195

In their role in the crisis as mouthpieces or ideological soldiers of the contending interests, the newspapers also waged battles against one another. In this, the New Nigerian, with candor, admitted that it – like the other newspapers – had failed the imagined nation: ‘The New Nigerian is conscious of its fall from grace but it has always sought to find the truth. It has not always succeeded … [B]ut having said that let us acknowledge that Nigeria’s press … can do much more to restore peace in the country than they are doing.’196 Without mentioning names, but obviously in reference to the Eastern Nigerian Outlook and Pilot, the New Nigerian also pointed to the ‘press in certain quarters’, which seemed ‘[h]ell-rent [sic] on sensationalizing any incident which it thinks can be regarded as favorable to their own case and against the North’.197 For the New Nigerian, the Pilot would perhaps typify this predilection to ‘sensationalize’ a case ‘against the 193

‘Unwarranted Agitation’, NN, September 16, 1966. ‘Action Not Words’, NN, Nov. 22, 1966. 195 ‘At Stake – The Future of the North’, NN, September 26, 1966. 196 ‘Responsibility of the Press’, NN, September 27, 1966. 197 Ibid. 194

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North’ as it suggested a meeting of all the military governors in Accra, Ghana, whose sole agenda should be ‘the refugee problem arising from the genocide in the North’.198 The Pilot insisted: ‘The aggrieved East in particular, must be appeased if all parts of the country are to sit down and reason together as members of the nation.’199 How should the East be appeased? The Pilot suggested a punitive tax on northerners in addition to a grant by the Federal Government. The Pilot stated Incidentally, the victims of the Eastern Nigerian origin in the last disturbances in the North have claimed 27 million [pounds] being the total loss they sustained during the riot. We believe a collective fine imposed on the taxable people of the North in addition to what the Federal Government can give to the East will calm, the distressed Easterners.200

This raised the question of whether guilt and responsibility was collective or personal. The Pilot seemed to locate the answer in what I will call the narrative of precedence: A precedent for this collective fine has already been laid in Nigerian history. In 1950, the Kalabari people of Eastern Nigeria paid a collective fine of 20,000 [pounds] to Okrika people for killing Okrika fishermen on a river near Kalabar. In 1951 or thereabouts, a riot broke out between Okrika and Oguloma citizens. The former damaged the property of the later and another collective fine of 20,000 [pounds] was imposed on Okrika people which was paid to the Oguloma people as compensation. In 1958, a riot broke out in Ibadan in Western Nigeria expressing bad-blood over the death of Adekoge Adelabu. A collective fine was imposed on the affected area to compensate those whose property was lost on the affray.201

These examples provided a basis for a strong case to be made by the Pilot, which insisted: ‘Until the East is pacified, the question of considering the future association of Nigeria is out of the question.’202 In the period preceding the civil war, unlike the Pilot, the New Nigerian was not interested in reparation or restitution in favor of the Eastern Region and its people. Rather, it accused the information media of the Eastern Region of waging ideological war against the rest of the country by practicing ‘journalism that can never do anybody any good’: They have carried news which are absolute [sic] false. They have published news which are criminally distorted. They have been saying things which are an open defiance to the National Military Government … They can be used to render [sic] any country asunder, any united people disintegrating [sic] 198

‘Meet in Ghana’, Front page comment, WAP, December 16, 1966. Ibid. 200 Ibid. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid. 199

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and any cause useless … We strongly maintain that such an information medium should hang its head in shame for helping to tear this country into pieces.203

The federal government-owned newspaper the Post took a similar position about ‘certain sections of the press [which] indulge in inciting bitterness’.204 But it returned the salvo from the New Nigerian, accusing the newspaper press in the East and, by implication, the Pilot. The Pilot stated: A Daily Paper [sic] printed in Northern Nigeria is trying very hard to introduce polemics into politics in Nigeria again … At this stage in our national metamorphosis, we regard it as calculated sabotage or incitement for anybody to do any act overt or covert to engender tribal bitterness or sectional ill-feeling.205

By the time the civil war broke out, these newspapers, as well as others, became, even more than before, ideological soldiers for the secessionist Republic of Biafra and the Federal Republic of Nigeria. This chapter argues that the role of the press in reporting and commenting on the civil war cannot be fully understood if we do not account for how the newspapers were fully implicated in the process that led to the outbreak of the civil war. As it is evident from the narratives above, the newspaper press in Nigeria was actively involved in producing the conditions that led to the outbreak of hostilities in 1967.

203

Ibid. ‘To The Future’, MP, August 30, 1966. 05 2 ‘Keep Polemics Away’, WAP, April 21, 1966. 204

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Literary Separatism Ethnic Balkanization in Nigeria-Biafra War Narratives Akachi Odoemene

Introduction ‘We remember differently’.1 Such were the words Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie used in her review of Chinua Achebe’s very last literary work, There Was a Country. Indeed, when it comes to the tragic and painful events that culminated in the civil war and their aftermath, we hardly remember the same way, due to our differences. The critical questions, in my opinion, are the following. How have and why do we remember differently? Is it a case of differences in perspective? Or, is it because of some ulterior motive, which might be sinister and/or self-serving – in other words, a deliberate attempt to rewrite history? This underlines the importance of memory, which shapes the nature of and trend in one’s knowledge, understanding and interpretation of the past and its meaning, particularly as we are essentially what we remember and know. In other words, while what has happened cannot be changed, through controlled measures its meaning can. This is so because the power to remember in particular ways lies within humans, and narratives are the primary forms and means through which to achieve this goal. Writing on wars has always been fashionable and attractive for many writers all through the ages, and the Nigeria-Biafra War is clearly not an exception. From the period leading to the end of that war to the present day, there has been a flurry of literature – histories, biographies, auto­ biographies, diaries, memoirs, political accounts, newspaper stories, etc. – by diverse writers who have produced both fictional and presumably ‘factual’ accounts of the war. For instance, Laurie Wiseberg noted that from 1968 to 1969, many speculated on whether more blood or more ink was being spilt on the battlefronts.2 The result is not surprising, as 1

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘Awo vs Achebe: “We Remember Differently”’, Vanguard online, November 28, 2012, www.vanguardngr.com/2012/11/achebe-at-82-we-remember-differently-by-chimamanda-adichie (accessed December 1, 2012). 2 Laurie S. Wiseberg, ‘An Emerging Literature: Studies of the Nigerian Civil War’, African Studies Review 18:1 (April 1975), 117. Wiseberg alluded to such flurry in literature by pointing to the vast bibliographical notes in A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook, 1966–1970, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), and in Zdenek Cervenka, The Nigerian War, 1967–1970: History of the War

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polemic flows more swiftly and more voluminously than actual scholarship. Aptly underlining the nature and importance of this seeming ‘scholarly tragedy’ that has befallen the Nigeria-Biafra War historiographical narratives, Gavin Williams appropriately opined that the events leading to the Biafran secession and the Nigerian Civil War itself were the most tragic and important in the history of Nigeria. They have also been silenced. Much is forgotten; what little is remembered is selectively constructed, as was much written at the time. There were fine analytical accounts and copious documentations of these events published in the early 1970s. Since then accounts have mainly been revived to serve current political purposes.3

The ‘selectively constructed’ narratives of the Nigeria-Biafra War have existed both at the local and the foreign levels. On the local narratives, there were two sets. The first related to those which were often balkanized along the wartime ‘Nigeria’ and ‘Biafra’ divides. Thus, most of the commentators from the Nigerian side during the conflict largely produced works that were sharply and diametrically opposed to those done by those from the separatists on the Biafran side, particularly by the ethnic Igbo. The nature and purposes of the majority of these accounts have been ethnically fragmented. A second kind of balkanization existed also on the local front, this time within the Biafra enclave alone and related to those war narratives balkanized chiefly along ethnic lines by diverse minority groups within the ‘Biafra enclave’. Not surprisingly, such a crisis also existed among foreign authors. Many of these writers have written from the perspective of the group(s) they were well acquainted with (and on or among those who they have often researched, in the case of scholars), and thus, had come to ‘know’, ‘understand’, and develop some level of familiarity and intimacy. This chapter sets out to achieve two broad objectives. The first is to examine the dynamics of balkanized narratives among both local and foreign authors. The second is to concentrate on and critically interrogate some key highlights of the war’s history that have been victim to such balkanizations. The chapter has been structured into five sections. The second section attempts an explication of the concepts of literary separatism and ethnic balkanization in scholarship, particularly as should be understood in the present context. The third explores the existing narratives of the Nigeria-Biafra War. It examines three examples of ‘ethnicized balkanization’ of the civil war narratives, providing some perspectives to their underlining traits. Some of the contentious – Selected Bibliography and Documents (Frankfurt: Bernard & Graefe, 1971), which she saw as excellent surveys of such a vast data bank at the time. 3 Gavin Williams, ‘Reconsidering the Nigerian Civil War’, paper presented at the Workshop of Oxford Research Network on Government in Africa on the theme ‘Biafra and Beyond: Identity, Democracy and Citizenship in Africa, African Studies Centre, and Department of Politics and International Relations, June 15–16, 2007, 1.

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highlights of the war’s history, which have been victims of such balkanization, thus invoke false and divergent interpretations. The fourth section engages and reassesses the third. Conclusions are drawn in the final section.

Literary Separatism and ‘Ethnic Balkanization’ in Scholarship Offering some concise conceptual clarifications and giving meaning to the notions of ‘ethnic balkanization’ in scholarship and ‘literary separatism’ at this stage, particularly in the context of this present discourse, would be helpful. Ethnic balkanization is a term often used to describe the pervasive and entrenched hostility between historically different and divided ethnic groups. This is emblematic of the Balkans from where it draws its name.4 It represents the splitting apart of something along ethnic lines, thus heightening of consciousness among groups and antagonism towards other groups and increased inter-group conflicts. As a result, ethnic balkanization is typically not a positive term as there is often much strife that takes place when and where it occurs. A cogent example of such is clearly the ethnically divided Nigerian state. To be sure, ethnicity still remains the most basic and politically salient identity, in addition to demonstrably being the most conspicuous group identity in Nigeria, in (non)competitive settings.5 Ethnicity played significant roles in Nigeria’s socio-political changes during the ‘ultra-crisis decade’ (1960–1970), as well as snowballing the country into one of Africa’s bloodiest ethnic-motivated wars. Ethnic balkanization in scholarship should be understood in terms of the purposeful fracturing of literary works and the wasting of something of scholarly importance on the basis of something totally unimportant, like ethnic differences. Of course, people are bound to write from their own myopic and biased viewpoints: narratives shaped the thinking of people, reinforced stereotypical divisions, and socialized them into specific systems of thought. Literary separatism, on the other hand, is an alternative to the literary entrapment of balkanization in scholarship. It is a conscious and deliberate breakaway, removal and detachment from ‘sloppy’ scholarship. Thus, to speak of literary separatism is to first admit the failures of subsisting trends in scholarship in an area of interest, and second, to attempt to rectify the observed anomaly by offering alternative interpretations and/or narratives. In other words, it appreciates the dynamics of 4

Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller, eds, Cultural Divides: Understanding and Overcoming Group Conflict (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 36. 5 Eghosa E. Osaghae and Rotimi T. Suberu, ‘A History of Identities, Violence, and Stability in Nigeria’, CRISE Working Paper 6 (January 2005), 8; Peter Lewis and Michael Bratton, ‘Attitudes Towards Democracy and Markets in Nigeria: Report of a National Opinion Survey’, (Washington, DC: Management Systems International, and International Foundation for Election Systems, 2000), 27.

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the politics that affected literary engagements and narratives within a specific subject. It, however, seeks to detach from such ‘politics’ in scholarly undertakings. Indeed, as one would imagine, the flurry of the first element in narratives, negative as it was, would necessarily warrant the need for and emergence of the later element in scholarly engagements. In this case, it is the Nigeria-Biafra War history and narratives that are our present focus. Here, the separatist emphasis would be on examining principal aspects of the war’s saga to show their balkanized nature and attempt to present a critical, corrective perspective on some important war highlights.

The Nigeria-Biafra War Narratives: An Exploration As a historian, one is of the opinion that narratives shape the way people remember and interpret events, and help them determine their meanings, thus, like literature, providing a strong vehicle for social thought.6 This is a massive point for understanding how the diverse, competing, and conflicting narratives of the civil war are meant to shape the understanding of that war among different groups. If a story is made up about a historical experience and told to people who will listen, even if it is not true, after some time the people will believe it and try to live up to it. This is the power of narratives on people’s memories. This is exactly what ethnically balkanized narratives of the war were intended to achieve: building representations that the respective targeted populace uses to interpret the tragic war saga, and unthinkingly respond and react to it. To be sure, this grand strategy has been outstandingly successful in living up to its desired objective. In this section, we will examine samples of three diverse sets of the war narratives, which ‘were most easily explained by grand theories: the Igbo plot and conspiracy, or the Northern conspiracy’.7 The aim here is to underline and show the leanings and trends in such ethnically balkanized interpretations of that war saga. ‘Nigerians’ and ‘Biafrans’: Competing narratives There exists a gulf between the literary works produced by Nigerians who were on the federal side and the nature of analysis produced by the Biafrans, particularly the Igbo. When requested by a Canadian colleague and friend to recommend ‘the most authoritative work’ by a Nigerian on the Nigeria-Biafra War, one was bewildered as to what recommendations to make. This was because there exists some level of ‘crisis of confidence’ with most narratives on that tragic conflict. All ‘local narratives’ are not ‘subjective’; some are quite objective in their 6

For some discussion on this, see Craig McLuckie, Nigerian Civil War Literature: Seeking an ‘Imagined Community’ (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1990). 7 Williams, ‘Reconsidering the Nigerian Civil War’, 2.

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discourses. However, the mere fact that such authors did not just write first-hand, eye-witness accounts but often wrote from the perspective of being an ‘active participant’, means that they often strived to justify and/or rationalize their positions and actions in that saga. It became a challenge for one to properly classify such narratives in terms of objectivity. However, apart from those narratives that fall into this category, many others are outright subjective with an ethnicized grandeur. Persons on each side of the divide always narrated their stories of the war in such a way that would justify their own stance and actions while discrediting or even demonizing that of ‘the other’ – the enemy during the conflict. This is important, as the narratives often give some inkling into how events were constructed into such conspiratorial views. In an effort to put the record straight and also justify their actions, motives, vision, and mission, Adewale Ademoyega wrote an epic analogy of the first military coup d’état in Nigeria’s history, Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup.8 This is an impressive, dispassionate, and enthralling narrative presented in lucid prose. This is not surprising given the background of the author. He is a graduate of History from the University of London. Ademoyega clearly dispelled many myths, misconceptions, and half-truths about that coup, especially held by many who push the case of an ethnic conspiracy. The book provides further insights into the details of and developments involved in the coup through an unambiguous presentation. A stellar eyewitness and active-participant account, his narrative about the causes, motives, visions, and missions of the coup is unquestionably solid. Indeed, he presents a narrative that is in tension with and diametrically opposed to those of the northern elite. Effectively combining the titles of the works of two participants in that coup, Wale Ademoyega and Ben Gbulie, A.M. Mainasara’s The Five Majors: Why They Struck is the northern version of Nigeria’s first military coup d’état.9 In other words, this work is an intentional repudiation of the participants’ version of what happened. Therefore, its objective is clear. In it, Mainasara, a northern historian from Kano, seriously seeks to counter the positions of the January 1966 participants in the coup. In doing so, he makes rather sweeping allegations hinged on the grand narrative of Igbo conspiracy. So protective of the North is Mainasara’s narrative that it critically but naively challenges what seems to be a commonly held opinion in most other accounts of one primary cause of the first coup: the corrupt nature of the northern-led First Republic.10 Mainasara’s narrative has always been a central reference for those 8

Adewale Ademoyega, Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup (Ibadan: Evans, 1981). 9 A.M. Mainasara, The Five Majors: Why They Struck (Zaria: Hudahuda, 1982). 10 All the works referenced here and many others were very critical of the First Republic as a bastion of corruption, impunity and inept and high-handed leadership – conditions which made a military coup largely unavoidable.

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who subscribe to the Igbo coup and conspiracy theory, especially in the North. My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War by Olusegun Obasanjo is another interesting civil war narrative.11 Written by a major actor, it comes across as a self-serving account that denigrated almost every other notable personality, glorified his own career, and extoled his acts in furthering the war. Despite these challenges, it is an important resource as it also exposed some truth of that conflict. It was written from a usual Nigerian perspective – as expected, given his role in the war – and also presented a convenient analogy, leaving out critical issues about which, from all indications, he must have been knowledgeable.12 When compared to Alexander Madiebo’s  account, the dichotomy is quite glaring. Madiebo, who also largely hyped his career and his role in the war in his account, offered a Biafran version instead and generally presented Biafra as an inevitable child of necessity. Madiebo equally closed many gaps Obasanjo left agape.13 General Yakubu Gowon was the focus of two important biographies that also covered the Nigeria-Biafra War, typically presenting a mix of both Nigerian and northern versions of the narrative, which is hinged on Igbo conspiracy and clearly explicated why northern peoples had to do what they did (in May, July, and September 1966).14 While they managed to put the records straight on certain contested issues, they also contained factual errors aimed at promoting the northern version of the war story. Indeed, their failure to come clean on certain issues of that war, as one now knows from many other authoritative sources, underlined and reflected a level of subjectivity which was sectionally motivated. There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, Chinualumogu Achebe’s last work, is, perhaps, the most controversial narrative of the Nigeria-Biafra War.15 Similarly, it has generated more commentaries 11

Olusegun Obasanjo, My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970 (London: Heinemann, 1981). 12 It is instructive that some of his colleagues, like Lt Gen. Alani Akinrinade (retired) and Brig. Gen. Godwin Alabi-Isama (retired), have revealed that Obasanjo’s war account was full of ‘serious and historical errors’ and constituted a ‘self-glorification’ – see Ade Adesomoju, ‘Obasanjo’s Civil War Book, Self-Glorification, Ex-Generals’, Punch newspaper online (July 19, 2013), www.punchng.com/news/obasanjos-civil-war-book-self-glorification-ex-generals (accessed April 12, 2014). There is also evidence to show that Obasanjo committed many strategic blunders in leading the Commando unit – facts that Obasanjo conveniently avoided in his narrative. See Godwin Alabi-Isama, The Tragedy of Victory: On-the-Spot Account of the Nigeria-Biafra War in the Atlantic Theatre (Ibadan: Spectrum, 2013). 13 Alexander A. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 2000). 14 John D. Clarke, Yakubu Gowon: Faith in a United Nigeria (London: Routledge, 1987); Isawa J. Elaigwu, Gowon: The Biography of a Soldier-Statesman (Ibadan: West Books, 1986). 15 Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin, 2012).

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and reviews from different sections of the country and elsewhere than any other. The vast majority of ethnic Igbo relate to and identify with this narrative, but it has incensed some people from other parts of the country, with the exception of a few Nigerian revisionists. While Achebe has hardly said anything radically different from the widely held Igbo view of the war saga, his voice added a tone of legitimacy, integrity, and finality to such narrative – exactly the reason for the controversy. The central brouhaha and contention in Achebe’s narrative is his take on the Igbo genocide, in which he accused General Yakubu Gowon and Chief Obafemi Awolowo of grave complicity, culpability, and liability. Such an ascription never went down well with many, especially the ethnic Yoruba, many of whom rose in defense of their deified leader and hero Awolowo.16 Many did so even before seeing the book, not to talk of reading it, and resorted to attacking the personality, integrity, and credibility of Achebe as they denied such an accusations about their leader. But what the denials – which are commonplace today – are really about is quite unclear and surprising. The issue, which has opened an ongoing debate emphasizing how one people’s hero is another’s war criminal, is discussed further below. Discordant voices in the ‘Biafran enclave’: The counter-narratives Biafra was not a monolithic unit. It was, like Nigeria, a multi-ethnic, multi-national entity. However, the Igbo was the dominant ethnic group in the region. Within the Biafran enclave both inter – and intra-ethnic schisms existed, contrary to some opinions that Biafra was a collective that spoke with one voice.17 Indeed, many groups and persons within the unit saw things differently and acted within their beliefs to achieve their disparate objectives, which were largely anti-Biafran. Notable authors include Ukpabi Asika, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Elechi Amadi, all of whom published opinions on the war. In some instances, they represented the views of entire ethnic or sub-ethnic groups. These schisms and fault lines appeared because of the threat of Igbo domination – real and imagined – and colored authors’ writings of their narratives; thus, unsurprisingly, the production of counter-narratives. The narratives of Elechi Amadi, an Ikwerre Captain of the Nigerian Army who served under the wartime federal side, and Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni playwright, are very much alike. In both accounts, which are evocative and highly personalized, the ‘idea of Biafra’ was evidently repugnant and denounced, while its leadership was repudiated for a barrage of reasons.18 Indeed, they never hid 16

Meanwhile, Gowon’s camp has maintained a studied silence over Achebe’s accusation and has yet to make any statement to date. 17 See Frederick Forsyth, The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend (New York: Penguin Books, 1969). 18 Ken Saro-Wiwa. On a Darkling Plain: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War (Port Harcourt: Saros, 1989); Elechi Amadi. Sunset in Biafra (London: Heinemann, 1973).

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their rather anti-Igbo stance and disdain for the Biafran cause; they exhibited themselves as advocates of minority groups’ rights. Interestingly though, they scarcely utilized the northern-style rhetoric of ‘Igbo conspiracy and domination’ in doing so. Instead, one could locate their resentments and dissent in the ‘popular’ fears of the minority groups within the enclave who had to contend with the overwhelming dominance and overbearing influence of the ethnic Igbo. To underscore their anti-Biafran stance, and as convinced believers in ‘one Nigeria’, both men served on the Nigerian side against the Biafra State during the war, and played active roles to ensure Biafra’s collapse. Chief Nkere Uwem Akpan’s narrative19 is a dissention narrative from a vantage point – an ‘insider’s perspective’. Akpan was Chief Secretary to the Biafran Government and Head of the Biafran Civil Service. His narrative is very important as it comes first hand from the head who held together and managed Biafra’s incredibly resilient administration. Lacking, however, is a critical focus on his role as secretary of the government of Biafra, despite all odds and in the midst of fierce battles and carnage in Biafra. One notes that to evade this significant challenge in his account, Akpan presented a picture of one who was not really trusted and was consequently isolated within the wartime administration, basically because he was not ethnic Igbo: he was Efik. Even if this was so – though it is highly unlikely – it seems Akpan merely told an expedient version of the war story, leaving out his critical roles in that administration.20 General Philip Effiong’s Nigeria and Biafra: My Story also falls in such refreshing counter-narratives of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Indeed, it is one of the four much-anticipated accounts of this most significant socio-political development in Nigeria’s history – an account by one of its key participants, especially from the Biafran side.21 He was a serious believer in ‘one Nigeria’ Thus, he did not really want Biafra but neither did he denounce Biafra nor regret fighting on its side. He also never claimed that he was deceived or coerced into joining ‘the rebellion’. However, he incidentally found himself on the Biafran side and had to fight in ‘self-defense’, which he argues is not ‘tantamount to a rebellion as some people have tried to make out’.22 In other words, at best, his narrative is a Nigerian view as he ‘wrote essentially as a Nigerian

19

Nkere U. Akpan, The Struggle for Secession 1966–1970: A Personal Account of the Nigerian Civil War (London: Frank Cass, 1972). 20 Chief Akpan was not just highly placed in the Biafran administration throughout its three-year existence, but in fact one of the hand-picked half-dozen men who exited Biafra with its leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu, on the eve of its collapse. 21 The others being those from the chief protagonists of that war – Gowon, Odumegwu Ojukwu and Awolowo – if they will ever be written, as two have gone and, it seems, without documenting their own accounts. 22 Philip Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra: My Story (New York: African Tree Press, 2007).

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who was a witness to events that led inexorably to Biafra’.23 Effiong’s account is fair and balanced and is rendered from a perspective not found elsewhere. His dispassionate narrative offered new perspectives to issues, and dispelled some misconceptions, faulty assumptions, hasty comments and conclusions as well as confirming some other notions on certain dramatis personae in the war saga. He faults several significant positions of Gowon in his biographic narratives.24 ‘Ethnic sympathies’ of foreign authors Distortions of the Nigeria-Biafra War narratives existed among foreign authors, too. In fact, they often have not been as ‘neutral’ as many would think or argue. It is often thought and expected that the narratives of foreign authors on the war would escape the unique circumstances experienced among local authors and their narratives. This is because of the seeming detachment of the foreign authors from the issues leading to and involved in that conflict. Such an expectation is largely idealistic. Foreign narratives also exhibited biases, following some kind of familiarity and attachment with particular groups, or among those they often researched and, thus, have grown to know and develop some level of intimacy and affinities. This situation makes it difficult for them to remain entirely neutral. In this regard Robin Cohen instructively observed that ‘with some notable exceptions … outside commentators have generally failed to grasp the complexity of the events … Instead all rights have been found on either the Biafra or Federal side, whose positions have usually been depicted in simplified terms.’25 Thus, the contention here is that these foreign narratives exhibit the same ethnicized tendencies, as is the case with local ones. Easily, one can identify foreign writers and their ethnic leanings by critically assessing the nature and depth of critique they give to the fundamental issues of the war saga. Thus, it would be very easy to categorize most foreign authors or ‘Nigerianists’ in the global West, particularly in Europe and continental America, according to different ethnic groups in Nigeria on which they conduct research. Murray Last is one scholar who has never hidden his pro-North stance on socio-political issues in Nigeria – whether on the civil war, vigilante matters, or even on the notorious Boko Haram. His positions have often betrayed him as being emotionally aligned with and biased to the northern cause. His essays on the war often read like a strong approval of the northern position with virtually no considerations for the other 23

Pini Jason, ‘Nigeria and Biafra: My Story by General Philip Efiong, A Review at the Public Presentation at the Sheraton Hotel, Abuja’, March 31, 2005, www.kwenu.com/bookreview/philip_efiong.htm (accessed September 17, 2014). 24 Elaigwu, Gowon, 52–54, 61; Wale Adebanwi, ‘Death, National Memory and the Social Construction of Heroism’, Journal of African History, 49:3 (2008), 424. 25 Robin Cohen, ‘A Greater South: A Reinterpretation of the Prelude to the Nigerian Civil War’, Manchester Papers on Development 3:3 (November 1987), 1.

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party to the conflict, whom he freely referred to as ‘wrongdoers’.26 This is certainly in bad taste and with such glaring but intentional inaccuracies when compared, for instance, with the more balanced analogy of Richard Sklar or the grand narrative of de St. Jorre.27 For example, he exhibited such bias when he claimed that ‘there was good reason for those in the federal government and in the armed forces to be very angry … especially since before the fighting started the Aburi accords had given Ojukwu everything he had been demanding’.28 Other notable authors who shared this podium include A.H.M. Kirk-Greene and Rex Niven, both of who wrote from the Nigerian/northern perspective.29 As Odoemene noted, Last’s ‘position is, at the very least, a blatant and unfortunate misrepresentation of the facts of Nigerian civil war history … Ojukwu was never given “everything he had been demanding” because the accord was scuttled.’30 In another instance, Last repudiates Odumegwu Ojukwu for his ‘defiant resistance’, which ‘is not the usual way of protest in Hausaland [where] you do not confront authority, you go away from it’.31 For sure, his accounts represent a typical northern narrative, demonizing the Biafran side and defending the actions of the Nigerian state. Clearly, Last is not oblivious of what he hopes to achieve with this ploy. Understandably, his disposition is a result of his long association with Northern Nigeria. To put things in perspective, Last did his doctorate on Northern Nigeria, which afforded him the opportunity to live among and establish close relations with the people of that area. Furthermore, he ‘has been working in or on Northern Nigeria since 1961, and still visits there every year’.32 He also ‘expects to continue visiting Northern Nigeria at least once a year’.33 This type of familiarity and relationship brings about the kind of empathy that is eventually manifested, even in scholarly works.

26

Murray Last, ‘Reconciliation and Memory in Postwar Nigeria’, in V. Das, A. Kleinman, M. Ramphele, and P. Reynolds, eds, Violence and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 316. 27 Richard Sklar, ‘Nigeria/Biafra’, Africa Today 16:1 (February-March 1969); John de St. Jorre, The Brothers’ War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972). 28 Last, ‘Reconciliation and Memory’, 315, emphasis added. 29 Rex Niven, The War of Nigerian Unity (London: Evans, 1970); Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict; Anthony H.M. Kirk-Greene, ‘The Genesis of the Nigerian Civil War and the Theory of Fear’, Research Report 27, Scandinavian Institute of African Studies (Uppsala), 1975. 30 Akachi Odoemene, ‘“Remember to Forget”: The Nigeria-Biafra War, History, and the Politics of Memory’, in The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory, edited by Chima J. Korieh (New York: Cambria, 2012), 175. 31 Murray Last, ‘Nation-breaking and Not-belonging in Nigeria: Withdrawal, Resistance, Riot?’ unpublished conference paper, European Conference of African Studies, Leipzig, 2009. 32 This was noted in Murray Last’s profile as the author of an article. See Murray Last, ‘The Search for Security in Muslim Northern Nigeria’, Africa 78:1 (2008), 41. 33 ‘Centre of African Studies Research Associates’, www.soas.ac.uk/cas/members/researchassociates (accessed July 15, 2014).

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Frederick Forsyth, the world-acclaimed novelist and journalist, is another author, who typically represents what one might see as ‘a foreign Biafran’, having shown an uncommon passion and stance for the Biafran cause. Indeed, he did not hide his pro-Biafran sympathies in his book, which he started off by noting: This book is not detached; it seeks to explain what Biafra is, why its people decided to separate themselves from Nigeria, and how they have reacted to what has been inflicted on them. I may be accused of presenting the Biafran story; this would not be without justification. It is the Biafra story and it is told from the Biafran standpoint.34

In this clearly skewed narrative, Forsyth, like Last, presents a narrative that feeds into a popular narrative of the war. Forsyth’s motivation came about due to his beliefs and understanding gained while serving as a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) journalist covering the Nigeria-Biafra War. He saw what he deemed unjust in the war period, where Biafra was the underdog, and its peoples, whom he portrayed as a united entity that spoke with one voice, were brutally oppressed victims.35 No doubt the tone of his narrative was further colored by his strong familiarity with the Biafran side, especially a close friendship and relationship with its Biafran leader and head of state, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. Forsyth would eventually write a popular biography, Emeka.36 The narratives of Suzanne Cronje equally bear such glaring biases for the Biafran cause. A journalist like Forsyth, she deployed her skills to critically investigating the conflict. Cronje, becoming convinced especially of the shameful complicity of her government (Britain) and Western ambivalence towards genocide, wrote almost entirely from a Biafran perspective.37 As has been shown, these diverse works were often written to protect, defend, and propagate or advance the interests and image of the group(s) with which the writer was familiar and had relationship. While not inferring that these works are entirely subjective – which is certainly not the case – the fear, to my mind, is that because these authors are respected and reputable scholars and are seen as representing a neutral perspective on civil war events, most people would be inclined towards believing some of the misrepresentations or biases they peddled. What is distinct in these cases, as with some others not here mentioned, is that unlike many other foreign authors on the war who misrepresented issues due to seeming ‘ignorance’ or outright sloppiness in research, most of these set of foreign authors take their positions based on 34

Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 7. Ibid., 228–9. 36 Frederick Forsyth, Emeka 2nd edn (Oxford: Spectrum Books, 1993). 37 See Suzanne Cronje, The World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of the Biafran War, 1967–1970 (New York: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972). 35

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certain affinity with different groups or persons involved in the conflict dynamics. Implications of ethnically balkanized narratives The articulation, crafting, and presentation of Nigeria-Biafra War narratives have been based mainly on ethnic differences of Nigerian peoples. As we have seen, both local and foreign authors are involved in this development. Apart from what seems to be the main motives for these narratives – to reinforce particular forms of thought processes of the war’s history on the targeted groups or populations – there seems to be some other reasons for such flurry of narratives in this regard, which range from the pecuniary to the patriotic. As Effiong wrote: Some have written to prove their innocence and helplessness in the roles they had played even if in the event they wielded considerable influence and power on issues of the time. Some have written to show how they won or lost the war, some have written to make quick money because they had a good story to tell, while some have written to justify the principles and causes in which they believe and for which some others lost their lives.38

But beyond these, one is very much interested in the effect of such ethnically balkanized narratives on the Nigerian society as a whole. One such effect has been identified, and it has been quite dire to social development in the country. First, this development has resulted in the bifurcation of the proper history and understanding of the war. As a consequence, the subsisting narrative trends often masked the truth and jeopardized efforts at making sense of Nigerians’ collective recollections. In this regard, people tended to ignore the facts or forget to check them, and thus the true history becomes difficult to figure out. Therefore, there is a tendency for the authentic lessons of the history to eventually elude the country’s citizens. These often distorted and embellished histories of the war have also reinforced divisions and distrust among Nigerians as they have influenced the public perception of the war, albeit divisively. A typical example could be seen in the wild, contentious, often unhealthy, and sometimes uncivil debates and conversations generated by Achebe’s narrative. In other words, these disparate ethnically balkanized narratives have served to balkanize even further the peoples of the country. Not only have they led to vexed, competing, and conflicting discourses on the civil war, but the trend has also reinforced ethnic prejudices, increased tension and misunderstanding, and deepened the agony of those who feel truly victimized, all of which succeeded in exacerbating the ethnic conflicts in the country. This has done a great damage to

38

Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra, 1.

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the country’s institutions and causes with its repercussions being felt in contemporary times.

Contentious Highlights of the War Saga: A Critique In this section, it is worth taking a moment to examine critically and offer evidence-based (alternative), candid (re)interpretations to five critical aspects of the civil war saga, which have been victims of ethnicized and thus subjective interpretations. Revisiting and critiquing these important aspects of the war’s history are efforts to establish their true meanings within the relevant context. Indeed, as has often been said, there are two sides to every story. Thus, it is only reasonable and fair to assess the evidence of both sides, otherwise any attempt at judgment or interpretation would not only be dangerous, but will always naturally be based on sectional prejudice often based on a balkanized knowledge of facts.39 To be sure, people can register their disagreements based on their prejudiced knowledge of facts, but one should bow to truth and superior viewpoint, no matter how insignificant it may look. As will be shown, further evidence would demonstrate that much of the events of the war saga were more complex and complicated than the existing explanations and representations have portrayed. The ‘Igbo Coup’ of January 1966 What exactly defines a coup? Why would the January 1966 putsch be regarded as and termed an ‘Igbo coup’? What evidence exists on this matter? To begin with, let us look at the protagonists of that coup and its eventual outcomes, which are the main basis for arguments for an Igbo conspiracy and coup, then examine and consider other factors. On January 15, 1966, a group of pro-United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA) young Army officers staged a coup d’état ostensibly to cleanse the country of bad and corrupt leadership.40 The coup’s original trio were Majors Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, Adewale Ademoyega, and Emmanuel Arinze Ifeajuna.41 That number was later enlarged to five, 39

One must concede that indeed, facts may be ‘sacred’, as is often said, but facts are not truths; facts can and often do contradict themselves. 40 It was clear that the officers involved in the January coup were sympathetic to the UPGA, which was an alliance of three political parties at the time – the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), the Action Group (AG) and the United Middle-Belt Congress (UMBC) – with the aim of confronting and checking the excesses of the Northern People’s Congress, in alliance with the Nigerian National Democratic Party. For instance, there were the bitter regional struggles 1962–66, the rigged federal elections in 1964, the unhealthy political practices of the regionally dominated political parties (as exemplified in the despotic quelling of the Tiv uprisings of 1964), the Western Region’s crisis following the flawed regional elections in 1965, the politically manipulated census exercise of 1962–1963 (the results of which were published in February 1964), and the revolting corruption that pervaded the entire political spectrum. 41 Ademoyega, Why We Struck.

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and then even more by the time of the coup’s execution.42 The ethnic origins of the majority of the men who plotted the coup clearly were Igbo.43 While asserting that most of them were of Igbo extraction and standing by that assertion, it is important to note that quite a good number of these dissident soldiers, including Nzeogwu, hailed from western Igboland (Anioma Igbo/Ibo/Ika-Ibo, as they are variously called). Many, if not most, of those indigenes – even some who participated in that coup – did not identify themselves as Igbo, but rather claimed a different ethnic identity.44 But, does the fact of disproportionate Igbo involvement in the coup qualify it as an ‘Igbo coup’? One would imagine that anyone remotely familiar with the nature and dynamics of plotting a coup would make two concessions. The first is that it is a very risky and potentially deadly business – an act of treason against the State – and thus, one of the most dangerous of activities. The second point is that by its clear disposition – often a matter of life and death, as noted above – it is often sworn to and held in secrecy, confidentiality, and privacy. The January 1966 event was a real coup and had the attributes of one.45 Igbo civilians and even so many others in the military were NOT involved or informed. Thus, the plotters were alone on this and never acted for the Igbo – and never claimed to have done so – even as they and their actions were widely admired and celebrated in not only the eastern parts of the country but also elsewhere throughout the country, such as in the West, where, according to Achebe, there were large celebrations for the heroes’ accomplishments as well as in the North, particularly among the Middle-Belt indigenes who felt relieved from the suffocating grip of the ‘Hausa-Fulani oligarchy’.46 In other words, only those who plotted and executed the January 1966 coup should have been held responsible for their actions. The eventual outcome of the coup was yet another reason why many term it an ‘Igbo coup’.47 Especially notable were the failure of 42

This led to the popular allusions to ‘the five Majors’, which included the original trio and then Donatus Okafor and Christopher Anuforo. Maj. Timothy Onwuatuegwu equally played significant and decisive roles in that coup and was considered one of the inner circle members too. 43 Of the original trio, two were Igbo and one was Yoruba, and of the later ‘five Majors’, four were Igbo. Finally, of the eventual number of the planners at the time of the coup’s execution, more than 65 percent were of Igbo extraction. 44 Denials by previously known Igbo sub-groups in current Delta, Rivers, and Cross River states of their Igbo identity may not be unconnected with their feeling of insecurity in identifying with the Igbo after the loss of the war. For instance, one of the prominent figures in the January 1966 coup, Col Mike Okwechime, who hails from the same place as Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu and has always been labelled as Igbo, has openly and consistently denied being Igbo. For sure, he is not alone. 45 It is on record that even the men ‘recruited’ to execute the putsch did not know what was going on until the last hour. 46 Achebe, There Was a Country; Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra; Cohen, ‘A Greater South’. 47 By the time the coup ended, 15 people had been killed: six northerners, three westerners, and one Igbo. A second Igbo officer was wrongly killed by loyal troops who presumed he

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the ‘Eastern plot’ and the haphazard nature of the killings that largely bypassed the Igbo in the army and in political office.48 But these outcomes were largely circumstantial. For instance, as Effiong showed, the Eastern plot even began to fail long before the actual coup took place because its original coordinator, Major Chudi Sokie, was posted to India. This sudden posting fundamentally affected their eastern plot and confused the rebels who totally lost focus about what to do with the East. This was essentially why Efeajuna and Donatus Okafor, having implemented the coup in Lagos, started racing to Enugu city by road to take charge there. This failed as loyal troops took firm control before they came into the city.49 Furthermore, the rebels derided Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo and the Supreme Commander of the Army, which clearly marked him for death. However, he survived for two reasons. First, he was alerted by his close friend, Col James Pam, of the violence that had attended such mutinous activities in the early hours of January 15, and thus escaped assassination. He then quickly commenced crushing the coup.50 Second, he survived because the officers tasked with his assassination, Major Donatus Okafor and another junior officer, were noted as largely inept and complete failures.51 Okafor, as Effiong argued, clearly lacked the capacity needed to carry out such a critical task. Furthermore, the key leaders of the coup took Aguiyi-Ironsi for granted and grossly underestimated him – a crucial mistake on their part.52 In the case of the Igbo political leaders, evidence clearly suggests that Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe’s circumstances remain controversial, though it is known that he was out of the country at the time, while Dr Michael Okpara, the Premier of Eastern Region, survived because of the lack of coordination as well as the presence of the visiting Head of State of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios.53 Dr Kingsley Mbadiwe, the Minister of Trade, ‘escaped across open gardens and hid in the empty State House, home of the absent President Azikiwe … one place the soldiers never thought of searching’.54 For some critical insight into the motives, intentions and mission of the men who plotted the coup, one must turn to one of the original trio, Ademoyega. He was the only inner-circle ringleader of the coup to narrate and document what happened for posterity. To my mind, was one of the plotters of the coup; see Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 39. Adebanwi, ‘Death, National Memory and the Social Construction’, 424. 49 Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 37–39. 50 Achebe, There Was a Country; Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra; Cohen, ‘The Army and Trade Unions’; Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 38. 51 Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra, 40. 52 Ibid, 42. 53 Ibid.; Forsyth, The Biafra Story; Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, trans. Klara Glowczewska, The Shadow of the Sun (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 100–101; Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 38. 54 Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 36. 48

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Ademoyega remains the best authority and most authoritative source of the January 1966 coup, particularly in terms of the causes, motives and mission, as well as their expectations. His narrative would be our main guide here. Ademoyega averred that contrary to the load of wicked propaganda that had since been heaped upon us, there was no decision at our meetings to single out any particular ethnic group for elimination or destruction. Our intentions were honourable, our views were national and our goals were idealistic.55

In other words, it was never ethnic or sectional, nor was it intended to be. Thus, whatever may have been the shortcomings of their plans were merely circumstantial. Ademoyega also clearly stated that a primary goal of that coup was to save Western Nigeria, which was then in great crisis, and the eastern parts of the country from being attacked by the Army, as was Tivland.56 These sinister army arrangements, which also had serious Islamic undertones, were being hatched by Alhaji Ahmadu Bello (the Sarduana and Premier of Northern Region), Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (the Prime Minister) and other northern leaders (including Army officers) in collaboration with Alhaji Samuel Ladoke Akintola, Chief Remilekun Fani-Kayode and a few others from Western Nigeria.57 The rebels also had other missions, which included giving ‘justice’ to the Tiv as well as freeing Chief Obafemi Awolowo, a Yoruba hero of theirs, and his men who were being incarcerated by the Northern People’s Congress-led government.58 According to him: We also believed in the immediate release of political prisoners of those days, namely Chief Awolowo, Jakande, Anthony Enahoro, Onitiri, Omisade and so on. As we saw it, these actions would bring immediate relief to the suffering masses of the West and North and would generate peace and concord throughout the Federation.59

Also there was a plan, at least by some of the rebels, to have Awolowo eventually installed as the Prime Minister to lead a government in

55

Ademoyega, Why We Struck, 60. It is instructive that Ademoyega and two others, Anuforo and Onwuatuegwu, had each in turn commanded troops in the Makurdi punitive expedition against Tiv rioters who were opposed to the high-handedness and oppression of the Sarduana government in the North. 57 This fact was to be confirmed by Brigadier General Ibrahim Haruna, the erstwhile General Officer Commanding (GOC), 2nd Division of the Army during the civil war. He revealed this during his testimony as at the Oputa Panel session; see Ademoyega, Why We Struck. 58 Awolowo’s radical democratic socialist posture greatly endeared him to these coupists. It is instructive that Chief Awolowo and his men were jailed for attempting to violently overthrow the same Balewa government, which eventually fell at the hands of the coupists. 59 Ademoyega, Why We Struck, 33. 56

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Nigeria.60 In this regard, Biodun Jeyifo aptly noted that ‘as a matter of fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the intension of making or “forcing” Chief Awolowo to assume the office of prime minister’.61 So, where lies the theory of Igbo coup and conspiracy in the coup’s vision and mission? These facts are certainly not consistent with a typical Igbo coup analogy. Again, if that was actually an Igbo coup, why was it also foiled by the Igbo? For instance, Aguiyi-Ironsi’s efforts at quashing the January 1966 coup are not unknown.62 Again, many other notable Igbo Army officers, like Col Hilary Njoku, Major Alexander Madiebo and Lt Col Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, aligned with their Supreme Commander Aguiyi-Ironsi in foiling that coup. Nzeogwu, in an interview, partly blamed Odumegwu Ojukwu for the failure of the coup, noting that ‘if Ojukwu had joined us, the take-over would have succeeded’.63 Again, there was Major Arthur Unegbu who refused to cooperate with the rebels, refusing to give them the keys to the armory for which he paid the ultimate price: the loss of his life.64 In many circles, the coup has been labeled as an Igbo coup because of the number of Igbo officers involved and the nature of its eventual outcome – both of which were clearly circumstantial. This view, however, does not consider the entirety of the facts. In fact, if the January 1966 coup d’état would pass for an Igbo coup in those regards – and all Igbo held accountable and punitively punished for it, as was the case – the more-recent Boko Haram attacks should equally pass for Islamic plots for which every Muslim in the country should be held accountable, hounded, severely persecuted, and punished, irrespective of whether or not they knew about, believed in, or supported the plots or not. Any arguments to the contrary would be outlandish, childish, and grossly disingenuous. The ‘Counter’ or ‘Revenge’ Coup There are three points to be made on this issue so as to clarify misconceptions expressed in many narratives. First, the notion of ‘counter’ or ‘revenge’ coup is very faulty. It presupposes that the previous coup in January 1966 was sectional, that is, an Igbo coup and, thus, the need to counter it. That is quite an erroneous assumption. Second, what took place on July 29, 1966 was not a coup in its strict sense. It lacked the principles and characteristics of a military coup d’état. 60

Ben Gbulie, Nigeria’s Five Majors: Coup d’État of 15th January 1966 – First Inside Account (Onitsha: Africana Educational Publishers, 1981), 18, 58, 127. 61 Biodun Jeyifo, ‘First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections on Achebe’s New Book’ Journal of Asian and African Studies 48:6 (2013), 686. 62 For instance, see Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra; Gbulie, Nigeria’s Five Majors; Ademoyega, Why We Struck; and Forsyth, The Biafra Story. 63 Quoted in Cohen, ‘A Greater South’, 15. 64 Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra; and Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 36.

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It was something else beyond a coup; it was the military part of a larger northern communal action of extermination targeting the Igbo, albeit erroneously. This was unlike the case in the first military coup d’état of January 15, 1966, where there was a clear conspiracy that involved all segments of the northern society: the ruling elites, the civil servants, the intelligentsia, the military, and even the ordinary person.65 Unlike a typical coup, it lacked secrecy; it was openly discussed among some of the officers. Rumors circulated among different military units across the country. The buildup and planning for the so-called counter-coup started soon after the January 1966 coup under the leadership of Lt Col Murtala Muhammed, and virtually all the top northern military officers were involved in it.66 The detailed planning, widespread involvement, and methodical execution of that conspiratorial plan showed it was thought out and exceptional. Through that Army rampage part, the Igbo were clinically eliminated: out of a total of 210 military personnel killed, 204 were Igbo (185 from the Eastern Region and 19 from the Mid-West), and six were Yoruba from the Western Region. Unsurprisingly, not a single person from the Northern Region was killed.67 At the end of this purge, the horrendous spate of targeted killings were soon extended to unsuspecting, innocent Igbo civilians – men, women and children – who lived in several parts of Nigeria, especially in the Northern Region. Third, the reasons given (and still being advanced) for such mutinous action included Igbo coup and Igbo domination, undue promotion of Igbo officers, the Aguiyi-Ironsi regime being run mostly by Igbo technocrats and politicians, and non-prosecution of the mostly Igbo actors in the January 1966 coup. These reasons did not truly reflect the realities on the ground at that time, but they were only a ploy by the North to justify its conspiracy and acts.68 For instance, of Aguiyi-Ironsi administration’s nine-man Supreme Military Council (SMC), only one other Igbo (apart from himself) – Lt Col Ojukwu – was a member.69 All others were non-Igbo persons. Similarly, in the Executive Council, which comprised the SMC and six others, only two were from the Eastern Region: the Attorney General, Mr Onyiuke (an Igbo) and the Inspector-General of 65

Achebe, There Was a Country; Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra; Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution. For instance, Madiebo reports of a young Hausa informant, who had come by night to inform him in the presence of another Igbo officer, who told him of the planned attacks on the Igbo and that while the civilians were ready to act, the soldiers were still undecided. 66 Sani Tukur, ‘Why We Killed Ironsi and Installed Gowon – Jeremiah Useni’ (September 27, 2013), www.premiumtimesng.com/news/145535-interview-killed-ironsi-installedgowon-jeremiah-useni.html (accessed May 23, 2014). 67 Achebe, There Was a Country, 83; and Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra. 68 Adebanwi, ‘Death,  National Memory and the Social Construction’, 424; Ademoyega, Why We Struck, 110–111; and Elaigwu, Gowon, 52–54. 69 Lt Col Ojukwu had an ex officio membership by virtue of being one of the Regional Military Governors.

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Police, Mr Edet (an Efik).70 In the appointment of permanent secretaries in the Federal Public Service, which were very powerful positions at the time, Aguiyi-Ironsi did not show favoritism to the Igbo either. Out of the 23 positions, eight were from the North, seven from the Mid-West, five from the Western Region, while the Igbo (Eastern Region) had three.71 The allegations of undue promotion of Igbo officers are equally quite doubtful, or at best half-truth. If anything, many sources point to the fact that Aguiyi-Ironsi overly appeased the North due to the outcomes of the January 1966 coup, which killed six of its leaders.72 Thus, for appointments and for recognizing the understandable rage of northern officers, Aguiyi-Ironsi moved swiftly to reassure and appease them. He promoted many of them even by two ranks over and above their southern counterparts. For instance, Captains Ibrahim Haruna, Murtala Muhammed, Usman Katsina, and Mohammed Shuwa were all promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.73 Aguiyi-Ironsi also put a good number of them in some very sensitive and key positions.  He appointed Lt Col Yakubu Gowon, the most senior northern officer, as the Chief of Army Staff over and above his non-northern superiors, and Murtala Mohammed as the Nigerian Army’s Inspector of Signals.74 Even his personal security network – bodyguards and ADCs – were all from the North, excepting one, Lieutenant Andrew Nwankwo, who was Igbo. This critical network was also headed by yet another northerner, Lieutenant Walbe. The claim that Aguiyi-Ironsi refused to prosecute the mostly Igbo coup members was equally very untrue.75 Not only is it on record that the military council set a date for the rebels’ trial, but Aguiyi-Ironsi gave the responsibility and task of investigating that coup to his Army Chief of Staff, Yakubu Gowon.76 More important, however, the men who participated in the January 1966 coup were celebrated as heroes across the country. To discipline them immediately, which would have been the most logical thing to do so as to restore confidence within the armed forces and avoid further bloodshed, might ‘cause a countrywide dissension, possibly disaster … [and] thus, was fraught with danger’.77 There is also another amazing twist to the whole coup saga. Many 70

Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 37. Note that both men had held these respective offices before the January coup. Aguiyi-Ironsi’s administration only retained them in such positions. 71 Ibid., 37. 72 Adebanwi, ‘Death, National Memory and the Social Construction’, 424; Elaigwu, Gowon, 52–54. 73 Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra. 74 Philip U. Effiong, ‘Forty Years Later, the War hasn’t Ended’, in The Nigeria-Biafra War, edited by Chima Korieh (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2012), 264–265; and Achebe, There Was a Country, 121–122. 75 Elaigwu, Gowon, 61; Adebanwi, ‘Death, National Memory and the Social Construction’, 424. 76 Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra, 23. 77 Ibid., 20, 21.

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writers have tended to vilify and repudiate the plotters of the January 1966 coup, while the plotters of the July 1966 coup seem to have been celebrated, for whatever reason. For instance, people criticized, sneered, and disparaged the plotters of the January 1966 coup while those involved in the July mutiny have largely been honored in some way or the other by the Nigerian state.78 Clearly, such lopsided treatment also feeds into the civil war’s ethnicized narratives. A coup is a coup however it turns out, whether it failed or succeeded. Coups are illegitimate and unconstitutional acts: treasonable crimes that must be seen and understood for what they are.79 Interestingly, the allegations against AguiyiIronsi of ‘inaction against illegal action’ and ‘condoning indiscipline or treason’ regarding the January 1966 coup by northern officers and politicians is also remarkable in this instance.80 One wonders if the July 1966 mutiny was any less an illegal and treasonable action, or whether its actors were not as guilty as those of the January 1966 coup. Again, was Gowon not as guilty as Aguiyi-Ironsi was – if one accepts that line of thought – for failing to take action against the rebellious northern officers, of which he was one? The Aburi (Ghana) talks and accord The peace talks between Gowon’s government and the Eastern Region Government, headed by Col Odumegwu Ojukwu, offered a rare opportunity for the resolution of the socio-political and leadership crises in Nigeria. The most momentous of these was the one in the Ghanaian town of Aburi at the instance of Gen. Joseph A. Ankrah of Ghana. By the end of the very stormy and tense talks an eventual agreement between the two parties, the historic ‘Aburi Accord’, was reached and signed. Essentially, this agreement, which offered a renewed chance for peace in the country, was to give more powers and freedom to the regions, an arrangement many believe was a loose confederacy in nature, as it gave the regions greater economic and political authority. Unfortunately this chance was blown; the apparent agreement between the belligerent soldiers broke down when its ambiguities were revealed, thus making likely that hostilities would eventually ensue. But, which of the parties reneged on the agreements and why? 78

None of those involved in the first military coup has ever been honored in any form. Even the portrait of the presumed leader of the coup, Nzeogwu, which was created by Olusegun Obasanjo, received a great deal of criticism and protest by the northern elite and students; see Cohen, ‘A Greater South’, 1. By contrast, the planners and participants of the second coup have been commemorated. For instance, Murtala Mohammed has been memorialized and immortalized, while Yakubu Gowon, Yakubu Danjuma, Jeremiah Useni, and the like, are still celebrated, revered, and honored, even as recently as during the centenary celebrations in January 2014. 79 The different treatment given to the different coups has been partly responsible for the upsurge of coups, or the development of a ‘coup culture’, in Nigeria. 80 Adebanwi, ‘Death,  National Memory and the Social Construction’, 424; and Elaigwu, Gowon, 61.

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Murray Last’s claims, as we have noted earlier, become instructive here. Furthermore, some have also averred that it was Col Odumegwu Ojukwu who did not live up to his side of the bargain. However, the fact was that it was Gowon’s government that failed to keep to the promises of that accord. According to his own confession in his official biography, and contrary to such faulty allusions noted above, he had to renege on the accord for specific reasons. When his law officers and permanent secretaries examined the official communiqué, they found that some of the decisions made at Aburi ‘were impracticable’ and ‘somewhat out of touch with the legal and economic facts of life and that it was impossible to embody them into effective edicts’.81 Claims of genocide in Biafra Something significant happened in Biafra. Even if somewhat forgotten today, it was Africa’s first modern civil war and had the worst human carnage before the 1994 Rwandan conflict. One can reasonably understand that this present subject – Igbo genocide – is very sensitive and generates lots of emotions. It might help to begin by posing four key questions. First, was there a buildup of anti-Igbo sentiments and their resentment by many Nigerian groups from the period before the war? Second, was there a premeditated, elaborately planned and intentional destruction of millions of the ethnic Igbo (1966–1970), who, out of dismay at their persecution by some Nigerians, chose to be called ‘Biafrans’, even as they posed no physical threat to any group in Nigeria? Third, was the nature and patterns of such destruction of Igbo lives of genocidal proportions? Finally, did such destruction of Igbo lives receive official backing, and was it implemented by State actors? Indeed, daunting evidence suggests that there was genocide in Biafra.82 The genocidal acts commenced from the May 1966 riots, given the detailed planning, specific targeting of the Igbo, methodical execution of the plans, and involvement of vast strata of the northern elite and people, which culminated in dastardly acts of commission during the war. First, there was evidently a buildup of anti-Igbo sentiments and resentment in northern parts of the country following the January 1966 coup. The consequent May 1966 riots in the North triggered a massacre of Igbo people in which tens of thousands of the ethnic Igbo were targeted and killed. These were followed by the July 29, 1966, army rampage in which 204 out of the 210 killed were Igbo officers and men. Furthermore, the civil riots that ensued in July, August, and September following the army rampage had even more – tens of thousands – Igbo people targeted and killed, not only in the North but also elsewhere across the country. 81 82

Clarke, Yakubu Gowon, 87. The Igbo were not the only victims of such genocidal acts; many other groups within the Biafran enclave were equally so treated. However, the Igbo were clearly the main targets.

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In each of these episodes, one would notice premeditated, detailed, carefully planned, and supervised acts of ethnic cleansing: patterns of mass killings which could hardly be justified in any circumstance. At the end, between May and September 1966, more than 100,000 ethnic Igbo had been brutally slaughtered. Their crime? Simple: being Igbo. They had absolutely nothing to do with the January 1966 coup, which in itself was not an Igbo coup as often advanced. Mistreated, persecuted, abused, and killed in parts of the country, the Igbo returned home, and shown such blatant shows of rejection, they chose to be called Biafrans and have a country of their own. To be sure, they posed no physical or military threat to any group. In July 1967, a war was declared in a bid to preserve the unity of Nigeria. But in what manner and at what cost? First, starvation was officially sanctioned as a policy of the federal government. This is clearly decipherable from the comments of the government hierarchy at the time. In an interview with the journalist Tom Burns, General Yakubu Gowon, then Nigeria’s Head of State, stated: ‘Food is the means to resistance; it is ammunition in this sense and the mercy flights into rebel territory are looked upon as tantamount to gun running.’83 Chief Awolowo, the Finance Minister and Vice-Chairman of the Federal Executive Council in the Nigerian Government, for his part stated: ‘All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I do not see why we should feed our enemies fat in order for them to fight us harder.’84 Nigeria’s Federal Commissioner for Labor and Information at the time, Chief Anthony Enahoro, also affirmed that ‘there are various ways of fighting a war. You might starve your enemy into submission, or you might kill him on the battlefield.’85 Furthermore, Brigadier Hassan Usman Katsina, Chief of Staff of the Nigerian Army, noted: ‘Personally I would not feed somebody I am fighting.’86 Chief Allison Ayida, Federal Permanent Secretary in the Nigerian Government and head of the Nigerian delegation to the Niamey Peace Talks in the Republic of Niger, also stated categorically that ‘starvation is a legitimate weapon of war, and we have every intention of using it against the rebels’.87 Starvation was indeed used as a weapon of war. From such stern rhetoric above, the veracity of which no-one has ever challenged, it is very clear that there was a definite and unambiguous Nigerian Government policy targeting Biafra. This policy was further advanced by other state actors. For instance, Col Shittu Alao, Commander of the Nigerian Air Force, noted that ‘as far as we are concerned we are hitting at everything flying into Biafra, Red Cross 83

Tablet (London), December 7, 1968; Spectator, December 27, 1968. Financial Times (London), June 26, 1969; Daily Telegraph (London), June 27, 1969; and Dan Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). 85 Daily Mirror (London), June 13, 1968. 86 The Times (London), June 28, 1969. 87 Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 205, emphasis added. 84

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or not’.88 Indeed, such threats were carried out. For instance, Lt Col Olusegun Obasanjo, Commander of the Third Marine Commando, in June 1969 ordered his air force in the south of Igboland to shoot down an International Committee of the Red Cross relief plane bringing in urgent supplies to Biafra – an action that outraged the international community.89 As soon-to-be President of the USA Richard Nixon ­unequivocally noted, efforts to relieve the Biafran people have been thwarted by the desire of the central government of Nigeria to pursue total and unconditional victory and by the fear of the Ibo [sic] people that surrender means wholesale atrocities and genocide … But genocide is what is taking place right now – and starvation is the grim reaper.90

Indeed, due to such inhumane and immoral policies, humanitarian crises of huge proportions ensued; more than a million people, mostly children, died of gruesome starvation and attrition. Even at the war’s end the victorious Nigerian Government still continued its starvation policy on the vanquished, starving, and dying erstwhile Biafrans. For instance, the Uli airstrip, which was pivotal during the war as the base for humanitarian supplies and was used to deliver 7,000 tons of food and relief supplies to Biafra in December 1969, was completely razed. By doing so, the government shut off ‘the quickest relief route’ into the hunger-stricken areas. Furthermore, the victorious government allowed only 8,000 tons of food to go into Biafra monthly, instead of the 20,000 to 40,000 tons that was needed. President Nixon criticized the State Department, which oversaw the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which had agreed to the 8,000ton target, noting that the department ‘just [doesn’t] care’ and ‘they’ve let all these people die’.91 Starvation was not the only weapon used by the Nigerian Government to cause mass deaths of innocent civilians in Biafra. There was also the case of chemical poisoning of foodstuffs being brought into Biafra. Some foreign correspondents located in Biafra were able to ‘provide detailed cogent evidence that foodstuffs reaching Biafra from Nigeria have in the past been treated with Arsenic, Cyanide, and other poisons.’92 This might sound rather outlandish and incredible, but its veracity was confirmed by some outside experts: ‘a team headed by U.S. 88

Washington Post, June 7, 1969. Obasanjo asked Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister, for help to sort out the outraged international response to this atrocity, which Obasanjo noted in his memoirs; see Obasanjo, My Command, 165; ‘Canada Blocks Peace, Says Biafran Official’, The Windsor Star (Ontario), October 9, 1969, 6. 90 President Richard Nixon’s speech during a presidential campaign, September 9, 1968. 91 All cited from Joseph E. Thompson, American Policy and African Famine: The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1966–1970 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990) supra note 7; 153, 156,159. 92 Daily Telegraph, July 8, 1968. 89

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Senator Charles Goodell and a nutritionist, Jean Mayer, confirmed that food brought into Biafra through Nigerian territory had, in fact, been poisoned’.93 Another pattern of killings was the deliberate targeting of innocent and unarmed civilian populations and non-military targets, such as markets, churches, schools, hospitals and the like. The evidence in this regard is enormous, but just a few instances are considered. One remarkable example of the genocidal pattern of killings during the war is illustrated in the acts of Col Ibrahim Haruna, the General Officer Commanding, 2nd Division of the Army during the civil war, in the Asaba Massacre infamy. Haruna and his men, having invaded the Asaba area, gathered all available men (about 500 unarmed, civilians, non-combatants), and summarily executed all of them without any cause.94 Admitting to such crimes while testifying for the Arewa Consultative Forum at the Oputa Panel sitting, Haruna expressed no regrets and stated: ‘As the commanding officer and leader of the troops that massacred 500 men in Asaba, I have no apology for those massacred in Asaba, Owerri and Ameke-Item.’95 Indeed, his ‘confession’ showed that this was a consistent pattern of engagement, not just an isolated case. One of the most notorious of the war’s protagonists was Col Benjamin Adekunle, who was also known as ‘Black Scorpion’, the Commander of the Third Marine Commando.96 He was no doubt a Nigeria war hero, had by now ‘earned a reputation, at least in Biafran quarters, for cruelty and sadism’.97 These could be gleaned from several of his public statements, which opulently illustrated his zeal not only for violence and warfare but also for cruel heartlessness against especially the Igbo. In one of the interviews with international journalists and observer teams, Adekunle stated In the sector which is under my command … I want to see no Red Cross, no World Council of Churches, no Pope, no missionary, and no UN delegation … Until the entire population capitulates, I want to prevent even one Ibo from having even one piece of food to eat.98

About the way he conducted the war, Adekunle aptly noted that ‘[w]e shoot at everything that moves and when our troops march into the center of Ibo territory, we shoot at everything even at things that don’t 93

Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations, 33. E. Okocha, Blood on the Niger: The First Black on Black Genocide: The Untold Story of the Asaba Massacre in the Nigerian Civil War (Lagos: Triatlantic, 2006). 95 Sufuyan Ojeifo and Lemmy Ughegbe, ‘No Regrets for the Asaba Massacre of Igbo-Haruna’, Vanguard, October 10, 2001. 96 He held this post until Olusegun Obasanjo replaced him. 97 Quote from Achebe, There Was a Country, 138. Incidentally, one of his wartime colleagues, Brigadier General Godwin Alabi-Isama clearly noted him as one of Nigeria’s ‘forgotten war heroes’; see Alabi-Isama, The Tragedy of Victory. 98 Stern Magazine (Berlin), August 18, 1968. 94

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move.’99 He was also reported to have told a German news weekly that ‘it is my job to kill Biafrans, as many as I am able to’, including persons not ‘bearing arms’.100 Furthermore, as L. Garrison reported, Adekunle lived up to such threats. In the fall of 1968 as he advanced with his forces, ‘thousands of Ibo male civilians were sought out and slaughtered’, and ‘looting and burning’ of cities and villages were systematic.101 In another instance, he averred that aid to Biafra was ‘misguided humanitarian rubbish … If children must die first, then that is too bad, just too bad’.102 This later statement ‘caused such an international uproar that the federal government of Nigeria found itself in the unenviable position of having to apologize for the actions of not only Adekunle but also of Haruna, leader of Asaba Massacre infamy’.103 Later on when confronted with the severity of his actions, Adekunle, during a 2004 interview, opined: ‘I did not want this war. I did not start this war – Ojukwu did. But I want to win this war. So I must kill Igbos. Sorry!’104 Even Col Murtala Mohammed was equally complicit in the mass killing of innocent civilians. It would suffice to quote Chief Enahoro at length in this regard. I was the one that stopped late Gen. Murtala Mohammed from further massacre of innocent children and mothers. At a point when Britain refused to sell further arms to Nigeria because they had ample evidence from the Red Cross of the federal forces killing innocent civilians, I confronted Gowon with the fact and that the only way I can get Britain through my contact with their High Commissioner to resume a supply of weapon to Nigeria was that Murtala had to leave that war sector. Either Murtala leaves or I will have to leave his cabinet. Gowon told me that he is willing to call a meeting and on the condition I will be the one to confront Murtala … At the meeting of the Federal Executive Council, I confronted Mohammed with elaborate evidence complete with photographs. He was livid. He could not refute them.105 99

Bridget  Conley-Zilkic and Samuel Totten, ‘Easier Said Than Done: The Challenges of Preventing and Responding to Genocide’, in Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 3rd Edition, edited by S. Totten and W. Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2008), 521; J. Doyle, ‘State Dept. Ponders End to U.S. Neutrality on Biafra’, Boston Globe, November 30, 1968, 7. 100 Hannibal Travis, ‘Ultranationalist Genocides: Failures of Global Justice in Nigeria and Pakistan’, International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 21 (2014), 417; P. Lust, ‘Biafra Could Be Rescued’, Canadian Jewish Chronicle Review (November 1, 1968), 2. 101 L. Garrison, ‘Fear of Genocide Fires Biafrans in Losing Battle’, Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, September 23, 1968, 20. 102 Achebe, There Was a Country; and Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations. 103 Achebe, There Was a Country. 104 Guardian, July 25, 2004. 105 The Nigerian and Africa Magazine, March 10, 1998. Chief Enahoro made this exposé during a kind of reconciliation meeting with some Igbo people in New Jersey organized by Jumoke Ogunkeyede, head of the United Committee to Save Nigeria. It is instructive that both Gowon and Enahoro were alive when this transcript was published and none refuted it.

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The tragic implications of such sadism, as exhibited by Haruna, Adekunle, and Mohammed, among others, on defenseless Biafran civilians, including women and children, are obvious. One is sure that without the kind of support Nigeria received from outside international interests, it would not have been so brazenly genocidal in Biafra. Of interest in this regard was Mr Harold Wilson, then British Prime Minister, who was complicit and actively supported the genocide. Apart from heavily arming Nigeria against Biafra, Wilson had informed Clyde Ferguson, the US State Department Special Coordinator for relief to Biafra, that he (Wilson) ‘would accept a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took’ to keep Nigeria unified.106 For him, this was ‘not too high a price to pay’.107 If the British Prime Minister, just for the selfish ends of Britain, could avow before foreigners that it was okay to murder the Igbo in such proportion to keep Nigeria one country, one can then imagine what he may have told General Yakubu Gowon and other Nigerian collaborators in private.108 Britain, under Wilson, also disgracefully prevented an objective international evaluation of Biafra genocide charges, promising Nigerian authorities that the observers would be ‘taking the sting’ out of the genocide charge.109 The international observer team never visited Biafra for any assessment.110 In the face of such evidence, these patterns of killings, supported by statements of government officials and state actors, have all the trappings of an ‘extermination agenda’. The denials and debates over this will certainly continue, though one is at a loss about what such denials are about. But no matter how politicized the issue is or has become, the truth is that between May 1966 and January 1970 an innocent ethnic population was clearly identified and viciously targeted with elaborate, thorough, expansive, and senseless plans for annihilation that led to mass killings of genocidal proportions. That population was the erstwhile Biafra. To be definite and clear, all is not fair in war. As Nixon additionally noted in his speech on this crime in Biafra, ‘the destruction of an entire people is an immoral objective even in the most moral of wars. It can never be justified; it can never be condoned.’111 106

Travis, ‘Ultranationalist Genocides’, 418; Charles L. Robertson, International Politics since World War II: A Short History (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 163; Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations, 261; Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (London and New York: Quartet, 1977), 122. 107 Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations, 261. 108 For a discussion of this self-serving interest of Britain, see Chibuike Uche, ‘Oil, British Interest and the Nigerian Civil War’, Journal of African History 49:1 (2008). 109 Karen E.  Smith, Genocide and the Europeans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 77. 110 One of the observers, Major-General Arthur Raab of Sweden, who insisted on visiting the site of a reported massacre of 500 Biafrans, was barred by the Nigerian commander Adekunle, who threatened to have him ‘whipped by his boys’. See ‘Nigeria War Observers Angered by Adekunle’, Montreal Gazette, October 30, 1968, 5. 111 President Richard Nixon’s speech.

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The continued refutation of this or the protection of ethnic leaders and heroes by certain persons and quarters is totally flawed and politically and parochially self-serving.112 The impression one gets is that it is considered a lesser crime if the victims were not of the perpetrators’ ethnic stock. As Lawrence Nwobu pointed out, if roles were reversed and it was Nnamidi Azikiwe who joined Nigeria to launch such a senseless and atrocious war against the Yoruba, and Azikiwe who declared to the world that all actions, no matter how atrocious and dastardly, were legitimate in war, one is not sure this would go down well with the Yoruba.113 Refusal to come to terms with the fact that the Nigeria-Biafra War produced several war criminals and a record of crimes against humanity because of ethnic and sectional differences is even a greater tragedy for the country.

The post-war ‘twenty-pound policy’ Soon after the end of the Nigeria-Biafra War, in June 1970, the Federal Government implemented a new policy that gave twenty Nigerian pounds (£20) to each adult Igbo who previously surrendered their money. This was applied irrespective of how much someone had saved in pre-war Nigeria. Similarly, any adult whose money in the banks was tampered with during the war forfeited everything, as he or she was deemed to have used such towards the prosecution of the civil war. Unfortunately, a lot of silence and half-truths abound about this policy, which Chief Awolowo pioneered and promoted.114 What was the real motive of this gesture, particularly in the context of a starved population and destroyed Igbo economy? Why was this necessary even within the framework of the federal governments ‘no victor, no vanquished’ declaration and rhetoric of reconciliation?115 How civilized, urbane, and desirable was this policy? What was it meant to achieve? What is known is that its implementation, following the devastating war experiences, was immensely destructive to so many families and persons, and damaged their capacities to recover from the effects of the war, let alone survive ‘the peace’.116 112

One wishes to emphasize that this was/has been the crux of the often disparaging criticisms of Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country. This has been mainly by the ethnic Yoruba, who felt embarrassed by Achebe’s accusation of Awolowo being one of the masterminds of the genocide in Biafra. 113 Lawrence Chinedu Nwobu, ‘Awo vs. Achebe: That the Truth Should Set Us Free!’, Nigeria Village Square, October 18, 2013, www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/awo-versusachebe-that-the-truth-should-set-us-free.html (accessed August 3, 2014). 114 Indeed, a Yoruba friend, who incidentally holds a doctorate degree in history, actually denied such a thing ever happened, but he came back to me after a few days to acknowledge that he has been briefed on it. So many are still unaware of this or why it was ‘necessary’. 115 See Ifi Amadiume and Abdullahi A. An-Na’im, The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing and Social Justice (London; New York: Zed, 2000). 116 Fred Onyeoziri, ‘What Caused the Nigerian Civil War’, in Eghosa Osaghae, Ebere Onwudiwe, and Rotimi Suberu, eds, The Nigerian Civil War and Its Aftermath (Ibadan: John

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It is instructive that soon following this demobilization and further destruction of the Igbo and their economic capacity, the federal government commenced the indigenization program through the Enterprises Promotion Decree of 1974, which gave Nigerians the opportunity to buy shares in foreign-owned companies. Thus, the Igbo were tactically eliminated from investing in this economic exercise, which eventually empowered a section of the country – a leverage they still hold till date.117

Conclusion The Nigeria-Biafra War was characteristically an ethnic conflict and is still largely seen along ethnic lines. Its narratives have also followed the same sectional or ethnic pattern. One is not unsure of the perspectives to the war of, say, the northern elite who promote an ‘Igbo conspiracy’ view, or the Igbo elite who uphold a ‘Northern conspiracy’ interpretation. Indeed, these conspiracy views are quite straightforward in pointing to inordinate ambitions and acts of each suspected group. The reasons for holding such conspiratorial views are equally understandable but may not be valid, as we have seen earlier. Instructively, what is copiously missing in the whole narrative discourse is an adequate account of the divided attitude towards the war among the Yoruba political elites. In other words, there is not any elaborated ‘Yoruba view’ of such nature that could have been incorporated into this discourse. However, what unmistakably exist are Igbo tropes of conspiracy and betrayal by the Yoruba in relation to that war. This is, however, beyond the mandate and scope of the present discourse. No one war narrative tells the whole story or presents the whole facts. Every narrative has some value attached to it, whether sectional, ethnic, or whatever else. But such values only become productive to the extent that they all collectively speak to one another in an interactive, meaningful, and creative manner, thus presenting a fairly complete picture of that tragic war’s saga. This is, however, not often the experience in the Nigeria-Biafra War example. Instead, the different war narratives from different sections seem to speak against one another across the sectional or ethnic lines. Indeed, the past is past, and Biafra is a part of history now. Learning from the lessons of that war, especially with regards to collective failures, or wallowing in them is up to one and all, no matter the divide. No productive lessons can be learned from such collective failures if the diverse narratives are deliberately distorted, fractured, conflicting, skewed, and faulty.

117

Archers, 2002). Adichie, ‘Chinua Achebe at 82’; Akachi Odoemene, ‘The Nigeria-Biafra Civil War, 1967–1970: Reconsidering a Rejected History’, in Perspectives in African History, edited by Christian B.N. Ogbogbo (Ibadan: Bookwright, 2012).

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9

Local Writers and Commitments to Ethnic Sentiments

Olukunle Ojeleye

Introduction Between 1970, when the Nigerian Civil War ended, and today, there has been (and continues to be) a plethora of publications that seek to understand and explain this dark moment in the history of the nation. Two distinct groups can be discerned: the academic and non-academic. Within these two broad groups lie various genres of writings on the civil war. In the academic group, writings critically examine the causes as well as the effects of the civil war, and they draw conclusions to serve as lessons for the future. In the non-academic category, four main genres of writings can be identified. The first are novels and stories. These works of fiction have invented characters who narrate their viewpoints of the events surrounding the emergence and prosecution of the civil war. The second genre encompasses memoirs and personal accounts in which authors seek to present their work empirically, having experienced, witnessed, and/or participated in the prosecution and resolution of the war. The third genre is social media writings – including blogs and opinion pieces as well as feature articles in newspapers and magazines. Social media has blossomed in the last few years as a result of the combination of renewed interest in the story of Nigeria by a younger generation as well as rapid advances in information technology.1 The final type of work in this genre, following the popularity of documentaries and full length motion pictures, consist of theatrical/movie scripts on which plays as well as movies about the war are based.2 It is important to state at the outset that although most of the works within the non-academic category are fictional in nature, they do not depart in their accounts from the various propositions made by the materials that fall within the academic literature of the war. 1

This genre encapsulates writings that would be found on social media sites such as www.nigeriavillagesquare.com; www.igbofocus.co.uk; www.nairaland.com; and www.dawodu.com. 2 A good example in this regard is the 2013 movie based on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s, Half of a Yellow Sun (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), which has the same title as the book.

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Chimamanda Adichie and K. Okpi are a good example of the cross­ over between fact and fiction. In Okpi’s words, ‘some of the characters and events … are fictional, some are not. Its background, however, is a matter of historical records … and [the] fictionalised telling is an honest reflection of [the] civil war.’3 The objective of this chapter is to address two questions in relation to the existing literature by local authors on the Nigerian Civil War. First, does ethnicity and group affiliation consciously or unconsciously affect objectivity in historical writing? Second, to what extent do writings by local authors on the Nigerian Civil War mirror or exhibit commitment to ethnic sentiments? The second section of this chapter, provides a working definition of who a local author is. The subsequent section provides an overview of the epistemology adopted in identifying ethnic sentiments in writings on the civil war, while the fourth section explores the concepts of ethnicity as well as ethnic politics and the impact both have on the attainment of objectivity in historical writing. The fifth section takes a cursory snapshot of selected writings by local authors on the Nigerian Civil War to highlight that most of the publications to date incorporate elements of value judgement in varying degrees. Against that backdrop, the final section expands on the opinion that ethnic sentiments in writings about the Nigerian Civil War do serve a purpose and that local authors’ commitment to such sentiments are not misplaced or unintentional. Thereafter a brief conclusion draws together the threads in the chapter.

Who Is a Local Author? Jose R. Martinez Cobo, Special Rapporteur of the United Nations SubCommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, has described an indigenous person as an individual who belongs to an indigenous population by virtue of group consciousness, and recognition as well as acceptance by the group as one of its members. To give meaning to this description, Cobo refers to an indigenous community, people or nation as: Those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued

3

K. Okpi, Biafra Testament (London: Macmillan, 1982), ix.

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existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal system.4

The historical continuity of such a community, people or nation may extend into the present by featuring the continuation of a common ancestry, culture, and language regardless of whether their residence is in the original ancestral location or land, another country, or other regions of the world. A local author in the context of the discussion in this chapter is, therefore, a person descended from any of the ethnic groups that inhabits the geographical space currently called Nigeria who has retained some or all of their cultural as well as ancestral characteristics and continues to have a sense of commitment as well as attachment to his or her community or the country called Nigeria, regardless of where he or she is currently domiciled.

Objectivity in Historical Writing: The Positivist Approach It is widely accepted that historical writing is one of the ways in which human societies know, construct and advocate knowledge. Regardless of his or her social identity, the fundamental question that is raised when an author seeks to advance our knowledge of any historical event is to what level the facts being presented are objective, and devoid of prejudice. In determining the objectivity or subjectivity of local authors on the Nigerian Civil War, this chapter adopts a positivist approach in reviewing and determining the degree of ethnic sentiments exhibited in the available literature across the academic and non-academic categories. The positivist approach to social enquiry seeks to ensure objectivity and avoid distortion of facts in the creation of a body of knowledge that illuminates our understanding of the world around us. According to Hanfling, all descriptions, whether of animate or inanimate things can be reduced to the vocabulary of physics.5 Any statement that cannot be confirmed or refuted by observation or logic is meaningless. Hence, a theatrical presentation of Julius Caesar can be explained as an empirical and methodological description of Caesar’s life and achievements – the essence of science. Positivism sees human beings as subjective in the analysis of events given our emotional feelings about specific events. It seeks to distinguish between what is (facts) and what ought to be (our values). In so doing, it demands a vigorous application of a given set of criteria to our propositions before we can conclude that our claims are what is and not what we feel ought to be. Values are seen as dependent

4

J.M. Cobo, Study of the Problem of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations, UN Doc. E/ CN.4/Sub.2/1986/7, 379–382. 5 O. Hanfling, Logical Positivism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).

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on beliefs and hence subjective, while facts are theory free, value neutral and, therefore, objective.6 In contrast to positivism, the rationalist approach to knowledge creation holds that the human eye cannot observe all variables involved in the cause of a particular event. It explains that by analysing the relationship between the variables that the human eye can observe, the reasoning capacity of human beings facilitates an understanding of how an event has occurred. Pragmatism, on the other hand, attempts to bridge the gap between positivism and rationalism. By explaining that while we can observe and, consequently, arrive at generalizations following the use of reasoning, it is our individual experiences that will necessitate either a reinforcement of our proposition or theory, or a revision of it.7 It must be admitted that the positivist approach does suffer shortcomings. First, it holds that prior to empirical observations there are neither theories nor beliefs that drive us towards a thirst for knowledge. It indirectly proffers that we do not have any information whatsoever about the phenomenon or event we are observing or studying. If this is true, then positivism is indirectly giving us the allowance to interpret events that we do not know a priori as we see them through our power of reasoning. While this might be argued by the positivist as enhancing the possibility of our arriving at a value-free and objective conclusion, the reality is that we are never blank in our minds. We hold beliefs that inadvertently condition the way we reason and interpret events. Second, a description of an empirical observation demands that the person describing and the one to whom the description is targeted have a common understanding of the subject matter. Such a description entails the use of language that is only understandable to the audience by prior agreement or knowledge. Consequently therefore, facts are dependent on our a priori knowledge of events no matter how small and intangible. This explains why Kuhn argued that ‘no puzzle-solving enterprise can exist unless its practitioners share criteria which, for that group and for that time, determine when a particular puzzle has been solved’.8 Third, by allowing us to use reasoning to interpret events indirectly, positivism acknowledges that not all contributory variables to a given situation can be observed and verified. However, it then prevents us from talking about these unobservable variables, while at the same time claiming that, for our proposition to be valid, all variables at work must be observable. For example, in an analogy used by Joad, let us assume this is biblical times, and we have just witnessed Jesus Christ turning water 6

Ibid., 13. S. Smith, K. Booth, and M. Zalewski, eds, International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13–20. 8 T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 7. 7

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into wine. The question that then arises is how to explain the process by which He did it. The explanation would be that He did it through His supernatural powers. But the point remains that we can neither empirically verify the extent of Christ’s powers nor if the water turning into wine was a consequence of the exercise of this power. Therefore, in asserting that water can be turned into wine (the verifiable) through Christ’s power (the unobservable), all variables involved have not been observed.9 From this, two deductions can be made. First, by allowing the interpretation of events, positivism is not wholly focused on physical manifestations or empirical confirmation as it claims. Second, by using interpretation to explain the linkage between the verifiable and the unobservable, we would be guilty of falsehood in claiming to possess true knowledge in as much as the whole process involved in the creation of knowledge is not empirically testable. Finally, positivism fails to define what it means by objectivity in our search for knowledge. Objectivity can only take place within a group that has a set of rules and regulations guiding its approach to a specific issue, event, or project. Once the rules are followed by the one making enquiry, then the result is objective in the sight of the members of the group. But for an outsider, who does not even know the subject matter beforehand, a careful consideration of the result may be deemed to be subjective. Regardless of any contradiction in the positivist approach to achieving objectivity in the creation of knowledge, an example of its enduring influence and advantage is in its emphasis on the uniformity of language across the natural science and the social world. The approach identifies two types of statements in the output of knowledge. First are empirical statements that are verifiable by observation, and second are analytical statements, which can only be ascertained by reflection on the meaning of the relevant words. Thus, by placing emphasis on the importance of language, the positivist approach enables us to determine if an author has strived, or not strived, to attain a distinctive level of objectivity in his or her writing.

Ethnicity and Ethnic Politics: Effect on Objectivity in Historical Writing The concept of ethnicity has been used implicitly or explicitly to describe the affiliation of individuals to a group on the basis of cultural and linguistic affinity. While some have argued that human behaviour along ethnic lines is biological and inborn, others are of the view that such behaviour is reflective of socio-historical experiences of the people concerned.10 Ethnicity delineates a group on the basis of a common 9 10

C.E.M. Joad, A Critique of Logical Positivism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1950). D. Edelman, ‘Ethnicity and Early Israel’, in Ethnicity and the Bible Biblical Interpretation Series 19, edited by M.G. Brett (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 25–26.

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history, religion, language, customs, as well as genealogical features. The homogeneity of ethnic groups in terms of language, religion, and culture encourages loyalty to the unit. This loyalty leads to the development of negative attitudes, prejudices, and discrimination towards members of other groups, which often results in aggression and violence between such groups. These features birth ethnic sentiments and loyalty to the group no matter the circumstance. For the effect of ethnicity to be fully understood, the concept has to be examined in the context of the class, socio-economic, political, and structural makeup of the society concerned.11 This is based on the widely accepted premise that this societal makeup gives impetus to group competition within a given political space. Ethnic politics in Nigeria were not a post-war phenomenon, but long predated political independence.12 In a bid to serve British administration effectively, Northern Nigeria, which was predominantly Muslim, was merged with Southern Nigeria, which was predominantly Christian and Animist. While Islam stresses obedience to authority and acceptance of predestination as virtues, Christianity encourages individual responsibility and achievement. These contradictory values held by Southern and Northern Nigerians have consistently fostered negative perceptions of each other. Apart from the issue of perception, the Yoruba and the Igbo see each other as competitors in terms of commerce and political leverage. However, given the level of development in both ethnic groups, the ability to compete on a level playing field did not engender and has not engendered a morbid fear of hegemony of one over the other. The Hausa, on the other hand, see the Yoruba, and especially the Igbo, as hegemonic, and they believe the Yoruba want to exert their will over the rest of the country.13 In an environment where colonialism subsequently imposed a peripheral capitalist economic system, the struggle for political relevance, economic power, and resources in the Nigerian society could not avoid being ethnic-based.14 Authors and writers are human beings, and they grow up in a complex link of relationships within a social system. These relationships of kinship, dependency, and mutual support not only enhance individual 11

K.L. Sparks, Ethnicity and Identity in Ancient Israel: Prolegomena to the Study of Ethnic Sentiments and Their Expression in the Hebrew Bible, Dissertation, University of North Carolina (1996), 22. 12 P. Lloyd, ‘The Ethnic Background to the Nigerian Civil War’ in Nigerian Politics and Military Rule: Prelude to the Civil War, edited by S.K. Panter-Brick (London: Athlone Press, 1970), 1–13. 13 A. Mbanefo, ‘A Psychological Analysis of the Nigerian Civil War: Future Implications for Unity and Nationhood’ in The Civil War Years: Proceedings of the National Conference on Nigeria Since Independence Vol. III (Zaria: Gaskiya, 1983), 8–20. 14 O. Nnoli, Ethnic Politics in Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980), 121–147; and R.I. Jacob, ‘A Historical Survey of Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria’ Asian Social Science 8:4 (2012), 13–14. http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ass/article/view/15959 (accessed April 12, 2014)

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as well as group survival, they also become a vehicle for identification that, in turn, provides a prism through which the individuals review social relations.15 These webs of socio-cultural, economic, and political relationships evolve into individual sentiments, which are essentially beliefs, feelings, opinions, and emotions upon which actions, decisions, and judgements as well as attitudes are based. In view of the effect of ethnicity on individual and group consciousness, Riggs surmised that the extension of kinship results in ethnic sentiments and that such sentiments are unavoidable when it comes to historical writing.16 Hence, this chapter argues that a local author cannot be wholly and totally non-judgemental when writing about fundamental issues of socio-cultural divisions in a multicultural society.

The Nigerian Civil War, Local Authors and Ethnic Sentiments: A Snapshot It must be noted that with the mounting volumes of writing on the Nigerian Civil War by local authors, it is impossible to carry out, an indepth survey of ethnic sentiments contained in all the available works in only one chapter of a book. As such, this section only aims to provide a glance into how ethnic sentiments have surfaced or are surfacing in writings by local authors on the war. As previously indicated, existing literature on the Nigerian Civil War can be broadly divided into two main categories of academic and nonacademic writings. Going back to the utility of language in determining objectivity as expounded by the positivist approach, even though academic writings in the existing literature on the civil war can lay claim to a higher level of objective analysis in contrast to the non-academic materials, there still exist a fair number of academic works that in their title as well as content are not only subjective but are reflective of ethnic sentiments. It is paradoxical that even though most, if not all, the local authors on the Nigerian Civil War identify ethnicity and its attendant baggage as one of the causes of the civil war, most have directly or indirectly continued to promote ethnicity though their writings. In spite of the attempts by local writers on the Nigerian Civil War to tell the truth each from his or her own perspective, the understanding and analysis of the course of events usually reflect the writer’s particular relationship to the war. Merely looking at the title of a novel, memoir, or media article is a good signpost to the biases of the author. For example, the title chosen by Chinua Achebe for his last memoir, There Was a Country, could be interpreted in two dimensions: either in reference to Biafra as a country 15 16

E. Cashmore, ed., Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations (London: Routledge, 1996), 195. F.W. Riggs, ed., Ethnicity: Concepts and Terms Used in Ethnicity Research (Honolulu: COCTA, 1985), 11–37.

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that existed quite briefly or as a symbolic reference to the death of any semblance of unity and nationhood in the country called Nigeria. Also, Adichie’s title for her fictional work, Half of a Yellow Sun is a reference to the flag of the defunct Biafra. The title provides a good indication of the leaning of the work as it reflects the desire of the author to keep alive not only the memory of her grandfathers who died in the war but also the ‘many issues that have been officially swept aside by the country’.17 These are, nevertheless, deeply alive in the consciousness of the Igbo people – including the consciousness of the author’s generation, who were not yet born when the civil war occurred but have been fed by the older generation with stories of what took place or did not take place in the course of the war. Samuel Ikpe echoes this desire for the re-emergence of the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’ in his own novel.18 Four decades after the end of the war, debates as to who did what and who led (or misled) who to take particular lines of actions remain contending issues. The closer the writer is to the event in terms of involvement, the greater the likelihood of subjectivity in his or her assessment. There are many dimensions to this, and one of the best illustrations is in regards to the true motive of Biafra’s secession. The view that has remained dominant since the end of the war on the federal side is that the war was ‘between one man and the rest of us’.19 Ojukwu is blamed by the federal side for Biafra’s secession on the premise that he fanned the flames of secession in order to further his personal ambition of ruling over an empire. This view of Ojukwu’s role in the civil war is further given credence by the assertion of Ige who claimed to be pro-Igbo but not proBiafra when he stated that ‘the Civil War was a misguided action begun by a self-deluded Army officer, fought with the limited skills, understanding and limited involvement of soldiers, and ended when the Biafran army leadership realised that their game was up’.20 Yet, it has been acknowledged that Igbo leaders decided, earlier than Colonel Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in 1966, that to remain in a Nigerian federation would not augur well for them given the massacre of the Igbo across the nation. Indeed, Dudley noted that the playwright Christopher Okigbo, who lost his life during the war, boasted ‘if Ojukwu does not declare secession we will organise 20,000 market women to lynch him’.21 Nwankwo claims that the declaration of secession by the East, which preceded the war, is the resultant effect of the hatred exhibited towards the Igbos by the two other ethnic groups. While Igbo writers continue 17

C.N. Adichie, ‘The Story Behind the Book’, http://chimamanda.com/books/half-of-ayellow-sun/the-story-behind-the-book (accessed August 16, 2014). 18 Samuel Ikpe, Red Belt: Biafra Rising (London: Bygfut Media, 2013). 19 O. Obasanjo, My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War 1967–1970 (London: Heinemann, 1981), 10–14. 20 B. Ige, People, Politics and Politicians of Nigeria (1940 – 1979) (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1995), 352. 21 B. Dudley, Instability and Political Order (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1973), 177.

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to rightly assert Biafra secession and the emergence of the civil war as emanating directly from the deliberate massacre of the Igbo in Northern Nigeria in 1966, it is noted that most writers on the federal side who are from the Yoruba, Hausa, and South-South minority ethnic groups have chosen to gloss over this important factor in their writings about the emergence of the civil war. It is also important to note that when the non-academic group of writings is considered, the Biafra side of the conflict has produced more work on the civil war than the federal side. The most divisive theme of the Nigerian Civil War that continues to resonate in ethnic sentiments by writers relates to the thousands of Igbos who died in the northern part of the country in 1966 as well as more than 2 million deaths on the Igbo side during the civil war.22 The title given to a collection of papers by Korieh suggests a quest to reawaken the memory of the global community, if not Nigeria, to what he termed the genocidal intent of actors on the federal side. Ekwe-Ekwe recently revisited the civil war, and he underlined the causes as well as the course of the civil war.23 He attempted to convince the reader that, several years after, Biafra and the place of the Igbo in the Nigerian federation remained an open and a sore wound. Even though most of the claims made by Ekwe-Ekwe cannot be refuted, he employed passionate language and used subjective phrases like ‘genocidist operatives’ in his description of the conduct of the federal forces and federal government officials.24 Nothing better encapsulates this division and ethnic sentiment regarding allegations that the federal forces deliberately carried out genocide against the Igbo than this extract from the novel by Adichie: He writes about starvation. Starvation was a Nigerian weapon of war. Starvation broke Biafra and brought Biafra fame and made Biafra last as long as it did. Starvation made the people of the world take notice and sparked protests and demonstrations in London and Moscow and Czechoslovakia. Starvation made Zambia and Tanzania and Ivory Coast and Gabon recognize Biafra, starvation brought Africa into Nixon’s American campaign and made parents all over the world tell their children to eat up. Starvation propelled aid organizations to sneak-fly food into Biafra at night since both sides could not agree on routes. Starvation aided the careers of photographers. And starvation made the International Red Cross call Biafra its gravest emergency since the Second World War.25

In addition, another impactful comment on this theme was written by 22

By the time the civil war ended, the number of dead in the former Eastern Region from hostilities, disease, and starvation during the thirty-month civil war was estimated at between 1 million and 3 million. For different estimates of the casualties of the Nigerian Civil War, see ‘Nigeria: 1966–1970’, http://necrometrics.com/20c1m.htm#Biafra (accessed June 23, 2014). 23 H. Ekwe-Ekwe, Biafra Revisited (Dakar: African Renaissance, 2006). 24 Ibid., 68. 25 Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 237.

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the late Professor Chinua Achebe. In his last work, he described Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who served as Yoruba leader and Finance Commissioner during the civil war, as having an overriding ambition for power … saw the dominant Igbos at the time as the obstacles to that goal, and when the opportunity arose – the Nigeria-Biafra war – his ambition drove him into a frenzy to go to a great length to achieve his dreams. In the Biafran case it meant hatching up a diabolical policy to reduce the number of his enemies through starvation. A statement credited to Chief Awolowo … is the most callous and unfortunate: ‘All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see why we should feed our enemies fat in order for them to fight harder.’26

With the exception of Nwankwo, who accused Ojukwu of promising arms and ammunitions that never arrived, and Madiebo, who quickly recanted his account of the military and political deficiencies of Biafra in the wake of Achebe’s book, most pro-Biafra local writers have failed to respond to some pro-federal forces’ claims.27 Pro-federal forces claim that independent assessments in diplomatic postings from the period reveal that Biafra was not prepared for the military conflict that attended the declaration of secession. They also fail to acknowledge the fact that when both sides reached an accord to allow relief materials to be airlifted through the federal territory into the Biafra enclave, the Biafran armed forces included weapons and ammunitions with the relief materials in these ‘mercy flights’. This accounted for the decision by the federal side that all airlifts must first land in Lagos to be checked before being allowed to proceed into Biafra.28 Not long after the furore caused by Achebe’s book, Alabi-Isama’s memoir responded to the allegation of genocide by pointing an accusing finger at the Biafra hierarchy for the death of the civilian population in the Biafra enclave. Other than the military and government officials, almost everybody else was a refugee, due, in part, to the propaganda of their government, which told them that federal troops would kill all of them if and when they were caught. Therefore, the four to five million population of refugees inside Biafra did not know where they were going, which food they would eat when they got where they were going; as these so-called Biafrans had no known farms nor farm infrastructure. They were a nation of traders and business people … Their leaders whom all the people trusted so much to help 26

C. Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 233. 27 A.A. Nwankwo, Nigeria: The Challenge of Biafra, 3rd ed. (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1972), 49. 28 The Biafra propaganda machine was quick to label this an attempt by the federal side to inject poison into the relief materials to annihilate the Igbo population and refused to accept the condition laid by the federal government.

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them out of all their problems, only compounded the problems and had no answers for the people except whom to blame. They evacuated villagers completely from their homes to nowhere in particular. The people starved and starved and by that, they overstretched their logistics. Biafran officers had rosy cheeks while their people starved; but they blamed the Federal Government of Nigeria for their woes. I had thought that these were educated people who knew and could differentiate right from wrong, even some that were not born at the time of war in 1967 still talk about Nigeria’s genocide on the Ibo people.29

In the immediate aftermath of the publication of memoirs by Adekunle in 2004, Achebe in 2013, and Alabi-Isama in 2013, the venom of ethnic sentiment across the three main ethnic groups in Nigeria has been openly and largely reflected in writings and commentaries on social media. In one of the threads on a website where Yoruba and Igbo commentators could not stop insulting each other’s ‘genealogy’, a third-party member of the forum named King Tom tried unsuccessfully to broker a truce between the social media warring groups. He wrote: ‘It seems you guys do not know when to stop the insults. Well my damage control is over. If una [sic] like kill yourselves, good night.’30 For a foreigner who wanders on to the Internet or Facebook without any knowledge of the background to the commentaries on most sites, he or she would think another civil war has erupted in the country.

Local Authors and the Value of Commitment to Ethnic Sentiments Against the backdrop of the ethnic sentiments already highlighted, this section seeks to provide an answer to the question as to why there seems to be a sustained commitment to ethnic sentiments by local authors in their writings on the civil war and to show that in multicultural societies like Nigeria, such commitments do have an intrinsic value to group identity. According to Copson, African conflicts are not ethnic based but tend to advocate modern political concepts rather than ethnic objectives.31 In essence, ethnic politics resulted from the urge by certain groups of people who shared the same political, economic, and cultural orientation to achieve power, influence, or wealth. It can become a major determinant of political action. This political action leads to ethnic nationalism, which seeks to unite an indigenous community, people, or nation on the basis of a shared ethnic identity, cultural pattern, or social institution. Consequently, Suhrke and Noble, and Rothschild 29

G. Alabi-Isama, The Tragedy of Victory: On-the-spot Account of the Nigeria-Biafra War in the Atlantic Theatre (Ibadan: Spectrum, 2013), 334. 30 www.nairaland.com/1583639/brigadier-general-alabi-isamas-rants/1 (accessed A ­ ugust 16, 2014). 31 R. Copson, African Wars and Prospects for Peace (New York: Sharpe, 1994), 75, 79.

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emphasized the utilitarian and affective motives for ethnic politics and nationalism.32 The utilitarian motives include economic gain, political stake, and strategic considerations, while the affective motives include ethnic identity (ethnicity), religion, ideology, historic injustice, irredentism, reasons of justice or principle, personal links with leaders in a political movement or conflict, humanitarian considerations, and a degree of embryonic racial-cultural affinity. According to Somekawa and Smith, the stories an author chooses to tell or the research an academician chooses to conduct reflect the writer’s social and political position within the society concerned.33 Keita takes this argument further by canvassing the position that the notion of race or ethnicity is a central concept in distinguishing between justified belief and opinion in the formation of knowledge, and that ‘this body of racialized [ethnic] knowledge is essential to both individual and group identity, private and public lives, and institutional, structural, and systemic development’.34 For example, the account of the civil war by Saro-Wiwa was written from the viewpoint of a minority ethnic nationality. The author catalogued what he regarded as the historical injustice of the domination of the eastern minority ethnic groups by the Igbos, and the reason why his people, the Ogoni opted to align with the federal forces rather than the Igbos in the civil war.35 More importantly, the account aimed to highlight the plight of the eastern minority ethnic groups in the post-civil war environment as one in which they exchanged injustice from one task-master (the Igbo) for another (the Nigerian state) since the latter failed to adequately recompense them for their contribution to the success of keeping the country one. It is in pursuit of this ethnic sentiment through activism that Saro-Wiwa eventually lost his life to the same nation-state he fought to keep. Particularly for the Igbos, who constituted the core of secessionist Biafra administration and military formations, the civil war experience remains the most traumatic event in their collective history. The immediate post-independence climate made the Nigerian Civil War inevitable. Unfortunately, the fallout from the war continues to linger on because of the choices made by Nigeria’s political leaders in the immediate postcivil war environment. Hence, Onuoha observed that 32

A. Suhrke and L.G. Noble, eds, ‘Spread or Containment? The Ethnic Factor’ in their Ethnic Conflict and International Relations (New York: Praeger, 1977), 226–230; and J. Rothschild, Ethnopolitics: A Conceptual Framework (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 186. 33 E. Somekawa and E. Smith, ‘Theorizing the Writing of History or “I Can’t Think Why It Should Be So Dull, For a Great Deal of It Must Be Invention”’, Journal of Social History, 22:1 (1988). 34 M. Keita, Race and the Writing of History: Riddling the Sphinx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6. 35 K. Saro-Wiwa, On a Darkling Plain: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War (London: Saros, 1989).

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what has emerged in the current phase of Igbo nationalism is a timely opposition that has successfully tapped into the deep sense of grievance, marginalisation and exclusion of the Igbo nation from the benefits of citizenship and socioeconomic rights within the Nigerian polity.36

Conclusion This chapter set out to address two key questions: does ethnicity and group affiliation consciously or unconsciously affect objectivity in historical writing? To what extent do writings by local authors on the Nigerian Civil War mirror or exhibit commitment to ethnic sentiments? In doing so, the chapter categorized existing literature on the war, discussed the positivist approach to determining objectivity in writing as the epistemology adopted for reviewing selected samples of existing literature, and examined the twin concepts of ethnicity and ethnic policy to identify the influence they may have on objectivity in writing history by a local author. Following from this, a limited part of the literature was reviewed for ethnic sentiments and reasons given for commitment to ethnic sentiments in writings by local writers. It is found that ethnicity and group affiliation do affect objectivity in historical writing. The more writings on the Nigerian Civil War by local authors fall outside the academic category where the rigorous process of scholarship demands a high level of objectivity, the greater the propensity for increase in value judgement and subjectivity. The various interpretations of the Nigerian Civil War by those who were active participants as well as by the immediate generation of their offspring shows that the war continues to evoke deep-seated memories, divisions, and controversy several years after the last gunfire. More than 40 years after cessation of hostilities on the battle field, Nigeria still retains the ethnic divisions as well as fundamental causes of the civil war of 1967. Even though Biafra is ‘back in Nigeria, relatively secure … the grave issues that elicited its birth are still with us in the Nigerian polity. Unless and until these have been seriously addressed, the jury remains hung.’37 In such an atmosphere, ethnic sentiments in writings by local authors have become an extension (or another means) of the pre – and post-war struggles between the main ethnic groups. Indeed, the ethnic sentiments have become the continuation of the Nigerian Civil War through the proxy of writing.

36

G. Onuoha, ‘Contemporary Igbo Nationalism and the Crisis of Self-Determination in Nigeria’, African Studies 71:1 (April 2012), 46. 37 G.A. Onyegbula, Memoirs of the Nigerian-Biafran Bureaucrat: An Account of Life in Biafra and Within Nigeria. (Ibadan: Spectrum, 2005), 181.

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Part III THE WAR IN FICTION, MEMOIR, AND IMAGINATION

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Memoirs and the Question of Objectivity Revisiting Alexander Madiebo’s The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War and Robert Collis’s Nigeria in Conflict Christian Chukwuma Opata

Introduction Two concepts – memoirs and objectivity – provide the major thrust for this discourse and as such delimit the boundaries of our probe of the two authors whose works are under examination. However, these two words are meaningful only if discussed in the context of historical writing about the Nigeria-Biafra War. It is imperative that our convenient takeoff point should be to know what history is and what it takes to write a work that could actually be regarded as an intellectual historical piece, as this line of action would establish which of the two works is more objective. An important question for us here would be to ask if we are talking of history as a body of knowledge existing on its own, or as a discipline. In the case of the latter, we are concerned with the reconstruction of the past by the use of existing knowledge about that aspect of the past that caught our interest. This demarcation is necessary because, as Colin Wells would always caution, ‘history, the discipline, goes beyond the simple past’ and that it goes beyond ‘official recordkeeping and even palace chronicles’.1 Wells argues: As an intellectual discipline, a particular way of thinking about the past (not better or worse, but peculiar to itself), the tradition of history that began with Herodotus has an essential ingredient that separates it from other traditional approaches to the past. History’s defining characteristic is not record-keeping or list-making, though it shares its interest in the past with these pursuits (not to mention using them as source materials). What distinguishes history’s attitude to the past is the overarching goal of rational explanation. History is about explaining the past, not just recording it.2

The above observation by Wells creates a distinction between history as a discipline and history as the ordinary past. A probe into history as the ordinary past and its meaning and relevance as a body of knowledge yields the summation below. 1

Colin Wells, A Brief History of History: Great Historians and the Epic Quest to Explain the Past (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2008), xii. 2 Wells, A Brief History of History, xiii, original emphasis.

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History is the memory of human group experience. If it is forgotten or ignored, we cease in that measure to be human. Without history, we have no knowledge of who we are or how we came to be, like victims of collective amnesia groping in the dark for our identity. It is the events recorded in history that have generated all the emotions, the values, the ideals that make life meaningful, that have given people something to live for, struggle over, die for … Historical events have created all the basic human groupings – countries, religions, classes – and all the loyalties that attach to these.3 Wells’ quotation mirrors why, even when discussing a single subject, authors are divided in their opinions. This stems largely from the fact that the past, as a permanent dimension of human consciousness, is an inevitable component of the institutions, values, and other patterns of human society.4 However, how the historian goes about his or her writings make him or her susceptible to criticism, especially where he or she takes sides and fails to be objective. This plays up the contest between objectivity and subjectivity in scholarship. It is the quest to resolve such contestations that lured professional historians into a movement called intellectual history. The need for an intellectual history of the Nigerian Civil War cannot be over emphasized because of the contradicting accounts. This contradiction must have prompted Ralph Uwechue to state: The intentions and motivations of the young idealists in military uniform who set the current military revolution in motion, on the night of January 15, 1966, have since been a subject of controversy. They are bound to remain so for as long as the present commotion lasts and the temper of the nation remains charged, as at present, with deep and conflicting emotions. For accurate assessment and therefore for fair judgement both the acts itself and the motives behind it will have to wait the historian’s post-mortem.5

The Accounts of Madiebo and Collis: A Test for Objectivity As it concerns the Nigerian Civil War, many authors have recorded their accounts of the war, emphasizing why the war was waged, the role of various actors, and why Biafra lost the war. The views of these authors are varied, as exemplified in Alexander Madiebo and Robert Collis. Whereas Madiebo was dramatis persona in the war and fought on the side of Biafra, Collis was a medical doctor of high standing in Nigeria during the war, which he witnessed. These authors made themselves 3

R.V. Daniels, Studying History, How and Why? 2nd edn (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972), 3, cited in Obaro Ikime, History, The Historian and the Nation: The Voice of a Nigerian Historian (Ibadan: Heinemann Educational), 2006, xii. 4 Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Abacus, 1998), 13. 5 Ralph Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War: A Call for Realism (London: O.I.T.H. International, 1969), 57–58.

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liable to suspicion at the onset of their work by trying to prove that they are not subjective in their views. For instance, Madiebo, in the preface to his work, enthused that his book was not intended to serve as a political propaganda material for the benefit of any section or group of individuals. It is rather a genuine attempt to render a dispassionate account of the Nigerian revolution and the civil war which took place from January 1966 to January 1970.6

For his own part, Robert Collis began his work by trying, like Madiebo, to wash his hands ‘clean’ and absolve himself of any possible charges of being subjective. He states: I have tried in these pages to give a true picture of the events which I have witnessed here, uninfluenced by propaganda, party or tribe … The facts that I describe and the conclusions I have drawn are those of a doctor. I have no axe to grind or future career to build up in Nigeria. I belong to no party. I am no supporter of no Nigerian tribe or Religion … I am not myself involved in the Nigerian ‘troubles’ and my only endeavour in this work is to present the truth.7

Good talks. However, all these foundational myths raise the question: why should a writer start his or her work by providing himself or herself an escape route, even when he or she is aware that some of his or her submissions are questionable? The probable answer is to make their readers believe they are objective. If we take off on the premise that objectivity arises from criticizing and comparing rival webs of interpretations in terms of agreed facts – and Madiebo and Collis are not agreed generally – then the meaning and application of objectivity in historical writing must be sought.8 What then is objectivity in History? Many scholars have discussed objectivity and came to varying opinions. These include the likes of Gadamer, Foucault, Derrida, Daston, and Novick. Some even went as far as stating emphatically that there is nothing like objectivity in writing history. For instance, Richard Bushman cautioned that, ‘we should not be deceived, however, by the illusion that at long last we have learned to write objective history … The myth of scientific history … has been discarded.’9 Arguing in the same light, Ronald K. Esplin avers that an approach to historical truth that assumes that a historian can be objective is unrealistic and naive.10 6

Alexander A. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War (Enugu: FourthDimension, 1980), xi. 7 Robert J.M. Collis, Nigeria in Conflict (London: Secker and Warburg, 1970), xii-xiii. 8 Mark Bevir, ‘Objectivity in History’, History and Theory, 33:3 (1994), 328–344, www. history510.files.wordpress.com (accessed May 17, 2014). 9 Richard Bushman, ‘Introduction: The Future of Mormon History’, Dialogue 1 (Autumn1966), 23–26. 10 Ronald K. Esplin, ‘How Then Should We Write History?’ Sunstone 7:2 (March-April, 1982), 41–45.

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Peter O. Oyewale, echoing Henige, surmises that objectivity means a state of having a comprehensive, systematic record of the past events as they actually happened and it (objectivity) holds the belief that historical writing should be based on solid facts alone.11 However, Peter Novick whose own definition is in use here maintains that the principle assumptions of objectivity for the profession of history include a commitment to reality of the past, and to truth as correspondence to reality; a sharp separation between knower and known, between fact and value, and above all, between history and fiction. Historical facts are seen as prior to and independent of interpretation: the value of interpretation is judged by how well it accounts for the facts; if contradicted by the facts, it must be abandoned. Truth is one, not perspectival.12

This assertion by Novick stands in sharp contrast to Edward Hallett Carr, who maintains that History consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.13

Memoir on the other hand is a personal reflection-cum-recollection of an event. Put differently, it is an individual’s account of an episode or episodes. Madiebo divided his work into three parts. Part One he titled ‘The Revolution’. In this part, he discusses six items. The first is a general remark and the other five details his account of the events in the nation’s military hierarchy. Part Two focuses on the war and how it was executed. The final part, the ‘Epilogue’, is more or less concerned with why Biafra lost the war. Robert Collis divides his work into four sections but only the third section dealt squarely on the war proper. Like Madiebo, he also concluded with an epilogue. However, it is imperative that we make some clarifications before delving into the works of these authors with a view to ascertaining their level of objectivity. Madiebo was an Igbo officer in the Nigerian army who commanded the Nigerian Artillery Regiment before the outbreak of hostilities. His ethnic group fought with the rest of Nigeria and he was the commander of the rebel soldiers. Based on his position as a former senior army officer in Nigeria and then as the head of the Biafran armed forces, as a member of the military inner cabinets he must have had classified information. He was a combatant during the war. As writings are propelled 11

Peter O. Oyewale, ‘Objectivity: A Subject of Discourse in Historical Writing’, AFRREV IJAH (An International Journal of Arts and Humanities) 3:1 (January 2014), 18–30, www. afrrevjo.net/ijah (accessed May 17, 2014). 12 Peter Novick, cited in Judy Hensley, ‘The Historical and Philosophical Understandings of Objectivity’, http://gustavus.edu/philosophy/judy.html (accessed May 17, 2014). 13 E.H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 9.

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by an interest, his work is like a cover up of what might be termed an Igbo misdeed. By contrast, Collis is Irish. He served as a medical doctor in Nigeria and witnessed both the first and second coups d’état in Nigeria. He was never directly involved in the war even as he was in touch with some high profile Nigerians on both sides of the divide. Most of his information was based on ‘second-hand information’. Most importantly, his ideas of Nigeria were shaped by the views of British colonial officers and early anthropologists. Both authors began their discourse on the civil war by looking at the ethnic configuration of Nigeria, the level of imbalance in terms of political representation in the polity, and the role of colonialism. Madiebo goes a little further to consider that part of the reasons for the war had to do with the British opinion of the South, which they saw as ‘politically unreliable’, as evident in military recruitment in Nigeria before World War II.14 During the World War I, when manpower pressure compelled the British War Office to send a recruitment mission to West Africa in 1916, the British Government tasked the mission to pay particular attention to the ‘pagan areas’ and not to the Christianized nationalities of the South as viable sources of recruits.15 Through this, the Igbo who belong to the ‘Christianized South’ were not considered fit for military recruitment by the British at this stage of the nation’s development. Madiebo, writing under the sub-heading ‘Political Background’, maintains that the origin of the civil war could be traced to ‘the divide and rule system of government which Britain introduced into the country’.16 Granted, when the British amalgamated Northern and Southern Protectorates of Nigeria in 1914, they did not create a common legislative council for the entire country. Even when a legislative council was eventually established in 1923, its jurisdiction was limited to the Colony of Lagos and the Southern Provinces. Hugh Clifford was aware of the shortcomings of the legislative council when he surmised that no legislative council that sat in Lagos could properly deal with the North.17 Governor Bourdillon saw no wisdom in having such a body since it had 12 African members (all from the southern part of the country) and the North was not included. This may have been the beginning of northern apprehension. This system of divide and rule, Madiebo argues, emphasized differences among the peoples. It encouraged social apartheid; it bred 14

Jide Osuntokun, ‘West African Armed Revolts During the First World War’, Tariku 5:3 (1977), 6–17. 15 E.C. Ejiogu, ‘Colonial Army Recruitment Patterns and Post-Colonial Military Coups d’État in Africa: The Case of Nigeria, 1966–1993’, Scientia Militaria, South African Journal of Military Studies 35:1 (2007), 99–132. 16 Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, 3–14. 17 I.M. Okonjo, British Administration in Nigeria, 1900–1950: A Nigerian View (New York: NOK, 1974), 302.

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division, hatred, unhealthy rivalries, and pronounced disparities in development among the various peoples of the country.18As a result, he argues that, after independence, the battle to consolidate this legacy of political and military dominance of a section of Nigeria over the rest of the Federation intensified and was degenerated into coups and the bloody civil war. On the question of ethnic rivalry, Collis was quick to note that perhaps, the most important lesson he learned from his journeys in Nigeria was that it is entirely an artificial country born out of the womb of an international Western Conference. It did not consist of a geographical or ethnological area. History had not welded its tribes into one national group as for instance in France and Germany ... The average villager in Nigeria, however, be he Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo [sic], Tiv or Birom cannot be regarded as a Nigerian first and a member of his tribe second. Indeed, his immediate family holds almost all the loyalty, his tribe comes next and the idea of being a Nigerian nation very much third.19

The authors’ notions on ethnic politics and the quest for dominance among the ethnic nationalities cannot be contested. During the elections that ushered in the First Republic and gave birth to the formation of the immediate post-independence government in Nigeria, the major political parties in the nation were regionally based with the leadership of those parties provided by nationals of the dominant ethnic group in each of the regions. It is in trying to interpret the dynamics of contest for dominance by the ethnic nationalities as it pertains to the coups and the subsequent civil war that Madiebo and Collis present contradicting viewpoints. Collis sees the war as a reaction of other ethnic nationalities to what he calls an ‘Igbo plot for domination which was hatched in their secret societies by first-class men in every other way’.20 From his account, one is meant to believe that the first coup in post-independent Nigeria was staged by the Igbo with the intention of carving a niche for themselves in the nation. Madiebo, on the other hand, sees the coup as a revolution meant to correct the ills in Nigeria of that era, but it was misinterpreted. These misunderstandings led to a civil war. The account of Madiebo on the causes of the war is, ideologically speaking, more objective but pragmatically subjective. His explanations for the coup include: the contest for political and military dominance during the 1959 federal elections, which played up the rift between the leader of the Northern People’s Congress, the Sarduana of Sokoto, and the leader of the Action Group, Chief Obafemi Awolowo; the 1963 census controversy; the crisis in the Western House of Assembly in 1962; and the 1965 regional 18

Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, 3–4. Collis, Nigeria in Conflict, 24. 20 Ibid., 149. 19

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parliamentary elections, in which the federal government declared Samuel Ladoke Akintola winner.21 One major issue that needs to be clarified is the people involved in the planning and execution of the coup. Here, Adewale Ademoyega’s Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup becomes insightful. Madiebo, even though a soldier, was not part of the planning. The main anchors of the planning were Nzeogwu, Ademoyega, and Ifeajuna.22 All the reasons offered by Madiebo were echoed by some other scholars, most of whom are not of Igbo extraction. These include the likes of Ahmed R. Mohammed,23 B.J. Dudley,24 General Olusegun Obasanjo,25 R.L. Sklar,26, W. Schwartz,27 and a host of others. Madiebo, in what appears to be a total rebuttal of Collis’ claim of Igbo plans to dominate the rest of the nation as unfounded, states that, if anything, it was the North that had a pre-conceived plan to dominate the country politically using the instrument of the military. He details the manner in which military installations favored the North, and he stressed dominance of the army, indicating that some officers of Southern Nigeria extraction faked their identities and claimed that they are from Northern Nigeria.28 In addition, Madiebo argues that the North used the army as an instrument of political domination. He narrates how Brigadier Samuel Ademulegun was a Yoruba who identified closely with the Northern People’s Congress because he hoped that through such association he would become the first indigenous General Officer to command the Nigerian Army after the British colonial authorities left. He breached military protocols to satisfy the Sarduana by sending troops to the Tiv Division. He claimed the Sarduana had dismantled all opposition to the demand that due process be followed in the dispatch of the soldiers. Sarduana also dismissed the Commanding Officer of the 5th Battalion. These troops were to go to Tiv Division because of his opposition to sending the troops without following due process.29 To ascertain the

21

Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, 4–7. Adewale Ademoyega, Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup (Ibadan: Evans Brothers, 1981), 76. 23 Ahmed R. Mohammed, ‘The Nigerian Civil War 1967–1970: A Critical Look at the Developments that Led to It’, in Nigeria: The First 25 Years, edited by Uma Eleazu (Lagos and Ibadan: Infodata and Heinemann Educational), 73–77. 24 B.J. Dudley, Instability and Political Order: Politics and Crisis in Nigeria (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1973). 25 General Olusegun Obasanjo, My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970 (London: Heinemann, 1981). 26 R.L. Sklar, ‘Contradictions in the Nigerian Political System’, Journal of Modern African Studies 3:2 (1965). 27 W. Schwartz, Nigeria (London: Pall Mall, 1968). 28 Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, 9 – 11. 29 Ibid., 12. 22

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objectivity of Madiebo’s claim that the North was bent on using the military to dominate the rest of the federation, one needs to ask how. The account of Adewale Ademoyega on the reasons for the coup and the rationale for the date gives one an opening from which to appraise the account of Madiebo. In what he captioned ‘NNA [Nigerian National Alliance] Plan to Wallop the West’, Ademoyega wrote: After extensive prodding, we discovered that the Balewa Government had a terrible plan to bring the Army fully to operate in the West for purpose of eliminating the elites of that region, especially the intellectuals who were believed to be behind the intransigence of the people against the Akintola Government ... The Federal Government was to use loyal troops for this purpose and the 4th Battalion in Ibadan commanded by LieutenantColonel Largema and the 2nd Battalion in Ikeja temporarily commanded by Major Igboba, but soon to be taken over by Lieutenant-Colonel Gowon, were designated for this assignment. The operation was fixed for the third week of January 1966, when the Sarduana would have returned from his pilgrimage, and Lieutenant-Colonel Gowon would have completed his takeover of the Ikeja Battalion. In preparation for this horrible move by the Federal Government, the high echelons of the Army and the Police were being reshuffled. Major-General Ironsi was ordered to proceed on leave from mid-January. He was to be relieved by Brigadier Maimalari, over the head of Brigadier Ademulegun. In the Police Force, Inspector-General Edet was sent on leave from December 20, 1965. The officer closest to him was retired and the third officer, Alhaji Kam Salem was brought in as the new InspectorGeneral. The stage was thus set for the proper walloping of the UPGA ‘rioters’ of the West.30

Going through the work of Billy Dudley, one is inclined to agree with Madiebo. Dudley avers that the Nigerian political leaders were so interested in the army to the extent that, by 1962, a quota system for recruitment was introduced for the armed forces. He equally observes that the proportions were not related to geographical distribution of the population between the governmental units of the federation but to the system of elective representation that obtained in Nigeria between 1951 and 1958. This he said allocated half of the representation to the North while the remainder was split between the East and West. However, a greater pointer to northern interest in the army is the fact that the decision to introduce a quota system in the army was so much in contrast with recruitment to other positions under the Federal Government, such as the police or the Federal Civil Service (both of which maintained an ‘open’ recruitment system) that it has to be seen as an indication of the awareness of the political leaders that the armed forces could be used as a political

30

Ademoyega, Why We Struck, 93–94.

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instrument to subserve sectional ends. It was also a reaction to what was thought to be an ‘imbalance’ in the composition of the forces.31

The pertinent question to ask here is why was the quota restricted to the army alone? The question becomes important when one observes that by 1961, of the 1,203 Nigerian officers in the administrative and professional grades of the Federal Public Service, only 34 were northerners. In the executive grades, of 1,150 Nigerians, only 30 were northerners, while in the clerical and technical grades, of 16,770 Nigerians, only 381 were northerners.32 If the answer is equal representation based on regions, it still doesn’t satisfy the curiosity of an investigator. It tends to jettison merit: a sign that the Nigerian project is suffering some form of dysrhythmia and the only plausible answer would be that a hidden agenda exists. Hence Ben Gbulie’s conclusion that in Nigeria of the period (First Republic) mediocrity sat unchallenged on the throne – mediocrity that was sustained by blind leadership. Merit meant nothing and so with talent and industry.33 In spite of Madiebo’s rebuttals, Collis stood his ground by quoting what Ironsi told Gowon. Ironsi was said to have told Gowon: ‘Oh, goodnight, have a good time, have a good night because you never know what may happen to you tomorrow.’34 What was more, he cites an unnamed research fellow of Igbo extraction as having told him that they (the Igbo) were planning what sounded like a takeover and that, when time came, he looked forward to bombing the northern cities and the bridge across the Niger. He also hoped the Igbo would be able to kill the Sarduana, after which he felt it would also be necessary to dispose of the Prime Minister.35 For those who may not read between lines, Collis and Madiebo’s accounts and what happened during coups and counter-coups might appear as real. However, what is at contest here are not the ‘facts’ but the dynamics of the event that would accord the ‘facts’ historical relevance in the light of scholarly academic discourse and objectivity. Collis insists that the Igbo plan to dominate the rest of the federation was made manifest in 1965 when Azikiwe failed to invite the leader of the predominant party to form a government after a general election.36 What is not contested is that Azikiwe’s ‘refusal’ to invite Balewa to form a government immediately after the election resulted from the manner 31

Dudley, Instability and Political Order, 90. 1962 Report of the Nigerianization Officer cited in Eghosa Osaghe, ‘Federal Society and Federal Character: The Politics of Plural Accommodation in Nigeria since Independence’, in Nigeria: The First 25 Years, edited by Uma Eleazu (Lagos and Ibadan: Infodata and Heinemann Educational, 1988), 23–33. 33 Ben Gbulie, Nigeria’s Five Majors: Coup d’État of 15th January 1966 – First Inside Account (Reprint, Enugu: Benlie, 2001), 8. 34 Collis, Nigeria in Conflict, 147 35 Ibid., 148–149. 36 Ibid., 138–139. 32

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in which the 1965 elections were conducted. The election that triggered the crisis brought the army to power. According to Ben Gbulie, the prevailing political situation constituted an unpleasant jar to Nigeria’s nerves.37 This necessitated a change in government, no matter how radical. The answer came in the form of a military coup d’état. Although army officers of Igbo extraction formed the majority of the coup’s planners, the coup was not an Igbo coup. It was probably based on the lopsided nature of the killings that forced Collis to conclude: Even then it seemed odd, if this was true and there was a national revolt against corrupt politicians that only the Prime Minister of the Federation, a Northerner, and the premier of the Northern and Western Regions had been killed while those from the Eastern and Mid-Western Region [Igbodominated areas] were not molested: even when politicians in this latter regions were known to be quite as corrupt as their counterparts in the West and North.38

At this juncture, we have to ask if the original intention of the coup plotters was to kill those political leaders or to arrest them and only kill them if they violently resisted arrest. On this count, Adewale Ademoyega, one of the architects of the coup informs us that during their Lagos meeting, [i]t was agreed that only the use of force could bring immediate end to the violence being perpetrated in many parts of the country. It was, however, agreed that the use of force should be minimal. Political leaders and their military collaborators were to be arrested, but wherever an arrest was resisted, it was to be met with force. Otherwise, no one was to be killed.39

This denies Collis’ account of any element of objectivity. Collis was absolutely correct in his corruption charge against the political leaders of the East and Mid-West. It is on record that two Commissions of Inquiry (the Foster-Sutton and the Coker Commissions) exposed how the leaders used the public as a source of financial capital for their economic interests. Specifically, the Foster-Sutton Tribunal of Inquiry that looked into the affairs of African Continental Bank reported that Nnamdi Azikiwe and his family sustained their financial empire through the use of public funds.40 Granted, Collis’ views are germane for purposes of investigation; his submissions left unanswered many questions that would present a clear picture of events. First is in regard 37

Gbulie, Nigeria’s Five Majors, 8. Collis, Nigeria in Conflict, 142. 39 Ademoyega, Why We Struck, 82. 40 For a detailed account of the said report see Report of the Tribunal Appointed to Inquire into Allegations on the Official Conduct of the Premier of, and Certain Persons Holding Ministerial and Other Public Offices in the Eastern Region of Nigeria, Cmnd. 51 (London: HMSO, 1957), cited in Okwudiba Nnoli, Ethnic Politics in Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980), 145–147. 38

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to his claim that the killing suggests an organized underground plan by the Igbo to topple the government of the federation so as to install one of themselves or, at least, an Igbo as the leader of the nation. Madiebo argues that the coup plotters were mainly Igbo because of the composition and structure of the army then. Ikenna Nzimiro, writing on the same issue agrees with Madiebo by stating that the coup plotters were patriotic and genuine and had no mandate of the Igbo for the coup, but believed that they were serving their fatherland. Nzimiro further argues that the non-ethnic fixation of the masterminds of the coup was clear in their program to make Awolowo the head of their new government.41 General Obasanjo also considered the idea that the coup was not ethnically focused; he stated that Major Nzeogwu’s aims for the coup were not borne out by its method, style, and results.42 The objectivity in this assertion could only be obtained if there were a list of leaders that the ring leaders of the January coup planned to kill. Such a list would show if the leaders of the East were exempt from the planning stage. Gbulie argues that Igbo leaders such as Azikiwe, Okpara, Ironsi, and Arthur Unegbe were in the list of those to be killed by the revolutionaries.43 Fredrick Forsyth expanded the list to include Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu.44 The case of Arthur Unegbe brings to the limelight the fact that the coup was not motivated by ethnic consideration as canvassed by Collis. At the time of the January coup, Unegbe was the quartermaster general of the Nigerian Armed Forces. He lost his life to the January coup plotters because he refused to cooperate with them. The fact that he refused to surrender the key to the armory as demanded by the young officers helped in no small way to facilitate the failure of the coup in Lagos. As the revolutionaries were denied access to arms and ammunition, they became handicapped in carrying out their plans in Lagos, which was the nation’s capital. Ralph Uwechue stressed the importance of Unegbe’s action and his contribution to the failure of the coup in Lagos and the non-ethnic agenda of the coup as follows. It was indeed, exactly this situation that gave Ironsi his chance on that fateful night of 15th January. The loyal troops he rallied at dawn had arms and ammunition to support him. Though they did not suffer the same fate as Lt. Col. Arthur Unegbe, most of the senior Ibo army officers were unaware of the plan to overthrow the government. Here it may be helpful perhaps to

41

Ikenna Nzimiro, Nigerian Civil War: A Study in Class Conflict (Enugu: Front Line, 1982), 86. See also Oha-na-Eze Ndigbo, The Violations of Human and Civil Rights of Ndigbo in the Federation of Nigeria (1966–1999): A Petition to the Human Rights Violations Investigating Committee (Enugu: Snaap. 2002), 12–13. 42 Obasanjo, My Command, 6. For a more detailed study, see Wale Ademoyega, Why We Struck. 43 Gbulie, Nigeria’s Five Majors, 51–55. 44 Frederick Forsyth, Emeka (Ibadan: Spectrum, 1991), 61.

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mention the fact that Lt. Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu, who was in charge of the 5th battalion of the Nigerian Army stationed in Kano, played a decisive role in ensuring the collapse of the coup. He refused to cooperate with Major Nzeogwu who was then in Kaduna and instead gave his support to General Ironsi in the latter’s opposition to the ‘January Boys’. A grateful Ironsi soon afterwards appointed him Military Governor of Eastern Nigeria.45

Both Ironsi and Nzeogwu were of Igbo extraction. However, no outsider would blame Collis for holding the Igbo culpable in the January coup. This is because between 2:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on January 15, 1966, when the soldiers surrounded the lodge of the Premier of Eastern Region and the Enugu Radio station on orders from Lagos, they had all the opportunity to kill the leaders already slated for death in their region. Here there was no Arthur Unegbe to prevent them. That Okpara and Ibiam were with Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus was no excuse as the soldiers who helped them take the Bishop to the airport would have shot them on their way back before the order came. Be that as it may, the failure of soldiers posted to the East to execute the coup created the scope for branding the coup as ethnically based. On this note, the account of Madiebo readily comes handy. He maintains that it is erroneous to state that Unegbe was killed because he refused to surrender the key to the armory to the ‘January Boys’ as he held no keys to any of the armories. He was killed because they feared that if he learned of the death of Maimalari, he would fight back.46 Another clue to buttress the non-ethnic agenda of the coup plotters is their mission statement as encapsulated in Major Nzeogwu’s broadcast to the nation. Nzeogwu stated that the aim of the coup was to ‘establish a strong, united and prosperous nation, free from corruption and internal strife’.47 Part of the internal strife, which the coup plotters wanted to forestall, was an Islamicizing jihad. According to one military intelligence chief, its tripartite aim is: first, to eliminate all powerful southern politicians opposed to the NNA; second, to enforce the present Igbos-must-go hue and cry in the North; and third to impose Islam on the Christian South – and consequently to establish Nigeria as a theocratic Muslim country … Sir Ahmadu Bello is behind it all … and he will be calling the shots I gather.48

It might well be insinuated that the coup supposedly planned by Ahmadu Bello was what the Oha-na-Eze Ndigbo alluded to in their petition to the Oputa Panel, also known as the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission, set up in 2000 to investigate human rights abuses dating back to the military coup of January 15, 1966. In the 45

Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War, 29–30, original emphasis. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution. 47 Nzeogwu January 15, 1966 broadcast, cited in Obasanjo, My Command, 6. 48 Gbulie, Nigeria’s Five Majors, 39. 46

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said petition, they submitted that they had it ‘on good authority that this 15 January, 1966 coup was in fact a counter-coup staged to preempt another coup planned for 17 January, 1966’.49 What might be called the ‘Ironsi factor’ and ‘Gowon’s intrigues’ were very eloquent in the works of both authors as a reason for the civil war. However, their interpretation of the events differs especially in terms of details. All of Ironsi’s actions were seen by Collis as an extension of the Igbo plot. Hence he submits that there is no doubt that, whatever Ironsi’s part was in the coup of January 15, he was ‘aiding what seemed like an Ibo plan to take over the government of the whole country’.50 Collis is of the view that the decision to abolish the regions and adopt a unitary system was an Igbo plan. Hence, he quotes Edozien as having said: ‘I have just come from State House, where we have decided that the only thing to do is to put an end to the Regions.’51 One wonders to whom ‘we’ here refers. Going through the work of Collis, one is forced to conclude that the ‘we’ refers to the Igbo. One of the measures that Collis sees as a design to effect, if not actualize, Igbo domination was the creation of about 20 new colonels. The great majority were Igbos with a view to filling these new posts.52 At this juncture one wonders about the objectivity in Collis’ report. If Ironsi was made head of state in order to actualize a supposed Igbo agenda of domination, why was it difficult for him to take control of the North where Nzeogwu (an Igbo) held sway at the early stage of his assumption of office, or is the North not part of Nigeria? This question becomes imperative in the face of Madiebo’s account. Madiebo enthuses that Nzeogwu ‘had by now discouraged all future operations, and in my attempt to get a quick and tidy end to Nzeogwu’s revolution I had created a stalemate. Ironsi was sitting in Lagos ruling the South and Nzeogwu was ruling the North from Kaduna.’53 For a leader, who through the Constitution Suspension and Modification (No. 1) Decree of 1966, invested all governmental powers on himself, to be so daft and obdurate to the extent that he failed, in the words of the axiom, to put his ears to the ground to hear the ballad of the ant is, to say the least, suspect and questionable. What the plot envisioned was totally different from what happened. It is what happened that is history – not what we thought would happen. Nzeogwu made us understand that their purpose was to change the country and make it a place we could all be proud to call our home. He argued that tribal considerations were completely ludicrous, but a setback occurred in the execution.54 This does not mean that Collis was entirely biased against 49

Oha-na-Eze Ndigbo,The Violations of Human and Civil Rights, 12. Collis, Nigeria in Conflict, 150. 51 Ibid., 150. 52 Ibid., 151. 53 Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, 25. 54 Africa and the World 3:31 (May 1967), 15, cited in Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War, 64. 50

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the Igbo. As an outsider, the contradiction between Nzeogwu’s plan and the result of the coup is suspect; more so, the order that led to the failure of the coup in the East came from Ironsi.55 Other ‘Ironsi factors’ are the way and manner he handled the officer who carried out the January coup, his enactment of Decree No. 34, tagged the Unification Decree, and his insensitivity to northern feelings. Madiebo maintains that the disaster that followed the coup was entirely due to weakness and lack of clear realistic political objectives and discipline on the part of the military regime which inherited power. The January coup was successful for that regime to have rectified whatever was done badly and still retain power, discipline and respect. What happened was that Nigeria, which was being treated for an overdose of compromise by those who carried out the coup, was being administered with more doses of compromise by Ironsi’s regime, which inherited power after the revolution.56

To ascertain the level of objectivity of Madiebo’s account, we need to find out what happened and at what time in order to understand if Ironsi actually made compromises where he should not. B.J. Dudley provides a quick answer to the latter by arguing that Ironsi vacillated regarding what to do to the January 1966 coup plotters. In May, the case of these men was brought before the newly created Supreme Military Council where finally it was decided that they should be brought to trial, but rather than implementing the decision, Ironsi suggested that the trial be postponed to July. In July, there was another postponement to September.57

This validates Madiebo’s account where he stated: This regime, formed in the first instance on basis of compromise between Ironsi and Nzeogwu on the one hand, and Ironsi and the politicians on the other, aspired to rule successfully by compromise. For this reason it tried to placate those who sought to destroy it and took no action on various substantiated reports available to it concerning plans to overthrow it.58

On these charges against Ironsi and his administration, the authors differ. Collis blamed the situation on Ironsi personally and his dream to actualize the Igbo agenda to dominate the nation. Madiebo blamed the situation largely on Ironsi’s administration and partly on Ironsi as an individual. On this count, one needs to cite Collis at length: The only misgiving I had at that time was continually meeting the more disreputable Ibos in the State House, men like the doctor who made a vast 55

For details, see Walter Schwarz, Nigeria (London: Pall Mall, 1968), 193–198. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, 28. 57 Dudley, Instability and Political Order, 115. 58 Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, 29. 56

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fortune out of his various official positions which he had obtained through politicians ... As far as I was concerned, however, Ironsi could not have behaved with greater consideration or been more cordial when I met him and I still find it hard to believe that he was acting the part of honest broker and covering up a further Ibo murder plot which is now believed to have been in the offing at the time.59

People might be forced to come to the conclusion that it was ‘the more disreputable Ibos in the State House’60 that dictated for Ironsi what to do. This notion may be right as Obasanjo observed that ‘Ironsi was handicapped by his own intellectual shortcomings; and his advisers (who were inward-looking) did not help him very much’.61 Ralph Uwechue made a similar assertion: Because the ‘discredited’ politicians were methodically left out of the show (a number of them including the erstwhile Premier of the Eastern Region, Dr. Michael Okpara, were imprisoned), the government of the Region was robbed of the politicians’ most important asset – supple realism. The void thus created greatly enhanced the voice and the chances of the ‘diehards’ who despite their proven abilities in the relatively closed world of civil service and academics were novices in the tortuous game of politics.62

Writing in the same vein, Collis surmised that Ironsi was personally in a hopeless situation as he was pushed by the leading Igbos to place them in strategic positions ahead of others by fair means or foul, which placed him in an impossible position, being pushed ‘forward all the time by unscrupulous fellow Ibos, so he had no choice’.63 Hence, the acts of omission or commission by Ironsi helped to facilitate Nigeria’s easy march to crisis – a point Madiebo equally corroborated. Be that as it may, there is no objectivity in the account of Collis to the effect that the suspension of the constitution by Ironsi was to effect an ‘Igbo agenda’. If this was an Igbo agenda as deduced by Collis, one wonders why all the military regimes and even the so-called civilian democracy in Nigeria since the overthrow of Ironsi had retained a unitary system in practice. Hence, W. Alade Fawole wrote that though the unification policy was greeted with protests and riots especially in the North, a situation that eventually led to the bloody overthrow of the Ironsi regime two months later in July 1966, it remained the hallmark of successive military regimes from then until May 1999.64 59

Collis, Nigeria in Conflict, 144. Ibid. 61 Obasanjo, My Command, 6. 62 Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War, 89–90. 63 Collis, Nigeria in Conflict, 153. 64 W. Alade Fawole, ‘Military Rule and Unitarianization of Nigeria’, in Richard A. Olaniyan (ed.), The Amalgamation and its Enemies: An Interpretive History of Modern Nigeria (Ile-Ife: Obafemi Awolowo University Press, 2003), 149–165. 60

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After Ironsi was killed in the July counter-coup, a leadership vacuum existed because, according to Collis, there was no definite plan by the young officers and there was also no Supreme Commander. Following this gap in planning, it was natural for one to think that, as an institution that placed emphasis on seniority and hierarchy, Brigadier Ogundipe (as the most senior military officer) would assume the position. However, this was not to be, because in the view of Collis ‘there wasn’t sufficient thrust between him and the troops’.65 It is on record that there were about six Nigerian soldiers who were senior to Gowon. If they did not trust Ogundipe, what of the other five, of which Ojukwu was one? This lull paved the way for Yakubu Gowon, who was the most senior military officer of Northern Nigerian origin to assume the leadership of the nation. Emeka Ojukwu, being senior to him and a stickler to military ethics, refused to recognize Gowon as the head of the new government. This introduced confusion in the already troubled Nigerian polity. A big question arose from the choice of Gowon: If he was chosen because he was the most senior army officer of Northern Nigeria extraction, it meant that the soldiers still recognized seniority, but not for the army of the nation, rather a section. It was this that Collis harped on in Chapter 7 of his work under Gowon and Ojukwu. Collis argues that Gowon made every attempt to bring peace back to the troubled polity, first by retaining Ojukwu as the Military Governor of the Eastern Region and then by maintaining the Igbo part of the army on full pay: thus, Ojukwu foiled all attempts at peace.66 On the notion of Ojukwu foiling Gowon’s attempt to bring peace to Nigerians, Madiebo says the contrary by referring to what became the fate of the Ad Hoc Constitutional Conference, which was set up to find a workable solution to the Nigerian crisis. Madiebo argues that even as the conference was being held, killings were going on in Northern Nigeria on a scale unknown before the conference. The killings prompted Ojukwu to demand that all soldiers should be returned to their regions of origin in accordance with an agreement reached between Gowon and the Regional Governors in August, 1966. (This meeting was held on August 4.) Gowon turned down Ojukwu’s demand and went a step further to suspend the Ad Hoc Committee indefinitely on the grounds that ‘it no longer served any useful purpose’67 – an indication that Gowon’s effort was not thwarted by Ojukwu but by Gowon who could not control the killings and the committee members. Gowon’s refusal to order military officers of Northern Nigerian extraction to go back to the North and their being made to stay in the West, especially Lagos, is suspect. Forsyth made us understand that Collis’ account is not in any way objective on 65

Ibid., 153. Ibid., 155–156. 67 Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, 81–82. 66

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this count, stating that when the easterners began to kill northerners in their midst Ojukwu ordered that they should be escorted to safety by the police. This, he said contrasted dramatically with Gowon’s complete inability to do anything to protect his fellow-Nigerians in his own home region.68 Gowon’s inability to control the anger of his region may be accounted for by his quest to please the North. If not, how can one justify the fact that one of the grievances held against Ironsi was that he did not try the January coup plotters for overthrowing a duly constituted authority? Gowon did the same and was not questioned. The only plausible answer one might arrive at is that both Ironsi and Gowon suffered the same fate: indecision and fear of losing the support of their regions and ethnic groups. Another issue that engaged the attention of both authors as a cause of the war as well as a factor in the failure of the ‘Biafran project’ are the roles of Ojukwu’s ambition and his ‘sole administrator mentality driven by personal agenda’. Collis maintains that the real cause of the continuation of the war is the person of Ojukwu himself; that without him and possibly a small group of devoted adherents, the other Ibo leaders being realists whatever their hopes of domination were in the past, now realise that this aim is impossible of attainment or that secession of Biafra could be accepted by the rest of Nigeria.69

Collis’ account was supported by Ralph Uwechue who advises, ‘that this fight became a fight for secession was Lt. Col. Ojukwu’s political decision’.70 Madiebo’s account allows even more on this issue as he states that, surprising as it may sound, it is true that not a single military officer to my knowledge, received an official briefing on the explosive political battle that was going on between Gowon and Ojukwu. The military got news of what was going on either from civilians, or through the wireless. Thus, the news of the Aburi Conference, the Ad Hoc Constitutional Conference and even the very declaration of independence came to the Army as a surprise over the national radio network.71

Equally, Ojukwu was accused by Madiebo of not taking the army into confidence; a fact he said may be the reason Ojukwu leaned entirely on the civilians for all military purchases, including weapons. Even when the weapons arrived, they were hidden around villages around Nnewi, an arrangement outside of the military control.72 The absence of trust introduced division into Biafra leading to sabotage – a major cause of 68

Forsyth, Emeka, 71. Collis, Nigeria in Conflict, 213. 70 Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War, 58. 71 Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, 87. 72 Ibid., 90. 69

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the failure of Biafra. This was made eloquent by the division in the militia leading to the emergence of two factions, each opposed to the other: the Port Harcourt Militia and the National Militia.73 Madiebo equally held that Ojukwu promoted nepotism by staffing the University Teaching Hospital at Enugu with either Nnewi citizens or their friends.74 The validity and objectivity in all these charges against Ojukwu is certain if one wants to know why Biafra failed. If not, how does one rationalize the fact that even on the very day Philip Effiong signed the formal act of Biafra’s surrender, Ojukwu was reported to have said: ‘While I live, Biafra Lives. If I am no more, it would be only a matter of time for the noble concept to be swept into oblivion.’75 He was a sort of megalomaniac, which forced Madiebo to conclude that ‘we often left the straight path leading to our objective in search of such frivolities as personal power, wealth and making one’s name’.76 Propaganda was also used by both authors as a tool used in the war. Collis saw the Biafran use of propaganda as a means to curry favor and support from the international community and as a tool to achieve their voyage of deceit. Madiebo saw the excessive use of propaganda by Biafra as a major undoing. Madiebo enthused that part of the failure of Biafra could be accounted by the fact that ‘we perhaps spent by far too much time and money on propaganda with little left for military preparations’.77 This obtains even when all the indices point to Biafra’s unpreparedness for the war either from the points of view of strategic planning or availability of resources. That the latter is true was made clear by Madiebo, who tells us that ‘the Biafran soldier therefore fought for almost three years naked, hungry and without ammunition’.78

Conclusion All writings are propelled by an interest, historical writing being no exception. For an episode as sensitive and volatile as the Nigerian Civil War, various writers have tried to present their own stand point with a view to convincing the public that their accounts are authentic and factual and therefore objective. After all, history is the history of thought.79 Such writers often tend to forget the dictum by Agathon with respect to history. Agathon maintains that ‘the Gods are not all powerful, they cannot change the past’.80 The past cannot be changed in spite of how 73

Ibid., 103. Ibid., 88. 75 Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War, 133–134. 76 Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, 389. 77 Ibid., 94. 78 Ibid., 118. 79 Carr, What is History? 22. 80 Agathon cited in Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London and New York: Verso, 2001), v. 74

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hard a writer may desire to change it. It remains as it is. Interpreting it to suit one’s countenance is only a miscarriage of justice. Robert Collis and General Alexander Madiebo wrote what might be termed their personal reflections of the Nigerian Civil War. Each asserted that his account was objective, yet they have two different theses. Collis maintained that the civil war occurred because the Igbo wanted to perfect a plan to dominate the rest of the federation. Madiebo saw the war as a consequence of a failed revolution originally planned to effect a change in the political leadership of the Nigerian state, which had shown signs of cracks in its political walls based on power tussle and the unbridled, if not unparalleled, recourse to the Hobbesian state of nature.Both authors agreed that ethnic rivalry in Nigeria has remained an albatross hanging on the neck of the nation. They both made an objective assessment of the situation in Nigeria before the January 1966 coup. However, they both neglected some vital information that would give readers an objective assessment and help them understand the dynamics of politics in Nigeria that eventually culminated in the civil war. Such omission blurs their accounts and denies them objectivity. For a good interpretation of the reactions that followed the January 1966 coup spearheaded by Nzeogwu, one needs to refer to the statement made by the Sarduana of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello in 1960. Bello enthused: The new nation called Nigeria should be an estate of our great grandfather Uthman Dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We use the minorities of the North as willing tools and the South as a conquered territory and never allow them to rule over us and never allow them to have control over their future.81

The above statement from a leader of no mean order has a lot of implications and would help any scholar who is interested in having an objective account of the Nigerian Civil War. This mindset must have informed the choice of the scandalous rigging of the November 1965 election into the regional parliament of Western Nigeria aimed at installing Sir Samuel Akintola in office as the Premier of the region. As Nigerians were busy bemoaning the fraudulent 1965 election, Sir Ahmadu Bello and Akintola scheduled a meeting in Kaduna January 13 and 14, 1966. During this meeting, the duo were said to have hatched diabolical schemes for the declaration of a state of emergency and the ruthless extermination of all opponents to an obnoxious tyranny they had installed.82 However, their plan was cut short by a ‘pre-emptive strike’ by some ‘dissidents in the Army’, which resulted first in a counter-coup 81

‘Oporoza House: The Niger Delta Struggle in Perspective’, Daily Sun, July 17, 2014, www. sunnewsonline.com (accessed August 8, 2014). 82 Mokwugo Okoye, Embattled Men: Profiles in Social Adjustment (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980), 142.

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in July, 1966, then secession by the Eastern Region (Biafra), and then civil war.83 The ovation that greeted the January coup at its initial stage throughout the country is indicative of the fact that the ideas of the coup plotters were popular. Collis argued that the lopsided nature of the killing of political leaders and military officers by the Nzeogwu group points to an Igbo plan to dominate the rest of other ethnic groups in the nation as being the reason for the January coup. However, a look at the ethnic group to which the military officers who foiled the January coup came from indicates that they were mainly of Igbo extraction. Ironsi foiled the coup in Lagos. Madiebo prevailed on Nzeogwu not to launch his planned offensive on the South, which would have had a different result. Ojukwu refused to take orders from any person save Ironsi or any other person collectively chosen by the Supreme Military Council by insisting on the traditions of the army: respect for seniority and hierarchy. This was in the Nigerian army, not Eastern Nigerian or Igbo Army. Lagos, where Ironsi foiled the coup, was the nation’s capital then, and Nzeogwu held sway in the Northern Region where all the nation’s military installations were under his control. A point often misunderstood and interpreted out of context, especially by Collis, is that Ironsi was never part of the coup and was never known to have nursed the ambition of becoming Nigeria’s head of state. He only became the leader of the nation when, following the coup of January 1966, Balewa’s whereabouts were unknown, and there was a vacuum in leadership. Ben Nwabueze argues that, legally speaking, given the urgent need to have a government that would help confront Nzeogwu’s planned assault on the South, the remnants of the federal council were given an assessment of the situation by the commanding general officer. Nwabueze, quoting a government document, writes: Among the available ministers there was much jockeying for leadership. It soon became clear that none of them was acceptable to all as a leader. They proved incapable of maintaining their own unity. How much less able would they have been to mobilise soldiers from the North! In the face of the ministers’ own disunity, surely the path of reason and the one most calculated to preserve their own lives and the safety of the nation was to withdraw, even if temporarily, from the helm of affairs, and let others handle the situation. In the event, that was what they did. In a short but historic speech at 11:50 p.m. on 16 January, the acting President, Dr Nwafor Orizu [the president, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, was away on a convalescent holiday in Britain], announced to the anxious nation that he had ‘tonight been advised by the council of ministers that they had come to a unanimous decision voluntarily to hand over the administration of the country to the Armed Forces of the Republic with immediate effect,’ and expressed his ‘fervent hope that 83

Wole Soyinka, The Man Died (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 162.

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the new administration will ensure the peace and stability of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and that all citizens will give them full co-operation.’84

What is even more important in assessing the level of objectivity in Collis account is the fact that, granted that both Nwafor Orizu and Ironsi were Igbo, the decision was not taken by the Igbo alone. Also worthy of note is the fact that Ironsi administration was meant to be an interim one. The ethnic origin of Ironsi, coupled with his inactions and acts of omissions and commissions sent fear into the northern citizens. Their fear is justified based on Azikiwe’s statement in 1948 when he stated: It would appear that the God of Africa has specially created the Ibo nation to lead the Children of Africa from bondage of all ages … The martial prowess of the Ibo nation at all stages of human history has enabled them not only to conquer others but also to also adapt themselves to the role of preservers … The Igbo nation cannot shirk its responsibility.85

This particular statement injected more bad blood than had existed between the various ethnic groups in Nigeria and forced them to form ethnic unions. Dr Eyo Ita was to fall a victim of what appears to be a fulfilment of Zik’s dictum in 1952 when Azikiwe used ethnic sentiment to dislodge him from the leadership and membership of the National Council of Nigerian Citizens. Probably based on fear that the Igbo wanted to actualize their dream, the North had to organize a counter-coup that swept the Ironsi administration, which was supposedly dominated by Igbo leadership and had enthroned Gowon, a northerner, without due process. The quest for due process – even if underneath it hid personal ambition – made Ojukwu challenge the authority and legality of the Gowon administration. He subsequently declared the Eastern Region as the independent state of Biafra. Any search for an intellectual history of the Nigerian Civil War must highlight the long trend of events in Nigeria, some of which predate the amalgamation, and the contest for political and economic space in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria.

84

Government Notice No. 147 of 26 January 1966, cited in B.O. Nwabueze, A Constitutional History of Nigeria (London: Longman, 1982), 162. 85 Okwudiba Nnoli, ‘Ethnic politics’, in The Biafran War and the Igbo in Contemporary Nigeria Politics, edited by E.C. Obiezuofu-Ezeigbo (Lagos: Pan Negro Continental, 2007), 341. See also J.S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), 347.

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‘War is War’ Recreating the Dreams and Nightmares of the Nigeria-Biafra War through the Eyes of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy Cyril Obi

Introduction This chapter posits that the historiography of the Nigeria-Biafra War has been characterized by a few ‘blind spots’. This comes to the fore when examining the ways the war has been deployed by scholars analysing the role and place of ethnic minorities located in the oil-rich parts of Eastern Region. These ethnic minorities’ territory became the object and terrain of war between a secessionist Biafra and the Federal Government of Nigeria. During the Nigeria-Biafra War, the ethnic minorities of the oil-producing Niger Delta were ‘caught in the crossfire’, torn between Ojukwu’s declaration of Biafra’s independence and a historic opportunity to achieve the age-old quest for ethnic minority rights and self-determination.1 It was an ambition driven by the determination to end perceived domination by the numerically predominant Igbo ethnic group of the Eastern Region. It was also buoyed by the creation of three new states in 1967 by the Federal Military Government for ethnic minorities in the Niger Delta, thus freeing them from the hegemony of the Eastern Region, which was dominated by Igbo elites. The creation of Rivers and South-Eastern states out of the former Eastern Region (and the creation of the new Mid-West State out of the old Mid-West Region) also encouraged some ethnic minority elites from the Niger Delta to support the federal side when the civil war broke out in 1967. While most accounts of the Nigeria-Biafra War have focused on its causes, specific events, and roles of various actors on both sides in the war (secessionist Biafra and the Federal Government of Nigeria), they have either glossed over or ignored the ways in which the war divided previously united and harmonious communities and people. In many cases, they have failed to capture the complex ways in which the war created a space for some individuals to change sides, trade places, and opportunistically take advantage of a war that simultaneously enriched 1

Cyril Obi, ‘Because of Oil? Understanding the Globalization of the Niger Delta and Its Consequences’, in Natural Resources, Conflict, and Sustainable Development: Lessons from the Niger Delta, edited by Okechukwu Ukaga, Ukoha O. Ukiwo, and Ibaba Samuel Ibaba (New York: Routledge, 2012).

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the few and decimated the impoverished and vulnerable majority trapped in war-ravaged Biafran territory. By the same token, a lot of the war literature has either been dominated by the works of professional historians or consist of a plethora of war accounts written by a range of actors, particularly military officers and politicians. However, some works of fiction based on the Biafran experience have enriched the literature on the war, and many of them appear to reflect or advance perspectives of the war ‘by literary means’.2 In spite of this, a case can still be made for the need to explore the paradoxes and ambiguities that defined the place of the Niger Delta ethnic minorities during the war, and how these played out in the years and decades that followed. More important perhaps is the need for more fictional works that evaluate the impact of the war on the people of the Niger Delta region against the background of the highly centralized oil-dependent, post-civil war Nigerian federalism. It is against this background that this chapter critically examines how Ken Saro-Wiwa’s work of fiction Sozaboy is deployed as a narrative of the experiences of the Ogoni ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta before, during, and after the war. The novel can be located within a narrative of how ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta experienced the Nigeria-Biafra War. It interrogates ethnic minorities’ interpretation of their roles and the positions they adopted as the war spread to and engulfed their rural communities. It also touches on the ways in which the logic of survival in war brought out the best and the worst in people and political actors, in a context where the real motive for fighting became blurred or unclear to some of the perpetrators and their victims. The story of the war is narrated by Mene or Sozaboy, an initially naïve young man who is transformed by the ‘winds of war’ into a soldier, or soza, proud to defend his community and win the respect of his family and peers. Finding himself facing the harsh realities of war and at different times fighting on both sides, being taken prisoner by both sides, and ending up losing everything, Sozaboy represents a literary critique of the Nigeria-Biafra War. This can be gleaned from the story of this young soldier severely traumatized by the season of anomie occasioned by the sheer destructiveness and horrors of the war. In more ways than one, Sozaboy personifies his community’s wartime experience narrated in the form of the recollections of the young villager swept into a war that he really never understood and from which he did not benefit. Although the story is rendered in a mixture of peculiar humor and ‘Rotten English’ by the protagonist, it is a literary representation of a community’s plight caught in the throes of a violent upheaval and constitutes a vantage locus from which to reinterpret the history of the Nigeria-Biafra War from below. 2

Hugh Hodges, ‘Writing Biafra: Adichie, Emecheta and the Dilemmas of Biafran War Fiction’, Postcolonial Text 5:1 (2009), 1.

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Cyril Obi

In setting about its task of interrogating warfare through the NigeriaBiafra War as seen through the eyes of the young soldier from Dukana, this chapter is organized into four broad sections. This introduction sets the context for the creative representation of the place of the ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta in the Nigeria-Biafra War, including the narration of wartime destruction and suffering and places this in the context of a violent form of nation-state building. It is followed by an analytical section connecting the story of the civil war to the portraiture of Mene and his transformation from an apprentice lorry driver to a soldier. This sets the stage for the third section that explores how the author teases out the paradoxes, pains, and ambiguities that underpinned the Nigeria-Biafra War, and its connections to the place of ethnic minorities in the Nigerian project. The fourth section sums up the main arguments of the forgoing sections and captures some of the ramifications of the history of war for the future of the Nigerian nation-state project.

Seeing War like Sozaboy: A Portraiture Set in the fictional Dukana community in the Niger Delta, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the author’s Ogoni land, the narrator, Mene, illustrates how far removed Dukana is from national political crises.3 He experiences the crises, first as rumors, news from the radio and then stories told by returnees from other parts of the country. For Mene, the motor-apprentice and his boss, the driver, the crises presaging the war are seen as an opportunity to make money by charging passengers fleeing from the massacres of the Igbo in Northern Nigeria, which forced them and other Eastern Nigerians to flee to their ancestral villages. As Mene recalls: We people cannot understand plenty what was happening. But the radio and other people were talking of how people were dying. And plenty people were returning to their village. From far places. We motor people begin to make plenty money … In the motorpark, the returning people were saying many things. I heard plenty tory by that time. About how they are killing people in the train; cutting their hand or their leg or breaking their head with matchet or chooking them with spear and arrow. Fear begin catch me small.4

Although he is confused as to reasons behind the crises and, despite making more money, Mene is afraid.5 He is aware that fear is also spreading throughout the community; the local chief, rather than reassure 3

Note the interesting fact that Bori – the real-time traditional headquarters of the Ogoni – is reported on page 1 as the district headquarters. 4 Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy (New York: Longmans, 1994), 3. 5 Ibid.

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the villagers, takes advantage of the situation by imposing a special tax on his subjects to support the government. Most of them were too impoverished to pay. It is clear, however, that the people distrusted the various forms of authority, including their local chief. They regard them as corrupt. As Duzia the cripple notes in response to the demand to pay the special tax: ‘How can porson like myself without house, without wife, without farm, without cloth to wear begin give government chop? Not government dey give chop and money and cloth to porson?’6 Mene is an only child. His mother, a peasant farmer, struggled hard to see him through elementary school but could not afford to send him to secondary school. Therefore, he ended up as an apprentice driver to the community’s lorry, called ‘progress’. He is a simple lad with modest ambitions to become a lorry driver. His naïveté comes up in at an encounter dancing with a young stewardess at African Upwine Bar in ‘New York’ Diobu: ‘I have never hold woman like I hold that service that night. Even woman never tell me what that baby was telling me. Shame catch me. I cannot talk again. I continue to dance but my dance is not dance again.’7 Afterwards, it is from this young female ‘service’ or stewardess that he comes face-to-face for the first time with the story of the looming civil war, told by someone displaced from Lagos and looking for her mother in Dukana.8 She is surprised Mene is unaware of the crises: ‘You no hear wetin dey happen? They are killing plenty people, so I return home.’9 But even then, he is still confused about the war. He says, ‘now that Agnes ask me wetin I think of trouble, I confuse small. I don’t know what I will say’. 10 However, he is very pleased to have attracted the attention of a ‘sophisticated’ Lagos girl and quickly falls in love with her, noting: ‘I am very proud because I am the only boy that Agnes talks to every time. I think that one day, I will marry Agnes.’11 A chance encounter with Zaza, a World War II veteran who boasts about his exploits in Burma, and Agnes’s preference for a strongman who can defend her in times of trouble convince Mene to become a soldier (soza).12 His resolve was reinforced when soldiers started to raid Dukana villagers, harassing and extorting them, even beating Zaza severely. No-one stood up to them, not even the leader of the community, Chief Birabee.13 However, Mene remains confused and afraid to the point of being haunted by nightmares.14 6

Ibid., 7. Ibid., 14. 8 Ibid., 14–17. 9 Ibid., 16. 10 Ibid., 19. 11 Ibid., 21. 12 Ibid., 37. 13 Ibid., 41. 14 Ibid., 45–49. 7

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At that point, the people of Dukana and Mene had been only indirectly affected by the war, except for growing poverty symbolized by the high cost and relative scarcity of salt. Mene captures the state of suffering thus: ‘So now salt is costing one shilling instead of two pence for one cup, it means that poor man cannot chop again. Country don spoil.’15 To get into the army, Mene pays a bribe to a recruiter, Okpara, like other young recruits before him. He enlisted in Pitakwa (likely the Biafran Army then in control of Port Harcourt). Although the author deliberately omits which side of the war Sozaboy joined, it is likely the Biafran side. However, it is clear that Sozaboy is really impressed with the smart uniform and gun, although he does not initially understand the drill and learns that he will have to wait a considerable time to get a uniform and gun. He also learns that war can have unpleasant consequences. As his instructor ‘Tan Papa’ warns, ‘because war is war’.16 As the narrator, Mene also shows that he did not understand most of what the Chief Commander General said when he addressed them as young army recruits at a passing out parade, but hopes he will have an opportunity to show off his uniform and gun to his friends and new wife in Dukana and to protect his people during the war.17 Yet his naïveté about the purpose of the war leads him to ask himself, ‘how war go finish when everybody don die finish? Na who go live to enjoy after that? Does it mean that myself, my wife Agnes and my mama go don die finish by that time? Then why are we fighting then?’18 His confusion is compounded by a tall man who he remembered seeing at the African Upwine Bar in Diobu discussing war with a short man. He subsequently gives the tall man the nickname, Manmuswak (a coinage from man must wack, i.e. eat). Manmuswak, an enemy soldier waving a white flag, visits his army company and plies them with gifts of cigarettes and drinks. Later, Sozaboy gets into trouble after his company gets drunk on alcohol stolen from the Captain’s tent, earning them seven days of detention and torture. Their ringleader ‘Bullet’ was tortured and forced to drink the Captain’s urine. Sozaboy begins to lose his innocence. In his words: ‘And I know that there will be trouble. Trouble will bring trouble. And trouble does not ring bell.’19 He sadly witnesses the murder of his Captain by his friend and company leader Bullet (an obvious case of revenge), who also later loses his life in a bombing raid by an enemy plane that left many in their company dead and their camp in ruins.

15

Ibid., 23. Ibid., 75. 17 Ibid., 78. 18 Ibid., 90. 19 Ibid., 103. 16

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Sozaboy is forced to flee into the swamps to avoid capture. Weakened by hunger and prolonged exposure to the elements he falls into coma. He notes: I come say to myself that oh my God, war is very bad thing. War is to drink urine, to die and all that uniform that they are giving us to wear is just to deceive us. And anybody who think that uniform is fine thing is stupid man who does not know what is good or bad or not good at all or very bad at all.20

Waking in the hospital, he is shocked to see Manmuswak, a recurring presence since the earlier encounter at the Upwine Bar in Diobu and on the war front as a ‘friendly’ enemy combatant. Now he was at a field hospital run by the Nigerian army working as a nurse!21 After recovering, Sozaboy denies that he is an enemy combatant, and is subjected to further torture. On his release, he is transformed from a prisoner of war to the ‘uniformed’ chauffeur of the (enemy Nigerian) Army captain that ordered his torture. At this point, all he can think of is how to return to Dukana, having realized that the suffering of war was becoming unbearable. Sozaboy’s journey back to Dukana, would later reveal a broken community, and the unwelcoming, indeed, haunting state of his destroyed homestead, representing the ‘nightmare’ that the NigeriaBiafra War was for many communities in the Niger Delta. Taking advantage of his new position, he sneaks off to visit Dukana to look for his mother and wife only to be shocked at the scale of destruction. Oh God of mercy. When I see my home town Dukana, I could not talk … when I see my own home town, I begin cry. I reach there for afternoon time. I did not see anybody, lai lai … I go my mama house … The only thing I see in the house is just empty pot and mortar and bucket. Nothing again.22

Even Sozaboy’s friends Duzia and Bom cannot believe he is still alive after going off to war.23 They tell him of the atrocities committed by rampaging soldiers: looting, raping, and killing villagers followed by bombings by a plane and another invasion by another set of (enemy) soldiers forcibly displacing all those that survived the horrific attack. In addition, another set of (Biafra) soldiers forcibly evacuated war survivors from Dukana to refugee camps located in Biafran territory. As Duzia lamented the situation: ‘Dukana don die. The war have buried our town.’24 But Sozaboy is further disappointed because there is no definitive news about the two people he cared for most: his mother and wife. He also cannot justify his fighting for the enemy army when his 20

Ibid., 114. Ibid., 119. 22 Ibid., 129. 23 Ibid., 131. 24 Ibid., 135. 21

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people are missing, so he abandons the ‘enemy side’ and goes away without leave to search for them. His search takes him to Nugwa refugee camp in Biafran territory. The living conditions were horrendous. There he meets his friend, the World War II veteran Zaza, who tells him that Dukana people are hated in Nugwa. Painting the picture of the paradoxical situation of Dukana people who fled into Biafra for protection, he notes, ‘we are among friends and they are hunting us like animals. I tell you, no strong young Dukana man or boy can go in this town and they will not catch him and put him in the army straight or into prison or they just kill him and eat him. Is this the action of friends?’25 Wandering around camps in Nugwa, Mene is brought to tears by the state of squalor, hunger, disease, and human suffering. He leaves for Urua, another refugee settlement, where he runs into Dukana people, including local elites like Pastor Barika and Chief Birabee. Another friend Terr Kole confides in him about how a few people were making good in the midst of the immense suffering in the camp: But there are some people, few people who are eating very well. Three times a day. Those few people and all their family. Those people are also having plenty money … But they hide the money under the ground for the same place where they bury all those small small children who are dying because of hunger and kwashiorkor.26

Throughout all these traumatizing events, Mene cannot establish the whereabouts of his mother and wife. To make matters worse, Chief Birabee turns him in as an ‘enemy soldier’ in exchange for rice and stockfish. Following an unsuccessful escape, he is captured and taken captive by the Biafra side. Mene is sent to a detention camp where each day one of his fellow inmates is taken out and summarily executed. He runs into Manmuswak again, this time working for the Biafran side. He wonders to himself how one individual can be fighting on both sides: ‘I cannot understand how this Manmuswak can be fighting on two sides of the same war. Or is it his brother? Or are my eyes deceiving me because I am sick for a long time?’27 Just as rumors are rife that the war is ending, he narrowly escapes being summarily executed along with other prisoners, because Manmuswak runs out of bullets. All of them dash for the bushes. Mene again makes his way back to Dukana in the hope of reuniting with his mother and wife. Without a home and with the community destroyed, he sleeps in the ‘broken church’ in Dukana. When he eventually goes into town, people are afraid that he is a ghost returning to haunt the community and kill people. To make

25

Ibid., 146. Ibid., 156. 27 Ibid., 166. 26

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things worse, he learns that his mother and wife were killed in a bombing raid and his entire world collapses and he decides to leave the town. He laments: As I was going, I was just thinking how the war have spoiled my town Dukana, uselessed many people, killed many others, killed my mama and my wife … and now it have made me a like a person whey get leprosy because I have no town again.28

In the end, Sozaboy finds that he embarked on a hopeless venture and lost out in a war that was beyond his comprehension and reduced him to a mere pawn in the chessboard of national politics by uncaring leaders and colluding elites. Sozaboy recalls his misfortune with regret: And I come say to myself that oh my God, war is very bad thing. War is to drink urine, to die and all that uniform that they are giving us to wear is just to deceive us. And anybody who think that uniform is fine thing is stupid man who does not know what is good or bad or not good at all or very bad at all. All those things they have been telling us is just stupid lie.29

The portraiture of Sozaboy is emblematic of the fate of Dukana people as ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta. A once proud and loving young man, broken by war and ostracized by the community he wanted to defend, ends up losing the people he loved most in his life. In more ways than one, his story captures the personal and collective catastrophe that the war represented. It also points to a trend that often fails to come out clearly in most discussions about the civil war: how a few local elites and soldiers benefitted immensely from the war at the expense of many people who endured a lot of suffering or even lost their lives. War is represented as bringing out the base instincts of survival, greed, and inhumanity, as dividing and destroying homes and hopes of people, and as betraying one’s dreams. It is one long endless nightmare where ordinary people and soldiers were mere pawns in a game being played by larger political forces.

The Pains and Paradoxes of the Nigerian Civil War: Sozaboy as the Ethnic Minority Voice in the Nigerian Nation-State Building Project Sozaboy is a literary work that speaks to the issue of what the war meant to the ethnic minorities of the Eastern Region (Biafra during the war), particularly those living in Eastern Niger Delta. Jeffrey Gunn points to the political underpinnings of the novel among others:

28 29

Ibid., 181. Ibid., 113–114.

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In the milieu of political activism, Sozaboy successfully presents the struggles of an ethnic minority group during wartime to a world audience. In doing so, Saro-Wiwa empowers ethnic minority groups by challenging Nigerians to look upon the history of their nation and consider the subordinate status that has been assigned to ethnic minority groups.30

While Gunn refers to the use of the ‘language of ambiguity’ in Sozaboy to capture the ‘trouble’ that besieged the country and the Dukana people, it is useful to explore how the ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta fit into the nation-building efforts of the contending sides in the Nigeria-Biafra War.31 Sozaboy tends to reflect the point that ethnic minorities ‘suffered from attacks from both sides in the Biafran war’.32 But he refrains from locating Dukana directly in the historization of the Nigerian nation-state. Rather what the reader glimpses are the vicissitudes of a much larger nation-state project through the eyes and story of the Dukana nation caught in a war that it does not fully understand but victimized nonetheless by both sides, with the complicity of some of its elites, including the likes of Chief Birabee and Pastor Barika. Another point that few commentators note relates to the class dimensions to the war. Mene is the son of a peasant mother. The beginning of the novel leaves no-one in doubt about the corruption of Chief Birabee, who makes money out of the ‘trouble’ by extorting money from villagers to ‘help’ in the governments’ war efforts. In Mene’s words, ‘trouble bring small money for Chief Birabee because that money which he is collecting for government he must chop part of it’.33 When he runs into his friend Terr Kole in the Red Cross camp in Biafran territory, he is told: some people have chopped the people food and sold the cloth that the Red Cross people ask them to give all the people. They are selling this food and cloth and afterwards they will preach to people and when they have dead, they will bury them with prayer and ask God to take care of them in heaven.34

This underscores the role of corrupt Dukana elites, personified by the chief and pastor who are living well by feeding off the misery of ordinary people and colluding with the Biafran Army, which has looted the community and moved its members to a refugee camp where they lived in horrendous conditions. Mene again captures the wretched conditions in which they lived: 30

Jeffrey Gunn, ‘Inside “Rotten English”: Interpreting the Language of Ambiguity in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy’, eSharp 11 (2008), 19. 31 Ibid.; Also see, Cyril Obi, ‘What happens to us after they suck out all the wealth from our lands? Globalisation, environment and protest politics in Nigeria’, Politeia 28:1 (2009), 96–97. 32 Hodges, ‘Writing Biafra’, 5. 33 Ibid., 19. 34 Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy, 156.

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this camp is proper human compost pit and all these people they are calling refugees are actually people that they have throway like rubbish. Nothing that you can use them for. They have nothing in this world. Not common food to eat. And everything that they have, they must beg before they can get it. All their children have big big belly like pregnant woman.35

This also brings to light some of the paradoxes of the war where members of oppressed minorities colluded with the oppressor against their own people for selfish reasons. Although not explicitly stated, Mene is actually accusing the Dukana elites of betraying their own people, an act that is symbolized in a dramatic way when the same elites trap and hand over Mene (who sees himself as joining the war to protect Dukana people) to the army as a deserter, where he will face further punishment and possible death. Thus, it is possible to approach the position of the ethnic minorities from the perspective of double-layered oppression: the first by the ethnic-majority groups that dominate political power in Nigeria and Biafra, and second by those ethnic minority elites profiting from the suffering of their own people. This coheres with a point made by Gunn that ‘Sozaboy is an empowering voice for suffering ethnic minority groups in the “fractured reality” created by the nation-state in postcolonial Nigeria’.36 He goes further to observe how the author of Sozaboy represents the sad plight of ordinary people caught up in the war: ‘Saro-Wiwa creates a voice for the voiceless by inventing a language which he terms “Rotten English” … It is a mixture which allows “Rotten English” to cross ethnic and cultural barriers and allows a critique of all parties involved in the Nigerian civil war.’37 Beyond this Gunn argues that the use of such language provides Sozaboy, as member of an ethnic minority, with a vehicle for critiquing all sides to the Nigeria-Biafra War, including some Dukana elites.

Ethnic Minority Struggles and the Nigerian Project The origin and nature of the ethnic minority agitation for self-determination and local autonomy is a well-known aspect of post-independence nation building in Nigeria.38 Two issues were critical. The first was the protest of the ethnic minorities against perceived ethnic-majority domination in the three regions (Eastern, Northern, and Western), and the second was the discovery and growing significance of oil in the Niger Delta, which became an object of interest by all the regions, particularly

35

Ibid., 148. Gunn, ‘Inside “Rotten English”’, 3, citing Christopher Walsh, ‘Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English’, The Explicator 60:2 (2002), 112–113. 37 Ibid. 38 Eghosa Osaghae, ‘Structural Adjustment and Ethnicity in Nigeria’, Research Report 98, Uppsala, The Nordic Africa Institute, 1995. 36

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the East, within whose territory (Niger Delta) many of the oil fields lay.39 Thus, when Biafra seceded and laid claim to the oil-rich Niger Delta, the ethnic minorities there were split between those that supported Biafra and those that supported the federal side in the hope that such support will translate into freedom from Igbo (Biafran) hegemony and control over the oil resources in their communities. However, in Sozaboy, neither oil, Ogoni, nor Biafra are directly mentioned, but there is enough evidence to place the events firmly in the context of Nigeria’s immediate postcolonial history, particularly the political crises of 1965, 1966, and 1967 – or the ‘trouble’ that presaged the outbreak of the civil war. It is clear about the immense suffering of the ethnic minorities represented as Dukana in the hands of both sides in the civil war – the Biafran and Nigerian troops – and the destruction of the communities. Sozaboy represents the successful use of literary means to tell the story of the ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta. It is told from the perspective that, far from being willing allies, the ethnic minorities were pressed into service and suffered abuse in the hands of leaders from both sides of the civil war. Other literary works on the war convey a different message and adopt a perspective that other ethnic groups, particularly the Igbo, who led the Biafran struggle, bore the brunt of the war. Since this chapter is not about who suffered more but focuses on Sozaboy and his people, it limits itself to discussing how the author of Sozaboy explores the plight of the ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta during a war that redefined (and centralized) the distribution of power and hence the basis of the post-civil war Nigerian nation-state building project.

Sozaboy’s War: What Implications for Nigeria? Sozaboy’s historical account of the war, though rendered in ‘Rotten English’, no doubt captures the transition of the main character from someone buoyed by dreams of protecting his community and family at the beginning of the war to being haunted by the nightmare of harrowing trauma, loss, and regret at the end. The key towards unlocking the importance of the fictionalization of the ethnic minority perspective to the Biafran War lies in its connection to the Nigerian nation-state project and its crisis. It also touches upon the fundamental question, did the Nigeria-Biafra War put an end to the marginalization and oppression of ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta? The Nigerian nation-state project cannot be understood outside of a structural crisis rooted in history, politics, and economics. The 39

Cyril Obi, ‘The Struggle for Resource Control in a Petro-state: A Perspective from Nigeria’, in National Perspectives on Globalization, edited by Paul Bowles, Henry Veltmeyer, Scarlett Cornelissen, Noela Invernizzi, and Kwong Leung Tang (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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immediate post-independence national project was based on strong regions, each with a relatively strong economic basis in globally linked cash-crop production and exports: groundnuts and cotton in the North, cocoa and rubber in the West, and palm produce and timber in the East. The immediate post-independence national project was also dominated by a hegemonic ethnic-majority elite, the collapse of global cash-crop prices in the mid-1960s, and the gradual rise in global oil prices, all of which had implications for politics within the Nigerian nation-state. It contributed to the growing interest of hegemonic regional elites (ethnic-majority groups) in the control of the oil produced in the ethnic minority regions of the South (Niger Delta). Such was the situation that, in 1965, Northern Nigerian elites warned their Eastern counterparts against staking claims to the oil in the Niger Delta.40 The following year, an attempt by a group of Ijaw activists calling themselves the Niger Delta Volunteer Force, led by Isaac Adaka Boro, to proclaim the Niger Delta Republic through force of arms was brutally crushed by the Federal Military Government on February 24, 1966.41 A key aspect of their demands was to prevent the region’s oil from falling into the hands of the Igbo elite, which was dominant in the Eastern Region. The Igbos drew their power from the oil located in the Igbo-dominated Eastern Region. The elite from the Hausa-Fulani and Yoruba, the two majority ethnic groups, and the minorities of the Eastern Region (Niger Delta) all had a mutual interest in resisting eastern claims to oil in the region.42 The geography of economic power shifting to ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta in the mid – to late 1960s shifted control of the new source of national wealth from the regions to the center, a move that was justified in the name of national unity and development. This shift was partly driven by an expedient panNigerian elite coalition that sought to prevent the secessionist Eastern Region from claiming the Niger Delta oil fields. It was further cemented by military victory that imposed a centralized logic on Nigeria’s hegemonic federal experiment, effectively sounding the death knell of regional autonomy and political decentralization. Power relations, defined by oil-based accumulation, fed into the monopolization of power (over oil revenues) by those elites who effectively ‘captured’ federal power, and led to the inequities, oppression, and exploitation that characterized the post-civil war political system. 40

Augustine Ikein and C. Anigboh-Briggs, Oil and Fiscal Federalism: The Political Economy of Resource Allocation in a Developing Country (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 103. 41 Ugbana Okpu, Ethnic Minority Problems in Nigerian Politics: 1960–1965,(Uppsala: Studia Historica Upsaliensa 1977), 136; Cyril Obi and Siri Aas Rustad, eds, ‘Introduction’, Oil and Insurgency in the Niger Delta: Managing the Complex Politics of Petro-Violence (London: Zed, 2011), 6. 42 Cyril Obi, ‘The Changing Form of Identity Politics in Nigeria under Economic Adjustment: The Case of the Oil Minorities Movement of the Niger Delta’, Research Report 119 (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2001), 21.

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Mobilized to oppose Biafra’s claim to the oil-rich Niger Delta region and further sever the ethnic minority groups on the Atlantic shoreline from the Biafran project, ethnic minorities from the Niger Delta who claimed ownership of oil turned out to be the focal point of ethnic identity politics after a prolonged period of marginalization and neglect. This shift in the relations of power with some ethnic-majority elites in the North and West won them three states, namely Midwest, Rivers and SouthEastern, and satisfied, to a large extent, their age-old quest for inclusion in the prevailing political and economic equation. A remarkable moment of inclusion marked several decades of struggles: some ethnic minority elites of the Niger Delta had come to see the creation of these three states and their new-found economic power as leverage over the majority ethnic groups and a basis for laying claim to the wealth of their region.43 However, as events would later show, this thinking failed to materialize in 1970 after the war, as the banner of ‘national unity’ under which the war was fought and won resulted in supremacy of the national power over the sectional interests and the consolidation of central(ized) control over economic and political power. These actions were a means of preventing regional or sectional claims from becoming strong enough to challenge or threaten the dominance of the federal government (as in the case of Biafra), thereby affirming the superiority of a homogenizing ideology of the Nigerian nation-state fueled by an oil-boom-induced dependence.44 It would appear that Sozaboy, though fictive, was perhaps a reflection of the reality that many ethnic minority elites initially thought that siding with the federal side during the war would reverse the marginalization of the region and people, and give them control of the oil within ‘their territory’, a belief that turned out to be mistaken. Centralized federal post-war governance did not deliver on expectations for the minority elite’s control of oil. Centralizing the collection of all oil revenues in the Federal Military Government meant that all ownership and rights to produce oil were vested in those groups who controlled the federal government. The transfer of control over revenues generated from the oil found in the Niger Delta (by reducing the percentage of the revenue allocation principles based on derivation) to the federal government meant that the marginalization of the ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta took a new turn. Although the Niger Delta ethnic minorities had their own states, they lacked control of the oil revenues generated from within those states.45 The Federal Military 43

Ken Saro-Wiwa, On a Darkling Plain (Port Harcourt: Saros, 1989). Obi, ‘The Changing Form of Identity Politics’, 22–23. 45 Adebayo Adedeji, Nigeria Federal Finance: Its Development, Problems and Prospects (London: Hutchinson, 1969); and Dagwom Dang, ‘Revenue Allocation and Economic Development in Nigeria: An Empirical Study’, Sage Open (September, 2013), www.academia. edu/4787433/Revenue_Allocation_and_Economic_Development_in_Nigeria_An_Empirical_Study_Introduction (accessed November 28, 2014). 44

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Government’s control of oil was further legitimized by Decree No. 51 of 1969, which, among other things, ‘vested in the Federal Military Government the entire ownership and control of all petroleum: in, under or upon any lands in Nigeria; under the territorial waters of Nigeria; or all lands forming part of the continental shelf of Nigeria’.46 At the end of the war, it became apparent that ethnic minorities of the oil-producing Niger Delta had lost out in their bid to control ‘their’ oil in a post-civil war Nigeria state based on a centralizing logic of national unity which meant that oil was a nationally owned asset – with access and distribution solely determined by the federal government. It did not take long before the minority elites began to protest against what they perceived as their marginalization from the oil wealth produced from their ancestral lands and waters, and wealth controlled by a ‘distant’ federal government operating in partnership with foreign oil multinationals.47 In a foreshadowing of future developments, some minority elites gained access to the ‘spoils’ of the oil economy through their federal patrons, and they acted as ‘gatekeepers’ facilitating the extraction of oil by the state-oil alliance.48 This in some way was reminiscent of the ways characters like Chief Birabee and Pastor Barika in Dukana used their positions to advance personal interests at the expense of the masses. The benefits of oil never trickled down to the masses in the impoverished communities of the Niger Delta, even in the oil-boom era. The situation was intensified by the immersion of Nigeria’s economy in crisis and the pronounced intensification of struggles over diminishing oil rents. Much has been written about the evolution of such non-violent campaigns for self-determination and resource control that later fueled insurgency, which only abated after the declaration of a presidential amnesty program in 2009.49

Conclusion When Sozaboy was published in 1994, its author Saro-Wiwa was leading a campaign for ethnic minority rights and resource control on behalf of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, representing the 46

Cited in Obi and Rustad, ‘Introduction’, 6. Obi, ‘The Struggle for Resource Control’. 48 Ibid. 49 Augustine Ikelegbe, ‘Popular and Criminal Violence as Instruments of Struggle in the Niger Delta Region’, in Obi and Rustad, Oil and Insurgency in the Niger Delta; Obi and Rustad, ‘Introduction’; Obi, ‘Because of Oil?’; Ukoha 2007; Rhuks Ako, ‘The Struggle for Resource Control and Violence in the Niger Delta’, in Obi and Rustad, Oil and Insurgency in the Niger Delta; Shola Omotola, ‘Why the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria Matters;, in Horror in Paradise: Frameworks for Understanding the Crises of the Niger Delta, edited by Christopher LaMonica and J. Shola Omotola (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2014); Kenneth Omeje, High Stakes and Stakeholders: Oil Conflict and Security in Nigeria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 47

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Ogoni ethnic minority group in the Niger Delta. Combining an international and national campaign with the unprecedented mobilization of ordinary people, it would appear that Sozaboy was part of the creative representation of the plight of the Ogoni during and after the civil war – rewriting its history through the eyes and mouth of a Dukana youth lured to a war founded on lies, deception, brutality, and betrayal. A war in which he set out to be a hero but returned from severely traumatized to a ravaged and broken community, to become a ‘ghost’, unwanted at home. The novel’s portrayal of the Nigeria-Biafra War might be interpreted as negative. However, this chapter lays more emphasis on the ways in which the author has used literature to convey a particular message, a message connected to a struggle that remained unresolved after three years of a bloody civil war. Perhaps its message touches a particular thread of the Ogoni struggle in post-civil war Nigeria, particularly the role and place of oil minorities in the nation-state building project. It is a critique of war, preferring non-violent struggle as a means of projecting a people’s demands. Sozaboy may be said to symbolize the story of the Niger Delta’s ethnic minorities in times of struggle, or it may as well be the personal story of someone whose dreams for himself and his people at the beginning of a war that turned into a nightmare. Either way, the message appears to be, ‘war is a very bad and stupid game’.50

50

Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy, 151.

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12

First, There Was a Country Then There Wasn’t: Reflections on Achebe’s There Was a Country* Biodun Jeyifo

‘Where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it.’ Igbo proverb quoted in Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments, 1611

Part One First, there was a country; then there wasn’t. To anyone who has read Chinua Achebe’s last book, There Was a Country,2 this statement that serves as the title of the reflections in this essay might seem to refer to Biafra. Indeed, Achebe’s book is a powerful and harrowing account of the crises that led both to the creation and the destruction of the secessionist republic. But I am also referring to Nigeria in this statement. For implicitly but implacably, Achebe’s new book also hints at a Nigeria that once was – or at least was on the verge of becoming – but is now vanished, seemingly forever, leaving only the trace of a national desire that is now completely in ruins. Not since Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died3 has a book so grippingly taken us back to the very foundations of how our country came into being, only to be almost immediately faced with the possibility of being stillborn with only very vague hints at how – if we are courageous, truthful, and fortunate – we might yet realize the Nigeria that we desire. Thus, Achebe’s book is almost at every turn aware of itself as the work of a writer, an intellectual addressing other writers and intellectuals and challenging them on such fundamental issues as the relationship of the writer to ethics and justice and the responsibilities of the true, humanistic intellectual to racial, national, and ethnic others. Indeed, as much as Achebe’s new book is conscious of the general reader, it is for the most part mainly addressed to the international community and the world at large. It is much like Soyinka’s 1972 book, which was *

This is a slightly revised version of a series that was spread over five weeks in the author’s weekly column, ‘Talakawa Liberation Courier’, in The Sunday Guardian (Nigeria) from December 23, 2012 to January 20, 2013, inclusive. 1 Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1989). 2 Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2013). 3 The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).

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a direct challenge to Nigeria’s community of writers and intellectuals, especially those who saw themselves in the progressive and humanistic traditions of intellectualism. At any rate, this is the point of departure for the reflections on Achebe’s memoir in this essay. Chinua Achebe was, of course, one of the world’s pre-eminent writers and intellectuals. For members of my generation of Nigerian and African writers, critics, and academics, as we came to intellectual and political-activist maturity, Achebe was a figure who exerted a powerful, authoritative fascination for us, even if there were the inevitable occasional small disagreements and quarrels. For me in particular, I have always regarded Achebe as one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the last 150 years. The proof of these assertions is the fact that among all writers of the last half century, and second only to Wole Soyinka, Achebe has been the writer to whose works I have returned again and again in the last three decades. In all, I have written a monograph and five essays, three of them quite substantial, on Achebe as a writer and intellectual. I can report that the Achebe that I have personally encountered in this book is more or less the enormously powerful realist writer that I saw and greatly admired in nearly all his previous writings minus his poetry. However, there is another Achebe that is almost completely new to me in There Was a Country. It is a challenge to precisely characterize this other Achebe standing beside the old, urbane, and subtle realist writer in this last book, but I will try. The writer as propagandist, media apparatchik, and ideological zealot, this is the Achebe who stands side by side with the great writer we have seen and admired since Things Fall Apart.4 As I went through the middle two parts of the four parts of There Was a Country, I was startled by the recognition of how close, from start to finish, Achebe had been to the Biafran political leadership. By his own oft-repeated assertions and anecdotes in the book, Achebe was not only one of the most important roving ambassadors for Biafra, he was also the star media and information propagandist for the breakaway republic. Also, going by his own assertions in the book, Achebe was a close adviser and confidant of Ojukwu, the Head of State of Biafra. To perceive one of the many ramifications of this aspect of Achebe’s self-presentation in his new book, it is important to recognize that while some prominent intellectuals felt and expressed major differences with the Biafran leadership during the war – with some actually being accused, tried and executed for treason – to the very end Achebe remained close to and intimate with the Biafran leadership. In my view, and unless I am mistaken, among all major and highly regarded African writers in the twentieth century, only Agostino Neto of Angola went 4

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958).

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farther than Achebe did in Biafra in placing his writing and his intellectual capacities completely at the service of the state. The point, though, is that while Neto, who was himself the leader of the anti-colonial nationalist movement and Head of State of the independent Angolan state, was very open and even militant in insisting that his intellectualism was indivisible from his role and actions as a politician-statesman, in There Was a Country, Achebe operates under the presumption that regardless of how close and faithful he was to the Biafran leadership, his independence and autonomy as a writer and intellectual were intact. But this is, at best, a genuine but mistaken assumption; at worst, it is more or less a self-serving delusion and mystification. I intend to bring the ‘two Achebes’ that we encounter in There Was a Country into a dialogical relationship with each other: on the one hand, the superb realist writer and progressive intellectual; on the other hand, wartime propaganda and media warrior and ethno-national ideological zealot. For those who might intuitively presuppose that I have in mind a hierarchy, a ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ order of integrity between these two putative Achebes, I hasten to say that this is not necessarily so. In other words, I will not hold one Achebe as a corrective, a benchmark for the other. Far from this, my central frame of reference simply is that against Achebe’s own presuppositions we must keep both in view: the writer and the ideologue. Achebe’s book is divided into four parts. In reality, the fourth and last part is really an epilogue that brings the chronological, temporal ordering of the contents of the book from the past of the first and second coups of 1966, the massacres of May and August of the same year, and the Nigeria-Biafra War to present-day Nigeria. For those who might have either completely missed it or seen it and not paid much attention to it, let me emphasize that it is only in this fourth part that Achebe talks substantially of a Nigerian ruling class. In the three main sections of the book, only a casual nod is accorded to class; the focus is totally and uncompromisingly on ‘tribe’, on ethnicity. For every one of us, and especially for writers and intellectuals, this raises many questions. Was this a deliberate choice on Achebe’s part? What particular kind of conception of ethnicity does he deploy in There Was a Country? Was there no ‘ruling class’ in the Nigeria of the precivil war years? In Biafra, was class so effectively and completely folded into ethnicity that it had little or no relevance or significance? If Achebe quite deliberately decided to base the main sections of his book on ethnicity while excluding class and other indices of social identity, what methodological and philosophical pressures does this exclusion place on him as a writer and intellectual, especially in light of the fact that he is, first and foremost, a realist writer? Can the devastating case that Achebe makes against the Nigerian ruling class in the fourth section of his book also be made against the Biafran ruling class of which he was such a prominent and influential figure, especially with regard to

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the central moral and human catastrophe at the heart of the book, this being the issue of mass starvation and the alleged attempted and nearly successful genocide committed against the children of Biafra? These are extremely difficult questions for which there are no easy or simple explanations. Achebe’s new book provides us with both a great challenge and a wonderful opportunity to engage them honestly and rigorously.

Part Two Superficially, it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed ‘an Igbo coup’. However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors are discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo in name only … [H]e was widely known as someone who saw himself as a Northerner, spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional Northern dress when not in uniform. Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country, 79 In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile, 24

Although ‘Nigerian ruling class’ appears twice in the book (on pages 69 and 243) – and the closely related phrase ‘Nigerian ruling elite’ appears once (on page 108) – it is the most stunning aspect of the general intellectual and discursive architecture of the book. This ‘architecture’, this ‘grammar’ is none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of the book, all of Achebe’s ‘explanations’ and speculations are relentlessly driven by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that matter. Logically, inevitably, the corollary to these ‘explanations’ and speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra – and interclass factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately excluded. As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable departure from virtually all of Achebe’s writings prior to this recently published book. For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete subsumption of class into ethnicity in There Was a Country with two particularly telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the book. The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than the January 15, 1966, coup itself, arguably the ‘opening shot’ in the chain of events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra War, the central subject of Achebe’s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant body of both general and academic writings, discourses, and works of fiction on this signal event. Indeed, Achebe’s long citation of his sources in the bibliographic section of his book mentions many of these writings and discourses on the coup. It is, therefore, baffling that of the variety of

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‘motives’ or ‘interests’ that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the single one that Achebe addresses in his book is ‘tribe’ or ethnicity: was it, or was it not, ‘an Igbo coup’? There have been suggestions and speculations that it was a ‘southern coup’ as most of the political and military leaders assassinated or inadvertently killed were overwhelmingly either northerners or southerners in alliance with northern leaders. More pertinent to the present discussion, there has also been even more plausible speculation that class and ideological interests were significant in the motives of influential coup members, like Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of the two alliances of the ruling class parties of the First Republic, the conservative Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and the somewhat social-democratic United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), all those assassinated belonged to the NNA, with the single exception of Festus Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister and right-hand man of the Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa; but Okotie-Eboh was effectively an ally of the NNA. S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was assassinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region, was spared. Thus, we can surmise that Okpara was spared, not because he was Igbo but because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As a matter of fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the intention of making or ‘forcing’ Chief Awolowo to assume the office of Prime Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies of UPGA were far more regionally and nationally popular and credible than the southern and conservative allies of the NNA. Achebe’s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was it, or was it not, ‘an Igbo coup’? That is all Achebe is interested in exploring – and disproving – in There Was a Country. Of the many threads that form the complex fabric of that fateful coup d’état, this single thread of ethnicity or ‘tribe’ is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his book. We might speculate that this may be because by the time of the terrible massacres of May 1966 against Igbos in the North, all other plausible motives for the coup had been almost completely erased by assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had incontrovertibly been an Igbo coup. Indeed, the massacres targeted all Igbos whether they were members of the ruling class or not, seeming therefore to completely subsume class into ‘tribe’. But class factors quickly reinserted themselves into the unfolding catastrophes and crises so that, by the time of the failed constitutional talks that led to the declaration of secession and the outbreak of war, no commentator, writer, or intellectual could credibly and persuasively exclude class as a crucial vector of analysis and reflection.

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At any rate, Achebe’s book was written and published more than 40 years after the event, and it had the advantage of both historical hindsight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For this reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding that Achebe almost certainly had a driving rationale for sticking exclusively to ethnicity or ‘tribalism’ while simultaneously ignoring or excluding all other plausible, and in some cases historical factors. This is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our two examples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the Nigeria-Biafra War. Here, in Achebe’s own words, is the particular case: By the time the government of the Western region also published a white paper outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions in the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and all over Nigeria in general had become untenable.5

This is indeed a fact, but it is a partial fact: one aspect of a complex of facts and realities, many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure. It is useful to carefully state what these other facts and realities were. First, the Western Region Government to which Achebe alludes here was that of Chief Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most pernicious rightwing government and party in Southern Nigeria in the entirety of our post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact and fixes exclusively on this government’s anti-Igbo programs and diatribes. He deliberately implies that this government spoke for and acted on behalf of the people of the Western Region. In actuality, Akintola’s government and party were not only extremely unpopular, they turned their unpopularity into a hardened, reified form of autocratic rule. They were not only virulently anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously antiwelfarist and anti-socialist. A brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola tirelessly satirized a range of targets and issues within which Igbos were only one composite group. He was particularly fond of spewing out twisted, parodic visions of welfarism and socialism in which everything would be shared: wives, children, family heirlooms, and personal belongings. Lastly, Akintola and his party quite deliberately stoked the fires of intra-ethnic tensions and resentments within Yoruba sub-groups, and they took this as far as founding a rival pan-Yoruba organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa (Society of the Descendants of Oduduwa – the ancestor of the Yoruba), which they called ‘Egbe Omo Olofin’ (Society of the Descendants of Olofin). For good measure, they 5

Achebe, There was a Country, 77.

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tried, unsuccessfully, to encourage the late Duro Ladipo to write and produce a play to counter Hubert Ogunde’s famous pro-Awolowo and pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu. It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic facts and realities were so well known at the time that Achebe could not have been ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion than Achebe simply had no place in his book for any factors, any realities beyond a pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and belonging in which no other aspects of social identification are allowed to ‘contaminate’ the singularity of ethnicity. This, I suggest, is what we see in its quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two epigraphs to this section to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo ‘in name only’, the January 15 coup could not have been ‘an Igbo coup’. Previously, I made the assertion that Achebe was one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the last 150 years. I now wish to clarify the relevance of that assertion to the present discussion. One of the most compelling claims of realism is that it is the mode or genre in which the chain of representation in a work of literature or, more broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest to the chain of causality in nature, history or society. In a layman’s formulation of this ‘big grammar’, this means that above all other modes, forms and genres, it is in realism that what is presented in a work of art or a treatise is as close as you can possibly get to how things actually happened. Put another way, a big gap exists between how things actually happen and how they are (re)presented in writing. It is only the most gifted and talented realist writers who come close to bridging that gap. In all of Achebe’s books on our precolonial and postcolonial experience, he came closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception and practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class, and individuality had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such titles as No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah, The Trouble with Nigeria, and Home and Exile.6 Thus, in my opinion, There Was a Country marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on our country, a rupture in which the realist rigor of his previous writings gives way to, or is considerably modified by, a mystique, an apologia in which an uncompromising promotion of Igbo ethno-nationalism almost completely ignores or obscures class until the fourth and final part of the book. But ethnic groups and communities never act or relate to one another solely on the basis of ‘tribe’ or ethnicity. This is particularly true in all modern, multi-ethnic nation-states in which typically, axiomatically, classes – or fractions of classes – act as the pivot, the lever around which, for better or for worse, in war or peace, ethnic groups 6

Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (London: Heinemann, 1969); A Man of the People (London: Heinemann, 1966); Anthills of the Savannah (London: Heinemann,1987); The Trouble with Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension,1983); and Home and Exile (Anchor, 2001).

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relate to one another. Thus, Achebe’s near total occlusion of class in this new book – for the very first time in all his writings – amounts to a great intellectual and ideological blind spot. I do not think that Achebe took this path in his new book in a fit of absentmindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a choice he made in the book quite deliberately and purposively. In Part Three, I shall consider this choice, with particular reference to what I personally regard as one of the most controversial aspects of There Was a Country, this being the link that Achebe makes in the book between what he deems the endemic ethnic scapegoating of Igbos in our country and the utter collapse of meritocracy in post-civil war Nigeria.

Part Three Nations enshrine mediocrity as their modus operandi, and create the fertile ground for the rise of tyrants and other base elements of the society, by silently assenting to the dismantling of systems of excellence because they do not immediately benefit one specific ethnic, racial, political or specialinterest group. That, in my humble opinion, is precisely where Nigeria finds itself today! Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country, 236

In the epigraph to this section, we have one of the many instances in There Was a Country in which Achebe urges a strong, perhaps even determining link between what he deems, not without considerable justification, an endemic ethnic scapegoating of Igbo people in preand post-civil war Nigeria and the total collapse of meritocracy in our country. With the possible exception of the subject of mass starvation and the claim of attempted genocide during the Nigeria-Biafra War, I confess that within the comprehensive and capacious scope of Achebe’s new book, nothing startled me more than this particular topic. Let me explain. Like most self-identified progressive commentators on the civil war and the events and crises that both led to and came after it, I had assumed that the mass slaughter of Igbo people in their thousands in the massacres before and after the July 1966 ‘Northern coup’ constituted the core of what had to be engaged, analysed, understood, and positively transcended in that dire, tragic period of our history. In essence, this entails the thesis that dominant elements within the right-wing successor state that came into being after the July 1966 coup not only stood by while Igbo people were being slaughtered but were actually behind the massacres. Any state that not only fails to provide guarantees and protection for the lives and properties of large segments of its population but also oversees the perpetration of such crimes loses both its political sovereignty and moral legitimacy. From this perspective, secession from Nigeria was both almost inevitable and a right to survival. Moreover,

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with a bit of historical hindsight, it is not difficult to see that what we are experiencing right now in the generalized climate of terror and insecurity around life, freedom of movement, and safety of possession in nearly all parts of the country – especially in the North – have their distant but effective roots in those massacres of May and August 1966. Against this background, the theme of the link between the ethnic scapegoating of Igbo people and the total overthrow of merit and excellence leading to a pervasive culture of mediocrity in contemporary Nigeria constitutes a related but separate topic, one that I personally have never encountered in the extraordinarily controversial and tendentious manner in which Achebe espouses it in There Was a Country. In the genuine hope that I am neither oversimplifying nor distorting Achebe’s ideas and claims on this subject in his last book, here follows a succinct summary of what I consider his five interlocking theses on the topic. 1 In a multi-ethnic nation like Nigeria, differences pertain not only to language, culture and customs but, crucially, also to rates and levels of effective absorption of education and currents of modern thought and culture. 2 By the time of the first decade of the post-independence period, the Igbos had surpassed all other ethnic groups in Nigeria in education, the professions, politics, trade and commerce. 3 This situation led to acts and expressions of thoughtless and exhibitionist arrogance among some Igbos and deep resentment and envy among non-Igbos. 4 The characterization of the January 15, 1966 coup as ‘an Igbo coup’ provided the justification for an organized, systematic mobilization, across nearly all other ethnic groups in the country, of resentment of meritorious Igbo intellectual, professional, commercial and cultural achievements. 5 Henceforth, merit was displaced as the benchmark for conducting the business of the nation in all areas, to be replaced by an all-pervading culture of mediocrity that was/is clothed in the garb of ‘federal character’. The essential elements of Achebe’s ideas on this particular topic are contained in a short section of Part One of There Was a Country titled ‘A History of Ethnic Tension and Resentment’.7 But this theme runs throughout all the four parts of the book like a leitmotif that undergirds the comprehensive and compelling ethnographic history of Igbo resilience and achievement under adverse historical and political conditions that Achebe celebrates throughout the book. In other words, though Achebe’s new book also extensively deals with registering the traumas 7

Achebe, There was a Country, 74–78.

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and tragedies that came with war, defeat, and post-war crises of reintegration into Nigeria, the central intellectual theme of the book is the loss that Nigeria sustained – and continues to sustain to this day – when mediocrity effectively replaced meritocracy after Igbos were purged from the intellectual and professional centers of our public life in those fateful months between January and August 1966. It is important to emphasize that, though the essential ingredients of this theme of Igbos as a dominant force, a collective benchmark for merit and excellence in our country had been tentatively broached in Achebe’s previous writings, notably in The Trouble with Nigeria and Home and Exile, the author had been more cautious, more restrained, and more comparative in those two previous books. For example, in The Trouble with Nigeria, the essential argument was that though the Yoruba had the advantage of a great historical and geographical head start over Igbos, the latter caught up with the former in education and the professions within three decades of the mid-twentieth century. In Home and Exile, Achebe’s extensive reflections on the vigorous and enthusiastic embrace of education and modernity by Igbo people had been made within the wider framework of a powerful Pan Africanist celebration of the elements within all African cultures that made them sift and choose the good from the bad in the currents and forces of modernity. But in this new book, Achebe takes this same nexus of ideas and makes of them a part of his startling claim that in the crises leading to the Nigeria-Biafra War, the Igbos were made the collective ethnic scapegoat of a nation caught in the paroxysm of an ‘Igbophobia’ that was effectively a mask, a pretext, a rationale for the overthrow of meritocracy and the consequent massive institutionalization of mediocrity in our country. In the fourth and final part of the book, as an illustration of the deliberate targeting of Igbo intellectual and professional achievement in the pervasive post-war culture of mediocrity, Achebe gives an account of how a ‘former president’ of Nigeria deliberately unleashed on his own home state of Anambra ‘corrupt politicians with plenty of money and low IQs’.8 He makes much of the fact that this was happening in Igboland and was connected to the former president having a strong and punitive aversion toward Igbo people. In other words, Achebe is deliberately insinuating here that this is a continuation of the pre-civil war overthrow of meritocracy on the basis of a virulent Igbophobia. But what he ignores, consciously or unwittingly, is what that former president was doing in Igboland in particular, and in Yorubaland in general: he appointed corrupt and mediocre politicians across the country. In case the ‘moral’ of this critique of Achebe’s link between ethnicity, meritocracy, and mediocrity is missed, let me point it out: each ethnic 8

Ibid., 248.

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group in Nigeria has its own actual or potential corrupt and mediocre politicians. This is because neither mediocrity nor meritocracy is innate in any ethnic group, each one being the determinate outcome of factors that pertain as much to class as to ethnicity. More pertinently, Achebe is grossly mistaken to trace the roots of the culture of mediocrity in our country to the purging of Igbo intellectuals and professionals in federal, regional, and local public agencies, institutions, and enterprises in those fateful months of 1966 before the Nigeria-Biafra War. For mediocrity preceded the crises leading to the civil war, as Achebe’s own novel, A Man of the People, powerfully and memorably demonstrates. Moreover, the culture of mediocrity in post-civil war Nigeria became exponentially much bigger when oil wealth replaced the pre-war export crop economy as the primary means of surplus extraction by the political class drawn from all of Nigeria’s ethnic groups, major and ‘minor’. In other words, in the new oil-dominated national economy, value – including merit and excellence – became disaggregated from work, effort, thrift, and innovation. Thus, meritocracy, and its obverse, mediocrity, are both too big, too complex as social and intellectual phenomena to be reduced to the single, determining agency of ‘tribe’ or ethnicity. Indeed, based on all his previous writings before this new book, this truism is something that Achebe himself had explored vigorously and compellingly. I have pondered long and hard on why Achebe in this book seems to be in such a desperate need to give a glaring supremacist twist to the incontrovertible historic achievements of Igbos in education, the professions, the arts, commerce, politics, sports and culture. The immediate historic context and justification for Achebe in this exercise seems to have been the indisputable fact that after the January 15, 1966 coup, there was a widespread but carefully manufactured fear of Igbo domination in all federal institutions and parastatals. This manufactured fear served as the basis and the pretext for the right-wing Northern and Western regional governments of the period to begin compiling data and statistics that seemed to reflect an orchestrated domination of the country that involved all Igbo people, even though the alleged spheres of domination specifically entailed middle and upper-middle class professions. Ironically, what Achebe’s own ‘list’ of Igbo professional and intellectual achievements in his new book does is to retroactively and inadvertently produce that alleged – and dreaded – domination by all Igbos. This observation needs careful elaboration. Achebe neither refutes nor impugns the accuracy of the figures and data in the lists compiled by the Northern and Western regional governments of the period; he merely ‘explains’ the data and statistics away by more or less implying that the alleged Igbo dominance was justified by achievement, by merit. The problem with this ‘explanation’ is that it conflates class with ethnicity. For if the figures and data released by the NNA parties were accurate, this only reflects the fact that at that point in time, Igbo middle and professional classes enjoyed a clear advantage

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over the middle and professional classes of other ethnic groups, principally the Yoruba and the Hausa-Fulani who then used the crises of 1966 to opportunistically wipe out that advantage. Is this the end of the story? No! The problem and issues did not end with the pre-civil war crises, as Achebe himself repeatedly asserts in his new book. Thus, we are dealing here with a complex historical and social phenomenon that, regrettably, Achebe grossly over-simplifies and distorts. Our task here is to try to understand why a writer, an intellectual like Achebe who has never shied away from engaging the complexities of our historical and social experience, descends into superficialities and distortions in his engagement of this particular topic in this new book. I think the beginnings of an answer might be found in two separate but linked processes. First, we must note that the intersection of fierce intraclass and inter-ethnic competition that led the Northern and Western governments to begin compiling lists of Igbo dominance in federal agencies and corporations inevitably became closely linked to the massacres of 1966 even though they were separate and distinct events. Second, we must also pay attention to the fact that the foreign audience, which constitutes a large and significant part of Achebe’s intended readership of There Was a Country, typically thinks of Africa in terms of ‘tribe’ and ethnicity and hardly ever in terms of class; there is ample textual evidence that Achebe panders to this foreign audience in the book. For these two reasons, Achebe refuses absolutely to concede the indisputable class advantage of Igbo professional and middle classes in pre-civil war Nigeria; he prefers instead to reduce or keep everything to the singularity of ‘tribe’. In other words, what he could – and should – have conceded in terms of class, Achebe displaces into a fortress constructed around ethnicity. He accomplishes this act of displacement by taking refuge in a mystique of meritocracy as an endowment, a natural outgrowth of ‘tribe’ or ethnicity. I repeat: I have never encountered a more tendentious, regrettable treatment of a presumed link between ethnicity and meritocracy in any book by an African author than what we encounter in Achebe’s engagement of the topic in his new book. As we shall see, these same factors were deployed far more ominously in the most harrowing issue raised in Achebe’s new book: the mass starvation and alleged attempted genocide committed against the children of Biafra.

Part Four I will begin by stating that I am not a sociologist, a political scientist, a human rights lawyer, or a government official. My aim is not to provide all the answers but to raise questions, and perhaps to cause a few headaches in the process. Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country, 228

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The epigraph above is the very first sentence in a section of There Was a Country, subtitled ‘The Question of Genocide’. This section is far and away the most explosive segment among the dozens of segments in the entire book. For this reason, in saying that his aim in this segment is ‘not to provide all the answers but to raise questions, and perhaps to cause a few headaches’, Achebe is either being disingenuous or deploying a penchant for ironic understatement that is a central aspect of his novelistic art.9 In my own frank opinion, I think he is being both ironic and disingenuous. At any rate, instead of ‘a few headaches’, the spate of responses to this section of the book has been more like an epidemic outbreak of violent seizures. I am using the metaphors of severe epilepsy and death throes here deliberately. Biafra was not defeated, was not vanquished easily. Relatively speaking, it took a long time and a lot of agony and trauma for the Nigerian forces to subdue the country. This was contrary to the initial overconfidence of the Nigerian federal government, which believed ‘police action’ lasting no more than three to six months, rather than full-scale war, would be all that was needed to end the secessionist republic. Indeed, after the recapture of Benin and the Mid-West region from the Biafran invasion force, there were swift, decisive victories by the federal forces within Biafra itself. Notable in this case were the captures of Calabar and Port Harcourt, both of which then enabled concentration of the war offensive of the Nigerian forces on the Biafran heartland in the Igbo-speaking areas of the breakaway republic. But thereafter, and as fate would have it, the war reached a stalemate: Biafran resistance became extremely fierce and resilient. The federal forces slowly but inevitably came to the realization that they had more than a ‘police action’ on their hands. It was during this long drawn-out phase that the all-important questions of mass starvation and an alleged, deliberate, and systematic genocide against Biafrans – women, children, and the young – became the primary human and moral issues of the Nigeria-Biafra War, not only while it lasted but up to the time of writing, almost five decades later. In my view, any and all discussion of this question of mass starvation and alleged genocide ought to keep two crucial issues in mind. Failure to do so almost inevitably leads to either deliberate or unwitting distortions in analysis, interpretation, and judgment. The first of these two issues was the fact that, unexpectedly, this phase of stalemate was the longest phase of the war. Second, it was also almost entirely concentrated on the Biafran heartland in the Igbo-speaking areas of the secessionist republic and it came after most of the non-Igbo areas of Biafra had been effectively captured, militarily occupied, and administratively run by the federal Nigerian forces. Before tackling these two issues, let 9

Ibid., 228.

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us consider the human and moral dimensions of the matter of mass starvation and alleged genocide, both of which Achebe engages with a combination of a master novelist’s artistry and passionate Biafran ideological zealotry. ‘It is important to point out that most Nigerians were against the war and abhorred the senseless violence that ensued as a result of the conflict’, Achebe observes.10 Also, earlier in the book, he had asserted that ‘the war came as a surprise to the vast majority of artists and intellectuals on both sides of the conflict’.11 This is the voice of Achebe the humanist and progressive thinker. Unfortunately, it is a part of the Achebe that we confront in this book that has been almost completely buried under the bitterness and severity of the critical responses to the controversial and tendentious aspects of the book. At the moral and human core of Achebe’s portrayal and evocation of so much suffering and death of individuals and the masses in Biafra is the simple but profound humanist belief that the claims of those who suffered and died on those who survived and are living can never be settled by convenient or expedient answers to the question of whether genocide was intended or ‘merely incidental’. In other words, while the matter of genocide has been largely framed by figures, data, statistics, and projections, the fact that millions of people did die and suffer – perhaps avoidably and needlessly – can never be in dispute. The elegiac poems and the harrowing prose evocations of death, trauma, and madness of so many in Biafra that accompany the ‘objective’ accounts constitute powerful and moving parts of Achebe’s book that nothing in the vast controversy that it has engendered can diminish. On that note, we come to the heart of the controversies. If the charge of organized and systematic genocide through mass starvation is the single most controversial claim of the book, the most controversial observation or statement in support of this claim is contained in the following sentences concerning Awolowo: It is my impression that Chief Obafemi Awolowo was driven by an overriding ambition for power, for himself in particular and for the advancement of his Yoruba people in general. And let it be said that there is, on the surface, nothing wrong with those aspirations. However, Awolowo saw the dominant Igbo at the time as the obstacles to that goal, and when the opportunity arose – the Nigerian-Biafran war – his ambition drove him into a frenzy to go to every length to achieve his dreams. In the Biafran case it meant hatching up a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation – eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations.12 10

Ibid., 233. Ibid., 108. 12 Ibid., 233. 11

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The charge of genocide as advanced by Achebe and as proposed by scholars like Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, whom Achebe cites, rests on many factors. Some of these are statements of bloodlust credited to many field commanders of the Nigerian army; actual atrocities committed by Nigerian forces in the Biafran heartland that went well beyond Geneva conventions and the norms of civilized warfare; and the indisputable fact that the Nigerian Government did use economic blockade and the resultant mass starvation as a means of forcing the Biafrans to surrender. But the charge of the diabolism of Awolowo in using genocide for the advancement of his personal ambition and as means of once and for all time eliminating Igbos in the competition for dominance in Nigeria is something else altogether. Let us address this observation carefully. Awolowo did make the infamous statement that starvation is a ‘legitimate’ weapon of war. As a matter of fact, he made the statement after the fall of Calabar and Port Harcourt and the consequent tightening of the noose of war on the Biafran heartland. However, in order to achieve the diabolical project imputed to him by Achebe, Awolowo would have had to possess the power to foresee the future and magically bring many things far beyond his or anyone’s control into being. First, he would have had to know beforehand that the war would drag on for more than the three to six months that the federal forces initially expected that it would take to overwhelm Biafra. The more than two million people who reportedly died of starvation died because the war was stalemated for nearly two years. Second, Awolowo would have needed to have the assurance that his alleged diabolical genocidal schemes would receive ‘help’ from the Biafrans themselves by the kind of resistance, the ‘fight to finish’ that they put up. Finally, Awolowo would have needed to have the power to make the Biafran leadership reject the offer by the Nigerian Government of which he was a member of a land corridor that would have enabled food and other necessities to reach the blockaded Biafra. For if the Biafran leadership had accepted this offer, which was in fact very reluctantly made by Nigeria under intense international pressure, the number of those that died in Biafra of starvation and kwashiorkor would have been significantly less than two million. At this point, I must confess that of all the controversial claims and statements made by Achebe in his new book, the charge of a diabolical plot hatched by Awolowo to exterminate Igbo people in furtherance of personal ambition and ethnic advantage for his own people seems to me so bizarre and so irrational that I refuse to take it seriously. If Achebe had stuck to the claim, the charge that some of Awolowo’s actions and policies during and immediately after the war objectively worked to the advantage of Yoruba middle, propertied, and moneyed classes and interest groups – whether or not these were Awolowo’s intentions – he would have been on more rational and plausible grounds. For instance, by the time the Indigenization Decree came into effect, Igbo moneyed and propertied classes and interest groups did not have capital in sufficient

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quantities to make the best of that unprecedented bonanza of post-civil war Nigeria presented to the kingpins of our country’s ruling class. As I have stressed, once again we see in this absurd charge the conflation by Achebe of the class component with the generality, the entirety of the ethnic group, whether the ethnic group in question is Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, or others. While there may be no easy or satisfactory answers to the myriad of questions thrown up by Achebe’s book, there are solid grounds on which we can move beyond the predominantly divisive and acrimonious controversies that have so far dominated the responses to the book.

Part Five The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society. Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country, 61

As I mentioned in the second section, Achebe uses ‘Nigerian ruling class’ and ‘Nigerian ruling elite’ only a few times in the book. His critique of members of our country’s ‘ruling elite/class’ is devastating and unforgiving. He compares them collectively to ‘Anwu’ the wasp, ‘a notorious predator from the insect kingdom’. I have no words to match Achebe’s own characterization of the scale of the predatory nature of our ruling class: ‘Wasps, African children learn during story time, greet unsuspecting prey with a painful, paralyzing sting, then lay eggs on their body, which then proceed to “eat the victim alive.”’ Achebe uses the term ‘ruling class’ to analyse the terrible state of things in our country. In other words, on the two occasions when he used the term, Achebe had merely dipped it into what could be described as the boiling cauldron of ‘tribe’ or ethnicity as his singular frame of reference. One proof of this is the significant fact that in spite of his extremely damning indictments of the both the pre – and post-civil war Nigerian ruling class, the term does not appear at all in the Index to the book. As noted, it is a remarkable, even defining, feature of Achebe’s book that while the whole of the fourth part of the book talks of the Nigerian ruling class as the frame of reference for understanding a great deal of all that is wrong in our country’s affairs, in the other three parts of the book it is the ‘tribe’ or the ethnic group that is the object either of Achebe’s searing indictment or, with particular regard to his Igbo people, of his solicitude and solidarity. In this connection, here is a typical observation from his Part One: The original idea of one Nigeria was pressed by the leaders and intellectuals from the Eastern Region. With all their shortcomings, they had this idea to

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build the country as one. The first to object were the Northerners, led by the Sardauna, who were followed closely by the Awolowo clique that had created the Action Group.13

This statement is as false as it is unworthy of a progressive writer and public intellectual of Achebe’s stature. From the amalgamation of the Southern and Northern Protectorates in 1914 to the brink of the outbreak of the Nigeria-Biafra War, progressive politicians and intellectuals from all parts of the country led the struggles for a united, equal and just Nigeria. From this perspective and in my own personal opinion, the greatest objection to Achebe’s new book is that in substantial parts of the first three sections of the book, class politics is completely subordinated to ethnic politics. Because Achebe apparently has no place in his book for class politics in pre- and post-civil war Nigeria, he almost completely leaves out the few but significant expressions and traditions of progressive, radical class politics within and across Nigeria’s ethnic groups. Before coming to my concluding reflections in this chapter, I would like briefly to discuss some of the most moving and valuable parts of this extraordinarily controversial book, some of these being paradoxically based on deep and changing realities and sentiments around ethni­ city and ethnic belonging as a positive value in our continent and our world. I don’t think that it is overstating the case to observe that There Was a Country probably aspired to be and will for decades be regarded as the definitive Igbo literary epic of this age. It is an epic of suffering, endurance, resilience, and survival. Like all great epics, it is based on the rediscovery of fundamental moral and philosophical ideas that go to the core of communal survival and human worth, especially in seasons of great and overwhelming catastrophe. Again and again, Achebe dips into Igbo creation myths, folklore, legends, and proverbs to underscore the scale of the issues involved in the production of this epic. He certainly does, on occasion, over-idealize aspects of traditional Igbo culture and worldview that he wishes to propose as self-defining and self-constituting counterweights to the festering cesspool of the Nigerian spiritual and moral malaise. But the cultural capital of what Achebe attempts here is undeniable, and it is consistent with what other African writers like Soyinka, Ngu˜gı˜, and Tanure Ojaide, in their essays and literary works, have done for Yoruba, Kikuyu, and Urhobo ethnic nations, respectively. His is a powerful demonstration of the idea that ethnic groups have an unfolding historic identity and can and should serve as repositories from which to rediscover and rekindle the virtues of democratic republicanism and common human decency and dignity in this new millennium. In this perspective, ethnicity, indigeneity, and

13

Ibid., 51.

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locality are not antithetical to but are indeed consistent with universal values that link all of us in our country and our planet to a common future, a common destiny. But the ethnic provenance of the epic Igbo project of There Was a Country takes its toll on the intellectual and artistic merits of the book. In a marked contrast with almost all the other books he had written, there is in this new book a veritable collapse of the ‘union and trust’ between writer and readers that Achebe, in the epigraph to this concluding section, identifies as the basis of all great writing. Let me carefully explain what this entails. I have stated repeatedly in this series that Achebe is one of the greatest realist writers in world literature in the last one and a half centuries. Among all other claims, realism bases itself on the ability, the unflinching resolve to let reality speak for itself, no matter where it leads the writer, the artist, the philosopher. But this is easier said than done for no writer, no artist can (re)present the fullness, the infinity of reality; what the writer can hope for is that in what he or she chooses from reality, nothing significant, nothing absolutely germane to the reality depicted is left out. Where this happens the reliability of the writer is badly compromised and with this goes his or her trustworthiness, if not across the whole spectrum of potential readers then among the most discerning, the most astute, and the most fair-minded of such readers. On this count, Achebe’s new book evinces the collapse of realist writing and philosophy the like of which we had heretofore never encountered in his writings. Let me put this in simple language: in this new book, whatever is not compatible with Achebe’s epic ethnic Igbo project is simply left out, even if and where such things were of great import in the affairs of the nation especially as these pertain to relations between ethnic groups and communities, both in Nigeria and Biafra. The central issue here, as I have repeated again and again, is the omission of class in most of Achebe’s narratives, analyses, and reflections in the book. There is also the additional fact that in most of his ideas and assertions about ethnicity and regionalism, he simply omits or over-simplifies many things that either complicate or run counter to his project of an Igbo ethnic epic. Among the myriad of such omissions and simplifications in the book, I shall cite only a few examples. First, in all of the first three and most-substantive parts of this book, in vain will the reader look for the signs, the evidence that beyond the ethnic/regional blocs, there were class alliances of both right-wing and progressive ideological and political currents. Indeed, there is no mention of the UPGA alliance between the National Council of Nigerian Citizens, the Action Group, and the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) – the three most important social democratic parties that straddled the North and the South in the First Republic. Second, there is no mention in the fourth part of the book of the fact that while the big, moneyed interest groups among Igbo people in the

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post-civil war period have done badly compared to the big, moneyed interest groups of Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani elites, the lower middle class of Igbo traders, merchants, and exporter-importers have done very well indeed compared with similar class and interest groups of the country’s other ethnic groups. Thus, on this count, one class segment among Igbos – admittedly the most potentially economically and politically influential – is far from being truly integrated into post-civil war Nigeria. Another segment – lower middle class merchants and exporters-importers – is very well integrated. Rather than acknowledge this indisputable fact of the interplay between class and ethnicity, Achebe simply asserts in his book that (all) Igbos are yet to be integrated into post-civil war Nigeria. Third, within Biafra and during the war itself, Achebe is almost completely silent on the fact that there were great tensions between the Igbo, the majority ethnic group, and the non-Igbo minorities. As a matter of fact, as one reads the two central parts of the book that deal with life (and death and suffering) in Biafra, one slowly comes to recognize that, for Achebe, ‘Biafra’ and ‘Igbo’ are inextricably conflated. Yet, it is a simple fact of history that Biafra was a multi-ethnic state. Last, most independent and fair-minded historians and analysts of the Biafra-Nigeria war know and state that, like the Nigerian forces, Biafran troops also committed terrible atrocities against civilian populations, most notably in the Mid-West region during their brief occupation and when they were in forced retreat before the advancing federal forces. Yet Achebe blithely asserts in the book that he has not obtained independent confirmation of this fact. For me personally, it is a matter of great regret that the reactions to Achebe’s book have been divided almost entirely along ethnic and regional lines: ‘to thy tents, O Israel!’ Well, not completely, so there is still hope that across our various ethnic and regional communities, we can still forge alliances based on interests that combine the best and the most positive values of our historic ethnic nations with progressive egalitarian values that will work for the vast majority of our peoples that remain disenfranchised and marginalized, regardless of how well or how badly their rich and powerful ethnic brethren and sisters are doing in Nigeria at large. The decision to fight to the finish was the most fateful decision taken by the Biafran ruling class of which Achebe was a morally and intellectually authoritative figure. Coupled with this was the decision not to accept the offer of a land corridor for getting food and supplies to the starving and suffering masses of people in Biafra that the international community pressured the Nigerian Government to make. These two decisions played their own role in the mass starvation and death of millions of the children of Biafra. Let it be known that by making this observation I do not, whatsoever, intend any negative critique or any gratuitous moralizing. This is because I am only too conscious of

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the fact that political and military history in all parts of the world is replete with such terrible decisions in times of war. War hardens people immeasurably and many decisions taken during war often seem totally incomprehensible later. I cannot imagine that the political and military leadership in Biafra took those decisions lightly. If Biafra had survived, the sacrifice would have paid off; defeat, on the contrary, made it infinitely worse. I cannot imagine that Achebe was not haunted by the part that some decisions of the Biafran leadership played in this particularly harrowing and gnawing tragedy of the Biafra-Nigeria war. How did he process this particular extra emotional, psychic burden of defeat? Not a word about this is found in There Was a Country. I wonder, I really wonder. For all of us, the very least we can and must do is to begin to have a more complete, a more complex and a more honest view of why and how mass starvation and the totally avoidable death of millions, most of them children, did happen in Biafra. If we can achieve this, we will find it much easier to come to terms with most of the other seemingly intractable issues raised in Achebe’s book. Thus, getting a fuller and truer picture of mass starvation and the alleged genocide is a first step, but it is a necessary one. More than any other book on the BiafraNigeria war, Achebe’s new book, with all its contradictions and the fierce controversies it has generated, provides a powerful basis for us to take this first step.

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13

Ethnic Minorities and the Biafran National Imaginary in Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun Meredith Coffey*

In 1969, American political scientist Rupert Emerson summarized one of the key debates shaping the course of the Nigeria-Biafra War: If the whole former Eastern region, restyled Biafra by the Ibo [sic] secessionists, is the proper unit for self-determination, then the minorities may properly be subordinated to the majority and swept along in its wake. If, on the other hand, these minorities are assumed to constitute ‘peoples,’ are their claims to be heard less valid than those of the Ibos?1

In this reflection, Emerson gestures towards the fact that the secession’s leaders cast the geopolitical territory initially under their control – the ‘whole former Eastern Region’ of Nigeria – as a cohesive ‘unit’ with the right to self-determination. Opponents of the separatist effort, on the other hand, not only denied the territory’s people the right to self-determination but also contended that the secession was at its core an Igbo nationalist project. If the latter argument proved correct, then the region’s minorities would necessarily be second-class citizens in the new nation. Given the heatedness of this debate, amidst a host of political, economic, social, and other factors, minorities’ loyalties became ‘sharply divided’.2 Being 40 percent of the Biafran population and possessing well over half its land, eastern ethnic minorities such as the Ijaw, Efik, Ibibio, Ogoni, Annang, and Ikwerre would play a significant, potentially decisive, role in the conflict.3 With the battle for minorities’ support as *

I wish to thank Dr Toyin Falola and Ogechukwu Ezekwem for their support of this project. I am also grateful to Allison Haas for her insightful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 1 Rupert Emerson, ‘The Problem of Identity, Selfhood, and Image in the New Nations: The Situation in Africa’, Comparative Politics 1:3 (1969), 303. 2 United States, National Security Council Interdepartmental Group for Africa, ‘Background Paper on Nigeria/Biafra’, February 10, 1969, amended April 21, 2005. 3 Arua Oko Omaka, ‘The Forgotten Victims: Ethnic Minorities in the Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967–1970’, Journal of Retracing Africa 1:1 (2014), 29; and Jimoh Lawal, ‘Nigeria – Class Struggle and the National Question’, in Nigeria: Dilemma of Nationhood, edited by Joseph Okpaku (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), 280. For a more thorough listing of these and other minority groups in the region, see Ken Saro-Wiwa, On a Darkling Plain: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War (Port Harcourt: Saros, 1989), 53.

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a growing undercurrent of the Biafran War, official anti-secessionist rhetoric portrayed Biafra as an ethnoculturally grounded Igbo nation, from which ethnic minorities would ultimately be excluded, while official secessionist rhetoric depicted the fledgling nation as civic-territorial in its ideology and therefore ethnically inclusive in scope.4 In various genres, from propaganda posters to scholarly works, stakeholders on both sides of the conflict frequently reiterated these depictions of Biafra. Novels would seem to provide an especially useful opportunity for Biafra’s sympathizers to make their case, given their widely noted capacity to imagine a ‘unified and coherent’ civicterritorial nation and thereby obscure significant ethnic differences or tensions.5 Although some Biafran novels completel y sidestep the issue of minority inclusion within the secessionist nation, others assert Biafran nationalism as primarily territorial (and therefore ethnically inclusive), including Eddie Iroh’s Toads of War and Cyprian Ekwensi’s Divided We Stand.6 A close examination of two of the most widely read pro-Biafran novels, however, reveals a more ambivalent take on the secessionist nation’s inclusiveness: Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn: A Novel of the Biafran War and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Published 30 years apart, these texts represent Biafra from distinct historical perspectives: Ike, already well into his thirties at the time of the war, is almost a half century older than Adichie, who was born several years after the war’s conclusion (and a year after Sunset at Dawn’s initial publication). Ike based his depiction largely on his own not-so-distant 4

The distinction between ethnic and territorial nations, or nations grounded in jus sanguinis as opposed to jus soli bases, is used widely. In using the particular terms ‘ethnocultural’ and ‘civic-territorial’, I am thinking especially of Anthony D. Smith’s usage. He views all nationalisms as some combination of these conceptions, but of course that does not preclude others’ usage of the terms as if they were mutually exclusive. See especially Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000). 5 See especially Benedict Anderson, ‘Cultural Roots’, Chapter 2 in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 1991); and David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 60. 6 Eddie Iroh, Toads of War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1979); Cyprian Ekwensi, Divided We Stand: A Novel of the Nigerian Civil War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980). With regard to Biafra novels that have sidestepped the issue of ethnic diversity within the secessionist nation, literary scholar Willfried Feuser noted in 1986 that ‘One criticism’ he might apply specifically to Igbo writers about the war was their ‘blind spot for the problem of minorities in Biafra’; see Willfried F. Feuser, ‘Anomy and Beyond: Nigeria’s Civil War in Literature’, Presence Africaine: Revue Culturelle du Monde Noir/Cultural Review of the Negro World 137–138 (1986),143. Indeed, S. Okechukwu Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun (1971), John Munonye’s A Wreath for the Maidens (1973), Flora Nwapa’s Never Again (1975), Eddie Iroh’s Forty-eight Guns for the General (1976), Ossie Onuora Enekwe’s Come Thunder (1984), and Dulue Mbachu’s War Games (2005) make either few or no references to interethnic tensions within Biafra, and any such references that do appear describe general cultural or economic differences.

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historical memory, whereas Adichie grounded her narrative in research that included interviews with first-hand witnesses and extensive reading – absorbing a generation’s worth of academic, creative, and personal reflection on the conflict.7 Indeed, a number of influential novels about the Biafran War appeared between the time that Sunset at Dawn and Half of a Yellow Sun were published.8 Despite these significant gaps in time and in the authors’ historical perspectives, their novels have a great deal in common when it comes to their treatment of minority characters in Biafra. Both Sunset at Dawn and Half of a Yellow Sun are deeply sympathetic to the Biafran effort, suggesting that they would aim to echo the official Biafran narrative of national inclusiveness. To this end, the novels each include a complex web of characters of different ages, genders, socioeconomic backgrounds, and professions, and they continuously switch among different plotlines and change focus to different characters. In so doing, they forgo a monolithic narrative in favor of a diverse and horizontal national imaginary. In the context of this inclusive vision, the novels’ cautious approach to dealing with ethnic minority characters is particularly striking. In two key ways, Sunset at Dawn and Half of a Yellow Sun each explicitly raise the question of eastern minorities’ inclusion without ever resolving it comfortably. First, characters in both novels comment uneasily on minorities’ place in Biafra in general. Second, both texts offer up specific cases of minority characters who would like to be fellow Biafrans. Sunset at Dawn portrays one minority character as fully Biafran, but another minority character’s effort to join the Biafran nation fails entirely, through no fault of his own; Half of a Yellow Sun is consistently ambiguous about each of its (few) minority characters’ places within the nation. Moreover, the novels only consider individual cases of minority would-be Biafrans; the novels remain purposefully vague about the wartime loyalties of ethnic minority groups more broadly, which means that any individual characters who successfully become Biafrans could be, arguably, exceptions. Despite being pro-Biafra texts, then, Sunset at Dawn and Half of a Yellow Sun depart from official Biafran rhetoric by not casting the secessionist nation as necessarily welcoming to all ethnic groups within its territory. 7

An author’s note at the end of the novel indicates that Adichie interviewed several family members who witnessed the war firsthand. It also includes a list of texts that she read in preparation for writing her own novel. Among the 31 works of fiction and nonfiction listed is Ike’s Sunset at Dawn. See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (New York: Anchor, 2007), Author’s Note. 8 Notable Biafran War novels published between Sunset at Dawn and Half of a Yellow Sun include Eddie Iroh’s Biafra trilogy (Forty-eight Guns for the General (1976), Toads of War (1979), and The Siren in the Night (1982)), Cyprian Ekwensi’s Divided We Stand (1980), Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982), Ossie Enekwe’s Come Thunder (1984), Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1985), and Dulue Mbachu’s War Games (2005).

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This chapter therefore analyzes the novels’ refusals to depict the short-lived nation as territorially inclusive, despite the ideological exigencies of doing so. To be clear, its interest lies not in determining whether Biafran nationalism was in historical fact more ethnocultural or civic-territorial; instead, it focuses on the portrayal of Biafran nationalism in these specific novels. By creating ambiguity surrounding the inclusion of minority Biafrans, the chapter contends, Sunset at Dawn and Half of a Yellow Sun each provide a subtle critique of the secessionists’ narrative of national inclusion (rare in pro-Biafran fiction), while otherwise remaining clearly sympathetic to the Biafran cause (aligning them firmly with the pro-Biafran literary tradition). Before embarking on this analysis, a brief political history of minorities’ position in Nigeria is offered, followed by some examples of official federal Nigerian as well as Biafran rhetoric surrounding minorities’ loyalties.

Nigeria’s Majorities and Minorities Despite occupying a pivotal place in the Nigeria-Biafra War, eastern minorities had not been a political category as such for very long. According to Nigerian political scholar Eghosa Osaghae, the term ‘“Ethnic minorities” did not become a part of the political vocabulary in Nigeria’ until the mid-1940s.9 Although Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo people had long comprised the largest of Nigeria’s approximately 250 ethnic groups, no one group had been populous enough to dominate the colonial possession’s longstanding unitary structure.10 In 1947, however, the Richards Constitution changed the administration system to a federal structure with three regions, each dominated by one of these groups: the Hausa in the North, the Yoruba in the West, and the Igbo in the East.11 A series of subsequent constitutions entrenched and strengthened the regional divisions.

9

Eghosa E. Osaghae, ‘Ethnic Minorities and Federalism in Nigeria’, African Affairs 90:359 (1991), 238. 10 By the 1960s, Nigeria included approximately 15 million Hausa, 12 million Yoruba, 10 million Igbo, and 20 million people belonging to ethnic minorities. See Okwudiba Nnoli, ‘The Nigera-Biafra Conflict – A Political Analysis’, in Okpaku, Nigeria: Dilemma of Nationhood , 127; and K.W.J. Post, ‘Is There a Case for Biafra?’ International Affairs 44:1 (1968), 27. Moreover, in many cases these ethnic affiliations were far from rigid or longstanding. Colonial rule had generally fortified distinctions between ethnic groups, many individuals and groups ‘defied [official] classification’, and each group was far from homogeneous. See Terence Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 248; Ugbana Okpu, Ethnic Minority Problems in Nigerian Politics: 1960–1965 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1977), 7; and Kathryn Nwajiaku-Dahou, ‘Heroes and Villains: Ijaw Nationalist Narratives of the Nigerian Civil War’, Africa Development 34:1 (2009), 54. 11 Lawal, ‘Nigeria’, 266.

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Although members of these groups lived throughout Nigeria, these identities became increasingly tied to the administrative regions for political reasons. With the creation of the three regions and the consequent political expediency of appealing to ethnic identity, the political options abruptly shifted such that only members of majority groups were likely to get elected to office.12 Further exacerbating this problem was the fact that ‘whichever region had control at the centre through its dominant political party would at once be in a position to determine the economic, if not the political, fate of all the other regions’.13 Within just a few years, the majority groups became fiercely competitive for central control, and minority groups struggled to maintain their political voices. Several minority political parties did spring up, often receiving support from other regions’ majority parties trying to disrupt the balance of power.14 In other cases, minorities were sometimes coerced into supporting the region’s major party; otherwise, they risked being denied basic necessities like water.15 Understandably, anxieties about majority ethnic groups’ dominance developed rapidly. Shortly before Nigerian independence, British administrators aimed to address these concerns through the 1958 Willink Commission of Inquiry into Minority Fears and Means of Allaying Them.16 The commission found that minorities were most ‘vulnerable’ in the Eastern and Northern Regions, and it agreed to several concessions, including the creation of a national rather than a regional police force.17 Despite these advances for minority advocates, the commission still denied their primary request – the division of Nigeria into more states, which would have more dramatically undermined the majority groups’ dominance.18 By the time of its independence in 1960, Nigeria was rife with tensions between and within its three regions. Eventually, in 1963, the central government agreed to create a fourth region, the Mid-West. This move, long fought for by minority groups within the region, pleased political leaders in the North and East but, unsurprisingly, displeased the Western Region, whose size and influence it fractured.19 Yet even this fairly 12

Osaghae, ‘Ethnic Minorities and Federalism in Nigeria’, 240. Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo and Samuel Udochukwu Ifejika, Biafra: The Making of a Nation (New York: Praeger, 1970), 33. 14 Okpu, Ethnic Minority Problems in Nigerian Politics, 139. 15 Steven Jervis, ‘Nigeria and Biafra’, Africa Today 14:6 (1967), 16. 16 Nwajiaku-Dahou, ‘Heroes and Villains’, 52. 17 Oshita O. Oshita, ‘Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Trajectory of Minority Predicament in Nigeria’, in Before I Am Hanged: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Literature, Politics, and Dissent, edited by Onookome Okome (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000), 38; and Rotimi T. Suberu, ‘Background: The Chequered Fortunes of Ethnic Minorities under Changing Political Regimes in Nigeria’, in Ethnic Minority Conflicts and Governance in Nigeria (Ibadan: Institut français de recherche en Afrique, 1996), Chapter 2 (not paginated). 18 Ibid. 19 Okpu, Ethnic Minority Problems in Nigerian Politics, 88–91. 13

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dramatic revision to Nigeria’s federal structure soon proved insufficient to quell the new nation’s interregional and inter-ethnic tensions.

Minorities in Nigeria and Biafra, 1966–1970 While many opponents of the January 1966 coup specifically associated the takeover with Igbo ambitions, the violent reprisals often targeted easterners more broadly. This phenomenon was in no small part due to the fact that many of the attackers did not distinguish Igbo from eastern minorities, instead placing them all in the same generic identity category of ‘Yameri’ or ‘Nyamiri’.20 In some cases, ‘the only nonnortherners generally spared in those events were those who wore the dress and bore the distinctive face markings of the Yoruba tribe of the West’.21 Clearly, much of this extraordinary violence impacted both the majority Igbo and minority easterners. After the July 1966 counter-coup and reinstatement of the federal system, escalating violence went on to cost a horrifying number of lives throughout Nigeria. As many as 30,000 easterners were killed and over 50,000 more were wounded.22 In addition, as many as two million people had to flee from the North to the East, including many whose families had not lived in the East for generations.23 The security of Igbo and other eastern people was at stake on an enormous scale. At the same time, northerners in the East also faced violent reprisals, and in October 1966, then-Governor of the Eastern Region Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu ordered all non-easterners out of the East, with the warning that his regional government could no longer guarantee their security.24 As the likelihood of eastern secession grew, Nigerian Head of State General Yakubu Gowon announced in May 1967 that the country would be divided into 12 regions. This move would undermine the majority groups’ control everywhere, but it had a particularly strong impact on the agitating Eastern Region. The Eastern Region would be converted into three states, two of which had non-Igbo majorities. The plan would also leave the only Igbo-majority state landlocked, with access to relatively few of the East’s valuable natural resources, most notably oil.25 This effect was far from coincidental, as Gowon’s hope was to break up Igbo control in the East while simultaneously appealing to minorities’ political demands and winning their loyalty.26 Motivating 20

Ntieyong U. Akpan, The Struggle for Secession, 1966–1970: A Personal Account of the Nigerian Civil War (London: Frank Cass, 1971), 152; and Saro-Wiwa, On a Darkling Plain, 58. 21 Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘A Condemned People’, The New York Review of Books 9:11 (1967). 22 Nwankwo and Ifejika, Biafra, 207–208. 23 Ibid., 208; and Lawal, ‘Nigeria’, 273. 24 Elechi Amadi, Sunset in Biafra: A Civil War Diary (London: Heinemann, 1973), 21. 25 Post, ‘Is There a Case’, 38. 26 Osaghae, ‘Ethnic Minorities and Federalism in Nigeria’, 243.

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this strategy were the federal government’s beliefs that the agitation for secession was Igbo-led and that minority support would be a decisive factor in the conflict. Just three days after the announcement of the twelve-state system, Eastern Region Governor Ojukwu declared Nigeria’s secession as the independent Republic of Biafra, with himself as the head of state. From the beginning, significant tensions existed between Igbo and ethnic minorities within Biafra. Some minorities were eager to be members of the new nation, fighting on the Biafran side in the war, remaining in civil service positions, and otherwise supporting Biafra’s cause.27 Others merely accepted the secession. Still others, however, believed from the start that they would be second-class citizens in the Igbomajority nation. Just after the secession, many minority university students departed abruptly from the University of Nigeria (soon to become the University of Biafra), while other minority easterners resigned from their civil service jobs.28 Later, as Nigerian federal forces gradually reclaimed portions of Biafran land, Biafran forces compelled many minorities to abandon their homes and ‘shepherded’ them into refugee camps in the remaining Biafran territory.29 As Biafra’s defeat looked increasingly likely, accusations against minority ‘saboteurs’ became a means of deflecting attention from Biafra’s increasing military failures and widespread starvation.30 Detention camps, which mostly contained accused minorities, ‘sprang up’.31 From enthusiastic Biafrans to political prisoners, ethnic minorities occupied a wide range of places in the secessionist nation.

Frames for Biafran Nationalism Despite Biafra’s varied treatment of its ethnic minorities, gaining minorities’ loyalty was and is widely perceived as a decisive factor in the conflict. Peter Ekeh argues that ‘the aversion of minority and marginal Nigerians to secession’ was decidedly ‘the single most important reason for the frustration of the Biafran secession’.32 Similarly, almost 30 years after Ekeh’s assessment, Murray Last argues that obtaining minority support was a key strategic priority for Biafra, second only in importance to international support.33 In reality, of course, eastern minori 27

Nwajiaku-Dahou, ‘Heroes and Villains’, 62. Stephen Vincent, ‘Should Biafra Survive?’, Transition 32 (1967), 57; and Nwajiaku-Dahou, ‘Heroes and Villains’, 61. 29 Saro-Wiwa, On a Darkling Plain, 187. 30 Ibid., 62. 31 Amadi, Sunset in Biafra, 20. 32 Peter Ekeh, ‘Citizenship and Political Conflict’, in Okpaku, Nigeria: Dilemma of Nationhood, 103. 33 Murray Last, ‘Reconciliation and Memory in Postwar Nigeria’, in Violence and Subjectivity, edited by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 318. 28

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ties formed highly diverse populations, and so no monolithic preference for Nigerian unity or Biafran independence existed among them. Irish politician and visitor to Biafra Conor Cruise O’Brien cautioned in 1967: ‘Both the Biafran claims that these peoples are wholeheartedly in support of Biafra and the claims made from Lagos that the minorities are longing to be liberated by Federal forces should be treated with reserve.’34 The battle for their loyalty became a highly and consistently contentious one. Each side fought this battle in no small part through official rhetoric about minority belonging in Biafra. Implicit in this rhetoric is a conflict over what type of nation Biafra would become. Federal Nigeria argued that minorities would be relegated to second-class citizen status in Biafra, due to an Igbo-centered ethnocultural national ideal, whereas official Biafran rhetoric promoted a vision of civic-territorial nationalism, in which all residents of the new nation could equally belong and participate. Competing visions of Biafra’s national construction were thus at work. Gowon, federal Nigeria’s Head of State, was a lead figure in the political project of casting Biafra as an ethnically exclusive nation. In his immediately pre-secession announcement of the administrative division into more regions, Gowon stated that his goal was ‘to remove the fear of domination’ by Igbo people, calling attention to the strains caused by the East’s ethnic composition.35 Shortly after the outbreak of war, Gowon cast the secession as an attempt at separation by Igbo people, rather than by all residents of a geopolitical region: ‘The Federal Military Government believes that the Ibos as a people need the rest of Nigeria just as the rest of Nigeria needs the Ibos.’36 Gowon’s use of ethnic labels disrupts any sense of territorial unity by foregrounding the role of the secession’s ethnic majority. Correspondingly, historians in favor of federal Nigeria’s cause have cast Biafran nationalism as ethnoculturally motivated. One of the most famous Biafran War memoirs is that of author Elechi Amadi, an ethnically Ikwerre (and therefore minority) Eastern Nigerian who opposed the secession.37 In the memoir Sunset in Biafra, he highlights the friction between Igbo and ethnic minorities: ‘Very few Ibo men of real influence conceded that the minorities should have a say in the determination of their own future.’38 Here and throughout the memoir, he consistently uses ethnic labels to describe actors in the conflict, clearly distinguishing Igbo and minority people. For Amadi, the monolithic territorial labels of ‘Eastern Nigerian’ or ‘Biafran’ are not representative of a people with 34

O’Brien, ‘A Condemned People’. Yakubu Gowon, ‘Broadcast to the Nation’, May 27, 1967. 36 Yakubu Gowon, ‘Welcome Address to the OAU Consultative Mission’, in Okpaku, Nigeria: Dilemma of Nationhood, 410. 37 Amadi, Sunset in Biafra, 21. 38 Ibid., 41. 35

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shared identities or goals. Like Gowon, Amadi emphasizes majority dominance within Biafra to portray an ethnocultural nationalism at work. Pro-federal Nigeria scholars from outside the country have also relied on primarily ethnic, rather than regional, identity labels. Just after the war began, American academic Stephen Vincent wrote about minorities who felt ‘exploited both in terms of commerce and oil by the Ibo trader and what they see as an Ibo dominated government’ and argued that ‘the Ibo leadership’ would never ‘quell the suspicions of the minority groups’.39 In these instances and throughout the article, Vincent focuses on the exclusion of minorities in contrast with Igbo ‘domination’ and ‘leadership’. Over three decades later, Britain-based Professor Murray Last held that one of Biafra’s implicit aims was to convince ‘non-Igbo minorities within the Eastern Region to accept Igbo hegemony’.40 Last, like Vincent, promotes an image of Igbo domination over all other ethnic groups, thereby reiterating the image of Biafra as an ethnoculturally based nation. In stark contrast was Eastern Nigeria’s (and later, Biafra’s) emphatically inclusive vision for the new nation. Starting even before secession, in pre-war messages to the region and during government meetings, Eastern Region House of Assembly member Alvan Ikoku addressed the rising regional tensions by repeatedly underscoring commonalities among and the shared victimization of Eastern Nigerians, never once using the word ‘Igbo’ or any other ethnic identification.41 Similarly, the official Proclamation of the Republic of Biafra, delivered by Ojukwu, consistently refers to ‘eastern Nigerians’ (often as against ‘northern Nigerians’). The Proclamation uses territorially inclusive phrases like, ‘Fellow countrymen and women, you, the people of Eastern Nigeria’.42 Similarly, the Ahiara Declaration, delivered by Ojukwu and aimed at establishing an ‘intellectual foundation’ for Biafra,43 includes many phrases like ‘fellow Biafrans’ and ‘fellow countrymen and women’.44 Ojukwu was sure to cast Biafra as a territorially inclusive nation to outsiders, too; in a telegram sent to the First International Conference on Biafra, held in 1968 at Columbia University in New York City, Ojukwu uses only regional or national identifications to characterize actors in the conflict, describing the ‘deep seated hatred which Nigerians, notably northerners, had for Eastern Nigerians’ and asserting that in the 39

Vincent, ‘Should Biafra Survive?’, 55 and 57, respectively. Last, ‘Reconciliation and Memory’, 318. 41 ‘Proclamation of the Republic of Biafra’, International Legal Materials 6:4 (1967), 665–678. 42 Ibid., 679–680. 43 Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin, 2012), 143. 44 National Guidance Committee of Biafra, ‘The Ahiara Declaration (The Principles of the Biafran Revolution)’, delivered as a speech by Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, June 1, 1969. 40

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North, ‘Eastern Nigerians there were denied fundamental freedoms’.45 Famously, Ojukwu also offered to have a plebiscite, organized by unbiased outsiders, to determine minorities’ side in the conflict, suggesting that he had confidence, or wanted to appear to have confidence, that they would choose Biafra.46 In addition to these carefully considered public statements, Biafran leaders also promoted the vision of a civic-territorial Biafran nation through propaganda. Before secession, as part of a campaign to spread concern about northern domination, the Eastern Region Government used posters that read, among other slogans, ‘Don’t Sell Your Region’.47 Already political leaders were emphasizing unity within and loyalty to the East – a loyalty that they hoped would override ethnic divisions. Later, to encourage young people to join the Biafran army, another poster campaign series displayed images of ‘Easterners marching united to battle’.48 These public campaigns were clearly careful to emphasize territorial, rather than ethnic, unity. During the conflict, Biafra’s domestic and international supporters echoed this rhetoric of civic-territorial nationalism. In 1969, Nigerian scholars Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo and Samuel Udochukwu Ifejika published Biafra: The Making of a Nation, in which they emphasize easterners’ widespread support for Ojukwu, despite ethnic differences. To take only one example, they narrate an occasion on which delegations of Ojukwu supporters came to Lagos in March 1967, only a few months prior to the secession: From the villages, indignant Eastern Nigerians poured into the cities … From the hills of Ogoja, from the mangroves of Brass, from the forests of Arochukwu, from the farmlands of Abakiliki, from the creeks of Bonny, from Awka, Aba, Uyo, Onitsha, Port Harcourt, Bende and all parts of the Regions.49

Here, Nwankwo and Ifejika demonstrate territorial unity not only by applying the label ‘Eastern Nigerians’, but also by painstakingly enumerating diverse cities and landscapes in the region; the coming together of so many peoples is indeed a key part of their titular argument – how Biafra became a nation. From a non-African perspective, English author Frederick Forsyth’s The Biafra Story, published the same year as Nwankwo and Ifejika’s book, is similarly emphatic about minorities’ equal inclusion in the new nation. Forsyth underscores that the violence targeted all easterners alike, not just Igbo people: ‘The killings of civilians have not been 45

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, Telegram to The First International Conference on Biafra, Columbia University, New York, NY, December 7, 1968. 46 United States, ‘Background Paper’. 47 Vincent, ‘Should Biafra Survive?’, 56. 48 Jervis, ‘Nigeria and Biafra’, 16. 49 Nwankwo and Ifejika, Biafra, 233.

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confined to Ibo land; the Efiks, Calabars, Ibibios and Ogonis have suffered heavily.’50 He also argues that, partially as a consequence, ethnic minorities were equally supportive of and involved in the Biafran cause: ‘All the on-the-spot evidence indicated that the minority groups fully participated in the decision-making process to get out of Nigeria, and were as enthusiastic as the Ibos.’51 As Forsyth’s and Nwankwo and Ifejika’s texts demonstrate, illustrating territorial unity in the face of ethnic diversity was a priority for these and other pro-Biafra historiographers.

‘A Nigerian in Biafran Clothing’: Responses to Minority Claims to Biafranness in Sunset at Dawn One of the first major pro-Biafra novels, however, hesitates to depict minorities or other non-Igbo characters as fully incorporated into the nation.52 Published in 1976, Sunset at Dawn narrates the wartime experiences of several proudly Biafran characters, mostly comprised of the family and friends of Dr Amilo Kanu, the fictional Biafran Director of Mobilization. The novel does not follow a single plotline, but rather shifts back and forth between conversations among the numerous characters and broader narrations of the war’s events. Throughout, the novel repeatedly indicates uncertainty surrounding the place of minorities in Biafra. With regard to Gowon’s pre-secession division of Nigeria into 12 states, the narrator declares it was ‘a clever move to undermine and then destroy the solidarity of the people who now constituted Biafra. It offered a most enticing bait to the non-Igbo among the Biafrans, by offering them two states of their own.’53 At first glance, this commentary seems to suggest a Biafran nation that united various ethnic groups, as it explicitly identifies an extant ‘solidarity’ among Biafra’s people. At the same time, though, it also acknowledges that non-Igbo – cast as a distinct and apparently readily identifiable population – might under some circumstances actually prefer to remain Nigerians. By making this observation, the narrator undercuts the image of solidarity he initially seems to want to promote; if ethnic minorities, comprising 40 percent of Biafran people, could really have found a pre-secession Nigerian solution so compelling, then a meaningful solidarity could hardly have existed in the first place. In this way, 50

Frederick Forsyth, The Biafra Story (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 211. Ibid., 159. 52 Earlier Biafran War novels include S. Okechukwu Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun (1971), John Munonye’s A Wreath for the Maidens (1973), I.N.C. Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice (1974), and Flora Nwapa’s Never Again (1975). Several of the other earlier best known works about Biafra fell into other genres, like Wole Soyinka’s prison memoir The Man Died (1972), Chinua Achebe’s short story collection Girls at War and Other Stories (1972), and Elechi Amadi’s memoir Sunset in Biafra: A Civil War Diary (1973). 53 Chukwuemeka Ike, Sunset at Dawn: A Novel of the Biafran War (Ibadan, Nigeria: University Press, 1976), 17. 51

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the narrator reveals a tension between the Biafran proclamations of solidarity across ethnic groups and ethnic minorities’ more complex political needs. Elsewhere, interactions among the Biafran characters sometimes highlight their uneasiness with non-Igbo people in Biafra. In the thenBiafran town of Obodo, local leaders debate whether or not to permit Fatima, the northern Hausa wife of the Obodo-born Dr Amilo Kanu, to stay in the town with her in-laws. Many of the meeting’s participants are troubled by her presence: ‘Just as it was impossible to say which lizard was male and which was female by merely watching them run around the house, so it was impossible to tell which foreigner was a true Biafran and which a Nigerian in Biafran clothing.’54 This argument, which assumes that an individual is either ‘a true Biafran’ or an impostor, indicates a clear uncertainty about whether non-Igbo people could be genuinely Biafran. Even if a non-Igbo Obodo resident under consideration was ‘a true Biafran’ (whatever that might mean), that person would still remain a ‘foreigner’, never truly at home in Biafra. Although the character in question in this particular instance is a northerner, rather than a member of an eastern minority group, the community expresses their concern about her loyalties in broad terms, applicable to anyone who is not Igbo. In this way, although it never mandates identifying as Igbo as a prerequisite for claiming Biafranness, Sunset at Dawn suggests that it is at least a preferred qualification. Putting these more generalized concerns about non-Igbo Biafrans to the test, the novel presents two minority characters that identify strongly as Biafrans: a major character named Duke Bassey and an unnamed old man. Sunset at Dawn never outright states that Bassey is from a minority group, but it gives several clues to suggest as much: his surname, fairly common in Southern Nigeria, is not typically Igbo; he is from Ikot Ekpene, a predominantly ethnically Annang town in what was briefly Biafran territory; another character, Bassey’s Igbo friend Professor Ezenwa, implies that Igbo is a learned language for Bassey; and, as Bassey travels in and around Biafra, he has (justified) anxiety about being stopped by soldiers from both sides of the conflict.55 Despite his presumably minority identity, however, Bassey is very much one of the accepted Biafran characters in Sunset at Dawn. At the end of the novel, for example, the narrator describes how all the Biafran characters immediately shift from ‘Biafranism back to Nigerianism’, including a list of the most important surviving ex-Biafran characters, all Igbo except for Bassey: ‘Akwaelumo, Duke Bassey, Barrister Ifeji, Onukaegbe,

54 55

Ibid., 62. ‘Ikot Ekpene Local Government Area’, Akwa Ibom State Government Online, last modified 2012, www.aksgonline.com.ws033.alentus.com/lga.aspx?qrID=ikotekpene (accessed November 10, 2014); and Ike, Sunset at Dawn, 24, 69.

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etcetera’.56 By placing Bassey in the middle of this list, the text includes him as equally and no differently Biafran from his Igbo peers (even though they have all just become Nigerians again, in this final post-war section of the novel). That said, the text avoids connecting Bassey to any specific ethnic group and detaches him from his community in Ikot Ekpene. Sunset at Dawn never names his ethnic identity, which precludes the novel from making any broader claims about specific ethnic groups’ belonging within Biafra. Moreover, Bassey’s connections to his imprecisely identified community of origin are severed over the course of the novel: he loses touch with his family; he is betrayed by his ‘own people’ (whoever they might be) to federal Nigerian forces; and he expresses a greater appreciation for his Igbo Biafran friends than for the childhood friend who risks his own life to save Bassey’s.57 In this way, the text’s apparent promotion of the official Biafran narrative of territorial inclusion is framed very carefully, leaving space to question the completeness of minority inclusion. Attentive readers might ask, for instance, whether it was essential for Bassey to disconnect from his community in order to belong as a Biafran. What might at first seem like an obvious illustration of Biafra’s declared inclusiveness (Bassey’s Biafranism) thus seems to be a nuanced and somewhat cautious engagement after all. In contrast with Bassey, an unnamed old man from an unidentified minority group provides a clear-cut instance of minority exclusion from the nation. Initially, the man had demonstrated tremendous loyalty to Biafra: he had served as a Junior Minister, subscribed enthusiastically to Biafran ideology, contributed materially to the new state, and tried to persuade members of his own ethnic group to contribute as well.58 Despite his emotional, professional, and material commitments to Biafra, the man nonetheless goes on to lose his ‘wife and four teenage sons’ in an ‘unprovoked midnight massacre of his people by a neighbouring Igbo village’ while he was out of town negotiating, ironically, for relief for Biafran refugees.59 Here, the Biafran nation proves unable to accommodate the ethnic minority family, and in response to the devastating tragedy, the man decides to support the federal Nigerian cause instead. The characters never lament the ‘unprovoked midnight massacre’.60 They merely treat this change in loyalties as tragic but understandable: the refugee camp organizers observe ‘his bitterness towards Biafra’ without any particular reaction.61 The old man’s eager 56

Ibid., 246. Ibid., 171. 58 Ibid., 225. 59 Historically, this tragic turn of events was not unusual. Arua Oko Omaka’s ‘The Forgotten Victims’ (2014) narrates several firsthand accounts of minorities initially loyal to Biafra who were turned against as tensions developed over the course of the war. 60 Ike, Sunset at Dawn, 225. 61 Ibid. 57

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participation in and support for the state were not enough to sustain his claim to belonging in Biafra. Moreover, Sunset at Dawn’s quick introduction to and dismissal of this unnamed minority character in under two pages stands in particular contrast to its lengthy considerations of two Hausa women, Fatima and Halima, as potential Biafrans. Especially given that Hausa people were commonly perceived as the primary perpetrators behind the 1966 atrocities and consequently as Biafra’s primary enemy, the eventual rejection of these women from the Biafran nation is unsurprising. What remains noteworthy, however, is the novel’s insistence on making Fatima and her quest to become Biafran a major plotline throughout the novel, while relegating the unnamed minority man – the only character explicitly identified as a from a Biafran minority – to a brief aside. After all, at stake in the debate over Biafran nationalism was not whether non-Eastern Nigerians, like the Hausa, were automatically included in a territorially based nation. Rather, the contested and relevant point was the place of eastern minorities. The emphasis on Fatima’s nationality makes the discussion of the old man seem all the more cursory by contrast. Though Sunset at Dawn is arguing against the prevalent Biafran narrative of inclusiveness, then, it makes this particular point only briefly. Even if the text’s critiques of the official line are marked by ambiguity or brevity, the fact that it does so nonetheless marks the first time that a pro-Biafran novel seriously remarked on this aspect of the conflict, highlighting complexities beyond the secessionists’ optimistic claims of a civic-territorial nationalism unencumbered by the territory’s ethnic composition. Particularly by dismissing the old man’s claims to Biafranness, and by foregrounding and raising questions around Bassey’s belonging, Sunset at Dawn offers a more nuanced counter-narrative to any straightforward claim about minority belonging in Biafra.

‘Still, They Looked Unconvinced’: Half of a Yellow Sun’s Uneasiness about Minorities in Biafra Like Sunset at Dawn, Half of a Yellow Sun raises concern about the challenges of incorporating minorities into the Biafran nation. These questions, however, are largely relegated to the background of the novel’s approximately 540 pages, as the plot follows the relationships among its five main characters: the twins, Kainene and Olanna Ozobia; Kainene’s partner, the white Englishman Richard Churchill; Olanna’s husband, Odenigbo; and Odenigbo’s servant, Ugwu. With the obvious exception of Richard, all the main characters are Igbo. While Richard consistently tries to identify as Biafran, Half of a Yellow Sun never takes his claim seriously; both Biafrans and Americans poke fun at his insistence on

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being Biafran.62 As is the case with the Hausa characters in Sunset at Dawn, though, the pervasiveness of Richard’s claims throughout the novel stands in stark contrast to the small number of moments in which the novel directly addresses questions about ethnic minorities in Biafra. Brief and uncomfortable, these moments in Half of a Yellow Sun remain at best unresolved. Despite the notable academic and popular attention that the novel has received, few critics have focused on this issue. One exception is political scholar Kathryn Nwajiaku-Dahou, who has argued that Half of a Yellow Sun treats the question of ethnic minorities in a complex and sympathetic way: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel is replete with references to persistent suspicions of minority commitment to the Biafra cause, constantly hounded for being saboteurs but equally instrumental in sustaining the Biafran effort, as professionals or fighters on the frontline. Adichie, while sympathetic to the Biafran cause, critically explores how the saboteur syndrome was exploited politically, as a convenient way of dealing with all forms of political opposition to Ojukwu and shielding Biafrans from disillusionment with a failing and costly war enterprise.63

While I agree that the novel raises concern about the treatment of minorities in Biafra, this assessment nonetheless falls short on a few counts. As I will show, the novel is far from ‘replete with’ such moments. Even when it does take on this problem, it never suggests in any unequivocal way that the accusations against saboteurs are political exploitations. Its engagement with the problem is both more subtle and more ambiguous than Nwajiaku-Dahou suggests. A second critic who has taken on the portrayal of ethnic minorities in Half of a Yellow Sun is literary critic Aghogho Akpome, who has detailed how ‘specific political persuasions are privileged and reinforced’ in the novel.64 In a 2013 article, Akpome notes how the novel foregrounds events and geographies likely to make readers most sympathetic to the Biafran cause, while pushing mitigating factors largely to the background. One of his main criticisms, for example, addresses the ‘insufficient representation of the significance of the discovery of commercial quantities of crude oil in the minority non-Igbo areas of then Eastern Nigeria’.65 Akpome identifies some important omissions, but this chapter still contends that the fact that Half of a Yellow Sun acknowledges ethnic tension within Biafra at all constitutes a significant departure from most Biafran novels’ treatment of the conflict. This chapter’s read 62

Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 469, 466. Nwajiaku-Dahou, ‘Heroes and Villains’, 62. 64 Aghogho Akpome, ‘Narrating a New Nationalism: Rehistoricization and Political Apologia in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun’, English Academy Review 30:1 (2013), 28. 65 Ibid., 31. 63

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ing of the novel is therefore situated somewhere in between NwajiakuDahou’s and Akpome’s: Half of a Yellow Sun does not go so far as to examine ethnic minorities’ position in depth, as Nwajiaku-Dahou holds, but it does more critical work than only ‘privileg[ing] and reinforc[ing]’ the Biafran position, as Akpome claims. Admittedly, though, and in line with Akpome’s critique, some moments in the novel obscure the presence of ethnic minorities in Biafra. For example, the novel’s unofficial Biafran War historian, Ugwu, writes: ‘What mattered was that the massacres frightened and united the Igbo. What mattered was that the massacres made fervent Biafrans of former Nigerians.’66 Ugwu’s analysis of ‘what mattered’ here is revealing, as it implies that the experience of the massacres brought together specifically Igbo victims. That is, although the massacres targeted easterners of various ethnic backgrounds, Ugwu only mentions the Igbo victims, according to their ethnic identity in his narrative, and he leaves out any mention of a territorial identity (for example, mentioning ‘former Nigerians’, but never ‘former Eastern Nigerians’). Perhaps unwittingly, Ugwu thus casts Biafra as an ethnocultural nation, and in so doing participates in the problematic trend of omitting narratives of minority victimhood in the war, a trend which Arua Oko Omaka has recently noted.67 The trend lifts for two key moments, however, which explicitly raise the matter of ‘saboteur syndrome’, both with ambiguous resolutions. The first of these instances occurs when Kainene’s friend Colonel Madu reports to Richard: ‘Some saboteurs have been arrested and all of them are non-Igbo minorities. I don’t know why these people insist on aiding the enemy.’68 Providing a fictional depiction of the historical antagonism toward alleged ‘saboteurs’ based on their ethnicity rather than their actions, Madu does not question whether these minorities are truly saboteurs. He offers no evidence of their guilt and refers to them merely as ‘these people’, as if their minority identity exclusively defined them and caused them to oppose Biafra. This moment is brief, and the novel never returns to complicate Madu’s statement. A generally sympathetic character, Madu is friendly with all the other characters except for Richard, to whom he is speaking here. Because of their personal animosity, Richard tends to be wary of what Madu says, but here, Richard reacts uncritically, thinking to himself: ‘The sacrilege of it, that some people could betray Biafra.’69 Richard’s unhesitating acceptance of Madu’s accusation initially seems like an outright refusal to question the identification of ethnic minorities with traitors to Biafra. 66

John C. Hawley, ‘Biafra as Heritage and Symbol: Adichie, Mbachu, and Iweala’, Research in African Literatures 39:2 (2008), 21; and Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 257. 67 See Omaka, ‘The Forgotten Victims’. 68 Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 395. 69 Ibid.

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The next part of Richard’s reaction, however, complicates his and Madu’s assertions. He recalls engaging in a debate with some unnamed Ijaw and Efik men about minorities’ place in the nation. The men express concern that ‘the Igbo would dominate them when Biafra was established’, but Richard insists that such will not be the case and earnestly lists off ‘the army general who was Efik, the director who was Ijaw, the minority soldiers who were fighting so brilliantly for the cause’. When Richard concludes his case, the paragraph concisely ends: ‘Still, they looked unconvinced’.70 Immediately afterwards, a break appears in the text, ending this piece of the narrative. While Richard is able to give specific and pertinent examples in favor of his argument, the section ends not with his enthusiastic, inclusive view, but instead on an uneasy note. The well-intentioned but not always astute Richard has failed to assuage the minorities’ concerns, encouraging the reader to question whether Richard’s optimism is valid, or whether they, too, should remain ‘unconvinced’. By promoting skepticism about minority inclusion in Biafra, the debate casts doubt on the veracity of Madu’s accusations, but without going so far as to examine ‘how the saboteur syndrome was exploited politically’, as Nwajiaku-Dahou argues.71 Later in the novel, the most dramatic exposition of the minority question takes place in a refugee hospital that Kainene and Richard visit. Dr Inyang, a doctor from an unidentified minority group, attends a sickly, pregnant patient.72 The patient suddenly spits in the doctor’s face, calling her a ‘saboteur’, and then exclaims: ‘It is you non-Igbo who are showing the enemy the way! Hapu m! It is you people that showed them the way to my hometown!’73 The doctor is ‘too stunned’ to respond.74 The bold Kainene takes action: The silence was thickened by uncertainty. Kainene walked over briskly and slapped the pregnant woman, two hard smacks in quick succession on her cheek. ‘We are all Biafrans! Anyincha bu Biafra!’ Kainene said. ‘Do you understand me? We are all Biafrans!’ The pregnant woman fell back on her bed. Richard was startled by Kainene’s violence. There was something brittle about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would destroy her.75

70

All quotations in Ibid. Nwajiaku-Dahou, ‘Heroes and Villains’, 62. 72 As with the old man in Sunset at Dawn, the specific ethnic identity of Dr Inyang is never revealed. 73 Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 401–402. 74 Ibid., 402. 75 Ibid. 71

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Here, Kainene becomes the only character in Half of a Yellow Sun who expresses real certainty that all easterners are equally Biafran. As Dr Inyang is obviously committed to the Biafran cause, working under difficult conditions at a Biafran refugee camp, the novel offers no reason to doubt her loyalty. Yet, immediately after Kainene’s reaction, the text neither confirms Kainene’s statement nor just ends the scene but rather goes on to create a sense of ambiguity around whether Kainene’s claim that they are ‘all Biafrans’ is correct. The atmosphere of ‘uncertainty’ is arguably not just due to the timid Richard’s confusion about what to do in this dramatic situation, but also about the characters’ more deeply rooted uncertainty about Dr Inyang’s Biafranness. The fact that Kainene needs to use ‘violence’ to assert Dr Inyang’s equal inclusion in Biafra suggests that identifying non-Igbo characters as Biafrans might require force. This notion calls to mind the minorities who were forced to move within Biafra’s shrinking territory as federal forces advanced – cases in which violence kept minorities within Biafran boundaries, as Kainene is perhaps doing here to emphasize Dr Inyang’s place within the Biafran nation. In this instance, however, Kainene is doing violence against another Igbo Biafran, not the minority character. Her emphatic inclusion of Dr Inyang thus comes at a cost to a character who is already assumed to be included based on her ethnocultural background. This twist suggests that incorporating ethnic minorities may come at a cost to the majority Igbo, perhaps intelligible as the cost of shared political power within Biafra. In addition, Richard identifies Kainene’s action here as part of a larger project of hers, involving what he calls ‘the erasing of memory’. While he certainly makes various dubious claims about his own Biafranness, Half of a Yellow Sun is sure to rebuke those statements, usually by having other characters deride him; in this case, on the other hand, the chapter ends without questioning that Kainene’s violent affirmation of Dr Inyang’s equal Biafranness could, in Richard’s words, eventually ‘destroy her’. Kainene has enacted violence upon another Igbo woman – and a pregnant woman at that, carrying with her a future Biafran – in order to obtain a goal, the inclusion of the minority woman, that the novel casts as questionable and potentially dangerous, both to the pregnant woman and herself. Given that Kainene later disappears, never to be found by friends or family, an attentive reader might wonder whether this excerpt is foreshadowing her fate – that is, whether her emphatic inclusion of Dr Inyang leads to a fragility, as Richard fears, that ultimately prevents her from succeeding in the risky trading mission that leads to her disappearance. In any case, as the various layers of this scene exemplify, the novel’s portrayal of minority characters is ambiguous at best; it introduces them amidst uncertain circumstances and never resolves their place in the nation. Like Sunset at Dawn, then, Half of a Yellow Sun raises the question of minority belonging in Biafra. That Adichie’s novel acknowledges these

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tensions at all marks a departure from the pro-Biafran narrative’s insistence on Biafran national inclusion, thereby offering a subtle critique of that narrative. Igbo characters, like the pregnant patient, and minority characters, like Richard’s minority interlocutors, all express doubt in Biafran nationalist assertions of genuinely inclusive territorial nationalism. Thirty years after Sunset at Dawn, the uneasiness surrounding the place of minorities in the Biafran nation thus remains present in the background of pro-Biafran fiction.

Conclusion By focusing on the brief moments that raise questions about ethnic minorities’ national belonging in Biafra, this chapter shows that Sunset at Dawn and Half of a Yellow Sun treat the contentious issue uncomfortably. By addressing it at all, however, they gesture towards a skepticism of a genuinely inclusive Biafran nationalism. That is, the novels’ hesitation to fully embrace ethnic minority characters as Biafrans does not indicate any belief that minorities should not have been treated as equal members of the secessionist nation, but rather that in historical terms they often were not treated as such, despite the Biafran leadership’s claims. Though subtle, these critiques nonetheless distinguish these novels from most other pro-Biafran literature, as they indicate an acknowledgement that the secessionist nation was not wholly ethnically inclusive. Moreover, the novels only ever consider individual minority claims to Biafranness. No group claim is ever made, as Sunset at Dawn’s Duke Bassey and unnamed old man and Half of a Yellow Sun’s Dr Inyang belong to ethnic groups that the texts never identify. Without naming their ethnic groups, the novels do not risk making a claim about Ijaw, Ogoni, Ikwerre, or any other group of minority people belonging, or not belonging, in Biafra. Sunset at Dawn’s and Half of a Yellow Sun’s refusals to reiterate the official Biafran image of a civic-territorially inclusive Biafran nationalism therefore betray an underlying anxiety that has endured from the war’s end into the twenty-first century. Yet the fact that these novels go as far as they do suggests a cautious desire to acknowledge the complexities of minorities’ circumstances in the short-lived nation.

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14

Biafra in the Irish Imagination War and Famine in Banville’s An End to Flight and Forristal’s Black Man’s Country Fiona Bateman

The idea of Biafra resonated in Ireland for a variety of reasons and, in the late 1960s, Biafra was a constant presence in the Irish media. In this chapter I will consider the representation of the war and famine in Biafra in Irish fiction, with a particular focus on two texts: the novel, An End to Flight (1973)1 and the play, Black Man’s Country (1974).2 These two substantial texts from Ireland describe how the situation was experienced by the Irish people who stayed in Biafra after secession, and thus provide an alternative perspective on the war. Nigerian authors produced many works of fiction describing the events in Biafra, both during and after the war, but these two fictional works, written primarily for Irish audiences, demonstrate an interest in and familiarity with the events that is perhaps unexpected from a small, geographically distant, European country. The existence of these texts demonstrates awareness of the short-lived Biafran state and the war and famine, but it also raises questions: do these works provide a commentary on Biafra or merely an account of Irish men and women abroad? Do these writings explain or elaborate on the Irish relationship with Biafra? Ireland’s relationship with Biafra was ambiguous – the popular and official responses to the breakaway republic were at variance. The Irish government never formally acknowledged the existence of the Republic of Biafra, but the Irish people spoke about and thought of Biafra as a real nation. In official documents, it was carefully noted as ‘Biafra’ or the Eastern Region of Nigeria, but in the print media quotation marks were never used around the name. In popular discourse the Biafran state was accepted as a legitimate and real entity; there was no uncertainty or ambiguity about its existence. It was accepted that ‘there was a country’.3 Ireland’s relationship with the African continent had developed during the twentieth century as a result of religious missions to convert Africans to Christianity:

1

Vincent Lawrence, An End to Flight (Dublin: Faber & Faber, 1973). See p. 290, n. 29. Desmond Forristal, Black Man’s Country (Newark, DE: Proscenium Press, 1975). 3 Chinua Achebe’s memoir of Biafra is titled There Was a Country. 2

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That fire has been kindled in Ireland. If history speaks truly it is the mission of the Irish to fan it to a bright flame on the hearths of the homeland and to carry its embers abroad to light up the darkness of paganism.4

Nigeria was considered the jewel in the crown of Ireland’s spiritual empire, and Eastern Nigeria, where Joseph Shanahan had first established a mission in the early 1900s, was a significant area of missionary activity for Irish priests and nuns. Over the decades, images of Africa in Irish missionary discourse had mirrored imperial representations, describing a savage and pagan space in need of civilization and Christianity.5 By the 1960s, these representations were changing and countries like the newly independent Nigeria were regarded as potential trading partners rather than as populations of pagans to be converted to Christianity. Schools had been the primary tool in the process of conversion, and Irish priests and nuns had been instrumental in educating Nigerians towards independence. Their influence was regarded with some disapproval by the British. A letter from the Irish Ambassador in Lagos in September 1968 mentions the difficulties being experienced by some missionaries, which he suspects is partially due to the ‘attitude of our British friends. For reasons of history probably and old anti-Missionary feeling they are still hostile to our priests and specially the Holy Ghosts.’6 But the Nigerians were grateful for that education. In a speech delivered at the Independence Ceremony in 1960, the Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, spoke about opening ‘a new chapter in the history of Nigeria’, and he thanked those who ‘had made Nigeria’. Among these he included the missionary societies, remarking on the ‘countless missionaries who have laboured unceasingly in the cause of education and to whom we owe many of our medical services’.7 In schools and parishes in Nigeria, the Irish shared stories of their own country’s struggle for independence, ideas and ideals that the Nigerians embraced along with their more formal education. Missionary and teacher Pádraig Ó Máille recalls in his memoir Dúdhúchas,8 how he explained to his students the importance of their poets and intellectuals, and that he read the poems of Irish patriots like Pearse, McDonagh and Plunkett to them. When Wole Soyinka was imprisoned for the second time after speaking out against the massacres in the North, the students and lecturers in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, met in tribute to Soyinka and to 4

Reverend John O’Leary, ‘Vocations’, Pagan Missions 3 (June 1924),78–79. See, for example, missionary magazines including African Missionary, Missionary Annals of the Holy Ghost Fathers, Pagan Missions, and St Patrick’s Missionary Bulletin. 6 Handwritten letter from Ambassador Paul Keating to Eamon O. Tuathail, Department of External Affairs, September 12, 1968, National Archives of Ireland, 2000/14/23. 7 Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Mr. Prime Minister: A Selection of Speeches Made by Alhaji the Right Honourable Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, K.B.E., M.P., Prime Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (Apapa: Nigerian National Press, 1964), 49. 8 This autobiographical account is written in the Irish language: Pádraig Ó Máille, Dúdhúchas (Dublin: Sáirséal agus Dill, 1972). 5

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protest his arrest. The president of the literary society read W.B. Yeats’s poem ‘Easter 1916’ and, identifying with the Irish experience, said that the society’s members were observing a ‘terrible beauty’ of their own.9 After secession, Biafran Radio broadcast readings from Irish patriots, supplied from the missionaries’ own libraries. In 1966, only six years after Nigerian independence, ongoing internal problems and political instability made it apparent that there was a real threat that the Eastern Region might secede. Staff in the Irish Embassy in Lagos began to make preparations to evacuate Irish citizens from the area. However when the Republic of Biafra was declared in May 1967, over 250 Irish citizens chose to remain in the enclave and refused to leave.10 Of this total, 189 were men and 78 were women; all but three were missionaries. Apart from the Irish, there were probably not more than 250 other expatriates in total (mostly Indian, Lebanese, and about 70 British citizens) remaining in Biafra, so the Irish made up by far the largest group. The presence of these Irish missionaries in Biafra was central to the concern for and affinity with the Biafrans that developed in Ireland. Biafra’s existence was accepted without question. Missionaries gave their address as Biafra and young Igbo (and other non-Igbo Biafran) students in Dublin were described as Biafran rather than Nigerian. In the Irish media, stories referred to missionaries who had been in Biafra for 10, 20 or even 30 years, ascribing a historical existence to the new state. These priests and nuns communicated with family, friends and colleagues, reporting incidents and atrocities that were not being covered in the official accounts of the war. For decades, missionaries had been the main source of information about Africa in Ireland and were quickly recognized as a reliable source of news there, but now they also had a role in alerting the international media to the humanitarian crisis which was unfolding. Irish missionaries were the first to report food shortages and ask for help to feed the starving population. As early as December 1967 a report that a ‘group [was] being formed … to raise funds for medical and missionary supplies to be sent to Biafra’ appeared in a national newspaper.11 It was not however until the summer of 1968 that the disaster was more widely acknowledged, and the international media began to report on the famine. Given the nature of the Irish relationship with Biafra over those few years, it is almost impossible to discuss or describe Ireland in 1967–1970 without mentioning Biafra. For the reader, a reference to Biafra conjures up the Ireland of the late 1960s: the sense of helplessness that people experienced when faced with images of starving 9

Ibid., 229. The poem is a response to the Easter Rising, an event in Ireland’s campaign for independence from Great Britain. 10 Irish National Archives, 2002/19/28. 11 Irish Independent, December 13, 1967, 12.

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children, the belief that sending aid could save lives, the conviction that the Biafrans were ‘like us’ despite the racial difference. The word ‘Biafra’ also reminds people of the endless, disturbing newspaper articles, and the fundraising drives and social and sporting events linked to a war in West Africa, when distant events seemed to have become inextricably linked with their own lives. Sadly for those for whom Biafra was a dream of an ideal civil society, the word also has connotations of disaster and starvation. From a political perspective, the Biafran struggle for independence had huge resonance in a country that had just commemorated the 50th Anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. In addition, reports of a developing famine struck a chord, recalling a catastrophic episode in nineteenth-century Irish history that remained traumatic and unresolved. While these coincidences of experience may have been exploited to encourage Irish support, the similarities were undeniable. In the emotive context of war and hunger, evident differences in the circumstances of the two populations were ignored and the shared experiences became the central focus. A newspaper article declared that, ‘as descendants of a people who experienced similar suffering at the hands of a more powerful neighbour, it was only right that there should be a more ready response from us’.12 The political idealism of the Biafrans was celebrated in somewhat romantic terms in the regional press with statements such as: ‘Biafra is a new name in the political sky drawn by those political and military leaders of the Ibo [sic] people.’13 However most of the public’s attention was concentrated on the suffering and starving population, and it was this concern which prompted the massive fundraising efforts and public manifestations of support for the Biafrans. Biafra became an obsession, a public preoccupation; it was a constant presence in the local and national print media, and fundraising events were organized countrywide. The frustration of watching a distant population starve, while politicians appeared to do nothing, generated an immense sense of injustice. The Irish government was accused of ‘apathy’ and of refusing to face the facts, even of doubting the testimony of ‘these courageous priests’.14 Of course, behind the scenes, there was diplomatic engagement but even that was immensely restrained; at the time it was all but invisible to the public: Our Government, in an effort to be neutral, has gone to the other extreme of inaction … few have the moral status, or the gift of friendship towards Nigeria, that we possess. We have allowed these assets to remain idle through, one feels, the timidity that is so much a part of our foreign policy in recent 12

‘Drumboylan Feis Proceeds For Biafra’, Leitrim Observer, August 10, 1968, 1. ‘Biafra and Ireland’, The Kerryman, July 13, 1968, 10. 14 Ciaran Carty, ‘Ireland’s apathy a bitter blow to Biafrans’, Sunday Independent, April 21, 1968, 10. 13

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years … Ireland, too, MUST do all in its power to bring about a cessation of hostilities.15

In March 1969 the Cork Examiner announced that it was time for an Irish protest. The ceaseless accounts of atrocities, for which there was irrefutable evidence from Red Cross teams, missionaries, television crews, and newspaper reporters, could not be ignored: ‘For our own government, the civil war has been an embarrassment.’16 The writer argued that ‘to remain neutral in such circumstances would be an indictment of our status as a Christian nation’. ‘Is indifference not complicity?’, asked a headline in the Irish Press.17 The Irish people determined that Ireland’s role on the global stage should be as a small nation that prioritized human rights. Given the catastrophic events that unfolded, it is no wonder that so many Nigerian writers have produced texts inspired by events in Biafra. Comprising poems and short stories as well as novels, these explore the war from a range of perspectives including those of women, soldiers, and journalists. However it is unusual to find texts set in Biafra written by non-Nigerian authors. One example is South African Charles Kearey’s Last Plane from Uli (1972), an adventure novel that uses the location as a backdrop for his characters, who are mercenary pilots. According to the author’s notes, shortly after what he terms the ‘Biafran-Nigerian shemozzle’, Kearey had met pilot Bill Fortuin who had flown for the Federal army against the Biafran forces. Together they decided to ‘do a novel based on the background of the Nigerian – Biafran Conflict’.18 Frederick Forsyth had been in Biafra as journalist and he drew upon that experience in his novel The Dogs of War (1974)19; the fictional ‘Republic of Zangaro’, in which the adventure unfolds, is based upon Equatorial Guinea. This genre of thriller might be described as postcolonial imperial adventure. The focus is on the action of war and there is little reference to politics or even to the humanity of the people involved: Swinging around I emptied the balance of the magazine of the FN [gun] at them, firing in short controlled bursts. The firing stopped. ‘Those were Biafrans,’ Christopher shouted. ‘I don’t give a fuck if they were Chinese,’ said Tubby. ‘We shoot every bastard who tries to stop us.’20

15

Evening Herald, June 13, 1968. ‘Nigerian War – Time for an Irish Protest’, Cork Examiner, March 12, 1969. 17 Irish Press, April 15, 1969, 3. 18 Charles Kearey, Last Plane from Uli (London: Collins, 1972), ‘Acknowledgement’. 19 Frederick Forsyth, The Dogs of War (London: Hutchinson, 1974). 20 Kearey, Last Plane from Uli, 218. 16

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In Ireland, the literary response was not extensive, but brief references to Biafra in works of fiction illustrate the lasting impact of these events on the Irish imagination. In short stories, references to Biafra are brief and generally allude to the famine, rather than the fight for independence. In one short story by Ita Daly, ‘Aimez-vous Colette?’, the narrator bemoans the hypocrisy of people in her town and their ‘absurd attempts at liberalism’.21 The author is commenting on the latent racism in Irish society, mentioning the ‘collections and fasts outside church doors for Biafrans, when every mother within twenty miles would lock up her daughter if a black man came to town’. She includes the clergy in her criticism: ‘And would be encouraged by their priests to do so.’22 The main character in the story remembers an African friend she had when a student in Trinity. She has lost touch with him: ‘I never saw him again. He may have been killed in the Biafran War (he was an Ibo), or he may be rich and prosperous, living somewhere in Nigeria, with several wives perhaps.’23 The reference to his ‘several wives’ plays to the ignorance of Irish people with regard to the cultures and traditions of Africa. In a novel by the same author, a character comments: ‘Children are starving in Africa and you’re turning up your nose at a good tea.’24 This refrain was one with which any Irish person who was a child in the 1970s would have been familiar. Even long after the famine had ended, Biafra was commonly referenced as a place of suffering and seemed linked forever with hunger. In a short story by Helen Lucy Burke, a character mentions Biafra in that context: ‘“Ha!” said Mrs MacMahon deeply. “And people starving. Starving. Bangladesh. Biafra. Here in Rome, even”.’25 Author Michael Collins describes the character Emmett, alone in a damp, abandoned landscape, who thinks to himself that if ‘there was a kinship with Africa it was there in this famine death, in the underbelly of these unknown fields with forgotten cottages, the hidden past’.26 All of the above references appear in works written some time after the events in Biafra, and they indicate the traces that Biafra left in the Irish psyche and in popular moral discourse. However, in this chapter I want to focus on two Irish works of fiction based in Biafra, which appeared soon after the Nigeria-Biafra War and which described the horror from the perspective of Irish characters. These texts were of course intended for Irish readers and although they were reviewed widely on their initial publication, and performance in 21

Ita Daly, ‘Aimez-vous Colette?’, in her The Lady with the Red Shoes (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1980), 79–91, here 80. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 90–91. 24 Ita Daly, Unholy Ghosts (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 38. 25 Helen Lucy Burke, ‘A Season for Mothers’ in D.J. Casey and L.M. Casey, Stories by Contemporary Irish Women (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 13–33, here 21. 26 Michael Collins, ‘The Sunday Races’ in his The Feminists go Swimming (London: Phoenix House, 1996),189–200, here 196.

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the case of the play, they have received little attention subsequently. The depiction of Biafra in these fictional accounts contributes another perspective to the story of Biafra: that of the outsider as participant and witness.

Vincent Banville’s An End to Flight In 1968, a short story titled ‘Ibo Kwennu’ was published in the ‘New Irish Writing’ section of the Irish Press.27 It was Vincent Lawrence’s first published work; he had returned to Dublin after spending five years as a teacher in Nigeria. ‘Igbo Kwenu’ is a call that requires a response from those in attendance to recognize each other and their shared ancestry. It establishes unity and collective will in the audience and in this context it may be a call to solidarity with the Igbo people. In the story, a group of expatriates in Biafra, including some missionaries, are waiting to go home as the inevitability of the fall of Biafra becomes apparent. They discuss their experiences and express regrets; their helplessness is evident as they make plans to leave. At the end of the story, the main character, Michael Painter, leaves on a flight from Uli. His Igbo friend Ben raises his clenched fist and shouts ‘Ibo Kwennwu’. Inside the plane Painter raises his hand and shouts ‘Ibo Kwennwu, Ibo Kwennwu’, until his voice ‘was caught in the roar of the plane’s engines’.28 Lawrence subsequently wrote a novel, An End to Flight (1973), set in Biafra, which he had developed from this short story. ‘Vincent Lawrence’ was a pseudonym and An End to Flight was re-issued in 2002, under the author’s real name, Vincent Banville (born 1940).29 The title of the novel is taken from a speech where General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwo described Biafra as ‘home’: ‘an end to a journey, an end to flight’.30 Clearly in the context of Biafra’s demise, ‘an end to flight’ takes on a different meaning than that intended in Ojukwu’s original phrase, which suggested a sanctuary, the reaching of a safe place. In fact, Biafra turned out to be the continuation of the journey, as Ojukwu later acknowledged to Time correspondent James Wilde: What you are seeing now is the end of a long, long journey. It began in the far north of Nigeria and moved steadily southward as we were driven out of

27

Vincent Lawrence, ‘Ibo Kwennu’, Irish Press, November 30, 1968, 12. Ibid. 29 Vincent Banville, An End to Flight 2nd edition (Dublin: New Island, 2002). The author will be referred to as (Vincent) Banville for the remainder of this chapter. 30 General Ojukwu’s words are quoted as an epigraph in the novel. It was a phrase he used more than once: ‘Biafra came into being for this reason, to put an end to the flight of our people’, Random Thoughts of C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, General of the People’s Army Biafra, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 25, 175. 28

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place after place. Now this path has become the road to the slaughterhouse here in the Ibo heartland.31

In Banville’s title, the phrase ‘an end to flight’ suggests the grounding of an idea, an incapacitated bird, the limit of exploration, and a halt to the endeavor to achieve change.32 The main character in the novel, Michael Painter, is an Irish teacher, who remains in Biafra after war breaks out. Unlike the missionaries, who choose to stay not only out of a sense of duty but also, more importantly, because they feel they belong there, Painter stays out of apathy. He experiences the events as an outsider, an observer who is curiously unaffected by the drama of which he has become a part. As in other fictional accounts, the media interest and publicity surrounding the war are noted and the suffering of the civilian population is described. In this novel, additionally, the Irish priests appear as characters whose roles are changing as the circumstances evolve. Their predicament, caught between religious duty and humanitarian imperative is evident. When author Benedict Kiely reviewed the novel, he remarked: ‘Just as Rudyard Kipling was an interesting by-product of the British Raj, so this interesting first novel might be described as a by-product of the Irish Catholic missions to Africa.’33 Painter, who finds himself without a school or students to teach, is emotionally detached from events. The war, as presented from his apathetic viewpoint, seems hopeless and meaningless. The novel includes some of the same scenes described in his short story ‘Ibo Kwennwu’. In the shorter work, Painter is preparing to leave Biafra. He encounters Irish missionaries, witnesses the aftermath of a market bombing, and describes scenes at Uli airstrip. In the novel, while the situation deteriorates slowly, the tedium of war, the agony of indecision and the sense of being an outsider are explored. The descriptions of kwashiorkor, of refugees endlessly moving ahead of the armies, and of poorly-equipped soldiers, are familiar. In this environment, Painter questions his very existence and struggles with his inability to feel the outrage or compassion that would seem to be the obvious response to his circumstances. Painter can be a frustrating anti-hero; he is variously described by reviewers as ‘emotionally paralysed’,34 ‘indecisive’,35 ‘listless and

31 32 33

‘Nigeria’s Civil War: Hate, Hunger and the Will to Survive’, Time, 92: 8 (August 23, 1968), 32.

It may also be a reference to the Austin Clarke’s poem ‘Flight to Africa’ (1963), a critique of the Irish missionary project.

Benedict Kiely, ‘Back from hell to tell of horrors’, Sunday Independent, November 25, 1973, 19. 34 Russell Davies, ‘Con-man’s confession’, The Observer, September 2, 1973, 34. 35 Roy Foster, ‘Novels of the Year: A Sort of Vintage’, Irish Times, December 22, 1973, 12.

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lascivious’,36 ‘an owlish thug’,37 and an ‘introspective rather pompous Johnny “Head-in-the-Air”’.38 As Colm Tóibín argues, his struggle is not so much about survival in a dangerous environment, but a personal one. It is about his ‘innocence and decency doing battle with his drunkenness and his laziness; Painter’s longing for something pure is set against a badness lurking at the edge of his every action’.39 However as the novel progresses, the struggle for survival becomes a real issue. Painter is, however unwillingly, compelled to act and make decisions when his own and the safety of others close to him is at stake. An interesting response to critiques of the character Painter is that of William Trevor: ‘the faintly unsatisfactory aspect of Painter as a character in a novel is not so much a failure on Mr. Lawrence’s part as a determination to stick to the truth: in life this man would be just as blurred at the edges’.40 With a white man in Africa as the central character, the comparisons with Graham Greene are inevitable. Though there are undeniable similarities, the Irishman in Africa carries a somewhat different set of historical and cultural baggage than the Englishman. 41 In an interview, Banville acknowledged that even before publication, he realized that the novel would be compared with Greene, saying: ‘It has a seedy atmosphere, an African locale, and one of its main concerns is to do with Catholicism.’42 Apart from these elements identified by Banville, the character Painter himself invites these comparisons. He shares much with Greene’s characters, like Querry in A Burnt Out Case (1960), who is the victim of a terrible attack of indifference. Querry says things like: ‘I haven’t enough feeling left for human beings to do anything for them out of pity.’43 Despite Ireland’s long relationship with the African continent, and especially Nigeria, there were no novels by Irish authors set in African countries, other than those by Joyce Cary (and he is often referred to as an Englishman).44 Discussing An End to Flight on radio, Seamus Heaney and John Horgan noted the atypical setting, commenting that it was 36

Colm Tóibín, ‘Back to a dark Biafran drama’, Irish Times, December 21, 2002, B11 (on the occasion of the re-publication of the novel). 37 Peter Donnelly, ‘Too much bluff and nonsense’, Irish Independent, October 13, 1973, 6. 38 Mary Lappin, ‘Heaney’s Imprints’, Irish Press, September 22, 1973, 11. 39 Tóibín, Irish Times. 40 William Trevor, ‘New Novels by Irish Writers’, Irish Press, September 1, 1973, 12. 41 For example: Foster, Irish Times, December 22, 1973 and Terence de Vere White, ‘Irish Publishing: Books of the Year’, Irish Times, December 28, 1973, A19. 42 Interview with John Boland, ‘Writers and the “Clique” Barrier’, Irish Press, November 9, 1973, 11. 43 Graham Greene, A Burnt Out Case (London and New York: Penguin, 1977 [1960]), 50. 44 Often considered as an English writer, Joyce Cary (1888–1957) was born in Ireland. His novels Aissa Saved (1932), An American Visitor (1933), The African Witch (1936), and Mister Johnson (1939) were all set in Africa and drew on his experience in the colonial service in Nigeria.

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refreshing to find an Irish writer ‘walking confidently into the far territories of Nigeria instead of concentrating on what Kevin Casey once described as “moral awakening in a rural setting”’.45 Ironically, it might be suggested that this is exactly the theme of the novel, but in an ‘exotic’ location with the addition of war and famine. Perhaps only the setting has changed, the narrative formula has not. Is Biafra then merely an unusual backdrop for a story about an Irishman and his internal struggle for meaning? In his review of the novel, Benedict Kiely notes that there is ‘a lesson we can learn on our own island’, and again commenting on an account of brutality, that ‘such refinements are not unknown in our own dear land’.46 Rather than seeing the location as an exotic backdrop, he clearly identifies the universality of the human condition. He indicates the relevance of this story to the Irish context of violence and dissent over identity; this distant land is no more savage than Ireland. Banville himself responded to this question: In my novel, Michael Painter, who is a very boring person, is the central character, and I would hate to think that the plight of the people was being used, even unconsciously, for a questionable motive, as just a backdrop to the self obsessed main character.47

The interviewer commented: What Vincent is very pleased with in his novel is the fact that he caught so well the atmosphere of the country: indeed, he captures very powerfully and with great immediacy what it must have felt like to live in that place during that particular time under those dreadful conditions.48

The reviews were generally encouraging, certainly the story’s location provided an unusual and novel setting, and the book won the 1973 Robert Pitman £1,000 literary prize.49 Even those who criticized the writing style (‘it has metaphors the way babies have wind’) acknowledged that it provided ‘an interesting close-up of the Irish in Nigeria’ and was ‘clear-sighted about the difficulties of [the] missionary priest’.50 Seamus Heaney and John Horgan agreed it was ‘an impressive first novel’,51 and Roy Foster commended its ‘grace, economy and incisiveness’.52 The novel is undeniably set in the specific circumstances of the Biafran situation and the main character endures his personal struggle 45

Lappin, Irish Press. Kiely, Sunday Independent. 47 Interview with John Boland, Irish Press. 48 Ibid. 49 ‘Top awards for Irish Authors’, Irish Press, November 9, 1973, 1. 50 Donnelly, Irish Independent. 51 Lappin, Irish Press. 52 Foster, Irish Times. 46

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within that context. While it might be suggested that the same struggle would have taken place for this character regardless of his location, the extremes of Biafra prompt a particular set of questions and challenges for the individual. This is a story of Biafra, but it is a story about the experience of an ‘outsider’. Painter wants Biafra to be his struggle; he wants to feel the same emotional attachment to the ideal that he witnesses in the Biafrans around him, but he cannot. In the absence of that idealism, that personal connection, the conflict is less romantic and more brutal and that experience is the story that Banville writes. This novel can never be comparable to those written by Nigerian authors, whose personal identity and suffering lay at the heart of the war – this is the story of the experience of a non-Biafran. Painter is the central character, but other figures in the story provide a variety of other perspectives. There are missionary priests, whose lives are invested in this place which they consider home. Ben Nzekwe, an Igbo man, who has studied in Dublin and London and returned to his home, is initially unconvinced about the war but, aware of history and the current crisis, he finally commits to the cause. Anne Siena, the young American nurse, struggles with the scale of suffering and a lack of resources. A nameless young woman from the Rivers works as a prostitute. The residents of Ogundizzy, the refugees, soldiers, and officers from both armies, as well as schoolboys and expatriates all feature in the narrative to varying degrees. The war with all its confusion and suffering provides the dark context for their interactions. Early in the novel, Painter is in a hotel with his friend Ben Nzekwe, when they hear the announcement of Biafran independence on the radio from which a ‘wheezy disembodied voice emanated, like someone crying for help from a long way away’. The ‘small scratchy voices rose and fell’, the drum solo sounded ‘like pebbles thrown against a window’, the voices were ‘tinny and indistinct’. Then at one minute to midnight, there was a hush in the room and Ojukwu ‘slowly and clearly pronounced the creation of Biafra’. Ojukwu spoke in ‘heavy sad tones’, his voice faded away, came back fainter. ‘His words whispered through the silence of the room: long live the Republic of Biafra and may God protect all who live in her.’53 Then the new anthem was played. Soon the compound where Painter lives and teaches is taken over as a military camp. Rather than feeling exhilarated by the danger, Painter feels as if he is living ‘in a thick cocoon of fetid cotton wool’. He wishes bombs would fall, believing that the sense of danger might wipe away the indecision and the self pity in which he is mired.54 In the hospital ward, his friend Anne, a nurse, laments all the deaths. Painter responds that the meaning is lost when so many die: 53

Banville, An End to Flight, 2nd edition, 2002, 24–25; all page numbers following are from this edition unless otherwise specified. 54 Ibid., 42.

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When someone that one knows dies there is sorrow, or rage, or perhaps even fear. When many people die, it should only be read about in the newspaper, or heard over the radio. It’s a statistic to be recorded and filed away somewhere in a dusty room.55

The author acknowledges the impact that the photographs and film of starving and dying individuals had in Ireland and around the world; without images the numbers would have remained mere statistics. Painter is incapable of making a decision to leave but has no real reason to stay. He witnesses the aftermath of a bombing and Banville accurately notes that ‘the pilots usually chose to drop their lethal cargoes on market places; bombs were very expensive and they had to be as effective as possible’.56 The resulting ‘jumbled pile of limbless torsos’ does not affect him: ‘like love, grief also demanded involvement, and responsibility, and above all, a sense of belonging’.57 Painter feels useless; he wants to be somewhere else. He has no words of consolation, no love, not even anger to contribute. Describing the attitude of the Igbo people, the author notes the similarity of the Igbo and the Irish, something that was remarked on a number of times during commentaries on the war, including by Ojukwu himself.58 In the novel, the two white teachers are described as ‘different’ to the Fathers and ‘in the extroversion of their Irishness resembled to a great extent the Ibo themselves’.59 Painter recognizes this but feels that ultimately they are ‘tolerated not accepted’ and finds that the life of the expatriate is strangely similar to his life in Ireland: By the time that Painter had arrived in Nigeria in the early sixties most schools and missions had their own generators, kerosene powered fridges, running water, film projectors; many of the roads were tarred, and even the smaller towns had coldstores and cinemas. Painter had come 4000 miles in search of a new lifestyle, in search of something strange and unfamiliar, and he had settled into a society no different from the one he had left.60

Home is present in Nigeria, manifested in tea, bacon and cabbage, Irish friends, and the month-old Irish newspapers. Painter thinks to himself that his motive for staying is curiosity.61 For him, nothing changes as the war progresses; he does odd jobs and teaches the soldiers, but he is reluctant to leave something that he may never experience again. 55

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 53. 57 Ibid., 54. 58 In an interview with Irish journalist, Des Mullan, Ojukwu joked: ‘With them [the Irish] we have a special attachment – anybody who speaks English in Biafra certainly has a little bit of Irish spirit in him’. ‘Biafran leader hopes solution to conflict will be found in Africa’, Irish Independent, August 26, 1968, 5. 59 Banville, An End to Flight, 54. 60 Ibid., 55. 61 Ibid., 58. 56

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In Chapter 12 of Part One, ‘Last Supper’, there is a lighter mood presaged by an encounter as he walks through the garden, which has become overgrown and unkempt. He meets two young boys, his servant Jude’s brothers: Jesus Christ and Mercedes Benz. The anthills have taken over and the hill is badly fissured by erosion. Leaving this wasteland, he arrives at a stone bridge at the river, with its ‘sliding current of dappled water’.62 In the overwhelming bleakness of the novel, the description of this lovely place is enchanting: ‘Hibiscus grew there, Flames of the Forest flared in the undergrowth, and there was a cool odour of fern and damp moss.’63 It is not only the beauty of nature that appeals to him; there are women washing cassava, singing and talking. He describes a scene that is peaceful and domestic, with the sound of singing, and populated by egrets, dragonflies, and huge multicolored butterflies. The air is scented by large purple flowers.64 For a short while it is as if the war has never happened. Inevitably the war approaches Ogundizzy, and the women are moved out. Painter is asked when he is leaving; still he prevaricates. As the expatriates who are going home gather for the last time, an Irish priest wonders what he will do in Ireland, a place he no longer considers his ‘home’. He tells a story about a young chief, whose reluctance to convert to Christianity was because of the three wives he would have to give up, who would then have no-one to provide for them. This anecdote, based on an account in a missionary magazine,65 is neatly stitched into the narrative: the priest jokes that the soldiers had done what God could not do, for the chief ’s wives were all gone now, ‘and only his first wife, too old and tired like himself to run, was left’.66 In the second part of the novel, ‘Gethsemane’, the ‘Federal Soldiers’ arrive in Ogundizzy. They meet no opposition, for the Biafran soldiers had already scuttled their only gunboat and had melted away like ghosts into the bush and mangrove swamps to the south. There was nothing they could do; they were outgunned and outnumbered, and to stay and fight would have been foolish. They were not brave men, but neither were they cowards; they merely wished to survive. They were farmers and ex-students, shopkeepers and small businessmen – only the officers were regular soldiers – and they knew that the Federals too would run away if they were not bolstered up by all the magic of British Saladin armoured cars, Russian mortars, and full bellies.67

This bitter comment on the involvement of international interests in what Gowon (Nigerian Head of State) continued to call ‘an internal 62

Ibid. Ibid. 64 Ibid., 95–96. 65 Reverend T.M. Greene, ‘His Viewpoint’, African Missionary (May 1929), 83. 66 Banville, An End to Flight, 101. 67 Ibid., 113. 63

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affair’ develops into a description of the horror of the war, where fear and rumor were the forces that moved the refugees: In the beginning the dream of nationhood had hovered bright and steadfast, and perhaps the leaders still believed in it, but now after almost a year of the reality of war the people saw the dream for what it had become: a nightmare of confusion, a landscape of surrealism and distortion, where nature had gone mad and children became gnarled obscene caricatures, where men and women appeared like walking skeletons, where suppurating wounds and charred emaciated bodies were ordinary sights, and where people wept, not out of the depth of their anger, but rather out of uselessness and self pity.68

Painter’s continued presence in Ogundizzy is an inconvenience for Captain Basanji of the Federal army. Painter acknowledges that he is only there because of his inability to decide, his prevarication; he is no martyr. The Captain is there because he is ambitious; he wants to be a hero. In a reference to the widespread media coverage of the war, he acknowledges: ‘World opinion seems to matter in modern wars. This one is particularly well publicized.’69 The Captain is volatile, violent, and bitter; he resents the influence of the colonizer on his country. Despite the danger, Painter seems confident that he will not be killed: ‘you cannot afford to have me killed … it’s not as easy to explain away the body of a dead whiteman as it is of a black’.70 In further conversations, the Captain’s antipathy to the ‘whiteman’ is elaborated, and he makes no distinction between the Irish and the British: ‘You are a product of that culture which has been imposed upon us Africans. You have succeeded so well that now we must try to live like you, yet inside we are hollow shells.’ He also describes Africans as being ‘victims’, and asks: ‘Are we to be forever like small children?’71 The description of the priests (Manton, Osserman and Sanson) and their involvement with the airlift at Uli, provides a compelling account of the fragility of this lifeline. Osserman’s admiration of the Biafrans, acknowledges the tenacity and ingenuity with which they continued to survive: They were fighting a war in which they were heavily outnumbered, both in manpower and in weapons, a war which was spread over a vast amount of territory, and yet they managed to operate a system of government which worked, and a fabric of social life which varied little from that which had gone on before hostilities had commenced.72

68

Ibid., 114. Ibid., 120. 70 Ibid., 124. 71 Ibid., 147. 72 Ibid., 157. 69

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The airstrip at Uli is vividly depicted. Small details such as the ‘smoky glow’ of the hissing lamp, and the embarrassment the priests feel when ordered to remove their white soutanes, provide an impression of authenticity. There is a mention of plane wreckage, camouflaged but still visible beside the runway, and graves with white wooden crosses: a reminder of how hazardous this relief effort was. The ring of landing lights is switched on briefly ‘like a frieze of candles held by pilgrims’ and then off again.73 Father Manton is led away, ostensibly to minister to a sick man, but is transported to Ogundizzy, where explosives are discovered in his Mass box and he is killed. Later that day the Biafrans recapture the village, and the Nigerian captain is taken and tortured by the people who blame him for Manton’s death. Painter’s physical deterioration is described, as he abjectly cooks a mouldy yam. His degradation of body and spirit is absolute. When he hears that the Biafrans are back and of Manton’s death, his reaction is muted: ‘I’ve been cured of feeling’, he explains to the Biafran Colonel.74 Ben, now a soldier, but one ‘too valuable to risk being shot at’,75 has returned to take him to Uli; the time has come for Painter to leave. First they attend the priest’s burial in the garden behind the house which did indeed resemble a cemetery. The sticks that had once supported cassava stalks leaned sideways like broken crosses, and the cement blocks which were scattered about might have been fallen headstones … the crowing of a cock from somewhere in the town was like the exhumation of a darker and more primeval sorrow.76

The domestic landscape of Biafra has become a graveyard. Ben tries to remember the dead priest’s face, but he cannot: ‘he always had difficulty in remembering the features of whitemen – they seemed so alike somehow’.77 The clay thudding on the coffin sounds like ‘the dull slaps of exploding mortar shells’.78 Ben has lost patience with Painter’s continuing and fruitless search for meaning, dismissing him with these words: ‘You epitomise for me the kind of etiolated thought and culture that the whiteman has brought to my country. Go! Leave us to find our own destinies.’79 They travel together to Uli in a lorry and, looking back at Ogundizzy, Painter feels nothing: ‘he had put down no roots’.80 On the journey, Painter spots the Rivers girl, a prostitute they have both known and one of the few people he seems to care about; he insists that she travel in the lorry with 73

Ibid., 155–158. Ibid., 189. 75 Ibid., 192. 76 Ibid., 203. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 204. 79 Ibid., 211. 80 Ibid., 212. 74

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them. Soon afterwards mortars explode and the lorry crashes leaving the driver dead and Ben injured. At this point, Painter feels a blaze of desperation: ‘all of the fear and hesitation seemed to lift from his heart, and he felt a strength in the very essence of his being which refused to accept any further prevarication or excuse’.81 They see soldiers approaching and Painter wants to take Ben with him, but Ben resists. Painter says: ‘I have dreamed of freedom, just as you Ibos have dreamed of it. It is my war as much as yours.’82 The girl walks away toward the soldiers and, watching her, Painter realizes she is pregnant. The distraction she creates provides Painter with a chance for escape and he drags Ben away, and then carries him through the bush. They eventually reach the river where he steals a small canoe. Fishermen find them drifting and bring them to Ogundizzy lake, but Ben has died.83 In the first edition of the novel (Lawrence, 1973), the final section of the novel, ‘Epilogue – Resurrection’, transports the reader abruptly from Ben’s tragic death in Biafra to a scene in a public house in Dublin, a year after Painter has returned home. The atmosphere of a cold wet January night, contrasts with the warmth and noise of the lounge, and the normality of the situation contrasts with the chaos of the earlier pages. A reporter meets Painter, and is curious about the effect his experiences have had on him. Painter confesses that he has come to the realization that he has not changed in any way: On the plane on the way back to Ireland I experienced a great depth of despair. I believed that my life was changed utterly, that what I had seen and been responsible for, whether directly or indirectly, was so traumatic that it would live with me for the rest of my days. I was wrong. Nowadays I scarcely think about what happened in Biafra.84

Robinson, the reporter, quotes something Painter said a year earlier about Biafra: ‘Biafra is a dream of freedom. It is of the spirit and does not depend for its existence on any material reality. It will never die as long as the Ibo nation lives, for too much pain and suffering went into its creation.’ Painter’s response is: ‘Did I really say that?’ He dismisses his own words as having no meaning and asserts that the ‘people were tired of the war, they would have given up long ago if their leaders had allowed them’. Robinson argues with him: ‘But you can’t just dismiss the whole thing like that.’ Painter replies: I can if I wish … I’m tired of Biafra, I’m tired thinking about it and I’m tired talking about it. Soon it will cease to exist and it will disappear from the news and you and your readers will lose interest in it. There is no freedom, 81

Ibid., 217–218. Ibid., 220. 83 Ibid., 226. 84 Lawrence, An End to Flight, 215. 82

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no secure harbour – there is only a dull structure of imposed and artificial order which keeps on repeating itself without end.85

His disenchantment, which shocks the reporter, is an acknowledgement of reality when romantic idealism for the war has faded. It is an accurate representation of the Irish public’s disengagement with Biafra. This first edition of the novel ends with a long paragraph relating the end of the war and the aftermath. Describing ‘the dream which had become a nightmare’ in a ‘torn and devastated place’, the writer mentions the cynicism of the foreign powers who had helped to prolong the conflict and now sought to take the credit for ending it. The final words ‘Biafra belonged only to history …’ seem to be a lament.86 In the second edition of the novel, that rather emotive paragraph comes immediately after Ben’s death, and it is followed by an epilogue, ‘Resurrection’, which describes Painter’s return to Dublin: In the beginning, after his return, he talked interminably about his experiences in Nigeria, but he soon realised that people were more taken up with their own preoccupations nearer home. With the collapse of the Biafran secession, the country became divided into twelve federal states, with military rule the order of the day. Yet ethnic and religious tensions remained, the threat of violence was ever present, and the whole economy continued to be based on a system of bribery and favouritism that earned for the country the title of one of the most corrupt places in Africa.87

Nightmares wake Painter for a time, but gradually these too have eased. Decades later, in a different Ireland, Painter becomes involved with an agency that helps settle Nigerian refugees, as ‘a form of catharsis’.88 Though dulled by time, his experiences in Biafra are still affecting him and this activity provides an opportunity of some ‘little redemption for all the emotive consternation of that troubled time’.89 Despite his insistence on his inability to become emotionally involved, it is apparent that the experience has had a lasting effect. A meeting with the son of the Rivers girl provides a more personal ending, perhaps a more satisfactory (if unlikely) closure for the character. Their encounter also introduces the effect of time on perception and memory, and the capacity a changing global situation affords to revisit events and provide alternative interpretations. As William Trevor commented: This is a gloomy novel, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the world which permitted the Biafran War is often a gloomy place. If for nothing else, novels as good as this one are necessary to remind us that life is not all soft soap 85

Ibid., 215–216. Ibid., 217. 87 Banville, An End to Flight, 231. 88 Ibid., 232. 89 Ibid. 86

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and panel games. The very hardness of the book is an achievement in itself: the Biafran barbarities cannot be shrugged off, a point that Mr. Lawrence adroitly makes by causing his hero to do so.90

Forristal’s Black Man’s Country In contrast, the second substantial Irish text set in Biafra is a play, Black Man’s Country (1974), which is much lighter in tone, though it includes some dark moments. A sadness exists at its core, which befits any fictional work set in a time of war. The Irish men and women at the center of the play represent different generations of missionaries and the characters, both Irish and Igbo, demonstrate the crucial changes in missionary attitudes and practice that had been evolving since the 1920s, and which were forced into the public arena by the events in Biafra. The play was written by Desmond Forristal (1930–2012), a priest who was also a writer and filmmaker. He visited Biafra in February 1968 to make a documentary, Night Flight to Uli, which was part of the Radharc series for RTE, Ireland’s national television station. In August 1973, it was announced that a new work about the Biafra War by Desmond Forristal, the ‘Radharc priest’ had been accepted for production by Hilton Edwards of the Gate Theatre. Radharc was a production company established in 1962 by Archbishop McQuaid of Dublin.91 The film-making priests produced over 400 documentaries on social, political, and cultural topics between 1962 and 1996. These influential and groundbreaking films, which were made from a Catholic perspective, documented a modernizing, changing Ireland but also examined the changing character of the Catholic Church around the world. In Black Man’s Country, Forristal foregrounds the debates about the role of modern missionaries which the Biafran War had raised in Ireland. It should be acknowledged that while Irish fiction includes many missionary characters, authors have rarely described the missionaries in their mission locations. Rather these representations have been of retired missionaries, or those ‘home for a visit’, or as distant, absent family members.92 In short stories the missionary appears as a liminal character – belonging in neither his native Ireland nor in his adopted African country.93 Forristal’s second play, Black Man’s Country appeared in the Gate Theatre in the spring of 1974. Hilton Edwards, founder of the Gate and a well-respected theatrical producer, produced the play. It was revived 90

Trevor, Irish Press. Radharc is the Irish word for ‘view’. 92 Fr Jack in Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), set in 1936, is one example of a returned missionary in Irish literature. He has been changed by his experiences and he misses his African ‘home’ and ‘family’. 93 For example, see short stories by Mary Lavin and Maeve Brennan. 91

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again that October, presumably due to a successful initial run. A review in The Furrow in 1974 described it as ‘maybe not a masterpiece’ but ‘a play that is totally absorbing, witty, explorative, and often extremely moving’.94 The two-act drama is set in ‘the priests’ house in Uzala in Eastern Nigeria, during the years 1967–1970’. The first act opens in the period immediately before the announcement of Biafran independence, and by the second act the closing stages of the war are approaching. The main characters are priests and nuns (Irish and Nigerian) and ‘the Bishop’, and the play reveals and describes their experience of the war. Though short, it is rich with ideas and detail, describing and raising many questions about a crucial point in Irish missionary history. The soundtrack was noted by all who reviewed the play. The production used tapes of what are described as ‘jungle sounds’, recorded by the Radharc team while in Biafra. These tapes provided an atmospheric background and, at least to Irish ears, an authenticity, which ‘made you feel the sweat trickling between your shoulder-blades’.95 Another reviewer, a journalist who had been in Biafra, quibbled with the soundtrack. Recalling no drums there, he said everyone was too busy listening for aeroplanes and bombs. However he did remark that the ‘Biafra of the play was the same Biafra I was in during the war – and the author managed to get a remarkable synopsis of all the attitudes to the war into the first 15 funny minutes of the play’.96 He also commented on the nostalgia in the production, mentioning props which included cartons of liquor plastered with Red Cross stickers. This reviewer felt that all parties were treated with commendable charity: ‘it can do nothing but good for us to see a charitable rather than a vindictive treatment of history’. Shortly after the war had ended, an alternative interpretation of the events cast Ojukwu as a power-hungry oligarch and placed oil interests at the heart of the secession. Irish journalist John Horgan remarked in an article on January 28 1970: ‘In some quarters he is already being depicted as a kind of black Hitler – as a leader who enslaved his people in his own quest for power’. He continues: ‘Nobody who claims to have known him well would agree with this assessment of him, although it is difficult enough nowadays to find people who are prepared to defend his memory.’97 To ‘Quidnunc’, the play served as a reminder of the idealism of the Biafran dream. Within an entertaining drama, Forristal efficiently introduces and lays out to the audience the various debates regarding nationalism, identity, and change prompted by events in Biafra. His characters draw comparisons with Irish history as the public discourse of the time had done.

94

Val Mulkerns, ‘Stage and Screen’, The Furrow, 25:6 (June 1974), 323–325, here 323. Ibid. 96 ‘Quidnunc’, ‘An Irishman’s Diary’, Irish Times, May 24, 1974, 13. 97 John Horgan, ‘Ojukwu, brutal fall of a leader’, Irish Times, January 28, 1970, 7. 95

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Forristal visited Biafra only briefly, but he traveled to many African countries with Radharc. As a priest, he was familiar with the activities of the Irish missionary movement. At a time when priests and nuns were still viewed with some reverence, an interviewer suggested to him that the play was ‘very revealing about the way priests and nuns talk and behave when they are alone together’. Certainly the play explores the humanity, emotions, and personal lives of the characters through their interaction with each other. At the time, this was a side of the religious life that was usually hidden and not even considered by the general population (a situation perhaps exemplified by the humorous title of a 1971 Radharc documentary titled Are Nuns Human?). Forristal acknowledged that it was easier for him ‘to write truthfully about the clergy than for a lay person’ and he professed that his aim in writing plays was to ‘make people think or look at things in a new way’. He denied that the play had any message, but hoped it might put things in perspective. He admitted that he had ‘felt great sympathy for the Irish missionaries in Eastern Nigeria at that time’ and still did: ‘I hope the play will be accepted as an accurate indication of the way they felt, and sacrificed themselves at that time’, he said. He also commented, perhaps more controversially, that the ‘Nigerian nation did become quite contentedly united again in the end’.98 At a time when attitudes to the Catholic Church were changing in Ireland, his insights into the complex politics of missionary activity, especially in a conflict situation, provided a sympathetic account of flawed personalities, whose dedication was total. The many comedic moments which occur during the interactions between the characters, provide a lightness and normality in an unimaginably difficult situation. In the preface, the playwright presents his perspective that: ‘missionaries are in some ways the saddest victims of the war. Because they had the misfortune to be on the losing side of the front line, they are shut out forever from the land to which they had given their hearts and lives’.99 He dedicated the play to those missionaries. It is apparent that the Irish missionaries, who remained in Biafra after secession, did so because it was their home and abandoning their parishioners was unthinkable. While not all of them supported Biafran independence, they were sympathetic and supportive of the Biafran people. The missionaries told the true story about civilian bombings (denied by the Federal army) and the worsening food shortages to the media. The missionaries ignored what was considered to be the ‘good of the Church’ and followed their instinct to help and alleviate suffering. Media reports on their activities arranging relief supplies drew the disapproval of the Federal authorities. In February 1968, Father O’Reilly, the Superior of St Patrick’s Missionary Society, met Mr O’Shaughnessy of the Irish 98 99

‘Kay Kent talks with Father Desmond Forristal’, Irish Times, April 30, 1974, 10. Forristal, Black Man’s Country, 4.

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Department of Foreign Affairs and confirmed the Society’s support of Government policy. O’Shaughnessy reported that ‘whatever their private sympathies might be he thought it was important not publicly to take the side of Biafra’ and that it was a ‘pity some missionaries had done so’.100 The missionaries were acting independently of their superiors and ignoring the advice of their bishops and the heads of the missionary orders that they should be less involved in the situation. Their point of view was that ‘only the hireling flees when his sheep are in danger’.101 In meetings with Nigerian officials from the Dublin embassy, the Tánaiste (deputy Prime Minister), Mr Frank Aiken, was careful to emphasize that there were only a few individual missionaries who were ‘involved politically but not the religious Orders themselves, who, as he knew, were against political interference, and he had personal knowledge of this from their Superiors’. 102 It was apparent that missionary work was changing; in raising questions about their roles, the war and famine were providing a challenge to traditional vocations and the vow of obedience. Act One of Black Man’s Country opens just before Biafra has been declared an independent state. It is evident that political tensions have been mounting and in the opening scene, an exchange between Cyprian (described as an Igbo youth of about 18, who is employed by the priests) and Fr Joe Mitchell immediately introduces the question of identity and nationalism. Cyprian denies he is Nigerian, insisting that he is an Igbo man, a Biafran. Mitchell, a man about 50 years old and the central figure in the play (described by Mulkerns as a ‘whiskey priest’103), states: ‘There is no such place as Biafra. Is not, was not, and never will be.’104 Fr Zachary Azuka enters and joins the conversation, declaring that it was the Irish ‘who taught us the idea of nationhood’ and that ‘nationhood depends on the heart and will of a people, not on boundaries drawn on a map by British colonialists’.105 Mitchell refuses to accept what he says, denying that this is nationalism and asserting that it is tribalism, asking: ‘Well, why do you behave like children?’ Zachary responds: ‘Is there any reason why your freedom is worth fighting for and ours is not?’106 The arrival at the mission of a new, young priest, Father Anthony O’Brien, full of idealism and enthusiasm, provides an excuse to describe 100

Notes on a meeting, February 13, 1968, National Archives of Ireland, 2000/14/20. Farrell Sheridan C.S.Sp., pages from Missionary Annals (April-May1968), National Archives of Ireland, 2000/14/21. 102 Notes on a meeting between Brigadier Ogundipe and Frank Aiken on September 17, 1968, National Archives of Ireland, 2000/14/24, VI. 103 Mulkerns, ‘Stage and Screen’, 324. 104 Forristal, Black Man’s Country, 6. 105 Ibid., 7. 106 Ibid. A similar reference to Africans being treated like children by the Europeans is made in Banville, 147. 101

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the growing militarization and the roadblocks which are a recent development. The massacres of Ibos in Northern Nigeria are referenced, reminding the audience of events which have led to the imminent secession. During the conversation, Zachary paraphrases Shakespeare, leading the Bishop to acknowledge the comparison of the Ibos to the Jews – a common trope of the time.107 The young O’Brien is also regaled with jokes about Mother Gertrude or ‘galloping Gertie’108 as she is referred to, a nun who is described later in the play as ‘tough as an old crocodile and just about as lovable’.109 The history of the mission is recalled as Fr Mitchell relishes telling the new arrival about Mother Gertrude’s campaign to clothe the natives; he jokes about a consignment of knickers in a story which he has clearly told before.110 He also refers to her disparagingly as a ‘crazy old bag’111 and a ‘filthy-minded old faggot’.112 However, later in the play, a deep affection for her based on their shared vocation and commitment, becomes apparent. In his anecdote, he makes fun of the discourse typical of the missionary magazines (and no doubt familiar to the theatre audience) in his description of ‘Nigeria as it was in those benighted days, a land darkened by idolatry and superstition, a land of primitive lust and pagan passion’, recounting a journey through ‘trackless jungles and snakeinfested swamps, fighting off lions and tigers and hostile tribesmen’.113 During their conversation, the young priest notices the racial distinction being made between European and African sisters by the older priest, and challenges him. He cannot accept the casual racism, which was an unfortunate element of the traditional missionary project. The reluctance of the older Irish missionaries to leave and to hand over the Church to African clergy is highlighted, and is compared with the attitude of the colonial powers: Mitchell: [T]he Church couldn’t survive here without the white missionaries. O’Brien: How do you know until you’ve tried? That’s the argument the colonial powers used. They said the Africans weren’t ready to govern themselves. Mitchell: … Look at this damn country. Only barely independent and it’s about to have a civil war. O’Brien: … We Irish are hardly in a position to throw stones.114

When the Irish Bishop announces his retirement, Mitchell is shocked that Zachary is named as the new bishop; the process of Africanizing the Church in Nigeria is underway. 107

Ibid., 10. Also referred to in Banville, 157. Ibid., 9. 109 Ibid., 11 110 Ibid., 12 111 Ibid., 27 112 Ibid., 30 113 Ibid., 12. 114 Ibid., 13. 108

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The complex question of vocation is also addressed in a series of interludes that interrupt the chronological narrative. The young Mitchell converses with the Bishop, and it becomes clear that his decision to become a priest and missionary was somewhat conflicted. Some of these interludes are set in the past, others are future projections; all reveal ongoing tension between the parish priest and his Bishop. A year later, while the first anniversary of Biafran independence is being celebrated, a young nun, Sister Eileen, describes the effects of kwashiorkor on children: ‘arms and legs like matchsticks and tummies all swelled out’.115 Images of starving children in Biafra were widely disseminated during the war and had a powerful impact on the Irish public, reminding people of Ireland’s ‘Great Hunger’ in the nineteenth century, when similar scenes had unfolded. O’Brien enters and confidently (and naively) announces that ‘we are now going to win the war’.116 He is cautioned by Mitchell that ‘it’s not a missionary’s job to get mixed up in politics’.117 Mitchell reminds the younger priest that they are essentially outsiders: ‘We are foreigners in a foreign country.’ He concedes that ‘maybe we would like to see the Ibos winning’, and continues, ‘but there’s a fifty-fifty chance they’ll lose. And what will happen to us then?’ He tells O’Brien that if they let themselves become identified with the Biafran side, they’ll be thrown out ‘and fifty years of missionary work will have gone for nothing’. O’Brien retorts: ‘So what do we do? Do we let ten million people die of starvation while we are poncing around in our political chastity belts?’118 This was the real dilemma faced by the missionaries. Advice from their orders and from the official church was to remain uninvolved, but faced with starving people, the instinct was to help. The moral imperative was greater than ‘the good of the Church’ and so missionaries defied instructions and participated in the airlift of supplies and the distribution of food and medicines. The point is being made in this exchange that they were aware of the consequences that might (and did) follow. All the missionaries remaining in Biafra at the end of the war were deported, and had to leave Nigeria, a place many of them considered ‘home’, forever. In the play, practical discussions about the airlift (‘anything that’s needed to keep us going apart from military supplies’),119 warehouses, and transportation take place alongside more philosophical debates about politics, identity, and nationalism. The war is not just a backdrop of explosions and suffering, the real issues behind and emerging from the conflict are examined. Other concerns, pertaining specifically to the missionary life including vocations, obedience, and celibacy are also 115

Ibid., 24. Ibid., 25. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid., 26. 116

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covered, some more obliquely than others. Unlike Painter in An End to Flight, who is a witness to suffering but is paralysed by his inability to feel any emotion, and despairs at his uselessness, O’Brien admits that he is enjoying the war in a way. He asks Eileen whether she does not even feel ‘a bit of pride at being in at the birth of a nation and sharing the glory as well as the pain?’120 He acknowledges that just by bringing in food they are ‘taking sides’ but has evidently enjoyed the journey he made back from Orlu with the Caritas sticker on the car ‘like a presidential banner’, and the cheering, waving people who acknowledged his passing by.121 O’Brien chooses to see the renaming of the broken-down old eating house in honor of the birthplace of the parish priest: the ‘Lisdoonvarna Imperial Ice Cream Parlour’, as an acknowledgement that they have become a ‘part of the people like we never were before’.122 His romantic view of the war is countered by Eileen’s awareness of the reality – death and suffering. She rejects his assertion that ‘it’s suffering that binds us together’, that the missionaries have become ‘part of Biafra’s history’.123 She declares: ‘personally I think I can do more good tying bandages than bleeding all over the pages of history books’.124 The full implication of O’Brien’s blithe assertion that ‘sooner or later, some of us will be injured or even killed and it will be very sad and all that’, is something he has to deal with very soon afterwards when Eileen is killed by machine-gun fire. She dies with a smile upon her lips, ‘just like Robert Emmet’, her grief-stricken companions comment.125 Act Two opens like the first with a conversation between Cyprian and Fr Mitchell. It is another year and a half later and the house is dilapidated, still bearing the scars of the mortar attack. Cyprian wants to leave, but Mitchell argues that they need him: ‘They are your people, Cyprian, and it’s you they need to help them.’126 O’Brien arrives with some supplies, and it transpires that he has been selling bottles of whiskey which were intended for Mitchell in order to buy food. ‘I thought the yams were good for the kids. And I thought the whiskey was bad for you. That’s all’, he explains.127 Mitchell is annoyed with him, but recognizes that O’Brien is under pressure and questions the younger priest, who admits that he is not sure how much longer he can carry on. ‘We feed them today and tomorrow they’re hungry again. When is it ever going to stop?’128 He is working very hard, and his physical condition is 120

Ibid., 28. Ibid. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid., 29. 125 Ibid., 33. ‘Bold Robert Emmet will die with a smile’ is a line from a song commemorating the Irish patriot and rebel, who was sentenced to death for his activities. 126 Forristal, Black Man’s Country, 34. 127 Ibid., 37. 128 Ibid., 38. 121

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deteriorating. He tells Mitchell about a hungry young Biafran soldier he encountered at a roadblock, with a wooden dummy gun and no boots. He gave the man some food and both worn out, they cried together. Mitchell tells him he needs a holiday, he’s heading for a ‘crack-up’.129 However Mitchell himself does not want a break, this is the only place he feels ‘at home’. When O’Brien leaves, the Bishop ‘appears’ and he and Mitchell have another of their ‘conversations’. This scene is set in the future, and Mitchell is in Ireland, having returned there on holiday. He wants to ‘get back to work’ but the Bishop is preventing his return to Biafra. The Bishop points out that they do not want people ‘out there’ who are not ‘really needed’: ‘An Irishman needs things a Biafran doesn’t. To keep one missionary alive, five babies may have to die. We have to be sure that every priest and nun in there is really indispensable to the work.’ The Bishop tells him that he is needed now in Ireland, as ‘one of the heroes of Biafra’ he can have an immense influence for good.130 Then the conversation suddenly shifts back in time, to when Mitchell was still at school, aged 17 years, discussing his future. The Bishop leaves. The sound of a car pulling up outside is heard, and Zachary the new Bishop enters to tell them that the Nigerian army has broken through and will be there by first light in the morning. Mitchell presumes that they will just pack up and move to another parish, but Zachary is intent on bringing them to Uli airstrip. Mitchell is not happy: ‘We’ve just been served with deportation orders by His Lordship the Bishop,’ he tells O’Brien.131 Zachary tells him that it is for their own good. But Mitchell is bitter and retorts angrily: It makes a nice variation. It sounds better than saying: ‘we don’t need you any more. You’ve given us the best years of your life and built us up and made us what we are and now we don’t need you any more. In fact, we prefer not to have you around, reminding us of how much we owe you, how you educated us and civilised us and coaxed us down out of the bloody trees. So for your own safety, get your fat white arse out of here before it’s shot off.’132

Zachary remains calm, explaining that the war is over. The Biafran army is short of weapons, ammunition, footwear and food. Zachary says: ‘If you were an Ibo, if you really knew the people and understood their language, you’d know it was the end of Biafra.’ Most of the other missionaries are already on the way to Uli. Mitchell asks what will happen to those who do not get away, and Zachary replies that some of them may get shot, those that survive will probably be put in prison and 129

Ibid., 39. Ibid., 41. 131 Ibid., 43. 132 Ibid. 130

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afterwards deported: ‘So it’s simpler to go now.’ Mitchell announces that he will stay: ‘We’ve stuck with the people through the good times and the bad and I think we should stick with them to the end. Even if we’re arrested or shot, they’ll remember that some of us stayed.’133 O’Brien leaves with Zachary. It transpires that Mother Gertrude has stayed too: ‘After all my time in Nigeria, I’m not going to sneak away in the dark. If they want to throw me out, they can look me in the eye while they’re doing it.’134 She trusts the younger Nigerian sisters to carry on the work: ‘They don’t need me anymore.’135 She has brought tea and sandwiches and they are sitting together sharing the picnic when a soldier arrives. Gertrude is not intimidated by his automatic rifle and quizzes him about where he went to school and who taught him. ‘She didn’t teach you much manners, did she?’ she challenges him.136 Cyprian appears; he has returned to help and Gertrude hands him the list of patients and keys. Mitchell and Gertrude leave with the soldier and, after a moment, Cyprian sits in Mitchell’s chair. Just before Gertrude’s arrival, Mitchell has had another exchange with the Bishop, this time the conversation takes place in the future after he has arrived back in Ireland following his arrest and deportation. The Bishop did not meet him at the airport, as he was at cocktail party in the Nigerian Embassy: ‘Very pleasant it was too, the word Biafra was never mentioned even once.’137 There was no official welcome for the missionaries on their return to Ireland and the Bishop comments: ‘You are just a tiny bit of an embarrassment at this stage. The war is well over now and the wounds are healing and no-one wants unpleasant memories revived. You did a great job under conditions which are no longer relevant’.138 The policy of both the Church and the Government is to ‘let bygones be bygones’ and forget about Biafra in order to strengthen ties with the new Nigeria. This exchange with the Bishop encapsulates the manner in which Biafra vanished as an uncomfortable interlude in Irish-Nigerian relations. There was no denying what had happened, but it was ignored. The lack of acknowledgement of the missionaries’ hard work and commitment was hardly ameliorated by the Bishop’s statement: ‘Your name is written in the Book of Life, there’s no need to have it in the newspapers as well.’139 The issues addressed in the play are those which were at the core of the debate about Biafra in Ireland. Although brief, a reference to the role of the Irish in fomenting revolt and encouraging independence in African countries is an acknowledgement of the role of missionary 133

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 47. 135 Ibid., 48. 136 Ibid., 49. 137 Ibid., 45. 138 Ibid. 139 Ibid., 45–46. 134

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educators. The conflicts that existed within the missionary movement are rarely addressed in Church discourse; this play exposes the intergenerational differences that existed between Irish missionaries as well as the difficulties inherent in handing over the Church to the African clergy. The older Irish missionaries were reluctant to lose control of their parishes and their dioceses but the war forced the transition; changes that had already been in progress were expedited. Forristal’s play attracted criticism from some missionaries who described it as inauthentic and misleading. A statement from a group of six priests and six nuns in response to the play was published on the front page of the Irish Independent on May 2, 1974.140 Headlined ‘Priest’s play irks priests, nuns’, their statement aimed to correct any ‘misapprehensions, which might arise’. They pointed out that there were still more than 700 Irish missionaries in Nigeria, working in the country with the approval of the federal government, and that they were under the competent guidance of a largely indigenous hierarchy. They wished to make it clear that the play did not reflect the viewpoint of the Catholic Church in Ireland or Nigeria, and to acknowledge the work of reconciliation already accomplished by the Nigerian people. This, they suggested, ‘could well serve as an example to Ireland in its present troubled situation’. They refuted Forristal’s suggestion in the preface that the missionaries were ‘in some ways the saddest victims of the war’, stating that they found this impossible to accept. Indeed, this statement in the preface is one that would cause any reader to pause, given the loss of life and terrible suffering endured by so many during the course of the war. The names of 12 signatories are provided: they include representatives of a number of different orders. Some of these individuals had previously commented on the war, and their orders were mainly based outside the Eastern Region. The resurgence of the Biafran debate would have been unwelcome to those who feared the effects on their missions, and had hoped that the story had gone away. The fact that their response to the play was published on the front page of a national newspaper, demonstrates the residual media interest in Biafra even four years after the war had ended. However, in general, the response to the play was good. One reviewer, Val Mulkerns, addressed the criticism the play had elicited: ‘It has been criticised by some of Fr Forristal’s fellow priests and religious as untypical of the Irish missionary mentality, as very much one man’s highly subjective Biafra’ he wrote. ‘As though that mattered!’. He continues: Desmond Forristal is a dramatist, and like any other creative artist he plucks what he pleases from his own random experience and twists it into any shape that fits his particular and specific purpose, in this case to show how traditional concepts stand up under historic and psychological pressures. 140

‘Priest’s play irks priests, nuns’, Irish Independent, May 2, 1974, 1.

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He describes it as ‘an old-fashioned play’.141 In reviews, the powerful performances by the three African actors were singled out for attention. Two of the actors, Fred Brobby who played the Nigerian officer, and Kwesi Kay who played Cyprian Akuta, were of Ghanaian background. The third, the only Nigerian in the cast, was Olu Jacobs who played Zachary, the new African Bishop, and he has gone on to have a long and distinguished acting career in Britain and Nollywood. The various missionary characters represent the different attitudes to the war within the missionary body, providing a range of opinions and opportunities to discuss these views. Although the play was first performed only four years after the war’s end, due to the official policy of ‘forgetting’ Biafra, the events had already faded from public consciousness. However the Irish public would immediately have recognized the subject of the play and perhaps it would have created an awareness of just how suddenly the story had disappeared and a realization that there had been no resolution of many of questions raised during the war (particularly for those who had been directly involved). Forristal reminded the audience of those unanswered questions: Perhaps one of my main problems in writing the play, was to avoid taking sides … I feel I have managed this. My theme is centred round a group of priests and nuns and deals with the war and the surrender of Biafra. On another level it deals with newly won independence by the black people and the problems associated with liberation.142

Conclusion These two Irish texts share a similar ending – the escape or departure from Biafra of the characters who, despite their desire to identify with the Biafran cause, ultimately did not belong. Even Kearey’s thriller, Last Plane from Uli, mentioned earlier, ends with the heroes’ escape from Uli: ‘Behind the fires dwindled to pinpoints, and darkness engulfed the last pitiful remains of a dying Biafra.’143 All contain a sense of finality with regard to the wish for a Biafran republic. Kearey’s novel concludes: ‘Then, slowly, like an old forgotten dream, the memories would fade and Nigeria would know peace.’144 Banville’s last sentence in the first edition of An End to Flight is: ‘Biafra belonged only to history …’.145 Only Forristal’s play ends without that sense of finality. As the missionaries

141

Mulkerns, ‘Stage and Screen’. Gus Smith, ‘Priest’s play on Biafra war’, Sunday Independent, August 12, 1973, 13. 143 Kearey, Last Plane from Uli, 223. 144 Ibid., 224. 145 Lawrence, An End to Flight, 217. 142

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leave, Cyprian ‘quite casually sits in Mitchell’s chair’.146 A transition of authority has occurred and life goes on. Essentially what both Irish writers have done is to mark the events that created a connection between Ireland and Biafra. However problematic that relationship – based as it was on a history of missionary activity – there is no denying that the Irish people felt a bond of solidarity and sympathy with the Biafrans. There were those who experienced the war first hand and were emotionally and physically invested in it; but in the end, it was not their war. Both the play and the novel repeatedly draw attention to the outsider status of the central characters, neither author is under any illusion that this is anything other than an observer’s perspective on the war. The title Black Man’s Country seems to be a statement on the sovereignty of African countries and the status of the white man as a visitor, perhaps a welcome guest, but nevertheless an interloper. The reasons that the story of Ireland and Biafra was so quickly buried and forgotten have been discussed elsewhere, but both Banville and Forristal have created narratives which are a reminder of the debates engendered by the conflict, the suffering experienced by many, and the bravery and idealism of others. In the rush to ‘move on’ after the Biafran surrender, there was little analysis of the events, there was no closure and the default position of support for the post-war Nigerian state was accepted. In February 1971, the Reverend Father Myles Fay, a Holy Ghost priest in Sierra Leone, wrote a letter to The Furrow about the role of the Church in the political world, ‘steering between “interfering in politics” and abdicating its duty’. He argued that the fact that Biafra was beaten does not mean that it was fundamentally in the wrong, or in the right; the problem remains unsolved. He criticized the Church, which hastened after the war to leave unsaid all of the arguments in favour of a Biafran state and declared that its only interest was in relieving hunger … To make an anti-Biafran judgement (even today) is to take a solid political stand; it is not being neutral.

He also objected to calling the Nigeria-Biafra War a civil war. As he saw it, the case was still open and ‘we do not canonize the present post-war set-up’. In his opinion the ‘sudden silence in Ireland [was] not a good thing either’.147 Newspaper coverage of the war and famine and its aftermath was extensive and compelling, but media coverage is of the moment. When media interest in Biafra ended, so did most of the public debate and interest in the subject. The advantage of texts such as An End to Flight 146 147

Forristal, Black Man’s Country (stage direction), 50. Myles Fay, ‘Priests and Politics: Biafra a Year After’, The Furrow, 22:2 (February 1971), 114–117, here 115.

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and Black Man’s Country is that unlike newspaper articles, they have permanence and as such they stand as a record of a war, which, as Fay commented, ‘entered the consciousness … of Irish people over a lengthy period’.148 Biafra was a significant event that could not be erased from history. Both writers were informed by their recent personal experiences of Biafra and could also draw on contemporaneous media accounts to re-create the atmosphere of uncertainty and disarray. By telling the story through imaginary characters, a range of different experiences and responses to the situation are explored in each text. Though these characters are fictional creations, it seems likely that they are based on real experiences and responses to a crisis. Indeed it seems that reviewers sought to identify a truth in these fictional texts. While media reports provided a snapshot, these texts explore how characters might change and adapt to a deteriorating situation. Both writers appropriate Biafra and transform it into an Irish experience, but also acknowledge that the Irish experienced the events differently than the Biafrans did. The events in Biafra unfolded at a crucial time for the Irish Church and its missionary project. Important issues arose during the war: What was the role of the white man in an African country? Was the traditional missionary an outdated and irrelevant character? The imperative to employ emergency measures to save lives meant that these issues were not properly examined or answered. The novel An End to Flight and the play Black Man’s Country provide an opportunity for contemplation at a remove from the drama of war and famine. Such texts provide a level of reflection missing from the more immediate journalistic accounts, while retaining the immediacy of the events in their narratives. These additional perspectives on the war, from perhaps an unlikely source, are another facet of the literature inspired by Biafra.

148

Ibid.

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Magical Realism or Science Fiction The Nigerian Civil War and Ali Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo Adetayo Alabi

‘Death itself in many of our societies, you will remember, was one more ceremonial transition. It constituted a passing in some ways no more fundamental, and certainly no less fundamental, than the transition from preadulthood to the full status of the adult. Death was not an interruption but a continuation.’ Ali Mazrui, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, 37

Poet Christopher Okigbo remains an enigma who continues to feature in African literature and the literary creativity and activities of several writers and Africanists, including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ali Mazrui. Hardly can a discussion of the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–1970 take place without a reference to Okigbo because he moved swiftly from being an accomplished poet to a soldier fighting on the side of Biafra during the war, suggesting that the urgency of the war went beyond poetry. One of the books that considers Okigbo’s role in the civil war is Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo where Okigbo is tried in After-Africa or afterlife for abandoning poetry for the war front. The book is particularly significant because of its futuristic and magical content and setting and its exclusive imaginative pretense to reality. This chapter will discuss The Trial of Christopher Okigbo within the context of the Nigeria-Biafra War and explore the highly resourceful frame of the novel, the accusations against Okigbo, the trial, the defense, and the judgment that follows. Mazrui’s indebtedness to magical realism and science fiction will be examined, and the suggestion made that the text is possible only because of Mazrui’s heavy reliance on those two sub-genres. Some of the other issues the chapter will address are whether there is any jurisdiction to try Okigbo at all either in life or afterlife, whether the trial in the text can resolve the civil war conflict in any meaningful way, whether there is a limit to how literature can dictate the life of a poet or that of a soldier, whether the socio-political considerations of the poet and the soldier are comparable or mutually exclusive such that one cannot be faulted for choosing either path, whether the discursive and counter discursive trends in literature itself are symptomatic of the life of the artist and that of the warrior, and 314

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whether any form of African development can be achieved or sustained with the compartmentalization of roles and responsibilities.

Science Fiction and The Trial of Christopher Okigbo Science fiction means different things to different people, but there are some definitions that can help contextualize the genre for the purposes of this chapter. It deals with the creation or recreation of unrealistic events with scientific elements, some of which were impossible decades ago but are now more imaginable or probable. Space and time travels are examples.1 Space travel was literally fiction a while back, but now, there are serious efforts being championed by Virgin Galactic to make that possible. A novel about Galileo’s ideas about the nature of the earth and the stars and the solar system in general six centuries ago would have been science fiction, but it has since been proven scientifically to be true. Another example is the short story ‘The Book of Sand’ by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story is an example of science fiction because of its obsessive concentration on untraceable infinite number of points, lines, planes, and volumes. The text when it was published in 1971 was completely improbable, but now it is ‘real’ because the infiniteness that the story focuses on is contemporarily realizable in the infinite or unending nature of the Internet. Science fiction also deals with other universes apart from the contemporary world and with extraterrestrial lives, what Gary K. Wolfe calls planet building.2 In this kind of writing, the author ‘employs principles of astronomy, geology, meteorology, biology and other sciences in calculating the likely conditions of an imaginary world’.3 It is an alternate or distinct world, ‘not merely a continuation of the present or a reinstatement of the past’, according to Gary Westfahl.4 The distinct world leads to the production of ‘distant and unfamiliar futures, or even the transportation of people or documents to or from the future’.5 The events in The Trial occur on two parallel universes. The reason for Okigbo’s trial occurred in a universe Mazrui identifies as ‘Herebefore’, and the trial occurs in a parallel universe that he describes as ‘AfterAfrica’, with nine African elders as judges, just like the nine egwugwu judges in Chapter 10 of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The prosecutor in the parallel universe of Herebefore is the Counsel for Salvation in After-Africa; the defense counsel is the Counsel for Damnation in 1

Gary Westfahl, ‘Introduction: The Quarries of Time’, in Worlds Enough and Time, edited by Gary Westfahl, George Slusser, and David Leiby (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 2002), 2. 2 Gary K. Wolfe, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 90. 3 Ibid. 4 Westfahl, ‘Introduction’, 2. 5 Ibid.

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After-Africa. Okigbo’s trial in a parallel universe after death is improbable ordinarily but the art of science fiction makes it possible in the book. In Hebrews 9:27 of the Christian Bible, after death there is judgment, and this notion of judgment is addressed in The Trial and differentiated from how it is conceived on different universes. While on earth it is represented as an autocracy with God dispensing justice, in the parallel universe of After-Africa, it is democracy with the nine elders as judges.6 The Trial is indebted to magical realism. Magical realism refers to a combination of the realistic and the magical. Ordinary and normal daily occurrences are combined with the supernatural and the fantastic. This is possible because many postcolonial societies had myths, legends, and magic as part of their daily events, and they expressed their discourses and resistance to different ideologies through these literary forms. What happens ultimately is that ‘the rational, linear world of realist fiction is placed against alter/native narrative modes that expose the hidden and naturalized cultural formations on which Western narratives are based’.7 Magical realism is popular in Latin American writing, particularly in Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera and short stories ‘Death Constant Beyond Love’ and ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children’.8 African writing like Ben Okri’s The Famished Road is also a form of magical realism.9 Like Latin America, the African world has an elaborate narrative tradition that deals with magical realism and science fiction, such as D.O. Fagunwa’s 1938 classic, Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irúnmo·lé·, translated by Wole Soyinka as The Forest of a Thousand Daemons in 1968. Akara-ogun the adventurer and protagonist in the story is a human being, but there are characters in the story who are partly human and partly ‘ghomids’. Humans intermarry with ghomids and spirits thereby crossing different terrestrial realms within the general framework of science fiction. Mount Langbodo, which is the setting of part of the text, is also situated in another universe. It ‘can hardly be regarded as a place on earth,

6

Ali A. Mazrui, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo (New York: Third Press, 1971), 25. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 133. 8 Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper, 1992 [1970]); Love in the Time of Cholera, translated by Edith Grossman (New York and London: Alfred Knopf, 1988); ‘Death Constant Beyond Love’, in ­Other Voices, Other Vistas: Short Stories from Africa, China, India, Japan, and Latin America, edited by Barbara H. Solomon (New York: Signet, 1992), 462–471; and ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children’, in Literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Willis Barnstone and Tony Barnstone (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), 391–396. 9 Ben Okri, The Famished Road. (London: Vintage, 1991). 7

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because the dwellers of Langbodo hear, in most distinct notes, the crowing of cocks from the heavenly vault’.10 The seven men who undertake the journey to Mount Langbodo cross different celestial and magical realms. A sampling of some of the attributes of the seven travelers shows their indebtedness to science fiction and magical realism. The mother of Kako of the Leopard Club was ‘a gnom; his father a dewild’ but was born with human features.11 Hence he was abandoned and was raised by a hunter.12 The second was Imodoye who lived in another realm outside of the human world for a while. According to the narrator, Imodoye at ten ‘was snatched away by the Whirlwind and he lived for seven years with him. In all those seven years he lived on a single alligator pepper every day. He was well versed in charms, wise and very knowledgeable, he was also a highly titled hunter. These qualities earned him the name of Imodoye, that is, knowledge fuses with understanding [sic].’13 Olohun-iyo, ‘the Voice of Flavors’ was the fourth man: ‘he was the most handsome of all men on earth, the finest singer and the best drummer. When he drummed smoke rose in the air, and when he sang flames danced out of his mouth; his favorite music was the music of incantations.’14 Another warrior is Elegbede-Ode who grew up with beasts and has three eyes and understood the language of beasts and birds.15 Next is Efoiye, ‘an archer and he really belonged to the family of birds’.16 The sixth one is Aramoda Okunrin, a man of opposites who feels cold when others are hot and vice versa.17 Akara-ogun, the narrator, undergoes different adventures in the story, marries a ghomid ‘no ordinary human’.18 She is ‘a spirit like the ghomid’ and actually visits the interior of the earth as shown in his encounter with Agbako.19 He resurfaces in the phenomenal world later through the help of Helpmeet: And then it was that he slarruped sparks ablaze in my face, proving to me that he was indeed Agbako the Master. He thudded earth with his feet and the earth opened beneath us and Agbako and I were sucked into the void. When I arrived in the interior of the earth, I found myself in a strange house. Of Agbako there was no sign, and until my return from this trip I did not set eyes on Agbako again. Not until the day of our journey to Mount Langbodo 10

D.O. Fagunwa, Forest of a Thousand Daemons, translated by Wole Soyinka (New York: Random House, 1982), 78. 11 Ibid., 85. 12 Ibid., 77–78. 13 Ibid., 85. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 86. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 69. 19 Ibid., 28 and 71.

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was I to encounter him again – you will hear about this later – but what I experienced until my escape from the depths of the earth I will never forget in this lifetime, and when I am gone to heaven I will remember it all, even there, for ever and ever.20

Akara-ogun, therefore, crisscrosses the worlds of the living, the dead, and the magical and always resurfaces in the world of the living. The magical qualities of the seven adventurers in The Forest of a Thousand Daemons are amazing and improbable unless they occur in stories and narrative traditions that show interactions among parallel worlds. It is, therefore, clear that several African novels and tales that deal with magical realism and science fiction predated Mazrui’s book. There were major interactions between the worlds of the living, the dead, and the unborn in those texts and in real life.21 These celestial interactions provide the background for Mazrui to set his trial in the world of the dead. Some of Mazrui’s immediate indebtedness to magical realism are in the development of the African trinity of the dead, the living, and the unborn, in the notion of reincarnation, and in the magical invocation of the dead. The spirit of dead Okigbo is invoked and is tried in another world. The Trial, therefore, has clear elements of science fiction, magical realism, and the fantastic genre of African narrative tradition all in it and the book oscillates freely among all those categories.

An Evaluation of the Nigeria-Biafra War through the Lens of Magical Realism The Trial of Christopher Okigbo combines several features of realism with those of magic to provide continuity between the parallel universes of the living and the dead. The narrator explains: So many things in After-Africa were already vastly different from the state of affairs in Africa of the Herebefore; yet some underpinnings of familiarity had to be available. The division of life into days and hours, the years mounting up to centuries, light and shade, day and night, windows and doors, all these were important contributions to the theme of continuity which lay between Africa and After-Africa.22

In the opening pages of the book, Hamisi discovers himself at a railway track. The railway track is realistic enough, and the reader is presented with the information that the ‘one-eyed monster that had suddenly emerged upon him from nowhere had as readily dissolved into

20

Ibid., 24. These interactions between the worlds of the living, the dead and the unborn are later celebrated in Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman (London: Eyre Methuen, 1975). 22 Mazrui, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, 48–49. 21

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nowhere’.23 The above description obviously reads like lines from the magically realistic work of Fagunwa earlier discussed. The setting of the story is quickly combined with elements of science fiction as the text refers to parallel universes of ‘a different world’ which necessitates ‘an agony of incongruity’ and ‘the cloud-world’ and ‘same universe’ and ‘in the world which Hamisi could now only vaguely remember’.24 The narrative then introduces Abiranja and Salisha, his companion, mimicking the author’s representation of parallel worlds of ‘dual personality of newness and timeless ancestry’ and who ‘must have been the same age for at least a thousand years’.25 It is only a combination of magical realism and science fiction that can ascribe the age of a thousand years to characters. Abiranja identifies Hamisi’s dilemma of trying to figure out his location because of the ‘veil of strange timelessness’ and asks him to wait till their arrival at home and not to ‘attempt to reason it out’.26 The mystery of the setting is compounded on arrival at Abiranja’s house where Hamisi finds a shield that Abiranja identifies as the one Chaka ‘the Zulu conqueror, used in the battle of Umbutera’.27 The realistic arrival in a house is combined with the magical discovery of a shield an emperor used over a century before. The realistic question for Hamisi is where Abiranja could have found the shield, but that is not forthcoming because of the setting of the text. Another very important but strange discovery in the house that deals with magic is the presence of a vase, which was a gift to Emperor Sundiata of Mali by the Sultan of Marrakesh. Realistically, Salisha is knitting a table mat for it. What we clearly have here is a combination of the ‘past and the present, life before and life after’.28 As the narrator describes the context, ‘[t]here was a certain ambivalence to the situation – a relic of the Herebefore dying and therefore surviving entire in the Hereafter’.29 The first reference to Christopher Okigbo in the text is when Hamisi wakes up from his initiation sleep and sees Okigbo’s book of poetry. From this casual reference to Okigbo, the narrative switches to the realistic mode on earth where Hamisi tries to recollect his last moments before suddenly appearing in an unknown world and his efforts lead to a combination of some lines from Okigbo’s poems titled ‘The Passage’ and ‘Watermaid’ presented as a single poem. The lines from both poems raise the question of location, a parallel universe of heaven, its gate, watchman, and the world under. They also depict the stars that have departed. These stars that have departed clearly correlate with Hamisi’s 23

Ibid., 1. Ibid. 25 Ibid., 1 and 2, respectively. 26 Ibid., 2. 27 Ibid., 3. 28 Ibid., 8. 29 Ibid. 24

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and Okigbo’s transition into another world. The reference to these Okigbo lines is appropriate because of the representation of science fiction and magical realism elements of stars, universes, and worlds that are clearly linked with the subsequent trial of Okigbo and Hamisi in another world. As the book progresses, it becomes obvious that both Hamisi and Salisha knew each other in London on earth, where Salisha was Aisha. Okigbo becomes the link that jostles Hamisi’s memory for him to remember Salisha from the world before. The realization comes with the rendition of another poem by Okigbo that deals with ‘the crisis point’ and the ‘twilight moment between sleep and waking’.30 The immediate consequence of the liminal space between sleeping and waking is when Hamisi regains consciousness and remembers his time in the Herebefore in London when Hamisi interviewed Salisha about Okigbo’s poetry. Both interviewer and interviewee spoke on Okigbo’s poetry and his use of words and meaning. They did not realize that the issues of poetry and meaning will unite them again with Okigbo ‘in a different setting, in a different world’ as both Okigbo and Hamisi are tried in the Hereafter for different offences.31 Hamisi and Salisha relive their experiences of a one-night stand in London while Abiranja is away in After-Africa. As the story unfolds, Salisha left Hamisi’s flat in London after the BBC interview while he was still sleeping because of the content of a letter she read from Hamisi’s desk. As they both recall that meeting, it is unclear what was in the letter that Salisha read, but ‘it was that uncompleted airletter which decided the issue’.32 That the characters are recalling these experiences in another world, a parallel science fiction world, comes to the front again as Hamisi wonders what was in the letter: ‘In the setting of another world, more than a decade after that night, Hamisi could not remember what that half-completed letter could have been.’33 Questions on what could have happened followed ‘under the influence of a new universe’.34 The return of Abiranja to the house where Hamisi and Salisha were becomes very important because he is the bearer of the bad news about Okigbo and the information that propels the conflict in the book. The news is that Okigbo was killed in the Nigerian Civil War and has arrived in the universe of the setting of the text. On arrival in After-Africa, the elders arrested him on ‘a high charge’.35 The text then switches from science fiction to magical realism as only Hamisi and Salisha who were tied ‘by a poetic refrain from a previous life’ out of the three in the room 30

Ibid., 8–9. Ibid., 13. 32 Ibid., 23. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 24. 31

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can hear the booming voice reciting Okigbo’s poetry.36 Abiranja who is also in the room with them is excluded from that experience. The lines from Okigbo’s poetry that are recited deal with the poet or his persona standing naked and lost as a prodigal in the legend of the watery presence of Mother Idoto. Under Idoto’s presence, the poet is like a watchman at Heavensgate.37 The reference to Heavensgate links the parallel universes of earth and heaven again in both Okigbo’s poetry and the encounter between Salisha and Hamisi in Herebefore and After-Africa. Hamisi is obviously confused about all that is going on around him and he asks questions. How can you arrest someone after death? Is there a police force or judiciary or government beyond the grave? He starts getting his answers from a concept that came out of his conversation with Abiranja, which is that ‘[d]eath is an exercise in Pan-Africanism’.38 As Abiranja explains, monotheism and Pan-Africanism or the ‘oneness of God and the oneness of Africa’ enjoy ‘moral indivisibility’.39 Indeed, there is a government after death and the implication of this is that Okigbo’s trial in After-Africa is not just a Nigerian or a Biafran issue. It is an African issue because jurisprudence in After-Africa is not determined only by the location of a person but determined by issues of concern to the whole continent. ‘Continental boundary’, according to Abiranja ‘remained to lend ease of definition to the concept of community after death’.40 The earthly concept of heaven and judgment is that of God’s autocracy and judgment whereas in After-Africa, there is a form of democracy that allows the living some autonomy and participation in the judgment of the dead: Sentences were not simply passed by one omnipotent judge, but permitted the utilization of human juries, human assessors, and indeed human judges. Great trials were subject to the jurisdiction of nine human Elders. God had the ultimate prerogative of mercy, but much of the rest of the process of justice was firmly in the hands of the living citizenry beyond the grave.41

There is also a global dimension to judgment in After-Africa that allowed people from other continents who committed offences against Africa to be extradited and tried in After-Africa. It is this arrangement that allowed the trial of Cecil Rhodes in After-Africa for offences he committed against Africa in the Herebefore. There is also the example of Warren Hastings who was tried in After-Asia after been acquitted by the House of Lords in old England.42 In relation to the Congo after the death of Patrice Lumumba, it was one of the mutineers who was 36

Ibid. Ibid. 38 Ibid., 24. 39 Ibid., 41. 40 Ibid., 27. 41 Ibid, 26. 42 Ibid., 27. 37

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tried in After-Africa. Hamisi sums up the implication for Okigbo’s trial as follows: The Nigerian Civil War had shaken Africa at least as profoundly, as ever the Congo troubles had done a few years previously. Thousands of Africans had been forced to trek on the highroad to infinity. Mass arrivals into AfterAfrica were something akin to the inflow of refugees from unhappy lands. Problems of adjustment beyond the grave were compounded. To use the language of the Herebefore, the ancestors were deeply disturbed by the turn of events in Nigeria.43

The trial and its location in After-Africa bring together science fiction, magical realism, and dilemma tale. The trial location foregrounds the traditional relationship and the umbilical cord among the living, the dead and the unborn in Africa. When people die, they move from the world of the living to that of the dead or the world of the ancestors. As the epigraph to this chapter suggests, death in many African societies is ceremonial, transitional, and a continuation of life. Since African societies believe in reincarnation, dead people migrate from the world of the dead to that of the unborn and return to the world of the living. In Okigbo’s case, he moves from the world of the living to the dead and his trial occurs in the universe of the dead. Perhaps at some point in time, he will reincarnate and return to the world of the living. On the immediate level, the trial deals with the parallel universes of the living and the dead, with which science fiction is concerned. It approaches both universes in a rather magically realistic way. It is realistic in that the trial methods of the living are adopted and the person being tried is a known person from the world of the living. It is magical because of the way the trial is conducted, the mysterious nine elders who are judges, and the setting in the supernatural world of the dead. The trial takes place at the Grand Stadium of After-Africa with millions of people from different historical periods and geographical regions of Africa in attendance. The narrator compares the venue to Kaaba in Mecca but ‘multiplied a hundred times in size and a thousand times in visual impact’.44 Some of the notable historical figures that mysteriously appear in the new universe of the trial are Chaka the Zulu emperor, with Mirambo of Nyamwezi, Sultan Barghash of Zanzibar, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa of Nigeria. The fact that several historical Africans from different epochs and areas are attending the trial shows what Abiranja earlier described as the indivisibility of Africa and a confirmation of the earlier dictum that Hamisi heard from Abiranja, that death in After-Africa deals with concerns about the whole continent.

43 44

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 62.

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Later the skies of After-Africa announce the arrival of the nine Elders of Judgment in their splendor. To give a semblance of realism, Hamisi, the Counsel for Salvation (Defense Counsel) and Kwame Apolo-Gyamfi, the Counsel for Damnation (Prosecutor) arrive at the trial. Okigbo himself does not appear at the trial because the rules allow him to watch the proceedings with the audience or in his room. His voice and poetry are, however, conjured to testify later at the trial.45 In the spirit of PanAfricanism which death in After-Africa is all about, several other notable African voices, such as those of Wole Soyinka, Kwame Nkrumah, and Leopold Sedar Senghor are conjured to testify at the trial.46 As a result of the global dimension of the trial, a non-African such as George Gordon, the Lord Byron, was also invited to testify, along with the voice of Oscar Wilde.47 One logistic issue earlier resolved by the Assembly of the Ages was about bringing evidence from the living in Africa to testify in trials in After-Africa. The resolution was that those voices could be summoned based on the genuineness or honesty of what they said on earth. This provision would allow the Elders to admit in evidence the voices of people like General Gowon of the Federal side and Colonel Ojukwu of the Biafra side as needed.48 The Nigerian Civil War provides the most immediate background to The Trial. The war was between the Eastern part of Nigeria and the rest of the country and Okigbo was an Igbo from Eastern Nigeria. Prior to 1967, Okigbo was an accomplished poet with a long list of remarkable poems to his credit, but left his career as a poet for the battlefield to fight for the Biafran forces and he died in the process. What Mazrui’s book does is to try Okigbo on a number of counts for his choice to defend Biafra at the expense of poetry. Count one was Okigbo’s subordination of the Nigerian vision to that of Biafra. This count presupposes a sacrosanct boundary between and among nations, forgetting Benedict Anderson’s argument that the nation is itself an imaginary construct. In the Nigeria example, several nations were forced together for the administrative convenience of the British colonizers. The cultural and ethnic differences that exist among the nations were not considered when they were joined together in a tension-filled relationship. For Okigbo, a nation cannot be superior to another because every nation goes through different forms of evolution and the basis of the union has to be evaluated based on traditional and contemporary circumstances.49 The visions of Nigeria and Biafra can, therefore, not be contradictory because they

45

Ibid., 79, 80, 90, and 140. Ibid., 89, 136, and 138. 47 Ibid., 109, 143. 48 Ibid., 75–76. 49 In 2014, the United Kingdom renegotiated its union when Scotland unsuccessfully attempted to secede and form a separate country. 46

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are both examples of nation building and the effort to form a perfect union.50 The second count for Okigbo’s trial is that he acted as an Igbo first and a poet last. As Solomon clarifies in the text, Okigbo gave his life for the concept of Biafra. As it happens that was a moral concept, transient to his inner being. The art of a great poet, on the other hand, carries the seed of immortality. No great artist has a right to carry patriotism to the extent of destroying his creative potential. The prosecution is going to suggest that Okigbo had no right to consider himself an Ibo [sic] patriot first, and an African artist only second. That was to subordinate the interests of generations of Africans to the needs of a collection of Ibos at an isolated moment in historical time.51

While the Counsel for Damnation argues that Okigbo’s death was that of his poetry, the Counsel for Salvation takes an opposite view and claims that the death was itself the deepest form of poetry.52 The second count against Okigbo presupposes the mutual exclusivity of the two categories of ethnic identity and vocation and that an individual’s vocation is more important than the person’s ethnic identity. This vision of the individual is faulty because an individual is made of so many things, including ethnic identity, gender identity, vocation, class position, educational status, family conditions, and the like, what Gayatri Spivak calls the subject effect.53 It is essentially the responsibility of the individual to prioritize one identity over others due to circumstances. More importantly, of what use is any one aspect of one’s identity when the other parts of his or her identity are destroyed by the other parts? Of what use is poetry when the lives of the poet and those of members of his or her community who serve as his or her muse and sources of nourishment are destroyed? Along with Okigbo’s trial, there are other trials in the book. Hamisi, the Counsel for Salvation, is a Kenyan Muslim who is in love with Salisha, from Northern Nigeria. He is on trial for the sin of miscalculation in the Herebefore and is now being tried in afterlife. Like Okigbo’s trial, this kind of judicial arrangement is improbable, but it happens because of the science fiction and magical realism backgrounds of the novel. Earlier in the Herebefore, Hamisi had interviewed Salisha on Okigbo’s poetry. While Salisha defended Okigbo’s poetry then, Hamisi ‘was rather 50

On the possibility of a perfect union, though in relation to the United States of America, see Barack Obama’s campaign speech titled ‘A More Perfect Union’. www.youtube. com/watch?v=zrp-v2tHaDo; and www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-racespeech-read-th_n_92077.html (accessed November 20, 2008). 51 Mazrui, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, 41. 52 Ibid., 90. 53 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’, in Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3–32.

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negative in his judgements on Okigbo’ and the arguments continued when they met in Hamisi’s flat.54 The circumstances are different in the Hereafter as Hamisi is responsible for defending Okigbo before the elders.55 Another associated trial in the book is that of Kwame ApoloGyamfi, the Counsel for Damnation, who is a brilliant Ghanaian who died in a road accident at Oxford. He is on trial for impatience in the Herebefore. Like the other trials, this is also possible because of the text’s background. The associated conflicts and characters are symbolic of some Nigerian Civil War characters. Hamisi, the Counsel for Salvation, who is tried for miscalculation, symbolizes those who miscalculated and defended Biafra, and those who opposed the Biafran cause are represented by Apolo-Gyamfi, who is tried for impatience.56 In terms of the final verdicts of the text, the counts against Okigbo and Biafra are not proven. Apolo-Gyamfi is exonerated for the sin of impatience because he sits patiently through the trial. The judges, however, return a guilty verdict against Hamisi for the count of miscalculation. The judgment is for him to live in and ‘haunt a lonely baobab tree in Gabon’.57 Salisha Bemedi, his companion, agrees to join him in Gabon. The Counsel for Biafra is also declared guilty while the Counsel against Biafra is declared not guilty.58

Conclusion Ali Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo foregrounds some important issues, including genre classification or terminology, the constructed nature of a contemporary nation, and conflict resolution. Concerning genre classification and terminology, the book is a mixture of science fiction, magical realism, and African folktale. One cannot place the book exclusively in one category because it shares features from all three. The narratological frame of a trial in After-Africa as a location that could be eventually empirically verifiable shows the futuristic nature of the book and its indebtedness to science fiction. Related to this notion of After-Africa is the African conception of the continuity of life in death, as suggested in the epigraph to this chapter. It is this idea of life in death and the unbroken cord that exists among the living, the dead, and the unborn that makes Okigbo’s trial conceivable in another universe. This futuristic element also links the story with African and diaspora dramatic and cinematic traditions where a part of a text can be set in a sitting room in Nigeria and in the next minute the setting can change to heaven or another part of the world. 54

Ibid., 12 Ibid., 44. 56 Ibid., 144. 57 Ibid., 145. 58 Ibid., 142 and 144. 55

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The setting can also change quickly, as in a dream, similar to Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain59; as in the invocation of ancestral spirits, mediums, or African deities similar to Nollywood films; or as in seeing a vision of heaven right after praying. Relating the civil war events with real characters like Okigbo with magical elements such as invoking the spirit of the dead suggests magical realism. The fantastic elements such as invoking the spirits in the story at the trial and bringing historical characters like Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Senghor, and Okigbo are conceivable within African folktale tradition. The judgment on Hamisi living in a baobab tree and scaring kids in Gabon also fits well within the didactic implications of African folktale tradition. Okigbo’s trial in After-Africa is also possible because of the African conception of the continuity of life in death, as the epigraph to this chapter claims. The constructed nature of a contemporary nation is also implicated in Okigbo’s trial. Several world events have shown that the idea of the contemporary nation stems primarily out of an imagined construction, an issue Benedict Anderson theorized in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.60 In Nigeria’s case, the events that show the artificial nature of country creation include the 1884–1885 Berlin conference on the scramble for and partition of Africa where European powers divided Africa among themselves completely oblivious of any roles for Africans, the arbitrary colonization of Nigeria by the British, the 1914 amalgamation of the Southern and Northern Protectorates of Nigeria by Lord Lugard, and the Nigerian Civil War. The above events all show that the Nigerian nation is an idea imagined and executed by British colonizers and their Nigerian sympathizers. What those who imagined Nigeria have done is to make the idea of Nigeria inviolable; hence the efforts at uniting Nigeria during and after the civil war. Incidentally, the civil war broke out because the imagined nation was not working for some and Okigbo joined the battle to develop a counter discourse to the existence of Nigeria. The creation of Biafra out of Nigeria was part of the imagined and constructed nature of the nation, but the effort was unsuccessful because of the previous investment in nation creation. In terms of conflict resolution, Mazrui raises the question of whether we can resolve the civil war crisis through science fiction, magical realism, or jurisprudence. The issue goes beyond literature, law, region, and ethnicity. It is still unresolved. Though the battle was fought and lost by Biafra, reminiscences of it are still reverberating in Nigeria through ongoing efforts to remember the civil war by events and organizations. These efforts include the Survival of Biafra movement, memoirs such as 59

Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain and other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971) 60 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

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Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country, the Ogoni resistance movement led by Ken Saro-Wiwa, the oil resource control movement, South-South autonomy, the clamor for regionalism – especially by the south-western region, advocacy for Sharia law in some Northern states, the 2014 National Conference in Nigeria, and the campaign for sectional interests by some groups and regions in the country during the 2015 general elections. In other words, people are still using various tactics to determine the fate of the country. The issues the book raises and the conflicts it attempts to resolve are still there more than four decades after the civil war and after the publication of the book.

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Biafra, an Impractical Mission? Revisiting S.O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun and I.N.C. Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice Ode Ogede

When the Biafran Independence War – also known as the Nigerian Civil War – broke out in July 1967, ‘exactly one month after the [third] ArabIsraeli War’, as the omniscient narrator of S.O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun is quick to point out, the Biafrans’ dream was to replicate the feat of ‘the famous six-day war that saw Israel triple the size of her territory’.1 The narrator adds in the same passage: The average Biafran knew that his new nation could perform the same miracle if it had the means. But Biafra had not the means and its independence was barely one month old, independence that was declared in the dark, independence that started with a total blockade of the country, independence that was celebrated with mourning in every family.2

Long after the physical combat ended, following the defeat of the gorgeous dream of Biafra, the Nigerian Civil War continues to fascinate students and scholars of African history and literature. This is primarily because the world is so used to haunting images of the brutal impact on the victims of the war, the thousands who were maimed, massacred, or starved to death. But, owing to the surge of misinformation and controversy surrounding the subject, which continues to reverberate to this day, the Biafran War has remained, understandably, one of the most equivocal events in post-Independence Nigerian history, and the conversation around this contentious topic is not likely to abate anytime soon.3  In order to be liberated from the baggage of obfuscation and to properly understand the conditions that caused the demise of Biafra and cut so deep a gulf in the lives of the people that their wounds are yet to fully heal, it is pertinent to identify and closely examine some 1

S.O. Mezu, Behind the Rising Sun (London: Heinemann, 1971), 19. Ibid. 3 For confirmation that no other subject has generated as many works, with perspectives as diverse as the ethnicity of the authors, see Chidi Amuta, ‘Literature of the Nigerian Civil War’, in Perspectives on Nigerian Literature, 1700 to the Present, Volume I, edited by Yemi Ogunbiyi (Lagos: Guardian, 1988), 85–92; Chinyere Nwahunanya, ‘The Aesthetics of Nigerian War Fiction’,  Modern Fiction Studies 37:3 (1991), 427–443; and Chinyere Nwahunanya, A Harvest from Tragedy: Critical Perspectives on Nigerian Civil War Literature (Owerri: Springfield, 1996). 2

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good starting points: S.O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun (1971) and I.N.C. Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice (1974), the earliest substantial narrative explorations by participant-observer, native Biafran authors of those chaotic events that sabotaged the war efforts from both within and outside of the ill-fated enclave. Mezu’s  Behind the Rising Sun  is a tour de force in historical fiction; it crafts, in a startlingly witty and innuendo-laden style, an eye-opening account that goes to the heart of why Biafra fell. It lays the blame squarely on a number of factors: lack of advance knowledge and equipment, poor strategizing or planning and coordination, ineffective diplomacy, and a crippling culture of corruption that embroiled the overseas arms purchase and shipping missions. What is abundantly clear in Mezu’s account is the liability of Biafrans’ approach to the war. At the start of the war, even ‘the head of the armed forces did not know how many soldiers he had in the army he was supposed to be commanding or how much equipment there was at their disposal’.4 Aniebo confirms in The Anonymity of Sacrifice that Biafrans lived in a fantasy world and approached the war under a rhetoric of exaggerated and unfounded beliefs. A misconception that ‘once the enemy saw Biafran soldiers they would leave their weapons and run away’, for example, made it ‘impossible for unit commanders to plan comprehensively’.5 In the same text, a good number of troops hold the false impression that ‘there was an inexhaustible stock of ammunition and military equipment in the country and that if ever the stock ran dry all one need do was go to Europe and buy more’, because ‘this was as easy as going to the market to buy yams’.6 Biafrans mythologized the war; average people entered the war harboring many illusions. They held out largely false hopes that the war was going to be just as brief as their Israeli counterparts’ had been. As chosen children of God they were destined to never fail at anything they put their hands on. In Aniebo’s novel, Captain Benjy Onwura puts it more explicitly in his bafflement, couched in a lament, at how one can ‘explain away God’s seeming callousness and indifference at the suffering of His people’.7 Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun reaffirms that Biafrans indeed entered the war not only under-estimating the enemy, but also over-estimating their own strength and taking the expected support of the international community as a fait accompli: In the village, the farmer knew for certain that if the Nigerians attacked by sea, the Biafran Navy would line the coasts with the debris of the Nigerian Navy. If they attacked by land, the Biafran People’s Liberation Army would push the northern borders to the banks of the River Benue. If they dared 4

Mezu, Behind the Rising Sun, 41–42. I.N.C. Aniebo, The Anonymity of Sacrifice (London: Heinemann Educational, 1974), 9. 6 Ibid., 89. 7 Ibid., 82. 5

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violate Biafran air-space with their Tiger Moth Air Force, the Biafran Air Force would carry the war right to the limits of the Nigerian territory. Seasoned Biafran diplomats carried around heavy files predicting the number of nations that would recognize the young nation’s independence within two weeks.8

In general, the war galvanized the consciousness of the separatists, but the federalists had military superiority. Thus, the war did not last only a few weeks or months, as Biafrans had flattered themselves it would. Instead, the battle dragged on for upward of two and a half weary years; in that time, only a handful of countries gave official recognition to Biafra: Gabon, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, and Zambia. Assistance in various forms trickled in from a few more countries: France, Israel, Portugal, Rhodesia, South Africa, and the Vatican City. Captain Onwura in Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice at one point refers despairingly to this ‘diplomatic recognition thing immediately after our declaration of independence’, which wrongly presumed that about ‘eight countries … were supposed to have recognized us’.9 Biafran chicanery took a heavy toll on the war effort. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun  indicates that matters were not helped when, barely a month after the breakout of hostilities, anticipation of a relatively meager cash flow, which they themselves had no intention of investing in the war effort, fooled the envoys into thinking that ‘the war was over’ already.10 Yet, in a staggering leap of faith, the mere prospect of a $6,000,000 loan from ‘the Pluto Trust Bank and about one and a half million dollars projected to come from the Dubien exchange’ led Biafran representatives, who had been sent to Europe to canvass for weapons, to the self-deluded conclusion that ‘the end of war was a matter of weeks, perhaps days, depending on how fast the equipment could be moved down’.11 One of Captain Onwura’s earliest discoveries upon becoming Battalion Commander in Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice was that Biafran soldiers lived in a fool’s paradise. Situation reports of commanders from the frontlines were invariably laced with falsehoods, leading Onwura to this conclusion: ‘Most of our commanders are inveterate liars … Patriotic exaggerators.’12 In the same novel, daredevil Cyril Agumo’s exploits have earned him the reputation of being ‘immune to bullets’.13 Even in their deaths, Biafrans found ways to shroud their fallen heroes in legend, trivializing the horrors of the war. In Behind the Rising Sun, speculation about Major Nzeogwu is just such a case. This tale, which had sent the 8

Mezu, Behind the Rising Sun, 20. Aniebo, The Anonymity of Sacrifice, 43. 10 Mezu, Behind the Rising Sun, 59. 11 Ibid., 59–60. 12 Aniebo, The Anonymity of Sacrifice, 43. 13 Ibid., 95. 9

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rumor mill into overdrive, held that, after Major Nzeogwu’s death at the war front near the university town of Nsukka, his ‘burial with military honours’ was ‘being organized in Kaduna’, the heart of the enemy territory in Nigeria, because ‘Nigerians had the greatest respect’ for him and considered him ‘to be the greatest officer the country – in fact, Africa – had ever produced’.14 The unlikely idea that Nigerians would mourn and decorate with military honors an enemy they had killed in combat was one of those comforting myths that Biafrans used to shield themselves from the shocking realities of war; even the envoys believed it and contributed to its constant circulation. Biafrans’  misplaced hopes of victory were destined to be dashed. The difficulty was the inability to prosecute the war beyond the level of the romanticized notions or tall tales, self-delusion, and emotion that gripped the troubled enclave. The manner in which the overseas mission was managed left a lot to be desired. The Biafran envoys continued to indulge themselves, oblivious of urgent messages from the frontline. Here is one instance: MOST IMMEDIATE TOP PRIORITY TOP PRIORITY TOP PRIORITY FOR COMMISSIONER IFEDI, REPEATED PROFESSOR OBELENWATA, CHIEF IWEKA, LAWYER AFOUKWU, ENVOY ODORO AND SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE RUDDY – MESSAGE BEGINS QUOTE: SITUATION CRITICAL – NOT A SINGLE LOAD SINCE PROFESSOR NWOKE LEFT PARIS – SHOULD WE GIVE UP – ENEMY HAS BROKEN THROUGH BORDERS – OUR TROUPS HAVE BROKEN ALL BRIDGES TO STEM ENEMY ADVANCE – SITUATION CRITICAL REPEAT CRITICAL – URGENTLY NEED RIFLES COMMA AMMUNITION ALL CALIBRES COMMA BAZOOKAS – CONFIRM ACTION IS BEING TAKEN WITHIN TWENTY FOUR HOURS – DEFENSE SECRETARY – UNQUOTE – MESSAGE ENDS. TOP PRIORITY – TOP PRIORITY – TOP PRIORITY – TOP.15

Testimony revealed that fact and fiction were so blurred for the Biafran envoys, that when reports of the deteriorating conditions at home got to them, they couldn’t care less; the harrowing situations faced by their compatriots did not bother them in the least: Lawyer Afoukwu said that if he had known that things would be as bad as that, he would have evacuated some of his property in Enugu. He had more than one thousand bottles of champagne sitting in his cellar. Obiora Ifedi was less moved. He said that the situation was not desperate. He was used to receiving messages like that. People at home believed, he said, that frantic 14 15

Mezu, Behind the Rising Sun, 69. Ibid., 24.

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messages like that would make them work harder … Chief Iweka said that it was difficult for people at home to conceive of the amount of exertion and anxiety those of them abroad suffered as they tried to charter a single plane to carry arms and ammunition home. He promised that when he got back to Biafra after the war, he would get everything straight. Those who worked abroad deserved real credit for winning the war.16

The envoys’ immediate reactions to the emergency in Biafra were lukewarm at best. The combination of denial and smugness reflected a culture of collective stupor, while the subordination of public welfare to self-interest manifested their misplaced priorities – the height of irresponsibility. It is within this context that one should view their eventual objective of setting up a ‘private company based on cost-accounting’ to buy and ship arms home as self-interested, for what they wanted was to make sure that they maximized their profit.17 They did not want to ‘pay so much to the charter companies that they would impoverish forever the future share-holders of the company about to be formed’ and they wanted to have ‘the Board of Directors … paid for their services while abroad’.18

S.O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun Behind the Rising Sun’s vivid portrayal of those clandestine activities, through which millions of dollars were siphoned from the coffers of the troubled Biafran regime and diverted into the pockets of the diplomats and European opportunists cloaked as businessmen, leaves no question that it is a work of direct observation. Specifically, it is a work of memory drawn from the author’s first-hand experience as co-founder and Deputy Director of the Biafran Historical Research Centre in Paris, at the time, Biafra’s pseudo-diplomatic mission in France and Europe, from July 1967 to July 1968. What Behind the Rising Sun does best is to construct a cohesive narrative of the imbroglio focused on procuring arms in Europe on Biafra’s behalf. Over time, the morass in the Biafran arms acquisition took on the character of a saga in itself.  Behind the Rising Sun evokes the breadth and scale of the arms entanglement with great resonance. In the narrative’s construction, what is most prominent is the oddity of the Biafran representation: during the quest to obtain arms in the European arms markets, the separatists were people who did not appear to have either the requisite experience in the Foreign Service or the integrity and commitment to serve effectively. The likes of Obiora Ifedi, Chancellor Obelenwata, Tobias Iweka, and Peter Afoukwu all held ‘important offices in the newly independent 16

Ibid., 24–25. Ibid., 25. 18 Ibid., 25–26. 17

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government, advising on political affairs, economic programmes, the establishment of new universities and institutes of technology, the organizations of national insurance companies, new airlines and new shipping lines’.19 Suddenly, these bureaucrats found themselves drafted into the Foreign Service. Though they were provided ‘a handsome treasury of foreign exchange’ and given the charge to ‘purchase arms for the fighting men at home and also let the world know, beyond any shadow of doubt, of the unmistakable determination of their people to fight to the bitter end, to the last man’, they were not professionally equipped to do this job.20 The bureaucrats were thrust into new roles with demands that in fact conflicted with the distinct ethics of their executive and civil service orientations, which predisposed them toward pomposity and other banalities. Not only did these Biafran executives, turned overnight into diplomats, lack the commanding resolve to endure personal sacrifices – something distinctly alien to executives used to lavish lifestyles – but they could not peel away the insulation in which their professional lives were wrapped to feel any sensitivity toward the humanitarian crises faced by their countrymen and women. In particular, they ignored the suffering of the soldiers who gave their lives on the battlefields to defend their community. Amidst gruesome images, missing limbs, and horrendous suffering of the soldiers and the ordinary people, the only thing on the minds of the diplomats was their personal comfort. The Biafran envoys in Europe lived like monarchs. The opulence on display in the Biafran office in Lisbon, Portugal, was representative of all of their extravagant lifestyle: The Biafran office itself was well furnished, in exquisite taste, with chandeliers floating down from the ceilings and Persian rugs decorating the floors. The lounge looked like a palatial anteroom and the officers there seemed to have a penchant for dry rosé during their meals.21

For example, we are told that, as the manager of the British Housing Corporation of Enugu, Lawyer Afoukwu had several upscale houses, all of which he had locked before going abroad ‘so that they would not be commandeered for military purposes or for housing new administrations’.22 One of his main worries was that ‘his prolonged absence might give the army boys an opportunity to claim the beautiful residential houses on some pretext or other’.23 Afoukwu so despised the men in uniform fighting to defend Biafra that he preferred to have men of

19

Ibid., 22. Ibid. 21 Ibid., 100. 22 Ibid., 11. 23 Ibid. 20

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substance like Professor Chancellor Obelenwata, Chief Tobias Iweka, or Obiora Ifedi ‘live in the houses because they were men of status’.24 The occupants of these deluxe houses lived in a world of their own, unaffected by all of the unrest around them; the yearnings of Afoukwu’s wife, conveyed from his ‘beautiful house’ near ‘a hospital for wounded soldiers’, were representative of the preoccupations of the elite occupants of these types of houses. As we learn, on her long wish list of the provisions which she was eagerly waiting to receive from her husband was ‘some perfume like the one Chief Tobias Iweka had mailed to his wives’, and she was ‘intrigued by the mini-dresses Obiora Ifedi had sent to his wife and children’, and she ‘complained that she was running low on Cutex, lipstick and hand cream’. She was also hungering for ‘panties, girdles, bras’ and ‘bread and butter’, which ‘the family had not seen’ for some time, although ‘the Iwekas were getting a steady supply’.25 From the perspective of the omniscient narrator in Behind the Rising Sun, the ultimate insult to the memories of their compatriots back home – many of whom faced rapid machine-gun fire, mortar shells, and other heavy artillery bombardment on the battlefields while countless others were dying of starvation – had to be the obsession with the consumer goods of Europe that came to dominate the culture of the travelling Biafran emissaries. Biafra sent out its representatives to Europe to take care of its interests there. But the mission, instead, sent the representatives into a frenzy; they sought consumer goods to buy and send home to their families. People wondered whether these autocrats could ever sleep with a clear conscience, especially when they got back to their expensive lodges and were feted by low-level luxury hotel service personnel. It is unclear whether they had any sense that their behavior was totally out of tune with the type of conduct usual in war times: Evening dresses from Dior, perfume from Nina Ricci, shoes from Raoul of Paris, scarves from the Champs-Elysées and women’s magazines from the Drug-Store were  amongst the smaller articles Samson Anele was to take home for the squad. Though Samson Anele was to take home for the group the packages they had bought and deliver them personally to their families, he was actually being sent home because he was carrying a very confidential hand-written message for the Enugu Government. Professor Obelenwata honoured him with the title of ‘Special Courier’. Whenever he or Obiora Ifedi had some provisions to send to their families, a special courier usually accompanied these. Samson Anele was a relation of Obiora Ifedi.26

In the scenes of their gleeful shopping sprees in some of the choice retail shops of Europe, the emphasis falls starkly on the discrepancy between the conspicuous consumption of the Biafran ambassadors and 24

Ibid., 23. Ibid., 158. 26 Ibid., 14. 25

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the dreadfully precarious conditions of their compatriots facing armed enemies and starvation at home. As we learn, in the heat of the battles at home, truly catastrophic events were taking place in Biafra: the death toll rose as town after town fell to the federalists; survivors faced insuperable misery due to extreme scarcities of food and shelter; families were torn apart with the destruction of houses which forced many into refugee camps, where the ‘voices of the frightened were confounded with the shrieks of the wounded and the dying’ and the ‘sun added fear and lustre to the wings of the planes as they dived low to spout out bullets and unload their bombs’.27 Yet, in the midst of the dire situation in Biafra, their autocratic envoys permitted themselves free expression of their instincts to employ misdirected public money to support their extravagant pastimes: Lawyer Afoukwu wanted to shop at the Samaritaine, Professor Obelenwata wanted to go to the Galeries Lafayette and Obiora Ifedi said that he normally did his shopping at Aux Trois Quartiers. Chief Iweka did not have any preference except that he just wanted to send home something bought from the Champs-Elysées.28

While obtaining the consumer goods Onuoho was to take home, the envoys, acting like men possessed, threw themselves with fury into a shopping mania, so much so that ‘the personal cars of Edu and Onuoha could not carry all the goods they purchased’, and the Hotel Lutetia had to rent ‘a special truck to go and collect them’.29 The Biafran envoys were guilty of a basic moral failure. For any government functionary to be preoccupied with inconsequential things such as fashion and cosmetics in times of utter turmoil such as that which afflicted Biafra was effectively neglecting the nation for a wench, which is flat treason against the State. However, quite inexplicably, the Biafran government itself actually gave incentives to its dignitaries’ crude self-indulgences. Rather than curb preferential treatment of the privileged, Biafra nurtured it. The practice of requiring everyone else to pay import duties while allowing the envoys to import consumer goods duty-free, a practice borrowed from Nigeria, was kept firmly in place. When Captain O’Donnell’s plane finally landed in Biafra after its unnecessary detour into Libreville, its cargo was largely consumer goods, though it was widely understood that ‘a bullet for a soldier’ was better than ‘a ton of powdered milk for a battalion’.30 Once the offloading began, it was clear that the bulk of ‘the suitcases belonged to an itinerant ambassador, Peter Afoukwu’.31 Ambassador 27

Ibid., 208. Ibid., 12. 29 Ibid., 13. 30 Ibid., 145. 31 Ibid., 150. 28

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Afoukwu had bought enough provisions ‘to last his wife a few weeks’.32 But his suitcases were subjected to neither a normal inspection nor to customs duties, whereas a young unemployed graduate travelling on the same plane, Titi, who had less luggage, was made to pay ‘the cost of transportation from Libreville to Biafra for the excess baggage’ along with ‘import duties on all the articles, including salt and pepper’.33 To make matters worse, there were ‘no standards or scales and the charges seemed to be at the whim of the officer in charge’.34 During the Annabelle airport incident in Biafra, the reader learns that Onuoha, the ambassador travelling on the plane with Titi, ‘felt guilty’ as she ‘watched him imploringly, begging him to intervene and come to her aid, asking probably how Onuoha managed to avoid paying a penny for all his luggage’.35 Not even someone as needy as ‘the young woman returning from America to join her husband’, the reader also learns, would be deserving of a helping hand from Onuoha, who drove off in the convoy of ‘the small truck and a station wagon filled up with Afuokwu’s goods’, leaving the woman abandoned to her own devices to find her way out of the lonely airport, while knowing that public transportation was virtually non-existent.36 Onuoha’s own thoughts on his action are pertinent: He could probably have taken along the lady and her child … As Onuoha left her, he could not help realizing what must be going on in the mind of the woman. She would probably be thinking that in Biafra there were also many mansions and her suite was rather low on the scale.37

Ambassador Afoukwu could not be more on target: his unsympathetic treatment of these women at the Annabelle airport in Biafra, who were less privileged than himself, parallels the crassness of the euphoria of the shopping spree in which he and his colleagues were caught up while on their tour of major European cities. What both of these episodes and the other incidents all show is that the Biafran envoys cared only about one thing: themselves. Throughout all of the events in which they are presented in Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun, the Biafran diplomats exhibited none of the restraint dictated by common wartime conditions; nor did they extend any empathy toward those less fortunate. The preferential treatment accorded envoys who had stolen public funds to provide themselves and their families with unapproved consumer goods was doubly repugnant when they ought to have been more concerned with the airlift of military hardware or relief supplies for the people they 32

Ibid. Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 151. 37 Ibid. 33

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should serve and on whose behalf they went on the overseas mission; these rogues are more deserving of prosecution than of honor. Some of the issues about the integrity of the agents of Biafra, who had been insulated from the devastations of the war, are also crystallized around their second obsession: the ‘estacode’. This is ‘the living allowance paid to those in the diplomatic service while they are serving abroad’.38 The wandering Biafran diplomatic service personnel’s fixation on emoluments allows readers to discover another facet of their self-aggrandizing behavior. It was one of the primary silent codes through which the roaming Biafran agents bilked their troubled and cash-strapped government of much-needed funds: Very astute diplomatic servants can make lots of money this way. They collect their estacode in advance on arrival for a planned ten-day trip. At the same time, they collect transportation allowance. Having received these, they usually get an Embassy official to drive them around in his private car, and, on the morning of their departure, because they are in a terrible hurry, they usually rush off in a taxi, leaving their hotel bills to be paid by the Embassy. The Embassy of course pays with a smile, since it booked the reservation to begin with. Besides, these perambulatory diplomatic servants are so powerful that they can get the most efficient foreign-based officer sacked with a stroke of their pen or a word from their mouth. The officer abroad therefore pays the bill with a smile and is given a good pat on the back by the itinerant ambassador, for the sake of his conscience, when he next comes abroad.39

Instead of disavowing the existing arbitrary rules and bureaucratic procedures which provide so much comfort to African autocrats, the touring Biafran officials even found new ways to multiply the senior service protocols of corruption inherited from Nigeria, such that [s]ome itinerant ambassadors, the smoother operators amongst them, claim their estacode in one foreign post and pass the period in another post where they leave their bills unpaid. Though the responsible officers in charge of the posts helplessly complain to each other over the telephone, no written record is kept of the complaint and such dissatisfaction is not supposed to show when the officer drives the visiting diplomat to the airport or carries his luggage to the counter.40

In stark negation of all the ideals of self-reliance and honor for which Biafra claimed to stand, the visiting Biafran dignitaries embodied the sort of rank corruption that had supported the flamboyancy associated with Nigerian leaders, who were infamous for their inappropriate diversion of public funds. In theory, Biafrans defined their independence in 38

Ibid., 11. Ibid. 40 Ibid., 11–12. 39

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document after document as a repudiation of everything represented by Nigeria: in particular, the leadership’s corruption and lack of discipline.41 However, in practice, here were the Biafran elite roaming the major European cities and getting caught up in all kinds of compromising situations. They showed absolute unwillingness to wean themselves off behaviors which had been so prominent among officials high in African governments, and appropriated the ‘“Code of General Directions” issued in Lagos during the civilian regime by the Nigerian Government, [stipulating that] a junior officer should on no account embarrass his senior officer’.42 So here was clear confirmation that it would be business as usual in Biafra. The much-touted notion of culture shift was no more than rhetoric: under the Biafran flag the conduct of government would be no different. Everything in the behavior of the Biafran emissaries in Europe was a slap in the face of the utopian ideas of those for whom, for a time, it had seemed possible to achieve a true renaissance, to develop a new country that retained the identity of the people while discarding vestiges of the old corruptive elements. Violating the honor code gave no umbrage to these envoys. One of those idealists was Dr Okeji, an outstanding Biafran professional based in Germany. Though this modest man was ‘appointed a Professor at a German University’ on the heels of a stellar career, he was ‘very unhappy’ on account of the human tragedy in his community back home.43 In Dr Okeji’s own words, ‘he could not in good conscience pursue his private and personal career when he felt that his people faced the danger of extermination’.44 Dr Okeji, therefore, roused other like-minded compatriots of his living in the United States, Britain, and Germany, who scrambled to pool their resources together to send support for the army back home. Yet, his main worries remained the Nigerian retentions he saw in Biafra. It would be difficult to give a better characterization of the quandary in Biafra than the one Dr Okeji gave. He summed up, in more accurate terms than was usual, the prevailing overlap of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and Biafra, and registered his profound regret that 41

The argument for the secession of Biafra was circulated widely. Chinua Achebe states the gist of it notably in his last book, There Was a Country: ‘There was enough talent, enough education in Nigeria for us to have been able to arrange our affairs more efficiently, more meticulously, even if not completely independently, than we were doing … One thinks back on this and is amazed. Nigeria had people of great quality, and what befell us – the corruption, the political ineptitude, the war – was a great disappointment and truly devastating to those of us who witnessed it.’ – Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin, 2012), 158. Also see General Chukwu-Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, Principles of The Biafran Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Biafra Review, 1969). 42 Mezu, Behind the Rising Sun, 11. 43 Ibid., 40. 44 Ibid., 41.

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almost the very same people who advised the civilian Prime Minister until his assassination, the very same people who condemned the Prime Minister and supported General Ironsi when the latter came to power, were the individuals, the Commissioners, the Special Envoys advising the present regime.45

Dr Okeji had a luminous vision of renewal: ‘the people, softened as they were by seven years of a corrupt civilian regime … must change their attitudes and see the nation first before their own interests’, and he prayed and hoped that the ‘graft, nepotism and selfishness that had led to the demise of the former Federation of Nigeria … would not beset the new Republic’.46 The patriotic vision of Dr Okeji and other like-minded individuals did not materialize, which resulted in the most obtuse forms of vulgarity in the odious concern for rank, obsessive deference, and public demonstration of grandeur evinced by the Biafran diplomats. The way in which their hosts exploited this weakness of the envoys provides insights into how some Europeans of questionable character were waiting to pounce at every opportunity they had. With close attention to those peculiar proclivities, which their rich and powerful guests shared with African leaders generally, the poorer members of the hotel staff, for instance, would take adequate care to cater to these flaws so as to win small favors. For example, the bellboys at the Lutetia Hotel would start running up and down when they saw signs of affluence, for tips normally followed close behind … A bell boy opened the car door as Obiora Ifedi arrived, dusted his shoes with an immaculate white handkerchief, took his brief-case in one hand, his umbrella in another and still found one to accept the tip. At the door of the elevator, the service boy smiled and held the door until he got his tip, even though the lift was automatic. On the fifth floor, another service boy held the elevator door open for Obiora Ifedi and ushered him to his door and kept it open until Mr Ifedi remembered to hand him over something discreetly. Quite often, the stewards went out of their way to ask Mr Ifedi if he had called for a drink, for with each drink came a compulsory fifteen per cent charge for service. Nor would the visitor forget the receptionist because when he had a phone call, she walked straight down to the lounge and tapped him on the back, saying: ‘There’s a phone call for you, sir’, as the rest of the common folk sat in the lounge wondering who the V.I.P. so well known in the hotel could be. With less generous clients, the receptionist usually sent a small porter with a bell and a board marked with the name of the person wanted, ringing and inviting him to come and answer his call.47

45

Ibid. Ibid. 47 Ibid., 13–14. 46

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Mezu implies  that no self-confident leader would seek validation through such ostentation. Thus, the lack of any display of modesty on the part of its representatives boded ill for the emerging Biafran nation; it was becoming indisputably obvious that the social superiority of its leadership had its basis in insecurity. The Biafran emissaries had such a desperate need for attention because of an inferiority complex. This inherently debilitating character flaw led them, rather than exercise the frugality demanded by the exigencies of war, to become big-time spendthrifts trying to impress the public by wasting their substance on sycophants and parasites. But the story did not end there. During the mission, ostensibly to acquire military ammunition, the roaming Biafran ambassadors behaved more like people on luxurious getaways than individuals operating under the desperate conditions dictated by war. Throughout their stay at the Hotel Lutetia, and beyond, the envoys not only showed that they enjoyed the banal pleasure of adoring eyes, but it was evident that they were also obsessed with other forms of power as well. For instance, they proved equally unable to resist the fragrance of beautiful women nor did they conceal the fact that womanizing was one of their favorite pastimes, to the extent that ‘if one of the Parisian girls the client met in the nightclub the day before came to keep an appointment in the hotel, the tipped bell boy could usher her discreetly into the client’s room without his having to come down to find her, blushing if he were not too black’.48 Ruddy Nnewi was another man ‘charged with secret missions’, but he ended up ‘trotting up and down in Germany staying in expensive hotels, racing up and down the autobahn between East and West Germany with a blonde-haired girl in a Mercedes 230 SL spending all the money he could lay hands on’.49 But perhaps most shocking of all was the fact that Everly Nwomah and Professor Obelenwata could even find the time to become involved in a rival adulterous relationship with one Mrs Judith Gatwick, adding another chief weakness to the envoys’ long list of character flaws. It was no coincidence that the Biafran envoys’ trip to the airport ended up with a motorcade. This event was of the same order of the pattern of conduct of people who liked to flaunt their wealth, demonstrated openly by the envoys throughout the duration of their overseas tours. In the ironic chain of events set off by Obiora Ifedi’s refusal to take the Peugeot 403 at the front of the line-up of taxis waiting in a queue for passengers, Mr Ifedi insisted, instead, on ‘going to the airport in the Black Citroen behind’ because that ‘definitely looked more majestic and ministerial’.50 The collective reaction of the troupe to the occurrences that unfolded articulated the banality of the Biafran envoys: ‘As luck or fate would have it, there was an ambulance rushing to the Autoroute 48

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 42. 50 Ibid., 14–15. 49

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du Sud to pick up some people injured in a car collision. The Ifedi squad motorcade followed closely behind as the ambulance blazed a trail with its siren’.51 That improvised parade of cars, following on the heels of the taxi episode, could be interpreted as a parody of the mode through which Third World countries, in particular, typically carry and escort their prominent members. In developing a continuous likeness between the conduct of the vainglorious Biafran autocrats and their counterparts elsewhere on the continent, the text establishes a tract on the very stuff of which African leaders of all hues are made: a brutish and compulsive need for a show of power. A matter of immediate concern is the fact that the distinction between the illusion of royal spectacle, which the ministerial motorcade aspired to evoke, and the trauma of an accident was blurred, for there is something rather chilling about people equating the two contrasting situations. Amidst the diversionary outlandish behaviors, what did get lost was the focus on the envoys’ chief charge to procure ammunition and other military hardware to deliver to the fighters back home – the raison d’être of the Biafran emissaries’ European mission: Monsieur Georges Blanc, Dubien’s associate, accompanied the group to the airport and was going to travel to Toulouse with Lawyer Afoukwu and Samson Anele. Tickets were bought for the three of them. The amount paid for excess baggage was enough to give a young couple a Concorde trip round the world and a two-week Cunard cruise on the Queen Elizabeth from New York to the Caribbean islands. But there was a sigh of relief that all the arrangements had been made. Professor Obelenwata was happy that his family would have enough to keep them going for another six weeks.52

To say that the Biafran emissaries abroad handled their responsibilities and the challenges and temptations of power that came their way poorly is to make an understatement. They mismanaged the huge amounts of money made available to them, throwing cocktail parties, wining and dining in luxury hotels like the Escale à Hong Kong in Paris, and they did not take their mission as seriously as was expected of them. There was a clear indication that self-gratification was their top and bottom line. Yet, Behind the Rising Sun does not lay all of the blame for the failure of the arms purchase and diplomatic missions at the feet of the travelling Biafran representatives, since they operated alongside opportunistic European swindlers masquerading as arms dealers. If the novel teems with images of the Biafran representatives engaged in disreputable conduct of all kinds, it is as a means to make the force of the costs for their pattern of misbehaviors weigh on the readers. It thus achieves its objective of portraying the autocrats not by peddling rumors about 51 52

Ibid., 15. Ibid.

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them, but by walking the readers through the defining characteristics of their personalities. Ironically, it was the fraudulent Europeans who passed themselves off as arms dealers, shippers, and foreign exchange and banking loan brokers – their co-actors in the drama – who offered the Biafran representatives a taste of their own medicine. The European underground arms market, monopolized by people of shady character and background – Ulrich Merton, Arthur Kutzenov, Jean-Pierre Dubien, and others – was all about easy money; and Biafra was the perfect prey. These unscrupulous characters all had one thing in common: a sense of entitlement. And they would use every trick in the book to get their way, including a resort to blackmail as tellingly revealed in Dubien’s effort to wrestle approval for his loan proposal. His desperation extended to the point of twisting Onuoha’s arm: You say … that you have nothing to do with these negotiations and yet you prepared the seal for the signature of the contract at Boulevard Suchet for a six million dollar loan. You say that you are nothing but a student and yet you are here recruiting mercenaries to go and blow up the Nigerian frigate. You have nothing to do with these and you carry around in your car more than one million pounds’ worth of old Nigerian currency. If you pretend any further, I will denounce you to the police.53 He  adds that next time he will ‘bring people to the hotel to beat up Onuoha’.54 The impassioned threat from Samson Ogbuefi also fell into this pattern. Ogbuefi is a ‘dangerous’ Biafran ex-convict recruited to serve as a front man for European fraudsters, masked as businessmen, to rob Biafra in a botched Nigerian currency exchange scheme. When Dubien could not get his way with his ultimatums, he enlisted Ogbuefi’s help to facilitate the £100,000 exchange scam. This certificate-forging double ex-convict lived up to his reputation, fabricating an elaborate money exchange plan, although Onuoha was smart enough not to be taken in. When Samson Ogbuefi thought Onuoha had sniffed out the fraud, he was irate: ‘Fuming with rage, Samson warned Onuoha to be careful, that he was not like Jean-Pierre Dubien, so Onuoha could not threaten him with guns and get away with it. Samson Ogbuefi said that he would deal with anyone who stood in his way.’55 A kind of double agent, Samson had so much money from ‘deals he had made on behalf of the Biafran government and gifts from foreign organizations who bought him over … [he was] carrying no less than one hundred thousand dollars in traveller’s cheques in his small brief-case’.56 Ogbuefi did eventually get 53

Ibid., 75. Ibid., 75. 55 Ibid., 80. 56 Ibid., 83. 54

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hold of the seven million Nigerian pounds, but the attempt to smuggle it back into Nigeria ended in a fiasco with its seizure at the airport in Togo; ‘later on the Nigerian government bought it … from the bankrupt Togolese Treasury’.57 In nearly every one of their quests, either for arms purchase and shipment or for foreign exchange and bank loan procurement, Biafran envoys found themselves engaged in a wild goose chase. Yet they could never deter violent European fraudsters, whether operating alone, in organized groups, or with Biafran collaborators, from hounding them down. Nowhere did the Biafran envoys encounter any proposals as odd as the ones presented by Pierre Richier. He appeared out of the blue and presented himself as someone in the know, well versed in the conundrums of arms purchase and shipment as well as foreign exchange ventures. As a solution, Richier offers to help the Biafran envoys to recover money lost in unfulfilled contracts, promising to take advantage of his ‘banking connections in Switzerland who were willing to take risk of changing’ the old Nigerian currency.58 Richier then went on to provide ample background information on several foreign exchange and arms purchase scammers, whom he portrayed accurately as profligate in criminality, before improvising what looked like a convincing conspiracy theory diagnosis of the Nigerian currency exchange quandary, arguing persuasively for a consolidated marketing strategy: The price of the Nigerian  currency had gone down so much in Europe because the Nigerian Government and the Bank of England had sent powerful agents to Switzerland, France, and Germany. The aim of these agents was to try to buy over at the minimum possible rate all the Nigerian currency available. He strongly criticized the Biafran sale effort. Biafran envoys, Richier said, had not made the matter easy. The law of supply and demand weighed heavily in this case. The prices of shares in a company go down when too many start offering sale of their shares. Buyers become wary and the prices go down. The difficulty in selling the Nigerian notes arose from the fact that there were too many Biafrans offering the sale of the same notes, often to the same buyer or to different agents of the same buyer. If ten people start offering agents of banks the sale of one million pounds of old Nigerian currency notes, sooner or later the impression is created that there are actually ten million pounds for sale and this is enough to bring the buying rate down from seventeen shillings to the pound to less than five shillings. At that price even, buyers are afraid they might not recover their investment.59

Richier’s intimidating analysis was so profound that the solution proposed to correct the impression of over-supply of the Nigerian currency 57

Ibid., 103. Ibid., 83. 59 Ibid., 84. 58

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– by pooling all of the money together and putting it under his charge for sale – persuaded the envoys, who arranged for him to travel to Switzerland to market seven million pounds. Onuoha, one of the diplomats, even took the trouble to accompany the tons of Nigerian currency, only for the Switzerland money exchange proposal of Richier’s to turn out, to the collective chagrin of the envoys, to amount to nothing more than a bank deposit box arrangement for which the client would have to pay hefty monthly fees. ‘It was obviously impossible, even in Zurich, to exchange the Nigerian pound for an American silver dollar’, and so the Biafran envoys were provided with the next leading prospect and advised to follow it to Lisbon, in Portugal.60 There was a festering nest of European contractors who sought to be employed by Biafra to clean up the mess left by other European contractors’ flubbed services, all of whom were seldom strangers to one another, as in the case of Dubien and Albert Bondieu, who had ‘known each other for more than fifteen years’, and had access to equal amounts of information about the botched contracts.61 The whole thing worked like a well-organized network of disreputable cronies operating in such a way that the action of the initial contractor set up an enabling opportunity for his anticipated replacement. The one coming to repair the damage done previously depended heavily on that initial bungled contract. The fraudsters were thus in a sort of self-perpetuating relationship of mutual unproductivity. Albert Bondieu, for instance, approached the representatives with a proposal to ‘help Biafra get out of the predicaments and its difficulties’ with the failed Dubien loan application and foreign exchange plan to market the old Nigerian currency, as well as the foiled arms and military hardware acquisition and shipment initiative. He envisaged a vaguely defined mission to ‘set out with a team of three frogmen and go to Lagos or Port-Harcourt and from there organize the sinking of the Nigerian frigate, the S.S. Nigeria’. His estimates of ‘a paltry sum of one hundred and fifty thousand francs’ and an ‘additional fifty thousand francs’ would save Biafra a lot because otherwise it would ‘have cost the Enugu government, he argued, at least two million pounds to equip effectively a Navy that could destroy the Nigerian frigate’, though ‘there was no guarantee of success’ and the precious lives of ‘the Biafran Navy officers would be lost’.62 The superiority of the Bondieu plan, he claimed, was self-evident. Perhaps the most high profile of the European scam artists who bilked Biafra of millions of dollars, Ulrich Merton received a 1.7 million pound sterling advance to ‘collect warships and torpedo boats’ to deliver to

60

Ibid., 84. Ibid., 75. 62 Ibid., 72. 61

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the Biafran Navy.63 He received the money ‘directly from Enugu and no formal receipt had been issued since the operation was supposed to be classified “top secret,” and the contract highly confidential’.64 Merton’s promise was ‘to equip fully the two warships and torpedo boats’ which were to ‘arrive near Port-Harcourt in two weeks’ from Europe ‘and sink the Nigerian frigate, S.S. Nigeria’ and then ‘isolate the other vessels one by one and sink them with torpedoes and rocket-fire’.65 Time passed and Merton’s delivery promises failed to materialize. As it turned out, the things Merton promised Biafra were in fact scrap metal, for the place where he had taken the Biafran naval officers sent from Enugu to inspect the construction of the weapons was ‘a yard where torpedo boats were being built for a movie company shooting movies about wars’ and ‘the vessels’ he had shown to them time and again actually ‘belonged to a demolition company. They were Second World War vessels being dismantled.’66 But Merton could not be held accountable because there had been ‘a kick-back, as happens in the United States to some highly placed government officials’ who offered Merton protection from investigation.67 Merton decided to ‘work for the destruction of Biafra so that the Enugu government could never come to claim back the money given to him’.68 Arthur Kutzenov, a self-proclaimed large investor, said he was ‘a French citizen whose parents had fled from Russia during the 1917 Revolution’ and had ‘lived through revolts in Czechoslovakia and Poland’.69 Kutzenov laid claim to a pedigree no-one could reasonably question regarding his declaration that he was ‘determined to fight the Russians’ and ‘assist any group of people fighting for a right to selfgovernment’.70 However, Kutzenov was a scoundrel, and he skimmed off a lot of money from the Biafran government. He did that by taking contracts for ammunition, as well as for aircraft he could not deliver to carry arms to Biafra. In one of the contracts, for example, Kutzenov was ‘to provide either one DC 7 or two DC 3 aircraft for the airlift of some material stocked in Prague, mostly 7.92 millimetre ammunition, some rifles and a few machine-guns’ and he insisted on ‘a down payment of ten thousand dollars’.71. The representatives of Biafra in Europe scrambled to put the resources together, and Kutzenov was duly advanced the required fee. However, come the day of reckoning it turned out that

63

Ibid., 64. Ibid. 65 Ibid., 65. 66 Ibid., 72. 67 Ibid., 65. 68 Ibid., 72. 69 Ibid., 1. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 64

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Kutzenov did not have the aircraft he took money to deliver to the Biafran representatives, and instead he presented one excuse after another: Arthur Kutzenov now told the squad that the DC 7 had developed engine trouble and that the departure would be shifted to about five o’clock that day. That was not serious. He was expecting a call immediately to confirm the departure time. The call did come almost immediately. He was almost sure it was his call, so, without even giving the owner of the hotel room the chance to find out who was on the phone, Kutzenov took the receiver and answered the call … He hung up the phone and turned slowly to the group and said that the plane could not be repaired … Kutzenov regretted the slight change in the programme and said that he had done his best. The following day, perhaps, the DC 7 would be able to fly to Prague, but he could not promise anything.72 Like all others of his kind,  Arthur Kutzenov knew how to play the system, and was dependent on the naïveté of his patrons, taking advantage of the Biafran representatives’ unsuspecting natures. Indeed, their failure to heed the timely warning from Jean-Pierre Dubien that Arthur Kutzenov was ‘a first-class crook’ who could not even be entrusted with someone’s daughter gives us the grounds to talk of the great betrayal by the Biafran elite, as it took a thief to know his kin.73 When the Biafran envoys endeavored to set themselves up as independent contractors, in a move intended to circumvent the European con artists, it was revealed that their own motives were not any purer, to begin with. The venture into the business of arms purchase and shipment was driven not by a feeling of sufficient urgency to ship arms to the fighting men on the battlefields in Biafra but instead by a motivation to raise profits.74 However, other European arms dealers were similarly one step ahead of the aspiring diplomats. These upstarts’ efforts at a venture that took on elements of a privatization project opened them up to be further hoodwinked. It is a tale of money, fraud, and power, with the connivance of even African-descended peoples of West Indian origin resident in Paris, with false expressions of pan-black sentiments, like Colonel Lavignette and Dr Eugene Fresco. Some European dealers who claimed to be connected within a conglomerate called Air Branco, presumed to sell planes, for instance, also swindled the Biafran envoys of more money in the guise of helping them navigate French bureaucratic red tape that prohibited non-French citizens from acquiring planes directly. These European dealers took the Biafran diplomats to a place passed off as ‘the office of the Engineering Director’, but, which ‘sounded very much like the V.I.P. lounge at the airport terminal’.75 There, the dealers 72

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 3. 74 Ibid., 25. 75 Ibid., 29. 73

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showed the envoys ‘a fleet of discarded but reconditioned Super Constellation G planes’ on sale.76 Though at first suspicious, the diplomats fell for the proposed deal all the same, spurred by persistent stories of competitive offers being tendered by their Nigerian enemies, who were said to be standing ready to clean them all out at any moment, and persuaded that ‘the reinforcement of the Nigerian Air Force’ would spell ‘tragedy for Biafra’.77 So the Biafran diplomats doled out huge amounts of money: US $220,000 paid for the aircraft and another $120,000 advanced for the spare parts that would ostensibly be needed in the future. But the Biafran envoys had hardly paid all of the money requested in cash to a third party called CONAREX when new developments arose. The depiction of the endlessly winding maze of conditions required of the Biafran envoys then took a Kafkaesque turn. To say that one would be remiss to miss the absurdity of the complications is an understatement; for instance, shortly after the conclusion of this payment procedure, Air Branco ratcheted up the pressure on the purse of the Biafran regime. Air Branco put forward a fresh request for ‘ten thousand dollars’ in advance payments to be made to ‘the pilot, co-pilot, and flight engineer per round trip for each of the four round trips to Biafra’ for the three-month duration. Next, Air Branco asked the Biafran envoys to dip further into their pockets and cover ‘the cost of refuelling and necessary repairs as well as airport charges at the ports of call and hotel bills of the pilots while waiting in Lisbon to ferry the planes to Enugu and also while in Enugu’.78 Soon after that issue was settled, another set of demands was introduced, this time for insurance coverage for the plane. Then, the reader learns, this was followed by the most bizarre requirement of all: the envoys must find a company to buy the plane from CONAREX in Lisbon ‘since it would be difficult to get registration for it in France’.79 As if the list was not long enough, the envoys were then asked for additional money to buy spare parts. ‘The cost of the required spare parts was $120,000 to be paid in cash to CONAREX, who would in turn issue a cheque to Air Branco.’80 The diplomats managed to overcome all the financial hurdles Air Branco placed in their path, and eventually saw the lift-off of the Super Constellation plane. The plane did successfully take its delivery of arms, ammunition, and other military hardware and chemical supplies to Biafra, but not without further costs. The success of that Super Constellation airlift operation opened up a floodgate of offers from other 76

Ibid. Ibid., 31. 78 Ibid., 35. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., 37. 77

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European arms dealers, precipitating a wild scramble for a piece of the Biafran pie, and causing the dealers aggressively to play the Biafran envoys who had been commissioned to award those contracts against one another; thus unleashing a nasty power struggle within the ranks of the diplomats which took no small toll on the group’s cohesiveness as a unit. One of these European competitors was Captain Henk, a retired pilot who had survived a plane crash on a previous Biafran mission. He wanted very badly to recoup his losses from that earlier disaster. The unorthodox methods employed by him yielded the desired result. The envoys in Germany carefully reviewed Captain Henk’s unsatisfactory record, and unanimously decided against renewing his contract. Onuoha, the self-appointed leader of the squad, was about to selfimportantly inform Captain Henk that he had been denied, when Henk himself smugly announced that he had received approval from Lisbon of a half million dollars, to the utter consternation and anger of the envoys in France, compelling them individually to plot new strategies for a power grab: Mr Everly Nwomah was planning to go to Enugu and claim all the credit for the purchase of the first plane, since the contract had his signature alone. He would also claim credit for signing the Captain Henk contract. When he came back to Europe, he would come back with increased powers to rule and to control all operations. Mr Ifedi would not tolerate someone else trying to control Biafran affairs in Europe, and Professor Obelenwata was not going to sit idle and let Everly Nwomah take credit for a plane he had personally negotiated and which had only been sold to Nwomah because of the Chancellor’s special relationship with Colonel Ochar Lavignette. The faces around became sour and confidence was broken.81

The consequences of the diplomats’ response to the perception of ‘this encroachment on their prerogative’ were calamitous; the lines of action they chose to pursue unleashed not only tension in their ranks but total discord as each resolved not to be marginalized.82 Their collective mission was put on the back burner, and the envoys worked at crosspurposes, squabbled, called each other names, and undercut each other instead of acting cooperatively together to achieve the common goal of facilitating the war effort back home. In the power tussle, for instance, Nwomah leveraged a key strategy in his aspiration to become the ‘de facto leader of the envoys in Europe’.83 If he could be perceived as the one with the best plan to save the Biafran regime lots of money by persuading Henk to accept payment in the Nigerian currency being smuggled out of Biafra, he believed it would 81

Ibid., 51–52. Ibid., 51. 83 Ibid. 82

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catapult him into the leadership position. But Nwomah’s plot in turn shifted prominence to the power of the smuggled Nigerian currency, letting loose an unprecedented power skirmish for its control. The brawl over authority unchained the animal in each of the diplomats. The magnitude of each envoy’s hubris showed how every one of them could do anything for power, just to seize it and exercise influence. For instance, when they sensed Nwomah’s plans, Ifedi and Obelenwata teamed up to employ it to undermine him through a relentless search for buyers in Switzerland of the smuggled Nigerian pounds. The Biafran envoys were afflicted with a compulsive demonstration of a love of power. Dubien’s ploy to remedy the foreign exchange shortfall was to bring in US dollars by securing loans for Biafra. A much-needed loan proposal was put together by Dubien for $6,000,000, but Nwomah would not be outdone and showed up in France, only to be accused by Lawyer Afoukwu of ‘running around with women instead of carrying out the very serious mission with which he had been entrusted’.84 The struggle to grasp power was not going to be limited to money matters, and Nwomah and Obelenwata extended it to a rival game of seduction with Mrs Judith Gatwick, a married woman, as the grand prize. This intense competition for her affections ramped up the mutual suspicions, which had coalesced around the Nigerian currency transfer from Biafra. During one confrontation, with Obelenwata accusing Nwomah of ‘going home to claim credit for a job he had accomplished singlehanded after weeks of exertion’, the arguments got so heated that a neighbor had to come out and knock at their door, threatening ‘to telephone the police if the disturbance continued’.85 One of the principal laws of power is that the man of power must conceal his intentions. Robert Greene, in his 48 Laws of Power, identifies this as Law Number 3.86 But the Biafran envoys so crudely craved power that their intentions were all too obvious. Judith Gatwick’s husband suspected that the two envoys were in adulterous relationships with his wife, and so received unique privileges at their office. Nwomah’s ready reciprocity was to secure Gatwick a contract both to appease him and to guarantee unadulterated, unrestricted access to the contract recipient’s wife. Obelenwata employed his rival’s adultery as a pawn to curb the reach of his power. Ifedi’s bargaining chip, in a scheme for Nwomah to ‘control all the foreign exchange you want’, was securing a commitment from Nwomah to use his order as the Commissioner of Lands and Survey to ‘allocate to me two thousand acres of land in the Rivers Province so that I can cultivate tobacco’.87 In return, Nwomah wanted the favor of Ifedi to ‘get the government to assign to him during his travels 84

Ibid., 56. Ibid., 58–59. 86 Robert Greene, 48 Laws of Power (New York: Penguin, 2000). 87 Mezu, Behind the Rising Sun, 60. 85

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abroad a nice-looking Igbo girl to act as his confidential secretary’, but was informed that she already ‘belong[ed] to another distinguished ambassador’.88 The Biafran envoys also had to contend with other forms of sabotage from European contractors. Strangely enough, Captain Henk, for example, while making many Biafran delivery flights, made sure that not all of the cargo reached its destination. Captain Henk’s Super Constellation plane carried ‘two million pounds of the new Biafran currency’ along with a ‘million pounds worth of assorted guns, bazookas, ammunition and a few 105 millimetre shells’. But Captain Henk would fly the plane over the West Coast of Africa, complain of ‘engine trouble’, and then make sure to throw into the Atlantic Ocean ‘more than three quarters of the load of Biafran arms and ammunition’ after having ‘come into Biafra and circled three times around the airport’, then ‘flown back and later landed on the island of Sao Tome, a Portuguese possession off the West African coast’.89 There was also Captain O’Donnell, ‘an Irishman who joined the service of Captain Henk’, to fly relief materials to Biafra but who did not know the safe route.90 So Captain O’Donnell had to ask Onuoha, one of his passengers, for help mid-flight. When Captain O’Donnell ‘came over to Onuoha and asked him to come to the cockpit and assist him with some information about directions’, the reader learns, ‘Onuoha almost fainted’ with the fear that ‘they might end up in the wrong airport’.91 There followed the impracticality of Captain O’Donnell’s action and advice: he said that he ‘knew the exact location of the Annabelle airport, but wanted to find out from Onuoha the dangerous zones that should be avoided, the zones controlled by Nigerians or where there was fighting’.92 Captain O’Donnell also ‘spoke at length of the hazards of the enterprise’, and added that the Biafrans ‘should try to obtain a few jets to escort the supply planes and protect them against Nigerian threats of destruction’.93 But Captain O’Donnell’s advice would aid the enemy more than the nation he supposedly wanted to assist: ‘To avoid shooting down a Red Cross plane, Captain O’Donnell said that if he were a Nigerian pilot, he would follow the planes as they took off and mark out the ones that belonged to Biafra, follow them out to sea and just shoot them down over the Atlantic Ocean.’94 That way, ‘[n]o announcement would be made about it’; and ‘if it happened two or three times, no other pilot

88

Ibid. Ibid., 127. 90 Ibid., 132. 91 Ibid., 132. 92 Ibid., 133. 93 Ibid., 134. 94 Ibid. 89

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would dare go into Biafra’.95 Was it any wonder Captain O’Donnell should land the plane anywhere but at the designated Biafran airport? Captain O’Donnell made what he believed was an emergency landing in Libreville, Gabon. Though not exactly enemy territory, Libreville was certainly not where the relief supplies were critically needed either. However, O’Donnell had a ready excuse, claiming he had ‘circled at least four times, called on the radio, given the code word and signal, but there had been no reply, no contact’, and he was also ‘running short of fuel after circling for such a long time at low altitude’.96

I.N.C. Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice The Anonymity of Sacrifice’s contributions to Nigerian civil war literature are manifold. It reproduces the Biafran battlefield dynamics, which were disorganized in the extreme, capturing action in the war fronts with poignancy, and uncovers with deadpan verisimilitude the perverted needs and aspirations of both the rank-and-file soldiers and the officers in the Biafran armed forces. Readers learn about the events from the perspectives of several officers who were involved in the planning and execution of those events. The profound attention given to the intersection of the public and the private evokes the inherent tensions that ranged officer against officer. From this novel, readers glean that the Biafran army suffered from a variety of ailments, and a significant part of these had to do with poor personnel training. The bulk of the troops was composed primarily of children pulled out of high school – ‘fresh-faced, easily frightened, and undisciplined, with the corky air of boys who had had some education’.97 From this pool, a few were invested with administrative authority and the rest sent to the war front to fight: New, young, and poorly trained officers are rushed in to take immediate command of new, equally young and inexperienced troops, and without any time for familiarization they are committed to the war front, not in a routine defensive action but in a tough attack or counter-attack or, once in a while, disastrous retreat and rear-guard action.98

Warrant Officer II Cyril Agumo’s eye-witness account attests to the calamitous consequences: because ‘the recruits brought from the training depots to make up the strength of the new 101 Battalion seemed not to have learnt much during their training’ they sometimes came up

95

Ibid. Ibid., 137. 97 Aniebo, The Anonymity of Sacrifice, 29. 98 Ibid., 32. 96

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with very poor military tactics such as digging trenches, which, rather than provide protection, actually threatened to kill the troops.99 Captain Onwura recalls how troops ‘had taken cover’ in a ‘well dug, four man trench of the company commander’ with the ‘roof of the trench covered with cut palm trunks and reinforced with huge sandbags’ and that ‘had looked impregnable when they dived into it’ only for it ‘after a time’ to turn out ‘more like a trap’ as ‘loose sand pelted down from the roof, and as the whine, chatter and reverberating thud of the bombs increased they feared the trench would bury them alive’.100 Not even the basics of self-defense and offense were taught to the youngsters, so these untrained and undisciplined troops would sabotage themselves as most of ‘the new officers threw away their rank insignias, anonymity facilitating their escape from the war fronts’ while the ‘soldiers themselves scattered in all directions, some running into the enemy to be captured’.101 We learn that ‘seventeen Battalions had disappeared overnight’.102 Biafran troop desertion was indeed high. After an enemy attack subsided, Agumo discovers that when the trenches were hit by the enemy fire they were all empty; his men had ‘all run like rats’, leaving their arms behind.103 But reinforcements were so highly limited that after sending out one ‘platoon reinforcement to each of his companies’, Captain Onwura was left with only two soldiers in the headquarters.104 Yet, successful deserters ‘one way or the other, found their way to their villages where for days they would brag about their imaginary exploits and were feted by their kinsmen’.105 The high fear factor among the Biafran troops could not be allayed because of the poor training available to them. For example, the troops were ‘frightened of the shelling which had continued unabated, and their officers could not give them the confidence they needed to overcome this fear’.106 Having troops ‘not battle-worthy’ did not help matters; some, such as Lieutenant Dike, were even playboys in Biafran army uniform.107 It was not unexpected that Dike should eventually desert his command post. Not even the Ogbunigwe bomb concoction, Biafra’s most dreadful weapon, could take away the fear factor from some of these troops as testified by the ‘ogbunigwe men’ and ‘members of the Biafran Army Engineers’ who abandoned their trenches without firing their deadly weapon.108 99

Ibid., 29. Ibid., 13. 101 Ibid., 32. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., 67. 104 Ibid., 84. 105 Ibid., 32. 106 Ibid., 47. 107 Ibid., 49. 108 Ibid., 68. 100

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The Anonymity of Sacrifice  attests that the poorly trained Biafran army had another handicap: a dearth of equipment and arms. Cyril Agumo’s discovery summarizes the dire equipment situation faced by this army: he asked for ‘a company strength reinforcement’ in the heat of battle but would ‘get them, unarmed’.109 There was ‘back-loading of ammunition and weapons’, but Biafra could not even ‘back-load sufficient weapons and ammunition to arm a company’.110 Captain Onwura recalls the frustration of begging for arms for his unit: ‘Benjy’s trip to the brigade headquarters was not quite successful. He got a company strength reinforcement, but most of the men were unarmed.’111 Biafran troops had to ration weapons and often find a way to fight without guns and ammunition. They were outgunned by their Nigerian opponents, and had to regularly beat a retreat, as Lieutenant Dike recounts: enemy bullets were ‘all over the place as I started to move back’.112 Dike did not want ‘a prolonged fire battle’.113 We learn that ‘[c] onstant requisitions had been made but nothing had been supplied’.114 When they did have equipment, Biafran troops were saddled with some useless ones, such as the signals, which were so slow that one soldier, Madike, believed that he would get to the headquarters on foot with a message from the front line before the signals got there. When sending messages to headquarters for reinforcement, in the absence of effective radios, ‘runners’ or soldiers who walked on foot were employed, though the headquarters themselves would often have been moved before the message bearers finally got there. Part of the root of the disorder in the Biafran army could be traced to misallocation of resources, which played no small role in the troops’ ineffectiveness. Brigade commander Captain Okoye, Captain Onwura’s immediate supervisor, diagnoses the problem with pinpoint accuracy. He refers, for instance, to the ‘petty jealousy’ which led to the marginalization of ‘all experienced army officers, that is, those formerly with the Nigerian army’, who were sent to the frontline, leaving ‘the administration of the army to the inexperienced’ officers who made all the critical decisions about the war from the headquarters.115 Not only did ‘the higher authorities’ fail to offer the commanders on the battlefields ‘something to counter the enemy’s known tactics’ whenever their advice was sought, but they were often dismissive of such requests.116 Captain Okoye’s several arms requisitions failed to materialize because the ‘brigades’ who were expected ‘to do the back-loading of weapons 109

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 45. 111 Ibid., 54. 112 Ibid., 52. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., 89. 115 Ibid., 13. 116 Ibid., 49. 110

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had failed to do so’ after having given their word that they would ‘send him some weapons the next day’.117 Okoye’s arms request was put to one side, leaving the soldiers to battle without weapons. Officers in the front line would put in requests for reinforcements that would end up being denied by those at headquarters; Madike was warned not to put too much hope on the promises he was given, because he ‘won’t get any’.118 Consequently, the ‘list of the missing and the dead was long, including the “A” Commander’.119 Just as far reaching in its undermining effects was that, contrary to the popular belief, individuals who enlisted did so because they viewed the Biafran army as an opportunity to live out their personal fantasies; rather than responding to the sway of any coherent nationalist ideology their driving force was the mundane, rather routine ambition of achieving status. The recruits saw the Biafran army as a job like any other, one that would provide opportunity for employment, promotion, rank, and progress; there is ample evidence that it was not out of any of the acclaimed lofty ideals of patriotic devotion to country that Biafrans joined their military services. The consequences of this proved to be monumental. The recruits sought to obtain personal advancement above anything else, and the performance of the soldiers ultimately took its shape from that original enlistment aspiration. That the motives for joining the Biafran army often have nothing to do with commitment to the defense of the community can be illustrated with the case of Second Lieutenant Ekemeize, who joined the army to offset a lack of education, seeing the Biafran armed forces as his ticket to a post-military service job. Ekemeize had to fabricate his age and forge a certificate in order to qualify for enlistment. Right up until he is killed in active duty as a platoon commander, Ekemeize never really understands what the war is about; nor does he expect, when he joins the army, to be deployed to fight. ‘This was why he was surprised and frightened when, on the day he passed out of the School of Infantry, he found himself in a gwongworo [old lorry], with many young men, heading for the front, and a front where, from all he had heard, death was a constant companion.’120 He decided to ‘desert as soon as possible’.121 Before he could act on his plan to give up the unit under his control and hand over his duties to Sergeant Agumo, however, Ekemeize’s worst fears came to pass and he was killed in battle. The story of Cyril Agumo – even with all its extremities and sharp edges – is perhaps the most apposite for closing our discussion of the primary motives of Biafran soldiers for enlisting. Agumo is compelled 117

Ibid., 54. Ibid., 43. 119 Ibid., 55. 120 Ibid., 58. 121 Ibid. 118

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to sign up by the taunts of his disrespectful and unfaithful wife, Maria. Agumo and Maria are living happily. Then Maria starts sleeping around with army officers and the affairs so embolden her that she is no longer able to hide her contempt for her civilian husband. Incessant complaints and bickering, which often flare up into open conflagrations, begin to creep into the couple’s relationship, snapping the romantic moments which wives and husbands customarily share. Things get so bad that Maria refuses to sleep with her husband or to even cook for him, incensing him to such an extent that he starts to give her severe beatings, which result in more expletives from her: ‘Is that all you are capable of?’ Maria asked slowly. Her lips trembled slightly and then her mouth tightened. ‘To beat a woman? And you think that makes you a man?’ She paused, and even though she still spoke softly, the words came out hard as palm kernels as she continued. ‘Let me tell you, Cyril, men who are men are at the front fighting the Hausas. That is where you should be if you think you are a man. No, you won’t go there. All you know is to stay in the rear, drinking, and beating up women, whilst others fight and get promotions. Even small boys who only stopped sucking their mothers’ breasts yesterday are officers.’122

Cyril Agumo is so stung by the humiliating gauntlet thrown down by his wife that he storms out of the house. He then goes to join the army so that he ‘can have my own back’ with the wives of civilians when he becomes an officer himself.123 Cyril Agumo is driven to excel in the army by his wife’s unforgettable taunting, and so when it finally arrives, his initial promotion to sergeant fulfills a great psychological need. ‘Cyril sighed as he thought of the stars on his shoulders ... his pet dreams … He just saw himself in the uniform, standing there proudly and looking handsome, dashing and disdainful.’124 Cyril  Agumo’s thoughts, upon his next elevation as a result of his former boss Lieutenant Ikemezie being killed in battle, go as follows: At last he had become an officer, a member of the elite, a commander, and this had come about through his achievements in the field not in the classroom. He had also been further impressed by death and the way it brought about dramatic, far-reaching changes … ‘Now that practically all my dreams are coming true’, he thought, ‘I cannot afford to relax. It’s wonderful what death can achieve! Now I can understand why people risk their lives to carry out a coup! This time yesterday I was a mere platoon sergeant, now I am a company commander! I could never in my wildest dreams have imagined it. Never. Now what was that song we used to sing on Easter days?

122

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 37. 24 1 Ibid., 30. 123

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Yes, Oh, Death where is thy sting? I think. And something about where is thy victory?’125

Agumo is truly elated: his star has risen from the fall of another man’s. From the outset, as we have seen, that’s the way things have always been: promotion over and above one’s peers – including over their dead bodies – was a powerful fantasy in the Biafran army, the attainment of which the soldiers were wont to celebrate individually with total abandon as it marked the fulfillment of longstanding dreams. It is not surprising, therefore, that, Agumo’s pride should swell uncontrollably. Cyril Agumo gets drunk with power, to the extent where he wants everyone to know that he’s now the man in charge. So, Cyril opens his commander’s account and shoots a corporal dead, in order to give an example to the troops that he will be a tough officer who means whatever he says. He shouts at ‘the three privates who cowered in fright. “That’s what I do to people who run from the enemy!”’126 Agumo then summons the Company Sergeant Major (CSM), and orders him to bury ‘that man … pointing at the corporal’s body with his pistol’.127 As we learn, when the CSM accepts his orders and salutes, ‘Cyril returned the salute carelessly. He had never felt so good before and he was determined not to let that feeling go.’128 Agumo next ‘went back into the office, sat down at his table, and opened his bible [sic]’, but it is disclosed that his mission is to find a rationalization for his obviously unbiblical act – which he does through misquotation: ‘The holy book immediately fell open at a marked place – Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3’, where his ‘eyes went straight to the verse he wanted to read: A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up.’129 Agumo has been no stranger to the attitude of reducing the business of the war to a means for self-promotion; this has been his approach as a platoon commander, one who ‘kept reminding himself that he really was the platoon commander’ and that it ‘would no longer be monkey de work baboon de chop’ as ‘[w]hatever he did would now be ascribed to him. He wanted to do something really noteworthy. Something that would make his superiors take notice of him.’130 But Cyril Agumo’s promotion, on this new occasion, actually turns lethal: it elevates his power giddiness to unprecedented heights. This promotion gets into Cyril Agumo’s head, so much so that he puts on more airs, and he begins to take things so personally that suspicion takes over completely in his relationship with those under his command. When one of his former colleagues comes to give him a situation report from 125

Ibid., 87–88. Ibid., 92–93. 127 Ibid., 93. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid., italics original. 130 Ibid., 66. 126

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the war front, for instance, Cyril Agumo starts to erect social barriers, resolved to ‘put people in their place’. Agumo does not want to obtain all of the requisite information to enable him to conceive a meaningful action plan because ‘he does not want to get too familiar with’ his subordinates; he ‘felt that the more they discussed, the more the barriers he was trying to erect crumbled’. But, ‘“I must always remember I am now the commander,” he thought, “and also an officer.”’131 Cyril Agumo grows increasingly insensitive to the situations of the troops, and is consumed by his personal agenda of heroics and the accolades to follow; and so, ‘whenever excitement took possession of him, most, if not all of his actions became instinctive and thus he gained some measure of invincibility, and personally took over the heavy machine-gun installed in his trench’.132 Cyril Agumo acts like a lone ranger, discarding the customary military team spirit. The men under Cyril Agumo’s watch are retreating from persistently overpowering enemy fire, but he opens fire at them, ‘cutting down those at the head’.133 Cyril Agumo’s cruelty comes into focus in his uncompromising determination to enforce his firm stand on deserters, irrespective of the grounds for their actions such as having no weapons to fight back with. Cyril Agumo adopts aloof, mercurial leadership styles, and detaches himself from all under his command, fashioning a single-minded and inflexible war strategy underlining confrontation with the enemy under all circumstances. Agumo is even prepared to waste weapons, getting the dreaded Ogbunigwe in the trenches and exploding them just to revel ‘in their doom-filled reverberations’. Captain Benjy Onwura, the battalion commander, could not have made a more costly mistake than to create the environment for a violent confrontation with Agumo, a man he himself had promoted as a company commander. It all begins with Agumo’s disobeying a retreat order from Onwura over the unavailability of food for the fighting men. Agumo takes it that ‘his battalion commander was a saboteur’. Agumo’s argument is that ‘[o]nly a saboteur could ask Biafran soldiers to withdraw as though they were fighting on enemy territory and not in defence of their own hearths. Only a saboteur would be prepared to surrender easily to the enemy an area defended with precious Biafran blood.’134 This act of disobedience by Agumo leads to a multitude of Biafran soldiers being killed, including John, his assistant; but Agumo tries to take emotion out of the situation, determined ‘never to get attached to any soldier’ so as to avoid ‘moments of anguish, gloom, and loneliness’.135 Captain Onwura becomes embroiled in an ominous confrontation 131

Ibid., 91. Ibid., 94. 133 Ibid., 95. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid., 97. 132

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with Agumo. The turning point is Onwura’s issuing a warrant for the out-of-control company commander’s immediate arrest. Onwura articulates a profoundly intelligent and persuasive intervention strategy, not narrowly and obsessively focused on attempts to take out the enemy. The core of Onwura’s mediation tactic stresses that realistic appraisal of all conditions is absolutely essential to ensure troop safety. Because of his eloquent tenderness toward the soldiers, Onwura warns the officers to factor their resources into all military plans so as to mitigate troop losses; he wants the officers to steer the troops judiciously, in a manner devoid of heroic excesses. However, when Onwura announces his plans to use Agumo as a disciplinary example before he himself could have time to take an offensive action, threatening the subordinate officer with the humiliation of a court-martial, the move proves to be mortally tactless: the altercation gets completely out of hand, as Agumo peremptorily pulls out his pistol and fatally shoots his own commander. The publisher’s blurb on the dust jacket of The Anonymity of Sacrifice describes Captain Onwura as an ‘elitist … career officer’; there could be no better characterization of him, in our use of that term in its original sense to mean something cut out from the best tradition of its kind.136 But, as often happens, wars have the terrible habit of placing men of noble stature on paths which bring them into ghastly collision with characters of lesser mettle. Wars are horrible affairs and the motives of those involved may be tangled; they may not always be noble. This is what happens to Captain Benjy Onwura: he brings exceptional sobriety and prudence to a topic of genuine importance – troop welfare during war situations. That is why his death at the hands of the very man that he himself has promoted is savage in the extreme and elicits pathos of the highest order; it is an undeserved end to an outstanding soldier’s career and life, and Cyril Agumo’s devious act is a vivid demonstration that there is no length to which some unscrupulous characters in the Biafran army would not go to secure a promotion and then preserve it. When a commander of Agumo’s ilk does not even care about his own troops, that is not civil: it is uncivil. Cyril Agumo does get arrested in the end and is sent to a remand facility to await his trial, along with other detainees, where he may face a sentence which could see his own brand of justice served on him and so give him a taste of his own medicine. But that is only a mild consolation, because nothing can fully compensate for the loss of an accomplished officer and essentially good man of Onwura’s caliber, cut down in his prime in a cowardly manner.

136

Ibid., dust jacket.

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Conclusion Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun and Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice are landmarks in the history of Nigerian civil war literature, being the first comprehensive attempts at an evocation of the external plot and the internal rot that were the downfall of beleaguered entity of Biafra to be written by authors who observed the events first hand and clearly understood what was going on there. Both novels are written in direct, clear language that is devoid of embroidery to convey the horror of the Biafran War. Both novels provide compelling and thorough evidence for the inevitability of Biafra’s defeat, which lay embedded in the war strategies it employed and the impulses of its servicemen, allowing readers to see that the troubled enclave actually wielded in its own hands the very instruments that brought about its eventual collapse; the Nigerian army served only as the catalyst for the onslaught. Both novels convey that the concept of ‘civil war’ is a misnomer when applied to this context. This war was an ‘uncivil’ and ungracious war that was not fought by well-bred, courteous, polite, chivalrous, and gallant men of the mien of Captain Onwura. This war let loose the worst instincts in mankind and enabled unscrupulous individuals to thrive. Aniebo reports in The Anonymity of Sacrifice that the federalists and the secessionists find out the hard way that each side would deploy any weapon of mass destruction at its disposal against the other and were willing to visit on each other the worst forms of atrocities imaginable. The Nigerian army used new weapons that had never been seen before by Biafrans; these weapons created scenes of horror and terror. Sometimes, ‘a new enemy gun’ with ‘cumulative delayed effect’ left a surviving enemy ‘weak and soaked with cold sweat’ and produced a ‘sinking [feeling] in the pit of his stomach’.137 At other times, the more conventional ‘continuous harsh sound of automatic rifle fire, interspersed with the heavy note of exploding mortar bombs’, which made ‘the sun hotter than it really was’ and destroyed ‘most of the trees in the area’, left the landscape looking ‘more of a grassland than a secondary forest area’.138 At times, an ‘extremely heavy explosion suddenly tore the air. The ground trembled. Three more giant explosions followed in quick succession, and the air filled with cries of agony.’139 In return, Biafra improvised the astonishing  Ogbunigwe  bomb, described by Chinua Achebe in his unforgettable Biafran War memoir There Was a Country as the most ‘important instrument of war at the disposal of the Biafrans’, which ‘struck great terror in the hearts of many a Nigerian soldier’ and was ‘used to great effect by the Biafran 137

Ibid., 14–15. Ibid., 15. 39 1 Ibid., 16. 138

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army throughout the conflict’.140 The Nigeria-Biafra War was truly a no-holds-barred armed conflict, one that has left permanent scars on all the survivors on both sides.

140

Achebe, There Was a Country, 156.

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17

Neo-Colonialism, Biafra, and the Causes of War as Imagined in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra Françoise Ugochukwu

Introduction Emecheta is mostly known for her novels reflecting on the domestic sphere, on women’s lives, and issues of marriage and children. Regrettably, Destination Biafra, her novel on the war, seems to have been largely ignored.1 Described in the author’s foreword as ‘a historical fiction’ which ‘simply had to be written’, the work follows the long journey of Emecheta’s dream character Debbie from Lagos to the heart of Biafra, a journey that both reveals the various sides of the war and deeply transforms Debbie’s character and viewpoint.2 This chapter will consider the novel’s presentation of the war through its using thinly veiled historical characters and events as a background, the novelist’s reflection on the causes of the conflict, and her presentation of the role neo-colonialism and ethnic realities played in the conflict to show its unique contribution to the Biafran War literature.

A Novelist on History The Biafran War, which ‘reflects the divisions between the various ethnic groups carelessly yoked together in the colonial construction of Nigeria’ has been a defining moment in Nigeria’s contemporary history3. It has also generated an impressive number of books, ‘a largely Igbo tradition’, with Adichie and Emecheta being the only female authors to represent that conflict within a larger historical context in their novels.4 Emecheta’s novel, described as ‘a bold and daring departure from the normal domestic preserve of most fictional works of African women 1

Ann-Marie Adams, ‘It’s a Woman’s War. Engendering Conflict in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra’, Callaloo 24:1 (2001), 288. 2 Buchi Emecheta, Destination Biafra (London: Allison & Busby, 1982), first quote ix, second quote vii. 3 Niyi Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past and Still Counting the Losses: Evaluating Narrative of the Nigerian Civil War in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra’, Epiphany: Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies 5:1 (2012), 35. 4 Hugh Hodges, ‘Writing Biafra: Adichie, Emecheta and the Dilemmas of Biafran War Fiction’, Postcolonial Text 5:1 (2009), 2.

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writers’, is however unique on two counts: for its author’s interest in the country’s pre-war politics and for her overt criticism of the Biafran stance.5 Within the confines of her text, she ‘dramatizes 12 years of political mismanagement, civil commotion, personal and communal greed, unabated selfishness and corrupt leadership which lead ultimately to social chaos, deprivation and death’.6 Yet the only major book on Emecheta, edited by Umeh in 1996, devotes only two chapters to Destination Biafra, while Porter and Sumalatha regret the ‘prominent absence’7 of that novel from ‘most critical discussions of the war novel in Africa’.8 For Morrison, Destination Biafra is the only novel ‘highly specific in its historical engagements’ including ‘explicit meditations on the nature of justice of the Biafran project’,9 ‘more committed and more detailed in its political and ideological analysis than many other texts of the genre’, going beyond the ‘documentation of suffering’ and looking at the situation from a distance to better grasp events which led to the war.10 Emecheta attempts to answer some of the questions already formulated by previous writers about the war from a different perspective: as an exiled female novelist from a minority group, bringing into the sum of writings on the war an ‘unconventional and compelling description of the probable causes of the war and the roles of women during that war’.11 For her, ‘some of the manipulations by external forces which became so flagrant during the civil war – and which are written quite extensively by her male compatriots – actually had their genesis at some earlier periods’.12 She looks back at pre-independence history to throw some light into the later behavior of the main protagonists, and endeavors first of all to reveal ‘the essentially ambiguous nature of Nigeria’s creation’.13 For Porter, one of the major points in the novel ‘is that the political legacy that was bequeathed to Nigerians by the British after independence was not only bound to fail but also had the potential of leading to inevitable chaos’, a fact now widely acknowledged.14 Emecheta’s 5

D. Sumalatha, ‘Privileging Politics as the Overriding Denominator in Social Transformation: A Study on Buchi Emecheta’s Fiction Novel Destination Biafra’, Language in India 13:9 (September 2013), 426. Also see J.O.J. Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta: Politics, War, and Feminism in Destination Biafra’, in Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, edited by Umeh Marie (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996), 388. 6 Sumalatha, ‘Privileging Politics’, 424. 7 Abioseh Porter, ‘They Were There, Too: Women and the Civil War in Destination Biafra’, in Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, edited by Umeh Marie (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1996), 313. 8 Sumalatha, ‘Privileging Politics’, 424. 9 Jago Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras: Fabricating Nation in Nigerian Civil War Writing’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 36:1–2 (2005), 13. 10 Ibid., 19. 11 Porter, ‘They Were There, Too’, 314. 12 Ibid., 316. 13 Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past’, 39. 14 Porter, ‘They Were There, Too’, 315.

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viewpoint is that this had little to do with genuine democratic principles, being based primarily (if not solely) on ensuring that the Hausa kept the power. Right from the start of her novel, she seeks to foreground the fact that of paramount importance to the British was ensuring the safety of their economic interests. It was, in fact, the only criterion in their choice of a successor at the helm of affairs in the country they were about to leave: finding ‘the man who would offer the least resistance to British trade’.15 A discussion between two outgoing colonials, Governor Macdonald and Captain Alan Grey, clearly shows their preference for the northerners and their anxiety over the Sarduana’s refusal to leave his palace and move south. Emecheta was obviously aware that the British were not the sole culprits, and ‘demonstrates how some of the causes of this war were directly attributable to the actions of some of the Nigerian politicians themselves’ and their use of tribalism.16 These included the imposition of an ineffective and nominally independent administration by a greedy foreign power [Britain], the desperate desire for and manipulation of power by local politicians who were interested only in the trappings of government and the material advantages that come with it, tribal and regional chauvinism, and, of course, political corruption and economic exploitation.17

Emecheta presents a cynical yet accurate picture of Nigerian politics: ‘as a responsible person in Nigeria, one did not just go into politics to introduce reforms but to get what one could out of the national cake and to use part of it to help one’s vast extended family, the village of one’s origin and if possible the whole tribe’.18 She equally insists on the ‘crass and unprogressive nature’ of exacerbated tribalism, encouraged and fueled by regional leaders, whom she considers as partly responsible for the progressive breakdown of the country’s political structure.19 This is aptly illustrated by the paragraphs devoted to the rigged 1966 elections in the North, including the repetition of the word bakodaya (nil, nothing) from the lips of journalists broadcasting the election results, who compared the massive voting in favor of northern candidates to the ‘nothing, nothing at all’ gained by their opponents.20 Events covered by her novel include ‘the Tiv riots of 1960–66, the Western Nigeria emergency of 1962, the national census controversy of 1962–63 and the Western election crisis of 1965–66’.21 These and 15

Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 1. Ibid., 16. 17 Porter, ‘They Were There, Too’, 318. 18 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 16. 19 Porter, ‘They Were There, Too’, 317. 20 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 21. 21 Godfrey Mwakikagile, Ethnic Politics in Kenya and Nigeria (New York: Nova, 2001), 10. For more details, see Eghosa Osaghae, Crippled Giant: Nigeria since Independence (London: Hurst, 1998), 10, 36. 16

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subsequent events – the elections, the Independence, the first and the second coups, the massacres, the Aburi meeting, the Biafran Independence, and the ensuing war – again closely follow reality. The vital role of women is equally brought to the fore, as when Emecheta describes their trade in the no-man’s land between Biafra and Nigeria as ‘between the fronts’.22 The Yoruba’s perceived betrayal, another key moment of the pre-war events, is equally mentioned in the novel, which did not shy away from including this bruising experience: after devoting several pages to the trouble in the Western Region, the planned Yoruba secession is dealt with in detail, with Odumosu informing Abosi that he ‘intended to declare the West a separate State; Abosi should do the same in the East. So if the worst came to the worst, any war would be between the north and the south.’ 23 Recalling events ‘just before and, especially, after the first coup’ is crucial to understand the causes of the war, particularly the fact that ‘not a single top Ibo [sic] politician had been killed’ and the arrogance of northern Igbo rejoicing after the coup.24 In addition, Emecheta alludes to the importance of the oil discovery in the East shortly before Biafra’s secession.25 When riots begin, it was being noised about that the Ibos were striking it rich from the oil that was being discovered in the Eastern Region, and one of the new legislations was that the nation’s wealth would be shared almost equally between the regions with only a slightly higher share going to the areas from where the wealth originated. This the Ibos regarded as unfair … There were demonstrations in the East itself.26

Paraphrasing Reality During the civil war, Emecheta, who had moved to London in 1962, ‘was an active campaigner against British arms supplies to the federal government’, and she personally witnessed the scene of a rowdy demonstration in Trafalgar Square.27 But as an outsider to the events she chose to chronicle, she had to rely on insiders’ reports from relatives and friends who experienced the war first hand. This included the massacre of Asaba residents and the Biafrans’ blowing of the bridge on River Niger: ‘Debbie recorded all this in her memory, to be transferred when 22

Marion Pape, ‘Nigerian War Literature by Women: From Civil War to Gender War’, Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society 29–30 (2005), 106, 230. 23 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 48, 52, quote on 99. On the Yoruba secession, see Emefiena Ezeani, In Biafra Africa Died: The Diplomatic Plot (London: Veritas Lumen, 2012), 71. 24 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 66. Emecheta uses the colonial spelling of ‘Ibo’, now discarded and replaced with the official ‘Igbo’. 25 Ibid., 6. 26 Ibid., 59. 27 Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, quote on 13 and 241.

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possible to the yellowing scraps of paper she dignified with the name of manuscript’.28 For that reason, Emecheta’s ‘artistic depiction of the historicity of the genesis of the post-independence Nigerian political setbacks cannot be dismissed outrightly as inaccurate’.29 Emecheta’s note to the reader ‘is directed more towards readers who are not really familiar with Nigerian history, as she briefly explains the historical point of departure and key figures of her novel’.30 Her decision to keep close to the reality of the ground, painting not only the suffering and violence but also the political events and military exploits, was possibly motivated by her desire to facilitate her readers’ identification with events described in the novel and support the political reflections she explores in the text. Her occasional manipulation and bending of history, regretted by some critics, is her way of using the historical past as a basis and fitting it into her novel to interrogate the role of the various Nigerian actors and foreign governments in the political affairs of Nigeria.31 In Destination Biafra, Debbie’s friend, Babs, reflecting on the casualties, comments that, for those outside, ‘the women and children who would be killed by bombs and guns would simply be statistics’.32 Emecheta’s novel is her way of translating these statistics into reality. The main protagonists bear fictitious names but are so close to reality that they can be described as thinly veiled replicas of the real actors. Ahmadu Bello (1910–1966), the Sardauna of Sokoto and traditional ruler of the North, keeps his title; Odumosu represents Chief Awolowo (1909–1987), Durosaro represents Akintola (1910–1966), Oladapo represents Fajuyi (1926–1966), Ogedemgbe represents Okotie-Eboh (1919–1966), Ozimba represents Azikiwe (1904–1996), Eze represents Mbadiwe (1915–1990), Abosi represents Ojukwu (1933–2011), Momoh represents Gowon (1934 – ), Onyemere represents Ironsi (1924–1966), Nwokolo represents Nzeogwu (1937–1967), and Nguru Kano represents Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (1912–1966). The British are presented in the same way: Sir James Wilson Robertson (1899–1983) who served as Governor-General from 1955 to 1960 is MacDonald in the novel, and Alan Grey is John, the son of Sir John Stuart MacPherson (1898–1971) who served as Governor-General from 1948 to 1955. In addition, the resemblance between the real players and their fictitious counterparts, both in their physical and moral traits and in their mannerisms and actions, is striking: Momoh and Gowon are both 28

Ibid., 216 and quote on 223. For more details on these events, see Emma Okocha, Blood on the Niger: The First Black on Black Genocide. The Untold Story of the Asaba Massacre during the Nigerian Civil War (New York: Triatlantic, 2004 [1994]). 29 Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta’, 388. 30 Pape, ‘Nigerian War Literature by Women’, 68. 31 Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past’, 47. 32 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 109.

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from minorities and from the same region – the current Plateau State – although the first is Tiv and the other Ngas (another minority). Ozimba’s nickname, ‘Zim’, is almost identical to the ‘Zik’ of Azikiwe; both wear the same ‘famous smile and gold-rimmed spectacles’ and defect to the federal side halfway through the war.33 Several authors have highlighted this fictionalization of the Nigerian political class of the time, thereby offering a reading guide to the novel.34 Emecheta did not even bother to change the names of the then-political parties: the Yoruba-led Action Group, the Igbo-led NCNC, the Hausa-led NNP, and the NPC. The novel, at least in its first part, foregrounds the viewpoints of politicians and the army, highlighting their responsibility in the events – a choice that probably explains why Emecheta’s novel failed to capture the public’s imagination. Her diary of events seems to be read from the barracks, with unguarded sideline comments revealing fractures within the military beyond the ethnic divide. These include the competition between the poor, desperate to make it through the ranks, and the Sandhurst-educated elite. The fracture between these two classes is illustrated by the different opposing Momoh, ‘this man from the Tiv tribe’ and Abosi, suspected of ‘regard[ing] soldiering as a rich man’s sport’.35 Emecheta adds to these the slow rise of ambitious females such as Debbie, Emecheta’s mouthpiece, which forces a change into that ‘masculine preserve’.36 We follow negotiations and verbal agreements ‘for the butchery of Ibos to stop, for the Hausa soldiers to go back to their barracks and for the East to be granted autonomy within the federation’.37 We witness the Aburi meeting, the hopes it raised, and the subsequent British pressure on Momoh, ‘uncertain what the word [autonomy] actually meant’ 33

Ibid., 42. Sir Ahmadu Bello was the first premier of the Northern Nigeria region from 1954–1966. Obafemi Awolowo was the first Premier of the Western Region from 1952–1959. Ladoke Akintola was the deputy leader of the Western-led Action Group Party under Awolowo. Festus Okotie-Eboh was a prominent Nigerian politician and former minister for finance during the administration of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Born to Urhobo parents from Uwherun, he adopted the Itsekiri as his tribe after marriage into a prominent Itsekiri family. He was assassinated along with Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa in the January 15, 1966, military coup. K.O. Mbadiwe was a government minister in the 1950s. Adekunle Fajuyi was the first Governor of the then-Western Region from January to July 1966. Nnamdi Azikiwe was Governor-General of Nigeria from 1960–1963 and the first Nigerian President from 1963–1966. Odumegwu Ojukwu was military governor of the Eastern Region in 1966 and the Biafran leader from 1967–1970. Yakubu Gowon was Head of State of Nigeria from 1966–1975. Aguiyi Ironsi was Head of State from January to July 1966. Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu was born in Northern Nigeria from Western Igbo parents from Okpanam in the Midwest, now Delta State. He led the January 1966 failed coup; he was later killed in action in the first days of the Biafran war. Tafawa Balewa was Nigeria’s only Prime Minister; he served from 1960–1966. 34 Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta’, 388–390; Adams, ‘It’s a Woman’s War’, 288; Hodges, ‘Writing Biafra’, 4; and Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past’, 46. 35 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 54. 36 Quote, ibid., 57. Also see Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past’, 43. 37 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 100.

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and to what he had actually just agreed.38 We read of more massacres and of the division of the federation into 12 states, followed by the declaration of independence by the former Eastern Region – Biafra – two events that followed each other closely, on May 28 and 30, 1967.

The Role of the British London-based Emecheta had an opportunity to observe British politics at close range, and she presents the British government ‘hovering in the background of every negotiation, every reversal of fortune, every attempt at resolution’ and dealing ‘by proxy – in arms, in oil rights, in facilitating government borrowing and in weaving complex webs of dependency’.39 As the novel ‘explores the political and historical implications of the Biafran war’, it reminds its readers that Nigeria is a country ‘where real power base lies outside its geographical boundaries’, in the hands of the British.40 It is equally useful to remember that, at the time, all the major players, with the exception of Azikiwe, who had studied in the United States, had been educated in Britain, which still maintained strong educational ties with the Nigerian civil and military elite. Unlike most novels on the Biafran War, Emecheta’s sets the scene on the British side right from the start; her first chapter introduces the reader to a discussion among colonial administrators about the forthcoming independence and Nigeria’s perceived corruption and ignorance. It also discusses the British motivation for favoring the Hausa: their fear of the then-Soviet Union and Communism and their contempt of Igbos’ ambition and passion for education. The first hint in the novel that the British were the source of the problems of the country, including manipulating Nigerians and manipulating and consolidating ethnic divisions, is the discussion of the ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.41 This contributed to ‘the reversal and abandonment of the Aburi accord … [which was] typical of British meddlesomeness in Nigerian political problems’.42 This policy had only one aim: to ensure ‘that any profit to come out of Nigeria should go to Britain rather than to other countries’.43 Emecheta explains the particular British interest in the Eastern Region by their knowledge that ‘those vast areas are full of oil, pure crude oil’ and by their wish to keep ‘Nigeria perpetually within their

38

Ibid., 103. Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, 15. 40 Sumalatha, ‘Privileging Politics,, 427. 41 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 113. Also see Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past’, 38 and Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, 14. 42 Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta’, 389. 43 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 15. 39

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sphere of influence, even after independence’.44 In addition, the British Government’s Irish and European policy clearly dictated their support for a united Nigeria: ‘How can we still maintain a united kingdom, with the hope of joining a united Europe, and then come to Africa and disunite another kingdom?’45 For Emecheta, the British Foreign Office is pleased about the war. The office [a]greed that a quick kill would be the best solution to the Biafran crisis; it was worth investing in arms and giving aid to Nigeria … now that it looked as if there was more oil in the country than they had imagined. It was decided that Alan should go to the surplus section of the Ministry of Defence and buy up the old unwanted ammunition that so much had been spent on during the First World War. However people might describe this conflict, it was still ‘jungle warfare’ as far as the members of the House were concerned … A new trade in ammunition and human blood had begun.46

In addition to the ammunitions they sold Nigeria, the British encourage the Head of State to buy the services of white mercenaries, whose payment is not a problem, as ‘the oil wells in the Midwest had been liberated … and a British oil company could now go there and pump enough oil to pay for the war’.47 More than 40 years after these events, the declassification of documents dating from 1968 of the British Ministry of Defence have proven these fictional details eerily accurate.48 The novel still concedes the British some insight and honesty for all their flaws: they occasionally recognize – in private – the Igbos’ right to decide for themselves and acknowledge their own ignorance of ‘what democracy really mean[s]’.49 At one point, they even recognize the validity of Igbos’ claims to independence: ‘many of [Abosi’s] people believe that if they gave in … Well, many of them think that this has

44

Ibid., 3 and 6. Alan later moans that Abosi ‘has now collected “friends” from France, Ireland and Eastern Europe who would jump on the bandwagon of drilling oil from the East’ (ibid., 115). 45 Ibid., 115. Emecheta also writes, ‘Momoh signed away the greatest percentage of the oil wells to some Western powers, on condition that they settled the Biafran question quickly’ (154). 46 Ibid., 156. 47 Ibid., 201. 48 According to these documents in Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, the ‘present British policy seems to be to provide conventional weapons and ammunition to Nigeria (on a rather more lavish scale than we would probably be keen to admit in public) in the knowledge that while this is not doing very much towards bringing the war to an end, Nigeria could almost certainly buy the stuff somewhere else if we didn’t provide it and by letting her have it we retain a certain degree of influence in Lagos and the possibility of emerging with good relations when Nigeria ultimately wins, thereby ensuring access to the oil reserves of Eastern Nigeria’ (16). 49 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 30.

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become a matter of genocide, judging from what Lawal is doing on the Benin road.’50

The Igbo Factor Emecheta has been accused by some Western critics of being biased in favor of the Igbo, but a careful study of the novel proves otherwise.51 From the start, Destination Biafra places the ethnic factor high on the agenda, as highlighted by many scholarly discussions.52 However, while Igbos are shown as conscious of their Igboness, she presents them as making every effort to prove their loyalty to the federal ideal. It is on record that Igbo leaders were among the staunchest supporters of the federal character of the newly independent Nigeria. This explains the coup plotters’ decision to include Igbo politicians and ministers, ‘including Dr. Ozimba himself and Nguru Kano’, on the list of those to be eliminated, to avoid the coup ‘look[ing] like an Igbo affair’.53 Onyemere, when thrown at the helm of affairs that he took over from a Hausa, worried about possible accusations against him. He ‘made up his mind to try to curb tribalism’.54 In the same way, to prove her loyalty, Debbie later starts her army career by singling out all Igbo soldiers in the barracks, rounding and locking them up, before abandoning them into the hands of their tormentors.55 Individual Igbos’ relentless efforts to prove their support for the federal ideal can be seen as a self-defense tactic to avoid being painted with the same brush as the rest of their community, but it was a vain effort. As summarized by one of the northern soldiers: an Ibo officer asking me what he has done? I will tell you. You people want to rule the country, don’t you? You rushed into the army, into the government, into all the lucrative positions in the country, not satisfied with that, you killed all the politicians from the other tribes and then your man … became the self-appointed Head of State.56

50

Ibid., 199. Although Pape, in ‘Nigerian War Literature by Women’ (62), considers Emecheta’s use of the words ‘some non-Igbos’ as evidence that she positions herself as an Igbo, it might just be part of the novelist’s distinction between the Biafrans and the rest, given the focus of her novel. Emecheta’s adopting the Biafrans’ report on the number of casualties in the massacres – ‘30,000’ (9) has also been counted against her – a sign of the degree of politicization of the war statistics, though confirmed by a number of publications since. 52 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 55. 53 Ibid., 60–61. The coup plotters arranged for the Yoruba to kill the Igbo politicians, the Igbo the Yoruba and for Nwokolo, a Midwestern man, to kill the Sardauna, but Igbo leaders manage to escape their fate. Ozimba in particular had gone to Britain for health reasons (64). 54 Ibid., 68. 55 Ibid., 81–83. 56 Ibid., 83. 51

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Nevertheless, Emecheta seemed to believe that Igbos lacked leadership qualities, as revealed by her brief sketches of their personality. Ozimba, for example, ‘whose charm and charisma has once earned him the foremost position in Nigerian politics … seemed to have been plunged eternally into a ditch of perpetual doubt’.57 When he tries to advise Abosi that they now concentrate on keeping to the East, the Biafran leader accuses him: ‘You never really wanted us to secede in the first place, Doctor. You were busy dreaming about your Pan-Africanism’.58 Ozimba tries to defend himself but knew that ‘in a situation like this, scapegoats would be needed to explain the defeat to the rest of the people’.59 The northern Igbos’ reaction to the coup is equally presented as both dangerous and unfortunate. Their noisy celebrations, provocative banners, placards, and slogans are partly responsible for the riots and slaughter in the North: ‘if nothing was done to restrain the southerners, then the Hausa would be aroused to the point where a holy war might result, with human blood running down the streets’.60 It looks as if Emecheta, considering that adopting a low profile might well have spared them most of the subsequent suffering, blames the Igbos for being themselves. Her mention of the slaughter in the North and in Lagos, where people ‘who had the remotest connection with Iboland started disappearing’, could be read in that light.61 Igbos were being killed ‘in places like the north, in Lagos, in the bushes surrounding Igbo heartland, in towns like Ibusa, Asaba [and] Okpanam’.62 The passage on the Nsukka battle, which alludes to the midnight surprise attack and massacre of hundreds of ‘hungry student soldiers who were still waiting for the sophisticated arms promised them’ and ‘died in their tens and hundreds’, adds another dimension to the reflection.63 It hints at the military weakness of the Biafran government. It also signals a shift in the perception of what was at stake: ‘the inner cabinet met again. It was then established that this was not just a war that the rest of Nigeria wished to win, it was genocide.’64 It is at that point that photos and info are sent to media abroad. Destination Biafra joins scores of other publications – memoirs, essays, novels, and media reports – in offering a sober reflection on the northern massacres: Only God knows how those who survived achieved that great feat. Ibos were hounded from their homes, from the market places and many were killed

57

Ibid., 99. Ibid., 182. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 69 and quote 72. 61 Ibid., 91 62 Ibid., 83. 63 Ibid., 185. 64 Ibid. 58

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at the airport on their way to the East. Then the witch-hunt began … How can politicians be preaching ‘one Nigeria’ when a tribe of people is being massacred?65

The episode of trains bringing maimed Igbos back to the East is directly inspired by widely disseminated press articles at the height of the war that gave eye-witness accounts of the events that took place in Kano on October 14, 1966. Part of Emecheta’s recounting of these events reads thus: The passengers on the platform were still alive – just – but the killers had made sure that those Ibos who went back home would always remember their stay in the North. Nearly all the women were without one breast. The very old ones had only one eye each. Some of the men had been castrated, some had only one arm, others had one foot amputated. All were in a shocked daze.66

This terrible evocation winds down with the words of one of the survivors: ‘tell Abosi to forget talk of “one Nigeria”’, and closes on Emecheta’s cold summary: ‘it was said that over thirty thousand Ibos died in that first part of the troubles’.67

A Plea for Unity Other novels’ presentations of the war usually set it firmly in Biafra and on the Biafran side. Emecheta’s discourse is one of unity. Her ‘dream woman’ Debbie, a Western Igbo who chose to join the Nigerian army, claimed to be a detribalized Nigerian. She ‘incarnates Emecheta’s ideal of nationhood’ and ‘her determinedly non-tribalistic nation-idea drives the nation’s anti-war engine’.68 Debbie’s becoming a Nigerian soldier is a public assertion of her support of the country’s unity and a demand for participation ‘in making political decisions as well’.69 The choice of Debbie, a minority girl, as a mouthpiece ‘affords Emecheta a convenient platform of neutrality and non-partisanship’ in presenting ‘a fair assessment of the Nigerian civil war from the two divides’. Debbie constantly displays her passion for the country’s unity. For example, she listened to the radio and learned to her horror that the people of the East already regarded themselves as members of a different nation. There was talk of their poets 65

Ibid., 88. Ibid., 89–90. See Françoise Ugochukwu, Torn Apart: The Nigerian Civil War and Its Impact (London: Adonis & Abbey, 2010), 61, n79. This particular event was later used by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her novel Half of a Yellow Sun (London: Fourth Estate, 2006). 67 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 91. 68 Marie Umeh, Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996), 215. 69 Pape, ‘Nigerian War Literature by Women’, 150. 66

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submitting words for their new national anthem … Patriotic zeal among Ibos was twenty times more than that of the rest of Nigeria … What was her position in all this mess? She was neither Ibo nor Yoruba, nor was she a Hausa, but a Nigerian.70

She wonders: ‘doesn’t Abosi want a united Nigeria? He can’t cut the East away from the federation.’71 At that point, there is a hint that she may be used as a peace emissary because of her status as ‘neither Igbo nor Yoruba’ and ‘because she personally believed that keeping the country together was a good thing’.72 She embarks on her diplomatic journey to the East as a peace negotiator sent by Momoh ‘to go and convince Abosi that a united Nigeria was the thing to be fought for’.73 She passes through a disputed territory in the process. Debbie’s journey has been likened to a camera that allows the reader to see everything and meet everybody, ‘including the leaders of both of the warring sides’.74 At that point, the focus of the novel shifts from the political and diplomatic scene to the gory reality. On her way, she hears that Biafrans have taken Benin City and are now moving towards Ore. The car in which she travels is later ambushed by federal troops, who kill its Igbo occupants. The graphic description of the brutal murder of the pregnant Igbo women and their children, the soldiers’ attack and rape prove Debbie wrong.75 There is no ‘Nigeria’ and people are still tribal. Subjected to violence at the hands of the Nigerians, ‘the very people she was trying to help’,76 and disillusioned by the corruption, greed, selfishness, and inefficiency she discovers in the ranks, Debbie’s confidence gradually erodes. While the situation on the ground leads Emecheta to justify the Biafran leader’s secessionist attempt, ‘Abosi is berated for insisting on facing the enemy on the battlefield when he had little or no arms, when he had no outlet to any ocean corridor’.77 Debbie blames the Biafran leader for his resolution ‘to fight to the last’, thinking that he can still win, and accuses him of ‘living in a dream world’.78 The religious argument he puts forward is equally attacked as a bad move because Britain is a protestant country. Most of the Irish are Catholics. I understand that the nuns managing the Ibo hospitals and many of the priests still running their schools are Irish. Britain would be blind not to see

70

Ibid., 126. Ibid., 93. 72 Ibid., 123. 73 Ibid., 123. 74 Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, 15. 75 Ibid., 130–136. 76 Ibid., 157. 77 Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta’, 390. 78 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 245. 71

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that if they backed Abosi there would be no reason for them not to look sympathetically on their own Irish problem.79

The novel blames Abosi for rejecting Debbie’s plea for peace, for ‘having led Igbos into this “holocaust”’, and for eventually leaving Biafra as the Nigerian army closes in.80 Debbie’s position is strengthened by Ozimba’s, the only other Nigerian whose national stature ‘cut across tribes’.81 Faced with mounting casualties, he shares his doubts on the viability of Biafra: ‘had they been right to secede? … Should he advise Abosi to cut his losses and give in now that the tide was turning?’82 Ozimba’s attempt to initiate a reflection on the war will lead to his being reprimanded for having been ‘busy dreaming about [his] Pan-Africanism’.83 He would later swap sides and start advocating for ‘one Nigeria’.84 Meanwhile, both on the front and in the bush, orders were now shouted in a language they knew was Nigerian, for they had heard it spoken so many times before, either softly to welcome them or musically to wish them good speed, but now it sounded more foreign still, for they had never heard it spoken in this brutal guttural way. The Ibo language had become a language of war.85

This change signals a gradual loss of identity and questions the purpose of pursuing the warpath. It is interesting, in this regard, to note Debbie’s embarrassment when confronted about her Oxfordian accent and to discover her subsequent choice of Pidgin English, a supra-ethnic Nigerian language facilitating communication across ethnic barriers.86 She displays a ‘great resourcefulness abroad as the propaganda officer for Abosi and Biafra’.87 However, confronted with the people’s suffering, she later asks herself whether her traveling between enemy lines had been worth it and whether there was ‘really any point in her mission? Or should she have stayed in Lagos and watch the stronger party win, if at the end of the day, the result was going to be the same?’88

The Minorities’ Fate Emecheta, of Western Igbo origin, reminds her readers of the heavy losses suffered by her people before and during the war, stating that 79

Ibid., 147. Ibid., 239 and quote on 252–254. 81 Ibid., 37. Azikiwe, born of Igbo parents in the north, later schooled in Calabar and Lagos before moving to the United States for further studies. 82 Ibid., 183. 83 Ibid., 182. 84 Ibid., 235. 85 Ibid., 138. 86 Ibid., 231. 87 Sumalatha, ‘Privileging Politics’, 429. 88 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 165. 80

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‘Nigeria was plunged into the bloodiest carnage ever seen in the whole of Africa. And the greater part of the blood that flowed was Ibo blood.’89 The novel presents a group of refugees from the North flocking to Abosi’s house, telling their stories, such that ‘the anger of those listening was stirred to fever point’ with many urging Abosi ‘not to bother to wait for Aburi but to declare war immediately’.90 Abosi’s reaction to the massacre of easterners highlights the crucial importance of the ethnic factor in the decision-making process – a viewpoint explained by Emecheta’s personal and family background. Pressed hard by Igbo victims’ pleas, Abosi reminds them that ‘this misunderstanding is not just between the Ibos and the rest of Nigeria but between Ibos from the West … Ibos from the East and the minority tribes in the East, against the rest of Nigeria. So before I make any move, all these people must be fully consulted’.91 The dividing of the federation into 12 states later effectively dismantles the former Eastern Region: Not only that, [Momoh] made sure that through the way it was divided, the richest oil wells in the East fall into the hands of the non-Igbo speaking people. In other words, he declared war against Abosi and his people. … How long [would] the non-Ibo speaking peoples of the East rally round Abosi, knowing that they can have their own state and that the richest oil wells lie in their villages? The seeds of doubt have already been sown.92

Momoh himself expresses the view that ‘the minority peoples in the East have to be protected, you know. You do realize that there are many groups who are not Ibos living in the East too? We seldom hear about them, because Abosi and his Ibos are busy shouting as if they own the whole world.’93 The issue of ethnic minorities was a sensitive issue, but Emecheta’s novel seems to give the impression that neither Momoh nor Abosi really cared about them. In any case, the concentration of early federal attacks on Biafra’s northern and southern borders soon led to a rapid change in Biafra’s ethnic identity, with the peripheral, non-Igbo areas of the former eastern State being taken back into the Nigerian federation. In the early months of 1968, when international media coverage of the war really took off, the war had practically become an Igbo war 89

Ibid., 78. Ibid., 96–97. 91 Ibid., 97. 92 Ibid., 120. Records from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office prove the British support for Shell-BP’s huge expansion plans in the Nigerian Midwest, in Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, 16–17. 93 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 124. See Osaghae, Crippled Giant, 63–64: ‘although secession was proposed in the name of the Eastern Region, it was primarily an Igbo affair. Minorities had also tended to suffer the same fate as the Igbos in the northern massacres and some of their leaders supported secession, but the fear of Igbo domination and the desire to be free from Igbo control influenced their half-hearted and reluctant involvement in the war.’ 90

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and was therefore rightly presented as such.94 Later in the novel, the author foregrounds the Igbos’ heavy contribution not only to the massacres but also to the war casualties. In the Mid-West alone, ‘over 2,000 Ibo men died along the Benin-Asaba road on “Operation Mosquito”. But, as they say, that was war.’95 The huge number of Igbo casualties and the absence of details about the non-Igbo dead and wounded – a direct consequence of their being reclaimed by the federal State – may explain Emecheta’s silence on the minorities’ contribution to the war. She aptly summarizes this herself: ‘How many Ibos were killed yesterday? How many Nigerians? As far as [Debbie] was concerned, they were all Nigerians.’96 For Pape, the novel ‘expresses the perspective of “being between the fronts” through a noticeable dissociation both from the Igbo East of the River Niger and from the Nigerians’.97 This point is illustrated by Debbie’s mission: ‘Momoh would wait for news of Debbie. If she gave any indication that Abosi was unwilling to budge, then he would send a conquering army into the Ibo heartland.’98 A whole paragraph is devoted to Western Igbos and their difficult relationship with Eastern/core Igbos.99 It is a subject that Emecheta, from Ibusa, knows well. ‘Someone raised the problem of the Western Ibos … but it was agreed that it was not yet an important issue. These could even be given the choice of joining the Eastern Ibos or following the rest of the country.’100 Narrated through the eyes of Debbie, the Mid-Western girl, the fate of Western Igbos looms large in the novel. Their leaders, Ugoji and Nwokolo, are presented as scapegoats sacrificed to appease Igbo leaders’ anger after the botched Biafran military sortie and capture of Benin and Ore.101 Ugoji, a military officer from the Mid-West, had expressed fears that if the federal soldiers retake Ore and Benin, Mid-Western Igbos may be at risk: ‘we should have left a standing army, we should have our men guarding our towns, our wives and children, our young girls and old mothers’.102 Abosi was made aware of the risk for the MidWesterners to be slaughtered if the attack was not going to plan, but he refused to rescue them. Nwokolo, ‘the conqueror of the Hausas in the north, the leader of the great Ore mission’, is later thrown into jail and 94

Comments by Western critics do not, unfortunately, take the shrinking Biafran landscape and the geographical modifications to its territory into account when blaming the presentation of the war as an all-Igbo war. It must be noted, in addition, that many of these criticisms fail to recognize Nigeria’s complex reality. This has led to some irrelevant and erroneous assessments concerning the war and the way it is rendered in literature. 95 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 177. 96 Ibid., 195. 97 Pape, ‘Nigerian War Literature by Women’, 56. 98 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 149. 99 Ibid., 55. 100 Ibid., 99. 101 Ibid., 184. 102 Ibid., 145.

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executed.103 What he did not know was that Abosi decided that those responsible for the Ore retreat must be punished, saying that ‘these socalled Mid-Westerners have … no loyalty at all’.104 These feelings explain the Western Igbo reaction to the visiting Biafran squad sent to the Mid-West to find out about the situation. They meet women in the bush and discover the Mid-Westerners’ hatred: ‘Biafra, Biafra, what is Biafra? You killed our man from this part, Nwokolo; the Nigerian soldiers came and killed what your soldiers left. We are Ibuza people but we now live in the bush, thanks to your Abosi and your Biafra.’105 For Nwachukwu-Agbada, Emecheta ‘used her privileged position as a writer … to draw attention to the plight of her people during a senseless war. The truth anyway is that it was not her own group alone which faced the scourge of Biafra or Nigerian soldiers once any of the sides was losing ground.’106 He goes on to remind his readers about the very mobile front: the truth is that the civil war on the Biafran side was fought on continuously shifting grounds. The loss of land occupied by Biafrans meant that on each occasion they were more concerned with protecting areas yet to be attacked. Once any part of it was captured by the federal forces, the Biafran soldiers retreated and got fortified in areas nearest to such a part.107

Emecheta’s foreword, aimed first and foremost at her Nigerian readership, discloses her sources of information as well as her political position which, as she openly admits, is biased: ‘I have tried very hard not to be bitter, and to be impartial – especially as I hail from Ibuza … where the worst atrocities of the war took place, which is never given any prominence.’108 These words tell of her identification with her place of origin and the way its inhabitants suffered during the war alongside with others from the West of the River Niger, thereby opposing the Igbo’s claim to be the war’s sole victims. The injustice meted out above all on her hometown is one of the reasons why the book, for her, ‘is one that simply had to be written’.109 Another reason – as is hinted at in her preface – seems to be that Emecheta suffered a kind of survivor’s guilt because she was not in Nigeria during the war and could only protest against it as a student on London’s Trafalgar Square. For NwachukwuAgbada, although Emecheta’s interpretation of the Nigerian political crisis

103

Ibid., 102 Ibid., 178. 105 Ibid., 231. 106 Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta’, 390–391. 107 Ibid., 391 108 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, vii. 109 Ibid. 104

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may lack the class perspective, the major issues raised by her historicism remain accurate. She has no overt philosophical statement about the war, but invariably she fires our imagination to enquire why … the Eastern and Western Igbo could so easily suspect each other.110

It seems that, until the very end, Emecheta shared her protagonist’s belief in the national unity of the federation.

Dreaming of a New Nigeria Morrison, reflecting on the novel, considers that ‘in his Ahiara Declaration of June 1969 … Emeka Ojukwu offers the most developed formulation of Biafran nationalism to emerge from the writing of the civil war’.111 He further perceives Ojukwu’s presentation of the Biafran project as a rejection of Nigeria itself as a ‘ramshackle creation that has no justification either in history or in the freely expressed wishes of the peoples’ and ‘a positive commitment to build a healthy, dynamic and progressive state such as would be the pride of black men the world over’.112 Far from being driven by petty regionalism, he insists, secession from Nigeria arose from ‘a conflict between two diametrically opposed conceptions of the end and purpose of the modern African state’.113 Building on the Biafran leader’s vision, Destination Biafra goes further. Indeed, its title announces both Debbie’s trip to the East and heralds a new country yet to be born. In the novel, the Biafran leader himself elaborates on this ‘new and happy country’ yet to emerge, adding: ‘I would rather say our destination is “Biafra” since as far as I am concerned, we’re not yet independent.’114 Akingbe rightly points to the depth of the text, insisting that ‘through abundant use of metaphors, allegory and allusive names, the writer demands a second-level reading of the novel as both historical and political statements on an important segment of Nigeria’s political history’.115 Several critics have described Emecheta’s Biafra as rather different from the Eastern independent republic as plebiscited by ‘the young people at the University of Nsukka … voicing their opinions openly and offering their services and even their lives for their fatherland’.116 The novel foregrounds it as ‘a political utopia, an idyllic country of hope without ethnic conflicts in which people can truly live independently and autonomously’.117 It is a detribalized nation ‘where wealth will be 110

Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta’, 394. Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, 7–11. 112 Ibid., 7. 113 Ibid., 10. 114 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 60. 115 Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past’, 32. 116 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 128. 117 Pape, ‘Nigerian War Literature by Women’, 83. 111

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equally distributed’, a new Nigeria ‘where there would be no corruption, no fighting in the streets, where traders need not fear being waylaid by gangs of armed robbers and there would be jobs for everybody’.118 The novel gradually ‘develops an understanding of “Biafra” as an alternate paradigm of Nigerianness itself ’, free from gender, ethnic, and class prejudices.119 Emecheta describes it as a ‘land of hope’.120 But the Biafra that Debbie and the coup perpetrators dream of will turn to be very different from the real historical Biafra. At the end of the novel, it ‘remains a destination yet to be reached, a liberation that the privileged and positioned Nigerian elite have not yet elected to grasp’.121 Debbie herself embodies this new country, feels responsible for it, and fully engages in the building of it. The unfortunate thing is that her own vision of Biafra as an idyllic state is not shared by any of the people she meets. The violence meted to her body – first gang raped by Yoruba soldiers and then by a Hausa officer, nails the coffin on her dreams.122 Emecheta fleshes out the hopes, efforts and pain associated with the war of independence in her presentation of Biafra as a pregnant dream whose birth is eagerly expected amidst fears and threats. This is a typically feminine imagery according to Virginia Coulon for whom these ‘scenes of rape, pregnancy and aborted birth symbolize the Biafran nation and are part of the female writers’ common “own language and grammar.”’123 The novel develops, in parallel, a powerful allegory: that of the child Biafra. Neither of the two leaders, Abosi and Momoh, manage to father a child. While Abosi’s wife suffers repeated miscarriages, Momoh’s wife eventually delivers a stillborn ‘monstrosity’ that is immediately taken away.124 Meanwhile, somewhere between Agbor and Benin, a dying pregnant woman gives birth to an underweight baby whom the refugees decide to call ‘Biafra’.125 Adopted by the refugee community and carried by Debbie, he eventually died of dysentery, triggering the anguished cry: ‘is our land Biafra going to die like this baby, before it is given time to live at all? … I think the death of this child is symbolic. This is how our Biafra is going to fall. I feel it in my bones.’126 The fate of the two baby boys demonstrates that for the novelist, neither Nigeria nor Biafra were viable national projects.

118

Emecheta, Destination Biafra, first quote 128, second quote 60. Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, 17. 120 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 213. 121 Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, 19. 122 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 133–134 and 174–176. 123 Cited in Pape, ‘Nigerian War Literature by Women’, 27. 124 In real life, Ojukwu divorced his first wife, Elizabeth Okoli, because she did not give him any child. 125 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 188. 126 Ibid., 212. 119

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Conclusion Interviewed in 1994, Emecheta explained that she saw herself as a storyteller with no other mission than ‘telling stories … to tell the world our part of the story while using the voices of women’.127 Yet, a detailed analysis of her novel reveals that she definitely went far beyond, adding to the growing body of historical writing from Africa and enriching it with a fictional unique viewpoint. It has been argued that her novel was not only describing ‘the current state of a nation, plagued by politicized ethnicity, but also the feasibility of overcoming this state’.128 As a diasporic Nigerian, all Emecheta could do was to stage a protest, and her novel has been seen as ‘a work expressing indignation and bitterness at both the causes of the civil war and the affliction and undue punishment brought upon a good number of ordinary Nigerians and Biafrans’.129 One of the lessons of the novel, and of the fast growing literature on the Biafran War, is that ‘a nation that fails to remember what it should remember or forget what it should forget is in danger of reliving its nightmares all over again’.130

127

Oladipo Joseph Ogundele, ‘A Conversation with Buchi Emecheta, July 22, 1994’, in Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, edited by Umeh Marie (Trenton, Africa World Press, 1996), 449. 128 Pape, ‘Nigerian War Literature by Women’, 92. 129 Porter, ‘They Were There, Too’, 326. 130 Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past’, 42.

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No, This is Not Redemption The Biafra War Legacy in Chris Abani’s GraceLand Hugh Hodges

‘That no one is any longer made accountable … that the kind of being manifested cannot be traced back to a causa prima … thus alone is the innocence of becoming restored.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 54 (original emphasis) ‘John Wayne is not in movies anymore.’

Chris Abani, GraceLand, 190

GraceLand’s protagonist Elvis Oke recalls how when he was younger he and his friends used to evaluate the characters in Hollywood action films: they were all either John Wayne, the uncomplicated embodiment of good citizenship; Bad Guy, the equally uncomplicated embodiment of evil; or Actor, the ‘rogue’ who is ‘part villain, part hero’.1 By the time Elvis is 16 years old, however, the movies have changed. ‘Now dere is only Bad Guy and Actor. No more John Wayne’, his friend Redemption explains.2 The shift mirrors the anomie that has descended on GraceLand’s Nigeria: good citizenship is no longer a possibility; one must choose (or have chosen for one) either the sociopathic evil of Bad Guy or the uncertainty of Actor. Throughout the novel, Elvis struggles with the latter and with what it means to be Actor in a world where the certainties that underwrote John Wayne’s actions are gone. Elvis seems to understand that what characterizes Actor is the will, that being Actor involves reclaiming what Nietzsche calls ‘the innocence of becoming’. But like the Lagos he inhabits, Elvis finds himself incapable of any creative act of will; instead succumbs to the nihilism that GraceLand depicts as characteristic of post-Biafra Nigeria. In 1983, Elvis lives with his father and stepmother in Maroko, then one of Lagos’s largest slums (it was bulldozed in 1990). Much of the story concerns his interactions with his father and three people he meets in Lagos: the Colonel, whose criminal ring employs Elvis; Redemption, Elvis’s friend and cohort in crime; and the King of Beggars, whom Elvis befriends and who subsequently takes Elvis in when his life 1

Chris Abani, GraceLand: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 147. Ibid., 190.

2

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is endangered by the Colonel. Regularly interspersed with this story are flashbacks to Elvis’s childhood in Afikpo beginning in 1972 and working their way forward until they catch up with the main narrative. What emerges is, in some ways, a conventional coming-of-age story: the Colonel, the King, and Redemption present Elvis with three possible futures that he must choose between as he enters adulthood, and the ending of the novel suggests that some sort of rite of passage has been completed or at any rate undertaken. Indeed, much of the scholarly attention GraceLand has attracted focuses on this feature of the book.3 The other principal focus of critical attention has been the novel’s commentary on globalization and urbanization.4 As Ashley Dawson puts it, GraceLand represents an unequivocal failure of self-formation and socialization … Elvis traverses a world in which hopes for economic development and political reform are systematically obliterated [and] spatial egress is substituted for temporal progress. Social and economic transformation on both an individual and collective level, that is, cannot be found within the fictional mega-city represented in the novel.5

There is no question that, on one level, the pervasive nihilism of GraceLand does seem to be an effect of globalization: the novel may be read, as Dawson observes, as ‘a damning allegory for a world in which narratives of development have been abandoned’.6 However, Matthew Omelsky, in an article addressed to the question of whether the ‘utopian “idea of America” provide[s] youth [in GraceLand] with a sense of possible agency’, gestures towards a more concrete source of the novel’s anomie.7 Discussing state-sponsored violence, he notes that the ‘memory of the [Biafra] war … surfaces on several occasions’, and that [b]etween this recurring residue of the civil war and the political violence that pervades the quotidian experiences in GraceLand, Abani underscores 3

See Amanda Aycock, ‘Becoming Black and Elvis: Transnational and Performative Identity in the Novels of Chris Abani’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 10:1 (January 2009), 11–25; Sita Maria Kattanek, ‘The Nigerian Coming-of-Age Novel as a Globalization Device: A Reading of Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Rupkatha 3:3 (2011), 426–433; and Madelaine Hron, ‘“Ora na-azu nwa”: The Figure of the Child in ThirdGeneration Nigerian Novels’, Research in African Literatures 39:2 (Summer 2008), 27–48. 4 See Rita Nnodim, ‘City, Identity, and Dystopia: Writing Lagos in Contemporary Nigerian Novels’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44:4 (2008), 321–332; Chris Dunton, ‘Entropy and Energy: Lagos as City of Words’, Research in African Literatures 39:2 (Summer 2008), 68–78; Ashley Dawson, ‘Surplus City: Structural Adjustment , Self-Fashioning, and Urban Insurrection in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Interventions 11:1 (2009), 16–34; Sarah K. Harrison, ‘“Suspended City”: Personal, Urban, and National Development in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Research in African Literatures 43:2 (Summer 2012), 95–114; and Matthew Omelsky, ‘Chris Abani and the Politics of Ambivalence’, Research in African Literatures 42:4 (Winter 2011), 84–96. 5 Dawson, ‘Surplus City’, 19–20. 6 Ibid., 20. 7 Omelsky, ‘Chris Abani and the Politics of Ambivalence’, 90.

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the ways in which the Nigerian sovereign has historically coerced and established control of the populace through a political culture of violence and intimidation.8

Omelsky does not explore these memories of the war. In fact, none of the published criticism of GraceLand seems to do so, but these memories define Abani’s fictionalized Nigeria and those who inhabit it. Elvis was born with Biafra; his mother’s cancer emerged with its defeat; the war created both the Colonel and the King of Beggars, the two poles of Elvis’s existence; more important, it was the historical moment at which ‘the Mbembean vulgarity of power’, to borrow Rita Nnodim’s phrase, first announced itself in the Nigerian context.9 When Nnodim uses the phrase ‘vulgarity of power’, she is referring to Achille Mbembe’s identification of ‘the grotesque and the obscene’ character of postcolonial power.10 Nnodim is also concerned mainly with this power’s hold on GraceLand’s Lagos, but her reference to Mbembe can be expanded to include his discussion of ‘necropower’, that is, power under conditions where ‘the state of exception and the relation of enmity have become the normative basis of the right to kill’.11 Under these conditions, ‘sovereignty means the capacity to determine who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not’.12 The power that grips GraceLand’s Lagos clearly has this character too. In Abani’s mega-city, there is a purely necropolitical relation between a sovereign military and the ‘bloody civilians’ who are treated as ‘disposable subjects’.13 This state of

8

Ibid., 85–86. Nnodim, ‘City, Identity, and Dystopia’, 322. 10 Achille Mbembe, ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 62:1 (1992), 4. 11 Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Translated by Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15:1 (2003), 16. I understand the phrase here and throughout in the sense developed by Giorgio Agamben, following Carl Schmitt. Agamben argues ‘on the one hand … the extension of the military authority’s wartime powers into the civil sphere, and on the other a suspension of the constitution’, or of those constitutional norms that protect individual liberties; see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Translated by Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 12 Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, 27. 13 Abani, GraceLand, 288. I borrow the paradoxical turn-of-phrase ‘disposable subjects’ from Nouri Gana and Heike Härting, who argue that necropower, if it can be said to produce subjects at all, produces only dehumanized ‘disposable people’ while itself defying ‘transcendence or convertibility’ (see Nouri Gana and Heike Härting, Narrative Violence: Africa and the Middle East (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1). In the Nigerian context, O.B. Lawuyi writes: ‘They [successive military regimes] militarized the space with commands, generating incessant chaos and promoting expedient decisions, a murder instinct, a tactical withdrawal consciousness, and the shelling and ambush of selected, targeted civilians. Uncertainty rules. They have simply depersonalized the civil person into a state of confusion, identity crises, begging, and opportunism’ (O.B. Lawuyi, ‘Understanding the Nigerian State: Popular Culture and the Struggle for Meaning’, in The Transformation of Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola, edited by Adebayo Oyebade (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002), 514. 9

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exception, which shapes the character of GraceLand and formalizes its nihilism, is in the first instance a product of the Biafra War. GraceLand is certainly not the first Nigerian novel to comment on the anomic repercussions of the Biafra War (as the very fact of this current collection attests); nor is it the only Nigerian novel to explore the nihilism that seems to pervade the globalized city. As Chris Dunton observes, with reference to Lekan Oyegoke’s Ill Winds and Maik Nwosu’s Invisible Chapters, ‘part of the task of the Lagos novel now, it seems, is to bear witness to the city’s resistance to positive change’.14 Dunton adds, however, that what these novels (and others such as Akin Adesokan’s Roots in the Sky and Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel) have in common is their ‘emphasis [on] the possibilities for cognition and action, and in particular the possibilities inherent in the act of writing [or some other form of expressive activity] as a means to assert a meaningful existence’.15 Dunton includes GraceLand in this generalization, but the latter actually deeply despairs about any attempts to make meaning from within the state of exception, any attempt to establish or restore some sort of moral economy in a world where power observes no law. Despite its closing line, ‘Yes, this is Redemption’, GraceLand finds no redemption from its nihilism.16

Nihilism and Redemption I use the terms nihilism and redemption, borrowed from Nietzsche and some of his recent commentators, because these related Nietzschean concepts, particularly as explored by Karen L. Carr and Ted Sadler, foreground certain key relationships in GraceLand that the novel’s commentators have tended to marginalize or overlook entirely.17 Specifically, they focus attention on the triangular relationship between Elvis, the Colonel, and the King of Beggars, and on the relationship between the Biafra War and the existential crisis dramatized in GraceLand. In turn this explains what Elvis is doing when he says, ‘Yes, this is Redemption.’18 For Nietzsche, existential nihilism, the emptiness attending the conviction that life has no meaning, is a sickness which may, paradoxically, lead the way to ‘redemption from an interpretation of life that [is] both hypocritical and debilitating’.19 This is because existential nihilism is, in the first place, a secondary effect of either ‘alethiological, epistemological, or ethical nihilism’, the judgment that there is no God, no Truth or

14

Chris Dunton, ‘Entropy and Energy’, 72. Ibid., 73. 16 Abani, GraceLand, 321. 17 Karen L. Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism (New York: SUNY Press, 1992); and Ted Sadler, Nietzsche: Truth and Redemption (London: Athlone, 1995). 18 Abani, GraceLand, 321. 19 Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism, 4. 15

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no Good.20 In other words, it follows from some sort of hermeneutical crisis. For Nietzsche that crisis was announced by secular modernity, ‘the death of God and the self-dissolution of Christianity’.21 Later, for Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre and Camus, it was the ‘collapse of the liberal paradigm on the battlefields of the First World War’.22 Still later, for Debord and the other Situationists, it was the postmodern rise of commodity culture. In all cases, some historically specific crisis is seen to shatter the interpretive paradigms people rely on to make life meaningful. For the characters in Chris Abani’s GraceLand, the crisis in question was the Biafra War. For the victorious as much as for the defeated, and for the military as much as for civilians, that war initiated a state of exception in which there can be no becoming, only surviving. Nietzsche argues that a person’s – or for that matter a people’s – nihilistic response to hermeneutical crisis may be either passive or active: Passive nihilism merely succumbs to the nothingness that surrounds it, being essentially an expression of weakness. [Nietzsche writes:] ‘The power of the spirit can be so worn down that the previous aims and values are inadequate and it [can] find no more faith’ … [For Nietzsche, to] will no longer, to suffer existence merely passively without offering some sort of interpretation, explanation, or justification, signifies the ultimate degeneration of an organism, the final decay of its instinctual nature into nothingness, a degeneration and decay that, left unchecked, can only culminate in the death of that organism.23

This terminal form of nihilism will be seen in people who have based their evaluation of the world on its relation to some causa prima external to their own existence. When that causa prima fails (God is Nietzsche’s particular example, but anything given objective, independent status will do), the believer must either cease to will entirely or alienate the will by making ‘one final nihilistic gesture’.24 To borrow the Situationist International’s memorable image, ‘he throws dice to decide his “cause”, and becomes its devoted slave’.25 Ted Sadler writes: ‘For Nietzsche, the fundamental perversity and corruption of human beings is that they give their heart to untruth, that their lives are therefore a constant slander of truth, of something which is in fact the only proper object of honour and reverence.’26 In this condition, their wills in thrall to something over which they have no control – be it the Past or the Gods, humans become resentful of their own existence. In Thus Spoke 20

Ibid., 19 Ibid., 48. 22 Ibid., 2. 23 Ibid., 37–38. 24 Christopher Gray, Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (London: Rebel Press, 1998), 103. 25 Gray, Leaving the 20th Century, 103. 26 Sadler, Nietzsche, 7. 21

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Zarathustra, it is the former, particularly, that Zarathustra identifies as the source of the will’s ‘loneliest sorrow’: That time does not run backward, this arouses the will’s fury: ‘That which was’ – that is the stone which it cannot roll away. And so it rolls stones in fury and ill-humour, and takes revenge on whatever does not, like itself, feel fury and ill-humour. Thus did the Will, the liberator, take to hurting; and upon all that can suffer it takes revenge for its inability to go backwards. This, this alone is what revenge itself is: the Will’s ill will – will toward time and its ‘It was.’27

Redemption from this ‘spirit of revenge’ can only be achieved by the creating will.28 Zarathustra says: ‘To redeem that which has passed away and to re-create all “It was” into a “Thus I willed it!” – that alone should I call redemption!’29 And the path to this redemption is through active nihilism. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche writes: That no one is any longer made accountable [i.e. to an external causa prima], that the kind of being manifested cannot be traced back to a causa prima, that the world is a unity neither as sensorium nor as ‘spirit’, this alone is the great liberation – thus alone is the innocence of becoming restored … The concept ‘God’ has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence … We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we redeem the world.30

Crucially, this redemptive rejection of God (or more accurately the God function) opens a space for Dionysian affirmation of life’s essential unity. According to Nietzsche: The word ‘Dionysian’ means: an urge to unity, a reaching out beyond personality, the everyday, society, reality, across the abyss of transitoriness … an ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life … the eternal will to procreation, to fruitfulness, to recurrence; the feeling of the necessary unity of creation and destruction.31

It is this creative act of the will that seems to be ruled out in GraceLand; for the bewildered citizens either because they have rolled the dice and bent their wills to some false causa prima or because, reduced to a condition of mere survival, they lack will entirely; for the military because their necropolitical power is merely the power to destroy – it cannot create anything. 27

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody, translated by Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 121. 28 Ibid., 122. 29 Ibid., 121. 30 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 54, original emphasis. 31 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values, translated by Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 539.

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Not coincidentally, it is also this creative act of the will, this innocent becoming (innocent because not accountable to God, or the Past, or some other causa prima), this redemptive life intoxication, that Wole Soyinka famously associates with Ogun in his discussion of Yoruba tragedy: Yoruba tragedy plunges straight into the ‘chthonic realm,’ the seething cauldron of the dark world will and psyche, the transitional yet inchoate matrix of death and becoming. Into this universal womb once plunged and emerged Ogun, the first actor, disintegrating within the abyss … Within the mystic summons of the chasm the protagonist actor … resists, like Ogun before him, the final step towards complete annihilation.32

For Soyinka, Ogun, destroyer/creator god of the forge and the road, is the figure who by reconciling death and becoming redeems a fragmented humanity and restores the primal unity of existence. Facing his own will’s dissolution, he asserts: ‘Thus do I will it’, and in so doing reassembles himself. I introduce Soyinka here first because he is an influencing presence in the novel: there are several explicit references to the man and his work in GraceLand that encourage intertextual reading, and that intertextual reading, particularly of Soyinka’s discussion of Ogun, suggests a way of understanding the lack of redemption in GraceLand.

Destruction and Creation Wole Soyinka’s interest in Ogun, at least as he articulates it in ‘The Fourth Stage’ and Myth, Literature and the African World, hinges primarily on Ogun’s function as ‘the first challenger, and conqueror of transition’,33 the embodiment ‘the Prometheus instinct in man, constantly at the service of society for its full self-realization’.34 The most important element of Ogun’s mythology in this respect is ‘his role of explorer through the primordial chaos, which he conquered, then bridged’.35 In this role, as god of the road, Ogun seems the ideal patron deity for the postcolonial nation – particularly for one trying to forge itself anew after the bloody chaos of civil war (as Nigeria was when Soyinka wrote ‘The Fourth Stage’). However, that chaos, far from being a bridgeable transition, was

32

Soyinka quoted in Biodun Jeyifo, ‘Wole Soyinka and Tropes of Disalienation’, in Jeyifo, ed., Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001), 142–143. 33 Wole Soyinka, ‘The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy’, in The Morality of Art: Essays Presented to G. Wilson Knight by his Colleagues and Friends, edited by Douglas William Jefferson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 119–134; and his Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 145. 34 Ibid., 30. 35 Ibid.

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to become in Nigeria a seemingly permanent condition;36 Ogun, it turns out, is a much more problematic patron deity than he at first appears. For Soyinka what matters is the balance between Ogun’s roles as creator and destroyer; there is something reassuring in the knowledge that every act of destruction becomes in turn a forging of something new. Less reassuring is the knowledge, present but never confronted head-on in either ‘The Fourth Stage’ or Myth, Literature and the African World, that Ogun’s destructiveness is quite arbitrary: He kills suddenly in the house and suddenly in the field He kills the child with iron with which it plays Ogun kills the slave-owner and the slaves as well He kills the owner of the house and paints the hearth with his blood.37

This is pure violence in Giorgio Agamben’s sense of the term, violence that ‘exposes and severs the nexus between law and violence and can thus appear in the end not as violence that governs … but as violence that purely acts and manifests’.38 For this reason, mankind is ill-advised to accede to Ogun’s sovereignty. Ogun warned men as much when they first asked him to be their king. When they offered him the crown of Ire: Ogun presented a face of himself which he hoped would put an end to their persistence. He came down in his leather war-kit, smeared in blood from head to foot. When they had fled he returned to his mountain-lair, satisfied that the lesson had been implanted. Alas they came back again. They implored him, if he would only come in less terrifying attire, they would welcome him as king and leader.39

Alas, indeed, because what is figured here is the foundation of political life. Giorgio Agamben writes: ‘The first foundation of political life is a life that may be killed, which is politicized through its very capacity to be killed.’40 The myth of Ogun’s kingship dramatizes both this submission of life to sovereign violence, and the mystification of that violence, which is the source of all political power. ‘Ogun finally consented. He came down decked in palm fronds and was crowned king.’41 This disguise – a mask of kingship – promises that violence will be constrained, pure violence transcended to produce political power, the anomie of naked force exchanged for political authority. 36

Symptomatically, when Soyinka accepted the job of creating a ‘Road Safety Corps’ in the 1980s, he did so in the belief that it might ‘stem the notorious hemorrhage on Nigerian roads’ – Soyinka, You Must Set Forth at Dawn (New York: Random House, 2006), 182; the job must have appealed to him as an opportunity to align his creative energies with those of Ogun, but the only obvious effect was to attract accusations that he had ‘sold out’ to the military government (182). 37 Obotunde Ijimere, quoted in Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 20. 38 Agamben, State of Exception, 62. 39 Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 29. 40 Agamben, State of Exception, 89. 41 Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 29.

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However, the mask is only ever a mask and when that mask is removed, the violence it releases knows no bounds.42 As Soyinka tells the myth, Ogun always led his men to victory in battle, but the cost could be terrible. The first time Ogun entered battle drunk, he ‘turned on his men and slaughtered them’.43 Ogun, who Soyinka says ‘stands for a transcendental, humane, but rigidly restorative justice’, becomes here the figure of pure violence, the suspension of justice, and the inauguration of a state of exception.44 It is this face of Ogun that Nigeria saw altogether too frequently from the late 1960s onward. Under successive military governments, Ogun seemed to be permanently drunk. Even for Soyinka, faced with the failure of the Road Safety Corps, this created a sense of sacrificial crisis.45 In You Must Set Forth at Dawn he recalls that in the early 1960s, like ‘the many faces of Ogun … the road was a violent host’, and even fatal accident scenes ‘had a solemnity about them, a graceful pronouncement of leavetaking where the precedent violence is gently absorbed’.46 Like Ogun after his annihilating passage through chaos, the survivors of these accidents experienced a form of tranquility, the catharsis of sacrifice. However, Soyinka laments: ‘In the road’s later decay … is recorded a nation’s retreat 42

I am drawing here on Deborah Root’s observation that ‘political authority is always underlain by chaos and death’ – Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview, 1996), 5. The context of Root’s observation is her discussion of the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoa¯tl and his brother Tezcatlipoca. The former’s peaceful rule is sustained by the mystification of sovereign violence; his appearance as the ‘priestly ideal … occlude[s] his despotic function or, rather purifie[s] and render[s] benign the idea of the despot or supreme lord’, much as the conceit of the good shepherd does. The reign of this good shepherd ends, however, and his kingdom falls when Tezcatlipoca shows Quetzalcoa¯tl his reflection in a mirror, ‘revealing the despot to be not the benign face of Quetzalcoa¯tl, but the fearsome face of the enemy on both sides’. Tezcatlipoca, demystifying his brother’s authority, reveals ‘that the state operates and maintains its authority through violence and terror’ (5). This precipitates what René Girard, in Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), calls a ‘sacrificial crisis’, a state in which previously legitimate violence can no longer perform its cathartic, governing function: ‘Demystification leads to constantly increasing violence, a violence perhaps less hypocritical than the violence it seeks to expose, but more energetic, more violent, and the harbinger of something worse – a violence that knows no bounds’ (Girard, 24–25). This ‘violence that knows no bounds’, and which announces that ‘there are no longer any terms by which to define the legitimate form of violence and to recognize it among the multitude of illicit forms’ (24), is precisely what the rule of Ogun always threatens. 43 Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 29. 44 Ibid., 26. 45 In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard uses the term ‘sacrificial crisis’ to identify a state in which previously legitimate violence can no longer perform its cathartic, governing function: ‘Demystification leads to constantly increasing violence, a violence perhaps less hypocritical than the violence it seeks to expose, but more energetic, more violent, and the harbinger of something worse – a violence that knows no bounds’ (24–25). This ‘violence that knows no bounds’ announces that ‘there are no longer any terms by which to define the legitimate form of violence and to recognize it among the multitude of illicit forms’ (24). 46 Soyinka, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, first quote 49 and second quote 50.

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from humanism … I was fated to watch the nation turn both carrion and scavenger as it killed and consumed its kind, the road remaining an obliging stream in which a nation’s fall from grace was duly reflected.’47 The slaughter is no longer analogous to ritual sacrifice, no longer suggestive of an ordered, balanced cosmos. The season of anomie, to borrow the title of one of Soyinka’s novels, is infinitely extended. Over this anomie Ogun presides, not as the embodiment of law-making violence, but as the figure of a violence that leads to nihilism.

There is No Meaning in GraceLand The pervasive nihilism of GraceLand is evident in the numerous ways meaninglessness is dramatized in the novel: for example, in the decorations that Elvis chooses for his private space: ‘Jesus Can Save and Nigerian Eagles almanacs [and a] magazine cutting of a BMW’, which should be icons for things that give Elvis’s life meaning, but which turn out to signify nothing.48 It is also evident in the exhausted manhood ritual that initiates Elvis into nothing49 and in the ethnographic descriptions of the kola nut ceremony that begin every chapter and which illuminate nothing about the narrative. Most disappointing is that the notebook which is all that Elvis has left of his mother reveals nothing about her.50 This last conclusion is anticipated in the way the notebook is introduced. Elvis recalls watching his mother, Beatrice, write a recipe in the notebook and seeing ‘her spidery handwriting spread across the page as though laying claim to an ancient kingdom’.51 The suggestion is that the notebook contains a meaningful inheritance – a kingdom’s worth – but in grasping awkwardly for it the narration stumbles into meaninglessness. The passive construction of the sentence removes Beatrice as agent: the writing has no writer. Then what can it possibly mean for handwriting to spread ‘as though laying claim to an ancient kingdom’?52 What does that look like? The image, at first glance concrete, turns out to be an empty abstraction. The same, odd passive sentence construction appears at the end of the episode: ‘Come closer,’ Beatrice said [to Elvis], pulling him close and handing him a pencil. ‘Here, draw next to me.’ As he bent over the page next to his mother, his crude picture emerged next to her sophisticated one.53

47

Ibid., 51. Abani, GraceLand, 4. 49 Ibid., 22. 50 Ibid., 320. 51 Ibid., 44. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 48

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The absence that characterizes Beatrice’s notebook has infected Elvis: his picture emerges without his agency. The ‘possibilities inherent in the act of writing’ identified by Chris Dunton ‘as a means to assert a meaningful existence’ seem to be unavailable in GraceLand. This absence of agency is a symptom of the passive nihilism Elvis himself diagnoses in Nigerian civil society: ‘That is the trouble with this country’, he says, ‘Everything is accepted. No dial tones or telephones. No stamps in post offices. No electricity. No water. We just accept.’54 But passive nihilism is equally characteristic of the military which preys on civil society. Jimoh, a soldier acquaintance of Elvis, tells him, ‘[D] ere is no right or wrong with soldier. Just what we want.’55 The message is repeated in even starker terms by another soldier when, after the destruction of Maroko, Elvis attempts to claim his father’s body: ‘If you annoy me I will kill you and add you to your father.’56 This capricious malice is the mirror of civil society’s hapless acceptance, just as the sovereign is the mirror of homo sacer.57 Both are symptoms of a sickness of the will.

There is No God in GraceLand GraceLand is also concerned, of course, with the source of that sickness, with the alethiological, epistemological, and ethical nihilism that underwrites that existential condition. I will focus here on the first, the conviction that there is no God, because GraceLand dramatizes it in several interlinked ways (although much of what follows is also evidence that there is neither truth nor right and wrong in GraceLand). About halfway through GraceLand, Elvis is given his mother’s Bible, which from long use falls open at Psalm 23: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me … Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the day of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.58

54

Ibid., 58. Ibid., 121. 56 Ibid., 306. 57 I borrow the term from Giorgio Agamben’s study of the figure in Roman law, homo sacer, the non-person excepted from the protection of the law who can be killed without sanction (Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, 82–83). 58 Psalms 23:1–6 KJV. 55

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It is a psalm conventionally read for reassurance in times of distress, and one can assume that Elvis’s mother turned to it repeatedly for precisely this reason during her illness. The psalm’s position in the novel also encourages us to read it this way, contrasting the uncertainty of life in GraceLand’s Nigeria with the surety promised by the heavenly guardian. That is, in the chapter preceding the psalm, Nigeria’s government is scorned as an ‘illegal and monstrous regime of military buffoons’ whose chief of security the Colonel is the Devil, the ‘original gangster’.59 In the succeeding chapter, venal politicians compete for the right to despoil the nation, in an election that is compared to an uncontrolled forest fire: ‘the only creatures who love forest fires are kites … they soar above the flames and ash, razor-sharp eyes hunting for prey, swooping down on confused creatures, snatching them up to some distant height where they can eat their catch in peace’.60 Where the alternatives are monsters on one side and birds of prey on the other, the shepherd’s mercy would seem a safe bet. However, Elvis’s reaction to the twenty-third psalm hardly embraces the promised redemption: ‘The Lord is my shepherd …’ he began, but stopped. ‘Go on,’ [his aunt] urged. ‘No,’ he said, shutting the Bible and putting it back on the table. ‘What else have you got for me?’61

One of the first things we learn about Elvis at the beginning of the novel is that he has a Jesus Can Save poster on his bedroom wall, but Elvis hesitates here because he has learned there is not much to choose between the shepherd’s mercy and the monster’s depredation, between having Ogun on your side or on the enemy’s. Mercy, it emerges, is merely the benevolent face of the same sovereignty that drives the monstrous; one can only show mercy – as the Colonel does when Elvis annoys him at a nightclub – if one also has the ability to withhold it and destroy one’s victim without consequences to oneself. A shepherd, even a good one, has absolute dominion over his flock and may do with it as he chooses; if the twenty-third psalm began, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, he driveth me to the abattoir’, the relationship between the psalmist and the Lord would be fundamentally unchanged. As the long-suffering Job discovered, God ‘destroys blameless and wicked alike’.62 The Christianity that Nietzsche perceived as having failed relies on the optimistic proposition that the Good Shepherd chooses not to destroy the blameless. But in GraceLand there are no good shepherds, as Elvis discovers when he becomes a shepherd himself. 59

Abani, GraceLand, 162–163. Ibid., 180. 61 Ibid., 167. 62 Job 9:22 KJV. 60

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Elvis and Redemption are hired by the Colonel to shepherd kidnapped children to the slaughterhouse: the children they are escorting will be ‘harvested’ for ‘spare parts’ to be used in organ transplants.63 The episode ends, like so much else in the novel, ambiguously. Elvis and Redemption do not escort the children to their deaths, but nor do they save them; they merely run away and, appropriately enough, get lost.64 Later, Elvis again becomes a shepherd, this time a ‘caretaker’ employed by homeless beggar children to watch over them at night.65 In this undertaking his partner is the beggar Okon, who takes sexual exploitation of his charges as ‘de fringe benefits’ of the job.66 Elvis chooses not to do the same, but again the episode ends ambiguously. Elvis does not exploit his charges, but nor does he protect them: he falls ill and is unconscious for four days.67 In both episodes, there is little to choose between the shepherds and the predators, and there are certainly no saviors. In fact, Elvis is just one in a list of ironic, abortive Christ figures in GraceLand that includes the King of the Beggars and the mob victim Jeremiah. I will discuss the former at length in the next section, but will conclude these observations about Christian salvation in GraceLand with the episode involving the unfortunate Jeremiah. As Elvis and Redemption prepare to embark on their shepherding, they witness the lynching of an accused thief. The scene – a malefactor set upon and killed by a mob – has become something of a commonplace in contemporary Nigerian fiction.68 It is always tempting to read this mob violence as resistance to the anomie of Lagos; its victims, after all, are usually low-level 419 men, those agents of chaos that the poor can actually get their hands on.69 However, the lynching that Elvis and Redemption witness defies this interpretation. Jeremiah, a carpenter trying to collect payment from a man named Peter, is accused by Peter of being a thief; Peter claims not to know him (the ironic reference to Peter’s denial of Christ is highlighted by the description of the scene as ‘comically biblical’).70 Jeremiah is bound and chased into the road: ‘Is he a thief?’ Elvis asked Redemption. ‘Maybe.’ 63

Abani, GraceLand, 242–243. Ibid., 243. 65 Ibid., 309. 66 Ibid., 312. 67 Ibid., 313. 68 See for example, Helon Habila, Waiting for an Angel (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004); Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus: A Novel (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2003); and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, I Do Not Come to You by Chance (New York: Hyperion, 2009). 69 ‘419’ refers to the section of the Nigerian penal code dealing with fraud. For an account of how ‘419’ has become a general term for all form of corruption in Nigeria see Daniel Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 166–190. 70 Ibid., 225. 64

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‘Or is he a carpenter?’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘Which one?’ ‘Either. I don’t know and I don’t care.’71

This is not simple indifference on Redemption’s part nor is it a Pilatelike refusal to judge; this is an assertion that it genuinely doesn’t matter whether Jeremiah is a thief or not. His exclusion (and execution) is entirely random and could be visited at any time on any person. His death, rather than signaling some kind of communal salvation (which the allusion to the crucifixion might anticipate) is a sign of general annihilation. Jeremiah is doused with gasoline and set on fire, but he breaks from the ring of people surrounding him and stumbles into an adjacent lumberyard: Within minutes, the timber was ablaze and the workers formed a chain, throwing buckets of water and sand on the fire, but it was too big. The mob of lynchers had melted away, as had the police. ‘We should help,’ Elvis said, not getting up. ‘What good is dat?’ ‘The fire will spread.’72

All will be burned, all abandoned, the Christian promise of salvation exchanged, as Jeremiah’s name anticipates, for an Old Testament prophecy of destruction. The final, ironic comment on this series of failed saviors is inscribed on a scrap of paper Elvis finds in the ruins of his home after Maroko is destroyed (presumably all that remains of the poster that was on his wall): Jesus Can Save. In GraceLand, he cannot. Nowhere in the novel is the closure of this path to redemption more clearly dramatized than in the recollections of Elvis’s cousin Innocent. The episode in which Innocent remembers his experiences during the Biafra War is notable for two reasons: it is one of only a handful of episodes in the novel in which Elvis is not the focalizer (all of which involve necropolitical violence), and it is one of only two episodes that recall events that predate Elvis’s narrative (both of which concern massacres committed during the Biafra War). The other episode involves the King and the Colonel; between them these two episodes function as a sort of origin myth for Elvis’s Nigeria. Innocent, we learn, was a child soldier and he is haunted by memories of a Church that his platoon came upon towards the end of the war. The priests and the congregation, refugees who had ‘converged on the church … believing they would be safe … protected by God’s benevolence’, had all been killed by the advancing federal troops.73 The only survivors, two nuns, were subsequently raped and killed by Innocent’s 71

Ibid. Ibid., 228. 73 Ibid., 211, 72

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captain. Innocent observes that the combatants on both sides were ‘all infected by the insanity of blood fever’, and concludes: ‘There is only one God in war: the gun. One religion: genocide.’74

The State of Exception Innocent, in his observation about genocide, identifies a particular kind of modern warfare, lately theorized by a number of commentators as not between two armed factions (although that may provide the pretext for the conflict) but between the military and civilians.75 Which ‘side’ a particular army unit is on, or which ‘side’ a particular group of civilians ostensibly belongs to is immaterial; the only meaningful distinction is between the armed, who wield necropower, and the unarmed who are the disposable subjects of that power. GraceLand provides a model of this relation in the King and the Colonel, moment on the eve of the Biafra War. As the King recalls it, he was working for the Public Works Department in the North when the Hausas turned on the Igbos. He fled south but the train was stopped by soldiers, and the Igbos – identified by their inability to sing the Muslim call to prayer – were forced to debark; then the Colonel, at the time a young lieutenant, executed them one by one and photographed the corpses. The King fortuitously survived the encounter only because he was bayoneted by a soldier and left for dead. Dramatized here is the moment that, Mbembe argues, inaugurates the present age. ‘What distinguishes our age from previous ages, the breach over which there is apparently no going back’, he says, is ‘existence that is contingent, dispersed, but reveals itself in the guise of arbitrariness and the absolute power to give death any time, anywhere, by any means, and for any reason.’76 The Colonel exercises necropower, ‘the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’.77 The King survives only by chance. On the one hand is the sovereign; on the other homo sacer. Under these circumstances, in which people defined solely by their capacity to be killed become ‘disposable subjects’ a permanent state of crisis replaces ‘normality’. Tejumola Olaniyan suggestively calls this state of crisis the ‘postcolonial incredible’: The ‘incredible’ inscribes that which cannot be believed; that which is too improbable, astonishing, and extraordinary to be believed. The incredible is not simply a breach but an outlandish infraction of ‘normality’ and its 74

Ibid. See, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005); Heike Harting ‘Global Civil War and Postcolonial Studies’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 8:1 (2008), 1–10; Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2006). 76 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 13. 77 Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, 11. 75

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limits. If ‘belief,’ as faith, confidence, trust, and conviction, underwrites the certainty and tangibility of institutions and practices of social exchange, the incredible dissolves all such props of stability, normality, and intelligibility (and therefore of authority) and engenders social and symbolic crisis.78

This postcolonial incredible is dramatized memorably in a conversation Elvis has with a stranger on a bus crossing Lagos. The episode is worth quoting at some length: The motorways were the only means of getting across the series of towns that made up Lagos. Intent on reaching their own destinations, pedestrians dodged between the speeding vehicles as they cross the wide motorways. It was dangerous, and every day at least ten people were killed trying to cross the road. If they didn’t die when the first car hit them, subsequent cars finished the job. The curious thing though, was that there were hundreds of overhead pedestrian bridges, but people ignored them. Some even walked up to the bridges and then cross underneath them.   Elvis was pulled back to the present as the car in front of the bus hit someone. The heavy wheels of the bus thudded over the inert body. ‘We are crazy you know. Did you see that?’ ‘Uh-huh,’ the man grunted. ‘Why can’t we cross with the bridges? Why do we gamble with our lives?’ … ‘We all have to die sometimes, you know. If it is your time, it is your time. You can be in your bed and die. If it is not your time, you can’t die even if you cross de busiest road. After all, you can fall from de bridge into de road and die. Now isn’t dat double foolishness?79

In a different context the observation, ‘[i]f it is your time, it is your time’, might be taken for an articulation of the belief in Fate, the belief that one is born with a purpose and has a responsibility to serve it. This is a belief that underwrites human agency and makes human action rich with numinous meaning. However, in the context of GraceLand’s Lagos, the observation becomes an assertion rather that humans have neither agency nor meaning. We will be killed or not killed at the whim of a drunken god. This is the world over which Ogun presides, not as protective god of the road, but as berserk destroyer. In this world, René Girard’s famous assertion that there is ‘hardly any form of violence that cannot be described in terms of sacrifice’80 is overturned by the discovery that ‘in our age all citizens … appear virtually as homines sacri’.81 There can be no sacrifice at all. This observation perhaps needs some expansion, because it hinges on a characteristic of sacrifice that Agamben does not emphasize in his discussion of homo sacer. That is, you cannot sacrifice something that 78

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 56–57. 80 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 133. 81 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 111. 79

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does not belong to you. Sacrifice is an exchange; you offer something of yours to enjoin a god or some interceding spirit to do something for you. In other words, sacrifice is the mechanism by which an otherwise intractable universe is bound by contract. Once a sacrifice is accepted, the receiver must fulfill his or her part of the bargain. This is why there are no stories of gods who accept sacrifice and then refuse to deliver – when sacrifices fail to produce results it is either because some malicious middle-man has interfered or because the offering was unacceptable for some reason. At the top of the list of unacceptable sacrifices are things that do not belong to you. Homo sacer does not belong to anyone. He has been permanently removed from the protection of a human community and is no longer either properly human or properly an animal. He is something else, unnatural, the wolf-man ‘who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither’.82 The qualification that homo sacer is not an animal is necessary because animals can belong to someone and so they can be offered in sacrifice. Homo sacer by contrast, though he can be killed, is not available for such trade. His death can have no sacrificial function; it cannot repair or redeem. So the death of Jeremiah, for example, cannot serve justice and will, in fact, only deepen the anomie. In this perverse state, the function of the so-called law is not to ensure justice, but to ensure futility. Elvis’s conversation about road fatalities with the man on the bus eventually turns towards precisely this topic: Outside, the road was littered with dead bodies at regular intervals. ‘At least take away the bodies,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Dey cannot,’ the man interjected into his thoughts. ‘Dis stupid government place a fine on dying by crossing road illegally. So de relatives can only take de body when dey pay de fine.’ ‘What about the State Sanitation Department?’ ‘Is dis your first day in Lagos?’83

The law against crossing the road, at least in its application, rather than securing order actually exacerbates the chaotic situation. Similarly, in the lynching scene, the police who should be there to impose order (if only to assert the government’s sovereign right to kill) watch impassively as the scene evolves and vanish once self-perpetuating chaos begins.

The Sovereign and the Disposable Subject When the King and the Colonel meet again at the climax of the novel, the result is the spectacle of the sovereign and homo sacer confronting one another and becoming indistinguishable. Both are anomic figures, 82 83

Ibid., 105. Ibid., 57.

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placed outside or beyond the human community: the Colonel because he acknowledges no human bonds; the King because he is permitted none. Both are killed; neither is sacrificed. That is, neither death is either meaningful or consequential. The Colonel is simply replaced by other soldiers wielding precisely the Colonel’s ‘blind, unreasoning power’.84 The King is merely erased. Although he is temporarily ‘deified’ by the dispossessed, ‘turned into a prophet, an advance guard, like John the Baptist, for the arrival of the Messiah’, the promise of salvation is as empty as the sacrifice is illegitimate.85 The attempt to make the King’s death meaningful, the failure of that attempt, and the continued dominion of terror are all anticipated in the moment of the King’s death: ‘The soldiers at the blockade opened fire and the bullets lifted the King bodily into the air. He soared, arms spread, before falling to the ground in a broken rumpled heap. The crowd scattered in panic, bullets and angry soldiers chasing them.’86 An illusory glimpse of soaring transcendence, of an angel announcing a new order of meaning which is nothing more than an old and discredited causa prima, and then the crushing resumption of necropower’s war on the population. The King of Beggars cannot offer any redemption from the state of exception because he is a symptom of the same nihilism it depends upon. The Colonel turned him into the King of Beggars, and ever since he has been seeking revenge, his will bent on something he cannot change: the past. Elvis’s father, Sunday, warns Elvis that the King’s ‘political agitation is a front, dat it is to help him find and kill de officer dat killed his family during de war. Dis is not for change, but revenge.’87 The King’s resentment of the world and his possession by what Nietzsche calls ‘the Spirit of Revenge’ express themselves in two ways: dramatically in this fixation on the moment of his dispossession, the moment when the state of exception was invoked; more insidiously in the ‘political agitation’ that Elvis’s father talks about. The King gives public speeches in which he argues articulately and passionately for a ‘return to the traditional values and ways of being’, but Elvis is uncomfortably aware that his passion, while ‘seductive’, is sterile.88 Nothing in the King’s speech suggests a way ‘to cope with these new and confusing times’, a way out of the state of exception.89 When another speaker takes over and begins to articulate a genuine challenge to the nihilism of military rule, the King takes fright. ‘How long can we continue to pretend we are not responsible for this?’ the new speaker asks.90 He adds: ‘we are both the jailer and the inmates, imprisoning ourselves by allowing this infernal, illegal and 84

Ibid., 306. Ibid., 303. 86 Ibid., 302–303. 87 Ibid., 205. 88 Ibid., 155. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 85

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monstrous regime of military buffoons to continue’.91 The King tells Elvis they should leave because the army will arrive soon. Elvis challenges him, ‘I thought you wanted to topple the government!’92 The King has no answer. Even the King’s encounter with the Colonel has this quality of emptiness. The people following him have no direction, no will: The mob was comprised of the curious, thugs looking for some trouble, market women and students. They all sang at the top of their voices as they marched on Ribadu Road, the seat of government. ‘Who shall be free?’ the King sang. ‘Nigeria shall be free,’ the crowd responded. Like a strange pied piper, he picked up more and more people as he marched. No one had any clear idea where they were marching to.93

As the allusion to the pied piper suggests, wherever they are marching to, it is not redemption. On the other side, the Colonel despite all his power of death has no power of life; he cannot create. If the King is fixated on a past he cannot touch, the Colonel is fixated on an equally inaccessible cause. Redemption tries to explain the Colonel to Elvis: ‘Dey rumor dat he personally supervises de tortures, taking pictures throughout,’ Redemption said … ‘Why take pictures?’ ‘Dey say it is because he is an artist, looking to find de beauty of death … Like de spirit, you know. He takes de picture just as de person die too, maybe he want to get de ghost on film … But he is never satisfy, so he arrange de dead body many ways, sometimes he cuts de leg or head off ’ … ‘So has he ever found it? … The spirit – or is it the beauty of death?’ ‘How can he, when he don’t know what to look for?’94

The Colonel is capable only of this parody of creation, shuffling the fragments of humanity without the spark of life. He becomes the furious Will, taking revenge ‘upon all that can suffer’.95

Conclusion: No Redemption Chris Abani began his 2008 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Talk with this observation: ‘My search is always to find ways to chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday

91

Ibid., 156. Ibid. 93 Ibid., 299. 94 Ibid., 163–164. 95 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 121. 92

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people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence.’96 However, Matthew Omelsky observes: ‘These statements seem to be purposely elliptical. Abani never clearly articulates what he means by ‘transformation’.97 Abani seems to recognize that some extraordinary act of the will is required, but is unclear about what that act should be. Elvis has a similar problem. Throughout GraceLand he recognizes that people ‘mistak[e] … resignation for control’.98 Like the boy soldiers in Innocent’s recollections of the Biafra War, they have ‘only one motto … We shall survive.’99 It is a motto which at a glance suggests a will at work, but which actually reflects a failure of will and a denial of life. Towards the end of the novel, when he is on the road with the King’s troupe of musicians and dancers, Elvis concludes that ‘it is only a small group of people who are spoiling our country’, and the King responds, approvingly: ‘De boy is becoming a man.’100 But if this is to become a man, then to become a man is to succumb to nihilism, to accept a choice between dispossession and death. ‘[W]hy don’t we revolt and overthrow this government?’ Elvis asks. One of his colleagues replies, ‘Who want to die?’101 The attempt would either be fatal for the rebels or succeed only in replacing one set of nihilists with another. As Elvis waits for the flight that will take him out of Nigeria, an exodus he neither willed nor acted towards, he reads James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man. He sees ‘parallels between himself and the description of a dying black man slowly being engulfed by flame’.102 He feels he knows ‘that scar, that pain, that shame, that degradation no metaphor could contain, inscribing it on his body. And yet beyond that, he was that scar, carved by hate and smallness and fear onto the world’s face.’103 Confronted with such brutal abjection (the dying black man’s, Elvis’s, Biafra’s), Nietzsche’s Dionysian demand that we ‘redeem that which has passed away and … re-create all “It was” into a “Thus I willed it!”’ can only seem absurd. Better to not attempt redemption at all. And so Elvis ends the novel with the nihilistic untruth that will spare him: Elvis stepped forward and spoke. ‘Yes, this is Redemption.’104

96

Chris Abani, ‘On Humanity’, TED.com, www.ted.com/talks/chris_abani_muses_on_humanity (accessed September 9, 2015). 97 Omelsky, ‘Chris Abani and the Politics of Ambivalence’, 93. 98 Abani, GraceLand, 6. 99 Ibid., 213. 100 Ibid., 280. 101 Ibid., 281. 102 Ibid., 319. 103 Ibid., 320. 104 Ibid., 321.

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Part IV LOCATING GENDER IN NIGERIA-BIAFRA WAR LITERATURE

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19

Gender and the Construction of the Nigeria-Biafra War Scholarship

Egodi Uchendu

‘The narrative of Nigeria’s momentary disrepute and postulated disintegration, and of her supreme achievement in overcoming the threat – predominantly internal yet on occasion unmistakably external – to her sovereignty is one that seems destined to be retold many times in our lifetime.’ A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria, vii.

Introduction The apt prediction made in March 1970 by A.H.M. Kirk-Greene was amply demonstrated both during the Nigeria-Biafra War (Nigerian Civil War) of July 1967 to January 1970 and in the four and a half decades after the cessation of hostilities. Indeed, each year witnesses the publication of fresh accounts of the war. Interest in the subject appears to have reached an all-time high in the last decade as the amount of research by individuals and institutions on different aspects of the conflict has increased tremendously. Issues investigated range from the legal implications of Biafra’s secession to the variegated nature of the Biafra versus Nigeria conflict, and to the impact of the conflict on Igbo diaspora communities after the war. Scholars have extended the scope of their investigations on the war to include the interconnections between the Biafra dream for independence from Nigeria, which resulted in one of the world’s bloodiest and most politicized twentieth century conflict, and the aspirations of second – and third-generation Biafrans – children or grandchildren of Biafrans born and raised decades after the conflict in different parts of the globe.1 Kirk-Greene could not have imagined the full range of the subjects and research themes that would flow from this singular event.2 1

One example is Emmanuella Asabor, ‘Memory, Nationhood and Belonging in Biafran Literary Heritage, 1966–2014’ (MPhil dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2014). Her research focuses on the historical memory of the Nigerian Civil War and the Biafran state. 2 He observes in his preface: ‘How the one time showpiece of decolonization in Africa, its Government repeatedly hailed as the continent’s exemplar of democratic institutions and its Prime Minister the paragon of unstampeded statesmanship, could manage to

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Many of the issues that triggered the Nigerian Civil War lie in the years preceding the actual fighting; some date as far back as the founding of the country, notably the supposed racial incompatibility of the North and South. In their analysis of the war, scholars have considered the period of actual fighting – from July 6, 1967 to January 15, 1970 – as well as a wide variety of happenings that occurred before the actual fighting. The war was of such magnitude that all classes of Biafran society felt the brunt of it, as did all gender groups within Biafra, irrespective of the age category.3 Biafra, previously Eastern Region of Nigeria, was populated by the Igbo, Ijaw, Efik, Ibibio, Ekoi, and a few other smaller ethnic groups that seceded from the Nigerian federation, but divested non-Igbo segments just prior to the hostilities. It became the major theater of war, and it has received the most attention in existing accounts of the war. Some attention has also been paid to Anioma, the Igbo homeland, west of the Niger River, located at the time of the fighting in Mid-Western Region. The Anioma’s ethnic affinity with the Biafra Igbo (east of the Niger) and strong support for the war effort led to their subjection to a relatively shorter period of militarization by the federal army. Several conclusions reached about the war posit its intense cruelty on all militarized societies and their citizens. Writing in the last weeks of the war while representatives of the two sides to the conflict negotiated an end to hostilities, Frederick Forsyth observed: ‘Too much blood has flowed, too much misery has been caused and felt, too many lives have been thrown uselessly away, too many tears have been shed and too much bitterness engendered.’4 This chapter is not intended to rehash the Biafra-Nigeria conflict or, as some writers have done, to decide the rights and the wrongs or where to place blame, but to examine the ways in which gender is integral to the construction – building, creation, and production – of the NigeriaBiafra war Scholarship. Gender is used here as a substitute for the term ‘woman’.5 To achieve the goal of this chapter, a textual study involving a re-examination of existing accounts on the Nigeria-Biafra War was plummet from such an apogee of grace in less than six years of its independence and come so perilously close to collapse; how it could plunge first into brutal assassination, then into constitutional chaos, and finally into the bloodiest civil war of the twentieth century so that even African leaders themselves denounced the carnage as “a shame on Africa”: how it succeeded in crushing rebellion and now accepts the challenge presented by the years of reconstruction; how it all happened, why and who was to blame; all these are issues that will arouse many sorts of minds to continuing analysis and arguments’. A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook 1966–1970, Volume 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), vii. 3 Egodi Uchendu, Women and Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007). 4 Frederick Forsyth, The Making of an African Legend: The Biafran Story (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 278–279. 5 Bonnie Smith, Women’s Studies: The Basics (Oxford: Routledge, 2013), 83.

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undertaken. The evident limitation of this methodology is the exclusion of non-English texts in the analysis. However, the magnitude of the available works in English is more than adequate.

Foreign Authors and Representation of Women Books in English reviewed in this chapter were selected randomly, and they include works by Nigerians and non-Nigerians. The latter blazed the trail in documenting the war and, for this reason, their accounts are considered first. These early authors are drawn from different disciplinary and professional groups. The earliest accounts were from journalists who covered the crisis. A good example is The Making of an African Legend: The Biafran Story by the British journalist Frederick Forsyth. Overwhelmed with sympathy for Biafra, Forsyth wrote without any consciousness for gender. Biafra, to Forsyth, was an asexual entity where male opinion stood for the opinion of all Biafrans and was representative of Biafra. But why should he have cared about Biafran women? Women’s issues had yet to gain any serious acceptance in Britain and other parts of the world by the time Forsyth penned his book in 1969.6 Moreover, his goal was to make a case for the newly created Republic of Biafra to give it a chance to survive in the comity of nations. In doing this, he gave detailed descriptions of the brutality perpetrated on the Biafran people and at the same time bemoaned Britain’s indifference, if not outright complicity, in ensuring the collapse of Biafra’s dream of becoming an independent nation from Nigeria. Forsyth succeeded in disturbing the consciences of his readers quite early in the conflict to the degree that his account was much critiqued by both Nigerian and British authors for its strong bias for Biafra. Incidentally, Forsyth’s revised version of the Making of an African Legend, published nearly a decade later in 1977, did not tone down his words or alter his convictions despite his awareness of the criticisms of his views on the war, but rather maintains: ‘Nothing can or ever will minimize the injustice and brutality perpetrated on the Biafra people, nor diminish the shamefulness of a British government’s frantic, albeit indirect, participation.’7 Two decades after Making of an African Legend was first published, it continued to evoke deep emotions in its readers. How effectively it accomplished this is evident in several reactions to it. In 1989, Akinjide Osuntokun could not resist suggesting that Forsyth must have been writing under the influence of a spell cast on him by Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Military Governor of Eastern Region and leader of Biafra,

6

Bonnie Smith’s analysis of the history of women’s studies identified the 1970s as ‘its age of discovery’ (Smith, Women’s Studies, 4). 7 Frederick Forsyth, The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend (New York: Pen and Sword, 2007), 8.

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that ‘beclouded his sense of judgment and objectivity’.8 The only excuse Osuntokun could proffer for Forsyth’s disturbing revelations on the human suffering in that war was that Forsyth wrote ‘instant history and in the heat of the battle’, besides ‘being overwhelmed by the physical suffering of Biafrans which he witnessed in his several journeys to the beleaguered republic’.9 What is important in all this is that Forsyth’s catalogue of the atrocities perpetrated on Biafrans did not include the experiences of Biafran women. Thus, he made no effort whatsoever to give them a voice in his account, but clearly subsumed their experiences under the men’s. His only direct mention of women was as he mused over the differences between the authority structure in Biafra and Nigeria. On this, he noted: The voice of the Biafran people is the Consultative Assembly and the Advisory Council of Chiefs and Elders, and they are unanimous on that. Colonel Ojukwu cannot go against their wishes – or on that topic their demands – no matter how much vituperation is thrown at him for intransigence, obduracy and stubbornness … It is interesting to speculate what would happen if General Gowon were obliged to follow the counsels on his war policy of a Consultative Assembly which included strong representation of the farming community, the academic community, the trade unions, the commercial interests and the womenfolk; for all these people are presently showing increasing restiveness at the war policy.10

Forsyth was aware of the existence of women in Biafra. He was also aware that women in Biafra were not silent entities but spoke in the society and could, like the men, show ‘increasing restiveness at the war policy’ yet he did not provide details of this in his pioneering account of the Nigeria-Biafra War.11 One is therefore left to guess whether the integration of women’s experiences early on would not have greatly helped the cause of Biafra on which Forsyth was most engrossed. In 1971, Kirk-Greene identified the target of his compilation published in two volumes titled Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook, 1966–1970 as follows: ‘to preserve the verbatim statements made by the leading dramatis personae of the Nigerian tragedy of 1966–70 as they were uttered and before they disappear or are dangerously half-remembered’.12 Kirk-Greene’s work is purely documentary, containing all available documents starting from January 1966, including speeches and press releases, on the Nigeria-Biafra War. 8

Akinjide Osuntokun, ‘Review of Literature on the Civil War’ in Nigeria since Independence: The First Twenty-Five Years, Volume 6, The Civil War Years, edited by T.N. Tamuno and S. Ukpabi (Ibadan: Heinemann Educational, 1989), 87. 9 Ibid., 87. 10 Forsyth, The Making of an African Legend, 279–280, emphasis added. 11 Ibid., 280. 12 Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria, viii.

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Volume I covered the 19 months of spiraling and unrestrained crisis in Nigeria. It began with the January 15, 1966, coup that saw the abrupt end of Nigeria’s newly independent but densely corrupt government and terminated in the outbreak of the civil war, a direct result of the troubles of the previous 19 months. Both dates – January 1966 and July 1967 – have since become landmarks in Nigeria’s history. Underpinning the sourcebook is the author’s realization that, as the years progressed, accuracy of memories was bound to become blurred, which could have far-reaching effects for scholarship. For example, individuals might gladly forget what they no longer wish to remember or falter in their recollection of what one wants to recollect. KirkGreene’s addition to the literature on the Nigerian Civil War did not aim at the evaluation or interpretation of events of this important period of Nigeria’s history. However, the author’s systematic retrieval of raw data from this period has been most useful especially as, in the face of the possibility of adulteration of sources, scholars are able to get more precise facts to evaluate or interpret the events of January 1966 to July 1967. Indeed some alterations of original sources on the civil war began to occur soon after samples of the original were collated. The unfortunate development buttressed the wisdom of Kirk-Greene’s project.13 With Kirk-Greene’s focus completely on preserving relevant documents on the Nigeria-Biafra War, his sourcebook was gender neutral. It is either that his project did not conceptualize such an undertaking at the time or that he lost it in the powerful current that drove his search for written relics of the war. Mention of women was limited to speeches and advertisements. The paucity of women, therefore, is a direct reflection of the consideration given them by the speechwriters and presenters. In Nigeria: Crisis and Beyond, John Oyinbo looked at Nigeria’s future after the conflict. His long years of residence in Nigeria propelled him, as it did several other expatriates with even less impressive résumé, to add his perspective on the war and on Nigeria. He did not differ much from other non-Nigerian writers such as Stremlau, who were on the side of the Nigerian Government and whose support of the government’s war-time agenda was directly linked to their own national interests and what their countries hoped to gain from a united Nigeria. Oyinbo was distressed that the war was not concluded quickly and blamed it on what he called Nigerian authorities’ ‘improvidence in 13

A much-reported example of such an adulteration is the mutilation of the original text of Lt Col Gowon’s broadcast to the nation after taking over leadership of the country in the wake of the murder of the Head of State, General Aguiyi Ironsi. The exact text of the broadcast monitored by the British Broadcasting Corporation (ME/2229/B/1) and reproduced in its entirety by Kirk-Greene differed from subsequent government accounts. The latter deviated from the original by omitting a crucial word ‘not’ from the phrase ‘the base for unity is not there’. See Forsyth, The Making of an African Legend, 60; Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria, 196–197; Federal Government of Nigeria, The Struggle for One Nigeria (Lagos: Government Printer, 1967); and John Stremlau, The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 29.

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planning’, which manifested in the failure to pre-empt the need to set up an administration in the areas freed by the federal army from Biafra control during the hostilities.14 He wrote: There were experienced administrators, including a handful of expatriates who still loyally served the independent government, ready to do this. There were even one or two available with considerable personal experience of the former Eastern Region and well known to the people there … The war would have been over sooner, and certainly with less loss of innocent lives.15

With respect to his predictions on post-conflict Nigeria, the knowledge of hindsight locates him in between being both right and wrong especially with respect to Igbo reintegration with Northern Nigeria and continued economic dominance up to the pre-civil war standard at the expense of ‘the very class of person who had most to gain from the departure of the [Igbo] in 1966 and took part in his dispatch’.16 Oyinbo’s only explicit mention of women is found towards the end of his book where he discusses the revolutionary changes going on in the North after the demise of the Sarduana of Sokoto, the Premier of Northern Nigeria. These changes were the impacts of Nigeria’s multiethnic composition on Muslim-dominated Northern Nigeria in the first decade of independence following the relaxation of traditional attitudes that stringently kept northern elites separate from their southern counterparts after the death of the Premier. The dramatic changes triggered thereafter were not restricted to men alone. They impacted as well on the very small company of educated Muslim women whose social restrictions ran deeper than men’s. He wrote: The Northern woman too has come into her own. For years she has enjoyed superior teaching in excellent secondary schools, thanks to the high quality of expatriate women teachers and the dedication of modern minded nuns, but has been unable to make use of it afterwards. Now she can, released at last from a social purdah. Within a few days of the coup the Military Governor, son of an emir, drove to the football stadium in Kaduna accompanied by his wife. In December 1969 the New Nigerian carried pictures of a permanent secretary, a native of Bornu, dancing in a tuxedo with a Northern woman at a Kaduna dance, and of another dance in Kano, organised by the Northern Women’s Association, at which Maitama Sule, a former minister, also appeared in a tuxedo. There were pictures too of a dance at the Hamdala hotel in which wives of senior officials were present, the tables covered with beer bottles, the men in Western dress and an all Northern pop group in skin tight trousers. The official Information Services calendar for 1967 was an attractive twelve page production with a pretty Northern 14

John Oyinbo, Nigeria: Crisis and Beyond (London: Charles Knight, 1971), 111. Ibid., 111. 16 Ibid., 122–123. 15

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girl delighting every month. Three years previously the calendar had had a mosque on nearly every page.17

With this inset Oyinbo shows us the many sides of a country torn by warfare and how much a society can harvest of social attitudes during times of disorder. It was evident that outside the corridors of officialdom and the tensions of the war, life continued as usual. Yet, the promise of a relaxation of traditional habits was eventually not realized for by the next decade another revolutionary wave swept through the region as some reformist Islamic leaders campaigned for a return to strict religious observances that took women back to their pre-civil war status.18 John de St. Jorre, another British journalist, tried to document the story of the Nigeria-Biafra War. He wrote The Nigerian Civil War (1972), according to the author, ‘in an attempt to put the record as straight as possible; to cut through the choking fog of myth and propaganda that obscured the conflict and to clarify the causes and course of the war while highlighting its rights and wrongs’.19 St. Jorre did not focus much on women in the text, but he was reasonably generous in his pictorial representation of them. By this, he outdid other foreign authors who wrote in the same decade. There was no chapter devoted to women, but scattered through the book were occasional references to them and pictures detailing several episodes of the drama unfolding around them: There was a very efficient Biafran Red Cross, a Women’s Voluntary Service and the school girls, their hair invariably bound up neatly in those spiky ‘sputnik’ plaits so common in West Africa, were knitting, sewing and cooking for the boys at the front, many of whom were their former classmates. 20

It would seem that St. Jorre’s secondary motivation to ‘hold the reality of Biafra’ for the historical time traveler drew him to those segments of the society, especially women, that his contemporaries ignored. The above extract captures women’s sense of duty towards their male counterparts, classmates, brothers, and husbands, who went to war voluntarily or otherwise out of necessity. For some, St. Jorre’s account introduced them to a hairstyle common among women of that generation, described as ‘sputnik-like’. Thus, intertwined with journalistic reports were historical elements to aid generations after the war to understand Igbo communal life in the mid-1960s. Interestingly, much of what St. Jorre failed to write about the female gender are documented in the pictures he took in the course of several trips to Biafra. Herein 17

Ibid., 139–140. For details of this, see Ousmane Kane, Muslim Modernity in Postcolonial Nigeria: A Study of the Society for the Removal of Innovation and Reinstatement of Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 19 John de St. Jorre, The Nigerian Civil War (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1972). The book was also published as The Brothers’ War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 17. 20 Ibid., 224. 18

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lies a major strength of his book as far as gender representation is concerned. There were a total of 62 pictures found on 21 different pages in The Nigerian Civil War. Ten of these are about women. A rundown of these depictions is found in the adjacent table. Page

Inset and Story

96

Biafran Colonel Achuzia’s wife

176

A mixed crowd at a folk dance in Owerri

177

A girl dug out alive after a shelling by federal troops

256

An underground operating theatre run by the International Committee of the Red Cross with mostly Biafran female nurses assisting in an operation

257

A group wedding

288

Mixed crowd of women and children mourning victims of air raid

289

A scene at the Bank of Biafra, Owerri branch, with nearly an allfemale team; comment under the picture reads: ‘Biafra survived until the last hours as an organized state’

353

Kwashiorkor victims (a woman and two children)

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Mixed group of kwashiorkor children waiting to be flown to Ivory Coast for treatment.

One may say that this was the first depiction of a real war-time society. Just from the pictures, life during hostilities could be recreated, and gender roles appreciated. With the men out in the frontlines, women took over the running of the communities. They featured in many roles, both to support the war effort and to maintain a semblance of order in the society when all around was chaotic. Their efforts kept Biafra going, as St. Jorre notes, until the last hours, yet many treated these efforts with silence leaving the impression that the war was fought only by men and the society kept going also only by men. Suzanne Cronje in The World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of the Biafran War 1967–1970 is one of very few early writers on the Nigeria-Biafra War to integrate women alongside children and old men in her discussion of propaganda and policy in the Nigeria-Biafra War.21 Cronje wrote precisely about how propaganda determined the foreign policy initiatives of the contending parties. She scored on two important points: she was the earliest female English writer on the war and one of the few voices discussing the war soon after the crisis. Although she did not give any significant attention to women, her inclusion of how the popular British weekly, The News of the World, unwittingly 21

Suzanne Cronje, The World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of the Biafran War 1967–1970 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972).

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joined the propaganda machinery of Biafra by calling for help for the beleaguered republic from British citizens became one of the earliest, direct, and powerful mentions of Biafra women in the literature on the civil war. Following from this, women and children, instead of men and soldiers, eventually became the international image of starving Biafra, all thanks to The News of the World. Cronje, illustrating the power of media propaganda reproduced the report as follows: The News of the World sent a team to report ‘From the hell that is Biafra’, and carried the huge bannerhead message: ‘FOR GOD’S SAKE SEND HELP – QUICKLY’. The report opened in a dramatic manner: ‘Twelve vultures strutted confidently on the rain-sodden grass of the yard … And all around was the prey they awaited. Women, children and old men. Hundreds of them – standing, squatting, sprawling. All still and silent. And all dying.22

Coming at a time when there were ‘official attempts in most major capitals to conceal the facts’ of the Nigeria-Biafra War, the impact of the advert was like an explosive on many consciences that became disturbed by it.23 From all indications, it strengthened Biafra’s claim of genocide, made the crisis more of a humanitarian crisis than a political dilemma, but it did not necessarily swing the fortunes of war to her advantage. Of interest is the fact that Cronje was aware that several authors had difficulty integrating women’s experience in accounts dealing with diplomacy, foreign policy, military operations, arms procurement, and oil politics, all factors that lent themselves to the dominant engagement on male domain. The result, therefore, was that whatever women did in these sectors was highly peripheral and largely ignored. As Cronje went on to argue, women’s roles in this sector were either as clerical staff or very junior workers whose behind-the-scenes role rarely captured a writer’s gaze. What Cronje did not add is the fact that the history of the marginal class, mostly represented by women, was as yet not conceived in scholarship and to an extent in journalism at that time, when the center, the pivotal cause of events, was dominated by men and revolved around men.24 Anything that mattered was what men did and so women in the diplomatic service all belonged to the margins. Women’s unskilled positions were, therefore, incapable of capturing a fellow woman’s gaze. It took the rise of women’s studies in the 1970s in Western scholarship, and the United Nations’ (UN) Beijing Conference of 1985 that concluded the UN Decade for Women, for gender-sensitive writers to emerge in the African continent. Even then, engagements with the social aspects of the war and especially with issues about women are still not complete. 22

Ibid., 211. Ibid., ix. 24 Smith, Women’s Studies, 36. 23

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John Stremlau in The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War 1967–1970 grappled with issues very similar to Cronje’s in that he addressed foreign policy and propaganda.25 His work is quite different from Cronje’s for these reasons: First, he queried the fundamental difference between prevailing attitudes about Biafra in Africa and public opinion in Western Europe and the United States. He centered on the issue of whether the survival of Biafra as a state was a necessary condition for the survival of the Igbo people. Second, he sought to understand how Nigerian and Biafran authorities dealt with the political implications of differing positions on Biafra. Anchored on the belief that very little had been published about how local parties in a modern civil war seek to attract or discourage foreign intervention, Stremlau studied the foreign policies of the two warring states, especially Nigeria’s, to see how she reacted to this ambiguity. Stremlau spent two years in Lagos researching Nigeria’s war-time foreign policy and only traveled in Biafra after the war. His greater familiarity with the Nigerian experience is evidenced in his documentation of what essentially transpired in Nigeria. Thus, principally, he did for Nigeria what Forsyth did for Biafra. From Stremlau’s submission, Nigeria’s foreign policy makers had very little opportunity to initiate international action in their favor during the civil war as a result of which she waged largely defensive diplomacy by reacting mostly to demands from foreign powers concerned about the deteriorating conditions in Biafra.26 One of the few exceptions to this foreign policy trajectory was Lieutenant General Gowon’s move to secure Russian support in response to Britain and United States’ reluctance to arm Nigeria against Biafra at the onset of the crisis, thereby providing the necessary gateway for the then Soviet Union to strengthen her influence over Nigeria. Britain and United States quickly revised their decision and began to sell arms to Nigeria, essentially to prevent the weakening of Western influence over Nigeria. Cronje and Robert Legvold both addressed the Nigeria-Russia relationship during the civil war.27 Both authors voiced the concerns in the West in particular over Soviet involvement in the Nigerian Civil War. No doubt, the civil war provided a platform for British-Russian contest over Nigeria. It was the Russian success in securing arms supply rights for the Nigerian Government that forced Britain to abandon its no-supply stance in the bid to prevent Lagos becoming over-dependent on Russia, with Russian influence in Nigeria increasing to a level above that in August 1968. Stremlau, however, regards this relationship as a last resort for arms supply for a desperate federal government of Nigeria 25

Stremlau, The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War. Ibid., 28. 27 Robert Legvold, Soviet Policy in West Africa (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 31–38. 26

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committed to preventing the breakup of the country. Its requests for arms early on in the conflict were turned down by Britain and the United States as well as by a number of other West European nations. Beyond culminating in the formal signing of a cultural agreement with Russia, Gowon turned this alliance into the greatest good for his war effort as it became characteristic of his administration to invoke ‘the threat of greater reliance on Moscow to ensure the flow of British small arms and to restrain the Western powers from pressing too vigorously for a compromise settlement on terms he considered contrary to the national interest’.28 Gowon’s successful moderation of that relationship altered his international standing, vesting the much-needed confidence on his regime at home and abroad that had been lacking since the July 1966 coup that he not only took part in, but emerged from to become Nigeria’s head of state.29 Quite unlike Forsyth and Cronje, Stremlau did not concern himself with issues of which side of the warring party was right or wrong either before or during the conflict. Similarly, he was also hesitant to criticize the various ways the international community reacted to the NigeriaBiafra conflict. His account of the Nigerian Civil War was essentially a showpiece of international haggling featuring diplomats and national leaders, each of whom responded to the Nigeria-Biafra conflict from the angle of their respective internal circumstances and future ambitions for favorable spoils from the conflict. Given that the foreign policy departments of both Biafra and Nigeria were entirely the domains of men, gender was not an issue in this work except if we consider that Stremlau dedicated his work to his wife, Carolyn.

Nigerian Authors and Representation of Women Nigerian writers on the Nigeria-Biafra War made more references to women than foreign authors who wrote before the 1980s. One of the earliest accounts from Nigeria was N.U. Akpan’s personal story of the Nigerian Civil War written in 1972. His Introduction alone contained no fewer than six instances where women appeared in the narrative. We first see this recognition of women in the third page, which reads: Even if there had been no secession, there was bound to be a fight – if not a full-scale civil war – in Nigeria. The killings in the North, particularly those of September 1966 and afterwards had, understandably, so enraged and

28 29

Stremlau, The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War, 80–81. See the following: Forsyth, The Making of an African Legend, 52–63; Stremlau, The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War, 81; A.A. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980); and A. Ademoyega, Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup (Ibadan: Evans Brothers, 1981).

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embittered the Ibos that practically all of them – men and women, young and old, soldier and civilian – were bent upon revenge against the Hausas.30

Akpan followed up this recognition of women in the next paragraph; he stated how, after giving a sermon at the University of Nigeria in which he called for Christian charity, love, and forgiveness towards the perpetrators of the 1966 atrocities on the Igbo, ‘hostile and disapproving groups of women surrounded [him] and remonstrated against that portion of [his] sermon concerned with love and forgiveness’.31 One elderly woman, he continued, had said: ‘As far as what the Hausas have done to our people is concerned, we shall neither love, nor forgive, nor forget. If that is what will send us to hell, then we are prepared.’32 Akpan’s account of the Biafran War contained the appalling experiences of the Igbo in Northern Nigeria between September and October 1966: victims with severed limbs, broken heads, and worse. He not only gave women a voice, but also went further in the body of his work and in the index to highlight their contributions to the war effort through the formation of cooperative societies and voluntary organizations.33 Readers of Akpan’s account could discern female agency as well as their opinions on, and reactions to, the difficult events of 1966 that led up to the civil war. Besides clear instances of individual female agency in the book, group agency was also identifiable in women’s responses to the events unfolding around them. Whatever its weaknesses, the fact that he takes the voiceless seriously and draws attention to their incapacitation amid the overwhelming elite public opinion that influenced events within Biafra during the war makes Akpan’s account one of the first grassroots’ treatment of the war by an indigenous writer. Akpan mentioned how most people considered secession unfortunate, but he could not publicly express such an opinion in the face of the overwhelming support for secession. The important contribution of Biafran women to the Biafran War, documented by Akpan, was the sudden emergence of women’s voluntary organizations early in the conflict in response to allegations of neglect of and food shortages among the fighting corps. He writes, a ‘number of the women and girls actually went to the fronts to cook and assist the soldiers in other ways’, exactly what St. Jorre captured roughly a year later in pictures.34 Akpan’s inclusion of women’s experiences and roles in his introduction, body and the index was a clear departure from several early texts on the war. Incidentally, Akpan did not set out to write about women. His concern was to expose the mistake called Biafra and the heinous nature 30

N.U. Akpan, The Struggle for Secession 1966–1970: A Personal Account of The Nigerian Civil War (London: Frank Cass, 1972), xi. 31 Ibid., xvi-xvii. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 99, 128–30. 34 Ibid., 99.

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of its leader, his former boss and war-time compatriot, Governor Odumegwu Ojukwu. Akpan’s motivation for writing The Struggle for Secession creates more questions than answers. It calls into question his involvement in the Biafran government. Despite his obvious reservations as a member of one of Biafra’s minority ethnic groups about the Biafran dream of independence and the Biafran determination to pursue it, he served Biafra in various capacities as Chief Secretary to the Military Government, Head of the Civil Service, Member and Secretary to the Cabinet of the Eastern Region Assembly, and other positions until the end of the civil war.35 Akpan proffered no reason for becoming deeply involved with the Biafran dream against the dominant minority belief that their greatest chance and scope lay in a united Nigeria.36 What reads as post-war name-calling and disgust at developments and actions he was privy to and abetted cast a big shadow on his narrative, giving the reader the impression that the book’s agenda transcends his claim of correcting ‘hearsay, second-hand information or incomplete records’ from the war.37 Could it be read not as a personal vendetta against the ordinary Biafrans but as a criticism of selected members of Biafran leadership? His discussions of hostilities within Biafran society and of the formation of illegal women’s cooperatives all over the enclave also buttress this fact. Men and women, soldiers and civilians all exploited the situation to their perceived best advantage. If this is true, then maintaining real order amid so much chaos, both internal and external, was a difficult task for any leader. However, Akpan was not prepared to concede as much to his chief executive and governor of Biafra. In spite of this, his account is reasonably balanced by its incorporation of women alongside men. A.A. Madiebo, the Biafran army commander, describes the motivation for The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War as rather a genuine attempt on my part to render a dispassionate account of the Nigerian revolution and the civil war which took place from January 1966 to January 1970. I believe I owe it as a duty to Nigerians particularly … to initiate a post-mortem on those events in which I was deeply involved, first as the Head of the Nigerian army Artillery and later as the General Officer that commanded the Biafran Army throughout the war.38

Madiebo’s concern was to explain the events of 1966 to 1970 through authentic, eye-witness accounts and inside stories of how Biafra fought a war with virtually nothing and yet survived for almost three years despite a total blockade and complete isolation from the world. His story 35

Ibid., ix. See ibid., xvi. 37 Ibid., x. 38 Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, x. 36

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was purely a military account in which he answered military questions, not least of all the complexities of the military situation in Nigeria exemplified in the coup of January and the reactionary coups of May, July, September, and October 1966. Madiebo, in his detailed epilogue dedicated to ‘Why We Lost the War’, echoed Akpan’s disenchantment with some members of the Biafran leadership.39 His disenchantment centered on the frequent struggles for power and position inside Biafra that, in his opinion, derailed the war effort. However, his generous use of the phrase ‘the civilian population of Biafra’ throughout his book displays his consciousness of the relevance of all gender groups in the happenings during the war. Madiebo’s book contains generous observations of what different gender categories did. He did not isolate any gender group for undue attention at the expense of the other. In his discussion of the activities of Biafra soldiers, he incorporated the militia, a paramilitary organization set up to assist the Biafran war effort. Unlike the regular army composed only of males, the militia had several female members in its ranks who performed a variety of functions for the regular army including acting as spies. Indeed, they scored much success as Biafra’s spies during the crisis. R.N. Ogbudinkpa deviated from the general discussion of the historic and political aspects of Biafra’s secession to consider what economic benefits Nigeria derived from the war. The focus on the gains from destruction balances the gloomy imagery drawn of the war by such authors as Cervenka40 and Madiebo; they recounted much of the military operations of Biafra’s ill-equipped and unskilled armed forces. Ogbudinkpa’s thesis was that Nigeria’s federal army war strategy prompted technological innovations in isolated, war-torn, and unrecognized Biafra, but not within its own territory. Biafra’s technological innovations in engineering, agriculture, and welfare-promoting ventures were intended to meet its military needs and civilian welfare. Ogbudinkpa argues that these innovations, more than other factors advanced by other analysts, helped Biafra to prosecute the war for as long as it did. Some manufactures were replicas of foreign hardware reproduced from indigenous resources. All the credit for these achievements did not go to Biafra men alone. The author notes that women’s efforts, especially in food processing, greatly boosted the war effort.41 The food-processing innovation was first recorded in Arochukwu where women dried and packaged foods that remained edible up to ten days after production despite the humid environment and lack of modern preservative equipment. The success of the Arochukwu 39

Ibid., 377–392. Zdenek Cervenka, The Nigerian War, 1967–1970: History of the War – Selected Bibliography and Documents (Frankfurt: Bernard & Graefe, 1971). 41 R.N. Ogbudinkpa, The Economics of the Nigerian Civil War and its Prospects for National Development (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1985), 62–63. 40

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experiment led the Calabar branch of the Biafran Women Voluntary Service organization to install a packing factory in the town. The foodprocessing revolution spread beyond Arochukwu. In testimony of this innovation, The Biafran Sun published in November 1968 the news about Nnewi Division of Women Council of Social Services producing 34,718 dry-packs for distribution to soldiers in their trenches at Onitsha.42 Over time, there emerged in Biafra different women’s support organizations bearing community-specific names. This discussion enriched our sparse knowledge about women and their contributions to the war. Another Nigerian Igbo writer on the war was Dike Ogu. In The Long Shadows of Biafra, he acknowledged female agency towards survival during the civil war. He captured this in the detailed dedication he wrote to his wife: This book is dedicated to my late wife Rebecca Ogochukwu who saw me through the unforgettable experiences of the war as narrated here and who bore all the burden of the negative aspects of the experiences. She stood by me at all times and in all vicissitudes. She filled my mind with noble and graceful images. She comforted me in times of danger and sorrows of the savage war but later made a supreme sacrifice for the crass incompetence of a doctor who used her for experimentation so that others may live.43

Ogu, who described himself as ‘a living victim of the [Biafran] holocaust’, set out in his work to recount ‘his horrifying experience in the heroic struggle by an embattled people to survive’ and ‘his personal studied assessment of the devastating war’.44 The Long Shadows of Biafra can roughly be divided into two halves. One half, comprised of the first six chapters, tells the story of the war with the author’s richly documented reminiscences. The second half, the last five chapters, deals with the rewards of conquest: the extensive looting of national wealth by the long military and short-lived civilian heads of state between 1970 and 1999, along with the growing cruelty perpetrated by succeeding regimes. An important marker of the Nigerian leadership class from 1970 to 1999, which the author was quick to point out, was their origins from Northern Nigeria. The only exception was Brigadier Olusegun Obasanjo, Head of State from 1975 to 1979.45 The gross misrule of three decades left its mark on different sectors of the society. Many narratives similar to that of Ogu abound on the civil war from the former Biafran enclave. One closely related, but more-recent, account is Achike Udenwa’s Nigeria/Biafra Civil War-My Experience.46 42

The Biafran Sun, November 28, 1968. I. Dike Ogu, The Long Shadows of Biafra (Nsukka: AP Express, 2001), iii. 44 Ibid., viii. 45 Ibid., 67–73. 46 Achike Udenwa, Nigeria/Biafra Civil War: My Experience (Ibadan: Spectrum, 2011). 43

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Achike’s purpose was ‘to fill the gap and further highlight the role played by the lower command – the platoons, companies, battalions and brigades’.47 The author told how young officers, consumed with patriotic fervor but without professional training, fought in the war. Very little could be considered new in this account. It is simply one more review of Nigeria’s colonial and postcolonial histories. What may be regarded as the author’s personal experiences and the social effects of the war in the form of rapes of women and prostitution are discussed in three out of the seven chapters of the book. Neither the military aspect of the work nor its social effects was given any incisive or elaborate treatment.48 In Egodi Uchendu’s Women and Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War, women’s experiences of the Nigeria-Biafra War differed considerably from one person to the other and were defined by each woman’s location at any point in time during the crisis and also by individual circumstances among other factors.49 A clear distinction could be made for the two groups of Igbo women – those in Biafra, east of the Niger and the major war theater, and their sisters in Anioma, west of the Niger who suffered as well, but whose homeland was not militarized for as long as was the case east of the Niger. So far, the two main works specifically focused on these categories of women are Gloria Chuku’s ‘Women in the Economy of Igboland, 1900 to 1970: A Survey’, which considers the experience of Biafra women, and Egodi Uchendu’s Women and Conflict in the Nigerian War, which was about the experiences of Anioma women during and after the conflict.50 Chuku integrated an analysis of Biafra women’s economic roles within a broader discussion of Igbo rural women’s participation in agriculture and local industries, and urban women in trade and commerce in Igboland over several decades from 1900 to 1970. Her discussion paid attention to women’s ingenuity in trade during the war, highlighting in particular the trans-border trade with the Anioma Igbo, a theme that both Emezue and Uchendu further explored.51 Uchendu, who studied Anioma women during the years spanning 1966 to 1975 with the goal of understanding and documenting the experiences of women who lived in one of the marginal Igbo homelands in the course of the civil war, incorporated the Anioma angle of the border trade along with several other ingenious contributions of women, in this supposedly 47

Ibid. Chukwuma Osakwe, Nigeria/Biafra Civil War: My Experience by Achike Udenwa (Ibadan: Spectrum Books Ltd., 2011), reprinted in Scientia Militaria 41:1 (2013), 155–157, http://scientiamilitaria.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/1057 (accessed July 23, 2014). 49 Uchendu, Women and Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War. 50 Gloria Chuku, ‘Women in the Economy of Igboland, 1900 to 1970: A Survey’, African Economic History, 23 (1995), 37–50; and Uchendu, Women and Conflict in the Nigerian War. 51 Sydney Emezue, ‘Women and the War’, in A Social History of the Nigerian Civil War: Perspectives from Below, edited by A. Harneit-Sievers, J.O. Ahazuem, and S. Emezue (Enugu: Jemezie Associates, 1997). 48

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borderline Igbo society, that enabled the women’s survival and those of their menfolk during the war. One peculiar quality of Anioma war-time society was the horrendous massacre of the male population by Nigerian soldiers in several communities. The death of the men placed women in a disturbingly exposed frame and eventually spurred them to an amazing degree of resilience that enabled them to survive the war. At the same time, it protected, at great cost, their embattled menfolk who had to remain hidden from the federal army and their children. Anioma women were involved in the very risky trans-border trade, which sometimes involved transporting trade goods with coffins to escape detection by the ever-watchful and prowling federal soldiers. This trade was, on one hand, a humanitarian action geared at helping the Biafra Igbo to survive the war and, on the other hand, a calculated offensive against the Nigerian army. The frustrations the federal army encountered in their attempts to arrest and break the trans-border trade between Anioma and Biafra was evident in their repeated, but unsuccessful plea throughout the hostilities for the Anioma to give up the trade.52 The trade served in undermining the federal army’s goal to crush Biafra through starvation. It also spoke volumes of Anioma women’s agency and capability in deciding the outcome of an intractable problem. The civil war posed a multi-faceted challenge to women in Anioma; survival took different forms and was understood differently by individual women. Clearly, they exploited every available opportunity to survive. However, some became too adventurous in their attempts to manage the situation; they wandered away from societal restrictions by going into short-term, war-time prostitution alongside a variety of other liaisons. Others created innovative and daring ways to cope. Varying degrees of these coping strategies existed in Anioma. Several women abandoned traditional roles and stepped into the shoes of men, performing functions that were the normal preserve of men. For example, the cream of Biafra militia was from Anioma. Nicole Dombrowski had argued that when women opt for the frontlines, they claim a place for themselves with men who traditionally enjoy much respect by their willingness to risk their lives for their communities.53 An important aspect of the war was the challenge it posed to Anioma women’s uncritical submission to social norms. Decades of adherence to these norms left women disadvantaged during such a major crisis as the civil war. For instance, the majority had accepted the creed that education was for men. War-time reality proved that theory very wrong as only the few slightly educated women were employed during the crisis. The larger percentage without any education were severely cash 52 53

The Nigerian Observer, June 8 and July 9, 1968. Nicole Dombrowski, Women and War in the Twentieth Century (New York: Garland, 1999), 2.

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strapped and were forced to depend on their own whims and imagination to survive and ensure their survival as well as that of their relatives. Little wonder that after the war women in Anioma championed education, especially of their daughters to give them a better grounding in the society than they had and to guarantee their security in case of a future crisis. In 2012, Chinua Achebe published There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. In this comprehensive memoir of his life, Achebe told ‘Nigeria’s story, Biafra’s story, our story and [his] story’.54 Women and their worlds – specifically those of his mother, wife, sisters, and sistersin-law – abound in Achebe’s story. From his reminiscences, dating back to the last decades of the nineteenth century, we follow the Igbo female world, the cultural restrictions on the female gender that could often easily translate into an insult to Igbo tradition, and conflicts over gender roles.55 In Part Two, which deals with the war, Achebe captures several atrocities meted out to women by federal troops, including indiscriminate executions. Achebe recalls an August 1968 article in The Times of London: ‘In Oji River … the Nigerian forces opened fire and murdered fourteen nurses and the patients in wards.’56 Among other military atrocities visited on women in Biafra were rapes and intentional starvation. Achebe interspersed his narrative with an interesting repertoire of poems that captured many aspects of Biafra women’s war-time trauma. One such poem, ‘Refugee Mother and Child’, tells of a mother’s tender care of her very sick child. It is reminiscent of many Biafra women’s fortitude in the face of overwhelming hopelessness. Excerpts from the poem read: No Madonna and Child could touch Her tenderness for a son She soon would have to forget. The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea, Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs. And dried up bottoms waddling in labored steps Behind blown-empty bellies. Most members there had long ceased to care, but not this one; She held a ghost-smile between her teeth, And in her eyes the memory Of a mother’s pride … She had bathed him And rubbed him down with bare palms.57

54

Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin, 2012), 3. 55 Ibid., 10. 56 Ibid., 137. 57 Ibid., 168.

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The strict divide in gender roles collapsed during the war as women and young girls, unsolicited, took over several male duties everywhere. They did this in addition to their normal social responsibilities. There Was a Country is as much the story of Chinua Achebe as it is of his wife Christie Achebe during the Nigeria-Biafra War. In its pages, one reads about Christie and her civil war experiences. This unintentional, third-hand biography of Christie Achebe has enriched the NigeriaBiafra War scholarship because it partially fills the gap created by an evident paucity of women’s stories on the war. Her elite education and lifestyle were relinquished because of the crisis. She made many necessary adjustments and filled several roles in efforts to both survive and to contribute to the survival of others. She took on the task of teaching school to help her children and those of her hosts continue with their studies amidst the chaos everywhere, and by so doing tried to lessen the scars of the war on the next generation. In her own way, she was a war hero as many other women were.

Conclusion The Nigeria-Biafra War has provided a platform for all manner of writings: military reports, biographies, autobiographies, and others. No doubt it has also provided an important platform for all classes of participants – observers, victims, and victors – who were drawn from different generations of Nigerians and from expatriates of all classes and walks of life to engage with the subject from any angle whatsoever. It is most interesting that, within two years of the conflict, several books discussing Nigeria and its unfortunate civil war emerged in different languages, but mostly in English, French, and German. The majority of these works were written by foreigners.58 Nigerians woke up slowly to the duty of documenting the war, perhaps because of their preoccupation with the conflict itself, but since that time they have risen to the task. Impartial and definitive studies on the war have continued to emerge, but few do justice to gender and women’s studies. The majority of the literature on the conflict is gender 58

A few examples include François Debré, Biafra An II (Paris: Julliard, 1968); F. de Bonne­ ville, La Mort du Biafra (Paris: Soler, 1968); Jean Buhler, Tuez les Tous! Guerre de Secession au Biafra (Paris: Flammarion, 1968); Eduardo dos Santos, Biafra: A Questão de Biafra (Porto: Portucalense, 1968); Paul Iyorpuu Unongo, The Case for Nigeria (Lagos: Town and Gown, 1968); Forsyth, The Making of an African Legend; Paola Antonello, Alex Chima, and Obi Benue Joseph Egbuna, Nigeria gegen Biafra? Falsche Alternativen oder über die Verschärfung der Widersprüche im Neokolonialismus (West Berlin: Wagenbach, 1969); Captain Armand, Biafra Vaincra (Paris: France-Empire, 1969); Bruce Hilton, Highly Irregular (New York: Macmillan, 1969); Ulf Himmelstrand, Varlden: Nigeria och Biafra (Stockholm: Aldus Aktuellt, 1969); C.C. von Rosen, Le Ghetto Biafrais tel que je l’ai vu (Paris: Arthaud, 1969); Jean Wolf and Claude Brovelli, La Guerre des rapaces: La vérité sur la guerre du Biafra (Paris: Albin Michel, 1969); and A. Waugh and S. Cronjé, Biafra: Britain’s Shame (London: ­Michael Joseph, 1969).

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neutral with little distinction in how different gender groups and segments of the society felt about the war. As it is, one is even tempted to conclude that Nigerian authors have shown more gender consciousness in their writings than non-Nigerian authors. On the whole, few authors set out ab initio to discuss women and the war. Writers like Cronje and Ogbudinkpa included them only to buttress their arguments; they simply provided skeletal references to one act or another performed by women during the war. Such inclusions fall short of providing a holistic picture of women’s varied roles, activities, and experiences during that conflict. What is particularly obvious is that more gender-conscious and women-focused narratives are needed on the Nigeria-Biafra War.

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What is the Country? Reimagining National Space in Women’s Writing on the Biafran War Jane Bryce

We are judged by the stories we tell. But only the dead know the true stories; they who speak to us, deaf that we are, in signs and ellipsis. (from ‘A Biafran War Survivor Remembers Africans Who Did Not Survive’, in Four Decades of Silence, by Chielozona Eze)

Part 1: Overview Writing, history, memory As the benefit of hindsight has revealed, the Nigerian Civil War was to become the very sign of post-Independence African wars, from the invasion of Uganda by Tanzania in 1978–1979, to conflicts, whether brief or long-drawn-out, in Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe, and as a tropological prefiguring of today’s situation in the Niger Delta. Occurring when they did, so soon after Nigerian Independence in 1960, the secession of Biafra and the subsequent civil war signified the shaky foundation of the nation-state in ex-colonial Africa, the potential for ethnic discord, competition over resources and the quest for power on the part of the new elites. Women have played a part in all these wars, both as fighters (including child soldiers) and, in some rare instances, as leaders, but to a far-greater extent as providers of army supplies, traders and producers of food, nurses, relief organizers, protectors of the weak and ensurers of collective survival. In the case of Biafra, although their role was predominantly non-combative (reflecting, no doubt, the gender politics of the time), the burden of suffering was none the less for that. This suffering is a strong thematic link in women’s war narratives, whether of the immediate post-war period or those which have emerged from what is now called the Third Generation of Nigerian writers. These narratives, moreover, depending as they do on personal and collective memory, are inevitably marked by trauma, which notoriously leads to both obsessive repetition and to repression, effects which may impede memory. If the Civil War constitutes ‘the wound that speaks’ in Nigeria’s construction of itself as an independent state, how do women’s narratives of the 423

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Civil War negotiate questions of memory, trauma, memorializing and forgetting? Contemporary research on post-conflict trauma emphasizes the importance of memory, both individual and collective, as the basis for narrativizing the past: Collective memory is thus a socially constructed representation of the past that is shared by members of a group, such as a generation or nation-state, and thus marked by power relationships … Memory therefore organises present and future, as every culture creates a ‘connective structure’ by reinscribing the past into the contemporary horizon.1

Memory, however, is not a cohesive archival object accessible on demand, but partial, fragmented, subjective and selective, and as a result, we are cautioned that ‘the representational media, in which cultural memory might be forged, stored and perpetuated, need careful attention.’2 According to Chima Korieh: In addition, little empirical scholarship has been conducted researching the event. Especially missing is documentation of the perspective of ordinary people who experienced the war as combatants or civilians. Moreover, the systematic attempts to ‘forget’ the war at several levels – attempts made by the state for political reasons and by individuals mainly for psychological reasons stemming from the desire to move on – have limited both postwar discussions of the war and the scholarship that could perhaps vindicate those who endured the war’s trauma.3

In the case of the Civil War, the pre-eminent medium performing this task has been literary. According to Nduka Otiono: ‘Two historic experiences have continued to dominate the consciousness of contemporary Nigerian writers … The first is the Nigerian Civil war of the 1960s and the second, the reign of military dictatorship, especially in the 1990s.’4 Biyi Bandele Thomas, in adapting Achebe’s Biafran short story, ‘Girls at War’, for the screen, was mindful that ‘the Civil War certainly holds a key to a lot of things and … all too often what we have done, especially as writers, certainly as a society, is we have tried to unremember it … we have to kind of open those wounds and look at things, study them very carefully and we can move on’.5 Earlier commentators agree on both the significance of the Civil War and the difficulties posed by its 1

www.postconflict.group.cam.ac.uk/glossary-memory.html (accessed February 19, 2015). 2 Ibid. 3 Chima Korieh, The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory (New York: Cambria, 2012), 3. 4 Nduka Otiono, ‘“Narrations of Survival”: Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel’, Wasafiri 19:41 (2004), 70. 5 Bandele Thomas, Interview, cited by Jane Bryce, ‘Half and Half Children: Third Generation Women Writers and the New Nigerian Novel’, in Research in African Literatures 39:2 (2008), 49–67.

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representation. By the 1980s, Civil War literature had achieved enough of a critical mass for check-lists to be drawn up by Craig McLuckie and Chidi Amuta. McLuckie refers to ‘the unresolved nature of this period in Nigeria’s history’ and the way Nigeria’s war fiction encapsulates ‘the country’s uncertainty and unease over the position and unity of a militarily won “imagined community”’.6 According to Amuta, meanwhile, Nigerian literature post-1970 was dominated by the Civil War, to the extent that ‘it can safely be said that in the growing body of Nigerian national literature, works, directly based on or indirectly deriving from the war experience, constitute the largest number of literary products on any single aspect of Nigerian history to date’.7 Considering the contribution of women writers to this key literary corpus raises an interesting question: how far was what Amuta calls the ‘social experience’ of the civil war inflected by gender, and was the ‘imagined community’ of Biafra therefore imagined differently by women? Writing in 2005, Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo calculated that ‘more than two-thirds of those who recorded their experiences of the Nigerian Civil War are male’, with only two non-fiction accounts by women out of 55 and 10 or so out of 50 creative works.8 On the one hand, why have so few women writers embraced the War as a narrative subject? Ezeigbo attributes this to ‘cultural constraints and social limitations under which women operate in Igboland’ and the emphasis on ‘collective rather than individual memory’.9 Marion Pape politicizes this point by posing the question of ‘who has the right to war memories’, and counters Ezeigbo’s more conservative reading with the idea of conflicting gendered discourses.10 Women, she suggests, self-consciously introduce new elements into both ‘the male war discourse [and] existing gender relations: namely, their negotiability’.11 Both agree, however, on the limited number of women’s texts. Marie Umeh, on the other hand, puts another slant on it, suggesting that, rather than being absent, they are ignored: ‘African women writers have not been treated as major contributors to the general output of war literature … one does not get the impression that post-war writing comprises any other than the male sex.’12 This is borne out in the 6

Craig McLuckie, ‘A Preliminary Checklist of Primary and Secondary sources on Nigerian Civil War/Biafran War Literature’, Research in African Literatures (henceforth RAL) 18:4 (1987), 510–527, 510. 7 Chidi Amuta, ‘Literature of the Nigerian Civil War’, in Perspectives in Nigerian Literature: 1700 to the Present, Vol. I, edited by Y. Ogunbuyi (Lagos: Guardian Books, 1988), 85. 8 A. Adimora-Ezeigbo, ‘From the Horse’s Mouth: The Politics of Remembrance in Women’s Writing on the Nigerian Civil War’, Matatu, 29:30 (2005), 221–230. 9 Ibid., 6. 10 Marion Pape, Gender Palava: Nigerian Women Writing War (Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher, 2011), 1. 11 Ibid., 4. 12 Marie Umeh, ‘The Poetics of Thwarted Sensitivity’, in Critical Theory and African Literature, edited by Ernest Emenyonu, Calabar Studies in African Literature 3 (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1987), 194.

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essay collection A Harvest from Tragedy, from which Emecheta, Nwapa and Onwubiko are missing, even while the editor claims that Nigerian war writing ‘continue(s) to function as the mirror of society [and] also serves as a compass for social redirection’.13 So what is the real extent of women’s writing on the Civil War? From the end of the War to the late 1980s, it included a handful of short stories by Flora Nwapa and her semi-fictionalized memoir, Never Again (1975); three novels: Rosina Umelo’s Felicia (1978), Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982), and Pauline Onwubiko’s Running for Cover (1988); two memoirs: Rose Njoku’s Withstand the Storm (1986) and Leslie Jean Ofoegbu’s Blow the Fire (1986); a collection of poems, Nigeria in the Year 1999 (1986) by Catherine Acholonu; and the plays, King Emene: a Tragedy of a Rebellion (1975) by Zulu Sofola and Into the Heart of Biafra (1986) by Catherine Acholonu. These were subsequently joined by Flora Nwapa’s play, Two Women in Conversation (1993), and the novels, The Seed Yams Have Been Eaten (1993) by Phanuel Egejuru, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) by Chimamanda Adichie, and Roses and Bullets (2011) by A. Adimora-Ezeigbo. Flora Nwapa, whose novels Efuru and Idu were published in 1966 and 1970 respectively, claimed she wrote nothing during the War itself except for one story, ‘My Soldier Brother’, which appears in the collection This is Lagos (1971). Already this early story manifests an oppositional stance and gender dichotomy typical of her later writing. It describes, through the eyes of his younger brother, the emergent manhood of Adiewere, who enlists for Biafra, and is killed. He is unequivocally a hero to his brother, who says, ‘I was so proud of him. I told all my friends about him and they came to see him to touch his uniform and his gun.’14 When Adiewere dies, the only audible dissent from the conventional celebration of heroism and sacrifice comes from the troublesome Aunt Monica, who embarrasses her listeners by bursting out: ‘I am tired of people coming here and talking rubbish. What death is honourable? Death is death. A good intelligent boy died, and old men who should die say he died honourably. The sooner they stop talking of honourable death, the better.’ Nobody answered her. Jolly good. Why shouldn’t Aunt Monica keep quiet and behave like other women?15

A week later, the younger brother is called up. His final comment: ‘I was going to get ten heads of the enemy before they got me’, ironically encapsulates, not only the speaker’s short-sightedness, but the way a

13

Chinyere Nwahunanya, ed., A Harvest from Tragedy: Critical Perspectives on Nigerian Civil War Literature (Owerri: Springfield, 1997), 14. 14 Flora Nwapa, This is Lagos (Enugu: Tana Press, 1971), 132. 15 Ibid., 134.

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brainwashed populace manifests a more general blindness to the realities of war.16 When Nwapa returns to the War in her semi-fictional account, Never Again (1975) and in stories in the collection, Wives at War (1980), the dissent from officially sanctioned ‘patriotism’ becomes more explicit and sustained.17 There is little in her writing of the political rights and wrongs of the War or the emotive pull of nationalism. Instead, her hard-headed pragmatism and instinct for survival, combined with distaste for rhetoric and for Biafran as well as Nigerian soldiers, recalls Virginia Woolf ’s pre-World War II anti-war tract, Three Guineas. Here, the English writer, muses on the difference in the meaning of ‘patriotism’ for men and women: But the educated man’s sister – what does ‘patriotism’ mean to her? Has she the same reasons for loving England, for defending England? Has she been ‘greatly blessed’ in England? History and biography when questioned would seem to show that her position in the home of freedom has been different from her brother’s; and psychology would seem to hint that history is not without its effect upon mind and body. Therefore her interpretation of the word ‘patriotic’ may well differ from his.18

The reason Woolf puts forward for this divergence, in the context of the Britain of the 1930s, is women’s historic inequality in terms of education, property and the ability to earn a living. Though Ifi Amadiume and Judith Van Allen have shown how the colonialist imposition of Victorian attitudes on Igbo society eroded women’s traditional autonomy and the powers vested in women’s organizations, Igbo women were nonetheless far in advance of their English sisters in terms of economic independence, and retained a voice in local affairs.19 In the case of the anti-taxation rebellion of 1927, known as the ‘Women’s War’, they exhibited a high degree of organization and political determination despite, as Amadiume tells it, colonialist attempts to marginalize and make women invisible. The Women’s War was all the more remarkable in the light of, as Van Allen puts it, the colonial failure ‘to discover or protect Igbo women’s political or economic roles by their assumption that politics and business were not proper, normal places for women’.20 The historian, Nina Mba, documenting the impact of colonial legislation and administration on Nigerian women, concluded with 16

Ibid., 135. Nwapa, Wives at War, and Other Stories (Enugu: Tana Press, 1980); Never Again. (London: Heinemann Educational, 1975). 18 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938), 17–18. 19 Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands (London: Zed, 1987); Judith Van Allen, ‘“Aba riots” or Igbo “women’s war?”: Ideology, Stratification, and the Invisibility of women’, in Women in Africa, edited by N.J. Hafkin and E.G. Bay (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). 20 Van Allen, ‘Aba riots’, 81. 17

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the dismal finding that there has been scarcely any increase in the political power of Nigerian women from 1965 to 1979. This is despite the fact that since 1965 more women than ever before have graduated from universities, many have become professionals, and a number have become judges, permanent secretaries, business executives and media executives. However, there is no spillover from educational attainment and professional diversification to political power.21

If, as it would seem, by 1967 the political position of the women of Eastern Nigeria was one of dependency on male power-brokers, does this suggest that women may have felt constrained in writing about the War because to do so was to enter a peculiarly masculine discourse? Chidi Amuta in 1984 analysed the War as a crisis of the bourgeois elite and an indictment of the political leadership, suggesting that the heroes of novels by Biafran writers Eddie Iroh, I.N.C. Aniebo and John Munonye are ‘repudiations of a specific phase of bourgeois hegemony in Nigerian history’.22 What is important in his analysis is the concept of ‘hero’ and what constitutes ‘heroism’. First, as he points out, war novel heroes reflect the class position of the writers, and also their frequently critical perspective on the War. Certainly, fictional treatments of the War by non-Biafrans, such as Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy (1973), Elechi Amadi’s Sunset in Biafra (1973), Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy (1985) and Festus Iyayi’s Heroes (1986), are overtly critical of the political machinations of both Nigerian and Biafran leaders. Festus Iyayi’s novel makes its statement in explicitly class terms: You get rid of the greed by getting rid of the ruling class, the generals and politicians and businessmen and traditional rulers and church leaders and professors … I tell you that the Ibo [sic] soldier is not the real enemy, nor are you the real enemies of the Ibo soldiers.23

But if class position defined both writers and heroes, there is still the question raised by Virginia Woolf: ‘But the educated man’s sister – what does ‘patriotism’ mean to her?’24 Texts by male writers, whether they endorse the notion of Biafra, like Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn (1976), or question it (see above), nonetheless assume the centrality of masculine experience in the events of the War. As a rule, in maleauthored accounts there is an intrinsic and inevitable marginalization of women’s role as neither combative nor concerned with policy making, but centered on survival. Though both Rose Njoku and Flora Nwapa give a very good account of the sacrificial effort involved in 21

Nina Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilised: Women’s Political Activity in Southern Nigeria, 1900–1965 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1982), 303. 22 Chidi Amuta, ‘History, Society and Heroism in the Nigerian War Novel’, Kunapip.  6:3 (1984), 69. 23 Festus Iyayi, Heroes (Harlow: Longman, 1986), 131. 24 Woolf, Three Guineas, 17–18.

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surviving and ensuring the survival of others, this effort is not figured as heroism in any conventional sense. Amuta, exploring the relationship between heroism and history, maintains: critical discourse of modern African literature must delve deeper into the ontological configurations of the very literary works in order to decipher the truth value of the texts as systems of aesthetic signification of meanings that ultimately derive from history.25

The elements of this statement: ‘ontological configurations’, ‘truth value’, ‘aesthetic signification’, and ‘history’, combine to project an assumption that the primary value of a war novel is its mimetic faithfulness to history perceived as externally verifiable events. Within the social realist genre it espouses, the protagonist assumes a kind of universal representativeness: accordingly, the various portraits of the hero in these novels derive ultimately from the position of writers in the structure of the Nigerian society up to the period of the war at least.26 Writers, Amuta suggests, had been schooled for power, ‘nurtured in the colonial educational system as logical successors to the colonialists’.27 The universality of Amuta’s statements, rife with easily disprovable assumptions about the nature of reality and its relationship to narrative, nonetheless provides a useful starting point for questioning their applicability on gender terms. Is it true, for example, that women writers were ‘schooled for power?’ What of ‘the educated man’s sister?’ What was she nurtured for? According to Van Allen: ‘The missionary’s avowed purpose in educating girls was to train them for Christian marriage and motherhood, not for jobs or citizenship.’28 Nwapa’s Women are Different bears witness to this in the education her protagonists receive at the Archdeacon Crowther Memorial Girls’ School, Elelenwa, in the early 1950s, which leaves them entirely unfitted for survival in the Nigeria of the 1970s.29 Similarly, in One is Enough (1981), the protagonist, Amaka, learns from her aunt and mother – free of Western education and closer to Igbo tradition – not to be dependent on a man: ‘The good missionaries had emphasized chastity, marriage and the home. Her mother was teaching her something different. Was it something traditional which she did not know because she went to school and was taught in the tradition of the white missionaries?’30 The logic of this is, at the very least, that women indeed had a different relationship to the War from men, who did the actual fighting and held the command positions. This certainly does not imply that women were inactive or passive – indeed, in the longue durée, Njoku and Adams quote from Equiano’s 25

Amuta, ‘History, Society and Heroism’, 57. Ibid., 60. 27 Ibid. 28 Van Allen, ‘Aba riots’, 76. 29 Nwapa, Women Are Different (Enugu: Tana Press, 1984). 30 Nwapa, One is Enough (Enugu: Tana Press, 1981), 11. 26

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mid-eighteenth century memoir on the ‘propensity to violence of Igbo women’ and speculate as to ‘a possible connection between the women’s predisposition to protests and violence and the societal trends emerging from the preceding centuries’.31 In the context of Biafra, both Van Allen and Amadiume stress the centrality of women to the war effort. Van Allen cites the demonstrations by Igbo women against the killings of 30,000 Igbos in other parts of the country in 1966, urging secession and protesting against Soviet involvement in the War. They also played an essential supportive role: ‘During the war, the women’s market network and other women’s organizations maintained a distribution system for what food there was and provided channels for the passage of food and information to the army.’32. They joined civil defense militia units and, in May 1969, formed a Women’s Front and called on the Biafran leadership to allow them to enlist in the infantry. This is corroborated by Amadiume, who says: Women fed and sustained the economy of Biafra through ‘attack’ trade, which involved market trips through enemy front lines. Women mobilised Biafrans for all public occasions. Women formed a strong core of the militia, task forces, etc., while mothers cooked for and fed the whole Biafran nation. Women became the cohesive force in a shifting, diminishing people who were slowly losing what they saw as a war of survival.33

If these then are the historical facts of women’s involvement in the Civil War, it becomes clear that women’s writings on the War can be expected to offer a ‘truth value’ and relationship to history qualitatively different from that of men/male writers. Given patriarchal political and military structures in both Nigeria and Biafra, and the masculinist rhetoric of ‘patriotism’ and ‘heroism’, any divergent perspective will inevitably find itself at odds with these received truths. Nor is realism necessarily, as Amuta avers, the most fitting mode for exploring violence, trauma, and memory. Rather than mimetic faithfulness, the more interesting line of enquiry is not so much what as how writers have narrativized the war, and the meanings generated by particular narrative strategies. For later writers, especially, the prevailing question is, through what ‘connective structures’ do they ‘reinscribe the past into the contemporary horizon’? Women at war That earlier women writers are conscious of writing as a gendered act, and thus of stepping out of masculine territory, is borne out by the titles 31

Ibrahim Umaru and Theophilus D. Lagi, ‘Women in the Aftermath of Ethnic Conflicts: the Egbirra-Bassa Crisis, 1986–2000’, in Shaping our Struggles: Nigerian Women in History, Culture and Social Change, edited by Obioma Nnaemeka and Chima Korieh (Trenton, NJ and Asmara: Africa World Press, 2011), 116–117. 32 Van Allen, ‘Aba riots’, 84 33 Ifi Amadiume, ‘Women’s Political History’, West Africa 10 (September, 1984), 1839.

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and preambles of their works. Buchi Emecheta, for example, prefaces with the statement: ‘I am glad this book is published; it is different from my other books, the subject is, as they say, “masculine”.’34 Rose Njoku, wife of a highly placed Nigerian officer, who personally knew all the major actors of the 1966 Nzeogwu coup, and Generals Gowon and Ojukwu, humbly entitles her own account of the War after a religious tract given to her by the Bishop of Ikot Ekpene when she was on the run with her children.35 We have only to compare such self-aggrandizing titles as Obasanjo’s My Command: an Account of the Nigerian Civil War 1967–1970 and Ademoyega’s Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup with her Withstand the Storm: War Memoirs of a Housewife to be conscious of a shift of emphasis, from the centrality of the first person actors and the militaristic actions ‘command’ and ‘struck’, as well as away from the named specificity of the events described.36 Instead, the generality of the indefinite article and the unassuming descriptor ‘housewife’ downplay the author’s role, while the nature metaphor ‘storm’ implies assault by an impersonal and external phenomenon that must be survived (note the collective injunction, ‘Withstand’) rather than overcome by individual endeavor. Flora Nwapa’s Never Again speaks for itself, though she amplifies the title in the first few lines of the narrative: Death was too near for comfort in Biafra. And for us who had known no danger of this kind before it was hell on earth. I meant to live at all costs. I meant to see the end of the war … so that I could tell my friends on the other side what it meant to be at war.37

‘I meant to live at all costs’, the motif of both Nwapa and Njoku’s accounts, naturally suggests a different emphasis from the young boy of ‘My Soldier Brother’, with his determination ‘to get ten heads of the enemy before they got me’. What is dramatized here is the social change brought about by war and the new choices for women it opens up. Umaru and Lagi, assessing the impact of ethnic conflicts in Nigeria, state: Women typically do not remain mere onlookers or innocent victims of conflicts. They often take on roles and responsibilities, partake in combat and political struggle, and build new networks in order to obtain needed resources for their families. While civil wars impose tremendous burdens on women, they often contribute to the redefinition

34

Buchi Emecheta, Destination Biafra (London: Allison & Busby, 1982), viii. Rose Njoku, Withstand the Storm: War Memoirs of a Housewife (Ibadan: Heinemann Educational, 1986), xi. 36 Olusegun Obasanjo, My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War 1967–1970 (London: Heinemann, 1981); Adewale Ademoyega, Why We Struck: the Story of the First Nigerian Coup (lbadan: Evans Brothers, 1981). 37 Nwapa, Never Again, 5, emphasis added. 35

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of traditional roles and the reconfiguration of gender relations in the society.38 In the story which gives its title to the collection, Wives at War, Flora Nwapa gives an ironic account of women’s roles through the tonguein-cheek story of Ebo and Bisi, who marry in Lagos before the War and subsequently find themselves in Biafra. Unlike Fatima in Sunset at Dawn, a Hausa woman who espouses the Biafran cause almost to the extent of rejecting her own parents, Bisi, a Yoruba, demands to be sent elsewhere: ‘The people are hostile to us. They will poison us, they will kill us. You and your people, you and your propaganda.’39 Ebo therefore smuggles her and the children onto a relief plane. The rumor gets round that a group of women have been sent to London to represent Biafran women, and women leaders go to see the Foreign Secretary to protest against their non-inclusion. The Foreign Secretary regrets not staying in his safe overseas posting, instead of returning ‘home to face Biafra and her women. The women. How could he cope with them? … Why could not the women organise themselves in one body and have just one leader? Why must every one of them want to lead?’40. His attempts to mollify them are briskly dismissed, with the warning: ‘You wait until the end of this war. There is going to be another war, the war of the women. You have fooled us enough. You have used us enough. You have exploited us enough.’41 The story is satirical in that the women are agitating about nothing: a delegation did not go to London, and they are obviously more concerned with recognition of their position than with more pressing matters of the War. This ironic perception of its ludicrous and less heroic aspects informs all Nwapa’s writings on the War, though the women do also make a serious point: Your offence is that you bypassed us. Without the women, the Nigerian vandals would have overrun Biafra; without the women, our gallant Biafran soldiers would have died on the war fronts. Without the women, the Biafran Red Cross would have collapsed.42

The leader of a rival group claims: ‘Right from the word go, we organised the women for a real fight. We asked for guns to fight the enemy. We asked to be taught how to shoot. Did not women and girls fight in Vietnam?’43 This analogy with the then contemporary war in Vietnam 38

Ibrahim Umaru and Theophilus D. Lagi, ‘Women in the Aftermath of Ethnic Conflicts: the Egbirra-Bassa Crisis, 1986–2000’, Nnaemeka and Korieh, Shaping our Struggles: Nigerian Women in History, Culture and Social Change, edited by Obioma Nnaemeka and Chima J. Korieh (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011), 251. 39 Nwapa, Wives at War, 3. 40 Ibid., 11 41 Ibid., 13 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 14

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reveals the extent to which women were aware of their position and their relationship to internal and external power. In the absence of guns, their most deadly weapon is ‘feminine intuition’, by which the Foreign Secretary is entirely defeated, conceding that he will have to investigate the women’s complaint. The comic element of self-seeking masquerading as patriotism recurs in Nwapa’s Never Again, a thinly disguised account of her own war experiences, in which the narrator Kat’s skepticism contrasts with her husband’s reluctance to concede that Biafra is going to be defeated. This skepticism also contrasts with the ruthless hypocrisy of some of those in positions of power, notably Kate and her husband’s friend, Kal, who says she should be in detention for disbelieving the Biafran propaganda. This polarization is evident early on at a village meeting, where most of those in attendance were the old politicians. I did not like them. To my way of thinking they caused the war. And they were now in the forefront again directing the war. The women especially were very active, more active than the men in fact. They made uniforms for the soldiers, they cooked for the soldiers and gave expensive presents to the officers. And they organised the women who prayed every Wednesday for Biafra. In return for these services, they were rewarded with special war reports exclusive to them and them alone.44

The fact that one of those who is most vocal, the woman leader, claims to have lost her husband in the War when Kate and Chudi know he died of diabetes, ironizes her exhortations to the people to stay and not flee the Nigerian soldiers: Why am I a woman? God, you should have made me a man. I would have said to the young men, to the youths whose blood I know is boiling now in their veins, follow me. I’ll lead you. I’ll fight the Vandals. They will not be allowed to pollute our fatherland. They will not be allowed to set their ugly feet on the soil of Ugwuta. Never in history, my grandfathers and great grandfathers never told me that Ugwuta had suffered from any aggressor. This will not happen in my life time!45

The fact that she is the first to crack and run underlines not only the emptiness of her rhetoric, but the cynicism and hypocrisy of war leaders in general, who require people to do what they will not do themselves. The terms in which it is expressed implicitly question assumptions of gendered heroism, even while the specific history and larger context of the War are not spelled out. However, in objecting that all these mass meetings achieve nothing, Kate implicitly addresses the wider context through a critique of political and class privilege:

44 45

Nwapa, Never Again, 10–11. Ibid., 12

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Committees could achieve something. Later I had discussed this point with one of the leaders. It was after our discussion which went very well that the ‘elites’ decided to form a ‘war cabinet’. My husband was not one of them. He was not an ‘elite’. But it was our idea, and nobody remembered us. Obviously, we could not be trusted.46

In a work that profoundly questions nationalist discourse, Nwapa highlights the way that discourse is constructed and controlled by those in power through a process of exclusion that has potentially deadly consequences. Kate’s perfectly logical insistence that the best thing to do is to run elicits a threat of arrest, diverted by her husband’s plea that she is suffering a mental breakdown. Meanwhile, her capacity for a surgical deconstruction of the pieties and dangers of nationalism demonstrates mental clarity rather than confusion: No, the Nigerians should not have fought us. We had left Lagos for them. They should have left us in peace in our new-found Biafra. We could have built up our Biafra ‘where no one would be oppressed’. Was anybody sure of this? ‘Where no one would be oppressed’? There was already oppression even before the young nation was able to stand on her feet. Wasn’t it even possible that war could have broken out in the young nation if there was no civil war? Perhaps Nigeria did well to attack us. If they hadn’t we would have, out of frustration, begun to attack and kill one another.47

It is easy to criticize Never Again, as does Obododimma Oha, for being ‘propagandistic’ and over-emotional.48 What it does very well, however, is to give an insight into the situation of ordinary, non-combatant and non-political people, trying to live their lives in a situation of unbearable contradictions. The narrowness of focus – the village of Ugwuta and the vacillation of its inhabitants about when to run in the face of direct frontal attack – and the simplicity of the narrative style, throw into relief the horrors of the panic-stricken evacuation: a woman dying in childbirth at the side of the road, a man’s grief-stricken account of his wife’s death. The simplicity has the virtue also of clarity of purpose. Nwapa’s disgust and utter rejection of the War and the way people are manipulated within it can be read as articulating dissent from a dominant masculine political narrative. Describing their return to Ugwuta, Kate asks: Where was everybody? What folly? What arrogance, what stupidity led us to this desolation, this madness, to this wickedness, to this war, to this death?

46

Ibid., 17 Ibid., 50. 48 Obododimma Oha, ‘Never A Gain? A Critical Reading of Flora Nwapa’s Never Again’, in Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa, edited by Marie Umeh (Trenton, NJ and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 1998), 430. 47

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When this cruel war was over, there will be no more war. It will not happen again, never again.49

This emotional statement with its concatenation of evils and rhetorical repetitions, may have the force of a spontaneous, unconsidered outburst, but in its uncensored outrage it expresses the effects of trauma – later to be returned to in retrospect by writers who were at the time children (Chris Abani, Dulue Mabachu) or did not directly experience the War (Chimamanda Adichie, Sefi Atta, Helon Habila, Uzodinma Iweala), for whom the trauma is a lingering trace and must be reimagined into life. Nwapa’s forceful dissent reverberates in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (though not a ‘Biafran’ novel, one of the most significant novels by a third-generation Nigerian woman writer, and strongly affiliated to novels I will examine later) some 30 years on: ‘What was the country I loved? The country I would fight for? Should it have borders?’50 These questions, dependent as they are on a retrospective stance on postcolonial Nigeria, are questions Nwapa’s Kate, caught in the tide of Biafran patriotism, could not so easily articulate. The poet, Olu Oguibe, 30 years later, answers them thus: ‘It occurred to me that the country that I was willing to fight and die for, the country that I celebrated in song and poetry, had set out not so long ago to destroy me and my own in order to save its pride.’51 To read these later utterances against Nwapa’s shows how the contradictions have only intensified with time. Nwapa’s strong and uncompromising ideological statement in Wives at War is therefore all the more remarkable. As in Never Again, in the short story, ‘A Certain Death’, in which a woman pays an 18-year-old volunteer to take her brother’s place in the army, she refuses to turn away her eyes from the social effects of suspicion and insecurity, accusations of sabotage and victimization. Nor does her determination to save her brother blind her to the moral dilemma of paying someone to replace him. Oha’s assertion, that ‘Never Again does not transcend the emotional weakness of the pro-war propaganda that it seeks to undermine and demystify … the narrative undermines itself as a critique on the demerits of sentimentalizing war’, fails to take into account the relative power of these opposing discourses and the irony with which they are juxtaposed.52 The same emphasis on survival at all costs and at the price of personal sacrifice is evident in Rosina Umelo’s (1978) Felicia, which addresses the social changes, particularly the new choices for women, brought about by the immense upheavals of the War.53 Like Never Again, it critiques hypocrisy and false values, but affords a more optimistic celebration of personal integrity and community support. Felicia, a young Red Cross 49

Nwapa, Never Again, 70. Sefi Atta, Everything Good Will Come (Adlestrop: Arris, 2005), 299. 51 Olu Oguibe, ‘Remembering Biafra’, Chimurenga 8 (2005), 30. 52 Oha, ‘Never A Gain?’, 430. 53 Rosina Umelo, Felicia (London: Macmillan, 1978). 50

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nurse, returns home to her village at the end of the War, at a time when songs are being sung about girls who have ‘spoilt’ themselves. When her pregnancy becomes apparent, she refuses to reveal the identity of the father to her mother and the elders. Her mother becomes so distraught that Felicia is sent to Enugu to stay with a relative and have the baby. Her determination to have the baby, whom she names Nkemakolam – ‘Let me keep what is my own’ – and her refusal to accept the elders’ alternative to local disgrace – to go to Lagos and become a prostitute – eventually win her the respect of her people. She is given a second chance to make good and sent back to school. Returning home after exams, she meets a delegation from the family of her deceased lover. A letter written to his brother about his intention to marry Felicia was delivered after his death and remained unopened, till one day it dropped from his mother’s prayer missal. Felicia is thus vindicated and her son accepted into his father’s family. The novel touches on many issues to do with the disruptive effects of the War on many aspects of people’s lives, from the traditional system to education and the new lawlessness that reigns in the city of Enugu. The tension that arises from Felicia’s individual pride and insistence on privacy in the face of communal values and customs illustrates the farreaching effects of change. No longer is the choice for a woman that between respectable marriage and leaving the village to seek her fortune in Lagos. Felicia demonstrates the possibility of making a personal choice to remain at home as an unmarried mother, despite public displeasure. Education offers the promise of an even more different future, the chance for a mother to support her child herself in the absence of a husband – a theme Nwapa was to take up in the 1980s novels, One is Enough and Women Are Different. When Felicia’s school principal ponders: ‘Class three with illegitimate children or even babies born in marriage? Why be surprised? Before the war, what did class three personally know of such things apart from carrying around the regular arrivals within their own families?’54 We can see how Felicia implicitly questions the ‘imagined community’ of pre- and post-war Biafra by showing profound social change as an unintended consequence of that war. Lee Erwin has usefully read this novel as participating in the ‘mixed generic codes’ of the Pacesetter Series by which it was published, so as to ‘recast those genres in order to suggest other possibilities for women’ in an ‘attempt to reattach their protagonists to multivalent kinship structures that offer women opportunities for alliance with other women and greater social authority in their own right’.55 He suggests that novels of this period – the 1970s and 1980s – share a common project of ‘rereading women’s roles in 54 55

Ibid., 113 Lee Erwin, ‘Genre and Authority in Some Popular Nigerian Women’s Novels’, RAL, 33:2 (2002), 95.

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traditional social structures outside a Western feminist paradigm’, both through generic affiliation and representations of an alternative (nonWestern) femininity.56 I want to propose that this suggestive symbiosis of genre and gender has a far wider application than Pacesetters, including both Nwapa and Umelo, and later writers like Ezeigbo and Adichie, beneath whose surface realism can be detected a muted semiotics rooted in traditional forms of femininity and indigenous belief systems. Gendering heroism Rose Njoku and Buchi Emecheta, two other authors of earlier narratives, take a different approach from Nwapa and Umelo by depicting events from the point of view of a protagonist who is very much bound up in the macro-politics of the War. Rose Njoku’s first-hand story is a remarkable document of danger and suffering, considering she is not describing the front but simply how she and her family survived as civilians. Her situation, similarly to that of Nwapa’s Kate, was complicated by the fact that her husband was detained early on as a saboteur, and therefore she was ostracized by all but a few and had to fend for herself. Withstand the Storm makes an eloquent counterpoint to Emecheta’s Destination Biafra, in the sense that Rose Njoku actually underwent many of the experiences Emecheta ascribes to the fictional Debbie Ogedemgbe. In terms of definitions of heroism and patriotism, and the relationship of the individual to history, these two texts provide interesting contrasts, not least in their approach to their protagonists. The most obvious of these is that, while Njoku endures pain, privation, and anxiety with stoical fortitude and underplays her own role as that of a dutiful wife, Emecheta makes all sorts of claims for Debbie as a new type of African woman. Debbie, indeed, has been co-opted as a Western-defined feminist heroine by the critic Katherine Frank who asserts: ‘Debbie is an unabashed feminist, but she is so completely Europeanized that one may ask if she is still an African woman.’57 It is a pertinent question: what is a ‘true’ African woman? Is she what Molara Ogundipe-Leslie has derided as a stereotype, the ‘pot of culture, who is static as history passes her by, who wants the old ways of life, who speaks like a lobotomised idiot of “iron snakes” and “our husband”’?58 In 2005, Sefi Atta’s Enitan objects to being classified in the following terms: ‘I didn’t know how to think like an African woman. I only knew how to think for myself.’59 And, ‘If a woman sneezed in 56

Ibid. Katherine Frank, ‘Women without Men: The Feminist Novel in Africa’, African Literature Today, edited by Eldred Durosimi Jones, Eustace Palmer and Marjorie Jones (London: James Currey, 1987), 26. 58 Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, ‘The Female Writer and her Commitment’, Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Review 1:1 (1985), 12. 59 Atta, Everything Good, 294. 57

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our country, someone would call her a feminist.’60 Since both terms, ‘African woman’ and ‘feminist’, are used to undermine and enforce obedience to a conservative status quo, it is the status quo itself that Enitan rejects. In seeking to claim Debbie as a feminist heroine – a woman who forges her identity independently of men – Frank overlooks the extent to which it is her privileged background that enables her to confront men on equal terms, a forerunner, perhaps, of Olanna and Kehinde in Half of a Yellow Sun. Emecheta herself calls her ‘a very radical modern girl of Africa’, and says, ‘one of the criticisms of Heinemann readers was that ‘this is not an African woman. People have to decide here what people should read there.’61 However, as Njoku’s story shows, Debbie does not, in fact, do anything that thousands of ordinary women did not do. The only difference is that she has a mission – to reach Abosi, the Biafran leader, and persuade him to stop the War. When she does eventually confront him, her way of presenting herself lays claim to a class position inherited from her father: ‘I am me. Debbie, the daughter of Ogedemgbe. Tell me, if I were a man, a man born almost thirty years ago, a graduate of politics, sociology and philosophy from Oxford, England, would you have dismissed my mission?’62 The parameters by which Debbie judges herself – her father’s status and her foreign education – at Oxford, no less – suggest that she is not, indeed, a representative ‘African woman’ of her time but a self-conscious exception. In contrast, Rose Njoku, also a member of the elite, unconsciously subverts the cause she purports to serve – that of her husband as male ‘hero’. The fact that her husband is first, Brigade Commander under General Ironsi, then Biafran War Commander, then detained by Ojukwu as a saboteur, only adds to Rose Njoku’s problems, since, besides her own and her children’s survival, she has the added burden of her husband’s absolute dependence on her – for information, for support, as a go-between. Throughout, she is alone with her children, surviving on her own resources. Like Debbie Ogedemgbe, at one point she has a personal interview with Ojukwu to intercede on her husband’s behalf. The contrast is telling: I presented my husband’s points as forcefully as the explosive situation could permit. I did my best to convince him that my husband never intended to split the loyalty of the troops but that zeal for the common good of the military and civilians had influenced all his actions. I told him that their quarrel had never been personal but official and that every man needed recognition in his own sphere. I never knew I would be as bold as I was in discussing the many other areas of their conflict. He also started with a catalogue of what

60

Ibid., 200. Interview with Jane Bryce, London, 21 January 1986. 62 Njoku, Withstand the Storm, 239. 61

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my husband had said to him in the presence of those who owed him much respect.63

The writer’s self-effacement does not disguise the fact that she was at the center of events. Yet she makes no claims for herself, continually harping on her ‘wifely duty’ and rationalizing her husband’s neglect and, it seems to the reader, at times crass egoism. Yet even with all her Christian submissiveness, she cannot suppress her resentment that her husband always puts the army first. The following quotation is typical. He had absolutely no conception of the mental strain I had been suffering since that fateful 29 July day. I decided to keep quiet and swallow that bitter pill. I did not want to mar my gratitude to God for preserving his life. I was still too excited at my husband’s escape from death to argue or defend myself. Under normal circumstances, I would have been very sad at such a seemingly inconsiderate remark.64

This level of self-control is, indeed, ‘heroic’, though it is neither dramatized nor presented as such. Emecheta’s novel, by comparison, is characterized by a straining for significance, particularly in the symbol-laden trek through the jungle in which Debbie carries the baby ‘Biafra’ on her back. The effect is, in both cases, the opposite of what was intended. Neither writer explicitly questions the accepted notion of ‘heroism’, but, by implicit contrast between herself and her husband, Rose Njoku exemplifies a different (and devalued) feminine manifestation of heroic qualities. Debbie Ogedemgbe remains a product of her class and a maledefined ‘exceptional’ woman, doing a man’s job.

Part 2: Recent Novels and Retrospective Imagining After the forgoing survey of women’s war writing of the 1970s and 1980s and its critical reception, I want to adopt a somewhat different framework in the following two sections. Obioma Nnaemeka points to the way ‘physical distance seems to determine narrative distance’ in the earlier women’s writing, and cites Ernest Emenyonu’s emphasis on ‘distance [as] a crucial element in reimag(in)ing and narrating the Nigeria-Biafra conflict’.65 Turning to imaginative recreations of the War by writers at a distance in time and/or space, I want to place in comparative perspective three novels: Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1981), Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Roses and Bullets (2011). I focus in each case on the question of subalternity and the representation of rape as metonymic 63

Ibid., 85. Ibid., 65. 65 Obioma Nnaemeka, ‘Fighting on All Fronts: Gendered Spaces, Ethnic Boundaries, and the Nigerian Civil War’, Dialectical Anthropology 22:3–4 (1997), 239, 240. 64

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of violence. Second, I read these novels for traditional tropes which I see as signs of a ‘suppressed semiotic’ beneath a realist textual surface. Although Destination Biafra belongs chronologically in the earlier group, the author’s physical distance from the War provides a useful touchstone for the way writers have been able to reimagine it only within the context of where they stand at the time of writing. Emecheta stated: ‘I was not in Nigeria during this War, but was one of the students demonstrating in Trafalgar Square in London at the time.’66 Important, too, is the fact that Emecheta approaches Biafra, not only as one who was absent, but as one whose affiliations place her somewhat outside its putative terrain. ‘I hail from Ibuza, in the Mid-West, a little town near Asaba where the worst atrocities of the War took place, which is never given any prominence’, because, she says, it was not ‘the Ibo heartland’.67 She claims, too, to have been inspired by Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died, as a result of which her protagonist is ‘neither Ibo, nor Yoruba, nor Hausa, but simply a Nigerian’.68 This statement, made in 1981, 11 years after the War ended, is strikingly different from positions taken at a greater distance in time – by Chinua Achebe, for example, in There Was a Country, where he castigates Nigeria for its continued failure to integrate his people. Similarly, the younger Igbo poet, Olu Oguibe, has written of how, after the War, ‘the country draped a blanket of silence over Biafra and set about repressing its memory’.69 He describes his realization, after years as a political activist, that ‘we weren’t simply all Nigerians, and that the old beast of ethnic distrust and clan loyalty was alive and well’, leading him to conclude that, ‘I became an exile not the day I left Nigeria, but the day Nigeria stepped over Biafra and reclaimed its territorial integrity’.70 In fiction, Sefi Atta’s Enitan, born in 1960, offers a reflection on her generation’s relationship to the War: In university, I finally acknowledged the holocaust that was Biafra, through memoirs and history books, and pictures of limbless people; children with their stomachs bloated from kwashiorkor and their rib cages as thin as leaf veins. Their parents were mostly dead. Executed. Macheted. Blown up. Beheaded. There were accounts of blood-drinking, flesh-eating, atrocities of the human spirit that only a civil war could generate, while in Lagos we had carried on as though it were happening in a different country.71

Distant in both time and space, this account is an attempt at coming to terms with what it means to be Nigerian in the twenty-first century in the face of a partially effaced collective memory. Atta here reclaims memory through its traces in the official record – memoirs, history 66

Emecheta, Destination Biafra, viii. Ibid., vii. 68 Ibid., viii. 69 Oguibe, ‘Remembering Biafra’, 30. 70 See Ibid., 30, 31. 71 Atta, Everything Good, 86. 67

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books, and pictures – so as to ‘reinscrib[e] the past into the contemporary horizon’.72 For her, this refusal of amnesia means there can be no such thing as being ‘simply a Nigerian’, as Emecheta positions Debbie. Despite Emecheta’s conscious conformity with the post-War slogan ‘No victor, no vanquished’, by which Nigeria’s East was invited to rejoin the polity, there is clearly a gap between the unproblematic homogeneity of Debbie’s identity and the crude anti-Hausa (and to some extent antiBritish) racism that pervades the novel, suggesting that ‘Nigerianness’ itself is built on a set of unexamined collective assumptions. Those who witnessed the War saw those assumptions radically challenged; Destination Biafra, while it adopts an anti-war position, arguably reinscribes the very binaries that caused the war in the first place. Reinscribing the past, representing trauma Although women’s war texts generally have come in for criticism (for their limited vision, their narrow ‘feminine’ concerns) or been entirely overlooked, Destination Biafra has had a mixed reception. NwachukwuAgbada, for example, notes of Emecheta ‘her feminist temper [which] remains unassuaged and unmitigated’,73 her condemnation of the treatment of the Western Igbos from whom she comes, rather than any larger critique of the War itself,74 and her over-valuation of rape: ‘The women are merely raped but the men are killed. Why the author bemoans the rapes more than the deaths is not explained.’75 What is clear, however, is: ‘Feminism in African fiction is an intrusive voice which calls our attention to the “failures” of male African writers with respect to the portrayal of women in their works.’76 Despite Emecheta’s ‘cartoon-like portrayal of the atrocities and consequences of the war itself (where we often see her biases leading her to create some highly implausible, idealized and even preposterous situations and characters)’, Abioseh Porter calls the novel ‘unconventional’, ‘compelling’, ‘complex’, and ‘insightful’.77 Some female critics, who have tended towards a more positive reception, have valorized the novel as a feminist intervention in masculine discourse, to the occlusion of other key elements.78 In particular, Obioma Nnaemeka and Oike Machiko, in taking up the question of subalternity, thereby unsettle the feminist consensus. Debbie Ogedemgbe is unapologetically a member of the elite, daughter of a politician, educated abroad, wealthy and able to choose 72

Ibid., viii. J.O.J. Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta: Politics, War and Feminism in Destination Biafra’, in Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta., edited by Marie Umeh (Trenton, NJ and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 1996), 388. 74 Ibid., 391. 75 Ibid., 393. 76 Ibid., 392. 77 Abioseh M. Porter, ‘Second-Class Citizen: The Point of Departure for Understanding Buchi Emecheta’s Major Fiction’, in Umeh, Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, 314–315. 78 Frank, ‘Women without Men’; Umeh, ‘The Poetics of Thwarted Sensitivity’. 73

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her lovers without regard to social or parental censorship – all of which attributes she shares with Olanna and Kainene, protagonists of Half of a Yellow Sun. It is instructive, however, to note the difference in reception between the two novels, separated by 25 years, and to speculate how far perceptions have changed in that period. Debbie’s outspoken articulation of feminist positions on a range of issues, from joining the military to personal relationships with men, is approvingly cited as making her ‘a veritable symbol of Emecheta’s African New Woman’, while Destination Biafra is the novel where Emecheta reaches the peak of her feminism. Critical responses to Half of a Yellow Sun, highlighting sexuality over gender, and personal relationships over public politics, no doubt reflect developments in critical theory and what readers expect from a female-authored novel in the twenty-first century, as opposed to the oppositional feminism of the 1980s. Writers, as observed by Amuta, reflect their class, but Third Generation writers show a marked degree of self-reflexivity on this score. Sefi Atta’s Enitan, for example, determines: ‘I would no longer speak for women in my country, because, quite simply, I didn’t know them all.’79 In Destination Biafra, Debbie’s journey into Biafra reveals to her how much she is defined by her class position: ‘Her education, the imported division of class, still stood in the way. She was trying hard to shake it off, to belong, but … she knew that achieving complete acceptance was indeed a formidable task.’80 This idea of ‘belonging’ is figured in terms of a certain kind of femininity, represented by Uzoma, one of her fellow-refugees, whose resourcefulness, strength and down-to-earthness Debbie admires, yet the narrative never positions Uzoma as other than a source for Debbie’s observations on women’s role in the War, and certainly never as a spokesperson. While it is given to Uzoma to express the hope ‘that history will be able to chronicle all this’,81 Debbie is the one who recorded all this in her memory, to be transferred when possible to the yellowing scraps of paper she dignified with the name of manuscript. They had survived with her so far, because most of the incidents were written down in her personal code which only she could decipher. If she should be killed, the entire story of the women’s experience of the war would be lost.82

Debbie is figured, in other words, not only as privileged possessor of the women’s narrative but also of their subjective experience of the War. Her public role is confirmed when she returns to London, instigates the demonstration in Trafalgar Square, speaks at press briefings and makes sure Biafran counter-information is distributed. On her return to Biafra with a second mission to Abosi, she tells her hostess she is writing ‘an 79

Atta, Everything Good, 284. Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 211. 81 Ibid., 222. 82 Ibid., 222–223, emphasis added. 80

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interesting story’ called Destination Biafra.83 In the closing pages, after Abosi’s desertion, she refuses to leave with Alan Grey, her British lover, with the words: there is my manuscript to publish. I shall tell those orphans the story of how a few ambitious soldiers from Sandhurst tried to make their dream a reality … If future generations should ask what became of Biafra, what do you want us to tell them?84

Debbie’s right to chronicle the war is, unlike that of Richard in Half of a Yellow Sun, or even Adichie herself, unequivocal. According to Machiko, Destination Biafra is ‘the story which Debbie, an elite woman, has composed from the memory of the subaltern’ and as a result, it ‘exposes the limit of storytelling [and] records the impossibility of representing the Other’.85 How do Adichie and Ezeigbo negotiate this impossibility? Half of a Yellow Sun is told through the narrative point of view of three of its characters: Olanna, Richard, and Ugwu. These perspectives are interspersed with excerpts from a different, parallel narrative-in-process known as ‘The Book’, which, since he is a writer, we at first attribute to Richard, the British writer who struggles to write the story of the War, only to reveal at the end that it is Ugwu, the houseboy, who is its ultimate chronicler. This device enables Adichie to relinquish her position as narrative authority in favor of a subaltern spokesman at the level of metanarrative. The protagonist of Ezeigbo’s Roses and Bullets occupies a somewhat different subject – and class – position from either Debbie or Olanna. For Ginika, daughter of a Port Harcourt-based Igbo doctor, London and Lagos are beyond her horizon. When the story begins, she is a secondary schoolgirl staying with her aunt in Enugu. At her father’s insistence, she reluctantly moves to Mbano, where he is stationed, and then to the home village of Ama-Oyi for the duration of the war. Ginika, though educated and anticipating going to university like her brother, is patently not a liberated elite woman. Both the style of the novel and the frequent use of Igbo expressions position her closer to being a village girl, subject to parental control and traditional conventions of femininity. She tells Eloka Odunze, later her husband: ‘We speak a mixture of dialects – Ama-Oyi, Ikwerre, Mbano, Onitsha and a smattering of Owerri dialect introduced into the family by Auntie Lizzy … I take a bit of every dialect and get them together.’86 The cultural context is, therefore, highly specific, geographically situated in what was known as ‘the Igbo heartland’ where spoken Igbo is colored by minute shifts in 83

Ibid., 246. Ibid., 258–259. 85 Oike Machiko, ‘Becoming a Feminist Writer: Representation of the Subaltern in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra’, in War in African Literature Today 26, edited by Ernest N. Emenyonu (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2008), 68, 69. 86 A. Adimora-Ezeigbo, Roses and Bullets (Lagos: Jalaa, 2011), Part 1. Ch. 2, n.p. 84

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location; Ezeigbo signifies this specificity by a conversational, leisurely, oral-inflected style of storytelling, dense with detail of the domestic and village environment, more reminiscent of Nwapa’s early novels than the creative writing-workshopped English of Adichie. Though the narrative point of view is third person, the fact that the focalization is almost exclusively expressed through Ginika privileges her perspective and intensifies reader-identification with it. Again, it is a story of survival, but without the tone of outrage that places Nwapa’s Kate as external witness to events. Like Olanna, Ginika undergoes the privations of the war, including extreme hunger bordering on starvation, all the while seeking solutions to her own and other people’s problems. Like Olanna, privations do not impede love and sex from playing an important role in her life, including an unremarked incident of intimacy with a female friend which, rather than being labeled transgressive, is allowed to take its place in the realm of the normal. Like Olanna, Ginika experiences love and passion with her chosen partner, Eloka, and like Debbie, she is raped by an officer on her own ‘side’. Most importantly, like Half of a Yellow Sun, the novel moves back and forth in time, revisiting the past so as to ‘create a connective structure’ that reveals the underlying power relations between the characters. The second section of Roses and Bullets, ‘Before the Beginning’, set before the war, thus explains why we meet Ginika at her aunt’s, and not her father’s house, in terms of a previous act of violence, which functions as the ‘future anterior’ of patriarchal forms of violence perpetrated during the war itself. Though rape features in all three of the novels under discussion, the extent to which it functions as metonymic of other forms of violence varies widely. The growth of trauma theory87 has enabled us to read rape as more than the act of gendered physical violence by which it is figured in Destination Biafra, and to reconsider the value-laden statement: ‘The women are merely raped but the men are killed. Why the author bemoans the rapes more than the deaths is not explained.’88 In an analysis of violence in the 1990s novels of Yvonne Vera and Calixte Beyala, Régine Jean-Charles argues for the term ‘victim-survivor’ as more appropriate than simply ‘victim’ or ‘survivor’ to African women writers’ accounts of rape, stating: ‘The rape victim-survivor narrative is a fundamentally processual mode, demonstrating that surviving rape is not an accomplished, but an extended – often unresolved – act.’89 87

See, for example, Susannah Radstone: ‘Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics’, Paragrap. 30:1 (2007), 9–29; and Paul Kirby: ‘How is Rape a Weapon of War? Feminist International Relations, Modes of Critical Explanation and the Study of Wartime Sexual Violence’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:4 (2012), 797–821. 88 Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta’, 393. 89 Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, ‘Toward a Victim-Survivor Narrative: Rape and Form in Yvonne Vera’s Under the Tongue and Calixthe Beyala’s Tu t’appelleras Tanga’, Research in African Literatures, 45:1 (2014), 42.

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Zoe Norridge addresses the simultaneous presence of ‘explicit sexual descriptions and graphic violence’ in novels by Aminatta Forna and Chimamanda Adichie, arguing that the interweaving of sex and violence offers ‘both a language and strategy with which to explore and contest violence against women’.90 This, she suggests, is qualitatively different from the representation of violence in earlier writers like Njoku, Nwapa, and Emecheta, whose attempt ‘to place rape on the agenda in a West African context’ has been superseded by writers who ‘seek to explore the varied nuances of how and why rape is experienced in specific situations’.91 Tracing Adichie’s genealogical link to Achebe, Susan Andrade states: ‘Adichie extends further [in 2006] what Achebe was able to imagine and write in 1958.’92 Shifting from a paternal to a maternal filiation, one could observe that Adichie and Ezeigbo extend further what Emecheta was able to imagine and write in the early 1980s. Like Olanna, Kainene, and Ginika, Debbie Ogedemgbe chooses her lover (Alan Grey) and freely expresses desire; unlike the detailed sensual descriptions, focalizing the female protagonists, of the other two novels, however, the one time we see them in bed together it is entirely from Grey’s point of view, contemplating ‘the richness of (her) shapely lips’ as she lies sleeping.93 When Debbie is raped on the road 100 pages later, though she is focalized there is a curious exteriority to the scene: She felt herself bleeding, though her head was still clear. Pain shot all over body like arrows. She felt her legs being pulled this way and that, and at times she could hear her mother’s protesting cries. But eventually, amid all the degradation that was being inflicted on her, Debbie lost consciousness.94

Later, in the car, we are told: ‘She was still too numb physically and emotionally to say a word; but her brain was ticking like a tireless clock.’95 In fact, it is her mother, who witnessed the whole attack, who experiences something like trauma, while Debbie remains calm and collected: ‘She could not shut out the horrible way the Ibo woman with the child was killed, how they had pushed the butt of a gun into her, how they had cut her open, how the unborn baby’s head had been cut off and the older child kicked to death … oh, it was too horrible.’96 This is trauma by observation; in Debbie’s case, the rape leaves her angry but articulate and logical. In the chapter, ‘The Tainted Woman’, despite the ‘deep 90

Zoe Norridge, ‘Sex as Synecdoche: Intimate Languages of Violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love’, RAL 43:2 (2012), 18. 91 Ibid., 27. 92 Susan Andrade, ‘Adichie’s Genealogies: National and Feminine Novels’, RAL 42:2 (2011), 93. 93 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 34. 94 Ibid., 134. 95 Ibid., 135. 96 Ibid., 136.

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mental ache’97 of a memory that causes ‘the hollowness in her stomach (to get) deeper, and bitterness (to come) to her mouth’,98 she remains able to argue with and resist her mother and determined to carry out her mission to reach Abosi. When she is raped again, by a Hausa officer, she withstands him both physically – slapping him – and verbally, telling him: Allah will never forgive you now because you tried to violate a woman who has been raped by so many soldiers, a woman who may now be carrying some disease, a woman who has been raped by black Nigerian soldiers. You thought you were going to use a white man’s plaything, as you called me, only to realize you held in your arms a woman who has slept with soldiers.99

The politics of rape arises again when, at the end of the novel, Debbie rebukes Alan Grey: ‘I had expected the son of Sir Fergus Grey to behave differently from an unsophisticated Moslem African … tell me, would it have made a difference if I had been raped by white soldiers?’100 This does not however stop her from co-operating with him and undertaking another mission to Abosi, but when he makes clear that her usefulness lies in her sexuality, which she is expected to trade to her advantage (‘Do your woman bit tonight’), she slaps him ‘for the way you and your country have fallen in the eyes of the black nations’.101 As should be clear from this summary, the representation of rape in Destination Biafra is of a different order from that in the novels of Vera, Forna, Adichie, or Ezeigbo. Debbie does not betray symptoms of what Jean-Charles calls ‘rape trauma syndrome’, manifest in Vera’s and Beyala’s novels ‘through narrative devices, ruptures in temporality, and the use of language’, emphasizing ‘the character’s struggle to reconstitute him or herself following the original trauma of sexual violence’.102 The linear realist mode of the narrative remains unbroken, and despite her ‘mental pain’, Debbie does not disintegrate emotionally, nor does she suffer flashbacks, loss of language nor the sense of stasis that overcomes trauma victims, the inability to incorporate their experience into the narrative of their life. The multiple rapes neither inhibit her from acting nor articulating her feelings, and in this sense the scene of violation takes precedence over the consequences. The Debbie who stands up to and slaps Lawal and Grey is not fundamentally changed from the Debbie we meet at the glittering Lagos party at the start of the novel; she is, temporarily, a victim, but cannot be called a survivor since there are no long-term processual effects to be overcome. The answer to Nwachukwu-Agbada’s question as to ‘[w]hy the author bemoans the 97

Ibid., 157. Ibid., 165. 99 Ibid., 176. 100 Ibid., 243. 101 Ibid., 255. 102 Ibid., 44. 98

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rapes more than the deaths’103 is thus ideological: Emecheta’s feminist project requires a discussion of rape in the context of a sexual politics where the specificity of women’s experience and rights is only just being articulated in African women’s writing. The difference in perspective between her, Adichie and Ezeigbo is therefore partly a matter of the temporal ground from which they perform their reinscription of the past into the contemporary horizon. In Half of a Yellow Sun, the rape is, unusually, told from the perspective of the perpetrator, Ugwu, one of the three focalizers of the novel. It occurs almost incidentally in a bar, alongside drinking and getting high, after a military engagement that has earned him the nickname ‘Target Destroyer’.104 The rape of the bar-girl is one incident in a series of experiences Ugwu has at the front, told in simple descriptive language with a minimum of commentary: blowing up an enemy trench and taking boots and guns from the corpses; commandeering a car from civilians looking for their missing son; seeing his captain blown up by a shell before being blown up himself. The rape therefore takes its place alongside other forms of traumatic suffering undergone or witnessed by the characters, including Olanna’s escape from Kano after her family has been slaughtered, and the refugee train journey south. Throughout his time at the front, Ugwu thinks of his girlfriend, Eberechi, shaping his experiences into a story for her ears while comforting himself with the ‘thought of Eberechi’s fingers pulling the skin of his neck, the wetness of her tongue in his mouth’.105 As Norridge has pointed out, violence and sensuality occur simultaneously in this novel, so that Ugwu the rapist is also Ugwu the lover who longs for a remembered tenderness. Olanna, not herself a victim of rape or extreme violence, nonetheless manifests post-traumatic symptoms as a result of what she has witnessed, described as ‘dark swoops’. In a sense, these symptoms may be read as a collective experience, undergone by Olanna on behalf of the other characters: A thick blanket descended from above and pressed itself over her face, firmly, while she struggled to breathe. Then, when it let go, freeing her to take in gulp after gulp of air, she saw burning owls at the window grinning and beckoning to her with charred feathers.106

After the war, when Ugwu returns to his home village, he discovers that his sister was raped and beaten by five Nigerian soldiers; later, Richard finds out that Eberechi was killed by a shell; meanwhile, Kainene, his wife and Olanna’s sister, has disappeared. In the face of universal collective and personal trauma, rape figures on a spectrum of violence which 103

Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta’, 393. Chimamanda Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (New York: Knopf/Anchor, 2006), 362. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., 157. 104

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makes everyone concerned a victim-survivor, part of a long drawn-out process of coming to terms with loss that, arguably, is still being played out in subsequent generations. As the back-and-forth chronology of Roses and Bullets makes clear, however, particular forms of sexual violence are not confined to the war. Patriarchal power relations, by which women are framed as unstable, vulnerable, and weak, subject them variously to protection, punishment, and possession by men. Part 2: ‘Before the Beginning’, is devoted to life before the War, when Ginika is a student at the Girls’ School at Elelenwa near Port Harcourt (incidentally, the same school attended by Nwapa and some of her characters). Returning late from a dance, the reaction she meets from her father is symptomatic of forms of violence to which she will be subjected during the war itself. She first fears flogging when he tells her to go to his room; then he subjects her to an internal examination to make sure she has not been interfered with. As a result of ‘this ugly incident … this violation of her body’, Ginika’s relationship with her father breaks down completely and she prefers to live with her aunt. When her brother, Nwakire, challenges her for being rebellious, and she reveals what she has hidden for two years, the forcefulness of his reaction to ‘the immoral and tyrannical invasion of Ginika’s privacy’ is an indicator of the taboo that has been broken. The very fact that he confronts their father is a sign of its seriousness, since disrespecting an elder is also a taboo: ‘You should not have done what you did; it was wrong, it was immoral and cruel. Your profession as a medical doctor and your position as her father were no justification for your conduct.’107 In response, their father tells the story of his sister’s pregnancy by her primary school teacher and her death as a result of an attempted abortion, and spells out the code by which he conducts himself as Ginika’s male protector: it is my conviction that a female child should be watched more closely in her relationship with the opposite sex than a male child. It is the female who usually gets hurt in any escapade between a man and a woman … it is the parents’ responsibility to watch over their daughter until she gets married, and only then can her parents disengage from that responsibility.108

The ‘ugly incident’, thus legitimated as acceptable discipline, leaves Ginika with nowhere to stand. Nor is it the only time she will be punished for a perceived transgression of which she is innocent. Considerable space is given to the mutual desire and intense pleasure that characterize the relationship between Ginika and Eloka, both before marriage and after, but Ginika’s lack of pregnancy does not please her mother-in-law whose possessive attitude towards Ginika’s fertility is similar to her father’s towards her virginity. Her carping and bullying, 107 108

Adimora-Ezeigbo, Roses and Bullets, Part 2. Ibid.

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indeed, lead to an act of rebellion when Ginika agrees to attend a party at the barracks with her co-worker at the refugee camp. Here, she is drugged and raped while unconscious, resulting in a pregnancy for which her parents-in-law throw her out of the house. She takes refuge with her aunt where the baby is born deformed and dies; together with her aunt’s family she faces kwashiorkor and starvation which she tries to counteract by engaging in the attack-trade. When the war ends, Nigerian soldiers occupy the local army camp where she sells akara (spicy fried bean cakes) to raise money, attracting the attention of Sule Ibrahim, a soldier who proposes to her. She puts him off by saying she cannot have sex with an uncircumcised man. Eloka returns from the war but, like everyone else, refuses to give her rape story any credence: How could a man have sex with her without her realizing it, without her crying out and calling for help … In other words, she claimed that the officer had raped her and she had not resisted him … The thought of it almost unhinged his mind … He thought that what she did was deceitful and irresponsible and he could not bring himself to overlook it. It was all about trust – and not about forgiveness or about trying to understand.109

After this rejection, the Nigerian soldier dies from undergoing circumcision and Ginika is accused of murdering him. She is dragged off to the army camp, beaten and serially raped before being rescued by her aunt and cousin, but not before Nwakire, hearing of her fate, has shot and killed both Eloka and himself. In a coda, ‘After the End’, Ginika returns to Enugu six months later to the family group she has made her own, having been accepted to study at the University at Nsukka. This truncated summary of a lengthy narrative is intended to show the extent to which this novel cleaves to a subaltern perspective: that of an innocent but powerless young woman whose words remain unheard by those with power over her, including the man she marries. The story’s location, moving from Enugu back to Port Harcourt and forward to Mbano and Ama-Oyi, signifies the narrowly focused lens through which the war will be seen. Atrocities are not lacking – as when Ginika sees the train arriving at Port Harcourt station with dismembered bodies from the North, or the air raid on Oke-Ohia market where she and Udo escape with their lives – but the most significant violence in the novel is that meted out to Ginika by her father, parents-in-law, and the men who rape her, one of whom is a Biafran officer. As Jean-Charles puts it, in African women’s texts of the 1990s and after, forms of violence may range from emotional abuse to physical assault, but … rape operates as a core and constitutive form of violence … because it is an event open to interpretation and definition by those who experience it … the intimate stories of rape can be linked to a larger history of violence against women and of 109

Ibid., part 4, section 36.

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the exclusion of women’s narratives of violation from the larger historical record.110

Not only the two novels considered here, but others (Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, but also Chris Abani’s Song for Night and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water) participate in the reclamation of those occluded stories and the dismantling of patriarchal assumptions about women’s sexuality, voice and social roles. The writers and protagonists of these novels tell a different story, not only through their feminine focus and point of view, but through the adoption of particular tropes and narrative techniques. I want to suggest, for example, that Emecheta’s un-reflexive realism is the sign of a discourse in which paternal authority is never interrogated – Debbie Ogedemgbe never questions her father’s political or parental position. As a result, though Destination Biafra may be the most overt of the post-War texts in its challenge to masculine authority, ultimately that challenge is recuperated for the cause of national unity. By contrast, the Civil War novels of Third Generation women writers are part of a wider corpus that fundamentally questions, not only the authority of fathers, but the legitimacy of official history by which nationalism is configured. Traditional tropes and the semiotics of femininity I want to turn now to the ‘suppressed semiotic’ by which Adichie and Ezeigbo figure their protagonists as simultaneously ‘radically modern’ and inflected by an Igbo orality and traditional belief system that speak to an alternative social reality. In ‘The War’s untold Story’, a short story of 44 pages published more than a decade before Roses and Bullets, Ezeigbo narrates the story of Olewo, a young woman displaced by the war and driven to survive by her wits.111 The piece is structured so as to postpone the resolution and along the way deliver several surprises. In the first 24 pages, we see Olewo escaping from two marauding ‘vandals’ who are threatening to rape her, only to realize she is dreaming. She wakes up in bed with Emman, a Biafran captain, with whom, however, she is in a familial rather than a romantic relationship. We see her return from the refugee camp where she works, stricken by the deaths, from eating poisonous mushrooms, of two children whose grave she has helped to dig. We hear how Ndubisi, an older man with the title Deputy Director of Fuel Directorate, with whom she is in a relationship, let her down by abandoning her when the village was ordered to evacuate. Emman deals with him and urges Olewo to join his own mother and sisters in Ogboji, where they are growing food to feed the war effort. The story could end there, but the equally long second section switches to Ogboji, ‘Biafra’s food basket’ and ‘an important base of the 110 111

Jean-Charles, RAL, 44. A. Adimora-Ezeigbo, ‘The War’s Untold Story’, in her Echoes in the Mind (Lagos: Foundation, 1994).

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land army’.112 Here, ‘the war’s untold story’ is played out, its heroes the women who labor daily under the hot sun to grow crops, or answer the call of the Community Council to shell sacks of groundnuts. As in Nwapa’s ‘A Certain Death’, where a sister pays a stranger to replace her brother in the army, the dread of conscription leads Emman’s mother, Nwalemu, to conceal her younger son from ‘the patriarchs controlling the war [who] send off to the fighting zone boys armed with sticks’.113 At first, Ogboji seems to offer peace and relative safety. As they return from the farm, Otaru, the spring where the women stop and bathe, is a focus of feminine activity, a ‘woman-manned … hive of industry’, with women cleaning cassava, collecting water, and bathing.114 Immersion in the water is a source of pleasure and purification for the women, who leave ‘refreshed, cleansed and invigorated by the healing water of Otaru’.115 Sacred bodies of water feature in Emecheta’s Destination Biafra and other novels (the River Niger and the streams of Ibuza) and Nwapa’s Never Again, as well as Efuru and Idu (the lake presided over by the goddess Uhamiri who protects the town of Ugwuta). Though not explicitly addressed as such, Otaru is another of these sacred waters, signifying feminine power, fertility, and the collective harmony that has been disrupted by the war. After bathing in the spring, and despite her realization that ‘nowhere in Biafra was safe, after all’, when Nwalemu’s son is conscripted Olewo understands that her role is to use her contacts to get him back: ‘One should do what one could to stay alive. And do what was possible to help others stay alive.’116 Nwapa’s Uhamiri is interpreted as the spiritual mother who stands in opposition to a patriarchal Christian god; by the same token, she signifies a traditional femininity that was sidelined by colonization and is still under threat from a contemporary masculinist politics driven by greed. Uhamiri is one of a series of water spirits ranging from tutelary goddesses to Mamiwata (water goddesses with mermaid-like features), who populate Igbo iconography and appear in the form of female avatars in Nigerian writing, from Christopher Okigbo, a devotee of the water goddess Idoto, whose poetry is filled with images of water spirits, to the novels of Adichie and Ezeigbo. In Half of a Yellow Sun, Okigbo himself is invoked in the figure of Okeoma, the poet who visits Odenigbo in Nsukka and is captivated by Olanna whom he describes as a ‘mermaid’, In Roses and Bullets, Eloka, who becomes Ginika’s husband, first approaches her to ask her to play ‘mermaid, the sea princess’, in the play he has written, titled MammyWata, which he describes as ‘a political allegory of the war between 112

Ibid., 81. Ibid., 168. 114 Ibid., 88. 115 Ibid., 89. 116 Ibid., 97. 113

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Nigeria and Biafra’.117 Thereafter, Ginika is repeatedly referred to as his ‘mermaid’. If Olanna and Ginika are figured as Mamiwata, another recurring trope from traditional iconography is that of the Ogbanje, the troublesome child that grieves its mother by dying, and whose characteristics are said to include ambiguity and duality. While duality is indeed an aspect of the female protagonists of these two novels, signified by their restlessness, their refusal of convention and determination to find love on their own terms, there are also more obvious Ogbanje figures. I have argued elsewhere that Olanna’s sister, Kainene, plays an Ogbanje role by disappearing at the end of the narrative;118 but there are also Baby, the child of Odenigbo – an Ogbanje who survives because Olanna adopts her as her own, as well as the stillborn child to which Ginika gives birth after her rape.119 This deformed baby is reminiscent of baby Biafra in Destination Biafra, who dies after being carried for miles on Debbie’s back through the bush, and the lost child of the pregnant woman who dies on the road out of Ugwuta in Never Again. One of the ways in which Eloka’s play, MammyWata, may be ‘a political allegory of the war between Nigeria and Biafra’, is the use of childlessness as a signifier. The fact that the great beauty of the play’s childless woman also makes her desirable and enticing could explain why Nigeria has gone to war to take possession of Biafra, the Mamiwata country that sacrifices its children. The use of what I am calling a ‘suppressed semiotic’ has been addressed by other critics, notably Madhu Krishnan. For Krishnan, ‘the occluded feminine’ (her term) so far permeates male- and femaleauthored novels by Igbo writers, from Achebe to Abani, as to constitute ‘an alternative paradigm for discourses of gender’. 120 By embodying pre-colonial womanhood, this occluded feminine, discernible in the shape of water spirits like Idemili and Mamiwata, signifies an alternative to postcolonial modes of theorizing identity, emphasizing ambivalence, instability and heterogeneity. The feminine emerges, she concludes, ‘as a tongue spoken in a distinct code uncontainable within the dominant discourse of the Nigerian novel, and instead reclaims its centrality as a marker of the ambivalence which marks the postcolonial Nigerian condition’.121 By extending the paradigm from a defining feature of

117

Adimora-Ezeigbo, Roses and Bullets, Part 1, Ch. 2. See Jane Bryce, ‘“Half and Half Children”: Third-Generation Women Writers and the New Nigerian Novel’, RAL 39:2 (2008), 49–67, for a more detailed discussion of Half of a Yellow Sun and the use of traditional tropes. 119 ‘Ginikanwa’: ‘Nothing is greater than a child’, www.umuigbo.com/igbo-names/g.html (accessed February 19, 2015). 120 M. Krishnan, ‘Mami Wata and the Occluded Feminine in Anglophone Nigerian-Igbo Literature’, 43:1 (2012), 2. 121 Ibid., 15. 118

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women’s writing to a foundational trope of Nigerian writing in general, this insight invites a further elaboration. Discussing the traditional ontological concepts that can be gleaned from African orality, Ghanaian philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu, speaks of a ‘normative’ idea of personhood – personhood as something to be aspired to and achieved through one’s own efforts. Yoruba belief, for example, tells us that humans choose their ori – literally, their head, or personal destiny – and are therefore responsible for what they become. In other words, to be human is to have a code of ethics; not to have one, or to be subjected to a situation where no-one around you has one, is to be less than human, to be animalized, as Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy and Abani’s child soldier in Song for Night, very well know; as Ginika experiences when she is imprisoned, raped and beaten. In Yoruba, this aspirational condition of personhood is known as eniyan; in Bantu languages it is known generically as ubuntu; while onipa in Akan, means ‘a human individual of a certain moral and social standing’, which, Wiredu says, ‘is naturally uppermost in the mind in contexts of social commentary or moral self-examination’.122 The novels I have discussed, I believe, offer such commentary and self-examination in the context of the Biafran Civil War, an event which called personhood into question. The Igbo chi, described by Echeruo as ‘probably one of the most complex theological concepts ever devised to explain the universe’, is at the root of the Igbo sense of personhood, of what it means to be human.123 Wiredu tells us that in African orality, communalism, kinship, and reciprocity are ‘the source of a sense of human connectedness’;124 it follows that the breaking of that connectedness – through acts of violence, war, rape, etc. – reduces the perpetrator, no less than the victim, to something less than human. In this regard, war novels that draw on a suppressed semiotic through the use of traditional tropes raise questions, not only about femininity, but about what it means to be human. These questions, contextualized as arising from the War, reverberate in the twenty-first century and make Biafra a key signifier in the construction of Nigerian personhood.

122

Kwasi Wiredu, ‘An Oral Philosophy of Personhood: Comments on Philosophy and Orality’, RAL 40:1 (2009), 16–17. 123 M.C. Onukawa, ‘The Chi Concept in Igbo Gender Naming’, Africa 70:1 (2000), 107. 124 Wiredu, ‘An Oral Philosophy’, 15.

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Female Participation in War and the Implication of Nationalism The Postcolonial Disconnection in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra Ofure O.M. Aito

Introduction War is a subjective experience defined by idealistic whims of leadership through which leaders seek to maintain a system of ideological participation. Further, war is purposeful as one group attempts to destroy or weaken the other in order to gain greater access and/or control, or convert the other into a form more beneficial to the dominant group. It starts as an idealism that results in disruptions such as, victimization, rebellion, and resistance, and it finally ends in conflict. Often, violence, victimization, and genocide are major consequences of war ignited in the ‘spirit of patriotism’. Nigeria as a nation is vast in territory, diverse in ethnicity and language, and has been confronted with issues of disputed borders and boundaries. With a history of violent conflicts, Nigeria’s first major experience of political transition was marked by military coups, geopolitical rebellion, and civil war from 1967 to 1970 (indicated as a nationalist/liberation war with ethnic-political undertones), which have resulted in historical and fictional literary works. The Civil War of 1967–1970 was the culmination of the geographical contradictions and political imbalances that existed in the nation since she came under colonial occupation. The geographical contradictions depict elements of tribalism/ethnicity, political and ideological ‘accidentals’ of the Western economic agenda, administrative miscalculations, local political rivalries, the 1963 census recount, the 1964/65 election, borders and boundaries disparities, dominant ethnic control, the discovery of and struggle for control of oil wealth, and individual betrayal and disillusionment. This chapter focuses on Buchi Emecheta’s fictionalization of the historical ‘accidentals’ of the 1967–1970 ‘pogrom’ – termed the Biafran War. Her work focuses on the struggle for national and ethnic identities, female participation, the negotiation of identity performance, and conflict resolution. It also focuses on the consequences of these historical ‘accidentals’ on the current political dispensation from a futuristic literary perspective. Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1983), as a part of a womanly, fictional continuum that helps define national 454

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and individual identities, is a narrative placed within a specific cultural location and context. On the one hand, she explores the points of conflict between the dominant identities represented by the West, the political leaders, and the Army, who latched on the manipulation of ethnic sentiments in their bid to access and control the oil wealth. On the other, the dominated identities are represented by the masses, particularly the women, in the pursuit of nationalism, personal rediscovery, and development. Emecheta’s narrative moves beyond being a journalistic repertoire of past events to a skeptical account of the corrupt governance that tends towards neo-colonialism. It is a foregrounding of history in fiction, from a woman’s perspective, to depict the facts of a national conflict and the challenges of the postcolonial transition process that disconnected and degenerated into disillusionment and war. Thus, the focus here is to investigate Emecheta’s view of the motifs of pain and disillusionment, socio-political disconnection, and the attendant victimization of various parties involved in the conflicts. In addition, the work highlights the female negotiating power in national and political conflicts, drawing upon the issues of war and the inter-group rivalry over ethnicity and the struggle for control of oil wealth. The paper takes various approaches, including an interrogation of the implications of nationalism within the notion of postcolonialism in Nigeria and its ambivalences in ethnicity through the blend of facts and fiction of civil war. In addition, the novel considers the disconnection in ethnic formation of Nigeria, and focuses on the burgeoning trend of female participation in war and significance in national and individual recognition, especially in the changing values of female identity in contemporary society. All lead to revealing how the novel represents the disconnection in human ideals and the significance of female presence in conflict resolution.

The Nigeria-Biafra War: Facts and Fiction of a Postcolonial Disconnection In Destination Biafra, the readers encounter a realistic recollection of history of Nigeria’s transition from colonialism to postcolonial self-rule. Emecheta has been greatly influenced by male literary chronicles about Civil War that failed to address the gender make-up of the imagined community. The writing of the novel is particularly influenced by Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died, which provides the idea about the plights of the minority tribal groups in Nigeria who are non-Igbos – the Mid-Western peoples on whose grounds the battle of personal idealism was fought – in the quest for ‘unitary nationalism’. The novel presents the consequences of the imperial carve-up of borders and boundaries (an administrative balkanization underwritten by British and French powers), which perennially assures Nigerians of nominal political control and

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unity.1 Unfortunately, lumping together people with divergent histories, cultures, tribes, religions, and languages raises questions about their social and political balance and consolidation in the shadows of the Western imperialism, even in the more-recent religious terrorism. The manipulation of political structure laid out by the colonialists glaringly depicts difference and pre-empts rebellion. Difference and rebellion are the beacons of independent Nigeria to date, with each ethnic group seeking to protect its own territorial identity. In other words, the ‘imaginary’ independent structure of Western creation is defined by contradictions, struggles, divisions, and constant threats of secession. The background difference and resistance in postcolonial Nigeria inform Emecheta’s literary writing, which explores the issues of difference by measuring it against the social and political conditions in the post-independence era also referred to as ‘post-contact’ disconnection by Elleke Boehmer.2 Destination Biafra, like many other Nigerian fictional narratives, represents these social and political events that have shaped the societies since the outset of Western imperialism, and refract the dynamism of the people since independence. The contemporary or postcolonial narratives have focused on anti-colonial struggles that have galvanized into war. Consequently, Nigerian fiction has become a veritable weapon for resistance, depicting postcolonial disillusionment with the economic and political imbalances in the societies that result from colonial experience and a corrupt postcolonial leadership system. It has also become the intellectual site for representing the confusion and contradiction that clearly mark the ethnic divisions of the colonized nations. Joya Uraizee, aligning with Eric Hobsbawm’s argument, comments that the postcolonial divisions and conflicts are the consequences of the random structure of the West for administrative zones and ‘economic control’. Uraizee’s view is that the omissions of the colonized nations are a result of colonialists’ lack of cultural knowledge of the people and their diversity.3 Her view implies that the agenda behind lumping ethnically and politically diverse people in hybrids or collective groups is an economic prognosis for granting independence that has left several African nations mired in ethnic conflict, and political and ideological states of confusion. Nigerian history of civil war, reflecting a typical Western lack of knowledge, presents a new experience of transition to new rule (self-rule) that deposits upon literature a new genre of literary interest about the anarchy that followed the political transition. 1

Wole Soyinka, The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (London: Rex Collings, 1973). Elleke Boehmer, ‘Introduction’, in her Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 115. 3 Joya Uraizee, ‘Fragmented Borders and Female Boundary Markers in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 30:1–2 (1997), 16. 2

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The Implications of Nationalism and Postcolonial Ambivalences The contestations of political imbroglio, ethnic conflicts, election abuses, and nationalist confusion are borne of idealistic attachment in one’s collective (familiar) space – tribal loyalty marked by the nation’s arbitrary history of transition. In this context, many Nigerian novels by male writers, such as Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died (1973), Chinua Achebe’s Girls at War (1972), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), Festus Iyayi’s The Heroes (1986), and Helon Habila’s Measuring Time (2007), conceptualize the created spaces (national order) or regions as structured by continual drawing and redrawing of imaginary and arbitrary boundaries. These boundaries ignite conflicts of ethnicity, political differences, corruption, disillusionment, rebellions, war, gender imbalance, and the discovery of oil wells. Modern African fiction features these ambivalences that emerge from the artificial or hybridized, sociopolitical, and cultural mapping of the West and also raises doubts about the authenticity of postcolonial experience and nationalism struggle. Scholars have mobilized postcolonialism as a theory and period marker to engage in critical assessment of literary texts produced in countries and cultures that have come into contact with the Western imperialist mission. However, scholars’ interrogations are based on existing colonial structures, which are questionable in the face of postindependence challenges. In Edward Said’s Orientalism, postcolonialism focuses on correcting the colonizer’s invented false images, myths and other (mis)representations of the ‘Third World’ in stereotypical images to conveniently justify Western exploitation and domination of Eastern and Middle-Eastern cultures and people.4 Homi Bhabha also shows how certain cultures (mis)represent other cultures, thereby extending their political and social domination in the modern world order.5 Postcolonial theory recognizes cultural identities in colonized societies and deals with the danger of developing a national identity after colonial rule, particularly the ways in which writers articulate and celebrate their colonialism via images of the colonized as perpetually inferior peoples, societies, and cultures. Nonetheless, many critics have expressed concerns about the authenticity of this theory in addressing the binary opposition structures of superiority versus inferiority of cultures and peoples. Critics like Kwame Anthony Appiah have further questioned the term postcolonialism and argued that it is frequently misunderstood as a temporal concept about the time after colonialism, or following the politically determined Independence Day, when a

4

Edward Said, Orientalism (Atlanta, GA: Vintage Books, 1979), 83. Homi Bhabha, ‘Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative’, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

5

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country breaks away from its governance by another state.6 To Said, it is an engagement with and contestation of the colonialist’s discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies. It is, thus, the colonized reply to the colonizer’s legacy by writing back to the center, when the indigenous peoples write their own histories and legacies using the colonizer’s language. However, the theory addresses matters of identity, gender, race, and ethnicity and the challenges of developing a postcolonial identity. Martin Japtok in the introduction to his collection of essays builds upon the argument about the meaning of postcolonialism and its authenticity by re-examining its advantages in the present war-torn independent African nations that are weighted by historical and cultural differences, despite the imaginary sense of geographical unity.7 Japtok questions the significance of independence or postcolonialism: is it a new, possibly invidious form of perpetuating Western hegemony through relating all ‘peripheries’ to a ‘center’ like the spokes of a wheel, thus, constricting the ability to interact with one another as long as change is focused on the West.8 These issues may be paramount in Emecheta’s Destination Biafra, representing an anti-imperialist attitude in the nationalist conflicts, negotiation, and transformation that have trailed postcolonial Africa, especially Nigeria, where attention focused on the West for resolution. In his attempt to answer the questions and implications of post-independence and postcoloniality tags, Japtok adopts Françoise Lionnet’s alternative proposal to postcolonialism which is ‘post-contact’. Lionnet infers that the ‘post’ in postcolonialism implies more than the static periodization after colonialism: ‘In fact, I find it useful to think of “postcoloniality” in terms of “post-contact”: that is as a condition that exists within, and thus contests and resists the colonial moment, itself with its ideology of domination.’9 To many, postcoloniality defies specific answers; it has become a theoretical adoption to understanding the contest between the colonizers and the colonized as well as the continued imperialist domination by the West and by African leaders. It is an interrogative approach to the spinoffs of colonialism and post-independence African leadership systems in order to analyse the ‘truth’ and the meaning of independence. In this chapter, Martin Japtok’s submission of postcoloniality as before and post-contact as after, as an interchange for postcoloniality, will be constantly referred to in the critical interrogation of the post-independence 6

Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Is the “Post” in “Postcolonial” the “Post” in “Postmodern”?’ in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, edited by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 420. 7 Martin Japtok, ed., ‘Introduction’, Postcolonial Perspectives on Women Writers: From Africa, the Caribbean and the U.S. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998), x. 8 Ibid., x–xi. 9 Françoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 4.

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disconnection in the Nigeria-Biafra War in Destination Biafra. The reference to the ‘post-contact’ line of argument is as a result of the skepticism that has trailed the notion of ‘marginal’ independence of Nigeria, which is subjective in terms of the unsettling continued Western influence and the failed liberation/nationalist impetus for independence. The failure of the ‘nationalist’ revolutionaries and the military reactionaries to attain a national unity in Nigeria has justified the doubt about the truth of postcolonial freedom and the illusionary/nominal unity.

The Nigeria-Biafra War: A Fundamental Conflict The Nigeria-Biafra Civil War of 1967–1970 was premised on the nationalist vision of an ideal national unity, freedom from Northern oligarchy, and military ‘personal’ idealism in what is seen as a conflict between nationalist revolutionaries and the military reactionaries. The consequences of this conflict defined the future structural bases of Nigeria and its peoples in terms of politics, religion, ethnicity, and economy, and it represented the first of many conflicts after colonialism. It marked the tragedy of evolution into a postmodern society in which the historical, socio-political conflict deposited a new genre of literary interests. The postcolonial contact or post-independence experience, which was triggered by a Nigerian Army revolutionary coup to overthrow the corrupt civilian government of Sir Abubakar Tafewa Balewa and to correct the electoral malpractices of 1964/65, resulted in different reactions and responses. The Army reactionary coup that instated the military rule of Yakubu Gowon was motivated by the ideals and principles of ‘one Nigeria’ and the desire to establish a new post-independence era, stamp out corruption and, above all, end the reign of terror in Western Nigeria. Accordingly this fact was established by Adewale Ademoyega in his extraction of Major Kaduna Nzeogwu’s revolutionary radio declaration: ‘Our enemies are the politicians’ profiteers, the swindlers; the men in high and low places that seek bribes and demand ten percent … the tribalists; those that have corrupted our society … and the ethno-religious terrorism of Boko Haram.’10 The survival of Nigeria was severely under the siege of corrupt leadership and influential presence of the Western imperialist who navigated the crisis to their respective economic advantages. The factors of the war stated by the Army were the results of the existing threats to national stability. According to Theodora Ezeigbo, ‘the 1966 coup hastened Nigeria’s collapse … from independence to January 1966, the country had been in serious turmoil; but the coup put the country in an

10

Adewale Ademoyega, Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup (Ibadan: Evans Brothers, 1981), 84, emphasis added.

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even graver situation’.11 The reactions regarding the eventful periods before the civil war were results of various and divergent perceptions that determined the grave actions that followed the coup, such as disillusionment, idealism, geographical ambivalence, ethnic rivalry, desires for political and economic control, and the imperialists’ double-deal strategy. All these historical determinants of modern Nigeria created an imbroglio in the notion of a nation, and planted the seeds of ethnic distrust and struggle for identity and recognition that characterized the nation. Such characteristics snowballed into present situations such as the constant religious conflicts, ethnic rivalry between the Hausas and the Igbos, and the militancy of the Niger Delta, and informed the new generation of writers’ thematic focus in Nigerian literature. Through their art, literary writers interrogated the morality of the war in order to justify the behavioral patterns of the people in the contemporary political dispensation. The war may thus be regarded as a ‘political intercourse’. This means that the ambivalences of geographical contradiction in the form of ethnicity (borders and boundaries) and cultural differences as they culminate in conflicts have inherent political significances, even though the responses or perceptions are represented differently. War in this sense becomes ‘accidental’ in the collective human intentions that defy a concise prediction. Yet, it is a historical reference and a fictional material for investigating its morality and shocking into consciousness the people’s sensibility in the post-war era, in order to reshape the future. In order to give insights into the reality of the past and make a case for anti-war views in the present socio-political contestations, divergent perceptions about the violence and human suffering during the civil war became biographical narratives or fictional documentations or eyewitness accounts. Male writers such as Wole Soyinka in The Man Died represent the plights of the masses, while Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn (1976) and Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty (1976) portrayed the common man as the real hero. The female fictional expressions of the war as documented by Flora Nwapa in Never Again (1975), Buchi Emecheta in Destination Biafra, and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of the Yellow Sun (2006) provide characteristic stark details of female sexual violation and political sacrifices on the altar of negotiation, degradation, and victimization unleashed on the people. This category of writers depict from the feminist point of view Nigeria’s political history from the days of independence, highlighting the corruption, the lack of vision and incompetence of the men who ruled the nation.

11

Theodora Ezeigbo, Fact & Fiction in the Literature of the Nigerian Civil War (Lagos: Unity Publishing & Research, 1991), 15.

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Nationalism and Female Negotiation: The Postcolonial Disconnection in Destination Biafra Buchi Emecheta’s nationalist postcolonial narrative presents an ambivalent position of war and female roles in national conflict and peace. It is more or less a chronological eye-witness account given to her by her people in Ibuza who were victims of the Nigerian Civil War. In fact, Destination Biafra was informed by survivors of the civil strife like Maria Nwukor. Her personal experience as a victim and survivor of the war in her struggle to reunite with her estranged family is embodied in the journey motif of the character Mrs Madako, Bonny, the kettle boy, and Ogo. By subjecting history into a realistic mode, Emecheta depicts the tragic events and the dehumanization of the ordinary people (especially women and children) in her skeptical fictionalization of history. Thus in rewriting history in order to ‘write home’ her bitterness about the war, she presents gender-conscious commentary on Achebe’ epochal oeuvre and recasts Flora Nwapa’s narrative endeavor. Emecheta, one could assume, reconstructed Nwapa’s Biafran wives’ and market women’s survival struggles by portraying a militant-feminist heroine on a mission of historical/war intervention and nationalist redefinition. The novel, a chronological documentation of war, is focused on re-imagining nationality, subjectivity, and sexuality as reactions to the disillusionment in postcolonialism. Her work reveals that these are interwoven with the nationalist quest for identity. In order to strengthen her submission, she projects the changing conditions of women in a changing society in Africa that was once an imperialist colony. In no other novel, however, is she more vociferous about the issues of nationalism woven around subjectivity and sexuality, with the woman as a peacemaker or conflict negotiator in the nation’s heterogeneous imaginary make-up, than in the ironic novel, Destination Biafra. Emecheta, like Nwapa, recasts the African social space of women and attempts to redefine ironically the postcolonial nation from her points of view. However, her narrative of female socio-political space during the emerging nationalist consciousness and civil war is taken from the standpoint of ambivalence about the implications of ‘one nation’ and female sexuality, which deviates from Nwapa’s Never Again representation of Biafran women’s survival strategies. Indeed, Emecheta’s Destination Biafra methodologically has been categorized as ‘temporal/ territorial’ by Elleke Boehmer, who regards it as (auto)biographical, in so far as Emecheta’s heroines play out episodes from her family’s matrilineal history throughout the novel.12 That is, she (auto)biographically transforms key experiences in her national history and life into the leitmotifs of her narrative: she extracts events and images that represent 12

Elleke Boehmer, ‘Introduction’, 114.

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women’s day-to-day struggles and realities to define the socio-political space of African women, especially Igbo women, in order to capture their identity or significance. Emecheta’s chronology of the civil war, such as the conditions and the contradictions before and during it, is literarily demonstrated in identity and sexual evolution, and in the significance of women in the national transformation process. In this vein, she reconstructs Nwapa’s narrative from the opposing ends of the war on the grounds of seeking unity in Nigeria through a contemporary heroine who reflects the can-do assertiveness of traditional Igbo women. Destination Biafra demonstrates Emecheta’s commitment to historical intervention and the national redefinition of socio-political ideals. Male writers have represented the war in patriarchal terms. Thus, the novel represents a female, anti-imperialist fictionalization of the plights of the ordinary people and women’s sexual subjectivity, victimization, and negotiation during war, and their participation in peace-making. In short, the fictional reconstruction of the painful history of national division and discrimination is based on ethnicity and imperialist overtures in national order and female sexual subjectivity. The novel represents the emergence of new women from the private sphere into the national discourse. The literary assertion depicts the inner strength and identity perceptions of traditional and ‘newly’ independent women as well as their ability to manage and respond to conflicts. It is a representation of the challenges of ‘post-contact’ process in Nigeria, featuring national division occasioned by the imperialist economic mission and the ethnic disaster through border and boundary divisions. Thematically, Destination Biafra portrays the ambivalent position of women in nationalist discourses. It questions the notion of political idealism and depicts the ambivalent reality of nationalism, the stark truths of violence and victimization, and the significance of negotiations during violent war. In the novel, women and children suffer just as ethnicity becomes the weapon of war. In Joya Uraizee’s view, the fragmented borders and boundaries of a nation are outlined symbolically in the identity and conditions of women. In essence, women are the ‘repositories’, however, ambivalent.13 This position is taken from Deniz Kandiyoti’s argument in another context that, as the nation transitions to neo-colonialism from the threshold of postcoloniality, the female status also transports into the ‘privileged repositor[ies] of uncontaminated national values’.14 Uraizee explains that the female characters as ‘privileged repositor[ies]’ in Destination Biafra become at various times the ‘boundary markers’, or the negotiators in the various communities 13 14

Uraizee, ‘Fragmented Borders’, 16. Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Identity and Its Discontents: Women and Nation’, in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 376–91.

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within the constantly fluid geographical structures.15 Her submission is that Emecheta’s narrative suggests that the position of Nigerian women within fluctuating borders is ambivalent. Sometimes they are victims of violence and at other times symbolic of the transition process of the nation. The novel focuses on a young Oxford-trained unmarried woman, Orisha Debbie Ogedemgbe, a self-consciously patriotic ‘new woman’ of the federated Nigeria who refracts the scene of the war, and eventually, redefines the nation. This woman is not a combatant or militia woman, as one finds in Achebe’s Girls at War, probably as a result of the intractability of the war materials. Yet her solution is aimed at the heart of male-dominant idealism in politics and narratives of the war. Thus, Emecheta, boldly rewriting Biafra’s history from a women-centered perspective, invents an idealized heroine who is caught in the web of male idealism. The heroine attempts to negotiate the consequences of such idealism by claiming Nigerianness, rather than becoming a member of one of the dominant ethnic groups – Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa – who are in conflict for political and economic control. The novel is premised on the awareness of the relationship between literature and its historical context(s), which Susan Andrade describes as a recast of the Igbo Women’s War or Aba Riot of 1929.16 Importantly, it examines the consequences of the civil war: victimization and rape, corruption, the notion of nationalism, and the disillusionment occasioned by ideological differences and geo-political or ethnic conflict. Destination Biafra represents the disconnection in the ideals of nationalism in the national, ethnic, and individual transitional changes after colonialism. Thus, it presents the transition process of Nigeria from colonialism to postcolonialism to ‘new’ colonialism, resulting in a complex war of idealization in a triangular form. For the Nigerian forces, the war was to unite the nation; for the Biafran force, it was a war of freedom; to the soldiers in the Nigerian forces, it became a revenge mission for the death of their religious and political leaders in the first revolution; to the heroine, Debbie, it marked the death of idealism and vision and the birth of division and disillusionment. Symbolically, it marks the transition of Nigerian women from traditional roles as politically suppressed, economically dependent, and educationally backward to an idealized status of new women and ‘the privileged repositories’ of nationalist notions. The initial postcolonial disconnection is marked by the imperialists’ political miscalculation about the ethnic unification of a diverse society. This Western political/economic motivation posits a number of 15 16

Uraizee, ‘Fragmented Borders’, 17. Susan Andrade, ‘The Joys of Daughterhood: Gender, Nationalism, and the Making of Literary Tradition(s)’, in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, edited by Deidre Lynch and William Warner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 249–75.

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responses, such as rebellion, ethnic distrust, and war. The first sign of political disconnection and national conflict is marked by the 1964/65 election. This is followed by other forms of conflicts or rebellions such as the military coup that idealized ‘a new meaning of independence’.17 The idealized utopia ‘Destination Biafra’ projects both individual and national significance. Each situation and character in the novel nurtures a personal meaning of ‘Destination Biafra’. The individual and national utopia is symbolized by Debbie as the new African woman, on an identity transformation mission, when she declares her interest in joining the Army, a male-dominant profession, in order to contribute to the development of her nation. Her desire is informed by the political vision of a new world for her society and the women based on the idealized part within the framework of psychofeminist impulses. The military utopia and Debbie’s impulsive idealism interrogate the implications of independence in the face of new imperialism, and also undercut the political visions of the party leaders, who are leaders without power: ‘A president without the power.’18 The novelist’s characterization is skeptical of the mainstream of political transformation, which suggests that the postcolonial project as a whole is a fraud and is a time bomb about to detonate based on the various idealized visions and impulses of the characters. The idealized impulses reflect political and sexual fractions, the belief in the possibility of a future without the imposing presence of the Western control, and the refraction of past visibility of African women before the advent of colonialism. Thus, Emecheta’s Destination Biafra is an ironic questioning of the imperialists’ imaginary civilization project, political veniality, the conditions of war, the vulnerability of the human society to social and political idealization of a group and the viability of a new-woman image in a patriarchal society. These ironic musings are played out in the various events that chronicle the war. On the road to national and female redefinition of identity, the answers are figured out. The journey motif in the novel, rather than mark a rediscovery or regeneration, symbolizes the death of innocence, unity, and growth for Nigeria and the people. Emecheta’s literary work simply acknowledges that women are intrinsic to national imagination through their articulation as determinate subject positions. However, within Emecheta’s symbolic representation of the socially and politically disconnected civilization project of the West, the issue of nationalism consciously emerges. In fact, the trailblazer of idealism is the national consciousness for one Nigeria flagged by the imperialists, the politicians, the Army, and the new-generation women like Debbie. The narrative is significantly a representation of female perspectives towards national unity, their participation or long-suffering and, in 17 18

Buchi Emecheta, Destination Biafra (Glasgow: Fontana and William Collins, 1983), 60 Ibid., 34.

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essence, endorses the nationalistic commitment to war narratives of Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died and, more recently, Helon Habila’s Measuring Time. Emecheta, on a mission of seeking the truth in a country influenced, defined, and structured by the Western economic imperialist system, takes up the nationalist mission through the character of Orisha Debbie, a non-partisan who is neither Igbo, nor Hausa, nor Yoruba. Debbie must either reconcile her differences or reconstruct the disconnection in the postcolonial nation and unveil the facade of nationalist commitment. Either way, as the protagonist, she takes up the mission of connecting and reconstructing history in order to make sense of the present claims to the nation’s integrity and political and economic independence. Her idealist impulse of being a national figure contributing to the development of her country, leads her on a pilgrimage of national rescue and self-discovery, which counters the oppressive formation of the elites’ interest and traditional perception of female identity as docile. In the representation of the issue of nationalism, Emecheta portrays ethnic differences in the interpretations of and the implications for nationalism. To the politicians, nationalism means power, corruption, empty promises, and personal gains. This is depicted in the corrupt practices of characters like the Minister of Finance, Samuel Ogedemgbe’s dealings with the West, the incessant tussle for power and hostility between Chief Odumosu and Chief Durosaro, and Alhaji Manliki’s election promise: ‘I shall feed you every Jimoh Day.’19 To the colonialists, African nationalism means political skirmishes to the advantage of the crown. This is summed up by Alan Grey’s description of the three ethnic groups, and his interchange with Governor Macdonald: ‘The Yoruba have been dealing with us for decades … There is no doubt that [the Igbos] are extremely intelligent. But they are greedy as well, and their arrogance could lead them into trouble. Also, the greater portions of the oil areas are in their region; so one has to be very careful how the country is divided constitutionally.’ … ‘But are Hausas not greater in number? … Then there is no problem. Introduce democracy, and let the Hausas rule forever. You did say they are not so ambitious, and they are happy in the Moslem faith?’20

Emecheta sums up the colonialists outlook on the colonized nation by depicting their perception and lack of understanding of the ethnic ties and hegemony that exist and also define the colonized political structure. Governor Macdonald pontificates the imperialist mission and motif:

19 20

Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 12. Ibid., 7.

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I think it’s about time we let them go, but not completely … now is the right time to introduce the type of government they should have. It means our type of democracy, may be adjusted here and there to suit the local people. All independence will give to them is the right to govern themselves. That has nothing to do with whom they trade with.21

Macdonald’s statement justifies both the mission of colonialism and postcolonial independence. In this sense, each group strives for dominance and personal gains to the detriment of national development. The Army, entrusted with the security issues of the nation that ranged from protection of land and properties to ensuring successful transition from colonialism to postcolonialism, also carries a flag of nationalism with connotations. The Army has been involved in governance for 33 years – from the outset of independence – yet the its nationalist commitment is idealized: defined by ethnicity and personal betrayals. The Army as a national conscious group, proposing a national cleansing of corrupt politicians and Western type of democracy, is informed by the patriotic spirit of national development, but individual members exhibit different notions of nationalism. For Brigadier Onyemere Nwokolo, Major John, and other majors, it means the ideal independence: the salvaging of Nigeria from corrupt politicians and British colonialists in order to create ‘a new Nigeria’ free of the ethnic preposition of Major Chijioke Abosi. To individuals like Major Abosi, Dr Eze and Dr Ezimba, nationalism means secession (ethno-nationalism) and regional control of natural resources predominant in the Mid-Western Region. Major Abosi ambitiously rides on other nationalists’ vision for a state of Biafra even at the expense of suffering, pains, and disillusionment of the people he plans to rule. The nationalist project of re-imaging Nigeria is thus defined by ethnicity – Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa notions of nationalism, which escalated into an internecine war. The nationalist ambitions of the Eastern Igbos and Hausas precipitate the conflicts and the civil war: ‘Many Ibos [sic] in Sabon Garri quarters of the North regard the coup as an Ibo success and were arrogant in their joy.’22 Thus, the civil war targets the Igbos in retaliation for their lack of nationalist sacrifice: An Ibo officer asking me what he has done to deserve this? I will tell you. You people want to rule the country, don’t you? You rushed into the army, into the government, into all the lucrative positions in the country, not satisfied with that you killed all the politicians from other tribes and then your man the brigadier became self-appointed head of state … going round the regions preaching ‘One Nigeria’.23

The perceptions and attitudes towards the notion of ‘one Nigeria’ are 21

Ibid., 7. Ibid., 69. 23 Ibid., 82. 22

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further encapsulated by Major Abosi and Sergeant Salihu Lawal, each depicting individual’s tribal sentiments, which escalated the war. Lawal expresses the Northern attitude towards a united nation by advocating an independent ethnic grouping supported by the West. However, to Major Oladapo from the Western Region (Yoruba), the notion of nationalism implies self-sacrifice and loyalty to all tribes.24 The notion of national emancipation, development, and tribal integration also catches on the new breed of educated women like Debbie and Babs Teteku who enlisted into the Army.25 Their entrance into that male-dominated world initiated a new world of women and deconstructs patriarchal dominance, especially in the tense socio-political atmosphere of the time. This deconstruction is further manifested in subsequent war situations in contemporary Africa such as in the wartorn Liberia and the myth of the Colonel ‘Black Diamond’, whose participation in war and media image subvert the notion of war as a male prerogative. That is, in the recently reconciled nations like Liberia, the dominant and powerful presence of Colonel Black Diamond impresses the involvement or agency of women in conflicts and resolutions. According to Mats Utas, as the head of the Women’s Auxiliary Corps in Liberia, she commanded a group of girls and young women who spread fear, if not respect, among Monrovians at the time of Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy’s final advance on the city. Her appearance in Western media drew popular attention to young female fighters in African Civil Wars. For a few weeks, the media responded to the depictions of Black Diamond and her sister rebels by constructing images that directly challenged the dominant gender discourse. Women in war are generally discussed only as victims, but Black Diamond and her sisters emerged as actors – killers portrayed as just as lethal as their male counterparts but wearing fashionable attire. Even though Black Diamond stories offered new ideas about women in war to media observers, in many ways these narratives reproduced and reinforced a broader dominant media frame that has established Liberia as a case of difference – of the ‘African Other’ to the rest of the world and even within the continent itself: In other African conflicts, like Uganda and Congo, women have participated in rebel movements, but usually in supporting roles. They cook, clean, and often sleep with soldiers – not always by choice. But here in Liberia, often out of revenge for husbands slain at the hands of the enemy, women have fought on the front line as part of an elite and feared unit unique on the continent.26

24

Ibid., 78–9. Ibid., 74. 26 Mats Utas, ‘Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering: Tactic Agency in a Young Woman’s Social Navigation of the Liberian War Zone’, Anthropological Quarterly 78:2 (Spring 2005), 404. 25

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In the Nigerian Civil War case, women’s participation subverts the general perception of women as victims yet maintains the African notion of women as nature/nurturer. Though these women are not combatants or militia members, the nationalist vision is embodied by Debbie, who carries a torch of such idealistic impulses of ‘a new Nigeria’ with the passion of a woman. Thus, when the ‘honeymoon of independence’ erupts in national conflict, the negotiator is the female soldier flagging on with undiluted nationalistic spirit: ‘You’d do well as a peace ambassador between the two warring leaders since they both like and respect you.’27 Betrayal is a key element that disconnects the Nigeria-Biafra destination to an ideal independence. Betrayal has always been an issue in postcolonial struggles and resistance. In the novel Destination Biafra, every character stands guilty of betraying the ideology of one nation. The politicians are untruthful in their promises to the electorate, the colonialists double-dealing with the notion of independence, and the ‘saviors’ – the Army – betray the nation and themselves. Thus, rather than have the utopic vision of unity, the novel in a journalistic approach reports the disconnection in the utopian impulses of each player. Debbie as the national negotiator is betrayed by the Nigerian and Biafran forces through her experiences of trauma and efforts to diffuse the conflict. Abosi, carried away by personal ambition, betrays the cause of Biafra to such a degree that he forgets his original aim of liberation to the extent of sacrificing his fellow combatants like Nwokolo and the innocent ones among Mid-Western Igbos who trusted him. Momoh and Abosi, along with the British perpetuators like Alan Grey, betray the Nigeria-Biafra spirit of trust and nationalism. Adewale Ademoyega in his eye-witness account of the 1967–1970 civil war concludes that the war ‘was a clash of personalities – not really of principles nor of politics’.28 Describing further the atrocities of the clash, Ademoyega views the Federal leader (Saka Momoh) Gowon as conciliatory and the Biafran leader (Chijioke Abosi) Ojukwu – whose principle is based on revenge and power – as intransigent. Based on the eye-witness accounts and refracted materials, Emecheta argues that the postcolonial project as a whole is a fraud that falls short of the original utopian impetus, that is, a betrayal by the Western imperialists and the politicians, with implications reflected in the contemporary restructure of democracy. In the same vein, she advocates for an acknowledgement of female participation in governance. The issue of reconstructing the symbolic disconnection in the political configuration of Nigeria is feminized. Importantly, the attendant chaos of war and the mission of restructuring the nation symbolically merge with the emergence of a new-woman image in Nigeria, who is 27 28

Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 95. Ademoyega, Why we Struck, 160.

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militant, yet culturally maternal. The devastated nation finds relevance in the devalued roles of women during the war. Thus, the war becomes multi-dimensional in function as a turning point for restructuring the national image as well as for the emerging significance of women in national/political discourses. In addition, the horrors of the war find significance in the plights of the women who symbolize Nigeria being pulled apart by the two warring leaders, just as Debbie is caught in the cross-fire of the war and the two ambitious leaders. Emecheta’s Destination Biafra at this juncture becomes an avant-garde of women as negotiators, mothers, militants, and national heroes. It is a text that brings to the consciousness of the readers the ‘forgotten’, the ‘scapegoats’ of war: children like Boniface and Ogo, who simply wanted plantain and chicken stew, the women and the Asaba/Ibuza women militia strategy for self-defense, and the murdered innocents in the cross-fire between the federal soldiers and the Biafran warriors. One perspective that Emecheta introduces in the text is that the nationalist impulses of the leaders are actualized by the feminine powers of conciliation and negotiation. This is seen in Debbie’s mission, which is both symbolic of national commitment and a representation of female courage. However, her position is defined by gender-discriminatory undertones that graphically portray the implications of war, and which are not part of the documented reports of the Nigeria-Biafra disconnection. The first instance of female symbolic entanglement in national discourse is the desire expressed by Debbie’s joining the Army: ‘Chijioke, I want to join the army.’29 This is contrary to the traditional roles expected of the few educated women that include being secretaries or wives taking care of their husbands and nursing babies.30 The second perception is drawn from Debbie being accepted into the army; her relevance is defined by her ‘feminine charms’. It may be said that national identity or difference is constituted through the medium of sexual binary, using the figure/sexuality of a woman as a primary vehicle. This view plays a significant function in the mission of reconstructing the ‘status quo’ in order to affect a conflict resolution. In this view, the woman becomes the ‘scapegoat’ or sacrificial lamb on the altar of conflict resolution. Debbie is known to be close to Major Chijioke Abosi, a key player in the war, and the Western negotiator, Alan Grey. In all senses, her feminine charms are evoked towards the resolution of conflicts, as indicated by Grey: Debbie, Debbie look, if it really comes to the crunch, could you make the journey to the East and remind Abosi of that simple fact? That will be all you’d have to do. You know how that man adores you, because his father and yours so respect each other. You can use that to try and save the situation. 29 30

Ibid., 57. Ibid., 108.

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Mind you, it’s more complex than that; I’m only suggesting a simplistic solution to a complicated problem … Please, Debbie, do this for your country.31

Saka Momoh pinpoints Grey’s insinuation about Debbie’s role in conflict resolution and female identity: ‘Your family and his were friends for a very long time, and of course you were both at Oxford, although you’re a woman … Not that that should be a handicap. It might help: you can use your feminine charms to break that icy reserve of his.’32 These two quotations reflect that the definition of female socio-political relevance is based on ‘feminine charms’, and from this emerges a female national figure who fights all odds to reconcile and redefine her society. However, Emecheta’s portrayal of nationalism and its implications for women, especially their sexuality, suggests ambivalences in politics and gender equality in Nigeria. By contrast, towards the end of the novel, Uzoma Madako, one of the women with whom Debbie is traveling and shares her travails across the war-torn country, voices the irony and divergence between the reality and the idealism of nationalism, the present harsh conditions of war and its implication for women: A few years ago it was independence, freedom for you, freedom for me: We [women] were always in the background. Now that freedom has turned into freedom to kill each other, and our men have left us to bury them and bring up their children.33

Thus, from the traumatized women’s point of view, nationalist politics makes up a harsh tale of socio-political conflict and betrayal in which women have a place only at the beginning and at the end. Madako’s comment sums up the ambivalence in the male socio-political utopia or musing: it contrasts the reality with the ideal. It also takes the readers back to the beginning of the novel when the Army officers deliberated on the shambles of independence in Major Oladapo’s house.34 Emecheta’s ironic presentation does not challenge the ambivalent position of women in the socio-political structure; rather it is expressed in the structure itself. That is, Biafra as a notion and as a cause is an ironic representation of Nigerian independence and her political structure: ‘I would rather say our destination is “Biafra”, since as far as I am concerned, we’re not yet independent … I think this country needs a military respite, so to Biafra we will go. Destination Biafra!’35 Biafra symbolizes the disconnection in the notion of independence and reconstruction process of ethnic identity and freedom. The ironic twist is further enhanced by the internecine war, which is basically a scheme of the Biafran group to 31

Ibid., 114. Ibid., 123. 33 Ibid., 214. 34 Ibid., 60. 35 Ibid., 60. 32

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control another, by the betrayal of the ideals of postcolonial liberation, and by the economic influence of the West under the guise of political independence and the plight of the victims of the conflict as summed up by Debbie: ‘You men make all this mess and call on us women to clear it up.’36 In a sense, Debbie becomes the bearer of national culture by living the Biafra of her dreams, and discovering not angels, just people who are corrupt and exploitative.37 Debbie, in the novel, is objectified as an ironic portrayal of male notions of social and political nationalism in the sense that she is an image of a new woman just as Nigeria is a newly independent nation and both are traumatized by misconceptions about patriotism and sexuality. Contrary to Mrs Ogedemgbe’s view that Debbie ‘wants to be a man’, Debbie seeks her own ‘Biafra’. Marie Umeh reflects on the idealism that went into the creation of the character when she observes that Debbie ‘is symbolic of Nigeria in search of its rightful place in world history’.38 She is an allegory and a metaphor in the process of nationalism that reassesses the historical past in order to cross over to the present and probably shock the readers into consciousness about the contemporary postcolonial conditions. Emecheta, by gendering nationalism, affirms Boehmer’s reference to Sangeeta Ray ‘that no theory engaging fully with either [national] resistance or sociality at both micro-political and macro-political levels can adopt “a gender-neutral method of inquiry”’.39 In the face of it, many progressive, self-assertive women appear caught in the dilemma of liberation and the transformation project, through their political action. In Destination Biafra, Debbie is initially taken by the idea of Biafra led by Chijioke Abosi’s truly independent Igbo nation, an ironic imagining of a new nation, free from corruption and Western economic influence: ‘I have a feeling that this is going to be the real fight for independence. What we’ve had up till now was a sham – the Europeans leaving but putting greedy “yes men” in the government. Now the young men are fighting for our real freedom.’40 However, her ideals are undercut by the reality or the truth of Biafra as ‘a dream’, which only Debbie believes to be a reality, thereby affirming Stella Ogedemgbe’s prediction: ‘I only hope you don’t get disappointed with yours [Biafra] when you find it.’41 The protagonist caught between the reality of her ideals and the idealism of postcolonial leaders portrays the betrayal and the trauma of thwarted ideals. For instance, on the 36

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 161. 38 Marie Umeh, Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta: Critical and Theoretical Essays (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996), 203. 39 Sangeeta Ray, En-gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 152. 40 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 114. 41 Ibid., 161. 37

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road to Biafra, Debbie and her co-travelers watch soldiers’ grisly rape of her traveling companions and murder of a pregnant woman.42 The literary representation of historical tragedies of the war and the victimization awaken a consciousness about the futility of violent conflict: ‘a conflict waged by brutalized troops, directed by an alienated leadership, and masterminded by foreign powers’.43 Boehmer’s comment summarizes the entire historical portrayal of a symbolic disconnection in the noble ideals of Destination Biafra. As a figure counterbalancing the hopelessness of a national condition and male idealization, Debbie Ogedemgbe reinterprets the male notion of Biafra. The new form of national image was integrative, inclusive, tolerant, and motherly – yet equally assertive. Thus, she carries the burden of a generalized hope for the future having been disillusioned by the failed concept of Biafra. In other words, rather than being a soldier in the federal forces, Debbie becomes, in the course of the narrative, a peacemaker/negotiator in conflict resolution. Emecheta represents women in the politics of war who, in spite of being its victims, act as negotiators/peacemakers, and also mop up postcolonial mix-up. Debbie starts off her symbolic mission to Biafra as a representative of a small elite, yet learns in the course of the mission to identify with the masses of women in flight; in the course of their suffering together as women, bonds form. Although, she fails to participate in the ‘men’s war’ after joining the army and, unable to follow the path of her mother by ‘doing something more than child bearing and being a secretary’, Debbie attains her personal ‘Biafra’ by being a volunteer to care for war orphans and writing the memoirs of the war experience.44 Her task, as a victim in a war of ‘no victor, no vanquished’, is to reconcile maternal values with her nationalistic instincts and to uncover the reality of male idealization about nationalism. Florence Stratton affirms in her review of the novel that what constitutes heroism (nationalism) in a war situation is not military acts but that which affirms and promotes life.45 In a sense, Emecheta, in representing the history of national conflict, depicts the resourcefulness of African women especially during crises. Dovetailing Uzoma Madako’s skeptical comment about conflict resolution, the Ibuza women in Asaba (Mid-Western) build up their own local army of female militia, while their men fight for Biafra and the Federal forces rape their girls.46 Apart from their militant defense strategy, these women economically sustain themselves amid scarcity by cultivating new farms and even opening and developing a new trading outlet in 42

Ibid., 136. Ibid., 116. 44 Ibid., 244–6. 45 Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (London: Routledge, 1994), 123. 46 Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 230. 43

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Upper Volta, as Mrs Elina Eze and Mrs Ozimba did. The economic and militant resourcefulness of these women runs parallel with Flora Nwapa’s representation of female survival strategy during crisis in Never Again. The inner strength of these women is a cultural fact that finds its root in the past history of women’s reaction and responses, like the Aba Riot or Aba Women’s War of 1929. Thus, the Mid-Western women negotiate their survival through economic and military strength that is found lacking in men, who seem to have been bought over by Abosi’s Biafran skirmishes. Within the context of negotiation and resourcefulness, Emecheta presents another quality of women that negates the notion that war is a solution, thereby mocking the male utopian impulses. This is the hindsight and analytic nature of the women. The novelist implicates that women are better political strategists who, by virtue of their maternal nature, both anticipate the unexpected and oftentimes guard against it. Mesdames Eze, Ozimba, and Ogedemgbe discover new trade links for making money and surviving during the crisis. These links, to Upper Volta and Gabon, provide the Ozimbas and Mrs Eze an escape before Dr Eze’s arrest. Mrs Eze’s resourcefulness, hindsight, and perception of the motives behind the war are voiced as she asks her husband to forget the Biafran War, because it is a holocaust not a destination to a new identity and, to her, the holocaust is the result of oil. For this reasons, she preempts the failure of Biafra: He will not win this war … Come and let us escape together. It wouldn’t be betrayal. He has lost. We have lost … But they have taken all our oil lands … Even if we win now, how can we maintain a Biafra without a drop of oil? Wasn’t the oil the reason for all this mess in the first place?47

The war is all about oil. The male utopic destination Biafra is all about oil. Mrs Eze’s hindsight and courage are belied in her maternal instinct to survive, protect, and even forgive all wrong doing of the men. The strength of character and courage of the women is further contrasted in her view about the war and the male idealism of Dr Eze: Pity at the shortsightedness of her husband and his sex came over Elina. How could grown men make such blunders, and yet elevate themselves with such arrogance that one could not reach them to tell them the truth? She did not want to perish with him … Yet the maternal thing inside her made her pity this childish man who thought he knew all. She forgave him his foolishness, just as she would many times forgive her own son.48

Emecheta’s authorial classification of men as childish people who live in the world of dreams is to condemn the male-dominant power derived from tradition and colonialism. To her, the male power conceals 47 48

Ibid., 252–3. Ibid., 253.

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an inner weakness that reflects their fear of failure, greed, and short sight. Indeed, Dr Eze hallucinates his ‘greedy’ Biafra – marked by oil wealth, power, and betrayal of the many believers (dead and living) in Biafra. The purpose of this contrastive representation of male and female ideological views regarding the war is to depict the shallowness of patriarchal identity and to represent female identity in its depth, strength, and resourcefulness. Symbolically, the female identity representation reflects the nation Nigeria, whose patriarchal ‘childish’ idealism is bastardized and betrayed. In other words, given the opportunity on a fair-play ground, women are depicted as rational political analysts and economic strategists, rather than as emotional amazons. The oil that indirectly motivates the conflict also informs the greed and corrupt desires of the major players in the war politics. Major Abosi is aware of the controlling power the oil in the western Igbo region will accord him, especially over the Western superior presence. His utopian view of war is similar to that of the politicians and nationalists who initially demanded independence for Nigeria. Chijioke Abosi’s vision of Biafra ‘the symbol of Biafra’ is captured in Dr Eze’s dreams about his Biafra, ‘which would be the richest land for black people, where he would be so wealthy that he would not know what to do with the money, where he would be so powerful that Europeans from all over the world would come to seek his friendship’.49 The natural resources that should have provided a basis for development and unity become the symbolic motif for destruction. The symbolism of ‘oil’ implies divergent implications and responses and these are prophetically summed up by the thoughts of Alan Grey: After all, his mission is complete. Nigeria had been successfully handed over to the approved leader, Saka Momoh. The fact that he came from the minority tribe, and had an ample supply of guns and bombs, would stabilize his position. Nigeria badly needed that stability to allow foreign investors to come in and suck out the oil. Nigeria would need the money, too, to repay the debts she owed the ‘friendly nations’ for their generosity in supplying her with arms, during the time when one tribe was fighting against the other.50

This statement categorizes the idealism in nationalist discourse on war and establishes the disconnection in attaining an ideal society. The essence of the Nigeria-Biafra War is motivated by political struggle to control the economic resources of the nation. The author, using the technique of authorial intrusion, implicates men for destroying the society, and she expresses her anti-imperialist stand on Grey’s view of the war as an imperialist, ‘post-contact’ overture to decenter the nation in order to continue the colonizers’ mission of being the all-seeing god, the

49 50

Ibid., 253. Ibid., 259.

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white people from whom ‘the black people could not hide [anything]’.51 The war is about the oil and the conflict of control wrapped up in the aborted ideals of utopic ‘destination to Biafra’ that hinders any ‘postcontact’ development in Nigeria to date, such as, incessant security threats occasioned by terror attacks and kidnapping in the Niger Delta, pollution, and corruption. Thus, at the end of the narrative, the major male characters in the conflict fail to contribute positively to nation rebuilding while the women suffer in the spin-off of the war and, in fact, mop up the mess caused by oil and politics of oil and ethnicity. For instance, Debbie is asked by Alan Grey to ‘do your woman bit tonight’ in ensuring Abosi surrenders. Debbie, however, harnesses her negotiating power and draws up the initially misplaced motherly instinct for the can-do-assertiveness by taking up the duty of caring for the orphaned children of war, and documenting the narrative about ‘a part of life’ of a people.52

Conclusion Destination Biafra is an overview of several factors that undermine development in Nigeria. But particularly, it is a female perspective of the historical narrative of Nigeria-Biafra War and acknowledgement of the unsung heroines and victims of war: the forgotten. This is captured in Debbie’s question in the novel about whether the participation of women like herself, Babs, Uzoma, and the nuns in Biafra would ever be ever mentioned at all.53 The novel performs two ideological roles: to bring to awareness the plight of women’s experience of the war, and to challenge male idealism that constructs the notion of nationalism. Writing from a diametrically opposing stance to the dominant gender idealism about nationhood, Emecheta represents the reality of the war from the female perspective, using a meta-narrative approach that sets to bring to consciousness the post-war conditions in Nigeria and female power. The novel is prophetic apart from being a historical memoir of the war. Regarding utopian visions, it calls to mind in a prophetic way, the implications of the notion of patriotism, especially now that Nigeria has returned to democracy, and more than five decades after independence. Nationalism/patriotism to Emecheta is affirmation and promotion of life. However, the infant democratic dispensation is besieged by political issues that sparked the war of 1967–1970 and marked the 33 years military interregnum. One major factor the author projects in this narrative is the maternal quality in female leadership distinct from the men, which is propelled by patriarchal dominance and quest for power. This is seen in Alan Grey’s 51

Ibid., 158. Ibid., 255. 53 Ibid., 195. 52

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closing remarks about the civil war and Debbie’s personal odyssey and her efforts in the aftermath to reconcile victims. Biafra in this context becomes a baby aborted by patriarchal idealistic vision as a result of the seeds of ethnicity, economic power, and political divergence planted by the colonizers and entrenched by Nigerians. In the present dispensation, Nigeria is still watering and nurturing the seeds of ethnicity and underdevelopment while dealing with issues of electoral malpractices and corrupt politicians, and the fierce struggle over oil that precipitated the conflict in the Niger Delta; these struggles also spur insecurity, terrorism, and ethnic cleansing. The civil war is a historical reality that is ‘a part of life’, which all ethnic groups, however, treat like leprosy. The failure to address the 1967–1970 disconnection has created elements of ethnic distrust and vendetta, especially between the Northern and Eastern ethnic groups. The constant trigger of conflicts between these groups is framed as religious, but in reality, is an ethnic/political vendetta that has existed since the civil war of 1967. The disconnection is thus that the past cannot be separated from the present and, unless the past errors/omissions are addressed, they will continue to plague the present and truncate the future. Apart from the complications of an aborted idealism, women’s participation, sacrifices, and negotiation – particularly by the people like Debbie, the women of Ibuza, Mrs Madako, the children, and other victims of the war – are unsung, without any reparation ever made. The failure to acknowledge these victims and the issues that caused the war perhaps is still responsible for the disparity in politics and power in twenty-first century ‘post-contact’ Nigeria. To further complicate the ‘post-contact’ disconnection, the reality of the historical aspect of the Nigeria-Biafra War has been deleted from the high school curriculum in order to simplify its implication on contemporary perceptions particularly among the youth, and to override ethnic motivations. This move implies that history of the war is lost except in the memories of the participants and victims, and that means that a particular aspect of national identity is lost. Researches like this one can serve to document the past events and as a reference for resolving more-recent conflicts/threats of war. Literary fiction, at this juncture, functions as the custodian of the history of human development in postcolonial Nigeria and offers a bridge through negotiation in the gap of ethnic differences.

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Plato, G.R.F. Ferrari, ed. and Tom Griffith, trans. The Republic. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Post K.W.J. and Michael Vickers. Structure and Conflict in Nigeria, 1960–1966. London: Heinemann, 1973. Riggs, F.W., ed. Ethnicity: Concepts and Terms Used in Ethnicity Research. Honolulu: COCTA, 1985. Rothschild, J. Ethnopolitics: A Conceptual Framework. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Saro-Wiwa, K. On a Darkling Plain: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War. London: Saros, 1989. ——Sozaboy. New York: Longmans, 1994. Sofola, Zulu. King Emene: A Tragedy of a Rebellion. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational, 1975. Smith, Bonnie. Women’s Studies: The Basics. Oxford: Routledge, 2013. Smith, S., K. Booth, and M. Zalewski, eds. International Theory: Positivism and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Sherman, John. War Stories: A Memoir of Nigeria and Biafra. Indianapolis: Mesa Verde, 2002. Soyinka, Wole. Season of Anomy. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1980 [1973]. ——Myth, Literature, and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. ——The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. ——The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Stratton, Florence. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. London: Routledge, 1994. Stremlau, John. The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Suberu, Rotimi, T. Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2001. Suhrke, A. and L.G. Noble, eds. Ethnic Conflict and International Relations. New York: Praeger, 1977. Sullivan, John R. Breadless Biafra. Dayton, OH: Pflaum, 1969. Tamuno, Takena and S.C. Ukpabi, eds. Nigeria Since Independence: The First 25 Years, Vol. VI, The Civil War Years. Ibadan: Heinemann, 1989. Uchendu, Egodi. Women and Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War. New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2007. Umeh, Marie, ed. Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta: Critical and Theoretical Essays. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996. Umelo, Rosina. Felicia. London: Macmillan, 1978. Umweni, Samuel. 888 Days in Biafra. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2007. Uwechue, Ralph. Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War: A Call for Realism. London: O.I.T.H. International, 1969. Uzoigwe, G.N. Visions of Nationhood: Prelude to the Nigerian Civil War, 1960–1967. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011. Uzoigwe, G.N. and Jonah Elaigwu, eds. Foundations of Nigerian Federalism, 1900–1960. Abuja: National Council on Intergovernmental Relations, 1996.

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Uzokwe, Alfred. Surviving in Biafra: The Story of the Nigerian Civil War – Over Two Million Died. Lagos: Writers Advantage, 2003. Waugh, A. and S. Cronjé. Biafra: Britain’s Shame. London: Michael Joseph, 1969. Welch, Claude. E. and Arthur K. Smith, Military Role and Rule: Perspectives on Civil-MilitaryRelations. Belmont, CA: Duxbury, 1974.

Articles Akingbe, Niyi. ‘Creating the Past and Still Counting the Losses: Evaluating Narratives of the Nigerian Civil War in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra’, Epiphany: Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies 5, 1 (2011): 31–51. Aluko, S.A. ‘How Many Nigerians? An Analysis of Nigeria’s Census Problems, 1901–63’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 3, 3 (1965): 371–392. Amuta, Chidi. ‘A Selected Checklist of Primary and Critical Sources on Nigerian Civil War Literature’, Research in African Literatures 13, 1 (1982): 68–72. Azzi, Corry and Ehrenberg, Ronald. ‘Household Allocation of Time and Church Attendance’, Journal of Political Economy 83, 1 (1975): 27–56. Bolton, Gary E. and Axel Ockenfels. ‘ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition’, American Economic Review 90, 1 (2000): 166–193. Davis, Morris. ‘Negotiating about Biafran Oil’, Issue: A Journal of Opinion 3, 2 (1973), 23–32. Dickson, Bernard and Kinggeorge Okoro Preye, ‘History, Memory and the Politics of National Unity in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Achebe’s There Was a Country’, International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature 2, 5 (2014): 81–89. Ejiogu, E.C. ‘Colonial Army Recruitment Patterns and Post-colonial Military Coups d’État in Africa: The Case of Nigeria, 1966–1993’, Scientia Militaria, South African Journal of Military Studies 35, 1 (2007): 99–132. Erwin, Lee. ‘Genre and Authority in Some Popular Nigerian Women’s Novels’, Research in African Literature, 33, 2 (2002): 81–99. Hodges, Hugh. ‘Writing Biafra: Adichie, Emecheta and the Dilemmas of Biafran War Fiction’, Postcolonial Text 5, 1 (2009): 1–13. Hodgson, Geoffrey, M. ‘On the Limits of Rational Choice Theory’, Economic Thought 1 (2012): 94–108. Jacob, R.I. ‘A Historical Survey of Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria’, Asian Social Science 8, 4 (2012): 13–29. Krishnan, M. ‘MamiWata and the Occluded Feminine in Anglophone NigerianIgbo Literature’, Research in African Literatures 43, 1 (2012): 1–18. McLuckie, Craig. ‘A Preliminary Checklist of Primary and Secondary Sources on Nigerian Civil War/Biafran War Literature’, Research in African Literatures 18, 4 (1987): 510–527. Nnaemeka, Obioma. ‘Fighting on All Fronts: Gendered Spaces, Ethnic Boundaries, and the Nigerian Civil War’, Dialectical Anthropology 22, 3–4 (1997): 235–263. Norridge, Zoe, ‘Sex as Synecdoche: Intimate Languages of Violence in Half of a Yellow Sun and The Memory of Love, Research in African Literatures 43, 2 (2012): 18–39.

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Index

Abakaliki 274 Abani, Chris  380–99, 450, 453 Abiraya  319, 320, 321, 322 Abosi, Major Chijioke  see Ojukwu, Col. Emeka Odumegwu The Aburi Accord  32, 34, 36, 55, 56, 84, 133, 175, 185, 186, 364, 366, 367, 374 Achebe, Chinua  58, 166, 171, 172, 179, 200, 203, 204, 245, 246–64, 314, 315, 327, 359, 365, 420, 421, 440, 445, 457, 463 Addis Ababa  33 Adebayo, Col. Robert  84 Adekunle, Col. Benjamin  189,190, 191, 203 Ademoyega, Maj. Adewale  170, 178, 180, 181, 215, 216, 218, 249, 468 Adichie, Chimamanda  10, 12, 166, 195, 202, 266, 267, 279, 435, 439, 443, 445, 446, 447, 450, 451, 460 Afoukwu, Lawyer Peter  331, 332, 333, 335, 336 After-Africa  315, 316, 318, 320, 322, 323, 325 AG  25, 28, 82, 120, 121, 131, 132, 262, 366 Aguiyi-Ironsi, Col. Johnston  20, 47, 48, 83, 84, 121, 124, 126, 127, 128, 132, 136, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 216, 217, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 228, 229, 339, 365, 438 Agumo, Cyril  330, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358 The Ahiara declaration  7, 62–80, 85–107, 273, 377

Akintola, Samuel Ladoka  25, 27, 28, 83, 132, 135, 181, 215, 216, 227, 249, 250, 365 Akpan, Chief Nkere Uwem  35, 58, 72, 173, 413, 414, 415 Alakija, Adeyemo  44 Alao, Col. Shittu  187 Algeria  66, 77 Amadi, Elechi  172, 272 Angola  246, 247 Anioma  418, 419, 420 Ankrah, Gen. Ankrah Joseph  185 Apolo-Gyamfi, Kwame  323, 325 Arochukwu  274, 416 The Arusha Declaration  85, 86, 88, 89, 104, 105 Asaba  102, 190, 370, 375, 440, 469, 472 Awka  63, 274 Awolowo, Chief Obafemi  25, 28, 36, 44, 82, 112, 120, 126, 131, 139, 143, 144, 147, 149, 172, 181, 182, 187, 192, 203, 214, 219, 249, 258, 259, 261, 364, 365 Azikiwe, Nnamdi  44, 58, 82, 103, 120, 131, 132, 144, 145,180, 192, 217, 218, 228, 229, 365, 366, 367, 369, 370, 373, 466, 473 Azuka, Fr. Zachary  304, 305 Azumini 63 Balewa, Sir Tafawa  44, 45, 47, 82, 83, 131, 132, 134, 181, 206, 208, 249, 285, 322, 365, 369, 459 Belgium  69, 70, 72 Bello, Sir Ahmadu  29, 82, 83, 131, 132, 181, 214, 215, 216, 217, 220, 227, 261, 363, 365, 408 Bemedi, Salisha  319, 320, 321, 324, 325

486

000 Fal book B.indb 486

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Index

487

Benin  64, 102, 130, 257, 372, 375 Benin Republic  69, 157 Biafra Constitution of   81 Recognized by  330 Size of   81 University of   see Nsukka, University of The Biafra-British Association  39 Bonny, Island  274, 461 Brass 274 Britain  3, 18, 19, 20, 23, 26, 27, 32, 33, 38, 39, 43, 51, 53, 54, 62, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79, 104, 111, 122, 176, 202, 321, 338, 343, 367, 372, 405, 413, 427, 438 British colonial policy  18, 33 Amalgamation  xvi, 21, 22, 40, 43, 120, 213, 326 Clifford Constitution  xvi Lyttleton’s Constitution  xvi McPherson’s Constitution  xvi Problems of Federation  19–25, 43 Richard’s Constitution  xvi, 44 British Union Jack  81

Echeruo, Joseph  58 Edet, Inspector-General  184, 216 Effiong, Gen. Philip  86, 87, 173, 174, 177, 180, 226 Egbe Omo Oduduwa 250 Egbe Omo Olofin 250 Egypt  62, 66, 77 Ejoor, Lt. Col.  133, 155 Ekpo, Margaret  58 Ekukinam, Bassey  58 Emecheta, Buchi  12, 361–79, 426, 431, 437, 438, 439, 440, 441, 442, 445, 446, 450, 451 454–76 Emir of Zaria  45 Enahoro, Chief Anthony  143, 181, 187 England  see Britain Enterprises Promotion Decree  193 Enugu  21, 30, 36, 50, 63, 64, 112, 220, 226, 333, 334, 345, 347, 348, 436, 449 Equatorial Guinea  288 Eritrea  65, 423 Ethiopia  65, 122, 423 Eyo-Ita, Dr.  229 Eze, Dr.  see Mbadiwe, Dr. K. O.

Calabar  112, 130, 162, 257, 259, 275, 417 Caritas  62, 112 Churchill, Winston S.  54, 58 Clifford, Sir Geoffrey Miles  38 Cold War  41, 50, 51, 65, 66, 70, 79 The Colonel  380, 381, 382, 391, 393, 394, 396, 397, 398 Congo  66, 467 Constitutional conference, 1950  44 Cookey, Prof. Sylvanus J.  94, 95 Cronje, Suzanne  176, 410, 411, 412, 413, 422 Cumming-Bruce, Francis  32 Czechoslovakia  202, 343

Fajuyi, Col. Adekunle  84, 122, 132, 365, 467, 470 Fani-Kayode, Remilekun  181 Fay, Rev. Fr. Myles  312, 313 Ferguson, Clyde  191 Forsyth, Frederick  176, 219, 224, 274, 275, 404, 405, 406, 412 France  62, 69, 70, 72, 112, 214, 330, 343, 347, 348 Friends of Nigeria  28

Debbie  361, 365, 366, 371, 372, 375, 377, 378, 437, 438, 439, 441, 442, 443, 445, 446, 450, 463, 464, 465, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471, 472 Decree number 34  see unification decree Dublin  286, 294, 300 Dukana  232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 243, 244 Dunn, Charles W.  70 Durosaro  see Akintola, Samuel Ladoka

000 Fal book B.indb 487

Gabon  65, 81, 202, 330, 335, 336, 351 Gender issues  403–76 Germany  70, 72, 214, 338, 340, 343, 348 Ghana  66, 122, 133, 161, 163, 185, 311 Goodell, Senator Charles E.  70, 189 Gowon, Yakubu  31, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, 48, 50, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 84, 122, 124, 126, 127, 128, 132, 133, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 154, 157, 158, 171, 172, 184, 185, 186, 187, 191, 216, 217, 224, 225, 229, 270, 272, 273, 296, 323, 365, 366, 374, 378, 406, 412, 413, 431, 459, 468, 470, 474

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488 Grey, Capt. Alan  363, 365, 443, 445–6, 465, 468–70, 474–5 Haiti  62, 65, 66, 81, 330 Hamisi  318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325 Haruna, Ibrahim  184, 189, 190, 191 Henk, Capt.  348, 350 Herebefore  315, 318, 322, 324, 325 Hunt, David  32, 51, 53, 56, 57, 58 Ibadan  30, 44, 84, 122, 125, 141 Ibiam, Sir Francis  58, 220 Ibuza  370, 376, 440, 461, 469, 472, 476 Ifedi, Obiora  331, 332, 334, 339, 340, 348, 349 Igboba, Maj.  216 Ikeja  84, 216 Ikoku, Alvan  45, 58 Ikot-Ekpene  63, 277, 431 Ikwerre  283, 443 Ireland  62, 286, 288–9, 292, 295, 296, 300, 303, 306, 308, 309 Irish parliamentary debate  78 Israel  62, 102, 330 Ivory Coast  62, 65, 81, 111, 122, 202, 330, 423 Iweka, Chief Tobias  332, 334 Kaduna  30, 45, 84, 220, 331, 408 Kaduna, Lt. Col. Hassan Usman  133 Kainene  274, 281, 282, 442, 445, 447, 452 Kano  30, 54, 84, 158 Kano, Nguru  see Balewa, Sir Tafawa Katsina, Usman  184, 187 King of Beggars  380, 381, 382, 383, 392, 393, 394, 396, 397, 398 Kirk-Greene  406, 407 Kogbara, Ignatius I.  106 Kutzenov, Arthur  345, 346 Lagos  21, 30, 43, 44, 51, 84, 125, 130, 150, 154, 157, 213, 272, 286, 361, 370, 383, 395, 412, 443 Last, Murray  174, 175, 186, 273 Legislative Council  213 Legum, Colin  30, 37, 49 Lennon, John  71, 72 Liberia  423, 467 Libreville  see Gabon Lord Selbourne Committee Report  23 Lugard, Lord Frederick Daltry  18, 19, 24, 43, 326

000 Fal book B.indb 488

Index Lumumba, Patrice  66, 321, 322 Macdonald, Governor  see Robertson, Sir James Wilson Macpherson Constitution  23, 46 Macpherson, John  365 Madiebo, Alexander  171, 182, 204, 209, 210, 212, 213–29, 415, 416 Mailamari, Brig.  216, 220 Mamiwata 452 Mbadiwe, Dr. K. O.  58, 180, 265, 365, 466, 473, 474 Mbanefo, Sir Louis  58, 108 Mbano  443, 449 Mbakwe, Chief Samuel  58 Mene  232, 233, 236, 238, 239 Mitchell  305, 306 Mojekwu, C. C.  106 Momoh, Saka  see Gowon, Yakubu Muhammed, Lt. Col. Murtala  183, 184, 190, 191 The National Guidance Committee  85, 94 NCNC  25, 28, 82, 120, 131, 132, 137, 262, 366 Ndem, Prof. Eyo Bassey  106 Niger Delta  230, 231, 232, 235, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 423, 460 Niger, Bridge  63 Niger, River  376 Nigeria Benue-Plateau State  54 Colony and Protectorate of Lagos  43 Demarcation of   23 East-Central State  54 Eastern Region  28, 36, 37, 40, 44, 47, 49, 52, 53, 54, 81, 83, 84, 106, 111, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 138, 139, 141, 143, 147, 150, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 161, 162, 164, 183, 184, 218, 228, 230, 237, 239, 241, 249, 260, 265, 270, 271, 273, 286, 310, 367, 404 First Republic  18, 23, 25, 26, 28, 131, 154, 217, 262 Indigenization Decree  259 Mid-Western Region  25, 47, 54, 121, 154, 183, 218, 230, 257, 263, 404 Mid-Western State  54, 230 Nigeria-Biafra War Arms dealing  59, 60

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Index Books on  170–7, 200–6, 209–399, 405–22, 424–76 Casualty figures  62 Coups  6, 20, 21, 27, 46, 48, 83, 111, 129, 132, 134, 178, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 210, 218, 219, 221, 220, 224, 225, 227, 248, 250, 252, 253, 270, 407, 431 Duration of   1, 6, 36, 40, 111, 130, 211, 314, 403, 404, 415, 454, 459, 475 Election boycott  27 Igbo massacre  20, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34, 46, 48, 51, 61, 73, 83, 111, 121, 134, 164, 170, 184, 186, 187, 191, 202, 203, 204, 218, 248, 252, 253, 256, 285, 305, 371, 413, 414 Independence, declaration of   26, 36, 286 International involvement, theories 65–70 Islamic factor  25, 31 Fodio, Uthman Dan  227 Boko Haram  174, 182, 459 Minor Ethnic Groups, effect on  230– 44, 265–83 National Census Crises  27, 214, 454 Newspaper involvement  130–65 Operation Hiroshima  xvi Operation Tail Wind  xvi Operation Tiger Claw  xvi Secession, date of   xvi, 33, 35, 57 Start of   36 Starvation, use of   187, 188 State of emergency  xvi, 28 Theories on  41–2, 114–20, 123–9 War fronts  xvi, 63, 370 Newspapers Daily Service 131 Eastern Outlook  133, 163 Morning Post  133, 134, 135, 137, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 150, 151, 165 New Nigerian  131, 133, 134, 135, 138, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164 Nigerian Citizen 131 Nigerian Tribune  131, 134, 135, 139, 144, 146, 148, 149, 151, 153, 156, 160, 161 West African Pilot  131, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 149, 150, 151, 153,

000 Fal book B.indb 489

489 155, 156, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165 Niger Coast Protectorate  43 Nixon, Richard M.  69, 71, 188, 191, 202 Njoku, Col. Hilary  182 Njoku, Rose  12, 437, 438, 445 Nkrumah, Kwame  66, 323, 322 NNA  27, 249, 255 Nnewi  225, 226 NNDP  25, 27, 120, 121, 250, 366 North-Central State  54 North-Eastern State  54 North-Western State  54 Northern Elements Progressive Union 262 Northern Protectorate  40, 43, 213 Northern Region  37, 44, 45, 47, 49, 54, 82, 83, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 141, 143, 150, 152, 154, 156, 157, 161, 162, 181, 218, 228, 239, 255 NPC  25, 28, 82, 120, 121, 131, 132, 135, 136 Nsukka  331, 370 Nsukka, University of   271, 285, 377, 414, 449 Nwankwo, Lt. Andrew  184, 203 Nwapa, Flora  12, 426, 427, 428, 429, 431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437, 444, 445, 451, 460, 461, 462, 473 Nwokolo, Brig. Onyemere  see Nzeogwu, Major Chukwuma K. Nwomah, Everly  348, 349 Nzeogwu, Major Chukwuma K.  27, 28, 47, 48, 121, 132, 178, 215, 219, 220, 221, 222, 227, 228, 248, 249, 251, 330, 331, 365, 375, 376, 431, 459, 466 OAU  30, 31, 33, 37, 66 Obanikoro 45 Obasanjo, Olusegun  170, 171, 188, 214, 219, 417, 431 Obelenwata, Prof. Chancellor  332, 334, 335, 341, 348, 349 Odenigbo  7, 278 Odomosu  see Awolowo, Chief Obafemi Ogbanje 452 Ogedengbe  see Okotie-Eboh Ogoja  162, 274 Ogoni  205, 231, 243, 244, 265, 275, 283, 327 Ogun  386, 387, 388, 389, 391, 395

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490 Ogundipe, Brig. Babafemi  84 Ogundipe, R. N.  416, 422 Oji River  420 Ojukwu, Col. Emeka Odumegwu After the war  39, 176, 190, 279, 290, 302, 405, 406, 415, 431 Before the war  21, 28, 33, 34, 36, 38, 40, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 81, 84, 85, 111, 112, 113, 114, 143, 146, 152, 154, 155, 156, 159, 160, 161, 163, 175, 183, 185, 186, 201, 202, 224, 225, 228, 229, 270, 271 During the war  7, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 86, 87, 93, 94, 100, 104, 106, 107, 203, 226, 246, 273, 274 In fiction  323, 364, 365, 368, 371, 372, 373, 374, 376, 377, 378, 438, 443, 446, 466, 467, 468, 471, 473, 474, 475 Ojukwu, Sir Louis P. O.  100, 103 Okafor, Maj. Donatus  180 Oke, Elvis  380, 381, 382, 389, 391, 392, 393, 395, 396, 397, 398 Okeji, Dr.  338,339 Okpala, Dr. Michael I.  28, 58, 180, 219, 220, 223, 249 Okpanam 370 Okigbo, Christopher  10, 201, 314–27, 451 Okigwe 63 Okotie-Eboh  249, 365, 473 Okoye, Brig. Comm. Capt.  353, 354 Oladapo, Maj.  see Fajuyi, Col. Adekunle Olanna  7, 278, 442, 443, 444, 445, 447, 451, 452 Onitsha  63, 102, 274, 417, 443 Onuoha  342, 344, 348, 350 Onwura, Capt. Benjy  329, 330, 352, 357, 358, 359 Oputa Panel  189, 220 Ore  372, 375, 376 Orizu, Nwafor  132, 228, 229 Orlu 307 Osuntokun, Akinjide  405, 406 Owerri  63, 64, 102, 410, 443 Oyekan, Oba Adeyinka  162 Oyibo, John  407, 408, 409 Ozimba  see Azikiwe, Nnamdi O’Brien, Fr. Anthony  304, 305, 306 O’Donnell, Capt.  351, 352

000 Fal book B.indb 490

Index Painter, Michael 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300 Paris  331, 334, 340, 346 Plateau State  366 Port-Harcourt  63, 64, 112, 226, 234, 257, 259, 274, 345, 443, 448, 449 Portugal  330, 333, 344 Red Cross  62, 112, 189, 288, 302, 350, 410 Redemption  380, 381, 383, 392, 396 Rivers State  21, 54, 230, 242, 298, 300 Robertson, Sir James Wilson  363, 365, 465, 466 Rosen, Carl von  95 Russia  66, 67, 78, 79, 104, 345, 412, 413 Rwanda  6, 118, 423 Sabon Garri  466 Salem, Alhaji Kam  216 Sarduana of Sokoto  see Bello, Sir Ahmadu Saro-Wiwa, Ken  9, 172, 205, 230, 231, 243, 327, 453 Schwarz, Walter  34, 46, 59 Senghor, Leopold Sedar  326, 323 Shell BP  21, 53, 54 South-Eastern State  54, 230, 242 Southern Protectorate  40, 43, 213 Soviet Union  62, 65, 66, 68, 70, 72, 79, 430 Soyinka, Wole  6, 28, 285, 314, 323, 386, 387, 388, 389, 440, 445, 457, 459, 465 Sozaboy  9, 230–44, 453 Stremlau, John  412, 413 St. Jorre, John de  409, 410 Supreme Military Council  183 Switzerland  70, 343, 344, 349 Tanzania  65, 81, 87, 88, 89, 92, 94, 104, 202, 330, 423 Teteku, Babs  365, 467, 475 Date of   66, 94 Principles of   97, 98 Nyerere, President Julius  65, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94 Trafalgar Square  376, 440, 442 Twenty-pound policy  192 Udoji, Chief Jerome  58 Uganda  106, 122, 423, 467 Ugwuta 433

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Index Uli, Airport  81, 85, 188, 288, 290, 291, 298, 301, 311 Umuahia 63 Unegbu, Maj. Arthur  182, 219, 220 Unification Decree  83, 132, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 222 United Kingdom  68 United Nations Beijing Conference 1985  411 Security Council  65 United States  38, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 111, 122, 338, 344, 345, 367, 412, 413

000 Fal book B.indb 491

491 UPGA  28, 132, 178, 249, 251, 262 Uyo 274 Western Region 25, 44, 47, 54, 81, 83, 125, 126, 131, 132, 137, 156, 157, 161, 164, 182, 183, 184, 218, 239, 249, 250, 255, 363, 364, 467 Western State 54 Wilson, Harold  31, 32, 33, 38, 39, 50, 52, 57, 74, 191 Zambia  65, 81, 202, 330 Zaria  84, 136

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Writing Nigeria-Biafra war_PPC_33mm v9_B+B 01/06/2016 17:01 Page 1

Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Ogechukwu Ezekwem is a PhD student in the Department of History, University of Texas at Austin. Cover image: Niger Delta Militancy II. Mixed Media. 2011 (24"x30") by dele jegede (reproduced by kind permission of the artist © dele jegede)

JAMES CURREY an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com www.jamescurrey.com

ISBN 978-1-84701-144-2

9 781847 011442

Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War

The recent high profile fictional account by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Half of a Yellow Sun was preceded by works by Ken Saro-Wiwa, Elechi Amadi, Kole Omotoso, Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Chukwuemeka Ike and Chris Abani, and strongly convey the horrific human cost of the war on individuals and their communities. The nonfictional accounts, including Chinua Achebe’s last work, There Was a Country, are biographies, personal accounts and essays on the causes and course of the war, its humanitarian crises, and the collaboration of foreign nations. The contributors examine writers’ and protagonists’ use of contemporary published texts as a means of continued resistance and justification of the war, the problems of objectivity encountered in memoirs and how authors’ backgrounds and sources determine the kinds of biases that influenced their interpretations, including the gendered divisions in Nigeria-Biafra War scholarship and sources. By initiating a dialogue on the civil war literature, this volume engages in a much-needed discourse on the problems confronting a culturally diverse post-war Nigeria.

Edited by FALOLA & EZEKWEM

The Nigeria-Biafra War lasted from 6 July 1966 to 15 January 1970, during which time the postcolonial Nigerian state fought to bring the Eastern region, which had seceded as the State or Republic of Biafra, back into the newly independent but ethnically and ideologically divided nation. This volume examines the trends and methodologies in the civil war writings, both fictional and non-fictional, and is the first to analyse in detail the intellectual and historical circumstances that helped to shape these often contentious texts.

Writing the

NigeriaBiafra War

Edited by TOYIN FALOLA & OGECHUKWU EZEKWEM