By Demola Awoyekun
Placed side by side independent accounts of the Nigerian
Civil War, Professor Chinua Achebe’s There Was A Country is a pot-pourri of
deliberate misrepresentations, outright inventions and a one-eyed view of
events.
A writer should not be an accomplice to lies. Even when
thorns infect the land, a writer must embody and defend the perennial destiny
of high values and principles. It is not the business of a writer to side with
the powerless against the powerful; the powerless can be thoughtless and wrong.
The Nazi party was once a powerless group. A writer should not prefer falsehood
to reality just because it serves patriotic ends. In times of great upheavals
in a multi-ethnic society, a writer should get out and warn the society that
the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Pride in
one’s ethnic identity is good, patriotism is fantastic but when they are not
properly moderated by higher considerations, they can prove more destructive
than nuclear weapons. Four months after America dropped nuclear bombs on Japan,
the dead eventually totalled 240,000. In the ethnic rivalry between Tutsis and
Hutus in Rwanda, within two months 500,000 were murdered with ordinary
machetes.
Patriotism, when deployed, must always be simultaneously
governed by something higher and lower than itself, like the arms of a
democratic government. These provide checks and balances so that patriotism
does not become a false conception of greatness at the expense of other tribes
or nations. It is for this reason that we proceed to discuss Chinua Achebe’s patriotic autobiography,
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, in the light of something
higher than it: 21,000 pages of Confidential, Secret, Top Secret US State Department
Central Files on Nigeria-Biafra 1967-1969 and something lower: The Education of
a British Protected Child by Chinua Achebe himself.
There Was A Country is written for the modern day Igbo to
know why they are suffering in the Nigerian federation and who should be
fingered for the cause. Achebe’s logic is neat, but too simple: Africa began to
suffer 500 years ago when Europe discovered it (that is, there was no suffering
or inter-tribal wars before then in Africa). Nigeria began to suffer when Lord
Lugard amalgamated it. And the Igbo began to suffer because of the events
surrounding the Biafran secession. To Achebe, there should have been more
countries in the behemoth Lord Lugard cobbled together. What Achebe does not
take into account is the role rabid tribalism plays in doing violence to social
cohesion, which makes every region counter-productively seek a perfect answer
in demanding its own nation state. There are over 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria
and there cannot be over 250 countries in Nigeria. There are officially 645
distinctive ethnic groups in India and only one country. All over the world
there are tens of thousands of ethnic nationalities and there are only 206
countries. What the ethnic nationalities that constitute Nigeria need to learn
for the unity of the country is the democratisation of their tribal loyalties.
And that inevitably leads to gradual detribalisation of consciousness, which
makes it possible to treat a person as an individual and not basically a member
of another tribe. That is the first error of Achebe.
Instead of writing the book as a writer who is Igbo, Achebe
wrote the book as an Igbo writer, working himself into a Zugzwang bind, a
position in chess that ensures the continuous weakening of your position with
every step you make. All the places that should alarm the moral consciousness
of any writer, Achebe is either indifferent to or dismisses them outright
because the victims are not his people. But in every encounter that shows the
Igbo being killed or resented by Nigerians, or by the Yoruba in particular,
Achebe intensifies the spotlight, deploying stratospheric rhetoric, including
quotes from foreign authors with further elaborations in end notes to show he
is not partial. Achebe calls upon powerfully coercive emotive words and
phrasings to dignify what is clearly repugnant to reason. Furthermore, not only
does he take pride in ignoring the findings of common sense, he allocates
primetime attention to fact-free rants just because they say his people are the
most superior tribe in Nigeria. The book, to say the least, is a masterpiece of
propaganda and sycophancy. It is not a writer’s business to be an accomplice to
lies.
First, let’s take Achebe’s Christopher Okigbo. Throughout
the book, Achebe presents Okigbo in loving moments complete with tender
details: Okigbo attending to Achebe’s wife during labour, Okigbo ordering
opulent room service dishes for Achebe’s wife in a swanky hotel, while millions
were allegedly dying of starvation and Achebe was out of the country, Okigbo
being a dearly beloved uncle to Achebe’s children and Okigbo opening a
publishing house in the middle of the war. Out of the blue, he writes that he
hears on Radio Nigeria the death of Major Christopher Okigbo. Major? The reader
is completely shocked and feels revulsion for the side that killed him and
sympathy for the side that lost him. Unlike other accounts, like Obi Nwankama’s
definitive biography of Okigbo, Achebe skips details of Okigbo running arms and
ammunition from Birmingham to Biafra and also from place to place in Biafra; he
omits the fact that Okigbo was an active-duty guerrilla fighter, killing the
other side before he himself got killed. Like many other episodes recounted in
the book, Achebe photoshops the true picture so that readers would allocate
early enough which side should merit their sympathy, which side should be
slated for revulsion. Pity, cheap sympathy, sloppy sentimentalism, one-sided
victimhood are what is on sale throughout the book. Achebe, of course, is
preparing the reader for his agenda at the end of the book.
Real Reasons For The Pogroms
To Achebe, the final straw that led to secession was the
alleged 30,000 Igbos killed in the North. He carefully structures the narrative
to locate the reason for this systematic killing/pogrom/ethnic-cleansing in the
so-called usual resentment of the Igbo and not from the fallout of the first
coup in the history of Nigeria. Achebe dismisses the targeted assassinations as
not an Igbo coup. The two reasons he gives are because there was a Yoruba
officer among the coup plotters and that the alleged leader of the coup, Major
Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, was Igbo in name only. “Not only was he born in
Kaduna, the capital of the Muslim North, he was widely known as someone who saw
himself as a Northerner, spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo and wore the
Northern traditional dress when not in uniform (p79).”
Really? First, it was not mysterious that Azikiwe left the
country in October 1965 on an endless medical cruise to Britain and the
Caribbean. Dr. Idehen, his personal doctor, abandoned him when he got tired of
the endless medical trip. Not even the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’
Conference, never held outside London, but hosted in Lagos for the first time
in early January, was enough incentive for Azikiwe to return, yet he was the president
of the nation. In a revelation contained in the American secret documents, it
was Azikiwe’s presidential bodyguards that Major Ifeajuna, the coup’s
mastermind, used to capture the Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.
Once Ifeajuna and Major Okafor, Commanding Officer of the
Federal Guards, tipped off Azikiwe about the planned bloodshed, Okafor,
Ezedigbo and other guards became freer to meet 12 kilometres away in Ifeajuna’s
house in Apapa to take the plan to the next level. The recruitment for the
ringleaders was done between August and October 1965. Immediately Azikiwe left, planning and
training for the execution began.
Second, the eastern leadership was spared when others were
murdered. Third, the head of state, Major-General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, an
Igbo, did not try to execute the coup plotters as was the practice in a purely
military affair. Ojukwu told Suzanne Cronje, the British-South African author,
that he asked Aguiyi-Ironsi to take over and told him how to unite the army
behind him. That was the reason he made him the governor of Eastern Region.
Four, when Awolowo, Bola Ige, Anthony Enahoro, Lateef Jakande were imprisoned
for sedition, they served their terms in Calabar, away from their regions as it
was the normal practice. When Wole Soyinka was imprisoned at the beginning of
the civil war, he was sent to Kaduna and Jos prisons, but the ring leaders of
the coup were moved from Lagos back to the Eastern Region, among their people
on the advice of Ojukwu. Five, during the Aburi negotiations, why was full
reprieve for the coup plotters put on the table? Six, a freed Nzeogwu by April
1967, before the secession, joined in training recruits in Abakaliki for the inevitable war with Nigeria. He later
died on the Nsukka front, fighting for Biafra. That was Achebe’s
Hausa-speaking, kaftan-wearing Kaduna man, who was Igbo in name only. It was an
Igbo coup. The same repackaging was attempted for the invasion and occupation
of the Midwest. It was called liberation of Midwest from Hausa-Fulani domination
when it was simply another Igbo coup for Igbo ends, planned in Enugu and headed
by a Yoruba man.
However, the January coup did not foment a much more
visceral response in the Western Region since their assassinated political
leader was viewed as part of the corrupt, troublesome, election-rigging class.
To Westerners, the coup was good riddance to bad rubbish. But to the
Northerners, who were feudal in their social organisation, it was a different
matter. Sardauna was their all in all; he was the heir to the powerful Sokoto
Caliphate and descendant of Usman dan Fodio. More than Azikiwe and Awolowo, Sardauna
was the most powerful politician in Nigeria (pg 46). Murdering him was
murdering the pride of a people. Achebe chooses to ignore this perspective and
more importantly the fact that the Igbo in the North were widely taunting their
hosts on the loss of their leaders. Celestine Ukwu, a popular Igbo musician,
released songs titled Ewu Ne Ba Akwa (Goats Are Crying) and others celebrating
“Igbo power”, the “January Victory.” Posters, stickers, postcards, cartoons
displaying the murdered Sardauna begging Major Nzeogwu at the gates of heaven
or Balewa burning outright in pits of hell or Nzeogwu standing St. George-like
on Sardauna, the defeated dragon, began to show up across Northern towns and
cities. These provocations were so pervasive that they warranted the
promulgation of Decree 44 of 1966 banning them. The Igbo did not stop. Azikiwe
is more honest than Achebe. In his pamphlet, The Origins of the Civil War, he
writes: “Some Ibo elements, who were domiciled in Northern Nigeria taunted
northerners by defaming their leaders through means of records or songs or
pictures. They also published pamphlets and postcards, which displayed a
peculiar representation of certain northerners, living or dead, in a manner
likely to provoke disaffection.” These
images and songs eventually led to the so-called
pogroms/ethnic-cleansing/genocide, not the coup. The coup was in January, the
pogroms started late in May and the provocations were in between.
However, the Igbo in the East did not sit idly by. They
started the massacre of innocent Northerners in their midst. Achebe chose to
ignore this account since it does not serve his agenda so we return to Azikiwe:
“Between August and September 1966, either by chance or by design, hundreds of
Hausa, Fulani, Nupe and Igala-speaking peoples of Northern Nigeria origin
residing in the Eastern Nigeria were abducted and massacred in Aba, Abakaliki,
Enugu, Onitsha and Port Harcourt.” It is worthy to note that these Northerners
never published nor circulated irreverent or taunting pictures of Eastern
leaders unlike the Igbo of the North; they were just massacred for being
Northerners. The government of Eastern Region did not stand up to stop these
massacres. Neither did the Igbo intellectuals. Ojukwu, the military
administrator, even made a radio broadcast, saying he could no longer guarantee
the security of non-Eastern Nigerians in the East and that Easterners, who did
not return to Igboland, would be considered traitors. This was the time
Professor Sam Aluko, who was the head of Economics department at University of
Nigeria, Nsukka, and personal friend of Ojukwu, fled back to the West. Azikiwe
continues in his book: “Eyewitnesses gave on-the-spot accounts of corpses
floating in the Imo River and River Niger. Radio Cotonou broadcast this macabre
news, which was suppressed by Enugu Radio. Then Radio Kaduna relayed it and
this sparked off the massacres of September – October 1966 [in the North].”
I Above Others
Achebe, like Enugu Radio, suppressed this information and
goes on to pivot the “pogrom” on the fact that the Igbo were resented because
they were the most superior, most successful nationality in the country. He
claims (on pg 233) that they were “the dominant tribe,” “led the nation in
virtually every sector – politics, education, commerce, and the arts (pg 66),”
which included having two vice-chancellors in Yorubaland; they the Igbo are the
folkloric “leopard, the wise and peaceful king of the animals (pg177),” they
“spearheaded (pg 97) the struggle to free Nigeria from colonial rule.” “This
group, the Igbo, that gave the colonising British so many headaches and then
literally drove them out of Nigeria was now an open target, scapegoats for the
failings and grievances of colonial and post-independent Nigeria (pg 67).” An
Igboman, Achebe writes, has “an unquestioned advantage over his
compatriots…Unlike the Hausa/Fulani he was unhindered by a wary religion, and
unlike the Yoruba he was unhampered by traditional hierarchies…Although the
Yoruba had a huge historical headstart, the Igbo wiped out their handicap in
one fantastic burst of energy in the twenty years between 1930 and 1950
(pg74).” Besides the fact that this has a language consistent with white
supremacist literature, Achebe, to demonstrate he is not partial or a
chauvinist, based himself on a 17-page report in Journal of Modern African
Studies, titled Modernisation and Political Disintegration: Nigeria and the
Ibos by Paul Anber.
I looked up the 1967 journal. Curiously this “scholar” was
designated as “a member of staff of one of the Nigerian universities.” Why
would a scholar hide his place of work in a journal? I checked the essays and
book reviews in all the 196 issues of Journal of Modern African Studies, from
Volume 1 Issue 1 of January 1963 to the last issue Volume 49 November 2011,
there was nowhere a piece was published and the designation of the scholar
vague or hidden. Also, this Anber never published any piece before and after
this article in this or any other journal. I wanted to start checking the
academic staff list of the five universities in Nigeria then until I realised
again that it says “he is a staff of a Nigerian university.” The truth is: Paul
Anber is a fake name under which someone else or a group of people, possibly
Igbo, is masquerading. And he/they never used this name again for any other
piece or books. So that this ruse would not be found out was the reason he/they
hid his/their university. And this piece, like The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, has been the cornerstone of books and widely quoted by other journals
over a period of 45 years. It is the cornerstone of the chapter, A History Of
Ethnic Tension And Resentment, which Achebe used to skew the motive for Igbo
people’s maltreatment from the fallout of January1966 coup and the inflammatory
provocations they published to resentment for being allegedly the most
successful and dominant tribe in Nigeria.
Had Achebe not overdosed on Igbo nationalism, he would have
had his chest-beating ethnic bombasts inflected with a deeper and more sober
analysis of the Nigerian situation in the next essay in the journal: The
Inevitability of Instability by a real and existing Professor James O’Connell,
an Irish priest and professor of Government, in a real and existing
institution: Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. O’Connell argues that the lack of
constitutionalism and disregard for rule of law fuelled psychology of
insecurities in all ethnic groups. He fingers as an inevitable cause of our
national instability, Nigerians’ “failure to find an identity and loyalty
beyond their primordial communities that lead them constantly to choose their
fellow workers, political and administrative, from the same community, ignoring
considerations of merit.”
The symbolism of the Igbo heading University of Ibadan and
University of Lagos, both in Yorubaland, was a positive image to assist Tiv,
Hausa, Ijaw, Urhobo, Yoruba, Ibibio, Igbo, Efik etc students shed their
over-loyalty to their respective primordial communities and to fashion a higher
sense of identity that is national in character and federal in outlook. To
Achebe, the symbolism was an example of the dominance and superiority of the
Igbo. “It would appear that the God of Africa has created the Ibo nation to
lead the children of Africa from the bondage
of ages,” Paul Anber quotes Azikiwe saying in his West African Pilot: “History
has enabled them not only to conquer others but also to adapt themselves to the
role of preserver… The Ibo nation cannot shirk its responsibility.” Anber says
in his/their essay: “The Ibo reaction to the British was not typically one of
complete rejection and resistance, though Ibos were militantly anti-colonial.
Since modernisation is in many respects basically a process of imitation, the
Ibos modelled themselves after their masters, seeing, as Simon Ottenberg put
it, that ‘the task was not merely to control the British influence but to
capture it.’
To some degree, it may be said that this is precisely what
they proceeded to do. Faced with internal problems of land, hunger,
impoverished soil, and population pressure, the Igbo migrated in large numbers
to urban areas, both in their own region and in the North and West…”
The spirit of inclusive humanism, the Martin Luther King
Ideal, the Mandela Example, the conscience of a writer should necessitate that
if a child in Sokoto goes to bed hungry, someone in Umuahia should get angry.
If a pregnant woman in Kontagora needs justice, someone in Patani should be
able to stand up and fight for her. If an Osu group is being maltreated in
Igboland, someone in Zaria should stand up and defend them. But to Achebe,
there should be no mercy for the weak in so far as he or she is unfortunate
enough to belong to the other side. Take for instance the butchering of the
lone shell-shocked “Mali-Chad mercenary” wandering around “dazed and aimless”
in the bush Achebe witnessed. To show the fight-to-finish courage of his people
in the face of overwhelming force, he describes how Major Jonathan Uchendu’s
Abagana Ambush succeeded in destroying Colonel Murtala Muhammed’s convoy of 96
vehicles, four armoured vehicles, killing 500 Nigerians in one and a half
hours. “There were widespread reports of atrocities perpetrated by angry Igbo
villagers, who captured wandering soldiers. I was an eyewitness to one such
angry bloody frenzy of retaliation after a particularly tall and lanky
soldier–clearly a mercenary from Chad or Mali–wandered into an ambush of young
men with machetes. His lifeless body was found mutilated on the roadside in a
matter of seconds (pg 173).”
Achebe does not tell us if he tried to prevent this
cold-blooded butchering, though there was an episode where he intervened to
save the life and chastity of a Biafran woman, arguing with some wandering
Nigerian soldiers who wanted to requisition her goat for food (pg 201). If
Achebe could not intervene in the butchering, what did he think of the killing
then or now that he is writing the book with the benefit of hindsight? Should
the man not have been handed over as a prisoner of war? Was his killing not a
violation of Geneva Convention, which he so much accused the Nigerian side of
disrespecting (pg 212)? Did villagers behaving this way not blur the lines
between soldiers and civilians hence making themselves fair game in war? Also
notice how Achebe starts the narration with an active first person voice: “I
was an eye witness to…” and how he quickly switches to a passive third person
voice in the next sentence: “His body was found…”Achebe quickly goes AWOL “in a
matter of seconds”, leaving a moral vacuum for the Igbo writer to emerge and
the conscientious writer to go under.
When atrocities are being committed against Biafrans, Achebe
deploys strong active voice (subject + verb), isolates the aggressive phrases
of military bravado with italics or quotation marks. But when Biafra is caught
committing the atrocity, he employs passive sentence structures, euphemisms and
never isolates pledges of murder in italics or quotation marks. Take the “Kwale
Incident (pg 218)” that eventually became an international embarrassment for
Biafra. Based on an unsubstantiated source, he writes: “Biafran military
intelligence allegedly obtained information that foreign oilmen…were allegedly
providing sensitive military information to federal forces – about Biafran
troop positions, strategic military manoeuvres, and training.” So they decided
to invade. “At the end of the ‘exercise’,” Achebe writes: “Eleven workers had
been killed.”
Also compare these two accounts: the background is Biafran
invasion of Midwest. Despite Ojukwu’s assurance to them before the secession
that he would absolutely respect their choice of belonging to neither side, he
invaded them, occupied their land, foisted his government on them, took charge
of their resources, looted the Central Bank of Nigeria in Benin, set up
military checkpoints in many places to regulate the flow of goods and human
beings, imposed dawn-to-dusk curfews, flooded the airwaves with pro-Ojukwu
propaganda, imprisoned and executed dissidents on a daily basis, according to
accounts of Nowa Omoigui and the recollections of Sam Ogbemudia. In fact, “The
Hausa community in the Lagos Street area of Benin and other parts of the state
were targeted for particularly savage treatment, in part a reprisal for the
pogroms of 1966, but also out of security concerns that they would naturally
harbour sympathies for the regime in Lagos,” Omoigui writes. The Midwesterners
regarded Biafrans as traitors. And the Nigerian Army came to the rescue.
Achebe writes: “The retreating Biafran forces, according to
several accounts, allegedly beat up a number of Midwesterners, who they
believed had served as saboteurs. Nigerian radio reports claimed that the
Biafrans shot a number of innocent civilians, as they fled the advancing
federal forces. As disturbing as these allegations are, I have found no credible
corroboration of them (pg 133).” Yes, he cannot find it; they were not his
people. Also note his euphemisms: “allegedly beat up”… “shot a number of
innocent civilians” (shot not killed). He writes: “a number of innocents” to
disguise the fact that massacres took place. He also writes: “saboteurs.”
Midwesterners collaborated with federal forces to liberate their lands from
Biafra, Achebe calls them “saboteurs.” Now, note in the next paragraph how he
describes what happened to his people, when the federal army in hot pursuit of
the Biafran soldiers, reached the Igbo side of the Midwest. It is noisily
headlined: The Asaba Massacre (pg 133).
“Armed with direct orders to retake the occupied areas at
all costs, this division rounded up and shot as many defenceless Igbo men as
they could find. Some reports place the death toll at five hundred, others as
high as one thousand. The Asaba Massacre, as it would be known, was only one of
many such post-pogrom atrocities committed by Nigerian soldiers during the war.
It became particular abomination for Asaba residents, as many of those killed
were titled Igbo chiefs and common folk alike, and their bodies were disposed
of with reckless abandon in mass graves, without regard to the wishes of the
families of the victims or the town’s ancient traditions.” Then he goes on to
quote lengthily from books and what the Pope’s emissary said about it in a
French newspaper, what Gowon said, what was said at Oputa Panel e.t.c. He found
time to research. They were his people unlike other Midwestern tribes’
sufferings he could not find “credible corroboration of.”
Massacre In The East
In the chapter, The Calabar Massacre, Achebe not only
totally blanks out the well-documented atrocities, including massacres Biafran
forces committed against the Efiks, Ibibios, Ikwerre, when they occupied their
lands and when they were retreating in the face of federal onslaught. Achebe
writes: “By the time the Nigerians were done they had shot at least 1,000 and
perhaps 2,000 Ibos [sic], most of them civilians.” There were other atrocities
throughout the region. “In Oji River,” The Times of London reported on August
2, 1968, “the Nigerian forces opened fire and murdered fourteen nurses and the
patients in the wards.” Achebe continues still referring to the same Times
article: “In Uyo and Okigwe, more innocent lives were lost to the brutality and
bloodlust of the Nigerian soldiers (pg137).” How the fact-checking services of
his publishers allowed him to get away with these is baffling. I looked up the
1968 piece, of course. It is a syndicated story written by Lloyd Garrison of
The New York Times to balance the piece by John Young, which appeared three
days before. In the piece Achebe quotes, there is no mention of Uyo or Okigwe
or Oji River at all. This is what is in the piece–the journalist was quoting
Brother Aloysius, an Irish missionary in Uturu 150km away from Abakaliki: “But
when they took Abakaliki, they put the 11 white fathers there on house arrest.
In the hospital outside Enugu, they shot all the fourteen Biafran nurses who
stayed behind, then went down the wards killing the patients as well. It was the
same thing in Port Harcourt.” This missionary had believed the ruthlessly
efficient Biafran propaganda service. Because of the atrocities Nigeria
soldiers committed on the Ogoja –Nsukka front and the revenge killings in
Asaba, the world had been alerted and it was hurting Nigeria’s arms procurement
abroad. So, Gowon agreed to an international observer team made of
representatives from UN General-Secretary and OAU to monitor the activities of the three
Nigerian divisions and the claims of Radio Biafra.
In their first report released on 9 October 1968, there was
no evidence of the killings, though it was brought to their attention. Even
Lloyd Garrison and other members of the international press corps in Biafra
could not find evidence of that particular killings in the hospital. Also note
Achebe’s statement: “By the time the Nigerians were done, they had shot at
least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos [sic], most of them civilians.” How can a
man of Achebe’s stature write: “They had shot at least 1,000,” which is an
uncertainty; follow it up with another uncertainty: “perhaps 2,000 Ibos” and
then say with certainty, “most of them are civilians”? How can he be sure that
most of them were civilians when he was not even sure whether they are 1,000 or
2,000? It is bizarre to build a certainty on two concurrent uncertainties and
then call it the truth. But that is the meaning of propaganda. William
Berndhardt of Markpress and Robert Goldstein were on contract from Ojukwu to
handle Biafra’s marketing and propaganda. Nathaniel Whittemore’s seminal
thesis, How Biafra Came to Be: Genocide, Starvation and American Imagination of
the Nigerian Civil War, freely available on the Internet, revealed how they did
it and how it worked.
Achebe proceeds to celebrate “the great ingenuity” of
scientists from Biafran Research and Production Unit, who developed “a great
number of rockets, bombs, and telecommunication gadgets, and devised an
ingenious indigenous strategy to refine petroleum.” Then he drops the most
disingenuously incongruous jaw-dropping statement in the book: “I would like to
make it crystal clear that I abhor violence, and a discussion of the weapons of
war does not imply that I am a war enthusiast or condone violence (pg
156).” That is Achebe who, pages before,
lamented the lack of weapons for his people; that is Achebe who travelled the
world soliciting material relief, including arms, for Biafra; that is Achebe
who watched the butchering of a lone mercenary without flinching; that is
Achebe who told Rajat Neogy on pg 105: “Portugal has not given us any arms. We
buy arms on the black market. What we cannot get elsewhere, we try and make.”
But there is a reason why he drops this gem of dishonesty
here: He is preparing us for what is coming next. Achebe begins to praise the
indigenously manufactured bomb, Ogbunigwe (meaning mass killer, a translation,
unlike others, Achebe does not include in the book for obvious reasons). He
continues: “Ogbunigwe bombs struck great terror in the hearts of many a
Nigerian soldier and were used to great effect by the Biafran army throughout
the conflict. The novelist Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike captures the hysteria and
dread evoked by it in a passage in his important book, Sunset at Dawn: A Novel
about Biafra: ‘‘When the history of this war comes to be written, the Ogbunigwe
and the shore batteries will receive special mention as Biafra’s greatest
saviours. We’ve been able to wipe out more Nigerians with those devices than
with any imported weapons.”
If the other side had used the phrase “wipe out”, Achebe
would have flagged it as an evidence of the plan to “annihilate the Igbo”. But
here, he let it pass without comment. And Ogbunigwe was not a product of Igbo
ingenuity; it was a “bespectacled” American mercenary from Massachussets
Institute of Technology, uncovered by the Irish journalist Donal Musgrave ,that
was secretly training Biafrans on how to use fertilisers to make bombs (cf 13
August 1968 cable from American Embassy in Dublin to the one in the Lagos).
Propaganda and Diplomatic Moves
In the book, Achebe narrates the many diplomatic
missions–official and unofficial–he embarked on for the secession. A
particularly telling one was to the President of Senegal, Leopold Senghor
(pg162). He and Ojukwu were attracted to Senghor because of his Negritude
philosophical movement. This story of course is not true. Sam Agbam, who Achebe
claimed he travelled with, was executed alongside Victor Banjo, Emmanuel
Ifeajuna and Philip Alale in Enugu on Saturday 23 September 1967. What Achebe
went to warn Senghor about did not become an issue until June 1968 when Biafra
was losing and Ojukwu had to move the
capital further south to the heartland of Umuahia, then to Orlu. And there was
a monstrously centripetal migration of Igbos towards the new capital, which
resulted in the humanitarian catastrophe. And the Uli Airport Achebe claimed
they flew from had not been constructed before his travel companion was
executed on 23 September 1967. It was constructed and opened for use in August
1968 because Enugu and Port Harcourt, which were Biafra’s only airports, had
fallen into the hands of Nigerians.
So let’s take Achebe’s story as story and move on. Achebe
tells us after days of bureaucratic obstacles, he directly delivered to
Senghor, Ojukwu’s personal letter that “informs him of the real catastrophe
building up in Biafra”. Senghor, Achebe writes, “glanced through the letter
quickly, and then turned to me and said he would deal with it overnight…as soon
as possible (pg 162).” Throughout the book Achebe never says what Senghor’s
response was. That alone should alert the reader that the response was not
favourable to the Biafran cause since Achebe usually suppresses unfavourable
views and information. In the foreword Senghor wrote during the war for Ralph
Uwechue’s book, Reflections on Nigerian Civil War: Call for Realism, we see why
Achebe chooses to omit Senghor’s stand. Senghor delivers a classic rebuke to
Achebe, Ojukwu and the very idea of Biafra. First, Senghor effusively praises
Uwechue: “Here, at last, is a man of courage and sense,” who did not forgo “his
ibotism, but because in him this is transcended by a national will, he thus
acquires the force to judge both facts and men with serene objectivity”. He
said after reading the manuscript and encountering arguments “for the unity of
Nigeria” Uwechue “won him over at once”. Note that with Ojukwu’s letter, which
Achebe brought, Senghor “glanced through” “quickly” and promised to do
something overnight. Then he started discussing philosophy and literature with Achebe.
Ojukwu’s letter never “won him over at once”. Yet the letter warned of the
urgency of Biafran humanitarian calamity. Clearly, Senghor was not flipping for
the emotional manipulation the Biafrans were using the humanitarian situation
to market. Uwechue says all the countries (African) that recognised Biafra as a
state did so because of the humanitarian catastrophe, not that they saw any
value in a sovereign Biafra.
“The leaders of Biafra should understand that the sympathy,
which compelled these countries to give them recognition was provoked by the
suffering of the ordinary people, whom the Biafran leadership, despite their
earlier assurances, proved unable to protect and that the act of recognition
was not a premeditated approval of the political choice of secession. Like the
secession itself, it was more a REACTION AGAINST than a DECISION FOR,” Uwechue
writes.
I recommend Ralph Uwechue’s book to every Nigerian, not only
because of the analysis and conclusions he supplies about the war, but because
the man is coruscatingly intelligent. President Senghor praises him further:
“What he proposes to us, after presenting us with a series of verifiable facts,
is more than just a solution. It is a method of finding solutions that are at
once just and effective. Herein lies his double merit. Uwechue is a man well
informed and consequently objective. He is a man of principle who is at the
same time, a realist. All through the length of the work, which is clear and
brief, we find the combination of practice and theory, of methodical pragmatism
and moral rationalism – a characteristic which marks out the very best amongst
the anglophones.” In other words, he is everything Achebe is not.
Of course, the epic humanitarian catastrophe was Biafra’s
golden goose. Achebe writes revealingly: “Ojukwu seized upon this humanitarian
emergency and channelled the Biafran propaganda machinery to broadcast and
showcase the suffering of Biafra to the world. In one speech, he accused Gowon
of a ‘calculated war of destruction and genocide’. Known in some circles as the
‘Biafran babies’ speech, it was hugely effective and touched the hearts of many
around the world. This move was brilliant in a couple of respects. First, it
deflected from himself or his war cabinet any sentiment of culpability and
outrage that might have been welling up in the hearts and minds of Biafrans.
And second, it was another opportunity to cast his arch-nemesis, Gowon, in
negative light (pg 210). Ojukwu never made efforts to take care of those little
children as any leader with a heart would do. Instead, Achebe continues: he
“dispatched several of his ambassadors to world’s capitals hoping to build on
the momentum from his broadcast”.
But the world’s capitals refused to be duped. Their spies
and diplomats were collating independent facts and insiders’ accounts. Sir
Louis Mbanefo, the Biafran Chief Justice, then emitted a Nessum Dorma howl:
“…If we are condemned to die, alright, we will die. But, at least, let the
world and the United States, be honest about it (pg 211).”
Uwechue did what Achebe never did: acting from a firm moral
base, he berated Ojukwu and all the Biafran leaders for rallying the Igbo to
die en masse for the secession. “Sovereignty or mass suicide,” he writes, “is
an irresponsible slogan unworthy of the sanction or encouragement of any
serious and sensible leadership.” What could have caused a thinking man to at
least flinch, Achebe rejoices in. Here, he is narrating the “explosion of
musical, lyrical, and poetic creativity and artistry (pg151)” that the Biafran
war had brought about. “But if the price is death for all we hold dear/ Then
let us die without a shred of fear…/Spilling our blood we’ll count a
privilege…/We shall remember those who died en mass…(pg 152)”
That is the Biafran national anthem, Land of the Rising Sun.
Achebe continues: “The anthem was set to the beautiful music of the Finnish
composer Jean Sibelius….” And for any group to compare the Biafran deaths to
the Holocaust is to desecrate the Holocaust and cast insults on the memory of
the Jewish dead. European Jewry never had an anthem rallying themselves to mass
deaths this way.
Another telling episode in the book is the war-ready
celebrations amongst Biafran Christians in their houses of God: “Biafran
churches made links to the persecution of the early Christians, others on radio
to the Inquisition and the persecution of the Jewish people. The prevalent
mantra of the time was ‘Ojukwu nyeanyiegbekaanyinuo agha’ – ‘Ojukwu give us
guns to fight a war.’ It was an energetic, infectious duty song, one sung to a
well-known melody and used effectively to recruit young men into the People’s
Army (the army of the Republic of Biafra). But in the early stages of the war,
when Biafran army grew quite rapidly, sadly Ojukwu had no guns to give those
brave souls (pg 171).” “Sadly”… “brave souls”… “in the house of God” are all
Achebe’s words.
Ojukwu’s wrong-headed intransigence to take another path in
place of secession that was even alarming to neutral observers never makes it
into this book unlike other books that recounted the stories. Azikiwe’s Origins
of Civil War lists the properties Ojukwu stole even before he declared
secession. How “he obstructed the passage of goods belonging to neighbouring
countries like, Cameroun, Chad and Niger, and expropriated them”. Achebe writes
that wealthy Biafrans’ private accounts were used to buy hardwares for the war.
He never tells us that Ojukwu stole via armed robbery, money worth billions in
today‘s rates, at the CBN branches at Benin, Calabar and Enugu, because he had
no money to prosecute a war he was obsessed with, fighting without thinking the
consequences through. Achebe never berates Ojukwu, both then and now that he is
recollecting with benefit of hindsight on clearly invalid judgements. For
instance, swindled by propaganda, Dick Tiger, the Liverpool-based Nigerian
boxer, renounced his MBE to come and fight for Biafra. Achebe writes: “Ojukwu
made Dick Tiger a lieutenant in the army of Biafra as soon as he enlisted (pg
158.)” That was a man with no military training or background being given over
a hundred fighters to command as an assistant of a captain by just showing up
in Nigeria!
Instead of upbraiding him, Achebe goes on to praise Ojukwu
as a man who needed little or no advice. “This trait would bring Ojukwu in
direct collision with some senior Biafrans, such as Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Dr.
Michael Okpara, Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiani and a few others, who were concerned
about Ojukwu’s tendency toward introversion and independent decision making
(pg119).” The US State Department’s files on Ojukwu did not dignify
dictatorship with fanciful language the way Achebe does; they called it by its
proper name. Here is a telegram cabled to Washington and some other American
embassies worldwide:
“Internal situation has changed a great deal since secession
was first declared. Ojukwu now rules as a dictator and moves about surrounded
by retinue of relatives and yes men. Responsible Ibos, who had been advising
him at the start of the war, have been eliminated in one way or the other from
the picture because they came to believe accommodation of some sorts would have
to be reached with FMG (Gowon’s Federal Military Government). Situation so bad
that Biafran representative in Paris, Okechukwu Mezu, has quit in disgust.
Azikiwe refuses to go back to Biafra and is sitting in London as an exile.
Ojukwu’s propaganda machine, by succeeding in creating the impression of some
forward movement, masked the cold fact that Biafrans are unable to break out of
FMG’s encirclement.”
That was 2 February 1969. Had Ojukwu listened to the advice
of “responsible Ibos” in his inner caucus all along, more lives would have been
saved. Instead, he surrounded himself with yes men. Take the chapter, The
Republic of Biafra: The Intellectual Foundation of a New Nation. Achebe’s
committee was National Guidance Committee; his office was in Ojukwu’s State
House. “Ojukwu then told me he wanted the new committee to report directly to
him, outside the control of the cabinet. I became immediately
apprehensive…Nevertheless I went ahead and chose a larger committee of experts
for the task at hand (pg 144).” Then the experts started to work on what was to
become the Ahiara Declaration, which Ojukwu read on radio 1 June 1969 “very
close to the end of the war”. There was starvation, great panic, epidemic,
anxiety, bereavements and despair in the streets. Even according to Biafra’s
propaganda statistics, over a million were already dead. The war was obviously
unwinnable. Federal forces had captured Enugu, Biafra’s first capital; Umuahia,
the second capital, Onitsha, Port Harcourt, Calabar, Nsukka and many places in
Biafra. Biafran troops were desperately fleeing and hiding. Yet, Achebe and
other Igbo intellectuals, who were clearly in a position to tell Ojukwu the
truth and prevent further deaths, were busy writing sycophantic declarations.
N.U. Akpan, Secretary to the Biafran government, was particularly scathing on
these “arrogant” “ignorant” intellectuals in his account of the war. “The day
this declaration was published and read by Ojukwu was a day of celebration in
Biafra,” Achebe writes. “My late brother, Frank, described the effect of this
Ahiara Declaration this way: ‘Odikasigbabiaagbagba’ (It was as if we should be
dancing to what Ojukwu was saying). People listened from wherever they were. It
sounded right to them: freedom, quality, self-determination, excellence. Ojukwu
read it beautifully that day. He had a gift for oratory (pg 149).”
The Americans took note of the contextual inanities of the
two and a half hour-long declaration and cabled this commentary to Washington:
“Ojukwu repeatedly develops the theme that our disability is racial. The root
cause of our problems lies in the fact that we are black.” Considering the
humanitarian and political support in response to Biafran propaganda, the level
of relief flown in and the concern expressed by private organisations and
governments, Ojukwu’s speech was almost unreal as he skipped even a passing
reference to the International Red Cross, Caritas or French military
assistance. The Americans continue: “In his efforts to foster solidarity and
support for continuing the war and maintaining the secession, Ojukwu appeals as
much to fear and xenophobia… Ojukwu sees the Nigerian Civil War in almost
conspiratorial terms. For example, he describes the war as the ‘latest
recrudescence in our time of the age-old struggle of the blackman for his true
stature of man’. We are the latest victims of a wicked collusion between the
three traditional curses of the blackman: racism, Arab-Muslim expansionism and
white economic imperialism.”
All along, the Americans knew of the ruthlessly efficient
Biafran propaganda. They questioned how they arrived at the 20/30/50,000 killed
in the North before the war. Reviewing Ojukwu’s radio broadcast of 14 November
1968, the Americans cabled this to Washington: “Ojukwu claimed 50,000 were
‘slaughtered like cattle’ in 1966, adding that in the course of war, ‘well over
one million of us have been killed, yet the world is unimpressed and looks on
in indifference.’ It was the highest figure we have seen him use for the
pre-war deaths, and the one million he claimed killed since the war began is
inconsistent with his assertion in the same speech that 6,700 Biafrans have
been killed daily since July 6, 1967.”
They also noted Ojukwu’s dishonest fabrications in his
broadcast of 31 October 1969 that President Nixon “had acknowledged fact of
genocide”, that earlier on, he called on Nixon “to live up to his words”. When at the inception of secession, Biafran
Radio broadcast the countries that had recognised Biafra, the Americans
informed Washington: “Following countries have denied recognition of Biafra:
US, USSR, Ethiopia, Israel, Australia, Ghana, Guinea…wording of statements
varies greatly, but all disapprove of
secession, or use words such as recognition, integrity of Nigeria,
support for federal government (June 9, 1967).” In fact, Ojukwu and the Biafran
project were one long crisis of credibility. In the cable of 22 May 1969, the
Americans cabled Washington: “How he (Ojukwu) can continue to deceive his
people, and apparently get away with it, is minor miracle, but difficult to see
how much delusions can last much longer.”
Blaming Awolowo
By the time truth finally triumphed over propaganda, the
Biafrans had to find another man to blame for the war and the deaths. Enter
Chief Obafemi Awolowo, whom Achebe falsely claimed Ojukwu released from prison.
First, this is what the autobiography of Harold Smith, one of the colonial
officers the British Government sent to rig Nigeria’s pre-independence
elections in favour of the North, had to say about Awolowo:
“But the British were not treated as gods by the Yoruba. In
my experience, the Yoruba regarded themselves as superior to the British and
one only had to read a book written by Awolowo, the Western leader, to know
why. The Yoruba were often highly intelligent and they taunted the British with
sending inferior people to Nigeria. The Igbo would be humble and avert his eyes
in the presence of a European. The Yoruba child would look at an important
European and shout, ‘Hello, white man,’ as if he were a freak.”
What is more: “Awolowo in the West had taunted the British
by claiming that his government had accomplished more in the space of two or
three years for his people than the British had since they arrived in West
Africa.” Of course, Achebe knows about these facts because he quoted from the
book in his (pg 50), but only the part favourable to his agenda. Smith again:
“The thrust of the British Government’s policy was against
the Action Group led by Chief Awolowo, which ruled in the Western Region. Not
only was the British Government working hand in glove with the North, which was
a puppet state favoured and controlled by the British administration, but it
was colluding through Okotie-Eboh with Dr. Azikiwe – Zik – the leader of the
largely Igbo NCNC, which ruled in the East. We tricked Azikiwe into accepting
to be president having known that Balewa will be the main man with power.
Awolowo has to go to jail to cripple his genius plans for a greater Nigeria.”
Achebe reveals his own mentality we never suspected before:
“We [intellectuals] were especially disheartened by the disintegration of the
state because we were brought up in the belief we were destined to rule [pg
108].” He uses this mind-set of his to judge Awolowo:
“It is my impression that Chief Obafemi Awolowo was driven
by an overriding ambition for power, for himself in particular and for his
Yoruba people in general…However Awolowo saw the dominant Igbos at the time as
the obstacle to that goal, and when the opportunity arose – the Nigeria-Biafra
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 number of his enemies significantly through starvation – eliminating over
two million people, mainly members of future generation (pg233).”
It is a mystery that a man of his stature could be so
persuaded. Awolowo built the first stadium in Africa, the first TV station in
Africa, the first high-rise building in Nigeria, first industrial estate, cocoa
development board and the Odua Investment Group. He offered free universal
education and free universal primary healthcare. Remarkably, Awolowo never
situated any of those landmarks in his hometown of Ikenne in Ogun State; he
spread them round the region he presided on. And the free universal education
and free primary healthcare were available to anyone of any tribe or
nationality including Nupe, Igbo, Ijaw and Ghanaians living in the Western
Region. Awolowo was interested in bettering the lives of everyone, not just the
Yoruba.
Of course, we know that the lasting legacy of the Biafra war
was the creation of a well-organised Yoruba-bashing industrial complex
headquartered in Igbo consciousness, working with machine regularity from
generation to generation and whose genuine aim is to fundamentally deflect
blame from Ojukwu and his sycophants like Achebe until misunderstandings are
perverted into evidence of Yoruba guilt, outright lies are perverted into
undisputed truth.
Undoubtedly, Awolowo was a master architect of the war to
defeat the secession. Therefore, the case against him requires scrutiny.
Blockade
To talk about a blockade on Biafra is to concede that the
control of Biafra’s borders was already in Awolowo’s hands. The control or
defence of borders is the main aim of any war since the beginning of war making
all over the world. But the 34-year-old Ojukwu led Biafra to secede based on
2,000 professional soldiers and extremely few artillery; they did not have
enough to defend their borders. “If the Nigerian side had known the state of
Biafran troops including their morale, they would have pursued them even on
canoes across the River Niger. Had the Nigerians taken up such pursuit, they
might have taken Onitsha, Awka and Enugu that same day.” That is Achike Udenwa,
who was a Biafran soldier and later became the governor of Imo State, writing
about the federal defeat of Biafra in the Midwest during the early weeks of the
war in his own recollection, Nigerian/Biafra War. Even, the so-called January
boys, Nzeogwu and Ifeajuna, both voiced their concern that the Biafran soldiers
were vastly underprepared for any kind of war. Achebe writes: “Biafran soldiers
marched into war one man behind the other because they had only one rifle
between them, and the thinking was that if one soldier was killed in combat the
other would pick up the only weapon available and continue fighting(pg 153).”
Therefore, even before the first bullet was fired, the
secession was not only a failure but was an epic humanitarian catastrophe
waiting to happen. Awolowo told Ojukwu one of the reasons the West was not keen
to join the secession was because the region already occupied by northern
troops did not have enough loyal men in the Nigerian Army to defend it. Weaned
on the hermeneutics of Yoruba history, Awolowo was not persuaded by the
seductive but flawed logic that the Nigerian forces would lose because they
would be incapable of prosecuting war on two fronts if the West joined the East
in seceding. At one point during the Kiriji war in the 19th century, Bashorun
Ogunmola (Omoarogundeyo), the Kingdom of Ibadan’s generalissimo, was
simultaneously warring with five neighbouring and far-flung kingdoms. Ibadan
never lost. To defeat Ibadan you did not have to defeat even its retreating
soldiers only, you had to defeat those dull-looking hills surrounding it. In
fact, one of the reasons Ibadan was so belligerent in its history was that
those mighty hills allowed it to spend little resources defending and more on
attacking. But Biafra was not surrounded by hills, literally or figuratively.
Its borders were so porous that they fell easily into the opponent’s hand. Days
after declaration of secession, the sea boundary of Biafra was already being
manned by Nigeria’s battleships and boats. By the sixth week all the boundaries
of Biafra were already under the control of Nigerian government. What remained
was zooming in. In fact, had only Awolowo’s Western Region seceded, the
strategy to recapture it would not be a variance with the one used against
Biafra because the West is geographically an enantiomer of the East. It was the
same blockade Nzeogwu used to capture and kill their targets, Sardauna and his
senior wife; Ademulegun and his wife, Latifa, who was eight months pregnant, in
the presence of their two children, Solape and Kole. As Solape recollected
years later, Nzeogwu, who shot her mother, was a family friend that regularly
visited to eat pounded yam and egusi soup. The little girl was even calling him
uncle while he shot her mother in the chest in their bedroom. It was the same
blockade Captain Emmanuel Nwobosi used to capture Remi Fani-Kayode and kill S.L
Akintola, the Western premier. It was the same blockade American Navy Seals
used to capture and kill Osama bin Laden.
What about Cameroon? Whose side was it on? Of course,
Cameroun was firmly on the Nigerian side, yet it had a sizeable Igbo population
and Azikiwe’s party was NCNC – National Council for Nigerian and the Cameroons.
But Ojukwu had stepped on their toes: he had stolen enough of their goods and
supplies that they helped the federal side to take Calabar and cooperated with
the Naval blockade of Biafra. As the US State Department’s cable of 29 November
1968 discloses: “GFRC [Government of the Federal Republic of Cameroon]
continues to support FMG [Federal Military Government] and recently ordered the
dissolution of newly formed Cameroon Relief Organisation (CAMRO) which was
being organised to receive Biafran children in west Cameroon.”
Starvation Policy
In Achebe’s book one could see several places where Biafrans
violated the basis of the Geneva Convention. You could see where villagers who
were non-combatants and should have been protected under Geneva Convention were
taking machetes to federal soldiers, hence becoming legitimate targets of war
themselves. Another striking instance was when Achebe was with his extended
family and overnight their compound was turned into military base without their
consent (pg 172). Heavens forbid the Nigerian side bombed the base. Yes, the
Biafran propaganda machine would go to work that an innocent illustrious family
had been eradicated by the “genocidal Nigerian army” and may even use it as an
evidence of war crime. But it was the Biafran army that compromised Achebe’s
household.
As part of security preparation for the last Olympics, the
British Army commandeered a strategic high-rise residential building and placed
surface-to-air missiles at the top. The residents protested and went to court.
Let us assume a war broke out and the enemy flattened the whole building. He would
not have committed a war crime because it was the British Army that made the
civilian residents legitimate targets in the first place. Unfortunate though it
may sound, schools, hospitals, churches, mosques, relief centres become
legitimate targets once military activities begin to go on there in the event
of a war. Check for instance the current Hamas tactics against Israel or the
bombing of University of Nigeria, Nsukka, when it allowed itself to become
headquarters of local Biafran Army, with several professors joining in
expedition force to hunt down lost federal soldiers in the bush and their wives
back on campus took care of wounded Biafran soldiers and students were going
for daily drills and rifle shooting practice under Prof. John C. Ene, Dean of Faculty of Sciences and
Commander, University Defence Corps, as revealed in the US secret cable of 16
June 1967. Or the federal raid on the Catholic Cathedral of The Most Holy
Trinity, Onitsha, when it was discovered Biafran snipers were operating from there.
When a plane or ship is designated as flying relief supplies
to war sufferers, it must not be used to supply arms. Once it does, it is no
longer covered by Geneva Convention. There was an Austrian Count, Carl Gustaf
von Rosen, whom Achebe praises a lot for his humanitarian assistance in flying
relief efforts to Biafra. This is what the Count’s wife had to say: “He told me
he was going to Biafra, but he didn’t say he would be bombing MIGs (pg 300).”
Achebe writes of von Rosen: “He led multiple relief flights with humanitarian
aid into Uli Airport – Biafra’s chief airstrip. Fed up with Nigerian Air Force
interference with his peaceful missions, he entered the war heroes hall of fame
after leading a five-plane assault on Nigerian aircraft in Port Harcourt, Benin
City, Ughelli, Enugu, and some other locations. He took the Nigerian Air Force
by total surprise and destroyed several Soviet-supplied aircraft in the
process.” That was someone flying humanitarian aid. How would the federal side
begin to see other humanitarian flights that were supposed to be carrying food
and medical supplies to war-ravished children? Cyprian Ekwensi, writer and head
of external publicity for Biafra, admitted in his post-war reminiscences that
the relief materials had arms built into them. The American documents too
confirmed. The same Hank Warton, who the relief agencies were using to fly food
into Biafra, was the one Ojukwu was using to deliver arms.
Of course the Nigerian side knew this and mandated all
relief flights to Biafra to submit themselves for inspection at the Port
Harcourt Airport. That was the interference Achebe claimed von Rosen was fed up
with. In any event, he never claimed such in that 6 July 1969 interview he gave
the London Observer. Those planes that passed their inspection delivered their
relief. Those that did not were shot down. One particular case was the Swiss
Red Cross DC7 Flight heading towards the Uli Airstrip (pg 101). After repeated
warnings to change course and land for inspection, it was shot down, disgorging
its arms and ammunition. The Biafran propaganda went to work, saying it was
part of the genocide policies of Nigerian military to destroy food supplies
meant for the kwashiorkor-stricken children.
It is also a fact that some of the relief supplies meant for
the children were either ambushed by soldiers or ended up on the black market.
Ekwensi again: “People were stealing and selling the food. You could buy it in
the market, but you couldn’t get it in the relief centres.” But why would
Biafra rely on food from thousands of miles away when their normal antebellum
route of supply was merely tens of miles nearby in the Midwest and Northern
Nigeria? It was because of the supply of arms and ammunition.
In a memorandum to the White House, Benjamin Read, the
Executive Secretary of US State Department, writes: “Because of the absence of
other airlines willing to make hazardous flights into Biafra, the ICRC
[International Committee Of The Red Cross] has been forced to charter planes
from Henry Wharton, an American citizen, who is widely known to be Biafra’s
only gun runner. In engaging Wharton, the ICRC is risking its good relations
with the FMG, which has long feared that ICRC flights might provide opportunity
for gun running.” When Awolowo offered to re-open the usual food corridors,
Ojukwu flatly refused. Achebe writes: “Ojukwu like many Biafrans, was concerned
about the prospect that Nigerians could poison the food supplies (pg211).”
Awolowo let in the food supplies for the children anyway, working with the
cover of Caritas and Red Cross. “In America, the Nixon administration increased
diplomatic pressure on the Gowon administration to open up avenues for
international relief agencies at about the same time, following months of
impasse over the logistics of supply route,” writes Achebe on pg 221. There was
neither pressure nor its increment.
Independent evidence from the US declines to support this.
“The problem of disaster relief in Biafra is not the lack of supplies or means
of transport but the lack of access, particularly by a land corridor to Biafra.
The authorities [Biafran] on the spot, under the conditions of civil war have
given a higher priority to politico-military considerations than to arranging
food to be delivered to Biafra. In early November 1968, the Nigerian government
told the ICRC that it would agree to daylight relief flights to the major
airstrip now held by Biafra if the ICRC could give assurances that the strip
would handle only relief flight in daylight hours. We welcome this step by the
Federal Government (FMG), which would substantially increase the flow of
relief. So far, however, the Biafran authorities have refused to agree. We find
it incomprehensible that despite the millions of Biafran lives at stake, the
Biafran leadership has not yet given its agreement. The Nigerian government has
also offered to cooperate in efforts to open a land corridor to Biafran-held
territory. We hope that the Biafran authorities will respond positively to this
but heretofore they have alleged they fear the food may be poisoned while
transiting FMG territory,” William B.
Macomber, Jr, Assistant Secretary for Congressional Relations wrote in a letter
dated 20 December 1968 to Congresswoman Florence Dwyer, when she sought
clarification on the plight of Biafran refugees she kept seeing in the media.
Later when Awolowo visited the battlefronts and saw the
kwashiorkor-ravaged children, he asked about the food supplies, only to
discover that soldiers were ambushing the supplies, feeding themselves and the
top hierarchy so as to continue the war. Awolowo decided this “dangerous
policy” must stop.
If Awolowo was a devil as contemporary Igbo folklore and
Achebe’s private demonology have him, he would have arranged for the food
supplies to be poisoned, knowing they were going to the soldiers. To protect
those children, who were suffering because of the war, he asked for a stop to
the food supply that was inevitably going to the soldiers and the Biafran
plutocrats unnecessarily elongating a war they would never win.
Once Cameroon too realised that to the Biafran authorities,
the suffering children existed for show business and arms trade, they not only
refused to take them into their country, they disbanded the newly formed relief
agency dedicated to their welfare. What is more, Achebe boasts of Biafran
prowess in manufacturing Ogbunigwe and the Biafran imaginative refinement of
petroleum that kept Biafran vehicles on the road throughout the war without
western technological help, but the most basic of human necessities – the
production or the supply of food – they had no clue. And the farmers that were supposed
to grow food, as the US documents noted, were conscripted into the Biafran Army
during planting season of 1967. The fertilisers that could have been used to
better their lands were used to make Ogbunigwe. And so the starvation was
Awolowo’s fault.
On The Mythical £20 Policy
Throughout the war, as the US State Department’s
confidential files disclose, there was no shortage of people and “isms” to
blame for the failure of war. At different times and to different audiences,
Biafrans blamed racism, neo-imperialism, colonialism for the war. When Ojukwu
sent Pius Okigbo to the mainly Latin American countries to solicit for funds
and arms for Biafra, he blamed the war on “the desire of Arab Muslims who saw
Biafra the only obstacle to the spread of Islam in Africa”. Okigbo noted to his
audiences that “Biafra is 60% Catholic and 40% Protestant.” Also, during
several of his radio addresses, Ojukwu blamed the war on the British Prime
Minister, Harold Wilson, who supplied 15% of Nigeria’s arms. He called the kwashiorkor
afflicting Biafran children Harold Wilson Syndrome or Herod Disease. Like the
biblical King Herod, Ojukwu said, Wilson wanted to exterminate the children of
Biafra.
While the blame-Arabs/Hausa/Islam narrative,
blame-Wilson/racism/imperialism narratives, that were so potently alive during
the war are now safely dead, the blame-Awolowo-for-starvation narrative is well
alive, going from generation to generation. To the Americans, who monitored and
documented everything about the war, there was no time Awolowo was blamed for
the starvation or deaths on any of these 21,000 pages. However, after the war,
it was through the £20 policy that the blame-Awolowo narrative began. To
develop it, they seized on this policy and worked their way back to include what
Awolowo may have said or done, and mixed it together to form a narrative.
The £20-for-every-Igbo was a myth. What happened then was a
currency crisis. On 30 December 1967, Awolowo decided to change the Nigerian
currency in circulation in order to render
useless the £37 million Ojukwu had for buying foreign weapons. The
Biafran leadership quickly took the loot, mopped up the ones they could get in
circulation and headed to Europe to exchange them for hard currencies.
Eventually, they introduced Biafran notes as the only legal tender. There was
around 149 million Biafran pounds in circulation by the end of the war–an
average of £10 per every Igbo. After the war, there was a general scramble to
exchange these notes for the new Nigerian notes. As Awolowo explained, he
didn’t know on what basis these notes were produced. It is like someone
bringing a single 50 billion Zimbabwean dollar note to the bank and expecting
to be given N50 billion. The exchange rate should be known to determine the
worth of the Zimbabwean dollar. Currently, 39 billion Zimbabwean dollars is
worth 1 US dollar. In the case of Biafra, the worth of the currency was
unknown; they were produced out of desperation, with lax security features to
boot. In his statement of 1 February 1968, Dr. Okigbo, Biafra’s Commissioner of
Economic Affairs, said “the lack of international acceptance and lack of a
commensurate exchange rate was immaterial since the currency was intended only
for circulation in Biafra.” In other words, it was worthless outside Biafra.
After the war those that had this money were carting them to Nigerian banks,
hoping to get the equivalent in new Nigerian notes. No banker or economist
worth that description would approve that. Awolowo, in his bid to rehabilitate
the Igbo and restore economic normalcy, approved the payment of 20 Nigerian
pounds flat rate for every Biafran notes depositor. It was never £20 for every
Igbo. Twenty pounds for every Biafran? That would have been around £300
million, when Nigeria’s annual
budget before the war was £342.22
million, for a population of 57 million.
Indigenisation Decree
The true winner of the civil war was the Nigerian military
class, which succeeded in using everybody against everybody and continued its
indefinite aggrandisement of the self by fleecing the country to the bone as
the next 30 years confirmed. After the January coup, Aguiyi-Ironsi used Dr.
Nwafor Orizu, the acting president, to capture power. What Nzeogwu and Ifeajuna
wanted to use bloodletting to achieve, he grabbed it on “a scrap piece of
paper” as Shehu Shagari’s eyewitness account, Beckoned to Serve, discloses. The
New York Times describes it as a coup within a coup. Gowon used Awolowo for the
war and to keep the country economically viable. He took advantage of the failed
secession to perpetuate himself in power. “Go On With One Nigeria (GOWON),” he
stumped. Ojukwu, too, as Wole Soyinka observes in his own ipsissimaverba, You
Must Set Forth At Dawn, was also interested in conquering Nigeria not only in
seceding.
Unknown to Victor Banjo and his Third Force, Ojukwu had
embedded special companies within the Third Force to topple Banjo and hand
control of Nigeria to him in case Banjo succeeded in conquering the West and
Lagos. The Indigenisation Decree had nothing to do with disenfranchising the
Igbos or other Biafrans of economic power. As was the vogue in 14 African
nations then, indigenisation and nationalisation was the ruling military class
and their friends’ way of dressing their bottomless impulse to loot with the populist
cloak of fighting western imperialism and neo-colonialism. For their roles
during the war, Awolowo or Enahoro should be getting major oil blocs. But they
did not. Can Achebe blame the maltreatment on the Igbo populace by many of the
governors in the zone on any indigenisation decree?
Indeed Awolowo could be ‘tribalistic’. The Yoruba region,
like pre-EU Europe, was always in a state of constant war. Ibadan vs Ekiti vs
Egba, Ondo vs Ijebu, Ife vs Ijesa, etc. This internecine war made Yorubaland
susceptible to easy French colonisation to the west (Dahomey) and British Royal
Niger Company taking the rest. When Awolowo “resuscitated ethnic pride”, he
used it to rally Yoruba to stop fighting and killing each other. This
resuscitation was not to elevate the Yoruba so that they would dominate other
tribes. Achebe observes: “Awolowo transformed the Action Group into a
formidable, highly disciplined political machine that often outperformed the
NCNC in regional elections. It did so by meticulously galvanising political
support in Yorubaland and among the riverine and minority groups in the Niger
Delta, who shared similar dread of the prospects of Igbo political domination
(pg45).”
Achebe never addresses this dread, though he mentions it in
two other places. Nowhere in the book does he stump for brotherliness or make a
stand for tribal harmony. In 1961, the British Cameroonians had to decide their
fate through a UN plebiscite since their lands were too small and landlocked to
stand as a country. The peoples of the Northern Cameroons voted to belong to
northern Nigeria, while the peoples of the Southern Cameroons not wanting to
belong to the Igbos decided to belong to Republic of Cameroon despite being
French-speaking. The reason minorities needed to be very afraid at the
prospects of collaborating with the Igbo is an important topic Achebe
conspicuously skips. Instead, he spends the final pages of the book
resurrecting the 44-year-old propaganda of genocide.
To prepare us to be swindled, he litters the book with hyped
phrases and sentences like “Smash the Biafrans”, “presence of organised
genocide” (pg 92)… “the Nigerian forces decided to purge the city of its Igbo
inhabitants (pg137)”… “the cost in human life made it one of the bloodiest
civil wars in human history (pg227)… “prospect of annihilation (pg217)”…
“Standing on the precipice of annihilation (pg 217).” Those that can rightly
talk of annihilation were the people of Abudu. The American document of
15/10/67 noted: “As the ‘Biafrans’ retreated from Benin to Agbor, they killed
all the men, women and children they could find who were not Ibos. The town of
Abudu, one of the larger places between Agbor and Benin, lost virtually all of
its population with the exception of a small who had escaped to the bush.” Those
that can rightly talk of annihilation were the Jews. Not only do Nazi policy
documents say so, on-the-ground facts support that. In Poland, Germany, Austria
and the Baltic countries alone, Hitler aiming for 100 per cent, killed 90 per
cent of Jews. Cyprian Ekwensi, a chief of Biafran propaganda says: “We gave the
number of children dying per day as 1,000. Can you prove that? Can you disprove
it? But can you believe it? That is propaganda.” So let us take the Biafran
propaganda at its highest and assume three million, i.e. 100,000 per month died
in the 30-month war. The Vietnamese genuinely lost close to three million to
the Vietnam War, but they do not talk of America’s plan to annihilate them.
Neither do the Japanese, the world’s first and only victims of nuclear
explosion. Azikiwe repeatedly argued that though Igbos were killed in the
North, it does not mean the tribe was “slated for slaughter” as a policy. Colin
Legum, whom Achebe claims was the first to describe the 1966 revenge killings
of Igbos in the North as pogroms (pg 82), does not think so, too. This is
curious. Instead of stating the source of the Legum article, Achebe references
his own interview in Transition. In the London Observer of 26 May 1968, Legum
writes: “It is clear that there is no systematic attempt at exterminating Ibos
to justify charge of genocide.” Also, Ojukwu’s hitherto unknown Director of
Intelligence and External Communications, the American priest, Rev Fr Kevin
Doheny, said in a secret but frank conversation with an American diplomat that
the claim of genocide is “highly exaggerated but, without it, Biafrans would
have given up fighting long time ago”.
If there was any intention to exterminate Igbos, why after
Ojukwu had fled and the Biafran military had been completely paralysed, did the
Nigerian military not use the
opportunity to turn the guns on the
defenceless Biafrans or carpet bomb them? Instead, there were steps to welcome
them back into the fold. It is disingenious of anyone to talk of “genocide” or
“prospect of annihilation” when the context and facts on ground say otherwise.
It is insulting to the memory of true genocide victims. “If you are blind,
describing an elephant is easy,” Achebe writes in The Education of a
British-Protected Child. “You can call it, like one of the six blind men in the
fable, a huge tree trunk; or perhaps a gigantic fan; or an enormous rope, and
so on. But having eyes, far from making such descriptions easy, actually
complicates them.” Achebe, throughout the book, chooses the easy path of the
blind over the complex task of a conscientious writer. Having taken a low road,
he wants to arrive at a high point by invoking the Mandela Example in the final
pages. Mandela described Achebe as the writer “in whose company the prison
walls fell down”. With There Was A Country, Achebe is the writer in whose
company dangerous walls are rising up: walls of tribal hatred, walls of lies,
walls of sloppy thinking and lazy research, walls of propaganda and walls of
moral ineptitude.
(The views expressed above are those of Demola Awoyekun and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the blog owner and have been published only in the interest of artistic freedom)
(The views expressed above are those of Demola Awoyekun and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the blog owner and have been published only in the interest of artistic freedom)
