There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

The next day I got a message from Heinemann, a cable or telex, asking me whether they should go ahead and publish the book. Why would they send this message? I wondered. I was unaware that a coup had happened the night before. I told the gentleman who carried this message—I think from the British embassy—to tell my publisher to go ahead and publish the novel. I was not particularly afraid, even though I had concerns. I thought, Who was likely to misunderstand? My sentiment changed from incredulity to dread when we heard details and the surrounding events of the coup.

In those days we went to work on Saturdays and worked till noon. When I got to my office that Saturday there were soldiers everywhere, surrounding Broadcasting House. The soldiers stopped me and interrogated me until they were satisfied that I worked there, and then let me pass through. The announcement of a coup on the radio had not been made. Some people had their suspicions, because soldiers in military vehicles were seen being deployed throughout the city, and roadblocks with barbed wire were being erected everywhere.

News began to seep through

. We heard that the prime minister was missing. Then came news from Kaduna that the Sardauna,1 Sir Ahmadu Bello, the most powerful of the premiers, had been killed. We then heard that Samuel Akintola, the premier of Western Nigeria, had also been killed. Those of us working in broadcasting in the coming days would get a more detailed list of those killed, imprisoned, or detained during the coup. These events thrust Nigeria into a state of shock for a long time.

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Nigeria was not ready or willing to face her problems. If her leaders had approached their duty with humility, they all might have realized long before the coup that the country was in deep trouble. Nigeria was rocked by one crisis after another in the years that followed independence. First the Nigerian census crisis of 1963–64 shook the nation, then the federal election crisis of 1964, which was followed by the Western Nigeria election crisis of 1965—which threatened to split the country at its seams. At that point most of us, the writers at least, knew that something was very wrong in Nigeria. A fix was long overdue.

When the artist’s imagination clashes with life’s very reality it creates a heavy conundrum. The story Nigeria had of herself was that something like a military coup would never happen; Nigeria was too stable for that. We were utterly unprepared for such an event, and for the magnitude of the dislocation that ensued.

Despite my fictional warning I never expected or wanted the form of violent intervention that became the military coup of January 15, 1966. I had hoped that the politicians would sort things out for our new nation. Any confidence we had that things could be put right was smashed as we watched elements from the military take control. The coup was led by a group of junior officers, most of them Igbo, and it would be known widely as the Nzeogwu coup after Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, the ringleader, who was from the northern city of Kaduna. That night of January 15, 1966, is something Nigeria has never really recovered from.

The Dark Days

On January 16, 1966, the day after the Nzeogwu coup, my wife, Christie, took our first child, Chinelo, to the movies to catch the matinee. Chinelo was full of energy—always running all over the place. My wife’s doctor, Dr. Okoronkwo Ogan, who became our daughter’s godfather, called her “quicksilver.”1 On their way home, my wife decided to drop by and see me in the office, so that our daughter could tell me all about the movie they had watched. I believe it was the Disney classic Dumbo, about the flying elephant. As they approached the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation they saw the soldiers around but did not know what was happening. They were not scared, even though they found the commotion a bit peculiar.

As they walked to my office someone yelled at my wife: “Where are you going? Don’t you know what is happening?” So she walked more briskly, because she wanted to find out whether I was alive. A soldier stopped them and asked them to leave. They returned home and tuned into the radio station to find out what was going on.

People were standing on the streets in small groups, listening to the radios of street newspaper vendors. There had been a coup, the radio announcers said, at which point there was an initial period of spontaneous, overt jubilation. The story of the coup and how it happened started leaking out, first from the military barracks and then from the international media. There was a great deal of anxiety among the general populace. Everyone wanted to find out exactly what had happened in Kaduna, Lagos, Ibadan, and elsewhere the night before, though apparently not much action had been seen in Enugu, the capital of the Eastern Region. The initial vacuum of information was filled with gossip, innuendo, and fabricated accounts that magnified the confusion throughout the country. A second story got around that the military coup, which at first had been so well received, was in fact a sinister plot by the ambitious Igbos of the East to seize control of Nigeria.

In a country in which tribalism was endemic, the rumor of an “Igbo coup” began to find acceptance. Before long many people were persuaded that their spontaneous jubilation in January had been a mistake. A Nigerian poet who had dedicated a new book “to the heroes of January 1966” had second thoughts after the countercoup of July, and he sent a frantic cable to his publishers to remove the dedication.

Those who knew Nigeria were not very surprised, because part of the way to respond to confusion in Nigeria is to blame those from the other ethnic group or the other side of the country. One found some ethnic or religious element supporting whatever one was trying to make sense of. This angle grew stronger and stronger as the days passed, mainly because the state of confusion was not really dispelled satisfactorily by the authorities.

The weeks following the coup saw Easterners attacked both randomly and in an organized fashion. There seemed to be a lust for revenge, which meant an excuse for Nigerians to take out their resentment on the Igbos who led the nation in virtually every sector—politics, education, commerce, and the arts. This group, the Igbo, that gave the colonizing 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-independence Nigeria.

It was a desperate time. Soldiers were being used by elements in power to commit a number of crimes against Igbos, Nigerian citizens. Military officers were rounding people up and summarily executing them, particularly in the North, we were told by victims fleeing the pogroms. There was a story of hoodlums looking to hunt down and kill Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiani, who was the chairman of the Nigerian Coal Corporation.2 Dr. Ikejiani escaped the grasp of these thugs by dressing up as a woman and crossing the Nigeria border to Dahomey (today’s Republic of Benin)!

In Lagos, where we lived, soldiers were also used in targeted raids of certain people’s homes, including our own. It happened that my wife and I had moved recently from Milverton Street to Turnbull Road, after my promotion to director of external broadcasting. Fortunately for us the soldiers went to Milverton Street, to our old house, to search for me.

Some may wonder why soldiers would be after me so fervently. As I mentioned, it happened that I had just written A Man of the People, which forecast a military coup that overthrows a corrupt civilian government. Clearly a case of fact imitating fiction and nothing else, but some military leaders believed that I must have had something to do with the coup and wanted to bring me in for questioning.

Eventually my family and I left our Turnbull Road house, a painful decision. We had moved into it after we were married. It was located in Ikoyi, a nice section of town, overlooking the lagoon. I remember receiving important visitors in our home, such as the great African American poet Langston Hughes, who stopped by during one of his famous African tours. I have a favorite picture of the two of us from that period, standing near a palm tree on the lawn of that lovely residence.

We found refuge in an old friend’s house—Frank Cawson, the British Council representative in Lagos, whose intervention literally saved our lives. He housed us for a number of days. Mr. Cawson had been the British Council representative in Accra, Ghana, and had invited me to give a lecture there before he came to Lagos. I delivered a lecture, entitled, “The African Writer and the English Language.” So when Mr. Cawson was transferred to Nigeria, he was already known to me.

He was monitoring local and international radio and newspapers to get a sense of what was happening. He took a number of precautionary steps to enhance our safety. First he took his car out of the garage and put our own there instead, so that no one would see it. It was a very tense, anxiety-plagued period for my wife and me and our two children, Chinelo, who was five years old, and Ike, who was two. Making matters worse was the fact that Frank Cawson was quite ill—I think with malaria.

For about a week, lying hidden in Mr. Cawson’s house in Lagos, I still simply thought that things had temporarily gotten out of hand, and that everything would soon be all right. Then, suddenly, I discovered that I had been operating on a false and perhaps naïve basis all along. The soldiers located us after we had been

hiding about a week. It became clear to me that I had to send my family away.

As many of us packed our belongings to return east some of the people we had lived with for years, some for decades, jeered and said, “Let them [Igbos] go; food will be cheaper in Lagos.” That kind of experience is very powerful. It is something I could not possibly forget. I realized suddenly that I had not been living in my home; I had been living in a strange place. There were more and more reports of massacres, and not only in the North, but also in the West and in Lagos. People were hounded out of their homes, as we were in Lagos, and returned to the East. We expected to hear something from the intellectuals, from our friends. Rather, what we heard was, “Oh, they had it coming to them,” or words to that effect. There were many others from other parts of Nigeria who did not jeer but suffered with us at this sudden discovery that a section of the large, diverse Nigerian family was not welcome in this new country.

A lot of this hot-blooded anger was fanned by British intellectuals and some radical Northern elements in places like Ahmadu Bello University. They were aided by a few in the expatriate population from outside Nigeria, who easily influenced the mostly self-satisfied and docile Northern leadership to activate a weapon that has been used repeatedly in Nigeria’s short history—a fringe element known as “area boys” or the “rent-a-crowd types”—to attack Igbos in an orgy of blood.

As we reached the brink of full-blown war it became clear to me that the chaos enveloping all of us in Nigeria was due to the incompetence of the Nigerian ruling class. They clearly had a poor grasp of history and found it difficult to appreciate and grapple with Nigeria’s ethnic and political complexity. This clique, stunted by ineptitude, distracted by power games and the pursuit of material comforts, was unwilling, if not incapable, of saving our fledgling new nation.

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I arranged to smuggle Christie and the children out of Lagos on a cargo ship from the port. Christie reports that it was one of the most horrendous voyages she has ever undertaken. She remembers the seasickness heightened on this particular trip as a result of her pregnancy. She and the children and other refugees from the bloodshed were placed in a section of the ship that was in the open, without any shelter from the elements. There was vomiting, nausea; it was just awful. After the harrowing sea journey, Christie, Chinelo, and Ike were received safely in Port Harcourt in Eastern Nigeria by her brother, Dr. Samuel Okoli, an obstetrician-gynecologist, who served gallantly during the war effort.

I found it difficult to come to terms with the fact that Nigeria was disintegrating, that I had to leave my house, leave Lagos, leave my job. So I decided to sneak back into our Turnbull Road residence and return to work. People were disappearing right and left. . . . There was a media report of someone from the senior service whose body was found the night before. At this point the killings had reached the peak figure of hundreds a week.

Victor Badejo, the director general of Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, saw me on the premises, stopped me, and said, “What are you still doing here?” And then he said, “Life has no duplicate”3 and provided further clarification of the situation. Badejo confirmed a story I had heard of drunken soldiers who came to my office “wanting to find out which was more powerful, their guns or my pen.” He was quite anxious on my behalf and advised me to leave my Turnbull Road residence immediately.4