There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

I will be the first to concede that the Igbo as a group is not without its flaws. Its success can and did carry deadly penalties: the dangers of hubris, overweening pride, and thoughtlessness, which invite envy and hatred or, even worse, that can obsess the mind with material success and dispose it to all kinds of crude showiness. There is no doubt at all that there is a strand in contemporary Igbo behavior that can offend by its noisy exhibitionism and disregard for humility and quietness.6

Having acknowledged these facts,7 any observer can clearly see how the competitive individualism and the adventurous spirit of the Igbo could have been harnessed by committed leaders for the modernization and development of Nigeria. Nigeria’s pathetic attempt to crush these idiosyncrasies rather than celebrate them is one of the fundamental reasons the country has not developed as it should and has emerged as a laughingstock.8

The ploy in the Nigerian context was simple and crude: Get the achievers out and replace them with less qualified individuals from the desired ethnic background so as to gain access to the resources of the state. This bizarre government strategy transformed the federal civil service, corporations, and universities into centers for ethnic bigotry and petty squabbles.9 It was in this toxic environment that Professor Eni Njoku, an Igbo who was vice chancellor of the University of Lagos, was forced out of office. An exasperated Kenneth Onwuka Dike, an ethnic Igbo and the vice chancellor of the University of Ibadan facing similar bouts of tribal small-mindedness, famously lamented during this crisis that “intellectuals were the worst peddlers of tribalism.”10

One of the first signs I saw of an Igbo backlash came in the form of a 1966 publication from Northern Nigeria called The Nigerian Situation: Facts and Background. In it the Igbo were cast as an assertive group that unfairly dominated almost every sector of Nigerian society. No mention was made of the culture of educational excellence imbibed from the British that pervaded Igbo society and schools at the time. Special attention instead was paid to the manpower distribution within the public services, where 45 percent of the managers were Igbo “and it is threatening to reach 60 percent by 1968. Moreover, regrettably though, [the] North’s future contribution”11 was credited with only 10 percent of the existing posts.

Of particular dismay to the authors of the report were the situations in the Nigerian Railway Corporation, in which over half of the posts were occupied by Igbos; the Nigerian Ports Authority; and the Nigerian Foreign Service, in which over 70 percent of the posts were held by Igbos. Probably the pettiest of the accusations was the lamentation over the academic success of Easterners who graduated in larger numbers in the 1965–66 academic year than their counterparts from the West, Mid-West, and North.12

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, but all over Nigeria in general, had become untenable. This government-sanctioned environment of hate and resentment created by self-serving politicians resulted in government-supervised persecutions, terminations, and dismissals of Nigerian citizens based on their ethnicity.

In most other nations the success of an ethnic group as industrious as the Igbo would stimulate healthy competition and a renaissance of learning and achievement. In Nigeria it bred deep resentment and both subtle and overt attempts to dismantle the structures in place for meritocracy in favor of mediocrity, under the cloak of a need for “federal character”—a morally bankrupt and deeply corrupt Nigerian form of the far more successful affirmative action in the United States.13

The denial of merit is a form of social injustice that can hurt not only the individuals directly concerned but ultimately the entire society. The motive for the original denial may be tribal discrimination, but it may also come from sexism, from political, religious, or some other partisan consideration, or from corruption and bribery. It is unnecessary to examine these various motives separately; it is sufficient to state that whenever merit is set aside by prejudice of whatever origin, individual citizens as well as the nation itself are victimized.14, 15

The Army

Before I go further an effort should be made to explain the nature of the dynamics at work within the Nigerian military at the time of the January 15, 1966, coup and the events that followed. Striking a balance between a level of detail that will satisfy readers who still feel the impact of these events deeply and that which will be palatable, if not to say comprehensible, to a less well-informed reader is an impossibility, but I will strive to do so nonetheless.

Historians have argued incessantly about the makeup of the January 15, 1966, coup and its meaning. It was led by the so-called five majors, a cadre of relatively junior officers whose front man of sorts was Chukwuma Nzeogwu. Very few people outside military circles (with the exception of the poet Christopher Okigbo) knew very much about him. What I heard of him was what his friends or those who happened to know him were telling us. He seemed to be a distant, mysterious figure.1

Nzeogwu had a reputation as a disciplined, no-nonsense, nonsmoking, nonphilandering teetotaler, and as an anticorruption crusader. This reputation, we were told, served him well as the chief instructor at the Nigerian Military Training College (NMTC) in Kaduna,2 and in recruiting military “intellectuals.”

In the wee hours of January 15, 1966, in a broadcast to the nation, Nzeogwu sought to explain “the coup attempt.” It happened that some journalists had approached

him to clarify the situation. Apparently the plan of the coup plotters was to take control of the various military commands in Kaduna, Lagos, and Enugu and to make a radio announcement from Lagos. Unbeknown to Nzeogwu, who was still in Kaduna, the Lagos operation had failed, and most information available to the population was coming from the BBC. Nzeogwu hastily put together a speech that became notorious for its attacks on the political class, bribery, and corruption.3

But by killing Sir Ahmadu Bello, Nzeogwu and the other coup plotters had put themselves on a collision course with the religious, ethnic, and political ramifications of such an action, something they had clearly not thought through sufficiently.4

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. 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. In the end the Nzeogwu coup was crushed by the man who was the highest-ranking Igbo officer in the Nigerian army, Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi.5

We were to learn later that Aguiyi-Ironsi was also on the list of those to be murdered. Ironsi got wind of the plot and mounted a successful resistance in Lagos, ultimately breaking the back of the coup.6

Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi emerged as Nigeria’s new head of state in late May 1966. In a broadcast to the nation on May 24, 1966, Ironsi banned all political parties and imposed what he called Decree No. 34 on a bewildered country. The widely unpopular decree eliminated Nigeria’s federal structure and put in place a unitary republic, which seemed to threaten more local patronage networks. For the first time in history a federal military government was in control of Nigeria.7

There was growing anger and dissatisfaction among officers from Northern Nigeria, who wanted revenge for what they saw8 as an Igbo coup. Aguiyi-Ironsi, a mild-mannered person, was reluctant to execute the Nzeogwu coup plotters, who were serving stiff prison sentences. Nzeogwu was imprisoned at the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison in Lagos. It didn’t help matters that all the coup plotters were eventually transferred to the Eastern Region, which at that time was under the jurisdiction of Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, son of Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu.9

Countercoup and Assassination

Throughout this time there was a sense of great unease and tension across the country, and multiple rumors of military insurrection in the offing. Prior to Major-General Aguiyui-Ironsi’s ascension in May 1966, there were reports of riots in Northern Nigeria. There are many reports of the genesis of these spontaneous riots.1 Marauding Northern youths armed with machetes, knives, and other instruments of death attacked unsuspecting civilians, mostly Igbos. The mainly Igbo and other Easterners who fled to the Eastern Region from the North during the May riots were persuaded to return to their livelihoods in the North by Aguiyi-Ironsi, the head of state, and Odumegwu Ojukwu, the military governor of Eastern Nigeria. These calls were predicated upon assurances from the Northern Region’s governor, Hassan Katsina, that no harm would befall them.2

By June several meetings had taken place among the Northern Nigerian ruling elite. They sent representatives to meet with now general Ironsi, handing him a list of their demands that included the revocation of the unpopular Decree 34; the courts-martial and punishment of the leaders of the January 15, 1966, coup; and the discontinuation of any plans to investigate the underpinnings of the May 1966 massacres in the North.3

Ironsi was alarmed that Northern leaders had been meeting without his knowledge for several months, and he sensed a great deal of anger bubbling beneath the surface. He made the ill-advised determination that, as Nigeria’s head of state, he could appease and soothe concerns if he met with the leaders of the regions.4 Ironsi embarked on a nationwide tour to calm growing fears of a permanently fractured nation and to promote his notion of a unitary republic. He stopped over in Ibadan as the guest of the military governor of Western Nigeria, Lieutenant Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi. A close friend and confidant, Fajuyi made Ironsi aware of rumors of a pending mutiny in the army.5

There are several accounts of what transpired next. What I was told by those close to the army was that on July 29, 1966, Ironsi was arrested by Nigerian army captain Theophilus Y. Danjuma, a Northerner, who wanted to know if Ironsi was linked to the death of the Sardauna of Sokoto. There are divergent accounts of what happened next. What is well known is that in a matter of hours the bullet-ridden bodies of Ironsi and Fajuyi were discovered in the bush.6 These executions would prove to be part of a larger and particularly bloody coup by Northern officers led by Murtala Muhammed.7

The Pogroms

Looking back, the naively idealistic coup of January 15, 1966, proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted with plausibility as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the East to take control of Nigeria from the Hausa/Fulani North. Six months later, I watched horrified as Northern officers carried out a revenge coup in which they killed Igbo officers and men in large numbers. If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a very tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the Northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the North and unleashed waves of brutal massacres that Colin Legum of The Observer (UK) was the first to describe as a pogrom. Thirty thousand civilian men, women, and children were slaughtered, hundreds of thousands were wounded, maimed, and violated, their homes and property looted and burned—and no one asked any questions. A Sierra Leonean living in Northern Nigeria at the time wrote home in horror: “The killing of the Igbos has become a state industry in Nigeria.”1

What terrified me about the massacres in Nigeria was this: If it was only a question of rioting in the streets and so on, that would be bad enough, but it could be explained. It happens everywhere in the world. But in this particular case a detailed plan for mass killing was implemented by the government—the army, the police—the very people who were there to protect life and property. Not a single person has been punished for these crimes. It was not just human nature, a case of somebody hating his neighbor and chopping off his head. It was something far more devastating, because it was a premeditated plan that involved careful coordination, awaiting only the right spark.

Throughout the country at this time, but particularly in Igbo intellectual circles, there was much discussion of the difficulties of coexisting in a nation with such disparate peoples and religious and cultural backgrounds. As early as October 1966, some were calling for outright war.2 Most of us, however, were still hoping for a peaceful solution. Many talked of a confederation, though few knew how it would look.

In the meantime, the Eastern Region was tackling the herculean task of resettling the refugees who were pouring into the East in the hundreds of thousands. It was said at the time that the number of displaced Nigerian citizens fleeing from other parts of the nation back to Eastern Nigeria was close to a million.

PENALTY OF GODHEAD