There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

There were other reasons for the ever-growing Soviet presence in Nigeria in 1969.18 The Soviets had announced their intention to expand their bilateral trade agreements with Nigeria to include military and economic assistance. They had their eyes on a truly large prize: a co

ntract to build one of the largest steel mills in all of Africa, at a cost of a then astonishing $120 million.19 That steel investment later became the Ajaokuta Steel Mill in northern Nigeria—the poster child of corruption and white elephant projects in Africa—that went on to gulp over $4.6 billion of the Nigerian taxpayers’ money although very little steel was produced.20

The Portuguese, it should be made clear, had a more nebulous role with regard to Biafra. Portugal did not overtly back one side over the other during the conflict, which generated a great deal of talk and speculation. The extent of the Biafran relationship with Portugal was quite simply one that said, We will support you quietly. . . . Your planes can land in our territory—São Tomé. Rajat Neogy of Transition magazine probed to find out from me whether there was more to our relationship. My position at the time was understandably passionate:

I am not interested in what motives Portugal may have. If the devil himself had offered his air facilities we would have taken it, and I would have supported it. Portugal was very clever when it realized we were about to be exterminated, and said, “You can land at my airport,” and that, as far as I know, is the extent of Biafran association with Portugal. Portugal has not given us any arms. We buy arms on the black market. What we cannot get elsewhere, we try and make.21

The Chinese entered the contest late, albeit on the side of the Biafrans. Reports of Chinese technical and military assistance have been widely cited. Nevertheless, all told, the callous interference of the great powers led to great despair and a prolongation of the tragedy.22

The Writers and Intellectuals

Some of the leading international thinkers of the era were so appalled by the Biafran tragedy that they took it upon themselves to pay the breakaway republic a visit and get a firsthand look at the suffering, the destitution, and the starvation. Auberon Waugh came and afterward wrote a devastating book on Harold Wilson’s duplicitous policy. He also named his newborn child Biafra Waugh! There was a small group of American writers—Kurt Vonnegut,1 Herbert Gold, and Harvey Swados—who came to show solidarity with me and other beleaguered Biafran writers.2

Vonnegut was so devastated following his trip that he cried for weeks. Todd Davis reports that

Vonnegut’s response to his trip to Biafra was not suicide, but tears. He recounts his return to Manhattan, where he checked in to [sic] the Royalton Hotel (his family was skiing in Vermont): “I found myself crying so hard I was barking like a dog. I didn’t come close to doing that after World War II” [Fates 174]. [His experiences in] Biafra and Mozambique, quite obviously, play a part in the author’s consistent plea that we respect one another, an action that must involve our participation in meeting the needs of the global community.3

Kurt left in the seminal essay “Biafra: A People Betrayed” a glowing testament to his observations.

Geoffrey Hill, the British poet, Douglas Killam, the Canadian literary critic and scholar, Stanley Diamond, and the amiable Conor Cruise O’Brien all visited Biafra. Diamond brought something additional—a long-standing scholarly interest and expertise in the territory.4 This world-renowned anthropologist became an “intellectual Biafran warrior,”5 galvanizing a formidable American and Canadian intellectual response to the tragedy.

Diamond’s knowledge of Nigeria came from having done extensive fieldwork in parts of the country right from the last days of the British raj, and he followed its affairs closely through independence, and after. He understood the ideological dimension of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict. He was not fooled by the strenuous effort of Britain to pass off her former colony as a success story of African independence, when in fact it had only passed, with Britain’s active collaboration, from colonial to neocolonial status. He saw the bloody civil war not as Harold Wilson and other apologists for Nigeria presented it—that is, as progressive nationalism fighting “primitive” tribalism—but as the ruining of a rare and genuine national culture at the moment of its birth.

It was advantageous to the federal Nigerian case to stigmatize Biafra for its alleged links with South Africa and Portugal. Diamond pointed out that it was the Czechoslovakians and the Chinese, not South Africans or Portuguese, who supplied the bulk of Biafra’s arms in the first year of the war, and that the Czech source dried up after the Prague spring reform movement was crushed by Soviet tanks and the fall of Alexander in 1968.

The moment has come for Nigerians and the world to ask the proper questions and draw the right inferences about what happened in those terrible years. Stanley Diamond’s perceptions will, no doubt, be a great help to us. They are rooted in prodigious learning and a profoundly humane sensibility. I am happy that this remarkable man, who has searched far, who has found and reclaimed the uncluttered vision of the “primitive” at the crossroads of science and song, has bestowed on my country the benefit of his deep scholarly, humanistic, and spiritual meditation.

The New York Review of Books of May 22, 1969, carried a long article, “Biafra Revisited,” by Conor Cruise O’Brien on the second visit he made with Diamond to the secessionist enclave. It was accompanied by a poem I had just written in memory of Christopher Okigbo, Africa’s greatest modern poet, who had recently died on the Biafran battlefield. It also carried a profoundly moving poem, “Sunday in Biafra,” by Stanley Diamond that, like all his poetry, combines startling substantiality with haunting ease and inevitability, and it stamps on the mind like an icon of Africa’s tragedy an image and logic that nothing will remove.6

Nigerian author Enzwa-Ohaeto later wrote, “O’Brien was convinced that the ‘survival of Biafra’ would be ‘a victory for African courage, endurance, and skill, and an opportunity for the further development of African creativity.’ In his report on that visit in The New York Review of Books, he points out that of the ‘two best known writers, . . . Achebe is a convinced Biafran patriot and the other, the playwright Wole Soyinka (a Yoruba) is a prisoner in Northern Nigeria.’”7 Of critical importance to the entire debate around the Biafran affair was O’Brien’s conclusion: “‘[N]o one seriously interested in African literature, in its relation to African social and political life, can have failed to ponder the meaning of the choices and fates of these two men.’”8

The War and the Nigerian Intellectual

The war came as a surprise to the vast majority of artists and intellectuals on both sides of the conflict. We had not realized just how fragile, even weak, Nigeria was as a nation. Only a few Nigerians, such as the poet Christopher Okigbo, had early and privileged insights into the Nigerian-Biafran crisis.

We, the intellectuals, were deeply disillusioned by the ineptitude of Nigeria’s ruling elite and by what we saw taking place in our young nation. As far as their relationship with the masses was concerned, Nigerian politicians, we felt, had slowly transformed themselves into the personification of Anwu.—the wasp—a notorious predator from the insect kingdom. Wasps, African children learn during story time, greet unsuspecting prey with a painful, paralyzing sting, then lay eggs on their body, which then proceed to “eat the victim alive.”

Intellectuals had other reasons to despair: We were especially disheartened by the disintegration of the state because we were brought up in the belief that we were destined to rule. Our Northern Nigerian brethren had similar sentiments, but those feelings came from a totally different understanding of the world.

This opinion may explain why so many intellectuals played an active role in various capacities during the war years. Some of us evolved into “public intellectuals” through the period of the national crisis leading up to the war and exposed distortions and misrepresentations within the political system. Once the war began, however, many, particularly those of us in Biafra, drew upon the teachings of our ancient traditions.

Nri philosophy implores intellectuals to transform themselves into “warriors of peace” during periods of crisis, with a proclivity for action over rhetoric. Many of our finest writers and thinkers were armed with this ancient wisdom and worked toward a peaceful resolution to the hostilities.

Cyprian Ekwensi was one of the pioneers of the West African literary renaissance of the twentieth century. He was the author of numerous works, such as An African Night’s Entertainment, The Passport of Mallam Ilia, Burning Grass, The Drummer Boy, and Jagua Nana. When the war broke out Ekwensi left his job as director of the Nigerian Ministry of Information and served the Biafran cause in the Bureau of External Publicity, and as a roving ambassador for the people of the enclave. During the war years I traveled with Ekwensi and Gabriel Okara on several diplomatic voyages on behalf of the people of Biafra.

Wole Soyinka was already regarded by this time as Africa’s foremost dramatist. He had published The Swamp Dweller, The Lion and the Jewel, and The Trials of Brother Jero as well as collections of poetry. The Road is considered by many to be his greatest play. A Dance of the Forest, a biting criticism of Nigeria’s ruling classes, was the first of what was to become his signature role—as one of the most consistent critics of misrule from his generation. His 1964 novel, The Interpreters, as well as ventures into recording, film, and poetry, showcased his versatility. Soyinka’s attempts to avert a full-blown civil war by meeting with Colonel Ojukwu and Victor Banjo, as well as with then lieutenant colonel Olusegun Obasanjo, would earn him enemies in the Nigerian federal government and a twenty-two-month imprisonment.

The story I was told about this incident was that Wole, fed up with the federal government’s unsuccessful treatment of the Biafra

issue, had traveled to secessionist Biafra in an attempt to appeal for a cease-fire to the hostilities. He planned to set up an antiwar delegation made up of intellectuals, artists, and writers from both sides of the conflict—and from around the world—to achieve his aim. When he returned to Nigeria the authorities arrested him and accused him of assisting Biafra in the purchase of weapons of war.1 There was no evidence to corroborate their case, and Wole was imprisoned without bail. Later, to justify holding him without evidence, the federal government accused Wole of being a Biafran agent or spy, trumped-up charges that he categorically denied. I remember relating my disgust about Soyinka’s predicament to the editors of Transition in 1968 during the war: “I have no intention of being placed in a Nigerian situation at all. I find it intolerable. I find the Nigerian situation untenable. If I had been a Nigerian, I think I would have been in the same situation as Wole Soyinka is—in prison.”2

There was great concern for Wole’s health and safety as time went on. For many of the months he was in prison he was held in solitary confinement and moved from one prison to another. Most of us in Biafra were appalled. PEN International and many major writers of the time—Norman Mailer comes to mind—led a vigorous protest on his behalf, but he was not released until close to the very end of the war.

Professor Kenneth Onwuka Dike inspired us all very greatly and deserves special attention. He was a pioneer in so many respects. He was one of the first pupils to attended Dennis Memorial Grammar School. After that he traveled to the Gold Coast to attend Achimota College, and then went farther afield to Sierra Leone to attend Fourah Bay College before proceeding to England for undergraduate studies. He received his bachelor of science degree at the Durham University, England, and his master of arts degree from the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland. After a few years of study at Oxford, he earned his PhD in history from the University of London and returned to Nigeria, first to join the faculty, but later to become the first indigenous vice chancellor of University College, Ibadan.

In the late 1960s, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations decided to set up the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture somewhere in Nigeria, under the leadership of the former president of North Dakota State University, Fargo, Dr. Herbert R. Albrecht; Dike, along with Dr. T. A. Lambo, were among the Nigerians consulted. Dike suggested the prestigious institute be founded on a twenty-three-hundred-acre campus, in a loose affiliation with University College, Ibadan. And so it was. Dike was involved in several of these kinds of projects. For example, he was also instrumental in the establishment of the Nigerian National Archives.

Everyone who knew him will acknowledge that Dike was one of the most “detribalized” Nigerians of his generation. This point requires emphasis. A man of this ilk, a rare breed indeed, watched horrified at the disintegration of the nation that he and so many others had fought to establish. His sentiments would change to despair and anger following the massacre of thirty thousand Easterners and the rising hostility toward him and his family in Ibadan.3