There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

Emeka Ojukwu went back to England to attend the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and returned shortly after to Nigeria, where he joined the officer corps and rapidly rose through the military ranks. He was accorded a great deal of respect by his military colleagues, who admired his pedigree and education.4 Frederick Forsyth, Ojukwu’s close friend, who would become a close Biafran ally during the war, reports of his days in England: “[H]e developed a private philosophy of total self-reliance, an

unyielding internal sufficiency that requires no external support from others.”5 This trait would bring Ojukwu in direct collision with some senior Biafrans, such as Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Michael Okpara, Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiani, and a few others who were concerned about Ojukwu’s tendency toward introversion and independent decision making.

Emeka Ojukwu received a mixed reception among the expatriate, mainly British, population in Nigeria. Many admired him for his background, as well as for his oratorical skills, and took great pride in the fact that he had been educated extensively in England. There is a magnificent story of how Emeka Ojukwu’s professors at Oxford enjoyed taking a spin or two in his sports car while he was a student there. Others, in contrast, felt that Ojukwu was some sort of spoiled rich kid. This impression made it more difficult for him to be cast as a sympathetic figure in the Western media when the war broke out. Complicating this image problem was the fact that some important wartime actors and observers, such as Sir David Hunt, the British ambassador to Nigeria during the conflict, and the eminent British journalist John de St. Jorre, believed Ojukwu looked down on Gowon. Ojukwu felt, they believed, that as an Oxford man he was far better prepared for leadership.6 Those of us who knew Ojukwu did not feel he harbored such sentiments. Whatever the case may be, Ojukwu’s background and temperament, for good or ill, influenced the decisions and choices that he made throughout the crisis and during much of what many believed was “a personal war and collision of egos”7 with Gowon.

THE GENTLEMAN GENERAL

Yakubu Gowon was born on October 19, 1934, in Pankshin, Plateau State, under circumstances very different from those of his military nemesis Emeka Ojukwu. Yakubu Gowon’s parents were Christian missionaries. His family spent several years during his early development in Zaria in Hausa land, where he received his early education and learned to speak the language of the dominant Hausa/Fulani fluently.8 Yakubu Gowon then received military training in Ghana and Eaton Hall in England before proceeding to the legendary officer training school in Sandhurst. “He then attended Young Officers’ College, Hythe Warminster, in 1957, Staff College, Camberley, England (1962), and Joint Services College, Latimer, England (1965).”9 He returned to Nigeria soon thereafter and became a star officer; his ability to assimilate would serve him well as he advanced rapidly in the Nigerian army.

Alexander Madiebo recounts the perception of Gowon’s contemporaries in the army:

Gowon for unknown reasons has always been very popular with the British authorities, both during his training in Britain and throughout his military service in Nigeria. For this reason, his progress in the army was so remarkable and extraordinary that even his fellow Northern officers were beginning to grumble. For instance, when he was chosen to attend the Camberley Staff College, England in January 1962, Major Pam, a Jos [Joint Service] Officer senior to him, called him a “sneaky sucker.”10

Yakubu Gowon was a particular favorite of the queen and other members of Britain’s royal family, a fact that he relished immensely.11 “[He] impressed the British monarchy as a sincere God-fearing leader who was determined to work for the development of his country under conditions of international peace and stability.” He did not fail to impress Britain’s cousins across the Atlantic either, at any opportunity. Henry Luce, the wealthy and highly influential American publisher of Time magazine, found Gowon

[a] spit-and-polish product of Britain’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Gowon is sometimes dismissed as “Jack the Boy Scout” in Lagos diplomatic circles. He neither smokes nor drinks, and keeps his 5-ft. 10-in. frame trim at 140 lbs.12

Whether or not one can ascribe this resentment held by his fellow officers toward Gowon to soldiers’ envy isn’t clear, but what was evident was that Gowon was a charismatic, eloquent, personable soldier who utilized a number of his skills to impress the rich and powerful. General Aguiyi-Ironsi, who became Nigeria’s first military head of state following the failed coup d’état of January 15, 1966, was one of many who were fond of Gowon, and the general appointed him chief of army staff. While I was watching events unfold in Nigeria in 1966, I found it instructive that when Ironsi was killed in the counter–coup d’état of young Northern officers on July 29, 1966, it was Yakubu Gowon who was chosen to become head of the federal military government and commander in chief of the armed forces.

Gowon’s elevation to head of state was a tactical compromise to assuage most ethnic groups that Nigeria was not coming under an Islamic Hausa/Fulani leadership intent on Christian and Southern domination. It did not help matters that many officers did not feel that Gowon was the most qualified to be in the role of head of state. In the Nigerian Outlook of March 21, 1967, Ojukwu revealed the sentiments of many military officers in Eastern Nigeria:

The point here and the crux of the whole matter is the fact that the North wants to dominate. . . . Gowon is not capable of doing anything. He is only a front man for the whole NPC/NNDP coalition. . . . [I]n fact the officers and men who took part in the July massacre were being used as tools. . . . But the NNDP/NPC coalition which master-minded this pogrom definitely wanted to continue the old policy of the North, that is to dominate and dictate.13

Behind the scenes, Murtala Muhammed was nursing his wounds. It was well-known that Muhammed, a favorite son of the Muslim Hausa/Fulani military establishment, was initially tapped to be head of state—an idea that was quickly shelved in favor of Gowon, the charismatic Christian and ethnic minority candidate from Plateau State. This snub was not lost on Muhammed, who harbored an unrelenting resentment toward Gowon and would later, in 1975, mount the decisive coup that ousted him from office.

In what was widely seen as an attempt to soothe growing ethnic hostility, particularly in Eastern Nigeria, Gowon appointed Emeka Ojukwu, a fellow Sandhurst alumnus, to the post of military governor of the Eastern Region, a post similar to that which he had held within Aguiyi-Ironsi’s Supreme Military Council. It was said that Emeka Ojukwu served in this new capacity reluctantly, because of what he believed was Gowon’s unclear role in the coup that led to the assassination of General Aguiyi-Ironsi and nearly two hundred Igbo officers. The relationship between the two men, shaky from the start of Gowon’s new government, suffered several other setbacks in the months to come, particularly following the series of pogroms that left over thirty thousand Easterners, mainly Igbo, murdered, and nearly one million fleeing to their ancestral homes in 1966.14

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There are a number who believe that neither Gowon nor Ojukwu were the right leaders for that desperate time, because they were blinded by ego, hindered by a lack of administrative experience, and obsessed with interpersonal competition and petty rivalries.15 As a consequence, according to this school of thought, these two men failed to make appropriate and wise decisions throughout the conflict and missed several opportunities when compromise could have saved the day.16

No small number of international political science experts found the Nigeria-Biafra War baffling, because it deviated frustratingly from their much vaunted models. But traditional Igbo philosophers, eyes ringed with white chalk and tongues dipped in the proverbial brew of prophecy, lay the scale and complexity of our situation at the feet of ethnic hatred and ekwolo—manifold rivalries between the belligerents. Internal rivalries, one discovers, between personalities, across ethnic groups, and within states, often fuel the persistence of conflicts.17 Conflicts are not just more likely to last longer as a result of these rivalries but are also more likely to recur, with alternating periods of aggression and peace of shorter and shorter duration.18 A “lock-in period”—the intensification of war with ever-shortening times of peace—is also classically seen.19

The internal rivalries that existed between Gowon and Ojukwu, and the pathological intraethnic dynamics that plagued the Nigerian military and wartime government, contributed in no small measure to the scale of the catastrophe that was the Nigeria-Biafra War. The fractured respect and un

enthusiastic reception Gowon received following his ascendancy to the position of head of state was only the beginning. There was a stifling anger at the dissolution of the Nigerian state, with all its ramifications. These sentiments were borne particularly by the Easterners overlooked by the young general at the helm of Nigerian affairs, with disastrous consequences.

There are a few other factors that merit consideration. There was an obsessive tendency by both belligerents—Gowon and Ojukwu—to seek positions of strength and avoid looking weak throughout the conflict. I am not referring to the propaganda statements, however over the top, which one expects in times of war, but to the ego-driven policies that were clearly not about the conflict at hand. Some of Ojukwu’s and Gowon’s civilian advisers aggravated the crisis by transforming themselves into sycophants. Rather than encourage their respective leader on each side of the conflict to consider a cease-fire, they massaged their egos and spurred them on to ever-escalating hostility.20

The longer the war dragged on, the more difficult it was for both sides to give in to anything that might lead to a peaceful resolution. In Biafra there was a widely held belief that “a cease-fire would lead to genocide or retribution of equal magnitude, or at least the relinquishing of self-determination and freedom.” Biafrans widely believed that the gap between our ideological position and that of our Nigerian brethren had simply grown too wide to bridge.21 Complicating matters was the fact that most intellectuals in Biafra viewed Nigeria, now under military dictatorship, as a neocolonial state under the iron grasp of its former colonial master, Great Britain, with a very willing steward at the helm.

There are some scholars who believe that the Igbo turned to Emeka Ojukwu by virtue of the fact that he was the governor of the Eastern Region of Nigeria at the time of the crisis—the “man in power” theory. Others have gone as far as to suggest that the war would have been prevented if there was a leader other than Ojukwu in place. The first statement will be debated for generations. As for the second, I believe that following the pogroms, or rather, the ethnic cleansing in the North that occurred over the four months starting in May 1966, which was compounded by the involvement, even connivance, of the federal government in those evil and dastardly acts, secession from Nigeria and the war that followed became an inevitability.

To be sure, there were a number that harbored alternative points of view. One of those people was the distinguished diplomat Raph Uwechue, who served as Biafra’s envoy to Paris up until 1968, and then later as Nigeria’s ambassador to Mali. Uwechue published a well-known personal memoir called Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War: Facing the Future in 1969, in which he unleashed a scathing criticism of Ojukwu and the leadership he provided for Biafra:

In Biafra two wars were fought simultaneously. The first was for the survival of the Ibos [sic] as a race. The second was for the survival of Ojukwu’s leadership. Ojukwu’s error, which proved fatal for millions of Ibos [sic], was that he put the latter first.22

Many who share Uwechue’s point of view cite as an example Ojukwu’s refusal to accept $600,000 from the British for relief supplies; they see this as evidence of a beleaguered albeit committed adversary who made ideological rather than practical or pragmatic decisions. Uwechue’s conclusions about the Biafran people are, however, far more controversial, in my opinion:

The Biafran masses, enslaved by an extremely efficient propaganda network and cowed by the iron grip of a ruthless military machine, had neither the facts nor the liberty to form an independent opinion. The case of the elite was different. . . . Those who had access to the facts knew that the time had come to seek a realistic way to end the war. . . . In private they expressed this view but proved too cowardly to take a stand and tell Ojukwu the truth.23

The late Senator Francis Ellah, a close friend of mine who helped set up the Biafran mission in London, and then served Biafra in several capacities, provides much more of a middle-ground analysis. He does, however, come down on the side of the many who believed that the Biafrans, not just the Nigerians, missed a number of opportunities to compromise and end the war earlier than they did:

I think the circumstances that led to Biafra were very unique; I remember that when I heard news of the secession on the radio I almost broke down . . . the causes were quite traumatic. I think once secession had been declared, the efforts made to fight the war were staggering. We were highly impressed by the solidarity shown by the Eastern Region. Then we had a cause we were fighting for.

I think that around March 1968, when we were in a position to achieve a confederation, we should have accepted the chance or opportunity. When we were insisting that Biafran sovereignty was not negotiable, as the government thought at the time, we ought to have considered the tragedy of the situation, because this country would have been much better if we had a confederation of four to six states, other than what we have now. Around the time of the Kampala talks there were definite signs that a confederation could be achieved. The Biafran side was adamant on the fact of sovereignty being nonnegotiable.24

THE FIRST SHOT