It did not escape Biafra’s founders that a great nation needed to be built on a strong intellectual foundation. Our modest attempt to put the beginnings of our thinking down on paper resulted in what would be known as the Ahiara Declaration.2
In the Harmattan Season of 1968, Ojukwu invited me to serve on a small political committee that the Ministry of Information was creating. The Ministry of Information was the only place that an author would be comfortable, he told me, because that was the venue of intellectual debate—where philosophy, cultural matters, literature, politics, and society with all its elements were discussed. The ministry had to play an important role in the new nation, he insisted, as Biafra tried to free itself from the faults it saw in Nigeria.
So I joined this group and set to work. The questions that we raised within the committee and later presented for broader discussion included: How would we win this war and begin the creation of a new nation with the qualities we seek? What did we want Biafra to look like? What would be the core components of our new nation-state? What did we mean by citizenship and nationhood? What would be Biafra’s relationship to other African countries? What kind of education would the general population need to aid Biafra’s development? How would Biafra attain these lofty goals?
The Biafran leader was pleased with the committee’s work and invited me to serve as the chairman of a larger committee that he wanted to set up within the state house. He called this new group the National Guidance Committee, and our business would be to write a kind of constitution for Biafra—a promulgation of the fundamental principles upon which the government and people of Biafra would operate. The final work would be a living document that could be modified over time and include at its core a set of philosophical rules that would serve as a guide for the people of Biafra. The Biafran nation, Ojukwu explained, had to have special attributes—the very principles that we approved of and were fighting for: unity, self-determination, social justice, etc. The final version of the document, we hoped, would also tell our story to the world—how Biafra had been pushed out of Nigeria by Nigerians and threatened with genocide. The only thing left for persecuted Easterners to do, we would stress, was to establish our own state and avert destruction. That, essentially, was the basis of the establishment of the Biafran nation.
Ojukwu then told me that he wanted the new committee to report directly to him, outside the control of the cabinet. I became immediately apprehensive. I was concerned that this arrangement could very easily become an area of conflict between the cabinet and this new committee that I was going to head. Who would be reporting to whom? And it seemed to me that Ojukwu wanted a hold on the organs of government—these two organs, plus the military—not so much separated but working at a pace and manner of his design. Nevertheless, I went ahead and chose a much larger committee of experts for the task at hand. I asked Ojukwu who he had in mind to be members of this larger committee. Several names were thrown about. Finally we arrived at quite an impressive group: Chieka Ifemesia, Ikenna Nzimiro, Justice A. N. Aniagolu, Dr. Ifegwu Eke, and Eyo Bassey Ndem.3 But the group still lacked a scribe and secretary.
There was a healthy competition for the position between Professor Ben Obumselu, who was an Oxford graduate like Ojukwu, and Professor Emmanuel Obiechina, who held a PhD from Cambridge University. I remember telling Ojukwu that Obiechina was educated in Cambridge, and he said, in the tradition of classic Oxbridge rivalry, “Oh, he is from the other place,” and we all laughed. In the end, Emmanuel Obiechina was appointed scribe and secretary.
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The work of the National Guidance Committee eventually produced the treatise widely known as the Ahiara Declaration. It was called “Ahiara” because Ojukwu’s headquarters at this time was a camouflaged colonial building in the village of Ahiara. Ojukwu was in hiding at that point of the hostilities. The retreats he had before, in Umuahia and Owerri, which became famously referred to as “Ojukwu bunkers,” were no longer available to him, having been bombed by the Nigerian army.
The concept of the Ahiara Declaration was taken from a similar one issued by President Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, called the Arusha Declaration. The importance of Julius Nyerere in Africa at that time was immense. Nyerere particularly caught the attention of African scholars because he stood for the things we believed in—equality, self-determination, respect for human values. I particularly liked how he drew inspiration from traditional African values and philosophy. He was admired by all of us not just because of his reputation as an incorruptible visionary leader endowed with admirable ideological positions, but also because he had shown great solidarity for our cause. He was, after all, the first African head of state to recognize Biafra.
Though we shared an admiration for President Nyerere and the Arusha Declaration, members of the National Guidance Committee came to work with diverse political beliefs, backgrounds, and influences; we did not all come from the same ideological or political school of thought. There were those on the committee who admired the American, British, and French notions of democracy. There were those who harbored socialist, even communist, views, who were influenced by the writings of Marcus Garvey, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, and the Argentine physician and Marxist revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevera. Others liked local intellectuals such as the centrist socialist Julius Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba, and Kwame Nkrumah. And still others like me preferred democratic institutions not in the purely Western sense but in a fusion of the good ideas of the West with the best that we had produced in our own ancient African civilizations.
In my case, I drew heavily on my background in literature, history, and theology. I also tapped into what I call “the observation of my reality”—an extension of the things taught in the formal education of secondary school and university into the education from life I picked up from our tradition. One influential group were the orators, a group that fascinated me because they always seemed to be able to find the right things to say to stop a crisis! I looked out for people like that, who embodied a wholesome African wisdom—African common sense; they were within our communities, and within the group that would be called “the uneducated.” But they were arbiters of the traditional values that had sustained our societies from the beginning of time.
One man, an Ozo title holder whose eloquence I always remembered,
personified what I thought was the essence of what we were trying to write and should try to communicate. I remember distinctly watching as Okudo Onenyi, with his fellow Ozo title holders, dressed in their impressive traditional regalia, red caps and feathers, assembled for one of their Ozo meetings. One of the things that struck me was the dignity of these old men, who arrived at the site of the gathering carrying their little chairs that they would sit on.
At one particular meeting Okudo Onenyi was given a piece of chalk to mark his insignia on the mud floor or wall, as these men were wont to do. What surprised me was that Okudo took the piece of chalk and put down his initials. I did not realize that this man had gone to school, but he obviously had. My admiration for him rose, because he was one of those who was not easily persuaded to abandon his ancient traditions, like the rest, to join a new culture or religion, but he was willing to make a type of accommodation to his world’s new dispensation. This man represented those who were still holding fort and not putting up a physical fight. So it was not enough in my view to state that we wanted to be radical and create a left-wing manifesto, but we also certainly did not want to be right wing. It was that ancient traditional virtue I wanted to channel into the Ahiara Declaration.
It took us several weeks to get the work we had done into one document. We worked day and night. Chieka Ifemesia, Emmanuel Obiechina, and I did the editing after the committee had spent days brooding over our situation and prospects. Chieka Ifemesia, an emeritus professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and a leading authority on Igbo history, would come to the table with much more than his own memories or abstract intellectual concepts, but with a great deal of relevant historical background and context. He was a solid historian—serious, studious. He came from my own village of Ikenga in Ogidi. At the time of the war he was regarded as a rising intellectual star and a person who many of us relied upon for intellectual and cultural stimulation and ideas. Emmanuel Obiechina pulled all the ideas together and transcribed the committee’s work. My role was to keep some kind of control over the radical elements in the group who had more extreme left-wing thinking, for instance, the popular firebrand professor Ikenna Nzimiro.4
Nzimiro always had trouble with the establishment from his Nnamdi Azikiwe youth wing “Zikist days.” He did not like the direction Nigeria was going in, and he had no trouble expressing his dissenting views. He was perhaps the youngest representative on the local government council in those days, and he was very well-known everywhere for his radical positions. He was educated in Germany and England, and his escapades were legendary. His stories kept us all laughing for weeks.
Nzimiro disappeared in the middle of our writing the Ahiara Declaration, and we were all very concerned. One day we were informed that the police had locked him up. Apparently he had gotten into an argument with a police officer who did not care for his radical views. Insults were exchanged and Nzimiro was subsequently arrested. Emmanuel Obiechina told me what was going on. So we went to Ojukwu and informed him of what was happening to a member of our committee. Ojukwu called the chief of police, and we went to the police station to pick up our ultraradical colleague.
On June 1, 1969, very close to the end of the war, Ojukwu finally delivered this major speech, the Ahiara Declaration. It was an attempt to capture the meaning of the struggle for Biafran sovereignty. He provided a historical overview of the events that had led to the secession from Nigeria and the founding of the Republic of Biafra. The speech was as notable for its concentration on a number of issues that Biafra stood for—such as the rights to liberty, safety, excellence, and self-determination—as it was for the things the republic was against: genocide, racism, imperialism, and ethnic hatred, which were squarely condemned. The speech also decried the blockade of Biafra imposed by the federal government of Nigeria that was creating an avoidable humanitarian crisis, particularly among children, who were dying in the hundreds daily, and attacked the support of Nigeria by the major world powers.
The day this declaration was published and read by Ojukwu was a day of celebration in Biafra. My late brother Frank described the effect of this Ahiara Declaration this way: “Odika si gbabia agbaba” (“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.
The Biafran State
I would like to say something about the structure of the Biafran state. The Republic of Biafra took its name from the Bight of Biafra, the vast expanse of water covering the continental shelf into which the Niger River empties before flowing into the Gulf of Biafra. After Biafra’s surrender that body of water was renamed the Gulf of Guinea. The origins of the word “Biafra” are difficult to trace, although historical records point to Portuguese writings from the sixteenth century that it may have been derived from.
The republic’s capital was initially Enugu, a metropolis of over one hundred thousand at the time. It was also known as the coal city, a reference to the nearby Onyeama Coal Mines and other coal deposits that once served as the fuel that drove a large part of the Nigerian economy. Enugu was also the old administrative capital of the Eastern Region. A well-planned, sedate capital, it had a pleasant climate and the advantages of all the amenities of an important urban center without the pathologies of a large conurbation.
When Enugu fell to the Nigerian army on October 4, 1967, the administrative capital of Biafra was moved to Umuahia. Following the capture of Umuahia on April 22, 1969, Biafra’s capital was moved once again, to Owerri, the last administrative seat before the end of the war in January 1970.1
The population of Biafra in June 1967 was just under fifteen million people, and it was home to a large number of ethnic groups in addition to the Igbo, who made up about 65 percent of the population. The other major groups were the Efik, Ibibio, Ijaw, and Ikwerre. Others included the Andoni, Agbo, Degema, Egbema, Eket, Ekoi, Ibeno, Ikom, Iyalla, Kana, Mbembe, Uyanga, and Yako.2
Biafra was divided initially into eleven administrative provinces with as many administrators. Later that number was expanded to twenty.3
Once secession was declared it became clear that the war effort required a great deal of military equipment—artillery, planes, boats, tanks, guns, grenades, mines, bombs, etc. Biafra needed a means to access foreign exchange and a legal tender for commerce. One of the first things the new government did was to establish the Bank of Biafra.
The Bank of Biafra was located in Enugu until the city fell in October 1967, and then it was moved several times to different locations all over Igbo land, with the seat of government. The bank’s first governor was Dr. Sylvester Ugoh.4
The legal tender produced by the institution in January 1968 was designed by Simon Okeke and other talented local artists.5 The first denominations were the five shilling and one pound notes. About a year later, the ten, five, and one pound as well as the ten and five shilling notes were issued. The currency was widely accepted in Biafra, although it was unavailable in large quantities, which quickly made it a prized possession. Despite its usefulness, it was not a recognized legal tender beyond Biafra’s borders and could not be used for foreign exchange. This dilemma produced a number of challenges for the Biafran government, which, we were told, used private bank accounts of wealthy Biafrans to perform transactions abroad.
THE BIAFRAN FLAG
The flag of the Republic of Biafra was based on the Pan-Africanist teachings of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). Garvey was a towering and controversial figure, a major Pan-Africanist thinker and civil rights pioneer at the beginning of the twentieth century, and his philosophy, known as Garveyism, was widely admired by many Africans. It was Garvey’s organization that first came up with the tricolored morphology of the Pan-African flag, with three horizontal bands, red, black, and green, to symbolize the common ancestry and political aspirations of all black people around the world. Kenya, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Malawi are just some of the many African and Caribbean nations that adopted variations of this flag.