There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

Gowon was clearly in a bind. He responded to this predicament by sending off secret memos to relay the details of his final offensive, a scorched-earth policy to crush the Biafran resistance once and for all. By the middle of January 1970, the Nigerian troops had regained the upper hand decisively. Biafra, for all terms and purposes was crushed emotionally, psychologically, financially, and militarily, and it came crashing down soon after the new year began.

After failing many times over the thirty-month period, Gowon finally had Biafra surrounded on three fronts. In mid-January 1970, after Owerri had been recaptured by the federal troops and Uli airport was under heavy air and land assault by federal troops led by Olusegun Obasanjo, I knew the end for Biafra was near. That feeling was confirmed for millions of others in Biafra when Ojukwu went on the radio and announced that he was “leaving the People’s Republic of Biafra to explore alternative options for peace.” We all learned later that he had traveled to Ivory Coast, one of Biafra’s early African supporters, where his longtime friend president Félix Houphouët-Boigny, with French backing, had offered him asylum. Nigeria mounted attempts to repatriate Ojukwu for at least five years following the war in order to try him for war crimes, but they failed mainly because the French made access to him impossible.

After that announcement there was sheer pandemonium throughout Biafra. Millions of Biafrans could be seen scrambling to get away from the Nigerian military forces, which at this point seemed to be advancing from every direction. Many of the classic Time and Life photos of this era were taken during this time of great panic, despair, and anxiety.

There have been several debates over the decades since about why Ojukwu, the resistance leader of a people so wronged, left (some say fled) Biafra at this critical juncture, declaring in his classic style: “Whilst I live, Biafra lives.”1 His detractors, many of whom are still alive, still believe that this particular act was one of great cowardice, and that true heroes go down with the cause.

I think Ojukwu’s departure, like many things that he did before, during, and after the war, was a complicated matter. It was clear to the Biafran leader that the end was near, that his troops had been defeated, at least militarily, and that the mostly Igbo Easterners on whose behalf he had waged this war were broken in every respect and were standing at the precipice of annihilation. By taking himself out of the equation, so to speak, Ojukwu robbed his old nemesis Gowon of the war booty he so

ught the most—his head. Therefore, the protracted internal rivalry between the two men that I have referred to had no resolution, and he had robbed Gowon of closure and complete satisfaction in victory. Indeed, many psychologists believe that Gowon may not have been as conciliatory as he ended up being had Ojukwu stayed behind.

Gowon does not stray far from my conclusions on this subject:

What you should remember about the time—and, at least, give us some credit for it—is that we did not take what would be considered normal action under such circumstances. In such an instance, all the senior officials involved—politicians as well as in the military—would have been strung up for their part in the war. This is what happened at the end of the Second World War in Germany; it happened in Japan at the end of the campaign in that part of the world. This is the civilized world’s way of doing things. But we did not do even that. We did set up committees to look into cases such as where rebel officers had been members of the Nigerian Armed Forces, and their loyalty was supposed to be to the Federal Government. When the war ended, we reabsorbed practically everyone who was in the Army. But there were officers at a certain senior level [who] we insisted had to accept responsibility for their role in the secession. It was the only thing to do. Probably I could have given pardon; however, I was not the one who gave pardon to Ojukwu. . . .

[I]n the case of Ojukwu, he had committed treason against the country! No matter how you see it, as far as the Nigerian context was concerned, he was the guilty party. In other areas, he would have been eliminated, and I thank God that He never put him in my hands. Otherwise I would have found it very difficult to save his life, even though I would try my best to save his life, because he was an old colleague, an old friend. But the public pressure would have made it impossible. So that was what happened in the case of people like Effiong. A few of the senior ones [who] were directly involved, we felt they should go. I think Effiong was dismissed. All that happened to the others was that they lost the few years of seniority gained during the period of the civil war.2

In Ojukwu’s absence, Sir Louis Mbanefo, the chief justice, and General Philip Effiong, the defeated republic’s leading military officer, met with a small group of Biafran government officials and made the fateful decision to surrender to the federal government of Nigeria. Effiong went on Biafran radio to announce the capitulation, and he spoke to the fear-stricken populace, urging calm and encouraging the troops to lay down their weapons. He announced that he was currently negotiating an armistice with the federal government of Nigeria, and that General Ojukwu had left the nation. This drew a very clear line between what was going on in the country and what was about to happen—which was the fall of Biafra.

Before that the defeat was already quite apparent. There were a few people who refused to recognize it and planned to continue to fight. I did not feel that continuing the conflict was an option at all. I felt that the best way to deal with this tremendous disaster was to not prolong the agony but to bring it to a close.

—

In the end, Biafra collapsed. We simply had to turn around and find a way to keep those people still there alive. It was a desperate situation, with so many children in need, kwashiorkor rampant, and thousands perishing every week. The notoriously incompetent Nigerian government was not responding to those in need quickly enough. With ill-advised bravado Gowon was busy banning relief agencies that had helped Biafra.3 It was in this environment of desperation that some people said, Let’s go into the forest and continue the struggle. That would have been suicidal, and I don’t think anybody should commit suicide.

We had spent nearly three years fighting, fighting for a cause, fighting to the finish . . . for freedom. But all that had collapsed, and Biafra with it. A very bitter experience had led to it in the first place. And the big powers prolonged it.

You see we, the little people of the world, are ever expendable. The big powers can play their games even if millions perish in the process. And perish they did. In the end millions (some state upward of three million, mostly children) had died, mainly from starvation due to the federal government of Nigeria’s blockade policies.4

General Gowon made a national broadcast on the eve of the official surrender to announce the end of the thirty-month war that he said had claimed over one hundred thousand military service men and women and over three million Biafrans. His “no victor, no vanquished” speech5 as it has come to be known, strove to strike a conciliatory tone, calling for the full reintegration of Igbos into the fabric of Nigerian life. There was great celebration throughout Nigeria and Biafra at the news of the end of the hostilities.

A day later, on January 15, 1970, the Biafran delegation, which was led by Major General Philip Effiong and included Sir Louis Mbanefo, M. T. Mbu, Colonel David Ogunewe, and other Biafran military officers, formally surrendered at Dodan Barracks to the troops of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Among the Nigerian delegation were: General Yakubu Gowon; the deputy chairman of the Supreme Military Council, Obafemi Awolowo; leaders of the various branches of the armed forces, including Brigadier Hassan Katsina, chief of staff; H. E. A. Ejueyitchie, the secretary to the federal military government; Anthony Enahoro, the commissioner for information; Taslim Elias, the attorney general; and the twelve military governors of the federation.

At the end of the thirty-month war Biafra was a vast smoldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 percent of the entire population. This high proportion was mostly children. The cost in human lives made it one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history.6

The sequelae of wars often begin with an armistice. The suffering and humanitarian disaster left in the wake of war’s destruction goes on long after the weapons are silenced—for months and years. Entire towns and villages, schools and farms in Biafra were destroyed. Roads and the rural areas were littered with landmines that continued to maim and kill unsuspecting pedestrians well after the hostilities ended. Many people had lost all that they owned. Loved ones in the thousands were reported missing by families. There were stories of scores of suicides. This was not just a case of Ani, or the land and its protector, the land goddess, “bleeding,” as my people would describe catastrophic events of this nature. It was worse: a case of Ani nearly “exsanguinating to death.”

My generation had great expectations for our young nation. After the war everything we had known before about Nigeria, all the optimism, had to be rethought. The worst had happened, and we were now forced into reorganizing our thinking, expectations, and hopes. We (the former Biafrans) had to carry on in spite of the great disaster that was military defeat and learn very quickly to live with such a loss. We would have to adjust to the realities and consequences of a Nigeria that did not appeal to us any longer. Nigeria had not succeeded in crushing the spirit of the Igbo people, but it had left us indigent, stripped bare, and stranded in the wilderness.

The Question of Genocide

I will begin by stating that I am not a sociologist, a political scientist, a human rights lawyer, or a government official. My aim is not to provide all the answers but to raise questions, and perhaps to cause a few headaches in the process. Almost thirty years before Rwanda, before Darfur, over two million people—mothers, children, babies, civilians—lost their lives as a result of the blatently callous and unnecessary policies enacted by the leaders of the federal government of Nigeria.1

As a writer I believe that it is fundamentally important, indeed essential to our humanity, to ask the hard questions, in order to better understand ourselves and our neighbors. Where there is justification for further investigation, then I believe justice should be served.

In the case of the Nigeria-Biafra War there is precious little relevant literature that helps answer these questions: Did the federal government of Nigeria engage in the genocide of its Igbo citizens through their punitive policies, the most notorious being “starvation as a legitimate weapon of war”? Is the information blockade around the war a case of calculated historical suppression? Why has the war not been discussed, or taught to the young, over forty years after its end? Are we perpetually doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past because we are too stubborn to learn from them?

We need not get into the prickly thicket of diagnosing the reasons for the federal government’s attempts to fool the world about what happened in Biafra. However, it may be helpful to start by defining the term genocide. Robert S. Leventhal provides this description:

The term genocide derives from the Latin (genos = race, tribe; cide = killing) and means literally the killing or murder of an entire tribe or people. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group. . . .” By “genocide” we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group. The UN General Assembly adopted this term and defined it in 1946 as “ . . . a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.”2

The Arguments

Throughout the conflict the Biafrans consistently charged that the Nigerians had a design to exterminate the Igbo people from the face of the earth. This calculation, the Biafrans insisted, was predicated on a holy jihad proclaimed by mainly Islamic extremists in the Nige

rian army and supported by the policies of economic blockade that prevented shipments of humanitarian aid, food, and supplies to the needy in Biafra.1

The argument extended by Harold Wilson’s government in defense of the federal government of Nigeria is important to highlight: