There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

The Nightmare Begins

1. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War, p. 93.

2. A memorandum from the American Jewish Congress in 1968 provides some more clarity to this murky milieu:

A definite step [toward secession] was taken in March when the Government of the Eastern Region announced that all revenues collected on behalf of the Federal Government would be paid to the Treasury of the Eastern Region. The Federal Government, it was alleged, had refused to pay the salaries of refugee civil servants forced to flee their areas of employment, and the East now had some 2 million refugees whose displacement from other parts of Nigeria was “irreversible.” Moreover, the Federal Government, it was alleged, had refused to pay the East its statutory share of revenues for months.

Faced with virtual secession, Colonel Gowon finally attempted to deal with grievances about Northern domination and also to appeal to minorities throughout Nigeria. He proposed that the Northern Region be broken up into six states, the East into three, and the West into two. The new states would coincide, to a large extent, with natural ethnic divisions. Notably, the East would be divided in such a way that the oil reserves would be located in states without an Ibo majority.

Source: Phil Baum, director, Commission on International Affairs, American Jewish Congress, “Memorandum to Chapter and Division Presidents, Chapter and Division CIA Chairmen, CRC’s, Field Staff,” December 27, 1968.

3. There is confirmation of this analysis from the CIA World Factbook:

Gowon rightly calculated that the eastern minorities would not actively support the Igbos, given the prospect of having their own states if the secession effort were defeated. Many of the federal troops who fought the civil war, known as the Biafran War, to bring the Eastern Region back to the federation were members of minority groups.

Sources: The Library of Congress Country Studies: Nigeria Civil War, http://workmall.com/wfb2001/nigeria/nigeria_history_civil_war.html; CIA World Factbook: Nigeria, the 1966 Coups, Civil War, and Gowon’s Government; Metz, Nigeria.

4. The government of Eastern Nigeria was quick to attack Gowon’s sardonic tactic of divide and conquer:

To the charge of Igbo domination over reluctant minorities, the Biafran Authorities reply: Because of the well-developed sense of community and cultural assimilation, there are no genuine minorities in the region, only local communities. . . . [T]he territory of the former Eastern Region of Nigeria is characterized by a high degree of cultural assimilation among the four major linguistic groups of the area: the Igbo, Efik, Ijaw, and Ogoja. Bilingualism and intermarriage, they claim, have made it difficult in many areas even to distinguish Ibos from non-Ibos [sic]. To support their claim that the non-Ibo peoples of the former Eastern Region are fully behind Biafra, officials of that state assert that of the 30,000 Easterners massacred in 1966, some 10,000 were non-Ibos [sic] and of the 2 million who were forced to return home, nearly 480,000 were non-Ibo [sic]. Biafran officials further assert that the former Eastern Region was the only part of Federal Nigeria which did not experience violent ethnic strife.

Sources: Baum, American Jewish Congress, “Memorandum,” December 27, 1968; The Library of Congress Country Studies; CIA World Factbook; Metz, Nigeria.

5. The Library of Congress Country Studies; CIA World Factbook; Nwankwo and Ifejika, Biafra; Achuzia, Requiem Biafra; Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War; Schabowska and Himmelstrand, Africa Reports on the Nigerian Crisis.

Part 2

The Nigeria-Biafra War

THE BIAFRAN POSITION

1. Luckham, The Nigerian Military.

THE NIGERIAN ARGUMENT

2. The American Jewish Congress provides further elucidation. Some used the minorities and their fear of Igbo domination as a reason for preventing the secession of Biafra:

Supporters of Nigeria fear that Biafran success would encourage ethnic groups in other African countries to attempt secession, thus further balkanizing a continent already divided into a large number of tiny and barely viable nations. They also argue that minority groups in the East, which form 35-40% of the population, do not favor an independent state in which they would allegedly be at the mercy of the more aggressive and numerous Ibos [sic]. The Federal Government, they claim, therefore has a moral responsibility not to abandon these peoples to Ibo [sic] domination. Mr. William Whitlock, British Under Secretary of State for Commonwealth Affairs, stated before Parliament on August 27 that he believed the 5 million non-Ibos [sic] of the East wanted to remain within Nigeria. This view was supported by The Guardian of August 21 (Parliamentary Debates pp. 32, 18).

One leading supporter of the Nigerian cause, Father James O’Connell, Professor of Government at Ahmadu Bello University, sees the conflict as one between the Ibos [sic] of the East and the minorities in the rest of Nigeria. The latter, he claims, now control the Federal Government, sit on the richest oil fields, and provide the majority of the soldiers for the Federal army. Within the context of the new 12-state structure which Colonel Gowon has decreed, these minorities see a chance to escape from domination by the major ethnic groups which they experienced in the three regions of the old Federation. O’Connell suggests they are as desperate to maintain a united Nigeria as the Ibos [sic] are to have their own country.

Source: Baum, American Jewish Congress, “Memorandum,” December 27, 1968.

3. Ibid.

THE ROLE OF THE ORGANIZATION OF AFRICAN UNITY

4. Ibid.

5. James D. D. Smith provides this historical observation of the role of intermediaries such as the Organization of African Unity in serving as effective agents of conflict resolution:

Intermediaries have their own difficulties when they become involved in cease-fire negotiations, and the way they conduct themselves has serious implications on their ability to be effective. Indeed, third parties may even be an obstacle to cease-fire [negotiations]. . . . These obstacles are not the same as those which stand in the way of a cease-fire. Here, we are concerned with those obstacles preventing the existence of a workable cease-fire proposal or agreement, which may or may not lead to an actual cease-fire. The acceptable proposal or agreement is a necessary but insufficient requirement for an actual cease-fire. In the case where it is only the appearance of the desire for cease-fire which is sought, proposals may be deliberately defective.

Source: James D. D. Smith, Stopping Wars: Defining the Obstacles to Cease-Fire (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1995).

6. It is sad to note, with the benefit of forty years of hindsight, that of the aforementioned six nations only Ghana and Cameroon were spared destabilizing national crises similar to Nigeria’s that either broke up the respective country or toppled political interests.

7. Enahoro, who was federal commissioner (minister) for information and labor under General Yakubu Gowon’s military government, remembers his encounter with Eni Njoku this way: