There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

Events of the time made war possible . . . not me. My good friend, Jack; he was thirty-three then, and so was I. That, in addition, made war almost inevitable. My good friend, Jack, had a smattering knowledge of the Eastern Region, but I grew up in it, and that created its own conflict. And so on and so forth. There are so many things. . . . My good friend, Jack: His people sent me a Christmas present of a headless corpse. He heard about it. . . . I received it! There’s conflict even in that experience, and so on and so forth.

But to be honest, war could have been avoided; after all, all you need to stop war is to say, I won’t fight! So it could have been avoided. But having fought it, my prayer is that we move forward, and learn from the past lessons of the war. We cannot wish it away. Whenever the history of Nigeria is written, whatever that is, there must be something written on the war. If you leaf through that book and there’s no mention of it, then throw the book away, because that is not the history of Nigeria. . . . But you’ll draw from the book the requisite lessons; if it has something on the war.

Source: Achebe Foundation interviews. Number 10, part 1: Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in conversation with Professor Nnaemeka Ikpeze and Nduka Otiono, July 25, 2005.

17. In Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis, Vol. 1, Africa, Collier et al. were not able to neatly wrap their highly respected theories of the genesis of civil war around the Nigerian situation:

Compared to the theory [the Collier-Hoeffler model], the reality of Nigeria’s conflicts is often puzzling, but it is precisely for this reason that this case offers several insights that may further our understanding of civil war. One insight is that several variables in the CH model, such as ethnic dominance and natural resource dependence, have to be re-operationalized. Another is that the way in which the government responds to protest matters in the process of conflict escalation and can trigger or prevent a civil war.

Source: Annalisa Zinn, “Theory Versus Reality: Civil War Onset and Avoidance in Nigeria Since 1960,” in Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis, eds., Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis, Vol. 1, Africa (Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2005), p. 117.

18. Jacob Bercovitch and Karl R. Derouen Jr., “Enduring Internal Rivalries: A New Framework for the Study of Civil War,” Journal of Peace Research 45, no. 1 (2008): 55–74.

19. Nathaniel H. Goetz provides an example of this “locking in period”:

Neither of the belligerents [Gowon and Ojukwu] was willing to concede the superiority of humanitarian over political considerations, which made it impossible to reach any agreement about the routes and methods to be used for moving relief supplies through the Federal blockade. In these circumstances, the humanitarian agencies felt compelled, given the gravity of the nutritional situation inside the enclave [of Biafra] in the summer of 1968, to step up their “clandestine” airlift of relief supplies.

Source: James M. Clevenger, “The Political Economy of Hunger: Famine in Nigeria, 1967–1970,” master of social sciences thesis, University of Birmingham, UK (June 1975), as quoted in Nathaniel H. Goetz, “Humanitarian issues in the Biafra conflict,” Working Paper No. 36, New Issues in Refugee Research, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (April 2001).

20. Writing about MacArthur’s Pacific challenges, James R. Locher III suggests that the American general’s failure to address a number of pressing issues similar to Gowon’s (albeit on a much larger scale) “resulted in divided effort, the waste of diffusion and duplication of force, [and] undue extension of the war with added casualties and cost.” (Emphasis added.) James R. Locher III, Victory on the Potomac: The Goldwater-Nichols Act Unifies the Pentagon. Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2004). Author interview with Archie D. Barrett, May 19, 2000.

21. Suppo

rted by the work of Smith, Stopping Wars.

22. Raph Uwechue. Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War: Facing the Future (Bloomington, IN: Trafford Publishing, 2004); Laurie S. Wiseberg, “An Emerging Literature: Studies of the Nigerian Civil War,” African Studies Review 18, no. 1 (April 1975), pp. 117–26.

23. Ibid. A Time magazine article from 1968, appropriately titled “A Bitter African Harvest,” elaborates:

Ojukwu has also said no to a British offer of $600,000 in relief funds. His reason: Britain sells arms to Gowon. Therefore, says Ojukwu, to give food at the same time would only “fatten the Biafrans for slaughter with British-made weapons.” Meanwhile his countrymen need an estimated 200 tons of protein food a day to survive, and are getting only about 40. Ojukwu insists that the only way to protect Biafra’s sovereignty is to fly the food in. He proposes mercy flights during the daytime, but these require the cooperation of federal Nigeria, which has threatened to shoot down the planes.

Source: “A Bitter African Harvest,” Time, July 12, 1968.

24. Francis Ellah worked in the Biafran Ministry of Transport and Communications, served as secretary to the Atrocities Commission, and supervised the establishment and activities of the Biafran Students’ Union.

Source: Achebe Foundation interviews: Senator Francis Ellah in conversation with Professors Ossie Enekwe and Nduka Otiono. © Chinua Achebe Foundation.

THE FIRST SHOT

1. Chinua Achebe, Collected Poems (New York: Anchor Books, 2004).

The Biafran Invasion of the Mid-West

1. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War; Metz, Nigeria.

2. Ibid.

3. C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, Biafra: Selected Speeches with Journals of Events (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).

4. De St. Jorre, The Nigerian Civil War.

5. Information from former classmates in Ibadan and Umuahia and their family members.

6. It was generally believed that both Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu of the Eastern Region (Biafra) and Lieutenant Colonel David Ejoor of the Mid-Western Region met secretly on several occasions to discuss the crisis before and even after the declaration of Biafra. In a recent interview, Ejoor (now a retired major general) admitted that all of these actions were taken “to prevent battle on Benin soil and to protect everybody’s interest, including the Igbo-speaking citizens [of the Region], even though [he] primarily supported the Federal Government.”

Source: S. E. Orobator, “The Biafran Crisis and the Midwest,” African Affairs 86, no. 344 (July 1987), pp. 367–83; African Affairs is published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal African Society.

7. Others included Ojukwu, General Philip Effiong, Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna, Major Sam Agbamuche, Major Phillip Alale, and Major Okonkwo.