There Was a Country: A Memoir Read online

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  I arranged to smuggle Christie and the children out of Lagos on a cargo ship from the port. Christie reports that it was one of the most horrendous voyages she has ever undertaken. She remembers the seasickness heightened on this particular trip as a result of her pregnancy. She and the children and other refugees from the bloodshed were placed in a section of the ship that was in the open, without any shelter from the elements. There was vomiting, nausea; it was just awful. After the harrowing sea journey, Christie, Chinelo, and Ike were received safely in Port Harcourt in Eastern Nigeria by her brother, Dr. Samuel Okoli, an obstetrician-gynecologist, who served gallantly during the war effort.

  I found it difficult to come to terms with the fact that Nigeria was disintegrating, that I had to leave my house, leave Lagos, leave my job. So I decided to sneak back into our Turnbull Road residence and return to work. People were disappearing right and left. . . . There was a media report of someone from the senior service whose body was found the night before. At this point the killings had reached the peak figure of hundreds a week.

  Victor Badejo, the director general of Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, saw me on the premises, stopped me, and said, “What are you still doing here?” And then he said, “Life has no duplicate”3 and provided further clarification of the situation. Badejo confirmed a story I had heard of drunken soldiers who came to my office “wanting to find out which was more powerful, their guns or my pen.” He was quite anxious on my behalf and advised me to leave my Turnbull Road residence immediately.4

  Philip Ume-Ezeoke was the controller of education programming at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. We were both from the Eastern Region and got on rather well. He and I decided together that the time had come for us to travel back to the East. Relatives were sending messages from there begging their loved ones in Lagos to return. There were a number of people like us who did not really want to see this come about . . . did not believe this was happening. Ume-Ezeoke came to my house and suggested we go in a two-car convoy back to Eastern Nigeria. We agreed on a time that we would leave Lagos the following morning.

  I got to Ume-Ezeoke’s house the next morning very early, exactly at the agreed-upon time, but no one was there. He was already gone. Unfortunately, Philip Ume-Ezeoke is no longer alive. If he were, it would be interesting to know what happened. In any case, I set out on my own, wondering what would come up at any point. The highway was full of police roadblocks along the way. I was stopped once or twice and had to show my papers—what Nigerians call my “particulars.”

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  I was one of the last to flee Lagos. I simply could not bring myself to accept that I could no longer live in my nation’s capital, although the facts clearly said so. My feeling toward Nigeria was one of profound disappointment. Not only because mobs were hunting down and killing innocent civilians in many parts, especially in the North, but because the federal government sat by and let it happen.

  The problems of the Nigerian federation were well-known, but I somehow had felt that perhaps this was part of a nation’s maturation, and that given time we would solve our problems. Then, suddenly, this incredible, horrific experience happened—not just to a few people but to millions, together. I could not escape the impact of this trauma happening to millions of people at the same time. Suddenly I realized that the only valid basis for existence is one that gives security to you and your people. It is as simple as that.5

  When I finally got to Benin City, which is located roughly halfway from Lagos to Igbo land in the Mid-West Region, there was a distinct atmospheric change. The fact that the Mid-West was a neighbor of the East meant that at this point there were Mid-Western Igbo policemen. It is important to recall that during this period in Nigerian history the Igbos had large numbers in the police force but not in the army, where their numbers were concentrated in the officer corps. Crowds of policemen recognized me when I got to Benin City and cheered, saying, “Oga, thank you!,” and let me through to continue my journey without incident to Onitsha Bridge, and over the Niger River to the East.

  It is pertinent to note that within the military there had been for at least half a decade preceding the coup a great sense of alienation from and disillusionment with the political class in Nigeria. They shared that feeling with a growing number of ordinary Nigerians, and clearly with the writers and intellectuals. The political class, oblivious of the growing disenchantment permeating literally every strata of Nigerian society, was consumed with individual and ethnic pursuits, and with the accumulation of material and other resources. Corruption was widespread, and those in power were “using every means at their disposal, including bribery, intimidation, and blackmail, to cling to power.”6

  Many within the military leadership were increasingly concerned that they were being asked to step in and set things right politically. In the first six years of its post-independence existence Nigeria found itself calling on the armed forces to quell two Tiv riots in the Middle Belt, crush the 1964 general strike, and reestablish order following regional elections in the Western Region in 1965. In hindsight, it seems as though President Azikiwe may have been aware of the sand shifting beneath the feet of the political class, and he tried to gain the support of the military brass during the constitutional crisis following the 1964 federal general election. The failure of Azikiwe’s attempt perhaps should have been the first sign to many of us that trouble lay ahead for our young nation.7

  BENIN ROAD

  Speed is violence

  Power is violence

  Weight violence

  The butterfly seeks safety in lightness

  In weightless, undulating flight

  But at a crossroads where mottled light

  From old trees falls on a brash new highway

  Our separate errands collide

  I come power-packed for two

  And the gentle butterfly offers

  Itself in bright yellow sacrifice

  Upon my hard silicon shield.1

  A History of Ethnic Tension and Resentment

  I have written in my small book entitled The Trouble with Nigeria that Nigerians will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbo. The origin of the national resentment of the Igbo is as old as Nigeria and quite as complicated. But it can be summarized thus: The Igbo culture, being receptive to change, individualistic, and highly competitive, gave the Igbo man an unquestioned advantage over his compatriots in securing credentials for advancement in Nigerian colonial society. Unlike the Hausa/Fulani he was unhindered by a wary religion, and unlike the Yoruba he was unhampered by traditional hierarchies. This kind of creature, fearing no god or man, was custom-made to grasp the opportunities, such as they were, of the white man’s dispensations. And the Igbo did so with both hands. Although the Yoruba had a huge historical and geographical head start, the Igbo wiped out their handicap in one fantastic burst of energy in the twenty years between 1930 and 1950.1

  Had the Igbo been a minor ethnic group of a few hundred thousand their menace might have been easily and quietly contained. But their members ran in the millions. As in J. P. Clark’s fine image of “ants filing out of the wood,” the Igbo moved out of their forest home, scattered, and virtually seized the floor.2

  Paul Anber explains:

  With unparalleled rapidity, the Igbos advanced fastest in the shortest period of time of all Nigeria’s ethnic groups. Like the Jews, to whom they have frequently been likened, they progressed despite being a minority in the country, filling the ranks of the nation’s educated, prosperous upper classes. . . . It was not long before the educational and economic progress of the Igbos led to their becoming the major source of administrators, managers, technicians, and civil servants for the country, occupying senior positions out of proportion to their numbers. Particularly with respect to the Federal public
service and the government statutory corporations, this led to accusations of an Igbo monopoly of essential services to the exclusion of other ethnic groups.

  The rise of the Igbo in Nigerian affairs was due to the self-confidence engendered by their open society and their belief that one man is as good as another, that no condition is permanent. It was not due, as non-Igbo observers have imagined, to tribal mutual aid societies. The Igbo Town Union that has often been written about was in reality an extension of the Igbo individualistic ethic. The Igbo towns competed among themselves for certain kinds of social achievement, like the building of schools, churches, markets, post offices, pipe-borne water projects, roads, etc. They did not concern themselves with pan-Igbo unity nor were they geared to securing an advantage over non-Igbo Nigerians. The Igbo have no compelling traditional loyalty beyond town or village.3

  There were a number of other factors that spurred the Igbos to educational, economic, and political success. The population density in Igbo land created a “land hunger”—a pressure on their low-fertility, laterite-laden soil for cultivation, housing, and other purposes, factors that led ultimately to migration to other parts of the nation: “In Northern Nigeria there were less than 3,000 Igbos in 1921; by 1931 the number had risen to nearly 12,000 and by 1952 to over 130,000.”4

  The coastal branches of the Yoruba nation had some of the earliest contact with the European missionaries and explorers as a consequence of their proximity to the shoreline and their own dedication to learning. They led the entire nation in educational attainment from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. By the time the Church Mission Society and a number of Roman Catholic orders had crossed the Niger River and entered Igbo land, there had been an explosion in the numbers of young Igbo students enrolled in school. The increase was so exponential in such a short time that within three short decades the Igbos had closed the gap and quickly moved ahead as the group with the highest literacy rate, the highest standard of living, and the greatest proportion of citizens with postsecondary education in Nigeria. The Igbo, for the most part (at least until recently), respected the education that the colonizers had brought with them. There was not only individual interest in the white man’s knowledge, but family, community, and regional interest. It would not surprise an observer that the “Igbos absorbed western education as readily as they responded to urbanization.”5

  I will be the first to concede that the Igbo as a group is not without its flaws. Its success can and did carry deadly penalties: the dangers of hubris, overweening pride, and thoughtlessness, which invite envy and hatred or, even worse, that can obsess the mind with material success and dispose it to all kinds of crude showiness. There is no doubt at all that there is a strand in contemporary Igbo behavior that can offend by its noisy exhibitionism and disregard for humility and quietness.6

  Having acknowledged these facts,7 any observer can clearly see how the competitive individualism and the adventurous spirit of the Igbo could have been harnessed by committed leaders for the modernization and development of Nigeria. Nigeria’s pathetic attempt to crush these idiosyncrasies rather than celebrate them is one of the fundamental reasons the country has not developed as it should and has emerged as a laughingstock.8

  The ploy in the Nigerian context was simple and crude: Get the achievers out and replace them with less qualified individuals from the desired ethnic background so as to gain access to the resources of the state. This bizarre government strategy transformed the federal civil service, corporations, and universities into centers for ethnic bigotry and petty squabbles.9 It was in this toxic environment that Professor Eni Njoku, an Igbo who was vice chancellor of the University of Lagos, was forced out of office. An exasperated Kenneth Onwuka Dike, an ethnic Igbo and the vice chancellor of the University of Ibadan facing similar bouts of tribal small-mindedness, famously lamented during this crisis that “intellectuals were the worst peddlers of tribalism.”10

  One of the first signs I saw of an Igbo backlash came in the form of a 1966 publication from Northern Nigeria called The Nigerian Situation: Facts and Background. In it the Igbo were cast as an assertive group that unfairly dominated almost every sector of Nigerian society. No mention was made of the culture of educational excellence imbibed from the British that pervaded Igbo society and schools at the time. Special attention instead was paid to the manpower distribution within the public services, where 45 percent of the managers were Igbo “and it is threatening to reach 60 percent by 1968. Moreover, regrettably though, [the] North’s future contribution”11 was credited with only 10 percent of the existing posts.

  Of particular dismay to the authors of the report were the situations in the Nigerian Railway Corporation, in which over half of the posts were occupied by Igbos; the Nigerian Ports Authority; and the Nigerian Foreign Service, in which over 70 percent of the posts were held by Igbos. Probably the pettiest of the accusations was the lamentation over the academic success of Easterners who graduated in larger numbers in the 1965–66 academic year than their counterparts from the West, Mid-West, and North.12

  By the time the government of the Western Region also published a white paper outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government positions in the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority, the situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular, but all over Nigeria in general, had become untenable. This government-sanctioned environment of hate and resentment created by self-serving politicians resulted in government-supervised persecutions, terminations, and dismissals of Nigerian citizens based on their ethnicity.

  In most other nations the success of an ethnic group as industrious as the Igbo would stimulate healthy competition and a renaissance of learning and achievement. In Nigeria it bred deep resentment and both subtle and overt attempts to dismantle the structures in place for meritocracy in favor of mediocrity, under the cloak of a need for “federal character”—a morally bankrupt and deeply corrupt Nigerian form of the far more successful affirmative action in the United States.13

  The denial of merit is a form of social injustice that can hurt not only the individuals directly concerned but ultimately the entire society. The motive for the original denial may be tribal discrimination, but it may also come from sexism, from political, religious, or some other partisan consideration, or from corruption and bribery. It is unnecessary to examine these various motives separately; it is sufficient to state that whenever merit is set aside by prejudice of whatever origin, individual citizens as well as the nation itself are victimized.14, 15

  The Army

  Before I go further an effort should be made to explain the nature of the dynamics at work within the Nigerian military at the time of the January 15, 1966, coup and the events that followed. Striking a balance between a level of detail that will satisfy readers who still feel the impact of these events deeply and that which will be palatable, if not to say comprehensible, to a less well-informed reader is an impossibility, but I will strive to do so nonetheless.

  Historians have argued incessantly about the makeup of the January 15, 1966, coup and its meaning. It was led by the so-called five majors, a cadre of relatively junior officers whose front man of sorts was Chukwuma Nzeogwu. Very few people outside military circles (with the exception of the poet Christopher Okigbo) knew very much about him. What I heard of him was what his friends or those who happened to know him were telling us. He seemed to be a distant, mysterious figure.1

  Nzeogwu had a reputation as a disciplined, no-nonsense, nonsmoking, nonphilandering teetotaler, and as an anticorruption crusader. This reputation, we were told, served him well as the chief instructor at the Nigerian Military Training College (NMTC) in Kaduna,2 and in recruiting military “intellectuals.”

  In the wee hours of January 15, 1966, in a broadcast to the nation, Nzeogwu sought to explain “the coup attempt.” It happened that some journalists had approached
him to clarify the situation. Apparently the plan of the coup plotters was to take control of the various military commands in Kaduna, Lagos, and Enugu and to make a radio announcement from Lagos. Unbeknown to Nzeogwu, who was still in Kaduna, the Lagos operation had failed, and most information available to the population was coming from the BBC. Nzeogwu hastily put together a speech that became notorious for its attacks on the political class, bribery, and corruption.3

  But by killing Sir Ahmadu Bello, Nzeogwu and the other coup plotters had put themselves on a collision course with the religious, ethnic, and political ramifications of such an action, something they had clearly not thought through sufficiently.4

  Superficially it was understandable to conclude that this was indeed “an Igbo coup.” However, scratch a little deeper and complicating factors are discovered: One of the majors was Yoruba, and Nzeogwu himself was Igbo in name only. Not only was he born in Kaduna, the capital of the Muslim North, he was widely known as someone who saw himself as a Northerner, spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the Northern traditional dress when not in uniform. In the end the Nzeogwu coup was crushed by the man who was the highest-ranking Igbo officer in the Nigerian army, Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi.5

  We were to learn later that Aguiyi-Ironsi was also on the list of those to be murdered. Ironsi got wind of the plot and mounted a successful resistance in Lagos, ultimately breaking the back of the coup.6

  Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi emerged as Nigeria’s new head of state in late May 1966. In a broadcast to the nation on May 24, 1966, Ironsi banned all political parties and imposed what he called Decree No. 34 on a bewildered country. The widely unpopular decree eliminated Nigeria’s federal structure and put in place a unitary republic, which seemed to threaten more local patronage networks. For the first time in history a federal military government was in control of Nigeria.7