There Was a Country: A Memoir Read online

  There was growing anger and dissatisfaction among officers from Northern Nigeria, who wanted revenge for what they saw8 as an Igbo coup. Aguiyi-Ironsi, a mild-mannered person, was reluctant to execute the Nzeogwu coup plotters, who were serving stiff prison sentences. Nzeogwu was imprisoned at the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison in Lagos. It didn’t help matters that all the coup plotters were eventually transferred to the Eastern Region, which at that time was under the jurisdiction of Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, son of Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu.9

  Countercoup and Assassination

  Throughout this time there was a sense of great unease and tension across the country, and multiple rumors of military insurrection in the offing. Prior to Major-General Aguiyui-Ironsi’s ascension in May 1966, there were reports of riots in Northern Nigeria. There are many reports of the genesis of these spontaneous riots.1 Marauding Northern youths armed with machetes, knives, and other instruments of death attacked unsuspecting civilians, mostly Igbos. The mainly Igbo and other Easterners who fled to the Eastern Region from the North during the May riots were persuaded to return to their livelihoods in the North by Aguiyi-Ironsi, the head of state, and Odumegwu Ojukwu, the military governor of Eastern Nigeria. These calls were predicated upon assurances from the Northern Region’s governor, Hassan Katsina, that no harm would befall them.2

  By June several meetings had taken place among the Northern Nigerian ruling elite. They sent representatives to meet with now general Ironsi, handing him a list of their demands that included the revocation of the unpopular Decree 34; the courts-martial and punishment of the leaders of the January 15, 1966, coup; and the discontinuation of any plans to investigate the underpinnings of the May 1966 massacres in the North.3

  Ironsi was alarmed that Northern leaders had been meeting without his knowledge for several months, and he sensed a great deal of anger bubbling beneath the surface. He made the ill-advised determination that, as Nigeria’s head of state, he could appease and soothe concerns if he met with the leaders of the regions.4 Ironsi embarked on a nationwide tour to calm growing fears of a permanently fractured nation and to promote his notion of a unitary republic. He stopped over in Ibadan as the guest of the military governor of Western Nigeria, Lieutenant Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi. A close friend and confidant, Fajuyi made Ironsi aware of rumors of a pending mutiny in the army.5

  There are several accounts of what transpired next. What I was told by those close to the army was that on July 29, 1966, Ironsi was arrested by Nigerian army captain Theophilus Y. Danjuma, a Northerner, who wanted to know if Ironsi was linked to the death of the Sardauna of Sokoto. There are divergent accounts of what happened next. What is well known is that in a matter of hours the bullet-ridden bodies of Ironsi and Fajuyi were discovered in the bush.6 These executions would prove to be part of a larger and particularly bloody coup by Northern officers led by Murtala Muhammed.7

  The Pogroms

  Looking back, the naively idealistic coup of January 15, 1966, proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted with plausibility as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the East to take control of Nigeria from the Hausa/Fulani North. Six months later, I watched horrified as Northern officers carried out a revenge coup in which they killed Igbo officers and men in large numbers. If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a very tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the Northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the North and unleashed waves of brutal massacres that Colin Legum of The Observer (UK) was the first to describe as a pogrom. Thirty thousand civilian men, women, and children were slaughtered, hundreds of thousands were wounded, maimed, and violated, their homes and property looted and burned—and no one asked any questions. A Sierra Leonean living in Northern Nigeria at the time wrote home in horror: “The killing of the Igbos has become a state industry in Nigeria.”1

  What terrified me about the massacres in Nigeria was this: If it was only a question of rioting in the streets and so on, that would be bad enough, but it could be explained. It happens everywhere in the world. But in this particular case a detailed plan for mass killing was implemented by the government—the army, the police—the very people who were there to protect life and property. Not a single person has been punished for these crimes. It was not just human nature, a case of somebody hating his neighbor and chopping off his head. It was something far more devastating, because it was a premeditated plan that involved careful coordination, awaiting only the right spark.

  Throughout the country at this time, but particularly in Igbo intellectual circles, there was much discussion of the difficulties of coexisting in a nation with such disparate peoples and religious and cultural backgrounds. As early as October 1966, some were calling for outright war.2 Most of us, however, were still hoping for a peaceful solution. Many talked of a confederation, though few knew how it would look.

  In the meantime, the Eastern Region was tackling the herculean task of resettling the refugees who were pouring into the East in the hundreds of thousands. It was said at the time that the number of displaced Nigerian citizens fleeing from other parts of the nation back to Eastern Nigeria was close to a million.

  PENALTY OF GODHEAD

  The old man’s bed

  of straw caught a flame blown

  from overnight logs by harmattan’s

  incendiary breath. Defying his age and

  sickness he rose and steered himself

  smoke-blind to safety.

  A nimble rat appeared at the

  door of his hole looked quickly to left and

  right and scurried across the floor

  to nearby farmlands.

  Even roaches that grim

  tenantry that nothing discourages

  fled their crevices that day on wings they

  only use in deadly haste.

  Household gods alone

  frozen in ritual black with blood

  of endless tribute festooned in feathers

  perished in the blazing pyre

  of that hut.1

  The Aburi Accord

  The absence of a concerted plan to address the eruption of violence throughout Nigeria against Easterners, mainly Igbos, and the inaction around the refugee problem amplified the anger and tensions between the federal government, now led by Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, and the Eastern Region. Calls in the East for independence grew louder, and threats from the deferral government grew more ominous, in a vicious cycle.

  A last-ditch summit was held from January 4 to January 5, 1967, to discuss the areas of conflict. Great optimism was expressed that this would be the instrument to bring lasting peace to Nigeria. Aburi, in Ghana, was chosen as the venue, as a concession to Ojukwu, who had asked for a neutral site outside Nigeria for this meeting, but also to impart a sense of impartiality and credibility to the summit. A document memorializing the areas of shared understanding was produced after two days of meetings. It would be known as the Aburi Accord.1

  The gathering was attended by senior military and police officials2 and government secretaries.3 Topics for discussion included: a committee to work out a constitutional future for Nigeria; the back payment of salaries to Igbo government employees who were forced to leave their posts as a result of the disturbances; the need for a resolution renouncing the use of force; and the refusal of the Eastern Region to recognize Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon as supreme commander. The predicament of displaced persons following the pogroms in the North, the fate of soldiers involved in disturbances on January 15, 1966, and the planned distribution of power between the federal military government and the regional governments also required urgent attention.4

  The goal of the Gowon-led Nigerian government was to emerge from these deliberations with Nigeria intact as a confederation of the regions. Many intellectuals and key members of Ojukwu’s cabinet in the E
ast had been battling with solutions to these issues for months before the Aburi meetings, thinking through various possible answers to these key questions: What is a confederation? How would it work in the Nigerian setting? How much power would be delegated to the central federal government as opposed to the regions? In my estimation there was not as much rigorous thought given by Gowon’s federal cabinet and the powerful interests in the North. The two parties therefore left Aburi with very different levels of understanding of what a confederation meant and how it would work in Nigeria.5

  By March 1967, two months after the summit in Aburi, Ghana, the Aburi Accord resolutions had yet to be implemented, and there was growing weariness in the East that Gowon had no intention of doing so. The government of the Eastern Region warned Gowon that his repeated failure to act on issues pertaining to Nigerian sovereignty could lead to secession.

  Gowon responded by issuing a decree, Decree 8, which called for the resurrection of the proposals for constitutional reform promulgated during the Aburi conference. But for reasons hard to explain other than as egotistical self-preservation, members of the federal civil service galvanized themselves in energetic opposition to the agreements of the Aburi Accord. Seeing this development as a strategic political opening, the Yoruba leader, Obafemi Awolowo, the West’s political kingpin, heretofore nursing political trouble himself, including prior imprisonment for sedition, insisted that the federal government remove all Northern military troops garrisoned in Lagos, Ibadan, Abeokuta, and throughout the Western Region—a demand similar to those Ojukwu had made earlier, during the crisis.6

  Awolowo warned Gowon’s federal government that if the Eastern Region left the federation the Western Region would not be far behind. This statement was considered sufficiently threatening by Gowon and the federal government to merit a complete troop withdrawal.

  There were increasing indications that Northern leaders never had any intention of implementing the settlement negotiated at Aburi. Ojukwu at this point was exasperated by what he saw as purposeful inaction from Gowon. During March through April 1967 he responded by instituting a systematic process that severed all Biafran ties to Nigeria: First he froze all official communication with Lagos, and he then followed this swiftly by disconnecting the “Eastern regional government’s administration and revenues from those of the federal government.”7

  I was in Lagos at the time. This event was so big that I cannot even in retrospect fully explain exactly what was happening. People were confused. I was confused myself. People who are confused in such a situation generally act with great desperation, emotion—some would say without logic.

  The movement toward a declaration of independence was very clear and sharp, because it was a result of a particular group of Nigerian citizens from the Eastern Region attempting to protect themselves from the great violence that had been organized and executed by arms of the government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. There was a strong sense that Nigeria was no longer habitable for the Igbo and many other peoples from Eastern Nigeria.

  That epiphany made us realize that Nigeria “did not belong we,” as Liberians would put it. “This country belong we” was the popular pidgin English mantra from their liberation struggle. That was not the case for Igbo people and many others from Eastern Nigeria. Nigeria did not belong to us. It was now clear to many of us that we, the Nigerian people, were not what we had thought we were. The Nigeria that meant so much to all of us was not reciprocating the affection we had for it. The country had not embraced us, the Igbo people and other Easterners, as full-fledged members of the Nigerian family. That was the predicament that the Igbo and many peoples from Eastern Nigeria found themselves in, and one that informed Ojukwu’s decisions, I believe, on the eve of civil war.

  The first part of May 1967 saw the visit of the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) to Enugu, the capital of the Eastern Region. It was led by Chief Awolowo and billed as a last-minute effort at peace and as an attempt to encourage Ojukwu and Eastern leaders to attend peace talks at a venue suitable to the Easterners. Despite providing a friendly reception, many Igbo leaders referred to the visit disdainfully as the “chop, chop, talk, talk, commission.” A majority of Easterners by this time had grown contemptuous of Gowon’s federal government for its failure to bring the culprits of the mass murders in the North to justice, and they saw this as the latest in a series of insincere overtures. Senior Igbo military officers were also openly voicing their concern that Gowon was an illegitimate leader, because he was not the most senior officer in the chain of military command, and so had no right to be head of state.

  There were a number of distinguished and well-meaning Nigerians on the National Reconciliation Commission, but they were meeting with leaders of an emotionally and psychologically exhausted and disillusioned Igbo people. Many of these same Igbo leaders had been at the vanguard of independence struggles, and after years of spearheading the “one Nigeria” mantra, had very little to show for it. Clearly the situation had become untenable.8

  On May 24, 1967, in the midst of this chaos, my wife went into labor. I sent my close friend, the poet Christopher Okigbo, to the hospital she had been admitted to to find out when the birth would take place, and then to call me at home, where I had briefly returned to rest and take a shower. In characteristic Okigbo fashion, he waited for the delivery, went to the nursery to see the baby, and then drove back to convey the news to me that my wife had delivered our third child, Chidi—“There is a God”—and that the way his baby locks were arranged, he looked like he had had a haircut and was ready to go to school! The baby’s arrival was a great joy, but I couldn’t but feel a certain amount of apprehension for this infant, indeed for all of us, as the prospect of civil war cast a dark shadow over our lives.

  GENERATION GAP

  A son’s arrival

  is the crescent moon

  too new too soon to lodge

  the man’s returning. His

  feast of reincarnation

  must await the moon’s

  ripening at the naming

  ceremony of his

  grandson.1

  The Nightmare Begins

  May the twenty-sixth saw an emergency meeting of Ojukwu’s special Advisory Committee of Chiefs and Elders in Enugu. The consensus was building across his cabinet that secession was the only viable path. “On May 27, the Consultative Assembly mandated Colonel Ojukwu to declare, at the earliest practicable date, Eastern Nigeria a free sovereign and independent state by the name and title of the Republic of Biafra.”1

  It is crucial to note that the decision of an entire people, the Igbo people, to leave Nigeria, did not come from Ojukwu alone but was informed by the desires of the people and mandated by a body that contained some of the most distinguished Nigerians in history: Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s, former governor-general and first ceremonial president; Dr. Michael I. Okpara and Sir Francis Ibiam, former premier and governor of Eastern Nigeria, respectively; and Supreme Court justice Sir Louis Mbanefo. Others included: the educator Dr. Alvan Ikoku; first republic minister Mr. K. O. Mbadiwe; as well as Mr. N. U. Akpan; Mr. Joseph Echeruo; Ekukinam-Bassey; Chief Samuel Mbakwe; Chief Jerome Udoji; and Chief Margaret Ekpo.

  In a speech to the nation on May 27, 1967, Gowon responded to Ojukwu’s “assault on Nigeria’s unity and blatant revenue appropriation,” as the federal government saw it, by calling a state of emergency and dividing the nation into twelve states.2

  The official position from the federal government was that the creation of new states was an important move to foster unity and stability in Nigeria. Many suspect a more Machiavellian scheme at work here.3 Gowon, understanding inter-ethnic rivalry, suspected that dividing the East into four states, landlocking the Igbos into the East Central State and isolating the oil-producing areas of Nigeria outside Igbo land, would weaken secessionist sentiments in the region and empow
er minority groups that lived in oil-producing regions to stand up to what they had already dreaded for years—the prospects of Igbo domination.4

  On May 30, 1967, Ojukwu, citing a variety of malevolent acts directed at the mainly Igbo Easterners—such as the pogrom that claimed over thirty thousand lives; the federal government’s failure to ensure the safety of Easterners in the presence of organized genocide; and the direct incrimination of the government in the murders of its own citizens—proclaimed the independence of the Republic of Biafra from Nigeria, with the full backing of the Eastern House Constituent Assembly.5 By taking this action Ojukwu had committed us to full-blown war. Nigeria would never be the same again.

  The Nigeria-Biafra War

  To fully comprehend some of the competing positions during the Nigeria-Biafra War, it may be useful to begin with an examination of the local and international response to Biafra.

  THE BIAFRAN POSITION

  Beginning with the January 15, 1966, coup d’état, through the countercoup (staged mainly by Northern Nigerian officers, who murdered 185 Igbo officers1) and the massacre of thirty thousand Igbos and Easterners in pogroms that started in May 1966 and occurred over four months—the events of those months left millions of other future Biafrans and me feeling terrified. As we fled “home” to Eastern Nigeria to escape all manner of atrocities that were being inflicted upon us and our families in different parts of Nigeria, we saw ourselves as victims. When we noticed that the federal government of Nigeria did not respond to our call to end the pogroms, we concluded that a government that failed to safeguard the lives of its citizens has no claim to their allegiance and must be ready to accept that the victims deserve the right to seek their safety in other ways—including secession.