Toyin Falola - Ogechukwu Ezekwem - Writing The Nigeria-Biafra War-Boydell & Brewer (2016)

Writing Nigeria-Biafra war_PPC_33mm v9_B+B 01/06/2016 17:01 Page 1
Writing the
EZEKWEM
FALOLA &
Edited by
The Nigeria-Biafra War lasted from 6 July 1966 to 15 January 1970, during
which time the postcolonial Nigerian state fought to bring the Eastern
Nigeria-
region, which had seceded as the State or Republic of Biafra, back into the
newly independent but ethnically and ideologically divided nation. This
volume examines the trends and methodologies in the civil war writings,
both fictional and non-fictional, and is the first to analyse in detail the
Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War

Biafra
intellectual and historical circumstances that helped to shape these often
contentious texts.
The recent high profile fictional account by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in
War
Half of a Yellow Sun was preceded by works by Ken Saro-Wiwa, Elechi
Amadi, Kole Omotoso, Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Edited by
Chukwuemeka Ike and Chris Abani, and strongly convey the horrific TOYIN FALOLA &
human cost of the war on individuals and their communities. The non- OGECHUKWU EZEKWEM
fictional accounts, including Chinua Achebe’s last work, There Was a
Country, are biographies, personal accounts and essays on the causes and
course of the war, its humanitarian crises, and the collaboration of foreign
nations. The contributors examine writers’ and protagonists’ use of
contemporary published texts as a means of continued resistance and
justification of the war, the problems of objectivity encountered in memoirs
and how authors’ backgrounds and sources determine the kinds of biases
that influenced their interpretations, including the gendered divisions in
Nigeria-Biafra War scholarship and sources. By initiating a dialogue on the
civil war literature, this volume engages in a much-needed discourse on the
problems confronting a culturally diverse post-war Nigeria.
Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the
Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the
University of Texas at Austin; Ogechukwu Ezekwem is a PhD student in
the Department of History, University of Texas at Austin.
Cover image: Niger Delta Militancy II. Mixed Media. 2011 (24"x30") by dele jegede
(reproduced by kind permission of the artist © dele jegede)
JAMES CURREY
an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd ISBN 978-1-84701-144-2
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and
668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US)
www.boydellandbrewer.com
www.jamescurrey.com 9 781847 011442
Writing the
Nigeria-Biafra War
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Writing the
Nigeria-Biafra War
Edited by
Toyin Falola and Ogechukwu Ezekwem
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James Currey
is an imprint of
Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge
Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB)
www.jamescurrey.com
and of
Boydell & Brewer Inc.

668 Mt Hope Avenue
Rochester, NY 14620–2731 (US)
© Contributors 2016
First published 2016
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part

of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published,
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remain, accurate or appropriate
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British
Library
ISBN 978–1–84701–144–2 James Currey (Cloth)
This publication is printed on acid-free paper
Typeset in 11/12pt Photina

by doubledagger.co.uk
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Contents
Notes on Contributors viii

List of Abbreviations xv
Timeline xvi
Map of Biafra 30 May 1967 – 1 May 1969 xx
Scholarly Trends, Issues, and Themes

1 Introduction
TOYIN FALOLA AND OGECHUKWU EZEKWEM 1
ON THE HISTORY OF THE

Part I NIGERIA-BIAFRA WAR
Background to the Nigerian Civil War

2 G.N. UZOIGWE 17
Connecting Theory with Reality

3 Understanding the Causes of the Nigeria-Biafra War
OGECHI E. ANYANWU 40
The Ahiara Declaration and the Fate of Biafra

4 in a Postcolonial/Bi-Polar World Order
RAPHAEL CHIJIOKE NJOKU 62
The Ahiara Declaration: Polemics and Politics

5 AUSTINE S.O. OKWU 81
CRITICAL DEBATES ON
Part II THE NIGERIAN CRISIS
Beyond the Blame Game

6 Theorizing the Nigeria-Biafra War
BUKOLA A. OYENIYI 111
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vi Contents
Confronting the Challenges of Nationhood in

7 Pre-Biafran Texts
Newspaper Narratives on the Eve of War
WALE ADEBANWI 130
Literary Separatism
8 Ethnic Balkanization in Nigeria-Biafra War Narratives
AKACHI ODOEMENE 166
Local Writers and Commitments to Ethnic Sentiments

9 OLUKUNLE OJELEYE 194
THE WAR IN FICTION, MEMOIR,

Part III AND IMAGINATION
Memoirs and the Question of Objectivity

10 Revisiting Alexander Madiebo’s The Nigerian Revolution
and the Biafran War and Robert Collis’s Nigeria in Conflict
CHRISTIAN CHUKWUMA OPATA 209
‘War is War’
11 Recreating the Dreams and Nightmares of the Nigeria-Biafra
War through the Eyes of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy
CYRIL OBI 230
First, There Was a Country

12 Then There Wasn’t: Reflections on
Achebe’s There was a Country
BIODUN JEYIFO 245
Ethnic Minorities and the Biafran National Imaginary

13 in Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn and
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun
MEREDITH COFFEY 265
Biafra in the Irish Imagination

14 War and Famine in Banville’s An End to Flight
and Forristal’s Black Man’s Country
FIONA BATEMAN 284
Magical Realism or Science Fiction

15 The Nigerian Civil War and Ali Mazrui’s
The Trial of Christopher Okigbo
ADETAYO ALABI 314
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Contents vii
Biafra, an Impractical Mission?

16 Revisiting S.O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun and
I.N.C. Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice
ODE OGEDE 328
Neo-Colonialism, Biafra, and the Causes of War as

17 Imagined in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra
FRANÇOISE UGOCHUKWU 361
No, This is Not Redemption

18 The Biafra War Legacy in Chris Abani’s GraceLand
HUGH HODGES 380
LOCATING GENDER IN
Part IV NIGERIA-BIAFRA WAR LITERATURE
Gender and the Construction of the Nigeria-Biafra

19 War Scholarship
EGODI UCHENDU 403
What is the Country? Reimagining National Space

20 in Women’s Writing on the Biafran War
JANE BRYCE 423
Female Participation in War and the Implication

21 of Nationalism
The Postcolonial Disconnection in Buchi Emecheta’s
Destination Biafra
OFURE O.M. AITO 454
Select Bibliography 477

Index 486
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Notes on Contributors
Adebanwi, Wale, Associate Professor in African American and Afri-

can Studies, University of California, Davis, holds doctoral degrees
in Political Science and Social Anthropology from the University of
Ibadan, Nigeria, and the University of Cambridge, UK, respectively. He
is the author of Authority Stealing: Anti-Corruption War and Democratic
Politics in Post-Military Nigeria (Carolina Academic Press, 2012), and
Yoruba Elite and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and Corporate
Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2014); also co-editor with Eben-
ezer Obadare of Encountering the Nigerian State (Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), Nigeria at Fifty: A Narration in Narration (Routledge, 2011), and
Democracy and Prebendalism in Nigeria: Critical Interpretation (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013).
Aito, Ofure is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Liter-

ary Studies, Federal University, Lokoja, Kogi State, Nigeria. She holds
a Postgraduate Diploma in Mass Communication, MA in Literature in
English and PhD (University of Lagos, Akoka). Her research and teach-
ing interests include African Literature, Gender Studies, Contemporary
American Literature, War Literature and African Cultural Studies. She
has attended a number of International conferences and presented papers
and has been a recipient of an American Fulbright Summer Fellowship
(2007). She has published several articles in journals, both international
and local, and has chapters in books on gender studies and poetry for
conflict resolution. She currently has on Amazon.com and Morebooks.
com a book of essays: Female Identity: The Dynamics of Culture in African
Women-Authored Novels. Among her essays is ‘The Poet as a Town-Crier*:
Poetry as Conflict Resolution in Okigbo and Ojaide’ in BRNO Studies in
English (2014). She is also the editor of HIRENTHA: Journal of the Humani-
ties. She is currently working on a documentation of the ‘Edo Pantheon
of gods, Rituals and Female Worshippers’.
Alabi, Adetayo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mis-

sissippi, where he teaches and researches world literatures and cultures in
English, particularly African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean. He
studied in Nigeria and Canada and obtained his PhD from the University
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Notes on Contributors ix
of Saskatchewan. Before joining the University of Mississippi, he taught

postcolonial and international literatures at Millikin University in Illinois
and at the University of Windsor in Canada. He is a former editor of The
Global South, a journal published by Indiana University Press, and the
author of Telling Our Stories: Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobi-
ographies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Other publications have appeared
in books and journals.
Anyanwu, Ogechi E. is Associate Professor of history at Eastern Kentucky

University. He received his PhD in African history from Bowling Green
State University, Ohio. He also holds a Master’s degree in International
Affairs and Diplomacy and a Bachelor of History degree, both from
Nigeria. Anyanwu’s research interests and focus have been on Africa’s
intellectual history, criminal justice system, and identity formation with
particular focus on Nigeria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
He is the author of The Politics of Access: University Education and Nation
Building in Nigeria, 1948–2000 (University of Calgary Press, 2011), and
co-edited the anthology, (Re)tracing Africa: A Multi-disciplinary Study of
African History, Societies, and Cultures (Kendall Hunt, 2012). Among
other publications, his articles have appeared in several peer-reviewed
journals such as Journal of Law and Religion, International Journal of Social
and Management Sciences, Journal of Nigerian Languages and Culture, Journal
of Humanities, International Journal of African Studies, American Journal of
Islamic Social Sciences, Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History, Journal
of Nigerian Studies, History of Education, and the International Journal of
Igbo Studies. Anyanwu serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Retracing
Africa, devoted to deconstructing the prevailing myths, stereotypes, and
misconceptions held in the western world about Africa and Africans.
Bateman, Fiona is based at the National University of Ireland Galway,

where she teaches in the discipline of English and on the MA in Culture
and Colonialism, and coordinates the MA in Public Advocacy and Activ-
ism. Her research has focused on Irish popular history and writing in
the twentieth century, especially issues of identity, race, and moderniza-
tion, as well as the Irish missionary movement and its texts. She is also
interested in postcolonial writing generally, and specifically from Africa.
She wrote her PhD thesis on Ireland’s foreign missions to Africa in the
twentieth century. She co-edited Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics,
Identity and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2011). Her postdoctoral research
on ‘Ireland and Biafra’ is ongoing: one article which draws on this work
is: ‘Ireland and the Nigeria Biafra War (1967–1970): Local Connections
to a Distant Conflict’ (New Hibernia Review, 16: 1, 2012).
Bryce, Jane is Professor of African Literature and Cinema at the Univer-

sity of the West Indies, Cave Hill. Born in Tanzania, she was educated
there and in the UK before gaining her PhD in Nigeria. She has been a
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x Notes on Contributors
freelance journalist and fiction editor, and has published in a range of

academic journals and essay collections, specializing in popular fiction,
contemporary African fiction, representations of gender, cinema, and
visual culture. Her current research focuses on popular cinema in dif-
ferent parts of Africa, as well as new publishing platforms and outlets
for creative writing in Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria. She also writes
creatively and is working on a memoir of colonial Tanzania.
Coffey, Meredith is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the

University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation focuses on nationalism,
globalization and resistance in contemporary Nigerian fiction.
Ezekwem, Ogechukwu is a PhD candidate in the Department of History,

University of Texas at Austin. She obtained her Master’s degree in His-
tory from the University of Texas at Austin and her Bachelor’s degree in
History and International Studies (First Class Honors) from the University
of Nigeria where she received the Best Graduating Student award in the
department. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the politics of midwifery
and reproduction in colonial Nigeria. She also works on issues regarding
gender, medicine in Africa and the African diaspora, wartime medicine,
international involvements in the Nigeria-Biafra War, and African Dias-
pora in the United States.
Falola, Toyin is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the
Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin. Author and editor of over a hundred books, he
has honorary doctorates from Monmouth University, Lincoln University,
City University of New York, Staten Island, Lead City University, Adekunle
Ajasin University, and Tai Solarin University of Education. His memoir,
Counting the Tiger’s Teeth (University of Michigan Press, 2014) recounts
the story of his life as a teenager.
Hugh Hodges is Associate Professor of English Literature at Trent Uni-

versity, Ontario, Canada, where his research focuses on African and West
Indian literature. His publications include ‘Fela Versus Craze World: Notes
on the Nigerian Grotesque’, in Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (eds)
Litpop: Writing and Popular Music (Ashgate, 2014); ‘Beasts and Abomina-
tions in Things Fall Apart and Omenuko’ (Ariel 43:4, 2012), ‘Marley at the
Crossroads: Invocations of Bob Marley in the Poetry of Geoffrey Philp’
(Review 81, 2010), ‘Writing Biafra: Adichie, Emecheta and the Dilem-
mas of Biafran War Fiction’ (Postcolonial Text 5:1, 2009), and Soon Come:
Jamaican Spirituality, Jamaican Poetics (University of Virginia Press, 2008).
Jeyifo, Biodun is Emeritus Professor of English at Cornell University and

Professor of Comparative Literature and African and African American
Studies at Harvard University. He was educated at the University of Ibadan
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Notes on Contributors xi
(BA First Class Honours in English) and New York University (MA, PhD).
He has taught at the University of Ibadan and the Obafemi Awolowo
University, Ile-Ife, both in Nigeria, and at Oberlin College and Cornell
University in the United States. He has lectured widely in Africa, Europe,
North America, and Asia. He has also served as an External Examiner
in several African, European, Canadian, Caribbean, and South Asian
universities. Professor Jeyifo has published many books, monographs, and
essays on Anglophone African and Caribbean writings, drama, Marxist,
and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poet-
ics, and Postcolonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), won one of
the American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Texts awards
for 2005. The two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, co-
edited with Professor Abiola Irele, was published in 2010. Professor Jeyifo
is presently completing a monograph on ‘Nollywood’, the national video
film industry of Nigeria, and editing some documentary shorts that he
has written and produced in the last few years.
Njoku, Raphael Chijioke graduated with a first class honours from the
University of Nigeria Nsukka and was Nigeria’s sixteenth Rhodes Scholar-
elect in 1992. He received his PhD in African history from Dalhousie Uni-
versity Canada in 2003. Previously, he had earned a doctorate in Political
Science from Vrije University, Belgium in 2001. His research specialty is
African history, politics, and culture, including the intersection between
literature and African studies. He has also been working on themes related
to international studies since 1997. Njoku is the author of Culture and
Customs of Morocco (Greenwood, 2005), African Cultural Values: Igbo Politi-
cal Leadership in Colonial Nigeria 1900–1966 (Routledge 2006), and The
History of Somalia (Greenwood, 2013); co-editor with Chima J. Korieh
of Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa (Taylor & Francis,
2007) and African history (2010); with Toyin Falola of War and Peace in
Africa (Carolina Academic Press, 2010); and with Hakeem Ibikunle Tijani
of Africa and the Wider World (2010). He has also authored 35 scholarly
articles in international journals and edited volumes. Some of his awards
include: Eleanor Young Love Award for Distinguished Scholarship (2006),
Distinguished Research Award in the Category of Social Sciences (2009),
Indiana University Library Residency Award (2009), Victor Olurunsola
Endowed Research Award (2007), and the Schomburg Center award for
Research in Black Studies (2006–07). Njoku is currently the Director of
International Studies and Chair of the Department of Languages and
Literature at Idaho.
Obi, Cyril is currently Program Director at the Social Science Research

Council (SSRC) and leads the African Peacebuilding Network (APN)
program. He is also a Research Associate of the Department of Political
Sciences, University of Pretoria, South Africa and a Visiting Scholar to the
Institute of African Studies (IAS), Columbia University, New York. Dr Obi
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xii Notes on Contributors
is widely published internationally. His publications include, The Rise of

China and India in Africa: Challenges, Opportunities and Critical Interventions
(Zed, 2010, co-edited with Fantu Cheru); Oil and Insurgency in the Niger
Delta: Managing the Complex Politics of Petro-Violence, (Zed, 2011, co-edited
with Siri Aas Rustad). He has also recently contributed chapters to the
following books: ‘Oil as the “Curse” of Conflict in Africa: Peering through
the Smoke and Mirrors’, in Rita Abrahamsen (ed.), Conflict and Security in
Africa (James Currey, 2013); ‘Africa’s International Relations beyond the
State: Insights from Nigeria’s Niger Delta’, in Tim Murithi (ed.), Handbook
of Africa’s International Relations (Routledge, 2013); and ‘ECOWAS-AU
Security Relations’, in James Hentz (ed.), Handbook of African Security
(Routledge, 2013).
Odoemene, Akachi holds a PhD in African History from the University

of Ibadan, Nigeria, and is currently an Oxford-Princeton Global Lead-
ers Postdoctoral Fellow (2013–2015) at University College, Oxford. His
current research focuses on African Social and Cultural History, Urban
History, Ethnic Studies, and Peace and Conflict Studies. He was the
Hewlett Visiting Scholar at the Population Studies and Training Center
(PSTC), Brown University, Providence, USA (2012), and also a 2009
African Humanities Program (AHP) Fellow of the American Council of
Learned Societies (ACLS). In 2012–2013 he held the Research Fellowship
of the African Peacebuilding Network (APN), Social Science Research
Council (SSRC) and the South-South Research Grants (the Africa/Asia/
Latin America – APISA/CLACSO/CODESRIA Collaborative Program)
respectively. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and
International Relations, Federal University, Otuoke, Nigeria.
Ogede, Ode is Professor of English at North Carolina Central Univer-

sity and author of Helping Students to Write Successful Paper Titles (Peter
Lang, 2013), Intertextuality in Contemporary African Literature (Lexington,
2011), Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2007),
Achebe and the Politics of Representation (Africa World Press, 2001), Ayi
Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast (Ohio University Press, 2000), Art, Society,
and Performance (University Press of Florida, 1997), and Teacher Com-
mentary on Student papers (Greenwood/Praeger2002).
Ojeleye, Olukunle currently teaches African History at the University of

Calgary, Calgary Alberta Canada. He has also worked as a management
consultant in Nigeria, United Kingdom, and Canada. His research has
focused on globalization, resource control, governance, development,
conflicts and conflict resolution in Sub-Saharan Africa. He has published
on such topics as reintegration of militarized combatants into post-civil
war African societies, migration, and the African diaspora. His most
recent book is the Politics of Demobilisation and Reintegration in Nigeria
(Ashgate, 2010).
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Notes on Contributors xiii
Okwu, Austine (Augustine) was, during the last few years of the British
Colonial Administration in Nigeria, an Assistant Divisional Officer. He
was a senior diplomat in the Nigerian Foreign Service, serving in Nigerian
High Commissions in London, Accra, and Ghana; in Dar es Salaam, Tan-
zania as Nigeria’s Acting High Commissioner and Nigeria’s first diplomat
in East and Central Africa; and at the Embassy Washington DC. During
the Nigeria-Biafra War, he was Biafra’s pioneer Special Representative
in the United Kingdom, Ambassador in Dar es Salaam, and Special
Representative in East and Central Africa, achieving the epic distinction
of securing two of the four recognitions for Biafra by African nations.
Now he is an emeritus college administrator/professor at Bloomfield
College New Jersey; Naugatuck Valley Community College, Waterbury,
Connecticut; and State University of New York, Oswego. He has a PhD
in History from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia
University, MA from Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven
and BA (Durham) from Fourah Bay College Freetown, Sierra Leone. He
is published in learned journals both in Europe and the United States and
is the author of The Igbo Culture and the Christian Missions 1857–1957
(University Press of America, 2009), and In Truth For Justice And Honor:
A Memoir of a Nigerian-Biafran Ambassador (Sungai, 2011).
Opata, Christian Chukwuma (PhD) is Economic Historian and Lecturer

in the Department of History and International Studies, University of
Nigeria. He is the author of many articles in academic journals and
book chapters. His published book is Igbo Entrepreneurship: A Study of
Night-Time Road Transportation in Nigeria, 1970–2000 (Lamb Lambert,
2012).His published research is on traditional Igbo economies; traditional
medicine; risk and quality control management; slave studies; the role of
incarnate beings, deities, and ontological forces in the regulation of eco-
nomic activities among the Igbo; the connect between extinct industries,
cultural practices, and women who through titles transformed themselves
into men, among Nsukka communities.
Oyeniyi, Bukola is Assistant Professor of African History at the Missouri

State University. He has published on social and cultural history of Africa,
conflict and peace building, Yoruba dress and identity, national and inter-
national migration of African peoples, and on African historiography. His
recent essay on terrorism, entitled ‘One Voice, Multiple Tongues: Dialogu-
ing with Boko Haram’, appears in Democracy and Security Journal, 10:1,
2014. His current research focuses on conflict memories, sacred spaces,
and on the history and trajectory of the growth and development of the
Nigerian state.
Uchendu, Egodi is Professor of History at the University of Nigeria,

Nsukka, with special interest in women’s history and lately in emerging
Muslim communities in Eastern Nigeria. She has worked as a researcher
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xiv Notes on Contributors
in the USA and several locations in Europe between 2001 and 2015
funded by the Fulbright Program, AvH (Germany), A.G. Leventis Foun-
dation, and others. Her researches revolve around women in conflict
situations, men and masculinities and their relation to women, African
historiography and emerging Muslim communities among the different
ethnic groups of Eastern Nigeria. Her publications include Women and
Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War (Africa World Press, 2007) and Dawn for
Islam in Eastern Nigeria: A History of the Arrival of Islam in Igboland (Klaus
Schwarz, 2011). Among her edited works are: Masculinities in Contempo-
rary Africa (CODESRIA, 2008), New Face of Islam in Eastern Nigeria and the
Lake Chad Basin: Essays in Honour of Simon Ottenberg (Aboki, 2012), and
as chief editor with Pat Uche Okpoko and Edlyne Anugwom, Perspectives
on Leadership in Africa (Afro-Orbis, 2010). Further details on her publica-
tions, projects and awards are available at www.egodiuchendu.com.
Ugochukwu, Françoise, habilitée à diriger des recherches and a Chartered

linguist, has been lecturing in Higher Education in Nigeria, France, and
the UK for more than 40 years. An Africanist affiliated to the Open Uni-
versity, UK, a Senior Research Fellow, IFRA (Nigeria) and a collaborator
to the Paris CNRS-LLACAN, with special interest in Nigerian and Inter-
cultural Studies, she is the author of the first Igbo-French dictionary (a
Franco-Nigerian joint venture), and of several books and some hundred
book chapters and articles in journals worldwide. Her qualifications,
professional career path, and areas of expertise have placed her at the
crossroads between language studies, literature, translation, anthropol-
ogy, and cinema. She is a member of several learned societies including
the Chartered Institute of Linguists (UK), the African Studies Associa-
tion of the UK, the Société des Africanistes (France), and a Fellow of
the British Higher Education Academy. Her pioneering work in the field
and her longstanding contribution to the strengthening of cultural and
educational ties between France and Nigeria awarded her the national
distinction of Chevalier des Palmes Académiques in 1994.
Uzoigwe, G.N. (DPhil, Oxon) is Emeritus Professor of History. A widely

published scholar and university administrator, he has authored and
edited several works on modern Nigerian history including History and
Democracy in Nigeria; Foundations of Nigerian Federalism, 1900–1960
(Esther Thompson, 1989); Inter-Ethnic and Religious Conflict Resolution
in Nigeria (with Ernest Uwazie, et al., Lexington Books, 1999); Troubled
Journey: Nigeria Since the Civil War (with Levi Nwachuku, University Press
of America, 2004); Visions of Nationhood: Prelude to the Nigerian Civil War,
1960–1967(Africa World Press, 2010). he is a fellow of the Historical
Society of Nigeria and a former president of that Society.
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List of Abbreviations
AG Action Group
NCNC National Council of Nigerian Citizens
NNA Nigerian National Alliance
NNDP Nigerian National Democratic Party
NPC Northern People’s Congress
OAU Organization of African Unity
RAL Research in African Literatures
UPGA United Progressive Grand Alliance
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Timeline of Nigeria’s Political History, 1900–1970
1900 – The governance of Nigeria passes from the Royal Niger Com-
pany to the British Crown
1906 – (1 May) – Amalgamation of the Lagos Colony with the South-
ern Nigeria Protectorate
1908 – German-owned Nigerian Bitumen Company begins search for
petroleum off the coast
1912 – The establishment of indirect rule by Lord Frederick Lugard,
Governor of Northern Nigeria
1914 – (January 1) – The amalgamation of Northern and Southern
Nigeria under the leadership of a governor-general, Lord Fred-
erick Lugard
1923 – Clifford Constitution is created
Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) is formed by Her-
bert Macaulay
1928 – (April) – Britain begins direct taxation in Nigeria
1929 – (November) – The Women’s War, a widespread revolt against
taxation, begins
1931 – The Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) is founded
1936 – Nigeria Youth Movement (NYM) is created
1937 – Shell D’Arcy Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (later
Shell-BP) granted rights to explore petroleum in the country
1940 – Northern People’s Congress (NPC) was organized
1944 – Nnamdi Azikiwe “Zik” founds the National Council of Nigeria
and Cameroun (NCNC)
1945 – A countrywide general strike as a result of government’s refusal
to review its African workers’ welfare package
First Ten-Year Plan for economic development adopted
1946 – Nigeria experiences growing nationalist sentiments
Promulgation of Richards’ Constitution
Richards’ Constitution splits the Southern Region into Eastern
Region and Western Region
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Timeline of Nigeria’s Political History, 1900–1970 xvii
1950 – McPherson’s Constitution comes into effect

Aminu Kano, one of the founders of NPC breaks away to found
the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU). NEPU forms
a parliamentary alliance with NCNC
Intensification of ethnic cleavages in Nigeria’s political scene
throughout the 1950s
1951 – The National Council of Nigeria and the Camerouns (NCNC)
proposes independence by 1956
(March 21) – Action Group (AG) is founded by Obafemi
Awolowo
1953 – (March 31) The motion for independence by 1956 proposed
in the House of Representatives by Anthony Enahoro receives
support from the Action Group (AG) and NCNC; Northern Peo-
ple’s Congress (NPC) recommends a delay
(May) – Kano Riot, a crisis between the North and South
1954 – The colonial government enacts Lyttleton’s Constitution that
firmly establishes the federal principle and paves way for
independence
1956 – Shell-BP discovers major oil deposits at Oloibiri and Afam
1957 – Constitutional Conference
1959 – The first national election is held to set up an independent gov-
ernment; the North wins majority of seats in parliament
NCNC becomes National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC)
after Southern Cameroon opted to leave Nigeria and merge
with French Cameroon
1960 – Nigeria’s first constitution, Independence Constitution, is
enacted
Tiv Uprising
(October 1) – Nigeria gains independence from Britain with
Nnamdi Azikiwe as Governor-General and Abubakar Tafawa
Balewa as Prime Minister
1962 – Action Group crisis
Controversial census leads to regional and ethnic tensions
(May 29) – State of emergency is declared in the Western
Region and the regional government is suspended
1963 – The 1963 Constitution makes Nigeria a federal republic
(June) – Mid-Western Region is formed
1964 – Samuel Akintola breaks away from AG to form Nigerian
National Democratic Party (NNDP), named after Macaulay’s
1923 political party
Another Tiv uprising over self-determination
(June 1–13) – General strike over workers’ wages
(30 December) – Parliamentary election is marked by violence
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xviii Timeline of Nigeria’s Political History, 1900–1970
and manipulations, bringing ethnic sentiments to the fore;

NPC dominates the parliament.
1965 – Western Region election
1966 – (January 15) First Military coup; end of the First Republic
(January 16) – The Federal Military Government is formed
and Aguiyi Ironsi becomes Head of State and Supreme Com-
mander of the Federal Republic
Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu becomes military gover-
nor of the Eastern Region
(May 24) – Unification Decree
(June to October) – Massacre of Eastern Nigerians in the North-
ern Region and mass exodus of easterners from the North
(29 July) Ironsi is killed in a counter coup and is succeeded by
Yakubu Gowon
1967 – (January 4–5) Negotiations between the Federal Military Gov-
ernment and the Eastern Region result in the Aburi Accord
(May 27) Nigeria is restructured into twelve states
(May 30) The Eastern Region secedes and the Republic of
Biafra is declared
(July 6) Nigeria invades Biafra
(July 14) The university town of Nsukka falls
(Late July) Bonny Island in the Niger Delta is captured by Nige-
rian troops, putting the control of Shell-BP facilities in Nige-
ria’s grasp
(August 9) Biafra forces occupy the Mid-West
(September19) Biafran military administrator declares the
Republic of Benin in the Mid-West, with capital in Benin City
(September 22) Benin City is retaken by Nigerian soldiers
(October 1–4) Fall of Biafra’s capital, Enugu
(October 4–12) Onitsha is invaded
(7 October) Asaba Massacre
(October 17–20) – Operation Tiger Claw. Occurred in Calabar
(November) – Relief supplies from the Red Cross are received in
Biafra
1968 – (January 2 to March 20) – Onitsha is invaded a second time
(March 31) – Abagana Ambush in which Biafran forces rout
Nigerian troops
(May 19) – Port Harcourt falls to Nigeria
(September 2) – Operation OAU in Owerri, Aba, and Umuahia,
resulting in Biafraan victory
(November 15) – Operation Hiroshima, a failed attempt by Bia-
fran troops to recapture Onitsha
1969 – (April 22) – The new Biafran capital, Umuahia, falls
(April 25) – Biafra regains Owerri
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Timeline of Nigeria’s Political History, 1900–1970 xix
(May) – Expatriate personnel are captured in Kwale oilfield

(June 1) – Ojukwu’s Ahiara Declaration, setting out the princi-
ples of the Biafran revolution
(November 25) – John Lennon returns his Member of the Order
of the British Empire (M.B.E) decoration to Queen Elizabeth II
in protest against British involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra war
(December 23) – A major push by Nigerian forces splits the
Biafran territory into two
1970 – (January 7) – Final Nigerian offensive, Operation Tail-Wind, is
launched
(January 9) – Owerri is captured by federal troops
Ojukwu hands over power to his second in command, Philip
Effiong, and leaves for Ivory Coast
(January 11) – Uli, Biafra’s airport town, falls
(January 15) – Biafra surrenders; the war ends
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Map of Biafra 30 May 1967 – 1 May 1969
(drawn by and reproduced by kind permission of Joseph Sloop and Pam Hurst)
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1 Scholarly Trends,
Issues, and Themes
Introduction
Toyin Falola and Ogechukwu Ezekwem
An Intellectual History?
The central premise of intellectual history is that ideas do not exist in
isolation but are shaped by the lives and outlooks of the people who
created them as well as the cultural, social, political, and historical con-
texts in which they were produced. It is not just a study of intellectuals
but of their opinions and the specific time and space that influenced
their views. Its distinctiveness lies in the aspect of the past that it aims
to illuminate, rather than the possession of any exclusive evidence.
For the purposes of this book, we examine specific authors as well as
particular themes and trajectories in the Nigeria-Biafra literature. Civil
wars are prime candidates for intellectual analyses because they are in
themselves contentious and cannot be abstracted from their historical
setting. They also resist reifications and extend into technical discourses
and non-expert exchanges. Analysing the Nigeria-Biafra war literature
within the parameters of its social, political, and cultural contexts pro-
vide insight into the bases of the strife that plague this historical event
and its consequent body of knowledge.
The Nigeria-Biafra War, which lasted from 1967 to 1970, has
remained a divisive issue in Nigeria and in scholarly circles. There is
a plethora of literature on the war; yet, no book has comprehensively
analysed the nature, background, and sentiments that shaped the
construction of these often contentious texts. This kind of analysis is
especially crucial because war literatures are shaped by various expe-
riences, group affiliations, and biases. In chronicling warfare, writers,
historians, chroniclers, combatants, and victims, among others, are
confronted with making sense of war, the shades of violence associated
with it, and the overall consequences.
The literatures also deal with the problem of apportioning blame,
giving voice to trauma, and evaluating the war’s overall impact. There
is also the difficult issue of trauma and memory, which shape narra-
tives of war-related experiences. Many cultures and individuals who
experienced traumatic events during wartime suppress these memo-
ries in their efforts to cope. Writers are, thus, not only faced with these
silences but also the physical impact on their subjects who relive their
1
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2 Toyin Falola and Ogechukwu Ezekwem
experiences in the process of recounting it. Then, there is the problem

of data analysis. There are those silences or manipulations that result
from the inclination to bend stories to suit the agendas of government
and other political groups. Records of wars can be manipulated by
those with vested interests in presenting specific opinions and narra-
tives. Historians and writers can also manifest biases in their interpre-
tive frameworks. In many cases, writers’ accounts are influenced by
their sentiments and affiliations.
In the light of all the aforementioned problems of understanding and
studying wars, this book examines fictional and non-fictional accounts
of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict as well as newspapers and primary docu-
ments related to the pre – and post-war periods. Our goal is to determine
and understand the nature of those fictions, non-fictions, and primary
documents, and the circumstances that underlie their construction.
Thus far, no book on the Nigeria-Biafra conflict has comprehensively
analysed the nature, background, and sentiments that shaped the con-
struction of these often contentious civil war texts. This volume, there-
fore, offers an expansive evaluation of the intellectual and historical
circumstances that shaped the creation of Nigeria-Biafra war literature.
It discusses trends and methodologies in civil war writings, such as the
techniques that novelists adopted in fictional recreations of the war,
the gendered nature of research and authorship on the war literature,
and ethnic sentiments wielded in fictional and non-fictional represen-
tations of the war. The volume also addresses the pre-war foundations
of the Nigeria-Biafra War especially in newspaper publications. Several
authors connect narrative patterns in works of fiction to contemporary
challenges and prospects in Africa. They also contemplate the limited
analyses of events that culminated in the Nigeria-Biafra conflict and
scholars’ approaches to critical debates. By initiating a dialog on the
civil war historiography, this book engages a much-needed discourse on
the problems confronting a culturally diverse post-war Nigeria. It is an
intellectual project with consequences for our understanding of politics
and society as they were shaped by the war.
In Nigeria, the government controlled the organization of the civil
war records, thereby curtailing the kinds of conversations in which
the society could engage. Books that confronted issues surrounding
the war were discouraged during the country’s long military regimes.
Most books were, therefore, published abroad. However, fictional
accounts became prominent in the period following the war, and they
depicted the daily traumatic and socially destabilizing experiences of
civilians during the war. The condition of the archives and the govern-
ment’s treatment of the civil war affected the nature of publications
within Nigeria, though the emergence of collections in foreign coun-
tries partially augmented these situations and pushed research on the
war beyond the traditional ‘causes and course’ literature. Writing the
Nigeria-Biafra War provides a reminder that wars are both political and
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Scholarly Trends, Issues, and Themes: Introduction 3
human and should be approached from a cultural, social, intellectual,

and political framework.
Historiographical Trends
Books on the war can be grouped into fiction and non-fiction. The first
category, though fictional, captures the war’s horrific impacts on indi-
viduals and communities.1 The non-fictional group mostly comprises
biographies, personal accounts, and essays on the causes and course
of the war. There are many publications by foreigners who had been
in both warring camps. This collection of essays not only considers the
course of the war but also draws attention to the war’s humanitarian
crises and the collaboration of nations such as Britain in escalating the
conflict.2
1
An impressive array of fictional works exists on the Nigeria-Biafra War. One that has
become quite popular and subject to analysis is Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow
Sun (New York: Anchor, 2007). It draws attention to women’s contributions to fictional
accounts on the war. Other notable works of fiction, some of which are examined by vari-
ous authors in this book, include Chinua Achebe, Girls at War and other Stories (Ibadan:
Heinemann, 1972); Chukwuemeka Ike, Sunset at Dawn: A Novel of the Biafran War (Glas-
gow: Collins Harville Press, 1976); Kole Omotoso, The Combat (Ibadan: Heinemann,
1972); Elechi Amadi, Sunset in Biafra (London: Heinemann, 1973); Cyprian Ekwensi,
Divided We Stand: A Novel of the Nigerian Civil War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publish-
ers, 1980); Ekwensi, Survive the Peace (London: Heinemann, 1976); Kalu Okpi, Biafra
Testament (London: Macmillan,1982); and Buchi Emecheta, Destination Biafra (London:
Allison and Busby, 1982). Another group of fictional works focuses on certain individu-
als during the war. It is to this class that Ali Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, J.P.
Clark’s Casualties, and Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died belong. Incarcerated by the Nigerian
government for alleged collaboration with the enemy, Soyinka’s The Man Died is a per-
sonal account of his experience in prison. It is also a condemnation of injustice and cor-
ruption in the Nigerian government. Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo is a fictional
account of a trial of the famous Igbo poet, Christopher Okigbo, who died in defense of
Biafra at the onset of the war. In this trial, Okigbo is accused of abandoning literature and
the arts to become a Biafran soldier, thereby betraying the vision of a united Nigeria. J.P.
Clark’s Casualties is a collection of poems written in honor of the victims of the Nigeria-
Biafra War.
2
Some of the foreigners and journalists who published works on the Nigeria-Biafra War
include Frederick Forsyth, John de St. Jorre, John Hatch, H.G. Hanbury, Geoffrey Birch,
Dominic St. George and Walter Schwarz. Forsyth, a notable foreign journalist who pub-
lished several works on the War and was a close friend of Colonel Ojukwu, spent most of
the war years in Biafra. During this period, he was a correspondent for Time magazine
and Daily Express, and he wrote extensive accounts of Biafra’s experience. In The Making
of an African Legend: The Biafra Story, Forsyth explores the background to the civil war
and reasons that prompted Biafra’s secession. He clearly indicates that his story is told
from the Biafran perspective. He traces the background of the war from the colonial era
to independence and post-independence. He casts Nigeria as an untenable British crea-
tion whose citizens soon discovered that their differences ran deep. He also examines the
nature of the Biafran federation and gives an account of the war on the Biafran front.
Another issue that he addresses in his book is the role of foreign nations, notably Britain,
France, Russia, and the United States. Forsyth’s other book, Emeka, is a biography of the
Biafran leader, Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. Another popular book in
this category is John de St. Jorre’s The Nigerian Civil War. He visited both warring factions
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Currently, there is no comprehensive book on the intellectual history

of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Some works that offer limited intellectual
analysis of the literature are Marion Pape’s Gender Palava: Nigerian
Women Writing War and Craig W. McLuckie’s Nigerian Civil War Litera-
ture: Seeking an ‘Imagined Community’.3 Pape’s book analyses fictional
accounts of the war from a gendered perspective and compares male
and female writers’ portrayal of women. She draws attention to wom-
en’s contribution to the Nigeria-Biafra war scholarship, a realm that
was significantly dominated by men until recently.4 Similarly, McLuckie
studies fictional accounts of the war and their depiction of Biafra’s
nationhood. The literary works that he examines are Kole Omotoso’s
The Combat, Cyprian Ekwensi’s Survive the Peace, S.O. Mezu’s Behind the
Rising Sun, I.N.C Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice, and a number of
writings by Wole Soyinka.5 Through these works, McLuckie reflects
on literary devices as a channel for art and activism, divisions within
Biafra as reflected in novels, and the depiction of ordinary people in the
war stories.
Another work that has contributed to knowledge on the nature of
the war literature is Chinyere Nwahunanya’s A Harvest from Tragedy,
which considers the place of the civil war texts in Africa’s political and
literary experience.6 Like McLuckie and Pape, Nwahunanya’s book tilts
towards fiction; however, there are interesting chapters that consider
drama and memoirs. Notwithstanding, the scope of the works explored
are limited and mostly comprise earlier publications. Academic works
on various themes surrounding the war are also not examined in any
depth. However, all of the aforementioned works are limited in their
in the course of the war. Like Forsyth’s book, The Nigerian Civil War traces the background
and course of the war. Other books in this category, for instance, H.G. Hanbury’s Biafra:
A Challenge to the Conscience of Britain; Geoffrey Birch and Dominic St. George’s Biafra:
The Case for Independence; and John Hatch’s Nigeria: Seeds of Disaster, mostly have a uni-
fied objective of drawing global attention to the humanitarian crisis of the civil war, and
arguing for Biafra’s right of independence. They also vilify British involvement in the war
and its support for the Nigerian federation in Biafra’s suppression.
3
Craig W. McLuckie, Nigerian Civil War Literature: Seeking an ‘Imagined Community’ (Lewis-
ton: Edwin Mellen, 1990); and Marion Pape, Gender Palava: Nigerian Women Writing War
(Trier: Wissenschaftlicher, 2011).
4
Pape’s evaluation of the place of gender in the civil war writings suggests that the war
has since shifted to a gender war, hence the importance of examining gender in Nigeria-
Biafra scholarship in Part IV of this volume.
5
Omotoso, The Combat; Amadi, Sunset in Biafra; Ekwensi, Survive the Peace; S.O. Mezu, Be-
hind the Rising Sun (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1971); and I.N.C. Aniebo, The Anonymity of
Sacrifice (Ibadan: Heinemann Education, 1974). Some of Wole Soyinka’s works that
McLuckie examines are Soyinka, Season of Anomy (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson,
1980); The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979);
and Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1976).
6
Chinyere Nwahunanya, ed., A Harvest from Tragedy: Critical Perspectives on Nigerian Civil
War Literature (Owerri: Springfield, 1997).
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scope; they focus mostly on aspects of fictional accounts.7 This volume,

however, covers fictional and non-fictional genre and considers vary-
ing issues in the civil war literature, such as gender, archives, personal
accounts, ethnic sentiments, and authors’ backgrounds. It is the first
attempt at a comprehensive analysis of the civil war writings.
There are other works that offer a degree of intellectual analyses on
the war. Chima Korieh’s The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics
of Memory comprises a collection of essays that not only examines the
non-military aspects of the war but also evaluates scholarly discussion
on genocide against the Igbo and prior to and during the Nigeria-Biafra
War.8 Though the focus of Korieh’s volume is not an intellectual analy-
sis of the war literature in its entirety, the appraisal of the conversation
on genocide highlights the intricacies of writers’ judgments and the
importance of examining circumstances surrounding scholarly ideas.
Brian McNeil’s ‘The Nigerian Civil War in History and Historiogra-
phy, 1967–1970’ offers an overview of trends in the war literature with
especial emphasis on themes and questions addressed in these texts.9
Though he offers no detailed intellectual analysis of themes in the
Nigeria-Biafra war literature, McNeil emphasizes the importance of the
civil war in global history and the need for a re-examination of issues
surrounding the war, which is a goal this volume undertakes. Through
an overview of ideas surrounding the causes of the war and its impact
on post-war Nigeria, McNeil emphasizes the need for historical reevalu-
ation of many assumptions commonly held about the war and its effect
on society.10 Authors in this volume – G.N. Uzoigwe, Ogechi Anyanwu,
Bukola Oyeniyi, Ralph Njoku, and Austin Okwu – address some of these
issues.
7
There are several scholarly analyses of fiction on the Nigeria-Biafra War. Some exemplary
representations are Hugh Hodges, ‘Writing Biafra: Adichie, Emecheta, and the Dilemmas
of Biafran War Fiction’, Postcolonial Text 5:1 (2009), 1–13; Ugochukwu, Françoise, ‘A
Lingering Nightmare: Achebe, Ofoegbu, and Adichie on Biafra’, Matatu: Journal for Af-
rican Culture and Society 39 (2011), 253–272; Bernard Dickson and Kinggeorge Okoro
Preye, ‘History, Memory, and the Politics of National Unity in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow
Sun’, International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature 2:5 (May 2014),
81–89; and Niyi Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past and Still Counting the Losses: Evaluating
Narratives of the Nigerian Civil War in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra’, Epiphany:
Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies 5:1 (2011), 31–51.
8
Chima Korieh, ed., The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory (New York:
Cambria Press, 2012).
9
Brian McNeil, ‘The Nigerian Civil War in History and Historiography, 1967–1970’ in
Africa, Empire, and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A.G. Hopkins, edited by Toyin Falola
and Emily Brownell (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2010), 541–554.
10
Ibid., 541. See also Osarhieme Benson Osadolor, ‘The Historiography of the Nigerian Civil
War, 1967–1970’ in The Nigerian Civil War and Its Aftermath, edited by Eghosa E. Osa-
ghae, Ebere Onwudiwe, and Rotimi T. Suberu (Ibadan: John Archers, 2002), 88.
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The Nigeria-Biafra War: Overview and Issues

The Nigeria-Biafra War highlighted the volatile nature of Africa’s colo-
nial legacy. At the end of colonial rule in 1960, Nigeria was a conglom-
eration of various ethnic nationalities whose loyalties lay with their
various ethnic groups. The country was carved into three regions –
North, West, and East – with three dominant ethnic groups – the Hausa,
Yoruba, and Igbo, respectively. Thus, political consciousness developed
along ethnic lines. Lacking a strong national consciousness, the first
post-independence government was overthrown on 15 January 1966,
in a coup led mainly by Igbo officers. Some Northern leaders interpreted
the coup as an eastern attempt to dominate the nation. In July 1966,
Northern officers staged a counter-coup accompanied by several mas-
sacres targeting the Igbo that also affecting many other Eastern Nigeri-
ans residing outside the Eastern Region. In defense against the killings,
which the Eastern leaders condemned as genocidal, the East seceded
and formed a new nation, Biafra. Nigeria’s attempt to force it back into
the country plunged the two camps into a war that lasted from 6 July
1966 to 15 January 1970. Until the Rwandan genocide, the Nigeria-
Biafra War was the most reported war on Africa in contemporary
media. By the war’s end, images of starving women and children had
become synonymous with Africa and African conflicts.
During the Nigeria-Biafra crisis, publications were censored. Most
published texts were either printed abroad or written by foreign jour-
nalists. Significant individuals or intellectuals who could write or
express strong opinions on the war were monitored closely or thrown
in prison. One notable case was Wole Soyinka, who, though he did not
belong to the Biafra camp, criticized the Nigerian Government and
supported Biafran struggle. Government censorship of intellectual
production on the Nigeria-Biafra crisis was not just limited to wartime
but also post-war.
Besieged by changing military regimes from 1966 until the 1990s,
public opinion and freedom of expression were circumscribed. The situ-
ation was worsened by Nigeria’s ‘no victor, no vanquished’ policy; as
a result, the war was treated as if it never happened. Successive mili-
tary governments suppressed discussions and information on the war,
thereby hampering any detailed research. The government seemed to
believe that distancing the nation from any dialogue on the war would
shelve the issues at stake. Amid this context, the archives on the civil
war were formed. One finds in Nigeria’s national archives few official
documents on the civil war. Archival records from the Nigerian warring
camp remained limited through the war and afterwards. Biafra news-
papers were preserved, however, and remain vital to the study of the
conflict. This situation meant that the Nigeria-Biafra War has largely
been studied from the perspective of Biafra and rarely from the dimen-
sion of the Nigerian experience.
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The unwillingness to engage on a national discourse regarding the

Nigeria-Biafra conflict has persisted into the present times. The war
remains a very sensitive subject in the country due to the clear ethnic
divisions associated with it. The most recent depiction of this issue was
the delay in Nigeria to grant permission for the release in Nigerian
theaters of the civil war movie, Half of a Yellow Sun, based on Chimam-
anda Adichie’s novel of the same title. The movie tracked the impacts
of Biafra secession and Nigeria-Biafra War on two lovers, Olanna and
Odenigbo, who were forced to retreat from the University of Nigeria to
their rural villages in Biafra. As a result of the war, their relationship
and moral values were threatened. Nigeria’s censorship board attrib-
uted the delay in approving the new movie to unresolved issues. Their
stance was interpreted as discomfort about raising the topics of the war
in a national magnitude, through a medium that was accessible to liter-
ate and non-literate Nigerians.
Several scholars in this book analyse circumstances surrounding the
Nigeria-Biafra War as well as some primary documents that formed the
core of wartime propaganda. G.N. Uzoigwe’s ‘Background to the Nige-
rian Civil War’ (Chapter 2) explores the reasons behind Nigeria’s implo-
sion shortly after independence, despite the country’s enormous caches
of resources and potential. He also considers scholars’ approaches to
this history, arguing that most literature focuses excessively on the war,
ignores its philosophical backgrounds, and validates stereotypes. In
Chapters 4 and 5, Ralph Chijioke Njoku and Austine S.O. Okwu exam-
ine the political document The Ahiara Declaration, which was issued by
the Biafra leader, Col. Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu on 9 June 1969 to
bolster the plunging morale within Biafra. The document included some
socialist ideologies that resounded in a world split by a Cold War strug-
gle between socialist and capitalist forces. Njoku and Okwu consider the
dynamics of this document as well as its local and global implications.
Okwu especially critiques the relevance of the Declaration to Biafra in
light of the document’s significant correlation to Tanzania’s Arusha
Declarations. Through his personal experience as a Biafran envoy, he
provides insight into various factors that influenced as well as mitigated
the impact of the Ahiara Declaration on the Biafran people, on the one
hand, and the international community on the other. Premised on the
belief that newspapers shaped the tone of the debates that preceded
the war, Wale Adebanwi analyses newspaper accounts of the ethnic
and political predicament that plunged Nigeria into war in Chapter 7.
He argues that newspapers, through their interpretations of circum-
stances in Nigeria on the eve of war, fired the first shots of the Nigeria-
Biafra crisis. His examination of newspaper narratives advances the
understanding of the war’s escalation.
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Theories of War
Peace and conflict studies experts approach conflicts through various
theories that have the potentials of both limiting and expanding under-
standings of war. Scholars in this volume utilize some of these conflict
theories to analyse the circumstances of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Ogechi
Anyanwu builds on Uzoigwe’s argument that writings on the war have
considered its causes rather narrowly. He uses theories of societal con-
ditions, human nature, and natural circumstances to analyse the com-
plex causes of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict. His Chapter 3 emphasizes the
influence of natural, environmental, and political situations alongside
other multiple factors on Nigeria’s history.
A similar contribution by Bukola Oyeniyi in Chapter 6 uses social and
economic conflict theories to shed light on civil wars. He applies these
various theories to his evaluation of the Nigeria-Biafra War in order to
determine to what extent circumstances in Nigeria justified the decline
to war. Despite his application of these theories to the Nigeria-Biafra
crisis, Oyeniyi states that they may not necessarily be the touchstone
explanation to the war but do facilitate better understanding and pro-
vide a common framework for the evaluation of civil war accounts.
Nigeria-Biafra War Writings and Ethnic Sentiments

A significant root of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict lies in the pervasiveness
of ethnic sentiments within the Nigerian Government and political
structure. These sentiments are reflected in written accounts of the
war, thereby shaping the narratives about the war and influencing
the depth of analyses reflected in these texts. Several authors consider
the phenomenon of ethnic inclinations within civil war texts. Akachi
Odoemene in Chapter 8 examines ways Nigeria-Biafra war literature
has been articulated and disseminated over time. He gives particular
consideration to the roles of ethno-centrism and other motives in the
war accounts. By providing insight into various authors’ motives, he
re-examines some contentious aspects of the war. Odoemene argues
that the memory of the war is grounded in ethnic differences, leading
to competing discourses that continue to shape the war’s public percep-
tion. He observes that a major divide in the literature emanates from the
Nigerian and Biafran camps, and from within the Biafran camp itself.
These differing claims and conclusions across various camps are also
reflected in works by foreign authors, who often leaned to one side or
the other based on their alliances, acquaintances, or historical bonds.
Odoemene studies these ethnic and other biases, how they influenced
the wartime accounts, and how they reinforced divisions and distrust
among Nigerians. Like several other authors, he points out that events
culminating in the conflict were more complicated than existing expla-
nations seem to portray.
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Similarly, in Chapter 9, Olukunle Ojeleye evaluates a cross-section of

works on the Nigeria-Biafra War published between 1970 and 2013
to determine how authors’ values and personal inclinations influenced
their statements. He argues that actions and inactions in a multicultural
society like Nigeria are viewed through the lens of group and ethnic
affiliations, which result in blurred boundaries between facts and false-
hoods. Under such circumstances, Ojeleye asserts, the goal of objective
histories by indigenous authors becomes mostly impossible.
Cyril Obi takes a different tack in Chapter 11 on the theme of ethnic-
ity by exploring the roles of ethnic minorities in the oil-producing Niger
Delta region in civil war texts. He analyses Ken Saro-Wiwa’s novel, Soza
boy, an account of a young male resident of a village in the Niger Delta
who sought to assert his manhood by joining the army. In doing so, he
lost his innocence and experienced the harsh realities of war, including
the loss of his family and community. Through the analyses of Sozaboy,
Obi draws attention to personal and communal aspects of the war that
are largely ignored in the accounts of the conflict: for instance, the real-
ity of the war for ordinary people and how some individuals profited
from others’ wartime misfortunes. Obi concludes his chapter by con-
necting these wartime memories to the current position of the Niger
Delta in Nigeria and the need to reflect on past events.
Archives and the Endurance of Memoirs and Fictional Accounts

No other genre on the Nigeria-Biafra war literature rivals memoirs and
fictional depictions in capturing the social upheavals wrought by the
war. Due to the suppressed nature of the Nigerian Civil War records,
many publications focused on the causes and the course of the war. Few
dealt with the individual experiences of people.11 Thus, fiction became
a key means for civilians to express their feelings about and share the
hardships they experienced during the war. More than any other liter-
ary medium, it became the outlet that captured the dislocations experi-
enced by families, the violation of women and girls, and the incessant
murder that occurred during this period. Thus, fiction is an important
part of studies of the civil war, and its separate consideration in this
book embodies not just peoples’ experiences but also gender politics and
other dynamics. Though historians may argue differences between fact,
as reflected in official records, and fiction, as embodied in novels, this
body of literature is indispensable in understanding the various strata
11
Some books that overcome this ‘causes and course’ trend and actually reflect ordinary
peoples’ encounters include: Axel Harneit-Seivers, Jones Ahazuem, and Sydney Emezue,
A Social History of the Nigerian Civil War: Perspectives from Below (Hamburg: LIT, 1997);
Egodi Uchendu, Women and Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War (New Jersey: Africa World
Press, 2007); and Korieh, The Nigeria-Biafra War.
000 Fal book B.indb 9 13/06/2016 22:06

of the Nigeria-Biafra crisis. It is largely based on real situations and

experiences.
Several essays in this collection examine characterizations of Biafra,
wartime violence and trauma, and depictions of neo-colonialism and
nationalism through fiction. The authors explore various uses of evi-
dence and themes evident in an expansive body of fictional works about
the conflict. They pay particular attention to the ideologies, political
views, and experiences that shaped these narratives. Meredith Coffey in
Chapter 13 considers Chimamanda Adichie’s depiction of the Nigeria-
Biafra War’s social complexities in Half of a Yellow Sun, an acclaimed
civil war novel that highlighted the ethnic basis of the conflict. She
compares her analysis of Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun to that of Chuk-
wuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn. Coffey focuses on the position of ethnic
minorities within these two novels, arguing that the tensions surround-
ing the inclusion of ethnic minorities have remained unresolved even
in fictional accounts. Like Coffey, in Chapter 17, Françoise Ugochukwu
studies Buchi Emecheta’s contemplation of ethnicity and the role of
neo-colonialism in the Nigeria-Biafra conflict in Destination Biafra, a
‘historical fiction’. Ugochukwu highlights that Emecheta’s work on the
Nigeria-Biafra War is largely ignored as opposed to her other novels on
the domestic sphere, for instance marriage, children, and women’s lives.
Fiona Bateman in Chapter 14 offers an international perspective
through her examination of Irish writers’ works set in Biafra. She shows
how Biafra represented for the Irish a nation struggling for freedom,
and mirrored Irish struggles for nationhood. The extensive media cover-
age of sufferings within Biafra evoked an emotive response that resulted
in massive fundraising on a scale hitherto unseen in Ireland. Events in
Biafra also shaped the Irish government’s attitudes about international
aid and human rights. Thus, the Nigeria-Biafra War and its represen-
tation in the Irish imagination highlight a moment in history when
Ireland’s struggle for nationhood and history of famine was reflected
in its perception of Biafra and pervasive images of starving women
and children. Some of the books that Bateman examines to highlight
this Irish affinity with Biafra are Desmond Forristal’s play Biafra: Black
Man’s Country and Vincent Lawrence’s novel An End of Flight.
Adetayo Alabi brings an interesting touch to this volume in Chap-
ter 15 with his analysis of Ali Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo.
Okigbo was a renowned poet who joined the Biafran war effort early
on as a soldier and eventually became a war casualty. Mazrui’s book
is cast as an afterlife trial of Okigbo for abandoning his responsibilities
as a poet to become a soldier. First, Alabi argues that Mazrui’s text, set
in the surreal, is only possible through his reliance on magical realism
and science fiction. Alabi then relates the context of Okigbo’s trial and
defense in Mazrui’s text with the Nigeria-Biafra War and its aftermath.
Through an assessment of Okigbo’s trial, he contemplates the extent
to which this trial could resolve issues surrounding the civil war in any
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meaningful way. Based on the premise of Okigbo’s trial – his abandon-

ment of poetry for war – Alabi extends the conversation to African
development, pondering if any form of African growth is sustainable
in light of the compartmentalization of roles and responsibilities. Simi-
lar to Alabi’s chapter, Biodun Jeyifo in Chapter 12 considers Chinua
Achebe’s final book There Was a Country. He connects it to broader issues
in Nigeria. Jeyifo confidently writes that Achebe’s novel is not just about
Biafra and the war with Nigeria but takes Nigeria back to its very shaky
foundations and summons Nigerian writers and intellectuals to action.
As part of the book’s aim of stressing some circumstances that influ-
ence writers’ of war, in Chapter 16 Ode Ogede examines two works that
he considers the most impartial narratives on the Biafran venture: S.O.
Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun and I.N.C. Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sac-
rifice. Ogede argues that these two authors wrote their texts before a
time when partisanship shadowed various accounts of the civil war and
were, therefore, able to provide a balanced account that separates facts
from illusions in ways that were both candid and sensitive. Ogede con-
siders how these authors’ approaches imparted a special significance to
their accounts.
Hugh Hodges discusses in Chapter 18 the significance of the Nigeria-
Biafra War in Chris Abani’s GraceLand. In order to provide sufficient
insight on the influence of Abani’s experiences and inclinations on his
fictional work, GraceLand, Hodges analyses Abani’s fictional autobiog-
raphy. He argues that Abani’s representation of the Nigeria-Biafra War
is highly connected to his invention of an abject and heroic past for him-
self in his autobiography.
In ‘Memoirs and the Question of Objectivity’ (Chapter 10), Chuk-
wuma Opata examines two contradictory accounts of the Nigeria-
Biafra crises as recounted in Alexander Madiebo and Robert Collis’s
memoirs. In The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War, Madiebo, an
Igbo general in the Nigerian army, provides a first-hand knowledge of
the events that led to war.12 On the other hand, Collis, an Irish medi-
cal doctor who worked in Lagos in the years after independence and
up to the civil war, offers another account whereby he clearly indicts
the Biafra camp for the war.13 Opata examines the historical sources
employed by Madiebo and Collis to determine the validity of their inter-
pretations and the potential biases they bring to their various positions.
He considers this type of evaluation expedient because the plethora of
works on the Nigeria-Biafra War are prone to sentiments and highly
subjective viewpoints, thus making historical objectivity a formidable
goal.
12
Alexander Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War (Enugu: Fourth Dimen-
sion Publishing, 2000)
13
Robert Collis, Nigeria in Conflict (London: Secker and Warburg, 1970).
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Gender in Nigeria-Biafra War Literature

Gender remains an enduring issue in conflict and post-conflict eras as
well as in the scholarship about the war: it plays a significant role in the
study of conflicts. The historiography of the Nigeria-Biafra War reveals
a discrepancy in the study of African women in conflict and post-con-
flict eras. Numerous books have been written on the war, focused on
the war’s causes and course, but women’s roles in sustaining the war
and post-war reconstructions, as well as their place in the scholarship,
are largely ignored.14 Jane Bryce considers in Chapter 20 the place of
men and women in the study of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict. She argues
that, until recently, there was a dearth of women writers studying the
civil war, and attempts to uncover the reasons behind this masculine
domination of the war. To address this issue, she examines the mean-
ing of the war for women and whether their need for survival displaced
nationalist concerns. She considers the possibility that the concept of
patriotism may indeed be a masculinist response to political crisis. She
compares the works of post-war female writers such as Flora Nwapa,
Buchi Emecheta, Rose Njoku, and Rosina Umelo to more contemporary
works by writers like Sefi Atta and Chimamanda Adichie to ascertain
trends in these literatures.
With a slightly different approach, Egodi Uchendu examines in
Chapter 19 the actual infusion of women’s wartime roles into texts on
the Nigeria-Biafra War. She describes the Nigeria-Biafra conflict as one
of Africa’s most studied historical events and a subject that has seen
more academic and non-academic interests in the twenty-first century.
Alongside this continued interest emerged a body of literature on wom-
en’s wartime efforts. Uchendu undertakes a textual survey of the war in
order to trace this infusion of women in the war narratives.
In ‘Female Participation in War and the Implication of Nationalism’
(Chapter 21), Ofure Aito observes that conflicts stem from cultural dif-
ferences, economic dominance, political manipulations, and religious
intolerance. To reconcile these differences, she argues that a more
integrative partnership that transcends patriarchal structures must be
adopted. Aito examines Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra and her
account of a woman who acted as negotiator between ethnicities sub-
merged in the crossfire of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Aito argues that this
fictional representation offers a platform for the redefinition of female
identity in Nigeria and the female potential not just as victim and par-
ticipant in war but also as negotiator in internal politics and conflict
resolution.
14
The twenty-first century saw an increased interest on women’s place in the civil war.
Some of the outstanding academic works on women in the Nigeria-Biafra War are
Uchendu, Women and Conflict; Pape, Gender Palava; and Karen Okigbo, Ghostly Narratives:
The Experiences and Roles of Biafran Women in the Nigeria-Biafra War (LAP Lambert, 2012).
000 Fal book B.indb 12 13/06/2016 22:06

The literature on the Nigeria-Biafra War encompasses scholarship

on wide-ranging genres, such as novels, drama, memoirs, oral histo-
ries, and academic texts. These works take various approaches as they
attempt to comprehend the war. The chapters in this volume offer his-
torical surveys of the Nigeria-Biafra war literature, the potential biases
and personal experiences that influence fictional and non-fictional
writers’ texts, a reassessment of the war’s causes, and the ways that
gender features in the scholarship. Authors also connect trends in the
literature to contemporary issues in Africa’s development. The cumu-
lative achievements of this volume include the highlighting of chal-
lenges encountered by writers of violence as they make sense of scale,
language, logic, experiences, and affiliations. The writers, works, and
ideas analysed in various chapters are reminders that wars are constant
in society and will continue to initiate critical debates. By examining
the construction of the Nigeria-Biafra war literatures and the senti-
ments and circumstances that influenced them, this book emphasizes
the intricacies that dictate civil war archives and memory, and conse-
quently, the scholarship.
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000 Fal book B.indb 14 13/06/2016 22:06
Part I
ON THE HISTORY OF
THE NIGERIA-BIAFRA WAR
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000 Fal book B.indb 16 13/06/2016 22:06
2 Background to the
Nigerian Civil War
G.N. Uzoigwe
Introduction
The American historian and public intellectual, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
once observed, with much propriety, that the historian suffers from an
occupational disease, namely: a passion for tidiness – an obsession that
stresses the importance of tidying past events in order to understand
the present and, hopefully, be better prepared to face the future. The
non-historian but distinguished novelist Chinua Achebe made a simi-
lar point in There Was a Country, his memoir on the Nigeria-Biafra War,
published just before his death. ‘An Igbo proverb’, he wrote, ‘tells us that
a man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot
say where he dried his body’.1 Both Schlesinger and Achebe believe – as
does this author – that a historical event cannot be fully comprehended
unless serious attention is paid to its antecedents. Much of the writing
about the Nigerian Civil War tends, unfortunately, to treat its causes in
a perfunctory, pedestrian manner. Beginning in media res, as it were, it
suffers from a palpable lack of tidiness, pays no attention whatsoever
to the conflict’s philosophical underpinnings, endorses generally erro-
neous stereotypes, and tends to be more concerned with the war itself
than what brought it about. Thus, no proper lessons are learned from
it, and consequently, mistakes of the past are continually repeated. It is
surprising that the civil war is not made required reading in Nigerian
colleges and universities, a palpable omission that should be corrected.
Using various archival and contemporary sources, oral interviews,
published official documents, and some relevant recent publications,
this chapter analyses the major reasons – remote and proximate – why
the most populous African country, one with enormous potential and
much promise, imploded within six years of independence and, to the
disappointment of many, plunged itself into a disastrous civil war from
which it has not fully recovered. The methodology is historical, and the
conclusions are derived from a careful study of the available evidence.
1
Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin,
2012), 1.
17
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18 G.N. Uzoigwe
Collapse of the First Republic

The collapse of Nigeria’s First Republic on January 15, 1966, sent shock
waves across the globe because it was generally believed that Britain’s
administration of its former colonial estate was exceptional. However,
serious students of Nigerian colonial history knew that the euphoria
that followed the new nation’s independence needed careful political
and socio-economic re-engineering to ensure that the wobbly and com-
plex edifice erected by Frederick Daltry Lugard and many others would
not unhinge. As some feared, the indigenous rulers of the country
failed woefully in this assignment – not because they were incompetent,
evil, or stupid but because the task facing them was Herculean. This
task was clearly captured in the first national anthem which spoke of
the determination to foster national unity and territorial integrity even
though ethnic groups and tongues might differ.
The crucial questions, then, are: Why did the great promise of Nige-
ria implode, within six years of independence? Why did the Igbo who,
arguably, were the greatest proponents of Nigerian unity, secede from
the country they loved so much and had contributed enormously to
build up? Why, given the nature of Nigeria’s colonial history, was the
fall of the First republic destined to so end? Was the civil war inevitable?
Historians naturally may differ in their answers to these questions.2
Nevertheless, they are questions that merit thoughtful consideration.
This chapter attempts to answer these questions by analysing three
broad propositions.
Proposition one: British colonial policy unwittingly sowed seeds

of disintegration
This proposition is generally accepted by historians of Nigeria, but they
also admit that Britain’s colonial stewardship is laudable for some great
achievements. However, there are also those, especially the disciples of
Lugard, who believe that given the colony’s vastness and complexities,
Britain’s stewardship was exceptional, but they remain largely silent on
the negative aspects of British rule. Whatever may be the case, there is
no doubt that Britain handed over to the indigenous leadership at inde-
pendence in 1960 a country that had serious, largely prefabricated,
internal problems that eventually led to its collapse in 1966. Some 60
years of intensive colonization created a new society, through both dic-
tatorial action and sometimes painful compromise, that was revolution-
ary in all its ramifications: military, economic, political, and social.
Britain was only able to hold its huge and complex colonial estate
together by imposing its will as it deemed fit ‘like a great steel grid’,
2
For one historian’s view, see G.N. Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood: Prelude to the Nigerian
Civil War, 1960–1967 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011), a detailed study of what
caused the conflict.
000 Fal book B.indb 18 13/06/2016 22:06

Background to the Nigerian Civil War 19
believing that it was only through muscular, autocratic rule that the
internal peace that was the sine qua non for the achievement of colonial
ends was possible.3 Lugard’s attitude toward those he regarded as trou-
blemakers was ‘Thrash them first, conciliate them afterwards’. 4 Indeed,
‘The present unity of Nigeria as well as its disunity’, it has been written,
‘is in part a reflection of the form and character of the common govern-
ment – the British superstructure – and the changes it has undergone
since 1900.’ 5 While this policy served Britain’s colonial ends admirably,
it was impossible to implement it in an independent Nigeria whose lead-
ers were up to their eyes operating a badly skewed democratic federa-
tion. The problems of this federation may be discussed at several levels,
but four may suffice.
Composition of the military: this was to become a source of instability,

though such issues were not anticipated at the time. This military grew
out of the West African Frontier Force (WAFF), which was created at the
close of the nineteenth century to conquer and pacify areas allocated to
Britain at the Berlin West Africa Conference. The area comprised over-
whelmingly Hausa-speaking peoples of Northern Nigeria who have
been described as possessing ‘sturdy, military virtues and simple loyalty
to their officers’; in addition, Britain was in ‘no great hurry to ‘spoil’
these [Hausa] soldiers by too much education’.6 This composition did
not significantly change by 1960, although by then the relatively small
officer corps was mostly southerners. Among this class the Igbo domi-
nated, but the most senior officers remained British.7
Ostensibly, this military was comprised of patriotic Nigerians who did
not interfere in the turbulent politics of their country. Rapid promotions
of men from the North to the officer corps that occurred at the expense
of southerners were intended to reduce the regional imbalance in that
class. It did bother some of the southern officers, though most under-
stood the political reason for such an action. What concerned the most
radical of them, however, was the failure of the great promise of Nige-
ria, the so-called giant of Africa and expected pride of the Black world,
to actualize that promise. They attributed this failure particularly to
growing corruption, ethnic chauvinism, religious intolerance, lack of
justice, and poor political leadership.8
3
See Margery Perham’s Introduction to Joan Wheare, The Nigerian Legislative Council (Lon-
don: Faber & Faber, 1950), x.
4
Cited in G.N. Uzoigwe, ‘The Evolution of the Nigerian State’ in Foundations of Nigerian Fed-
eralism, 1900–1960, edited by G.N. Uzoigwe & Jonah Elaigwu (Abuja: National Council
on Intergovernmental Relations, 1996), 7.
5
James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Benin City: Broburg & Wistrom,
1986), 45–46.
6
Cited in Uzoigwe, ‘The Evolution of the Nigerian State’, 7.
7
The first Nigerian General Commanding Officer of the Nigerian Military was Johnson
Aguiyi-Ironsi.
8
See Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu’s National Broadcast, 15 January, 1966.
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20 G.N. Uzoigwe
Fearing that these evils would ultimately destroy the country, the
radicals overthrew the government in 1966. All but one of these
young officers were Igbo from the East and the Mid-West; the other
was Yoruba. Unfortunately for them, they could not control the entire
country. Under the leadership of Johnston Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo, their
efforts were foiled, but Nigeria’s First Republic came to an end nonethe-
less. Interestingly, no-one mourned the brief life of that republic, even
though of the 16 Nigerians who lost their lives during the coup only
one was Igbo.
The dawn of a new Nigeria was anxiously expected. As events
unfolded, the coup, which was initially very popular in the country,
began to lose support. Many Nigerians came to believe – rightly or
wrongly – that what happened was the result of a calculated Igbo coup
that actualized their master plan to dominate Nigeria because of their
belief in their own exceptionalism.9 Ironsi’s Unity Decree easily lent
credence to this belief, although no documented evidence of collusion
between the Igbo and the coup makers has been produced.10 Moreover,
an interregnum military government operates best, for obvious rea-
sons, under a unitary administration, and there was no reason to treat
Nigeria as an exception to the general rule. Nevertheless, the Nigerian
military easily allowed itself to become as ethnically divided as Nigerian
politics, demonstrating that their so-called Nigerian patriotism was
only skin deep. The result was the vengeful killings of Igbo civilians and
soldiers particularly in the North between May and October 1966 that
international observers were convinced reached genocidal proportions.
The killings resulted in the secession of the Eastern Region and its inva-
sion by Nigeria.11
The archives at Kew Gardens (London), Rhodes House Library
(Oxford), Nigerian National Archives, and published official documents,
it is important to note, contain no evidence of any serious efforts made
by the governments of Nigeria and Britain to stop the carnage, in spite
of accounts written by respected foreign correspondents from promi-
nent British, European, and American newspapers.12 Particularly wor-
risome was the deliberate silence of the government of Britain during
the massacres, whether they were genocidal or not. None of the perpe-
trators, including the military and northern politicians who paraded
themselves in public, were ever brought to justice. Nigeria made it clear
that it would not brook any foreign interference in its internal affairs. It
is also true that Ironsi did not bring the coup leaders to justice, but the
reason was because the terms of their surrender granted them amnesty.
9
For details see Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 69–76.
10
This Decree is reproduced in full in S.K. Panter-Brick, ed., Nigerian Politics and Military
Rule: Prelude to the Civil War. London: Athlone, 1970, Appendix.
11
For details see Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, Chapter 6.
12
Ibid., 100–112.
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The coup and the counter-coup as well as the major massacres of July
29, September 29, and October 29 in 1966 completely destroyed the
military’s esprit de corps.
Economic character of the society: this became a contentious issue

quite early, especially in terms of fiscal relations between the regions.
After the arbitrary division of Nigeria in 1906 into North and South,
it soon became clear that while the Southern Protectorate enjoyed sur-
plus economic revenue, the Northern Protectorate accumulated deficits
that necessitated financial subsidies from the South and London. To
remedy this situation, the British government decided on the ‘union’ of
the two protectorates so as to legally justify the use of surplus southern
resources to partly offset northern deficits. This administrative or paper
union was, indeed, more an economic than a political act imposed on
Nigerians for legal and colonial ends. The civil service, the judiciary, and
the police force were not included in the unity decree.13 This anomalous
interregional allocation of revenues was sanctified by Lugard’s Amalga-
mation Decree of 1914 and remained in force throughout the colonial
period, leading to constant friction that continued after 1960.14
An issue that has received wide publicity but one which is not based
on any official documentation whatsoever is that Ojukwu urged the
East to secede because of its enormous oil deposits.15 Nothing could be
further from the truth. We now know from the sources that even before
the start of the civil war, Shell-BP was aware that Nigerian oil revenues
from the East would double by 1970 but hid the fact from both Lagos
and Enugu.16 Indeed, the extent to which oil played any role in the poli-
tics of secession was Gowon’s arbitrary Decree No. 8 which, without
consulting the East, carefully carved out most of the oil-producing areas
of Igboland and included them in the newly created Rivers State.17 For
the Igbo, this poke in the eye had two consequences: it made the Igbo
a minority in the East, and denied them access to the sea. These out-
comes constituted the needle that broke the camel’s back and a point of
no return that the Igbo believed was a calculated move by the central
government to drive them out of Nigeria. In other words, ‘the East did
13
For the Amalgamation Decree, see Public Record Office (PRO) London, C.O. CMD 468, Re-
port by Sir Frederick D. Lugard on the Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria,
1912–1919.
14
For details, see Adedotun O. Philips, ‘Inter-Governmental Fiscal Relations, 1900–1960’
in Uzoigwe and Elaigwu, Foundations of Nigerian Federalism, 139–161.
15
This unfounded assertion is given wide publicity in Ali Mazrui’s The Africans: A Triple Her-
itage documentary series.
16
The document is reproduced in Michael Gould, The Biafran War: The Struggle for Modern
Nigeria, Foreword by Frederick Forsyth (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), appendix 2, ‘Docu-
ment confirming the potential doubling of Nigerian oil revenue by 1970’,
17
This Decree is substantially reproduced in Panter-Brick, Nigerian Politics, 45–46.
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22 G.N. Uzoigwe
not secede’18 but it was forced to secede, their leaders strongly believed.
Gowon, on his part, stated that he needed dictatorial powers to prevent
the East from seceding.19
Political structure: the new society was politically and administratively

divided because the 1914 Amalgamation confirmed the idea of two
‘Nigerias’, thus making nonsense of the very essence of amalgamation.
John Flint wrote: ‘Indeed, the ‘Amalgamation Report’ discounted amal-
gamation in practice. Lugard proposed the complete amalgamation of
only the railways, the marine department and the customs service.’ To
which I.F. Nicolson added, ‘the most remarkable thing about Lugard’s
amalgamation is that it never really took place’.20 For James S. Cole-
man, ‘The fact that the northern and southern protectorates were
never effectively united has tended to perpetuate the sharp cultural dif-
ferences between the peoples of the north and the south’.21 Uzoigwe
stated:
For some inexplicable reasons it did not occur to colonial administrators in
Nigeria (both North and South) and the British government, to attempt to
reconcile the much vaunted administrative excellence of the Northern Pro-
tectorate to its glaring economic backwardness. Nor did it occur to them to
examine the real significance of the amalgamation, especially its impact on
the rest of Nigeria.22
Looking back at some of these issues, Flint provided this sober reflection:
British officials never seriously discussed how conflicting policies, in the
two Nigerias might be harmonized, how the rapidly growing individualism
of the South, with its cash crops, its rapidly expanding mission schools, its
growing wage-earning and clerical class, its African entrepreneurs and
petty capitalists, can be blended with northern feudal conservatism, Muslim
Law and self-sufficiency.23
Britain’s colonial government also faced two other dilemmas of its
own making: direct rule versus indirect rule and centralism versus
federalism. Scholars have studied these dilemmas extensively. In the
final analysis, the so-called difference between direct and indirect rule
with which early Nigerian scholarship was enthusiastically concerned
18
See Paper No. 3 submitted by the Biafran delegation to the Addis Ababa Peace conference,
1968 reproduced in Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 264–266.
19
See Walter Schwarz, Nigeria (London: Pall Mall Press, 1968), 229–230.
20
John E. Flint, ‘Nigeria: The Colonial Experience from 1880 to 1914’ in The History and
Politics of Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1914, edited by L.H. Gann and Peter Duignan
(Cambridge: The University Press, 1969), 256; I.F. Nicolson, The British Administration of
Nigeria: Men, Methods and Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 201.
21
Coleman, Nigeria, 46–7.
22
See Uzoigwe, ‘Evolution of the Nigerian State’, in Uzoigwe and Elaigwu, Foundations of
Nigerian Federalism, 25–26.
23
See Flint, ‘Nigeria: Colonial Experience’, 255.
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turned out to be a colonial red herring and a myth. The brutal fact is
that, in any part of colonial Nigeria, the colonial government was the
alpha and the omega since all the precolonial rulers had ceded their
sovereignties to the British Crown at the time of conquest. Given the
vastness and diversity of Nigeria, too, it was clear that a confederal or
perhaps a federal arrangement was most appropriate.
However, aware that such a system of government was fraught with
problems in a colonial situation, Britain chose to speak from both sides of
its mouth and became ridiculously incoherent, because colonial Nigeria
was ruled neither as a unitary state nor as a federal or confederal state.
Thus, the period from the Lord Selbourne Committee Report of 1898 to
the Macpherson Constitution of 1954, which was intended to minimize
Nigeria’s emerging ethnic politics, was a time of constitutional incoher-
ence and uncertainty.24 Nor, indeed, did the Independence Constitution
of 1959 – an object lesson in what a federal constitution should not
be – settle the major issues at stake.25
Another problem was the retention of the official lopsided demarca-
tion of Nigeria in 1939 between North and South whereby the North
controlled two-thirds of the country’s landmass and more than half of
its population, creating an imaginary line of demarcation that made
no historical or geographic sense.26 Since then, this line has become
a sacred cow for northern politicians. But it is an axiom among fed-
eration scholars that in a federation no country should be so divided
that a single part can control the whole. The division of Nigeria’s four
regions in 1966 into the current 36 states – 19 in the North and 17 in
the South, plus the Abuja Capital Territory in the North – clearly has
not solved the demarcation issue.
Given all the issues raised above, it becomes clear that Nigeria’s First
Republic and its opponents were faced with an impossible political task.
Therefore, it also becomes clear that Britain’s stewardship of its colonial
estate needs a serious re-examination, one that may result in jettisoning
the popular view that scholars should stop blaming postcolonial prob-
lems in Africa on colonialism. In any case, let it be made clear, here and
now, that no serious historian can study these problems outside of the
context of the consequences of colonial administrative policies in Nige-
ria. Let it also be understood that the function of the historian is not to
blame or praise anybody but rather to analyse and interpret events in
light of available evidence.
24
For Selborne’s Report see G.N. Uzoigwe, ‘The Niger Committee of 1898: Lord Selborne’s
Report’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, IV:3 (1968), 467–76.
25
See S.E. Majuk, ‘Independence and the Triumph of Federalism, 1954–1960’ in Uzoigwe
and Elaigwu, Foundations of Nigerian Federalism, 295–300.
26
See CO 583, Vol. 244, Memorandum on the Future of Political Development in Nigeria,
1939.
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24 G.N. Uzoigwe
Social transformations: colonial Nigeria was transformed into a ‘tribal-

ized’ society. The concept of ‘tribe’, a European invention, was alien to
pre-British Nigeria, but under colonialism it became an important tool
for achieving a divide-and-rule policy that was used to attain colonial
ends.27 Under British rule, therefore, some 250 independent nationali-
ties were forced to metamorphose into ‘tribal’ societies ruled by ‘barba-
rous’ chieftains said to be perpetually warring among themselves, a sort
of Hobbesian society from which the people were happy to be saved by
the benevolence of the British Leviathan. ‘The greatest contribution the
British have made to Nigerian unity,’ it has been claimed, ‘is the paci-
fication of the country’.28 This may be so, but the perpetual warring
among nationalities that came to be called Nigeria that is often implied
in the pacification enterprise is a historical fiction. Conquests, usurpa-
tions, and reconciliations did occur among some of those nationalities,
as in all countries around the world, but there is no evidence that sug-
gests that what occurred before the British conquest was extraordinary.
Nevertheless, a common joke among British officials in Nigeria during
the nationalist period was that if the British left the country abruptly
the North and the South would go to war, a prediction that actually
came to pass, but ironically, as a consequence of colonial policies that
these officials were hired to execute.
Also, among Nigerian peoples, British political officers had their pet
‘tribes’, the obedient ‘noble savages’ of the North (the good ones), and
the recalcitrant, uppity ‘tribes’ of the South, the Igbo especially (the
bad ones). Lugard described Southern Nigerians as generally being ‘of
a low and degraded type’29 whose mode of government filled him ‘with
something very close to disgust’.30 Yet: ‘Educated Africans made him
uneasy in public and irrational in private.’31 He therefore imposed on
the North a rigid conservative system of governance to shield it from
contamination by educated Southern Nigerians, which resulted in the
rise of a northern patriotism that was uncompromisingly assertive that
the South was not sufficiently united to reciprocate.
27
The word ‘tribe’ does not exist in any Nigerian language. Its origin is Hebrew and Latin
and simply meant community (tribus); but while Hebrew society was organized in 12
tribes, ancient Roman society was organized in 193 tribes. With the transition from tribe
to monarchy beginning with the Books of Samuel, Hebrew tribal organization was de-
emphasized. In Roman society, too, the transition from republic to empire under the Prin-
cipate of Augustus saw a similar de-emphasis. Unfortunately, Western peoples have used
the word ‘tribe’ since the seventeenth century to describe ‘other cultures’ they believe are
not as civilized as theirs. Unlike Westerners neither the Hebrews nor the Romans used the
word tribe pejoratively.
28
Coleman, Nigeria, 45.
29
Cited in Flint, ‘Colonial Experience’, 256.
30
Margery Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority, 1898–1945 (London: Collins, 1960),
422.
31
Flint, ‘Colonial Experience’, 256.
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It was also a society that was allowed to develop along religious lines.
In the North, the emirs, supported by British political officers, vigor-
ously fought against the promotion of Christianity and Western educa-
tion because they feared, correctly, that they would undermine Islam.
The South, unable to fight off these forces, in the end, enthusiastically
embraced both, resulting in the educational imbalance between the
two ‘Nigerias’ that was to favor the South and was to become a source
of friction in the postcolonial period. The great influence of Britain’s
‘prancing proconsuls’ during the conquest period and its curiously self
– ‘tribalized’ political officers on-the-spot during the evolution of colo-
nial policy was, for the most part, deleterious and fatal to unity.
Proposition two: Conflicting visions of Nigerian nationhood in the early

postcolonial period led to constant frictions that eventually ended the
First Republic
The question was whether the First Republic could have survived
despite serious issues. This is a difficult question to answer. Although
the foundation of the Nigerian state was unstable at independence, the
managers of Nigeria’s postcolonial state failed to re-engineer it in such
a way that the foundation would be firmly secured, because it inherited
a very difficult task and had conflicting visions of what Nigerian nation-
hood meant. What concerned them most was which among the regions
would dominate the country. The political alliance between the North
and the East, the implosion of the Western Region, and collusion of the
alliance to carve out the Mid-Western Region from the West took the
latter out of contention early – but only temporarily.
In 1959, Samuel Ladoka Akintola, the deputy leader of the Western
Region’s Action Group (AG), became Premier of the Western Region.
Serious disagreements between Akintola and Obafemi Awolowo, the
party leader, led to requests by Awolowo’s supporters for Akintola’s
replacement as Premier in 1962. Akintola’s refusal to resign resulted
in an uproar in the Western Regional Assembly and the declaration of
a state of emergency in the West. Akintola was restored to the premier-
ship while Awolowo was imprisoned by a federal government that was
more amenable to the former. Seizing this opportunity, Akintola and
his supporters from the Action Group formed a new party, the Nige-
rian National Democratic Party (NNDP), and developed alliances with
the ruling Northern People’s Congress (NPC). The rise of Akintola, the
unofficial ‘dissolution’ of the uncomfortable alliance between NPC and
the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) opened the way for
Akintola to pivot the West towards the North, representing a masterful
stroke that put the West back in contention in the struggle for domi-
nance in Nigeria. The loser this time was the East. The East’s political dif-
ficulty was worsened by the eastern minorities demanding the creation
of their own state, a demand that the NCNC rejected. Thus, the struggle
for dominion eventually was reduced to a contest between the Igbo and
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26 G.N. Uzoigwe
the North. The NCNC – previously the only truly national party – was
now practically reduced to an Igbo party and left out on a limb.32 This
led to ‘pogroms’ or ethnic cleansings against the Igbo that drove them
to secession and declaration of the Republic of Biafra. Fearing that Bia-
fra’s independence would be fatal to Nigeria’s existence because other
powerful groups might follow the Igbo example, the federal government
declared war on Biafra, accusing the Igbo of breaking the socio-political
compact. The Igbo leadership dismissed the fear as essentially bogus
because no other Nigerian group was being ethnically cleansed.
Thus, the two sides justified their actions by appealing to the idea of
governance as a socio-political contract between the ruler and the ruled,
leading to both calling each other rebels. Both argued that for any state
to endure, each side must fulfill its role in this contract. Achebe stated:
patriotism, being part of an unwritten social contract between a citizen
and the state, cannot exist where the state reneges on the agreement. The
state undertakes to organize society in such a way that the citizen can enjoy
peace, and the citizen in return agrees to perform his patriotic duties.33
G.N. Uzoigwe added, ‘failure, then, by the ruled to obey the constitu-
tion [the socio-political contract] means rebellion; failure by the ruler
to act according to the tenets of the constitution also means rebellion,
and consequently the dissolution of the original association’.34 The col-
lapse of the First Republic, therefore, would not necessarily have led to
secession and war had the federal government protected the lives and
property of the Igbo, a situation that drove them to seek survival in
secession. The colonial government clearly understood its responsibili-
ties in this respect and took no action against any group that might be
considered genocidal. Nigeria and Britain, however, denied that any
genocide occurred and demanded that the Igbo must renounce seces-
sion or face the consequences of their illegal action, but felt no obliga-
tion whatsoever to say what the horrendous massacres should be called.
This idea of government as a socio-political contract has a long his-
torical pedigree. Founded on the political ideas of classical and medieval
Europe, it was only in the early modern age that the very talented trio
– Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – brutally
articulated the concept and concluded that the only reason why an
individual or a group would agree to surrender some of their cherished
civil and natural rights to a state is for the protection of their lives and
property by the state, stressing therefore that failure by the state to offer
this protection for whatever reason renders the contract moot.
32
The NCNC was founded in 1944 under the name, National Council of Nigeria and the
Cameroons. This name was changed to the National Council of Nigerian Citizens after
Southern Cameroon voted to merge with French Cameroon.
33
Chinua Achebe, The Problem With Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1983), 15.
34
Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 148.
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Hobbes, who was distressed by the horrors of the English Civil War
through which he lived, wrote ‘The end of obedience [Achebe’s patriot-
ism] is protection.’ Locke and Rousseau, too, were much troubled by the
socio-political crises in their respective countries that ended in revolu-
tion and brutal wars. Although, the contract idea has been criticized
over the centuries, it has survived proudly in various forms in the writ-
ings of Thomas Hill Green and Herbert Spencer, and in the written fun-
damental laws of modern democratic states, starting with the American
Constitution. Locke and Sir Ernest Barker have effectively demolished
the opposition to the contract proposition.35 In a telling passage, Locke
wrote: ‘Who shall be judge whether the prince or legislative act con-
trary to their trust?’ He concluded emphatically: ‘The people shall be
judge.’36 Thus, the Nigeria-Biafra conflict is far from being unique and
should be studied thus. The collapse of the First Republic and its after-
math should also be studied as a shared responsibility between Britain
and its indigenous successors in 1960.
Proposition three: The secession of Eastern Nigeria and the civil war
were inevitable
Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu led a coup on January 15, 1966 that
opened a Pandora’s Box of sectarian and other problems that had been
festering in the colonial period but had been pushed under the rug.
These problems were exposed by several issues. First, the North-East
alliance initially placed the West at a political disadvantage. The 1962
crisis in the Western Region led to the implosion of the AG and the
rise of Akintola. The national census (1962–1963) crisis pitched the
North against the East, leading to hateful and outrageous outbursts by
northern politicians against the Igbo that portended the massacres of
1966. The preposterous and rigged 1964–1965 federal elections that
were boycotted by the East practically ended the North-East alliance,
thus paving the way for a North-West alliance – the Nigerian National
Alliance (NNA) – and ensured that an East-West alliance, dreaded by
the North, did not materialize.37 Akintola used the election to demonize
the Igbo and invigorate his base to vote for his party so as to put to an
end to Igbo domination of the West that he believed would result if the
AG won.38 This ugly and fraudulent election, ‘won’ by Akintola’s NNDP,
35
See Ernest Barker, ed., Social Contract: Locke, Hume, Rousseau (London: Oxford University
Press, 1946).
36
John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, edited by J.W. Gough (Oxford: Blackwell,
1956), 121.
37
For details see Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 25–33, 35–52; cf. G.N. Uzoigwe, ‘Prelude
to Secession and War: The Nigerian Census Crisis, 1962–1963’, Mbari: The International
Journal of Igbo Studies, 2:1&2 (January 2009), 9–24; Schwarz, Nigeria & K.W.J. Post and
Michael Vickers, Structure and Conflict in Nigeria, 1960–1966 (London: Heinemann,
1973).
38
For details See Victor Ladipo Akintola, Akintola: The Man and the Legend, Enugu: Delta,
1982; cf. Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 53–63; Post and Vickers, Structure and Conflict;
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28 G.N. Uzoigwe
had the slogan ‘Operation Salvation for the West’. Far from achieving
those ends, it led to the breakdown of law and order, leading to the fed-
eral government belatedly declaring a state of emergency in the West.
This was the proximate cause for the collapse of the First Republic.
It should be noted that Balewa waited to act until his new ally, Akin-
tola, was in power because Sarduana of Sokoto and leader of the NPC,
Ahmadu Bello, ‘would not hear of Samuel Ladoke’s humiliation for
the protection of [Michael] Okpara’.39 Okpara was Premier of the East-
ern Region and the United Progressive Grand Alliance, which caused
Bello nightmares. Schwarz pointed out appropriately that Bello and
his NPC were too shortsighted to realize ‘that the political advantages
that would arise from the fall of Akintola were far less serious than the
general calamity which now promised to overtake the whole regime
[of Akintola]’.40 The ascendancy of Akintola and the NNA, the fall of
Obafemi Awolowo and his AG, and the reduction of the NCNC to the
status of a regional party, led to an unbridled Northern arrogance that
seemed to care more about the North than the rest of the country. View-
ing what happened, considering that the North controlled the federal
government, one may concur with John Locke that the contract of
government was practically ended, the general will of the country had
become ‘mute’, and leaders on all sides were guided by secret motives.
Given such a situation, the federal government as sovereign could no
longer honor its trust to protect peoples’ lives and property. The result
was that the Nigerian state was headed for trouble because it was main-
taining ‘only a vain, illusory, and formal existence’. 41 Nzeogwu and his
group, indeed, did the First Republic a favor by terminating its short life.
Unfortunately, the Ironsi regime made matters worse.
Another issue that complicated the situation was that no major Igbo
politicians or top military officers were killed during the January 15
coup. This brought to the fore some of the sectarian problems raised
above. The lack of convincing explanation for the absence of Igbo casu-
alties was to cause the Igbo and Ojukwu infinite trouble throughout
the Nigerian crisis, especially from those Nigerians who harbored a
pathological distrust and suspicion of the Igbo. Nzeogwu’s rather lame
explanation that while some of his soldiers ‘carried out our assignment,
others did not’42 failed to change their mindset. Nor were they satisfied
with the reasons the soldiers provided for their putsch, principally to
change ‘our country and make it a place we could be proud to call our
home, and not to wage war … Tribal considerations were completely out
of our minds.’ 43
Schwarz, Nigeria.
39
Akintola, Akintola, 105
40
Schwarz, Nigeria, 189.
41
Locke, Second Treatise, 112.
42
Quoted in Schwarz, Nigeria, 191.
43
Quoted in ibid., 194.
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Some writers have pointed out that the public jubilation of several
Igbo in the North following the death of Balewa and Ahmadu Bello in
particular and Ironsi’s actions during his short stewardship as head of
state convinced many Nigerians that what happened was a planned
Igbo coup that the North believed attracted justifiable reprisals.44 The
findings of these writers may well be correct. However, no justifiable
explanation has been provided why the killing of six prominent North-
erners led to the continued killing of thousands of Igbo domiciled
in the North between May and October 1966. At the same time, the
northern political leadership, the federal government, and the British
government, which was later adamantly opposed to the secession that
followed, did nothing to stop the carnage, especially since the July 29
counter-coup in which thousands of Igbo soldiers and civilians lost
their lives – the so-called ‘return match’ – had firmly returned political
power to the North. An Eastern Nigerian publication made this point
more poignantly:
If revenge was the motive behind what happened in May and the even more
deadly counter-coup in July, then why was the September-October holo-
caust necessary? … When will the North ever be satisfied with its ‘revenge’
for the attempted coup of 15th January? How many Easterners must die
before the six Northerners out of the fifteen who lost their lives in the 15th
January incident are avenged? Until the power of the North is enthroned
again in Lagos? Or until the North seceded? … The East does not agree that
the price it must pay for the life of its people is the acceptance of domination
in Nigeria.45
Several writers on the Nigeria-Biafra conflict have totally ignored this
point. They have also failed to examine seriously the belief that the
January 15 incident was a calculated Igbo affair to actualize their
domination of Nigeria. But they know, or ought to know, that the Igbo
had neither the manpower in the military, nor the political alliance in
the country, nor the population, and not even the financial resources
needed to achieve such an ambition.
Indeed, those who have looked closely at what happened have
debunked the Igbo coup thesis.46 The easy readiness of the proponents
of the Igbo thesis, without authenticated proof, is a function of the sus-
44
See, for example, J. Isawa Elaigwu, Gowon: The Biography of a Soldier-Statesman (Ibadan:
West Books, 1986), 39–47; N.U. Akpan, Struggle for Secession, 1966–970: A Personal Ac-
count of the Nigerian Civil War (London: Frank Cass, 1976), 3–11, 30; Schwarz, Nigeria,
203–205; Panter-Brick, Nigerian Politics, 23–30; Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 67–76.
45
See Eastern Nigeria (Ministry of Information), ‘Nigerian Pogrom: The Organized Mas-
sacre of Eastern Nigerians’, Crisis series, vol. 3. (Enugu: Ministry of Information, 1966),
25–26.
46
Lloyd, ‘The Ethnic Background to the Nigerian Crisis’ in Panter-Brick, Nigerian Politics,
10; cf. ibid., K. Whiteman, ‘Enugu: The Psychology of Secession, 20 July 1966 to 30 May
1967’, in Panter-Brick, Nigerian Politics, 116; Geoffrey Birch and Dominic St. George, Bia-
fra: The Case for Independence (London: Britain-Biafra Association, 1968), 4.
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30 G.N. Uzoigwe
picion of Igbo motives mentioned earlier, thus making it quite comfort-

able for them to show no compassion whatsoever to the perilous plight
of the Igbo. K. Whiteman, a Briton, wrote:
Visiting Nigeria in November 1966, I was conscious of the extreme gulf
between the attitude towards the massacres in the East and in the rest of
Nigeria. It was astonishing how many people, not only in Kano and Kaduna
but in Ibadan and Lagos, merely commented that it was very sad, ‘the Ibos
[sic]47 had it coming to them’, and that, despite evidence that the massa-
cres were planned by political groups for political ends, they were somehow
‘God’s will’. I was told in Kaduna that several expatriates had to threaten to
resign before the Northern Government laid on a most modest airlift to help
evacuate Easterners. There were also many gravely troubled by the events,
including those who had helped Ibos to escape, who seldom voiced their
concern publicly, and it too often seemed to the East as if they were faced
with callous indifference, if not murderous hostility.48
He also observed:
After the worst round of massacres of all, at the end of September, which
precipitated the massive exodus of Easterners from the North, the expecta-
tion of secession was inevitably intensified…. All those in Enugu who went
to the station to see the refugees arriving, some bandaged and maimed,
were horrified, as I was when visiting hospitals there a month later. [49]…
If it had been possible to avoid the September massacres, it is hard to see
how secession could have been staged, in spite of the existence of elements
in favour of it among the elite. The massacres have provided the weightiest
moral argument in the Biafran case and it is still difficult to find satisfactory
excuses for them in Lagos.50
The refugee problem in the East was enormous, the likes of which the
African continent had never experienced before. Colin Legum compared
the exodus to the East to ‘the gatherings of exiles into Israel after the last
war’.51 Yet both the federal government and the British government –
great exponents of Nigerian unity – were incredulously unconcerned.
Had the massacres of the Igbo taken place a generation later, the
reaction of the international community may have been less favorable
to Nigeria. The 1960s, however, were a different age. The fragility of the
Organization of African Unity (OAU), Cold War politics, Britain’s still
significant diplomatic influence, the relative underdevelopment of com-
munication systems, and the absence of anything like the still-to-come
47
Some works quoted directly in this and other chapters use the non-standard/colonial
spelling ‘Ibo’, and these are rendered as in the originals, marked by [sic] at the first use in
each chapter. Otherwise ‘Igbo’ is used throughout.
48
Whiteman, ‘Enugu’, 116.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid.
51
See Colin Legum, The Observer, London, October 16, 1966.
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Internet were factors that significantly influenced national and inter-

national reactions to the massacres against the Igbo that occurred from
May to October 1966. The survival of Nigeria and the fate of the Igbo
were in the hands of the OAU and the big powers. Whatever decision
they made was destined to have grave repercussions. Faced with this
agonizing burden, they chose to turn a blind eye to the disaster the Igbo
were experiencing. Their attitudes were based not on the contract idea,
ethical and moral grounds, or justice but on geopolitical and economic
calculations, as well as on a hard-headed assessment of the likely out-
come of any conflict. Since it was believed that without the support of
the rest of Nigeria, OAU, and the big powers, the Igbo had no chance in
a conflict with Nigeria. Africa and the big powers decided to abandon
the Igbo to their fate.
Take the OAU, for instance. Created some three years before the
1966 massacres began, it was still fragile. It was feared that support for
the Eastern Region, even if its case was justified, would endanger the
OAU’s existence because such action would undermine the two major
principles of its charter. The first was the provision that the inherited
colonial boundaries should be left intact (even if they make no geo-
graphic or ethno-cultural sense), and the second that no member of the
organization shall interfere in the internal affairs of other states (even
when such a grave crime as genocide was committed by any member
state). Support for the East, therefore, was out of the question because
it would destroy the young organization. The Islamic factor within the
organization was also significant. The entire world of Islam gave Nige-
ria unqualified solidarity and paid no attention whatsoever to what
happened to the Igbo in Northern Nigeria between May and October
1966.52 Pan-Africanists too, strongly opposed to the balkanization of
any African state for any reason, urged the Igbo not to take any action
that would lead to the disintegration of Nigeria. They regarded what
happened to them as their sacrifice for the greater cause of African and
Black solidarity, but they failed to call the federal government to stop the
carnage. The Igbo, therefore, were faced with a triple whammy. What to
do in such a situation was determined by realpolitik and by the psychol-
ogy of both the Igbo people and their countrymen and countrywomen.
Above all, however, Britain was the driving force against the impend-
ing secession. A study of the papers left behind by policy makers at the
Commonwealth Office and Downing Street reveals that, from start to
finish, Britain’s ‘official mind’ towards the Igbo leadership was unre-
pentantly hostile, brazenly one-sided, and indeed dishonest. Harold
Wilson, British Prime Minister at the time, disregarded the pre-war
massacres of the Igbo and gave no help to Yakubu Gowon, the Nigerian
leader, to end the massacres. By persuading Gowon to renege on the
52
See NAL (London), FCO 65/248, 1968, Confidential.
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32 G.N. Uzoigwe
Aburi Accord53 that would have prevented the Civil War, and promising
Gowon a supply of arms that encouraged him to invade Biafra, Wilson
and his government must bear some responsibility for the civil war.54
Britain’s hostility toward the Igbo in general has a long history that has
been well documented.55
Suffice it to say here that the image of the Igbo – true or false – that
British colonial officials in Nigeria transmitted home during the con-
quest era (and throughout the colonial period) caused policy makers
to be suspicious of Igbo intentions.56 Indeed, one of Britain’s first acts
after the conquest of Igboland was to stop, for a short while, Igbo expan-
sion into neighboring territories that had been going on for centuries.
It is also generally believed that Britain refused to hand over political
power to the South at independence, especially to the Igbo. It was deter-
mined at independence to leave the affairs of Nigeria in ‘in a safe pair
of hands’, meaning Balewa and the North.57 Francis Cumming-Bruce,
British High Commissioner, and his successor, David Hunt, both dis-
liked the Igbo intensely. As far as Bruce was concerned the Igbo ‘were
too clever by half ’ and Hunt thought little of Igbo military prowess.58
Walter Schwarz observed:
The Igbo is quickest to learn [of all Nigerians]: he is at home in an office,
a factory, a Rotary Club or a ballroom. Yet in the social and political arts
of living with other people in a federation, without getting himself heavily
disapproved of, he has failed totally and disastrously.59
Current developments in Nigeria seemed, therefore, to have brought
back bad memories of the past, stoked particularly by Igbo frontline
radical leadership during the independence struggle and led to fears
that the Igbo would undo over 60 years of Nigerian state development.
53
This Accord is reproduced in full in Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, Chapter 10; and for
Wilson’s action regarding it see Stanley Diamond, Who Killed Biafra? (London: Biafra As-
sociation of Europe, 1970), 8.
54
Dan Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 12; cf. Tobe
Nnamani, ‘Biafra in Retrospect’, in Chima Korieh, ed., The Nigeria-Biafra War (New York:
Cambria, 2012), 145.
55
See, for example, Adiele E. Afigbo, Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Culture (Ibadan
University Press, 1981); Don C. Ohadike, The Ekumeku Movement: Western Igbo Resistance
to British Colonial Conquest of Nigeria, 1883–1914 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991);
S.N. Nwabara, Iboland: A Century of Contact with Britain, 1860–1960 (London: Hodder
& Stoughton, 1977); Sylvia Leith-Ross, African Women: A Study of the Ibo of Nigeria (Lon-
don: Faber & Faber, 1939); cf. Uzoigwe, ‘The Igbo and the Nigerian Experiment’ in Against
All Odds: The Igbo Experience in Postcolonial Nigeria, edited by Apollos O. Nwauwa and
Chima J. Korieh (Glassboro, NJ: Goldline & Jacobs Publishing, 2011), 17–22.
56
See ibid.
57
Gould, Biafran War, 44; Trevor Clark, A Right Honourable Gentleman: The Life and Times of
Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (Zaria: Hudahuda, 1991), 405–406; cf. Majuk, ‘Inde-
pendence’, 300–302.
58
See Gould, Biafran War, 52.
59
Schwarz, Nigeria, 251–252.
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It was not that British officials hated the Igbo as a group as some Igbo
scholars seem to imply; on the contrary, the Igbo-British relationship
may be characterized as love-hate. Uzoigwe wrote:
By the 1940s and 1950s the Igbo had come to admire what they perceived
to be the British ideal of fair play, and how they rewarded hard work, hon-
esty, and excellence. However, for the most part, they never bowed their
back to their new rulers in obsequious humility. The British, although they
never really liked the Igbo for this and for other reasons, did reward them
when they felt that it was fair to do so; however, the infrastructural develop-
ment of Igboland and the East generally did not seem to have been a major
concern of the colonial administration.60
As long as the Igbo did not upset the status quo in independent
Nigeria, all was well, and Britain was determined to keep the apple
cart intact at all cost. Thus, official British policy as revealed during
the civil war was simple: Biafra must be crushed because ‘the Ibos took
matters into their own hands and resorted to unilateral action when
they seceded in May, 1967 [but] if the two sides can agree that Nigeria
should remain a single country, as it was when we brought it to inde-
pendence, we should gladly support this’.61 This became the centerpiece
of British policy throughout the conflict. Because Gowon agreed with
this policy and Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, the Biafran leader, did not,
Harold Wilson’s administration launched an unprecedented global dip-
lomatic campaign that brought both the big powers and the OAU, the
Arab League, the Islamic world, India, the West Indies, South America,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and all the smaller European coun-
tries together to support British policy on Biafra.62 Britain, of course,
did not incur the huge financial expenses that this diplomatic onslaught
involved because of a love of Nigeria or for the preservation of constitu-
tional integrity but essentially to protect its huge investments and other
interests in Nigeria as well as to retain its influence. All the other coun-
tries involved, too, were also driven to do what they did to protect their
respective national interests as they saw them, despite the fact that, in
most countries, public opinion was sympathetic toward the sufferings
of the Igbo. Their interests included economic, religious, neo-colonial,
and Cold War considerations.63
Why then did the Igbo, after seeing this handwriting on the wall,
still favor secession? In his speech at the Addis Ababa conference in
August, 1968, Ojukwu, following the European contractarians, sup-
plied this answer: ‘In the northernmost parts of Nigeria they [Northern
60
Uzoigwe, ‘The Igbo and the Nigerian Experiment’, 19.
61
NAL, CAB 151/83. Brief No 20, 1968. Nigeria; Some Questions and Answers. Confiden-
tial.
62
NAL, FCO 65/248, July 28, 1968. Confidential.
63
See Rhodes House Library (RHL), Oxford – Papers of Sir Miles Clifford’s ‘Friends of Nige-
ria’; cf. Gould, Biafran War, xvi, xviii, 54.
000 Fal book B.indb 33 13/06/2016 22:06

34 G.N. Uzoigwe
Nigerians] started slaughtering our people. We kept running, running,

running. Having crossed a line, we called it home. That is what Biafra
is – an end to a journey and an end to flight.’ 64 While we may quibble
as much as we want about the number of Eastern Nigerians who were
massacred or fled to the East for safety, nobody denies that the numbers
were sufficiently large to have created a psychology of fear and distrust
among those affected directly or indirectly. The available evidence dem-
onstrates clearly that (i) the Igbo were specifically targeted and openly
eliminated while the government did nothing to stop the massacres, (ii)
that no other ethnic minorities domiciled in the North were so targeted
and killed, and (iii) that the death of several non-Igbo during the massa-
cres was purely accidental. This is the context within which the actions
of the Igbo leadership should be evaluated.
What happened to the Igbo, in their view, was a genocidal act. Inter-
national newspaper correspondents who witnessed some of the atroci-
ties agreed with them.65 Even so, had the massacres in the summer of
1966 sufficiently satisfied northern vengeance, it would have been dif-
ficult, as mentioned earlier, for the Igbo leadership to successfully ask
their people to vote for secession. The British and Nigerian official views
that Ojukwu was a sort of Adolph Hitler who did as he pleased are not
based on any serious evidence. Like Gowon, Ojukwu was keenly aware
of a palace coup that would overthrow him. However, his deliberately
cultivated public posture did portray him as an intimidating figure, very
much unlike Gowon’s seemingly amiable and, frankly, more likeable
image. However, these images should be separated from the facts on
the ground.66 One of these facts is that the continued and by far more-
massive massacre in September-October 1966 made it much easier for
the Igbo people to opt for secession.67 Walter Schwarz, a distinguished
British newspaper correspondent, described what happened as,
a traumatic event in Nigerian history. It destroyed the illusion that tribal
rivalries could be dismissed as growing pains in a new nation and laid the
foundation for the secessionist feeling that was to become an irresistible
force in the East. No accurate figure for the number who died is available.
The East’s first claim, made at the Aburi conference three months later was
10,000; the official figure given later was 30,000. Whichever figure is more
accurate, no one disputes that it was a pogrom of genocidal proportions.68
Whiteman, writing a few years later, concurred:
64
See Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 155 for complete quotation.
65
See some of these gruesome accounts in Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 100–114; cf.
Uzoigwe, ‘Forgotten Genocide’, 73–78.
66
For a portrayal of Ojukwu’s and Gowon’s characters see Gould, Biafran War, 152–157.
67
See Uzoigwe, ‘Forgotten Genocide’, 67–73, especially the interview he had with General
Gowon.
68
Schwarz, Nigeria, 215, emphasis added.
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The main point about the September killings was that they affected the mass
of the people and created a sort of an emotional climate in which seces-
sion was possible. The argument about numbers (whether it was 5,000 or
30,000 killed or whether there were 700,000 or 2 million refugees) is irrel-
evant. Whatever the number, it was sufficiently large to create a trauma of
considerable proportions, because it affected so many families and stretched
through society.69
Two other actions of the federal government fortified the Igbo’s belief
that secession was the best option for them. The first was Gowon’s deci-
sion to renege on the Aburi Accord that he willingly signed. He did so
because federal permanent secretaries as well as the British government
convinced him on his return from Aburi that the Accord was a confed-
eral arrangement that would eventually lead to the disintegration of
Nigeria.70 ‘On Aburi we stand’ became, therefore, the official policy of
the East, and a rallying point for the Igbo.71 Had the Accord been given
a chance to work there is no doubt that there would have been no seces-
sion and no civil war. The other reason they believed that secession was
inevitable was Decree No. 8 of 1967 that, as stated earlier, made the
Igbo a minority in the East.72 Uzoigwe wrote:
first the Igbo now controlled only one of the twelve states, becoming even
a minority in the East … the Hausa-Fulani controlled four of the five north-
ern states; the Yoruba controlled all the three Yoruba states, Lagos being,
for all practical purposes, a Yoruba state; Port Harcourt which the Willinck
Commission of Inquiry declared to be an Igbo city, was now carved out of
Igboland and made the capital of the new Rivers State; also carved out of
Igboland were most of the oil-producing Igbo subgroups including Obigbo
[literal translation, ‘Abode of Ndigbo’] and thirteen oil-producing commu-
nities of Egbema which no one ever doubted to be Igbo as well as all the
Ikweres, a sub-Igbo group.73
He went on:
The Igbo now denied access to the sea on all sides, and trapped, to borrow
Jonathan Swift’s felicitous, even if morbid, description of himself, ‘like a
poisoned rat in a hole’ were clearly in trouble. The issue was, as Igbo lead-
ers confided in N.U. Akpan, ‘the honour of their race,’ asking how ‘anyone’
could ‘dare … even conceive that Ibo blood could be shed in such a wanton
way, and imagine that nothing would be done about it – impossible!’ – What
was Ojukwu to do now that Gowon had called his bluff?74
69
Whiteman, ‘Enugu’, 116.
70
Elaigwu, Gowon, 29–30.
71
Ojukwu’s administration reproduced the Accord in twelve gramophone records.
72
For details of this decree see Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 117–120.
73
Ibid., 120.
74
Ibid.
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36 G.N. Uzoigwe
Schwarz accurately captured the dilemma of the Igbo when he

wrote: ‘To the East, the arbitrary division of its territory into three leav-
ing even Port Harcourt a predominantly Ibo city outside the Ibo state,
was an open challenge to secede. But by that time the die was already
cast.’75 There was unbearable tension and fear among the Igbo and the
East generally. N.U. Akpan, an Ibibio and head of the Eastern Region
Civil Service, later wrote that since it was known in official circles in the
East that he was against secession, he was kept in the dark about what
the East was planning to do.76 Akpan was in a very difficult position.
The whole country, too, felt much apprehension. There were, indeed,
some Igbo people
who might not have been quite comfortable with secession for various
reasons but because they were unable or were afraid to present an accept-
able solution to the dilemma had no choice but to go along with the over-
whelming majority view who said that they had been subjected to too much
humiliation and suffering in Nigeria and could take no more.77
The Igbo leadership was in such frightful mood that they bluntly told
Obafemi Awolowo, who had gone to Enugu to de-escalate the tension,
‘that the place of meeting between the people of the East and those of
the North would be the battlefield’.78
The die, then, was cast. Precisely at 2:00 a.m. on May 30, 1967 –
the anniversary of the May massacres – Ojukwu, after receiving the
mandate of the Eastern leadership, made this historic declaration of
independence:
Fellow countrymen and women, You, the people of Eastern Nigeria, con-
scious of the supreme authority of Almighty God over all mankind, of your
duty to yourselves and posterity; aware that you can no longer be protected
in your lives and in your property by any government based outside Eastern
Nigeria … unwilling to be unfree partners in any association of a political
or economic nature … now, therefore, I, Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuemeka
Odumegwu Ojukwu, by virtue of your authority and pursuant to the prin-
ciples recited above, do hereby solemnly proclaim that the territory and
region known as Eastern Nigeria, together with the continental shelf and
territorial waters, shall henceforth be an independent sovereign state of the
name and title The Republic of Biafra.79
Following this declaration, federal soldiers invaded Biafra on July 6,
1967, confident of reducing it back to obedience in a matter of weeks.
The civil war had begun; it lasted for 33 months.
75
Schwarz, Nigeria, 230.
76
See Akpan, Struggle for Secession, xiii-xviii.
77
Cited in ibid., xiii.
78
Cited in ibid.
79
The declaration is reproduced in full in Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 121; cf. also
Schwarz, Nigeria, 229–230.
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The public discussion of what happened to the Igbo between May

and October 1966 and its aftermath has tended, unfortunately, to be
characterized by palpable flippancy and unwillingness to carefully
study the available evidence. The public has also failed to read the works
of those who have attempted to interpret the events and to subject them
to serious critical analysis before making pronouncements. Given the
situation described above, did the Igbo leadership overreact? If so, what
should it have done? Recall the Leaders of Thought whose deliberations
were terminated because of the major massacres of September and
October. Should they have been recalled, who would have enforced
any agreement reached, especially as the international community
appeared to be unconcerned? On the one hand, opponents of the seces-
sion roundly reject the Eastern Region’s action. On the other, they show
an unquestioning readiness to accept the federal government’s and
British government’s denial that no genocide ever took place. Two Brit-
ish journalists noticed this tendency at the time. Colin Legum of The
Observer noted:
For fear of promoting an even greater tragedy, the Nigerians have been
sheltered from knowing the full magnitude of the disaster that has over
taken the Ibos in the Northern Region. The danger is that the truth will
not be believed, and so no proper lessons learned, once the horror is over
… While the Hausas in each town and village in the North know what hap-
pened in their own locations, only the Ibo know the whole terrible story
from the 600,000 or so refugees who have fled to the safety of the Eastern
Region, hacked, slashed, mangled, stripped naked and robbed of all their
possessions.80
The other journalist, Walter Partington of the Daily Express wrote:
Nigerian and British diplomats are playing down the full terror, apparently
to prevent panic among Europeans and what Ibos are left, and to keep
Nigeria from crumbling into anarchy if there is secession from the Nigerian
Federation by the embittered Eastern Region … The Northern government
has done its best to play down the four-day carnage which I am the first Fleet
Street reporter to see.81
There is also no evidence to show that Gowon was in a strong enough
position to enforce the verbal guarantees he made to the Igbo for their
safety. The dilemma of the Igbo was, indeed, very clear and, believing
that they were despised and unwanted in their own country, they made
the choice to opt out of Nigeria for their own safety. This is the Igbo case,
simply put. Surely, the dilemma of the Igbo, for them, was clear; and
those who blamed, or still blame, the East for seceding are responsible
80
Legum, The Observer, October 16, 1966.
81
Partington, ‘The Carnage I saw’, Daily Express, October 6, 1966.
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38 G.N. Uzoigwe
for providing answers to the above questions, but somehow they have
not even raised them, let alone answered them.
Conclusion
The rabid historicist is free to argue that this visitation gives too much
credit to human agency in directing the course of historical events and
neglects those immutable and cyclic laws said to govern these events.
What is undeniable, nevertheless, is that in Nigeria’s colonial and early
postcolonial history, the imprint of the human agency both in its laud-
able achievements and failures is writ large. Britain and its adminis-
trators forged a new country from hundreds of sovereign nations and
called it Nigeria. They ruled it autocratically for some 60 years in amaz-
ing stability, and made commendable achievements in educational, eco-
nomic and social development by the time of independence. However,
some problems of this ostensibly stable country that were swept under
the carpet erupted soon afterwards. Because their Nigerian successors
failed to address these problems successfully, given the system of a curi-
ous democratic federation that they inherited, Nigeria collapsed, and
the aftermath was a series of events that ended in secession and civil
war. To blame the conflict solely on Ojukwu or the Igbo would be both
simplistic and unhistorical. What also happened had precious little to
do with the laws of historicism. The duty of the historian is to provide a
critique of how the human agency handled its awesome task, for good
or ill.
Postscript
It was generally known that since the OAU, Britain, and the United States
were on Nigeria’s side, Biafra was doomed. Within Britain, indeed, Nige-
ria won the unsolicited but grateful support of an influential group of
individuals made up of captains of industry and commerce, and signifi-
cant politicians of the Labour and Tory parties in both Houses of Parlia-
ment; they were headed by Sir Geoffrey Miles Clifford. Their ostensible
aims were to counter what they called ‘Biafran propaganda’, to comple-
ment Wilson’s diplomatic efforts and present the ‘true facts’ of events
in Nigeria to the world. They called themselves ‘Friends of Nigeria’ and
they hired an influential public relations firm, Galitzine & Partners for
this purpose.82 A case of the kettle calling the pot black! There was also
a less influential group of individuals in the British Isles made up of
intellectuals, radicals, missionaries, newspaper correspondents, and
philanthropists who supported Biafra’s cause. They called themselves
82
Their papers are deposited at Rhodes House Library (RHL), Oxford.
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the British-Biafra Association who, too, claimed to possess the ‘true

facts’.83
When the state of the war showed beyond doubt that Biafra was a
lost cause, the global community, led by Britain, turned attention to
stopping the war through diplomatic negotiations within the context of
one Nigeria, providing relief supplies to the starving population in Nige-
ria by international organizations, and ensuring that after the expected
Nigerian victory the Igbo people would not be exterminated. Naturally,
Gowon accepted these actions. Not surprisingly Ojukwu and the Biafran
leadership adamantly refused to return to the Nigerian Commonwealth
under the above conditions because to do so implied that the East had
no reason to opt out of Nigeria in the first instance; that all the suffer-
ings, humiliations, and deaths of their people would have been in vain;
that might was right; and that the contract of government was a useless
document.84
Consequently, Wilson blamed the crisis on Ojukwu, including starva-
tion in Biafra, and stated:
The Federal Government is glad to have our help in co-operation with the
International Red Cross. It is Colonel Ojukwu who has spurned our offer of
relief supplies … If he were to compromise, he could stop the war tomorrow
and open the way to unimpeded operations to save the refugees. It is up to
the Ibo leaders to save their own people, having got them into this terrible
plight.85
It is an assumption that is difficult to prove. He denied that any genocide
was committed against the Igbo, citing the report of a group of inter-
national observers invited by Gowon to the war zones that found no
evidence of any genocide but refrained from considering contrary evi-
dence available to him.86 He rejected outright the accusation that some
Britons in Northern Nigeria encouraged the 1966 massacres, contin-
ued to supply necessary arms to Nigeria, and supported total embargo
of such supplies to Biafra. These policies were considered necessary to
expedite the fall of Biafra and to save lives.87
83
Their papers are also deposited at RHL. These include two boxes containing hundreds of
revolting photographs depicting the atrocities visited on the Igbo. Cf. Uzoigwe, Visions of
Nationhood, 281–334.
84
For the position of Ojukwu, see Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood, 223–245.
85
NAL, CAB 151/83. Brief NO. 20. Confidential.
86
For this contrary evidence see RHL Mss AFr. s 2399; Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood,
281–334; S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser Ottanelli, ‘The History and Legacy of the Asaba,
Nigeria, Massacres’, African Studies Review, 54:3 (2011),1–26.
87
NAL, CAB 151/83. Brief NO. 20. Confidential.
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3 Connecting Theory with Reality
Understanding the Causes of
the Nigeria-Biafra War
Ogechi E. Anyanwu
Introduction
The Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–1970) was a defining event in the his-
tory of postcolonial Nigeria. Nigeria’s independence in 1960 marked
the beginning of attempts to build a strong, united, and prosperous
nation in Africa’s most populous pluralistic country. Yet the tension
arising from the conflicting interests and aspirations of the country’s
diverse ethnic groups intensified. The British had made little effort to
unite the different ethnic groups in a collective consciousness during the
colonial period. Its indirect rule system of administering Nigeria under-
cut any chances of promoting social solidarity among various ethnici-
ties. Worse still was that the forced amalgamation of the Northern and
Southern Protectorates of Nigeria in 1914 was not successful in nar-
rowing the entrenched historical, cultural, and religious differences in
the country. Due to the mistrust and fear of domination and deprivation
that dominated Nigeria’s politics during the colonial period, it was only
a matter of time before the country’s fragile unity would be tested. That
test came at independence. The inability to resolve the disagreements
between the federal government, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu
Gowon, and the Eastern Region, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Emeka
Ojukwu, compelled the latter to secede from Nigeria by proclaiming the
independent Republic of Biafra on May 30, 1967. Swiftly, the federal
government declared a war designed to keep the county together. A civil
war ensued, lasting from July 6, 1967 to January 15, 1970.1
One of the subjects of unending scholarly debates about the Nigeria-
Biafra War has been its causes. Much of the scholarly writing on the
causes of the war has taken a narrow view of the war, often inspired
by loyalty to an ideology or ethnic group. This chapter applies the theo-
ries of societal conditions, economic conditions, and human nature as
explanatory frameworks to analyse the dynamic and complex causes of
1
Various scholars have acknowledged the devastation of the war and its impact on Nige-
ria’s postcolonial politics. See Eghosa E. Osaghae, Ebere Onwudiwe, and Rotimi T. Suberu,
The Nigerian Civil War and its Aftermath (Ibadan, Nigeria: John Archers, 2002); A. Adejoh,
The Nigerian Civil War: Forty Years After, What Lessons? (Ibadan: Aboki, 2008).
40
000 Fal book B.indb 40 13/06/2016 22:06

Understanding the Causes of the Nigeria-Biafra War 41
the war. Through analysis of mostly primary sources acquired from the
National Archives, London (UK), this chapter argues that the Nigeria-
Biafra War represented a predictable convergence of domestic mistrusts
and rivalries that British colonial rule consolidated with broader neo-
colonial British interests that the Cold War era politics facilitated. The
war was a logical manifestation of unaddressed ethnic tension that
typified Nigeria’s colonial society. It shows that even after achieving
political independence, the tension refused to disappear but was rather
sharpened, making war inevitable. As demonstrated in this chapter, the
historical causes of the Nigeria-Biafra War can only be fully understood
in the context of several processes that include the prevailing attitudes
and relationship among Nigerian peoples and societies; the competition
and fear over the control of the country’s natural resources, especially
oil; and the mindset of major actors in the conflict. By exploring the
subject from a perspective that incorporates multiple forces that created
the underlying conditions for the war, this chapter provides a much
more comprehensive understanding of the war’s significance in Nige-
ria’s history and a valuable window into not only the current problems
of Nigeria but also the remedies.
This chapter shows that the theories of societal conditions, economic
conditions, and human nature are crucial to any understanding of the
dynamic and complex causes of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Many scholars
have blamed societal problems for conflicts, wars, and many other ills
afflicting societies. Jean-Jacques Rousseau sees the ills as emanating
from the dynamics existing within a society. For him, exploitation and
domination of others reflect human enslavement to their own needs.2
As the history of the Nigeria-Biafra War reveals, the undercurrents
of Nigeria’s pluralistic society made it likely for the country’s diverse
ethnic groups to either attempt to dominate others or avoid domina-
tion. Nationalism, described as an adulterous religion, often leads to
war. Every nation ‘has its own rose colored mirror’, and members,
when threatened, opt to defend themselves even with violence.3 There
is no mistaking the fact that the millions of Igbo people, who put up
a gallant fight in the face of Nigeria’s superior military power, loved
their nation; so did the Nigerian forces that fought to keep the country
united. Unjust rule marked by dictatorship and tyranny often lead to
conflicts and wars. For Immanuel Kant, absence of democracy creates
the atmosphere in which war could be possible.4 The heated undemo-
cratic political environment in which the Nigeria-Biafra War occurred
supports Kant’s positon.
Related to the theory of societal condition is that of economic
2
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (New York: Dutton, 1950).
3
Frederick H. Hartmann, The Relations of Nations (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 32.
4
Immanuel Kant and Carl J. Friedrich, The Philosophy of Kant: Immanuel Kant’s Moral and
Political Writings (New York: Modern Library, 1949).
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42 Ogechi E. Anyanwu
conditions. Economic conditions create an incentive to fight. According

to John Locke, the desire for land and resources or the need to avoid dep-
rivation of those resources typically leads nations to war.5 The uneven
spread of resources creates the urge to fight neighbors more naturally
endowed with these.6 Lenin sees cutthroat capitalism as the culprit.7
No observer of Nigeria’s political scene in the 1960s would ignore the
role played by the struggle to control oil revenue in both contributing to
the war and influencing foreign involvement. The popularity of oil as a
major export earner and its uneven location in the South emboldened
Biafran leaders to engage in the war with a full understanding of the
economic viability of the new country. It also made the idea of keeping
the country united an overriding economic imperative, from the per-
spectives of the Nigerian and British governments.
A full understanding of the war is impossible without analysing the
mindset of major players during the war. The theory of human nature
therefore provides a clue as to the causes of the war. Saint Augustine
blames human nature for wars: according to him, all human beings are
flawed due to the original sin committed by Adam and Eve.8 Plato sees
humans’ feverish drive for worldly possession as a reflection of human
defect that naturally leads to war.9 For Sigmund Freud, humans are
born with a death wish that is often redirected to other activities such
as war.10 Thomas Hobbes notes that human beings possess a natural
tendency to fight endlessly but the existence of government acts as a
moderating influence.11 Overall, the imperfection of the world, as evi-
dent in numerous wars, according to Hans Morgenthau, ‘is the result of
forces inherent in human nature’.12 In Nigeria, the mutual distrust and
resentment between the North and the East that manifested prominently
in the relationship between Gowon and Ojukwu contributed to the war
significantly. Whether focusing on the ethnic, economic, political, or
external dimensions of the war, the history of Nigeria in the 1960s
continues to occupy the attention of scholars.13 This chapter shows
5
John Locke, The Second Treatise on Civil Government (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books,
1986), 6–8.
6
Richard A. Falk, This Endangered Planet (New York: Vintage, 1973).
7
Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1982 [1963]).
8
Saint Augustine, quoted in Thomas M. Magstadt and Peter M. Schotten, Understanding
Politics: Ideas, Institutions, and Issues (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 440.
9
Plato, The Republic, edited by G.R.F. Ferrari and translated by Tom Griffith (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
10
Sigmund Freud and A.A. Brill, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York: Modern
Library, 1938).
11
Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, edited by A.R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1904), 63–5.
12
Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York:
Knopf, 1967), 36.
13
G.N. Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood: Prelude to the Nigerian Civil War (Trenton, NJ: Af-
rica World Press, 2010); Alexander A. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran
000 Fal book B.indb 42 13/06/2016 22:06

that the Nigeria-Biafra War was only possible because of the complex
interactions between leaders unwilling to compromise and trapped in
a winner-takes-all mentality, a historically divided country assailed by
fear of domination and deprivation, and a lopsided economy that lent
itself to unhealthy competition between the major ethnic groups.
Nigeria Before the War

Following years of treaties signed with local rulers – and shortly after
the conclusion of the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 – Britain estab-
lished a colonial administration in Nigeria. It carved out three terri-
tories: the Colony and Protectorate of Lagos (1886), the Niger Coast
Protectorate (1893), and the Northern Protectorate (1900). The Niger
Coast Protectorate was merged with the Colony and Protectorate of
Lagos to become the Southern Protectorate in 1906. Modern Nigeria
emerged in 1914 when Britain amalgamated northern and southern
protectorates, bringing together diverse peoples, cultures, religions, and
languages. The unification of the two areas with incompatible and con-
flicting histories and aspirations was made for the administrative and
financial interests of the British. According to Osadolor,
Lugard considered it unnecessary to carve up a territory undivided by natu-
ral boundaries, more so since one portion (the South) was wealthy enough
to commit resources to even ‘unimportant’ programmes while the other
portion (the North), could not balance its budget necessitating the British
taxpayer being called upon to bear the larger share of even the cost of its
administration. This partly explains the amalgamation, an act which pro-
voked bitter controversy at the time, arousing the resentment of educated
elites and of some British administrators.14
The amalgamation of the two different areas saddled postcolonial
Nigeria with a difficult problem of building a nation out of the com-
ponent nationalities. Thus the relationship between the North and the
South since amalgamation has been contentious. As early as 1944, the
Daily Service newspaper predicted ‘an era of wholesome rivalry’ among
War (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980); Chinua Achebe, There was
a Country: A Memoir (New York: Penguin Books, 2013); Chima Korieh, ed., The Nigeria-
Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2012); John de St.
Jorre, The Brothers’ War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1972); E. Wayne
Nafziger, The Economics of Political Instability: The Nigerian-Biafran War (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1983); Michael Gould, The Struggle for Modern Nigeria: The Biafran War,
1967–1970 (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012); Morris Davis, ‘Negotiating about
Biafran Oil’, Issue: A Journal of Opinion 3:2 (Summer 1973), 23–32; Suzanne Cronje, The
World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of the Biafran War, 1967–1970 (London: Sidg-
wick and Jackson, 1972).
14
O. Osadolor, ‘The Development of the Federal Idea and the Federal Framework’, in Feder-
alism and Political Restructuring in Nigeria, edited by K. Amuwo, A. Agbaje, R. Suberu, and
G. Herault (Ibadan: Spectrum, 1998), 35.
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the three dominant ethnic groups in Nigeria: Igbos, Yorubas, and

Hausas.15 Adeyemo Alakija, the president of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa
(a pan-Yoruba organization in the West), declared that the Yoruba
people ‘will hold their own among other tribes of Nigeria’ and resist
being ‘relegated to the background in the future’.16 Nnamdi Azikiwe
urged Igbos to assume the leadership position they truly deserved.17
The problems resulting from the amalgamation of 1914 have been
the subject of what is dubbed ‘The National Question’. This question
became important because Nigeria comprises many groups at ‘differ-
ent levels of development hence the need to solve these problems and
find an equitable basis for the peaceful and harmonious co-existence of
these groups’.18 Finding a common ground to work together was never
easy as each ethnic group often viewed national issues from a purely
narrow-minded, self-centered standpoint.
Nigerian leaders acknowledged the absence of national cohesion in
the country. Speaking on the floor of the Federal House of Representa-
tives, Lagos, Tafawa Balewa, who later became the country’s first Prime
Minister insisted: ‘Since the amalgamation of southern and northern
provinces in 1914, Nigeria has existed as one country only on paper …
It is still far from being united. Nigerian unity is only a British intention
for the country’.19 Obafemi Awolowo echoed Balewa’s sentiment when
he wrote: ‘Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expres-
sion. There are no “Nigerians” in the same sense there are “English” or
“Welsh” or “French”.’ The word Nigeria was merely a distinctive appel-
lation to distinguish those who lived within the boundaries of Nigeria
from those who did not’.20 With these public assertions of the absence
of a national spirit by regional politicians, distrust naturally character-
ized interregional relationship.
The misgivings between the North and the South manifested more
prominently during the constitutional conference of 1950. Delegates
from Nigeria’s three administrative areas (Eastern, Western, and North-
ern regions) gathered in Ibadan to reform the Richards Constitution.
They unanimously agreed on greater regional autonomy organized
around a federal system of government. In that system, each region
would send representatives to the national congress in Lagos. The desire
of the regions to protect their independence was a step in the unend-
ing and unhealthy competition that contributed in undermining the
15
Daily Service (Lagos), October 17, 1944, 2.
16
Minutes of the first inaugural conference of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, June 1948, cited in
James Smoot Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley, University of Califor-
nia Press, 1958), 346.
17
West African Pilot, July 6, 1949.
18
Education Sector Analysis, Historical Background on the Development of Education in Nigeria
(Abuja: Education Sector Analysis, 2003), 14.
19
Ahmadu Bello, My Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 160.
20
Obafemi Awolowo, Path to Nigerian Freedom (London: Faber & Faber, 1947), 47–48.
000 Fal book B.indb 44 13/06/2016 22:06

prospects of nation building. Although the three regions agreed on

regional autonomy, they differed on the ratio of regional representation
at the national assembly. While delegates from the East and the West
demanded for equal representation, delegates from the Northern Region
demanded for a 50–50 representation ratio between it and the two other
regions in the South combined. Demand by the northern delegates was
born out of fear of potential domination by the more advanced South.
As Mallam Sani Dingyadi, a spokesperson for the North, stated,
the North has a different religion and different standards of education, so
the North must stand alone by itself. Therefore, in any matter of importance
one would find the East, West, Lagos … on one side leaving the North on the
other side. Therefore, I do not think it is fair and cannot tolerate it that equal
representation should be given to each region. What we would recommend
is at least one-half representation for the North and one-half for what I call
the South.21
Obanikoro and Alvan Ikoku, who spoke for the West and the East,
respectively, insisted that the North’s proposition, if allowed, would
translate to ‘placing the fate of the two regions at the mercy of the
North’.22 In their words, ‘the population of the North is larger than
that of the other two regions. But if the principle is one of federation
and not of domination, the basis of representation at the centre must
be regional.’23 At the end of the conference, the North’s preference pre-
vailed without which the Emir of Zaria threatened to ‘ask for separation
from the rest of Nigeria’.24
The autonomy enjoyed by the regions led to unhealthy rivalry which
compromised attempts to build a united nation. Balewa registered his
concern over the influx of southerners in the North which he believed
threatened to displace less-educated northerners.25 Because of the
superior educational attainment of southerners, the Gaskiya Ta Fi
Kwabo newspaper echoed Balewa’s sentiment when it warned in 1953
that if Britain grants Nigeria early independence, southerners would
run the country. According to him, ‘it is the Southerner who has the
power in the North. They have control of the railway stations; of the
Post Offices; of Government Hospitals; of the canteens; the majority
employed in the Kaduna Secretariat and in the Public Works Depart-
ment are all Southerners.’26
21
Proceedings of the General Conference on Review of the Constitution, January 1950 (Lagos:
Government Printer, 1950), 46–47.
22
Ibid., 52.
23
Ibid., 22.
24
Ibid., 218.
25
Legislative Council Debates, Nigeria, March 4, 1948, 227, cited in Coleman, Nigeria, 361.
26
Editorial, Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo, February 18, 1950, cited in Report on the Kano Disturbances
of May 1953 (Kaduna: Northern Regional Government, 1953), 43.
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The fear of southern domination and strong negative sentiments

against the Igbos persisted among all classes of people in the North. For
instance, according to Martin Arnold, the Hausa people on the street
despised the Igbos for disrespecting authority, laughing at their prophet,
dismissing Hausa people as stupid sometimes because they could not
speak English.27 In a letter to a newspaper editor, a northerner wrote:
‘We were conquered by the white man, but he did not enslave us, and
now those who did not conquer us will enslave us. Editor, lead us. God,
show us the way.’28 With the mutual distrust of each group during the
colonial period, it was not surprising that it was only a matter of time
before Nigeria’s fragile unity would be tested following independence.
The country’s failure to pass the test contributed to the Nigeria-Biafra
War, the causes of which can be fully understood when societal, eco-
nomic, and human elements are analysed and connected.
A Society Ripe for Change

Postcolonial Nigeria inherited a colonial arrangement in which three
regions were created along ethnic lines with three dominant groups:
Igbo in the East, Hausa-Fulani in the North, and Yoruba in the West.
The adopted federal system of government gave a measure of financial
and political autonomy to the regions with a weak federal government.
No political observer in the early 1960s would escape the feeling that
something was wrong with Nigeria’s nation-building project. The Nige-
rian society in the 1960s was ripe for change. The contested census
results, the coup and counter-coup, the killings of Igbos in the North,
and the inability of the regionally minded political elites to reach a com-
promise in addressing contentious issues all made the Nigeria-Biafra
War predictable. Before independence in 1960, and in the years fol-
lowing it, fear of domination and deprivation had shaped interregional
interactions. To allay the fears of each region, Nigeria’s independence
constitution maintained the regional autonomy established by the
Macpherson Constitution in 1951.
Yet the fears remained. For instance, the census conducted in 1962
was cancelled due to disagreement over regional population. Even
when another census was conducted in 1963, the South disputed the
result of 25.86 million for its area and 29.80 million for the North.29 It
accused the North of attempting to dominate the country’s politics by
inflating its population numbers. Because population determined fed-
eral financial allocations and the number of political seats assigned to
27
Martin Arnold, ‘Ibos Noted for Strong Will, Which Some Denounce’, New York Times,
January 14, 1970, 17.
28
Arnold, ‘Ibos Noted for Strong Will, Which Some Denounce’.
29
Federal Republic of Nigeria, Population Census of Nigeria, 1963 Volume 111 (Lagos: Office
of Statistics, 1963). S.A. Aluko, ‘How Many Nigerians? An Analysis of Nigeria’s Census
Problems, 1901–63’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 3:3 (Oct. 1965), 371–392.
000 Fal book B.indb 46 13/06/2016 22:06

each region at the federal legislature, the controversy was not surpris-
ing.30 The main issue surrounding the census crisis was ‘which section
of the country – the North or the South – should exercise veto over the
future of Nigeria … And the 1962–1963 census resolved it, at any rate
temporarily, in favor of the North. But almost absentmindedly, Nigeria’s
ethnic politicians were cascading their country toward a precipice.’ 31
To many in the South, the 1962–1963 census, ‘provided further evi-
dence of the ability and determination of the North … to maintain its
population majority and the political power that it conferred’.32
Before 1966, Nigeria had four regions: the North, East, West, and
Mid-West, the last having been carved out from the West in June 1963.
In these regions, ‘three major national groups – the Hausas, Yorubas
and Ibos [sic] – each dominated their own region, while at the same
time they engaged in a bitter struggle for power at the Federal center’.33
The Hausa-Fulani controlled the center. According to Walter Schwarz:
‘The federation has never achieved the balance of interests that it has
in America or in India. In practice the arrangement has been that the
winner takes all. The Northern People’s Congress effectively rules the
whole country.’34 The census crisis coincided with the disputed elections
of 1964 and the allegation of corruptions levied against political lead-
ers at the federal and regional levels to drive a military coup in January
1966 which saw the assassination of mostly prominent northern politi-
cians, including Balewa. The leader of the coup was Kaduna Nzeogwu,
an Igbo officer.
An Igbo-led coup that saw the lopsided killing of northern politi-
cians aggravated existing ethnic mistrust. Although the coup was
unsuccessful, the North was apprehensive of southern domination, as
Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo man, who was the top-ranking military
officer, became the head of state. Northern misgiving was confirmed
when Aguiyi-Ironsi’s government introduced a unitary system of gov-
ernment for the country, a system that ended regional autonomy.35
Losing power to a southerner, afraid of competing with the much more
advanced southerners for educational opportunities, and unsure of
the consequences of the new unification policy, northern restlessness
heightened. Although the North was bigger in size than the South, as
Welch and Smith put it,
30
See Eghosa Osaghae, The Crippled Giant: Nigeria since Independence (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1998).
31
G.N. Uzoigwe, ‘Prelude to Secession and War: The Nigerian Census Crisis, 1962–1963’,
Mbari: The International Journal of Igbo Studies 2:1&2 (January 2009), 22.
32
Rotimi T. Suberu, Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria (Washington, DC: United States
Institute of Peace, 2001), 29.
33
Colin Legum, ‘The Civil War in Nigeria: Pattern for a New Nation’, The Observer Foreign
News Service, September 26, 1969, in Foreign and Commonwealth Office 65/446 (here-
after FCO 65/446). The National Archives, London, United Kingdom.
34
Walter Schwarz, ‘The Next Escalation’, (FCO 65/446).
35
Federal Republic of Nigeria, Decree No. 1, 1966; Daily Times, 29 January 1966.
000 Fal book B.indb 47 13/06/2016 22:06

the North feared the southern regions. This fear sprang largely from the
limited educational and economic opportunities in the region. Preference
for recruitment into the Northern Civil Service was given [to] Northern-
ers, even with lower educational qualifications. Abolition of such prefer-
ences would close the major avenue by which Northerners could advance
themselves.36
The fears and uncertainty of the unitary system of government
under the control of an Igbo man, combined with Aguiyi-Ironsi’s
delay in punishing those who executed the first military coup, brought
uneasy feelings in the North. Because they were fearful of losing the
independence and privileges they enjoyed previously, the North backed
another coup that overthrew Aguiyi-Ironsi’s regime on 29 July 1966,
six months after coming to power. Gowon, one of the leaders of the
coup that resulted in the assassination of Aguiyi-Ironsi, emerged as
the new leader. He acted swiftly by suspending unitary decree, uncon-
sciously sending a message that the basis of Nigeria’s unity was absent.
Ojukwu, the Military Governor of the East questioned the legitimacy
of Gowon’s authority, especially since the circumstances surrounding
Aguiyi-Ironsi’s death remained unclear.
The assassination of mostly northern political leaders in the wake of
the Nzeogwu-led coup saw retaliatory killings of mostly Igbos living in
the North. Such killings started when Aguiyi-Ironsi was in power and
increased in intensity when Gowon became the head of state. The sys-
tematic slaughter of Igbos living in the North not only provided eastern
leaders part of the justification to secede from Nigeria but also made
it easy for them to sway the public in the East in favor of war. As the
political elites in Nigeria discussed the future of the country following
the two coups, Igbos living in the Northern Region were systematically
killed. Between May and October 1966, over 30,000 Igbo people living
in the North were brutally massacred.37 Mobs in many northern cities,
mostly with active assistance of local officials, carried out the killings.
Gowon’s inability to end the killing of Igbo people in the North caused
the Igbos to question the validity of the country’s nation-building pro-
ject. In fact, the consensus at a meeting between George Thomas, the
minister of State for Commonwealth Affairs, and the Nigerian High
Commissioner in London was that the major cause of the crisis that
led to the war ‘was the massacre of eastern Ibos in the north in the
aftermath of the coup’.38 The fear of further genocide and the desire for
36
Claude E. Welch and Arthur K. Smith, Military Role and Rule: Perspectives on Civil-Military
Relations (Belmont, CA: Duxbury, 1974), 128.
37
Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood.
38
‘Record of a Talk between the Minister of State for Commonwealth Affairs, Mr. George
Thomas and the Nigerian High Commissioner at the Commonwealth Office on Friday 28
April 1967’, Prime Minister’s Office 13/1661 (hereafter PREM 13/1661). The National
Archives, London, UK.
000 Fal book B.indb 48 13/06/2016 22:06

survival of the Igbo ethnic group played into the hands of leaders in the
East as they galvanized the public against the federal government. They
made the people believe that the choice available to them was either
secession or death. Choosing the former, therefore, was only logical.
Colin Legum, the chief correspondent for Africa for The Observer Foreign
News Service, noted:
It is almost impossible for the Federals to reach the minds of the mass of
Ibos within Biafra to persuade them that genocide is not what lies in wait for
them if they abandon secession. The Biafran leadership’s efforts to keep the
fears of genocide are naturally greatly helped by memories of the ghastly
massacres which occurred in Northern Nigeria in 1966, when large num-
bers of Ibos as well as other Nigerians died.39
Ojukwu was accurate when he said that the Igbos were ‘the foremost
champions of unity in Nigeria’ but ‘that unity has, however, proved
through so many crises, to be a costly mirage’.40 The killings of Igbos
in the North weakened their commitment to Nigeria’s unity. Ojukwu
exploited the prevailing public mood in the East to justify secession and
attract support for it. This is because, as Achebe saw it, ‘a strong sense
[prevailed] that Nigeria was no longer habitable for the Igbo and many
other peoples from Eastern Nigeria’.41 Framing secession and the war
that followed as a struggle for survival was especially appealing to the
easterners. Ojukwu felt justified since the war was aimed at saving his
people from complete annihilation.42
The consolidation of two competing nationalisms in the mid-1960s
in the aftermath of the Igbo killings further poisoned the political and
social landscape of Nigeria. For those in Biafra, strong nationalistic
cohesion and sentiments were forged due to the hatred and bitter-
ness engendered by their common suffering. For Nigeria, despite the
differences among other ethnic groups, it was united in the shared
fear of potentially losing its share of the oil wealth. United by shared
sorrow, nationalism among Igbos surpassed in strength the sense of
39
Colin Legum, ‘The Civil War in Nigeria: For Biafra, A Gamble Against Slow Death’, The
Observer Foreign News Service, September 24, 1969 (FCO 65/446).
40
Letter from Odumegwu Ojukwu to Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister, May 30,
1967 (PREM 13/1661).
41
Achebe, There was a Country, 86.
42
In a BBC interview in 2000, Ojukwu argued, ‘At 33 I reacted as a brilliant 33 year old. At
66 it is my hope that if I had to face this I should also confront it as a brilliant 66 year old
… How can I feel responsible in a situation in which I put myself out and saved the people
from genocide? No, I don’t feel responsible at all. I did the best I could.’ Insisting that the
major issues that led to the civil war remain unaddressed in post-civil war Nigeria, he said
that the Igbos have remained excluded from power, which will remain a source of insta-
bility in the country. As he noted, ‘None of the problems that led to the war have been
solved yet. They are still there. We have a situation creeping towards the type of situation
that saw the beginning of the war.’ See Barnaby Phillips, ‘Biafra: Thirty Years On’, BBC,
January 13, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/596712.stm (accessed August 20
2014).
000 Fal book B.indb 49 13/06/2016 22:06

nationalism in Nigeria. The strength of that nationalism was reflected

in the people’s support for a separate country and determined fight to
maintain their independence throughout the war, notwithstanding the
superior military and financial advantages Nigeria enjoyed. Although
the Economist noted in 1969 that ‘the wrongs done to the Ibos did not
justify this secession’, it acknowledged that ‘[s]ince the massacre of Ibos
in the north in 1966 and throughout the war, Biafran solidarity has
showed no signs of cracking’.43
The real or perceived militarization of Nigeria and the Eastern Region
made peaceful resolution of the conflict impossible. Gowon believed that
Ojukwu’s attempt to increase the Eastern Region’s military supplies to
withstand potential federal attacks would enable the East to maintain
its independence and thus control the lucrative oil installations in the
region. Gowon’s reactive efforts to procure arms from Britain height-
ened the existing tension, hardened federal attitudes toward Biafra, and
made a showdown inevitable. In his letter to the British Prime Minister,
Gowon expressed worry that ‘the illegal regime at Enugu’ had acquired
‘offensive military aircraft,’ ‘at least one B26 bomber’, and ‘a number of
military helicopters’.44 He therefore requested Britain to supply it with
‘12 Jet fighter-bomber aircraft, 6 fast seaward defense boats capable
of at least 30 knots per hour and fully equipped, and 24 anti-aircraft
guns’.45 A.M. Palliser, a British diplomat and private secretary to the
British Prime Minister noted that Nigeria’s request for ‘patrol boats
would greatly increase their ability to enforce a potential blockage
of Eastern ports’.46 The arms race by both sides further undermined
chances of peaceful resolution of the crisis.
Ethnic conflict in Africa’s most populous state was a potential magnet
for the Cold War rivalry. Gowon exploited the situation to his advantage.
Gowon had sensed that since Britain was pushing for a peaceful resolu-
tion to the conflict they would be reluctant to supply weapons to Nige-
ria or send troops to the country. Yet he was mindful and fearful of the
potential military capability of Biafra. To force the hands of the British,
he played the Cold War card. In a letter to the British Prime Minister,
Harold Wilson, he stated: ‘if for any reason Her Majesty’s Government
is unable to help, you would understand, I trust, why I must seek the
necessary equipment from any source whatsoever that can help as we
desire the equipment strictly on commercial [basis].’ 47 Gowon was dip-
lomatic enough to assure Britain of Nigeria’s willingness to continue its
friendship with it. He further noted that ‘nothing we do in this regard
43
‘Ojukwu has made his Point’, Economist, August 30, 1969. The paper wondered if ‘the
Biafrans demonstrated that their claim to a separate state is as strong, as say, that of the
Irish?’ 19 (FCO 65/446).
44
‘Text of Gowon’s message to Prime Minister’, July 1, 1967 (PREM 13/1661).
45
Ibid.
46
‘Nigerian Request for Arms’, A.M. Palliser Telegram, July 2, 1967 (PREM 13/1661).
47
Gowon to Prime Minister July 1, 1967.
000 Fal book B.indb 50 13/06/2016 22:06

should be construed as affecting in any way the traditional policy of

Nigeria of non-alignment in the issues that divide the military and ideo-
logical camps in the world’.48
Despite the urgency expressed in Gowon’s letter – and in spite of the
subtle threat implied – Britain was unpersuaded to act quickly. Nige-
rian officials were disappointed, especially when they believed that
Biafran secessionist state had been acquiring offensive weapons. Sir
David Hunt, a British diplomat and the High Commissioner to Nigeria
between 1967 and 1969, sensed the disappointment among some high
level officials of the federal government who he said ‘have been hinting
they would ask Russians for military assistance’.49 He added: ‘I am not
sure whether they did make this request or whether they are only trying
to frighten us but if they did I think it likely Russians rejected it.’50 Brit-
ain’s initial reluctance to supply arms to Nigeria ultimately gave way
to increased military cooperation when the war became unavoidable,
and when Britain determined that it was in their best interest to back
Nigeria or risk losing their investments to rival powers, especially in the
Eastern bloc.
The escalation of ethnic tension, the 1966 killings of Igbos in the
North, and the arms race between Nigeria and Biafra were societal con-
ditions central in understanding the causes of the Nigeria-Biafra War.
Alone, these societal factors are inadequate to explain the causes of
the war. Economic conditions are just as important. The uneven loca-
tion of oil wealth, the sudden and increased importance of oil revenue,
and the scramble to control the revenue are equally compelling forces
that contributed to the war. Oil revenue, more than any other factor,
strengthened the resolve of officials in the East to secede from Nigeria,
the determination of Nigeria to respond militarily, and the desire of Brit-
ain to see a Nigeria united as an economic necessity, especially in the
context of the Cold War.
Oil, Money, and Power Politics

The financial and administrative autonomy enjoyed by the regions
coincided with the growing national dependence on oil revenues to
embolden leaders in the East and harden the attitudes of officials in
Lagos. The contribution of oil wealth to the country’s national revenue
rose from 1 percent in 1960 to 18 percent in 1966.51 By 1965, the oil
sector employed over 17,178 Nigerians with salaries estimated at £3.6
million), generated up to £15.8 million in tax revenue to the federal
government, paid £2 million in harbor fees to the Ports Authority, and
48
Ibid.
49
‘Telegram from Sir. D. Hunt to Commonwealth Office’, June 2, 1967’ (PREM 13/1661).
50
Ibid.
51
Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Annual Statistical Bulletin, 1994.
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provided up to £30.3 million in foreign exchange. Excluding oil, rev-

enue from other sources during the 1965–1966 fiscal year was £172
million, but projected revenue from oil alone was estimated at between
£75 million to £115 million by 1970.52 Given the statistics and poten-
tial economic importance of oil, it was inconceivable for any politician
to ignore the central role oil would play in the country’s politics.
Because the majority of the country’s oil reserves were located in
the East, it was not surprising that the federal government resisted any
threat of secession from the region. The centrality of the oil revenues
to the conflict was evident even before the outbreak of the war; it domi-
nated the thinking of key officials. Uncertainty over who should receive
the oil revenues heightened the tension between both sides and made
peaceful resolution of the crisis impossible. By seceding, Ojukwu was
confident that his new country would be economically viable given
the strength of its human and natural resources. In a letter to Harold
Wilson, Ojukwu touted the potentials of Biafra:
Its population of 14 million contains a very high proportion of trained per-
sonnel in business and industry, administration, science and technology.
Our area of about 30,000 square miles supports an agriculture buoyant in
the production of food crops, copra, cocoa, rubber and oil palm, large min-
eral deposit such a limestone, iron ore, lead zinc, coal, oil and natural gas.53
Eager to raise money to fulfill his financial responsibility to his new
country, in June 1967, Ojukwu announced a decree that required oil
companies operating in the Eastern Region to pay royalties and other
revenues from oil operations to the Biafran government. Ojukwu
understood that the control of oil money would not only provide the
finances to prosecute a possible war but would also make the new
country economically viable. He united the collective conscience of
the people against Nigeria by playing the oil card. According to him,
‘Gowon is determined to come into our home and destroy us in order to
carry away what belongs to us.’54 Even though Ojukwu indicated other
natural endowments, it was clear to any neutral observer that oil rev-
enue was a significant variable.
By early 1967, with the two sides of the conflict unable to reach an
understanding, money became central to their calculations. As noted
by the US Ambassador to Nigeria, ‘FMG [Federal Military Government]
and Eastern Government are both becoming increasingly aware of
52
W. Ehwarieme, ‘The Military, Oil and Development: The Political Economy of Fiscal Feder-
alism in Nigeria’, in Fiscal Federalism and Nigeria’s Economic Development, edited by E. Aig-
bokhan (Ibadan: Nigerian Economic Society, 1999), 57. During that period, the Pound
Sterling was worth approximately 15 times its value in early 2016, and £1 was worth
about $2.4 US Dollars of the time.
53
Ojukwu to Wilson.
54
‘Text of Ojukwu’s Speech’, June 30, 1967 (PREM 13/1661).
000 Fal book B.indb 52 13/06/2016 22:06

critical importance of control of public revenue’.55 Revenue control put

the oil companies, especially Shell-BP, the main exporter of oil from the
Eastern Region, in a tricky position. In view of the existing agreement
between Shell-BP and the federal government, Ojukwu’s decree threat-
ened oil business, particularly as the federal government was unwilling
to back down. Gowon quickly sent a telegram to London requesting the
Prime Minister to mount pressure on the oil companies to fulfill their
contractual obligations to the federal government. In it, he acknowl-
edged that ‘the British Government has a controlling voice in the affairs
of the British petroleum … [and therefore insisted] that royalties due
in July should be paid by Shell-BP promptly to the Federal Military
Government’.56 The letter warned strongly that payment of royalties to
Ojukwu ‘will make a peaceful solution of the crisis and the avoidance
of violence, especially in the area of oil installations, very difficult’. 57
The implication was that the federal government was prepared to go to
war if the revenue from oil went into the account of the Eastern Region.
To that end, it advised the British government to ‘urge Shell-BP to do
nothing which will be against the interests and wishes of the Federal
Military Government of Nigeria’.58
Threat to oil production and supply heightened the tension and car-
ried the potential of hurting not only the investments oil companies
made in Nigeria but also the British economy. The British government
that had relied on oil revenues suddenly found itself in a difficult situa-
tion as oil supply from the Middle East declined due to regional conflict.
Open support for either Gowon or Ojukwu would have threatened oil
supply and potentially caused Britain to suffer from balance of pay-
ment difficulties. As Hunt argued, ‘whatever decision is taken, the flow
of crude will be stopped either by Ojukwu or Gowon, whichever we
offend’.59 He sensed, however, that it would be ‘slightly more serious to
offend Gowon because to collaborate with Ojukwu would prejudice us
[Britain] with other African states with memories of Katanga’.60 Brit-
ain’s eventual support for Nigeria, driven by selfish economic interest,
emboldened Nigerian officials and made them less enthusiastic about
making compromises that would have averted the war. Although Hunt
cautioned Shell-BP against making any payment to the Eastern Region,
he advised that ‘even if they eventually decide it is in their best interest
55
‘Text of United States Ambassador’s Assessment of Current Situation’, February 20,
1967 (PREM 13/1661).
56
‘Text of Letter from M.E.A.’, June 28, 1967 (PREM 13/1661).
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid.
59
Hunt to Commonwealth Office.
60
Ibid. Western Support for the secessionist Katanga region in the newly independent Re-
public of Congo (capital Léopoldville, now Kinshasa) created violent unrest in the coun-
try which saw the assassination of the first democratically elected government headed by
the Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. Events in Congo became a public relations night-
mare for western countries during the Cold War.
000 Fal book B.indb 53 13/06/2016 22:06

to pay to Eastern authorities instead of F.M.G., they should at least put

off the evil day by fourth week of July’.61 Despite the dilemma Shell-
BP faced before and during the civil war, its operations witnessed little
interruptions throughout the war period. Eager to protect its economic
investment, the company remained loyal to the federal government
while secretly satisfying the financial demands of Biafra – until Nigeria
retook former Biafran territories in which major oilfields were located.62
Gowon’s attempts to undermine Ojukwu’s control of oil installations
in some parts of the East further worsened the relationship between
Nigeria and the East. Decree No. 14 of 1967 that Gowon promulgated
divided the country into 12 states. Nigeria now moved from four regions
(Northern, Eastern, Western, and Mid-West) to 12 states: six states
carved out of the Northern Region (North-Central, North-Eastern,
North-Western, Kano, Benue-Plateau, and Kwara); three were carved
out of the Eastern Region (East-Central, South-Eastern, and Rivers); two
were formed out of the Western Region (Lagos and Western); and the
Mid-West Region became the Mid-Western State.63 This decree aimed
at empowering minorities within the Eastern Region and isolating the
Igbos. By this decree Gowon believed he had removed ‘any fear of domi-
nation throughout the Federation’ by creating 12 states.64 But Ojukwu
accused Gowon of insincerity by creating states ‘without consultation
and at a time when it could only further increase tension and fear in
the country’.65 Denied of the right to oil installation, Ojukwu resisted
the geopolitical changes the decree brought, arguing that it was the
responsibility of the regions to create states. These changes, however,
did not prevent Ojukwu from pursuing the region’s secessionist agenda.
The economic benefits of one Nigeria made the idea of Biafra unac-
ceptable to both Nigeria and Britain. This economic dimension made
Nigeria’s readiness to fight and keep the country together and the Brit-
ish willingness to assist in that endeavor coincide. As British Member
of Parliament Winston S. Churchill noted, ‘one Nigeria makes eco-
nomic sense, both from the point of view of Britain, which has sub-
stantial investments throughout the federation, and of the Nigerians
themselves. The northerners need the access to the sea and a share in
the affluence of the oil-producing south.’66 The real fear of potentially
losing their investments and increasing sources of revenue in oil were
respective motivations for Nigerian and British involvement in the war.
61
Ibid.
62
See The Times (London), July 3, 1967, 9; July 6, 1967, 5; July 7, 1967, 1; July 8, 1967, 1;
and New York Times, July 8, 1967, 2.
63
Federal Republic of Nigeria, Decree No. 14 of 1967.
64
‘Letter from Yakubu Gowon to Harold Wilson’, June 2, 1967 (PREM 13/1661).
65
Ojukwu to Wilson.
66
Winston S. Churchill, ‘Can the Nigerian Crisis have a Military Solution?’ The Times, March
6, 1969.
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The emergence of oil as a major contributor to the country’s econ-

omy in 1966 and the lopsided location of oil installations in the East
added a new dimension to the conflict. The East suddenly realized that it
would survive outside Nigeria. Nigeria realized that it needed the East to
remain in the country as an economic necessity. Dealing with a united
Nigeria in order to protect their investments became an imperative for
the British government and companies. The realities of oil money as a
crucial element in Biafra declaration, Nigeria’s readiness to wage war
to maintain control of the oil revenue, and Britain’s support for Nigeria
created an environment in which political leaders and advisers on both
sides exploited the situation.
The Hype, Hypocrisy, and Hysteria of Political Leaders

The attitudes, words, and actions of principal actors in the conflict are
crucial in understanding the causes of the war. Since the coup that
brought Gowon to power, Ojukwu had always been critical of what he
described as the ‘illegitimate’ government in Lagos led by Gowon. The
inflammatory speeches made by both Gowon and Ojukwu promoted a
climate that minimized the chances of peaceful resolution of the crisis.
The conscious or unconscious misinterpretation or non-enforcement
of the agreement reached at a meeting of Nigerian military leaders at
Aburi, Ghana, between January 4 and 5, 1967, further poisoned the
relationship between Nigeria and the East. Trust, necessary to narrow
differences between the two groups, diminished and paved the way for
the war. Owing to mutual fears existing among leaders and the eagerness
to avert war, a meeting was convened at Aburi to, according to Ojukwu,
‘establish a working basis for solving the country’s problems’.67 Delegates
at the meeting agreed to renounce the use of force, end arms purchases,
stop recruitment into the army by both parties, and establish an Area
Military Command in each region under regional governors. They also
agreed to abolish the post of Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces,
empower the Supreme Military Council to control the army, repeal all
decrees passed since January 15, 1966 that denied each region the
autonomy they enjoyed under the 1963 constitution, and pay salaries
of displaced persons following the disturbances in the North.68
By March, two months after the Aburi agreement, Gowon had not
started implementing the resolution and, as Achebe puts it, ‘there was
growing weariness in the East that Gowon had no intention of doing
so’.69 More worrisome was that ‘the inaction around the refugee prob-
lem amplified the anger and tension’ between Nigeria and Biafra.70
67
Ojukwu to Wilson.
68
Ibid.
69
Achebe, There Was a Country, 86.
70
Ibid., 85.
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Telegrams from American and British diplomats to the Commonwealth

Office unanimously agreed that Gowon was listening too much to civil
service advisers who ‘had been pointing to consequences of decisions
reached at Aburi and were persuading Gowon to back down on some
of them’.71 What confederation meant, and its practical outworking in
Nigeria especially concerning power sharing, was subjected to different
interpretations by Nigeria and Biafra. As Achebe observed, ‘there was
not as much rigorous thought given by Gowon’s federal cabinet and the
powerful interest in the North. The two parties therefore left Aburi with
very different levels of understanding of what confederation meant and
how it would work in Nigeria.’72
In many of his speeches, Ojukwu warned Gowon against taking
unilateral action and demanded that he should honor the agreement
signed at Aburi. One month before he declared Biafra, he argued that
the ‘disregard of the Aburi agreement is only the latest in the exhibition
of bad faith that has characterized Lt. Col. Gowon handling of the crisis
since he installed himself in Lagos.’73 Eager to start implementing the
agreement in the East ‘from March 31, 1967, if by that date he him-
self fails to do so,’ he insisted that ‘any economic blockage of Eastern
Nigeria’ arising from his action would be ‘tantamount to pushing her
out of the Nigerian Federation’.74 When Gowon imposed the blockage,
Ojukwu immediately announced Biafra. The economic measures taken
against the Eastern Region when Ojukwu took over most of the federal
functions in the region was a major source of tension that made the war
inevitable. In a speech on June 30, 1967, one month after declaring the
sovereign state of Biafra, Ojukwu claimed he had ‘conclusive evidence
that [Gowon] and his Northern bandits have now finalized their plans
to attack us in our homeland’.75 Preparing the minds of the people for
war even when Gowon has not declared one, he further stated:
Fellow countrymen and women, we have arrived at zero hour … The psy-
chological warfare and lying propaganda calculated to promote alarm,
frighten our people and sow dissention among us has failed completely … I
want you all to remain calm and determined as you have been. Our soldiers
are ready.76
Ojukwu’s speech, which was broadcast on radio, understandably
attracted Britain’s immediate attention. Hunt sent a telegram to the
Commonwealth Office in which he argued that the speech
71
Telegram No. 286, March 1, 1967 and Telegram No. 267, February 20, 1967 (PREM
13/1661).
72
73
Ojukwu to Wilson.
74
Ibid.
75
‘Text of Ojukwu’s Speech’, June 30, 1967 (PREM 13/1661).
76
Ibid.
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could be interpreted as either meaning he believes that a Federal attack is

imminent or that he intends to seize the initiative and attack Federal troops.
Latter should not be excluded, as he is supremely confident … I think, how-
ever, that this justifies asking for Credence Forces to be brought to higher
degree of readiness.77
British readiness to evacuate their nationals indicated their understand-
ing that war was looming.
The uncompromising nature of the political elite on both sides of the
conflict during the 1960s made war highly likely. Even after Gowon had
promulgated a decree on March 17, 1967, changing the constitution to
reflect the pre-1966 regional autonomy, Ojukwu remained suspicious
of the federal government and insisted on the ‘right of separate existence
for Eastern Nigeria as a sovereign unit’.78 More troubling to Ojukwu
was the aspect of the 1967 decree that gave the federal government the
power to declare a state of emergency in any region of the federation,
an act Ojukwu felt violated the principles of greater regional autonomy
that the Aburi agreement provided. Ojukwu’s ultimatum to Gowon that
the East would begin full implementation by 31 March attracted federal
government economic sanctions, forcing the East to secede on May 30,
1967. As anticipated, the federal government declared war on July 7,
1967. With two opposing views for Nigeria strongly held by Gowon and
Ojukwu, a showdown was not surprising. Hunt assessed the potential
threat when Biafra declared that the only option of preserving Nigeria’s
unity would contain a violent component. For Hunt, force was necessary
‘to remove Ojukwu’ and ‘if Gowon were to decide against this I think he
might himself be removed by force’.79 That Gowon would lose power
if he failed to remove Ojukwu underscores the powerful forces around
Gowon that resolutely favored maintaining the status by all means.
Ojukwu enjoyed public support in favor of acting to ensure the
survival of Igbo people. Even before the declaration of Biafra, public
sentiment in the East favored separation from Nigeria. At the Eastern
Consultative Assembly on May 26, Ojukwu presented the delegates
with three options. While the delegates booed at the options of accept-
ing Gowon’s terms or continuing the stalemate, they enthusiastically
cheered at the option of asserting autonomy.80 This response was not
surprising because the killing of Igbos in the North in 1966 and ‘the
subsequent exodus of the remaining Ibos back to the East [had] left
extremely bitter feelings’.81 Public opinion shaped by a sense of insecu-
rity within Nigeria largely underscored ‘the Eastern Region’s demands
for autonomy within a much looser Federation or, if necessary, outside
77
78
Gowon to Wilson.
79
80
‘Eastern Consultative Assembly’, May 26, 1967 (PREM 13/1661).
81
‘Nigeria’, May 25, 1967 (PREM 13/1661).
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it’. 82 The leaders had no choice except to respond to the people’s wishes.
At the assembly, Ojukwu encountered, as Achebe observed, ‘leaders of
an emotionally and psychologically exhausted and disillusioned Igbo
people’.83 The inability of Gowon’s government to allay the fears of the
East or narrow its differences with it after they declared Biafra directly
led to the war. Against accusation that the declaration of Biafra was
born out of Ojukwu’s personal agenda, Achebe writes:
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 Nige-
rians in history: Dr. Nnandi 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 Margaret Ekpo. 84
Both sides of the conflicts miscalculated and misjudged the inten-
tions of each other, a factor that contributed to the war. According to
Churchill,
Ojukwu evidently hoped that Biafra could gain its independence without
a costly war and that many states would grant it recognition. The federal
government, for its part, disastrously underestimated the military capacity
of the Biafrans in imagining that the war would last only a matter of weeks
and would end in victory with little bloodshed.85
When Ojukwu declared Biafra, the federal government immediately
prepared for war notwithstanding its public proclamations of seeking a
peaceful resolution of the crisis. Gowon released a statement immedi-
ately condemning Ojukwu’s announcement as ‘ill-advised’ and describ-
ing it ‘as an act of rebellion which will be crushed’.86 On the day Biafra
was declared, Hunt met with Gowon and left ‘with a definite impression
that Federal Military Government are planning to take military action
against the East’.87
Gowon had invited Hunt and the American ambassador, Elbert G.
Mathews, to Government House to discuss the nature of assistance
the federal government needed from Britain and America. Gowon’s
request for ‘military assistance’, ‘air reconnaissance’, and ‘fighter cover
82
Ibid.
83
84
Ibid., 91.
85
Winston S. Churchill, ‘Can the Nigerian Crisis Have a Military Solution?’ The Times,
March 6, 1969.
86
‘Text of statement by Federal Military Government’, May 30, 1967 (PREM 13/1661).
87
‘Telegram from David Hunt to Commonwealth Office’, May 31, 1967 (PREM 13/1661).
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and ships’ from the United States and the United Kingdom was politely
turned down even when Gowon asked if their ‘answer would have been
different if British/American [oil] interest in the Eastern Region were
threatened’.88 Hunt stated that Gowon’s ‘thoughts revealed frightening
absence of any sense of realism’, a factor that Ojukwu pointed out in
many of his speeches about Gowon.89 In fact, in a letter to the British
Prime Minister, Ojukwu wrote that Nigeria and Biafra ‘have reached
the parting of ways [because of] the uncompromising attitude of the
authorities in control of Lagos under the direction of Northern Nigeria
and their refusal to implement agreements’.90 He insisted that federal
attempts to withhold funds due to the region coupled with the massa-
cre of Igbos in Northern Nigeria were ‘aimed at annihilating the entire
population of Eastern Nigeria’.91
Although the economic measures taken against the Eastern Region
escalated the conflict, it was Ojukwu’s insistence on the right of seces-
sion and the federal government’s unwillingness to allow it that made
peaceful resolution of the conflict beyond reach. Ojukwu made real
his publicly declared threat that if the federal government imposed a
blockage on the Eastern Region they would secede from Nigeria. Such
a blockage threatened Biafra’s right to independence. Suzanne Cronje
argued:
The Nigerian war was fought over one issue and one issue only: Biafra’s right
of secession … If the basic issue was Biafra’s right to live apart from Nigeria,
British suggestions that peace could be achieved ‘if only’ Ojukwu were to
be a little more flexible and agree to accept Federal authority amounted to
an invitation to the Biafrans to surrender … The only possible compromise
– a loose association between Nigeria and Biafra entailing close cooperation
between equal partners on a voluntary basis – was unacceptable to Nigeria
and did not receive British support.92
The easy availability of foreign, self-serving military assistance not
only served to entrench foreign involvement in Nigeria’s domestic scene
but also provided the impetus for war. Walter Schwarz noted that if
Nigeria won the war ‘with oil money and Russian planes and European
pilots, Nigeria’s borders will have been maintained, as they were drawn
in the first place, by foreign interest’.93 Biafra had built up its air force
largely through buying surplus French air force stock as well as the
purchase of a dozen Super Constellations from Spanish, Portuguese,
and French civil airlines.94 Weapons easily made available by shady
88
89
90
Ojukwu to Wilson.
91
Ibid.
92
Cronje, The World and Nigeria, 66, 68, and 70.
93
Walter Schwarz, ‘The Next Escalation’ (FCO 65/446).
94
Ibid.
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European individuals with the cooperation of like-minded Nigerian

characters reflect a human problem that hardened minds on both
sides of the divide. Civil war, or the prospect of one, provides a profit-
able source of income for a small group of individuals involved in the
underground arms trade. When a civil war breaks out or is impending,
according to Sunday Times, ‘most western governments are happy to
leave arms sales to the “independents”’.95 As early as 1966 that news-
paper reported an ‘illicit arms deal between a retired French policeman
named Paul Favier and an anonymous group of Nigerians in Geneva’,
stating that ‘the laws preventing such traffic were evaded by fraudulent
use of an import certificate innocently granted in London by the Board
of Trade’.96 As a new market for arms dealers, arms business in Nigeria
gathered momentum after the January 1966 coup. The paper noted
that since the coup,
the Hausa in the North have been terrorizing the Ibo from the East of Nige-
ria’s Federation. They blame the Ibo for the killings, so the Hausa want
weapons to attack the Ibo, and the Ibo want weapons to protect themselves.
Favier seems to have been the first man in the arms business to exploit the
situation.97
The ready availability of weapons made the slaughter of easterners
in the North easy and resultant tension and war certain. There is no
denying the fact that the tension generated from the killings united the
public in the East against Nigeria and made the civil war a war not only
to establish a separate country but also to ensure survival of the Igbo
people.
Conclusion
The Nigeria-Biafra War was one of Africa’s bloodiest postcolonial wars.
The war threatened to tear Nigeria apart. The politics of exclusion, the
fear of domination, and deprivations that dominated the history of post-
colonial Africa lay at the root of many wars on the continent, including
this one. Understanding the causes of the war requires a thoughtful
analysis of the prevailing nature and conditions of Nigeria’s peoples
and societies, the country’s uneven spread of natural resources, and
the uncompromising attitudes of leaders. Aoy Raji’s and T.S. Abejide’s
argument that ‘oil served as an underlying factor why Biafra wanted a
separate republic’ ignores the complexity, history, and context of the
war.98 This chapter has used the theories of societal conditions, eco-
95
Sunday Times, October 23, 1966.
96
Ibid.
97
Ibid.
98
Aoy Raji and T.S. Abejide, ‘Oil and Biafra: An Assessment of Shell-BP’s Dilemma during
the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970’, Kuwait Chapter of Arabian Journal of Business and
Management Review 2:1 (July 2013), 15–32.
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nomic conditions, and human nature to analyse the complex forces that
coincided in 1967 to cause the Nigeria-Biafra War. It deconstructs the
argument that Ojukwu’s declaration of the war was motivated simply
by the prospects of controlling the revenue from oil wells situated in the
East, or to realize his personal ambition.
Placing all the societal, economic, and human variables at the center
of analysis of the causes of the Nigeria-Biafra War, as demonstrated in
this chapter, provides a much more comprehensive understanding of its
complex causes. Nigeria’s public mood between 1966 and 1967, espe-
cially between the Northern and Eastern Regions, hardly lent itself to
compromise. The Igbo nationalism that the 1966 killings consolidated,
the emergence of a volatile and uncompromising public mood that
Gowon and Ojukwu’s words and actions emphasized, the easy access
to military support that foreign involvement guaranteed, and the pos-
sibility of establishing an economically viable Biafran nation that the
oil revenue promised, made the declaration of Biafra irresistible, federal
response predictable, and war unavoidable.
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4 The Ahiara Declaration and
the Fate of Biafra in a
Postcolonial/Bi-Polar World Order
Raphael Chijioke Njoku
‘Proud Biafrans, I have kept my promise.’

Gen. Emeka Ojukwu, June 1, 1969
Background to the Declaration

In order to properly understand why the Igbo leadership considered the
Ahiara Declaration a necessity, it is vital to briefly highlight the tide of
the civil war on the eve of the historic announcement. But first, it must
be underlined that the notion of a ‘civil war’ is a myth for there were no
wars in the postcolonial era that did not include multiple foreign involve-
ments.1 The Nigeria-Biafra War lends credence to this theory in many
ways. Both sides in the combat had external support, but the nature
of the support was unbalanced and varied. Threatened by starvation,
Biafrans received humanitarian aid from different agencies like the Red
Cross and Caritas, individuals, and foreign governments, including the
United States, France, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Ireland and Israel.
The Nigerian federal government received huge supplies of weap-
onry and hardware and technical and logistics support mostly from
Britain and the then Soviet Union. Egypt sent pilots who flew attack
planes against the secessionists. These supplies, whether in the form of
weapons, material, logistics, food, medicine, or simply unquantifiable
moral and diplomatic assistance, contributed in prolonging the conflict
which claimed an estimated 1.5 million easterners, most of them Igbo.2
The spike in civilian casualties between 1968 and the first half of
1969 was mainly as the result of aerial bombardments and humani-
tarian blockades imposed by the federal government. This required that
the Biafran leaders speak to the people about the state of things in Biafra
1
Elsewhere I have underscored this point. See Raphael Chijioke Njoku, ‘Nationalism, Sepa-
ratism and the Neoliberal Globalism: A Review of Africa and the Quest for Self-Determi-
nation since the 1950s’, in Secession as an International Phenomenon, edited by Don Doyle
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 338–380.
2
Alain Rouvez, Disconsolate Empires: French, British and Belgian Military Involvement in
Postcolonial Sub-Saharan Africa (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994), 147–149.
62
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The Ahiara Declaration and the Fate of Biafra 63
and reassure them about their future.3 Also, given that every secession-
ist conflict involves territorial claims and resource control, the Biafran
soldiers in 1969 appeared to have somehow started to slow down the
advancement of the federal troops though they had altogether lost a
good chunk of the original Biafran territories.4 As a recently declassified
US memo noted, in late 1968, the secessionist soldiers were still control-
ling about 10,000 square miles of the Igbo country.5 This translates to
approximately 62 percent of the estimated 16,216 square miles of the
Igbo homeland.
Alluding to the successes made by his troops in his speech, the Bia-
fran leader reminded the audience that in the Onitsha front of the war,
for instance, his ‘gallant’ soldiers contained the advance of the federal
troops who first took control of the town 15 months previously.6 After
the better-equipped federal troops attempted to enter Onitsha in October
1967, the ragtag Biafran soldiers resorted to guerrilla tactics, blowing
up the Niger Bridge, which momentarily frustrated and slowed down
the progress of 12th Brigade of the federal soldiers. Being a commercial
hub of Igboland, Onitsha held great strategic interest for the Nigerian
military in the quest to stop Biafra. In other words, for Biafra, the inabil-
ity of the federal troops to a gain an absolute control of the town since
October 1967 was, in itself, a form of victory.
In the Awka, Okigwe, Umuahia, Ikot Ekpene, Azumini, and Aba sec-
tors of the war, the story was similar. In the Awka district for instance,
Ojukwu reported that the ‘enemy is confined only to the highway
between Enugu and Onitsha, not venturing north or south of that
road’.7 In the Okigwe front, the progress of Nigerian troops was ham-
pered by landmines laid by the Biafrans, which made the highway lead-
ing from Okigwe treacherous. It was also true that the Biafran forces
had regained some grounds along the Owerri/Port Harcourt area.8
3
This fact has been emphasized by Elder Ugoeze Onyekwere who watched the speech live
at Ahiara village from midnight when it started to 4 a.m. on the fateful day. See Report by
Chika Abanobi, ‘Ahiara: 42 Years after Ojukwu’s Biafra Declaration’, Daily Sun, April 15,
2013.
4
For a timeline on the fall of Biafra’s territories, see, for instance, Ntieyong U. Akpan, The
Struggle for Secession, 1966–1970: A Personal Account of the Nigerian Civil War (London:
Frank Cass, 1972), 134.
5
US Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States,
1964–1968 Volume XXIV, Africa, Document 398 (hereafter FRUS). Memorandum From
Edward Hamilton of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Special As-
sistant (Rostow), 1 (fn1) Washington, August 12, 1968. See also Ini Ekott, ‘U.S. Blames
Ojukwu, Gowon for Biafra Starvation Deaths’, Premium Times (Lagos), October 12, 2012.
6
Emeka Ojukwu, ‘The Ahiara Declaration (The Principles of the People’s Army) by Emeka
Ojukwu General of the People’s Army’, Ahiara Village, Mbaise, Biafra, June 1, 1969, 2–3,
in Francis Ayozieuwa Joseph Njoku Personal Collections (hereafter FAJN Personal Collec-
tions, AD-PPA).
7
Ibid., 2–3.
8
Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (London: Penguin,
2013), 217.
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64 Raphael Chijioke Njoku
After recapturing Owerri in April 1969, Biafran troops continued to

make a bold push towards Port Harcourt which had, on May 19, 1968,
collapsed under the ferocious and no nonsense command of Brigadier
Benjamin Adekunle (1936–2014) of the Nigerian army. The capitula-
tion of Port Harcourt, which occupied the core of the conflict because of
its immense oil resources, constituted a huge setback for Biafra; hence
the frantic effort to recapture it. It was in the midst of the battle for Port
Harcourt in June 1969 that the controversial seizure of 18 European
oil workers of an Italian company happened. In his Ahiara discourse,
Ojukwu had claimed that these were foreign fighters aiding the Nige-
rian army to kill Biafra.9
Additionally, as Ojukwu observed, the Biafran Air Force, towards the
end of May 1969, had made a ‘dramatic re-entry into the war’.10 Eye-
witness, Michael Draper, documented the performance of Biafran Air
Force during the war. He revealed that the Air Force was reconstituted
from makeshift procurements, which included hijacked and abandoned
aircrafts and helicopters, a handful of purchases from questionable
sources: some civilian planes converted to military use and others per-
sonally flown by the Swedish nobleman and friend of Biafra, Carl Gustaf
Von Rosen.11 It is remarkable to note that the fortunes of Biafra had
changed from the initial air advantage that it held at the start of the
war to a rapid decline by the beginning of 1968 when Russian fighter
bombers had taken a heavy toll on Biafra.
The effort to reconstitute Biafra’s air power in 1969 was due to the
realization that there was no future for the movement without its Air
Force. Ojukwu noted in the Ahiara Declaration:
In four days’ operations, eleven operational planes of the enemy were put
out of action, three control towers in Port Harcourt, Enugu and Benin were
set ablaze, the Airport building in Enugu, and the numerous gun positions
were knocked out. The refinery in Port Harcourt was set on fire. And, more
recently, three days ago, the Ughelli Power Station was put out of action.12
While the Biafran leader touted all these as victories, it must be
acknowledged that throughout the war, the battles were fought on Igbo
territory and the damages to infrastructure actually hurt the easterners
more than the federal side.
Given that the Ahiara Declaration was intended to shore up morale,
Ojukwu declared his ‘feeling of pride and satisfaction’ in the accom-
plishments Biafra made as a people; he praised the people’s ‘indomi-
table will, our courage, our endurance of the severest privations, our
resourcefulness and inventiveness in the face of tremendous odds and
9
FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 5.
10
Ibid., 3.
11
Michael Draper, ‘Biafra’s Air Force’, Aircraft Illustrated (November 1969), 436–439.
12
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dangers’. While congratulating his fellow Biafrans both at home and

overseas, Ojukwu affirmed those famous lines: ‘Proud Biafrans, I have
kept my promise.’13
Meanwhile, a more strategic aspect of the speech meant for the inter-
national audience – including both enemies and sympathizers of Biafra
– needs to be highlighted. This is important because there has been no
successful secessionist movement in the postcolonial world order with-
out international support. More specifically, without the endorsement
of the Western world, nearly 99 percent of secessionist movements
around the globe have either failed or suffered a stillbirth. Two African
examples prove the point. Eritrea’s separatist war with Ethiopia lin-
gered from 1961 to May 29, 1991, when Western powers eventually
endorsed Eritrea’s right to self-determination. But this was only possible
after the thaw in the Cold War from 1989–1990. Similarly, the south-
ern Sudanese civil war continued for over 53 years until 2011, when
South Sudan was recognized by the United Nations Security Council.14
In apparent realization of the critical role that the international com-
munity plays in every secessionist movement, Ojukwu expressed his
appreciation for the sympathy and support from Julius Nyerere’s Tan-
zania, Oma Bongo’s Gabon, Houphoüet Boigny’s Ivory Coast, Kenneth
Kaunda’s Zambia, and François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s Haiti:
To the growing band of men and women around the world who have, in
spite of the vile propaganda mounted against us, identified themselves with
the justice of our cause, in particular to our courageous friends, officers and
staff of the Relief Agencies and humanitarian organizations, pilots who
daily offer themselves in sacrifice that our people might be saved; to Govern-
ments, in particular Tanzania, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Zambia and Haiti. I give
my warmest thanks and those of our entire people.15
Biafra’s ‘Real’ Struggle: The International Dimension

The short list of poor and practically powerless countries on the Bia-
fran side buttresses the argument put forth that the ‘real’ struggle that
Biafra confronted and that culminated in its demise was the inability of
its leaders to win the backing of at least one of the most powerful for-
eign governments in the 1960s – specifically Britain, the United States,
and the Soviet Union. None of the openly declared friends of Biafra pos-
sessed any substantial or symbolic political clout in the international
arena. They had neither the personnel nor resources to support Biafra,
13
All quotes from ibid., 4.
14
United Nations Security Council Resolution S/RES/2032 (2011) dated December 22,
2011.
15
FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 2. See also CWC 1–5, Civil War Bulletin of Pam-
phlets, Books, and Speeches, 1966–70, in National Archives, Ibadan (hereafter NAI-
CWC 1–5).
000 Fal book B.indb 65 13/06/2016 22:06

nor did they have regional influences within such bodies as the Organi-
zation of African Unity, which could have halted the war. Yet, except
for the impoverished and isolated Haiti, the friendly countries had just
started to break free from several decades of European colonial domi-
nation. As a result, their vulnerability as independent nations in the
perilous game of international politics was obvious.
Pertinent questions arise as to why the three most powerful and
influential superpowers – Britain, United States, and the Soviet Union –
chose to either openly side with the Nigerian federal government, as was
the choice of the Soviet Union and Britain, or pretend to be neutral in
the war, as was the policy of the United States. In a Cold War era, when
the Western capitalist bloc, led by the United States, and the Eastern
bloc, headed by the now-defunct Soviet Union, habitually disagreed on
every issue pertaining to international politics, the question becomes
even more critical as to why the superpowers were united in their objec-
tion to the Igbo cause. This was the real obstacle the Biafrans could not
overcome, and it demands a prudent investigation.
The United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain understood the inci-
dents of human rights abuses and genocidal practices of the Nigerian
state against the easterners. In particular, throughout the duration
of the war, Britain and the United States were under pressure from
the British and American masses to intervene in favor of Biafra. The
most potent pressure came in the form of an outpouring of European
public opinion around a conflict Europeans have come to understand in
religious terms: persecuted Christian Biafra versus a leviathan Muslim
Hausa-Fulani-dominated Nigerian Federal Military Government. The
primary concern for both the Eastern and Western powers was that the
phenomenon of separatism or political divorce in an unstable imme-
diate postcolonial world order was an anathema. Secession posed a
real and serious strategic danger to the superpowers’ vested economic,
political, ideological, and cultural interests around the world.
In the Ahiara Proclamation of June 1969, Ojukwu described Bolshe-
vik Russia as a late bloomer in the race for World Empire since the end
of the world wars. According to Ojukwu, Russia was frantic in its quest
to establish a foothold in Africa, in realization that the continent occu-
pies an important position in the quest for global power.16 To support his
claims, Ojukwu cited Russia’s growing alliance with leaders of North
African states such as Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser and Algeria
under Houari Boumediene. These Arab leaders were moving their
respective countries towards state communism. Perhaps encouraged
in part by the bold but truncated efforts of communist ideologues like
Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (1909–1972) and Patrice Lumumba of the
Congo (1925–1961) to establish Soviet-like political systems in their
16
FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 16–17.
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respective countries, Ojukwu asserted that, from North Africa, Russia

had started to speculate on gaining more territory in Sub-Saharan Afri-
ca.17 In light of this, Ojukwu claimed that the Nigeria-Biafra struggle
provided the Russians an opportunity to try to reestablish a foothold
in West Africa. In Ojukwu’s view, Russia’s involvement in the Nigerian
Civil War was a tactical maneuver aimed at countering entrenched
Western influence in Sub-Saharan Africa. Forcing this perspective,
Ojukwu cites the linkage between Hausa as a lingua franca for the major-
ity in West Africa and how it serves as a viable tool for spreading Islam
combined with Bolshevism.18
When Russia gives the Nigerians Illyushin jets to bomb us, the MiGs to strafe
and rocket us and AK-47 rifles to mow us down, we should see all this in
proper light that Russia, like other imperialist powers, has no regard for the
Negro. To her, what is important is to gain a vantage point in Negro-land
from which to challenge American and western European world power and
influence. The Arabs also in this find further attraction in that it gives to
them a back-door entry eventually into Israel.19
While all these charges might hold some validity, there is no evidence
to believe that Islam and Communism are compatible bedfellows. As
the failure of Bolshevism under Siad Barre’s Somalia has shown, Islam
and Communism are not mutually agreeable.20 All things being equal,
the ‘Principles of the Biafran Revolution’, as disclosed by Ojukwu,
could have appealed to Russia, given its more communist than capital-
ist economic ideals. Ojukwu had stated: ‘In the New Biafra, all property
belongs to the Community. Every individual must consider all he has,
whether in talent or material wealth, as belonging to the community
for which he holds it in trust.’21 While clarifying that this idea does not
suppose an end to personal property, he added that
it implies that the State, acting on behalf of the community, can intervene
in the disposition of property to the greater advantage of all. Over-acquisi-
tiveness or the inordinate desire to amass wealth is a factor liable to threaten
social stability, especially in underdeveloped societies in which there are not
enough material goods to go round.22
According to Ojukwu, unbridled individual acquisition creates a
problem of lopsided ‘development, breeds antagonisms between the
17
All the African leaders who had embraced communism as a strategy for moving their
respective countries forward met stiff opposition from both within and outside and often
untimely deaths.
18
FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 17; NAI, CWC 1–5.
19
20
See Raphael Chijioke Njoku, The History of Somalia (Westport: ABC-CLIO Press, 2013),
115–132.
21
FAJN Personal Collections, AD-PPA, 32–33; NAI, CWC 1–5.
22
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haves and the have-nots and undermines the peace and unity of the
people’.23 Ojukwu further contended that a society where this is allowed
is doomed to rot and decay. Moreover, the danger is always there of a small
group of powerful property-owners using their influence to deflect the State
from performing its duties to the citizens as a whole and thereby destroying
the democratic basis of society. This happens in many countries and it is one
of the duties of our Revolution to prevent its occurrence in Biafra.24
Given the apparent inclination towards a socialist state system, which
was a source of concern for many Igbo ‘moneybags’ who willingly sup-
ported secession with their personal resources, one would have thought
that the Soviet Union would embrace Biafra as an ally. The salient fact
underlining the Soviets’ opposition to Biafra substantially rested on the
potential harm that aiding a secessionist movement overseas might
bring to the unity of the restive units of the Union whose Constitution
of 1936 contained a secessionist clause. Article 72 stated, inter alia:
‘Each Union Republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the
Soviet Union.’25 Consequently, any conduct of Soviet foreign policy that
implied support for separatism would have sent a dangerous message to
the restless ethnic groups within the federation.
Although its huge economic interests in the conflict outweighed
other considerations, Britain faced a similar problem of a potential irre-
dentist backlash within and outside the United Kingdom. At home, the
Scottish and Irish questions remained volatile in the 1950s through to
the 1970s. For example, the Scots, whom the Nobel Prize winner Wole
Soyinka wittily described as the ‘most tribal society in the world’, have
been contemplating independence over the past 170 years, as under-
scored in the September 18, 2014 referendum that narrowly stopped
the quest for an independent nationhood.26 Similarly, the question of
self-rule in Northern Ireland has remained very explosive. It might be
recalled that it was precisely in 1968 that Northern Ireland’s Catholics
organized a large demonstration protesting discrimination in voting
rights, housing, and unemployment. A brutal police repression sparked
several months of fighting and a re-emergence of the Republican
movement.27
In the United States, the memories of a brutal secessionist war
(1861–1865), lingered alongside with US colonial interests in the Phil-
ippines, Guam, and Panama. Additionally, the respective governments
23
Ibid.; NAI, CWC 1–5.
24
25
Constitution of the USSR, 1936. See also Articles 73 and 76 of other editions of the same
Constitution.
26
Scottish Independence Referendum Act of 2013. See ‘Scots’ Day of Reckoning’, The Her-
ald, September 18, 2014, 1. See Graham Fraser, ‘Nobel Laureate Lauds Federalism’s Or-
dinariness’, The Globe and Mail, October 8, 1999, 1.
27
See Tim Ito and Aileen Yoo, ‘Ireland’s Troubled History’, Washington Post, April, 1998.
000 Fal book B.indb 68 13/06/2016 22:06

under Presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963–1969) and Rich-

ard M. Nixon (1969–1974) were preoccupied with the Vietnam War
(1954–1973) while further struggling to clear up the racial bigotry
from the legacy of Jim Crow laws – segregation laws enacted between
1876 and 1965.28 In light of this, it was not feasible for the United States
to become embroiled in the Nigerian Civil War at this time. These were
some of reasons why it officially observed a policy of neutrality, believ-
ing that the conflict was ‘essentially a Nigerian, African, and [British]
Commonwealth matter’.29
However, US involvement in the conflict was more complex. Despite
an arms embargo prohibiting military assistance to either side, the US
government continued to recognize the federal Nigerian government
as the legitimate authority while providing humanitarian relief for the
Biafran people. As Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs
William B. Macomber Jr. explained to a congressional inquiry in 1969,
‘this conflict has its roots in tribal and regional animosities which
cannot be exclusively blamed on either side’.30 In leaving any military
intervention to Britain, the US policymakers jostled with the competing
diplomatic and humanitarian demands that the conflict posed.31
For France, which played an ambiguous role of support for Biafra and
subversion of the Nigerian state, its primary strategic interest in West
Africa was an attempt to break up the unity of Nigeria’s conglomerate
ethnic groups in order to diminish its seemingly immense political and
economic dominance in the region. A divided Nigeria would no longer
have the capacity to intimidate the 15 weaker Francophone countries
in the West and Central African sub-regions, including Nigeria’s imme-
diate neighbors: Cameroon, Niger, Benin Republic, and Chad. In other
words, the French Government’s touted support for Biafra at various
times during the conflict was not essentially for its love of the Igbo, but
to help accomplish a policy envisioned to enhance France’s neo-colonial
designs in West Africa. Similar points have been made by Alain Rouvez
in his Disconsolate Empires, which analyses how former colonial powers
France, Britain, and Belgium have preserved or mutated their levers
of influence in their erstwhile African colonies since the 1960s. This
thought-provoking book, whose lessons are relevant in understanding
Euro-African relations, is an authoritative study of decades of com-
plex political and military relationships involving Europeans and their
former African dominions.32
28
For details, see, for instance, Jerrold M. Packard, American Nightmare: The History of Jim
Crow (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).
29
FRUS, Reel 3, Frame 0549.
30
Ibid., Reel 6, Frame 0176.
31
US State Department Central Files, Biafra-Nigeria 1967–1969 Political Affairs, A UPA
Collection from LexisNexis (hereafter USSDCF).
32
Rouvez, Disconsolate Empires, 147.
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Altogether, Biafra’s diplomatic efforts aimed at attracting the vital

international support for secession failed, but not because the Igbo had
no legitimate cause. The incidents of alleged genocidal practices against
the easterners dating back to 1945, charges of Igbo destruction based
on Muslim versus Christian interests, and claims to self-determination
on the condition of avoiding forms of illiberal ideologies often associ-
ated with Islamic states (as alleged by Ojukwu) were of concerns to the
United States, Britain, and France, as well as among other established
Western democratic countries such as Germany, Belgium, Switzerland,
and Austria. However, these issues weighed lower on the scales when
compared with the more explosive nature of secession as a political
phenomenon in the immediate postcolonial international politics con-
trolled by Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union.
Revolutionary Jingoism and the Ire of ‘Superpowerism’

Despite the common grounds on which the Eastern and the Western
Blocs in the Cold War struggle were vehemently opposed to Biafra, it is
noteworthy that prior to June 1, 1969, when the Ahiara Declaration
was announced on Biafra’s radio, there had been some hesitancies on
the side of the superpowers as to how much support they should be
giving the Federal Government of Nigeria. In the US House of Legisla-
ture for instance, some politicians had questioned their government’s
entire role in the conflict. In 1968, a group of senators passionate about
saving Biafra’s malnourished and endangered population requested
that the government intervene, at least on humanitarian grounds.33
The result, as reported by the Harvard Crimson of January 25, 1969,
was the constitution of a six-man fact-finding mission sent by the State
Department early in January 1969 to ascertain
the needs of both Nigeria and Biafra and to make recommendations to the
U.S. government about the necessary forms and amount of possible aid.
Senator Charles E. Goodell (R.-N.Y.), accompanied by his administrative
assistant – Charles W. Dunn – was in charge of the mission’s diplomatic
aspects.34
A similar report published in January 1969 by Time magazine cap-
tured an increasing feeling of foreboding among the Americans. The
report talked about ‘pictures of starving [Biafran] children, their eyes
bulging, their bodies bloated or matchstick thin’, which haunted many
concerned Americans. ‘Most Americans ask indignantly: Why has the
U.S. not done more to relieve such suffering?’ With an appropriate load-
ing of sarcasm, the Times reporter concluded that the
33
USSDCF.
34
Jeffrey D. Blum, ‘Who Cares About Biafra Anyway?’, Harvard Crimson, January 25, 1969.
000 Fal book B.indb 70 13/06/2016 22:06

answer, of course, is that starvation has been a calculated weapon in the

civil war between federal Nigeria and secessionist Biafra. The Nigerians are
fearful that arms will flow into Biafra under the cover of relief shipments
and therefore insist that aid be shipped in under their supervision. The Bia-
frans reject such terms because they fear foul play.35
A month after the Ahiara Declaration, yet another report published
in August 1969 noted that the conditions were worsening in Biafra
as concerned Americans started to publicly protest its government’s
inaction.
Outside the White House last week, a group that called itself Concerned
Citizens of Rochester marched with a 7-ft. poster bearing the words: Biafra
Postcard. Staring out from the poster with baleful, bulging eyes was a starv-
ing child, his ribs protruding and his limbs shriveled. On the reverse side was
a message urging President Nixon – who was not at the White House but in
California – to act on the concern he voiced during last year’s presidential
campaign for the Biafrans’ plight.36
These rising voices of sympathy for Biafra complemented the dedication
of the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive, a non-governmental
organization founded to keep Americans apprised of the enormity of
sufferings going on in Biafra.37
In Britain, strident opposition to the government’s anti-Biafra poli-
cies began to gain momentum. But as Peter Sedgwick, a self-declared
British Marxist, has noted, the British Left did little to save Biafra from
the stranglehold of British self-interests in Nigeria.38 As in the United
States and other parts of Western Europe, the opinion of the masses
on the war differed sharply from that of their governments. In fact,
one of the most dramatic events of the emerging positive outlook of
things for Biafra was the action taken by John Lennon, a member of
the legendary Beatles band, who was awarded the prestigious Member
of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) four years earlier on October
26, 1965. Because of Biafra, Lennon returned this award to the Queen
of England on Tuesday November 25, 1969, with a letter stating: ‘I am
35
All quotes from ‘Biafra: More Help from the US’, Time, January 3, 1969.
36
‘Biafra: Worsening Conditions’, Time, August 29, 1969.
37
See Stanford University Libraries, The Inventory of the American Committee to Keep Bia-
fra Alive, 1967–1970, No. 71031, such as the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), the Government of the Republic of Biafra, and the Government of
Nigeria; press releases from the United States Department of State, American congress-
men and women, and Markpress, Biafran Overseas Press Division; clippings; periodical
literature; and audio-visual materials relating to the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–1970.
38
Peter Sedgwick, ‘The Appalling Silence and Inactivity of the British Left as Biafrans Face
Death and Starvation’, transcribed from Socialist Worker by Ted Crawford, Marxists’ Inter-
net Archive, July 10, 1969.
000 Fal book B.indb 71 13/06/2016 22:06

returning my MBE as a protest to Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-

Biafra thing.’39
In France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Belgium, the Catholic
Church relentlessly mounted pressures on the various governments
to save Biafrans. In a milestone statement explaining why France sup-
ported Biafra, issued on July 31, 1968, the French Council of Ministers
explained:
The government considers that the bloodshed and suffering endured for a
year by the population of Biafra demonstrate their will to assert themselves
as a people. Faithful to its principles, the French Government therefore
considers that present conflict should be solved on the basis of the right of
peoples to self-determination and should include the setting in motion of
appropriate international procedures.40
These Western voices of sympathy for Biafra – voices of ordinary people
– could have possibly prolonged the life of the secession or even ensured
its eventual survival had the Ahiara Declaration avoided much of the
explosive themes it emphasized. This view is also shared by Ntieyong U.
Akpan. Early on, in 1966 when he was serving under the Biafran leader
as a diplomat, Akpan stated: ‘In modern times of international power
politics, no great power can succumb to threats of intimidation.’41
Akpan continued on to narrate how he disagreed with most of the con-
tents of the Ahiara document and how this nearly cost him his life.
For its enemies, the Ahiara Declaration was misinterpreted as a dec-
laration of war against the great powers: United States, Britain, and the
Soviet Union. The Biafran leader started off the speech with an attempt
to connect with the West around Christianity: ‘We have fought alone,
we have fought with honour, [and] we have fought in the highest tradi-
tions of Christian civilization. Yet, the very custodians of this civiliza-
tion and our one-time mentors are the very self-same monsters who
have vowed to devour us.’42 While this part of the speech tried to assert
Biafra’s common Christian identity with the West to make the most pos-
itive impact on the intended audience, Ojukwu undermined the appeal
with a blanket charge against the entire Western world based on what
he perceived as systemic racialism and racist attitudes towards Biafra in
particular and the black race in general:
39
In a press conference following his action, Lennon reiterated that his action was in
response to the role of Britain in the plight of Biafra, which he said ‘most of the Brit-
ish public aren’t aware of ’. This action was also a protest against British support for
America’s Vietnam war. See ‘John Lennon – Returning His MBE’, www.youtube.com/
watch?v=6m0glhvwhdI (accessed August 29, 2014).
40
Rouvez, Disconsolate Empires, 147.
41
Akpan, The Struggle for Secession, 143.
42
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I have for a long time thought about this our predicament – the attitude of
the civilized world to this our conflict. The more I think about it the more I
am convinced that our disability is racial. The root cause of our problem lies
in the fact that we are black. If all the things that have happened to us had
happened to another people who are not black … the world’s response would
surely have been different.43
In the next breath, the speech switched to the issue of alleged geno-
cide against the Igbo. Attacks on Igbo elements residing in Northern
Nigeria began as early as 1945, and one of the most disturbing attacks
occurred in 1953. The bloody riots of that year revealed that the dif-
ficult task of getting the three diverse regions (North, West, and East)
to work harmoniously in any close-knit federation proved more difficult
than anyone acknowledged. But, instead of confronting this problem
then and perhaps coming up with a solution in advance, the excite-
ment to gain independence from Britain hindered careful thought on
the matter. Eventually, the 1966 attacks became the spark that ignited
the civil war. Reflecting on the violent Igbo-Hausa-Fulani relations,
Ojukwu noted that, in 1966,
some 50,000 of us were slaughtered like cattle in Nigeria. In the course of
this war, well over one million of us have been killed; yet the world is unim-
pressed and looks on in indifference. Last year, some blood-thirsty [sic] Nige-
rian troops for sport murdered the entire male population of a village. All
the world did was to indulge in an academic argument whether the number
was in hundreds or in thousands.44
Once again, the legitimate argument based on genocide was mis-
placed on two crucial points. First, Ojukwu cited the arrest of 18 ‘white
men’ who were purported to be fighting along with the federal army.
‘Today, because a handful of white men collaborating with the enemy
… were caught by our gallant troops, the entire world threatens to stop.
For 18 white men, Europe is aroused. What have they said about our
millions? … How many black dead make one missing white?’45 Reacting
to this charge on Friday June 13, 1979, Time magazine noted:
The voice of General Odumegwu Ojukwu, carried by Radio Biafra, vibrated
between impassioned outrage and constrained eloquence. The 18 men that
Biafra’s boss referred to – 14 Italians, three West Germans and a Lebanese –
were employees of the Italian government’s oil combine, ENI.46
43
Ibid.; NAI, CWC 1–5.
44
45
Even this was more than evident when the Declaration stated: ‘The mass deaths of our
citizens resulting from starvation and indiscriminate air raids and large despoliation of
towns and villages are a mere continuation of this crime. That Nigeria has received com-
plete support from Britain should surprise no one. For Britain is a country whose history
is replete with instances of genocide’.
46
‘Biafra: Reprieve for Eighteen’, Time, June 13, 1969.
000 Fal book B.indb 73 13/06/2016 22:06

Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI) S.p.A was incorporated in 1953,

forming a leading oil and gas conglomerate. The predicament of the oil
workers in the hands of Biafran soldiers was bad public relations for the
beleaguered Igbo people.
Meanwhile, the most vexing and explosive part of the Ahiara Decla-
ration remains its characterization of Britain as the worst offender of
genocidal practices in the world. To prove his point, Ojukwu highlighted
Britain’s history of brutal colonial practices around the world. ‘If the
white race has sinned against the world, the Anglo-Saxon branch of
that race has been, and still is, the worst sinner of all.’47 Ojukwu went
on to cite a long list of British encounters with indigenous peoples in
the Americas, the Caribbean, Tasmanians of Australia, and the native
Maoris of New Zealand. Moreover, as the speech insinuated, Britain
further
led the genocidal attempt against the Negro race as a whole. Today, they
are engaged in committing genocide against us. The unprejudiced observer
is forced in consternation to wonder whether genocide is not a way of life
of the Anglo-Saxon British. Luckily, all white people are not like the Anglo-
Saxon British.48
The dark parts of British imperial history are not very desirable,
and Britons do not encourage anyone, especially a fearless 36-year-old
radical, to remind them of this history. While parts of Ojukwu’s speech
concerned with genocide and Arab imperialism gained some sympathy
from the international community and could easily have resonated with
the masses in the Western world, the tone of the speech and the bold-
ness with which it reminded Britain of its imperialist sins came across to
the British lawmakers such as Prime Minister Harold Wilson as indict-
ing, confrontational, audacious, and condemnatory. It would have been
a folly of romanticism on the part of Biafra not to expect consequences
from Great Britain.
Similarly, America in the 1960s was not the best place to curry for
sympathy based on racial injustices. Using the phrase ‘The myth of the
Negro past’, after Melville J. Herskovits’ study commissioned by the
Carnegie Corporation in 1938 that focused on the Negro in the United
States, Ojukwu charged that the Biafran struggle had far-reaching sig-
nificance.49 He charged:
It is the latest recrudescence in our time of the age-old struggle of the black
man for his full stature as man. We [the Igbo] are the latest victims of a
wicked collusion between the three traditional scourges of the black man
– racism, Arab-Muslim expansionism and white economic imperialism.
47
48
Ibid., 18.
49
See Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper, 1941), ix.
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Playing a subsidiary role is Bolshevik Russia seeking for a place in the Afri-
can sun.50
The inability of the Nigerian state to overcome its multitude of
problems, including state corruption and social decay, has often been
blamed squarely on the British colonial and neo-colonial interests that
forced hundreds of ethnic groups with diverse cultures into a common
union.51 In his speech, Ojukwu claimed that the Biafran Revolution was
‘a total and vehement rejection of all those evils which blighted Nige-
ria, evils which were bound to lead to the disintegration of that ill-fated
federation’.52 He claims that Biafra was ‘a positive commitment to build
a healthy, dynamic and progressive state, such as would be the pride of
black men the world over’.53 According to him, Nigeria was a classic
example of a neo-colonialist state. After the end of colonial rule, Britain
changed its colonial tactics
by installing the ignorant, decadent and feudalistic Hausa-Fulani oligarchy
in power … Owing their position to the British, they were servile and submis-
sive. The result was that while Nigerians lived in the illusion of independ-
ence, they were still in fact being ruled from Number 10 Downing Street.
The British still enjoyed a stranglehold on their economy.54
The failure of the Africa postcolonial state to sustain a progressive
and stable political order has been a sore point of criticism for Africans
and grounds for racist attacks. In light of this, Ojukwu declared that the
Igbo cause was a rejection of racial chauvinism, ‘in particular against
that tendency to regard the black man as culturally, morally, spiritually,
intellectually, and physically inferior to the other two major races of the
world – the yellow and the white races’.55 Like the earlier generations
of black intellectuals and pioneers of modern African thought, such
as Alexander Crummell (1819–1898), Edward Blyden (1832–1912),
James Africanus Beale Horton (1835–1883), and W.E.B. DuBois
(1868–1963), to mention a few who have articulated similar race
theories, Ojukwu asserted that this ‘belief in the innate inferiority of
the Negro and that his proper place in the world is that of the servant of
the other races, has from early days coloured the attitude of the outside
world to Negro problems. It still does today.’56 This assertion recalls Du
Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, in which he proclaimed that ‘the problem
of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line – the relation
50
51
See, for instance, Uche Chukwumereije, ‘Ndigbo: The Sacrificial Lamb of a Deformed Na-
tion’, in Against All Odds: The Igbo Experience in Postcolonial Nigeria, edited by Apollos O.
Nwauwa and Chima J. Korieh (Glassboro, NJ: Goldline & Jacobs, 2011), 57–72.
52
53
Ibid., 7.
54
Ibid., 15.
55
Ibid., 7–8.
56
Ibid., 7–9.
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of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America
and islands of the sea’.57 Using this statement to underline the nega-
tive connotation the term ‘blackness’ has come to represent in the last
century, Du Bois explains the meaning of the emancipation in America
and its lingering effects on his race.
A modern history graduate and alumnus of Oxford University,
Ojukwu criticized the now discredited Hamitic hypothesis to further
support his points. The proponents of the theory, among its other vari-
ants, postulated that the Negro African is mentally inferior and ques-
tioned the humanity of the Negro. As Ojukwu stated in his speech, some
European theorists had variously identified the Devil as the first Negro,
linked the Negro with the cursed progeny of Ham, and also questioned
whether the Negro ‘had a soul; and if he had a soul, whether conver-
sion to Christianity could make any difference to his spiritual condition
and destination’.58 In conclusion, Ojukwu charged:
It is this myth about the Negro that still conditions the thinking and attitude
of most white governments on all issues concerning black Africa and the
black man; it explains the double standards which they apply to present-day
world problems; it explains their stand on the whole question of independ-
ence and basic human rights for the black peoples of the world.59
At a time the civil rights movement in the US was intense, lawmakers
and the powerful dominant majority were very suspicious of any speech
that used race as a talking point.
Further commenting on the legitimacy of the Biafran struggle as a
movement of self-determination, Ojukwu claimed that the revolution
was a movement based on democratic ideals, human rights, and self-
determination: ‘When the Nigerians violated our basic human rights
and liberties, we decided reluctantly but bravely to found our own
state, to exercise our inalienable right to self-determination as our only
remaining hope for survival as a people.’60 These ideals, in the views of
many white powers, he charged, are good only for whites. Attempts by
the Biafran leaders to claim it, according to Ojukwu, were ‘considered
dangerous and pernicious: a point of view which explains but does not
justify the blind support which these powers have given to uphold the
Nigerian ideal of a corrupt, decadent and putrefying society’.61 To the
Western powers,
genocide is an appropriate answer to any group of black people who have
the temerity to attempt to evolve their own social system … Yet, because we
are black, we are denied by the white powers the exercise of this right which
57
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1903), 5, 16.
58
59
Ibid., 8–9.
60
Ibid., 9–10.
61
Ibid., 9.
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they themselves have proclaimed inalienable. In our struggle we have learnt

that the right of self-determination is inalienable, but only to the white
man.62
Arguing that the Greeks, Belgians, and Central and Eastern Europeans
at the end of World War I were all granted independence based on the
right to self-determination, Ojukwu wondered why the Biafran cause
should be different. When blacks claim that right, they are warned
against dangers trumped up by the imperialists: ‘fragmentation’ and
‘balkanization’.63 Comparing the constitution of the defunct Ottoman
Empire with the composition of the Nigerian under the British imperial
power, Ojukwu further wondered why the restructuring of the Otto-
man Empire in Eastern Europe was permitted in contrast to the Nige-
rian federation.64
On another plane, Ojukwu chided Arab-Muslim states like Algeria,
Egypt, and the Sudan for aiding the federal troops in the civil war. In
this context, Ojukwu tried to justify the Biafran cause by describing it as
a resistance to the Arab-Muslim expansionism in the continent going
back to the first quarter of the seventh century when Arabs from the
Arabian Peninsula used the Islamic religion as an imperial tool for ter-
ritorial expansion. After the occupation of North Africa by the tenth
century, the Muslims sought a foothold in Sub-Saharan Africa, particu-
larly in West Africa. While Islam has achieved remarkable success in
the Sahel regions of West Africa, the forest regions where Igboland is
located have been shielded from Islamic incursion. The European Chris-
tian evangelism of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought
the entire Eastern Nigeria into the Christian sphere:
We came to stand out as a non-Muslim island in a raging Islamic sea.
Throughout the period of the ill-fated Nigerian experiment, the Muslims
hoped to infiltrate Biafra by peaceful means and quiet propaganda, but
failed … The crises which agitated the so-called independent Nigeria from
1962 gave these aggressive proselytizers the chance to try converting us by
force.65
To militant Islam, therefore, ‘Biafra is a stumbling block to their plan for
controlling the whole continent’.66
Ojukwu went on to articulate in detail what he considered the
implicit principles of the Biafran revolution as related to the duties and
expectations of everyone:
62
Ibid., 9–10.
63
Ibid., 10.
64
Ibid., 10–12.
65
Ibid., 7–8.
66
Ibid., 18–19.
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‘the farmer, the trader, the clerk, the business man, the housewife, the stu-
dent, the civil servant, the soldier, you and I are the people … [T]he People
are master; the leader is servant. My name is Emeka. I am your servant, that
is all.’67
In the context of Biafra,
revolution is a forward movement … [meant to improve] a people’s standard
of living and their material circumstance and purifies and raises their moral
tone. It transforms for the better those institutions which are still relevant,
and discards those which stand in the way of progress.68
In the new system, Ojukwu declared that ‘those who aspire to lead must
bear in mind the fact that they are servants and as such cannot ever be
greater than the People, their masters. The leader must be custodians of
social justice and equality of all citizens.’69 Some of Biafra’s principles
resonated with the mainstream liberal Western values, others linked
with property and community came across as communistic.
The Final Six Months

In the final parts of the Ahiara Declaration, Ojukwu reminded the
people of the circumstances that had brought about their plight and
what they should expect in the coming days and months. He said:
We have forced a stalemate on the enemy and this is likely to continue, with
any advances likely to be on our side. If we fail, which God forbid, it can only
be because of certain inner weakness in our being. It is in order to avoid
these pitfalls that I have today proclaimed before you the Principles of the
Biafran Revolution.70
As the outcome of events would prove, Biafra’s capitulation had little
or nothing to do with any ‘inner weakness’ in the people as Ojukwu
alluded. Rather, the position of Biafra would quickly deteriorate soon
after the historic speech because of its brashness.
Britain and Russia took exceptional offense at the Ahiara Declaration
as a proclamation of war against everything the superpowers stood for.
They mobilized and deployed enormous resources for what was consid-
ered a final and decisive action against the Igbo leadership. The pace at
which the condition of life deteriorated in Biafra soon after June 1969
was a subject of serious concern for the Irish lawmakers in a parliamen-
tary debate held on July 9, 1969. Speaking for the greater majority of
the Irish people who were on the Biafran side of the conflict, Dr Conor
67
Ibid., 24.
68
Ibid., 27.
69
Ibid., 30–31.
70
Ibid., 53.
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Cruise O’Brien had asked their government to offer an explanation as to

why it chose to remain silent on the Nigerian-Biafran conflict:
We are raising the question of Biafra on the Adjournment and the question
I tabled on that subject as a matter of urgent public importance because
we see in Biafra at present a rapidly deteriorating crisis, a crisis which was
already grave – I hope I can have the attention of the Minister for External
Affairs, thank you – and which has deteriorated very rapidly within the past
months. We are very anxious to know what the Government proposes to do
in this matter which is of very grave concern to many Irish people both in
Biafra and here at home.71
The words above best describe the effect of the wrath of Britain and
Russia on Biafra after Ojukwu’s Ahiara Proclamation.
Conclusion
This chapter emphasizes the influence of the Ahiara Declaration in
bringing to an end the Biafran struggle to claim self-determination in
the face of what the secessionist leaders had perceived as gross injustice
on the part of the Nigerian federal government, which they character-
ized as genocide – a selective attempt to eliminate the Igbo as an ethnic
group. The argument has been made that, despite the fact that in the
context of international politics Biafra had a legitimate right to secede,
this right weighed low on the scale compared with the prerogative of
the superpowers of the immediate colonial order to safeguard their
powers and interests. The key antagonists in the Cold War struggle were
united in their opposition of Biafra because, among other reasons, they
feared that allowing Biafra to have its way would have set a bad example
for similar movements around the world, including within the restive
borders of the defunct Soviet Union, Britain, and other places.
The fate of Biafra would take a sharp turn downward soon after the
Ahiara Declaration, which was provocative to the ears of enemies of
the Biafran cause in the international arena. Sharing a similar view, on
April 13, 2012, the NBF News acknowledged that the Ahiara Declara-
tion was necessary but came too soon for the well-being of the struggle:
There were portions of it that weakened the [Igbo] elders, leaders of thought,
especially the moneybags in Biafra. The moneybags were those rich people
who on their own had volunteered to help the nation and the Army instead
of being meant to understand that their wealth belonged to the nation and
the government. For instance, the ideas of reminding them to ‘freely’ donate
71
See Republic of Ireland Parliamentary Debates, Adjournment Debate: Nigeria-Biafra
Conflict, Vol. 241, July 9, 1969.
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one van or truck or a house, if they had two, did not go down well with
many of them.72
Overall, the various interest groups – notably, the international, Afri-
can, Nigerian, and Biafran audiences – misunderstood the Ahiara Dec-
laration, and it negatively impacted the fortunes of the young republic.
The British and the Soviets, who were already biased against Biafra, per-
ceived it as an insult, a slap on the face. The Igbo elite interpreted it as
a threat to their wealth and to free enterprise. While the Proclamation
could easily earn high marks as an academic essay, it perhaps only suc-
ceeded in explaining to the Igbo people why they should demonstrate
love, oneness, social justice, freedom, and security in their lives. Unfor-
tunately, it alienated the rich and the powerful within and without. The
consequence was the end of Biafra, six months after the eloquence of
Ojukwu captured the ears of the world over the Biafran Radio.
72
‘Between Ojukwu’s “Ahiara Declaration” and Hitler’s Mein Kampf’, NBF (The National
Bonsai Foundation) News, April 13, 2012.
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5 The Ahiara Declaration
Polemics and Politics
Austine S.O. Okwu
Biafra had been the former Eastern Region of Nigeria until May 1967
when the Governor, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu
Ojukwu, and leaders of the state declared it a sovereign and independ-
ent nation separate and apart from Nigeria. The region’s separation
from Nigeria was a result of the two deadly military coups in 1966
and the massacres of the easterners, especially the Igbo, in the other
parts of Nigeria. The predominant ethnic group in the East was the Igbo
and the principal minority groups were the Efik, Ibibio, Ijaw, Okrika,
Ogoni, Akwa-Ibom, Annang, Oron, Ogba, Ekpeya, and Ngeni. The
young nation fought a brave 30-month civil war with Nigeria and lost
on January 1970. It secured diplomatic recognitions as an independent
nation from Tanzania, Gabon, Zambia, Ivory Coast, and Haiti.
By June 1969, Biafra was a physical remnant of Igboland still under
the control of the Biafran Army. It consisted principally of parts of
Owerri; the adjoining towns of Ogbaku, Mbieri, Ikeduru, Isu, Osu,
Obowu, Ahiara, Mbaise, Umuaka, Ihiala, and Orlu; and the famous
Uli Airport. The territory was less than 5 percent of the original size
of Biafra and constituted mainly of the Igbo and some refugees of the
minority ethnic groups of the state.
The First Six Years of Post-Independence Nigeria

The Federation of Nigeria, consisting of the three original regions of
the East, West, and North became independent on October 1, 1960. It
was a day of joy and celebration throughout the country. At midnight
on September 30, the British Union Jack, the colonial flag, was lowered
throughout Nigeria for the last time. As the Assistant Divisional Officer,
Ahoada Division, I was privileged to receive the marchpast by thousands
of school children at Elele Catholic School while the Divisional Officer,
Anthony St. Ledger, did so at Ahoada town, the division headquarters.
The people celebrated and held dances and parties, rejoicing that the
domination of the British had ended and that, with independence, life
would become better for them. But that was to be a pipe dream, akuko
ufere, a story of the wind, a fable.
81
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82 Austine S.O. Okwu
The three component regions of Nigeria – the East, the West, and the
North – were separate and independent of one another and had three
different, ideologically entrenched political parties, namely, National
Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) in the Eastern Region, the Action
Group (AG) in the West, and the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) in
the North.
The country had political independence from its colonial master, the
United Kingdom, but was not a nation yet. All of the political leaders –
Dr Nmamdi Azikiwe of the East; Chief Obafemi Awolowo of the West;
and Sir Ahmadu Bello and Sir Abubakar Balewa, both of the North –
were regional leaders with no overall national following. No one leader
in pre-independence Nigeria was able to generate followership across
his own ethnic frontiers because of suspicion, envy, religion, customs,
language, and foreign influence.
The lack of concern for the evolution of the Nigerian nationhood
during the first six years of independence was not unexpected. There
was, for example, no one national resistance movement in which the
leaders were all involved. To the contrary, the party leaders represented
their own different respective political parties with opposing programs
and philosophies. The East and the West, for example, agreed that Nige-
ria was ready for independence in 1957 when Ghana had its independ-
ence but were not in agreement as to whether Nigeria should have a
unitary or federal system of government. The North, on the other hand,
did not agree that the country was ready for independence but wanted
a federation for the country. The differences had to be negotiated, and
inevitable compromises by the leaders that made the country’s inde-
pendence possible were their major contribution, especially considering
the odds and the circumstances of the time.
The situation was not made easier by the colonial master who foisted
an independence constitution on the country that accentuated ethnic-
ity, tribal hatred, and envy in Nigeria. The blueprint for the country’s
independence assured and assuaged the reluctant North. It provided a
built-in 50 percent representation at the central government that guar-
anteed the region a permanent majority and control of the Government
of the Federation of Nigeria. As the suspicions deepened, awareness
of regionalism and protection of sectional rights and privileges, and
ethno-centrism manifested themselves in extravagant lifestyles; mas-
sive individual accumulation of wealth and real estate; corruption in
both high and low places by Government Ministers, Civil Servants, the
Judiciary, the Police, Corporation Boards, Commissions, Electoral and
Census Boards; disregard for the Public Service Code of Conduct in
appointment, promotion, retirement and discipline; and, worst of all,
corruption and tribalism in the Nigerian Armed Forces.
The emergence of a presumed collective interest in the country’s
freedom from colonial domination that resulted in the compromises
by the three party leaders and led to the country’s independence soon
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The Ahiara Declaration: Polemics and Politics 83
disappeared. The fledgling ‘patriotism’, if ever it existed, was replaced

by the rise of unfettered selfish micro-nationalism. Soon after the brief
euphoria, unsettling political dynamics in the independent nation man-
ifested themselves in the many major crises that beleaguered the people
successively, an ominous indication that all was not well in the country.
With the first military coup of January 15, 1966, the lack of any
notion of Nigerian nationhood dawned on everyone. The progressives,
mostly in the South, saw the putsch as patriotic and long overdue while
most in the North saw it otherwise. The vengeance counter-coup of
July 29, 1966 and the consequent massacres of Eastern Nigerians,
especially Igbos in the North, were expected. The northerner’s superior
power structure both in the federal government and in the military had
been seriously shaken by the killing in January of Sir Tafawa Balewa,
the Prime Minister; Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Premier of the Northern
Region; senior army officers from the North; senior political leaders in
the South who were friendly or allied with the North, such as the Pre-
mier of the Western Region, Chief Akintola; and the federal Minister
of Finance Okotie Eboh, who was also known to have amassed consid-
erable wealth. No-one in the Eastern Region was killed, and the mili-
tary leaders of the coup were mostly Igbo and were perceived to have
planned for Igbo domination of the country.
The Counter-Coup Aftermath and Biafra

The counter-coup of July 29, 1966, was the predictable result of the
January 15 coup elimination of many northerners from top political and
military positions, as well as the introduction of Decree Number 34 (Uni-
fication Decree) which many interpreted, especially those in the North,
as the introduction of a unitary form of government. For sure, the Janu-
ary 15 coup had seriously undermined the power structure of the North
in Nigeria. Besides, Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo, had become
the Supreme Military Commander of Nigeria and the Head of State of
the country. This was presumed as the unmistakable beginning of Igbo
domination. Consequently, a month before the revenge coup, a highly
organized massacre of Eastern Nigerians, especially the Igbo in the North,
was launched. Many graphic reports of the massacre of the easterners
have been written. Martin Meredith, a British journalist, reported:
another upsurge of violence against Easterners erupted in the North on a
far more terrible scale than before, and the purpose now was not simply
to seek vengeance but to drive Easterners out of the North altogether. All
the envy, resentment and mistrust that Northerners felt for the minority
Eastern communities living in their midst burst out with explosive force
into a pogrom that the authorities made no attempt to stop … local politi-
cians, civil servants and students were active in getting the mobs on to the
streets; Northern troops joined in the rampage. In the savage onslaught that
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followed, thousands of Easterners died or were maimed … a massive exodus

to the East began, abandoning all their possessions, hundreds of thousands
of Easterners … fled from their Northern homes … By the end of the year,
more than a million refugees, many of them wounded … sought safety in
the East.1
On July 29, 1966, a group of northern army officers led a counter-
coup that killed Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi and his brave host,
Lieutenant Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi, at Ibadan. With the battle cry
in Hausa – Araba – ‘Let us part’, they slaughtered soldiers and civil-
ians from Eastern Nigeria at Ikeja, Kaduna, Lagos, Zaria, Kano, and
wherever there were army stations. There were neither killings in the
Mid-Western Region, where no military camps were located, nor in the
Eastern Region where the coup did not take place and where Lieutenant
Colonel Ojukwu was Governor.
Lieutenant Colonel Yakuba Gowon, a northerner of minority-group
origin, was chosen by the putsch leaders to be their leader. He, accord-
ingly, assumed power on August 1, 1966 as the head of the Nigerian
Military Government. Ojukwu objected to Gowon’s assumption of office
as the Supreme Military Commander and Head of State of Nigeria on
grounds of military discipline, protocol, professional succession, and
the maintenance of the army hierarchy. He proposed three other mili-
tary officers who were all of southern origin but were not Igbo. They
were all senior to Gowon who at that time was the most senior officer
from the Northern Region. Ojukwu’s preferred successors to Ironsi
were Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe, Colonel Robert Adebayo, and Com-
modore Joseph A. Wey. None of the three dared to accept Ojukwu’s pro-
posal and the northern coup leaders would not accept anyone else but
Lieutenant Colonel Gowon, a northerner.2
The horrible sequence of events that caused the loss of between
7,000 and 50,000 human lives, the murder of Ironsi and Igbo soldiers,
the persecutions, massacres, the million and more refugees in the East-
ern Region who left their property and businesses in various parts of
Nigeria to return to the security of their homeland, and the return of
Northerners to power all combined to create an environment of resent-
ment and revenge that culminated in the desire for complete severance
from a people and a place that could allow, and probably participated
in, such needless inhuman atrocities. The lack of sympathy for a people
who were fellow countrymen, and the rejection and/or deliberate mis-
interpretation of the Aburi Accord January 4–5, 1967 were the ‘last
straws’ that broke the bond between Eastern Nigeria and the Federal
1
Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence (New
York: Public Affairs, 2011), 202.
2
Austine Okwu, In Truth for Justice and Honor: A Memoir of A Nigerian-Biafran Ambassador
(Princeton: Sungai, 2011), 241–244, 268–271.
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Republic of Nigeria.3 Exactly a year after the first massacres of East-

ern Nigerians began in Northern Nigeria, Ojukwu, on May 30, 1967,
announced the creation of the independent and sovereign State of the
Republic of Biafra.
The Ahiara Formulations and the Arusha Declaration

The Ahiara Declaration was enunciated by General Ojukwu in the town
of Ahiara Ahiaizu in Mbaise area about 12 miles from Owerri, Imo State
and eight miles from Uli airport. The town, fairly large and concealed,
only a few miles from Uli, was considered secure as a hiding place for
the Biafran Head of State whose Head of Intelligence and Security was
born in that area. In case of escape from the endangered territory, the
airport was very close to the Head of State. General Ojukwu formed the
National Guidance Committee and charged it ‘to write a kind of consti-
tution for Biafra – a promulgation of the fundamental principles upon
which the government and people of Biafra would operate’.4 The mem-
bers of the Committee consisted mostly of graduates of Oxford, Cam-
bridge, and Harvard. Their work resulted in a constitutional framework
regarding the Legislature, the Public Service, the Police, the Judiciary,
and the Ahiara Declaration.
The concept of the Declaration, according to the chairman of the
committee, was taken from a similar one produced by President Julius
Nyerere of Tanzania, called the Arusha Declaration. In fact, by Decem-
ber 1968, I had sent about a dozen copies of that treatise to the Bia-
fran leader at his request. A few copies of the socialist Mao Zedong of
China’s The Little Red Book were also sent with the Declaration without
any knowledge of the reasons for them. Similarly, in1967, when I was
the Biafran Envoy in London, I had also sent him, at his request, copies
of The Edge of the Sword, a book by President Charles de Gaulle.5
Following the guidelines given to them, and for incomprehensible
rather than obvious reasons, the Committee adopted Nyerere’s Arusha
formulations as the model for Biafra. The choice of the Tanzanian pro-
totype without some serious scrutiny gives the clear impression that
the Ahiara Declaration was simply a political drama by the General and
his fellow Oxbridge intellectual friends. The Committee operated with
direct access to the Head of State, an arrangement that seemed to have
offended many people in the government and gave the impression that
the General was more interested in the seminars and colloquia with the
elite group than in paying attention to his senior military colleagues,
experienced politicians, and civil servants.
3
Ibid., 235–241.
4
Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country (New York: Penguin, 2012), 144.
5
Okwu, In Truth for Justice and Honor, 278.
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The following reasons, and apparently the only ones given by the
Chairman of the Committee, for the adoption of the Arusha Declara-
tion as their model for Ahiara formulation would seem to suggest an
obvious cursory attitude to the whole concept and articulation of the
treatise, which is reproduced here:
1 The importance of Julius Nyerere in Africa at that time was
immense.
2 Nyerere particularly caught the attention of African scholars
because he stood for the things we believed in: equality, self-
determination, and respect for human values.
3 I particularly like how he drew inspiration from traditional Afri-
can values and philosophy.
4 He was admired by all of us not just because of his reputation as
an incorruptible visionary leader endowed with admirable ideo-
logical positions; but also because he had shown great solidarity
for our cause.
5 He was, after all, the first African Head of State to recognize
Biafra.6
It is not easy to accept the given rationale as purposeful for the choice of
a model for a serious manifesto. It is probable that some of the members
of the writers of the Declaration held the view that they were ‘brought
up to believe they were destined to rule’.7 They, therefore, produced their
all-purpose charter for Biafra’s governance and cultural transformation
summarily, without any study of their model and without the consul-
tation and input of experienced and wise politicians, and the counsel
of learned constitutional experts. There was no proof or evidence that
their model of choice worked in its own home base or served its popu-
lace sufficiently well for it to be attractive and relevant to Biafra.
General Philip Effiong, the former Chief of Staff of the Biafran Army,
who had a strained relationship with President Ojukwu, had serious
concerns about the leader’s consuming solicitude for the Biafran liter-
ary personalities. The former Chief of Staff stated: ‘Throughout the
crisis period and the War, Ojukwu had one basic problem that colored most
of his thinking and actions. It was, perhaps, best describable as his preoc-
cupation with chasing after “intellectual knick-knacks”.’8
The Ahiara Declaration, as popular as it might have sounded to the
people, seemed like the product of the overindulgence with political games
and intellectual exercises that resulted in the selection of a model for
the social transformation of Biafra on the basis of emotional and non-
empirical considerations. The choice, instead, should have been based
on practical and socio-economic reasons such as the cultural, political,
6
7
Ibid., 108.
8
Philip Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra: My Story (Princeton: Sungai, 2004), 335, emphasis
added.
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social, developmental, and ethnographical similarities between the two

states, Biafra and Tanzania; circumstances prevalent in the two nations;
and the empirical evidence of the successes of the preferred model. None
of this was investigated, symbolizing that ab initio the concept of the
Ahiara Declaration was to divert attention, rather than as a serious trea-
tise for changes in governance, politics, economics, and culture.
In the context of this inquiry, the insight of Major-General Effiong,
regardless of his possible bias and exaggeration, is fairly relevant to the
topic and accordingly is quoted in extenso as follows:
[Ojukwu’s] Oxford and Public Schools background was a hindrance as it
tended to intrude into his psyche and make him seek for intellectual ful-
fillment in a situation that required mature military appreciation … [H]
e intended to ignore or treat with levity the advice and suggestions of his
colleagues … preferred instead, solutions proffered or favored by the more
‘intellectually’ acceptable civilians with whom he surrounded himself ...
Debates, seminars and the Ahiara Declaration were some of the results of
such indulgence when the collapse of Biafra was staring us in the face.9
The provisions of the Declaration show that the Committee, in obedi-
ence to the directives of the Leader, crafted an all-purpose framework
– a constitution as well as a blueprint for social and cultural transfor-
mation at a time the state had lost over 95 percent of its territory and
was on the verge of losing the war. If the whole treatise became, indeed,
a reality instead of the stillbirth it was, one would begin to wonder who
should in fact defend and support it when the input of the Army and
the political leadership of the public were ignored in its production? The
rhetorical question is asked simply as a lead to the obvious concern as
to its introduction at the time it was launched, and whether in fact the
Head of State was ever advised against the obvious unnecessary politi-
cal, divisive, and diversionary stratagem that had serious emotional
impact on the people that he loved so much.
There is almost always a reason for everything. So there must be one
for the rush in the introduction of the manifesto to the people in the
throes of a deadly war of survival. It could perhaps be a political pacifier
for the General himself, who, by June 1969, was aware of the inevita-
ble conclusion of the war. In one of the 1969 entries in the Timeline:
Key Dates in the Life of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, he observed:
‘But at this time of the struggle, the scourges of war were too telling on
every segment of the Biafran society for the Declaration to make any
difference.’10
The General obviously had a serious feeling of uncertainty as to the
need for, and impact of, the formulation on the people who at that time
9
Ibid.
10
Kalu Ogbaa, General Ojukwu: The Legend of Biafra (New York: Triatlantic Books, 2007),
xvii.
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had suffered a great deal. His uncharacteristic self-contradiction after

the launching of the Declaration was as controversial as it was para-
doxical. On the one hand, he acknowledged the severity of the level of
misery in the land caused by two years of war, and as such doubted the
need for the Declaration at that stage of the war, and yet on the other
hand, he had also assured them in his Declaration address that:
Today, I am glad that our problems are less than they were a year ago that
arms alone can no longer destroy us; that our victory, the fulfillment of our
dreams, is very much a sight [sic]… If we fail, God forbid, it can only be because
of certain inner weakness in our being. It is in order to avoid these pitfalls that I
have today proclaimed before you the Principles of the Biafran Revolution.11
Two important deductions come instantly to mind. By June 1969, the
problems of Biafra were really not less than they were in 1968. In 1969,
there were millions of refugees from all over the original Biafra territory
living in less than one-tenth of the territory. The people had lost more
of their farms, businesses, and homes by 1969 than in 1968. Victory
was far from sight in 1969. But should the people be told that they were
losing the war? It is clear that the Declarations were intended to divert, to
comfort, to exhort, and to politicize, that is, to make people think about
different things and to take different positions – obviously, some for and
some against the Declaration. Such a situation of various opinions in
an indefensible war environment would be acceptable to any general.
The Arusha Declaration of Tanzania, the model for the Biafra formu-
lation was, however, adopted essentially by the Biafran leader and his
Committee to give the crafters of the Biafran treatise some semblance of
a serious blueprint for social and cultural transformation. But such was
far from the principal objective. Tanzania’s adoption of the strategies
of socialism and egalitarianism for the resolution of its real problems
were, however, fully adopted by Biafra, while the problems of the latter
were not identical to those of its mentor, Tanzania, a real serious indica-
tor of the trifling nature of the Ahiara exercise.
Nyerere’s strategies were not formulated for ideological reasons but as
real practical solutions to the real pressing social and political problems
of Tanzania. The producers of the Ahiara Declaration, however, emo-
tionally adopted socialism and egalitarianism, as if Tanzania and Biafra
were one nation with identical problems. Nothing could be farther from
the truth. Biafra had neither Tanzania’s problems nor did Tanzania have
Biafra’s fortunes regardless of its wartime miseries. Unfortunately, the
copycat approach, obviously, gave the highly brilliant General an image
of a ‘me too’ political character, an imitator rather than the original
thinker that he really was, like those other African leaders who had put
their guiding socialist and political philosophies in writing or in slogans.
11
Ibid., 317, emphasis added.
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African Socialism
Léopold Sédar Senghor postulated in his work, Man, that human
beings remain the first consideration of government: ‘He constitutes
our measure’.12 Kwame Nkrumah’s Philosophical Consciencism accepts
some principles of Marxist scientific socialism based on African tradi-
tional patterns. According to Nkrumah, the new philosophy will pro-
vide the theoretical basis for an ideology whose aim shall be to contain
the African experience of Islam and Euro-Christian presence as well as
experience of traditional African society.13 Mzee Jomo Kenyatta in his
non-ideological stand, promoted the idea of local individuals pulling
together in self-help developments: Harambee, a Kiswahili word for ‘pull
together!’ Kenneth Kaunda, a Christian of great emotional intensity, in
the book, A Humanist in Africa, expressed the love of man and Christian-
oriented governance system in Africa.14 None of these prescriptions
transformed the people of their countries.
Nyerere’s Arusha formulations were in response to the social realities
and economic exigencies of his country, Tanzania. The nation that he
had inherited from Britain in 1961, Tanganyika (merged with Zanzibar
to form Tanzania in 1964), was a state in which the majority of the
people were poor and uneducated. The few educated and well-to-do
were Indian, Asian, Arab, and European-Tanganyikan citizens who
looked down on the poor and uneducated African citizens. Tanganyika,
like most of the other East and Central African nations, had a large
settler population unlike Biafra and the other West African states that
did not have that problem. There was also in Tanganyika the issue of
Christian and Muslim populations with the latter slightly in the major-
ity and also culturally more dominant and economically better off than
the Christian Africans.
The stress for Nyerere did not end there. The small African-educated
group, mostly Christians, had important government positions. They
were, however, drawn from only three out of the over 120 ethnic
groups in the country. They were the Wahaya, the Wanyakusa, and
the Wachaga with whom the Christian missionaries succeeded, and
built schools, while the British colonial government, a reluctant
foster father and trustee administrator, neglected to build schools in
the country but preferred to do so in Kenya. Tanzania, indeed, was a
colonial-deprived orphan. The socio-economic and political situation
in Tanzania presented real serious dangers that could be exploited for
possible ethnic animosities between the African communities, religious
12
Léopold Sédar Senghor, African Socialism (London and Dunmow: Pall Mall Press, 1962),
64–65.
13
Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism (London: Heinemann, 1964), 70.
14
Kenneth D. Kaunda and Colin M. Morris, A Humanist in Africa (London: Longmans, Green
and Co., 1967).
000 Fal book B.indb 89 13/06/2016 22:06

tension between the religious groups, and a racial split between the
African and the non-African citizens because of economic and wealth
disparities. None of these serious situations existed in Biafra. It was
obviously humiliating and self-diminishing, to be a ‘have not’ in one’s
own community where the non-indigenous citizens owned most if not
all the businesses, and at the same time, or as a result, humiliated and
looked down upon the Africans. Nyerere saw this situation in his coun-
try. Evidently, for him and his people, egalitarianism and socialism were
tailor-made solutions to the problems that he had inherited with the
independence of his country.
The Future of African Socialism

The study of the Ahiara Declaration makes it necessary to review briefly
the appeal of African Socialism to African scholars and some political
leaders during that timeframe. By 1969, however, it had become an
anachronism to think of socialism seriously as a development ideology
anywhere in Africa, much less so in Biafra. Programs highly promoted
and based on either the doctrine of Marxist socialism or the Arab Third
Universal Theory, Islam and Sharia Law had failed in the Arab Moslem
world. The African traditional socialism, such as the incomprehensible
Nkrumaism, also known as Consciencism, and Nyerere’s more popular
and famous Ujamaa (Swahili), literally familyhood or brotherhood, all
were failed theories and programs with little or no benefits for the people
they were supposed to develop.
The socialist programs failed principally because poverty cannot be
cured by poverty or prevented, by spreading its misery around. They
failed also because African traditional socialism had its own time and
space. It is now in the past and should not be resurrected in its entirety to
fit in with people of this contemporary culture, time, and place. It would
seem to me that African Socialism, whether of Senghor’s intellectual
hue, Nasser’s, Gaddafi’s, Nkrumah’s, or Nyerere’s most acknowledged
brand, should now all be laid to rest in peace like feudalism, absolutism,
slavery and slave trade, imperialism, and colonialism. They all, except
African Socialism, should now remain as sad and unfortunate experi-
ences of the past.
African Socialism operated in the small space of the sustenance
agrarian culture of the machete and hoe, cut and burn farming
system. The tradition of mutual dependence and sharing derived from
a number of factors mainly the fact that land was the mainstay of the
people’s livelihood, the collective ownership of land because of this role
in people’s lives, strong ancestral bond with the progenitors, and the
need for survival. It was not possible to live in that community without
the community support.
The principal foundation blocks for living in that communal cul-
ture have been mortally undermined by irresistible forces: mainly
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modernization, Christianization, urbanization, diminished interest

in traditional farming, the rise of mechanized agriculture, increasing
population, land speculation, mineral prospecting, increasing financial
value of land, increasing interest in individual ownership of land, and,
above all, the availability of police protection – and with it the diminu-
tion of dependence on traditional community security. In the pristine
close village community life, the villagers as a whole raised the children,
disciplined the wayward spouse, built houses, tilled the soil, fought
fires and floods, provided security, built village pathways, feuded, and
maintained peace and order; families ate with one spoon, drank tombo
(locally made brew) or water from one cup or pot, ate food with each
dipping his or her hand in one bowl of soup, and shared the small piece
of fish or meat in the soup without quarrelling; children and young
adolescents shared sleeping floors with neighbors away from their own
homes without harm, neighbors borrowed money without interest and
without signed documents, borrowed foodstuffs, clothes, and even fire-
wood from one another, and buried and mourned their dead with one
another. These were part of the African traditional socialism. Today it
is only in the minds of those who experienced it. They and those they
mentor should see the sharing of the rising prosperity as a social, public,
and moral imperative.
The human-based attributes of African traditional universal family-
hood are difficult to replicate in the contemporary community and values.
Things have changed considerably. Most Africans now live in culturally
mixed urban or semi-urban areas. Attitudes, needs, hygiene, space, and
time have changed irretrievably. Africans now live not only in their own
villages, but also far from their homes. They own cars and drive, or they
walk to work. They have different types of houses from those of their
grandparents and great-grandparents. They need more space for their
children, for themselves, for their spouses, for their guests from afar,
dependent domestic staff, and automobiles. They own and read books
and use computers that need space. They also need more time because
they have a lot more to do than their forebears who were usually self-
employed in arts, crafts, cattle rearing, trading, and farming.
Contemporary Africans work not only for themselves as their fore-
fathers did, but they also serve their employers: the government, busi-
ness, industry, schools, organizations, and religious entities. These
impersonal ‘live agents’ exact and exercise considerable influence on
the people different from those of the traditional communities. New
times need new strategies to deal with the new and evolving problems
and opportunities connected with ever developing technologies and
global living, rising and brazen dishonesty, delayed and corrupt justice
system in place of instant community justice, irreverence, incivility,
and ingratitude. The way to progress is not by putting ‘old wine’ into
a ‘new bottle’, but by respecting those human and humane values of
old, and by creating a new development ideology that would suite the
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culture and the characters of the present age within the paradigms of
organized philanthropy and humanitarianism both in the public and
private domains.
Friendly Relationship with Tanzania

I lived with my family in Tanganyika/Tanzania, for over five years during
my diplomatic assignments: first for Nigeria and then for Biafra. My
relationship with President Nyerere, his brother Joseph, and his people
and government was excellent. I was always called Ndugu, Swahili for
brother, and honored by the Wagogo community. The government gave
me two of the greatest achievements in my diplomatic career: the Nige-
rian Technical Assistance Agreement, which will be discussed later, and
Tanzania’s diplomatic recognition of Biafra during the Nigeria-Biafra
War.
With clarity of mind, I recall how Nyerere told me in December
1962, soon after assuming the office of the presidency, that there was
no pleasure in the independence of his country at that time with an
important arm of the government still under the control of the former
colonial masters and their minions. The Chief Justice of the nation was
still British and so were all the judges and magistrates, some of whom
were Asians. The promulgations and legislations of an independent
Tanganyikan parliament could be struck down at any moment by the
Judiciary with the stroke of a pen. ‘Wherein lies your independence?’
Nyerere rhetorically asked.
By 1962 there were only three African Tanganyikan citizens who
were lawyers in a country of over ten million people and the third
largest African country in size at that time. Law, consequently, was by
the instruction of Nyerere, the first faculty of the then-new University
College of Dar es Salaam. The discussion with Nyerere also led to the
Nigerian Judicial Technical Assistance Program for Tanganyika. The
Government of Nigeria sent over one dozen young unemployed lawyers
from the three regions of the Federation as Resident Magistrates in Tan-
ganyika, and paid part of their financial entitlements. The day the first
group of Nigerian lawyers arrived at Dar es Salaam international air-
port was one of the happiest days in my diplomatic life. Unfortunately,
Nigeria cancelled the agreement and withdrew the lawyers, then
Resident Magistrates, following the Tanzanian recognition of Biafra in
1968, another occasion of my remarkable diplomatic achievement.15
It is relevant to add at this juncture that I personally witnessed the
preparation, the launching, and development of the Arusha Declara-
tion in Tanzania. The Arusha Declaration impacted my Biafran mis-
sion, which benefitted, in some ways, because of the kindness of the
15
Okwu, In Truth for Justice and Honor, 198.
000 Fal book B.indb 92 13/06/2016 22:06

government. My family and I lived rent free in a new two-story build-

ing with extensive premises in a new exclusive development area from
1967 to 1970. My staff of two home-based officers also had a rent-free,
three-bedroom bungalow in Oyster Bay, another upscale district. The
two buildings were houses seized by the government from Tanzanians
who were forbidden to own houses for rental according to the provi-
sions of the Declaration.
The Declaration: People’s Revolution

By the time of the Ahiara Declaration, Biafra was, indeed, with the
exception of very few non-Igbo, an ethnically homogeneous state
whose people were facing the horrible problems and awful hardships
of an extremely cruel civil war. There were, however, no internal social
tensions among the people who themselves, as Eastern Nigerians were
the victims of the northern massacres that preceded the war, as well as
the collective targets for the Nigerian air raids, strafing and indiscrimi-
nate amateurish bombings. Biafra, especially Igboland, suffered no reli-
gious animosities in the state. Overall, there was a stable and cohesive
socio-political environment during the war especially by 1969 when
Biafra was a shrunk and diminished enclave in Igboland. The Declara-
tion essentially was introduced to the Igbo people.
In one of his most controversial statements, General Ojukwu declared
that the ‘Biafran Revolution is not dreamt up by an elite; it is the will of
the People. The People want it. They are fighting and dying to defend
it’.16 He also called the Declaration the ‘Biafran Revolution’. Obviously,
he mixed up his cultural transformation vision with the ongoing war
of severance from Nigeria, which most people regarded as the Biafran
Revolution. The two controversial and contradictory statements, seem-
ingly in error, were deliberately made to provide a political situation for
the people’s engagement in their homes and minds. In the environment
of the shrinking territory and deteriorating war situation, the Ahiara
prescriptions served a useful public purpose as a valuable distraction
from daily speculations about the war and its associated miseries.
On the occasion of launching the Declaration, the center of emphasis
was, of course, the people. For all practical and political purposes, the
General, who loved his people, also had to sound populist, and had to
ascribe politically, the formulation of the treatise to the people to whom
‘all sovereignty belongs … In Biafra the People are supreme, the People
are masters, the leader is servant’.17 The Declaration, he affirmed, was
not produced by an elite but by the people.
It is evident that the General and his elite committee copied Nyerere
in everything for their Declaration. They did not, however, have what
16
Ogbaa, General Ojukwu, 295.
17
Ibid., 293.
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Nyerere had: the political party Tanganyika African National Union.

The party won independence with Nyerere for their country, and (as
the Tanzania African National Union) also produced the Arusha Decla-
ration with their leader, Mwalimu (teacher) Nyerere. General Ojukwu,
therefore, by his own political intuition, mere oratory, and proclama-
tion, had to give himself the comfort and satisfaction that the Ahiara
formulation was ‘the will of the People. The People want it.’18 The
‘People’ had become synonymous with the ‘Party’ in his mind. But the
obvious fact is that the people of course had no input in its formulation.
The people might have liked the formulations especially because of his
natural eloquent delivery style.
The Ahiara Declaration was not produced by an elite, as the General
had intriguingly and correctly observed. It was however, the produc-
tion of the National Guidance Committee that was noted for its elitist
membership. Without much of any system of checks and balances, the
Head of State accepted the Committee’s treatise. He presented the Dec-
laration in a radio address on June 1, 1969, when he had lost almost
all of the Biafran territory, was surrounded by the Nigerian Army, and
the people worn out by the miseries of the war. The Declaration was evi-
dently a convenient political sketch conceived for the purpose of luring
the suffering war-weary population to an illusion of a false hope of an
emerging new state, free from corruption, unemployment, favoritism,
a new order in which the state itself would be the Fountain of Justice,
and: ‘The rulers must satisfy the People at all times.’19
The General was, however, aware that it would not be so because at
that time he was aware of the outcome of the war. It was more opportune
to envision a better tomorrow that one was not sure of than to dwell on
the miseries of the present that one could not resolve. Indeed the prob-
lems of the present were for the General to resolve while the promises of
the future were just cheerful presumptions. However, regardless of the
known writing on the wall, he went ahead and launched the Declara-
tion. In his political thinking, it would be in the people’s interest for him
to do so. Indeed, the people liked what they heard. He cared for them,
and he was fighting for them, win or lose.
Ahiara Declaration: Reason for the Timing of the Launch

In the second week of July 1969, the Biafran representatives abroad
were briefed on the Ahiara Declaration in Paris. At the session, I asked
Professor Sylvanus J. Cookey, Biafran Relief Coordinator, who came to
do the briefing, to tell us why the Declaration could not be delayed until
after the end of the war. With evident hesitation, he pointed out that my
question was moot since the formulation had already been launched in
18
Ibid., 295.
19
Ibid., 297–299.
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Biafra. The representatives were only being advised, he pointed out, only
for them to use it at their presentations and meetings with their host
governments. I demurred and appreciated Professor Cookey’s’ reserva-
tion. The war ended six months after the discussion, and I found some
support by the comment of Carl von Rosen, a Swedish humanitarian,
who, at the risk of his own life, operated humanitarian flights during
the war into Uli under the auspices of the Geneva-based International
Committee of the Red Cross. He told The Times of London in February
1970 that it was the threatening of entrenched interests by the Decla-
ration that finally led to the deliberate sabotage of the war efforts from
within Biafra and caused its fall.20
The General, at his address introducing the Declaration on June
1, 1969, provided the answer to the inevitable question, which most
people avoided to ask, about the launching of the program in the middle
of a cruel civil war. Here is his reasoning:
Are we going to watch the very disease which caused the demise of Nigeria
take root in our new Biafra? Are we prepared to embark on another revolu-
tion perhaps more blood to put right the inevitable disaster? I ask you, my
countrymen, can we afford another spell of strife when this one is over to
correct social inequalities in our Fatherland? I say NO. A thousand times no.
The ordinary Biafran says no. When I speak of the ordinary Biafran, I speak
of the People. The Biafran Revolution is the People’s Revolution.21
Regardless of the concerns and anxieties about the ongoing devas-
tating war with its daily deadly consequences, the General insisted on
his formulation to correct the ‘social inequalities in our Fatherland’. He
knew Biafra was losing the war and would lose the war in the end. But
still he considered the second revolution the right thing to talk about
because the ongoing war situation was the opportune moment to cor-
rect the social inequalities in the Biafran native soil. To do otherwise,
according to him, was to postpone the evil day and to engage in another
revolution that would perhaps cause more bloodshed.
What was left of Biafra by June 1969 was fairly politically united. By
the time the Declaration was introduced there was, however, consid-
erable suffering in the land: hunger, scarcity of food, medicine, essen-
tials such as salt and flour, and living and hiding in the bush to escape
Nigerian air raids and strafing. There were refugees everywhere with
no privacy and no security, destruction of homes, businesses, crops
and plants, sickness especially among malnourished children, abuse of
the use of arms/planes for foreign trade by some people with access to
the leadership, hoarding of money and foodstuffs and selling them at
inflated prices, nepotism and favoritism in the sharing and distribution
of the available food and relief-aid materials, and ‘attack-trade’ by some
20
Okwu, In Truth for Justice and Honor, 205, 277.
21
000 Fal book B.indb 95 13/06/2016 22:06

soldiers who preferred trading to fighting. These were not unusual war
problems. Every war has its own problems that should be dealt with
administratively. The war complications and suffering should not have
been characterized as ‘Nigerianisms’.
The irregularities, some by highly placed Biafrans, should not have
led to a wholesale cultural transformation treatise. Most of the social
inequalities of the period were caused by the war and did not need a
more serious and urgent separate program to resolve them than more
attention and concentration on ending the war. It was the war that
brought about the refugee situation and famine, destruction of farm-
ing crops, businesses, homes, and people’s lives. The General, however,
had to accentuate the need to end the social evils in order to assure the
people of his awareness of their problems. The war was evidently not
going well. Biafra and the war only lasted six months from the date of
the launching of the Declaration. As the Head of State, he was not to
give the bad news that the war was not going well for Biafra. But instead
he had to maneuver them to something more palatable and more con-
soling: the correction of the social inequalities in the land of which
most of them were victims.
The General affirmed in his speech that the people wanted the revolu-
tion, and that they were already fighting and dying to defend what they
heard for the first time at that moment in history. It is difficult to com-
prehend unless one assumes that he had regarded the Ahiara Declara-
tion and the ongoing war to salvage the revolution of the separation
of Biafra from Nigeria as one and the same. The obvious controversy
over the two separate major developments – the emergence of Biafra
and the war that it triggered, and the enunciation of the Ahiara for-
mulation – could be seen yet as another deflection-strategy from the
people’s concentration on the miseries of the war, to their fascination
for the prescriptions. On the whole, the Ahiara Declaration seemed like
a convenient anodyne from the General to the people. He intended at
that juncture of the war to lure the suffering people to some sense of
comfort and relief, the unrealistic hope of a future state where there
were no discriminations based on sex, tribe, religion, or ‘fatherland divi-
sions’, and where there was no corruption, but a State that would be the
‘fountain of justice’ for all and sundry and where the state guaranteed
employment to all able to work. The General would want these as his
legacy to the people. If he lost the war, as he did, the people would still
remember him for the dream.
Despite the General’s double entendre, he still tried to reassure the
people that the Biafran Revolution, along with the ongoing military
conflict, and the proposed cultural reformation were separate and apart.
He accordingly affirmed to them that ‘immediate concern is to defeat
the Nigerian aggressor and so safeguard the Biafran Revolution’.22
22
Ibid., 295.
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Obviously, the Head of State thought that the revolution consisted

of, first his creation of the sovereign state of Biafra, independent of the
corrupt and wicked Nigeria, and second, the establishment of a pristine
Biafran culture free from and purified of Nigerianism. In the new Biafra,
the people would live in their State where ‘all property belongs to the
Community’ and the ‘society is open and progressive’ and ‘is tradition-
ally egalitarian’.23 His reflections in this particular regard were, obvi-
ously, contradicted and confounded by his indomitable will and actions:
fighting a political war of sovereignty at the same time complicating it
with an unnecessary and ill-timed war of cultural transformation. He,
however, attempted to justify his action, and in his assurances to the
people, he said: ‘It was, and still is, our firm conviction that a modern
Negro African government worth the trust placed in it by the people
must build a progressive state that ensures the reign of social and eco-
nomic justice and of the rule of law.’24
The Principles
Every war creates its own peculiar problems and human tragedies that
need to be addressed where humanly possible by the leadership. The
solution to the hardships in 1969 Biafra, obviously, should have been
in the realistic appraisal and review of the military strategies and in
governmental directives, and targeted actions on those hardship and
problem areas. It should certainly not have been by the introduction of
the Declaration – the Principles of the Biafran Revolution – a political
program equivalent to killing a gnat with a sledge hammer. The pro-
motion and creation of a political and suitable environment for imple-
mentation, nurturing support, and dealing with the public response
and reaction to the Declaration – the ‘Biafranization’ formula of the
people – usually would not be a short-term project but a series of long
and arduous experimentations. The fundamental transformation of
the culture and lifestyle of a people is not easy. During the war, condi-
tions were in disarray with a complicated and damaged administrative
system operated in a makeshift, downgraded, and uncertain environ-
ment. The future was uncertain, and the absence of a political party
made the introduction of the Declaration difficult to comprehend and
even more difficult to implement, if it were a serious formulation and
not merely political posturing.
One has to be alive first before one can think about an idyllic society
and culture. On the whole, the Declaration seemed like dressing up in
one’s best clothes with no place to go. In summary, the principles of the
Declaration were:
23
Ibid., 300–301.
24
Ibid., 281.
000 Fal book B.indb 97 13/06/2016 22:06

1 Sanctity of human life and the dignity of the human person.

2 Firm opposition to genocide – against any attempt to destroy a
people, its security, its right to life, property, and progress.
3 Places a high premium on Patriotism – Love and Devotion to the
Fatherland – Biafra.
4 All Biafrans are brothers and sisters and bound together by ties
of geography, trade … and their common misfortune in Nigeria.
5 Knowledge of individual’s civic rights and recognition of those of
other Biafrans.
6 Sovereignty and power belong to the people.
7 Public accountability ensures that those who exercise power are
accountable to people for the way they use that power.
8 A leader must stand at all times for justice in dealing with the
people.
9 Social Justice is the cornerstone of the Biafran Revolution.
10 All property belongs to the community.
11 Biafran Revolution is creating a society not formed by class con-
sciousness and class antagonisms. Biafran society is traditionally
egalitarian.25
With the exception of socialism and egalitarianism, the Principles
of the Declaration were basic, deeply emotional reaffirmations, and
political appeals to the people, aimed at renewing their support for the
two-year old war with which they had become tired and worn out. The
people were to recollect the slaughter of over ‘50,000 of us’ in Nigeria
in 1966, the ‘sport’ murder of the ‘entire male population of a village’,
the total blockade of Biafra by Nigeria while no ‘white belligerents’ ever
carried ‘out a total blockade of their fellow whites during World Wars I
and II. Ours is the only example in recent history where a whole people
have been so treated.’26
Those impassioned appeals were important and powerful emotional
reminders of the bitter hatred that Nigeria had for Biafra. Consequently,
the people’s renewed support for the war was an absolute and impera-
tive need to endure its hardships. An all-inclusive love of one another
in Biafra as brothers and sisters, knowledge of one’s civic rights and the
rights of others, public accountability, and the practice and observance
of social justice by public servants and the military were the popular
prescriptions for the administrative abuses, acts of malpractice, and
nepotism. The proposed counteractive nostrums were, of course, not
unknown in Biafra, but it was popular and politically proper for General
Ojukwu to repeat them to the fearful and anxiety-stricken people who
were, at every moment, receptive to any news about plans that would
stop or at least alleviate their misery or give them hope for a better
25
Ibid., 295–298.
26
Ibid., 297.
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future. It also was politically wise to speak about individual rights, usu-
ally guaranteed and sustained by the vigilance of the government but
often in peril in times of war. The Ahiara Declaration, in this regard, was
a step forward for the people, at least in attempting to restore their faith
in the government’s belief that they, the people, mattered. The Head of
State, the shrewd politician, probably thought seriously about it, and
ensured that the Declaration provided for it.
Property and the Community

The Declaration provided that, in the New Biafra, ‘all property belongs
to the Community. Every individual must consider all he has … as
belonging to the community for which he holds it in trust. This princi-
ple does not mean the abolition of personal property.’27 Many Biafrans,
especially the Igbo found the formulation both difficult to comprehend
and to accept. However, without any clear evidence to support his
apprehension, the General argued that ‘[o]ver-acquisitiveness or the
inordinate desire to amass wealth is a factor liable to threaten social
stability, especially in an underdeveloped society in which there are not
enough material goods to go around’.28 It was these factors, the leader
also asserted, that caused ‘lopsided development and bred antagonisms
between the “haves” and the “have-nots” and undermined “the peace
and unity of the people”’.29
The leaders prognostications seemed highly inauspicious. The fears,
however, were not supported by facts. Biafra is the land of capitalism,
and Igbo are natural capitalists with no incident of resentment or oppo-
sition against any prosperous business person in Igboland – be they
indigenous or alien. Also, in the larger arena of Nigeria, none of the
eight military coups in the country since 1966 was remotely caused by
corruption, nor did rebels mention corruption or excessive accumula-
tion of wealth as one of the reasons for any of the military takeovers,
despite the excessive wealth accumulated largely through corruption.
Despite the corrupt political and business environment, in 1969 Nige-
ria had the second highest foreign investment in Africa; in 2014, it had
the highest in the continent.
The introduction of socialism in Biafra in 1969 by the Ahiara Decla-
ration was an unsuccessful political tactic to assuage the highly disen-
chanted male population in Biafra, who wanted the war to end so that
they may resume their normal lives: to get back to business and making
money. The General, in reaction to mounting frustration, was forced
to focus his inaugural message on greater recognition for the crooked
wealthy man than the honest citizenry who were not so well off.
27
Ibid., 300.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
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At the launching of the Declaration, the Head of State condemned

the few rich in order to reassure and assuage the majority poor in the
society. According to him, ‘the danger is always there of a small group
of powerful property-owners using their influence to deflect the State
from performing its duties to the citizens as a whole and thereby destroy-
ing the democratic basis of society’.30 The pronouncement was, by all
accounts, a dangerous utterance that could create class-based conflict
between the rich and poor in a population where such hostility had
never existed. For the Leader, however, under the circumstances, any
and everything that served his political purpose at that stage of Biafra’s
existence was proper and acceptable.
West Africans believe that the love of money and owning property
are the natural pursuits of Biafrans, especially the Igbo. Other Nigerian
groups in the region also were, and still are, money lovers. The father of
General Ojukwu, Sir Louis P.O. Ojukwu, was reportedly the first Nige-
rian millionaire. He owned extensive property in different Nigerian cities
and towns. The Biafrans, as a result, were uncertain of the intentions
of the Declaration. The General’s fellow Biafrans also were hated and
murdered in the Northern Region of Nigeria because of their business
successes. Was the Declaration a mocking parody of their lives, business
styles, and aspirations? Was the Ahiara Manifesto an open repudiation
of Biafran entrepreneurship and concealed support for the northern-
ers’ envy and discrimination against the Biafrans in their region? These
were and still are troubling questions today.
Non-Biafrans as well, were incredulous of the Declaration coming
from a government run predominantly by Igbo and by a state headed
by an Igbo. The Igbo were regarded as great entrepreneurs, merchants,
business people, petty traders, cobblers, taxi owners and drivers, and
hoteliers. Indeed, people found them engaged in all aspects of business
and industry not only throughout West Africa but also throughout
all of Africa. The Biafrans usually succeeded in many activities where
others failed. Consequently, some fault finders of the Igbo have, in envy,
characterized them as ‘exploiters’ and as the ‘Jews of West Africa’. The
question then was whether Ojukwu was supporting the critics and
enemies of Biafran successful entrepreneurial spirit or playing politics
with the business well-being of his own people.
An Egalitarian Society
In the words of the Declaration, ‘The Biafran Revolution is creating a
society not torn by class consciousness and class antagonisms. Biafran
society is traditionally egalitarian.’ The formulation continued:
The New Society is open and progressive … We are adaptable because as a
people we are convinced that in the world ‘no condition is permanent’ …
30
Ibid., 301.
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In this process of rapid transformation he will retain and cherish the best
elements of his culture, drawing sustenance as well as moral and psycho-
logical stability from them.31
The Igbo culture has always been open, progressive, and generally
inclusive. The formulation’s emphasis on the culture of the ‘New Soci-
ety’ was, however, a political overreach that underplayed the existent
Igbo culture by ignoring it, and by overselling what was hoped for
but had yet to be realized: ‘The New Society’. As a result, there was
an unnecessary display of concern over giving more social respect to
the wealthy crook than the poor honest man. The point that appeared
to have been forgotten was the fact that, in Igboland, the people were
commonly raised to be honest. Celebrating what was expected, such as
honesty, was uncommon. Achievement with wealth, on the contrary,
was uncommon. Celebrating it, even when it was tarnished, should
therefore be seen for what it really was. It should not be magnified for
the support of the majority poor. This cultural irritant should, however,
be left for the Ezes – the potentates of the autonomous communities –
and for the state governors to resolve.
Egalitarian Igboland provides for a fluid cultural structure in which
everyone has a share of social obeisance. There are the time-honored
acknowledgments for the Diokpa, Opara, Dee, Dede, Nwaada, Ulu, Ndaa,
Dada, Oha, Okoro, and Mazi. No well-raised Igbo will call his/her senior
in age by his/her first name. It is as reviled as a mark of poor upbring-
ing, but it is a phenomenon that is rising in contemporary Nigeria.
The egalitarian Biafra did not imply that the people nurtured anti-
monarchy feelings. After all, it was an Igbo ex-slave, Jubo Juboha of
Amaigbo, Orlu, famously known as Ja Ja of Opobo, who founded the
eponymous Kingdom of Opobo at the mouth of the Imo River in the
late nineteenth century. The word Eze, or monarch in Igboland, is the
epitome for excellence, the best of the land, such as Ezenna, Ezenne,
Ezenwa, Ezenwoke, Ezenwanyi, Ezeani, Ezeala, Ezeaku, Ezeako, Ezewuru,
Ezewuihe, and Ezebuenyi. Eze, in political and administrative terms, is the
person in whom the last decision rests in the community. The statement,
Igbo enwegh Eze (the Igbo have no monarch), means that the Igbo, as a
group, have no one monarch for all the Igbo throughout Igboland.
The concept, form, shape, power, authority, influence, and attributes
of monarchs and monarchies differ, as they should, all over the world.
Monarchies explain, in most cases, the origin, the history, and the rise
of the demesnes and their peoples as well as their character, psychol-
ogy, attitudes to government, governance, politics, war, peace, physical
environment, and the neighbors and the other polities around. Monar-
chies also have many forms and levels, such as absolute, conventional,
hereditary, constitutional, limited, muted, ritual, and even kingless.
31
Ibid., 301–302.
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The Biafran or Igbo concept of monarchy, like several of their other

notions and practices, is pragmatic, purposeful, and highly reflective of
the Igbo character and psychology. Things are not rigidly set in Igbo
culture. The Igbo Eze-ship is similar to the judges of Israel before the
era of kings. Eze Igbo, accordingly, varies in grandeur and protocol in
the different Igbo communities. The royal authority of the Kabaka of
Buganda, for example, differs from that of the Oni of Ife, as does that of
the Asantehene of Ashante vary from the Oba of Bini, and the British
monarchy differs from that of the Netherlands.
The monarchy, in those Igbo communities where it exists, is similar
to the Hebrew Judges’ ruling tradition before Samuel, the last of the
Judges, anointed Saul as the first King of Israel. The Igbo monarchy is
muted in that it is more experienced than expressed and advertised in
deference to its deity, Chukwu, who is the king, Chukwu wu Eze. The
system began with the Nri religious and moral potentates and exorcists
about 1000. With the return and expansion of the émigré Umuez-
echima (children of King Chima) from Benin between 1300 and 1800,
the kingship system mushroomed in many Igbo communities such as
Agbor, Aboh, Onitsha, Asaba, Ubulu Ukwu, and Oguta. Other Igbo
groups such as Aro, Ndoki, Ikwenga, Egbu, Owerri, Orlu, Emekuku, and
Urata also adopted a form of muted kingship system between the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries because of the problem and prospects
of the Atlantic Slave Trade.32
The titled men, or ozo people, are traditionally advisers and counse-
lors to the Eze. The ozo title is highly regarded in Igboland, and accord-
ingly is seriously sought after by the rich in the egalitarian society. The
title-taking ceremony is expensive with the result that only the very rich
can afford it. This was one of the main reasons the pioneer missionaries
opposed it. The rituals and ceremonies associated with the ozo-taking
have also led to two major conflicting results. The first, on the one hand,
is the celebration of excellence and achievement and their promotion
for emulation; and the second, on the other hand, is the rise of cor-
ruption in the amassing and displaying of excessive accumulation of
wealth and conspicuous consumption. The giving of titles to people of
less than sterling character has also emerged. It is, however, neither
uncommon nor unusual. It is universal. The knighthood of the famous
‘heroic’ seafaring Englishman, Francis Drake, is not an unimportant
part of British history.
32
Augustine S.O. Okwu, Igbo Culture and the Christian Missions 1857–1957: Conversion in
Theory and Practice (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009), 13–14, 30–35,
65–68.
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Deductions
Essentially, the introduction of the Ahiara Declaration, even as a vision
for the expected New Biafra, was simply an unfinished intellectual
exercise. It was far from a reasoned and crucial ideology for the cul-
tural transformation, social and economic development for the trau-
matized populace of Biafra. The deductions derive from the following
considerations.
1 By June 1969, Biafra was still in the throes of a losing war, having
lost over 95 percent of its territory as well as all its major towns
and cities. For whom then was the Declaration since the people
would soon be reunited with Nigeria?
2 There was no demonstrated need for the socialist aspects of the
Declaration. Almost all aspects of business and industry in the
state were already owned by either the Biafran Government and
its people or by the Federal Government during the period. Gen-
eral Ojukwu’s administration had of course taken over the Uni-
versity of Nigeria from Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, its founder, early in
1966 to the annoyance and disappointment of the Igbo foremost
leader.
3 There were, in fact, no foreign exploiters in Biafra and there was
never any incident of resentment or agitation about ‘native’
exploitation in Biafra. The foreign oil companies producing
petroleum and gas in Biafra were under the Nigerian Army by
June 1969.
4 If there were any noticeable agitations against ‘native’ exces-
sive acquisition of wealth, it could have been in Northern Nige-
ria against the Biafrans themselves, especially against the Igbo
because of their progress and wealth in the Northern Region of
Nigeria.
5 General Ojukwu’s father himself had considerable wealth and
landed property located mostly outside Biafra. But no one both-
ered his father and his businesses in the various regions of Nige-
ria. One therefore might be tempted to ask whether the General
was attempting an economic suicide.
6 Biafra and Igboland are the homestead of capitalists. It would
have been advisable for the struggling nation to attract badly
needed foreign investment to rebuild the war-ravaged economy.
Would it not have better served the people if the planners had
maintained the people as what they really were, and still are –
capitalists – rather than attempt to transform them into what
they never were – socialists?
7 The members of the committee that crafted the Ahiara Decla-
ration were recognized inside and outside of Biafra as learned,
well respected, and esteemed people. However, it seemed the
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committee did not demonstrate much diligence and intellectual

scrutiny in the preparation of the treatise. For example, they had
not studied the problems that were associated with the Arusha
Declaration. If it had sought advisement, the Biafran Office in
Tanzania would have provided the necessary insights.
8 Planning for economic and social development and for cultural
transformation would have been better left until after the war
when the physical, psychological, moral, and infrastructural
damages could have been better assessed and better planned.
9 The failure of socialist-based programs in Africa since the inde-
pendence of Egypt in 1922 should have served as a red flag to the
learned planners of the Declaration. It is a common saying that
‘lunacy is doing the same thing over and over again and expect-
ing a different result’.
Conclusion
The Ahiara Declaration embodied the birth, mission, and struggle of
Biafra – and the root cause of its problems. These problems included
racism, the indifference of the European former colonial powers, the
open hostility of Britain, the connivance and participation of some
of the Arab and Muslim world, and the wickedness of the revisionist
Russian imperialism toward Biafra. Despite the odds and the obvious
impending fall of Biafra, six months after June 1, 1969, General Ojukwu
remained ambivalent, doubting himself whether the Declaration was
purposeful while reassuring the people of ‘our victory, the fulfillment
of our dream’ which ‘is very much in sight’.33 He also saw Biafra as one
of the modern African states and accordingly launched the Principles
of the Revolution, which dealt with issues such as social justice, right
to work, sovereignty, brotherly love, patriotism, self-reliance, and trans-
parency and accountability in public service. These political and emo-
tional issues were clearly intended to reenergize the people and rekindle
their support for the leader and for the war – a war that caused, and was
still causing at that time, unimaginable miseries and prolonged refugee-
ism, only the first in a long series of hardships in the lives of the people
of Biafra. The Declaration should have ended without the enunciation
of the Principles of Socialism that were, obviously, not needed in Biafra-
land – especially at that stage of the cruel war.
The General was fully aware of the hopelessness of the war situation
at that time. In his 1969 entry in the Timeline: Key Dates in the Life of
Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, he clearly sums up the situation as
follows:
33
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Hunger, starvation, malnutrition and accompanying diseases take their

tolls on people inside the war-ravaged and ever diminishing Biafran terri-
tory. The initial spirit of determination and patriotism that sustained Biafra
up to this point, despite obvious difficulties, soon gives way to cynicism,
fatalism, defeatism, and hopelessness. And thus it becomes very obvious to
most Biafrans that their defeat and surrender are inevitable. 34
The Ahiara Declaration with its eloquence and resounding intellec-
tual philosophy was essentially a prescription for a condition that did
not exist. It was like dressing up in one’s best fashion clothes with no
place to go. Probably, as a result of the Committee’s awareness of the
fact that Biafra was the land of capitalism and the people were natural
capitalists, its members paid no attention to a pre-adoption appraisal
of the successes and failures of the Arusha Declaration before adopt-
ing it as their model. They also failed to note that all socialist-based
development formulations in Africa had failed since the independence
of Egypt. Had the Committee inquired, they would have been advised
that their model, the Arusha Declaration, was failing woefully by June
1969; indeed, it was withdrawn three months after the launching of
the Ahiara formulations. If the model was failing in a society that was
relatively a good fit for a socialist program and that had the support of a
one-party government, how would the Ahiara Declaration succeed in a
society with no existing party-support structure and a community that
was avidly capitalistic? It is clearly obvious that the Ahiara Declaration
was essentially a politically contrived intellectual exercise. Ideologically,
it was not likely to win friends from the West, certainly not the United
States. Britain and the Soviet Union supported Nigeria, and the French
were helpless with the oil areas under the Nigerian control. At home, the
Declaration caused Biafra the loss of the rich, and the business owners.
The Declaration stated: ‘Biafran society is traditionally egalitarian.
The possibility for social mobility is always present in our society.’35
Perhaps including egalitarianism in the formulation was merely diver-
sionary. The whole Declaration had, of course, one legitimate objective:
appealing to Biafrans for their continued support of the war effort. All
other declared subjects mentioned in the formulations were for political
and public relations objectives.
Personal hubris, intellect over self-assurance, and belief in one’s own
destiny of ‘born to rule’ can be dangerous and do not promote good gov-
ernance, and have usually resulted in negative interpersonal dynamics,
ethnic animosities, and disaffection. The danger is that people in leader-
ship positions who hold such attitudes usually want things their own
way in every decision and they run roughshod over the truth and facts
of events and circumstances. In the post-war period, some well-known
34
Ibid., xvii.
35
Ibid., 301.
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and respected Biafrans continued in this manner. In their publications,

for example, their names and those of some of their friends and relatives
were falsely included as members of the Biafran delegation to the Kam-
pala Peace Talks in Uganda. If this aberrant behavior was not reprehen-
sible enough, that is, the corruption of historical evidence, the names
of some of those who were the actual participants, particularly those
representing Biafran minority groups, were also excluded.
As the former Biafran Special Representative for East and Central
Africa which included Uganda, I can personally testify that I partici-
pated actively in the Talks and was obviously involved in coordinating
contacts between the Biafran delegation on one side and the Ugandan
Government, Commonwealth Secretariat staff, and conference organiz-
ers on the other. The only members of the Biafran delegation at the talks
in Kampala were Sir Louis Mbanefo, Chief Justice of Biafra, leader of the
delegation; C.C. Mojekwu, Commissioner at Large and Special Adviser;
Professor Eyo Bassey Ndem (Efik), Commissioner for Agriculture; Igna-
tius I. Kogbara (Ogoni-Rivers), Biafra Special Representative, London;
and Austine S. O. Okwu, Biafra Special Representative, East and Cen-
tral Africa.36 The listing in Africa Contemporary Record, while correctly
noting my official title – Special Representative East and Central Africa
– erroneously listed my name as B.C. Okwu, the eminent politician from
Achi, Awgu Division and famous Minister of Information in the former
Eastern Region of Nigeria during the Nigerian First Republic.
Authenticity and honesty in intellectual inquiry would suggest that
the public should have the true facts. The unfortunate presumption of
the absolute ownership of truth, for any reasons whatsoever includ-
ing acknowledged fame and renown, can, like absolute power, corrupt
absolutely. Admittedly, one can tell one’s truth in one’s own way but
one, surely, cannot tell lies with brazen impunity and expect to be left
uncorrected. In his wise opinion in this regard, the famous Mahatma
Gandhi suggested that what one believes, what one thinks, what one
does, and what one says must all be in alliance and not at variance. In
the public affairs of Nigeria, in my opinion, the lack of adherence to
Gandhi philosophy is one of the major causes of what is wrong in the
country.
The Ahiara Declaration was the work of Biafran intellectual giants.
Its ideals were ambitious, eloquent, and lofty, if perhaps a little too
zealous for its time and place. As a political and controversial trea-
tise, it served the General well. It helped him transform sullen, grave,
and heart-rending moments into passionate inspiration and hopeful
reawakening. No-one likes to be the bearer of bad war news, especially
generals, who were expected to win wars and lead people to victory
36
Colin Legum and John Drysdale, eds, Africa Contemporary Record: Annual Survey and Docu-
ments 1969–1970 (Exeter: African Research, 1970), 554; Okwu, In Truth for Justice and
Honor, 216–219.
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– not talk of battles lost and entertain the idea of possible defeat. Such
was the case with Biafra’s proud and self-confident General Chukwue-
meka Odumegwu Ojukwu.
Because of the war situation, the Declaration was prepared in haste
and without prerequisite investigations. Ahiara’s political objectives
and focus were principally to reenergize the people and to redirect
them from despair to hope for a new Biafra of new opportunities and
new values. Tactically, the formulations should have been limited to
those crucial emotional solicitudes of the time. The extension of the
prescriptions of the manifesto to socialist and egalitarian ideological
pronouncements diminished in many ways the brilliant and original
thinking of the Biafran leadership. Clearly, the Declaration won Biafra
no friends abroad and lost it friends at home. Predictably, Biafra lost
the war six months later. Its overall social and cultural transformative
impact and the public reception of and the reaction to it in a civilian
and non-military culture and environment cannot be determined since
its implementation was aborted by events beyond Biafra’s control.
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000 Fal book B.indb 108 13/06/2016 22:06
Part II
CRITICAL DEBATES
ON THE NIGERIAN CRISIS
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000 Fal book B.indb 110 13/06/2016 22:06
6 Beyond the Blame Game:
Theorizing the Nigeria-Biafra War
Bukola A. Oyeniyi
Introduction
On May 30, 1967, when Colonel Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the head
of the Eastern Region, declared the independent Republic of Biafra,
no-one knew that the resultant war would lead to the death, mostly by
starvation, of about a million people. The war, which almost tore Nige-
ria apart, began effectively in July, almost seven years after Nigeria’s
independence from Great Britain. The Biafran forces recorded early suc-
cesses, but Nigerian troops immediately pushed them back. No sooner
had the war started than photographs of starving children with huge
distended stomachs adorned television screens and the front pages of
newspapers.
As studies have shown, the circumstances that led to the war could
not be divorced from the spate of violence that erupted between Hausa
and Igbos in Northern Nigeria following the first military coup of 1966.
The violence prompted thousands of Igbos to flee Northern Nigeria.
Nigeria’s military government failed to guarantee security for them
and, on May 30, 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, with
the active support of other non-Igbo representatives in Eastern Nigeria,
declared secession and established the Republic of Biafra.
All diplomatic efforts to reunite the Eastern Region with the rest of
Nigeria failed, and in July 1967 war broke out between Nigeria and
Biafra. As already noted, an initial success of Ojukwu’s ragtag forces
was promptly pushed back, and the forces eventually capitulated under
superior military strength of the Nigerian state. On January 11, 1970,
the Nigerian forces captured the provincial capital of Owerri, one of the
last Biafran strongholds. Ojukwu, the leader of the insurgents, fled to
neighboring Ivory Coast. Four days later, Biafra surrendered and the
war ended. The civil war not only came close to tearing Nigeria apart
but also provoked passions in different parts of the world, most espe-
cially the United States of America and Britain.
In addition to about 30,000 Igbos who were killed in Northern
Nigeria before the war, more than 1 million other Igbos died in the war.
About another 1 million were either internally displaced within Eastern
111
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112 Bukola A. Oyeniyi
Nigeria or became refugees in neighboring countries. Most of the war-

dead were civilians, with a large number being women and children.
Over 30 years after the war, the ghost of Biafra still haunts Nigeria,
as the Igbos continue to claim marginalization and humiliation from
the war. Additionally, wounded veterans are daily seen on wheelchairs
alongside main roads in Enugu, begging for alms. Many of the Igbos
also believed that their inability to rule Nigeria since the war resulted
from other Nigerians’ distrust of them.
The highpoint of most discussions on the war revolves around
the role played by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, then Minister of Finance
and second-in-command to the Head of State. More recently, Chinua
Achebe blamed the death of thousands of Igbos during the war, espe-
cially children, on Awolowo. He claimed that Awolowo orchestrated a
food blockade that led to starvation and multiple deaths. The eventual
loss of the war was also blamed on Yoruba people’s refusal to join the
Igbos in seceding from Nigeria.
These views, which seemingly resonate with a majority of Igbo,
have been heavily criticized as unrealistic and untrue. Odia Ofeimun,
for instance, argued that instead of the food blockade and the so-called
Yoruba sabotage, Ojukwu indeed led the Igbos into a war that neither
he nor his people were prepared for.1 More appropriately, Ofeimun, like
many other Nigerians, blamed Ojukwu for unwittingly leading the Igbo
nation into an avoidable war. In his defense, Ojukwu noted:
At 33 I reacted as a brilliant 33 year old. At 66, it is my hope that if I had
to face this I should also confront it as a brilliant 66 year old. Responsibility
for what went on – how could I feel responsible in a situation in which I put
myself out and saved the people from genocide? No, I don’t feel responsible
at all. I did the best I could.2
On the food blockade, Awolowo revealed in a radio and television
interview, that when he visited Igboland during the war:
I saw the kwashiorkor victims. If you see a kwashiorkor victim you’ll never
like war to be waged. Terrible sight, in Enugu, in Port Harcourt, not many
in Calabar, but mainly in Enugu and Port Harcourt. Then I enquired what
happened to the food we are sending to the civilians. We were sending food
through the Red Cross, and CARITAS to them, but what happened was that
the vehicles carrying the food were always ambushed by the soldiers. That’s
what I discovered, and the food would then be taken to the soldiers to feed
them, and so they were able to continue to fight. And I said that was a very
1
Odia Ofeimun, ‘Awolowo and the Forgotten Documents of the Civil War’, Vanguard
newspaper (Lagos), October 28, 2012, www.vanguardngr.com/2012/10/the-
achebe-controversy-awolowo-and-the-forgotten-documents-of-the-civil-war-by-odia-
ofeimun/#sthash.gNleOOtj.dpuf (accessed November 6, 2014).
2
Barnaby Philips, ‘Biafra: Thirty Years On’, BBC News, January 13, 2000, http://news.
bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/596712.stm (accessed November 6, 2014).
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Beyond the Blame-Game: Theorizing the War 113
dangerous policy, we didn’t intend the food for soldiers. But who will go
behind the line to stop the soldiers from ambushing the vehicles that were
carrying the food? And as long as soldiers were fed, the war will continue,
and who’ll continue to suffer? And those who didn’t go to the place to see
things as I did, you remember that all the big guns, all the soldiers in the
Biafran army looked all well fed after the war, its [sic] only the mass of the
people that suffered kwashiorkor.
You won’t hear of a single lawyer, a single doctor, a single architect, who
suffered from kwashiorkor? None of their children either, so they waylaid
the foods, they ambushed the vehicles and took the foods to their friends and
to their collaborators and to their children and the masses were suffering. So
I decided to stop sending the food there. In the process the civilians would
suffer, but the soldiers will suffer most.3
The tendency to trade blame, which began since the end of the war,
continues unabated to date. This chapter, far from apportioning either
responsibility or blame, seeks to know whether the civil war was justifi-
able or not, especially under the circumstance. The war, as many have
pointed out, is unjustifiable either for the government or for the Biafrans.
If, within a larger construct, civil wars are unjustifiable for government
and rebels, why then was Nigerian civil war inevitable? Given the cir-
cumstances of its occurrence, was the secession or the resultant civil
war avoidable?
As extant literature has shown, ‘freedom fighters’ are most likely to
argue that certain conditions make civil wars inevitable, while govern-
ments consider and treat civil wars as avoidable challenges to sover-
eignty of states. Hence, Ojukwu and his associates believed that the civil
war was inevitable while the military government considered the civil
war as unnecessary and Ojukwu and his cohorts as enemies and rebels
that must be destroyed at any cost. Given the massacre of the Igbos in
Northern Nigeria and the inability of the military government to control
the situation, it would be irresponsible of Ojukwu and other Igbo lead-
ers to acquiesce in the matter. For Ojukwu’s camp, objective grievances
existed that justified the civil war. For the government, Ojukwu was
misguided by his personal ambition. Given these diametrically opposed
views, how best do we understand and interpret the Biafran War? In
this chapter, I impose three analytical frameworks – the rational choice
theory, economic theory of conflict, and social conflict theory – on the
civil war in order to examine its justifiability and desirability. While not
pretending to provide a one-size-fits-all explanation to the civil war, the
chapter uses official documents, participants’ testimonies, and second-
ary literature to weave a narrative to understand the Nigerian Civil War
as a rational and conscious choice amidst many alternatives.
3
Obafemi Awolowo quoted in ‘Response of Late Pa Awolowo to the New Book of Chinua
Achebe There Was a Country’, CNN iReport, October 7, 2012, http://ireport.cnn.com/
docs/DOC-854578 (accessed November 6, 2014).
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Structurally, the chapter is divided into five sections, with this

introduction, which sets out the basic objectives of the study, as the
first section. The second section briefly examines the three analytical
frameworks and their relationship to the civil war. As the third section
shows, by applying basic insights from the three analytical tools to our
understanding of the civil war, the civil war emerges as a rational and
conscious choice aimed at attaining a set of objectives that, for both
the Nigerian Government and the Biafrans, explains the use of civil war
over other alternative actions in resolving the conflict.
The fourth section isolates the various issues in the civil war. On the
one hand, the Marxist-based social conflict theory locates the civil war
within the ambit of relations between social classes in stratified societies
where all instruments of the state are geared up toward class domina-
tion. The economic theory of conflict, on the other hand, locates the
civil war within the ambit of atypical opportunity for profit, which, as
the theory claims, impelled the Biafrans to take up arms against the
Nigerian state. From this point of view, Ojukwu and his cohorts were
not in any way different from bandits and pirates. As inferential motives
rather than stated claims point in the direction of the atypical opportu-
nity that the civil war availed them to profit rather than the rhetoric of
insecurity within the Nigerian state. The rational choice theory, which
is premised on the fact that the Biafrans balanced costs against benefits
in order to arrive at the use of civil war among other alternatives as the
best means to maximize their objectives, sees Ojukwu and the Biafrans
as profit seekers. Overall, the chapter asserts that conditions that make
the war justifiable existed in Nigeria prior to the civil war and, based on
insights from the three models, the fourth section argues that the use of
civil war as a tool in Biafra-Nigeria relations is a rational and conscious
choice that must not be divorced from its attendant responsibilities. As
the fifth section submits, the use of analytical frameworks in organizing
and explaining the civil war helps in isolating basic facts from misgiv-
ings that may be premised on ethnic loyalty.
The Political Economy of Civil War: Seeing Through Theories

This section examines three conflict theories as analytical frameworks
through which conflicts and wars can be explained and understood.
These are the rational choice theory, economic theory of conflict, and
social conflict theory. The choice of these theories among many others
stems, in part, from the fact that they allow an examination of conflict
and wars from both the individual and group levels.
To begin with, rational choice theory, pioneered by George Homans,4
is a sociological theory, which argues that gains play important roles in
4
George Homans, Social Behaviour: Its Elementary Forms (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1961).
000 Fal book B.indb 114 13/06/2016 22:06

human behavior. In other words, the theory argues that the possibil-
ity of making a profit underlies all human actions – seen as conscious,
rational, and calculated towards making gains. Although the theory
has become increasingly mathematical in recent times, rational choice
theory is anchored on individuals’ and groups’ interests, wants, goals,
and desires. As it is impossible to attain all human wants and desires,
individuals and/or groups, therefore, make choices based both on their
goals and the means through which these goals are best attained. In
order to do this, individuals and groups must consider results of differ-
ent lines of action and decide on which would deliver the best results.
The products of the conscious and rational considerations are actions
and measures that are best capable of delivering the best result and
yield maximum satisfaction.
Intrinsic to rational choice theory is the belief that all actions and
reactions are fundamentally rational; hence, the theory gives no room
for any other kinds of actions or reactions except the purely rational
and calculated ones. From the smallest changes to complex social phe-
nomena, rational choice theory sees social change as a sum of individu-
als’ (or group’s) actions and interactions. Therefore, we can understand
complex social changes by understanding the behavior of individuals
that make up a group.
Rational choice theory’s obtuse fascination with individuals’ actions
and reactions has been criticized as deficient in explaining collective
actions and reactions. Put differently, if individuals’ actions are based
on calculations of personal profit, what then explains social norms that
impel selfless, philanthropic services? To critics, rational choice theory
is a reductionism which is unduly individualistic and fails to account for
larger social structures.5
Notwithstanding these and other criticisms, rational choice theory
is the cornerstone of game, social choice, and decision theories. As
Oppenheimer puts it, rational choice theory is a normative and empiri-
cal theory of individual behavior.6 It is also a formalized logical structure
which ties individual choices to preferences while underscoring choices
as teleological, if not purposeful, behavior. As a normative theory, it sets
parameters on how individuals ought to behave, especially in according
to prescribed values. On the whole, it explains individuals’ choices as
dependent on preferences, with causal linkages to normative presump-
tions and implications.
Although criticized as a form of reductionism, rational choice theory
is built on a foundational presumption that explains individual behavior
5
Gary Browning, Abigail Halcli, and Frank Webster, eds, Understanding Contemporary Soci-
ety: Theories of the Present (London: Sage, 2000).
6
Joe Oppenheimer, Principles of Politics: A Rational Choice Theory Guide to Politics and Social
Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15.
000 Fal book B.indb 115 13/06/2016 22:06

as a key to understanding institutions and group behavior.7 Whether

individually or in groups, actions and reactions are believed to be prod-
ucts of preferences made in ‘pairwise comparisons’. These preferences
are believed to be complete, that is, derived from objective considera-
tion of all alternatives. Individuals and groups are capable of judging
whether one item is better than another or whether two alternatives
are equally good. Individuals or groups reach conclusions that relate to
a certain end or gain. Understood in this way, actions and reactions are
scalable variables that can be ranked or ordered according to their abil-
ity to produce the desired ends. In this way, individuals and groups are
presumed to always choose their most preferred alternatives. Therefore,
individuals’ or group’s behavior, actions, and inactions are conscious
choices. Irrespective of its flaws, rational choice theory helps explain
social change, cooperation, and behavior, the logic of collective action,
and the behavior of collective actors, and it serves as a yardstick for
measuring political performance.8
The central argument of the economic theory of conflict, also known
as the greed-grievance theory of conflict, is that greed, rather than
grievance, is the underlying factor underwriting conflict and wars.
Greed describes all gains accruable to individuals; grievance includes
phenomena such as deprivation, marginalization, inequalities, and the
like. Proceeding from these conceptualizations, the economic theory of
conflict explains conflict and wars as resulting from the atypical oppor-
tunity these events afford individuals to realize and make profit. As Paul
Collier, Anke Hoeffler, Nicholas Sambanis, and others argue, greed and
grievance are not competitive explanations for conflict and wars, but
are often alternative interpretations of the same phenomenon.9
The pivot upon which the theory rests is the gap between motives
and objectives. The theory argues that by examining motives – not the
stated but the inferential motives of individuals and groups – conflict
and wars become a kind of industry that generates profits. This profit
motive consigns agitators to the same pit as looters, bandits, and pirates.
Seen in this way, conflict and wars are not explained by motives but by
the atypical circumstances that generate profitable opportunities. Thus,
7
Geoffrey M. Hodgson, ‘On the Limits of Rational Choice Theory’, Economic Thought, 1
(2012), 94–108. See also Alfred S. Eichner, ed., Why Economics is Not Yet a Science (Ar-
monk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1983); Corry Azzi and Ronald Ehrenberg, ‘Household Allocation
of Time and Church Attendance’, Journal of Political Economy, 83:1 (1975), 27–56.
8
Duncan Black, The Theory Of Committees and Elections (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1958); Gary E. Bolton and Axel Ockenfels, ‘ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity,
and Competition’, American Economic Review, 90:1 (2000),166–93; David Braybrooke,
Meeting Needs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Gillian Brock, ‘Needs
and Global Justice’. in Soran Reader, ed., The Philosophy of Need (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 51–72.
9
Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis, eds, Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis
(Washington DC: World Bank, 2005).
000 Fal book B.indb 116 13/06/2016 22:06

rebellion assumes different motivations (gains) and different explana-

tions (atypical opportunities).
While not discounting the place of grievance in conflict and wars,
the theory provides that, for a given level of grievance, it is the atypi-
cal opportunity that conflict and wars afford rebels that motivates the
onset or outbreak of conflict – not the objectives trumpeted by rebels.
In other words, conflict and wars are driven by greed, understood nar-
rowly as the desire for profit, and not grievances, as rebels are wont to
claim. This explanation rejects the general argument that conflict and
wars occur when grievances are sufficiently acute so that people want
to engage in violent protest in order to redress the imbalance.
Owing to this, greed is believed to be dependent on preferences,
opportunities, and perceptions. While preferences deal with conscious
choices made by rebels, opportunities relate to chances that become
available as a result of those choices. Perception, as a variable, hinges
on the fact that rebels may wrongly perceive not only their grievances
but also the opportunities for atypical profit that accompany them.
Hence, when grievances and/or opportunities are wrongly perceived,
conflict and wars bring either beneficial or non-beneficial outcomes to
the rebels.
Where rebels wrongly perceive grievances and opportunities, con-
flict and wars often become possible prospects for either a beneficial
outcome, especially if the rebels succeed, or a non-beneficial outcome.
Whether right or wrong, it must be noted that perception could create
genuine grievances. Irrespective of this, where grievances are exagger-
ated, opportunities for rebellion are misperceived, or stated motives do
not explain the incidence of conflict and wars, grievances are based on
faulty assumptions.
The import of the above is that conflict and wars may be driven by
exaggerated or misperceived grievances; hence, atypical opportunity
for gain exists to drive conflict and wars. Where this is the case, conflict
and wars would be premised on misperceived agendas. In the light of
this, the economic model concludes that objective grievances may exist,
but it is the beneficial outcomes and not individuals’ or groups’ stated
objectives, mostly presented as grievances, that explain conflict and
wars.
From the forgoing, it could be argued that the economic model pro-
vides a common explanation for conflict and wars: opportunity and
viability. Both, as the theory states, may be misperceived or exagger-
ated. Whichever of the two, stated objectives alone would not explain
conflict and wars, even though they are assumed to be well grounded
in objective circumstances, such as inequality, marginalization, oppres-
sion, and the like.
As Collier and Hoeffler noted, conflict and wars may result from
factors such as the exploitation of natural resources, donations from
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diasporas, and subventions from hostile governments.10 Where natu-

ral resources exist, access and control might lead to conflict and wars.
Where a group derives support from another one in the diaspora, con-
flict and wars might be plausible in much the same way as when an
individual or group derives subventions from a hostile government. Put
differently, for a certain level of grievance, these different factors pro-
vide atypical opportunities for rebel groups to deploy violence and wars
in their engagements with either the state or with other groups.
As the theory notes, ethnic or religious hatred, political repression
and exclusion, and economic inequality provide adequate grounds for
objective grievances. More often than not, ethnic and religious griev-
ances are measurable; evidence abounds in different societies across
the world where conditions that could stimulate ethno-religious griev-
ances are gradually becoming impossible. For instance, to carry out
ethnically motivated violence against another ethnic group, one ethnic
group must be big enough to dominate the other, as in Rwanda, where
the Hutu ethnic group was larger than both the Tutsi and Twa ethnic
groups. The Hutu were able to orchestrate genocide against the Tutsis.
The same explanation suffices for religious hatred. Although hatred is
immeasurable, it could occur in multi-ethnic or multi-religious socie-
ties. However, a group – religious or ethnic – must be big enough to
dominate other groups for ethnic and religious hatred to snowball into
conflict and wars. From this consideration, the theory posits that ethno-
religious wars could only occur where there are two ethno-religious
groups. Therefore where there is ethno-religious diversity, heterogene-
ity, in itself, undermines ethno-religious hatred.
Ethno-religious diversity, therefore, is considered a factor in ensuring
socio-religious cohesion rather than causing ethno-religious hatred.
In other words, the more heterogeneous a society, the more difficulty
is associated with planning, coordinating, and executing religious and
ethnic conflicts. This position completely negates the general view that
multi-ethnic and multi-religious communities are bedrocks of ethno-
religious conflicts. While the model recognizes the possibility of political
exclusion and alienation, it claims that the more democratic a society is,
the more difficult it becomes to plan ethno-religious conflict and wars.
Poverty, however, could cause economic exclusion and rebellion.
However, it works in two ways. On the one hand, the poor may rebel to
induce redistribution. The rich, on the other hand, could mount seces-
sion in order to prevent wealth redistribution.
Unlike both the rational choice and economic theories of conflict,
which consider conflict and wars as rational conscious choices, social
conflict theory adopts a systemic view to conflict and wars. Derived
from the works of the German philosopher Karl Marx, social conflict
10
Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, ‘Greed and Grievances in Civil War’, Oxford Economic
Papers 56 (2004), 567–570.
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theory views society as a space where structural inequalities generate

conflict and social change. As Marx argued, all stratified societies are
composed of two major social groups: a ruling class and a subject class.
In pre-modern society, this involved the aristocratic landowners and
laborers who work for them. The equivalents in today’s world include
company/industry owners and workers, respectively. As Marx noted,
the ruling class derives power from its ownership and control of pro-
duction; hence, it seeks to maximize profit by exploiting and oppressing
the subject class. In pre-modern societies, as in modern ones, landown-
ers (including company owners) require laborers (or staff) to work for
longer hours and receive lesser wages while laborers desire to work
fewer hours and receive higher wages. Given the above, social conflict
theorists argue that one can only attain its objective by eliminating the
objective of the other. Hence, the theory argues, inequality pervades all
social relationships and that all conflicts are about power and exploita-
tion. As Padgitt and Padgitt succinctly put it, social conflict is a result of
the strong and the rich exploiting the poor and the weak.11
Moreover, societal institutions like the legal and political systems,
including the police and the army, are considered instruments the
ruling class can use to dominate the weaker class. Hence, conflict and
wars result as the weaker seeks to throw away the domination of the
stronger. This view, which was later expressed in purely economic terms
by Max Weber, locates conflict and wars within the ambit of the differ-
ing amounts of material and non-material resources available to the
different social classes within a society.
Consequent upon this consideration, social conflict theorists argue
that in capitalist society, individuals and groups work in the disservice
of other individuals and groups. In addition, social conflict theorists
note that aiding social inequality in human society are factors of race,
sex, class, age, education, and the like. As Marx puts it, the solution to
this problem is a workers’ revolution that would break the political and
economic domination of the capitalist class and reorganize the society
along the lines of collective ownership and mass democratic control. In
contemporary society, social conflict theorists translate this solution to
mean finding a balance and building cooperation.
What are the basic characteristics of these theories, and do they
offer any different view(s) to conflict and wars? With reference to the
Biafran War, how do they contribute to knowledge, especially beyond
the blame game that pervades previous studies? In subsequent sec-
tions, this chapter finds answers to these and other questions while at
the same time examining how best to understand the war in the lights
of these theories. Before examining what these analytical frameworks
11
S.C. and J.S. Padgitt, ‘Cognitive Structure of Sexual Harassment’, in Journal of College Stu-
dent Personnel, 27:1 (1986), 34–39.
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contribute to our understanding of the civil war, the next section offers
a brief account of the war.
The Nigeria-Biafra War: A Brief Review

The story of the Biafran War has been told and retold so that an exten-
sive review of the literature here is unnecessary; however, a brief review
is offered. Reports from government sources are combined with reports
from Biafra’s main actors to weave a concise narrative that examines
the main issues in the war.
The general argument in most literature on Nigeria’s nationhood is
that the nation was a product of coercive integration of varied and het-
erogeneous cultural groups who, prior to the amalgamation of 1914,
had lived as separate and independent groups. In order to administer
the different areas, British administrators fostered a divide-and-rule
system, pitching the North against the South; two distinctly different
systems evolved in the two areas. In the South, Christianity and West-
ern education (and, invariably, Western culture) spread while the North
was insulated against both. The division facilitated administrative con-
venience as the North, unlike the South, was centrally administered
before the colonial intrusion. Divide and rule continued even after inde-
pendence in 1960.
At independence, Dr Nnamid Azikiwe of the National Council of
Nigerian Citizens refused to team up with Chief Obafemi Awolowo of
the Action Group (AG), both from the South, but preferred the Northern
People’s Congress (NPC) from the North. It can be argued that Azikiwe’s
decision to align with the conservative NPC, rather than Awolowo and
his fellow AG progressives, sowed the seed of discord and disunity in
Nigeria. As Nnoli puts it, the new government immediately embarked
on the use of the political machinery to pursue their class interests of
amazing wealth and privileges rather than embarking on policies and
programs that would foster prosperity, unity, and progress.12 Corrup-
tion and inept leadership, favoritism and nepotism, ethnicity and abuse
of office, among other things, characterized the independence govern-
ment. To perpetuate itself in office, especially in the face of no meaning-
ful development in the country, government resorted to vote rigging and
political violence. It also took advantage of internal crisis within the
AG to break the party, establish another political party – the Nigerian
National Democratic Party (NNDP) which allied with the ruling NPC
– and declare a state of emergency in Western Region. At the height of
its powers, the government sentenced Chief Awolowo, the leader of the
AG, to ten years jail term on treason charges.
12
Okwudiba Nnoli, Ethnic Politics in Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1980).
000 Fal book B.indb 120 13/06/2016 22:06

In further efforts at perpetuating itself, the 1965 general elections

were massively rigged. The situation in the Western Region was particu-
larly intriguing, as electoral officers who refused to support the ruling
party were either killed or kidnapped. In many places, polling units were
deserted by electoral officials in order to avoid receiving election results
from AG party officials, appointments of impartial electoral officials were
revoked, and certificates of return that were issued earlier to candidates
were revoked and declared null and void. In many such areas, NPC/
NNDP candidates were declared unopposed winners. Sections of the
electoral laws that allowed aggrieved parties to institute legal measures
were revoked. At the height of this electoral travesty, many AG candidates
who declared for the NPC/NNDP coalition were declared winners of elec-
tions and their erstwhile opponents were quietly dropped. Consequently,
unprecedented violence resulted and, as Esko Toyo noted, the general
elections whipped up a national crisis of major proportion that brought
the nation to its knees, as the coalition of the NPC and NNDP sought to
defeat Awolowo and his AG by all means.13
As Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogu, the leader of the 1966 coup,
noted, the coup became necessary not only because the political lead-
ership failed outright in uniting the new nation but also because they
were leading the nation on the path of a civil war. In addition, the coup
aimed to end regionalism and ethnic loyalties, which promoted ethnic
consciousness and sectional interests, in order to pave the way for
national reconstruction.14
Although the coup failed, the rebels killed more Hausa and Yoruba
political leaders than they did Igbo political leaders. This undisputable
fact colored the coup as an Igbo coup. Although Major-General Aguiyi-
Ironsi, an Igbo officer, was not part of the coup plotters, he nevertheless
rallied support of the remaining part of the army and, as Head of State,
reinstalled governance. His initial actions were unpopular across the
country. He not only remained silent about the rebels, but also posted
military governors to the four regions. In addition, he began to canvass
for support and loyalty of the northern leaders, especially given their
losses in the botched coup plot.
These moves, regardless of their intentions, were unpopular in north-
ern political and military circles. The last straw that broke the camel’s
back was the Unification Decree. Despite the fact that the decree aimed
at unifying the civil service, the people perceived it as Igbo domination,
and violence broke out, especially in the North, between Hausas and
the Igbos. More than 300,000 Igbos were killed.
While both the coup and mass killings were and still are contempt-
ible, Ironsi refused to try the rebels though he did order investigations
into the mass killings of Igbo in Northern Nigeria. The situation in the
13
Esko Toyo, West African Pilot (Lagos), January 1, 1965, 4.
14
Joe Igbokwe, Igbos, 25 Years after Biafra (Lagos: Advent Communications, 1995), 12–13.
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North grew out of control, and defenseless Igbo people fled in thousands
to the East. Ironsi’s inquiry was never held, and he was killed in a bloody
coup orchestrated by Hausa officers on July 29, 1966. Ironsi and his
host, the Governor of Western Region, Lt Colonel Benjamin Adekunle
Fajuyi, were murdered in Ibadan. Following Ironsi’s murder, hundreds
of other Igbo officers were savagely murdered in different military for-
mations in Northern Nigeria.
Lt Colonel Yakubu Gowon, the new Head of State, immediately
called for a constitutional conference in order to rein in the situation,
foster unity, and restore the nation. He was, however, unable to control
the passion of northerners as more and more Igbo officers and civil-
ians were attacked. Colonel Ojukwu, the Military Governor of Eastern
Region who voiced his refusal to recognize Gowon as the new Head of
State, unequivocally declared on August 27, 1966: ‘there is in fact no
genuine basis for true unity’.15 He subsequently ordered Igbo repre-
sentatives at the national conference to withdraw. Ojukwu made it clear
that given the killing of Igbos in Northern Nigeria and the inability of
the government to bring the situation under control, the Igbos would
secede from Nigeria.
International efforts, especially by the Organization of African Unity
(now the African Union) and meetings in Kampala, Adis Ababa, and
Aburi, Ghana, failed to bring about peace between Ojukwu and Gowon.
Gowon’s refusal to abide by the agreement reached at Aburi, especially
the payment of debt owed to the Eastern Region by the Federal Gov-
ernment and the suspension of Decree No. 8, also known as the Con-
stitution Suspension and Modification Decree of 1967, was premised
on the fact that majority of the agreements would enhance Ojukwu’s
war efforts. It was clear that Ojukwu was already preparing for a war.
As later events would reveal, Gowon was also advised by Great Britain
and the United States of America against abiding by the Aburi Accord,
as Ojukwu was receiving enormous military and other supports from
France, Ivory Coast, and other nations.16
Rather than following through on the decisions reached at Aburi,
Gowon dissolved the regions and announced the creation of 12 states
from the ashes of the erstwhile four regions. In turn, Ojukwu announced
the secession of the Eastern Region from Nigeria and announced the
birth of the independent state of Biafra.
As Karl von Clausewitz noted, ‘war is not merely of itself a politi-
cal act, but serves as a real political instrument for the achievement
of certain ends’.17 For Ojukwu and Gowon, the dissolution of regions
15
A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Source Book, 1966–1970
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 167.
16
Ibid., 197.
17
Clausewitz as cited in Ivan A. Shearer, Starke’s International Law, 11th Edition (London:
Butterworths, 1994), 480.
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and creation of states, as well as the civil war, were undoubtedly means
to different ends. For Gowon, the creation of states would undermine
Ojukwu’s power and the new leaders of the newly created states would
cling to their new powers. Ojukwu was unequivocal when he declared,
‘what you are seeing now is the end of a long journey. It began in the far
north of Nigeria, and moved steadily southwards as we were driven out
of place after place.’18 While for Ojukwu, the civil war was ‘the final act
of sacrifice that easterners would be called upon to make in the interest
of Nigerian unity’,19 for Gowon, it was a mere police action intended to
flush out a rebel group. After an initial success, the Federal forces suc-
cessfully crushed the secession, Ojukwu fled, and the war ended after
some 30 months of action.
Important works have come to light on the civil war, with a great
majority apportioning blame.20 One question that eludes most of the
literature is whether or not the civil war was avoidable. This chapter,
far removed from the blame-apportioning literature, seeks to show
how best to understand and explain the war. As demonstrated in the
next section, the three analytical frameworks discussed in the previ-
ous section could help in shedding more and useful insights into the
civil war, which go beyond the rhetoric of the various actors and their
sympathizers.
Smashing the Ceiling: A Theoretical Explanation of the Nigerian

Civil War
From the perspective of rational choice theory, the Nigerian Civil War
should be seen as a conscious, rational choice that was (i) adopted in the
midst of alternatives and (ii) calculated towards bringing its promot-
ers gains. Desire for these gains, rather than the rhetoric of actors and
sympathizers, underwrites the civil war. What are the alternatives to
war and what are the gains accruable to the promoters?
At both the individual and group levels, rational choice theory holds
that actions are based on interests, wants, goals, and desires. In other
words, actions target the attainment of individual or group desires.
Actions are, therefore, products of choices from among alterna-
tive courses of action, and individual or group action reflects what is
18
Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria, 197.
19
Ministry of Information, Republic of Biafra, The Case of Biafra (June 12, 1968), 13.
20
Notable examples include Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Bia-
fra (New York: Penguin, 2012); Alexander A. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the
Biafran War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 2000); Alfred Uzokwe, Surviving in Biafra: The
Story of the Nigerian Civil War – Over Two Million Died (Lagos: Writers Advantage, 2003);
Peter Baxter, Biafra: The Nigerian Civil War 1967–1970 (Ontario: Helion, 2014); Phillip
Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra: My Story (Lagos: Sungai, 2003); Frederick Forsyth, The Biafra
Story: The Making of an African Legend (New York: Pen and Sword, 2007); Frederick For-
syth, Emeka (Lagos: Spectrum, 1991).
000 Fal book B.indb 123 13/06/2016 22:06

considered the best course of action capable of delivering the best pos-
sible result. Given this, two issues have to be determined in relation to
the civil war. Firstly, what were the objectives of Ojukwu and the Igbo
people? Inexorably tied to this question is the need to ascertain where
there could be variance or congruence between a leader’s goal and a
group’s goal. One must also be careful not to conflate a leader’s goal
with a group’s goal. This is important, as it is common in politics and
history for a leader to impose his or her personality, will, and objectives
on a group in ways that make an individual’s goal the group’s goal. To
this end, what was Ojukwu’s objective? What was the Igbo objective?
Could one be conflated with the other? There is no point examining an
alternative situation: a situation whereby there is a variance between a
leader’s objective and group objectives. Usually, where this happens, the
leader loses all power to lead, a situation that was absent in the Nigerian
Civil War.
The second issue is as complex and nuanced as the first. On the
one hand, what alternative course of action was open to Ojukwu, as
an individual, a soldier, and as the leader of the Igbos in attaining his
objective? On the other hand, what alternative course of action was
open to the Igbos in attaining the group’s objective? Where there is a
synergy between a leader and a group objective, could the same alter-
native course of action attain the individual and group’s objectives?
Undoubtedly, these questions are complex and not easily answered.
While there are indications that Ojukwu encouraged atypical conflict
with the choice of Gowon as a Head of State after the coup that ousted
Aguiyi-Ironsi,21 there is little doubt that the persecution and death that
Hausa/Fulani meted out to Igbo people across Northern Nigeria before
the civil war reflected broader aims. Ojukwu’s refusal to recognize Gow-
on’s leadership shows an individualized goal, which could therefore
signify a personal objective. As for the Igbo, persecution and death led
to an exodus from Northern Nigeria to the Eastern Region, which cre-
ated serious management crises for the Ojukwu-led government. The
dislocation, insecurity, death, and destruction of the Igbos following the
first coup are indicative of an objective grievance.
As noted above, Ojukwu’s statement that the civil war was a culmi-
nation of multiple activities and an end of a long journey that started in
the far North of Nigeria and moved steadily southwards pointed to his
conflation of personal objective with the Igbo’s need for security of lives
and property following the crises in the North. An alternative reading of
this development is that Ojukwu’s objective resonated or coincided with
Igbos’ needs. This second reading amounts to a mere excuse: without
the crises and persecution of the Igbo in the North, it would have been
21
Toyin Falola and Ann Genova, Historical Dictionary of Nigeria (Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow
Press, 2009), xxxviii; see also Charles Hauss, Comparative Politics: Domestic Responses to
Global Challenges (Stamford, CT: Cengage, 2013), 401.
000 Fal book B.indb 124 13/06/2016 22:06

impossible for them to support any secessionist bid. In other words, the
perception that the first coup was an Igbo coup that culminated in the
second coup plot created an uncommon situation whereby a leader’s
objective coheres with that of his group; hence, it becomes difficult
to separate what was a personal issue from a group problem. In this
atypical situation, obedience and support for secession seem willingly
obtained whereas the objectives were at variance.
In relation to his personal objective, were there any alternative
courses of action open to Ojukwu other than war? In strict military
terms, he had two courses of action open to him. He could resign his
position or face a court-martial as his actions, in purely military terms,
amounted only to planning a coup, the punishment for which was
death. As a young military officer at the beginning of his career, resign-
ing might not be a feasible option for Ojukwu; hence, only secession
offers the kind of opportunity that many young and educated men of
the time desire.22
As far as the Igbo are concerned, was secession the only course of
action? Owing to the fact that the events following the crises in North-
ern Nigeria are far removed from us today, one could only surmise that
secession was not the only option and that there were other alterna-
tives. Contrary to Ojukwu’s sweeping remark that Igbo people were
persecuted from North to South, there is no record to support any claim
that Igbo people were persecuted in other parts of Nigeria before the
civil war except in Northern Nigeria. In fact, many Igbo traders fled to
Lagos and Ibadan, among other southwestern cities, and it was, indeed,
the secession that led to the flight of many Igbos from the Western
Region to Eastern Region.
From the above, it could be argued that two clear-cut alternatives
other than secession were open to the Igbo. The first was relocation to
other parts of Nigeria outside of the Eastern Region. The second was
relocation to the Eastern Region. Relocation to the Eastern Region was,
undoubtedly, a natural and instinctual reaction, which was borne out
of the human need for self-protection and self-preservation through
falling back on the familiar. Had Ojukwu not declared secession, a large
number of Igbo traders who fled homeward instinctually would still
have migrated elsewhere after the initial shock had worn off. In addi-
tion, Igbos who fled from the Western Region did so not because they
were persecuted but because of the newly created Biafran state. Lurk-
ing in between these points is the fact that, for the Igbos, alternatives
to flight to the Eastern Region and to civil war existed. It could also be
argued that the desire (or hope) for gains accruable from the Biafran
state served as an impetus for driving many Igbos from different parts
of Nigeria to the Eastern Region and not essentially persecution, which
22
Achebe, There Was a Country, 39–50.
000 Fal book B.indb 125 13/06/2016 22:06

was limited to Northern Nigeria. Gains, in any newly created state,

included new jobs, new political offices to be filled, and opportunities to
profit from government contracts.
To refine these arguments, one would need more precise statistics
about the Igbo population throughout Nigeria. For instance, if the
number of Igbos in Northern Nigeria was more than those living in
other areas of the country combined, then one could argue that the
large number of Igbos who fled did so because of persecution, which
was limited primarily to the North. Without population data to the con-
trary, it is safe to assume Igbos in Northern Nigeria fled for safety and
out of a need for security (of life and property); the majority of other
groups who fled from other parts of Nigeria may have fled with a mind
to gain.
Both Ojukwu and Igbo people had objective grievances and also
alternative courses of action to civil war. For Ojukwu, his objective
grievance was the choice of Gowon as Head of State. What alternative
course of action was open to Ojukwu? As noted earlier, he could either
resign or face being court-martialed. The former option appeared the
better choice for a 33-year-old young man at that point in his career. For
Ojukwu, therefore, only secession could deliver him from being sacked
and court-martialed, as he had made the initial mistake of voicing his
rejection to the choice of Gowon, which, under the circumstances,
amounted to mutiny.
For the Igbos in Northern Nigeria, the need for security was acute.
Unfortunately, first the military government of Aguiyi-Ironsi and later
the government of Gowon failed to protect the Igbos in Northern Nige-
ria. For other Igbos, the need for gain and the atypical opportunities cre-
ated by the persecution of Igbos in Northern Nigeria and by the creation
of an independent state drove their flight. For the first category of Igbos,
flight to other parts of Nigeria, including Eastern Nigeria, and secession
were alternative courses of action. The fact that the first coup led to the
death of political leaders in both Northern and Western Nigeria could
necessarily lead to a fear of persecution in the Western Region, but the
sheer fact that the Premier of the Western Region did not enjoy the pop-
ular support of his people played a major part in the way and manner
in which people in Western Region took the situation. There is no doubt
that if Awolowo was killed, the whole of Western Region would have
erupted into violence, and Igbos in their midst would also have been
persecuted. Can we therefore impute to the fleeing Igbos (from Western
Nigeria) the fear of a possible persecution over the death of the Premier?
While this is possible, it certainly played little or no part, especially given
the role Chief Awolowo and a number of key individuals from Western
Region played in avoiding the civil war.
Ojukwu had a large number of followers, the majority of whom
were Igbos. Non-Igbos in the Eastern Region government also sup-
ported secession. However, for analytical purposes, the followers and
000 Fal book B.indb 126 13/06/2016 22:06

supporters do not fit into neat categories. To begin with, there were three
categories of Igbos: Igbos in Eastern Region, persecuted and trauma-
tized Igbos from Northern Nigeria, and fleeing Igbos from other parts of
Nigeria. As noted above, the experiences and impetus for flight differed
remarkably for the last two categories. The first category also suffered
from the developments in the North and the flight of others from other
parts of Nigeria. As common in all complex humanitarian emergencies,
resources quickly ran low, leaving both the returnees and their hosts
in abject poverty. Faced with dwindling government support, land and
housing were desperately needed. Food resources quickly dried up.
Inadequate housing and increasing pressure on land resources
presented enormous administrative, social, and economic problems.
Ojukwu was not prepared for any of these and his government could
not provide any meaningful responses to these problems. As later
intelligence showed, rather than using the resources available to him,
Ojukwu diverted federal funding and other allocations to the region into
preparing for a war. In other words, rather than meeting the immediate
needs of the Igbo people, Ojukwu armed them for a war. The result was
hunger and death. In other words, food shortages, malnourishment,
and death had started killing people even before the war started.
The last category, the non-Igbo in the Eastern Region government
and House of Assembly who supported the secession, did so for gain.
What objective grievance could have impelled this last category to sup-
port secession and the resultant civil war? What alternative course of
action was open to this last category of supporters? First, they were
members of minority groups in the Eastern Region and joining forces
with Ojukwu rather than Nigeria would place them in a position of
power. Hence, the most logical alternative course of action was to join
the group where their interests would best be served than remaining
where their minority status was more pronounced. This factor played a
vital role in the ease with which these groups capitulated under Gowon.
In other words, they realized their gains before Ojukwu’s war started
and found it easier to change allegiance once it is clear that Ojukwu was
not going to win the war.
As far as the Federal Military Government is concerned, Aguiyi-
Ironsi, and later Gowon, failed to provide security for the Igbos in North-
ern Nigeria. After they fled home, Gowon’s government failed to ensure
that the immediate needs of the Igbos were provided. Aguiyi-Ironsi left
little doubt that he would not wield the big stick by court-martialing
those who plotted the coup. This cluelessness and political insensitivity
earned him death and created a situation whereby the first coup was
seen as an Igbo coup. Gowon, as an individual, may have had other
ambitions, but as the processes that brought him into power revealed,
he headed a group on a mission of revenge. The primary objective of
his government was not only to preserve the nation’s territory, but also
to avenge the death of the northern politicians. This objective blinded
000 Fal book B.indb 127 13/06/2016 22:06

his government to the serious humanitarian crises that resulted from

the large-scale movement of Igbos from Northern Nigeria to Eastern
Region.
From the above, it could be argued that from Aguiyi-Ironsi to Gowon
and from Hausa/Fulani in Northern Nigeria to Igbos and their non-
Igbo supporters in Eastern Nigeria, the choices made by the various
individuals and groups were not in the overall interests of either Nigeria
as a whole or of the Igbo people in particular. In the case of Ojukwu
and the people of Eastern Nigeria, there was a conflation of Ojukwu’s
personal problems with the complex humanitarian situation in Biafra.
In other words, the import of Ojukwu’s rejection of Gowon’s leadership
played a decisive role in his decision to cede the Eastern Region from
Nigeria. Although a clear-cut demarcation existed between Ojukwu’s
choice and the Igbos’ choices in the matter, the complex humanitar-
ian situation in Igboland overshadowed any talk on Ojukwu’s personal
ambition, especially since he faced a possible resignation or death fol-
lowing his rejection of Gowon’s leadership.
The economic theory posits that it is this opportunity to gain or to
profit that impels the civil war and not the rhetoric mounted by the vari-
ous parties. While this is not to discount or deny the objective grievances
associated with death, displacement, and the attendant humanitarian
crises faced by Igbos in Eastern Nigeria, one particular course of action
in the midst of various alternatives is heavily influenced by a rational
consideration of which alternative would best generate the attainment
of a particular gain or profit. Hence, it could be argued, secession served
the interests of Ojukwu and would best deliver his gain over other alter-
natives. As far as the Igbos were concerned, options abound that could
best deliver a range of desired results other than secession.
As a refinement to the economic model, the analysis here is that
the civil war was a dependent variable; secession an independent one.
Therefore, the economic model, as Nicholas Sambanis noted, shifts the
analysis from outcome to cause.23 Without the desire for profit or gain,
the choice of secession over and above all other options would not have
arose. In other words, without the secession, the civil war could have
been avoided. Seen in this way, the civil war became a tool that was
deliberately used to attain personal and group gains or profits.
From this point of view, inferential motives rather than Ojukwu and
the Biafran’s stated claims point toward the opportunity that secession
provided them for profit rather than the rhetoric of insecurity within
the Nigerian state as the primary reason for the secession. As earlier
noted, Ojukwu and the Biafrans balanced costs against benefits in order
to arrive at the use of secession among other alternatives as the only
means to maximize their objectives. Hence, the resultant civil war,
23
Nicholas Sambanis, Expanding Economic Models of Civil War Using Case Studies, www.poli-
tics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/4744/ns1110.pdf (accessed January 7, 2015).
000 Fal book B.indb 128 13/06/2016 22:06

which, for the federal government, tried to preserve the nation’s terri-
tory, was just and unavoidable. In the light of this, Ojukwu and the Bia-
frans could be described as profit seekers who took advantage of a bad
situation to realize profits. This bad situation undoubtedly justified civil
violence or war if federal and regional governments failed to respond.
Just as no nation would watch its territories dismembered, no nation
would, by proxy, fund a war to dismember it. To the extent that Ojukwu
was preparing for a war, it would be foolhardy for a government to
continue to inject resources to the Eastern Region. Just as ineffectual
responses to death, displacement, and complex humanitarian emergen-
cies in Eastern Nigeria were critical errors in judgment, the rational and
conscious choice of secession must not be divorced from any attendant
responsibilities. In the case of Nigeria, these attendant responsibilities
include the civil war, starvation, displacement, and death attending the
civil war.
Understanding the Nigeria-Biafra War

From the forgoing analysis, there is no doubt that circumstances that
made civil violence inevitable occurred in Nigeria following the 1966
coup. The circumstances have, so far, been misdiagnosed. The cor-
nerstone of the misdiagnosis deals largely with biases and playing the
blame game. To move beyond the blame game, this chapter imposes
three analytical frameworks on the crucial issues of the civil war and
isolates the fact that, to understand the civil war, analysis must focus on
cause and not outcome, independent variables and not dependent ones,
secession and not the civil war.
Although theories generally have limitations, they help facilitate a
better understanding of the issues. In addition, theories provide us with
a common framework through which knowledge of any social conflict,
not just the Nigerian Civil War, could be best organized. From these
theories, the civil war is not explained by the stated objectives of giving
people in the Eastern Region a better life, especially following the per-
secution that followed the 1966 coup, but the disguised motives of the
different players. In other words, the situation in Northern Nigeria cre-
ated circumstances that generated profitable opportunities for individu-
als and groups in Eastern Nigeria, the culmination of which resulted
in secession and the attendant civil war that resulted from the federal
government’s efforts to restore normalcy. Thus, the secession assumes
different motivations (i.e. gains) and different explanations (i.e. atypical
opportunities). Moreover, the theories provide better explanations for
both individual and group behavior before, during, and after the war,
and therefore facilitate a clearer understanding of the Biafran War.
000 Fal book B.indb 129 13/06/2016 22:06

7 Confronting the Challenges of
Nationhood in Pre-Biafran Texts
Newspaper Narratives on the Eve of War*
Wale Adebanwi
Introduction
Before the first shots were fired by professional soldiers in the Nigeria-
Biafra War (1967–1970), the issues at the center of the long-drawn
crisis of statehood and nationhood in Nigeria were narrated and con-
tested in the press. This is not surprising given that the press predated
the corporate existence of Nigeria by more than half a century. Given
the nature of the evolution of the newspaper press in the country
and the fact that the key political leaders and public intellectuals who
defined and largely determined the character of the emergent modern
public sphere in colonial Nigeria were almost always journalists and/or
newspaper proprietors, the press has been at the vortex of every impor-
tant battle concerning Nigeria’s history. Starting from the struggles
over the modern urban formation; to governance in Abeokuta, Benin,
Calabar, Lagos, and other areas near the coast; the interventions in colo-
nial policies; to the crusades over the proper structural and ideological
approaches to the interface of European Enlightenment and African
tradition, the early newspaper press in Nigeria could be described as
a battleground where ideological, cultural, and political ‘combatants’
took on one another.
As Nigeria approached independence between the early 1940s and
the late-1950s, all the major ethno-regional blocs and the political par-
ties representing these blocs seemed to have been united in recognizing
the important role of the newspaper press in the struggles for ideologi-
cal and cultural validation and political victories. In most cases, every
major political issue was thoroughly debated on the pages of newspa-
pers before they were either adopted or rejected. Examples include the
controversies over the best political system for Nigeria (unitarism or fed-
eralism), the best constitutional arrangement, the status of the capital
city (then Lagos), and the political economy of national unity. It is not a
surprise, therefore, that every major political gladiator, ethno-regional
*
A version of this chapter first appeared as Chapter 5 in Wale Adebanwi, Nation as Grand
Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (Rochester, NY: University of
Rochester Press, 2016).
130
000 Fal book B.indb 130 13/06/2016 22:06

Nationhood: Newspaper Narratives on the Eve of War 131
grouping, and political party in this era had its own ideological mouth-
piece: a newspaper. Each realized that the battle for the minds of men
and women must be fought alongside other battles. Even though the
bayonet and the pen are often contrasted in social history, in this chap-
ter, based on an examination of the newspaper archive, I argue for an
approach that takes the pen as ideological bayonet.
For many of the political gladiators in late colonial and early post-
colonial Nigeria, the battle for the minds of the people was, in fact, the
first battle that needed to be won. In the decade before independence,
the Northern Region, the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), and NPC
leaders, including Sir Ahmadu Bello and Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa,
had the Nigerian Citizen as their leading ideological warrior. The East-
ern Region, the National Council for Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), and its
pre-eminent leader Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe had the West African Pilot as
their mouthpiece. Azikiwe, owner of the Pilot, later became President
of Nigeria. The Western Region, the Action Group (AG), and its pre-
eminent leader Chief Obafemi Awolowo had the Daily Service and the
Nigerian Tribune. Awolowo owned the Tribune.
In the first decade of Nigeria’s independence, the political turmoil the
country experienced was largely defined by the press representing the
different groups, parties, and leaders. By this period, the New Nigerian
became the mouthpiece of the North, NPC, and Sir Bello, while the
Nigerian Tribune became the most important mouthpiece for the West,
AG, and Chief Awolowo. The West African Pilot remained the voice of
the East, the NCNC, and Dr Azikiwe.
In this chapter, I focus on the newspapers’ narratives of interregional,
inter-ethnic, and national political relations against the backdrop of the
collapse of the First Republic and the tension and contradictions that
led to the Civil War. I am focusing on this period to point out the critical
role of the press in not only narrating the challenges of national unity
but also in constructing, deconstructing, and exacerbating the crisis
that engulfed the young nation after some soldiers attempted to seize
power in January 1966.
The Nigerian Crisis and the Collapse of the First Republic

The Nigerian state after independence was confronted with discomfort-
ing realities in the struggle to provide a convergence between state and
the nation and the attempt to make the state as much an expression of,
as well as a means of becoming, a nation. At independence, the alliance
between the NPC and the NCNC produced Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa
Balewa (NPC) as Prime Minister and Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe (NCNC) as
President in a Western parliamentary system of government. Chief
Obafemi Awolowo (AG), who had been the Premier of the Western
Region, left the region to become the leader of the opposition at the Fed-
eral House of Representatives. In the crisis that broke out within the AG
000 Fal book B.indb 131 13/06/2016 22:06

132 Wale Adebanwi
in 1962, Awolowo’s successor Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola and his

supporters left the party and formed the Nigerian National Democratic
Party, which entered into an alliance with the NPC. The NCNC-NPC
alliance also broke down; the NCNC and AG entered into an alliance
between 1964 and 1965 called the United Progressive Grand Alliance
(UPGA). The AG crisis led to widespread violence in the Western Region,
which in turn led to a declaration of a state of emergency in the region.
In the course of all these, Awolowo and his lieutenants were accused
of planning to overthrow the federal government and were charged with
treasonable felony and later jailed. The national anomie that all these
provoked led to a coup by some young soldiers led by Chukwuma Kaduna
Nzeogwu. Nzeogwu declared: ‘The aim of the revolutionary council is to
establish a strong, united and prosperous nation, free from corruption
and internal strife.’1 The coup leader added that the enemies are those
who ‘have put the Nigerian calendar back by their words and deeds’.2
The young majors were later rounded up and detained while the Senate
president, Nwafor Orizu, who was acting for President Azikiwe, handed
over power to the head of the army, Major-General J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi. In
his maiden broadcast, Major-General Ironsi announced the suspension of
the constitution and some other measures while affirming the regime’s
readiness to honor the country’s international commitments. He also
asked for the cooperation of Nigerians in the task ahead.
In the foiled coup, the Premier of the North, Ahmadu Bello; Prime
Minister Tafawa Balewa, Premier of the West; Ladoke Akintola, and
some others were killed. While there was widespread jubilation in the
West and the East, the North was significantly shocked and unhappy
with the loss of its paramount leaders, Bello and Balewa. The intro-
duction of the Unification Decree by the Ironsi government later led to
rumors about the return of the much-feared ‘Igbo domination’ of Nige-
ria in the Northern Region. All efforts by the government to counter
this and reassure the people of the region that there were no plans to
impose ‘Igbo hegemony’ over the country proved abortive as northern
soldiers executed a counter-coup in July 1966, killing the head of state
Ironsi and his host in Ibadan, Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi, the Military
Governor of Western Region. Subsequently, a northern officer, Lieuten-
ant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, was installed as head of state.
The Igbo-dominated Eastern Region, in turn, felt a deep sense of
loss and fear of the return of ‘Northern domination’ when the Military
Governor of the East, Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, who
was senior to Gowon, refused to accept either that there was a central
government in Nigeria or that Gowon was Head of State and Supreme
Commander of the Armed Forces. According to a newspaper report,
Ojukwu stated: ‘That question is such a simple one and anyone who has
1
Quoted in ‘First Coup: Nzeogwu’s Speech’, Vanguard, February 10, 2000, 30.
2
Ibid.
000 Fal book B.indb 132 13/06/2016 22:06

been listening to what I have been saying all the time would know that
I do not see a Central Government in Nigeria today.’3 The massacres of
the Igbo in the North that followed this change of government precipi-
tated a crisis that was hitherto unprecedented in Nigeria’s history. This
led to mass migration of the Igbo, not only from the Northern Region,
but also from other parts of Nigeria, back to their homestead in the East.
Several attempts were made to resolve the crisis and bring the
estranged Eastern Region back fully into the union. The most signifi-
cant were the Aburi (Ghana) meetings where the military governors
of the regions and Lagos together with the new head of state, Colonel
Yakubu Gowon, tried to come to a settlement.4 It is significant that at
Aburi, the role of the media in exacerbating the crisis was noted by the
military leaders. The following is an example of this:

Lt. Col. Gowon (Head of State): On the Government Informa-
tion Media. I think all the Government Information Media in the
country have done terribly bad [sic]. Emeka [Ojukwu] would say
the New Nigerian has been very unkind to the East …

Lt. Col. Ojukwu (Military Governor of Eastern Region): And the
[Morning] Post [owned by the federal government] which I pay
for.

Lt. Col. Gowon: Sometimes I feel my problem is not with
anyone but the [Eastern] Outlook [owned by the Eastern Region
Government].

Lt. Col. Ojukwu: All the other information media have done a
lot. When the Information Media in a country completely closed
their eyes to what was happening. I think it is a dangerous thing.

Major Johnson (Military Governor of Lagos): Let us agree it is the
situation.

Lt. Col. Ejoor (Military Governor of Mid-West Region): All of
them have committed one crime or the other.

Lt. Col. Hassan (Military Governor of Northern Region): The
Outlook is the worst of them.

Lt. Col. Ojukwu: The Outlook is not the worst, the Post which we
all in fact pay for is the worst followed closely by New Nigerian
[owned by the Northern Region Government].5
However, the efforts to reconcile the opposing regions based on the
Aburi Accord failed. On May 2, 1967, Ojukwu declared the secessionist
Republic of Biafra and the Nigeria-Biafra War started thereafter.
3
Quoted in ‘Attitudes at Aburi: How the Military Viewed Politicians’, Special Review Sec-
tion, Vanguard, February 15, 2000, 32.
4
Ibid.
5
Quoted in ‘Views and Counter Views at Aburi’, Vanguard, February 17, 2000, 30.
000 Fal book B.indb 133 13/06/2016 22:06

134 Wale Adebanwi
‘Paper Soldiers’ and the Nigerian Crisis

The above conversation among the military leaders before the outbreak
of the Civil War further confirms the role of the newspaper press in the
events that led to the civil war. Therefore, this chapter argues that it is
important to examine newspaper narratives on the eve of the Nigeria-
Biafra War so as to be able to fully account for the conditions that pre-
disposed the country to war and the role of the newspaper narratives in
this context. I undertake a comparison and analysis of the narratives
of four newspapers on the eve of the Civil War, that is, in 1966. The
narratives in the following newspapers are compared and analysed:
the New Nigerian, owned by the Northern Regional Government; the
West African Pilot (owned by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe), which spoke largely
for the Eastern Region; the Nigerian Tribune (owned by Chief Obafemi
Awolowo), which spoke for the Western Region; and the Morning Post
(owned by the federal government), which was the mouthpiece of the
federal government. The main issues in the newspapers included the
change in government that occurred on January 15, 1966, the Uni-
fication Decree promulgated by the Aguiyi-Ironsi military regime, the
counter-coup led by Northern officers in July 1966, the massacres in
the Northern Region of easterners, and the ‘intransigence’ of the East-
ern regional government.
The Nigerian crisis of the early post-independence years, which the
press had helped create and exacerbate through its reporting, put the
various newspapers in different camps. Understandably, those whose
principals had lost out in the battle that followed the granting of inde-
pendence were eagerly awaiting a fundamental change that would
sweep away their opponents from power. Against the backdrop of the
political context discussed above, when soldiers came to power in Janu-
ary 1966, the Tribune and Pilot were jubilant while the Morning Post had
no other option than to support the new military regime, which paid
its bills. However, the Post was transformed by the coup as much as it
remained the same. While it no longer defended some of the issues and
policies it had supported under the defunct Balewa administration, the
Pilot still supported the power holders at the center. In spite of its ear-
lier glorification and defense of the state of affairs under the old order,
the Post ‘join[ed] all lovers of peace in this country in welcoming the
Military Government’.6 The Post’s position was based on a simple fact:
‘A people deserve the type of government they get.’7 The image of the
politicians for the paper was now that of a most contemptible bunch.8
The Post asked the new regime to be tough and to suspend all politi-
cal activities: ‘Nigeria at this time deserves a tough and strong hand to
6
‘Road to Survival’, Morning Post, January 19, 1966 [hereafter MP].
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
000 Fal book B.indb 134 13/06/2016 22:06

steer her barque of state; such the Military Government now holds out
every promise of supplying.’9 In addition: ‘The new Government must
suspend all political activities. Without doing this, it cannot be sure that
it will get the atmosphere conducive to the re-planning that lies ahead.
The trouble with this country has been over-present surfeit of politics.’10
It took the Post six years to come to this conclusion about ‘over-pre-
sent surfeit of politics’,11 which incidentally was also responsible for the
advent of the paper itself. But in the tradition of going overboard in its
support for whoever was paying its bill, the Post sanctioned anything
and everything that the military government did or said. The state-
ments of the military head of the regime, Aguiyi-Ironsi, were described
as ‘words of gold’12 in the context of the ‘task of nation-building that
lies ahead’.13
Tribune seemed to agree with the Post on the prospect of the emer-
gence of a Nigerian nation from the rubbles of the First Republic, given
the way the central and regional governments had dealt with Awolowo,
the paper’s owner, and his political party, the AG. ‘The spirit of one-
ness,’ editorialized Tribune, ‘the idea of a united, detribalized country,
appears to be having honest expressions in the everyday actions of our
military rulers.’14 The Post added to this by describing politicians as the
‘ultimate fraudsters’ whose past actions have to be obliterated so that
Nigeria can start on a ‘clean slate’.15
For the Tribune, the assassination of Premier Akintola, its founder’s
arch-political enemy, and the collapse of the republic in which Akintola
and his principals (the NPC and the Hausa-Fulani political leaders) held
sway was a ‘God-send’, given the fact that ‘[t]he new military regime
came at a time when the ordinary people of Nigeria were wondering
whether God really existed … And so when God struck through our
valiant army … the people rejoice[d].’16 While Pilot agreed with Tribune
that the Western Region suffered most under the Balewa-led federal
government, the latter asked the region to ‘behave’ since it had more to
be grateful for that the military intervened. ‘After all, only God knows
what would have been the fate of westerners by now if the Army did not
halt the events following the last Western Nigeria elections!’17
In all these issues, the New Nigerian seemed not to have reconciled
itself – like the northern elite whose views it represented – to the sudden
change in government and the killing of the Northern Region’s key
9
Ibid.
10
‘Best Hope for Democracy’, MP, January 20, 1966.
11
Ibid., 1.
12
‘Words of Gold’, MP, January 21, 1966, 5.
13
Ibid.
14
‘Path to True Unity’, Nigerian Tribune, March 9, 1966 [hereafter NT].
15
‘Without Bitterness’, MP, February 9, 1966, 5.
16
‘Forward with Our Army’, NT, January 29, 1966.
17
‘Help Fajuyi’, West African Pilot, April 7, 1966, 2 [hereafter WAP].
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136 Wale Adebanwi
political and military leaders. The ensuing violent riots in the North-
ern Region, in which the Igbo and others were killed, were pointedly
ignored by New Nigerian.18 However, in such narratives as that on
Ironsi’s planned visit to the Northern Region, the position of the North
on emergent formations in the country came to the fore:
We welcome the decision of the Head of the National Military Government
[Aguiyi-Ironsi] to tour parts of the republic … We are particularly glad that
the Supreme Commander has found time in his schedule to visit the North.
With calls at Kano, Zaria, Jos and Kaduna he will obtain a cross section of
opinion in the whole North … He will be able to re-assure any doubts they
may have about the effectiveness of recent Government legislation.19
The New Nigerian, by narrating the position of the power elite as that
of the ‘whole North’, obscured the relations of domination through
conflating a collective and its part. However, the New Nigerian argued
for the building of a grand Nigerian nation that could supersede the
‘whole North’. The paper asked that every school should be made to
perform the ‘daily ritual’ of saluting the national flag as this will help
consolidate the idea of a Nigerian nation.20
The Unification Decree No. 34 of May 24, 1966 promulgated by the
Ironsi-led regime, provided a major prism through which the newspa-
pers narrated the tensions and contradictions of nationhood. In his
speech announcing the decree, Ironsi stated: ‘The former regions are
abolished, and Nigeria grouped into a number of territorial areas called
provinces … Nigeria ceases to be what has been described as a federation.
It now becomes simply the Republic of Nigeria’.21 Unification, in itself,
is a narrative, and a major mode of ideology, as J.B. Thompson argues.
As a mode of ideology, narratives of unification, help in creating condi-
tions through which relations of domination ‘may be established and
sustained by constructing, at the symbolic level, a form of unity which
embraces individuals in a collective identity, irrespective of the differ-
ences and divisions that may separate them’.22 One of the strategies by
which this is done is through what Thompson calls the ‘symbolization
of unity’, which involves ‘the construction of symbols of unity, of col-
lective identity and identification … [which] may be interwoven with
the process of narrativization, as symbols of unity may be an integral
18
For instance, the headlines of editorials as late as July 1966 give indications of this. They
include, ‘Meeting the People’, July 1, 1966; ‘[U.S.] Independence’, July 4, 1966; ‘Putting
Teeth into the Rent Legislation’, July 4, 1966; ‘Get Expert Advice to Build Exports’, July
13, 1966; and ‘Incentive for Self-Help’, July 15, 1966.
19
‘Meeting the People’, New Nigerian, July 16, 1966 [hereafter NN], emphasis added.
20
‘A Symbol of National Unity’, NN, July 18, 1966, 6.
21
‘The Regions are Abolished’, Ironsi’s Broadcast to the Nation banning Political Parties
and introducing Decree No. 34, May 24, 1966.
22
John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass
Communication (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 64.
000 Fal book B.indb 136 13/06/2016 22:06

part of the narrative … which recounts a shared history and projects a

collective fate’.23
The narratives of the crisis in the Nigerian press in 1966, reflected
the mode and strategy of ideology in that they were affirming different
kinds of collective identity, national, regional, or ethnic, while simul-
taneously emphasizing the differences and divisions of the national,
regional, or ethnic collective and the imagined other(s). Narratives,
therefore, constituted an integral part of the work of the paper soldiers
in the period before the civil war.
According to the Post, ‘[b]uilding one Nigeria is not an easy task by
any means. But it is not impossible either.’24 Therefore, the announce-
ment of the Unification Decree for the Post constituted ‘the first step in
a journey that takes Nigeria to greatness’, since ‘it is clear that tribalism
or disunity was Nigeria’s greatest bane’.25 While the Post’s position is
understandable given the fact that it supported the official line, the Pilot
supported the unitary system as a fundamental credo, in part because
that was the original position of Azikiwe, the NCNC, and the Igbo politi-
cal elite before they were temporarily persuaded to abandon this by the
federalists by the late 1950s. However, the Igbo political elite remained
committed to a unitarist political system in the early 1960s. Against
this backdrop, the Pilot saw unification through the unitary system,
even before the Unification Decree was formally promulgated, as ‘[t]he
coming into being by natural process of a central Government [which]
henceforth makes the concept of a Federal Government a misnomer’.26
Pilot hoped ‘that in time, the Military Government of Nigeria
would consider the abolition of the word “federal” usually attached
to Nigeria’.27 If this was done, the Pilot concluded, ‘[t]he name of the
Military Government will be written in Gold as the only Go-Getter Gov-
ernment that brought unity to this country’.28 The paper also praised
Aguiyi-Ironsi for bringing a ‘message of hope to millions of our people’,
when he stated in his budget speech that ‘[t]he new nation that we
are creating will have a place for all people commensurate with their
talent’.29 Pilot’s position was a return to the fierce battle on the pages of
the leading newspapers over federal versus unitary system in the 1940s
and early 1950s. The Pilot, in that period, described the federalists as
‘Pakistanists’. Its editorials on the Unification Decree, therefore, totally
ignored the popular resolve in the other two regions – Northern and
Western – that Nigeria should operate the federal system.
23
Ibid.
24
‘One Nigeria’, MP, February 15, 1966. Yet the MP states that the demarcation between
Nigerians was ‘artificial’; see ‘This Accra Victory’, MP, February 15, 1966.
25
Ibid.
26
‘The Budget’, WAP, April 2, 1966.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
Ironsi quoted in Ibid.
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138 Wale Adebanwi
The Northern Region could hardly be part of the Pilot’s ‘our people’
nor could the Western Region given the fact that central to the former’s
‘doubts’ about the new regime was the idea of ‘talent’ which, for the
North, represented a euphemism for, generally, ‘southern domination’,
and particularly ‘Igbo domination’.30 A signpost of these doubts and
‘fears’ was the piece published in the New Nigerian.31 The newspaper
stated that:
Many Northerners still need convincing that the regime is a truly national
one – and not one out to replace Northern domination of the South by
Southern domination of the North. Some are beginning to ask … why the
coup leaders have not been brought to trial.32
The narrative then sets the basis for the fear of ‘Southern domination’:
The North has both a lower population density and lower educational
standard than the South. This leads some of the Northerners to fear that the
South will somehow ‘colonize’ them by taking over both the jobs in the civil
services and their lands. There is fear that all the current talk about admin-
istrative unity, in practice, opens the way to the demotion of Northerners.33
However, the fact that the idea of unification constituted an ideal
for the interests that Pilot served was further stated in the editorial
devoted to defending it against the attacks and/or ambivalence of the
other parts of Nigeria. Contrary to New Nigerian’s fears on the Unifica-
tion Decree, Pilot stated that that was ‘what Nigerians want’ and that
under the system ‘the question of one section dominating the other
does not arise’.34 Those who argued to the contrary, affirmed the Pilot,
were ‘tribalists’, who ‘could not learn by the mistakes of the past, and
even though may like a unitary form of Government, they still want the
country to be tied up with the appendages of federalism’.35 Pilot then
corroborated the opinion of Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu,
the Military Governor of Eastern Region, who stated that ‘the present
era was one of unity and solidarity for the whole country in which there
were no minority areas’.36
30
As expressed in editorial, ‘Meeting the People’, NN.
31
The article by one Walter Schwarz was supposedly intended to be published in the Lon-
don Sunday Observer, but this did not happen. ‘Strangers Within Our Gates’, NT, May 18,
1966.
32
Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and the other majors who planned and executed
the January 15, 1966 coup in which prominent northern leaders were killed. They had
been arrested and detained by the Ironsi regime. Walter Schwarz, ‘Nigeria Back in Poli-
tics?’ New Nigerian, May 12, 1966.
33
Ibid.
34
‘Govt Must Be Firm’, May 31, 1966.
35
Ibid.
36
‘In the Bid for A United Nigeria … There is No Talk of a Minority – Ojukwu’, WAP, April 9,
1966, 1.
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For the Pilot, this was the ‘ideal’ that had to be turned into practical
reality. Though not explicitly stated, the idea of minorities in the East-
ern Region was an uncomfortable one for Ojukwu and the interests that
Pilot represented. As stated by the Pilot:
Indeed minority problems arise with the question of federalism no matter by
what description. Before the division of the country into states, there was noth-
ing like minority problem. Nigerians want a constitution in which any section
should feel at home anywhere in the country and not feel as minorities.37
The Pilot added that nothing short of a constitution that allowed ‘free
interchange of abode throughout the country’ will ‘serve the interest
of the people’.38 To the Pilot, ‘the people’ were primarily the Igbo, who
had commercial interests in virtually every part of Nigeria, particularly
Lagos and the major cities of the North. The Pilot’s plan for unifica-
tion, therefore, was ‘far reaching’ and would help Nigerians ‘evolve a
common nationality and end sectionalism’.39 Consequently, the paper
urged the ‘Ironsi Regime to carry on since its doings have the unani-
mous support of the people. We are convinced of our national salvation
under the aegis of the new Military Government.’40
Surprisingly, despite the fact that its proprietor was the first and most
eloquent of the proponents of a federal system among the country’s
founding fathers, the Tribune also shared this position on the Unification
Decree, believing that it ‘would pave the way for a great and prosperous
nation, which is the hope of everyone’.41 The united nation that might
emerge was of interest to the Tribune:
If the present army regime within the time-table set for itself is able to build a
new Nigerian nation out of the ruins of the past, if it is able to bring together
a people torn asunder by tribal trappings and narrow sectionalism which in
the day of politicians became worshipped, cherished institutions, then the
future of a united and progressive Nigeria is assured.42
Perhaps the Tribune’s position was influenced more by the fact that the
new military regime upstaged the political parties and leaders who had
‘conspired’ to defeat Awolowo’s party and jailed the man. At this point,
Awolowo was still in jail.
However, there was no question for the Pilot that the Unification
Decree would ‘bring together a people torn asunder by tribal trap-
pings and narrow sectionalism’. In fact, the adoption of this form of
government represented the birth of ‘true Nigeria’.43 The fact that Pilot
37
‘What Nigerians Want’, WAP, April, 19, 1966.
38
Ibid.
39
‘Recrimination?’ WAP, April 25, 1966.
40
Ibid.
41
‘A United Nigeria’, NT, May 26, 1966.
42
Ibid.
43
‘One Nigeria, One Destiny’,
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140 Wale Adebanwi
had always desired unitary system was evident in its jubilation at the
achievement of ‘one Nigeria, one destiny’ and the ‘wiping out’ of fed-
eralism.44 When the unitary system was formally announced, the Pilot
editorialized:
Today a true Nigeria is born. Federalism has been wiped out. All the equivo-
cation in the past about common nationality is over. Today every Nigerian is
a Nigerian no matter in what part of the country he is … The policy of divide
and rule introduced by the British Colonial administration and perpetuated
by self-seeking politicians is over.45
Also, for the new regime’s mouthpiece, Morning Post, the decision
took Nigeria into ‘a new epoch’:
This is a thing that all true patriots of this country have eagerly looked
forward to … The Morning Post commend[s] the National Government for
taking the bold step to erase all the divisive tendencies that had contributed
to make Nigerians from one part of Nigeria stranger[s] in another part.46
Where the Tribune hoped that the Ironsi regime was able to perform
the recommended task ‘within the time-table set for itself ’,47 the Pilot
did not foresee an end for the military regime as the paper announced:
‘Long live Aguiyi Ironsi’s Military Government. Long live the Nigerian
Republic.’48 The Pilot could not but wish the government long life given
the way it articulated the regime’s raison d’etre on the regime’s behalf:
It is the declared policy of the government to build a hate-free, greed-free
nation with a contented citizenship provided with all the basic human
requirements. It behooves any true lover of this country to bring these
facts home to misguided Nigerians. This is the supreme task of one and all,
particularly the information media at this time of national reconstruction.
Anything short of this is gross disservice to the nation.49
The fact that these newspapers served as the paper soldiers for the
ideological and ethno-political struggle among the contending groups
was further demonstrated by the way the agendas of members of par-
ticular groups were picked up and amplified by their newspapers and
how, at other times, the agendas articulated by the newspapers were
picked up and amplified by the political leaders. For example, when the
Military Governor of the Eastern Region, Ojukwu, ordered that all refer-
ences to ‘tribe or ethnic group’ be ‘completely expunged in future from
44
‘One Nigeria, One Destiny’, May 26, 1966, 2.
45
Ibid.
46
‘Civis Nigerianus Sum’, MP, May 26, 1966.
47
‘A United Nigeria’, The Tribune notes elsewhere, when Ironsi announced that they had
prepared a 20-year plan for Nigeria, that ‘this does not fall within the programme of a
corrective government’, ‘Twenty Years’, NT, July 22, 1966.
48
49
‘Government Must Be Firm’, WAP, May 31, 1966.
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all Government records’, the Post praised it as a ‘signpost of the future

of Nigeria’.50 The Pilot, about five weeks later, asked the central govern-
ment to follow the Eastern Region Government’s example by expung-
ing ‘from all books and documents the vestige of colonial era regarding
“tribe” within Nigeria … Long live Nigeria as a nation.’51
As tension rose in the country, particularly in the disaffected parts
of the Northern Region,52 the Pilot praised the controversial decision
to rotate military governors among the regions as a ‘blessing [which
will] minimize tribalism’.53 It presented the Ironsi regime as one that
was ‘marching on’.54 The ‘sixth milestone’ of the Ironsi regime in its
‘mission of salvation’, stated the Pilot, was producing a united coun-
try, against the odds, in that ‘in place of division, we are now forging
a homogenous whole, instead of sectionalism, the dominant theme is
now unity’.55 It is quite significant that the Morning Post and West Afri-
can Pilot were either completely unaware of the simmering disaffection
in the Northern Region or choose to ignore it.
To promote the unpopular Unification Decree in the Western and
Northern Regions of the country, the Military Head of State, General
Aguiyi-Ironsi decided to embark on a tour of the country. Ironsi never
returned alive from that tour, which Pilot described as the ‘march to
progress … [in the] forging of a homogeneous whole’.56 Disaffection in
the army and the political tension in the North led to a counter-coup by
northern officers in which Ironsi was killed in Ibadan, Western Nigeria,
on July 29, 1966. The Pilot’s somewhat arrogant earlier statement that
those who lacked an ‘enlarged vista’ would be swept away became a
conundrum of sorts a few days later with the counter-coup. The Pilot,
totally impervious to the growing unpopularity of the Unification
Decree, had declared a day before the counter-coup that
[t]he days when the pivot of nationalism began and ended with one’s small
sectional environment are far gone. Now the format of nationalism is broad
and all embracing. Only those who are capable of showing an equally
enlarged vista on public affairs will survive the clean-up campaign now
taking place all around.57
Even on the day of the counter-coup, the Pilot, unaware of what
had happened earlier that morning, described Ironsi’s meeting with
the Natural Rulers from all over the country the day before as a ‘huge
50
‘We Must Unite’, MP, May 10, 1966.
51
‘Long Live United Nigeria’, WAP, June 25, 1966.
52
Tribune and Pilot report ‘92 killed … 506 wounded, 300 arrested’, NT, June 2, 1966; and
WAP, June 2, 1966.
53
‘Transfer of Army Governors’, WAP, July 5, 1966.
54
‘Marching to Progress’, WAP, July 18, 1966.
55
‘The First 6 Months’, WAP, July 18, 1966.
56
Ibid.
57
‘Test For Rulers’, WAP, July 28, 1966.
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142 Wale Adebanwi
success … in Nigeria’s onward march as a nation’.58 After the counter-

coup, and at a period when it was not yet clear what direction Nigeria
would take, the Pilot still narrated the ‘success’ of the Ironsi regime,
asking for peace to save the Nigerian nation:
The West African Pilot and all Nigerians for that matter feel very much
concerned that there should be trouble in the Army at a time when the
national reconstruction program has advanced to very great height … No
matter what the source of grouse, no matter how deep and sentimental the
cause of difference among the rank and file, we implore them [the soldiers]
in the name of Nigeria to cease fire … There is no doubt that up-to-date the
National Military Government was riding high in the estimation of the
people of Nigeria … In this regard, we call on all men and women of good
conscience to throw in their full weight in order to halt the hand of doom
before it engulfs our young nation.59
The next few days witnessed a vacuum in power until, eventually,
Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon was announced as the new head of
state. Though the fate of Ironsi was still unknown, Gowon’s first broad-
cast included the abrogation of the Unification Decree and the return
of Nigeria to the federal system. Given its own opposition as well as the
opposition of the Northern Region to the unification process under the
fallen regime, the New Nigerian was jubilant when it reviewed the col-
lapse of the Ironsi regime. The paper editorialized that:
Nigeria has a new Government. New men have accepted the arduous and
difficult task of guiding the nation … For the sake of the country; for the
sake of our people and for the sake of our children; the new leadership must
be given every support … The unitary system of Government has not stood
the test of time. One reason perhaps was that it was imposed hastily and
without sufficient thought for the future. Unity is not something which can
be imposed by force … It must come about slowly and gradually and be built
on goodwill. 60
In spite of the fact that such unity, as conceived by New Nigerian, was
yet to be established in Nigeria, the paper saw a ‘whole nation’61 eagerly
awaiting the new measures by Gowon. Yet New Nigerian countered any
suggestion that the North was jubilant over the counter-coup, because
Nigeria ‘fac[ed] a grave situation’.62 In an attempt to conceal its own
jubilation, the paper added: ‘Anybody who reports or gives the impres-
sion that any section of the community is jubilant is hindering the
efforts to restore calm and order.’63
58
‘A Huge Success’, WAP, July 30, 1966.
59
‘Plea for Calm’, WAP, August 1, 1966.
60
‘Our Hope for the Future’, NN, August 2, 1966.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid., 1.
63
Ibid.
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Despite the tension, crises, and uncertainties of the post-Ironsi era, the
Pilot was still irrevocably committed to the sustenance of Nigeria as one
indivisible entity, as it romanticized the idea of an overriding nationalism:
Although the armour of our National Military Government has sustained
some visible dents at many points, we of the West African Pilot still believe
that we can all rally round and begin all over again to mend it in the greatest
interest of our national survival … It will be a thing of joy to Nigerians if
all segments of our populace will continue to feel a deep sense of national
belonging borne out of justified national cohesion.64
However, Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu, the Military Governor of the
Eastern Region, refused to recognize the new head of state. Against this
backdrop, the Post regarded the divergent positions expressed by Gowon
and Ojukwu in the aftermath of the coup as representing the depth of
the ‘tribal sentiments in the army’.65 The paper reported that
Lt. Col. Gowon said ‘putting all the considerations to test … the basis for
unity is not there.’ The same night, Lt. Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu … said just
as much, concluding, ‘there are serious doubts as to whether the people of
Nigeria … can sincerely live together as members of the same nation’.66
In spite of all these, the Post still advertised its belief that Nigerians can
swim together without bitterness and bloodshed.67
As part of the efforts to appease some sections of the country and iso-
late the Eastern Region, Gowon released all political prisoners, includ-
ing Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief Anthony Enahoro. This provided
another interesting context for hostilities between the newspapers. In its
report of the releases, New Nigerian added an exclamation mark to the
claim by Ojukwu that the defunct Supreme Military Council headed by
Ironsi had earlier decided to release Awolowo, before Ironsi was toppled.
The newspaper reported: ‘In the telegram, Lt. Col. Ojukwu said the deci-
sion to release Chief Awolowo and other political prisoners was taken
by the Supreme Council earlier on!’68 The New Nigerian, which had
endorsed the imprisonment of Awolowo and the others, now recalled
that the imprisonment had been ‘a source of contention and dissension
throughout Nigeria for the past few years’.69 It was evident that with
the killing of Northern leaders (Awo’s sworn political adversaries) in
the January 1966 coup, the refusal by Ironsi to put Nzeogwu and his
fellow plotters to trial, and the Unification Decree, Ironsi would have
been even more unpopular in the Northern Region if he had released
Awolowo. But given how Awolowo’s release now served the interest of
64
‘Let’s Begin Again’, WAP, August 2, 1966.
65
Ibid.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid.
68
‘Ojukwu Congratulates Chief Awolowo’, August 4, 1966, 1.
69
‘Releasing Goodwill Through the Prison Gates’, NN, August 4, 1966.
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144 Wale Adebanwi
the New Nigerian and its backers, the ‘merits and demerits’ of Awolowo’s
treasonable felony trial, the paper argued, were no longer important.70
The paper concluded that Awolowo and others’ release should only be
‘welcome and accepted by every Nigerian’ because ‘[t]heir confinement
provided a cause and reason for discord and differences between Nige-
rians of varying political beliefs. The future is more important than the
past. The stability and prosperity of our country is more important than
old political feuds and fights.’71 The stability and prosperity that New
Nigerian emphasized were ostensibly those of the Northern Region-led
regime, as Gowon’s statement later confirmed.72
While the Post saw the warm welcome that Awolowo received after
his release as his ‘hour of glory’,73 the Pilot narrated the release as ‘the
triumph of truth over falsehood and victory of light over darkness’.74
The Tribune reported that the arrival of the
58 year-old Nigerian nationalist, politician, philosopher and idealist [Awolowo]
… at this time when the nation and its people are passing through a period
marked by certain vital significant [sic] events sharpening all facets of history
of our great nation … Therefore, the release of [Awolowo] we hope, marks
the beginning of [a] new crusade, of a new social and political force towards
building of a Nigerian nation welded together by genuine unity and strength.75
Even though the New Nigerian, in the context of Awo’s imprisonment
argued that the past should be forgotten, it returned to that past to rub
in the political ‘loss’ of ‘a top leader’ who had for long preached unitary
form of government.76 The top leader, who the paper failed to mention,
was the former ceremonial president, Nnamdi Azikiwe:
About nine years ago, one of the top leaders in Nigeria suddenly discovered
that his time-honoured fight for unitary form of government for Nigerian
was a lost battle. For almost 20 years, he had advocated a unitary form of
government for Nigeria. He even called for 12 states in Nigeria – all of them
weak and powerless states – with a very strong centre. But to everybody’s
surprise … while in London for the 1957 Constitutional Conference, he cried
out that ‘federalism is imperative for Nigeria’. This was a very serious depar-
ture from an age long belief in a cause that was very unpopular.77
70
‘Releasing Goodwill Through the Prison Gates’, NN, August 4, 1966.
71
Ibid. This is an example of a ‘euphemization’. The three years that these three men served
out of the 10-year (or less) term was described as ‘confinement’, which glossed over the
hardship and psychological trauma of imprisonment.
72
This is addressed below. See footnotes 162–164.
73
‘Awo’s Hour of Glory’, MP, August 4, 1966.
74
‘Awo at Ibadan’, WAP, August 9, 1966.
75
‘Welcome, Awolowo’, NT, August 4, 1966. Also see ‘Release for Awo’, NT, August 3,
1966: 1.
76
‘Federalism Only Answer’, NN, August 10, 1966, 1.
77
‘Federalism Only Answer’, NN, August 10, 1966, 1. Interesting enough, Gowon later
created 12 states and part of the rationale was to break the ‘recalcitrance’ of the East.
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This editorial illuminated the indirect way Azikiwe’s and Igbo’s advo-
cacy for unitary form of government connected with Ironsi’s adoption
of the same. The newspaper seems to suggest that this connection was
in the pursuit of ‘Igbo domination’. Without mentioning any names,
the New Nigerian again placed a ‘consistent’ Awolowo against the
‘inconsistent’ Zik:
Quite in contrast with this leader, another leader advocated a federal system
of government for Nigeria. He did not mince words over it. He emphasized
that a country so diverse in culture and traditions – a country with many
languages, and with development, educationally and otherwise, so uneven
– a constitution that allowed for every region to go its own pace, could only
be acceptable to the majority of the people.78
At this point, the Northern Region entered the New Nigerian’s narrative:
The Northern leaders of all shades of opinion … remained unmoved in their
strong belief in a federal form of government … The North thus became a
late starter in the race for self-rule as it was in the race for education. The
federal form of government became a blessing. Everybody came to realize
that under this system no inequality and injustice could be done to anyone.
That every region could progress at its own pace.79
However, there were some crises that confronted the ‘nation’ in the nar-
rative of the New Nigerian.
Then the Army stepped in to save us from total disintegration. We all hailed
our liberators … Then very soon, many things, apparently nauseating,
started to happen. The military power-that-be made the most disastrous
and catastrophic slip. Much against the advice of the elders of the country,
the authorities decided to abolish the federation and sought to impose uni-
tarism on the people. The result of some arbitrary decisions were chaos and
confusion.80
‘The nation’ had apparently now returned to where the newspaper
believed it should be. Therefore, the New Nigerian editorialized, ‘[n]
othing can be more reassuring than … that this country is to return to
the federal system … The decision is wise and sane.’81
Once the interests of the Northern Region were well served, the New
Nigerian announced that all was well with Nigeria. This was particu-
larly true if decentralization was encouraged in principle:
The people of this country have much in common and at stake. We can
survive the strains and stresses of a lasting existence if only we return to
a constitution that allows for each and every component section of the
78
‘Federalism Only Answer’, NN.
79
Ibid.
80
Ibid.
81
Ibid.
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146 Wale Adebanwi
Republic to go at its own pace and to run its affairs in its own manner and
light. Lt.-Col. Yakubu Gowon is certainly moving in the right direction.82
For its part, the Pilot, which had earlier celebrated the ‘wiping out’ of
federalism, describing the introduction of unitary system as the ‘birth
of a true Nigeria’,83 changed gears again, stating that a ‘federal system
which should respect the wishes of the majority ethnic and linguistic
groupings in the country and at the same time allay the fears of the
minorities should appeal to the proposed consultative meetings to be
drawn from all over Nigeria’.84 In the new dispensation, the newspaper
insisted that the ‘new’ federalism should be ‘true federalism’ because,
‘[t]here is a greater benefit to gain if we still remain one country, instead
of tearing asunder by secession’.85 With this, the Pilot reintroduced
the option of secession into the narrative, even though it did so by
disclaiming it. A few days later, Ojukwu picked this up while rejecting
the proposed reintroduction of federalism, because, as he argued, ‘the
factors making for a true federation of Nigeria no longer exists [sic].’86
Yet, Ojukwu was reported by Pilot to have reviewed the situation in the
country in declaring: ‘The East is anxious to ensure peace in the coun-
try and she does not wish for secession.’87
The Post, which had earlier also celebrated the promulgation of uni-
tary system by the Ironsi regime and described it as a ‘bold step’ which
all ‘true patriots’ had looked forward to, reversed itself.88 It stated: ‘Per-
haps our unity lies through a federal system of government.’89 Two days
later, the Post went beyond ‘perhaps’ to state categorically that federal-
ism was the best for Nigeria, even reversing itself again on the question
of the abolition of the word ‘tribe’:
WE ARE CONVINCED THAT FEDERALISM WOULD SUIT A SOCIETY
SUCH AS OURS BETTER THAN A UNITARY GOVERNMENT … We are not
ashamed to admit that tribalism abounds. For, we are yet to see a Nigerian
who does not see himself only as Ibo [sic], Yoruba, Hausa or Bini. We do not
feel this sense of shame, not because we revel in tribalism or clanishness,
but because we recognize too well that it is only a natural propensity. We
believe every Nigerian is a tribalist. That doesn’t matter. What matters is if
tribalism succeeds to lie between Nigerians like a curtain of iron.90
Also, the Tribune had welcomed the ‘administrative, constitutional
and geographical reforms’ (i.e. unitary system) in the hope that it would
82
Ibid.
83
84
‘True Federalism’, WAP, August 10, 1966.
85
Ibid.
86
‘Factors for True Federation No Longer Exists: Ojukwu’, WAP, August 19, 1966, 1.
87
Ibid.
88
‘Crisis Nigerianus Sum’,
89
‘Peace in Our Time’, MP, August 6, 1966.
90
Ibid., capitals in original.
000 Fal book B.indb 146 13/06/2016 22:06

make Nigeria a ‘great and prosperous nation’.91 The paper now argues
that there was ‘no doubt’ that a federal constitution was acceptable to
Nigerians, given the fact that it was ‘adequate to the exigencies and
function of government and of course the preservation of national
unity’.92 The paper then rearticulated the fundamental position of its
founders: ‘A federal system of administration will help keep the balance
of power between the component parts of the federation. Above all we
are hopeful that out of all these efforts will emerge a new, powerful, pro-
gressive and united nation of our dream.’93
The national conference that the Gowon regime planned to hold to
decide the future of the country provided yet another means for the
discursive negotiation of power in the troubled federation. As evident
in the press, the proposed constitutional talks presented an opportunity
for the narration of power from the past, presaging the negotiation of
power in the present, which would determine future prospects.
The New Nigerian, which earlier stated that Awolowo’s release
meant that ‘old political feuds and fights’ should be forgotten because
they were not very important, returned to the past in locating the pro-
posed talks in the trajectory of Nigeria’s history.94 The talks reminded
the paper of the fears of ‘Igbo domination’ in the few months that the
Ironsi regime lasted rather than the accusations of ‘Northern domina-
tion’ between 1960–1966 that preceded Ironsi’s era. The paper added:
‘Post-independent Nigeria, unfortunately, was saddled precariously
with propensities of some sections of our population to lord it over the
rest of the country.’95
Given the balance of power, which favored the North, the New Nige-
rian argued that such ‘wise counsel’ as existed under the Gowon regime
should not be lost for a return to ‘Igbo domination’, as existed under
General Ironsi. The paper added, ‘Now that our ship of state has reached
another cross-roads at which point wise counsel must prevail, nothing
should be done to give room for a recurrence of the events that set our
hearts rumbling in January this year.’96 The paper also established a
‘fact’ that revealed a predilection to affirm the supremacy of the North
in the area of leadership: ‘Northern Nigeria has been blessed with good
leadership at all times and now is the time this leadership must be on
show. Our place in the Republic must be unique.’97
Despite the ‘sporadic and tendentious outbursts from certain quar-
ters of the Republic’98 – a reference to the Eastern Region – the New
91
‘A United Nigeria’, NT.
92
‘A New Constitution’, NT, August 10, 1966.
93
Ibid.
94
‘Releasing Goodwill through the Prison Gates’, NN, August 4, 1966.
95
‘The Forthcoming Big Talks’, NN, Aug 23, 1966: 6.
96
Ibid.
97
Ibid.
98
Ibid.
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148 Wale Adebanwi
Nigerian argued that, in the context of the constitutional conference

being held,
We may end up in a federation or a confederation. But whatever happens
the die is now cast and there should be no illusion of what is good for our
people. Our [northern] leaders at this week’s meeting must bear in mind
that they have the support of some 29 million people [of Northern Region].
They must not fail us. They must not seek concession purely for the sake of
unity that cannot stand the test of time. 99
This position of the New Nigerian is very significant in the way it com-
pares to portions of Gowon’s inaugural speech. The conclusion reads as
if it was lifted out Gowon’s speech. Gowon stated, inter alia, ‘I have come
to strongly believe that we cannot honestly and sincerely continue in
this wise, as the basis for trust and confidence in our unitary system of
government has not been able to stand the test of time.’100 Published
next to this editorial was an opinion piece entitled, ‘A Voice from the
East Pleads with Yakubu Gowon – Let’s Part Our Ways.’ It buttressed
Gowon’s and New Nigerian’s fears, stating in part:
It is not possible for us to live together. The seed of bitterness has not only
been sown but has long germinated and the resulting plant is producing its
own ripe seeds which are already dispersing and germinating in their own
turn. If you [Gowon] really mean to give us peace, the best and easiest way
of doing that is obvious. Let each Region go its own way.101
For this contributor, whose position was given prominence in the New
Nigerian, the idea of a Nigerian union was vanishing and nothing
needed be done to save it:
The edifice which was erected by the British colonial administration and
which was once asked to take the name of Songhai is now a vanishing fan-
tasy. What now remains only comprises … the clashing cymbals of our time
… Therefore there is a great risk in continuing this peculiar political union.
The basis for unity as a single nation is [lacking because] … tribal passion
die hard. Nigeria was a chance result of British imperial administration con-
noting nothing higher than common allegiance to the British Masters.102
However, the Tribune was concerned more about the future and the
consolidation of the ideal and idea of the Nigerian nation in the paper’s
take on the talks. But the paper was also concerned about leadership
99
Ibid. The paper asked that whatever comes out of the talks must be based ‘absolutely on
what is good for the people of the North and, of course, Nigeria’, ‘The Issue at Stake’, NN,
August 29, 1966.
100
Gowon’s inaugural speech.
101
Raymond E. Okorie, ‘A Voice from the East Pleads With Yakubu Gowon – Let’s Part Our
Ways’, NN, August 23, 1966, 6.
102
Ibid.
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among the Yoruba. The Tribune stated that the selection of its proprie-
tor, Awolowo, to lead the Western Region to the talks were vital because
Chief Awolowo, as we know him, is a man who has dedicated his energies
to the welfare and happiness of the [Yoruba] people and by placing the
burden of the leadership of the people on him, he is only being asked to weld
together a people once wrecked by feud; and to put into service his personal
qualities and decisiveness.103
The paper argued that the constitutional conference was about ‘the
nation’s destiny’:
This conference is historic, it is significant … It is significant because out of
these talks will emerge a charter or a philosophy upon which rests the hopes
and aspirations of a people who should live together in a spirit of common
belief and understanding; a genuine spirit completely divorced of the past
hatred, bias and ill-feelings indeed a spirit cardinally aimed towards one
destiny.104
The Tribune saw the ‘charter’ and ‘philosophy’ that would provide
the basis for the ‘genuine spirit’105 towards common destiny for Nige-
rians as being far more elevating than New Nigerian’s ‘no compromise’
stance which Northern delegates were urged to take in matters that, for
the New Nigerian, were only of a ‘tenuous unity’.106 For the Tribune, the
conference was all about the present and future of Nigeria. Therefore,
the paper stated: ‘All those taking part in this ‘people’s conference’…
represent the present and the future of the Nigerian nation.’107
Like the Tribune, the Pilot argued that it was also concerned with
national unity and not sectional advantage as advocated by the New
Nigerian. If every section of the country had a ‘master plan’ like the
North, the Pilot wondered whose ‘plan’ would be rejected.108 First, the
paper reviewed what was at stake in Nigeria, stated what it assumes to
be the truth of the Nigerian crisis, and emphasized ‘what is to be done’:
The truth about the country is that we are lacking in those fundamental
elements that make for unity – that is to say, DEFENSIVE NATIONALISM
and IRON HAND LEADERSHIP. A nation requires … foreign aggression in
order to develop defensive nationalism which [represents] a unifying factor
… Secondly, to attain unity a nation requires a man on a horse back with a
whip to keep the people together.109
The Pilot, unlike the New Nigerian, asked that the constitutional talks in
103
‘A New Chapter’, NT, August 16, 1966.
104
‘The Nation’s Destiny’, NT, September 12, 1966, 1.
105
Ibid.
106
This position is reflected in ‘The Forthcoming Big Talks’, NN, August 23, 1966, 6.
107
Ibid.
108
‘The Problem of Unity’, NN, August 23, 1966, 6.
109
Ibid., capitals in original.
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150 Wale Adebanwi
Lagos fashion a constitution that would ‘satisfy the aspirations of the

various ethnic and linguistic groups in Nigeria’.110
With the contending regions, particularly the Northern and East-
ern Regions, taking diametrically opposed positions on the political
structure of the country, mass killings erupted in the Northern Region.
Against this backdrop, the Post argued that these two regions and the
individuals representing them were not greater than the nation. In
an editorial, the paper stated: ‘They must all agree that this country,
Nigeria, can continue as one indivisible sovereign state.’111 In another,
it continued: ‘We must, all of us Nigerians, accept the challenge of the
times and rise as one man to the task of binding the nation’s wounds in
order to save her from bleeding to death … If this is done, then a Nige-
rian nation would emerge as a “paradise”.’112
While the Pilot refrained from commenting on the flight of the Igbo
from the North in the wake of the riots and the killings, the New Nige-
rian, in the context of its concern with the themes of unity, used every
opportunity to protect the Northern Region’s ‘heritage’ and attacked
the Eastern Region and its people. While the Pilot saw the whole crisis in
the year 1966 as a ‘great lesson’ that taught the people ‘never again [to]
postpone till tomorrow what they have to do today’,113 it added that, in
spite of the debacle, Nigerians ‘have every reason to be proud that from
the still smoking rubble have emerged a new generation of Nigerians
able to face the stark realities of our times’.114 When the Lafia Native
Authority in the Northern Region stopped the illegal collection of taxes
from fleeing easterners, the New Nigerian used the incident as an excuse
to condemn the ‘enemies of a united Nigeria [who exploited the con-
troversy of the illegal taxes] in their campaign of denigration against
the North’.115 As far as the New Nigerian was concerned, complaints
about the illegal taxes ‘buttress[ed the] stupid demand for disintegra-
tion of the country’.116 The paper further characterized the complaints
as a situation ‘in which the sins of one “overzealous official” is [sic] vis-
ited on a whole government or region’. The paper accused the North of
‘indiscretion and insanity’.117 Consequently, New Nigerian argued that
‘if the communities in this country decide to part their ways, as they
have the right to do, they should do so in peace and not in pieces’.118
110
‘The Task Before Us’, Front page comment, WAP, September 12, 1966.
111
‘The Nation Before Self ’, MP, August 16, 1966
112
‘Best Yet to Come’, MP, August 12, 1966.
113
‘The March of History’, WAP, Sep. 2, 1966.
114
Ibid.
115
‘An Example of Reasonableness’, NN, August 25, 1966.
116
Ibid.
117
Ibid.
118
‘Restraint, Please’, NN, August 24, 1966.
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The Post picked this up, asking if there was any need for the constitu-
ent parts of Nigeria to separate and remain enemies if, indeed, separa-
tion was achieved:
There is already deep-seated bitterness among the peoples of this country.
But with a little bit of good sense, time, the healer of all wounds, will ulti-
mately ameliorate whatever bitterness may exist among the people … And
who knows, Nigeria may yet remain. And if she crumbles, should she do so
with former Nigerians becoming inveterate enemies?119
In the wake of the massacre of easterners in the North, the Post asked
the government to be ‘ruthless in maintaining peace’ by ‘crushing the
saboteurs’.120 The Tribune asked for restraint because Nigeria sat ‘on a
tinder box’.121 The paper also echoed the Military Governor of the Mid-
West, Lieutenant Colonel David Ejoor:
Nigeria is now passing through a crucial and momentous stage in her his-
tory when different communities have to consider whether they can march
forward as one indivisible whole in true mutual affection and concord or
whether they have indeed reached the end of a once hopeful experiment in
nation-building.122
As the number of the victims of the massacres in the North increased,
the Pilot abandoned its earlier pleas for unity, raising what it considered
critical questions:
The days of wishful thinking is [sic] over … We have long deceived ourselves
and no nation based on self-deception can long endure … One of the major
issues facing the country today is whether Nigerians can live together as
one people, in peace and security … Can Nigerians live together without fear
of one section dominating the other? If they cannot then what is the basis
of togetherness which the weeping Jeremiahs fancy can be achieved in the
country?123
Furthermore, the paper argued that the Lagos talks could not do much
in the face of the odds:
The facts as they are today, are that Nigerians are haunted by fear of domi-
nation of one section by another, by fear of insecurity of life and property,
by fear of molestation. These are basic human freedoms which, lacking in
a country makes nonsense of united nationhood. Under the atmosphere
of apprehension and misgivings, it will be wishful thinking to feel that by
a magic wand, the ad-hoc committee on Nigerian constitution meeting in
Lagos can manufacture a way in which by tomorrow morning Nigerians
119
‘Freedom of Movement’, MP, August 26, 1966.
120
‘Crush the Saboteurs’, MP, August 31, 1966.
121
‘Restraint Please’, NT, August 30, 1966.
122
‘To Be Or Not to Be?’ NT, August 27, 1966.
123
‘When Our £-o-v-e Is Tied to The Pound’, WAP, September 19, 1966.
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152 Wale Adebanwi
will march along in mutual confidence as one people without suspicion of

one another. Togetherness cannot be imposed.124
The Eastern Region Government declared ‘Mourning Day’ on August
29 ‘in respect of souls lost [in the Northern Region] following the events
of May 15 and July 29, 1966’.125 The Federal Military Government did
not succeed in blocking the ‘Mourning Day’. The event irked the New
Nigerian deeply, as reflected in its reaction. Even though the paper found
no problem with mourning ‘the death of anybody’, acknowledging
what Ojukwu described as the ‘least honor we can do those our sons
and daughters now dead’, the New Nigerian went on to assert:
Every reasonable and right-thinking Nigerian would loathe the uncon-
stitutional action of the Military Governor of Eastern Nigeria, Lt.-Col.
Odumegwu Ojukwu in selecting a day of mourning for the people of his
region … There is nothing wrong in mourning the death of anybody. But
to do so in circumstances of defiance of lawful authority is to worsen an
already bad situation. We dare ask whether those who died during the mad
outrages of January this year did not deserve to be mourned.126
What the New Nigerian described as the ‘mad outrages of January’
was the Igbo-led coup of January 15, 1966, in which two prominent
Northern politicians, Bello and Balewa, and other northern military
officers were killed. The paper eagerly pointed out that the Igbo pro-
voked the killings in the Northern Region by assassinating northern
leaders: ‘We are surprised and rightly too, to note that the authorities
in the East were so indiscreet as to have singled out the tragic events of
May and July 29 as if nothing provoked or preceded those events, tragic
as they were.’127 Consequently, the paper concluded:
The declaration of a day of mourning was a flagrant incitement and whipping
up of irrational emotions at a time when all reasonable people are working
hard to find a solution to our present problem … We can now see clearly the
designs of the perpetrators of an order whereby only a section of the Nigerian
community must have the right to lord things over the other sections.128
Even the 16-man delegation of northerners resident in the Eastern
Region, which planned to visit the Northern Region to plead for the
safety and security of easterners in the North, were told by the New
Nigerian that, even though this was a ‘gesture of goodwill’, it was
‘unnecessary’, because it was ‘a well-known fact that easterners, cer-
tainly all non-northerners, have always been given protection in the
124
Ibid.
125
‘Indiscreet’. NN, August 31, 1966.
126
Ibid.
127
Ibid.
128
Ibid.
000 Fal book B.indb 152 13/06/2016 22:06

North’.129 Yet, contrary to the New Nigerian’s position, it was in the

midst of all these ‘hospitable, friendly, sincere and orderly’ people that
several hundreds of Eastern Nigerians, particularly the Igbo, were mas-
sacred.130 Two days after this narrative of normalcy and order, the New
Nigerian itself reported that the military governor of the North ‘gives
another STERN WARNING against lawlessness, molestation and acts
of subversion’.131 Despite this, the paper insisted that these acts were
perpetrated by a ‘small, misguided minority’ of northerners. However,
the New Nigerian later attempted to face the reality of the divisiveness
and national crisis:
We are back where we were. The uncertainties and fears which were brought
about by the mad propensity of a few are now being exploited to make the
work of national reconstruction difficult. Acts of lawlessness, molestation,
intimidation and subversion cannot do this region any good. Nations are
never built or sustained by indulging in recriminations, bitterness and
rancor … As the Governor of the North [said, we are] most distressed over
the action of the small misguided minority.132
This mild ‘internal criticism’ by the New Nigerian would certainly not do
for the Tribune, which asked Lt Col Gowon to take urgent action to stop
the ‘large scale killings’ in the North, because ‘[t]his is savagery and
sadism in their worst form. We condemn, in strong terms, these killings
and other acts of lawlessness and disorder.’133
It is worth noting that the New Nigerian did not describe the events as
‘killings’ or ‘massacre’ as the Tribune did.134 The strongest words that
the New Nigerian used were ‘acts of lawlessness, molestation, intimida-
tion and subversion’ – ostensibly among otherwise ‘hospitable, friendly,
sincere and orderly’ northerners.135 However, for the Pilot, those that
Tribune described as practicing ‘savagery and sadism’136 by participat-
ing in the killings, were ‘men on the lunatic fringe’137 who could cause
the country to degenerate ‘[in]to civil war’, but for the extraordinary
restraint of the easterners.138 According to the Pilot,
Could we now face the grim realities arising from the disreputable and tragic
events of recent weeks. For unless we do this, the hopes expressed both by
129
‘That Delegation from East’, NN, September 10, 1966.
130
Ibid.
131
‘Lt. Col. Hassan Gives Another STERN WARNING – Against Lawlessness, Molestation
and Acts of Subversion’, NN, September 12, 1966, 1, capitals in original.
132
The ‘few’ were ostensibly the Five Majors led by Nzeogwu who masterminded the January
16, 1966 coup. ‘Let’s Watch and Pray’, NN, September 13, 1966, 1.
133
‘Action, Gowon’, NT, October 4, 1966, 1.
134
‘What Next, Gowon?’ NT, October 5, 1966.
135
‘That Delegation from East’, NN, September 10, 1966.
136
‘Action, Gowon’, NT, October 4 1966, 1.
137
‘A Daniel, A Daniel’, WAP, October 5, 1966.
138
‘Hitting the Bull’s Eye’, Front page comment, WAP, October 3, 1966.
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154 Wale Adebanwi
Lieutenant-Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu and Lt. Col. Gowon over the week-
end will dash to pieces and Nigeria with it … Goodwill messages cannot solve
our problems which can be solved by ourselves IF WE APPROACH THESE
PROBLEMS WITH TRANSPARENT HONESTY AND OPEN MIND AND STOP
PLAYING THE OSTRICH WHILE OUR NATION IS ON THE BRINK OF DIS-
SOLUTION. It is useless to sugar-coat the fact that the calamities we face are
unthinkably menacing.139
During airlift of easterners back to their region and Ojukwu’s repeated
warning that the Eastern Region might find itself in a situation where
it would be ‘pushed out’ of Nigeria , the New Nigerian reminded a frac-
tious country about how the crisis arose. The paper often narrated this
so as to emphasize that the attempt at ‘Igbo domination’ represented
by the January 15, 1966, coup was the source of all the problems of
Nigeria, thereby depriving the Major Nzeogwu-led coup of its historical
character. It was as if Nigeria’s history began for the paper on that day.
Perhaps, lest people misunderstood the basis for the massacre of the
Igbo, the New Nigerian, reconstructed the past through its narration of
the ‘genesis of the exodus [of the Igbo]’:
The history of the First Republic is written in blood … It stands to reason,
therefore, that we should draw some conclusions from and make sober reap-
praisals of the events that matured into the crisis which now envelops the
nation … It is therefore, surprising that there are still some well-placed per-
sonalities who abuse their office by whipping up hysteria and indulging in
a war of psychosis; by so doing they have unconsciously fanned the embers
of hatred to the chagrin of the champions of peace and nation-building.140
In spite of the fact that the paper itself had earlier reported the ‘moles-
tation and harassment’ of the Igbo, it now argued that the exodus of the
Igbo from the Northern Region was ‘pre-planned’ and ‘obviously’ had
nothing to do with what the easterners experienced in the Northern
Region.141 In any case, argued the New Nigerian, the exodus was not
only from the North. ‘This is untrue and wicked’, stated the paper. ‘Why
should we not summon courage to admit the fact that those so-called
refugees have decided to migrate home out of their own volition and
that the North as well as the West, the Mid-West and Lagos, have wit-
nessed the abnormal social phenomenon.’142
This narrative is a good example of how relations of domination
are established through dissimulation, involving concealing, denying,
obscuring, or deflecting attention away from, or glossing over, existing
relations of domination and their process as it is expressed particularly
139
‘States For Sale’, WAP, October 3, 1966, 1, capitals in original.
140
‘Genesis of the Exodus’, NN, September 28, 1966, 1.
141
Ibid.
142
Ibid.
000 Fal book B.indb 154 13/06/2016 22:06

in ‘euphemization’.143 The massacre of the Eastern Nigerians was pre-

sented as a ‘misinterpretation’, while the flights to safety were described
as ‘pre-planned migration’.144 Those displaced individuals who fled for
dear lives were described as ‘so-called refugees’ who decided to ‘migrate
of their own volition’.145 Yet, the New Nigerian saw in this mass ‘migra-
tion’ a meaningless, and thus, ‘abnormal social phenomenon’.146
‘History’, the New Nigerian continued, provided many examples of
how ‘would-be mob leaders’ – ostensibly, Ojukwu – were ‘eaten up’ by
the ‘hydra-headed monster’, which they created.147 The Igbo victims of
Northern killings – and not the perpetrators – for the New Nigerian, con-
stituted the ‘mob’. The paper added: ‘We pray and hope that after sober
reflection the excited and ignited people will rediscover themselves and
retrace their faltering steps to the path of rectitude and penitence.’148
Paradoxically, the New Nigerian was ‘consoled’ that a Nigerian nation
will emerge in the near future:
It is consoling, however, that out of this tragedy has emerged one great
lesson and a guiding principle to generations to come. This is that to live as a
nation, the maturity of mind, steadfastness and the appreciation of spiritual
values are desirable attitude, and that these qualities must form the philoso-
phy on which the new nation must subsist.149
While totally ignoring the devastation suffered by thousands of east-
erners in the North, including the hundreds of lives lost, and the move
towards secession, the mouthpiece of the Northern Region narrates the
story of a ‘united nation’:
We are happy to note that those who threatened a total disintegration of
our national edifice have suddenly seen the wisdom of staying together as
one united nation … For the everlasting glory of our nation, let us march
forward as one united nation in a federation of common destiny.150
However, the Pilot reported that Ojukwu, the Governor of the East-
ern Region, claimed that the credit for the past unity of Nigeria should
go to the people of his region. Ojukwu reportedly stated:
This is a fact which we ourselves know and which, I am sure, our enemies
minimize, but the last thing that this Region would like to do is to help destroy
143
Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 62.
144
‘Genesis of the Exodus,’ NN, Sep. 28 1966, 1.
145
Ibid.
146
Ibid.
147
‘Genesis of the Exodus’, NN.
148
Ibid.
149
Ibid.
150
Ibid.
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156 Wale Adebanwi
the edifice which they have made more sacrifice, put in greater efforts and
made far-greater contributions than any other section to build.151
However, one of the assumed ‘enemies’ of the Eastern Region, that is
the newspaper owned by the Yoruba, Tribune, indeed ‘minimizes’ this
‘sacrifice’. The paper describes Ojukwu’s claim as one that was ‘in
bad taste’ which was ‘tantamount to propaganda’.152 Even though
the Tribune condemned the killings in the Northern Region and con-
sidered the reactions from the Eastern Region, particularly Ojukwu’s,
as ‘understandably emotional’,153 the paper’s overriding task was to
protect Western Nigeria in the crisis. The paper, unfortunately, reduced
the crisis to a fight between the Igbo-dominated Eastern Region and
the Hausa-Fulani-dominated Northern Region. Yorubaland/Western
Region could be the turf for their mutual war:
First, everything must be done … to see that no agent-provocateurs, whether
Hausa or Ibo, or their agents … are allowed to spread foul rumors among the
people of Western Nigeria. Ibos and Hausas must be warned that neither
the government nor the generality of the people will allow Yoruba land to be
anybody’s battle-ground [sic] or arena for small skirmishes.154
Despite the magnitude of the tragedy that the country was witness-
ing, the Tribune was singularly devoted to ensuring that the ‘skirmishes’
were restricted to the eastern and northern Regions – as if the Western
Region was not in any way involved in the crisis. The paper assured the
Igbo and the Hausa that the Yoruba were ready to defend their land
against the outbreak of hostilities between the other two:
[W]e would again warn potential trouble-makers, whether Hausa or Ibo
and whatever their uniform or smuggled arms, that all Yorubas will rise like
one man to defend their land and heritage, and that they will not allow any
foolish outsider to poison the calm atmosphere of Western Nigeria.155
The reference to ‘uniform’ and ‘smuggled arms’ were tropes for the
northern soldiers stationed in the Western Region and the Igbo’s
rumored preparation for secession, respectively. The ‘smuggled arms’
was particularly in reference to the ill-fated aircraft, which was allegedly
flying smuggled arms to the Eastern Region in preparation for war.156
Yet, the Tribune picked up the phrase used by the Pilot, regarding the
people ‘on the lunatic fringe’, in asking for mediation while presenting
the Yoruba as the ‘sober’ and ‘neutral’ group that could save the nation
151
‘We’ll Not Destroy The Edifice We Helped To Build 3,000 Easterners Dead in May Riots –
Ojukwu’, WAP, October 20, 1966, 1.
152
‘Enough is Enough’, NT, October 26, 1966.
153
Ibid.
154
‘Warning and Vigilance’, NT, October 6, 1966.
155
Ibid.
156
‘Stop the Gas’, NT, October 27, 1966.
000 Fal book B.indb 156 13/06/2016 22:06

from war: ‘Yorubas, with other ethnic groups, are destined to restore
peace and harmony between Ibos and Hausas. They must not allow
people on the lunatic fringe to involve them in the present mass killings
and molestation.’157
But the New Nigerian disagreed that the Yoruba had a ‘destiny’ that
imposed on them the task of mediation, because the issue was not a
clear-cut one between the Hausa and the Igbo. Therefore, the paper
objected to those who suggested that ‘the Yorubas should mediate
between the Eastern Region and the Northern Region, the implication
being that the whole unhappy business is simply a clear-cut issue of
North versus East, Hausas versus Ibos’.158 Rather, the paper, without
stating so explicitly, would like the matter to be seen as the Igbo against
the rest of the country. The New Nigerian continued that the view that
the crisis was between the Igbo and the Hausa ‘is not so [because] Yoru-
bas lost their lives in January [1966 Igbo-led coup] as well as North-
erners. In addition, we should also remember that the Ibos are leaving
Lagos and many towns in Western Region in large numbers.’159 This
was clearly an attempt to isolate the Igbo and present the Western and
Northern Region as a bloc united against the Eastern Region.
Interesting enough, whereas it never used the word ‘killings’ to
describe the massacres of the easterners in the North, when a broad-
cast on Radio Cotonou (Republic of Benin) announced that northern-
ers were being killed in the Eastern Region, the New Nigerian used the
word ‘killing’, even though ‘some [of the reports were] confirmed, [and]
others yet unsubstantiated’.160 Still, based on these unconfirmed and
unsubstantiated reports on the killing of a few northerners, the paper
declared: ‘The nation trembles on the brink of anarchy and despair …
A full-scale civil war of the most awful kind is a prospect that must be
feared and avoided at all costs.’161 For the New Nigerian, the massacres
of the Easterners did not provoke similar ‘trembl[ing]s on the brink of
anarchy’.
However, about one month after this, the New Nigerian asked north-
erners to heed the appeal by the Head of State, Lt Col Gowon, for an
end to the riots and killings in the North, given the fact that north-
erners ‘have always prided themselves on their respect for constituted
authority and for the maintenance of law and order’.162 This was after
the mass murder of hundreds of people. In the same edition where the
paper echoed Gowon, the latter’s speech addressed directly to Northern-
ers was also published. Gowon stated that ‘We [northerners, including
himself] are known as peace-loving people and we must do everything
157
‘Warning and Vigilance’, NT, October 6, 1966.
158
‘Not Such a Clear Cut Issue’, NN, September 29, 1966.
159
Ibid.
160
‘Peace – We Must Find an Answer’, front page comment, NN, September 30, 1966.
161
Ibid.
162
‘Above All Keep Calm’, October 3, 1966.
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158 Wale Adebanwi
in our power not to allow this good reputation to be soiled.’163 The very
instructive appeal stated further:
Fellow Northerners … You all know that since the end of July, God, in his
power, has entrusted the responsibility of this great country of ours, Nige-
rian, to the hands of another Northerner … Right from the beginning of
politics in this country, up to this date, whenever complications arise, the
people of the North are known to champion the cause of peace and set-
tlement. Once the North remains peaceful it is easy to settle disputes aris-
ing from any other part of the country … I receive complaints daily that up
to now, Easterners living in the North are being killed and molested, their
property looted.164
The Pilot was very charitable in its reaction to Gowon’s call, in spite
of Gowon’s ‘glorification’ of the northerner. The paper stated that
Gowon deserved ‘the praise of every Nigerian’ for calling a halt to the
‘hell let loose by men on the lunatic fringe’.165 It even describes Gowon
as a ‘Daniel’, adding: ‘All along, the sincere patriots of this country
have been looking for a Daniel to come to the rescue of our bleeding
nation.’166 This was an expression of an unusual restraint after an
orgy of violence, particularly in Kano, where even the indulgent New
Nigerian stated: ‘The bullet holes in the airport buildings and the dark,
ominously significant stains, are a reminder that blind ignorance and
prejudice can have no place in a nation aspiring to greatness.’167
However, the exceptional nature of the massacres in Kano in October
1966 affected the outlook of the New Nigerian. In a somewhat contrite
manner, after the Kano killings, the paper narrated a rare ‘moment of
truth’ in Nigeria’s history:
A moment of truth has been reached in Nigerian history. A moment when
we have no alternative but swallow our pride and acknowledge our failings
and our guilt. The legacies of hate, mistrust, bitterness and prejudices inher-
ited from the past have exploded in our face and we now see the prospect of
utter and complete chaos confronting us.168
Even though the paper screened off the killings that preceded these
massive Kano killings, it stated that the ‘proud history’ of the ‘great city
[Kano]’ had been stained. Instructively, the New Nigerian did not use
the words massacre (or pogrom) to describe what happened in Kano,
nor did it expressly accuse the northerners of being the perpetrators.
163
‘Appeal by Gowon. North’s Role in Peace Moves’, NN, October 3, 1966.
164
Gowon could have added, ‘after the last Northerner in power, Balewa, was killed by the
Igbo’, He did not cite even one example of when the North had compromised its position
in the interest of ‘peace and settlement’. Ibid.
165
‘A Daniel, A Daniel’, WAP, October 5, 1966.
166
Ibid.
167
‘On the Spot Report: Kano – A City of Hurt Yet New Hope’, NN, October 4, 1966, 1.
168
‘Moment of Truth in Our History’, NN, October 4, 1966.
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Instead, the killings were described as ‘black and terrible’ and ‘full [of]
horror’,169 phrases which did not immediately suggest that the killings
were against a particular group. This strategy of symbolic construction
of domination has been described by Thompson as passivization in that
it ‘delete[s] actors and agency and … tend[s] to represent processes as
things and events [that] take place in the absence of a subject who pro-
duces them’.170 The paper stated: ‘Only those who were in Kano over this
last black and terrible weekend know the full horror of what took place.
It is a memory that will remain for years to come. A memory besmirch-
ing what, in the main, has been a proud history of a great city.’171
In spite of the magnitude of the killings and its own acceptance of
complicity in the crisis, the New Nigerian still offered a defense of the
North, even while it avoided mentioning the ethnic/regional group to
which the victims belonged (easterners/Igbo), describing them rather
as ‘those who suffered’:
But with the same sincerity and intensity with which we now express our
sorrow and sympathy with those who suffered we ask that there should
be no outright condemnation of the North. It is true that there have been
mistakes. All of us – including this newspaper – must share some degree
of blame for seeking to exploit prejudices of one kind or another. But now,
albeit tragically belated, a true appreciation of the road to national suicide
on which we have embarked, has been revealed in a way that we cannot, we
dare not, ignore.172
However, beyond the sorrow and sympathy, the paper still saw the pos-
sibilities of national redemption. Thus, it appealed ‘to everyone with
a true understanding of the situation … that if we must survive as a
nation we must learn to live together … and work selfishlessly [sic] and
honestly towards rebuilding a better and happier nation’.173
Perhaps to ensure that this ‘rebuilding’ was accomplished and that
the Eastern Region did not surprise the rest of the country with seces-
sion, the New Nigerian constantly focused on what the Eastern Region
was up to in the aftermath of the massacres. For instance, the paper
asked, ‘Why … should Lt.-Col. Ojukwu … be at pains to reiterate that the
East is not hell-bent on secession when her every move seems in that
direction?’174 Later, New Nigerian returned to the issue again and again
stating in one instance that nothing had happened in Nigeria to ‘push’
the Eastern Region out of the country, as Ojukwu alleged:
169
Ibid.
170
Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 66.
171
‘Moment of Truth in Our History’.
172
Ibid.
173
Ibid.
174
‘Why Not?’ NN, October 15, 1966.
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160 Wale Adebanwi
Which prompts us to repeat the question we asked the other day: What is
the East up to? Does she mean what she says or is she playing for time? Lt.
Colonel Ojukwu tells foreign diplomats that his region has no intention of
seceding from the rest of the federation – not unless it is ‘pushed.’ And the
East is behaving as if she is being pushed. We ourselves have not seen any
evidence of this effect.175
As far as the New Nigerian was concerned, the East could only suffer
more if it decided on secession: ‘We can’t understand why the East is so
apparently intent to inflict more hurt upon [itself]. It is in the interest
of the East for her to declare right now, without further prevarications,
exactly what her intentions are.’176
Another major indication of the role of the newspapers in the crisis
as ideological soldiers for the different groups and regions was that, a
few days after this editorial, the New Nigerian – which had, two weeks
earlier, announced that ‘in spite of the crisis it continues to be widely
circulated in the East [with] its delivery vans [going] unmolested’177 –
was ‘warned’ that the paper should no longer be circulated in the East-
ern Region.178
On its part, Tribune more or less agreed with the New Nigerian on the
implications of the statements credited to Ojukwu concerning the East-
ern Region’s position on the crisis. The Tribune stated:
After strenuous denials in the past about the intentions of Eastern Nigeria to
secede from the federation, the Eastern Governor has now said that the East
‘might suddenly find’ that it has nothing more in common with the other
regions. And the question that arises from the statement is: what next?179
For the paper, this only deepened the crisis and isolated the Eastern
Region, because ‘[i]n our view, we cannot solve our problems by ignoring
them. The problem of the East today is at the very top on the list of our
national problems. It must first be solved before we can go forward.’180
The Tribune then suggested ‘the solution’, going even further than New
Nigerian to request a military solution: ‘The Nigerian Tribune urges the
Supreme Commander [Gowon] to recognize that the time has come for
a firm solution of [sic] the Eastern problem. If we have the force and the
will to bring the East into line by armed intervention, let it be done with
dispatch.’181
175
‘What is the East Up to? (With No Apologies for Repeating the Question)’, NN, October 21,
1966.
176
Ibid. Incidentally, Zik had also warned the North in 1953 that secession would be ‘calami-
tous to its corporate existence’, ‘Dr. Zik Warns the North Secession Prophets and Propa-
gandists: It Would Be Capital Blunder’, WAP, May 15, 1953, 1.
177
‘Footnote: On the Spot Report’, NN, October 4, 1966, 6.
178
‘Motor, Carrying New Nigerian Turned Back at Onitsha’, NN, October 28, 1966.
179
‘What Next?’ NT, December 14, 1966.
180
Ibid.
181
Ibid.
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The Tribune disagreed with the Pilot that the proposed meeting of the
army chiefs be held in Accra, Ghana, rather than in Lagos. The Tribune’s
position was a self-interested one. Ojukwu’s only condition for attend-
ing the meeting in Lagos accorded with the wishes of the Yoruba people:
That Northern troops in the Western Region be withdrawn to their
region and replaced by Yoruba troops.182 Therefore, when the military
governor of the Northern Region, Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Usman
Katsina, stated that he would not support such withdrawal, the Tribune
came down heavily on him: ‘We … consider the statement credited to
the Military Governor of the North as extremely provocative. For who
does this young aristocrat in military uniform think he is to seek to draw
the whole Yoruba race in battle against him and Hausas?’183
The paper claimed the ‘Hausa troops’, who were described as ‘for-
eign troops … not averse to rape, murder and high-handedness’, were
threatening to turn Yorubaland into an ‘occupied territory’. Tribune
then announced the resolve of the Yoruba, who were ‘determined to
see that their fatherland is not turned into an “occupied territory”’. As
these narratives show, by this time, the newspapers had reached a level
of such divisiveness and even hate that soldiers who were compatriots
were seen as ‘foreign troops’ as well as threats to certain parts of the
country. That was not all. Governor Katsina would be mistaken, the
Tribune averred, if he thought that Nigeria would continue to exist if
‘the East secedes or is forced to secede’:184
If the Northern Military Governor does not know it, he can carry this fact
away: The people of Western Nigeria and Lagos have taken an irrevocable
decision – if any part of Nigeria opts out of the federation, Yorubas reserve
to themselves the right to determine their own future in any association.185
It is significant that the Tribune did not see a contradiction in this and
its earlier position in the December 14, 1966 editorial in which it asked
that ‘armed intervention’ be used ‘with dispatch’ to ensure that the
Eastern Region did not secede.
In the middle of all of these, the Pilot was not ready to let go of Lagos
and refused to accept that the city was a Yoruba city. While reviewing
the state of the union after the collapse of the All-Nigeria Constitutional
182
Ibid.
183
Ibid.
184
Ibid. Tribune which had earlier asked that the East be brought into line by force changes
tone, asking: ‘Will Nigeria continue as a political unit? If so, in what form? To assume
that these questions do not arise since Nigeria MUST remain one is to fly in the face of the
facts … The truth we now face is that Eastern Nigeria is gradually breaking its links with the
rest of the country. There are powerful elements in the Region who advocate its complete
secession from Nigeria. Equally, there are powerful elements in Northern Nigeria who
are anxious to see the Ibos out of Nigeria. How do we reconcile these opposing forces?’
The paper then calls for reconciliation rather than ‘forcing’ the East back into the union.
‘Wanted: A Happy New Year’, NT, December 31, 1966, emphasis added.
185
Ibid.
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162 Wale Adebanwi
Conference, the Pilot, which again abandoned its support for federal-
ism, stated that
We whole-heartedly endorse a confederal system of government for Nigeria
at least so that the inveterate enmity and bitterness existing between the
North and East can be healed by time … In the absence of a federation we
support the suggestion of Eastern Nigeria for a Council of State, comprising
equal representatives from each state or region to serve as a weak glue to
hold the country together.186
However, the Pilot added that, since ‘Lagos is jointly developed by all
regions of the federation, we suggest that All-Nigeria Constitutional
Conference should meet soon to decide the question of Lagos during the
short spell of confederation.’187 The Pilot, as it did throughout the pre-
independence period, stood resolutely for an independent Lagos. The
rejection by Oba Adeyinka Oyekan, the Oba of Lagos, of the planned
merger plan with the Western Region was given prominence in Pilot.
Oyekan stated, ‘we shall fight to the last’ because ‘our tradition is differ-
ent from that of the West’.188 Even though Lateef Jakande, the leader of
the Lagos delegation to the Lagos constitutional conference, described
Oyekan’s statement as ‘reckless’,189 the Pilot editorialized: ‘The people
of Lagos have the right to self-determination. It is their prerogative
to decide whether the federal capital should be merged with the West
or whether it should remain free from the region. This is perfectly the
people’s choice through a referendum.’190 However, Pilot did not leave
the matter entirely to a referendum: ‘We urge that Lagos should be a
Federal territory in case the country retains its federal status. And in
case of a confederation Lagos should be the country’s political capital.
In other words, Lagos should be a separate entity.’191
Such territorial narratives were usually directed against rival regions.
While the Pilot fought for Lagos, the New Nigerian also promoted minor-
ity agitation in the Eastern Region where ‘the people of Calabar and
Ogoja Provinces’ suggested a strong center with ‘states created on the
principle of ethnic grouping’.192 While it promoted such agitation in the
Eastern Region, the New Nigerian considered the ‘appeal’ led by Josiah
Sunday Olawoyin for a merger of Ilorin-Kabba province in the Northern
Region with the Western Region as ‘irrational emotions’ and a ‘nefari-
186
‘Nigerian Confederation’, WAP, November 22, 1966.
187
Ibid. For more on this, see Wale Adebanwi, ‘The City, Hegemony and Ethno-Spatial Poli-
tics: The Press and the Struggle for Lagos in Colonial Nigeria’, Nationalism and Ethnic Poli-
tics, 9:4 (2004), 25–51.
188
‘We Shall Fight Against Merger With West’,WAP, November 28, 1966: 1.
189
‘”Oyekan’s Attack is Reckless.” Jakande Defends Lagos Delegation’, WAP, November 29,
1966, 1.
190
‘Lagos State?’ November 30, 1966, 2–3.
191
Ibid.
192
‘Calabar, Ogoja Want A Strong Centre. New Memo to Ojukwu’, NN, November 24, 1966,
1.
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ous and treacherous design to sabotage the efforts of the [constitutional

conference]’, something in which ‘right-thinking people’ ought not to
engage.193
Conclusion
As paper soldiers, the newspapers in the period before the civil war were
not unaware of what they were doing. They realized that in the ensu-
ing battle, the soldiers wielding the pen were as critical as the actual
soldiers who would eventually bear arms at the outbreak of actual hos-
tilities. Therefore, the journalists and their media institutions regarded
themselves as critical to the resolution or exacerbation of the Nigerian
crisis of nationhood.
Interesting enough, New Nigerian noted the central role of the press
in the crisis engulfing the country by ‘observing’ the tendency of
Ojukwu ‘to use the press … as a vehicle of negotiation’.194 Yet, even the
New Nigerian confessed in an earlier editorial that it too was an instru-
ment of the negotiation of power and relations of domination by the
Northern Region:
The New Nigerian seeks to be read throughout Nigeria but it has never lost
sight of the fact that it was brought into being primarily to serve the North.
It is because it considers it in the immediate as well as longer term interest
of the North that it feels obliged to comment on those misguided people – we
will put it no worse than that – whose actions are destined to bring nothing
but dishonor and disaster to the North.195
In their role in the crisis as mouthpieces or ideological soldiers of the
contending interests, the newspapers also waged battles against one
another. In this, the New Nigerian, with candor, admitted that it – like
the other newspapers – had failed the imagined nation: ‘The New Nige-
rian is conscious of its fall from grace but it has always sought to find
the truth. It has not always succeeded … [B]ut having said that let us
acknowledge that Nigeria’s press … can do much more to restore peace
in the country than they are doing.’196
Without mentioning names, but obviously in reference to the Eastern
Nigerian Outlook and Pilot, the New Nigerian also pointed to the ‘press
in certain quarters’, which seemed ‘[h]ell-rent [sic] on sensationalizing
any incident which it thinks can be regarded as favorable to their own
case and against the North’.197 For the New Nigerian, the Pilot would
perhaps typify this predilection to ‘sensationalize’ a case ‘against the
193
‘Unwarranted Agitation’, NN, September 16, 1966.
194
‘Action Not Words’, NN, Nov. 22, 1966.
195
‘At Stake – The Future of the North’, NN, September 26, 1966.
196
‘Responsibility of the Press’, NN, September 27, 1966.
197
Ibid.
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164 Wale Adebanwi
North’ as it suggested a meeting of all the military governors in Accra,

Ghana, whose sole agenda should be ‘the refugee problem arising from
the genocide in the North’.198 The Pilot insisted: ‘The aggrieved East in
particular, must be appeased if all parts of the country are to sit down
and reason together as members of the nation.’199
How should the East be appeased? The Pilot suggested a punitive tax
on northerners in addition to a grant by the Federal Government. The
Pilot stated
Incidentally, the victims of the Eastern Nigerian origin in the last distur-
bances in the North have claimed 27 million [pounds] being the total loss
they sustained during the riot. We believe a collective fine imposed on the
taxable people of the North in addition to what the Federal Government can
give to the East will calm, the distressed Easterners.200
This raised the question of whether guilt and responsibility was collec-
tive or personal. The Pilot seemed to locate the answer in what I will call
the narrative of precedence:
A precedent for this collective fine has already been laid in Nigerian his-
tory. In 1950, the Kalabari people of Eastern Nigeria paid a collective fine
of 20,000 [pounds] to Okrika people for killing Okrika fishermen on a river
near Kalabar. In 1951 or thereabouts, a riot broke out between Okrika
and Oguloma citizens. The former damaged the property of the later and
another collective fine of 20,000 [pounds] was imposed on Okrika people
which was paid to the Oguloma people as compensation. In 1958, a riot
broke out in Ibadan in Western Nigeria expressing bad-blood over the death
of Adekoge Adelabu. A collective fine was imposed on the affected area to
compensate those whose property was lost on the affray.201
These examples provided a basis for a strong case to be made by the
Pilot, which insisted: ‘Until the East is pacified, the question of consider-
ing the future association of Nigeria is out of the question.’202
In the period preceding the civil war, unlike the Pilot, the New Nigerian
was not interested in reparation or restitution in favor of the Eastern
Region and its people. Rather, it accused the information media of the
Eastern Region of waging ideological war against the rest of the coun-
try by practicing ‘journalism that can never do anybody any good’:
They have carried news which are absolute [sic] false. They have published
news which are criminally distorted. They have been saying things which are
an open defiance to the National Military Government … They can be used
to render [sic] any country asunder, any united people disintegrating [sic]
198
‘Meet in Ghana’, Front page comment, WAP, December 16, 1966.
199
Ibid.
200
Ibid.
201
Ibid.
202
Ibid.
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and any cause useless … We strongly maintain that such an information

medium should hang its head in shame for helping to tear this country into
pieces.203
The federal government-owned newspaper the Post took a similar posi-
tion about ‘certain sections of the press [which] indulge in inciting bit-
terness’.204 But it returned the salvo from the New Nigerian, accusing
the newspaper press in the East and, by implication, the Pilot. The Pilot
stated:
A Daily Paper [sic] printed in Northern Nigeria is trying very hard to intro-
duce polemics into politics in Nigeria again … At this stage in our national
metamorphosis, we regard it as calculated sabotage or incitement for any-
body to do any act overt or covert to engender tribal bitterness or sectional
ill-feeling.205
By the time the civil war broke out, these newspapers, as well as
others, became, even more than before, ideological soldiers for the
secessionist Republic of Biafra and the Federal Republic of Nigeria. This
chapter argues that the role of the press in reporting and comment-
ing on the civil war cannot be fully understood if we do not account
for how the newspapers were fully implicated in the process that led to
the outbreak of the civil war. As it is evident from the narratives above,
the newspaper press in Nigeria was actively involved in producing the
conditions that led to the outbreak of hostilities in 1967.
203
Ibid.
204
‘To The Future’, MP, August 30, 1966.
205
‘Keep Polemics Away’, WAP, April 21, 1966.
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8 Literary Separatism
Ethnic Balkanization in Nigeria-Biafra
War Narratives
Akachi Odoemene
Introduction
‘We remember differently’.1 Such were the words Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie used in her review of Chinua Achebe’s very last literary work,
There Was a Country. Indeed, when it comes to the tragic and painful
events that culminated in the civil war and their aftermath, we hardly
remember the same way, due to our differences. The critical questions,
in my opinion, are the following. How have and why do we remember
differently? Is it a case of differences in perspective? Or, is it because of
some ulterior motive, which might be sinister and/or self-serving – in
other words, a deliberate attempt to rewrite history? This underlines the
importance of memory, which shapes the nature of and trend in one’s
knowledge, understanding and interpretation of the past and its mean-
ing, particularly as we are essentially what we remember and know. In
other words, while what has happened cannot be changed, through
controlled measures its meaning can. This is so because the power to
remember in particular ways lies within humans, and narratives are
the primary forms and means through which to achieve this goal.
Writing on wars has always been fashionable and attractive for many
writers all through the ages, and the Nigeria-Biafra War is clearly not an
exception. From the period leading to the end of that war to the present
day, there has been a flurry of literature – histories, biographies, auto
biographies, diaries, memoirs, political accounts, newspaper stories, etc.
– by diverse writers who have produced both fictional and presumably
‘factual’ accounts of the war. For instance, Laurie Wiseberg noted that
from 1968 to 1969, many speculated on whether more blood or more
ink was being spilt on the battlefronts.2 The result is not surprising, as
1
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘Awo vs Achebe: “We Remember Differently”’, Vanguard on-
line, November 28, 2012, www.vanguardngr.com/2012/11/achebe-at-82-we-remem-
ber-differently-by-chimamanda-adichie (accessed December 1, 2012).
2
Laurie S. Wiseberg, ‘An Emerging Literature: Studies of the Nigerian Civil War’, African
Studies Review 18:1 (April 1975), 117. Wiseberg alluded to such flurry in literature by
pointing to the vast bibliographical notes in A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in
Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook, 1966–1970, 2 vols (London: Oxford University
Press, 1971), and in Zdenek Cervenka, The Nigerian War, 1967–1970: History of the War
166
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Ethnic Balkanization in the War Narratives 167
polemic flows more swiftly and more voluminously than actual schol-
arship. Aptly underlining the nature and importance of this seeming
‘scholarly tragedy’ that has befallen the Nigeria-Biafra War historio-
graphical narratives, Gavin Williams appropriately opined that
the events leading to the Biafran secession and the Nigerian Civil War itself
were the most tragic and important in the history of Nigeria. They have also
been silenced. Much is forgotten; what little is remembered is selectively
constructed, as was much written at the time. There were fine analytical
accounts and copious documentations of these events published in the
early 1970s. Since then accounts have mainly been revived to serve current
political purposes.3
The ‘selectively constructed’ narratives of the Nigeria-Biafra War
have existed both at the local and the foreign levels. On the local nar-
ratives, there were two sets. The first related to those which were often
balkanized along the wartime ‘Nigeria’ and ‘Biafra’ divides. Thus, most
of the commentators from the Nigerian side during the conflict largely
produced works that were sharply and diametrically opposed to those
done by those from the separatists on the Biafran side, particularly
by the ethnic Igbo. The nature and purposes of the majority of these
accounts have been ethnically fragmented. A second kind of balkaniza-
tion existed also on the local front, this time within the Biafra enclave
alone and related to those war narratives balkanized chiefly along
ethnic lines by diverse minority groups within the ‘Biafra enclave’. Not
surprisingly, such a crisis also existed among foreign authors. Many
of these writers have written from the perspective of the group(s) they
were well acquainted with (and on or among those who they have often
researched, in the case of scholars), and thus, had come to ‘know’,
‘understand’, and develop some level of familiarity and intimacy.
This chapter sets out to achieve two broad objectives. The first is to
examine the dynamics of balkanized narratives among both local and
foreign authors. The second is to concentrate on and critically inter-
rogate some key highlights of the war’s history that have been victim
to such balkanizations. The chapter has been structured into five sec-
tions. The second section attempts an explication of the concepts of lit-
erary separatism and ethnic balkanization in scholarship, particularly
as should be understood in the present context. The third explores the
existing narratives of the Nigeria-Biafra War. It examines three exam-
ples of ‘ethnicized balkanization’ of the civil war narratives, providing
some perspectives to their underlining traits. Some of the contentious
– Selected Bibliography and Documents (Frankfurt: Bernard & Graefe, 1971), which she saw
as excellent surveys of such a vast data bank at the time.
3
Gavin Williams, ‘Reconsidering the Nigerian Civil War’, paper presented at the Workshop
of Oxford Research Network on Government in Africa on the theme ‘Biafra and Beyond:
Identity, Democracy and Citizenship in Africa, African Studies Centre, and Department of
Politics and International Relations, June 15–16, 2007, 1.
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168 Akachi Odoemene
highlights of the war’s history, which have been victims of such bal-
kanization, thus invoke false and divergent interpretations. The fourth
section engages and reassesses the third. Conclusions are drawn in the
final section.
Literary Separatism and ‘Ethnic Balkanization’ in Scholarship

Offering some concise conceptual clarifications and giving meaning to
the notions of ‘ethnic balkanization’ in scholarship and ‘literary separa-
tism’ at this stage, particularly in the context of this present discourse,
would be helpful. Ethnic balkanization is a term often used to describe
the pervasive and entrenched hostility between historically different
and divided ethnic groups. This is emblematic of the Balkans from
where it draws its name.4 It represents the splitting apart of something
along ethnic lines, thus heightening of consciousness among groups
and antagonism towards other groups and increased inter-group con-
flicts. As a result, ethnic balkanization is typically not a positive term as
there is often much strife that takes place when and where it occurs. A
cogent example of such is clearly the ethnically divided Nigerian state.
To be sure, ethnicity still remains the most basic and politically salient
identity, in addition to demonstrably being the most conspicuous group
identity in Nigeria, in (non)competitive settings.5 Ethnicity played sig-
nificant roles in Nigeria’s socio-political changes during the ‘ultra-crisis
decade’ (1960–1970), as well as snowballing the country into one of
Africa’s bloodiest ethnic-motivated wars.
Ethnic balkanization in scholarship should be understood in terms of
the purposeful fracturing of literary works and the wasting of some-
thing of scholarly importance on the basis of something totally unim-
portant, like ethnic differences. Of course, people are bound to write
from their own myopic and biased viewpoints: narratives shaped the
thinking of people, reinforced stereotypical divisions, and socialized
them into specific systems of thought.
Literary separatism, on the other hand, is an alternative to the liter-
ary entrapment of balkanization in scholarship. It is a conscious and
deliberate breakaway, removal and detachment from ‘sloppy’ scholar-
ship. Thus, to speak of literary separatism is to first admit the failures
of subsisting trends in scholarship in an area of interest, and second, to
attempt to rectify the observed anomaly by offering alternative interpre-
tations and/or narratives. In other words, it appreciates the dynamics of
4
Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller, eds, Cultural Divides: Understanding and Overcoming
Group Conflict (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 36.
5
Eghosa E. Osaghae and Rotimi T. Suberu, ‘A History of Identities, Violence, and Stability
in Nigeria’, CRISE Working Paper 6 (January 2005), 8; Peter Lewis and Michael Bratton,
‘Attitudes Towards Democracy and Markets in Nigeria: Report of a National Opinion Sur-
vey’, (Washington, DC: Management Systems International, and International Founda-
tion for Election Systems, 2000), 27.
000 Fal book B.indb 168 13/06/2016 22:06

the politics that affected literary engagements and narratives within a

specific subject. It, however, seeks to detach from such ‘politics’ in schol-
arly undertakings. Indeed, as one would imagine, the flurry of the first
element in narratives, negative as it was, would necessarily warrant the
need for and emergence of the later element in scholarly engagements.
In this case, it is the Nigeria-Biafra War history and narratives
that are our present focus. Here, the separatist emphasis would be on
examining principal aspects of the war’s saga to show their balkanized
nature and attempt to present a critical, corrective perspective on some
important war highlights.
The Nigeria-Biafra War Narratives: An Exploration

As a historian, one is of the opinion that narratives shape the way people
remember and interpret events, and help them determine their mean-
ings, thus, like literature, providing a strong vehicle for social thought.6
This is a massive point for understanding how the diverse, competing,
and conflicting narratives of the civil war are meant to shape the under-
standing of that war among different groups. If a story is made up about
a historical experience and told to people who will listen, even if it is not
true, after some time the people will believe it and try to live up to it. This
is the power of narratives on people’s memories. This is exactly what
ethnically balkanized narratives of the war were intended to achieve:
building representations that the respective targeted populace uses to
interpret the tragic war saga, and unthinkingly respond and react to
it. To be sure, this grand strategy has been outstandingly successful in
living up to its desired objective.
In this section, we will examine samples of three diverse sets of the
war narratives, which ‘were most easily explained by grand theories:
the Igbo plot and conspiracy, or the Northern conspiracy’.7 The aim
here is to underline and show the leanings and trends in such ethnically
balkanized interpretations of that war saga.
‘Nigerians’ and ‘Biafrans’: Competing narratives

There exists a gulf between the literary works produced by Nigerians
who were on the federal side and the nature of analysis produced by
the Biafrans, particularly the Igbo. When requested by a Canadian
colleague and friend to recommend ‘the most authoritative work’ by
a Nigerian on the Nigeria-Biafra War, one was bewildered as to what
recommendations to make. This was because there exists some level of
‘crisis of confidence’ with most narratives on that tragic conflict. All
‘local narratives’ are not ‘subjective’; some are quite objective in their
6
For some discussion on this, see Craig McLuckie, Nigerian Civil War Literature: Seeking an
‘Imagined Community’ (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1990).
7
Williams, ‘Reconsidering the Nigerian Civil War’, 2.
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170 Akachi Odoemene
discourses. However, the mere fact that such authors did not just write
first-hand, eye-witness accounts but often wrote from the perspective
of being an ‘active participant’, means that they often strived to justify
and/or rationalize their positions and actions in that saga. It became a
challenge for one to properly classify such narratives in terms of objec-
tivity. However, apart from those narratives that fall into this category,
many others are outright subjective with an ethnicized grandeur. Per-
sons on each side of the divide always narrated their stories of the war
in such a way that would justify their own stance and actions while
discrediting or even demonizing that of ‘the other’ – the enemy during
the conflict. This is important, as the narratives often give some inkling
into how events were constructed into such conspiratorial views.
In an effort to put the record straight and also justify their actions,
motives, vision, and mission, Adewale Ademoyega wrote an epic anal-
ogy of the first military coup d’état in Nigeria’s history, Why We Struck:
The Story of the First Nigerian Coup.8 This is an impressive, dispassionate,
and enthralling narrative presented in lucid prose. This is not surprising
given the background of the author. He is a graduate of History from
the University of London. Ademoyega clearly dispelled many myths,
misconceptions, and half-truths about that coup, especially held by
many who push the case of an ethnic conspiracy. The book provides
further insights into the details of and developments involved in the
coup through an unambiguous presentation. A stellar eyewitness and
active-participant account, his narrative about the causes, motives,
visions, and missions of the coup is unquestionably solid. Indeed, he
presents a narrative that is in tension with and diametrically opposed to
those of the northern elite.
Effectively combining the titles of the works of two participants in
that coup, Wale Ademoyega and Ben Gbulie, A.M. Mainasara’s The Five
Majors: Why They Struck is the northern version of Nigeria’s first mili-
tary coup d’état.9 In other words, this work is an intentional repudiation
of the participants’ version of what happened. Therefore, its objective is
clear. In it, Mainasara, a northern historian from Kano, seriously seeks
to counter the positions of the January 1966 participants in the coup.
In doing so, he makes rather sweeping allegations hinged on the grand
narrative of Igbo conspiracy. So protective of the North is Mainasara’s
narrative that it critically but naively challenges what seems to be a
commonly held opinion in most other accounts of one primary cause of
the first coup: the corrupt nature of the northern-led First Republic.10
Mainasara’s narrative has always been a central reference for those
8
Adewale Ademoyega, Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup (Ibadan: Evans,
1981).
9
A.M. Mainasara, The Five Majors: Why They Struck (Zaria: Hudahuda, 1982).
10
All the works referenced here and many others were very critical of the First Republic
as a bastion of corruption, impunity and inept and high-handed leadership – conditions
which made a military coup largely unavoidable.
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who subscribe to the Igbo coup and conspiracy theory, especially in the
North.
My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War by Olusegun Oba-
sanjo is another interesting civil war narrative.11 Written by a major
actor, it comes across as a self-serving account that denigrated almost
every other notable personality, glorified his own career, and extoled his
acts in furthering the war. Despite these challenges, it is an important
resource as it also exposed some truth of that conflict. It was written
from a usual Nigerian perspective – as expected, given his role in the war
– and also presented a convenient analogy, leaving out critical issues
about which, from all indications, he must have been knowledgeable.12
When compared to Alexander Madiebo’s account, the dichotomy is
quite glaring. Madiebo, who also largely hyped his career and his role
in the war in his account, offered a Biafran version instead and gener-
ally presented Biafra as an inevitable child of necessity. Madiebo equally
closed many gaps Obasanjo left agape.13
General Yakubu Gowon was the focus of two important biographies
that also covered the Nigeria-Biafra War, typically presenting a mix of
both Nigerian and northern versions of the narrative, which is hinged
on Igbo conspiracy and clearly explicated why northern peoples had
to do what they did (in May, July, and September 1966).14 While they
managed to put the records straight on certain contested issues, they
also contained factual errors aimed at promoting the northern version
of the war story. Indeed, their failure to come clean on certain issues
of that war, as one now knows from many other authoritative sources,
underlined and reflected a level of subjectivity which was sectionally
motivated.
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, Chinualumogu
Achebe’s last work, is, perhaps, the most controversial narrative of the
Nigeria-Biafra War.15 Similarly, it has generated more commentaries
11
Olusegun Obasanjo, My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970
(London: Heinemann, 1981).
12
It is instructive that some of his colleagues, like Lt Gen. Alani Akinrinade (retired) and
Brig. Gen. Godwin Alabi-Isama (retired), have revealed that Obasanjo’s war account was
full of ‘serious and historical errors’ and constituted a ‘self-glorification’ – see Ade Adeso-
moju, ‘Obasanjo’s Civil War Book, Self-Glorification, Ex-Generals’, Punch newspaper on-
line (July 19, 2013), www.punchng.com/news/obasanjos-civil-war-book-self-glorifica-
tion-ex-generals (accessed April 12, 2014). There is also evidence to show that Obasanjo
committed many strategic blunders in leading the Commando unit – facts that Obasanjo
conveniently avoided in his narrative. See Godwin Alabi-Isama, The Tragedy of Victory:
On-the-Spot Account of the Nigeria-Biafra War in the Atlantic Theatre (Ibadan: Spectrum,
2013).
13
Alexander A. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War (Enugu: Fourth Di-
mension, 2000).
14
John D. Clarke, Yakubu Gowon: Faith in a United Nigeria (London: Routledge, 1987); Isawa
J. Elaigwu, Gowon: The Biography of a Soldier-Statesman (Ibadan: West Books, 1986).
15
2012).
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172 Akachi Odoemene
and reviews from different sections of the country and elsewhere than
any other. The vast majority of ethnic Igbo relate to and identify with
this narrative, but it has incensed some people from other parts of the
country, with the exception of a few Nigerian revisionists. While Achebe
has hardly said anything radically different from the widely held Igbo
view of the war saga, his voice added a tone of legitimacy, integrity, and
finality to such narrative – exactly the reason for the controversy. The
central brouhaha and contention in Achebe’s narrative is his take on
the Igbo genocide, in which he accused General Yakubu Gowon and
Chief Obafemi Awolowo of grave complicity, culpability, and liability.
Such an ascription never went down well with many, especially the
ethnic Yoruba, many of whom rose in defense of their deified leader and
hero Awolowo.16 Many did so even before seeing the book, not to talk of
reading it, and resorted to attacking the personality, integrity, and cred-
ibility of Achebe as they denied such an accusations about their leader.
But what the denials – which are commonplace today – are really about
is quite unclear and surprising. The issue, which has opened an ongoing
debate emphasizing how one people’s hero is another’s war criminal, is
discussed further below.
Discordant voices in the ‘Biafran enclave’: The counter-narratives

Biafra was not a monolithic unit. It was, like Nigeria, a multi-ethnic,
multi-national entity. However, the Igbo was the dominant ethnic group
in the region. Within the Biafran enclave both inter – and intra-ethnic
schisms existed, contrary to some opinions that Biafra was a collective
that spoke with one voice.17 Indeed, many groups and persons within
the unit saw things differently and acted within their beliefs to achieve
their disparate objectives, which were largely anti-Biafran. Notable
authors include Ukpabi Asika, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Elechi Amadi, all
of whom published opinions on the war. In some instances, they repre-
sented the views of entire ethnic or sub-ethnic groups. These schisms
and fault lines appeared because of the threat of Igbo domination – real
and imagined – and colored authors’ writings of their narratives; thus,
unsurprisingly, the production of counter-narratives.
The narratives of Elechi Amadi, an Ikwerre Captain of the Nige-
rian Army who served under the wartime federal side, and Kenule
Beeson Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni playwright, are very much alike. In
both accounts, which are evocative and highly personalized, the ‘idea
of Biafra’ was evidently repugnant and denounced, while its leader-
ship was repudiated for a barrage of reasons.18 Indeed, they never hid
16
Meanwhile, Gowon’s camp has maintained a studied silence over Achebe’s accusation
and has yet to make any statement to date.
17
See Frederick Forsyth, The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend (New York: Pen-
guin Books, 1969).
18
Ken Saro-Wiwa. On a Darkling Plain: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War (Port Harcourt:
Saros, 1989); Elechi Amadi. Sunset in Biafra (London: Heinemann, 1973).
000 Fal book B.indb 172 13/06/2016 22:06

their rather anti-Igbo stance and disdain for the Biafran cause; they
exhibited themselves as advocates of minority groups’ rights. Interest-
ingly though, they scarcely utilized the northern-style rhetoric of ‘Igbo
conspiracy and domination’ in doing so. Instead, one could locate their
resentments and dissent in the ‘popular’ fears of the minority groups
within the enclave who had to contend with the overwhelming domi-
nance and overbearing influence of the ethnic Igbo. To underscore their
anti-Biafran stance, and as convinced believers in ‘one Nigeria’, both
men served on the Nigerian side against the Biafra State during the war,
and played active roles to ensure Biafra’s collapse.
Chief Nkere Uwem Akpan’s narrative19 is a dissention narrative from
a vantage point – an ‘insider’s perspective’. Akpan was Chief Secretary
to the Biafran Government and Head of the Biafran Civil Service. His
narrative is very important as it comes first hand from the head who
held together and managed Biafra’s incredibly resilient administra-
tion. Lacking, however, is a critical focus on his role as secretary of the
government of Biafra, despite all odds and in the midst of fierce battles
and carnage in Biafra. One notes that to evade this significant challenge
in his account, Akpan presented a picture of one who was not really
trusted and was consequently isolated within the wartime administra-
tion, basically because he was not ethnic Igbo: he was Efik. Even if this
was so – though it is highly unlikely – it seems Akpan merely told an
expedient version of the war story, leaving out his critical roles in that
administration.20
General Philip Effiong’s Nigeria and Biafra: My Story also falls in
such refreshing counter-narratives of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Indeed,
it is one of the four much-anticipated accounts of this most significant
socio-political development in Nigeria’s history – an account by one of
its key participants, especially from the Biafran side.21 He was a serious
believer in ‘one Nigeria’ Thus, he did not really want Biafra but neither
did he denounce Biafra nor regret fighting on its side. He also never
claimed that he was deceived or coerced into joining ‘the rebellion’.
However, he incidentally found himself on the Biafran side and had to
fight in ‘self-defense’, which he argues is not ‘tantamount to a rebel-
lion as some people have tried to make out’.22 In other words, at best,
his narrative is a Nigerian view as he ‘wrote essentially as a Nigerian
19
Nkere U. Akpan, The Struggle for Secession 1966–1970: A Personal Account of the Nigerian
Civil War (London: Frank Cass, 1972).
20
Chief Akpan was not just highly placed in the Biafran administration throughout its
three-year existence, but in fact one of the hand-picked half-dozen men who exited Biafra
with its leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu, on the eve of its collapse.
21
The others being those from the chief protagonists of that war – Gowon, Odumegwu
Ojukwu and Awolowo – if they will ever be written, as two have gone and, it seems, with-
out documenting their own accounts.
22
Philip Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra: My Story (New York: African Tree Press, 2007).
000 Fal book B.indb 173 13/06/2016 22:06

174 Akachi Odoemene
who was a witness to events that led inexorably to Biafra’.23 Effiong’s

account is fair and balanced and is rendered from a perspective not
found elsewhere. His dispassionate narrative offered new perspectives
to issues, and dispelled some misconceptions, faulty assumptions, hasty
comments and conclusions as well as confirming some other notions on
certain dramatis personae in the war saga. He faults several significant
positions of Gowon in his biographic narratives.24
‘Ethnic sympathies’ of foreign authors

Distortions of the Nigeria-Biafra War narratives existed among foreign
authors, too. In fact, they often have not been as ‘neutral’ as many would
think or argue. It is often thought and expected that the narratives of
foreign authors on the war would escape the unique circumstances
experienced among local authors and their narratives. This is because
of the seeming detachment of the foreign authors from the issues
leading to and involved in that conflict. Such an expectation is largely
idealistic. Foreign narratives also exhibited biases, following some kind
of familiarity and attachment with particular groups, or among those
they often researched and, thus, have grown to know and develop some
level of intimacy and affinities. This situation makes it difficult for them
to remain entirely neutral. In this regard Robin Cohen instructively
observed that ‘with some notable exceptions … outside commentators
have generally failed to grasp the complexity of the events … Instead all
rights have been found on either the Biafra or Federal side, whose posi-
tions have usually been depicted in simplified terms.’25
Thus, the contention here is that these foreign narratives exhibit the
same ethnicized tendencies, as is the case with local ones. Easily, one can
identify foreign writers and their ethnic leanings by critically assessing
the nature and depth of critique they give to the fundamental issues
of the war saga. Thus, it would be very easy to categorize most foreign
authors or ‘Nigerianists’ in the global West, particularly in Europe and
continental America, according to different ethnic groups in Nigeria on
which they conduct research.
Murray Last is one scholar who has never hidden his pro-North
stance on socio-political issues in Nigeria – whether on the civil war, vig-
ilante matters, or even on the notorious Boko Haram. His positions have
often betrayed him as being emotionally aligned with and biased to the
northern cause. His essays on the war often read like a strong approval
of the northern position with virtually no considerations for the other
23
Pini Jason, ‘Nigeria and Biafra: My Story by General Philip Efiong, A Review at the Public
Presentation at the Sheraton Hotel, Abuja’, March 31, 2005, www.kwenu.com/bookre-
view/philip_efiong.htm (accessed September 17, 2014).
24
Elaigwu, Gowon, 52–54, 61; Wale Adebanwi, ‘Death, National Memory and the Social
Construction of Heroism’, Journal of African History, 49:3 (2008), 424.
25
Robin Cohen, ‘A Greater South: A Reinterpretation of the Prelude to the Nigerian Civil
War’, Manchester Papers on Development 3:3 (November 1987), 1.
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party to the conflict, whom he freely referred to as ‘wrongdoers’.26 This

is certainly in bad taste and with such glaring but intentional inaccu-
racies when compared, for instance, with the more balanced analogy
of Richard Sklar or the grand narrative of de St. Jorre.27 For example,
he exhibited such bias when he claimed that ‘there was good reason
for those in the federal government and in the armed forces to be very
angry … especially since before the fighting started the Aburi accords had
given Ojukwu everything he had been demanding’.28 Other notable authors
who shared this podium include A.H.M. Kirk-Greene and Rex Niven,
both of who wrote from the Nigerian/northern perspective.29
As Odoemene noted, Last’s ‘position is, at the very least, a blatant and
unfortunate misrepresentation of the facts of Nigerian civil war his-
tory … Ojukwu was never given “everything he had been demanding”
because the accord was scuttled.’30 In another instance, Last repudiates
Odumegwu Ojukwu for his ‘defiant resistance’, which ‘is not the usual
way of protest in Hausaland [where] you do not confront authority, you
go away from it’.31 For sure, his accounts represent a typical northern
narrative, demonizing the Biafran side and defending the actions of the
Nigerian state. Clearly, Last is not oblivious of what he hopes to achieve
with this ploy. Understandably, his disposition is a result of his long
association with Northern Nigeria. To put things in perspective, Last did
his doctorate on Northern Nigeria, which afforded him the opportunity
to live among and establish close relations with the people of that area.
Furthermore, he ‘has been working in or on Northern Nigeria since
1961, and still visits there every year’.32 He also ‘expects to continue
visiting Northern Nigeria at least once a year’.33 This type of familiarity
and relationship brings about the kind of empathy that is eventually
manifested, even in scholarly works.
26
Murray Last, ‘Reconciliation and Memory in Postwar Nigeria’, in V. Das, A. Kleinman, M.
Ramphele, and P. Reynolds, eds, Violence and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2000), 316.
27
Richard Sklar, ‘Nigeria/Biafra’, Africa Today 16:1 (February-March 1969); John de St.
Jorre, The Brothers’ War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
28
Last, ‘Reconciliation and Memory’, 315, emphasis added.
29
Rex Niven, The War of Nigerian Unity (London: Evans, 1970); Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Con-
flict; Anthony H.M. Kirk-Greene, ‘The Genesis of the Nigerian Civil War and the Theory
of Fear’, Research Report 27, Scandinavian Institute of African Studies (Uppsala), 1975.
30
Akachi Odoemene, ‘“Remember to Forget”: The Nigeria-Biafra War, History, and the Poli-
tics of Memory’, in The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory, edited by
Chima J. Korieh (New York: Cambria, 2012), 175.
31
Murray Last, ‘Nation-breaking and Not-belonging in Nigeria: Withdrawal, Resistance,
Riot?’ unpublished conference paper, European Conference of African Studies, Leipzig,
2009.
32
This was noted in Murray Last’s profile as the author of an article. See Murray Last, ‘The
Search for Security in Muslim Northern Nigeria’, Africa 78:1 (2008), 41.
33
‘Centre of African Studies Research Associates’, www.soas.ac.uk/cas/members/re-
searchassociates (accessed July 15, 2014).
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176 Akachi Odoemene
Frederick Forsyth, the world-acclaimed novelist and journalist, is

another author, who typically represents what one might see as ‘a for-
eign Biafran’, having shown an uncommon passion and stance for the
Biafran cause. Indeed, he did not hide his pro-Biafran sympathies in his
book, which he started off by noting:
This book is not detached; it seeks to explain what Biafra is, why its people
decided to separate themselves from Nigeria, and how they have reacted to
what has been inflicted on them. I may be accused of presenting the Biafran
story; this would not be without justification. It is the Biafra story and it is
told from the Biafran standpoint.34
In this clearly skewed narrative, Forsyth, like Last, presents a narra-
tive that feeds into a popular narrative of the war. Forsyth’s motivation
came about due to his beliefs and understanding gained while serving
as a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) journalist covering the
Nigeria-Biafra War. He saw what he deemed unjust in the war period,
where Biafra was the underdog, and its peoples, whom he portrayed
as a united entity that spoke with one voice, were brutally oppressed
victims.35 No doubt the tone of his narrative was further colored by his
strong familiarity with the Biafran side, especially a close friendship and
relationship with its Biafran leader and head of state, Chukwuemeka
Odumegwu Ojukwu. Forsyth would eventually write a popular biogra-
phy, Emeka.36 The narratives of Suzanne Cronje equally bear such glar-
ing biases for the Biafran cause. A journalist like Forsyth, she deployed
her skills to critically investigating the conflict. Cronje, becoming con-
vinced especially of the shameful complicity of her government (Brit-
ain) and Western ambivalence towards genocide, wrote almost entirely
from a Biafran perspective.37
As has been shown, these diverse works were often written to pro-
tect, defend, and propagate or advance the interests and image of the
group(s) with which the writer was familiar and had relationship. While
not inferring that these works are entirely subjective – which is certainly
not the case – the fear, to my mind, is that because these authors are
respected and reputable scholars and are seen as representing a neutral
perspective on civil war events, most people would be inclined towards
believing some of the misrepresentations or biases they peddled. What
is distinct in these cases, as with some others not here mentioned, is
that unlike many other foreign authors on the war who misrepresented
issues due to seeming ‘ignorance’ or outright sloppiness in research,
most of these set of foreign authors take their positions based on
34
Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 7.
35
Ibid., 228–9.
36
Frederick Forsyth, Emeka 2nd edn (Oxford: Spectrum Books, 1993).
37
See Suzanne Cronje, The World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of the Biafran War,
1967–1970 (New York: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972).
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certain affinity with different groups or persons involved in the conflict

dynamics.
Implications of ethnically balkanized narratives

The articulation, crafting, and presentation of Nigeria-Biafra War nar-
ratives have been based mainly on ethnic differences of Nigerian peo-
ples. As we have seen, both local and foreign authors are involved in this
development. Apart from what seems to be the main motives for these
narratives – to reinforce particular forms of thought processes of the
war’s history on the targeted groups or populations – there seems to be
some other reasons for such flurry of narratives in this regard, which
range from the pecuniary to the patriotic. As Effiong wrote:
Some have written to prove their innocence and helplessness in the roles
they had played even if in the event they wielded considerable influence
and power on issues of the time. Some have written to show how they won
or lost the war, some have written to make quick money because they had
a good story to tell, while some have written to justify the principles and
causes in which they believe and for which some others lost their lives.38
But beyond these, one is very much interested in the effect of such
ethnically balkanized narratives on the Nigerian society as a whole.
One such effect has been identified, and it has been quite dire to social
development in the country. First, this development has resulted in the
bifurcation of the proper history and understanding of the war. As a
consequence, the subsisting narrative trends often masked the truth
and jeopardized efforts at making sense of Nigerians’ collective recol-
lections. In this regard, people tended to ignore the facts or forget to
check them, and thus the true history becomes difficult to figure out.
Therefore, there is a tendency for the authentic lessons of the history to
eventually elude the country’s citizens.
These often distorted and embellished histories of the war have
also reinforced divisions and distrust among Nigerians as they have
influenced the public perception of the war, albeit divisively. A typical
example could be seen in the wild, contentious, often unhealthy, and
sometimes uncivil debates and conversations generated by Achebe’s
narrative. In other words, these disparate ethnically balkanized narra-
tives have served to balkanize even further the peoples of the country.
Not only have they led to vexed, competing, and conflicting discourses
on the civil war, but the trend has also reinforced ethnic prejudices,
increased tension and misunderstanding, and deepened the agony of
those who feel truly victimized, all of which succeeded in exacerbat-
ing the ethnic conflicts in the country. This has done a great damage to
38
Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra, 1.
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178 Akachi Odoemene
the country’s institutions and causes with its repercussions being felt in
contemporary times.
Contentious Highlights of the War Saga: A Critique

In this section, it is worth taking a moment to examine critically and
offer evidence-based (alternative), candid (re)interpretations to five crit-
ical aspects of the civil war saga, which have been victims of ethnicized
and thus subjective interpretations. Revisiting and critiquing these
important aspects of the war’s history are efforts to establish their true
meanings within the relevant context. Indeed, as has often been said,
there are two sides to every story. Thus, it is only reasonable and fair to
assess the evidence of both sides, otherwise any attempt at judgment or
interpretation would not only be dangerous, but will always naturally
be based on sectional prejudice often based on a balkanized knowledge
of facts.39 To be sure, people can register their disagreements based on
their prejudiced knowledge of facts, but one should bow to truth and
superior viewpoint, no matter how insignificant it may look. As will be
shown, further evidence would demonstrate that much of the events
of the war saga were more complex and complicated than the existing
explanations and representations have portrayed.
The ‘Igbo Coup’ of January 1966

What exactly defines a coup? Why would the January 1966 putsch be
regarded as and termed an ‘Igbo coup’? What evidence exists on this
matter? To begin with, let us look at the protagonists of that coup and
its eventual outcomes, which are the main basis for arguments for an
Igbo conspiracy and coup, then examine and consider other factors. On
January 15, 1966, a group of pro-United Progressive Grand Alliance
(UPGA) young Army officers staged a coup d’état ostensibly to cleanse
the country of bad and corrupt leadership.40 The coup’s original trio
were Majors Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, Adewale Ademoyega, and
Emmanuel Arinze Ifeajuna.41 That number was later enlarged to five,
39
One must concede that indeed, facts may be ‘sacred’, as is often said, but facts are not
truths; facts can and often do contradict themselves.
40
It was clear that the officers involved in the January coup were sympathetic to the UPGA,
which was an alliance of three political parties at the time – the National Council of
Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), the Action Group (AG) and the United Middle-Belt Congress
(UMBC) – with the aim of confronting and checking the excesses of the Northern People’s
Congress, in alliance with the Nigerian National Democratic Party. For instance, there
were the bitter regional struggles 1962–66, the rigged federal elections in 1964, the un-
healthy political practices of the regionally dominated political parties (as exemplified in
the despotic quelling of the Tiv uprisings of 1964), the Western Region’s crisis follow-
ing the flawed regional elections in 1965, the politically manipulated census exercise of
1962–1963 (the results of which were published in February 1964), and the revolting
corruption that pervaded the entire political spectrum.
41
Ademoyega, Why We Struck.
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and then even more by the time of the coup’s execution.42 The ethnic
origins of the majority of the men who plotted the coup clearly were
Igbo.43 While asserting that most of them were of Igbo extraction and
standing by that assertion, it is important to note that quite a good
number of these dissident soldiers, including Nzeogwu, hailed from
western Igboland (Anioma Igbo/Ibo/Ika-Ibo, as they are variously
called). Many, if not most, of those indigenes – even some who par-
ticipated in that coup – did not identify themselves as Igbo, but rather
claimed a different ethnic identity.44 But, does the fact of disproportion-
ate Igbo involvement in the coup qualify it as an ‘Igbo coup’?
One would imagine that anyone remotely familiar with the nature and
dynamics of plotting a coup would make two concessions. The first is
that it is a very risky and potentially deadly business – an act of treason
against the State – and thus, one of the most dangerous of activities.
The second point is that by its clear disposition – often a matter of life
and death, as noted above – it is often sworn to and held in secrecy, con-
fidentiality, and privacy. The January 1966 event was a real coup and
had the attributes of one.45 Igbo civilians and even so many others in the
military were NOT involved or informed. Thus, the plotters were alone
on this and never acted for the Igbo – and never claimed to have done
so – even as they and their actions were widely admired and celebrated
in not only the eastern parts of the country but also elsewhere through-
out the country, such as in the West, where, according to Achebe,
there were large celebrations for the heroes’ accomplishments as well
as in the North, particularly among the Middle-Belt indigenes who felt
relieved from the suffocating grip of the ‘Hausa-Fulani oligarchy’.46 In
other words, only those who plotted and executed the January 1966
coup should have been held responsible for their actions.
The eventual outcome of the coup was yet another reason why
many term it an ‘Igbo coup’.47 Especially notable were the failure of
42
This led to the popular allusions to ‘the five Majors’, which included the original trio and
then Donatus Okafor and Christopher Anuforo. Maj. Timothy Onwuatuegwu equally
played significant and decisive roles in that coup and was considered one of the inner
circle members too.
43
Of the original trio, two were Igbo and one was Yoruba, and of the later ‘five Majors’,
four were Igbo. Finally, of the eventual number of the planners at the time of the coup’s
execution, more than 65 percent were of Igbo extraction.
44
Denials by previously known Igbo sub-groups in current Delta, Rivers, and Cross River
states of their Igbo identity may not be unconnected with their feeling of insecurity in
identifying with the Igbo after the loss of the war. For instance, one of the prominent
figures in the January 1966 coup, Col Mike Okwechime, who hails from the same place
as Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu and has always been labelled as Igbo, has openly and con-
sistently denied being Igbo. For sure, he is not alone.
45
It is on record that even the men ‘recruited’ to execute the putsch did not know what was
going on until the last hour.
46
Achebe, There Was a Country; Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra; Cohen, ‘A Greater South’.
47
By the time the coup ended, 15 people had been killed: six northerners, three westerners,
and one Igbo. A second Igbo officer was wrongly killed by loyal troops who presumed he
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180 Akachi Odoemene
the ‘Eastern plot’ and the haphazard nature of the killings that largely
bypassed the Igbo in the army and in political office.48 But these out-
comes were largely circumstantial. For instance, as Effiong showed,
the Eastern plot even began to fail long before the actual coup took
place because its original coordinator, Major Chudi Sokie, was posted
to India. This sudden posting fundamentally affected their eastern plot
and confused the rebels who totally lost focus about what to do with
the East. This was essentially why Efeajuna and Donatus Okafor, having
implemented the coup in Lagos, started racing to Enugu city by road
to take charge there. This failed as loyal troops took firm control before
they came into the city.49
Furthermore, the rebels derided Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi, an
Igbo and the Supreme Commander of the Army, which clearly marked
him for death. However, he survived for two reasons. First, he was
alerted by his close friend, Col James Pam, of the violence that had
attended such mutinous activities in the early hours of January 15,
and thus escaped assassination. He then quickly commenced crush-
ing the coup.50 Second, he survived because the officers tasked with
his assassination, Major Donatus Okafor and another junior officer,
were noted as largely inept and complete failures.51 Okafor, as Effiong
argued, clearly lacked the capacity needed to carry out such a critical
task. Furthermore, the key leaders of the coup took Aguiyi-Ironsi for
granted and grossly underestimated him – a crucial mistake on their
part.52 In the case of the Igbo political leaders, evidence clearly suggests
that Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe’s circumstances remain controversial, though
it is known that he was out of the country at the time, while Dr Michael
Okpara, the Premier of Eastern Region, survived because of the lack
of coordination as well as the presence of the visiting Head of State of
Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios.53 Dr Kingsley Mbadiwe, the Minister of
Trade, ‘escaped across open gardens and hid in the empty State House,
home of the absent President Azikiwe … one place the soldiers never
thought of searching’.54
For some critical insight into the motives, intentions and mission
of the men who plotted the coup, one must turn to one of the original
trio, Ademoyega. He was the only inner-circle ringleader of the coup
to narrate and document what happened for posterity. To my mind,
was one of the plotters of the coup; see Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 39.
48
Adebanwi, ‘Death, National Memory and the Social Construction’, 424.
49
Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 37–39.
50
Achebe, There Was a Country; Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra; Cohen, ‘The Army and Trade Un-
ions’; Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 38.
51
52
Ibid, 42.
53
Ibid.; Forsyth, The Biafra Story; Ryszard Kapuściński, trans. Klara Glowczewska, The Shad-
ow of the Sun (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 100–101; Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 38.
54
Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 36.
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Ademoyega remains the best authority and most authoritative source

of the January 1966 coup, particularly in terms of the causes, motives
and mission, as well as their expectations. His narrative would be our
main guide here. Ademoyega averred that
contrary to the load of wicked propaganda that had since been heaped upon
us, there was no decision at our meetings to single out any particular ethnic
group for elimination or destruction. Our intentions were honourable, our
views were national and our goals were idealistic.55
In other words, it was never ethnic or sectional, nor was it intended to
be. Thus, whatever may have been the shortcomings of their plans were
merely circumstantial.
Ademoyega also clearly stated that a primary goal of that coup was
to save Western Nigeria, which was then in great crisis, and the eastern
parts of the country from being attacked by the Army, as was Tivland.56
These sinister army arrangements, which also had serious Islamic
undertones, were being hatched by Alhaji Ahmadu Bello (the Sarduana
and Premier of Northern Region), Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (the
Prime Minister) and other northern leaders (including Army officers)
in collaboration with Alhaji Samuel Ladoke Akintola, Chief Remilekun
Fani-Kayode and a few others from Western Nigeria.57 The rebels also
had other missions, which included giving ‘justice’ to the Tiv as well as
freeing Chief Obafemi Awolowo, a Yoruba hero of theirs, and his men
who were being incarcerated by the Northern People’s Congress-led
government.58 According to him:
We also believed in the immediate release of political prisoners of those
days, namely Chief Awolowo, Jakande, Anthony Enahoro, Onitiri, Omisade
and so on. As we saw it, these actions would bring immediate relief to the
suffering masses of the West and North and would generate peace and con-
cord throughout the Federation.59
Also there was a plan, at least by some of the rebels, to have Awolowo
eventually installed as the Prime Minister to lead a government in
55
Ademoyega, Why We Struck, 60.
56
It is instructive that Ademoyega and two others, Anuforo and Onwuatuegwu, had each
in turn commanded troops in the Makurdi punitive expedition against Tiv rioters who
were opposed to the high-handedness and oppression of the Sarduana government in the
North.
57
This fact was to be confirmed by Brigadier General Ibrahim Haruna, the erstwhile Gener-
al Officer Commanding (GOC), 2nd Division of the Army during the civil war. He revealed
this during his testimony as at the Oputa Panel session; see Ademoyega, Why We Struck.
58
Awolowo’s radical democratic socialist posture greatly endeared him to these coupists. It
is instructive that Chief Awolowo and his men were jailed for attempting to violently over-
throw the same Balewa government, which eventually fell at the hands of the coupists.
59
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182 Akachi Odoemene
Nigeria.60 In this regard, Biodun Jeyifo aptly noted that ‘as a matter
of fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters had the
intension of making or “forcing” Chief Awolowo to assume the office of
prime minister’.61
So, where lies the theory of Igbo coup and conspiracy in the coup’s
vision and mission? These facts are certainly not consistent with a typi-
cal Igbo coup analogy. Again, if that was actually an Igbo coup, why
was it also foiled by the Igbo? For instance, Aguiyi-Ironsi’s efforts at
quashing the January 1966 coup are not unknown.62 Again, many
other notable Igbo Army officers, like Col Hilary Njoku, Major Alexan-
der Madiebo and Lt Col Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, aligned
with their Supreme Commander Aguiyi-Ironsi in foiling that coup.
Nzeogwu, in an interview, partly blamed Odumegwu Ojukwu for the
failure of the coup, noting that ‘if Ojukwu had joined us, the take-over
would have succeeded’.63 Again, there was Major Arthur Unegbu who
refused to cooperate with the rebels, refusing to give them the keys to
the armory for which he paid the ultimate price: the loss of his life.64
In many circles, the coup has been labeled as an Igbo coup because of
the number of Igbo officers involved and the nature of its eventual out-
come – both of which were clearly circumstantial. This view, however,
does not consider the entirety of the facts. In fact, if the January 1966
coup d’état would pass for an Igbo coup in those regards – and all Igbo
held accountable and punitively punished for it, as was the case – the
more-recent Boko Haram attacks should equally pass for Islamic plots
for which every Muslim in the country should be held accountable,
hounded, severely persecuted, and punished, irrespective of whether or
not they knew about, believed in, or supported the plots or not. Any
arguments to the contrary would be outlandish, childish, and grossly
disingenuous.
The ‘Counter’ or ‘Revenge’ Coup

There are three points to be made on this issue so as to clarify miscon-
ceptions expressed in many narratives. First, the notion of ‘counter’ or
‘revenge’ coup is very faulty. It presupposes that the previous coup in
January 1966 was sectional, that is, an Igbo coup and, thus, the need
to counter it. That is quite an erroneous assumption.
Second, what took place on July 29, 1966 was not a coup in its strict
sense. It lacked the principles and characteristics of a military coup d’état.
60
Ben Gbulie, Nigeria’s Five Majors: Coup d’État of 15th January 1966 – First Inside Account
(Onitsha: Africana Educational Publishers, 1981), 18, 58, 127.
61
Biodun Jeyifo, ‘First, There Was A Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections on Achebe’s
New Book’ Journal of Asian and African Studies 48:6 (2013), 686.
62
For instance, see Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra; Gbulie, Nigeria’s Five Majors; Ademoyega, Why
We Struck; and Forsyth, The Biafra Story.
63
Quoted in Cohen, ‘A Greater South’, 15.
64
Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra; and Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 36.
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It was something else beyond a coup; it was the military part of a larger
northern communal action of extermination targeting the Igbo, albeit
erroneously. This was unlike the case in the first military coup d’état of
January 15, 1966, where there was a clear conspiracy that involved all
segments of the northern society: the ruling elites, the civil servants,
the intelligentsia, the military, and even the ordinary person.65 Unlike
a typical coup, it lacked secrecy; it was openly discussed among some
of the officers. Rumors circulated among different military units across
the country.
The buildup and planning for the so-called counter-coup started
soon after the January 1966 coup under the leadership of Lt Col Mur-
tala Muhammed, and virtually all the top northern military officers
were involved in it.66 The detailed planning, widespread involvement,
and methodical execution of that conspiratorial plan showed it was
thought out and exceptional. Through that Army rampage part, the
Igbo were clinically eliminated: out of a total of 210 military personnel
killed, 204 were Igbo (185 from the Eastern Region and 19 from the
Mid-West), and six were Yoruba from the Western Region. Unsurpris-
ingly, not a single person from the Northern Region was killed.67 At the
end of this purge, the horrendous spate of targeted killings were soon
extended to unsuspecting, innocent Igbo civilians – men, women and
children – who lived in several parts of Nigeria, especially in the North-
ern Region.
Third, the reasons given (and still being advanced) for such mutinous
action included Igbo coup and Igbo domination, undue promotion of
Igbo officers, the Aguiyi-Ironsi regime being run mostly by Igbo techno-
crats and politicians, and non-prosecution of the mostly Igbo actors in
the January 1966 coup. These reasons did not truly reflect the realities
on the ground at that time, but they were only a ploy by the North to jus-
tify its conspiracy and acts.68 For instance, of Aguiyi-Ironsi administra-
tion’s nine-man Supreme Military Council (SMC), only one other Igbo
(apart from himself) – Lt Col Ojukwu – was a member.69 All others were
non-Igbo persons. Similarly, in the Executive Council, which comprised
the SMC and six others, only two were from the Eastern Region: the
Attorney General, Mr Onyiuke (an Igbo) and the Inspector-General of
65
Achebe, There Was a Country; Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra; Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution.
For instance, Madiebo reports of a young Hausa informant, who had come by night to in-
form him in the presence of another Igbo officer, who told him of the planned attacks on
the Igbo and that while the civilians were ready to act, the soldiers were still undecided.
66
Sani Tukur, ‘Why We Killed Ironsi and Installed Gowon – Jeremiah Useni’ (September
27, 2013), www.premiumtimesng.com/news/145535-interview-killed-ironsi-installed-
gowon-jeremiah-useni.html (accessed May 23, 2014).
67
Achebe, There Was a Country, 83; and Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra.
68
Adebanwi, ‘Death, National Memory and the Social Construction’, 424; Ademoyega,
Why We Struck, 110–111; and Elaigwu, Gowon, 52–54.
69
Lt Col Ojukwu had an ex officio membership by virtue of being one of the Regional Mili-
tary Governors.
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184 Akachi Odoemene
Police, Mr Edet (an Efik).70 In the appointment of permanent secretaries

in the Federal Public Service, which were very powerful positions at the
time, Aguiyi-Ironsi did not show favoritism to the Igbo either. Out of the
23 positions, eight were from the North, seven from the Mid-West, five
from the Western Region, while the Igbo (Eastern Region) had three.71
The allegations of undue promotion of Igbo officers are equally
quite doubtful, or at best half-truth. If anything, many sources point
to the fact that Aguiyi-Ironsi overly appeased the North due to the
outcomes of the January 1966 coup, which killed six of its leaders.72
Thus, for appointments and for recognizing the understandable rage of
northern officers, Aguiyi-Ironsi moved swiftly to reassure and appease
them. He promoted many of them even by two ranks over and above
their southern counterparts. For instance, Captains Ibrahim Haruna,
Murtala Muhammed, Usman Katsina, and Mohammed Shuwa were all
promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.73 Aguiyi-Ironsi also put
a good number of them in some very sensitive and key positions. He
appointed Lt Col Yakubu Gowon, the most senior northern officer, as
the Chief of Army Staff over and above his non-northern superiors,
and Murtala Mohammed as the Nigerian Army’s Inspector of Signals.74
Even his personal security network – bodyguards and ADCs – were all
from the North, excepting one, Lieutenant Andrew Nwankwo, who was
Igbo. This critical network was also headed by yet another northerner,
Lieutenant Walbe.
The claim that Aguiyi-Ironsi refused to prosecute the mostly Igbo
coup members was equally very untrue.75 Not only is it on record that
the military council set a date for the rebels’ trial, but Aguiyi-Ironsi gave
the responsibility and task of investigating that coup to his Army Chief
of Staff, Yakubu Gowon.76 More important, however, the men who par-
ticipated in the January 1966 coup were celebrated as heroes across
the country. To discipline them immediately, which would have been the
most logical thing to do so as to restore confidence within the armed
forces and avoid further bloodshed, might ‘cause a countrywide dissen-
sion, possibly disaster … [and] thus, was fraught with danger’.77
There is also another amazing twist to the whole coup saga. Many
70
Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 37. Note that both men had held these respective offices before
the January coup. Aguiyi-Ironsi’s administration only retained them in such positions.
71
Ibid., 37.
72
Adebanwi, ‘Death, National Memory and the Social Construction’, 424; Elaigwu, Gowon,
52–54.
73
Efiong, Nigeria and Biafra.
74
Philip U. Effiong, ‘Forty Years Later, the War hasn’t Ended’, in The Nigeria-Biafra War, ed-
ited by Chima Korieh (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2012), 264–265; and Achebe, There Was a
Country, 121–122.
75
Elaigwu, Gowon, 61; Adebanwi, ‘Death, National Memory and the Social Construction’,
424.
76
77
Ibid., 20, 21.
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writers have tended to vilify and repudiate the plotters of the January
1966 coup, while the plotters of the July 1966 coup seem to have been
celebrated, for whatever reason. For instance, people criticized, sneered,
and disparaged the plotters of the January 1966 coup while those
involved in the July mutiny have largely been honored in some way or
the other by the Nigerian state.78 Clearly, such lopsided treatment also
feeds into the civil war’s ethnicized narratives. A coup is a coup however
it turns out, whether it failed or succeeded. Coups are illegitimate and
unconstitutional acts: treasonable crimes that must be seen and under-
stood for what they are.79 Interestingly, the allegations against Aguiyi-
Ironsi of ‘inaction against illegal action’ and ‘condoning indiscipline
or treason’ regarding the January 1966 coup by northern officers and
politicians is also remarkable in this instance.80 One wonders if the July
1966 mutiny was any less an illegal and treasonable action, or whether
its actors were not as guilty as those of the January 1966 coup. Again,
was Gowon not as guilty as Aguiyi-Ironsi was – if one accepts that line
of thought – for failing to take action against the rebellious northern
officers, of which he was one?
The Aburi (Ghana) talks and accord

The peace talks between Gowon’s government and the Eastern Region
Government, headed by Col Odumegwu Ojukwu, offered a rare oppor-
tunity for the resolution of the socio-political and leadership crises in
Nigeria. The most momentous of these was the one in the Ghanaian
town of Aburi at the instance of Gen. Joseph A. Ankrah of Ghana.
By the end of the very stormy and tense talks an eventual agreement
between the two parties, the historic ‘Aburi Accord’, was reached and
signed. Essentially, this agreement, which offered a renewed chance
for peace in the country, was to give more powers and freedom to the
regions, an arrangement many believe was a loose confederacy in
nature, as it gave the regions greater economic and political authority.
Unfortunately this chance was blown; the apparent agreement between
the belligerent soldiers broke down when its ambiguities were revealed,
thus making likely that hostilities would eventually ensue. But, which
of the parties reneged on the agreements and why?
78
None of those involved in the first military coup has ever been honored in any form.
Even the portrait of the presumed leader of the coup, Nzeogwu, which was created by
Olusegun Obasanjo, received a great deal of criticism and protest by the northern elite
and students; see Cohen, ‘A Greater South’, 1. By contrast, the planners and participants
of the second coup have been commemorated. For instance, Murtala Mohammed has
been memorialized and immortalized, while Yakubu Gowon, Yakubu Danjuma, Jeremiah
Useni, and the like, are still celebrated, revered, and honored, even as recently as during
the centenary celebrations in January 2014.
79
The different treatment given to the different coups has been partly responsible for the
upsurge of coups, or the development of a ‘coup culture’, in Nigeria.
80
Adebanwi, ‘Death, National Memory and the Social Construction’, 424; and Elaigwu,
Gowon, 61.
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186 Akachi Odoemene
Murray Last’s claims, as we have noted earlier, become instructive

here. Furthermore, some have also averred that it was Col Odumegwu
Ojukwu who did not live up to his side of the bargain. However, the fact
was that it was Gowon’s government that failed to keep to the promises
of that accord. According to his own confession in his official biography,
and contrary to such faulty allusions noted above, he had to renege on
the accord for specific reasons. When his law officers and permanent
secretaries examined the official communiqué, they found that some of
the decisions made at Aburi ‘were impracticable’ and ‘somewhat out of
touch with the legal and economic facts of life and that it was impos-
sible to embody them into effective edicts’.81
Claims of genocide in Biafra

Something significant happened in Biafra. Even if somewhat forgotten
today, it was Africa’s first modern civil war and had the worst human
carnage before the 1994 Rwandan conflict. One can reasonably under-
stand that this present subject – Igbo genocide – is very sensitive and
generates lots of emotions. It might help to begin by posing four key
questions. First, was there a buildup of anti-Igbo sentiments and their
resentment by many Nigerian groups from the period before the war?
Second, was there a premeditated, elaborately planned and intentional
destruction of millions of the ethnic Igbo (1966–1970), who, out of
dismay at their persecution by some Nigerians, chose to be called ‘Bia-
frans’, even as they posed no physical threat to any group in Nigeria?
Third, was the nature and patterns of such destruction of Igbo lives of
genocidal proportions? Finally, did such destruction of Igbo lives receive
official backing, and was it implemented by State actors?
Indeed, daunting evidence suggests that there was genocide in Biafra.82
The genocidal acts commenced from the May 1966 riots, given the
detailed planning, specific targeting of the Igbo, methodical execution
of the plans, and involvement of vast strata of the northern elite and
people, which culminated in dastardly acts of commission during the
war. First, there was evidently a buildup of anti-Igbo sentiments and
resentment in northern parts of the country following the January
1966 coup. The consequent May 1966 riots in the North triggered a
massacre of Igbo people in which tens of thousands of the ethnic Igbo
were targeted and killed. These were followed by the July 29, 1966,
army rampage in which 204 out of the 210 killed were Igbo officers
and men. Furthermore, the civil riots that ensued in July, August, and
September following the army rampage had even more – tens of thou-
sands – Igbo people targeted and killed, not only in the North but also
elsewhere across the country.
81
Clarke, Yakubu Gowon, 87.
82
The Igbo were not the only victims of such genocidal acts; many other groups within the
Biafran enclave were equally so treated. However, the Igbo were clearly the main targets.
000 Fal book B.indb 186 13/06/2016 22:06

In each of these episodes, one would notice premeditated, detailed,

carefully planned, and supervised acts of ethnic cleansing: patterns of
mass killings which could hardly be justified in any circumstance. At
the end, between May and September 1966, more than 100,000 ethnic
Igbo had been brutally slaughtered. Their crime? Simple: being Igbo.
They had absolutely nothing to do with the January 1966 coup, which
in itself was not an Igbo coup as often advanced. Mistreated, persecuted,
abused, and killed in parts of the country, the Igbo returned home, and
shown such blatant shows of rejection, they chose to be called Biafrans
and have a country of their own. To be sure, they posed no physical or
military threat to any group. In July 1967, a war was declared in a bid
to preserve the unity of Nigeria. But in what manner and at what cost?
First, starvation was officially sanctioned as a policy of the federal
government. This is clearly decipherable from the comments of the gov-
ernment hierarchy at the time. In an interview with the journalist Tom
Burns, General Yakubu Gowon, then Nigeria’s Head of State, stated:
‘Food is the means to resistance; it is ammunition in this sense and the
mercy flights into rebel territory are looked upon as tantamount to gun
running.’83 Chief Awolowo, the Finance Minister and Vice-Chairman
of the Federal Executive Council in the Nigerian Government, for his
part stated: ‘All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of
war. I do not see why we should feed our enemies fat in order for them
to fight us harder.’84
Nigeria’s Federal Commissioner for Labor and Information at the
time, Chief Anthony Enahoro, also affirmed that ‘there are various
ways of fighting a war. You might starve your enemy into submission, or
you might kill him on the battlefield.’85 Furthermore, Brigadier Hassan
Usman Katsina, Chief of Staff of the Nigerian Army, noted: ‘Personally
I would not feed somebody I am fighting.’86 Chief Allison Ayida, Fed-
eral Permanent Secretary in the Nigerian Government and head of the
Nigerian delegation to the Niamey Peace Talks in the Republic of Niger,
also stated categorically that ‘starvation is a legitimate weapon of war,
and we have every intention of using it against the rebels’.87 Starvation was
indeed used as a weapon of war.
From such stern rhetoric above, the veracity of which no-one has
ever challenged, it is very clear that there was a definite and unam-
biguous Nigerian Government policy targeting Biafra. This policy was
further advanced by other state actors. For instance, Col Shittu Alao,
Commander of the Nigerian Air Force, noted that ‘as far as we are
concerned we are hitting at everything flying into Biafra, Red Cross
83
Tablet (London), December 7, 1968; Spectator, December 27, 1968.
84
Financial Times (London), June 26, 1969; Daily Telegraph (London), June 27, 1969; and
Dan Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).
85
Daily Mirror (London), June 13, 1968.
86
The Times (London), June 28, 1969.
87
Forsyth, The Biafra Story, 205, emphasis added.
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188 Akachi Odoemene
or not’.88 Indeed, such threats were carried out. For instance, Lt Col
Olusegun Obasanjo, Commander of the Third Marine Commando, in
June 1969 ordered his air force in the south of Igboland to shoot down
an International Committee of the Red Cross relief plane bringing in
urgent supplies to Biafra – an action that outraged the international
community.89 As soon-to-be President of the USA Richard Nixon
unequivocally noted,
efforts to relieve the Biafran people have been thwarted by the desire of
the central government of Nigeria to pursue total and unconditional vic-
tory and by the fear of the Ibo [sic] people that surrender means wholesale
atrocities and genocide … But genocide is what is taking place right now
– and starvation is the grim reaper.90
Indeed, due to such inhumane and immoral policies, humanitarian
crises of huge proportions ensued; more than a million people, mostly
children, died of gruesome starvation and attrition.
Even at the war’s end the victorious Nigerian Government still con-
tinued its starvation policy on the vanquished, starving, and dying erst-
while Biafrans. For instance, the Uli airstrip, which was pivotal during
the war as the base for humanitarian supplies and was used to deliver
7,000 tons of food and relief supplies to Biafra in December 1969, was
completely razed. By doing so, the government shut off ‘the quickest
relief route’ into the hunger-stricken areas. Furthermore, the victorious
government allowed only 8,000 tons of food to go into Biafra monthly,
instead of the 20,000 to 40,000 tons that was needed. President Nixon
criticized the State Department, which oversaw the US Agency for
International Development (USAID), which had agreed to the 8,000-
ton target, noting that the department ‘just [doesn’t] care’ and ‘they’ve
let all these people die’.91
Starvation was not the only weapon used by the Nigerian Govern-
ment to cause mass deaths of innocent civilians in Biafra. There was
also the case of chemical poisoning of foodstuffs being brought into
Biafra. Some foreign correspondents located in Biafra were able to
‘provide detailed cogent evidence that foodstuffs reaching Biafra from
Nigeria have in the past been treated with Arsenic, Cyanide, and other
poisons.’92 This might sound rather outlandish and incredible, but its
veracity was confirmed by some outside experts: ‘a team headed by U.S.
88
Washington Post, June 7, 1969.
89
Obasanjo asked Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister, for help to sort out the out-
raged international response to this atrocity, which Obasanjo noted in his memoirs; see
Obasanjo, My Command, 165; ‘Canada Blocks Peace, Says Biafran Official’, The Windsor
Star (Ontario), October 9, 1969, 6.
90
President Richard Nixon’s speech during a presidential campaign, September 9, 1968.
91
All cited from Joseph E. Thompson, American Policy and African Famine: The Nigeria-Biafra
War, 1966–1970 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990) supra note 7; 153, 156,159.
92
Daily Telegraph, July 8, 1968.
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Senator Charles Goodell and a nutritionist, Jean Mayer, confirmed that

food brought into Biafra through Nigerian territory had, in fact, been
poisoned’.93
Another pattern of killings was the deliberate targeting of innocent
and unarmed civilian populations and non-military targets, such as
markets, churches, schools, hospitals and the like. The evidence in
this regard is enormous, but just a few instances are considered. One
remarkable example of the genocidal pattern of killings during the war
is illustrated in the acts of Col Ibrahim Haruna, the General Officer Com-
manding, 2nd Division of the Army during the civil war, in the Asaba
Massacre infamy. Haruna and his men, having invaded the Asaba area,
gathered all available men (about 500 unarmed, civilians, non-combat-
ants), and summarily executed all of them without any cause.94 Admit-
ting to such crimes while testifying for the Arewa Consultative Forum at
the Oputa Panel sitting, Haruna expressed no regrets and stated: ‘As the
commanding officer and leader of the troops that massacred 500 men
in Asaba, I have no apology for those massacred in Asaba, Owerri and
Ameke-Item.’95 Indeed, his ‘confession’ showed that this was a consist-
ent pattern of engagement, not just an isolated case.
One of the most notorious of the war’s protagonists was Col Ben-
jamin Adekunle, who was also known as ‘Black Scorpion’, the Com-
mander of the Third Marine Commando.96 He was no doubt a Nigeria
war hero, had by now ‘earned a reputation, at least in Biafran quar-
ters, for cruelty and sadism’.97 These could be gleaned from several of
his public statements, which opulently illustrated his zeal not only for
violence and warfare but also for cruel heartlessness against especially
the Igbo. In one of the interviews with international journalists and
observer teams, Adekunle stated
In the sector which is under my command … I want to see no Red Cross, no
World Council of Churches, no Pope, no missionary, and no UN delegation
… Until the entire population capitulates, I want to prevent even one Ibo
from having even one piece of food to eat.98
About the way he conducted the war, Adekunle aptly noted that ‘[w]e
shoot at everything that moves and when our troops march into the
center of Ibo territory, we shoot at everything even at things that don’t
93
Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations, 33.
94
E. Okocha, Blood on the Niger: The First Black on Black Genocide: The Untold Story of the
Asaba Massacre in the Nigerian Civil War (Lagos: Triatlantic, 2006).
95
Sufuyan Ojeifo and Lemmy Ughegbe, ‘No Regrets for the Asaba Massacre of Igbo-Haru-
na’, Vanguard, October 10, 2001.
96
He held this post until Olusegun Obasanjo replaced him.
97
Quote from Achebe, There Was a Country, 138. Incidentally, one of his wartime col-
leagues, Brigadier General Godwin Alabi-Isama clearly noted him as one of Nigeria’s ‘for-
gotten war heroes’; see Alabi-Isama, The Tragedy of Victory.
98
Stern Magazine (Berlin), August 18, 1968.
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190 Akachi Odoemene
move.’99 He was also reported to have told a German news weekly that ‘it
is my job to kill Biafrans, as many as I am able to’, including persons not
‘bearing arms’.100 Furthermore, as L. Garrison reported, Adekunle lived
up to such threats. In the fall of 1968 as he advanced with his forces,
‘thousands of Ibo male civilians were sought out and slaughtered’,
and ‘looting and burning’ of cities and villages were systematic.101 In
another instance, he averred that aid to Biafra was ‘misguided humani-
tarian rubbish … If children must die first, then that is too bad, just too
bad’.102 This later statement ‘caused such an international uproar that
the federal government of Nigeria found itself in the unenviable posi-
tion of having to apologize for the actions of not only Adekunle but also
of Haruna, leader of Asaba Massacre infamy’.103
Later on when confronted with the severity of his actions, Adekunle,
during a 2004 interview, opined: ‘I did not want this war. I did not start
this war – Ojukwu did. But I want to win this war. So I must kill Igbos.
Sorry!’104 Even Col Murtala Mohammed was equally complicit in the
mass killing of innocent civilians. It would suffice to quote Chief Ena-
horo at length in this regard.
I was the one that stopped late Gen. Murtala Mohammed from further mas-
sacre of innocent children and mothers. At a point when Britain refused
to sell further arms to Nigeria because they had ample evidence from the
Red Cross of the federal forces killing innocent civilians, I confronted Gowon
with the fact and that the only way I can get Britain through my contact
with their High Commissioner to resume a supply of weapon to Nigeria was
that Murtala had to leave that war sector. Either Murtala leaves or I will
have to leave his cabinet. Gowon told me that he is willing to call a meeting
and on the condition I will be the one to confront Murtala … At the meeting
of the Federal Executive Council, I confronted Mohammed with elaborate
evidence complete with photographs. He was livid. He could not refute
them.105
99
Bridget Conley-Zilkic and Samuel Totten, ‘Easier Said Than Done: The Challenges of
Preventing and Responding to Genocide’, in Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eye-
witness Accounts, 3rd Edition, edited by S. Totten and W. Parsons (New York: Routledge,
2008), 521; J. Doyle, ‘State Dept. Ponders End to U.S. Neutrality on Biafra’, Boston Globe,
November 30, 1968, 7.
100
Hannibal Travis, ‘Ultranationalist Genocides: Failures of Global Justice in Nigeria and Pa-
kistan’, International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 21 (2014), 417; P. Lust, ‘Biafra
Could Be Rescued’, Canadian Jewish Chronicle Review (November 1, 1968), 2.
101
L. Garrison, ‘Fear of Genocide Fires Biafrans in Losing Battle’, Saskatoon Star-Phoenix,
September 23, 1968, 20.
102
Achebe, There Was a Country; and Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations.
103
Achebe, There Was a Country.
104
Guardian, July 25, 2004.
105
The Nigerian and Africa Magazine, March 10, 1998. Chief Enahoro made this exposé dur-
ing a kind of reconciliation meeting with some Igbo people in New Jersey organized by
Jumoke Ogunkeyede, head of the United Committee to Save Nigeria. It is instructive that
both Gowon and Enahoro were alive when this transcript was published and none refuted
it.
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The tragic implications of such sadism, as exhibited by Haruna,

Adekunle, and Mohammed, among others, on defenseless Biafran civil-
ians, including women and children, are obvious.
One is sure that without the kind of support Nigeria received from
outside international interests, it would not have been so brazenly geno-
cidal in Biafra. Of interest in this regard was Mr Harold Wilson, then
British Prime Minister, who was complicit and actively supported the
genocide. Apart from heavily arming Nigeria against Biafra, Wilson had
informed Clyde Ferguson, the US State Department Special Coordina-
tor for relief to Biafra, that he (Wilson) ‘would accept a million dead
Biafrans if that was what it took’ to keep Nigeria unified.106 For him,
this was ‘not too high a price to pay’.107 If the British Prime Minister,
just for the selfish ends of Britain, could avow before foreigners that it
was okay to murder the Igbo in such proportion to keep Nigeria one
country, one can then imagine what he may have told General Yakubu
Gowon and other Nigerian collaborators in private.108 Britain, under
Wilson, also disgracefully prevented an objective international evalua-
tion of Biafra genocide charges, promising Nigerian authorities that the
observers would be ‘taking the sting’ out of the genocide charge.109 The
international observer team never visited Biafra for any assessment.110
In the face of such evidence, these patterns of killings, supported by
statements of government officials and state actors, have all the trap-
pings of an ‘extermination agenda’. The denials and debates over this
will certainly continue, though one is at a loss about what such deni-
als are about. But no matter how politicized the issue is or has become,
the truth is that between May 1966 and January 1970 an innocent
ethnic population was clearly identified and viciously targeted with
elaborate, thorough, expansive, and senseless plans for annihilation
that led to mass killings of genocidal proportions. That population
was the erstwhile Biafra. To be definite and clear, all is not fair in war.
As Nixon additionally noted in his speech on this crime in Biafra, ‘the
destruction of an entire people is an immoral objective even in the most
moral of wars. It can never be justified; it can never be condoned.’111
106
Travis, ‘Ultranationalist Genocides’, 418; Charles L. Robertson, International Politics since
World War II: A Short History (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 163; Jacobs, The Brutality
of Nations, 261; Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign
Policy (London and New York: Quartet, 1977), 122.
107
Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations, 261.
108
For a discussion of this self-serving interest of Britain, see Chibuike Uche, ‘Oil, British
Interest and the Nigerian Civil War’, Journal of African History 49:1 (2008).
109
Karen E. Smith, Genocide and the Europeans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), 77.
110
One of the observers, Major-General Arthur Raab of Sweden, who insisted on visiting
the site of a reported massacre of 500 Biafrans, was barred by the Nigerian commander
Adekunle, who threatened to have him ‘whipped by his boys’. See ‘Nigeria War Observers
Angered by Adekunle’, Montreal Gazette, October 30, 1968, 5.
111
President Richard Nixon’s speech.
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192 Akachi Odoemene
The continued refutation of this or the protection of ethnic leaders and

heroes by certain persons and quarters is totally flawed and politically
and parochially self-serving.112
The impression one gets is that it is considered a lesser crime if the
victims were not of the perpetrators’ ethnic stock. As Lawrence Nwobu
pointed out, if roles were reversed and it was Nnamidi Azikiwe who
joined Nigeria to launch such a senseless and atrocious war against
the Yoruba, and Azikiwe who declared to the world that all actions, no
matter how atrocious and dastardly, were legitimate in war, one is not
sure this would go down well with the Yoruba.113 Refusal to come to
terms with the fact that the Nigeria-Biafra War produced several war
criminals and a record of crimes against humanity because of ethnic
and sectional differences is even a greater tragedy for the country.
The post-war ‘twenty-pound policy’

Soon after the end of the Nigeria-Biafra War, in June 1970, the Federal
Government implemented a new policy that gave twenty Nigerian pounds
(£20) to each adult Igbo who previously surrendered their money. This
was applied irrespective of how much someone had saved in pre-war
Nigeria. Similarly, any adult whose money in the banks was tampered
with during the war forfeited everything, as he or she was deemed to have
used such towards the prosecution of the civil war. Unfortunately, a lot of
silence and half-truths abound about this policy, which Chief Awolowo
pioneered and promoted.114 What was the real motive of this gesture,
particularly in the context of a starved population and destroyed Igbo
economy? Why was this necessary even within the framework of the
federal governments ‘no victor, no vanquished’ declaration and rhetoric
of reconciliation?115 How civilized, urbane, and desirable was this policy?
What was it meant to achieve? What is known is that its implementation,
following the devastating war experiences, was immensely destructive to
so many families and persons, and damaged their capacities to recover
from the effects of the war, let alone survive ‘the peace’.116
112
One wishes to emphasize that this was/has been the crux of the often disparaging criti-
cisms of Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country. This has been mainly by the ethnic Yor-
uba, who felt embarrassed by Achebe’s accusation of Awolowo being one of the master-
minds of the genocide in Biafra.
113
Lawrence Chinedu Nwobu, ‘Awo vs. Achebe: That the Truth Should Set Us Free!’, Nigeria
Village Square, October 18, 2013, www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/awo-versus-
achebe-that-the-truth-should-set-us-free.html (accessed August 3, 2014).
114
Indeed, a Yoruba friend, who incidentally holds a doctorate degree in history, actually de-
nied such a thing ever happened, but he came back to me after a few days to acknowledge
that he has been briefed on it. So many are still unaware of this or why it was ‘necessary’.
115
See Ifi Amadiume and Abdullahi A. An-Na’im, The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing and
Social Justice (London; New York: Zed, 2000).
116
Fred Onyeoziri, ‘What Caused the Nigerian Civil War’, in Eghosa Osaghae, Ebere On-
wudiwe, and Rotimi Suberu, eds, The Nigerian Civil War and Its Aftermath (Ibadan: John
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It is instructive that soon following this demobilization and further

destruction of the Igbo and their economic capacity, the federal govern-
ment commenced the indigenization program through the Enterprises
Promotion Decree of 1974, which gave Nigerians the opportunity to
buy shares in foreign-owned companies. Thus, the Igbo were tactically
eliminated from investing in this economic exercise, which eventu-
ally empowered a section of the country – a leverage they still hold till
date.117
Conclusion
The Nigeria-Biafra War was characteristically an ethnic conflict and is
still largely seen along ethnic lines. Its narratives have also followed the
same sectional or ethnic pattern. One is not unsure of the perspectives
to the war of, say, the northern elite who promote an ‘Igbo conspiracy’
view, or the Igbo elite who uphold a ‘Northern conspiracy’ interpreta-
tion. Indeed, these conspiracy views are quite straightforward in point-
ing to inordinate ambitions and acts of each suspected group. The
reasons for holding such conspiratorial views are equally understand-
able but may not be valid, as we have seen earlier. Instructively, what
is copiously missing in the whole narrative discourse is an adequate
account of the divided attitude towards the war among the Yoruba
political elites. In other words, there is not any elaborated ‘Yoruba view’
of such nature that could have been incorporated into this discourse.
However, what unmistakably exist are Igbo tropes of conspiracy and
betrayal by the Yoruba in relation to that war. This is, however, beyond
the mandate and scope of the present discourse.
No one war narrative tells the whole story or presents the whole
facts. Every narrative has some value attached to it, whether sectional,
ethnic, or whatever else. But such values only become productive to the
extent that they all collectively speak to one another in an interactive,
meaningful, and creative manner, thus presenting a fairly complete pic-
ture of that tragic war’s saga. This is, however, not often the experience
in the Nigeria-Biafra War example. Instead, the different war narratives
from different sections seem to speak against one another across the
sectional or ethnic lines. Indeed, the past is past, and Biafra is a part
of history now. Learning from the lessons of that war, especially with
regards to collective failures, or wallowing in them is up to one and all,
no matter the divide. No productive lessons can be learned from such
collective failures if the diverse narratives are deliberately distorted,
fractured, conflicting, skewed, and faulty.
Archers, 2002).
117
Adichie, ‘Chinua Achebe at 82’; Akachi Odoemene, ‘The Nigeria-Biafra Civil War,
1967–1970: Reconsidering a Rejected History’, in Perspectives in African History, edited
by Christian B.N. Ogbogbo (Ibadan: Bookwright, 2012).
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9 Local Writers and Commitments to
Ethnic Sentiments
Olukunle Ojeleye
Introduction
Between 1970, when the Nigerian Civil War ended, and today, there
has been (and continues to be) a plethora of publications that seek to
understand and explain this dark moment in the history of the nation.
Two distinct groups can be discerned: the academic and non-academic.
Within these two broad groups lie various genres of writings on the civil
war. In the academic group, writings critically examine the causes as
well as the effects of the civil war, and they draw conclusions to serve as
lessons for the future.
In the non-academic category, four main genres of writings can be
identified. The first are novels and stories. These works of fiction have
invented characters who narrate their viewpoints of the events sur-
rounding the emergence and prosecution of the civil war. The second
genre encompasses memoirs and personal accounts in which authors
seek to present their work empirically, having experienced, witnessed,
and/or participated in the prosecution and resolution of the war. The
third genre is social media writings – including blogs and opinion pieces
as well as feature articles in newspapers and magazines. Social media
has blossomed in the last few years as a result of the combination of
renewed interest in the story of Nigeria by a younger generation as well
as rapid advances in information technology.1 The final type of work in
this genre, following the popularity of documentaries and full length
motion pictures, consist of theatrical/movie scripts on which plays as
well as movies about the war are based.2
It is important to state at the outset that although most of the
works within the non-academic category are fictional in nature, they
do not depart in their accounts from the various propositions made
by the materials that fall within the academic literature of the war.
1
This genre encapsulates writings that would be found on social media sites such as
www.nigeriavillagesquare.com; www.igbofocus.co.uk; www.nairaland.com; and
www.dawodu.com.
2
A good example in this regard is the 2013 movie based on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s,
Half of a Yellow Sun (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), which has the same title as the
book.
194
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Local Writers and Commitments to Ethnic Sentiments 195
Chimamanda Adichie and K. Okpi are a good example of the cross

over between fact and fiction. In Okpi’s words, ‘some of the characters
and events … are fictional, some are not. Its background, however, is a
matter of historical records … and [the] fictionalised telling is an honest
reflection of [the] civil war.’3
The objective of this chapter is to address two questions in relation to
the existing literature by local authors on the Nigerian Civil War. First,
does ethnicity and group affiliation consciously or unconsciously affect
objectivity in historical writing? Second, to what extent do writings
by local authors on the Nigerian Civil War mirror or exhibit commit-
ment to ethnic sentiments? The second section of this chapter, provides
a working definition of who a local author is. The subsequent section
provides an overview of the epistemology adopted in identifying ethnic
sentiments in writings on the civil war, while the fourth section explores
the concepts of ethnicity as well as ethnic politics and the impact both
have on the attainment of objectivity in historical writing. The fifth sec-
tion takes a cursory snapshot of selected writings by local authors on
the Nigerian Civil War to highlight that most of the publications to date
incorporate elements of value judgement in varying degrees. Against
that backdrop, the final section expands on the opinion that ethnic
sentiments in writings about the Nigerian Civil War do serve a purpose
and that local authors’ commitment to such sentiments are not mis-
placed or unintentional. Thereafter a brief conclusion draws together
the threads in the chapter.
Who Is a Local Author?

Jose R. Martinez Cobo, Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Sub-
Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minori-
ties, has described an indigenous person as an individual who belongs
to an indigenous population by virtue of group consciousness, and
recognition as well as acceptance by the group as one of its members.
To give meaning to this description, Cobo refers to an indigenous com-
munity, people or nation as:
Those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colo-
nial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct
from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or
parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and
are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their
ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued
3
K. Okpi, Biafra Testament (London: Macmillan, 1982), ix.
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196 Olukunle Ojeleye
existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social

institutions and legal system.4
The historical continuity of such a community, people or nation may
extend into the present by featuring the continuation of a common
ancestry, culture, and language regardless of whether their residence
is in the original ancestral location or land, another country, or other
regions of the world. A local author in the context of the discussion in
this chapter is, therefore, a person descended from any of the ethnic
groups that inhabits the geographical space currently called Nige-
ria who has retained some or all of their cultural as well as ancestral
characteristics and continues to have a sense of commitment as well
as attachment to his or her community or the country called Nigeria,
regardless of where he or she is currently domiciled.
Objectivity in Historical Writing: The Positivist Approach

It is widely accepted that historical writing is one of the ways in which
human societies know, construct and advocate knowledge. Regardless
of his or her social identity, the fundamental question that is raised
when an author seeks to advance our knowledge of any historical event
is to what level the facts being presented are objective, and devoid of
prejudice.
In determining the objectivity or subjectivity of local authors on the
Nigerian Civil War, this chapter adopts a positivist approach in review-
ing and determining the degree of ethnic sentiments exhibited in the
available literature across the academic and non-academic categories.
The positivist approach to social enquiry seeks to ensure objectivity and
avoid distortion of facts in the creation of a body of knowledge that
illuminates our understanding of the world around us. According to
Hanfling, all descriptions, whether of animate or inanimate things can
be reduced to the vocabulary of physics.5 Any statement that cannot be
confirmed or refuted by observation or logic is meaningless. Hence, a
theatrical presentation of Julius Caesar can be explained as an empirical
and methodological description of Caesar’s life and achievements – the
essence of science. Positivism sees human beings as subjective in the
analysis of events given our emotional feelings about specific events. It
seeks to distinguish between what is (facts) and what ought to be (our
values). In so doing, it demands a vigorous application of a given set of
criteria to our propositions before we can conclude that our claims are
what is and not what we feel ought to be. Values are seen as dependent
4
J.M. Cobo, Study of the Problem of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations, UN Doc. E/
CN.4/Sub.2/1986/7, 379–382.
5
O. Hanfling, Logical Positivism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).
000 Fal book B.indb 196 13/06/2016 22:06

on beliefs and hence subjective, while facts are theory free, value neu-
tral and, therefore, objective.6
In contrast to positivism, the rationalist approach to knowledge crea-
tion holds that the human eye cannot observe all variables involved in
the cause of a particular event. It explains that by analysing the rela-
tionship between the variables that the human eye can observe, the
reasoning capacity of human beings facilitates an understanding of
how an event has occurred. Pragmatism, on the other hand, attempts
to bridge the gap between positivism and rationalism. By explaining
that while we can observe and, consequently, arrive at generalizations
following the use of reasoning, it is our individual experiences that will
necessitate either a reinforcement of our proposition or theory, or a
revision of it.7
It must be admitted that the positivist approach does suffer shortcom-
ings. First, it holds that prior to empirical observations there are neither
theories nor beliefs that drive us towards a thirst for knowledge. It indi-
rectly proffers that we do not have any information whatsoever about the
phenomenon or event we are observing or studying. If this is true, then
positivism is indirectly giving us the allowance to interpret events that
we do not know a priori as we see them through our power of reasoning.
While this might be argued by the positivist as enhancing the possibility
of our arriving at a value-free and objective conclusion, the reality is
that we are never blank in our minds. We hold beliefs that inadvertently
condition the way we reason and interpret events. Second, a description
of an empirical observation demands that the person describing and the
one to whom the description is targeted have a common understanding
of the subject matter. Such a description entails the use of language that
is only understandable to the audience by prior agreement or knowledge.
Consequently therefore, facts are dependent on our a priori knowledge
of events no matter how small and intangible. This explains why Kuhn
argued that ‘no puzzle-solving enterprise can exist unless its practitioners
share criteria which, for that group and for that time, determine when a
particular puzzle has been solved’.8
Third, by allowing us to use reasoning to interpret events indirectly,
positivism acknowledges that not all contributory variables to a given
situation can be observed and verified. However, it then prevents us from
talking about these unobservable variables, while at the same time claim-
ing that, for our proposition to be valid, all variables at work must be
observable. For example, in an analogy used by Joad, let us assume this
is biblical times, and we have just witnessed Jesus Christ turning water
6
Ibid., 13.
7
S. Smith, K. Booth, and M. Zalewski, eds, International Theory: Positivism and Beyond
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13–20.
8
T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1970), 7.
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into wine. The question that then arises is how to explain the process
by which He did it. The explanation would be that He did it through His
supernatural powers. But the point remains that we can neither empiri-
cally verify the extent of Christ’s powers nor if the water turning into wine
was a consequence of the exercise of this power. Therefore, in asserting
that water can be turned into wine (the verifiable) through Christ’s power
(the unobservable), all variables involved have not been observed.9
From this, two deductions can be made. First, by allowing the
interpretation of events, positivism is not wholly focused on physical
manifestations or empirical confirmation as it claims. Second, by using
interpretation to explain the linkage between the verifiable and the
unobservable, we would be guilty of falsehood in claiming to possess
true knowledge in as much as the whole process involved in the creation
of knowledge is not empirically testable. Finally, positivism fails to define
what it means by objectivity in our search for knowledge. Objectivity
can only take place within a group that has a set of rules and regula-
tions guiding its approach to a specific issue, event, or project. Once the
rules are followed by the one making enquiry, then the result is objective
in the sight of the members of the group. But for an outsider, who does
not even know the subject matter beforehand, a careful consideration
of the result may be deemed to be subjective.
Regardless of any contradiction in the positivist approach to achiev-
ing objectivity in the creation of knowledge, an example of its enduring
influence and advantage is in its emphasis on the uniformity of language
across the natural science and the social world. The approach identifies
two types of statements in the output of knowledge. First are empirical
statements that are verifiable by observation, and second are analytical
statements, which can only be ascertained by reflection on the meaning
of the relevant words. Thus, by placing emphasis on the importance of
language, the positivist approach enables us to determine if an author
has strived, or not strived, to attain a distinctive level of objectivity in his
or her writing.
Ethnicity and Ethnic Politics: Effect on Objectivity in

Historical Writing
The concept of ethnicity has been used implicitly or explicitly to
describe the affiliation of individuals to a group on the basis of cultural
and linguistic affinity. While some have argued that human behaviour
along ethnic lines is biological and inborn, others are of the view that
such behaviour is reflective of socio-historical experiences of the people
concerned.10 Ethnicity delineates a group on the basis of a common
9
C.E.M. Joad, A Critique of Logical Positivism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1950).
10
D. Edelman, ‘Ethnicity and Early Israel’, in Ethnicity and the Bible Biblical Interpretation
Series 19, edited by M.G. Brett (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 25–26.
000 Fal book B.indb 198 13/06/2016 22:06

history, religion, language, customs, as well as genealogical features.

The homogeneity of ethnic groups in terms of language, religion, and
culture encourages loyalty to the unit. This loyalty leads to the devel-
opment of negative attitudes, prejudices, and discrimination towards
members of other groups, which often results in aggression and vio-
lence between such groups. These features birth ethnic sentiments
and loyalty to the group no matter the circumstance. For the effect of
ethnicity to be fully understood, the concept has to be examined in the
context of the class, socio-economic, political, and structural makeup
of the society concerned.11 This is based on the widely accepted premise
that this societal makeup gives impetus to group competition within a
given political space.
Ethnic politics in Nigeria were not a post-war phenomenon, but long
predated political independence.12 In a bid to serve British administra-
tion effectively, Northern Nigeria, which was predominantly Muslim,
was merged with Southern Nigeria, which was predominantly Chris-
tian and Animist. While Islam stresses obedience to authority and
acceptance of predestination as virtues, Christianity encourages indi-
vidual responsibility and achievement. These contradictory values
held by Southern and Northern Nigerians have consistently fostered
negative perceptions of each other. Apart from the issue of perception,
the Yoruba and the Igbo see each other as competitors in terms of com-
merce and political leverage. However, given the level of development in
both ethnic groups, the ability to compete on a level playing field did not
engender and has not engendered a morbid fear of hegemony of one
over the other. The Hausa, on the other hand, see the Yoruba, and espe-
cially the Igbo, as hegemonic, and they believe the Yoruba want to exert
their will over the rest of the country.13 In an environment where colo-
nialism subsequently imposed a peripheral capitalist economic system,
the struggle for political relevance, economic power, and resources in
the Nigerian society could not avoid being ethnic-based.14
Authors and writers are human beings, and they grow up in a com-
plex link of relationships within a social system. These relationships of
kinship, dependency, and mutual support not only enhance individual
11
K.L. Sparks, Ethnicity and Identity in Ancient Israel: Prolegomena to the Study of Ethnic Senti-
ments and Their Expression in the Hebrew Bible, Dissertation, University of North Carolina
(1996), 22.
12
P. Lloyd, ‘The Ethnic Background to the Nigerian Civil War’ in Nigerian Politics and Mili-
tary Rule: Prelude to the Civil War, edited by S.K. Panter-Brick (London: Athlone Press,
1970), 1–13.
13
A. Mbanefo, ‘A Psychological Analysis of the Nigerian Civil War: Future Implications for
Unity and Nationhood’ in The Civil War Years: Proceedings of the National Conference on
Nigeria Since Independence Vol. III (Zaria: Gaskiya, 1983), 8–20.
14
O. Nnoli, Ethnic Politics in Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980), 121–147; and R.I.
Jacob, ‘A Historical Survey of Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria’ Asian Social Science 8:4 (2012),
13–14. http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ass/article/view/15959 (accessed April
12, 2014)
000 Fal book B.indb 199 13/06/2016 22:06

as well as group survival, they also become a vehicle for identification

that, in turn, provides a prism through which the individuals review
social relations.15 These webs of socio-cultural, economic, and political
relationships evolve into individual sentiments, which are essentially
beliefs, feelings, opinions, and emotions upon which actions, decisions,
and judgements as well as attitudes are based.
In view of the effect of ethnicity on individual and group conscious-
ness, Riggs surmised that the extension of kinship results in ethnic
sentiments and that such sentiments are unavoidable when it comes
to historical writing.16 Hence, this chapter argues that a local author
cannot be wholly and totally non-judgemental when writing about fun-
damental issues of socio-cultural divisions in a multicultural society.
The Nigerian Civil War, Local Authors and Ethnic Sentiments:

A Snapshot
It must be noted that with the mounting volumes of writing on the
Nigerian Civil War by local authors, it is impossible to carry out, an in-
depth survey of ethnic sentiments contained in all the available works
in only one chapter of a book. As such, this section only aims to provide
a glance into how ethnic sentiments have surfaced or are surfacing in
writings by local authors on the war.
As previously indicated, existing literature on the Nigerian Civil War
can be broadly divided into two main categories of academic and non-
academic writings. Going back to the utility of language in determining
objectivity as expounded by the positivist approach, even though aca-
demic writings in the existing literature on the civil war can lay claim
to a higher level of objective analysis in contrast to the non-academic
materials, there still exist a fair number of academic works that in their
title as well as content are not only subjective but are reflective of ethnic
sentiments. It is paradoxical that even though most, if not all, the local
authors on the Nigerian Civil War identify ethnicity and its attendant
baggage as one of the causes of the civil war, most have directly or indi-
rectly continued to promote ethnicity though their writings. In spite of
the attempts by local writers on the Nigerian Civil War to tell the truth
each from his or her own perspective, the understanding and analysis
of the course of events usually reflect the writer’s particular relation-
ship to the war.
Merely looking at the title of a novel, memoir, or media article is a
good signpost to the biases of the author. For example, the title chosen
by Chinua Achebe for his last memoir, There Was a Country, could be
interpreted in two dimensions: either in reference to Biafra as a country
15
E. Cashmore, ed., Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations (London: Routledge, 1996), 195.
16
F.W. Riggs, ed., Ethnicity: Concepts and Terms Used in Ethnicity Research (Honolulu: COC-
TA, 1985), 11–37.
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that existed quite briefly or as a symbolic reference to the death of any

semblance of unity and nationhood in the country called Nigeria. Also,
Adichie’s title for her fictional work, Half of a Yellow Sun is a reference to
the flag of the defunct Biafra. The title provides a good indication of the
leaning of the work as it reflects the desire of the author to keep alive
not only the memory of her grandfathers who died in the war but also
the ‘many issues that have been officially swept aside by the country’.17
These are, nevertheless, deeply alive in the consciousness of the Igbo
people – including the consciousness of the author’s generation, who
were not yet born when the civil war occurred but have been fed by the
older generation with stories of what took place or did not take place in
the course of the war. Samuel Ikpe echoes this desire for the re-emer-
gence of the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’ in his own novel.18
Four decades after the end of the war, debates as to who did what
and who led (or misled) who to take particular lines of actions remain
contending issues. The closer the writer is to the event in terms of involve-
ment, the greater the likelihood of subjectivity in his or her assessment.
There are many dimensions to this, and one of the best illustrations is
in regards to the true motive of Biafra’s secession. The view that has
remained dominant since the end of the war on the federal side is that
the war was ‘between one man and the rest of us’.19 Ojukwu is blamed
by the federal side for Biafra’s secession on the premise that he fanned
the flames of secession in order to further his personal ambition of ruling
over an empire. This view of Ojukwu’s role in the civil war is further given
credence by the assertion of Ige who claimed to be pro-Igbo but not pro-
Biafra when he stated that ‘the Civil War was a misguided action begun by
a self-deluded Army officer, fought with the limited skills, understanding
and limited involvement of soldiers, and ended when the Biafran army
leadership realised that their game was up’.20 Yet, it has been acknowl-
edged that Igbo leaders decided, earlier than Colonel Emeka Odumegwu
Ojukwu in 1966, that to remain in a Nigerian federation would not augur
well for them given the massacre of the Igbo across the nation. Indeed,
Dudley noted that the playwright Christopher Okigbo, who lost his life
during the war, boasted ‘if Ojukwu does not declare secession we will
organise 20,000 market women to lynch him’.21
Nwankwo claims that the declaration of secession by the East, which
preceded the war, is the resultant effect of the hatred exhibited towards
the Igbos by the two other ethnic groups. While Igbo writers continue
17
C.N. Adichie, ‘The Story Behind the Book’, http://chimamanda.com/books/half-of-a-
yellow-sun/the-story-behind-the-book (accessed August 16, 2014).
18
Samuel Ikpe, Red Belt: Biafra Rising (London: Bygfut Media, 2013).
19
O. Obasanjo, My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War 1967–1970 (London:
Heinemann, 1981), 10–14.
20
B. Ige, People, Politics and Politicians of Nigeria (1940 – 1979) (Ibadan: Heinemann,
1995), 352.
21
B. Dudley, Instability and Political Order (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1973), 177.
000 Fal book B.indb 201 13/06/2016 22:06

to rightly assert Biafra secession and the emergence of the civil war as
emanating directly from the deliberate massacre of the Igbo in North-
ern Nigeria in 1966, it is noted that most writers on the federal side who
are from the Yoruba, Hausa, and South-South minority ethnic groups
have chosen to gloss over this important factor in their writings about
the emergence of the civil war. It is also important to note that when
the non-academic group of writings is considered, the Biafra side of the
conflict has produced more work on the civil war than the federal side.
The most divisive theme of the Nigerian Civil War that continues to
resonate in ethnic sentiments by writers relates to the thousands of Igbos
who died in the northern part of the country in 1966 as well as more than
2 million deaths on the Igbo side during the civil war.22 The title given to
a collection of papers by Korieh suggests a quest to reawaken the memory
of the global community, if not Nigeria, to what he termed the genocidal
intent of actors on the federal side. Ekwe-Ekwe recently revisited the civil
war, and he underlined the causes as well as the course of the civil war.23
He attempted to convince the reader that, several years after, Biafra and
the place of the Igbo in the Nigerian federation remained an open and a
sore wound. Even though most of the claims made by Ekwe-Ekwe cannot
be refuted, he employed passionate language and used subjective phrases
like ‘genocidist operatives’ in his description of the conduct of the federal
forces and federal government officials.24
Nothing better encapsulates this division and ethnic sentiment
regarding allegations that the federal forces deliberately carried out
genocide against the Igbo than this extract from the novel by Adichie:
He writes about starvation. Starvation was a Nigerian weapon of war. Star-
vation broke Biafra and brought Biafra fame and made Biafra last as long
as it did. Starvation made the people of the world take notice and sparked
protests and demonstrations in London and Moscow and Czechoslovakia.
Starvation made Zambia and Tanzania and Ivory Coast and Gabon recog-
nize Biafra, starvation brought Africa into Nixon’s American campaign and
made parents all over the world tell their children to eat up. Starvation pro-
pelled aid organizations to sneak-fly food into Biafra at night since both sides
could not agree on routes. Starvation aided the careers of photographers.
And starvation made the International Red Cross call Biafra its gravest
emergency since the Second World War.25
In addition, another impactful comment on this theme was written by
22
By the time the civil war ended, the number of dead in the former Eastern Region from
hostilities, disease, and starvation during the thirty-month civil war was estimated at
between 1 million and 3 million. For different estimates of the casualties of the Nigerian
Civil War, see ‘Nigeria: 1966–1970’, http://necrometrics.com/20c1m.htm#Biafra (ac-
cessed June 23, 2014).
23
H. Ekwe-Ekwe, Biafra Revisited (Dakar: African Renaissance, 2006).
24
Ibid., 68.
25
Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 237.
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the late Professor Chinua Achebe. In his last work, he described Chief
Obafemi Awolowo, who served as Yoruba leader and Finance Commis-
sioner during the civil war, as
having an overriding ambition for power … saw the dominant Igbos at the
time as the obstacles to that goal, and when the opportunity arose – the
Nigeria-Biafra war – his ambition drove him into a frenzy to go to a great
length to achieve his dreams. In the Biafran case it meant hatching up a
diabolical policy to reduce the number of his enemies through starvation. A
statement credited to Chief Awolowo … is the most callous and unfortunate:
‘All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see why
we should feed our enemies fat in order for them to fight harder.’26
With the exception of Nwankwo, who accused Ojukwu of promis-
ing arms and ammunitions that never arrived, and Madiebo, who
quickly recanted his account of the military and political deficiencies of
Biafra in the wake of Achebe’s book, most pro-Biafra local writers have
failed to respond to some pro-federal forces’ claims.27 Pro-federal forces
claim that independent assessments in diplomatic postings from the
period reveal that Biafra was not prepared for the military conflict that
attended the declaration of secession. They also fail to acknowledge the
fact that when both sides reached an accord to allow relief materials to
be airlifted through the federal territory into the Biafra enclave, the Bia-
fran armed forces included weapons and ammunitions with the relief
materials in these ‘mercy flights’. This accounted for the decision by the
federal side that all airlifts must first land in Lagos to be checked before
being allowed to proceed into Biafra.28
Not long after the furore caused by Achebe’s book, Alabi-Isama’s
memoir responded to the allegation of genocide by pointing an accus-
ing finger at the Biafra hierarchy for the death of the civilian population
in the Biafra enclave.
Other than the military and government officials, almost everybody else
was a refugee, due, in part, to the propaganda of their government, which
told them that federal troops would kill all of them if and when they were
caught. Therefore, the four to five million population of refugees inside
Biafra did not know where they were going, which food they would eat
when they got where they were going; as these so-called Biafrans had no
known farms nor farm infrastructure. They were a nation of traders and
business people … Their leaders whom all the people trusted so much to help
26
C. Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (London: Penguin Books,
2013), 233.
27
A.A. Nwankwo, Nigeria: The Challenge of Biafra, 3rd ed. (Enugu: Fourth Dimension,
1972), 49.
28
The Biafra propaganda machine was quick to label this an attempt by the federal side to
inject poison into the relief materials to annihilate the Igbo population and refused to ac-
cept the condition laid by the federal government.
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them out of all their problems, only compounded the problems and had
no answers for the people except whom to blame. They evacuated villagers
completely from their homes to nowhere in particular. The people starved
and starved and by that, they overstretched their logistics. Biafran officers
had rosy cheeks while their people starved; but they blamed the Federal Gov-
ernment of Nigeria for their woes. I had thought that these were educated
people who knew and could differentiate right from wrong, even some that
were not born at the time of war in 1967 still talk about Nigeria’s genocide
on the Ibo people.29
In the immediate aftermath of the publication of memoirs by
Adekunle in 2004, Achebe in 2013, and Alabi-Isama in 2013, the
venom of ethnic sentiment across the three main ethnic groups in Nige-
ria has been openly and largely reflected in writings and commentaries
on social media. In one of the threads on a website where Yoruba and
Igbo commentators could not stop insulting each other’s ‘genealogy’,
a third-party member of the forum named King Tom tried unsuccess-
fully to broker a truce between the social media warring groups. He
wrote: ‘It seems you guys do not know when to stop the insults. Well my
damage control is over. If una [sic] like kill yourselves, good night.’30 For
a foreigner who wanders on to the Internet or Facebook without any
knowledge of the background to the commentaries on most sites, he or
she would think another civil war has erupted in the country.
Local Authors and the Value of Commitment to

Ethnic Sentiments
Against the backdrop of the ethnic sentiments already highlighted, this
section seeks to provide an answer to the question as to why there seems
to be a sustained commitment to ethnic sentiments by local authors in
their writings on the civil war and to show that in multicultural socie-
ties like Nigeria, such commitments do have an intrinsic value to group
identity. According to Copson, African conflicts are not ethnic based
but tend to advocate modern political concepts rather than ethnic
objectives.31 In essence, ethnic politics resulted from the urge by certain
groups of people who shared the same political, economic, and cultural
orientation to achieve power, influence, or wealth. It can become a major
determinant of political action. This political action leads to ethnic
nationalism, which seeks to unite an indigenous community, people,
or nation on the basis of a shared ethnic identity, cultural pattern, or
social institution. Consequently, Suhrke and Noble, and Rothschild
29
G. Alabi-Isama, The Tragedy of Victory: On-the-spot Account of the Nigeria-Biafra War in the
Atlantic Theatre (Ibadan: Spectrum, 2013), 334.
30
www.nairaland.com/1583639/brigadier-general-alabi-isamas-rants/1
(accessed A
ugust 16, 2014).
31
R. Copson, African Wars and Prospects for Peace (New York: Sharpe, 1994), 75, 79.
000 Fal book B.indb 204 13/06/2016 22:06

emphasized the utilitarian and affective motives for ethnic politics and
nationalism.32 The utilitarian motives include economic gain, political
stake, and strategic considerations, while the affective motives include
ethnic identity (ethnicity), religion, ideology, historic injustice, irre-
dentism, reasons of justice or principle, personal links with leaders in
a political movement or conflict, humanitarian considerations, and a
degree of embryonic racial-cultural affinity.
According to Somekawa and Smith, the stories an author chooses to
tell or the research an academician chooses to conduct reflect the writ-
er’s social and political position within the society concerned.33 Keita
takes this argument further by canvassing the position that the notion
of race or ethnicity is a central concept in distinguishing between justi-
fied belief and opinion in the formation of knowledge, and that ‘this
body of racialized [ethnic] knowledge is essential to both individual and
group identity, private and public lives, and institutional, structural,
and systemic development’.34
For example, the account of the civil war by Saro-Wiwa was written
from the viewpoint of a minority ethnic nationality. The author cata-
logued what he regarded as the historical injustice of the domination of
the eastern minority ethnic groups by the Igbos, and the reason why his
people, the Ogoni opted to align with the federal forces rather than the
Igbos in the civil war.35 More importantly, the account aimed to high-
light the plight of the eastern minority ethnic groups in the post-civil
war environment as one in which they exchanged injustice from one
task-master (the Igbo) for another (the Nigerian state) since the latter
failed to adequately recompense them for their contribution to the suc-
cess of keeping the country one. It is in pursuit of this ethnic sentiment
through activism that Saro-Wiwa eventually lost his life to the same
nation-state he fought to keep.
Particularly for the Igbos, who constituted the core of secessionist
Biafra administration and military formations, the civil war experience
remains the most traumatic event in their collective history. The imme-
diate post-independence climate made the Nigerian Civil War inevitable.
Unfortunately, the fallout from the war continues to linger on because
of the choices made by Nigeria’s political leaders in the immediate post-
civil war environment. Hence, Onuoha observed that
32
A. Suhrke and L.G. Noble, eds, ‘Spread or Containment? The Ethnic Factor’ in their
Ethnic Conflict and International Relations (New York: Praeger, 1977), 226–230; and J.
Rothschild, Ethnopolitics: A Conceptual Framework (New York: Columbia University Press,
1981), 186.
33
E. Somekawa and E. Smith, ‘Theorizing the Writing of History or “I Can’t Think Why It
Should Be So Dull, For a Great Deal of It Must Be Invention”’, Journal of Social History,
22:1 (1988).
34
M. Keita, Race and the Writing of History: Riddling the Sphinx (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 6.
35
K. Saro-Wiwa, On a Darkling Plain: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War (London: Saros,
1989).
000 Fal book B.indb 205 13/06/2016 22:06

what has emerged in the current phase of Igbo nationalism is a timely oppo-
sition that has successfully tapped into the deep sense of grievance, margin-
alisation and exclusion of the Igbo nation from the benefits of citizenship
and socioeconomic rights within the Nigerian polity.36
Conclusion
This chapter set out to address two key questions: does ethnicity and
group affiliation consciously or unconsciously affect objectivity in
historical writing? To what extent do writings by local authors on the
Nigerian Civil War mirror or exhibit commitment to ethnic sentiments?
In doing so, the chapter categorized existing literature on the war, dis-
cussed the positivist approach to determining objectivity in writing as
the epistemology adopted for reviewing selected samples of existing lit-
erature, and examined the twin concepts of ethnicity and ethnic policy
to identify the influence they may have on objectivity in writing history
by a local author. Following from this, a limited part of the literature
was reviewed for ethnic sentiments and reasons given for commitment
to ethnic sentiments in writings by local writers.
It is found that ethnicity and group affiliation do affect objectivity in
historical writing. The more writings on the Nigerian Civil War by local
authors fall outside the academic category where the rigorous process
of scholarship demands a high level of objectivity, the greater the pro-
pensity for increase in value judgement and subjectivity. The various
interpretations of the Nigerian Civil War by those who were active par-
ticipants as well as by the immediate generation of their offspring shows
that the war continues to evoke deep-seated memories, divisions, and
controversy several years after the last gunfire.
More than 40 years after cessation of hostilities on the battle field,
Nigeria still retains the ethnic divisions as well as fundamental causes of
the civil war of 1967. Even though Biafra is ‘back in Nigeria, relatively
secure … the grave issues that elicited its birth are still with us in the
Nigerian polity. Unless and until these have been seriously addressed,
the jury remains hung.’37 In such an atmosphere, ethnic sentiments in
writings by local authors have become an extension (or another means)
of the pre – and post-war struggles between the main ethnic groups.
Indeed, the ethnic sentiments have become the continuation of the
Nigerian Civil War through the proxy of writing.
36
G. Onuoha, ‘Contemporary Igbo Nationalism and the Crisis of Self-Determination in Ni-
geria’, African Studies 71:1 (April 2012), 46.
37
G.A. Onyegbula, Memoirs of the Nigerian-Biafran Bureaucrat: An Account of Life in Biafra
and Within Nigeria. (Ibadan: Spectrum, 2005), 181.
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Part III
THE WAR IN FICTION,
MEMOIR, AND IMAGINATION
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000 Fal book B.indb 208 13/06/2016 22:06
10 Memoirs and the Question
of Objectivity
Revisiting Alexander Madiebo’s The Nigerian
Revolution and the Biafran War and
Robert Collis’s Nigeria in Conflict
Christian Chukwuma Opata
Introduction
Two concepts – memoirs and objectivity – provide the major thrust for
this discourse and as such delimit the boundaries of our probe of the
two authors whose works are under examination. However, these two
words are meaningful only if discussed in the context of historical writ-
ing about the Nigeria-Biafra War. It is imperative that our convenient
takeoff point should be to know what history is and what it takes to
write a work that could actually be regarded as an intellectual historical
piece, as this line of action would establish which of the two works is
more objective. An important question for us here would be to ask if we
are talking of history as a body of knowledge existing on its own, or as
a discipline. In the case of the latter, we are concerned with the recon-
struction of the past by the use of existing knowledge about that aspect
of the past that caught our interest. This demarcation is necessary
because, as Colin Wells would always caution, ‘history, the discipline,
goes beyond the simple past’ and that it goes beyond ‘official record-
keeping and even palace chronicles’.1 Wells argues:
As an intellectual discipline, a particular way of thinking about the past
(not better or worse, but peculiar to itself), the tradition of history that
began with Herodotus has an essential ingredient that separates it from
other traditional approaches to the past. History’s defining characteristic is
not record-keeping or list-making, though it shares its interest in the past
with these pursuits (not to mention using them as source materials). What
distinguishes history’s attitude to the past is the overarching goal of rational
explanation. History is about explaining the past, not just recording it.2
The above observation by Wells creates a distinction between history as
a discipline and history as the ordinary past. A probe into history as the
ordinary past and its meaning and relevance as a body of knowledge
yields the summation below.
1
Colin Wells, A Brief History of History: Great Historians and the Epic Quest to Explain the
Past (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2008), xii.
2
Wells, A Brief History of History, xiii, original emphasis.
209
000 Fal book B.indb 209 13/06/2016 22:06

210 Christian Chukwuma Opata
History is the memory of human group experience. If it is forgotten or

ignored, we cease in that measure to be human. Without history, we
have no knowledge of who we are or how we came to be, like victims of
collective amnesia groping in the dark for our identity. It is the events
recorded in history that have generated all the emotions, the values,
the ideals that make life meaningful, that have given people something
to live for, struggle over, die for … Historical events have created all the
basic human groupings – countries, religions, classes – and all the loy-
alties that attach to these.3
Wells’ quotation mirrors why, even when discussing a single subject,
authors are divided in their opinions. This stems largely from the fact
that the past, as a permanent dimension of human consciousness, is an
inevitable component of the institutions, values, and other patterns of
human society.4 However, how the historian goes about his or her writ-
ings make him or her susceptible to criticism, especially where he or she
takes sides and fails to be objective. This plays up the contest between
objectivity and subjectivity in scholarship. It is the quest to resolve such
contestations that lured professional historians into a movement called
intellectual history. The need for an intellectual history of the Nigerian
Civil War cannot be over emphasized because of the contradicting
accounts. This contradiction must have prompted Ralph Uwechue to
state:
The intentions and motivations of the young idealists in military uniform
who set the current military revolution in motion, on the night of Janu-
ary 15, 1966, have since been a subject of controversy. They are bound to
remain so for as long as the present commotion lasts and the temper of the
nation remains charged, as at present, with deep and conflicting emotions.
For accurate assessment and therefore for fair judgement both the acts itself
and the motives behind it will have to wait the historian’s post-mortem.5
The Accounts of Madiebo and Collis: A Test for Objectivity

As it concerns the Nigerian Civil War, many authors have recorded
their accounts of the war, emphasizing why the war was waged, the
role of various actors, and why Biafra lost the war. The views of these
authors are varied, as exemplified in Alexander Madiebo and Robert
Collis. Whereas Madiebo was dramatis persona in the war and fought on
the side of Biafra, Collis was a medical doctor of high standing in Nige-
ria during the war, which he witnessed. These authors made themselves
3
R.V. Daniels, Studying History, How and Why? 2nd edn (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1972), 3, cited in Obaro Ikime, History, The Historian and the Nation: The Voice of a
Nigerian Historian (Ibadan: Heinemann Educational), 2006, xii.
4
Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Abacus, 1998), 13.
5
Ralph Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War: A Call for Realism (London: O.I.T.H.
International, 1969), 57–58.
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Memoirs and Objectivity: A. Madiebo and R. Collis 211
liable to suspicion at the onset of their work by trying to prove that they
are not subjective in their views. For instance, Madiebo, in the preface
to his work, enthused that his book was
not intended to serve as a political propaganda material for the benefit of
any section or group of individuals. It is rather a genuine attempt to render
a dispassionate account of the Nigerian revolution and the civil war which
took place from January 1966 to January 1970.6
For his own part, Robert Collis began his work by trying, like Madiebo,
to wash his hands ‘clean’ and absolve himself of any possible charges of
being subjective. He states:
I have tried in these pages to give a true picture of the events which I have
witnessed here, uninfluenced by propaganda, party or tribe … The facts that
I describe and the conclusions I have drawn are those of a doctor. I have no
axe to grind or future career to build up in Nigeria. I belong to no party. I am
no supporter of no Nigerian tribe or Religion … I am not myself involved in
the Nigerian ‘troubles’ and my only endeavour in this work is to present the
truth.7
Good talks. However, all these foundational myths raise the question:
why should a writer start his or her work by providing himself or her-
self an escape route, even when he or she is aware that some of his or
her submissions are questionable? The probable answer is to make their
readers believe they are objective. If we take off on the premise that
objectivity arises from criticizing and comparing rival webs of interpre-
tations in terms of agreed facts – and Madiebo and Collis are not agreed
generally – then the meaning and application of objectivity in historical
writing must be sought.8 What then is objectivity in History?
Many scholars have discussed objectivity and came to varying opin-
ions. These include the likes of Gadamer, Foucault, Derrida, Daston,
and Novick. Some even went as far as stating emphatically that there
is nothing like objectivity in writing history. For instance, Richard
Bushman cautioned that, ‘we should not be deceived, however, by the
illusion that at long last we have learned to write objective history …
The myth of scientific history … has been discarded.’9 Arguing in the
same light, Ronald K. Esplin avers that an approach to historical truth
that assumes that a historian can be objective is unrealistic and naive.10
6
Alexander A. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War (Enugu: FourthDimen-
sion, 1980), xi.
7
Robert J.M. Collis, Nigeria in Conflict (London: Secker and Warburg, 1970), xii-xiii.
8
Mark Bevir, ‘Objectivity in History’, History and Theory, 33:3 (1994), 328–344, www.
history510.files.wordpress.com (accessed May 17, 2014).
9
Richard Bushman, ‘Introduction: The Future of Mormon History’, Dialogue 1 (Au-
tumn1966), 23–26.
10
Ronald K. Esplin, ‘How Then Should We Write History?’ Sunstone 7:2 (March-April,
1982), 41–45.
000 Fal book B.indb 211 13/06/2016 22:06

Peter O. Oyewale, echoing Henige, surmises that objectivity means a

state of having a comprehensive, systematic record of the past events
as they actually happened and it (objectivity) holds the belief that his-
torical writing should be based on solid facts alone.11 However, Peter
Novick whose own definition is in use here maintains that
the principle assumptions of objectivity for the profession of history include
a commitment to reality of the past, and to truth as correspondence to real-
ity; a sharp separation between knower and known, between fact and value,
and above all, between history and fiction. Historical facts are seen as prior
to and independent of interpretation: the value of interpretation is judged
by how well it accounts for the facts; if contradicted by the facts, it must be
abandoned. Truth is one, not perspectival.12
This assertion by Novick stands in sharp contrast to Edward Hallett
Carr, who maintains that
History consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. The facts are available
to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish on the fish-
monger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and
serves them in whatever style appeals to him.13
Memoir on the other hand is a personal reflection-cum-recollection of
an event. Put differently, it is an individual’s account of an episode or
episodes.
Madiebo divided his work into three parts. Part One he titled ‘The
Revolution’. In this part, he discusses six items. The first is a general
remark and the other five details his account of the events in the
nation’s military hierarchy. Part Two focuses on the war and how it
was executed. The final part, the ‘Epilogue’, is more or less concerned
with why Biafra lost the war. Robert Collis divides his work into four
sections but only the third section dealt squarely on the war proper. Like
Madiebo, he also concluded with an epilogue. However, it is imperative
that we make some clarifications before delving into the works of these
authors with a view to ascertaining their level of objectivity.
Madiebo was an Igbo officer in the Nigerian army who commanded
the Nigerian Artillery Regiment before the outbreak of hostilities. His
ethnic group fought with the rest of Nigeria and he was the commander
of the rebel soldiers. Based on his position as a former senior army
officer in Nigeria and then as the head of the Biafran armed forces, as a
member of the military inner cabinets he must have had classified infor-
mation. He was a combatant during the war. As writings are propelled
11
Peter O. Oyewale, ‘Objectivity: A Subject of Discourse in Historical Writing’, AFRREV
IJAH (An International Journal of Arts and Humanities) 3:1 (January 2014), 18–30, www.
afrrevjo.net/ijah (accessed May 17, 2014).
12
Peter Novick, cited in Judy Hensley, ‘The Historical and Philosophical Understandings of
Objectivity’, http://gustavus.edu/philosophy/judy.html (accessed May 17, 2014).
13
E.H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 9.
000 Fal book B.indb 212 13/06/2016 22:06

by an interest, his work is like a cover up of what might be termed an

Igbo misdeed.
By contrast, Collis is Irish. He served as a medical doctor in Nigeria
and witnessed both the first and second coups d’état in Nigeria. He was
never directly involved in the war even as he was in touch with some
high profile Nigerians on both sides of the divide. Most of his informa-
tion was based on ‘second-hand information’. Most importantly, his
ideas of Nigeria were shaped by the views of British colonial officers
and early anthropologists.
Both authors began their discourse on the civil war by looking at the
ethnic configuration of Nigeria, the level of imbalance in terms of politi-
cal representation in the polity, and the role of colonialism. Madiebo goes
a little further to consider that part of the reasons for the war had to do
with the British opinion of the South, which they saw as ‘politically unre-
liable’, as evident in military recruitment in Nigeria before World War
II.14 During the World War I, when manpower pressure compelled the
British War Office to send a recruitment mission to West Africa in 1916,
the British Government tasked the mission to pay particular attention to
the ‘pagan areas’ and not to the Christianized nationalities of the South
as viable sources of recruits.15 Through this, the Igbo who belong to the
‘Christianized South’ were not considered fit for military recruitment by
the British at this stage of the nation’s development.
Madiebo, writing under the sub-heading ‘Political Background’,
maintains that the origin of the civil war could be traced to ‘the
divide and rule system of government which Britain introduced into
the country’.16 Granted, when the British amalgamated Northern
and Southern Protectorates of Nigeria in 1914, they did not create a
common legislative council for the entire country. Even when a legis-
lative council was eventually established in 1923, its jurisdiction was
limited to the Colony of Lagos and the Southern Provinces. Hugh Clif-
ford was aware of the shortcomings of the legislative council when he
surmised that no legislative council that sat in Lagos could properly deal
with the North.17 Governor Bourdillon saw no wisdom in having such
a body since it had 12 African members (all from the southern part of
the country) and the North was not included. This may have been the
beginning of northern apprehension.
This system of divide and rule, Madiebo argues, emphasized dif-
ferences among the peoples. It encouraged social apartheid; it bred
14
Jide Osuntokun, ‘West African Armed Revolts During the First World War’, Tariku 5:3
(1977), 6–17.
15
E.C. Ejiogu, ‘Colonial Army Recruitment Patterns and Post-Colonial Military Coups d’État
in Africa: The Case of Nigeria, 1966–1993’, Scientia Militaria, South African Journal of
Military Studies 35:1 (2007), 99–132.
16
Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, 3–14.
17
I.M. Okonjo, British Administration in Nigeria, 1900–1950: A Nigerian View (New York:
NOK, 1974), 302.
000 Fal book B.indb 213 13/06/2016 22:06

division, hatred, unhealthy rivalries, and pronounced disparities in

development among the various peoples of the country.18As a result,
he argues that, after independence, the battle to consolidate this legacy
of political and military dominance of a section of Nigeria over the rest
of the Federation intensified and was degenerated into coups and the
bloody civil war. On the question of ethnic rivalry, Collis was quick to
note that perhaps, the most important lesson he learned from his jour-
neys in Nigeria was that
it is entirely an artificial country born out of the womb of an international
Western Conference. It did not consist of a geographical or ethnological
area. History had not welded its tribes into one national group as for instance
in France and Germany ... The average villager in Nigeria, however, be he
Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo [sic], Tiv or Birom cannot be regarded as a Nigerian
first and a member of his tribe second. Indeed, his immediate family holds
almost all the loyalty, his tribe comes next and the idea of being a Nigerian
nation very much third.19
The authors’ notions on ethnic politics and the quest for dominance
among the ethnic nationalities cannot be contested. During the elec-
tions that ushered in the First Republic and gave birth to the formation
of the immediate post-independence government in Nigeria, the major
political parties in the nation were regionally based with the leadership
of those parties provided by nationals of the dominant ethnic group in
each of the regions. It is in trying to interpret the dynamics of contest
for dominance by the ethnic nationalities as it pertains to the coups and
the subsequent civil war that Madiebo and Collis present contradicting
viewpoints.
Collis sees the war as a reaction of other ethnic nationalities to what
he calls an ‘Igbo plot for domination which was hatched in their secret
societies by first-class men in every other way’.20 From his account, one
is meant to believe that the first coup in post-independent Nigeria was
staged by the Igbo with the intention of carving a niche for themselves
in the nation. Madiebo, on the other hand, sees the coup as a revolution
meant to correct the ills in Nigeria of that era, but it was misinterpreted.
These misunderstandings led to a civil war. The account of Madiebo on
the causes of the war is, ideologically speaking, more objective but prag-
matically subjective. His explanations for the coup include: the contest
for political and military dominance during the 1959 federal elections,
which played up the rift between the leader of the Northern People’s
Congress, the Sarduana of Sokoto, and the leader of the Action Group,
Chief Obafemi Awolowo; the 1963 census controversy; the crisis in
the Western House of Assembly in 1962; and the 1965 regional
18
19
Collis, Nigeria in Conflict, 24.
20
Ibid., 149.
000 Fal book B.indb 214 13/06/2016 22:06

parliamentary elections, in which the federal government declared

Samuel Ladoke Akintola winner.21
One major issue that needs to be clarified is the people involved in
the planning and execution of the coup. Here, Adewale Ademoyega’s
Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup becomes insightful.
Madiebo, even though a soldier, was not part of the planning. The main
anchors of the planning were Nzeogwu, Ademoyega, and Ifeajuna.22
All the reasons offered by Madiebo were echoed by some other schol-
ars, most of whom are not of Igbo extraction. These include the likes of
Ahmed R. Mohammed,23 B.J. Dudley,24 General Olusegun Obasanjo,25
R.L. Sklar,26, W. Schwartz,27 and a host of others.
Madiebo, in what appears to be a total rebuttal of Collis’ claim of Igbo
plans to dominate the rest of the nation as unfounded, states that, if
anything, it was the North that had a pre-conceived plan to dominate
the country politically using the instrument of the military. He details
the manner in which military installations favored the North, and he
stressed dominance of the army, indicating that some officers of South-
ern Nigeria extraction faked their identities and claimed that they are
from Northern Nigeria.28
In addition, Madiebo argues that the North used the army as an
instrument of political domination. He narrates how Brigadier Samuel
Ademulegun was a Yoruba who identified closely with the Northern
People’s Congress because he hoped that through such association
he would become the first indigenous General Officer to command the
Nigerian Army after the British colonial authorities left. He breached
military protocols to satisfy the Sarduana by sending troops to the Tiv
Division. He claimed the Sarduana had dismantled all opposition to the
demand that due process be followed in the dispatch of the soldiers.
Sarduana also dismissed the Commanding Officer of the 5th Battal-
ion. These troops were to go to Tiv Division because of his opposition
to sending the troops without following due process.29 To ascertain the
21
22
Adewale Ademoyega, Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup (Ibadan: Evans
Brothers, 1981), 76.
23
Ahmed R. Mohammed, ‘The Nigerian Civil War 1967–1970: A Critical Look at the De-
velopments that Led to It’, in Nigeria: The First 25 Years, edited by Uma Eleazu (Lagos and
Ibadan: Infodata and Heinemann Educational), 73–77.
24
B.J. Dudley, Instability and Political Order: Politics and Crisis in Nigeria (Ibadan: Ibadan Uni-
versity Press, 1973).
25
General Olusegun Obasanjo, My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War,
1967–1970 (London: Heinemann, 1981).
26
R.L. Sklar, ‘Contradictions in the Nigerian Political System’, Journal of Modern African
Studies 3:2 (1965).
27
W. Schwartz, Nigeria (London: Pall Mall, 1968).
28
Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, 9 – 11.
29
Ibid., 12.
000 Fal book B.indb 215 13/06/2016 22:06

objectivity of Madiebo’s claim that the North was bent on using the
military to dominate the rest of the federation, one needs to ask how.
The account of Adewale Ademoyega on the reasons for the coup and
the rationale for the date gives one an opening from which to appraise
the account of Madiebo. In what he captioned ‘NNA [Nigerian National
Alliance] Plan to Wallop the West’, Ademoyega wrote:
After extensive prodding, we discovered that the Balewa Government had
a terrible plan to bring the Army fully to operate in the West for purpose of
eliminating the elites of that region, especially the intellectuals who were
believed to be behind the intransigence of the people against the Akin-
tola Government ... The Federal Government was to use loyal troops for
this purpose and the 4th Battalion in Ibadan commanded by Lieutenant-
Colonel Largema and the 2nd Battalion in Ikeja temporarily commanded
by Major Igboba, but soon to be taken over by Lieutenant-Colonel Gowon,
were designated for this assignment. The operation was fixed for the third
week of January 1966, when the Sarduana would have returned from
his pilgrimage, and Lieutenant-Colonel Gowon would have completed his
takeover of the Ikeja Battalion. In preparation for this horrible move by the
Federal Government, the high echelons of the Army and the Police were
being reshuffled. Major-General Ironsi was ordered to proceed on leave from
mid-January. He was to be relieved by Brigadier Maimalari, over the head of
Brigadier Ademulegun. In the Police Force, Inspector-General Edet was sent
on leave from December 20, 1965. The officer closest to him was retired and
the third officer, Alhaji Kam Salem was brought in as the new Inspector-
General. The stage was thus set for the proper walloping of the UPGA ‘riot-
ers’ of the West.30
Going through the work of Billy Dudley, one is inclined to agree with
Madiebo. Dudley avers that the Nigerian political leaders were so inter-
ested in the army to the extent that, by 1962, a quota system for recruit-
ment was introduced for the armed forces. He equally observes that the
proportions were not related to geographical distribution of the popula-
tion between the governmental units of the federation but to the system
of elective representation that obtained in Nigeria between 1951 and
1958. This he said allocated half of the representation to the North
while the remainder was split between the East and West. However, a
greater pointer to northern interest in the army is the fact that the deci-
sion to introduce a quota system in the army was so much in contrast
with recruitment to other positions under the Federal Government, such as
the police or the Federal Civil Service (both of which maintained an ‘open’
recruitment system) that it has to be seen as an indication of the aware-
ness of the political leaders that the armed forces could be used as a political
30
Ademoyega, Why We Struck, 93–94.
000 Fal book B.indb 216 13/06/2016 22:06

instrument to subserve sectional ends. It was also a reaction to what was

thought to be an ‘imbalance’ in the composition of the forces.31
The pertinent question to ask here is why was the quota restricted to
the army alone? The question becomes important when one observes
that by 1961, of the 1,203 Nigerian officers in the administrative and
professional grades of the Federal Public Service, only 34 were north-
erners. In the executive grades, of 1,150 Nigerians, only 30 were north-
erners, while in the clerical and technical grades, of 16,770 Nigerians,
only 381 were northerners.32 If the answer is equal representation
based on regions, it still doesn’t satisfy the curiosity of an investigator.
It tends to jettison merit: a sign that the Nigerian project is suffering
some form of dysrhythmia and the only plausible answer would be that
a hidden agenda exists. Hence Ben Gbulie’s conclusion that in Nigeria
of the period (First Republic) mediocrity sat unchallenged on the throne
– mediocrity that was sustained by blind leadership. Merit meant noth-
ing and so with talent and industry.33
In spite of Madiebo’s rebuttals, Collis stood his ground by quoting
what Ironsi told Gowon. Ironsi was said to have told Gowon: ‘Oh, good-
night, have a good time, have a good night because you never know
what may happen to you tomorrow.’34 What was more, he cites an
unnamed research fellow of Igbo extraction as having told him that
they (the Igbo) were planning what sounded like a takeover and that,
when time came, he looked forward to bombing the northern cities and
the bridge across the Niger. He also hoped the Igbo would be able to kill
the Sarduana, after which he felt it would also be necessary to dispose
of the Prime Minister.35 For those who may not read between lines,
Collis and Madiebo’s accounts and what happened during coups and
counter-coups might appear as real. However, what is at contest here
are not the ‘facts’ but the dynamics of the event that would accord the
‘facts’ historical relevance in the light of scholarly academic discourse
and objectivity.
Collis insists that the Igbo plan to dominate the rest of the federation
was made manifest in 1965 when Azikiwe failed to invite the leader of
the predominant party to form a government after a general election.36
What is not contested is that Azikiwe’s ‘refusal’ to invite Balewa to form
a government immediately after the election resulted from the manner
31
Dudley, Instability and Political Order, 90.
32
1962 Report of the Nigerianization Officer cited in Eghosa Osaghe, ‘Federal Society and
Federal Character: The Politics of Plural Accommodation in Nigeria since Independ-
ence’, in Nigeria: The First 25 Years, edited by Uma Eleazu (Lagos and Ibadan: Infodata
and Heinemann Educational, 1988), 23–33.
33
Ben Gbulie, Nigeria’s Five Majors: Coup d’État of 15th January 1966 – First Inside Account
(Reprint, Enugu: Benlie, 2001), 8.
34
Collis, Nigeria in Conflict, 147
35
Ibid., 148–149.
36
Ibid., 138–139.
000 Fal book B.indb 217 13/06/2016 22:06

in which the 1965 elections were conducted. The election that trig-
gered the crisis brought the army to power. According to Ben Gbulie, the
prevailing political situation constituted an unpleasant jar to Nigeria’s
nerves.37 This necessitated a change in government, no matter how
radical. The answer came in the form of a military coup d’état. Although
army officers of Igbo extraction formed the majority of the coup’s plan-
ners, the coup was not an Igbo coup. It was probably based on the lop-
sided nature of the killings that forced Collis to conclude:
Even then it seemed odd, if this was true and there was a national revolt
against corrupt politicians that only the Prime Minister of the Federation,
a Northerner, and the premier of the Northern and Western Regions had
been killed while those from the Eastern and Mid-Western Region [Igbo-
dominated areas] were not molested: even when politicians in this latter
regions were known to be quite as corrupt as their counterparts in the West
and North.38
At this juncture, we have to ask if the original intention of the coup
plotters was to kill those political leaders or to arrest them and only
kill them if they violently resisted arrest. On this count, Adewale Ade-
moyega, one of the architects of the coup informs us that during their
Lagos meeting,
[i]t was agreed that only the use of force could bring immediate end to the
violence being perpetrated in many parts of the country. It was, however,
agreed that the use of force should be minimal. Political leaders and their
military collaborators were to be arrested, but wherever an arrest was
resisted, it was to be met with force. Otherwise, no one was to be killed.39
This denies Collis’ account of any element of objectivity.
Collis was absolutely correct in his corruption charge against the
political leaders of the East and Mid-West. It is on record that two Com-
missions of Inquiry (the Foster-Sutton and the Coker Commissions)
exposed how the leaders used the public as a source of financial capital
for their economic interests. Specifically, the Foster-Sutton Tribunal of
Inquiry that looked into the affairs of African Continental Bank reported
that Nnamdi Azikiwe and his family sustained their financial empire
through the use of public funds.40 Granted, Collis’ views are germane
for purposes of investigation; his submissions left unanswered many
questions that would present a clear picture of events. First is in regard
37
Gbulie, Nigeria’s Five Majors, 8.
38
39
40
For a detailed account of the said report see Report of the Tribunal Appointed to Inquire into
Allegations on the Official Conduct of the Premier of, and Certain Persons Holding Ministerial
and Other Public Offices in the Eastern Region of Nigeria, Cmnd. 51 (London: HMSO, 1957),
cited in Okwudiba Nnoli, Ethnic Politics in Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980),
145–147.
000 Fal book B.indb 218 13/06/2016 22:06

to his claim that the killing suggests an organized underground plan by

the Igbo to topple the government of the federation so as to install one
of themselves or, at least, an Igbo as the leader of the nation.
Madiebo argues that the coup plotters were mainly Igbo because of
the composition and structure of the army then. Ikenna Nzimiro, writ-
ing on the same issue agrees with Madiebo by stating that the coup
plotters were patriotic and genuine and had no mandate of the Igbo for
the coup, but believed that they were serving their fatherland. Nzimiro
further argues that the non-ethnic fixation of the masterminds of the
coup was clear in their program to make Awolowo the head of their
new government.41 General Obasanjo also considered the idea that the
coup was not ethnically focused; he stated that Major Nzeogwu’s aims
for the coup were not borne out by its method, style, and results.42 The
objectivity in this assertion could only be obtained if there were a list of
leaders that the ring leaders of the January coup planned to kill. Such
a list would show if the leaders of the East were exempt from the plan-
ning stage. Gbulie argues that Igbo leaders such as Azikiwe, Okpara,
Ironsi, and Arthur Unegbe were in the list of those to be killed by the
revolutionaries.43 Fredrick Forsyth expanded the list to include Emeka
Odumegwu Ojukwu.44
The case of Arthur Unegbe brings to the limelight the fact that the
coup was not motivated by ethnic consideration as canvassed by Collis.
At the time of the January coup, Unegbe was the quartermaster general
of the Nigerian Armed Forces. He lost his life to the January coup plot-
ters because he refused to cooperate with them. The fact that he refused
to surrender the key to the armory as demanded by the young officers
helped in no small way to facilitate the failure of the coup in Lagos. As
the revolutionaries were denied access to arms and ammunition, they
became handicapped in carrying out their plans in Lagos, which was
the nation’s capital. Ralph Uwechue stressed the importance of Uneg-
be’s action and his contribution to the failure of the coup in Lagos and
the non-ethnic agenda of the coup as follows.
It was indeed, exactly this situation that gave Ironsi his chance on that fate-
ful night of 15th January. The loyal troops he rallied at dawn had arms and
ammunition to support him. Though they did not suffer the same fate as Lt.
Col. Arthur Unegbe, most of the senior Ibo army officers were unaware of
the plan to overthrow the government. Here it may be helpful perhaps to
41
Ikenna Nzimiro, Nigerian Civil War: A Study in Class Conflict (Enugu: Front Line, 1982),
86. See also Oha-na-Eze Ndigbo, The Violations of Human and Civil Rights of Ndigbo in the
Federation of Nigeria (1966–1999): A Petition to the Human Rights Violations Investigating
Committee (Enugu: Snaap. 2002), 12–13.
42
Obasanjo, My Command, 6. For a more detailed study, see Wale Ademoyega, Why We
Struck.
43
Gbulie, Nigeria’s Five Majors, 51–55.
44
Frederick Forsyth, Emeka (Ibadan: Spectrum, 1991), 61.
000 Fal book B.indb 219 13/06/2016 22:06

mention the fact that Lt. Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu, who was in charge of
the 5th battalion of the Nigerian Army stationed in Kano, played a decisive
role in ensuring the collapse of the coup. He refused to cooperate with Major
Nzeogwu who was then in Kaduna and instead gave his support to General
Ironsi in the latter’s opposition to the ‘January Boys’. A grateful Ironsi soon
afterwards appointed him Military Governor of Eastern Nigeria.45
Both Ironsi and Nzeogwu were of Igbo extraction. However, no out-
sider would blame Collis for holding the Igbo culpable in the January
coup. This is because between 2:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on January 15,
1966, when the soldiers surrounded the lodge of the Premier of East-
ern Region and the Enugu Radio station on orders from Lagos, they had
all the opportunity to kill the leaders already slated for death in their
region. Here there was no Arthur Unegbe to prevent them. That Okpara
and Ibiam were with Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus was no excuse
as the soldiers who helped them take the Bishop to the airport would
have shot them on their way back before the order came. Be that as it
may, the failure of soldiers posted to the East to execute the coup created
the scope for branding the coup as ethnically based. On this note, the
account of Madiebo readily comes handy. He maintains that it is erro-
neous to state that Unegbe was killed because he refused to surrender
the key to the armory to the ‘January Boys’ as he held no keys to any of
the armories. He was killed because they feared that if he learned of the
death of Maimalari, he would fight back.46
Another clue to buttress the non-ethnic agenda of the coup plotters
is their mission statement as encapsulated in Major Nzeogwu’s broad-
cast to the nation. Nzeogwu stated that the aim of the coup was to
‘establish a strong, united and prosperous nation, free from corruption
and internal strife’.47 Part of the internal strife, which the coup plotters
wanted to forestall, was an Islamicizing jihad. According to one military
intelligence chief,
its tripartite aim is: first, to eliminate all powerful southern politicians
opposed to the NNA; second, to enforce the present Igbos-must-go hue and
cry in the North; and third to impose Islam on the Christian South – and
consequently to establish Nigeria as a theocratic Muslim country … Sir
Ahmadu Bello is behind it all … and he will be calling the shots I gather.48
It might well be insinuated that the coup supposedly planned by
Ahmadu Bello was what the Oha-na-Eze Ndigbo alluded to in their peti-
tion to the Oputa Panel, also known as the Human Rights Violations
Investigation Commission, set up in 2000 to investigate human rights
abuses dating back to the military coup of January 15, 1966. In the
45
Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War, 29–30, original emphasis.
46
Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution.
47
Nzeogwu January 15, 1966 broadcast, cited in Obasanjo, My Command, 6.
48
Gbulie, Nigeria’s Five Majors, 39.
000 Fal book B.indb 220 13/06/2016 22:06

said petition, they submitted that they had it ‘on good authority that
this 15 January, 1966 coup was in fact a counter-coup staged to pre-
empt another coup planned for 17 January, 1966’.49
What might be called the ‘Ironsi factor’ and ‘Gowon’s intrigues’ were
very eloquent in the works of both authors as a reason for the civil war.
However, their interpretation of the events differs especially in terms
of details. All of Ironsi’s actions were seen by Collis as an extension of
the Igbo plot. Hence he submits that there is no doubt that, whatever
Ironsi’s part was in the coup of January 15, he was ‘aiding what seemed
like an Ibo plan to take over the government of the whole country’.50
Collis is of the view that the decision to abolish the regions and adopt a
unitary system was an Igbo plan. Hence, he quotes Edozien as having
said: ‘I have just come from State House, where we have decided that
the only thing to do is to put an end to the Regions.’51 One wonders to
whom ‘we’ here refers. Going through the work of Collis, one is forced
to conclude that the ‘we’ refers to the Igbo. One of the measures that
Collis sees as a design to effect, if not actualize, Igbo domination was the
creation of about 20 new colonels. The great majority were Igbos with
a view to filling these new posts.52 At this juncture one wonders about
the objectivity in Collis’ report. If Ironsi was made head of state in order
to actualize a supposed Igbo agenda of domination, why was it difficult
for him to take control of the North where Nzeogwu (an Igbo) held sway
at the early stage of his assumption of office, or is the North not part
of Nigeria? This question becomes imperative in the face of Madiebo’s
account. Madiebo enthuses that Nzeogwu ‘had by now discouraged all
future operations, and in my attempt to get a quick and tidy end to Nze-
ogwu’s revolution I had created a stalemate. Ironsi was sitting in Lagos
ruling the South and Nzeogwu was ruling the North from Kaduna.’53
For a leader, who through the Constitution Suspension and Modi-
fication (No. 1) Decree of 1966, invested all governmental powers on
himself, to be so daft and obdurate to the extent that he failed, in the
words of the axiom, to put his ears to the ground to hear the ballad of
the ant is, to say the least, suspect and questionable. What the plot envi-
sioned was totally different from what happened. It is what happened
that is history – not what we thought would happen. Nzeogwu made
us understand that their purpose was to change the country and make
it a place we could all be proud to call our home. He argued that tribal
considerations were completely ludicrous, but a setback occurred in the
execution.54 This does not mean that Collis was entirely biased against
49
Oha-na-Eze Ndigbo,The Violations of Human and Civil Rights, 12.
50
51
Ibid., 150.
52
Ibid., 151.
53
Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, 25.
54
Africa and the World 3:31 (May 1967), 15, cited in Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian
Civil War, 64.
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the Igbo. As an outsider, the contradiction between Nzeogwu’s plan and

the result of the coup is suspect; more so, the order that led to the failure
of the coup in the East came from Ironsi.55
Other ‘Ironsi factors’ are the way and manner he handled the officer
who carried out the January coup, his enactment of Decree No. 34,
tagged the Unification Decree, and his insensitivity to northern feelings.
Madiebo maintains that
the disaster that followed the coup was entirely due to weakness and lack of
clear realistic political objectives and discipline on the part of the military
regime which inherited power. The January coup was successful for that
regime to have rectified whatever was done badly and still retain power,
discipline and respect. What happened was that Nigeria, which was being
treated for an overdose of compromise by those who carried out the coup,
was being administered with more doses of compromise by Ironsi’s regime,
which inherited power after the revolution.56
To ascertain the level of objectivity of Madiebo’s account, we need
to find out what happened and at what time in order to understand if
Ironsi actually made compromises where he should not. B.J. Dudley
provides a quick answer to the latter by arguing that Ironsi vacillated
regarding what to do to the January 1966 coup plotters.
In May, the case of these men was brought before the newly created Supreme
Military Council where finally it was decided that they should be brought
to trial, but rather than implementing the decision, Ironsi suggested that
the trial be postponed to July. In July, there was another postponement to
September.57
This validates Madiebo’s account where he stated:
This regime, formed in the first instance on basis of compromise between
Ironsi and Nzeogwu on the one hand, and Ironsi and the politicians on the
other, aspired to rule successfully by compromise. For this reason it tried to
placate those who sought to destroy it and took no action on various sub-
stantiated reports available to it concerning plans to overthrow it.58
On these charges against Ironsi and his administration, the authors
differ. Collis blamed the situation on Ironsi personally and his dream to
actualize the Igbo agenda to dominate the nation. Madiebo blamed the
situation largely on Ironsi’s administration and partly on Ironsi as an
individual. On this count, one needs to cite Collis at length:
The only misgiving I had at that time was continually meeting the more
disreputable Ibos in the State House, men like the doctor who made a vast
55
For details, see Walter Schwarz, Nigeria (London: Pall Mall, 1968), 193–198.
56
57
Dudley, Instability and Political Order, 115.
58
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fortune out of his various official positions which he had obtained through
politicians ... As far as I was concerned, however, Ironsi could not have
behaved with greater consideration or been more cordial when I met him
and I still find it hard to believe that he was acting the part of honest broker
and covering up a further Ibo murder plot which is now believed to have
been in the offing at the time.59
People might be forced to come to the conclusion that it was ‘the
more disreputable Ibos in the State House’60 that dictated for Ironsi
what to do. This notion may be right as Obasanjo observed that ‘Ironsi
was handicapped by his own intellectual shortcomings; and his advis-
ers (who were inward-looking) did not help him very much’.61 Ralph
Uwechue made a similar assertion:
Because the ‘discredited’ politicians were methodically left out of the show
(a number of them including the erstwhile Premier of the Eastern Region,
Dr. Michael Okpara, were imprisoned), the government of the Region was
robbed of the politicians’ most important asset – supple realism. The void
thus created greatly enhanced the voice and the chances of the ‘diehards’
who despite their proven abilities in the relatively closed world of civil ser-
vice and academics were novices in the tortuous game of politics.62
Writing in the same vein, Collis surmised that Ironsi was personally
in a hopeless situation as he was pushed by the leading Igbos to place
them in strategic positions ahead of others by fair means or foul, which
placed him in an impossible position, being pushed ‘forward all the time
by unscrupulous fellow Ibos, so he had no choice’.63 Hence, the acts
of omission or commission by Ironsi helped to facilitate Nigeria’s easy
march to crisis – a point Madiebo equally corroborated. Be that as it
may, there is no objectivity in the account of Collis to the effect that the
suspension of the constitution by Ironsi was to effect an ‘Igbo agenda’.
If this was an Igbo agenda as deduced by Collis, one wonders why all the
military regimes and even the so-called civilian democracy in Nigeria
since the overthrow of Ironsi had retained a unitary system in practice.
Hence, W. Alade Fawole wrote that though the unification policy was
greeted with protests and riots especially in the North, a situation that
eventually led to the bloody overthrow of the Ironsi regime two months
later in July 1966, it remained the hallmark of successive military
regimes from then until May 1999.64
59
60
Ibid.
61
Obasanjo, My Command, 6.
62
Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War, 89–90.
63
64
W. Alade Fawole, ‘Military Rule and Unitarianization of Nigeria’, in Richard A. Olaniyan
(ed.), The Amalgamation and its Enemies: An Interpretive History of Modern Nigeria (Ile-Ife:
Obafemi Awolowo University Press, 2003), 149–165.
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After Ironsi was killed in the July counter-coup, a leadership vacuum

existed because, according to Collis, there was no definite plan by the
young officers and there was also no Supreme Commander. Following
this gap in planning, it was natural for one to think that, as an institu-
tion that placed emphasis on seniority and hierarchy, Brigadier Ogun-
dipe (as the most senior military officer) would assume the position.
However, this was not to be, because in the view of Collis ‘there wasn’t
sufficient thrust between him and the troops’.65 It is on record that there
were about six Nigerian soldiers who were senior to Gowon. If they did
not trust Ogundipe, what of the other five, of which Ojukwu was one?
This lull paved the way for Yakubu Gowon, who was the most senior
military officer of Northern Nigerian origin to assume the leadership of
the nation. Emeka Ojukwu, being senior to him and a stickler to military
ethics, refused to recognize Gowon as the head of the new government.
This introduced confusion in the already troubled Nigerian polity. A
big question arose from the choice of Gowon: If he was chosen because
he was the most senior army officer of Northern Nigeria extraction, it
meant that the soldiers still recognized seniority, but not for the army of
the nation, rather a section. It was this that Collis harped on in Chapter
7 of his work under Gowon and Ojukwu.
Collis argues that Gowon made every attempt to bring peace back
to the troubled polity, first by retaining Ojukwu as the Military Gover-
nor of the Eastern Region and then by maintaining the Igbo part of
the army on full pay: thus, Ojukwu foiled all attempts at peace.66 On
the notion of Ojukwu foiling Gowon’s attempt to bring peace to Nige-
rians, Madiebo says the contrary by referring to what became the fate
of the Ad Hoc Constitutional Conference, which was set up to find a
workable solution to the Nigerian crisis. Madiebo argues that even as
the conference was being held, killings were going on in Northern Nige-
ria on a scale unknown before the conference. The killings prompted
Ojukwu to demand that all soldiers should be returned to their regions
of origin in accordance with an agreement reached between Gowon
and the Regional Governors in August, 1966. (This meeting was held
on August 4.)
Gowon turned down Ojukwu’s demand and went a step further to
suspend the Ad Hoc Committee indefinitely on the grounds that ‘it no
longer served any useful purpose’67 – an indication that Gowon’s effort
was not thwarted by Ojukwu but by Gowon who could not control the
killings and the committee members. Gowon’s refusal to order military
officers of Northern Nigerian extraction to go back to the North and
their being made to stay in the West, especially Lagos, is suspect. Forsyth
made us understand that Collis’ account is not in any way objective on
65
Ibid., 153.
66
Ibid., 155–156.
67
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this count, stating that when the easterners began to kill northerners
in their midst Ojukwu ordered that they should be escorted to safety
by the police. This, he said contrasted dramatically with Gowon’s com-
plete inability to do anything to protect his fellow-Nigerians in his own
home region.68 Gowon’s inability to control the anger of his region may
be accounted for by his quest to please the North. If not, how can one
justify the fact that one of the grievances held against Ironsi was that
he did not try the January coup plotters for overthrowing a duly con-
stituted authority? Gowon did the same and was not questioned. The
only plausible answer one might arrive at is that both Ironsi and Gowon
suffered the same fate: indecision and fear of losing the support of their
regions and ethnic groups.
Another issue that engaged the attention of both authors as a cause
of the war as well as a factor in the failure of the ‘Biafran project’ are the
roles of Ojukwu’s ambition and his ‘sole administrator mentality driven
by personal agenda’. Collis maintains that
the real cause of the continuation of the war is the person of Ojukwu him-
self; that without him and possibly a small group of devoted adherents, the
other Ibo leaders being realists whatever their hopes of domination were in
the past, now realise that this aim is impossible of attainment or that seces-
sion of Biafra could be accepted by the rest of Nigeria.69
Collis’ account was supported by Ralph Uwechue who advises, ‘that
this fight became a fight for secession was Lt. Col. Ojukwu’s political
decision’.70 Madiebo’s account allows even more on this issue as he
states that,
surprising as it may sound, it is true that not a single military officer to my
knowledge, received an official briefing on the explosive political battle that
was going on between Gowon and Ojukwu. The military got news of what
was going on either from civilians, or through the wireless. Thus, the news
of the Aburi Conference, the Ad Hoc Constitutional Conference and even
the very declaration of independence came to the Army as a surprise over
the national radio network.71
Equally, Ojukwu was accused by Madiebo of not taking the army into
confidence; a fact he said may be the reason Ojukwu leaned entirely on
the civilians for all military purchases, including weapons. Even when
the weapons arrived, they were hidden around villages around Nnewi,
an arrangement outside of the military control.72 The absence of trust
introduced division into Biafra leading to sabotage – a major cause of
68
Forsyth, Emeka, 71.
69
70
Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War, 58.
71
72
Ibid., 90.
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the failure of Biafra. This was made eloquent by the division in the mili-
tia leading to the emergence of two factions, each opposed to the other:
the Port Harcourt Militia and the National Militia.73 Madiebo equally
held that Ojukwu promoted nepotism by staffing the University Teach-
ing Hospital at Enugu with either Nnewi citizens or their friends.74 The
validity and objectivity in all these charges against Ojukwu is certain if
one wants to know why Biafra failed. If not, how does one rationalize
the fact that even on the very day Philip Effiong signed the formal act
of Biafra’s surrender, Ojukwu was reported to have said: ‘While I live,
Biafra Lives. If I am no more, it would be only a matter of time for the
noble concept to be swept into oblivion.’75 He was a sort of megaloma-
niac, which forced Madiebo to conclude that ‘we often left the straight
path leading to our objective in search of such frivolities as personal
power, wealth and making one’s name’.76
Propaganda was also used by both authors as a tool used in the war.
Collis saw the Biafran use of propaganda as a means to curry favor and
support from the international community and as a tool to achieve
their voyage of deceit. Madiebo saw the excessive use of propaganda by
Biafra as a major undoing. Madiebo enthused that part of the failure
of Biafra could be accounted by the fact that ‘we perhaps spent by far
too much time and money on propaganda with little left for military
preparations’.77 This obtains even when all the indices point to Biafra’s
unpreparedness for the war either from the points of view of strategic
planning or availability of resources. That the latter is true was made
clear by Madiebo, who tells us that ‘the Biafran soldier therefore fought
for almost three years naked, hungry and without ammunition’.78
Conclusion
All writings are propelled by an interest, historical writing being no
exception. For an episode as sensitive and volatile as the Nigerian Civil
War, various writers have tried to present their own stand point with a
view to convincing the public that their accounts are authentic and fac-
tual and therefore objective. After all, history is the history of thought.79
Such writers often tend to forget the dictum by Agathon with respect
to history. Agathon maintains that ‘the Gods are not all powerful, they
cannot change the past’.80 The past cannot be changed in spite of how
73
Ibid., 103.
74
Ibid., 88.
75
Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War, 133–134.
76
77
Ibid., 94.
78
Ibid., 118.
79
Carr, What is History? 22.
80
Agathon cited in Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London and New York:
Verso, 2001), v.
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hard a writer may desire to change it. It remains as it is. Interpreting it

to suit one’s countenance is only a miscarriage of justice.
Robert Collis and General Alexander Madiebo wrote what might be
termed their personal reflections of the Nigerian Civil War. Each asserted
that his account was objective, yet they have two different theses. Collis
maintained that the civil war occurred because the Igbo wanted to
perfect a plan to dominate the rest of the federation. Madiebo saw the
war as a consequence of a failed revolution originally planned to effect
a change in the political leadership of the Nigerian state, which had
shown signs of cracks in its political walls based on power tussle and
the unbridled, if not unparalleled, recourse to the Hobbesian state of
nature.Both authors agreed that ethnic rivalry in Nigeria has remained
an albatross hanging on the neck of the nation. They both made an
objective assessment of the situation in Nigeria before the January 1966
coup. However, they both neglected some vital information that would
give readers an objective assessment and help them understand the
dynamics of politics in Nigeria that eventually culminated in the civil
war. Such omission blurs their accounts and denies them objectivity.
For a good interpretation of the reactions that followed the January
1966 coup spearheaded by Nzeogwu, one needs to refer to the state-
ment made by the Sarduana of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello in 1960. Bello
enthused:
The new nation called Nigeria should be an estate of our great grandfather
Uthman Dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We use
the minorities of the North as willing tools and the South as a conquered
territory and never allow them to rule over us and never allow them to have
control over their future.81
The above statement from a leader of no mean order has a lot of implica-
tions and would help any scholar who is interested in having an objec-
tive account of the Nigerian Civil War. This mindset must have informed
the choice of the scandalous rigging of the November 1965 election
into the regional parliament of Western Nigeria aimed at installing
Sir Samuel Akintola in office as the Premier of the region. As Nigeri-
ans were busy bemoaning the fraudulent 1965 election, Sir Ahmadu
Bello and Akintola scheduled a meeting in Kaduna January 13 and 14,
1966. During this meeting, the duo were said to have hatched diaboli-
cal schemes for the declaration of a state of emergency and the ruth-
less extermination of all opponents to an obnoxious tyranny they had
installed.82 However, their plan was cut short by a ‘pre-emptive strike’
by some ‘dissidents in the Army’, which resulted first in a counter-coup
81
‘Oporoza House: The Niger Delta Struggle in Perspective’, Daily Sun, July 17, 2014, www.
sunnewsonline.com (accessed August 8, 2014).
82
Mokwugo Okoye, Embattled Men: Profiles in Social Adjustment (Enugu: Fourth Dimension,
1980), 142.
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in July, 1966, then secession by the Eastern Region (Biafra), and then
civil war.83 The ovation that greeted the January coup at its initial stage
throughout the country is indicative of the fact that the ideas of the
coup plotters were popular.
Collis argued that the lopsided nature of the killing of political lead-
ers and military officers by the Nzeogwu group points to an Igbo plan
to dominate the rest of other ethnic groups in the nation as being the
reason for the January coup. However, a look at the ethnic group to
which the military officers who foiled the January coup came from indi-
cates that they were mainly of Igbo extraction. Ironsi foiled the coup in
Lagos. Madiebo prevailed on Nzeogwu not to launch his planned offen-
sive on the South, which would have had a different result. Ojukwu
refused to take orders from any person save Ironsi or any other person
collectively chosen by the Supreme Military Council by insisting on the
traditions of the army: respect for seniority and hierarchy. This was in
the Nigerian army, not Eastern Nigerian or Igbo Army. Lagos, where
Ironsi foiled the coup, was the nation’s capital then, and Nzeogwu held
sway in the Northern Region where all the nation’s military installa-
tions were under his control.
A point often misunderstood and interpreted out of context, espe-
cially by Collis, is that Ironsi was never part of the coup and was never
known to have nursed the ambition of becoming Nigeria’s head of
state. He only became the leader of the nation when, following the coup
of January 1966, Balewa’s whereabouts were unknown, and there was
a vacuum in leadership. Ben Nwabueze argues that, legally speaking,
given the urgent need to have a government that would help confront
Nzeogwu’s planned assault on the South, the remnants of the federal
council were given an assessment of the situation by the commanding
general officer. Nwabueze, quoting a government document, writes:
Among the available ministers there was much jockeying for leadership. It
soon became clear that none of them was acceptable to all as a leader. They
proved incapable of maintaining their own unity. How much less able would
they have been to mobilise soldiers from the North! In the face of the min-
isters’ own disunity, surely the path of reason and the one most calculated
to preserve their own lives and the safety of the nation was to withdraw,
even if temporarily, from the helm of affairs, and let others handle the situ-
ation. In the event, that was what they did. In a short but historic speech at
11:50 p.m. on 16 January, the acting President, Dr Nwafor Orizu [the presi-
dent, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, was away on a convalescent holiday in Britain],
announced to the anxious nation that he had ‘tonight been advised by the
council of ministers that they had come to a unanimous decision voluntar-
ily to hand over the administration of the country to the Armed Forces of
the Republic with immediate effect,’ and expressed his ‘fervent hope that
83
Wole Soyinka, The Man Died (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 162.
000 Fal book B.indb 228 13/06/2016 22:06

the new administration will ensure the peace and stability of the Federal
Republic of Nigeria and that all citizens will give them full co-operation.’84
What is even more important in assessing the level of objectivity in Collis
account is the fact that, granted that both Nwafor Orizu and Ironsi were
Igbo, the decision was not taken by the Igbo alone. Also worthy of note
is the fact that Ironsi administration was meant to be an interim one.
The ethnic origin of Ironsi, coupled with his inactions and acts of
omissions and commissions sent fear into the northern citizens. Their
fear is justified based on Azikiwe’s statement in 1948 when he stated:
It would appear that the God of Africa has specially created the Ibo nation to
lead the Children of Africa from bondage of all ages … The martial prowess
of the Ibo nation at all stages of human history has enabled them not only
to conquer others but also to also adapt themselves to the role of preservers
… The Igbo nation cannot shirk its responsibility.85
This particular statement injected more bad blood than had existed
between the various ethnic groups in Nigeria and forced them to form
ethnic unions. Dr Eyo Ita was to fall a victim of what appears to be a ful-
filment of Zik’s dictum in 1952 when Azikiwe used ethnic sentiment to
dislodge him from the leadership and membership of the National Coun-
cil of Nigerian Citizens. Probably based on fear that the Igbo wanted to
actualize their dream, the North had to organize a counter-coup that
swept the Ironsi administration, which was supposedly dominated by
Igbo leadership and had enthroned Gowon, a northerner, without due
process. The quest for due process – even if underneath it hid personal
ambition – made Ojukwu challenge the authority and legality of the
Gowon administration. He subsequently declared the Eastern Region as
the independent state of Biafra. Any search for an intellectual history
of the Nigerian Civil War must highlight the long trend of events in
Nigeria, some of which predate the amalgamation, and the contest for
political and economic space in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria.
84
Government Notice No. 147 of 26 January 1966, cited in B.O. Nwabueze, A Constitu-
tional History of Nigeria (London: Longman, 1982), 162.
85
Okwudiba Nnoli, ‘Ethnic politics’, in The Biafran War and the Igbo in Contemporary Nigeria
Politics, edited by E.C. Obiezuofu-Ezeigbo (Lagos: Pan Negro Continental, 2007), 341. See
also J.S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1963), 347.
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11 ‘War is War’
Recreating the Dreams and Nightmares
of the Nigeria-Biafra War through the Eyes
of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy
Cyril Obi
Introduction
This chapter posits that the historiography of the Nigeria-Biafra War
has been characterized by a few ‘blind spots’. This comes to the fore
when examining the ways the war has been deployed by scholars ana-
lysing the role and place of ethnic minorities located in the oil-rich parts
of Eastern Region. These ethnic minorities’ territory became the object
and terrain of war between a secessionist Biafra and the Federal Gov-
ernment of Nigeria. During the Nigeria-Biafra War, the ethnic minori-
ties of the oil-producing Niger Delta were ‘caught in the crossfire’, torn
between Ojukwu’s declaration of Biafra’s independence and a historic
opportunity to achieve the age-old quest for ethnic minority rights and
self-determination.1 It was an ambition driven by the determination to
end perceived domination by the numerically predominant Igbo ethnic
group of the Eastern Region. It was also buoyed by the creation of
three new states in 1967 by the Federal Military Government for ethnic
minorities in the Niger Delta, thus freeing them from the hegemony of
the Eastern Region, which was dominated by Igbo elites. The creation of
Rivers and South-Eastern states out of the former Eastern Region (and
the creation of the new Mid-West State out of the old Mid-West Region)
also encouraged some ethnic minority elites from the Niger Delta to
support the federal side when the civil war broke out in 1967.
While most accounts of the Nigeria-Biafra War have focused on its
causes, specific events, and roles of various actors on both sides in the
war (secessionist Biafra and the Federal Government of Nigeria), they
have either glossed over or ignored the ways in which the war divided
previously united and harmonious communities and people. In many
cases, they have failed to capture the complex ways in which the war
created a space for some individuals to change sides, trade places, and
opportunistically take advantage of a war that simultaneously enriched
1
Cyril Obi, ‘Because of Oil? Understanding the Globalization of the Niger Delta and Its
Consequences’, in Natural Resources, Conflict, and Sustainable Development: Lessons from the
Niger Delta, edited by Okechukwu Ukaga, Ukoha O. Ukiwo, and Ibaba Samuel Ibaba (New
York: Routledge, 2012).
230
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Dreams and Nightmares: Saro-Wiwa Sozaboy 231
the few and decimated the impoverished and vulnerable majority

trapped in war-ravaged Biafran territory. By the same token, a lot of
the war literature has either been dominated by the works of profes-
sional historians or consist of a plethora of war accounts written by a
range of actors, particularly military officers and politicians. However,
some works of fiction based on the Biafran experience have enriched the
literature on the war, and many of them appear to reflect or advance
perspectives of the war ‘by literary means’.2 In spite of this, a case can
still be made for the need to explore the paradoxes and ambiguities that
defined the place of the Niger Delta ethnic minorities during the war,
and how these played out in the years and decades that followed. More
important perhaps is the need for more fictional works that evaluate
the impact of the war on the people of the Niger Delta region against
the background of the highly centralized oil-dependent, post-civil war
Nigerian federalism.
It is against this background that this chapter critically examines how
Ken Saro-Wiwa’s work of fiction Sozaboy is deployed as a narrative of
the experiences of the Ogoni ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta before,
during, and after the war. The novel can be located within a narrative of
how ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta experienced the Nigeria-Biafra
War. It interrogates ethnic minorities’ interpretation of their roles and
the positions they adopted as the war spread to and engulfed their rural
communities. It also touches on the ways in which the logic of sur-
vival in war brought out the best and the worst in people and political
actors, in a context where the real motive for fighting became blurred or
unclear to some of the perpetrators and their victims.
The story of the war is narrated by Mene or Sozaboy, an initially naïve
young man who is transformed by the ‘winds of war’ into a soldier, or
soza, proud to defend his community and win the respect of his family
and peers. Finding himself facing the harsh realities of war and at dif-
ferent times fighting on both sides, being taken prisoner by both sides,
and ending up losing everything, Sozaboy represents a literary critique
of the Nigeria-Biafra War. This can be gleaned from the story of this
young soldier severely traumatized by the season of anomie occasioned
by the sheer destructiveness and horrors of the war. In more ways
than one, Sozaboy personifies his community’s wartime experience
narrated in the form of the recollections of the young villager swept
into a war that he really never understood and from which he did not
benefit. Although the story is rendered in a mixture of peculiar humor
and ‘Rotten English’ by the protagonist, it is a literary representation of
a community’s plight caught in the throes of a violent upheaval and
constitutes a vantage locus from which to reinterpret the history of the
Nigeria-Biafra War from below.
2
Hugh Hodges, ‘Writing Biafra: Adichie, Emecheta and the Dilemmas of Biafran War Fic-
tion’, Postcolonial Text 5:1 (2009), 1.
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232 Cyril Obi
In setting about its task of interrogating warfare through the Nigeria-

Biafra War as seen through the eyes of the young soldier from Dukana,
this chapter is organized into four broad sections. This introduction sets
the context for the creative representation of the place of the ethnic
minorities of the Niger Delta in the Nigeria-Biafra War, including the
narration of wartime destruction and suffering and places this in the
context of a violent form of nation-state building. It is followed by an
analytical section connecting the story of the civil war to the portrai-
ture of Mene and his transformation from an apprentice lorry driver
to a soldier. This sets the stage for the third section that explores how
the author teases out the paradoxes, pains, and ambiguities that under-
pinned the Nigeria-Biafra War, and its connections to the place of ethnic
minorities in the Nigerian project. The fourth section sums up the main
arguments of the forgoing sections and captures some of the ramifica-
tions of the history of war for the future of the Nigerian nation-state
project.
Seeing War like Sozaboy: A Portraiture

Set in the fictional Dukana community in the Niger Delta, which bears
an uncanny resemblance to the author’s Ogoni land, the narrator,
Mene, illustrates how far removed Dukana is from national political
crises.3 He experiences the crises, first as rumors, news from the radio
and then stories told by returnees from other parts of the country. For
Mene, the motor-apprentice and his boss, the driver, the crises presag-
ing the war are seen as an opportunity to make money by charging
passengers fleeing from the massacres of the Igbo in Northern Nigeria,
which forced them and other Eastern Nigerians to flee to their ancestral
villages. As Mene recalls:
We people cannot understand plenty what was happening. But the radio
and other people were talking of how people were dying. And plenty people
were returning to their village. From far places. We motor people begin to
make plenty money … In the motorpark, the returning people were saying
many things. I heard plenty tory by that time. About how they are killing
people in the train; cutting their hand or their leg or breaking their head
with matchet or chooking them with spear and arrow. Fear begin catch me
small.4
Although he is confused as to reasons behind the crises and, despite
making more money, Mene is afraid.5 He is aware that fear is also spread-
ing throughout the community; the local chief, rather than reassure
3
Note the interesting fact that Bori – the real-time traditional headquarters of the Ogoni –
is reported on page 1 as the district headquarters.
4
Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy (New York: Longmans, 1994), 3.
5
Ibid.
000 Fal book B.indb 232 13/06/2016 22:06

the villagers, takes advantage of the situation by imposing a special

tax on his subjects to support the government. Most of them were too
impoverished to pay. It is clear, however, that the people distrusted the
various forms of authority, including their local chief. They regard them
as corrupt. As Duzia the cripple notes in response to the demand to pay
the special tax: ‘How can porson like myself without house, without
wife, without farm, without cloth to wear begin give government chop?
Not government dey give chop and money and cloth to porson?’6
Mene is an only child. His mother, a peasant farmer, struggled hard
to see him through elementary school but could not afford to send him
to secondary school. Therefore, he ended up as an apprentice driver
to the community’s lorry, called ‘progress’. He is a simple lad with
modest ambitions to become a lorry driver. His naïveté comes up in at
an encounter dancing with a young stewardess at African Upwine Bar
in ‘New York’ Diobu: ‘I have never hold woman like I hold that service
that night. Even woman never tell me what that baby was telling me.
Shame catch me. I cannot talk again. I continue to dance but my dance
is not dance again.’7 Afterwards, it is from this young female ‘service’ or
stewardess that he comes face-to-face for the first time with the story of
the looming civil war, told by someone displaced from Lagos and look-
ing for her mother in Dukana.8 She is surprised Mene is unaware of the
crises: ‘You no hear wetin dey happen? They are killing plenty people,
so I return home.’9 But even then, he is still confused about the war. He
says, ‘now that Agnes ask me wetin I think of trouble, I confuse small. I
don’t know what I will say’. 10
However, he is very pleased to have attracted the attention of a
‘sophisticated’ Lagos girl and quickly falls in love with her, noting: ‘I am
very proud because I am the only boy that Agnes talks to every time.
I think that one day, I will marry Agnes.’11 A chance encounter with
Zaza, a World War II veteran who boasts about his exploits in Burma,
and Agnes’s preference for a strongman who can defend her in times
of trouble convince Mene to become a soldier (soza).12 His resolve was
reinforced when soldiers started to raid Dukana villagers, harassing
and extorting them, even beating Zaza severely. No-one stood up to
them, not even the leader of the community, Chief Birabee.13 However,
Mene remains confused and afraid to the point of being haunted by
nightmares.14
6
Ibid., 7.
7
Ibid., 14.
8
Ibid., 14–17.
9
Ibid., 16.
10
Ibid., 19.
11
Ibid., 21.
12
Ibid., 37.
13
Ibid., 41.
14
Ibid., 45–49.
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234 Cyril Obi
At that point, the people of Dukana and Mene had been only indi-
rectly affected by the war, except for growing poverty symbolized by
the high cost and relative scarcity of salt. Mene captures the state of
suffering thus: ‘So now salt is costing one shilling instead of two pence
for one cup, it means that poor man cannot chop again. Country don
spoil.’15 To get into the army, Mene pays a bribe to a recruiter, Okpara,
like other young recruits before him. He enlisted in Pitakwa (likely the
Biafran Army then in control of Port Harcourt). Although the author
deliberately omits which side of the war Sozaboy joined, it is likely the
Biafran side. However, it is clear that Sozaboy is really impressed with
the smart uniform and gun, although he does not initially understand
the drill and learns that he will have to wait a considerable time to get a
uniform and gun.
He also learns that war can have unpleasant consequences. As his
instructor ‘Tan Papa’ warns, ‘because war is war’.16 As the narrator,
Mene also shows that he did not understand most of what the Chief
Commander General said when he addressed them as young army
recruits at a passing out parade, but hopes he will have an opportunity
to show off his uniform and gun to his friends and new wife in Dukana
and to protect his people during the war.17 Yet his naïveté about the pur-
pose of the war leads him to ask himself, ‘how war go finish when eve-
rybody don die finish? Na who go live to enjoy after that? Does it mean
that myself, my wife Agnes and my mama go don die finish by that time?
Then why are we fighting then?’18
His confusion is compounded by a tall man who he remembered
seeing at the African Upwine Bar in Diobu discussing war with a short
man. He subsequently gives the tall man the nickname, Manmuswak
(a coinage from man must wack, i.e. eat). Manmuswak, an enemy sol-
dier waving a white flag, visits his army company and plies them with
gifts of cigarettes and drinks. Later, Sozaboy gets into trouble after his
company gets drunk on alcohol stolen from the Captain’s tent, earn-
ing them seven days of detention and torture. Their ringleader ‘Bullet’
was tortured and forced to drink the Captain’s urine. Sozaboy begins to
lose his innocence. In his words: ‘And I know that there will be trouble.
Trouble will bring trouble. And trouble does not ring bell.’19 He sadly
witnesses the murder of his Captain by his friend and company leader
Bullet (an obvious case of revenge), who also later loses his life in a
bombing raid by an enemy plane that left many in their company dead
and their camp in ruins.
15
Ibid., 23.
16
Ibid., 75.
17
Ibid., 78.
18
Ibid., 90.
19
Ibid., 103.
000 Fal book B.indb 234 13/06/2016 22:06

Sozaboy is forced to flee into the swamps to avoid capture. Weakened

by hunger and prolonged exposure to the elements he falls into coma.
He notes:
I come say to myself that oh my God, war is very bad thing. War is to drink
urine, to die and all that uniform that they are giving us to wear is just to
deceive us. And anybody who think that uniform is fine thing is stupid man
who does not know what is good or bad or not good at all or very bad at all.20
Waking in the hospital, he is shocked to see Manmuswak, a recurring
presence since the earlier encounter at the Upwine Bar in Diobu and
on the war front as a ‘friendly’ enemy combatant. Now he was at a field
hospital run by the Nigerian army working as a nurse!21 After recover-
ing, Sozaboy denies that he is an enemy combatant, and is subjected
to further torture. On his release, he is transformed from a prisoner of
war to the ‘uniformed’ chauffeur of the (enemy Nigerian) Army cap-
tain that ordered his torture. At this point, all he can think of is how to
return to Dukana, having realized that the suffering of war was becom-
ing unbearable. Sozaboy’s journey back to Dukana, would later reveal
a broken community, and the unwelcoming, indeed, haunting state of
his destroyed homestead, representing the ‘nightmare’ that the Nigeria-
Biafra War was for many communities in the Niger Delta.
Taking advantage of his new position, he sneaks off to visit Dukana
to look for his mother and wife only to be shocked at the scale of
destruction.
Oh God of mercy. When I see my home town Dukana, I could not talk …
when I see my own home town, I begin cry. I reach there for afternoon time.
I did not see anybody, lai lai … I go my mama house … The only thing I see in
the house is just empty pot and mortar and bucket. Nothing again.22
Even Sozaboy’s friends Duzia and Bom cannot believe he is still alive
after going off to war.23 They tell him of the atrocities committed by
rampaging soldiers: looting, raping, and killing villagers followed by
bombings by a plane and another invasion by another set of (enemy)
soldiers forcibly displacing all those that survived the horrific attack.
In addition, another set of (Biafra) soldiers forcibly evacuated war sur-
vivors from Dukana to refugee camps located in Biafran territory. As
Duzia lamented the situation: ‘Dukana don die. The war have buried
our town.’24 But Sozaboy is further disappointed because there is no
definitive news about the two people he cared for most: his mother and
wife. He also cannot justify his fighting for the enemy army when his
20
Ibid., 114.
21
Ibid., 119.
22
Ibid., 129.
23
Ibid., 131.
24
Ibid., 135.
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236 Cyril Obi
people are missing, so he abandons the ‘enemy side’ and goes away
without leave to search for them.
His search takes him to Nugwa refugee camp in Biafran territory.
The living conditions were horrendous. There he meets his friend, the
World War II veteran Zaza, who tells him that Dukana people are hated
in Nugwa. Painting the picture of the paradoxical situation of Dukana
people who fled into Biafra for protection, he notes, ‘we are among
friends and they are hunting us like animals. I tell you, no strong young
Dukana man or boy can go in this town and they will not catch him
and put him in the army straight or into prison or they just kill him
and eat him. Is this the action of friends?’25 Wandering around camps
in Nugwa, Mene is brought to tears by the state of squalor, hunger,
disease, and human suffering. He leaves for Urua, another refugee set-
tlement, where he runs into Dukana people, including local elites like
Pastor Barika and Chief Birabee. Another friend Terr Kole confides
in him about how a few people were making good in the midst of the
immense suffering in the camp:
But there are some people, few people who are eating very well. Three times
a day. Those few people and all their family. Those people are also having
plenty money … But they hide the money under the ground for the same
place where they bury all those small small children who are dying because
of hunger and kwashiorkor.26
Throughout all these traumatizing events, Mene cannot establish
the whereabouts of his mother and wife. To make matters worse, Chief
Birabee turns him in as an ‘enemy soldier’ in exchange for rice and
stockfish. Following an unsuccessful escape, he is captured and taken
captive by the Biafra side. Mene is sent to a detention camp where each
day one of his fellow inmates is taken out and summarily executed. He
runs into Manmuswak again, this time working for the Biafran side. He
wonders to himself how one individual can be fighting on both sides:
‘I cannot understand how this Manmuswak can be fighting on two
sides of the same war. Or is it his brother? Or are my eyes deceiving me
because I am sick for a long time?’27 Just as rumors are rife that the
war is ending, he narrowly escapes being summarily executed along
with other prisoners, because Manmuswak runs out of bullets. All of
them dash for the bushes. Mene again makes his way back to Dukana
in the hope of reuniting with his mother and wife. Without a home
and with the community destroyed, he sleeps in the ‘broken church’ in
Dukana. When he eventually goes into town, people are afraid that he
is a ghost returning to haunt the community and kill people. To make
25
Ibid., 146.
26
Ibid., 156.
27
Ibid., 166.
000 Fal book B.indb 236 13/06/2016 22:06

things worse, he learns that his mother and wife were killed in a bomb-
ing raid and his entire world collapses and he decides to leave the town.
He laments:
As I was going, I was just thinking how the war have spoiled my town
Dukana, uselessed many people, killed many others, killed my mama and
my wife … and now it have made me a like a person whey get leprosy because
I have no town again.28
In the end, Sozaboy finds that he embarked on a hopeless venture
and lost out in a war that was beyond his comprehension and reduced
him to a mere pawn in the chessboard of national politics by uncaring
leaders and colluding elites. Sozaboy recalls his misfortune with regret:
And I come say to myself that oh my God, war is very bad thing. War is to
drink urine, to die and all that uniform that they are giving us to wear is just
to deceive us. And anybody who think that uniform is fine thing is stupid
man who does not know what is good or bad or not good at all or very bad at
all. All those things they have been telling us is just stupid lie.29
The portraiture of Sozaboy is emblematic of the fate of Dukana
people as ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta. A once proud and loving
young man, broken by war and ostracized by the community he wanted
to defend, ends up losing the people he loved most in his life. In more
ways than one, his story captures the personal and collective catastro-
phe that the war represented. It also points to a trend that often fails to
come out clearly in most discussions about the civil war: how a few local
elites and soldiers benefitted immensely from the war at the expense of
many people who endured a lot of suffering or even lost their lives. War
is represented as bringing out the base instincts of survival, greed, and
inhumanity, as dividing and destroying homes and hopes of people,
and as betraying one’s dreams. It is one long endless nightmare where
ordinary people and soldiers were mere pawns in a game being played
by larger political forces.
The Pains and Paradoxes of the Nigerian Civil War:

Sozaboy as the Ethnic Minority Voice in the Nigerian
Nation-State Building Project
Sozaboy is a literary work that speaks to the issue of what the war meant
to the ethnic minorities of the Eastern Region (Biafra during the war),
particularly those living in Eastern Niger Delta. Jeffrey Gunn points to
the political underpinnings of the novel among others:
28
Ibid., 181.
29
Ibid., 113–114.
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238 Cyril Obi
In the milieu of political activism, Sozaboy successfully presents the struggles

of an ethnic minority group during wartime to a world audience. In doing
so, Saro-Wiwa empowers ethnic minority groups by challenging Nigerians
to look upon the history of their nation and consider the subordinate status
that has been assigned to ethnic minority groups.30
While Gunn refers to the use of the ‘language of ambiguity’ in Soz-
aboy to capture the ‘trouble’ that besieged the country and the Dukana
people, it is useful to explore how the ethnic minorities of the Niger
Delta fit into the nation-building efforts of the contending sides in
the Nigeria-Biafra War.31 Sozaboy tends to reflect the point that ethnic
minorities ‘suffered from attacks from both sides in the Biafran war’.32
But he refrains from locating Dukana directly in the historization of the
Nigerian nation-state. Rather what the reader glimpses are the vicis-
situdes of a much larger nation-state project through the eyes and story
of the Dukana nation caught in a war that it does not fully understand
but victimized nonetheless by both sides, with the complicity of some of
its elites, including the likes of Chief Birabee and Pastor Barika.
Another point that few commentators note relates to the class dimen-
sions to the war. Mene is the son of a peasant mother. The beginning of
the novel leaves no-one in doubt about the corruption of Chief Birabee,
who makes money out of the ‘trouble’ by extorting money from villag-
ers to ‘help’ in the governments’ war efforts. In Mene’s words, ‘trouble
bring small money for Chief Birabee because that money which he is
collecting for government he must chop part of it’.33 When he runs into
his friend Terr Kole in the Red Cross camp in Biafran territory, he is told:
some people have chopped the people food and sold the cloth that the
Red Cross people ask them to give all the people. They are selling this food
and cloth and afterwards they will preach to people and when they have
dead, they will bury them with prayer and ask God to take care of them in
heaven.34
This underscores the role of corrupt Dukana elites, personified by
the chief and pastor who are living well by feeding off the misery of
ordinary people and colluding with the Biafran Army, which has looted
the community and moved its members to a refugee camp where they
lived in horrendous conditions. Mene again captures the wretched con-
ditions in which they lived:
30
Jeffrey Gunn, ‘Inside “Rotten English”: Interpreting the Language of Ambiguity in Ken
Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy’, eSharp 11 (2008), 19.
31
Ibid.; Also see, Cyril Obi, ‘What happens to us after they suck out all the wealth from our
lands? Globalisation, environment and protest politics in Nigeria’, Politeia 28:1 (2009),
96–97.
32
Hodges, ‘Writing Biafra’, 5.
33
Ibid., 19.
34
Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy, 156.
000 Fal book B.indb 238 13/06/2016 22:06

this camp is proper human compost pit and all these people they are calling
refugees are actually people that they have throway like rubbish. Nothing
that you can use them for. They have nothing in this world. Not common
food to eat. And everything that they have, they must beg before they can
get it. All their children have big big belly like pregnant woman.35
This also brings to light some of the paradoxes of the war where mem-
bers of oppressed minorities colluded with the oppressor against their
own people for selfish reasons. Although not explicitly stated, Mene is
actually accusing the Dukana elites of betraying their own people, an
act that is symbolized in a dramatic way when the same elites trap and
hand over Mene (who sees himself as joining the war to protect Dukana
people) to the army as a deserter, where he will face further punishment
and possible death. Thus, it is possible to approach the position of the
ethnic minorities from the perspective of double-layered oppression:
the first by the ethnic-majority groups that dominate political power in
Nigeria and Biafra, and second by those ethnic minority elites profiting
from the suffering of their own people.
This coheres with a point made by Gunn that ‘Sozaboy is an empower-
ing voice for suffering ethnic minority groups in the “fractured reality”
created by the nation-state in postcolonial Nigeria’.36 He goes further
to observe how the author of Sozaboy represents the sad plight of ordi-
nary people caught up in the war: ‘Saro-Wiwa creates a voice for the
voiceless by inventing a language which he terms “Rotten English” … It
is a mixture which allows “Rotten English” to cross ethnic and cultural
barriers and allows a critique of all parties involved in the Nigerian civil
war.’37 Beyond this Gunn argues that the use of such language provides
Sozaboy, as member of an ethnic minority, with a vehicle for critiquing
all sides to the Nigeria-Biafra War, including some Dukana elites.
Ethnic Minority Struggles and the Nigerian Project

The origin and nature of the ethnic minority agitation for self-determi-
nation and local autonomy is a well-known aspect of post-independence
nation building in Nigeria.38 Two issues were critical. The first was the
protest of the ethnic minorities against perceived ethnic-majority domi-
nation in the three regions (Eastern, Northern, and Western), and the
second was the discovery and growing significance of oil in the Niger
Delta, which became an object of interest by all the regions, particularly
35
Ibid., 148.
36
Gunn, ‘Inside “Rotten English”’, 3, citing Christopher Walsh, ‘Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A
Novel in Rotten English’, The Explicator 60:2 (2002), 112–113.
37
Ibid.
38
Eghosa Osaghae, ‘Structural Adjustment and Ethnicity in Nigeria’, Research Report 98,
Uppsala, The Nordic Africa Institute, 1995.
000 Fal book B.indb 239 13/06/2016 22:06

240 Cyril Obi
the East, within whose territory (Niger Delta) many of the oil fields lay.39
Thus, when Biafra seceded and laid claim to the oil-rich Niger Delta, the
ethnic minorities there were split between those that supported Biafra
and those that supported the federal side in the hope that such support
will translate into freedom from Igbo (Biafran) hegemony and control
over the oil resources in their communities.
However, in Sozaboy, neither oil, Ogoni, nor Biafra are directly men-
tioned, but there is enough evidence to place the events firmly in the
context of Nigeria’s immediate postcolonial history, particularly the
political crises of 1965, 1966, and 1967 – or the ‘trouble’ that presaged
the outbreak of the civil war. It is clear about the immense suffering of
the ethnic minorities represented as Dukana in the hands of both sides
in the civil war – the Biafran and Nigerian troops – and the destruction
of the communities.
Sozaboy represents the successful use of literary means to tell the story
of the ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta. It is told from the perspec-
tive that, far from being willing allies, the ethnic minorities were pressed
into service and suffered abuse in the hands of leaders from both sides
of the civil war. Other literary works on the war convey a different mes-
sage and adopt a perspective that other ethnic groups, particularly the
Igbo, who led the Biafran struggle, bore the brunt of the war. Since this
chapter is not about who suffered more but focuses on Sozaboy and his
people, it limits itself to discussing how the author of Sozaboy explores
the plight of the ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta during a war that
redefined (and centralized) the distribution of power and hence the
basis of the post-civil war Nigerian nation-state building project.
Sozaboy’s War: What Implications for Nigeria?

Sozaboy’s historical account of the war, though rendered in ‘Rotten
English’, no doubt captures the transition of the main character from
someone buoyed by dreams of protecting his community and family at
the beginning of the war to being haunted by the nightmare of har-
rowing trauma, loss, and regret at the end. The key towards unlocking
the importance of the fictionalization of the ethnic minority perspective
to the Biafran War lies in its connection to the Nigerian nation-state
project and its crisis. It also touches upon the fundamental question, did
the Nigeria-Biafra War put an end to the marginalization and oppres-
sion of ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta?
The Nigerian nation-state project cannot be understood outside
of a structural crisis rooted in history, politics, and economics. The
39
Cyril Obi, ‘The Struggle for Resource Control in a Petro-state: A Perspective from Nigeria’,
in National Perspectives on Globalization, edited by Paul Bowles, Henry Veltmeyer, Scarlett
Cornelissen, Noela Invernizzi, and Kwong Leung Tang (Basingstoke and New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2007).
000 Fal book B.indb 240 13/06/2016 22:06

immediate post-independence national project was based on strong

regions, each with a relatively strong economic basis in globally linked
cash-crop production and exports: groundnuts and cotton in the North,
cocoa and rubber in the West, and palm produce and timber in the East.
The immediate post-independence national project was also dominated
by a hegemonic ethnic-majority elite, the collapse of global cash-crop
prices in the mid-1960s, and the gradual rise in global oil prices, all
of which had implications for politics within the Nigerian nation-state.
It contributed to the growing interest of hegemonic regional elites
(ethnic-majority groups) in the control of the oil produced in the ethnic
minority regions of the South (Niger Delta). Such was the situation
that, in 1965, Northern Nigerian elites warned their Eastern counter-
parts against staking claims to the oil in the Niger Delta.40 The follow-
ing year, an attempt by a group of Ijaw activists calling themselves the
Niger Delta Volunteer Force, led by Isaac Adaka Boro, to proclaim the
Niger Delta Republic through force of arms was brutally crushed by the
Federal Military Government on February 24, 1966.41
A key aspect of their demands was to prevent the region’s oil from
falling into the hands of the Igbo elite, which was dominant in the
Eastern Region. The Igbos drew their power from the oil located in the
Igbo-dominated Eastern Region. The elite from the Hausa-Fulani and
Yoruba, the two majority ethnic groups, and the minorities of the East-
ern Region (Niger Delta) all had a mutual interest in resisting eastern
claims to oil in the region.42 The geography of economic power shift-
ing to ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta in the mid – to late 1960s
shifted control of the new source of national wealth from the regions
to the center, a move that was justified in the name of national unity
and development. This shift was partly driven by an expedient pan-
Nigerian elite coalition that sought to prevent the secessionist Eastern
Region from claiming the Niger Delta oil fields. It was further cemented
by military victory that imposed a centralized logic on Nigeria’s hegem-
onic federal experiment, effectively sounding the death knell of regional
autonomy and political decentralization.
Power relations, defined by oil-based accumulation, fed into the
monopolization of power (over oil revenues) by those elites who effec-
tively ‘captured’ federal power, and led to the inequities, oppression,
and exploitation that characterized the post-civil war political system.
40
Augustine Ikein and C. Anigboh-Briggs, Oil and Fiscal Federalism: The Political Economy of
Resource Allocation in a Developing Country (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 103.
41
Ugbana Okpu, Ethnic Minority Problems in Nigerian Politics: 1960–1965,(Uppsala: Studia
Historica Upsaliensa 1977), 136; Cyril Obi and Siri Aas Rustad, eds, ‘Introduction’, Oil
and Insurgency in the Niger Delta: Managing the Complex Politics of Petro-Violence (London:
Zed, 2011), 6.
42
Cyril Obi, ‘The Changing Form of Identity Politics in Nigeria under Economic Adjust-
ment: The Case of the Oil Minorities Movement of the Niger Delta’, Research Report 119
(Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2001), 21.
000 Fal book B.indb 241 13/06/2016 22:06

242 Cyril Obi
Mobilized to oppose Biafra’s claim to the oil-rich Niger Delta region and
further sever the ethnic minority groups on the Atlantic shoreline from
the Biafran project, ethnic minorities from the Niger Delta who claimed
ownership of oil turned out to be the focal point of ethnic identity poli-
tics after a prolonged period of marginalization and neglect. This shift
in the relations of power with some ethnic-majority elites in the North
and West won them three states, namely Midwest, Rivers and South-
Eastern, and satisfied, to a large extent, their age-old quest for inclusion
in the prevailing political and economic equation.
A remarkable moment of inclusion marked several decades of strug-
gles: some ethnic minority elites of the Niger Delta had come to see the
creation of these three states and their new-found economic power as
leverage over the majority ethnic groups and a basis for laying claim to
the wealth of their region.43 However, as events would later show, this
thinking failed to materialize in 1970 after the war, as the banner of
‘national unity’ under which the war was fought and won resulted in
supremacy of the national power over the sectional interests and the
consolidation of central(ized) control over economic and political power.
These actions were a means of preventing regional or sectional claims
from becoming strong enough to challenge or threaten the dominance
of the federal government (as in the case of Biafra), thereby affirming
the superiority of a homogenizing ideology of the Nigerian nation-state
fueled by an oil-boom-induced dependence.44 It would appear that Soz-
aboy, though fictive, was perhaps a reflection of the reality that many
ethnic minority elites initially thought that siding with the federal side
during the war would reverse the marginalization of the region and
people, and give them control of the oil within ‘their territory’, a belief
that turned out to be mistaken.
Centralized federal post-war governance did not deliver on expecta-
tions for the minority elite’s control of oil. Centralizing the collection
of all oil revenues in the Federal Military Government meant that all
ownership and rights to produce oil were vested in those groups who
controlled the federal government. The transfer of control over rev-
enues generated from the oil found in the Niger Delta (by reducing the
percentage of the revenue allocation principles based on derivation) to
the federal government meant that the marginalization of the ethnic
minorities of the Niger Delta took a new turn. Although the Niger Delta
ethnic minorities had their own states, they lacked control of the oil
revenues generated from within those states.45 The Federal Military
43
Ken Saro-Wiwa, On a Darkling Plain (Port Harcourt: Saros, 1989).
44
Obi, ‘The Changing Form of Identity Politics’, 22–23.
45
Adebayo Adedeji, Nigeria Federal Finance: Its Development, Problems and Prospects (London:
Hutchinson, 1969); and Dagwom Dang, ‘Revenue Allocation and Economic Develop-
ment in Nigeria: An Empirical Study’, Sage Open (September, 2013), www.academia.
edu/4787433/Revenue_Allocation_and_Economic_Development_in_Nigeria_An_Em-
pirical_Study_Introduction (accessed November 28, 2014).
000 Fal book B.indb 242 13/06/2016 22:06

Government’s control of oil was further legitimized by Decree No. 51 of

1969, which, among other things, ‘vested in the Federal Military Gov-
ernment the entire ownership and control of all petroleum: in, under or
upon any lands in Nigeria; under the territorial waters of Nigeria; or all
lands forming part of the continental shelf of Nigeria’.46
At the end of the war, it became apparent that ethnic minorities of the
oil-producing Niger Delta had lost out in their bid to control ‘their’ oil
in a post-civil war Nigeria state based on a centralizing logic of national
unity which meant that oil was a nationally owned asset – with access
and distribution solely determined by the federal government. It did not
take long before the minority elites began to protest against what they
perceived as their marginalization from the oil wealth produced from
their ancestral lands and waters, and wealth controlled by a ‘distant’
federal government operating in partnership with foreign oil multina-
tionals.47 In a foreshadowing of future developments, some minority
elites gained access to the ‘spoils’ of the oil economy through their fed-
eral patrons, and they acted as ‘gatekeepers’ facilitating the extraction
of oil by the state-oil alliance.48 This in some way was reminiscent of
the ways characters like Chief Birabee and Pastor Barika in Dukana
used their positions to advance personal interests at the expense of the
masses.
The benefits of oil never trickled down to the masses in the impov-
erished communities of the Niger Delta, even in the oil-boom era. The
situation was intensified by the immersion of Nigeria’s economy in crisis
and the pronounced intensification of struggles over diminishing oil
rents. Much has been written about the evolution of such non-violent
campaigns for self-determination and resource control that later fueled
insurgency, which only abated after the declaration of a presidential
amnesty program in 2009.49
Conclusion
When Sozaboy was published in 1994, its author Saro-Wiwa was leading
a campaign for ethnic minority rights and resource control on behalf of
the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, representing the
46
Cited in Obi and Rustad, ‘Introduction’, 6.
47
Obi, ‘The Struggle for Resource Control’.
48
Ibid.
49
Augustine Ikelegbe, ‘Popular and Criminal Violence as Instruments of Struggle in the
Niger Delta Region’, in Obi and Rustad, Oil and Insurgency in the Niger Delta; Obi and
Rustad, ‘Introduction’; Obi, ‘Because of Oil?’; Ukoha 2007; Rhuks Ako, ‘The Struggle for
Resource Control and Violence in the Niger Delta’, in Obi and Rustad, Oil and Insurgency
in the Niger Delta; Shola Omotola, ‘Why the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria Matters;, in
Horror in Paradise: Frameworks for Understanding the Crises of the Niger Delta, edited by
Christopher LaMonica and J. Shola Omotola (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2014);
Kenneth Omeje, High Stakes and Stakeholders: Oil Conflict and Security in Nigeria (Alder-
shot: Ashgate, 2006).
000 Fal book B.indb 243 13/06/2016 22:06

244 Cyril Obi
Ogoni ethnic minority group in the Niger Delta. Combining an interna-

tional and national campaign with the unprecedented mobilization of
ordinary people, it would appear that Sozaboy was part of the creative
representation of the plight of the Ogoni during and after the civil war
– rewriting its history through the eyes and mouth of a Dukana youth
lured to a war founded on lies, deception, brutality, and betrayal. A war
in which he set out to be a hero but returned from severely traumatized
to a ravaged and broken community, to become a ‘ghost’, unwanted at
home. The novel’s portrayal of the Nigeria-Biafra War might be inter-
preted as negative. However, this chapter lays more emphasis on the
ways in which the author has used literature to convey a particular
message, a message connected to a struggle that remained unresolved
after three years of a bloody civil war.
Perhaps its message touches a particular thread of the Ogoni struggle
in post-civil war Nigeria, particularly the role and place of oil minori-
ties in the nation-state building project. It is a critique of war, prefer-
ring non-violent struggle as a means of projecting a people’s demands.
Sozaboy may be said to symbolize the story of the Niger Delta’s ethnic
minorities in times of struggle, or it may as well be the personal story of
someone whose dreams for himself and his people at the beginning of
a war that turned into a nightmare. Either way, the message appears to
be, ‘war is a very bad and stupid game’.50
50
Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy, 151.
000 Fal book B.indb 244 13/06/2016 22:06

12 First, There Was a Country
Then There Wasn’t: Reflections on
Achebe’s There Was a Country*
Biodun Jeyifo
‘Where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it.’
Igbo proverb quoted in Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments, 1611
Part One
First, there was a country; then there wasn’t. To anyone who has read
Chinua Achebe’s last book, There Was a Country,2 this statement that
serves as the title of the reflections in this essay might seem to refer to
Biafra. Indeed, Achebe’s book is a powerful and harrowing account of
the crises that led both to the creation and the destruction of the seces-
sionist republic. But I am also referring to Nigeria in this statement. For
implicitly but implacably, Achebe’s new book also hints at a Nigeria
that once was – or at least was on the verge of becoming – but is now
vanished, seemingly forever, leaving only the trace of a national desire
that is now completely in ruins. Not since Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died3
has a book so grippingly taken us back to the very foundations of how
our country came into being, only to be almost immediately faced with
the possibility of being stillborn with only very vague hints at how – if
we are courageous, truthful, and fortunate – we might yet realize the
Nigeria that we desire.
Thus, Achebe’s book is almost at every turn aware of itself as the
work of a writer, an intellectual addressing other writers and intellectu-
als and challenging them on such fundamental issues as the relation-
ship of the writer to ethics and justice and the responsibilities of the true,
humanistic intellectual to racial, national, and ethnic others. Indeed,
as much as Achebe’s new book is conscious of the general reader, it
is for the most part mainly addressed to the international community
and the world at large. It is much like Soyinka’s 1972 book, which was
*
This is a slightly revised version of a series that was spread over five weeks in the author’s
weekly column, ‘Talakawa Liberation Courier’, in The Sunday Guardian (Nigeria) from De-
cember 23, 2012 to January 20, 2013, inclusive.
1
Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1989).
2
Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2013).
3
The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).
245
000 Fal book B.indb 245 13/06/2016 22:06

246 Biodun Jeyifo
a direct challenge to Nigeria’s community of writers and intellectuals,

especially those who saw themselves in the progressive and humanistic
traditions of intellectualism. At any rate, this is the point of departure
for the reflections on Achebe’s memoir in this essay.
Chinua Achebe was, of course, one of the world’s pre-eminent writ-
ers and intellectuals. For members of my generation of Nigerian and
African writers, critics, and academics, as we came to intellectual and
political-activist maturity, Achebe was a figure who exerted a powerful,
authoritative fascination for us, even if there were the inevitable occa-
sional small disagreements and quarrels. For me in particular, I have
always regarded Achebe as one of the greatest realist writers in world
literature in the last 150 years. The proof of these assertions is the fact
that among all writers of the last half century, and second only to Wole
Soyinka, Achebe has been the writer to whose works I have returned
again and again in the last three decades. In all, I have written a mono-
graph and five essays, three of them quite substantial, on Achebe as a
writer and intellectual.
I can report that the Achebe that I have personally encountered in
this book is more or less the enormously powerful realist writer that I
saw and greatly admired in nearly all his previous writings minus his
poetry. However, there is another Achebe that is almost completely new
to me in There Was a Country. It is a challenge to precisely character-
ize this other Achebe standing beside the old, urbane, and subtle realist
writer in this last book, but I will try.
The writer as propagandist, media apparatchik, and ideological
zealot, this is the Achebe who stands side by side with the great writer
we have seen and admired since Things Fall Apart.4 As I went through
the middle two parts of the four parts of There Was a Country, I was star-
tled by the recognition of how close, from start to finish, Achebe had
been to the Biafran political leadership. By his own oft-repeated asser-
tions and anecdotes in the book, Achebe was not only one of the most
important roving ambassadors for Biafra, he was also the star media
and information propagandist for the breakaway republic. Also, going
by his own assertions in the book, Achebe was a close adviser and con-
fidant of Ojukwu, the Head of State of Biafra.
To perceive one of the many ramifications of this aspect of Achebe’s
self-presentation in his new book, it is important to recognize that
while some prominent intellectuals felt and expressed major differ-
ences with the Biafran leadership during the war – with some actually
being accused, tried and executed for treason – to the very end Achebe
remained close to and intimate with the Biafran leadership. In my view,
and unless I am mistaken, among all major and highly regarded African
writers in the twentieth century, only Agostino Neto of Angola went
4
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958).
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Reflections on Achebe There was a Country 247
farther than Achebe did in Biafra in placing his writing and his intellec-
tual capacities completely at the service of the state. The point, though,
is that while Neto, who was himself the leader of the anti-colonial
nationalist movement and Head of State of the independent Angolan
state, was very open and even militant in insisting that his intellectual-
ism was indivisible from his role and actions as a politician-statesman,
in There Was a Country, Achebe operates under the presumption that
regardless of how close and faithful he was to the Biafran leadership, his
independence and autonomy as a writer and intellectual were intact.
But this is, at best, a genuine but mistaken assumption; at worst, it is
more or less a self-serving delusion and mystification.
I intend to bring the ‘two Achebes’ that we encounter in There Was a
Country into a dialogical relationship with each other: on the one hand,
the superb realist writer and progressive intellectual; on the other hand,
wartime propaganda and media warrior and ethno-national ideological
zealot. For those who might intuitively presuppose that I have in mind
a hierarchy, a ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ order of integrity between these two
putative Achebes, I hasten to say that this is not necessarily so. In other
words, I will not hold one Achebe as a corrective, a benchmark for the
other. Far from this, my central frame of reference simply is that against
Achebe’s own presuppositions we must keep both in view: the writer
and the ideologue.
Achebe’s book is divided into four parts. In reality, the fourth and last
part is really an epilogue that brings the chronological, temporal order-
ing of the contents of the book from the past of the first and second
coups of 1966, the massacres of May and August of the same year, and
the Nigeria-Biafra War to present-day Nigeria. For those who might
have either completely missed it or seen it and not paid much attention
to it, let me emphasize that it is only in this fourth part that Achebe talks
substantially of a Nigerian ruling class. In the three main sections of
the book, only a casual nod is accorded to class; the focus is totally and
uncompromisingly on ‘tribe’, on ethnicity.
For every one of us, and especially for writers and intellectuals, this
raises many questions. Was this a deliberate choice on Achebe’s part?
What particular kind of conception of ethnicity does he deploy in There
Was a Country? Was there no ‘ruling class’ in the Nigeria of the pre-
civil war years? In Biafra, was class so effectively and completely folded
into ethnicity that it had little or no relevance or significance? If Achebe
quite deliberately decided to base the main sections of his book on eth-
nicity while excluding class and other indices of social identity, what
methodological and philosophical pressures does this exclusion place
on him as a writer and intellectual, especially in light of the fact that
he is, first and foremost, a realist writer? Can the devastating case that
Achebe makes against the Nigerian ruling class in the fourth section
of his book also be made against the Biafran ruling class of which he
was such a prominent and influential figure, especially with regard to
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248 Biodun Jeyifo
the central moral and human catastrophe at the heart of the book, this
being the issue of mass starvation and the alleged attempted and nearly
successful genocide committed against the children of Biafra?
These are extremely difficult questions for which there are no easy or
simple explanations. Achebe’s new book provides us with both a great
challenge and a wonderful opportunity to engage them honestly and
rigorously.
Part Two
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 … [H]e was widely known as someone who saw himself as
a Northerner, spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the traditional
Northern dress when not in uniform.
Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country, 79
In the end, I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power

over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange
stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.
Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile, 24
Although ‘Nigerian ruling class’ appears twice in the book (on pages 69
and 243) – and the closely related phrase ‘Nigerian ruling elite’ appears
once (on page 108) – it is the most stunning aspect of the general intel-
lectual and discursive architecture of the book. This ‘architecture’, this
‘grammar’ is none other than the fact that for nearly all other parts of
the book, all of Achebe’s ‘explanations’ and speculations are relentlessly
driven by ethnicity, and a very curious conception of ethnicity for that
matter. Logically, inevitably, the corollary to these ‘explanations’ and
speculations based on class, and more specifically on intra – and inter-
class factors, are either completely ignored or even deliberately excluded.
As I shall presently demonstrate, this is a remarkable departure from
virtually all of Achebe’s writings prior to this recently published book.
For now, let me illustrate this startling matter of the complete subsump-
tion of class into ethnicity in There Was a Country with two particularly
telling examples out of innumerable other instances in the book.
The first of our two selected examples pertains to nothing less than
the January 15, 1966, coup itself, arguably the ‘opening shot’ in the
chain of events and crises that led to the Nigeria-Biafra War, the central
subject of Achebe’s book. It so happens that there is quite a significant
body of both general and academic writings, discourses, and works of
fiction on this signal event. Indeed, Achebe’s long citation of his sources
in the bibliographic section of his book mentions many of these writings
and discourses on the coup. It is, therefore, baffling that of the variety of
000 Fal book B.indb 248 13/06/2016 22:06

‘motives’ or ‘interests’ that have been ascribed to the coup plotters, the
single one that Achebe addresses in his book is ‘tribe’ or ethnicity: was
it, or was it not, ‘an Igbo coup’?
There have been suggestions and speculations that it was a ‘southern
coup’ as most of the political and military leaders assassinated or inad-
vertently killed were overwhelmingly either northerners or southerners
in alliance with northern leaders. More pertinent to the present discus-
sion, there has also been even more plausible speculation that class and
ideological interests were significant in the motives of influential coup
members, like Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and Wale Ademoyega. Of
the two alliances of the ruling class parties of the First Republic, the
conservative Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) and the somewhat
social-democratic United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), all those
assassinated belonged to the NNA, with the single exception of Festus
Okotie-Eboh, the Finance Minister and right-hand man of the Prime
Minister, Tafawa Balewa; but Okotie-Eboh was effectively an ally of the
NNA.
S.L. Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, was a diehard NNA
chieftain; there is compelling evidence that this was why he was assas-
sinated while Michael Okpara, the Premier of the Eastern Region, was
spared. Thus, we can surmise that Okpara was spared, not because he
was Igbo but because he was a major figure in the UPGA alliance. As
a matter of fact, there is clear evidence that some of the coup plotters
had the intention of making or ‘forcing’ Chief Awolowo to assume the
office of Prime Minister in the belief that the progressive northern allies
of UPGA were far more regionally and nationally popular and credible
than the southern and conservative allies of the NNA.
Achebe’s book pays not the slightest attention to these other probable
factors in assessing the motives of the January 15 coup plotters. Was it,
or was it not, ‘an Igbo coup’? That is all Achebe is interested in explor-
ing – and disproving – in There Was a Country. Of the many threads that
form the complex fabric of that fateful coup d’état, this single thread of
ethnicity or ‘tribe’ is all that Achebe strenuously tries to unravel in his
book.
We might speculate that this may be because by the time of the
terrible massacres of May 1966 against Igbos in the North, all other
plausible motives for the coup had been almost completely erased by
assertions, indeed pronouncements that the coup had incontrovertibly
been an Igbo coup. Indeed, the massacres targeted all Igbos whether
they were members of the ruling class or not, seeming therefore to com-
pletely subsume class into ‘tribe’. But class factors quickly reinserted
themselves into the unfolding catastrophes and crises so that, by the
time of the failed constitutional talks that led to the declaration of
secession and the outbreak of war, no commentator, writer, or intel-
lectual could credibly and persuasively exclude class as a crucial vector
of analysis and reflection.
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250 Biodun Jeyifo
At any rate, Achebe’s book was written and published more than 40
years after the event, and it had the advantage of both historical hind-
sight and a vast body of accumulated research and discourses. For this
reason, there is no other conclusion left for us other than a finding that
Achebe almost certainly had a driving rationale for sticking exclusively
to ethnicity or ‘tribalism’ while simultaneously ignoring or excluding
all other plausible, and in some cases historical factors.
This is precisely what Achebe repeats in the second of our two exam-
ples. This pertains to the period of regional and nation-wide crises
between 1964 to 1966 that preceded the January 15 coup and the
Nigeria-Biafra War. Here, in Achebe’s own words, is the particular case:
By the time the government of the Western region also published a white
paper outlining the dominance of the ethnic Igbo in key government posi-
tions in the Nigerian Railway Corporation and the Nigerian Ports Authority,
the situation for ethnic Igbos working in Western Nigeria in particular and
all over Nigeria in general had become untenable.5
This is indeed a fact, but it is a partial fact: one aspect of a complex of
facts and realities, many of which Achebe chooses to ignore or obscure.
It is useful to carefully state what these other facts and realities were.
First, the Western Region Government to which Achebe alludes here
was that of Chief Akintola and his party, the Nigerian National Demo-
cratic Party (NNDP). Arguably, these were the most pernicious right-
wing government and party in Southern Nigeria in the entirety of our
post-independence political history. Achebe completely ignores this fact
and fixes exclusively on this government’s anti-Igbo programs and dia-
tribes. He deliberately implies that this government spoke for and acted
on behalf of the people of the Western Region. In actuality, Akintola’s
government and party were not only extremely unpopular, they turned
their unpopularity into a hardened, reified form of autocratic rule. They
were not only virulently anti-Igbo, they were also scurrilously anti-
welfarist and anti-socialist.
A brilliant orator and a master of Yoruba rhetorical arts, Akintola
tirelessly satirized a range of targets and issues within which Igbos
were only one composite group. He was particularly fond of spew-
ing out twisted, parodic visions of welfarism and socialism in which
everything would be shared: wives, children, family heirlooms, and
personal belongings. Lastly, Akintola and his party quite deliberately
stoked the fires of intra-ethnic tensions and resentments within Yoruba
sub-groups, and they took this as far as founding a rival pan-Yoruba
organization to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa (Society of the Descendants of
Oduduwa – the ancestor of the Yoruba), which they called ‘Egbe Omo
Olofin’ (Society of the Descendants of Olofin). For good measure, they
5
Achebe, There was a Country, 77.
000 Fal book B.indb 250 13/06/2016 22:06

tried, unsuccessfully, to encourage the late Duro Ladipo to write and

produce a play to counter Hubert Ogunde’s famous pro-Awolowo and
pro-UPGA play, Yoruba Ronu.
It must be emphasized that all these intra-class and intra-ethnic
facts and realities were so well known at the time that Achebe could
not have been ignorant of them. We are left with no other conclusion
than Achebe simply had no place in his book for any factors, any reali-
ties beyond a pristine, autochthonous conception of ethnic identity and
belonging in which no other aspects of social identification are allowed
to ‘contaminate’ the singularity of ethnicity. This, I suggest, is what we
see in its quintessence in the argument expressed in the first of the two
epigraphs to this section to the effect that Nzeogwu being Igbo ‘in name
only’, the January 15 coup could not have been ‘an Igbo coup’.
Previously, I made the assertion that Achebe was one of the greatest
realist writers in world literature in the last 150 years. I now wish to
clarify the relevance of that assertion to the present discussion. One of
the most compelling claims of realism is that it is the mode or genre
in which the chain of representation in a work of literature or, more
broadly, an intellectual treatise, comes closest to the chain of causal-
ity in nature, history or society. In a layman’s formulation of this ‘big
grammar’, this means that above all other modes, forms and genres, it is
in realism that what is presented in a work of art or a treatise is as close
as you can possibly get to how things actually happened. Put another
way, a big gap exists between how things actually happen and how they
are (re)presented in writing. It is only the most gifted and talented real-
ist writers who come close to bridging that gap.
In all of Achebe’s books on our precolonial and postcolonial experi-
ence, he came closer than perhaps any other writer to this conception
and practice of realism. More specifically, ethnicity, class, and individu-
ality had been superbly interwoven and productively explored in such
titles as No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah,
The Trouble with Nigeria, and Home and Exile.6 Thus, in my opinion,
There Was a Country marks a radical rupture in Achebe’s writings on
our country, a rupture in which the realist rigor of his previous writ-
ings gives way to, or is considerably modified by, a mystique, an apologia
in which an uncompromising promotion of Igbo ethno-nationalism
almost completely ignores or obscures class until the fourth and final
part of the book. But ethnic groups and communities never act or relate
to one another solely on the basis of ‘tribe’ or ethnicity. This is particu-
larly true in all modern, multi-ethnic nation-states in which typically,
axiomatically, classes – or fractions of classes – act as the pivot, the lever
around which, for better or for worse, in war or peace, ethnic groups
6
Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (London: Heinemann, 1969); A Man of the People (Lon-
don: Heinemann, 1966); Anthills of the Savannah (London: Heinemann,1987); The Trou-
ble with Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension,1983); and Home and Exile (Anchor, 2001).
000 Fal book B.indb 251 13/06/2016 22:06

252 Biodun Jeyifo
relate to one another. Thus, Achebe’s near total occlusion of class in

this new book – for the very first time in all his writings – amounts to a
great intellectual and ideological blind spot.
I do not think that Achebe took this path in his new book in a fit
of absentmindedness; to the contrary, I think it is a decision, a choice
he made in the book quite deliberately and purposively. In Part Three, I
shall consider this choice, with particular reference to what I personally
regard as one of the most controversial aspects of There Was a Country,
this being the link that Achebe makes in the book between what he
deems the endemic ethnic scapegoating of Igbos in our country and the
utter collapse of meritocracy in post-civil war Nigeria.
Part Three
Nations enshrine mediocrity as their modus operandi, and create the fer-
tile ground for the rise of tyrants and other base elements of the society, by
silently assenting to the dismantling of systems of excellence because they
do not immediately benefit one specific ethnic, racial, political or special-
interest group. That, in my humble opinion, is precisely where Nigeria finds
itself today!
In the epigraph to this section, we have one of the many instances in
There Was a Country in which Achebe urges a strong, perhaps even
determining link between what he deems, not without considerable
justification, an endemic ethnic scapegoating of Igbo people in pre-
and post-civil war Nigeria and the total collapse of meritocracy in our
country. With the possible exception of the subject of mass starvation
and the claim of attempted genocide during the Nigeria-Biafra War, I
confess that within the comprehensive and capacious scope of Achebe’s
new book, nothing startled me more than this particular topic. Let me
explain.
Like most self-identified progressive commentators on the civil war
and the events and crises that both led to and came after it, I had assumed
that the mass slaughter of Igbo people in their thousands in the mas-
sacres before and after the July 1966 ‘Northern coup’ constituted the
core of what had to be engaged, analysed, understood, and positively
transcended in that dire, tragic period of our history. In essence, this
entails the thesis that dominant elements within the right-wing succes-
sor state that came into being after the July 1966 coup not only stood by
while Igbo people were being slaughtered but were actually behind the
massacres. Any state that not only fails to provide guarantees and pro-
tection for the lives and properties of large segments of its population
but also oversees the perpetration of such crimes loses both its political
sovereignty and moral legitimacy. From this perspective, secession from
Nigeria was both almost inevitable and a right to survival. Moreover,
000 Fal book B.indb 252 13/06/2016 22:06

with a bit of historical hindsight, it is not difficult to see that what we

are experiencing right now in the generalized climate of terror and
insecurity around life, freedom of movement, and safety of possession
in nearly all parts of the country – especially in the North – have their
distant but effective roots in those massacres of May and August 1966.
Against this background, the theme of the link between the ethnic
scapegoating of Igbo people and the total overthrow of merit and excel-
lence leading to a pervasive culture of mediocrity in contemporary
Nigeria constitutes a related but separate topic, one that I personally
have never encountered in the extraordinarily controversial and ten-
dentious manner in which Achebe espouses it in There Was a Country.
In the genuine hope that I am neither oversimplifying nor distorting
Achebe’s ideas and claims on this subject in his last book, here follows
a succinct summary of what I consider his five interlocking theses on
the topic.
1 In a multi-ethnic nation like Nigeria, differences pertain not only
to language, culture and customs but, crucially, also to rates
and levels of effective absorption of education and currents of
modern thought and culture.
2 By the time of the first decade of the post-independence period,
the Igbos had surpassed all other ethnic groups in Nigeria in edu-
cation, the professions, politics, trade and commerce.
3 This situation led to acts and expressions of thoughtless and
exhibitionist arrogance among some Igbos and deep resentment
and envy among non-Igbos.
4 The characterization of the January 15, 1966 coup as ‘an Igbo
coup’ provided the justification for an organized, systematic
mobilization, across nearly all other ethnic groups in the coun-
try, of resentment of meritorious Igbo intellectual, professional,
commercial and cultural achievements.
5 Henceforth, merit was displaced as the benchmark for conduct-
ing the business of the nation in all areas, to be replaced by an
all-pervading culture of mediocrity that was/is clothed in the
garb of ‘federal character’.
The essential elements of Achebe’s ideas on this particular topic are
contained in a short section of Part One of There Was a Country titled
‘A History of Ethnic Tension and Resentment’.7 But this theme runs
throughout all the four parts of the book like a leitmotif that undergirds
the comprehensive and compelling ethnographic history of Igbo resil-
ience and achievement under adverse historical and political conditions
that Achebe celebrates throughout the book. In other words, though
Achebe’s new book also extensively deals with registering the traumas
7
Achebe, There was a Country, 74–78.
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254 Biodun Jeyifo
and tragedies that came with war, defeat, and post-war crises of rein-
tegration into Nigeria, the central intellectual theme of the book is the
loss that Nigeria sustained – and continues to sustain to this day – when
mediocrity effectively replaced meritocracy after Igbos were purged
from the intellectual and professional centers of our public life in those
fateful months between January and August 1966.
It is important to emphasize that, though the essential ingredients
of this theme of Igbos as a dominant force, a collective benchmark for
merit and excellence in our country had been tentatively broached in
Achebe’s previous writings, notably in The Trouble with Nigeria and
Home and Exile, the author had been more cautious, more restrained,
and more comparative in those two previous books. For example, in
The Trouble with Nigeria, the essential argument was that though the
Yoruba had the advantage of a great historical and geographical head
start over Igbos, the latter caught up with the former in education and
the professions within three decades of the mid-twentieth century.
In Home and Exile, Achebe’s extensive reflections on the vigorous and
enthusiastic embrace of education and modernity by Igbo people had
been made within the wider framework of a powerful Pan Africanist
celebration of the elements within all African cultures that made them
sift and choose the good from the bad in the currents and forces of
modernity. But in this new book, Achebe takes this same nexus of ideas
and makes of them a part of his startling claim that in the crises lead-
ing to the Nigeria-Biafra War, the Igbos were made the collective ethnic
scapegoat of a nation caught in the paroxysm of an ‘Igbophobia’ that
was effectively a mask, a pretext, a rationale for the overthrow of meri-
tocracy and the consequent massive institutionalization of mediocrity
in our country.
In the fourth and final part of the book, as an illustration of the delib-
erate targeting of Igbo intellectual and professional achievement in the
pervasive post-war culture of mediocrity, Achebe gives an account of
how a ‘former president’ of Nigeria deliberately unleashed on his own
home state of Anambra ‘corrupt politicians with plenty of money and
low IQs’.8 He makes much of the fact that this was happening in Igbo-
land and was connected to the former president having a strong and
punitive aversion toward Igbo people. In other words, Achebe is delib-
erately insinuating here that this is a continuation of the pre-civil war
overthrow of meritocracy on the basis of a virulent Igbophobia. But
what he ignores, consciously or unwittingly, is what that former presi-
dent was doing in Igboland in particular, and in Yorubaland in general:
he appointed corrupt and mediocre politicians across the country.
In case the ‘moral’ of this critique of Achebe’s link between ethnicity,
meritocracy, and mediocrity is missed, let me point it out: each ethnic
8
Ibid., 248.
000 Fal book B.indb 254 13/06/2016 22:06

group in Nigeria has its own actual or potential corrupt and mediocre
politicians. This is because neither mediocrity nor meritocracy is innate
in any ethnic group, each one being the determinate outcome of factors
that pertain as much to class as to ethnicity. More pertinently, Achebe
is grossly mistaken to trace the roots of the culture of mediocrity in our
country to the purging of Igbo intellectuals and professionals in federal,
regional, and local public agencies, institutions, and enterprises in those
fateful months of 1966 before the Nigeria-Biafra War. For mediocrity
preceded the crises leading to the civil war, as Achebe’s own novel, A
Man of the People, powerfully and memorably demonstrates. Moreover,
the culture of mediocrity in post-civil war Nigeria became exponentially
much bigger when oil wealth replaced the pre-war export crop economy
as the primary means of surplus extraction by the political class drawn
from all of Nigeria’s ethnic groups, major and ‘minor’. In other words,
in the new oil-dominated national economy, value – including merit
and excellence – became disaggregated from work, effort, thrift, and
innovation. Thus, meritocracy, and its obverse, mediocrity, are both too
big, too complex as social and intellectual phenomena to be reduced to
the single, determining agency of ‘tribe’ or ethnicity. Indeed, based on
all his previous writings before this new book, this truism is something
that Achebe himself had explored vigorously and compellingly.
I have pondered long and hard on why Achebe in this book seems
to be in such a desperate need to give a glaring supremacist twist to
the incontrovertible historic achievements of Igbos in education, the
professions, the arts, commerce, politics, sports and culture. The imme-
diate historic context and justification for Achebe in this exercise seems
to have been the indisputable fact that after the January 15, 1966 coup,
there was a widespread but carefully manufactured fear of Igbo domi-
nation in all federal institutions and parastatals. This manufactured
fear served as the basis and the pretext for the right-wing Northern and
Western regional governments of the period to begin compiling data
and statistics that seemed to reflect an orchestrated domination of the
country that involved all Igbo people, even though the alleged spheres
of domination specifically entailed middle and upper-middle class pro-
fessions. Ironically, what Achebe’s own ‘list’ of Igbo professional and
intellectual achievements in his new book does is to retroactively and
inadvertently produce that alleged – and dreaded – domination by all
Igbos. This observation needs careful elaboration.
Achebe neither refutes nor impugns the accuracy of the figures and
data in the lists compiled by the Northern and Western regional govern-
ments of the period; he merely ‘explains’ the data and statistics away
by more or less implying that the alleged Igbo dominance was justified
by achievement, by merit. The problem with this ‘explanation’ is that it
conflates class with ethnicity. For if the figures and data released by the
NNA parties were accurate, this only reflects the fact that at that point
in time, Igbo middle and professional classes enjoyed a clear advantage
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256 Biodun Jeyifo
over the middle and professional classes of other ethnic groups, prin-
cipally the Yoruba and the Hausa-Fulani who then used the crises of
1966 to opportunistically wipe out that advantage. Is this the end of
the story? No!
The problem and issues did not end with the pre-civil war crises, as
Achebe himself repeatedly asserts in his new book. Thus, we are dealing
here with a complex historical and social phenomenon that, regretta-
bly, Achebe grossly over-simplifies and distorts. Our task here is to try
to understand why a writer, an intellectual like Achebe who has never
shied away from engaging the complexities of our historical and social
experience, descends into superficialities and distortions in his engage-
ment of this particular topic in this new book.
I think the beginnings of an answer might be found in two separate but
linked processes. First, we must note that the intersection of fierce intra-
class and inter-ethnic competition that led the Northern and Western
governments to begin compiling lists of Igbo dominance in federal agen-
cies and corporations inevitably became closely linked to the massacres
of 1966 even though they were separate and distinct events. Second,
we must also pay attention to the fact that the foreign audience, which
constitutes a large and significant part of Achebe’s intended readership
of There Was a Country, typically thinks of Africa in terms of ‘tribe’ and
ethnicity and hardly ever in terms of class; there is ample textual evidence
that Achebe panders to this foreign audience in the book. For these two
reasons, Achebe refuses absolutely to concede the indisputable class
advantage of Igbo professional and middle classes in pre-civil war Nigeria;
he prefers instead to reduce or keep everything to the singularity of ‘tribe’.
In other words, what he could – and should – have conceded in terms of
class, Achebe displaces into a fortress constructed around ethnicity. He
accomplishes this act of displacement by taking refuge in a mystique of
meritocracy as an endowment, a natural outgrowth of ‘tribe’ or ethnic-
ity. I repeat: I have never encountered a more tendentious, regrettable
treatment of a presumed link between ethnicity and meritocracy in any
book by an African author than what we encounter in Achebe’s engage-
ment of the topic in his new book. As we shall see, these same factors
were deployed far more ominously in the most harrowing issue raised in
Achebe’s new book: the mass starvation and alleged attempted genocide
committed against the children of Biafra.
Part Four
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.
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The epigraph above is the very first sentence in a section of There Was
a Country, subtitled ‘The Question of Genocide’. This section is far and
away the most explosive segment among the dozens of segments in the
entire book. For this reason, in saying that his aim in this segment is
‘not to provide all the answers but to raise questions, and perhaps to
cause a few headaches’, Achebe is either being disingenuous or deploy-
ing a penchant for ironic understatement that is a central aspect of his
novelistic art.9 In my own frank opinion, I think he is being both ironic
and disingenuous. At any rate, instead of ‘a few headaches’, the spate
of responses to this section of the book has been more like an epidemic
outbreak of violent seizures.
I am using the metaphors of severe epilepsy and death throes here
deliberately. Biafra was not defeated, was not vanquished easily. Rela-
tively speaking, it took a long time and a lot of agony and trauma for
the Nigerian forces to subdue the country. This was contrary to the ini-
tial overconfidence of the Nigerian federal government, which believed
‘police action’ lasting no more than three to six months, rather than
full-scale war, would be all that was needed to end the secessionist
republic. Indeed, after the recapture of Benin and the Mid-West region
from the Biafran invasion force, there were swift, decisive victories by
the federal forces within Biafra itself.
Notable in this case were the captures of Calabar and Port Harcourt,
both of which then enabled concentration of the war offensive of the
Nigerian forces on the Biafran heartland in the Igbo-speaking areas of
the breakaway republic. But thereafter, and as fate would have it, the
war reached a stalemate: Biafran resistance became extremely fierce
and resilient. The federal forces slowly but inevitably came to the reali-
zation that they had more than a ‘police action’ on their hands. It was
during this long drawn-out phase that the all-important questions of
mass starvation and an alleged, deliberate, and systematic genocide
against Biafrans – women, children, and the young – became the pri-
mary human and moral issues of the Nigeria-Biafra War, not only while
it lasted but up to the time of writing, almost five decades later.
In my view, any and all discussion of this question of mass starvation
and alleged genocide ought to keep two crucial issues in mind. Failure
to do so almost inevitably leads to either deliberate or unwitting distor-
tions in analysis, interpretation, and judgment. The first of these two
issues was the fact that, unexpectedly, this phase of stalemate was the
longest phase of the war. Second, it was also almost entirely concen-
trated on the Biafran heartland in the Igbo-speaking areas of the seces-
sionist republic and it came after most of the non-Igbo areas of Biafra
had been effectively captured, militarily occupied, and administratively
run by the federal Nigerian forces. Before tackling these two issues, let
9
Ibid., 228.
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258 Biodun Jeyifo
us consider the human and moral dimensions of the matter of mass

starvation and alleged genocide, both of which Achebe engages with
a combination of a master novelist’s artistry and passionate Biafran
ideological zealotry.
‘It is important to point out that most Nigerians were against the
war and abhorred the senseless violence that ensued as a result of the
conflict’, Achebe observes.10 Also, earlier in the book, he had asserted
that ‘the war came as a surprise to the vast majority of artists and
intellectuals on both sides of the conflict’.11 This is the voice of Achebe
the humanist and progressive thinker. Unfortunately, it is a part of the
Achebe that we confront in this book that has been almost completely
buried under the bitterness and severity of the critical responses to the
controversial and tendentious aspects of the book.
At the moral and human core of Achebe’s portrayal and evocation
of so much suffering and death of individuals and the masses in Biafra
is the simple but profound humanist belief that the claims of those who
suffered and died on those who survived and are living can never be
settled by convenient or expedient answers to the question of whether
genocide was intended or ‘merely incidental’. In other words, while the
matter of genocide has been largely framed by figures, data, statistics,
and projections, the fact that millions of people did die and suffer – per-
haps avoidably and needlessly – can never be in dispute. The elegiac
poems and the harrowing prose evocations of death, trauma, and mad-
ness of so many in Biafra that accompany the ‘objective’ accounts con-
stitute powerful and moving parts of Achebe’s book that nothing in the
vast controversy that it has engendered can diminish.
On that note, we come to the heart of the controversies. If the charge
of organized and systematic genocide through mass starvation is the
single most controversial claim of the book, the most controversial
observation or statement in support of this claim is contained in the
following sentences concerning Awolowo:
It is my impression that Chief Obafemi Awolowo was driven by an overriding
ambition for power, for himself in particular and for the advancement of
his Yoruba people in general. And let it be said that there is, on the surface,
nothing wrong with those aspirations. However, Awolowo saw the domi-
nant Igbo at the time as the obstacles to that goal, and when the opportunity
arose – the Nigerian-Biafran war – his ambition drove him into a frenzy to
go to every length to achieve his dreams. In the Biafran case it meant hatch-
ing up a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly
through starvation – eliminating over two million people, mainly members
of future generations.12
10
Ibid., 233.
11
Ibid., 108.
12
Ibid., 233.
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The charge of genocide as advanced by Achebe and as proposed by

scholars like Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, whom Achebe cites, rests on many
factors. Some of these are statements of bloodlust credited to many
field commanders of the Nigerian army; actual atrocities committed by
Nigerian forces in the Biafran heartland that went well beyond Geneva
conventions and the norms of civilized warfare; and the indisputable
fact that the Nigerian Government did use economic blockade and the
resultant mass starvation as a means of forcing the Biafrans to surren-
der. But the charge of the diabolism of Awolowo in using genocide for
the advancement of his personal ambition and as means of once and for
all time eliminating Igbos in the competition for dominance in Nigeria
is something else altogether. Let us address this observation carefully.
Awolowo did make the infamous statement that starvation is a ‘legit-
imate’ weapon of war. As a matter of fact, he made the statement after
the fall of Calabar and Port Harcourt and the consequent tightening of
the noose of war on the Biafran heartland. However, in order to achieve
the diabolical project imputed to him by Achebe, Awolowo would have
had to possess the power to foresee the future and magically bring many
things far beyond his or anyone’s control into being. First, he would
have had to know beforehand that the war would drag on for more than
the three to six months that the federal forces initially expected that it
would take to overwhelm Biafra. The more than two million people
who reportedly died of starvation died because the war was stalemated
for nearly two years. Second, Awolowo would have needed to have the
assurance that his alleged diabolical genocidal schemes would receive
‘help’ from the Biafrans themselves by the kind of resistance, the ‘fight
to finish’ that they put up. Finally, Awolowo would have needed to have
the power to make the Biafran leadership reject the offer by the Nigerian
Government of which he was a member of a land corridor that would
have enabled food and other necessities to reach the blockaded Biafra.
For if the Biafran leadership had accepted this offer, which was in fact
very reluctantly made by Nigeria under intense international pressure,
the number of those that died in Biafra of starvation and kwashiorkor
would have been significantly less than two million.
At this point, I must confess that of all the controversial claims and
statements made by Achebe in his new book, the charge of a diabolical
plot hatched by Awolowo to exterminate Igbo people in furtherance of
personal ambition and ethnic advantage for his own people seems to me
so bizarre and so irrational that I refuse to take it seriously. If Achebe
had stuck to the claim, the charge that some of Awolowo’s actions and
policies during and immediately after the war objectively worked to the
advantage of Yoruba middle, propertied, and moneyed classes and inter-
est groups – whether or not these were Awolowo’s intentions – he would
have been on more rational and plausible grounds. For instance, by the
time the Indigenization Decree came into effect, Igbo moneyed and
propertied classes and interest groups did not have capital in sufficient
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260 Biodun Jeyifo
quantities to make the best of that unprecedented bonanza of post-civil

war Nigeria presented to the kingpins of our country’s ruling class. As
I have stressed, once again we see in this absurd charge the conflation
by Achebe of the class component with the generality, the entirety of
the ethnic group, whether the ethnic group in question is Yoruba, Igbo,
Hausa, or others. While there may be no easy or satisfactory answers
to the myriad of questions thrown up by Achebe’s book, there are solid
grounds on which we can move beyond the predominantly divisive and
acrimonious controversies that have so far dominated the responses to
the book.
Part Five
The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves
union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep
into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak,
toward a deeper understanding of self or society.
As I mentioned in the second section, Achebe uses ‘Nigerian ruling
class’ and ‘Nigerian ruling elite’ only a few times in the book. His cri-
tique of members of our country’s ‘ruling elite/class’ is devastating
and unforgiving. He compares them collectively to ‘Anwu’ the wasp, ‘a
notorious predator from the insect kingdom’. I have no words to match
Achebe’s own characterization of the scale of the predatory nature
of our ruling class: ‘Wasps, African children learn during story time,
greet unsuspecting prey with a painful, paralyzing sting, then lay eggs
on their body, which then proceed to “eat the victim alive.”’ Achebe
uses the term ‘ruling class’ to analyse the terrible state of things in our
country. In other words, on the two occasions when he used the term,
Achebe had merely dipped it into what could be described as the boiling
cauldron of ‘tribe’ or ethnicity as his singular frame of reference. One
proof of this is the significant fact that in spite of his extremely damn-
ing indictments of the both the pre – and post-civil war Nigerian ruling
class, the term does not appear at all in the Index to the book.
As noted, it is a remarkable, even defining, feature of Achebe’s book
that while the whole of the fourth part of the book talks of the Nige-
rian ruling class as the frame of reference for understanding a great
deal of all that is wrong in our country’s affairs, in the other three parts
of the book it is the ‘tribe’ or the ethnic group that is the object either
of Achebe’s searing indictment or, with particular regard to his Igbo
people, of his solicitude and solidarity. In this connection, here is a typi-
cal observation from his Part One:
The original idea of one Nigeria was pressed by the leaders and intellectuals
from the Eastern Region. With all their shortcomings, they had this idea to
000 Fal book B.indb 260 13/06/2016 22:06

build the country as one. The first to object were the Northerners, led by
the Sardauna, who were followed closely by the Awolowo clique that had
created the Action Group.13
This statement is as false as it is unworthy of a progressive writer and
public intellectual of Achebe’s stature. From the amalgamation of the
Southern and Northern Protectorates in 1914 to the brink of the out-
break of the Nigeria-Biafra War, progressive politicians and intellectu-
als from all parts of the country led the struggles for a united, equal and
just Nigeria. From this perspective and in my own personal opinion, the
greatest objection to Achebe’s new book is that in substantial parts of
the first three sections of the book, class politics is completely subor-
dinated to ethnic politics. Because Achebe apparently has no place in
his book for class politics in pre- and post-civil war Nigeria, he almost
completely leaves out the few but significant expressions and traditions
of progressive, radical class politics within and across Nigeria’s ethnic
groups.
Before coming to my concluding reflections in this chapter, I would
like briefly to discuss some of the most moving and valuable parts of this
extraordinarily controversial book, some of these being paradoxically
based on deep and changing realities and sentiments around ethni
city and ethnic belonging as a positive value in our continent and our
world. I don’t think that it is overstating the case to observe that There
Was a Country probably aspired to be and will for decades be regarded
as the definitive Igbo literary epic of this age. It is an epic of suffering,
endurance, resilience, and survival. Like all great epics, it is based on
the rediscovery of fundamental moral and philosophical ideas that
go to the core of communal survival and human worth, especially in
seasons of great and overwhelming catastrophe. Again and again,
Achebe dips into Igbo creation myths, folklore, legends, and proverbs
to underscore the scale of the issues involved in the production of this
epic. He certainly does, on occasion, over-idealize aspects of traditional
Igbo culture and worldview that he wishes to propose as self-defining
and self-constituting counterweights to the festering cesspool of the
Nigerian spiritual and moral malaise. But the cultural capital of what
Achebe attempts here is undeniable, and it is consistent with what other
African writers like Soyinka, Ngũgı̃, and Tanure Ojaide, in their essays
and literary works, have done for Yoruba, Kikuyu, and Urhobo ethnic
nations, respectively. His is a powerful demonstration of the idea that
ethnic groups have an unfolding historic identity and can and should
serve as repositories from which to rediscover and rekindle the virtues
of democratic republicanism and common human decency and dignity
in this new millennium. In this perspective, ethnicity, indigeneity, and
13
Ibid., 51.
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262 Biodun Jeyifo
locality are not antithetical to but are indeed consistent with universal
values that link all of us in our country and our planet to a common
future, a common destiny.
But the ethnic provenance of the epic Igbo project of There Was a
Country takes its toll on the intellectual and artistic merits of the book.
In a marked contrast with almost all the other books he had written,
there is in this new book a veritable collapse of the ‘union and trust’
between writer and readers that Achebe, in the epigraph to this con-
cluding section, identifies as the basis of all great writing. Let me care-
fully explain what this entails.
I have stated repeatedly in this series that Achebe is one of the great-
est realist writers in world literature in the last one and a half centuries.
Among all other claims, realism bases itself on the ability, the unflinch-
ing resolve to let reality speak for itself, no matter where it leads the
writer, the artist, the philosopher. But this is easier said than done for
no writer, no artist can (re)present the fullness, the infinity of reality;
what the writer can hope for is that in what he or she chooses from
reality, nothing significant, nothing absolutely germane to the reality
depicted is left out. Where this happens the reliability of the writer is
badly compromised and with this goes his or her trustworthiness, if not
across the whole spectrum of potential readers then among the most
discerning, the most astute, and the most fair-minded of such readers.
On this count, Achebe’s new book evinces the collapse of realist writing
and philosophy the like of which we had heretofore never encountered
in his writings. Let me put this in simple language: in this new book,
whatever is not compatible with Achebe’s epic ethnic Igbo project is
simply left out, even if and where such things were of great import in
the affairs of the nation especially as these pertain to relations between
ethnic groups and communities, both in Nigeria and Biafra.
The central issue here, as I have repeated again and again, is the
omission of class in most of Achebe’s narratives, analyses, and reflec-
tions in the book. There is also the additional fact that in most of his
ideas and assertions about ethnicity and regionalism, he simply omits
or over-simplifies many things that either complicate or run counter to
his project of an Igbo ethnic epic. Among the myriad of such omissions
and simplifications in the book, I shall cite only a few examples.
First, in all of the first three and most-substantive parts of this book,
in vain will the reader look for the signs, the evidence that beyond the
ethnic/regional blocs, there were class alliances of both right-wing and
progressive ideological and political currents. Indeed, there is no men-
tion of the UPGA alliance between the National Council of Nigerian
Citizens, the Action Group, and the Northern Elements Progressive
Union (NEPU) – the three most important social democratic parties that
straddled the North and the South in the First Republic.
Second, there is no mention in the fourth part of the book of the fact
that while the big, moneyed interest groups among Igbo people in the
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post-civil war period have done badly compared to the big, moneyed
interest groups of Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani elites, the lower middle
class of Igbo traders, merchants, and exporter-importers have done
very well indeed compared with similar class and interest groups of the
country’s other ethnic groups. Thus, on this count, one class segment
among Igbos – admittedly the most potentially economically and politi-
cally influential – is far from being truly integrated into post-civil war
Nigeria. Another segment – lower middle class merchants and export-
ers-importers – is very well integrated. Rather than acknowledge this
indisputable fact of the interplay between class and ethnicity, Achebe
simply asserts in his book that (all) Igbos are yet to be integrated into
post-civil war Nigeria.
Third, within Biafra and during the war itself, Achebe is almost com-
pletely silent on the fact that there were great tensions between the Igbo,
the majority ethnic group, and the non-Igbo minorities. As a matter
of fact, as one reads the two central parts of the book that deal with
life (and death and suffering) in Biafra, one slowly comes to recognize
that, for Achebe, ‘Biafra’ and ‘Igbo’ are inextricably conflated. Yet, it is a
simple fact of history that Biafra was a multi-ethnic state.
Last, most independent and fair-minded historians and analysts of
the Biafra-Nigeria war know and state that, like the Nigerian forces,
Biafran troops also committed terrible atrocities against civilian popu-
lations, most notably in the Mid-West region during their brief occupa-
tion and when they were in forced retreat before the advancing federal
forces. Yet Achebe blithely asserts in the book that he has not obtained
independent confirmation of this fact.
For me personally, it is a matter of great regret that the reactions
to Achebe’s book have been divided almost entirely along ethnic and
regional lines: ‘to thy tents, O Israel!’ Well, not completely, so there is
still hope that across our various ethnic and regional communities, we
can still forge alliances based on interests that combine the best and
the most positive values of our historic ethnic nations with progressive
egalitarian values that will work for the vast majority of our peoples
that remain disenfranchised and marginalized, regardless of how well
or how badly their rich and powerful ethnic brethren and sisters are
doing in Nigeria at large.
The decision to fight to the finish was the most fateful decision taken
by the Biafran ruling class of which Achebe was a morally and intel-
lectually authoritative figure. Coupled with this was the decision not
to accept the offer of a land corridor for getting food and supplies to
the starving and suffering masses of people in Biafra that the interna-
tional community pressured the Nigerian Government to make. These
two decisions played their own role in the mass starvation and death
of millions of the children of Biafra. Let it be known that by making
this observation I do not, whatsoever, intend any negative critique or
any gratuitous moralizing. This is because I am only too conscious of
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264 Biodun Jeyifo
the fact that political and military history in all parts of the world is
replete with such terrible decisions in times of war. War hardens people
immeasurably and many decisions taken during war often seem totally
incomprehensible later. I cannot imagine that the political and military
leadership in Biafra took those decisions lightly. If Biafra had survived,
the sacrifice would have paid off; defeat, on the contrary, made it infi-
nitely worse. I cannot imagine that Achebe was not haunted by the part
that some decisions of the Biafran leadership played in this particularly
harrowing and gnawing tragedy of the Biafra-Nigeria war. How did
he process this particular extra emotional, psychic burden of defeat?
Not a word about this is found in There Was a Country. I wonder, I really
wonder.
For all of us, the very least we can and must do is to begin to have a
more complete, a more complex and a more honest view of why and
how mass starvation and the totally avoidable death of millions, most
of them children, did happen in Biafra. If we can achieve this, we will
find it much easier to come to terms with most of the other seemingly
intractable issues raised in Achebe’s book. Thus, getting a fuller and
truer picture of mass starvation and the alleged genocide is a first
step, but it is a necessary one. More than any other book on the Biafra-
Nigeria war, Achebe’s new book, with all its contradictions and the
fierce controversies it has generated, provides a powerful basis for us to
take this first step.
000 Fal book B.indb 264 13/06/2016 22:06

13 Ethnic Minorities and the
Biafran National Imaginary in
Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn
and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s
Half of a Yellow Sun
Meredith Coffey*
In 1969, American political scientist Rupert Emerson summarized one

of the key debates shaping the course of the Nigeria-Biafra War:
If the whole former Eastern region, restyled Biafra by the Ibo [sic] seces-
sionists, is the proper unit for self-determination, then the minorities may
properly be subordinated to the majority and swept along in its wake. If,
on the other hand, these minorities are assumed to constitute ‘peoples,’ are
their claims to be heard less valid than those of the Ibos?1
In this reflection, Emerson gestures towards the fact that the secession’s
leaders cast the geopolitical territory initially under their control – the
‘whole former Eastern Region’ of Nigeria – as a cohesive ‘unit’ with the
right to self-determination. Opponents of the separatist effort, on the other
hand, not only denied the territory’s people the right to self-determination
but also contended that the secession was at its core an Igbo nationalist
project. If the latter argument proved correct, then the region’s minorities
would necessarily be second-class citizens in the new nation.
Given the heatedness of this debate, amidst a host of political, eco-
nomic, social, and other factors, minorities’ loyalties became ‘sharply
divided’.2 Being 40 percent of the Biafran population and possessing
well over half its land, eastern ethnic minorities such as the Ijaw, Efik,
Ibibio, Ogoni, Annang, and Ikwerre would play a significant, potentially
decisive, role in the conflict.3 With the battle for minorities’ support as
*
I wish to thank Dr Toyin Falola and Ogechukwu Ezekwem for their support of this project.
I am also grateful to Allison Haas for her insightful comments on an earlier version of this
chapter.
1
Rupert Emerson, ‘The Problem of Identity, Selfhood, and Image in the New Nations: The
Situation in Africa’, Comparative Politics 1:3 (1969), 303.
2
United States, National Security Council Interdepartmental Group for Africa, ‘Back-
ground Paper on Nigeria/Biafra’, February 10, 1969, amended April 21, 2005.
3
Arua Oko Omaka, ‘The Forgotten Victims: Ethnic Minorities in the Nigeria-Biafra War,
1967–1970’, Journal of Retracing Africa 1:1 (2014), 29; and Jimoh Lawal, ‘Nigeria – Class
Struggle and the National Question’, in Nigeria: Dilemma of Nationhood, edited by Joseph
Okpaku (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), 280. For a more thorough listing of these and
other minority groups in the region, see Ken Saro-Wiwa, On a Darkling Plain: An Account
of the Nigerian Civil War (Port Harcourt: Saros, 1989), 53.
265
000 Fal book B.indb 265 13/06/2016 22:06

266 Meredith Coffey
a growing undercurrent of the Biafran War, official anti-secessionist

rhetoric portrayed Biafra as an ethnoculturally grounded Igbo nation,
from which ethnic minorities would ultimately be excluded, while offi-
cial secessionist rhetoric depicted the fledgling nation as civic-territorial
in its ideology and therefore ethnically inclusive in scope.4
In various genres, from propaganda posters to scholarly works,
stakeholders on both sides of the conflict frequently reiterated these
depictions of Biafra. Novels would seem to provide an especially
useful opportunity for Biafra’s sympathizers to make their case, given
their widely noted capacity to imagine a ‘unified and coherent’ civic-
territorial nation and thereby obscure significant ethnic differences
or tensions.5 Although some Biafran novels completel y sidestep the
issue of minority inclusion within the secessionist nation, others assert
Biafran nationalism as primarily territorial (and therefore ethnically
inclusive), including Eddie Iroh’s Toads of War and Cyprian Ekwensi’s
Divided We Stand.6
A close examination of two of the most widely read pro-Biafran
novels, however, reveals a more ambivalent take on the secessionist
nation’s inclusiveness: Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn: A Novel of
the Biafran War and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.
Published 30 years apart, these texts represent Biafra from distinct his-
torical perspectives: Ike, already well into his thirties at the time of the
war, is almost a half century older than Adichie, who was born several
years after the war’s conclusion (and a year after Sunset at Dawn’s initial
publication). Ike based his depiction largely on his own not-so-distant
4
The distinction between ethnic and territorial nations, or nations grounded in jus san-
guinis as opposed to jus soli bases, is used widely. In using the particular terms ‘ethno-
cultural’ and ‘civic-territorial’, I am thinking especially of Anthony D. Smith’s usage. He
views all nationalisms as some combination of these conceptions, but of course that does
not preclude others’ usage of the terms as if they were mutually exclusive. See especially
Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Na-
tionalism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000).
5
See especially Benedict Anderson, ‘Cultural Roots’, Chapter 2 in Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 1991); and
David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of
Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 60.
6
Eddie Iroh, Toads of War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1979); Cyprian Ekwensi,
Divided We Stand: A Novel of the Nigerian Civil War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980).
With regard to Biafra novels that have sidestepped the issue of ethnic diversity within the
secessionist nation, literary scholar Willfried Feuser noted in 1986 that ‘One criticism’ he
might apply specifically to Igbo writers about the war was their ‘blind spot for the problem
of minorities in Biafra’; see Willfried F. Feuser, ‘Anomy and Beyond: Nigeria’s Civil War in
Literature’, Presence Africaine: Revue Culturelle du Monde Noir/Cultural Review of the Negro
World 137–138 (1986),143. Indeed, S. Okechukwu Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun (1971),
John Munonye’s A Wreath for the Maidens (1973), Flora Nwapa’s Never Again (1975), Ed-
die Iroh’s Forty-eight Guns for the General (1976), Ossie Onuora Enekwe’s Come Thunder
(1984), and Dulue Mbachu’s War Games (2005) make either few or no references to in-
terethnic tensions within Biafra, and any such references that do appear describe general
cultural or economic differences.
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Ike Sunset at Dawn; Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun 267
historical memory, whereas Adichie grounded her narrative in research

that included interviews with first-hand witnesses and extensive read-
ing – absorbing a generation’s worth of academic, creative, and per-
sonal reflection on the conflict.7 Indeed, a number of influential novels
about the Biafran War appeared between the time that Sunset at Dawn
and Half of a Yellow Sun were published.8 Despite these significant gaps
in time and in the authors’ historical perspectives, their novels have a
great deal in common when it comes to their treatment of minority
characters in Biafra.
Both Sunset at Dawn and Half of a Yellow Sun are deeply sympathetic
to the Biafran effort, suggesting that they would aim to echo the official
Biafran narrative of national inclusiveness. To this end, the novels each
include a complex web of characters of different ages, genders, socio-
economic backgrounds, and professions, and they continuously switch
among different plotlines and change focus to different characters. In so
doing, they forgo a monolithic narrative in favor of a diverse and hori-
zontal national imaginary.
In the context of this inclusive vision, the novels’ cautious approach
to dealing with ethnic minority characters is particularly striking. In
two key ways, Sunset at Dawn and Half of a Yellow Sun each explicitly
raise the question of eastern minorities’ inclusion without ever resolv-
ing it comfortably. First, characters in both novels comment uneasily
on minorities’ place in Biafra in general. Second, both texts offer up
specific cases of minority characters who would like to be fellow Bia-
frans. Sunset at Dawn portrays one minority character as fully Biafran,
but another minority character’s effort to join the Biafran nation fails
entirely, through no fault of his own; Half of a Yellow Sun is consist-
ently ambiguous about each of its (few) minority characters’ places
within the nation. Moreover, the novels only consider individual cases
of minority would-be Biafrans; the novels remain purposefully vague
about the wartime loyalties of ethnic minority groups more broadly,
which means that any individual characters who successfully become
Biafrans could be, arguably, exceptions. Despite being pro-Biafra texts,
then, Sunset at Dawn and Half of a Yellow Sun depart from official Biafran
rhetoric by not casting the secessionist nation as necessarily welcoming
to all ethnic groups within its territory.
7
An author’s note at the end of the novel indicates that Adichie interviewed several family
members who witnessed the war firsthand. It also includes a list of texts that she read
in preparation for writing her own novel. Among the 31 works of fiction and nonfiction
listed is Ike’s Sunset at Dawn. See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (New
York: Anchor, 2007), Author’s Note.
8
Notable Biafran War novels published between Sunset at Dawn and Half of a Yellow Sun
include Eddie Iroh’s Biafra trilogy (Forty-eight Guns for the General (1976), Toads of War
(1979), and The Siren in the Night (1982)), Cyprian Ekwensi’s Divided We Stand (1980),
Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982), Ossie Enekwe’s Come Thunder (1984), Ken
Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1985), and Dulue Mbachu’s War Games
(2005).
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268 Meredith Coffey
This chapter therefore analyzes the novels’ refusals to depict the

short-lived nation as territorially inclusive, despite the ideological
exigencies of doing so. To be clear, its interest lies not in determining
whether Biafran nationalism was in historical fact more ethnocultural
or civic-territorial; instead, it focuses on the portrayal of Biafran nation-
alism in these specific novels. By creating ambiguity surrounding the
inclusion of minority Biafrans, the chapter contends, Sunset at Dawn
and Half of a Yellow Sun each provide a subtle critique of the secession-
ists’ narrative of national inclusion (rare in pro-Biafran fiction), while
otherwise remaining clearly sympathetic to the Biafran cause (aligning
them firmly with the pro-Biafran literary tradition). Before embarking
on this analysis, a brief political history of minorities’ position in Nige-
ria is offered, followed by some examples of official federal Nigerian as
well as Biafran rhetoric surrounding minorities’ loyalties.
Nigeria’s Majorities and Minorities

Despite occupying a pivotal place in the Nigeria-Biafra War, eastern
minorities had not been a political category as such for very long.
According to Nigerian political scholar Eghosa Osaghae, the term
‘“Ethnic minorities” did not become a part of the political vocabulary
in Nigeria’ until the mid-1940s.9 Although Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo
people had long comprised the largest of Nigeria’s approximately 250
ethnic groups, no one group had been populous enough to dominate
the colonial possession’s longstanding unitary structure.10 In 1947,
however, the Richards Constitution changed the administration system
to a federal structure with three regions, each dominated by one of
these groups: the Hausa in the North, the Yoruba in the West, and the
Igbo in the East.11 A series of subsequent constitutions entrenched and
strengthened the regional divisions.
9
Eghosa E. Osaghae, ‘Ethnic Minorities and Federalism in Nigeria’, African Affairs 90:359
(1991), 238.
10
By the 1960s, Nigeria included approximately 15 million Hausa, 12 million Yoruba,
10 million Igbo, and 20 million people belonging to ethnic minorities. See Okwudiba
Nnoli, ‘The Nigera-Biafra Conflict – A Political Analysis’, in Okpaku, Nigeria: Dilemma of
Nationhood , 127; and K.W.J. Post, ‘Is There a Case for Biafra?’ International Affairs 44:1
(1968), 27.
Moreover, in many cases these ethnic affiliations were far from rigid or longstanding.
Colonial rule had generally fortified distinctions between ethnic groups, many individu-
als and groups ‘defied [official] classification’, and each group was far from homogene-
ous. See Terence Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in The Invention
of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1983), 248; Ugbana Okpu, Ethnic Minority Problems in Nigerian Politics:
1960–1965 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1977), 7; and Kathryn Nwajiaku-Dahou,
‘Heroes and Villains: Ijaw Nationalist Narratives of the Nigerian Civil War’, Africa Devel-
opment 34:1 (2009), 54.
11
Lawal, ‘Nigeria’, 266.
000 Fal book B.indb 268 13/06/2016 22:06

Although members of these groups lived throughout Nigeria, these

identities became increasingly tied to the administrative regions for
political reasons. With the creation of the three regions and the conse-
quent political expediency of appealing to ethnic identity, the political
options abruptly shifted such that only members of majority groups
were likely to get elected to office.12 Further exacerbating this problem
was the fact that ‘whichever region had control at the centre through
its dominant political party would at once be in a position to determine
the economic, if not the political, fate of all the other regions’.13 Within
just a few years, the majority groups became fiercely competitive for
central control, and minority groups struggled to maintain their politi-
cal voices. Several minority political parties did spring up, often receiv-
ing support from other regions’ majority parties trying to disrupt the
balance of power.14 In other cases, minorities were sometimes coerced
into supporting the region’s major party; otherwise, they risked being
denied basic necessities like water.15
Understandably, anxieties about majority ethnic groups’ dominance
developed rapidly. Shortly before Nigerian independence, British admin-
istrators aimed to address these concerns through the 1958 Willink
Commission of Inquiry into Minority Fears and Means of Allaying
Them.16 The commission found that minorities were most ‘vulnerable’
in the Eastern and Northern Regions, and it agreed to several conces-
sions, including the creation of a national rather than a regional police
force.17 Despite these advances for minority advocates, the commission
still denied their primary request – the division of Nigeria into more
states, which would have more dramatically undermined the majority
groups’ dominance.18
By the time of its independence in 1960, Nigeria was rife with tensions
between and within its three regions. Eventually, in 1963, the central
government agreed to create a fourth region, the Mid-West. This move,
long fought for by minority groups within the region, pleased political
leaders in the North and East but, unsurprisingly, displeased the West-
ern Region, whose size and influence it fractured.19 Yet even this fairly
12
Osaghae, ‘Ethnic Minorities and Federalism in Nigeria’, 240.
13
Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo and Samuel Udochukwu Ifejika, Biafra: The Making of a
Nation (New York: Praeger, 1970), 33.
14
Okpu, Ethnic Minority Problems in Nigerian Politics, 139.
15
Steven Jervis, ‘Nigeria and Biafra’, Africa Today 14:6 (1967), 16.
16
Nwajiaku-Dahou, ‘Heroes and Villains’, 52.
17
Oshita O. Oshita, ‘Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Trajectory of Minority Predicament in Nige-
ria’, in Before I Am Hanged: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Literature, Politics, and Dissent, edited by On-
ookome Okome (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000), 38; and Rotimi T. Suberu, ‘Back-
ground: The Chequered Fortunes of Ethnic Minorities under Changing Political Regimes
in Nigeria’, in Ethnic Minority Conflicts and Governance in Nigeria (Ibadan: Institut français
de recherche en Afrique, 1996), Chapter 2 (not paginated).
18
Ibid.
19
Okpu, Ethnic Minority Problems in Nigerian Politics, 88–91.
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270 Meredith Coffey
dramatic revision to Nigeria’s federal structure soon proved insufficient

to quell the new nation’s interregional and inter-ethnic tensions.
Minorities in Nigeria and Biafra, 1966–1970

While many opponents of the January 1966 coup specifically associ-
ated the takeover with Igbo ambitions, the violent reprisals often tar-
geted easterners more broadly. This phenomenon was in no small part
due to the fact that many of the attackers did not distinguish Igbo from
eastern minorities, instead placing them all in the same generic iden-
tity category of ‘Yameri’ or ‘Nyamiri’.20 In some cases, ‘the only non-
northerners generally spared in those events were those who wore the
dress and bore the distinctive face markings of the Yoruba tribe of the
West’.21 Clearly, much of this extraordinary violence impacted both the
majority Igbo and minority easterners.
After the July 1966 counter-coup and reinstatement of the federal
system, escalating violence went on to cost a horrifying number of
lives throughout Nigeria. As many as 30,000 easterners were killed
and over 50,000 more were wounded.22 In addition, as many as two
million people had to flee from the North to the East, including many
whose families had not lived in the East for generations.23 The security
of Igbo and other eastern people was at stake on an enormous scale. At
the same time, northerners in the East also faced violent reprisals, and
in October 1966, then-Governor of the Eastern Region Chukwuemeka
Odumegwu Ojukwu ordered all non-easterners out of the East, with the
warning that his regional government could no longer guarantee their
security.24
As the likelihood of eastern secession grew, Nigerian Head of State
General Yakubu Gowon announced in May 1967 that the country
would be divided into 12 regions. This move would undermine the
majority groups’ control everywhere, but it had a particularly strong
impact on the agitating Eastern Region. The Eastern Region would be
converted into three states, two of which had non-Igbo majorities. The
plan would also leave the only Igbo-majority state landlocked, with
access to relatively few of the East’s valuable natural resources, most
notably oil.25 This effect was far from coincidental, as Gowon’s hope was
to break up Igbo control in the East while simultaneously appealing to
minorities’ political demands and winning their loyalty.26 Motivating
20
Ntieyong U. Akpan, The Struggle for Secession, 1966–1970: A Personal Account of the Nige-
rian Civil War (London: Frank Cass, 1971), 152; and Saro-Wiwa, On a Darkling Plain, 58.
21
Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘A Condemned People’, The New York Review of Books 9:11 (1967).
22
Nwankwo and Ifejika, Biafra, 207–208.
23
Ibid., 208; and Lawal, ‘Nigeria’, 273.
24
Elechi Amadi, Sunset in Biafra: A Civil War Diary (London: Heinemann, 1973), 21.
25
Post, ‘Is There a Case’, 38.
26
Osaghae, ‘Ethnic Minorities and Federalism in Nigeria’, 243.
000 Fal book B.indb 270 13/06/2016 22:06

this strategy were the federal government’s beliefs that the agitation for
secession was Igbo-led and that minority support would be a decisive
factor in the conflict. Just three days after the announcement of the
twelve-state system, Eastern Region Governor Ojukwu declared Nige-
ria’s secession as the independent Republic of Biafra, with himself as
the head of state.
From the beginning, significant tensions existed between Igbo and
ethnic minorities within Biafra. Some minorities were eager to be mem-
bers of the new nation, fighting on the Biafran side in the war, remain-
ing in civil service positions, and otherwise supporting Biafra’s cause.27
Others merely accepted the secession. Still others, however, believed
from the start that they would be second-class citizens in the Igbo-
majority nation. Just after the secession, many minority university stu-
dents departed abruptly from the University of Nigeria (soon to become
the University of Biafra), while other minority easterners resigned
from their civil service jobs.28 Later, as Nigerian federal forces gradu-
ally reclaimed portions of Biafran land, Biafran forces compelled many
minorities to abandon their homes and ‘shepherded’ them into refugee
camps in the remaining Biafran territory.29 As Biafra’s defeat looked
increasingly likely, accusations against minority ‘saboteurs’ became a
means of deflecting attention from Biafra’s increasing military failures
and widespread starvation.30 Detention camps, which mostly contained
accused minorities, ‘sprang up’.31 From enthusiastic Biafrans to politi-
cal prisoners, ethnic minorities occupied a wide range of places in the
secessionist nation.
Frames for Biafran Nationalism

Despite Biafra’s varied treatment of its ethnic minorities, gaining
minorities’ loyalty was and is widely perceived as a decisive factor in the
conflict. Peter Ekeh argues that ‘the aversion of minority and marginal
Nigerians to secession’ was decidedly ‘the single most important reason
for the frustration of the Biafran secession’.32 Similarly, almost 30 years
after Ekeh’s assessment, Murray Last argues that obtaining minority
support was a key strategic priority for Biafra, second only in impor-
tance to international support.33 In reality, of course, eastern minori-
27
28
Stephen Vincent, ‘Should Biafra Survive?’, Transition 32 (1967), 57; and Nwajiaku-Da-
hou, ‘Heroes and Villains’, 61.
29
Saro-Wiwa, On a Darkling Plain, 187.
30
Ibid., 62.
31
Amadi, Sunset in Biafra, 20.
32
Peter Ekeh, ‘Citizenship and Political Conflict’, in Okpaku, Nigeria: Dilemma of Nationhood,
103.
33
Murray Last, ‘Reconciliation and Memory in Postwar Nigeria’, in Violence and Subjectiv-
ity, edited by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 318.
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272 Meredith Coffey
ties formed highly diverse populations, and so no monolithic preference

for Nigerian unity or Biafran independence existed among them. Irish
politician and visitor to Biafra Conor Cruise O’Brien cautioned in
1967: ‘Both the Biafran claims that these peoples are wholeheartedly
in support of Biafra and the claims made from Lagos that the minori-
ties are longing to be liberated by Federal forces should be treated with
reserve.’34 The battle for their loyalty became a highly and consistently
contentious one.
Each side fought this battle in no small part through official rhetoric
about minority belonging in Biafra. Implicit in this rhetoric is a conflict
over what type of nation Biafra would become. Federal Nigeria argued
that minorities would be relegated to second-class citizen status in
Biafra, due to an Igbo-centered ethnocultural national ideal, whereas
official Biafran rhetoric promoted a vision of civic-territorial national-
ism, in which all residents of the new nation could equally belong and
participate. Competing visions of Biafra’s national construction were
thus at work.
Gowon, federal Nigeria’s Head of State, was a lead figure in the
political project of casting Biafra as an ethnically exclusive nation. In
his immediately pre-secession announcement of the administrative
division into more regions, Gowon stated that his goal was ‘to remove
the fear of domination’ by Igbo people, calling attention to the strains
caused by the East’s ethnic composition.35 Shortly after the outbreak
of war, Gowon cast the secession as an attempt at separation by Igbo
people, rather than by all residents of a geopolitical region: ‘The Federal
Military Government believes that the Ibos as a people need the rest
of Nigeria just as the rest of Nigeria needs the Ibos.’36 Gowon’s use of
ethnic labels disrupts any sense of territorial unity by foregrounding
the role of the secession’s ethnic majority.
Correspondingly, historians in favor of federal Nigeria’s cause have
cast Biafran nationalism as ethnoculturally motivated. One of the most
famous Biafran War memoirs is that of author Elechi Amadi, an ethni-
cally Ikwerre (and therefore minority) Eastern Nigerian who opposed
the secession.37 In the memoir Sunset in Biafra, he highlights the friction
between Igbo and ethnic minorities: ‘Very few Ibo men of real influence
conceded that the minorities should have a say in the determination of
their own future.’38 Here and throughout the memoir, he consistently
uses ethnic labels to describe actors in the conflict, clearly distinguishing
Igbo and minority people. For Amadi, the monolithic territorial labels of
‘Eastern Nigerian’ or ‘Biafran’ are not representative of a people with
34
O’Brien, ‘A Condemned People’.
35
Yakubu Gowon, ‘Broadcast to the Nation’, May 27, 1967.
36
Yakubu Gowon, ‘Welcome Address to the OAU Consultative Mission’, in Okpaku, Nigeria:
Dilemma of Nationhood, 410.
37
Amadi, Sunset in Biafra, 21.
38
Ibid., 41.
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shared identities or goals. Like Gowon, Amadi emphasizes majority

dominance within Biafra to portray an ethnocultural nationalism at
work.
Pro-federal Nigeria scholars from outside the country have also
relied on primarily ethnic, rather than regional, identity labels. Just
after the war began, American academic Stephen Vincent wrote about
minorities who felt ‘exploited both in terms of commerce and oil by the
Ibo trader and what they see as an Ibo dominated government’ and
argued that ‘the Ibo leadership’ would never ‘quell the suspicions of
the minority groups’.39 In these instances and throughout the article,
Vincent focuses on the exclusion of minorities in contrast with Igbo
‘domination’ and ‘leadership’. Over three decades later, Britain-based
Professor Murray Last held that one of Biafra’s implicit aims was to
convince ‘non-Igbo minorities within the Eastern Region to accept Igbo
hegemony’.40 Last, like Vincent, promotes an image of Igbo domination
over all other ethnic groups, thereby reiterating the image of Biafra as
an ethnoculturally based nation.
In stark contrast was Eastern Nigeria’s (and later, Biafra’s) emphati-
cally inclusive vision for the new nation. Starting even before secession,
in pre-war messages to the region and during government meetings,
Eastern Region House of Assembly member Alvan Ikoku addressed
the rising regional tensions by repeatedly underscoring commonalities
among and the shared victimization of Eastern Nigerians, never once
using the word ‘Igbo’ or any other ethnic identification.41 Similarly, the
official Proclamation of the Republic of Biafra, delivered by Ojukwu,
consistently refers to ‘eastern Nigerians’ (often as against ‘northern
Nigerians’). The Proclamation uses territorially inclusive phrases like,
‘Fellow countrymen and women, you, the people of Eastern Nigeria’.42
Similarly, the Ahiara Declaration, delivered by Ojukwu and aimed at
establishing an ‘intellectual foundation’ for Biafra,43 includes many
phrases like ‘fellow Biafrans’ and ‘fellow countrymen and women’.44
Ojukwu was sure to cast Biafra as a territorially inclusive nation to out-
siders, too; in a telegram sent to the First International Conference on
Biafra, held in 1968 at Columbia University in New York City, Ojukwu
uses only regional or national identifications to characterize actors in
the conflict, describing the ‘deep seated hatred which Nigerians, nota-
bly northerners, had for Eastern Nigerians’ and asserting that in the
39
Vincent, ‘Should Biafra Survive?’, 55 and 57, respectively.
40
Last, ‘Reconciliation and Memory’, 318.
41
‘Proclamation of the Republic of Biafra’, International Legal Materials 6:4 (1967),
665–678.
42
Ibid., 679–680.
43
2012), 143.
44
National Guidance Committee of Biafra, ‘The Ahiara Declaration (The Principles of the
Biafran Revolution)’, delivered as a speech by Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, June 1, 1969.
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274 Meredith Coffey
North, ‘Eastern Nigerians there were denied fundamental freedoms’.45

Famously, Ojukwu also offered to have a plebiscite, organized by unbi-
ased outsiders, to determine minorities’ side in the conflict, suggesting
that he had confidence, or wanted to appear to have confidence, that
they would choose Biafra.46
In addition to these carefully considered public statements, Biafran
leaders also promoted the vision of a civic-territorial Biafran nation
through propaganda. Before secession, as part of a campaign to spread
concern about northern domination, the Eastern Region Government
used posters that read, among other slogans, ‘Don’t Sell Your Region’.47
Already political leaders were emphasizing unity within and loyalty
to the East – a loyalty that they hoped would override ethnic divisions.
Later, to encourage young people to join the Biafran army, another
poster campaign series displayed images of ‘Easterners marching united
to battle’.48 These public campaigns were clearly careful to emphasize
territorial, rather than ethnic, unity.
During the conflict, Biafra’s domestic and international supporters
echoed this rhetoric of civic-territorial nationalism. In 1969, Nigerian
scholars Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo and Samuel Udochukwu Ifejika
published Biafra: The Making of a Nation, in which they emphasize east-
erners’ widespread support for Ojukwu, despite ethnic differences. To
take only one example, they narrate an occasion on which delegations
of Ojukwu supporters came to Lagos in March 1967, only a few months
prior to the secession:
From the villages, indignant Eastern Nigerians poured into the cities …
From the hills of Ogoja, from the mangroves of Brass, from the forests of
Arochukwu, from the farmlands of Abakiliki, from the creeks of Bonny,
from Awka, Aba, Uyo, Onitsha, Port Harcourt, Bende and all parts of the
Regions.49
Here, Nwankwo and Ifejika demonstrate territorial unity not only
by applying the label ‘Eastern Nigerians’, but also by painstakingly
enumerating diverse cities and landscapes in the region; the coming
together of so many peoples is indeed a key part of their titular argu-
ment – how Biafra became a nation.
From a non-African perspective, English author Frederick Forsyth’s
The Biafra Story, published the same year as Nwankwo and Ifejika’s
book, is similarly emphatic about minorities’ equal inclusion in the
new nation. Forsyth underscores that the violence targeted all eastern-
ers alike, not just Igbo people: ‘The killings of civilians have not been
45
Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, Telegram to The First International Conference on
Biafra, Columbia University, New York, NY, December 7, 1968.
46
United States, ‘Background Paper’.
47
Vincent, ‘Should Biafra Survive?’, 56.
48
Jervis, ‘Nigeria and Biafra’, 16.
49
Nwankwo and Ifejika, Biafra, 233.
000 Fal book B.indb 274 13/06/2016 22:06

confined to Ibo land; the Efiks, Calabars, Ibibios and Ogonis have suf-
fered heavily.’50 He also argues that, partially as a consequence, ethnic
minorities were equally supportive of and involved in the Biafran cause:
‘All the on-the-spot evidence indicated that the minority groups fully
participated in the decision-making process to get out of Nigeria, and
were as enthusiastic as the Ibos.’51 As Forsyth’s and Nwankwo and Ifeji-
ka’s texts demonstrate, illustrating territorial unity in the face of ethnic
diversity was a priority for these and other pro-Biafra historiographers.
‘A Nigerian in Biafran Clothing’: Responses to Minority Claims to

Biafranness in Sunset at Dawn
One of the first major pro-Biafra novels, however, hesitates to depict
minorities or other non-Igbo characters as fully incorporated into the
nation.52 Published in 1976, Sunset at Dawn narrates the wartime expe-
riences of several proudly Biafran characters, mostly comprised of the
family and friends of Dr Amilo Kanu, the fictional Biafran Director of
Mobilization. The novel does not follow a single plotline, but rather shifts
back and forth between conversations among the numerous characters
and broader narrations of the war’s events.
Throughout, the novel repeatedly indicates uncertainty surrounding
the place of minorities in Biafra. With regard to Gowon’s pre-secession
division of Nigeria into 12 states, the narrator declares it was ‘a clever
move to undermine and then destroy the solidarity of the people who
now constituted Biafra. It offered a most enticing bait to the non-Igbo
among the Biafrans, by offering them two states of their own.’53 At first
glance, this commentary seems to suggest a Biafran nation that united
various ethnic groups, as it explicitly identifies an extant ‘solidarity’
among Biafra’s people. At the same time, though, it also acknowledges
that non-Igbo – cast as a distinct and apparently readily identifi-
able population – might under some circumstances actually prefer to
remain Nigerians. By making this observation, the narrator undercuts
the image of solidarity he initially seems to want to promote; if ethnic
minorities, comprising 40 percent of Biafran people, could really have
found a pre-secession Nigerian solution so compelling, then a meaning-
ful solidarity could hardly have existed in the first place. In this way,
50
Frederick Forsyth, The Biafra Story (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 211.
51
Ibid., 159.
52
Earlier Biafran War novels include S. Okechukwu Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun (1971),
John Munonye’s A Wreath for the Maidens (1973), I.N.C. Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sac-
rifice (1974), and Flora Nwapa’s Never Again (1975). Several of the other earlier best
known works about Biafra fell into other genres, like Wole Soyinka’s prison memoir The
Man Died (1972), Chinua Achebe’s short story collection Girls at War and Other Stories
(1972), and Elechi Amadi’s memoir Sunset in Biafra: A Civil War Diary (1973).
53
Chukwuemeka Ike, Sunset at Dawn: A Novel of the Biafran War (Ibadan, Nigeria: Univer-
sity Press, 1976), 17.
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276 Meredith Coffey
the narrator reveals a tension between the Biafran proclamations of

solidarity across ethnic groups and ethnic minorities’ more complex
political needs.
Elsewhere, interactions among the Biafran characters sometimes
highlight their uneasiness with non-Igbo people in Biafra. In the then-
Biafran town of Obodo, local leaders debate whether or not to permit
Fatima, the northern Hausa wife of the Obodo-born Dr Amilo Kanu, to
stay in the town with her in-laws. Many of the meeting’s participants
are troubled by her presence: ‘Just as it was impossible to say which
lizard was male and which was female by merely watching them run
around the house, so it was impossible to tell which foreigner was a true
Biafran and which a Nigerian in Biafran clothing.’54 This argument,
which assumes that an individual is either ‘a true Biafran’ or an impos-
tor, indicates a clear uncertainty about whether non-Igbo people could
be genuinely Biafran. Even if a non-Igbo Obodo resident under consid-
eration was ‘a true Biafran’ (whatever that might mean), that person
would still remain a ‘foreigner’, never truly at home in Biafra. Although
the character in question in this particular instance is a northerner,
rather than a member of an eastern minority group, the community
expresses their concern about her loyalties in broad terms, applicable to
anyone who is not Igbo. In this way, although it never mandates identi-
fying as Igbo as a prerequisite for claiming Biafranness, Sunset at Dawn
suggests that it is at least a preferred qualification.
Putting these more generalized concerns about non-Igbo Biafrans
to the test, the novel presents two minority characters that identify
strongly as Biafrans: a major character named Duke Bassey and an
unnamed old man. Sunset at Dawn never outright states that Bassey is
from a minority group, but it gives several clues to suggest as much: his
surname, fairly common in Southern Nigeria, is not typically Igbo; he
is from Ikot Ekpene, a predominantly ethnically Annang town in what
was briefly Biafran territory; another character, Bassey’s Igbo friend
Professor Ezenwa, implies that Igbo is a learned language for Bassey;
and, as Bassey travels in and around Biafra, he has (justified) anxiety
about being stopped by soldiers from both sides of the conflict.55 Despite
his presumably minority identity, however, Bassey is very much one of
the accepted Biafran characters in Sunset at Dawn. At the end of the
novel, for example, the narrator describes how all the Biafran charac-
ters immediately shift from ‘Biafranism back to Nigerianism’, including
a list of the most important surviving ex-Biafran characters, all Igbo
except for Bassey: ‘Akwaelumo, Duke Bassey, Barrister Ifeji, Onukaegbe,
54
Ibid., 62.
55
‘Ikot Ekpene Local Government Area’, Akwa Ibom State Government Online, last modified
2012, www.aksgonline.com.ws033.alentus.com/lga.aspx?qrID=ikotekpene (accessed
November 10, 2014); and Ike, Sunset at Dawn, 24, 69.
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etcetera’.56 By placing Bassey in the middle of this list, the text includes
him as equally and no differently Biafran from his Igbo peers (even
though they have all just become Nigerians again, in this final post-war
section of the novel).
That said, the text avoids connecting Bassey to any specific ethnic
group and detaches him from his community in Ikot Ekpene. Sunset at
Dawn never names his ethnic identity, which precludes the novel from
making any broader claims about specific ethnic groups’ belonging
within Biafra. Moreover, Bassey’s connections to his imprecisely identi-
fied community of origin are severed over the course of the novel: he
loses touch with his family; he is betrayed by his ‘own people’ (whoever
they might be) to federal Nigerian forces; and he expresses a greater
appreciation for his Igbo Biafran friends than for the childhood friend
who risks his own life to save Bassey’s.57 In this way, the text’s appar-
ent promotion of the official Biafran narrative of territorial inclusion
is framed very carefully, leaving space to question the completeness of
minority inclusion. Attentive readers might ask, for instance, whether
it was essential for Bassey to disconnect from his community in order to
belong as a Biafran. What might at first seem like an obvious illustration
of Biafra’s declared inclusiveness (Bassey’s Biafranism) thus seems to be
a nuanced and somewhat cautious engagement after all.
In contrast with Bassey, an unnamed old man from an unidentified
minority group provides a clear-cut instance of minority exclusion from
the nation. Initially, the man had demonstrated tremendous loyalty to
Biafra: he had served as a Junior Minister, subscribed enthusiastically
to Biafran ideology, contributed materially to the new state, and tried
to persuade members of his own ethnic group to contribute as well.58
Despite his emotional, professional, and material commitments to
Biafra, the man nonetheless goes on to lose his ‘wife and four teenage
sons’ in an ‘unprovoked midnight massacre of his people by a neigh-
bouring Igbo village’ while he was out of town negotiating, ironically,
for relief for Biafran refugees.59 Here, the Biafran nation proves unable
to accommodate the ethnic minority family, and in response to the
devastating tragedy, the man decides to support the federal Nigerian
cause instead. The characters never lament the ‘unprovoked midnight
massacre’.60 They merely treat this change in loyalties as tragic but
understandable: the refugee camp organizers observe ‘his bitterness
towards Biafra’ without any particular reaction.61 The old man’s eager
56
Ibid., 246.
57
Ibid., 171.
58
Ibid., 225.
59
Historically, this tragic turn of events was not unusual. Arua Oko Omaka’s ‘The Forgot-
ten Victims’ (2014) narrates several firsthand accounts of minorities initially loyal to
Biafra who were turned against as tensions developed over the course of the war.
60
Ike, Sunset at Dawn, 225.
61
Ibid.
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278 Meredith Coffey
participation in and support for the state were not enough to sustain his
claim to belonging in Biafra.
Moreover, Sunset at Dawn’s quick introduction to and dismissal of
this unnamed minority character in under two pages stands in par-
ticular contrast to its lengthy considerations of two Hausa women,
Fatima and Halima, as potential Biafrans. Especially given that Hausa
people were commonly perceived as the primary perpetrators behind
the 1966 atrocities and consequently as Biafra’s primary enemy, the
eventual rejection of these women from the Biafran nation is unsur-
prising. What remains noteworthy, however, is the novel’s insistence
on making Fatima and her quest to become Biafran a major plotline
throughout the novel, while relegating the unnamed minority man –
the only character explicitly identified as a from a Biafran minority – to
a brief aside. After all, at stake in the debate over Biafran nationalism
was not whether non-Eastern Nigerians, like the Hausa, were auto-
matically included in a territorially based nation. Rather, the contested
and relevant point was the place of eastern minorities. The emphasis on
Fatima’s nationality makes the discussion of the old man seem all the
more cursory by contrast. Though Sunset at Dawn is arguing against the
prevalent Biafran narrative of inclusiveness, then, it makes this particu-
lar point only briefly.
Even if the text’s critiques of the official line are marked by ambiguity
or brevity, the fact that it does so nonetheless marks the first time that
a pro-Biafran novel seriously remarked on this aspect of the conflict,
highlighting complexities beyond the secessionists’ optimistic claims of
a civic-territorial nationalism unencumbered by the territory’s ethnic
composition. Particularly by dismissing the old man’s claims to Bia-
franness, and by foregrounding and raising questions around Bassey’s
belonging, Sunset at Dawn offers a more nuanced counter-narrative to
any straightforward claim about minority belonging in Biafra.
‘Still, They Looked Unconvinced’: Half of a Yellow Sun’s

Uneasiness about Minorities in Biafra
Like Sunset at Dawn, Half of a Yellow Sun raises concern about the chal-
lenges of incorporating minorities into the Biafran nation. These ques-
tions, however, are largely relegated to the background of the novel’s
approximately 540 pages, as the plot follows the relationships among its
five main characters: the twins, Kainene and Olanna Ozobia; Kainene’s
partner, the white Englishman Richard Churchill; Olanna’s husband,
Odenigbo; and Odenigbo’s servant, Ugwu. With the obvious exception
of Richard, all the main characters are Igbo. While Richard consistently
tries to identify as Biafran, Half of a Yellow Sun never takes his claim
seriously; both Biafrans and Americans poke fun at his insistence on
000 Fal book B.indb 278 13/06/2016 22:06

being Biafran.62 As is the case with the Hausa characters in Sunset at

Dawn, though, the pervasiveness of Richard’s claims throughout the
novel stands in stark contrast to the small number of moments in which
the novel directly addresses questions about ethnic minorities in Biafra.
Brief and uncomfortable, these moments in Half of a Yellow Sun remain
at best unresolved.
Despite the notable academic and popular attention that the novel
has received, few critics have focused on this issue. One exception is
political scholar Kathryn Nwajiaku-Dahou, who has argued that Half
of a Yellow Sun treats the question of ethnic minorities in a complex and
sympathetic way:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel is replete with references to persistent
suspicions of minority commitment to the Biafra cause, constantly hounded
for being saboteurs but equally instrumental in sustaining the Biafran
effort, as professionals or fighters on the frontline. Adichie, while sympa-
thetic to the Biafran cause, critically explores how the saboteur syndrome
was exploited politically, as a convenient way of dealing with all forms of
political opposition to Ojukwu and shielding Biafrans from disillusionment
with a failing and costly war enterprise.63
While I agree that the novel raises concern about the treatment of minor-
ities in Biafra, this assessment nonetheless falls short on a few counts.
As I will show, the novel is far from ‘replete with’ such moments. Even
when it does take on this problem, it never suggests in any unequivocal
way that the accusations against saboteurs are political exploitations.
Its engagement with the problem is both more subtle and more ambigu-
ous than Nwajiaku-Dahou suggests.
A second critic who has taken on the portrayal of ethnic minorities in
Half of a Yellow Sun is literary critic Aghogho Akpome, who has detailed
how ‘specific political persuasions are privileged and reinforced’ in the
novel.64 In a 2013 article, Akpome notes how the novel foregrounds
events and geographies likely to make readers most sympathetic to the
Biafran cause, while pushing mitigating factors largely to the back-
ground. One of his main criticisms, for example, addresses the ‘insuf-
ficient representation of the significance of the discovery of commercial
quantities of crude oil in the minority non-Igbo areas of then Eastern
Nigeria’.65 Akpome identifies some important omissions, but this chap-
ter still contends that the fact that Half of a Yellow Sun acknowledges
ethnic tension within Biafra at all constitutes a significant departure
from most Biafran novels’ treatment of the conflict. This chapter’s read-
62
Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 469, 466.
63
64
Aghogho Akpome, ‘Narrating a New Nationalism: Rehistoricization and Political Apo-
logia in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun’, English Academy Review 30:1
(2013), 28.
65
Ibid., 31.
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280 Meredith Coffey
ing of the novel is therefore situated somewhere in between Nwajiaku-

Dahou’s and Akpome’s: Half of a Yellow Sun does not go so far as to
examine ethnic minorities’ position in depth, as Nwajiaku-Dahou holds,
but it does more critical work than only ‘privileg[ing] and reinforc[ing]’
the Biafran position, as Akpome claims.
Admittedly, though, and in line with Akpome’s critique, some
moments in the novel obscure the presence of ethnic minorities in Biafra.
For example, the novel’s unofficial Biafran War historian, Ugwu, writes:
‘What mattered was that the massacres frightened and united the Igbo.
What mattered was that the massacres made fervent Biafrans of former
Nigerians.’66 Ugwu’s analysis of ‘what mattered’ here is revealing, as it
implies that the experience of the massacres brought together specifi-
cally Igbo victims. That is, although the massacres targeted easterners
of various ethnic backgrounds, Ugwu only mentions the Igbo victims,
according to their ethnic identity in his narrative, and he leaves out
any mention of a territorial identity (for example, mentioning ‘former
Nigerians’, but never ‘former Eastern Nigerians’). Perhaps unwittingly,
Ugwu thus casts Biafra as an ethnocultural nation, and in so doing
participates in the problematic trend of omitting narratives of minority
victimhood in the war, a trend which Arua Oko Omaka has recently
noted.67
The trend lifts for two key moments, however, which explicitly raise
the matter of ‘saboteur syndrome’, both with ambiguous resolutions.
The first of these instances occurs when Kainene’s friend Colonel Madu
reports to Richard: ‘Some saboteurs have been arrested and all of them
are non-Igbo minorities. I don’t know why these people insist on aiding
the enemy.’68 Providing a fictional depiction of the historical antago-
nism toward alleged ‘saboteurs’ based on their ethnicity rather than
their actions, Madu does not question whether these minorities are
truly saboteurs. He offers no evidence of their guilt and refers to them
merely as ‘these people’, as if their minority identity exclusively defined
them and caused them to oppose Biafra. This moment is brief, and
the novel never returns to complicate Madu’s statement. A generally
sympathetic character, Madu is friendly with all the other characters
except for Richard, to whom he is speaking here. Because of their per-
sonal animosity, Richard tends to be wary of what Madu says, but here,
Richard reacts uncritically, thinking to himself: ‘The sacrilege of it, that
some people could betray Biafra.’69 Richard’s unhesitating acceptance
of Madu’s accusation initially seems like an outright refusal to question
the identification of ethnic minorities with traitors to Biafra.
66
John C. Hawley, ‘Biafra as Heritage and Symbol: Adichie, Mbachu, and Iweala’, Research
in African Literatures 39:2 (2008), 21; and Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 257.
67
See Omaka, ‘The Forgotten Victims’.
68
Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 395.
69
Ibid.
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The next part of Richard’s reaction, however, complicates his and

Madu’s assertions. He recalls engaging in a debate with some unnamed
Ijaw and Efik men about minorities’ place in the nation. The men
express concern that ‘the Igbo would dominate them when Biafra was
established’, but Richard insists that such will not be the case and ear-
nestly lists off ‘the army general who was Efik, the director who was
Ijaw, the minority soldiers who were fighting so brilliantly for the cause’.
When Richard concludes his case, the paragraph concisely ends: ‘Still,
they looked unconvinced’.70 Immediately afterwards, a break appears
in the text, ending this piece of the narrative. While Richard is able to
give specific and pertinent examples in favor of his argument, the sec-
tion ends not with his enthusiastic, inclusive view, but instead on an
uneasy note. The well-intentioned but not always astute Richard has
failed to assuage the minorities’ concerns, encouraging the reader to
question whether Richard’s optimism is valid, or whether they, too,
should remain ‘unconvinced’. By promoting skepticism about minority
inclusion in Biafra, the debate casts doubt on the veracity of Madu’s
accusations, but without going so far as to examine ‘how the saboteur
syndrome was exploited politically’, as Nwajiaku-Dahou argues.71
Later in the novel, the most dramatic exposition of the minority ques-
tion takes place in a refugee hospital that Kainene and Richard visit. Dr
Inyang, a doctor from an unidentified minority group, attends a sickly,
pregnant patient.72 The patient suddenly spits in the doctor’s face, call-
ing her a ‘saboteur’, and then exclaims: ‘It is you non-Igbo who are
showing the enemy the way! Hapu m! It is you people that showed them
the way to my hometown!’73 The doctor is ‘too stunned’ to respond.74
The bold Kainene takes action:
The silence was thickened by uncertainty. Kainene walked over briskly and
slapped the pregnant woman, two hard smacks in quick succession on her
cheek.
‘We are all Biafrans! Anyincha bu Biafra!’ Kainene said. ‘Do you understand
me? We are all Biafrans!’
The pregnant woman fell back on her bed.
Richard was startled by Kainene’s violence. There was something brittle
about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she
had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would
destroy her.75
70
All quotations in Ibid.
71
72
As with the old man in Sunset at Dawn, the specific ethnic identity of Dr Inyang is never
revealed.
73
Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 401–402.
74
Ibid., 402.
75
Ibid.
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282 Meredith Coffey
Here, Kainene becomes the only character in Half of a Yellow Sun who
expresses real certainty that all easterners are equally Biafran.
As Dr Inyang is obviously committed to the Biafran cause, working
under difficult conditions at a Biafran refugee camp, the novel offers
no reason to doubt her loyalty. Yet, immediately after Kainene’s reac-
tion, the text neither confirms Kainene’s statement nor just ends the
scene but rather goes on to create a sense of ambiguity around whether
Kainene’s claim that they are ‘all Biafrans’ is correct. The atmosphere
of ‘uncertainty’ is arguably not just due to the timid Richard’s confu-
sion about what to do in this dramatic situation, but also about the
characters’ more deeply rooted uncertainty about Dr Inyang’s Biafran-
ness. The fact that Kainene needs to use ‘violence’ to assert Dr Inyang’s
equal inclusion in Biafra suggests that identifying non-Igbo characters
as Biafrans might require force. This notion calls to mind the minorities
who were forced to move within Biafra’s shrinking territory as federal
forces advanced – cases in which violence kept minorities within Biafran
boundaries, as Kainene is perhaps doing here to emphasize Dr Inyang’s
place within the Biafran nation. In this instance, however, Kainene is
doing violence against another Igbo Biafran, not the minority charac-
ter. Her emphatic inclusion of Dr Inyang thus comes at a cost to a char-
acter who is already assumed to be included based on her ethnocultural
background. This twist suggests that incorporating ethnic minorities
may come at a cost to the majority Igbo, perhaps intelligible as the cost
of shared political power within Biafra.
In addition, Richard identifies Kainene’s action here as part of a
larger project of hers, involving what he calls ‘the erasing of memory’.
While he certainly makes various dubious claims about his own Bia-
franness, Half of a Yellow Sun is sure to rebuke those statements, usually
by having other characters deride him; in this case, on the other hand,
the chapter ends without questioning that Kainene’s violent affirma-
tion of Dr Inyang’s equal Biafranness could, in Richard’s words, even-
tually ‘destroy her’. Kainene has enacted violence upon another Igbo
woman – and a pregnant woman at that, carrying with her a future
Biafran – in order to obtain a goal, the inclusion of the minority woman,
that the novel casts as questionable and potentially dangerous, both to
the pregnant woman and herself. Given that Kainene later disappears,
never to be found by friends or family, an attentive reader might wonder
whether this excerpt is foreshadowing her fate – that is, whether her
emphatic inclusion of Dr Inyang leads to a fragility, as Richard fears,
that ultimately prevents her from succeeding in the risky trading mis-
sion that leads to her disappearance. In any case, as the various layers
of this scene exemplify, the novel’s portrayal of minority characters is
ambiguous at best; it introduces them amidst uncertain circumstances
and never resolves their place in the nation.
Like Sunset at Dawn, then, Half of a Yellow Sun raises the question of
minority belonging in Biafra. That Adichie’s novel acknowledges these
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tensions at all marks a departure from the pro-Biafran narrative’s insist-

ence on Biafran national inclusion, thereby offering a subtle critique of
that narrative. Igbo characters, like the pregnant patient, and minority
characters, like Richard’s minority interlocutors, all express doubt in
Biafran nationalist assertions of genuinely inclusive territorial nation-
alism. Thirty years after Sunset at Dawn, the uneasiness surrounding
the place of minorities in the Biafran nation thus remains present in the
background of pro-Biafran fiction.
Conclusion
By focusing on the brief moments that raise questions about ethnic
minorities’ national belonging in Biafra, this chapter shows that Sunset
at Dawn and Half of a Yellow Sun treat the contentious issue uncom-
fortably. By addressing it at all, however, they gesture towards a skepti-
cism of a genuinely inclusive Biafran nationalism. That is, the novels’
hesitation to fully embrace ethnic minority characters as Biafrans does
not indicate any belief that minorities should not have been treated as
equal members of the secessionist nation, but rather that in historical
terms they often were not treated as such, despite the Biafran leader-
ship’s claims. Though subtle, these critiques nonetheless distinguish
these novels from most other pro-Biafran literature, as they indicate an
acknowledgement that the secessionist nation was not wholly ethni-
cally inclusive.
Moreover, the novels only ever consider individual minority claims
to Biafranness. No group claim is ever made, as Sunset at Dawn’s Duke
Bassey and unnamed old man and Half of a Yellow Sun’s Dr Inyang
belong to ethnic groups that the texts never identify. Without naming
their ethnic groups, the novels do not risk making a claim about Ijaw,
Ogoni, Ikwerre, or any other group of minority people belonging, or
not belonging, in Biafra. Sunset at Dawn’s and Half of a Yellow Sun’s
refusals to reiterate the official Biafran image of a civic-territorially
inclusive Biafran nationalism therefore betray an underlying anxiety
that has endured from the war’s end into the twenty-first century. Yet
the fact that these novels go as far as they do suggests a cautious desire
to acknowledge the complexities of minorities’ circumstances in the
short-lived nation.
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14 Biafra in the Irish Imagination
War and Famine in Banville’s An End to Flight
and Forristal’s Black Man’s Country
Fiona Bateman
The idea of Biafra resonated in Ireland for a variety of reasons and, in

the late 1960s, Biafra was a constant presence in the Irish media. In
this chapter I will consider the representation of the war and famine
in Biafra in Irish fiction, with a particular focus on two texts: the novel,
An End to Flight (1973)1 and the play, Black Man’s Country (1974).2
These two substantial texts from Ireland describe how the situation was
experienced by the Irish people who stayed in Biafra after secession, and
thus provide an alternative perspective on the war. Nigerian authors
produced many works of fiction describing the events in Biafra, both
during and after the war, but these two fictional works, written primarily
for Irish audiences, demonstrate an interest in and familiarity with the
events that is perhaps unexpected from a small, geographically distant,
European country. The existence of these texts demonstrates awareness
of the short-lived Biafran state and the war and famine, but it also raises
questions: do these works provide a commentary on Biafra or merely an
account of Irish men and women abroad? Do these writings explain or
elaborate on the Irish relationship with Biafra?
Ireland’s relationship with Biafra was ambiguous – the popular and
official responses to the breakaway republic were at variance. The Irish
government never formally acknowledged the existence of the Republic
of Biafra, but the Irish people spoke about and thought of Biafra as a
real nation. In official documents, it was carefully noted as ‘Biafra’ or
the Eastern Region of Nigeria, but in the print media quotation marks
were never used around the name. In popular discourse the Biafran
state was accepted as a legitimate and real entity; there was no uncer-
tainty or ambiguity about its existence. It was accepted that ‘there was
a country’.3
Ireland’s relationship with the African continent had developed
during the twentieth century as a result of religious missions to convert
Africans to Christianity:
1
Vincent Lawrence, An End to Flight (Dublin: Faber & Faber, 1973). See p. 290, n. 29.
2
Desmond Forristal, Black Man’s Country (Newark, DE: Proscenium Press, 1975).
3
Chinua Achebe’s memoir of Biafra is titled There Was a Country.
284
000 Fal book B.indb 284 13/06/2016 22:06

Biafra in the Irish Imagination 285
That fire has been kindled in Ireland. If history speaks truly it is the mission
of the Irish to fan it to a bright flame on the hearths of the homeland and to
carry its embers abroad to light up the darkness of paganism.4
Nigeria was considered the jewel in the crown of Ireland’s spiritual
empire, and Eastern Nigeria, where Joseph Shanahan had first estab-
lished a mission in the early 1900s, was a significant area of missionary
activity for Irish priests and nuns. Over the decades, images of Africa
in Irish missionary discourse had mirrored imperial representations,
describing a savage and pagan space in need of civilization and Christi-
anity.5 By the 1960s, these representations were changing and countries
like the newly independent Nigeria were regarded as potential trading
partners rather than as populations of pagans to be converted to Chris-
tianity. Schools had been the primary tool in the process of conversion,
and Irish priests and nuns had been instrumental in educating Nige-
rians towards independence. Their influence was regarded with some
disapproval by the British. A letter from the Irish Ambassador in Lagos
in September 1968 mentions the difficulties being experienced by some
missionaries, which he suspects is partially due to the ‘attitude of our
British friends. For reasons of history probably and old anti-Missionary
feeling they are still hostile to our priests and specially the Holy Ghosts.’6
But the Nigerians were grateful for that education. In a speech delivered
at the Independence Ceremony in 1960, the Prime Minister, Sir Abuba-
kar Tafawa Balewa, spoke about opening ‘a new chapter in the history
of Nigeria’, and he thanked those who ‘had made Nigeria’. Among these
he included the missionary societies, remarking on the ‘countless mis-
sionaries who have laboured unceasingly in the cause of education and
to whom we owe many of our medical services’.7 In schools and par-
ishes in Nigeria, the Irish shared stories of their own country’s struggle
for independence, ideas and ideals that the Nigerians embraced along
with their more formal education. Missionary and teacher Pádraig Ó
Máille recalls in his memoir Dúdhúchas,8 how he explained to his stu-
dents the importance of their poets and intellectuals, and that he read
the poems of Irish patriots like Pearse, McDonagh and Plunkett to them.
When Wole Soyinka was imprisoned for the second time after speak-
ing out against the massacres in the North, the students and lecturers
in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, met in tribute to Soyinka and to
4
Reverend John O’Leary, ‘Vocations’, Pagan Missions 3 (June 1924),78–79.
5
See, for example, missionary magazines including African Missionary, Missionary Annals
of the Holy Ghost Fathers, Pagan Missions, and St Patrick’s Missionary Bulletin.
6
Handwritten letter from Ambassador Paul Keating to Eamon O. Tuathail, Department of
External Affairs, September 12, 1968, National Archives of Ireland, 2000/14/23.
7
Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Mr. Prime Minister: A Selection of Speeches Made by Alhaji
the Right Honourable Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, K.B.E., M.P., Prime Minister of the Federal
Republic of Nigeria (Apapa: Nigerian National Press, 1964), 49.
8
This autobiographical account is written in the Irish language: Pádraig Ó Máille, Dúdhú-
chas (Dublin: Sáirséal agus Dill, 1972).
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286 Fiona Bateman
protest his arrest. The president of the literary society read W.B. Yeats’s
poem ‘Easter 1916’ and, identifying with the Irish experience, said that
the society’s members were observing a ‘terrible beauty’ of their own.9
After secession, Biafran Radio broadcast readings from Irish patriots,
supplied from the missionaries’ own libraries.
In 1966, only six years after Nigerian independence, ongoing inter-
nal problems and political instability made it apparent that there was
a real threat that the Eastern Region might secede. Staff in the Irish
Embassy in Lagos began to make preparations to evacuate Irish citizens
from the area. However when the Republic of Biafra was declared in
May 1967, over 250 Irish citizens chose to remain in the enclave and
refused to leave.10 Of this total, 189 were men and 78 were women; all
but three were missionaries. Apart from the Irish, there were probably
not more than 250 other expatriates in total (mostly Indian, Lebanese,
and about 70 British citizens) remaining in Biafra, so the Irish made
up by far the largest group. The presence of these Irish missionaries in
Biafra was central to the concern for and affinity with the Biafrans that
developed in Ireland.
Biafra’s existence was accepted without question. Missionaries gave
their address as Biafra and young Igbo (and other non-Igbo Biafran)
students in Dublin were described as Biafran rather than Nigerian. In
the Irish media, stories referred to missionaries who had been in Biafra
for 10, 20 or even 30 years, ascribing a historical existence to the new
state. These priests and nuns communicated with family, friends and
colleagues, reporting incidents and atrocities that were not being cov-
ered in the official accounts of the war. For decades, missionaries had
been the main source of information about Africa in Ireland and were
quickly recognized as a reliable source of news there, but now they
also had a role in alerting the international media to the humanitarian
crisis which was unfolding. Irish missionaries were the first to report
food shortages and ask for help to feed the starving population. As early
as December 1967 a report that a ‘group [was] being formed … to raise
funds for medical and missionary supplies to be sent to Biafra’ appeared
in a national newspaper.11 It was not however until the summer of 1968
that the disaster was more widely acknowledged, and the international
media began to report on the famine.
Given the nature of the Irish relationship with Biafra over those
few years, it is almost impossible to discuss or describe Ireland in
1967–1970 without mentioning Biafra. For the reader, a reference
to Biafra conjures up the Ireland of the late 1960s: the sense of help-
lessness that people experienced when faced with images of starving
9
Ibid., 229. The poem is a response to the Easter Rising, an event in Ireland’s campaign for
independence from Great Britain.
10
Irish National Archives, 2002/19/28.
11
Irish Independent, December 13, 1967, 12.
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children, the belief that sending aid could save lives, the conviction that
the Biafrans were ‘like us’ despite the racial difference. The word ‘Biafra’
also reminds people of the endless, disturbing newspaper articles, and
the fundraising drives and social and sporting events linked to a war in
West Africa, when distant events seemed to have become inextricably
linked with their own lives. Sadly for those for whom Biafra was a dream
of an ideal civil society, the word also has connotations of disaster and
starvation.
From a political perspective, the Biafran struggle for independence
had huge resonance in a country that had just commemorated the
50th Anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. In addition, reports of a
developing famine struck a chord, recalling a catastrophic episode in
nineteenth-century Irish history that remained traumatic and unre-
solved. While these coincidences of experience may have been exploited
to encourage Irish support, the similarities were undeniable. In the
emotive context of war and hunger, evident differences in the circum-
stances of the two populations were ignored and the shared experi-
ences became the central focus. A newspaper article declared that, ‘as
descendants of a people who experienced similar suffering at the hands
of a more powerful neighbour, it was only right that there should be a
more ready response from us’.12
The political idealism of the Biafrans was celebrated in somewhat
romantic terms in the regional press with statements such as: ‘Biafra
is a new name in the political sky drawn by those political and military
leaders of the Ibo [sic] people.’13 However most of the public’s atten-
tion was concentrated on the suffering and starving population, and
it was this concern which prompted the massive fundraising efforts
and public manifestations of support for the Biafrans. Biafra became
an obsession, a public preoccupation; it was a constant presence in the
local and national print media, and fundraising events were organized
countrywide. The frustration of watching a distant population starve,
while politicians appeared to do nothing, generated an immense sense
of injustice. The Irish government was accused of ‘apathy’ and of refus-
ing to face the facts, even of doubting the testimony of ‘these coura-
geous priests’.14 Of course, behind the scenes, there was diplomatic
engagement but even that was immensely restrained; at the time it was
all but invisible to the public:
Our Government, in an effort to be neutral, has gone to the other extreme of
inaction … few have the moral status, or the gift of friendship towards Nige-
ria, that we possess. We have allowed these assets to remain idle through,
one feels, the timidity that is so much a part of our foreign policy in recent
12
‘Drumboylan Feis Proceeds For Biafra’, Leitrim Observer, August 10, 1968, 1.
13
‘Biafra and Ireland’, The Kerryman, July 13, 1968, 10.
14
Ciaran Carty, ‘Ireland’s apathy a bitter blow to Biafrans’, Sunday Independent, April 21,
1968, 10.
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288 Fiona Bateman
years … Ireland, too, MUST do all in its power to bring about a cessation of
hostilities.15
In March 1969 the Cork Examiner announced that it was time for
an Irish protest. The ceaseless accounts of atrocities, for which there
was irrefutable evidence from Red Cross teams, missionaries, televi-
sion crews, and newspaper reporters, could not be ignored: ‘For our
own government, the civil war has been an embarrassment.’16 The
writer argued that ‘to remain neutral in such circumstances would be
an indictment of our status as a Christian nation’. ‘Is indifference not
complicity?’, asked a headline in the Irish Press.17 The Irish people deter-
mined that Ireland’s role on the global stage should be as a small nation
that prioritized human rights.
Given the catastrophic events that unfolded, it is no wonder that so
many Nigerian writers have produced texts inspired by events in Biafra.
Comprising poems and short stories as well as novels, these explore the
war from a range of perspectives including those of women, soldiers,
and journalists. However it is unusual to find texts set in Biafra writ-
ten by non-Nigerian authors. One example is South African Charles
Kearey’s Last Plane from Uli (1972), an adventure novel that uses the
location as a backdrop for his characters, who are mercenary pilots.
According to the author’s notes, shortly after what he terms the ‘Bia-
fran-Nigerian shemozzle’, Kearey had met pilot Bill Fortuin who had
flown for the Federal army against the Biafran forces. Together they
decided to ‘do a novel based on the background of the Nigerian – Bia-
fran Conflict’.18 Frederick Forsyth had been in Biafra as journalist and
he drew upon that experience in his novel The Dogs of War (1974)19;
the fictional ‘Republic of Zangaro’, in which the adventure unfolds, is
based upon Equatorial Guinea. This genre of thriller might be described
as postcolonial imperial adventure. The focus is on the action of war
and there is little reference to politics or even to the humanity of the
people involved:
Swinging around I emptied the balance of the magazine of the FN [gun] at
them, firing in short controlled bursts. The firing stopped.
‘Those were Biafrans,’ Christopher shouted.
‘I don’t give a fuck if they were Chinese,’ said Tubby.
‘We shoot every bastard who tries to stop us.’20
15
Evening Herald, June 13, 1968.
16
‘Nigerian War – Time for an Irish Protest’, Cork Examiner, March 12, 1969.
17
Irish Press, April 15, 1969, 3.
18
Charles Kearey, Last Plane from Uli (London: Collins, 1972), ‘Acknowledgement’.
19
Frederick Forsyth, The Dogs of War (London: Hutchinson, 1974).
20
Kearey, Last Plane from Uli, 218.
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In Ireland, the literary response was not extensive, but brief references
to Biafra in works of fiction illustrate the lasting impact of these events
on the Irish imagination.
In short stories, references to Biafra are brief and generally allude to
the famine, rather than the fight for independence. In one short story
by Ita Daly, ‘Aimez-vous Colette?’, the narrator bemoans the hypocrisy
of people in her town and their ‘absurd attempts at liberalism’.21 The
author is commenting on the latent racism in Irish society, mentioning
the ‘collections and fasts outside church doors for Biafrans, when every
mother within twenty miles would lock up her daughter if a black man
came to town’. She includes the clergy in her criticism: ‘And would be
encouraged by their priests to do so.’22 The main character in the story
remembers an African friend she had when a student in Trinity. She has
lost touch with him: ‘I never saw him again. He may have been killed
in the Biafran War (he was an Ibo), or he may be rich and prosperous,
living somewhere in Nigeria, with several wives perhaps.’23 The reference
to his ‘several wives’ plays to the ignorance of Irish people with regard
to the cultures and traditions of Africa. In a novel by the same author, a
character comments: ‘Children are starving in Africa and you’re turning
up your nose at a good tea.’24 This refrain was one with which any Irish
person who was a child in the 1970s would have been familiar. Even long
after the famine had ended, Biafra was commonly referenced as a place of
suffering and seemed linked forever with hunger. In a short story by Helen
Lucy Burke, a character mentions Biafra in that context: ‘“Ha!” said Mrs
MacMahon deeply. “And people starving. Starving. Bangladesh. Biafra.
Here in Rome, even”.’25 Author Michael Collins describes the character
Emmett, alone in a damp, abandoned landscape, who thinks to himself
that if ‘there was a kinship with Africa it was there in this famine death,
in the underbelly of these unknown fields with forgotten cottages, the
hidden past’.26 All of the above references appear in works written some
time after the events in Biafra, and they indicate the traces that Biafra
left in the Irish psyche and in popular moral discourse.
However, in this chapter I want to focus on two Irish works of fiction
based in Biafra, which appeared soon after the Nigeria-Biafra War and
which described the horror from the perspective of Irish characters.
These texts were of course intended for Irish readers and although they
were reviewed widely on their initial publication, and performance in
21
Ita Daly, ‘Aimez-vous Colette?’, in her The Lady with the Red Shoes (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1980),
79–91, here 80.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid., 90–91.
24
Ita Daly, Unholy Ghosts (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 38.
25
Helen Lucy Burke, ‘A Season for Mothers’ in D.J. Casey and L.M. Casey, Stories by Contem-
porary Irish Women (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 13–33, here 21.
26
Michael Collins, ‘The Sunday Races’ in his The Feminists go Swimming (London: Phoenix
House, 1996),189–200, here 196.
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290 Fiona Bateman
the case of the play, they have received little attention subsequently.
The depiction of Biafra in these fictional accounts contributes another
perspective to the story of Biafra: that of the outsider as participant and
witness.
Vincent Banville’s An End to Flight

In 1968, a short story titled ‘Ibo Kwennu’ was published in the ‘New
Irish Writing’ section of the Irish Press.27 It was Vincent Lawrence’s first
published work; he had returned to Dublin after spending five years as a
teacher in Nigeria. ‘Igbo Kwenu’ is a call that requires a response from
those in attendance to recognize each other and their shared ancestry.
It establishes unity and collective will in the audience and in this con-
text it may be a call to solidarity with the Igbo people. In the story, a
group of expatriates in Biafra, including some missionaries, are waiting
to go home as the inevitability of the fall of Biafra becomes apparent.
They discuss their experiences and express regrets; their helplessness
is evident as they make plans to leave. At the end of the story, the main
character, Michael Painter, leaves on a flight from Uli. His Igbo friend
Ben raises his clenched fist and shouts ‘Ibo Kwennwu’. Inside the plane
Painter raises his hand and shouts ‘Ibo Kwennwu, Ibo Kwennwu’, until
his voice ‘was caught in the roar of the plane’s engines’.28
Lawrence subsequently wrote a novel, An End to Flight (1973), set
in Biafra, which he had developed from this short story. ‘Vincent Law-
rence’ was a pseudonym and An End to Flight was re-issued in 2002,
under the author’s real name, Vincent Banville (born 1940).29
The title of the novel is taken from a speech where General Chuk-
wuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwo described Biafra as ‘home’: ‘an end to a
journey, an end to flight’.30 Clearly in the context of Biafra’s demise,
‘an end to flight’ takes on a different meaning than that intended in
Ojukwu’s original phrase, which suggested a sanctuary, the reaching of
a safe place. In fact, Biafra turned out to be the continuation of the jour-
ney, as Ojukwu later acknowledged to Time correspondent James Wilde:
What you are seeing now is the end of a long, long journey. It began in the
far north of Nigeria and moved steadily southward as we were driven out of
27
Vincent Lawrence, ‘Ibo Kwennu’, Irish Press, November 30, 1968, 12.
28
Ibid.
29
Vincent Banville, An End to Flight 2nd edition (Dublin: New Island, 2002). The author
will be referred to as (Vincent) Banville for the remainder of this chapter.
30
General Ojukwu’s words are quoted as an epigraph in the novel. It was a phrase he used
more than once: ‘Biafra came into being for this reason, to put an end to the flight of our
people’, Random Thoughts of C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, General of the People’s Army Biafra, vol.
2 (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 25, 175.
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place after place. Now this path has become the road to the slaughterhouse
here in the Ibo heartland.31
In Banville’s title, the phrase ‘an end to flight’ suggests the grounding of
an idea, an incapacitated bird, the limit of exploration, and a halt to the
endeavor to achieve change.32
The main character in the novel, Michael Painter, is an Irish teacher,
who remains in Biafra after war breaks out. Unlike the missionaries,
who choose to stay not only out of a sense of duty but also, more impor-
tantly, because they feel they belong there, Painter stays out of apathy.
He experiences the events as an outsider, an observer who is curiously
unaffected by the drama of which he has become a part. As in other
fictional accounts, the media interest and publicity surrounding the
war are noted and the suffering of the civilian population is described.
In this novel, additionally, the Irish priests appear as characters whose
roles are changing as the circumstances evolve. Their predicament,
caught between religious duty and humanitarian imperative is evident.
When author Benedict Kiely reviewed the novel, he remarked: ‘Just as
Rudyard Kipling was an interesting by-product of the British Raj, so this
interesting first novel might be described as a by-product of the Irish
Catholic missions to Africa.’33
Painter, who finds himself without a school or students to teach, is
emotionally detached from events. The war, as presented from his apa-
thetic viewpoint, seems hopeless and meaningless. The novel includes
some of the same scenes described in his short story ‘Ibo Kwennwu’.
In the shorter work, Painter is preparing to leave Biafra. He encounters
Irish missionaries, witnesses the aftermath of a market bombing, and
describes scenes at Uli airstrip. In the novel, while the situation deterio-
rates slowly, the tedium of war, the agony of indecision and the sense
of being an outsider are explored. The descriptions of kwashiorkor, of
refugees endlessly moving ahead of the armies, and of poorly-equipped
soldiers, are familiar. In this environment, Painter questions his very
existence and struggles with his inability to feel the outrage or compas-
sion that would seem to be the obvious response to his circumstances.
Painter can be a frustrating anti-hero; he is variously described
by reviewers as ‘emotionally paralysed’,34 ‘indecisive’,35 ‘listless and
31
‘Nigeria’s Civil War: Hate, Hunger and the Will to Survive’, Time, 92: 8 (August 23,
1968), 32.
32
It may also be a reference to the Austin Clarke’s poem ‘Flight to Africa’ (1963), a
critique of the Irish missionary project.
33
Benedict Kiely, ‘Back from hell to tell of horrors’, Sunday Independent, November 25,
1973, 19.
34
Russell Davies, ‘Con-man’s confession’, The Observer, September 2, 1973, 34.
35
Roy Foster, ‘Novels of the Year: A Sort of Vintage’, Irish Times, December 22, 1973, 12.
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292 Fiona Bateman
lascivious’,36 ‘an owlish thug’,37 and an ‘introspective rather pomp-

ous Johnny “Head-in-the-Air”’.38 As Colm Tóibín argues, his struggle
is not so much about survival in a dangerous environment, but a per-
sonal one. It is about his ‘innocence and decency doing battle with his
drunkenness and his laziness; Painter’s longing for something pure is
set against a badness lurking at the edge of his every action’.39 However
as the novel progresses, the struggle for survival becomes a real issue.
Painter is, however unwillingly, compelled to act and make decisions
when his own and the safety of others close to him is at stake. An inter-
esting response to critiques of the character Painter is that of William
Trevor: ‘the faintly unsatisfactory aspect of Painter as a character in a
novel is not so much a failure on Mr. Lawrence’s part as a determina-
tion to stick to the truth: in life this man would be just as blurred at the
edges’.40
With a white man in Africa as the central character, the compari-
sons with Graham Greene are inevitable. Though there are undeniable
similarities, the Irishman in Africa carries a somewhat different set of
historical and cultural baggage than the Englishman. 41 In an inter-
view, Banville acknowledged that even before publication, he realized
that the novel would be compared with Greene, saying: ‘It has a seedy
atmosphere, an African locale, and one of its main concerns is to do
with Catholicism.’42 Apart from these elements identified by Banville,
the character Painter himself invites these comparisons. He shares
much with Greene’s characters, like Querry in A Burnt Out Case (1960),
who is the victim of a terrible attack of indifference. Querry says things
like: ‘I haven’t enough feeling left for human beings to do anything for
them out of pity.’43
Despite Ireland’s long relationship with the African continent, and
especially Nigeria, there were no novels by Irish authors set in African
countries, other than those by Joyce Cary (and he is often referred to as
an Englishman).44 Discussing An End to Flight on radio, Seamus Heaney
and John Horgan noted the atypical setting, commenting that it was
36
Colm Tóibín, ‘Back to a dark Biafran drama’, Irish Times, December 21, 2002, B11 (on the
occasion of the re-publication of the novel).
37
Peter Donnelly, ‘Too much bluff and nonsense’, Irish Independent, October 13, 1973, 6.
38
Mary Lappin, ‘Heaney’s Imprints’, Irish Press, September 22, 1973, 11.
39
Tóibín, Irish Times.
40
William Trevor, ‘New Novels by Irish Writers’, Irish Press, September 1, 1973, 12.
41
For example: Foster, Irish Times, December 22, 1973 and Terence de Vere White, ‘Irish
Publishing: Books of the Year’, Irish Times, December 28, 1973, A19.
42
Interview with John Boland, ‘Writers and the “Clique” Barrier’, Irish Press, November 9,
1973, 11.
43
Graham Greene, A Burnt Out Case (London and New York: Penguin, 1977 [1960]), 50.
44
Often considered as an English writer, Joyce Cary (1888–1957) was born in Ireland. His
novels Aissa Saved (1932), An American Visitor (1933), The African Witch (1936), and Mis-
ter Johnson (1939) were all set in Africa and drew on his experience in the colonial service
in Nigeria.
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refreshing to find an Irish writer ‘walking confidently into the far ter-
ritories of Nigeria instead of concentrating on what Kevin Casey once
described as “moral awakening in a rural setting”’.45 Ironically, it might
be suggested that this is exactly the theme of the novel, but in an ‘exotic’
location with the addition of war and famine. Perhaps only the setting
has changed, the narrative formula has not.
Is Biafra then merely an unusual backdrop for a story about an
Irishman and his internal struggle for meaning? In his review of the
novel, Benedict Kiely notes that there is ‘a lesson we can learn on our
own island’, and again commenting on an account of brutality, that
‘such refinements are not unknown in our own dear land’.46 Rather
than seeing the location as an exotic backdrop, he clearly identifies the
universality of the human condition. He indicates the relevance of this
story to the Irish context of violence and dissent over identity; this dis-
tant land is no more savage than Ireland. Banville himself responded to
this question:
In my novel, Michael Painter, who is a very boring person, is the central
character, and I would hate to think that the plight of the people was being
used, even unconsciously, for a questionable motive, as just a backdrop to
the self obsessed main character.47
The interviewer commented:
What Vincent is very pleased with in his novel is the fact that he caught so
well the atmosphere of the country: indeed, he captures very powerfully and
with great immediacy what it must have felt like to live in that place during
that particular time under those dreadful conditions.48
The reviews were generally encouraging, certainly the story’s loca-
tion provided an unusual and novel setting, and the book won the
1973 Robert Pitman £1,000 literary prize.49 Even those who criti-
cized the writing style (‘it has metaphors the way babies have wind’)
acknowledged that it provided ‘an interesting close-up of the Irish in
Nigeria’ and was ‘clear-sighted about the difficulties of [the] missionary
priest’.50 Seamus Heaney and John Horgan agreed it was ‘an impres-
sive first novel’,51 and Roy Foster commended its ‘grace, economy and
incisiveness’.52
The novel is undeniably set in the specific circumstances of the Bia-
fran situation and the main character endures his personal struggle
45
Lappin, Irish Press.
46
Kiely, Sunday Independent.
47
Interview with John Boland, Irish Press.
48
Ibid.
49
‘Top awards for Irish Authors’, Irish Press, November 9, 1973, 1.
50
Donnelly, Irish Independent.
51
Lappin, Irish Press.
52
Foster, Irish Times.
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294 Fiona Bateman
within that context. While it might be suggested that the same struggle
would have taken place for this character regardless of his location, the
extremes of Biafra prompt a particular set of questions and challenges
for the individual. This is a story of Biafra, but it is a story about the expe-
rience of an ‘outsider’. Painter wants Biafra to be his struggle; he wants
to feel the same emotional attachment to the ideal that he witnesses in
the Biafrans around him, but he cannot. In the absence of that idealism,
that personal connection, the conflict is less romantic and more brutal
and that experience is the story that Banville writes. This novel can
never be comparable to those written by Nigerian authors, whose per-
sonal identity and suffering lay at the heart of the war – this is the story
of the experience of a non-Biafran. Painter is the central character, but
other figures in the story provide a variety of other perspectives. There
are missionary priests, whose lives are invested in this place which they
consider home. Ben Nzekwe, an Igbo man, who has studied in Dublin
and London and returned to his home, is initially unconvinced about
the war but, aware of history and the current crisis, he finally commits
to the cause. Anne Siena, the young American nurse, struggles with the
scale of suffering and a lack of resources. A nameless young woman
from the Rivers works as a prostitute. The residents of Ogundizzy, the
refugees, soldiers, and officers from both armies, as well as schoolboys
and expatriates all feature in the narrative to varying degrees. The war
with all its confusion and suffering provides the dark context for their
interactions.
Early in the novel, Painter is in a hotel with his friend Ben Nzekwe,
when they hear the announcement of Biafran independence on the
radio from which a ‘wheezy disembodied voice emanated, like some-
one crying for help from a long way away’. The ‘small scratchy voices
rose and fell’, the drum solo sounded ‘like pebbles thrown against a
window’, the voices were ‘tinny and indistinct’. Then at one minute to
midnight, there was a hush in the room and Ojukwu ‘slowly and clearly
pronounced the creation of Biafra’. Ojukwu spoke in ‘heavy sad tones’,
his voice faded away, came back fainter. ‘His words whispered through
the silence of the room: long live the Republic of Biafra and may God
protect all who live in her.’53 Then the new anthem was played.
Soon the compound where Painter lives and teaches is taken over as
a military camp. Rather than feeling exhilarated by the danger, Painter
feels as if he is living ‘in a thick cocoon of fetid cotton wool’. He wishes
bombs would fall, believing that the sense of danger might wipe away
the indecision and the self pity in which he is mired.54 In the hospital
ward, his friend Anne, a nurse, laments all the deaths. Painter responds
that the meaning is lost when so many die:
53
Banville, An End to Flight, 2nd edition, 2002, 24–25; all page numbers following are from
this edition unless otherwise specified.
54
Ibid., 42.
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When someone that one knows dies there is sorrow, or rage, or perhaps even
fear. When many people die, it should only be read about in the newspaper,
or heard over the radio. It’s a statistic to be recorded and filed away some-
where in a dusty room.55
The author acknowledges the impact that the photographs and film of
starving and dying individuals had in Ireland and around the world;
without images the numbers would have remained mere statistics.
Painter is incapable of making a decision to leave but has no real
reason to stay. He witnesses the aftermath of a bombing and Banville
accurately notes that ‘the pilots usually chose to drop their lethal car-
goes on market places; bombs were very expensive and they had to be
as effective as possible’.56 The resulting ‘jumbled pile of limbless torsos’
does not affect him: ‘like love, grief also demanded involvement, and
responsibility, and above all, a sense of belonging’.57 Painter feels use-
less; he wants to be somewhere else. He has no words of consolation, no
love, not even anger to contribute.
Describing the attitude of the Igbo people, the author notes the
similarity of the Igbo and the Irish, something that was remarked on a
number of times during commentaries on the war, including by Ojukwu
himself.58 In the novel, the two white teachers are described as ‘differ-
ent’ to the Fathers and ‘in the extroversion of their Irishness resembled
to a great extent the Ibo themselves’.59 Painter recognizes this but feels
that ultimately they are ‘tolerated not accepted’ and finds that the life of
the expatriate is strangely similar to his life in Ireland:
By the time that Painter had arrived in Nigeria in the early sixties most
schools and missions had their own generators, kerosene powered fridges,
running water, film projectors; many of the roads were tarred, and even the
smaller towns had coldstores and cinemas. Painter had come 4000 miles
in search of a new lifestyle, in search of something strange and unfamiliar,
and he had settled into a society no different from the one he had left.60
Home is present in Nigeria, manifested in tea, bacon and cabbage, Irish
friends, and the month-old Irish newspapers. Painter thinks to himself
that his motive for staying is curiosity.61 For him, nothing changes as
the war progresses; he does odd jobs and teaches the soldiers, but he is
reluctant to leave something that he may never experience again.
55
Ibid., 44.
56
Ibid., 53.
57
Ibid., 54.
58
In an interview with Irish journalist, Des Mullan, Ojukwu joked: ‘With them [the Irish]
we have a special attachment – anybody who speaks English in Biafra certainly has a little
bit of Irish spirit in him’. ‘Biafran leader hopes solution to conflict will be found in Africa’,
Irish Independent, August 26, 1968, 5.
59
Banville, An End to Flight, 54.
60
Ibid., 55.
61
Ibid., 58.
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296 Fiona Bateman
In Chapter 12 of Part One, ‘Last Supper’, there is a lighter mood

presaged by an encounter as he walks through the garden, which has
become overgrown and unkempt. He meets two young boys, his servant
Jude’s brothers: Jesus Christ and Mercedes Benz. The anthills have taken
over and the hill is badly fissured by erosion. Leaving this wasteland, he
arrives at a stone bridge at the river, with its ‘sliding current of dappled
water’.62 In the overwhelming bleakness of the novel, the description
of this lovely place is enchanting: ‘Hibiscus grew there, Flames of the
Forest flared in the undergrowth, and there was a cool odour of fern and
damp moss.’63 It is not only the beauty of nature that appeals to him;
there are women washing cassava, singing and talking. He describes
a scene that is peaceful and domestic, with the sound of singing, and
populated by egrets, dragonflies, and huge multicolored butterflies. The
air is scented by large purple flowers.64 For a short while it is as if the
war has never happened.
Inevitably the war approaches Ogundizzy, and the women are moved
out. Painter is asked when he is leaving; still he prevaricates. As the
expatriates who are going home gather for the last time, an Irish priest
wonders what he will do in Ireland, a place he no longer considers his
‘home’. He tells a story about a young chief, whose reluctance to con-
vert to Christianity was because of the three wives he would have to give
up, who would then have no-one to provide for them. This anecdote,
based on an account in a missionary magazine,65 is neatly stitched into
the narrative: the priest jokes that the soldiers had done what God could
not do, for the chief ’s wives were all gone now, ‘and only his first wife,
too old and tired like himself to run, was left’.66
In the second part of the novel, ‘Gethsemane’, the ‘Federal Soldiers’
arrive in Ogundizzy. They meet no opposition, for the Biafran soldiers
had already scuttled their only gunboat and had melted away like ghosts
into the bush and mangrove swamps to the south. There was nothing they
could do; they were outgunned and outnumbered, and to stay and fight
would have been foolish. They were not brave men, but neither were they
cowards; they merely wished to survive. They were farmers and ex-students,
shopkeepers and small businessmen – only the officers were regular sol-
diers – and they knew that the Federals too would run away if they were
not bolstered up by all the magic of British Saladin armoured cars, Russian
mortars, and full bellies.67
This bitter comment on the involvement of international interests in
what Gowon (Nigerian Head of State) continued to call ‘an internal
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid., 95–96.
65
Reverend T.M. Greene, ‘His Viewpoint’, African Missionary (May 1929), 83.
66
67
Ibid., 113.
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affair’ develops into a description of the horror of the war, where fear
and rumor were the forces that moved the refugees:
In the beginning the dream of nationhood had hovered bright and stead-
fast, and perhaps the leaders still believed in it, but now after almost a year
of the reality of war the people saw the dream for what it had become: a
nightmare of confusion, a landscape of surrealism and distortion, where
nature had gone mad and children became gnarled obscene caricatures,
where men and women appeared like walking skeletons, where suppurat-
ing wounds and charred emaciated bodies were ordinary sights, and where
people wept, not out of the depth of their anger, but rather out of useless-
ness and self pity.68
Painter’s continued presence in Ogundizzy is an inconvenience for
Captain Basanji of the Federal army. Painter acknowledges that he is
only there because of his inability to decide, his prevarication; he is no
martyr. The Captain is there because he is ambitious; he wants to be a
hero. In a reference to the widespread media coverage of the war, he
acknowledges: ‘World opinion seems to matter in modern wars. This
one is particularly well publicized.’69 The Captain is volatile, violent,
and bitter; he resents the influence of the colonizer on his country.
Despite the danger, Painter seems confident that he will not be killed:
‘you cannot afford to have me killed … it’s not as easy to explain away
the body of a dead whiteman as it is of a black’.70 In further conversa-
tions, the Captain’s antipathy to the ‘whiteman’ is elaborated, and he
makes no distinction between the Irish and the British: ‘You are a prod-
uct of that culture which has been imposed upon us Africans. You have
succeeded so well that now we must try to live like you, yet inside we are
hollow shells.’ He also describes Africans as being ‘victims’, and asks:
‘Are we to be forever like small children?’71
The description of the priests (Manton, Osserman and Sanson) and
their involvement with the airlift at Uli, provides a compelling account
of the fragility of this lifeline. Osserman’s admiration of the Biafrans,
acknowledges the tenacity and ingenuity with which they continued
to survive:
They were fighting a war in which they were heavily outnumbered, both in
manpower and in weapons, a war which was spread over a vast amount of
territory, and yet they managed to operate a system of government which
worked, and a fabric of social life which varied little from that which had
gone on before hostilities had commenced.72
68
Ibid., 114.
69
Ibid., 120.
70
Ibid., 124.
71
Ibid., 147.
72
Ibid., 157.
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298 Fiona Bateman
The airstrip at Uli is vividly depicted. Small details such as the ‘smoky
glow’ of the hissing lamp, and the embarrassment the priests feel when
ordered to remove their white soutanes, provide an impression of
authenticity. There is a mention of plane wreckage, camouflaged but
still visible beside the runway, and graves with white wooden crosses:
a reminder of how hazardous this relief effort was. The ring of land-
ing lights is switched on briefly ‘like a frieze of candles held by pilgrims’
and then off again.73 Father Manton is led away, ostensibly to minister
to a sick man, but is transported to Ogundizzy, where explosives are
discovered in his Mass box and he is killed. Later that day the Biafrans
recapture the village, and the Nigerian captain is taken and tortured by
the people who blame him for Manton’s death.
Painter’s physical deterioration is described, as he abjectly cooks a
mouldy yam. His degradation of body and spirit is absolute. When he
hears that the Biafrans are back and of Manton’s death, his reaction is
muted: ‘I’ve been cured of feeling’, he explains to the Biafran Colonel.74
Ben, now a soldier, but one ‘too valuable to risk being shot at’,75 has
returned to take him to Uli; the time has come for Painter to leave. First
they attend the priest’s burial in the garden behind the house which
did indeed resemble a cemetery. The sticks that had once supported cassava
stalks leaned sideways like broken crosses, and the cement blocks which
were scattered about might have been fallen headstones … the crowing of a
cock from somewhere in the town was like the exhumation of a darker and
more primeval sorrow.76
The domestic landscape of Biafra has become a graveyard. Ben tries to
remember the dead priest’s face, but he cannot: ‘he always had diffi-
culty in remembering the features of whitemen – they seemed so alike
somehow’.77 The clay thudding on the coffin sounds like ‘the dull slaps
of exploding mortar shells’.78
Ben has lost patience with Painter’s continuing and fruitless search
for meaning, dismissing him with these words: ‘You epitomise for me the
kind of etiolated thought and culture that the whiteman has brought
to my country. Go! Leave us to find our own destinies.’79 They travel
together to Uli in a lorry and, looking back at Ogundizzy, Painter feels
nothing: ‘he had put down no roots’.80 On the journey, Painter spots
the Rivers girl, a prostitute they have both known and one of the few
people he seems to care about; he insists that she travel in the lorry with
73
Ibid., 155–158.
74
Ibid., 189.
75
Ibid., 192.
76
Ibid., 203.
77
Ibid.
78
Ibid., 204.
79
Ibid., 211.
80
Ibid., 212.
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them. Soon afterwards mortars explode and the lorry crashes leaving
the driver dead and Ben injured.
At this point, Painter feels a blaze of desperation: ‘all of the fear and
hesitation seemed to lift from his heart, and he felt a strength in the very
essence of his being which refused to accept any further prevarication
or excuse’.81 They see soldiers approaching and Painter wants to take
Ben with him, but Ben resists. Painter says: ‘I have dreamed of freedom,
just as you Ibos have dreamed of it. It is my war as much as yours.’82
The girl walks away toward the soldiers and, watching her, Painter real-
izes she is pregnant. The distraction she creates provides Painter with a
chance for escape and he drags Ben away, and then carries him through
the bush. They eventually reach the river where he steals a small canoe.
Fishermen find them drifting and bring them to Ogundizzy lake, but Ben
has died.83
In the first edition of the novel (Lawrence, 1973), the final section
of the novel, ‘Epilogue – Resurrection’, transports the reader abruptly
from Ben’s tragic death in Biafra to a scene in a public house in Dublin, a
year after Painter has returned home. The atmosphere of a cold wet Jan-
uary night, contrasts with the warmth and noise of the lounge, and the
normality of the situation contrasts with the chaos of the earlier pages.
A reporter meets Painter, and is curious about the effect his experiences
have had on him. Painter confesses that he has come to the realization
that he has not changed in any way:
On the plane on the way back to Ireland I experienced a great depth of
despair. I believed that my life was changed utterly, that what I had seen and
been responsible for, whether directly or indirectly, was so traumatic that it
would live with me for the rest of my days. I was wrong. Nowadays I scarcely
think about what happened in Biafra.84
Robinson, the reporter, quotes something Painter said a year earlier
about Biafra: ‘Biafra is a dream of freedom. It is of the spirit and does
not depend for its existence on any material reality. It will never die as
long as the Ibo nation lives, for too much pain and suffering went into
its creation.’ Painter’s response is: ‘Did I really say that?’ He dismisses
his own words as having no meaning and asserts that the ‘people were
tired of the war, they would have given up long ago if their leaders had
allowed them’. Robinson argues with him: ‘But you can’t just dismiss
the whole thing like that.’ Painter replies:
I can if I wish … I’m tired of Biafra, I’m tired thinking about it and I’m tired
talking about it. Soon it will cease to exist and it will disappear from the
news and you and your readers will lose interest in it. There is no freedom,
81
Ibid., 217–218.
82
Ibid., 220.
83
Ibid., 226.
84
Lawrence, An End to Flight, 215.
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300 Fiona Bateman
no secure harbour – there is only a dull structure of imposed and artificial

order which keeps on repeating itself without end.85
His disenchantment, which shocks the reporter, is an acknowledge-
ment of reality when romantic idealism for the war has faded. It is an
accurate representation of the Irish public’s disengagement with Biafra.
This first edition of the novel ends with a long paragraph relating the
end of the war and the aftermath. Describing ‘the dream which had
become a nightmare’ in a ‘torn and devastated place’, the writer men-
tions the cynicism of the foreign powers who had helped to prolong the
conflict and now sought to take the credit for ending it. The final words
‘Biafra belonged only to history …’ seem to be a lament.86
In the second edition of the novel, that rather emotive paragraph
comes immediately after Ben’s death, and it is followed by an epilogue,
‘Resurrection’, which describes Painter’s return to Dublin:
In the beginning, after his return, he talked interminably about his experi-
ences in Nigeria, but he soon realised that people were more taken up with
their own preoccupations nearer home. With the collapse of the Biafran
secession, the country became divided into twelve federal states, with mili-
tary rule the order of the day. Yet ethnic and religious tensions remained,
the threat of violence was ever present, and the whole economy continued
to be based on a system of bribery and favouritism that earned for the coun-
try the title of one of the most corrupt places in Africa.87
Nightmares wake Painter for a time, but gradually these too have eased.
Decades later, in a different Ireland, Painter becomes involved with an
agency that helps settle Nigerian refugees, as ‘a form of catharsis’.88
Though dulled by time, his experiences in Biafra are still affecting him
and this activity provides an opportunity of some ‘little redemption for
all the emotive consternation of that troubled time’.89 Despite his insist-
ence on his inability to become emotionally involved, it is apparent that
the experience has had a lasting effect. A meeting with the son of the
Rivers girl provides a more personal ending, perhaps a more satisfac-
tory (if unlikely) closure for the character. Their encounter also intro-
duces the effect of time on perception and memory, and the capacity a
changing global situation affords to revisit events and provide alterna-
tive interpretations. As William Trevor commented:
This is a gloomy novel, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the world which
permitted the Biafran War is often a gloomy place. If for nothing else, novels
as good as this one are necessary to remind us that life is not all soft soap
85
Ibid., 215–216.
86
Ibid., 217.
87
88
Ibid., 232.
89
Ibid.
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and panel games. The very hardness of the book is an achievement in itself:
the Biafran barbarities cannot be shrugged off, a point that Mr. Lawrence
adroitly makes by causing his hero to do so.90
Forristal’s Black Man’s Country

In contrast, the second substantial Irish text set in Biafra is a play, Black
Man’s Country (1974), which is much lighter in tone, though it includes
some dark moments. A sadness exists at its core, which befits any fic-
tional work set in a time of war. The Irish men and women at the center
of the play represent different generations of missionaries and the char-
acters, both Irish and Igbo, demonstrate the crucial changes in mission-
ary attitudes and practice that had been evolving since the 1920s, and
which were forced into the public arena by the events in Biafra.
The play was written by Desmond Forristal (1930–2012), a priest
who was also a writer and filmmaker. He visited Biafra in February
1968 to make a documentary, Night Flight to Uli, which was part of the
Radharc series for RTE, Ireland’s national television station. In August
1973, it was announced that a new work about the Biafra War by
Desmond Forristal, the ‘Radharc priest’ had been accepted for produc-
tion by Hilton Edwards of the Gate Theatre. Radharc was a production
company established in 1962 by Archbishop McQuaid of Dublin.91
The film-making priests produced over 400 documentaries on social,
political, and cultural topics between 1962 and 1996. These influential
and groundbreaking films, which were made from a Catholic perspec-
tive, documented a modernizing, changing Ireland but also examined
the changing character of the Catholic Church around the world. In
Black Man’s Country, Forristal foregrounds the debates about the role
of modern missionaries which the Biafran War had raised in Ireland.
It should be acknowledged that while Irish fiction includes many mis-
sionary characters, authors have rarely described the missionaries
in their mission locations. Rather these representations have been of
retired missionaries, or those ‘home for a visit’, or as distant, absent
family members.92 In short stories the missionary appears as a liminal
character – belonging in neither his native Ireland nor in his adopted
African country.93
Forristal’s second play, Black Man’s Country appeared in the Gate
Theatre in the spring of 1974. Hilton Edwards, founder of the Gate and
a well-respected theatrical producer, produced the play. It was revived
90
Trevor, Irish Press.
91
Radharc is the Irish word for ‘view’.
92
Fr Jack in Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), set in 1936, is one example of a
returned missionary in Irish literature. He has been changed by his experiences and he
misses his African ‘home’ and ‘family’.
93
For example, see short stories by Mary Lavin and Maeve Brennan.
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302 Fiona Bateman
again that October, presumably due to a successful initial run. A review

in The Furrow in 1974 described it as ‘maybe not a masterpiece’ but
‘a play that is totally absorbing, witty, explorative, and often extremely
moving’.94 The two-act drama is set in ‘the priests’ house in Uzala in
Eastern Nigeria, during the years 1967–1970’. The first act opens in
the period immediately before the announcement of Biafran independ-
ence, and by the second act the closing stages of the war are approach-
ing. The main characters are priests and nuns (Irish and Nigerian) and
‘the Bishop’, and the play reveals and describes their experience of the
war. Though short, it is rich with ideas and detail, describing and rais-
ing many questions about a crucial point in Irish missionary history.
The soundtrack was noted by all who reviewed the play. The produc-
tion used tapes of what are described as ‘jungle sounds’, recorded by
the Radharc team while in Biafra. These tapes provided an atmospheric
background and, at least to Irish ears, an authenticity, which ‘made
you feel the sweat trickling between your shoulder-blades’.95 Another
reviewer, a journalist who had been in Biafra, quibbled with the
soundtrack. Recalling no drums there, he said everyone was too busy
listening for aeroplanes and bombs. However he did remark that the
‘Biafra of the play was the same Biafra I was in during the war – and the
author managed to get a remarkable synopsis of all the attitudes to the
war into the first 15 funny minutes of the play’.96 He also commented
on the nostalgia in the production, mentioning props which included
cartons of liquor plastered with Red Cross stickers. This reviewer felt
that all parties were treated with commendable charity: ‘it can do noth-
ing but good for us to see a charitable rather than a vindictive treatment
of history’. Shortly after the war had ended, an alternative interpreta-
tion of the events cast Ojukwu as a power-hungry oligarch and placed
oil interests at the heart of the secession. Irish journalist John Horgan
remarked in an article on January 28 1970: ‘In some quarters he is
already being depicted as a kind of black Hitler – as a leader who
enslaved his people in his own quest for power’. He continues: ‘Nobody
who claims to have known him well would agree with this assessment
of him, although it is difficult enough nowadays to find people who are
prepared to defend his memory.’97 To ‘Quidnunc’, the play served as a
reminder of the idealism of the Biafran dream. Within an entertaining
drama, Forristal efficiently introduces and lays out to the audience the
various debates regarding nationalism, identity, and change prompted
by events in Biafra. His characters draw comparisons with Irish history
as the public discourse of the time had done.
94
Val Mulkerns, ‘Stage and Screen’, The Furrow, 25:6 (June 1974), 323–325, here 323.
95
Ibid.
96
‘Quidnunc’, ‘An Irishman’s Diary’, Irish Times, May 24, 1974, 13.
97
John Horgan, ‘Ojukwu, brutal fall of a leader’, Irish Times, January 28, 1970, 7.
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Forristal visited Biafra only briefly, but he traveled to many African

countries with Radharc. As a priest, he was familiar with the activities
of the Irish missionary movement. At a time when priests and nuns
were still viewed with some reverence, an interviewer suggested to him
that the play was ‘very revealing about the way priests and nuns talk
and behave when they are alone together’. Certainly the play explores
the humanity, emotions, and personal lives of the characters through
their interaction with each other. At the time, this was a side of the
religious life that was usually hidden and not even considered by the
general population (a situation perhaps exemplified by the humorous
title of a 1971 Radharc documentary titled Are Nuns Human?). Forristal
acknowledged that it was easier for him ‘to write truthfully about the
clergy than for a lay person’ and he professed that his aim in writing
plays was to ‘make people think or look at things in a new way’. He
denied that the play had any message, but hoped it might put things in
perspective. He admitted that he had ‘felt great sympathy for the Irish
missionaries in Eastern Nigeria at that time’ and still did: ‘I hope the
play will be accepted as an accurate indication of the way they felt, and
sacrificed themselves at that time’, he said. He also commented, perhaps
more controversially, that the ‘Nigerian nation did become quite con-
tentedly united again in the end’.98
At a time when attitudes to the Catholic Church were changing in
Ireland, his insights into the complex politics of missionary activity,
especially in a conflict situation, provided a sympathetic account of
flawed personalities, whose dedication was total. The many comedic
moments which occur during the interactions between the characters,
provide a lightness and normality in an unimaginably difficult situa-
tion. In the preface, the playwright presents his perspective that: ‘mis-
sionaries are in some ways the saddest victims of the war. Because they
had the misfortune to be on the losing side of the front line, they are
shut out forever from the land to which they had given their hearts and
lives’.99 He dedicated the play to those missionaries.
It is apparent that the Irish missionaries, who remained in Biafra after
secession, did so because it was their home and abandoning their parish-
ioners was unthinkable. While not all of them supported Biafran inde-
pendence, they were sympathetic and supportive of the Biafran people.
The missionaries told the true story about civilian bombings (denied by
the Federal army) and the worsening food shortages to the media. The
missionaries ignored what was considered to be the ‘good of the Church’
and followed their instinct to help and alleviate suffering. Media reports
on their activities arranging relief supplies drew the disapproval of the
Federal authorities. In February 1968, Father O’Reilly, the Superior
of St Patrick’s Missionary Society, met Mr O’Shaughnessy of the Irish
98
‘Kay Kent talks with Father Desmond Forristal’, Irish Times, April 30, 1974, 10.
99
Forristal, Black Man’s Country, 4.
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304 Fiona Bateman
Department of Foreign Affairs and confirmed the Society’s support of

Government policy. O’Shaughnessy reported that ‘whatever their private
sympathies might be he thought it was important not publicly to take
the side of Biafra’ and that it was a ‘pity some missionaries had done
so’.100 The missionaries were acting independently of their superiors and
ignoring the advice of their bishops and the heads of the missionary
orders that they should be less involved in the situation. Their point of
view was that ‘only the hireling flees when his sheep are in danger’.101
In meetings with Nigerian officials from the Dublin embassy, the
Tánaiste (deputy Prime Minister), Mr Frank Aiken, was careful to
emphasize that there were only a few individual missionaries who were
‘involved politically but not the religious Orders themselves, who, as he
knew, were against political interference, and he had personal knowl-
edge of this from their Superiors’. 102 It was apparent that missionary
work was changing; in raising questions about their roles, the war and
famine were providing a challenge to traditional vocations and the vow
of obedience.
Act One of Black Man’s Country opens just before Biafra has been
declared an independent state. It is evident that political tensions have
been mounting and in the opening scene, an exchange between Cyprian
(described as an Igbo youth of about 18, who is employed by the priests)
and Fr Joe Mitchell immediately introduces the question of identity and
nationalism. Cyprian denies he is Nigerian, insisting that he is an Igbo
man, a Biafran. Mitchell, a man about 50 years old and the central
figure in the play (described by Mulkerns as a ‘whiskey priest’103), states:
‘There is no such place as Biafra. Is not, was not, and never will be.’104 Fr
Zachary Azuka enters and joins the conversation, declaring that it was
the Irish ‘who taught us the idea of nationhood’ and that ‘nationhood
depends on the heart and will of a people, not on boundaries drawn
on a map by British colonialists’.105 Mitchell refuses to accept what he
says, denying that this is nationalism and asserting that it is tribalism,
asking: ‘Well, why do you behave like children?’ Zachary responds: ‘Is
there any reason why your freedom is worth fighting for and ours is
not?’106
The arrival at the mission of a new, young priest, Father Anthony
O’Brien, full of idealism and enthusiasm, provides an excuse to describe
100
Notes on a meeting, February 13, 1968, National Archives of Ireland, 2000/14/20.
101
Farrell Sheridan C.S.Sp., pages from Missionary Annals (April-May1968), National Ar-
chives of Ireland, 2000/14/21.
102
Notes on a meeting between Brigadier Ogundipe and Frank Aiken on September 17,
1968, National Archives of Ireland, 2000/14/24, VI.
103
Mulkerns, ‘Stage and Screen’, 324.
104
105
Ibid., 7.
106
Ibid. A similar reference to Africans being treated like children by the Europeans is made
in Banville, 147.
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the growing militarization and the roadblocks which are a recent devel-
opment. The massacres of Ibos in Northern Nigeria are referenced,
reminding the audience of events which have led to the imminent
secession. During the conversation, Zachary paraphrases Shakespeare,
leading the Bishop to acknowledge the comparison of the Ibos to the
Jews – a common trope of the time.107
The young O’Brien is also regaled with jokes about Mother Gertrude
or ‘galloping Gertie’108 as she is referred to, a nun who is described later
in the play as ‘tough as an old crocodile and just about as lovable’.109
The history of the mission is recalled as Fr Mitchell relishes telling the
new arrival about Mother Gertrude’s campaign to clothe the natives; he
jokes about a consignment of knickers in a story which he has clearly told
before.110 He also refers to her disparagingly as a ‘crazy old bag’111 and
a ‘filthy-minded old faggot’.112 However, later in the play, a deep affec-
tion for her based on their shared vocation and commitment, becomes
apparent. In his anecdote, he makes fun of the discourse typical of the
missionary magazines (and no doubt familiar to the theatre audience)
in his description of ‘Nigeria as it was in those benighted days, a land
darkened by idolatry and superstition, a land of primitive lust and pagan
passion’, recounting a journey through ‘trackless jungles and snake-
infested swamps, fighting off lions and tigers and hostile tribesmen’.113
During their conversation, the young priest notices the racial dis-
tinction being made between European and African sisters by the older
priest, and challenges him. He cannot accept the casual racism, which
was an unfortunate element of the traditional missionary project. The
reluctance of the older Irish missionaries to leave and to hand over the
Church to African clergy is highlighted, and is compared with the atti-
tude of the colonial powers:
Mitchell: [T]he Church couldn’t survive here without the white missionaries.
O’Brien: How do you know until you’ve tried? That’s the argument the colo-
nial powers used. They said the Africans weren’t ready to govern themselves.
Mitchell: … Look at this damn country. Only barely independent and it’s
about to have a civil war.
O’Brien: … We Irish are hardly in a position to throw stones.114
When the Irish Bishop announces his retirement, Mitchell is shocked
that Zachary is named as the new bishop; the process of Africanizing
the Church in Nigeria is underway.
107
Ibid., 10. Also referred to in Banville, 157.
108
Ibid., 9.
109
Ibid., 11
110
Ibid., 12
111
Ibid., 27
112
Ibid., 30
113
Ibid., 12.
114
Ibid., 13.
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306 Fiona Bateman
The complex question of vocation is also addressed in a series of

interludes that interrupt the chronological narrative. The young Mitch-
ell converses with the Bishop, and it becomes clear that his decision
to become a priest and missionary was somewhat conflicted. Some of
these interludes are set in the past, others are future projections; all
reveal ongoing tension between the parish priest and his Bishop.
A year later, while the first anniversary of Biafran independence is
being celebrated, a young nun, Sister Eileen, describes the effects of
kwashiorkor on children: ‘arms and legs like matchsticks and tummies
all swelled out’.115 Images of starving children in Biafra were widely dis-
seminated during the war and had a powerful impact on the Irish public,
reminding people of Ireland’s ‘Great Hunger’ in the nineteenth century,
when similar scenes had unfolded. O’Brien enters and confidently (and
naively) announces that ‘we are now going to win the war’.116 He is
cautioned by Mitchell that ‘it’s not a missionary’s job to get mixed up
in politics’.117 Mitchell reminds the younger priest that they are essen-
tially outsiders: ‘We are foreigners in a foreign country.’ He concedes
that ‘maybe we would like to see the Ibos winning’, and continues, ‘but
there’s a fifty-fifty chance they’ll lose. And what will happen to us then?’
He tells O’Brien that if they let themselves become identified with the
Biafran side, they’ll be thrown out ‘and fifty years of missionary work
will have gone for nothing’. O’Brien retorts: ‘So what do we do? Do we
let ten million people die of starvation while we are poncing around in
our political chastity belts?’118 This was the real dilemma faced by the
missionaries. Advice from their orders and from the official church was
to remain uninvolved, but faced with starving people, the instinct was
to help. The moral imperative was greater than ‘the good of the Church’
and so missionaries defied instructions and participated in the airlift of
supplies and the distribution of food and medicines. The point is being
made in this exchange that they were aware of the consequences that
might (and did) follow. All the missionaries remaining in Biafra at the
end of the war were deported, and had to leave Nigeria, a place many of
them considered ‘home’, forever.
In the play, practical discussions about the airlift (‘anything that’s
needed to keep us going apart from military supplies’),119 warehouses,
and transportation take place alongside more philosophical debates
about politics, identity, and nationalism. The war is not just a backdrop
of explosions and suffering, the real issues behind and emerging from
the conflict are examined. Other concerns, pertaining specifically to the
missionary life including vocations, obedience, and celibacy are also
115
Ibid., 24.
116
Ibid., 25.
117
Ibid.
118
Ibid.
119
Ibid., 26.
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covered, some more obliquely than others. Unlike Painter in An End to

Flight, who is a witness to suffering but is paralysed by his inability to
feel any emotion, and despairs at his uselessness, O’Brien admits that
he is enjoying the war in a way. He asks Eileen whether she does not
even feel ‘a bit of pride at being in at the birth of a nation and sharing
the glory as well as the pain?’120 He acknowledges that just by bringing
in food they are ‘taking sides’ but has evidently enjoyed the journey he
made back from Orlu with the Caritas sticker on the car ‘like a presiden-
tial banner’, and the cheering, waving people who acknowledged his
passing by.121 O’Brien chooses to see the renaming of the broken-down
old eating house in honor of the birthplace of the parish priest: the ‘Lis-
doonvarna Imperial Ice Cream Parlour’, as an acknowledgement that
they have become a ‘part of the people like we never were before’.122
His romantic view of the war is countered by Eileen’s awareness of the
reality – death and suffering. She rejects his assertion that ‘it’s suffer-
ing that binds us together’, that the missionaries have become ‘part of
Biafra’s history’.123 She declares: ‘personally I think I can do more good
tying bandages than bleeding all over the pages of history books’.124
The full implication of O’Brien’s blithe assertion that ‘sooner or later,
some of us will be injured or even killed and it will be very sad and all
that’, is something he has to deal with very soon afterwards when Eileen
is killed by machine-gun fire. She dies with a smile upon her lips, ‘just
like Robert Emmet’, her grief-stricken companions comment.125
Act Two opens like the first with a conversation between Cyprian and
Fr Mitchell. It is another year and a half later and the house is dilapi-
dated, still bearing the scars of the mortar attack. Cyprian wants to
leave, but Mitchell argues that they need him: ‘They are your people,
Cyprian, and it’s you they need to help them.’126 O’Brien arrives with
some supplies, and it transpires that he has been selling bottles of whis-
key which were intended for Mitchell in order to buy food. ‘I thought
the yams were good for the kids. And I thought the whiskey was bad for
you. That’s all’, he explains.127 Mitchell is annoyed with him, but recog-
nizes that O’Brien is under pressure and questions the younger priest,
who admits that he is not sure how much longer he can carry on. ‘We
feed them today and tomorrow they’re hungry again. When is it ever
going to stop?’128 He is working very hard, and his physical condition is
120
Ibid., 28.
121
Ibid.
122
Ibid.
123
Ibid.
124
Ibid., 29.
125
Ibid., 33. ‘Bold Robert Emmet will die with a smile’ is a line from a song commemorating
the Irish patriot and rebel, who was sentenced to death for his activities.
126
127
Ibid., 37.
128
Ibid., 38.
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308 Fiona Bateman
deteriorating. He tells Mitchell about a hungry young Biafran soldier he

encountered at a roadblock, with a wooden dummy gun and no boots.
He gave the man some food and both worn out, they cried together.
Mitchell tells him he needs a holiday, he’s heading for a ‘crack-up’.129
However Mitchell himself does not want a break, this is the only place
he feels ‘at home’.
When O’Brien leaves, the Bishop ‘appears’ and he and Mitchell have
another of their ‘conversations’. This scene is set in the future, and
Mitchell is in Ireland, having returned there on holiday. He wants to
‘get back to work’ but the Bishop is preventing his return to Biafra. The
Bishop points out that they do not want people ‘out there’ who are not
‘really needed’: ‘An Irishman needs things a Biafran doesn’t. To keep
one missionary alive, five babies may have to die. We have to be sure
that every priest and nun in there is really indispensable to the work.’
The Bishop tells him that he is needed now in Ireland, as ‘one of the
heroes of Biafra’ he can have an immense influence for good.130 Then
the conversation suddenly shifts back in time, to when Mitchell was still
at school, aged 17 years, discussing his future. The Bishop leaves.
The sound of a car pulling up outside is heard, and Zachary the new
Bishop enters to tell them that the Nigerian army has broken through
and will be there by first light in the morning. Mitchell presumes that
they will just pack up and move to another parish, but Zachary is intent
on bringing them to Uli airstrip. Mitchell is not happy: ‘We’ve just been
served with deportation orders by His Lordship the Bishop,’ he tells
O’Brien.131 Zachary tells him that it is for their own good. But Mitchell
is bitter and retorts angrily:
It makes a nice variation. It sounds better than saying: ‘we don’t need you
any more. You’ve given us the best years of your life and built us up and
made us what we are and now we don’t need you any more. In fact, we
prefer not to have you around, reminding us of how much we owe you, how
you educated us and civilised us and coaxed us down out of the bloody trees.
So for your own safety, get your fat white arse out of here before it’s shot
off.’132
Zachary remains calm, explaining that the war is over. The Biafran
army is short of weapons, ammunition, footwear and food. Zachary
says: ‘If you were an Ibo, if you really knew the people and understood
their language, you’d know it was the end of Biafra.’ Most of the other
missionaries are already on the way to Uli. Mitchell asks what will
happen to those who do not get away, and Zachary replies that some of
them may get shot, those that survive will probably be put in prison and
129
Ibid., 39.
130
Ibid., 41.
131
Ibid., 43.
132
Ibid.
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afterwards deported: ‘So it’s simpler to go now.’ Mitchell announces that

he will stay: ‘We’ve stuck with the people through the good times and
the bad and I think we should stick with them to the end. Even if we’re
arrested or shot, they’ll remember that some of us stayed.’133
O’Brien leaves with Zachary. It transpires that Mother Gertrude has
stayed too: ‘After all my time in Nigeria, I’m not going to sneak away
in the dark. If they want to throw me out, they can look me in the eye
while they’re doing it.’134 She trusts the younger Nigerian sisters to
carry on the work: ‘They don’t need me anymore.’135 She has brought
tea and sandwiches and they are sitting together sharing the picnic
when a soldier arrives. Gertrude is not intimidated by his automatic rifle
and quizzes him about where he went to school and who taught him.
‘She didn’t teach you much manners, did she?’ she challenges him.136
Cyprian appears; he has returned to help and Gertrude hands him the
list of patients and keys. Mitchell and Gertrude leave with the soldier
and, after a moment, Cyprian sits in Mitchell’s chair.
Just before Gertrude’s arrival, Mitchell has had another exchange
with the Bishop, this time the conversation takes place in the future after
he has arrived back in Ireland following his arrest and deportation. The
Bishop did not meet him at the airport, as he was at cocktail party in
the Nigerian Embassy: ‘Very pleasant it was too, the word Biafra was
never mentioned even once.’137 There was no official welcome for the
missionaries on their return to Ireland and the Bishop comments: ‘You
are just a tiny bit of an embarrassment at this stage. The war is well over
now and the wounds are healing and no-one wants unpleasant memo-
ries revived. You did a great job under conditions which are no longer
relevant’.138 The policy of both the Church and the Government is to
‘let bygones be bygones’ and forget about Biafra in order to strengthen
ties with the new Nigeria. This exchange with the Bishop encapsulates
the manner in which Biafra vanished as an uncomfortable interlude in
Irish-Nigerian relations. There was no denying what had happened, but
it was ignored. The lack of acknowledgement of the missionaries’ hard
work and commitment was hardly ameliorated by the Bishop’s state-
ment: ‘Your name is written in the Book of Life, there’s no need to have
it in the newspapers as well.’139
The issues addressed in the play are those which were at the core of
the debate about Biafra in Ireland. Although brief, a reference to the
role of the Irish in fomenting revolt and encouraging independence
in African countries is an acknowledgement of the role of missionary
133
Ibid., 44.
134
Ibid., 47.
135
Ibid., 48.
136
Ibid., 49.
137
Ibid., 45.
138
Ibid.
139
Ibid., 45–46.
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310 Fiona Bateman
educators. The conflicts that existed within the missionary movement

are rarely addressed in Church discourse; this play exposes the inter-
generational differences that existed between Irish missionaries as well
as the difficulties inherent in handing over the Church to the African
clergy. The older Irish missionaries were reluctant to lose control of their
parishes and their dioceses but the war forced the transition; changes
that had already been in progress were expedited.
Forristal’s play attracted criticism from some missionaries who
described it as inauthentic and misleading. A statement from a group
of six priests and six nuns in response to the play was published on
the front page of the Irish Independent on May 2, 1974.140 Headlined
‘Priest’s play irks priests, nuns’, their statement aimed to correct any
‘misapprehensions, which might arise’. They pointed out that there
were still more than 700 Irish missionaries in Nigeria, working in the
country with the approval of the federal government, and that they
were under the competent guidance of a largely indigenous hierarchy.
They wished to make it clear that the play did not reflect the viewpoint
of the Catholic Church in Ireland or Nigeria, and to acknowledge the
work of reconciliation already accomplished by the Nigerian people.
This, they suggested, ‘could well serve as an example to Ireland in its
present troubled situation’. They refuted Forristal’s suggestion in the
preface that the missionaries were ‘in some ways the saddest victims of
the war’, stating that they found this impossible to accept. Indeed, this
statement in the preface is one that would cause any reader to pause,
given the loss of life and terrible suffering endured by so many during
the course of the war. The names of 12 signatories are provided: they
include representatives of a number of different orders. Some of these
individuals had previously commented on the war, and their orders
were mainly based outside the Eastern Region. The resurgence of the
Biafran debate would have been unwelcome to those who feared the
effects on their missions, and had hoped that the story had gone away.
The fact that their response to the play was published on the front page
of a national newspaper, demonstrates the residual media interest in
Biafra even four years after the war had ended.
However, in general, the response to the play was good. One reviewer,
Val Mulkerns, addressed the criticism the play had elicited: ‘It has been
criticised by some of Fr Forristal’s fellow priests and religious as untypi-
cal of the Irish missionary mentality, as very much one man’s highly
subjective Biafra’ he wrote. ‘As though that mattered!’. He continues:
Desmond Forristal is a dramatist, and like any other creative artist he plucks
what he pleases from his own random experience and twists it into any
shape that fits his particular and specific purpose, in this case to show how
traditional concepts stand up under historic and psychological pressures.
140
‘Priest’s play irks priests, nuns’, Irish Independent, May 2, 1974, 1.
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He describes it as ‘an old-fashioned play’.141

In reviews, the powerful performances by the three African actors
were singled out for attention. Two of the actors, Fred Brobby who
played the Nigerian officer, and Kwesi Kay who played Cyprian Akuta,
were of Ghanaian background. The third, the only Nigerian in the cast,
was Olu Jacobs who played Zachary, the new African Bishop, and he has
gone on to have a long and distinguished acting career in Britain and
Nollywood. The various missionary characters represent the different
attitudes to the war within the missionary body, providing a range of
opinions and opportunities to discuss these views.
Although the play was first performed only four years after the
war’s end, due to the official policy of ‘forgetting’ Biafra, the events
had already faded from public consciousness. However the Irish public
would immediately have recognized the subject of the play and perhaps
it would have created an awareness of just how suddenly the story
had disappeared and a realization that there had been no resolution of
many of questions raised during the war (particularly for those who
had been directly involved). Forristal reminded the audience of those
unanswered questions:
Perhaps one of my main problems in writing the play, was to avoid taking
sides … I feel I have managed this. My theme is centred round a group of
priests and nuns and deals with the war and the surrender of Biafra. On
another level it deals with newly won independence by the black people and
the problems associated with liberation.142
Conclusion
These two Irish texts share a similar ending – the escape or departure
from Biafra of the characters who, despite their desire to identify with
the Biafran cause, ultimately did not belong. Even Kearey’s thriller, Last
Plane from Uli, mentioned earlier, ends with the heroes’ escape from
Uli: ‘Behind the fires dwindled to pinpoints, and darkness engulfed the
last pitiful remains of a dying Biafra.’143 All contain a sense of finality
with regard to the wish for a Biafran republic. Kearey’s novel concludes:
‘Then, slowly, like an old forgotten dream, the memories would fade and
Nigeria would know peace.’144 Banville’s last sentence in the first edi-
tion of An End to Flight is: ‘Biafra belonged only to history …’.145 Only
Forristal’s play ends without that sense of finality. As the missionaries
141
Mulkerns, ‘Stage and Screen’.
142
Gus Smith, ‘Priest’s play on Biafra war’, Sunday Independent, August 12, 1973, 13.
143
Kearey, Last Plane from Uli, 223.
144
Ibid., 224.
145
Lawrence, An End to Flight, 217.
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312 Fiona Bateman
leave, Cyprian ‘quite casually sits in Mitchell’s chair’.146 A transition of

authority has occurred and life goes on.
Essentially what both Irish writers have done is to mark the events
that created a connection between Ireland and Biafra. However prob-
lematic that relationship – based as it was on a history of missionary
activity – there is no denying that the Irish people felt a bond of solidar-
ity and sympathy with the Biafrans. There were those who experienced
the war first hand and were emotionally and physically invested in it;
but in the end, it was not their war. Both the play and the novel repeat-
edly draw attention to the outsider status of the central characters,
neither author is under any illusion that this is anything other than an
observer’s perspective on the war. The title Black Man’s Country seems to
be a statement on the sovereignty of African countries and the status of
the white man as a visitor, perhaps a welcome guest, but nevertheless
an interloper.
The reasons that the story of Ireland and Biafra was so quickly buried
and forgotten have been discussed elsewhere, but both Banville and
Forristal have created narratives which are a reminder of the debates
engendered by the conflict, the suffering experienced by many, and
the bravery and idealism of others. In the rush to ‘move on’ after the
Biafran surrender, there was little analysis of the events, there was no
closure and the default position of support for the post-war Nigerian
state was accepted.
In February 1971, the Reverend Father Myles Fay, a Holy Ghost
priest in Sierra Leone, wrote a letter to The Furrow about the role of the
Church in the political world, ‘steering between “interfering in politics”
and abdicating its duty’. He argued that the fact that Biafra was beaten
does not mean that it was fundamentally in the wrong, or in the right;
the problem remains unsolved. He criticized the Church, which
hastened after the war to leave unsaid all of the arguments in favour of a
Biafran state and declared that its only interest was in relieving hunger …
To make an anti-Biafran judgement (even today) is to take a solid political
stand; it is not being neutral.
He also objected to calling the Nigeria-Biafra War a civil war. As he saw
it, the case was still open and ‘we do not canonize the present post-war
set-up’. In his opinion the ‘sudden silence in Ireland [was] not a good
thing either’.147
Newspaper coverage of the war and famine and its aftermath was
extensive and compelling, but media coverage is of the moment. When
media interest in Biafra ended, so did most of the public debate and
interest in the subject. The advantage of texts such as An End to Flight
146
Forristal, Black Man’s Country (stage direction), 50.
147
Myles Fay, ‘Priests and Politics: Biafra a Year After’, The Furrow, 22:2 (February 1971),
114–117, here 115.
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and Black Man’s Country is that unlike newspaper articles, they have
permanence and as such they stand as a record of a war, which, as Fay
commented, ‘entered the consciousness … of Irish people over a lengthy
period’.148 Biafra was a significant event that could not be erased from
history. Both writers were informed by their recent personal experiences
of Biafra and could also draw on contemporaneous media accounts to
re-create the atmosphere of uncertainty and disarray. By telling the
story through imaginary characters, a range of different experiences
and responses to the situation are explored in each text. Though these
characters are fictional creations, it seems likely that they are based on
real experiences and responses to a crisis. Indeed it seems that reviewers
sought to identify a truth in these fictional texts. While media reports
provided a snapshot, these texts explore how characters might change
and adapt to a deteriorating situation. Both writers appropriate Biafra
and transform it into an Irish experience, but also acknowledge that the
Irish experienced the events differently than the Biafrans did.
The events in Biafra unfolded at a crucial time for the Irish Church
and its missionary project. Important issues arose during the war: What
was the role of the white man in an African country? Was the traditional
missionary an outdated and irrelevant character? The imperative to
employ emergency measures to save lives meant that these issues were
not properly examined or answered. The novel An End to Flight and the
play Black Man’s Country provide an opportunity for contemplation at
a remove from the drama of war and famine. Such texts provide a level
of reflection missing from the more immediate journalistic accounts,
while retaining the immediacy of the events in their narratives. These
additional perspectives on the war, from perhaps an unlikely source, are
another facet of the literature inspired by Biafra.
148
Ibid.
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15 Magical Realism or Science Fiction
The Nigerian Civil War and Ali Mazrui’s
The Trial of Christopher Okigbo
Adetayo Alabi
‘Death itself in many of our societies, you will remember, was one more
ceremonial transition. It constituted a passing in some ways no more fun-
damental, and certainly no less fundamental, than the transition from pre-
adulthood to the full status of the adult. Death was not an interruption but
a continuation.’
Ali Mazrui, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, 37
Poet Christopher Okigbo remains an enigma who continues to feature
in African literature and the literary creativity and activities of sev-
eral writers and Africanists, including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka,
and Ali Mazrui. Hardly can a discussion of the Nigerian Civil War of
1967–1970 take place without a reference to Okigbo because he moved
swiftly from being an accomplished poet to a soldier fighting on the side
of Biafra during the war, suggesting that the urgency of the war went
beyond poetry. One of the books that considers Okigbo’s role in the civil
war is Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo where Okigbo is tried in
After-Africa or afterlife for abandoning poetry for the war front. The
book is particularly significant because of its futuristic and magical
content and setting and its exclusive imaginative pretense to reality.
This chapter will discuss The Trial of Christopher Okigbo within the
context of the Nigeria-Biafra War and explore the highly resourceful
frame of the novel, the accusations against Okigbo, the trial, the defense,
and the judgment that follows. Mazrui’s indebtedness to magical real-
ism and science fiction will be examined, and the suggestion made that
the text is possible only because of Mazrui’s heavy reliance on those
two sub-genres. Some of the other issues the chapter will address are
whether there is any jurisdiction to try Okigbo at all either in life or
afterlife, whether the trial in the text can resolve the civil war conflict
in any meaningful way, whether there is a limit to how literature can
dictate the life of a poet or that of a soldier, whether the socio-political
considerations of the poet and the soldier are comparable or mutually
exclusive such that one cannot be faulted for choosing either path,
whether the discursive and counter discursive trends in literature itself
are symptomatic of the life of the artist and that of the warrior, and
314
000 Fal book B.indb 314 13/06/2016 22:06

Ali Mazrui The Trial of Christopher Okigbo 315
whether any form of African development can be achieved or sustained

with the compartmentalization of roles and responsibilities.
Science Fiction and The Trial of Christopher Okigbo

Science fiction means different things to different people, but there are
some definitions that can help contextualize the genre for the purposes
of this chapter. It deals with the creation or recreation of unrealistic
events with scientific elements, some of which were impossible decades
ago but are now more imaginable or probable. Space and time travels
are examples.1 Space travel was literally fiction a while back, but now,
there are serious efforts being championed by Virgin Galactic to make
that possible. A novel about Galileo’s ideas about the nature of the earth
and the stars and the solar system in general six centuries ago would
have been science fiction, but it has since been proven scientifically to
be true. Another example is the short story ‘The Book of Sand’ by the
Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story is an example of science
fiction because of its obsessive concentration on untraceable infinite
number of points, lines, planes, and volumes. The text when it was pub-
lished in 1971 was completely improbable, but now it is ‘real’ because
the infiniteness that the story focuses on is contemporarily realizable in
the infinite or unending nature of the Internet.
Science fiction also deals with other universes apart from the con-
temporary world and with extraterrestrial lives, what Gary K. Wolfe
calls planet building.2 In this kind of writing, the author ‘employs prin-
ciples of astronomy, geology, meteorology, biology and other sciences
in calculating the likely conditions of an imaginary world’.3 It is an
alternate or distinct world, ‘not merely a continuation of the present or
a reinstatement of the past’, according to Gary Westfahl.4 The distinct
world leads to the production of ‘distant and unfamiliar futures, or even
the transportation of people or documents to or from the future’.5
The events in The Trial occur on two parallel universes. The reason for
Okigbo’s trial occurred in a universe Mazrui identifies as ‘Herebefore’,
and the trial occurs in a parallel universe that he describes as ‘After-
Africa’, with nine African elders as judges, just like the nine egwugwu
judges in Chapter 10 of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The prosecu-
tor in the parallel universe of Herebefore is the Counsel for Salvation
in After-Africa; the defense counsel is the Counsel for Damnation in
1
Gary Westfahl, ‘Introduction: The Quarries of Time’, in Worlds Enough and Time, edited by
Gary Westfahl, George Slusser, and David Leiby (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood,
2002), 2.
2
Gary K. Wolfe, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Schol-
arship (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 90.
3
Ibid.
4
Westfahl, ‘Introduction’, 2.
5
Ibid.
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316 Adetayo Alabi
After-Africa. Okigbo’s trial in a parallel universe after death is improba-

ble ordinarily but the art of science fiction makes it possible in the book.
In Hebrews 9:27 of the Christian Bible, after death there is judgment,
and this notion of judgment is addressed in The Trial and differentiated
from how it is conceived on different universes. While on earth it is
represented as an autocracy with God dispensing justice, in the parallel
universe of After-Africa, it is democracy with the nine elders as judges.6
The Trial is indebted to magical realism. Magical realism refers to a
combination of the realistic and the magical. Ordinary and normal daily
occurrences are combined with the supernatural and the fantastic. This
is possible because many postcolonial societies had myths, legends, and
magic as part of their daily events, and they expressed their discourses
and resistance to different ideologies through these literary forms. What
happens ultimately is that ‘the rational, linear world of realist fiction
is placed against alter/native narrative modes that expose the hidden
and naturalized cultural formations on which Western narratives are
based’.7 Magical realism is popular in Latin American writing, particu-
larly in Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s novels One Hundred
Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera and short stories ‘Death
Constant Beyond Love’ and ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A
Tale for Children’.8 African writing like Ben Okri’s The Famished Road is
also a form of magical realism.9
Like Latin America, the African world has an elaborate narrative tra-
dition that deals with magical realism and science fiction, such as D.O.
Fagunwa’s 1938 classic, Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irúnmo·lé·, translated by
Wole Soyinka as The Forest of a Thousand Daemons in 1968. Akara-ogun
the adventurer and protagonist in the story is a human being, but there
are characters in the story who are partly human and partly ‘ghomids’.
Humans intermarry with ghomids and spirits thereby crossing differ-
ent terrestrial realms within the general framework of science fiction.
Mount Langbodo, which is the setting of part of the text, is also situ-
ated in another universe. It ‘can hardly be regarded as a place on earth,
6
Ali A. Mazrui, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo (New York: Third Press, 1971), 25.
7
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (Lon-
don and New York: Routledge, 1998), 133.
8
Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa
(New York: Harper, 1992 [1970]); Love in the Time of Cholera, translated by Edith Gross-
man (New York and London: Alfred Knopf, 1988); ‘Death Constant Beyond Love’, in
Other Voices, Other Vistas: Short Stories from Africa, China, India, Japan, and Latin America,
edited by Barbara H. Solomon (New York: Signet, 1992), 462–471; and ‘A Very Old Man
with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children’, in Literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin Amer-
ica: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Willis Barnstone and Tony Barnstone (Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), 391–396.
9
Ben Okri, The Famished Road. (London: Vintage, 1991).
000 Fal book B.indb 316 13/06/2016 22:06

because the dwellers of Langbodo hear, in most distinct notes, the crow-
ing of cocks from the heavenly vault’.10
The seven men who undertake the journey to Mount Langbodo
cross different celestial and magical realms. A sampling of some of the
attributes of the seven travelers shows their indebtedness to science
fiction and magical realism. The mother of Kako of the Leopard Club
was ‘a gnom; his father a dewild’ but was born with human features.11
Hence he was abandoned and was raised by a hunter.12 The second was
Imodoye who lived in another realm outside of the human world for a
while. According to the narrator, Imodoye at ten ‘was snatched away
by the Whirlwind and he lived for seven years with him. In all those
seven years he lived on a single alligator pepper every day. He was well
versed in charms, wise and very knowledgeable, he was also a highly
titled hunter. These qualities earned him the name of Imodoye, that is,
knowledge fuses with understanding [sic].’13 Olohun-iyo, ‘the Voice of
Flavors’ was the fourth man: ‘he was the most handsome of all men
on earth, the finest singer and the best drummer. When he drummed
smoke rose in the air, and when he sang flames danced out of his
mouth; his favorite music was the music of incantations.’14 Another
warrior is Elegbede-Ode who grew up with beasts and has three eyes
and understood the language of beasts and birds.15 Next is Efoiye, ‘an
archer and he really belonged to the family of birds’.16 The sixth one is
Aramoda Okunrin, a man of opposites who feels cold when others are
hot and vice versa.17
Akara-ogun, the narrator, undergoes different adventures in the
story, marries a ghomid ‘no ordinary human’.18 She is ‘a spirit like the
ghomid’ and actually visits the interior of the earth as shown in his
encounter with Agbako.19 He resurfaces in the phenomenal world later
through the help of Helpmeet:
And then it was that he slarruped sparks ablaze in my face, proving to me
that he was indeed Agbako the Master. He thudded earth with his feet and
the earth opened beneath us and Agbako and I were sucked into the void.
When I arrived in the interior of the earth, I found myself in a strange house.
Of Agbako there was no sign, and until my return from this trip I did not set
eyes on Agbako again. Not until the day of our journey to Mount Langbodo
10
D.O. Fagunwa, Forest of a Thousand Daemons, translated by Wole Soyinka (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1982), 78.
11
Ibid., 85.
12
Ibid., 77–78.
13
Ibid., 85.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 86.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid., 69.
19
Ibid., 28 and 71.
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318 Adetayo Alabi
was I to encounter him again – you will hear about this later – but what I
experienced until my escape from the depths of the earth I will never forget
in this lifetime, and when I am gone to heaven I will remember it all, even
there, for ever and ever.20
Akara-ogun, therefore, crisscrosses the worlds of the living, the dead,
and the magical and always resurfaces in the world of the living.
The magical qualities of the seven adventurers in The Forest of a Thou-
sand Daemons are amazing and improbable unless they occur in stories
and narrative traditions that show interactions among parallel worlds.
It is, therefore, clear that several African novels and tales that deal with
magical realism and science fiction predated Mazrui’s book. There were
major interactions between the worlds of the living, the dead, and the
unborn in those texts and in real life.21 These celestial interactions pro-
vide the background for Mazrui to set his trial in the world of the dead.
Some of Mazrui’s immediate indebtedness to magical realism are in
the development of the African trinity of the dead, the living, and the
unborn, in the notion of reincarnation, and in the magical invocation
of the dead. The spirit of dead Okigbo is invoked and is tried in another
world. The Trial, therefore, has clear elements of science fiction, magical
realism, and the fantastic genre of African narrative tradition all in it
and the book oscillates freely among all those categories.
An Evaluation of the Nigeria-Biafra War through the Lens of

Magical Realism
The Trial of Christopher Okigbo combines several features of realism with
those of magic to provide continuity between the parallel universes of
the living and the dead. The narrator explains:
So many things in After-Africa were already vastly different from the state
of affairs in Africa of the Herebefore; yet some underpinnings of familiar-
ity had to be available. The division of life into days and hours, the years
mounting up to centuries, light and shade, day and night, windows and
doors, all these were important contributions to the theme of continuity
which lay between Africa and After-Africa.22
In the opening pages of the book, Hamisi discovers himself at a
railway track. The railway track is realistic enough, and the reader is
presented with the information that the ‘one-eyed monster that had
suddenly emerged upon him from nowhere had as readily dissolved into
20
Ibid., 24.
21
These interactions between the worlds of the living, the dead and the unborn are later
celebrated in Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman (London:
Eyre Methuen, 1975).
22
Mazrui, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, 48–49.
000 Fal book B.indb 318 13/06/2016 22:06

nowhere’.23 The above description obviously reads like lines from the
magically realistic work of Fagunwa earlier discussed. The setting of
the story is quickly combined with elements of science fiction as the text
refers to parallel universes of ‘a different world’ which necessitates ‘an
agony of incongruity’ and ‘the cloud-world’ and ‘same universe’ and ‘in
the world which Hamisi could now only vaguely remember’.24 The nar-
rative then introduces Abiranja and Salisha, his companion, mimick-
ing the author’s representation of parallel worlds of ‘dual personality
of newness and timeless ancestry’ and who ‘must have been the same
age for at least a thousand years’.25 It is only a combination of magical
realism and science fiction that can ascribe the age of a thousand years
to characters.
Abiranja identifies Hamisi’s dilemma of trying to figure out his loca-
tion because of the ‘veil of strange timelessness’ and asks him to wait
till their arrival at home and not to ‘attempt to reason it out’.26 The
mystery of the setting is compounded on arrival at Abiranja’s house
where Hamisi finds a shield that Abiranja identifies as the one Chaka
‘the Zulu conqueror, used in the battle of Umbutera’.27 The realistic
arrival in a house is combined with the magical discovery of a shield an
emperor used over a century before. The realistic question for Hamisi
is where Abiranja could have found the shield, but that is not forth-
coming because of the setting of the text. Another very important but
strange discovery in the house that deals with magic is the presence
of a vase, which was a gift to Emperor Sundiata of Mali by the Sultan
of Marrakesh. Realistically, Salisha is knitting a table mat for it. What
we clearly have here is a combination of the ‘past and the present, life
before and life after’.28 As the narrator describes the context, ‘[t]here
was a certain ambivalence to the situation – a relic of the Herebefore
dying and therefore surviving entire in the Hereafter’.29
The first reference to Christopher Okigbo in the text is when Hamisi
wakes up from his initiation sleep and sees Okigbo’s book of poetry.
From this casual reference to Okigbo, the narrative switches to the
realistic mode on earth where Hamisi tries to recollect his last moments
before suddenly appearing in an unknown world and his efforts lead to
a combination of some lines from Okigbo’s poems titled ‘The Passage’
and ‘Watermaid’ presented as a single poem. The lines from both poems
raise the question of location, a parallel universe of heaven, its gate,
watchman, and the world under. They also depict the stars that have
departed. These stars that have departed clearly correlate with Hamisi’s
23
Ibid., 1.
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid., 1 and 2, respectively.
26
Ibid., 2.
27
Ibid., 3.
28
Ibid., 8.
29
Ibid.
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320 Adetayo Alabi
and Okigbo’s transition into another world. The reference to these

Okigbo lines is appropriate because of the representation of science fic-
tion and magical realism elements of stars, universes, and worlds that
are clearly linked with the subsequent trial of Okigbo and Hamisi in
another world.
As the book progresses, it becomes obvious that both Hamisi and
Salisha knew each other in London on earth, where Salisha was Aisha.
Okigbo becomes the link that jostles Hamisi’s memory for him to
remember Salisha from the world before. The realization comes with the
rendition of another poem by Okigbo that deals with ‘the crisis point’
and the ‘twilight moment between sleep and waking’.30 The immediate
consequence of the liminal space between sleeping and waking is when
Hamisi regains consciousness and remembers his time in the Herebe-
fore in London when Hamisi interviewed Salisha about Okigbo’s poetry.
Both interviewer and interviewee spoke on Okigbo’s poetry and his use
of words and meaning. They did not realize that the issues of poetry and
meaning will unite them again with Okigbo ‘in a different setting, in a
different world’ as both Okigbo and Hamisi are tried in the Hereafter for
different offences.31
Hamisi and Salisha relive their experiences of a one-night stand in
London while Abiranja is away in After-Africa. As the story unfolds,
Salisha left Hamisi’s flat in London after the BBC interview while he was
still sleeping because of the content of a letter she read from Hamisi’s
desk. As they both recall that meeting, it is unclear what was in the
letter that Salisha read, but ‘it was that uncompleted airletter which
decided the issue’.32 That the characters are recalling these experi-
ences in another world, a parallel science fiction world, comes to the
front again as Hamisi wonders what was in the letter: ‘In the setting
of another world, more than a decade after that night, Hamisi could
not remember what that half-completed letter could have been.’33 Ques-
tions on what could have happened followed ‘under the influence of a
new universe’.34
The return of Abiranja to the house where Hamisi and Salisha were
becomes very important because he is the bearer of the bad news about
Okigbo and the information that propels the conflict in the book. The
news is that Okigbo was killed in the Nigerian Civil War and has arrived
in the universe of the setting of the text. On arrival in After-Africa, the
elders arrested him on ‘a high charge’.35 The text then switches from
science fiction to magical realism as only Hamisi and Salisha who were
tied ‘by a poetic refrain from a previous life’ out of the three in the room
30
Ibid., 8–9.
31
Ibid., 13.
32
Ibid., 23.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid., 24.
000 Fal book B.indb 320 13/06/2016 22:06

can hear the booming voice reciting Okigbo’s poetry.36 Abiranja who is
also in the room with them is excluded from that experience. The lines
from Okigbo’s poetry that are recited deal with the poet or his persona
standing naked and lost as a prodigal in the legend of the watery pres-
ence of Mother Idoto. Under Idoto’s presence, the poet is like a watch-
man at Heavensgate.37 The reference to Heavensgate links the parallel
universes of earth and heaven again in both Okigbo’s poetry and the
encounter between Salisha and Hamisi in Herebefore and After-Africa.
Hamisi is obviously confused about all that is going on around him
and he asks questions. How can you arrest someone after death? Is there
a police force or judiciary or government beyond the grave? He starts
getting his answers from a concept that came out of his conversation
with Abiranja, which is that ‘[d]eath is an exercise in Pan-Africanism’.38
As Abiranja explains, monotheism and Pan-Africanism or the ‘one-
ness of God and the oneness of Africa’ enjoy ‘moral indivisibility’.39
Indeed, there is a government after death and the implication of this
is that Okigbo’s trial in After-Africa is not just a Nigerian or a Biafran
issue. It is an African issue because jurisprudence in After-Africa is not
determined only by the location of a person but determined by issues
of concern to the whole continent. ‘Continental boundary’, according
to Abiranja ‘remained to lend ease of definition to the concept of com-
munity after death’.40 The earthly concept of heaven and judgment is
that of God’s autocracy and judgment whereas in After-Africa, there is
a form of democracy that allows the living some autonomy and partici-
pation in the judgment of the dead:
Sentences were not simply passed by one omnipotent judge, but permitted
the utilization of human juries, human assessors, and indeed human judges.
Great trials were subject to the jurisdiction of nine human Elders. God had
the ultimate prerogative of mercy, but much of the rest of the process of
justice was firmly in the hands of the living citizenry beyond the grave.41
There is also a global dimension to judgment in After-Africa that
allowed people from other continents who committed offences against
Africa to be extradited and tried in After-Africa. It is this arrangement
that allowed the trial of Cecil Rhodes in After-Africa for offences he
committed against Africa in the Herebefore. There is also the example
of Warren Hastings who was tried in After-Asia after been acquitted
by the House of Lords in old England.42 In relation to the Congo after
the death of Patrice Lumumba, it was one of the mutineers who was
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid.
38
Ibid., 24.
39
Ibid., 41.
40
Ibid., 27.
41
Ibid, 26.
42
Ibid., 27.
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322 Adetayo Alabi
tried in After-Africa. Hamisi sums up the implication for Okigbo’s trial

as follows:
The Nigerian Civil War had shaken Africa at least as profoundly, as ever
the Congo troubles had done a few years previously. Thousands of Africans
had been forced to trek on the highroad to infinity. Mass arrivals into After-
Africa were something akin to the inflow of refugees from unhappy lands.
Problems of adjustment beyond the grave were compounded. To use the
language of the Herebefore, the ancestors were deeply disturbed by the turn
of events in Nigeria.43
The trial and its location in After-Africa bring together science fic-
tion, magical realism, and dilemma tale. The trial location foregrounds
the traditional relationship and the umbilical cord among the living,
the dead and the unborn in Africa. When people die, they move from
the world of the living to that of the dead or the world of the ancestors.
As the epigraph to this chapter suggests, death in many African socie-
ties is ceremonial, transitional, and a continuation of life. Since African
societies believe in reincarnation, dead people migrate from the world
of the dead to that of the unborn and return to the world of the living.
In Okigbo’s case, he moves from the world of the living to the dead and
his trial occurs in the universe of the dead. Perhaps at some point in
time, he will reincarnate and return to the world of the living. On the
immediate level, the trial deals with the parallel universes of the living
and the dead, with which science fiction is concerned. It approaches
both universes in a rather magically realistic way. It is realistic in that
the trial methods of the living are adopted and the person being tried is
a known person from the world of the living. It is magical because of the
way the trial is conducted, the mysterious nine elders who are judges,
and the setting in the supernatural world of the dead.
The trial takes place at the Grand Stadium of After-Africa with
millions of people from different historical periods and geographical
regions of Africa in attendance. The narrator compares the venue to
Kaaba in Mecca but ‘multiplied a hundred times in size and a thou-
sand times in visual impact’.44 Some of the notable historical figures
that mysteriously appear in the new universe of the trial are Chaka the
Zulu emperor, with Mirambo of Nyamwezi, Sultan Barghash of Zanzi-
bar, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa of
Nigeria. The fact that several historical Africans from different epochs
and areas are attending the trial shows what Abiranja earlier described
as the indivisibility of Africa and a confirmation of the earlier dictum
that Hamisi heard from Abiranja, that death in After-Africa deals with
concerns about the whole continent.
43
Ibid., 28.
44
Ibid., 62.
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Later the skies of After-Africa announce the arrival of the nine Elders
of Judgment in their splendor. To give a semblance of realism, Hamisi,
the Counsel for Salvation (Defense Counsel) and Kwame Apolo-Gyamfi,
the Counsel for Damnation (Prosecutor) arrive at the trial. Okigbo him-
self does not appear at the trial because the rules allow him to watch
the proceedings with the audience or in his room. His voice and poetry
are, however, conjured to testify later at the trial.45 In the spirit of Pan-
Africanism which death in After-Africa is all about, several other nota-
ble African voices, such as those of Wole Soyinka, Kwame Nkrumah,
and Leopold Sedar Senghor are conjured to testify at the trial.46 As a
result of the global dimension of the trial, a non-African such as George
Gordon, the Lord Byron, was also invited to testify, along with the voice
of Oscar Wilde.47 One logistic issue earlier resolved by the Assembly of
the Ages was about bringing evidence from the living in Africa to tes-
tify in trials in After-Africa. The resolution was that those voices could
be summoned based on the genuineness or honesty of what they said
on earth. This provision would allow the Elders to admit in evidence
the voices of people like General Gowon of the Federal side and Colonel
Ojukwu of the Biafra side as needed.48
The Nigerian Civil War provides the most immediate background to
The Trial. The war was between the Eastern part of Nigeria and the rest
of the country and Okigbo was an Igbo from Eastern Nigeria. Prior to
1967, Okigbo was an accomplished poet with a long list of remarkable
poems to his credit, but left his career as a poet for the battlefield to fight
for the Biafran forces and he died in the process. What Mazrui’s book
does is to try Okigbo on a number of counts for his choice to defend Biafra
at the expense of poetry. Count one was Okigbo’s subordination of the
Nigerian vision to that of Biafra. This count presupposes a sacrosanct
boundary between and among nations, forgetting Benedict Anderson’s
argument that the nation is itself an imaginary construct. In the Nige-
ria example, several nations were forced together for the administrative
convenience of the British colonizers. The cultural and ethnic differ-
ences that exist among the nations were not considered when they were
joined together in a tension-filled relationship. For Okigbo, a nation
cannot be superior to another because every nation goes through dif-
ferent forms of evolution and the basis of the union has to be evaluated
based on traditional and contemporary circumstances.49 The visions
of Nigeria and Biafra can, therefore, not be contradictory because they
45
Ibid., 79, 80, 90, and 140.
46
Ibid., 89, 136, and 138.
47
Ibid., 109, 143.
48
Ibid., 75–76.
49
In 2014, the United Kingdom renegotiated its union when Scotland unsuccessfully at-
tempted to secede and form a separate country.
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324 Adetayo Alabi
are both examples of nation building and the effort to form a perfect
union.50
The second count for Okigbo’s trial is that he acted as an Igbo first
and a poet last. As Solomon clarifies in the text,
Okigbo gave his life for the concept of Biafra. As it happens that was a moral
concept, transient to his inner being. The art of a great poet, on the other
hand, carries the seed of immortality. No great artist has a right to carry
patriotism to the extent of destroying his creative potential. The prosecution
is going to suggest that Okigbo had no right to consider himself an Ibo [sic]
patriot first, and an African artist only second. That was to subordinate the
interests of generations of Africans to the needs of a collection of Ibos at an
isolated moment in historical time.51
While the Counsel for Damnation argues that Okigbo’s death was that
of his poetry, the Counsel for Salvation takes an opposite view and
claims that the death was itself the deepest form of poetry.52
The second count against Okigbo presupposes the mutual exclusiv-
ity of the two categories of ethnic identity and vocation and that an
individual’s vocation is more important than the person’s ethnic iden-
tity. This vision of the individual is faulty because an individual is made
of so many things, including ethnic identity, gender identity, vocation,
class position, educational status, family conditions, and the like, what
Gayatri Spivak calls the subject effect.53 It is essentially the responsi-
bility of the individual to prioritize one identity over others due to cir-
cumstances. More importantly, of what use is any one aspect of one’s
identity when the other parts of his or her identity are destroyed by the
other parts? Of what use is poetry when the lives of the poet and those
of members of his or her community who serve as his or her muse and
sources of nourishment are destroyed?
Along with Okigbo’s trial, there are other trials in the book. Hamisi,
the Counsel for Salvation, is a Kenyan Muslim who is in love with Sali-
sha, from Northern Nigeria. He is on trial for the sin of miscalculation
in the Herebefore and is now being tried in afterlife. Like Okigbo’s trial,
this kind of judicial arrangement is improbable, but it happens because
of the science fiction and magical realism backgrounds of the novel.
Earlier in the Herebefore, Hamisi had interviewed Salisha on Okigbo’s
poetry. While Salisha defended Okigbo’s poetry then, Hamisi ‘was rather
50
On the possibility of a perfect union, though in relation to the United States of Ameri-
ca, see Barack Obama’s campaign speech titled ‘A More Perfect Union’. www.youtube.
com/watch?v=zrp-v2tHaDo; and www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-
speech-read-th_n_92077.html (accessed November 20, 2008).
51
Mazrui, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, 41.
52
Ibid., 90.
53
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’, in Se-
lected Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3–32.
000 Fal book B.indb 324 13/06/2016 22:06

negative in his judgements on Okigbo’ and the arguments continued

when they met in Hamisi’s flat.54 The circumstances are different in
the Hereafter as Hamisi is responsible for defending Okigbo before the
elders.55 Another associated trial in the book is that of Kwame Apolo-
Gyamfi, the Counsel for Damnation, who is a brilliant Ghanaian who
died in a road accident at Oxford. He is on trial for impatience in the
Herebefore. Like the other trials, this is also possible because of the text’s
background. The associated conflicts and characters are symbolic of
some Nigerian Civil War characters. Hamisi, the Counsel for Salvation,
who is tried for miscalculation, symbolizes those who miscalculated
and defended Biafra, and those who opposed the Biafran cause are rep-
resented by Apolo-Gyamfi, who is tried for impatience.56
In terms of the final verdicts of the text, the counts against Okigbo
and Biafra are not proven. Apolo-Gyamfi is exonerated for the sin of
impatience because he sits patiently through the trial. The judges, how-
ever, return a guilty verdict against Hamisi for the count of miscalcu-
lation. The judgment is for him to live in and ‘haunt a lonely baobab
tree in Gabon’.57 Salisha Bemedi, his companion, agrees to join him in
Gabon. The Counsel for Biafra is also declared guilty while the Counsel
against Biafra is declared not guilty.58
Conclusion
Ali Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo foregrounds some important
issues, including genre classification or terminology, the constructed
nature of a contemporary nation, and conflict resolution. Concerning
genre classification and terminology, the book is a mixture of science
fiction, magical realism, and African folktale. One cannot place the book
exclusively in one category because it shares features from all three. The
narratological frame of a trial in After-Africa as a location that could
be eventually empirically verifiable shows the futuristic nature of the
book and its indebtedness to science fiction. Related to this notion of
After-Africa is the African conception of the continuity of life in death,
as suggested in the epigraph to this chapter.
It is this idea of life in death and the unbroken cord that exists among
the living, the dead, and the unborn that makes Okigbo’s trial conceiv-
able in another universe. This futuristic element also links the story
with African and diaspora dramatic and cinematic traditions where a
part of a text can be set in a sitting room in Nigeria and in the next
minute the setting can change to heaven or another part of the world.
54
Ibid., 12
55
Ibid., 44.
56
Ibid., 144.
57
Ibid., 145.
58
Ibid., 142 and 144.
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326 Adetayo Alabi
The setting can also change quickly, as in a dream, similar to Derek

Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain59; as in the invocation of ances-
tral spirits, mediums, or African deities similar to Nollywood films; or as
in seeing a vision of heaven right after praying. Relating the civil war
events with real characters like Okigbo with magical elements such as
invoking the spirit of the dead suggests magical realism. The fantastic
elements such as invoking the spirits in the story at the trial and bring-
ing historical characters like Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Senghor, and
Okigbo are conceivable within African folktale tradition. The judgment
on Hamisi living in a baobab tree and scaring kids in Gabon also fits well
within the didactic implications of African folktale tradition. Okigbo’s
trial in After-Africa is also possible because of the African conception
of the continuity of life in death, as the epigraph to this chapter claims.
The constructed nature of a contemporary nation is also implicated
in Okigbo’s trial. Several world events have shown that the idea of the
contemporary nation stems primarily out of an imagined construc-
tion, an issue Benedict Anderson theorized in Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.60 In Nigeria’s case,
the events that show the artificial nature of country creation include
the 1884–1885 Berlin conference on the scramble for and partition of
Africa where European powers divided Africa among themselves com-
pletely oblivious of any roles for Africans, the arbitrary colonization of
Nigeria by the British, the 1914 amalgamation of the Southern and
Northern Protectorates of Nigeria by Lord Lugard, and the Nigerian
Civil War. The above events all show that the Nigerian nation is an idea
imagined and executed by British colonizers and their Nigerian sym-
pathizers. What those who imagined Nigeria have done is to make the
idea of Nigeria inviolable; hence the efforts at uniting Nigeria during
and after the civil war. Incidentally, the civil war broke out because the
imagined nation was not working for some and Okigbo joined the battle
to develop a counter discourse to the existence of Nigeria. The crea-
tion of Biafra out of Nigeria was part of the imagined and constructed
nature of the nation, but the effort was unsuccessful because of the
previous investment in nation creation.
In terms of conflict resolution, Mazrui raises the question of whether
we can resolve the civil war crisis through science fiction, magical real-
ism, or jurisprudence. The issue goes beyond literature, law, region, and
ethnicity. It is still unresolved. Though the battle was fought and lost
by Biafra, reminiscences of it are still reverberating in Nigeria through
ongoing efforts to remember the civil war by events and organizations.
These efforts include the Survival of Biafra movement, memoirs such as
59
Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain and other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1971)
60
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of National-
ism (London: Verso, 1983).
000 Fal book B.indb 326 13/06/2016 22:06

Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country, the Ogoni resistance movement

led by Ken Saro-Wiwa, the oil resource control movement, South-South
autonomy, the clamor for regionalism – especially by the south-western
region, advocacy for Sharia law in some Northern states, the 2014
National Conference in Nigeria, and the campaign for sectional inter-
ests by some groups and regions in the country during the 2015 gen-
eral elections. In other words, people are still using various tactics to
determine the fate of the country. The issues the book raises and the
conflicts it attempts to resolve are still there more than four decades
after the civil war and after the publication of the book.
000 Fal book B.indb 327 13/06/2016 22:06

16 Biafra, an Impractical Mission?
Revisiting S.O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising
Sun and I.N.C. Aniebo’s The Anonymity of
Sacrifice
Ode Ogede
When the Biafran Independence War – also known as the Nigerian Civil
War – broke out in July 1967, ‘exactly one month after the [third] Arab-
Israeli War’, as the omniscient narrator of S.O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising
Sun is quick to point out, the Biafrans’ dream was to replicate the feat of
‘the famous six-day war that saw Israel triple the size of her territory’.1
The narrator adds in the same passage:
The average Biafran knew that his new nation could perform the same
miracle if it had the means. But Biafra had not the means and its independ-
ence was barely one month old, independence that was declared in the dark,
independence that started with a total blockade of the country, independ-
ence that was celebrated with mourning in every family.2
Long after the physical combat ended, following the defeat of the gor-
geous dream of Biafra, the Nigerian Civil War continues to fascinate
students and scholars of African history and literature. This is primarily
because the world is so used to haunting images of the brutal impact on
the victims of the war, the thousands who were maimed, massacred,
or starved to death. But, owing to the surge of misinformation and
controversy surrounding the subject, which continues to reverberate
to this day, the Biafran War has remained, understandably, one of the
most equivocal events in post-Independence Nigerian history, and the
conversation around this contentious topic is not likely to abate any-
time soon.3 In order to be liberated from the baggage of obfuscation
and to properly understand the conditions that caused the demise of
Biafra and cut so deep a gulf in the lives of the people that their wounds
are yet to fully heal, it is pertinent to identify and closely examine some
1
S.O. Mezu, Behind the Rising Sun (London: Heinemann, 1971), 19.
2
Ibid.
3
For confirmation that no other subject has generated as many works, with perspectives
as diverse as the ethnicity of the authors, see Chidi Amuta, ‘Literature of the Nigerian
Civil War’, in Perspectives on Nigerian Literature, 1700 to the Present, Volume I, edited by
Yemi Ogunbiyi (Lagos: Guardian, 1988), 85–92; Chinyere Nwahunanya, ‘The Aesthetics
of Nigerian War Fiction’, Modern Fiction Studies 37:3 (1991), 427–443; and Chinyere
Nwahunanya, A Harvest from Tragedy: Critical Perspectives on Nigerian Civil War Literature
(Owerri: Springfield, 1996).
328
000 Fal book B.indb 328 13/06/2016 22:06

Biafra, an Impractical Mission? 329
good starting points: S.O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun (1971) and I.N.C.
Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice (1974), the earliest substantial nar-
rative explorations by participant-observer, native Biafran authors of
those chaotic events that sabotaged the war efforts from both within
and outside of the ill-fated enclave.
Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun is a tour de force in historical fiction;
it crafts, in a startlingly witty and innuendo-laden style, an eye-open-
ing account that goes to the heart of why Biafra fell. It lays the blame
squarely on a number of factors: lack of advance knowledge and equip-
ment, poor strategizing or planning and coordination, ineffective diplo-
macy, and a crippling culture of corruption that embroiled the overseas
arms purchase and shipping missions. What is abundantly clear in
Mezu’s account is the liability of Biafrans’ approach to the war. At the
start of the war, even ‘the head of the armed forces did not know how
many soldiers he had in the army he was supposed to be commanding
or how much equipment there was at their disposal’.4 Aniebo confirms
in The Anonymity of Sacrifice that Biafrans lived in a fantasy world and
approached the war under a rhetoric of exaggerated and unfounded
beliefs. A misconception that ‘once the enemy saw Biafran soldiers they
would leave their weapons and run away’, for example, made it ‘impos-
sible for unit commanders to plan comprehensively’.5 In the same text,
a good number of troops hold the false impression that ‘there was an
inexhaustible stock of ammunition and military equipment in the
country and that if ever the stock ran dry all one need do was go to
Europe and buy more’, because ‘this was as easy as going to the market
to buy yams’.6
Biafrans mythologized the war; average people entered the war har-
boring many illusions. They held out largely false hopes that the war
was going to be just as brief as their Israeli counterparts’ had been. As
chosen children of God they were destined to never fail at anything they
put their hands on. In Aniebo’s novel, Captain Benjy Onwura puts it
more explicitly in his bafflement, couched in a lament, at how one can
‘explain away God’s seeming callousness and indifference at the suffer-
ing of His people’.7 Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun reaffirms that Biafrans
indeed entered the war not only under-estimating the enemy, but also
over-estimating their own strength and taking the expected support of
the international community as a fait accompli:
In the village, the farmer knew for certain that if the Nigerians attacked by
sea, the Biafran Navy would line the coasts with the debris of the Nigerian
Navy. If they attacked by land, the Biafran People’s Liberation Army would
push the northern borders to the banks of the River Benue. If they dared
4
Mezu, Behind the Rising Sun, 41–42.
5
I.N.C. Aniebo, The Anonymity of Sacrifice (London: Heinemann Educational, 1974), 9.
6
Ibid., 89.
7
Ibid., 82.
000 Fal book B.indb 329 13/06/2016 22:06

330 Ode Ogede
violate Biafran air-space with their Tiger Moth Air Force, the Biafran Air
Force would carry the war right to the limits of the Nigerian territory. Sea-
soned Biafran diplomats carried around heavy files predicting the number
of nations that would recognize the young nation’s independence within
two weeks.8
In general, the war galvanized the consciousness of the separatists,
but the federalists had military superiority. Thus, the war did not last
only a few weeks or months, as Biafrans had flattered themselves it
would. Instead, the battle dragged on for upward of two and a half weary
years; in that time, only a handful of countries gave official recognition
to Biafra: Gabon, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, and Zambia. Assistance
in various forms trickled in from a few more countries: France, Israel,
Portugal, Rhodesia, South Africa, and the Vatican City. Captain Onwura
in Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice at one point refers despairingly to
this ‘diplomatic recognition thing immediately after our declaration of
independence’, which wrongly presumed that about ‘eight countries …
were supposed to have recognized us’.9
Biafran chicanery took a heavy toll on the war effort. Mezu’s Behind
the Rising Sun indicates that matters were not helped when, barely a
month after the breakout of hostilities, anticipation of a relatively
meager cash flow, which they themselves had no intention of invest-
ing in the war effort, fooled the envoys into thinking that ‘the war was
over’ already.10 Yet, in a staggering leap of faith, the mere prospect of a
$6,000,000 loan from ‘the Pluto Trust Bank and about one and a half
million dollars projected to come from the Dubien exchange’ led Biafran
representatives, who had been sent to Europe to canvass for weapons, to
the self-deluded conclusion that ‘the end of war was a matter of weeks,
perhaps days, depending on how fast the equipment could be moved
down’.11
One of Captain Onwura’s earliest discoveries upon becoming Battal-
ion Commander in Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice was that Biafran
soldiers lived in a fool’s paradise. Situation reports of commanders from
the frontlines were invariably laced with falsehoods, leading Onwura to
this conclusion: ‘Most of our commanders are inveterate liars … Patri-
otic exaggerators.’12 In the same novel, daredevil Cyril Agumo’s exploits
have earned him the reputation of being ‘immune to bullets’.13 Even in
their deaths, Biafrans found ways to shroud their fallen heroes in legend,
trivializing the horrors of the war. In Behind the Rising Sun, speculation
about Major Nzeogwu is just such a case. This tale, which had sent the
8
Mezu, Behind the Rising Sun, 20.
9
Aniebo, The Anonymity of Sacrifice, 43.
10
11
Ibid., 59–60.
12
13
Ibid., 95.
000 Fal book B.indb 330 13/06/2016 22:06

rumor mill into overdrive, held that, after Major Nzeogwu’s death at the
war front near the university town of Nsukka, his ‘burial with military
honours’ was ‘being organized in Kaduna’, the heart of the enemy ter-
ritory in Nigeria, because ‘Nigerians had the greatest respect’ for him
and considered him ‘to be the greatest officer the country – in fact,
Africa – had ever produced’.14 The unlikely idea that Nigerians would
mourn and decorate with military honors an enemy they had killed in
combat was one of those comforting myths that Biafrans used to shield
themselves from the shocking realities of war; even the envoys believed
it and contributed to its constant circulation.
Biafrans’ misplaced hopes of victory were destined to be dashed.
The difficulty was the inability to prosecute the war beyond the level of
the romanticized notions or tall tales, self-delusion, and emotion that
gripped the troubled enclave. The manner in which the overseas mis-
sion was managed left a lot to be desired. The Biafran envoys continued
to indulge themselves, oblivious of urgent messages from the frontline.
Here is one instance:
MOST IMMEDIATE
TOP PRIORITY
TOP PRIORITY
TOP PRIORITY
FOR COMMISSIONER IFEDI, REPEATED PROFESSOR OBELENWATA,
CHIEF IWEKA, LAWYER AFOUKWU, ENVOY ODORO AND SPECIAL REP-
RESENTATIVE RUDDY – MESSAGE BEGINS QUOTE:
SITUATION CRITICAL – NOT A SINGLE LOAD SINCE PROFESSOR NWOKE
LEFT PARIS – SHOULD WE GIVE UP – ENEMY HAS BROKEN THROUGH
BORDERS – OUR TROUPS HAVE BROKEN ALL BRIDGES TO STEM ENEMY
ADVANCE – SITUATION CRITICAL REPEAT CRITICAL – URGENTLY NEED
RIFLES COMMA AMMUNITION ALL CALIBRES COMMA BAZOOKAS –
CONFIRM ACTION IS BEING TAKEN WITHIN TWENTY FOUR HOURS –
DEFENSE SECRETARY – UNQUOTE – MESSAGE ENDS.
TOP PRIORITY – TOP PRIORITY – TOP PRIORITY – TOP.15
Testimony revealed that fact and fiction were so blurred for the Biafran
envoys, that when reports of the deteriorating conditions at home got
to them, they couldn’t care less; the harrowing situations faced by their
compatriots did not bother them in the least:
Lawyer Afoukwu said that if he had known that things would be as bad as
that, he would have evacuated some of his property in Enugu. He had more
than one thousand bottles of champagne sitting in his cellar. Obiora Ifedi
was less moved. He said that the situation was not desperate. He was used to
receiving messages like that. People at home believed, he said, that frantic
14
15
Ibid., 24.
000 Fal book B.indb 331 13/06/2016 22:06

332 Ode Ogede
messages like that would make them work harder … Chief Iweka said that it
was difficult for people at home to conceive of the amount of exertion and
anxiety those of them abroad suffered as they tried to charter a single plane
to carry arms and ammunition home. He promised that when he got back
to Biafra after the war, he would get everything straight. Those who worked
abroad deserved real credit for winning the war.16
The envoys’ immediate reactions to the emergency in Biafra were
lukewarm at best. The combination of denial and smugness reflected
a culture of collective stupor, while the subordination of public welfare
to self-interest manifested their misplaced priorities – the height of irre-
sponsibility. It is within this context that one should view their eventual
objective of setting up a ‘private company based on cost-accounting’ to
buy and ship arms home as self-interested, for what they wanted was to
make sure that they maximized their profit.17 They did not want to ‘pay
so much to the charter companies that they would impoverish forever
the future share-holders of the company about to be formed’ and they
wanted to have ‘the Board of Directors … paid for their services while
abroad’.18
S.O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun

Behind the Rising Sun’s vivid portrayal of those clandestine activities,
through which millions of dollars were siphoned from the coffers of the
troubled Biafran regime and diverted into the pockets of the diplomats
and European opportunists cloaked as businessmen, leaves no ques-
tion that it is a work of direct observation. Specifically, it is a work of
memory drawn from the author’s first-hand experience as co-founder
and Deputy Director of the Biafran Historical Research Centre in Paris,
at the time, Biafra’s pseudo-diplomatic mission in France and Europe,
from July 1967 to July 1968. What Behind the Rising Sun does best is to
construct a cohesive narrative of the imbroglio focused on procuring
arms in Europe on Biafra’s behalf. Over time, the morass in the Biafran
arms acquisition took on the character of a saga in itself. Behind the
Rising Sun evokes the breadth and scale of the arms entanglement with
great resonance. In the narrative’s construction, what is most promi-
nent is the oddity of the Biafran representation: during the quest to
obtain arms in the European arms markets, the separatists were people
who did not appear to have either the requisite experience in the For-
eign Service or the integrity and commitment to serve effectively.
The likes of Obiora Ifedi, Chancellor Obelenwata, Tobias Iweka, and
Peter Afoukwu all held ‘important offices in the newly independent
16
Ibid., 24–25.
17
Ibid., 25.
18
Ibid., 25–26.
000 Fal book B.indb 332 13/06/2016 22:06

government, advising on political affairs, economic programmes, the

establishment of new universities and institutes of technology, the
organizations of national insurance companies, new airlines and new
shipping lines’.19 Suddenly, these bureaucrats found themselves drafted
into the Foreign Service. Though they were provided ‘a handsome treas-
ury of foreign exchange’ and given the charge to ‘purchase arms for the
fighting men at home and also let the world know, beyond any shadow
of doubt, of the unmistakable determination of their people to fight to
the bitter end, to the last man’, they were not professionally equipped to
do this job.20 The bureaucrats were thrust into new roles with demands
that in fact conflicted with the distinct ethics of their executive and civil
service orientations, which predisposed them toward pomposity and
other banalities.
Not only did these Biafran executives, turned overnight into diplo-
mats, lack the commanding resolve to endure personal sacrifices –
something distinctly alien to executives used to lavish lifestyles – but
they could not peel away the insulation in which their professional lives
were wrapped to feel any sensitivity toward the humanitarian crises
faced by their countrymen and women. In particular, they ignored the
suffering of the soldiers who gave their lives on the battlefields to defend
their community. Amidst gruesome images, missing limbs, and horren-
dous suffering of the soldiers and the ordinary people, the only thing
on the minds of the diplomats was their personal comfort. The Biafran
envoys in Europe lived like monarchs. The opulence on display in the
Biafran office in Lisbon, Portugal, was representative of all of their
extravagant lifestyle:
The Biafran office itself was well furnished, in exquisite taste, with chande-
liers floating down from the ceilings and Persian rugs decorating the floors.
The lounge looked like a palatial anteroom and the officers there seemed to
have a penchant for dry rosé during their meals.21
For example, we are told that, as the manager of the British Housing
Corporation of Enugu, Lawyer Afoukwu had several upscale houses,
all of which he had locked before going abroad ‘so that they would not
be commandeered for military purposes or for housing new adminis-
trations’.22 One of his main worries was that ‘his prolonged absence
might give the army boys an opportunity to claim the beautiful residen-
tial houses on some pretext or other’.23 Afoukwu so despised the men
in uniform fighting to defend Biafra that he preferred to have men of
19
Ibid., 22.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid., 100.
22
Ibid., 11.
23
Ibid.
000 Fal book B.indb 333 13/06/2016 22:06

334 Ode Ogede
substance like Professor Chancellor Obelenwata, Chief Tobias Iweka, or

Obiora Ifedi ‘live in the houses because they were men of status’.24
The occupants of these deluxe houses lived in a world of their own,
unaffected by all of the unrest around them; the yearnings of Afoukwu’s
wife, conveyed from his ‘beautiful house’ near ‘a hospital for wounded
soldiers’, were representative of the preoccupations of the elite occu-
pants of these types of houses. As we learn, on her long wish list of the
provisions which she was eagerly waiting to receive from her husband
was ‘some perfume like the one Chief Tobias Iweka had mailed to his
wives’, and she was ‘intrigued by the mini-dresses Obiora Ifedi had sent
to his wife and children’, and she ‘complained that she was running low
on Cutex, lipstick and hand cream’. She was also hungering for ‘pant-
ies, girdles, bras’ and ‘bread and butter’, which ‘the family had not seen’
for some time, although ‘the Iwekas were getting a steady supply’.25
From the perspective of the omniscient narrator in Behind the Rising
Sun, the ultimate insult to the memories of their compatriots back home
– many of whom faced rapid machine-gun fire, mortar shells, and other
heavy artillery bombardment on the battlefields while countless others
were dying of starvation – had to be the obsession with the consumer
goods of Europe that came to dominate the culture of the travelling
Biafran emissaries. Biafra sent out its representatives to Europe to take
care of its interests there. But the mission, instead, sent the representa-
tives into a frenzy; they sought consumer goods to buy and send home
to their families. People wondered whether these autocrats could ever
sleep with a clear conscience, especially when they got back to their
expensive lodges and were feted by low-level luxury hotel service per-
sonnel. It is unclear whether they had any sense that their behavior was
totally out of tune with the type of conduct usual in war times:
Evening dresses from Dior, perfume from Nina Ricci, shoes from Raoul of
Paris, scarves from the Champs-Elysées and women’s magazines from the
Drug-Store were amongst the smaller articles Samson Anele was to take
home for the squad. Though Samson Anele was to take home for the group
the packages they had bought and deliver them personally to their families,
he was actually being sent home because he was carrying a very confidential
hand-written message for the Enugu Government. Professor Obelenwata
honoured him with the title of ‘Special Courier’. Whenever he or Obiora
Ifedi had some provisions to send to their families, a special courier usually
accompanied these. Samson Anele was a relation of Obiora Ifedi.26
In the scenes of their gleeful shopping sprees in some of the choice
retail shops of Europe, the emphasis falls starkly on the discrepancy
between the conspicuous consumption of the Biafran ambassadors and
24
Ibid., 23.
25
Ibid., 158.
26
Ibid., 14.
000 Fal book B.indb 334 13/06/2016 22:06

the dreadfully precarious conditions of their compatriots facing armed

enemies and starvation at home. As we learn, in the heat of the battles
at home, truly catastrophic events were taking place in Biafra: the death
toll rose as town after town fell to the federalists; survivors faced insu-
perable misery due to extreme scarcities of food and shelter; families
were torn apart with the destruction of houses which forced many into
refugee camps, where the ‘voices of the frightened were confounded
with the shrieks of the wounded and the dying’ and the ‘sun added fear
and lustre to the wings of the planes as they dived low to spout out bul-
lets and unload their bombs’.27
Yet, in the midst of the dire situation in Biafra, their autocratic envoys
permitted themselves free expression of their instincts to employ misdi-
rected public money to support their extravagant pastimes:
Lawyer Afoukwu wanted to shop at the Samaritaine, Professor Obelenwata
wanted to go to the Galeries Lafayette and Obiora Ifedi said that he normally
did his shopping at Aux Trois Quartiers. Chief Iweka did not have any pref-
erence except that he just wanted to send home something bought from the
Champs-Elysées.28
While obtaining the consumer goods Onuoho was to take home, the
envoys, acting like men possessed, threw themselves with fury into a
shopping mania, so much so that ‘the personal cars of Edu and Onuoha
could not carry all the goods they purchased’, and the Hotel Lutetia had
to rent ‘a special truck to go and collect them’.29
The Biafran envoys were guilty of a basic moral failure. For any gov-
ernment functionary to be preoccupied with inconsequential things
such as fashion and cosmetics in times of utter turmoil such as that
which afflicted Biafra was effectively neglecting the nation for a wench,
which is flat treason against the State. However, quite inexplicably, the
Biafran government itself actually gave incentives to its dignitaries’
crude self-indulgences. Rather than curb preferential treatment of the
privileged, Biafra nurtured it. The practice of requiring everyone else to
pay import duties while allowing the envoys to import consumer goods
duty-free, a practice borrowed from Nigeria, was kept firmly in place.
When Captain O’Donnell’s plane finally landed in Biafra after its unnec-
essary detour into Libreville, its cargo was largely consumer goods,
though it was widely understood that ‘a bullet for a soldier’ was better
than ‘a ton of powdered milk for a battalion’.30
Once the offloading began, it was clear that the bulk of ‘the suitcases
belonged to an itinerant ambassador, Peter Afoukwu’.31 Ambassador
27
Ibid., 208.
28
Ibid., 12.
29
Ibid., 13.
30
Ibid., 145.
31
Ibid., 150.
000 Fal book B.indb 335 13/06/2016 22:06

336 Ode Ogede
Afoukwu had bought enough provisions ‘to last his wife a few weeks’.32
But his suitcases were subjected to neither a normal inspection nor to
customs duties, whereas a young unemployed graduate travelling on
the same plane, Titi, who had less luggage, was made to pay ‘the cost
of transportation from Libreville to Biafra for the excess baggage’ along
with ‘import duties on all the articles, including salt and pepper’.33 To
make matters worse, there were ‘no standards or scales and the charges
seemed to be at the whim of the officer in charge’.34
During the Annabelle airport incident in Biafra, the reader learns
that Onuoha, the ambassador travelling on the plane with Titi, ‘felt
guilty’ as she ‘watched him imploringly, begging him to intervene and
come to her aid, asking probably how Onuoha managed to avoid paying
a penny for all his luggage’.35 Not even someone as needy as ‘the young
woman returning from America to join her husband’, the reader also
learns, would be deserving of a helping hand from Onuoha, who drove
off in the convoy of ‘the small truck and a station wagon filled up with
Afuokwu’s goods’, leaving the woman abandoned to her own devices to
find her way out of the lonely airport, while knowing that public trans-
portation was virtually non-existent.36 Onuoha’s own thoughts on his
action are pertinent:
He could probably have taken along the lady and her child … As Onuoha left
her, he could not help realizing what must be going on in the mind of the
woman. She would probably be thinking that in Biafra there were also many
mansions and her suite was rather low on the scale.37
Ambassador Afoukwu could not be more on target: his unsympathetic
treatment of these women at the Annabelle airport in Biafra, who were
less privileged than himself, parallels the crassness of the euphoria of
the shopping spree in which he and his colleagues were caught up while
on their tour of major European cities. What both of these episodes and
the other incidents all show is that the Biafran envoys cared only about
one thing: themselves. Throughout all of the events in which they are
presented in Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun, the Biafran diplomats exhib-
ited none of the restraint dictated by common wartime conditions; nor
did they extend any empathy toward those less fortunate. The preferen-
tial treatment accorded envoys who had stolen public funds to provide
themselves and their families with unapproved consumer goods was
doubly repugnant when they ought to have been more concerned with
the airlift of military hardware or relief supplies for the people they
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid., 151.
37
Ibid.
000 Fal book B.indb 336 13/06/2016 22:06

should serve and on whose behalf they went on the overseas mission;
these rogues are more deserving of prosecution than of honor.
Some of the issues about the integrity of the agents of Biafra, who
had been insulated from the devastations of the war, are also crystal-
lized around their second obsession: the ‘estacode’. This is ‘the living
allowance paid to those in the diplomatic service while they are serv-
ing abroad’.38 The wandering Biafran diplomatic service personnel’s
fixation on emoluments allows readers to discover another facet of
their self-aggrandizing behavior. It was one of the primary silent codes
through which the roaming Biafran agents bilked their troubled and
cash-strapped government of much-needed funds:
Very astute diplomatic servants can make lots of money this way. They col-
lect their estacode in advance on arrival for a planned ten-day trip. At the
same time, they collect transportation allowance. Having received these,
they usually get an Embassy official to drive them around in his private car,
and, on the morning of their departure, because they are in a terrible hurry,
they usually rush off in a taxi, leaving their hotel bills to be paid by the
Embassy. The Embassy of course pays with a smile, since it booked the reser-
vation to begin with. Besides, these perambulatory diplomatic servants are
so powerful that they can get the most efficient foreign-based officer sacked
with a stroke of their pen or a word from their mouth. The officer abroad
therefore pays the bill with a smile and is given a good pat on the back by the
itinerant ambassador, for the sake of his conscience, when he next comes
abroad.39
Instead of disavowing the existing arbitrary rules and bureaucratic pro-
cedures which provide so much comfort to African autocrats, the tour-
ing Biafran officials even found new ways to multiply the senior service
protocols of corruption inherited from Nigeria, such that
[s]ome itinerant ambassadors, the smoother operators amongst them, claim
their estacode in one foreign post and pass the period in another post where
they leave their bills unpaid. Though the responsible officers in charge of
the posts helplessly complain to each other over the telephone, no written
record is kept of the complaint and such dissatisfaction is not supposed to
show when the officer drives the visiting diplomat to the airport or carries
his luggage to the counter.40
In stark negation of all the ideals of self-reliance and honor for which
Biafra claimed to stand, the visiting Biafran dignitaries embodied the
sort of rank corruption that had supported the flamboyancy associated
with Nigerian leaders, who were infamous for their inappropriate diver-
sion of public funds. In theory, Biafrans defined their independence in
38
Ibid., 11.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., 11–12.
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338 Ode Ogede
document after document as a repudiation of everything represented

by Nigeria: in particular, the leadership’s corruption and lack of
discipline.41
However, in practice, here were the Biafran elite roaming the major
European cities and getting caught up in all kinds of compromising
situations. They showed absolute unwillingness to wean themselves off
behaviors which had been so prominent among officials high in Afri-
can governments, and appropriated the ‘“Code of General Directions”
issued in Lagos during the civilian regime by the Nigerian Government,
[stipulating that] a junior officer should on no account embarrass his
senior officer’.42 So here was clear confirmation that it would be busi-
ness as usual in Biafra. The much-touted notion of culture shift was no
more than rhetoric: under the Biafran flag the conduct of government
would be no different. Everything in the behavior of the Biafran emis-
saries in Europe was a slap in the face of the utopian ideas of those for
whom, for a time, it had seemed possible to achieve a true renaissance,
to develop a new country that retained the identity of the people while
discarding vestiges of the old corruptive elements. Violating the honor
code gave no umbrage to these envoys.
One of those idealists was Dr Okeji, an outstanding Biafran profes-
sional based in Germany. Though this modest man was ‘appointed a
Professor at a German University’ on the heels of a stellar career, he
was ‘very unhappy’ on account of the human tragedy in his com-
munity back home.43 In Dr Okeji’s own words, ‘he could not in good
conscience pursue his private and personal career when he felt that his
people faced the danger of extermination’.44 Dr Okeji, therefore, roused
other like-minded compatriots of his living in the United States, Britain,
and Germany, who scrambled to pool their resources together to send
support for the army back home. Yet, his main worries remained the
Nigerian retentions he saw in Biafra. It would be difficult to give a better
characterization of the quandary in Biafra than the one Dr Okeji gave.
He summed up, in more accurate terms than was usual, the prevailing
overlap of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and Biafra, and registered his
profound regret that
41
The argument for the secession of Biafra was circulated widely. Chinua Achebe states the
gist of it notably in his last book, There Was a Country: ‘There was enough talent, enough
education in Nigeria for us to have been able to arrange our affairs more efficiently, more
meticulously, even if not completely independently, than we were doing … One thinks
back on this and is amazed. Nigeria had people of great quality, and what befell us –
the corruption, the political ineptitude, the war – was a great disappointment and truly
devastating to those of us who witnessed it.’ – Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal
History of Biafra (New York: Penguin, 2012), 158. Also see General Chukwu-Emeka
Odumegwu Ojukwu, Principles of The Biafran Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Biafra Review,
1969).
42
43
Ibid., 40.
44
Ibid., 41.
000 Fal book B.indb 338 13/06/2016 22:06

almost the very same people who advised the civilian Prime Minister until
his assassination, the very same people who condemned the Prime Minis-
ter and supported General Ironsi when the latter came to power, were the
individuals, the Commissioners, the Special Envoys advising the present
regime.45
Dr Okeji had a luminous vision of renewal: ‘the people, softened as
they were by seven years of a corrupt civilian regime … must change
their attitudes and see the nation first before their own interests’, and
he prayed and hoped that the ‘graft, nepotism and selfishness that had
led to the demise of the former Federation of Nigeria … would not beset
the new Republic’.46
The patriotic vision of Dr Okeji and other like-minded individuals did
not materialize, which resulted in the most obtuse forms of vulgarity in
the odious concern for rank, obsessive deference, and public demonstra-
tion of grandeur evinced by the Biafran diplomats. The way in which
their hosts exploited this weakness of the envoys provides insights into
how some Europeans of questionable character were waiting to pounce
at every opportunity they had. With close attention to those peculiar
proclivities, which their rich and powerful guests shared with African
leaders generally, the poorer members of the hotel staff, for instance,
would take adequate care to cater to these flaws so as to win small
favors. For example, the bellboys at the Lutetia Hotel would start
running up and down when they saw signs of affluence, for tips normally
followed close behind … A bell boy opened the car door as Obiora Ifedi
arrived, dusted his shoes with an immaculate white handkerchief, took his
brief-case in one hand, his umbrella in another and still found one to accept
the tip. At the door of the elevator, the service boy smiled and held the door
until he got his tip, even though the lift was automatic. On the fifth floor,
another service boy held the elevator door open for Obiora Ifedi and ushered
him to his door and kept it open until Mr Ifedi remembered to hand him
over something discreetly. Quite often, the stewards went out of their way
to ask Mr Ifedi if he had called for a drink, for with each drink came a com-
pulsory fifteen per cent charge for service. Nor would the visitor forget the
receptionist because when he had a phone call, she walked straight down
to the lounge and tapped him on the back, saying: ‘There’s a phone call for
you, sir’, as the rest of the common folk sat in the lounge wondering who
the V.I.P. so well known in the hotel could be. With less generous clients,
the receptionist usually sent a small porter with a bell and a board marked
with the name of the person wanted, ringing and inviting him to come and
answer his call.47
45
Ibid.
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid., 13–14.
000 Fal book B.indb 339 13/06/2016 22:06

340 Ode Ogede
Mezu implies that no self-confident leader would seek validation

through such ostentation. Thus, the lack of any display of modesty on
the part of its representatives boded ill for the emerging Biafran nation;
it was becoming indisputably obvious that the social superiority of its
leadership had its basis in insecurity. The Biafran emissaries had such
a desperate need for attention because of an inferiority complex. This
inherently debilitating character flaw led them, rather than exercise
the frugality demanded by the exigencies of war, to become big-time
spendthrifts trying to impress the public by wasting their substance on
sycophants and parasites. But the story did not end there.
During the mission, ostensibly to acquire military ammunition, the
roaming Biafran ambassadors behaved more like people on luxurious
getaways than individuals operating under the desperate conditions
dictated by war. Throughout their stay at the Hotel Lutetia, and beyond,
the envoys not only showed that they enjoyed the banal pleasure of
adoring eyes, but it was evident that they were also obsessed with other
forms of power as well. For instance, they proved equally unable to resist
the fragrance of beautiful women nor did they conceal the fact that
womanizing was one of their favorite pastimes, to the extent that ‘if one
of the Parisian girls the client met in the nightclub the day before came
to keep an appointment in the hotel, the tipped bell boy could usher her
discreetly into the client’s room without his having to come down to
find her, blushing if he were not too black’.48 Ruddy Nnewi was another
man ‘charged with secret missions’, but he ended up ‘trotting up and
down in Germany staying in expensive hotels, racing up and down the
autobahn between East and West Germany with a blonde-haired girl in
a Mercedes 230 SL spending all the money he could lay hands on’.49 But
perhaps most shocking of all was the fact that Everly Nwomah and Pro-
fessor Obelenwata could even find the time to become involved in a rival
adulterous relationship with one Mrs Judith Gatwick, adding another
chief weakness to the envoys’ long list of character flaws.
It was no coincidence that the Biafran envoys’ trip to the airport
ended up with a motorcade. This event was of the same order of the
pattern of conduct of people who liked to flaunt their wealth, demon-
strated openly by the envoys throughout the duration of their overseas
tours. In the ironic chain of events set off by Obiora Ifedi’s refusal to take
the Peugeot 403 at the front of the line-up of taxis waiting in a queue
for passengers, Mr Ifedi insisted, instead, on ‘going to the airport in the
Black Citroen behind’ because that ‘definitely looked more majestic and
ministerial’.50 The collective reaction of the troupe to the occurrences
that unfolded articulated the banality of the Biafran envoys: ‘As luck or
fate would have it, there was an ambulance rushing to the Autoroute
48
Ibid., 14.
49
Ibid., 42.
50
Ibid., 14–15.
000 Fal book B.indb 340 13/06/2016 22:06

du Sud to pick up some people injured in a car collision. The Ifedi squad
motorcade followed closely behind as the ambulance blazed a trail with
its siren’.51 That improvised parade of cars, following on the heels of
the taxi episode, could be interpreted as a parody of the mode through
which Third World countries, in particular, typically carry and escort
their prominent members.
In developing a continuous likeness between the conduct of the
vainglorious Biafran autocrats and their counterparts elsewhere on the
continent, the text establishes a tract on the very stuff of which African
leaders of all hues are made: a brutish and compulsive need for a show
of power. A matter of immediate concern is the fact that the distinction
between the illusion of royal spectacle, which the ministerial motorcade
aspired to evoke, and the trauma of an accident was blurred, for there
is something rather chilling about people equating the two contrasting
situations.
Amidst the diversionary outlandish behaviors, what did get lost was
the focus on the envoys’ chief charge to procure ammunition and other
military hardware to deliver to the fighters back home – the raison d’être
of the Biafran emissaries’ European mission:
Monsieur Georges Blanc, Dubien’s associate, accompanied the group to
the airport and was going to travel to Toulouse with Lawyer Afoukwu and
Samson Anele. Tickets were bought for the three of them. The amount
paid for excess baggage was enough to give a young couple a Concorde trip
round the world and a two-week Cunard cruise on the Queen Elizabeth from
New York to the Caribbean islands. But there was a sigh of relief that all
the arrangements had been made. Professor Obelenwata was happy that
his family would have enough to keep them going for another six weeks.52
To say that the Biafran emissaries abroad handled their responsibilities
and the challenges and temptations of power that came their way poorly
is to make an understatement. They mismanaged the huge amounts of
money made available to them, throwing cocktail parties, wining and
dining in luxury hotels like the Escale à Hong Kong in Paris, and they did
not take their mission as seriously as was expected of them. There was
a clear indication that self-gratification was their top and bottom line.
Yet, Behind the Rising Sun does not lay all of the blame for the failure
of the arms purchase and diplomatic missions at the feet of the travel-
ling Biafran representatives, since they operated alongside opportun-
istic European swindlers masquerading as arms dealers. If the novel
teems with images of the Biafran representatives engaged in disreputa-
ble conduct of all kinds, it is as a means to make the force of the costs
for their pattern of misbehaviors weigh on the readers. It thus achieves
its objective of portraying the autocrats not by peddling rumors about
51
Ibid., 15.
52
Ibid.
000 Fal book B.indb 341 13/06/2016 22:06

342 Ode Ogede
them, but by walking the readers through the defining characteristics

of their personalities.
Ironically, it was the fraudulent Europeans who passed themselves off
as arms dealers, shippers, and foreign exchange and banking loan bro-
kers – their co-actors in the drama – who offered the Biafran representa-
tives a taste of their own medicine. The European underground arms
market, monopolized by people of shady character and background –
Ulrich Merton, Arthur Kutzenov, Jean-Pierre Dubien, and others – was
all about easy money; and Biafra was the perfect prey. These unscrupu-
lous characters all had one thing in common: a sense of entitlement.
And they would use every trick in the book to get their way, including
a resort to blackmail as tellingly revealed in Dubien’s effort to wrestle
approval for his loan proposal. His desperation extended to the point of
twisting Onuoha’s arm:
You say … that you have nothing to do with these negotiations and
yet you prepared the seal for the signature of the contract at Boulevard
Suchet for a six million dollar loan. You say that you are nothing but a
student and yet you are here recruiting mercenaries to go and blow up
the Nigerian frigate. You have nothing to do with these and you carry
around in your car more than one million pounds’ worth of old Nige-
rian currency. If you pretend any further, I will denounce you to the
police.53
He adds that next time he will ‘bring people to the hotel to beat up
Onuoha’.54
The impassioned threat from Samson Ogbuefi also fell into this pat-
tern. Ogbuefi is a ‘dangerous’ Biafran ex-convict recruited to serve as
a front man for European fraudsters, masked as businessmen, to rob
Biafra in a botched Nigerian currency exchange scheme. When Dubien
could not get his way with his ultimatums, he enlisted Ogbuefi’s help to
facilitate the £100,000 exchange scam. This certificate-forging double
ex-convict lived up to his reputation, fabricating an elaborate money
exchange plan, although Onuoha was smart enough not to be taken in.
When Samson Ogbuefi thought Onuoha had sniffed out the fraud, he
was irate: ‘Fuming with rage, Samson warned Onuoha to be careful, that
he was not like Jean-Pierre Dubien, so Onuoha could not threaten him
with guns and get away with it. Samson Ogbuefi said that he would deal
with anyone who stood in his way.’55 A kind of double agent, Samson
had so much money from ‘deals he had made on behalf of the Biafran
government and gifts from foreign organizations who bought him over
… [he was] carrying no less than one hundred thousand dollars in
traveller’s cheques in his small brief-case’.56 Ogbuefi did eventually get
53
Ibid., 75.
54
Ibid., 75.
55
Ibid., 80.
56
Ibid., 83.
000 Fal book B.indb 342 13/06/2016 22:06

hold of the seven million Nigerian pounds, but the attempt to smuggle
it back into Nigeria ended in a fiasco with its seizure at the airport in
Togo; ‘later on the Nigerian government bought it … from the bankrupt
Togolese Treasury’.57
In nearly every one of their quests, either for arms purchase and
shipment or for foreign exchange and bank loan procurement, Biafran
envoys found themselves engaged in a wild goose chase. Yet they could
never deter violent European fraudsters, whether operating alone, in
organized groups, or with Biafran collaborators, from hounding them
down. Nowhere did the Biafran envoys encounter any proposals as odd
as the ones presented by Pierre Richier. He appeared out of the blue and
presented himself as someone in the know, well versed in the conun-
drums of arms purchase and shipment as well as foreign exchange ven-
tures. As a solution, Richier offers to help the Biafran envoys to recover
money lost in unfulfilled contracts, promising to take advantage of his
‘banking connections in Switzerland who were willing to take risk of
changing’ the old Nigerian currency.58 Richier then went on to pro-
vide ample background information on several foreign exchange and
arms purchase scammers, whom he portrayed accurately as profligate
in criminality, before improvising what looked like a convincing con-
spiracy theory diagnosis of the Nigerian currency exchange quandary,
arguing persuasively for a consolidated marketing strategy:
The price of the Nigerian currency had gone down so much in Europe
because the Nigerian Government and the Bank of England had sent pow-
erful agents to Switzerland, France, and Germany. The aim of these agents
was to try to buy over at the minimum possible rate all the Nigerian cur-
rency available. He strongly criticized the Biafran sale effort. Biafran envoys,
Richier said, had not made the matter easy. The law of supply and demand
weighed heavily in this case. The prices of shares in a company go down
when too many start offering sale of their shares. Buyers become wary and
the prices go down. The difficulty in selling the Nigerian notes arose from
the fact that there were too many Biafrans offering the sale of the same
notes, often to the same buyer or to different agents of the same buyer. If
ten people start offering agents of banks the sale of one million pounds of
old Nigerian currency notes, sooner or later the impression is created that
there are actually ten million pounds for sale and this is enough to bring
the buying rate down from seventeen shillings to the pound to less than five
shillings. At that price even, buyers are afraid they might not recover their
investment.59
Richier’s intimidating analysis was so profound that the solution pro-
posed to correct the impression of over-supply of the Nigerian currency
57
Ibid., 103.
58
Ibid., 83.
59
Ibid., 84.
000 Fal book B.indb 343 13/06/2016 22:06

344 Ode Ogede
– by pooling all of the money together and putting it under his charge
for sale – persuaded the envoys, who arranged for him to travel to Swit-
zerland to market seven million pounds. Onuoha, one of the diplomats,
even took the trouble to accompany the tons of Nigerian currency, only
for the Switzerland money exchange proposal of Richier’s to turn out,
to the collective chagrin of the envoys, to amount to nothing more
than a bank deposit box arrangement for which the client would have
to pay hefty monthly fees. ‘It was obviously impossible, even in Zurich,
to exchange the Nigerian pound for an American silver dollar’, and so
the Biafran envoys were provided with the next leading prospect and
advised to follow it to Lisbon, in Portugal.60
There was a festering nest of European contractors who sought
to be employed by Biafra to clean up the mess left by other European
contractors’ flubbed services, all of whom were seldom strangers to
one another, as in the case of Dubien and Albert Bondieu, who had
‘known each other for more than fifteen years’, and had access to equal
amounts of information about the botched contracts.61 The whole thing
worked like a well-organized network of disreputable cronies operating
in such a way that the action of the initial contractor set up an enabling
opportunity for his anticipated replacement. The one coming to repair
the damage done previously depended heavily on that initial bungled
contract. The fraudsters were thus in a sort of self-perpetuating rela-
tionship of mutual unproductivity.
Albert Bondieu, for instance, approached the representatives with a
proposal to ‘help Biafra get out of the predicaments and its difficulties’
with the failed Dubien loan application and foreign exchange plan to
market the old Nigerian currency, as well as the foiled arms and military
hardware acquisition and shipment initiative. He envisaged a vaguely
defined mission to ‘set out with a team of three frogmen and go to Lagos
or Port-Harcourt and from there organize the sinking of the Nigerian
frigate, the S.S. Nigeria’. His estimates of ‘a paltry sum of one hundred
and fifty thousand francs’ and an ‘additional fifty thousand francs’
would save Biafra a lot because otherwise it would ‘have cost the Enugu
government, he argued, at least two million pounds to equip effectively
a Navy that could destroy the Nigerian frigate’, though ‘there was no
guarantee of success’ and the precious lives of ‘the Biafran Navy offic-
ers would be lost’.62 The superiority of the Bondieu plan, he claimed,
was self-evident.
Perhaps the most high profile of the European scam artists who bilked
Biafra of millions of dollars, Ulrich Merton received a 1.7 million pound
sterling advance to ‘collect warships and torpedo boats’ to deliver to
60
Ibid., 84.
61
Ibid., 75.
62
Ibid., 72.
000 Fal book B.indb 344 13/06/2016 22:06

the Biafran Navy.63 He received the money ‘directly from Enugu and no
formal receipt had been issued since the operation was supposed to be
classified “top secret,” and the contract highly confidential’.64 Merton’s
promise was ‘to equip fully the two warships and torpedo boats’ which
were to ‘arrive near Port-Harcourt in two weeks’ from Europe ‘and sink
the Nigerian frigate, S.S. Nigeria’ and then ‘isolate the other vessels one
by one and sink them with torpedoes and rocket-fire’.65
Time passed and Merton’s delivery promises failed to materialize.
As it turned out, the things Merton promised Biafra were in fact scrap
metal, for the place where he had taken the Biafran naval officers sent
from Enugu to inspect the construction of the weapons was ‘a yard
where torpedo boats were being built for a movie company shooting
movies about wars’ and ‘the vessels’ he had shown to them time and
again actually ‘belonged to a demolition company. They were Second
World War vessels being dismantled.’66 But Merton could not be held
accountable because there had been ‘a kick-back, as happens in the
United States to some highly placed government officials’ who offered
Merton protection from investigation.67 Merton decided to ‘work for the
destruction of Biafra so that the Enugu government could never come
to claim back the money given to him’.68
Arthur Kutzenov, a self-proclaimed large investor, said he was ‘a
French citizen whose parents had fled from Russia during the 1917
Revolution’ and had ‘lived through revolts in Czechoslovakia and
Poland’.69 Kutzenov laid claim to a pedigree no-one could reasonably
question regarding his declaration that he was ‘determined to fight the
Russians’ and ‘assist any group of people fighting for a right to self-
government’.70 However, Kutzenov was a scoundrel, and he skimmed
off a lot of money from the Biafran government. He did that by taking
contracts for ammunition, as well as for aircraft he could not deliver to
carry arms to Biafra. In one of the contracts, for example, Kutzenov was
‘to provide either one DC 7 or two DC 3 aircraft for the airlift of some
material stocked in Prague, mostly 7.92 millimetre ammunition, some
rifles and a few machine-guns’ and he insisted on ‘a down payment of
ten thousand dollars’.71. The representatives of Biafra in Europe scram-
bled to put the resources together, and Kutzenov was duly advanced
the required fee. However, come the day of reckoning it turned out that
63
Ibid., 64.
64
Ibid.
65
Ibid., 65.
66
Ibid., 72.
67
Ibid., 65.
68
Ibid., 72.
69
Ibid., 1.
70
Ibid.
71
Ibid.
000 Fal book B.indb 345 13/06/2016 22:06

346 Ode Ogede
Kutzenov did not have the aircraft he took money to deliver to the Bia-
fran representatives, and instead he presented one excuse after another:
Arthur Kutzenov now told the squad that the DC 7 had developed
engine trouble and that the departure would be shifted to about five
o’clock that day. That was not serious. He was expecting a call imme-
diately to confirm the departure time. The call did come almost imme-
diately. He was almost sure it was his call, so, without even giving the
owner of the hotel room the chance to find out who was on the phone,
Kutzenov took the receiver and answered the call … He hung up the
phone and turned slowly to the group and said that the plane could not
be repaired … Kutzenov regretted the slight change in the programme
and said that he had done his best. The following day, perhaps, the DC
7 would be able to fly to Prague, but he could not promise anything.72
Like all others of his kind, Arthur Kutzenov knew how to play the
system, and was dependent on the naïveté of his patrons, taking advan-
tage of the Biafran representatives’ unsuspecting natures. Indeed, their
failure to heed the timely warning from Jean-Pierre Dubien that Arthur
Kutzenov was ‘a first-class crook’ who could not even be entrusted with
someone’s daughter gives us the grounds to talk of the great betrayal by
the Biafran elite, as it took a thief to know his kin.73
When the Biafran envoys endeavored to set themselves up as inde-
pendent contractors, in a move intended to circumvent the European
con artists, it was revealed that their own motives were not any purer,
to begin with. The venture into the business of arms purchase and ship-
ment was driven not by a feeling of sufficient urgency to ship arms to
the fighting men on the battlefields in Biafra but instead by a motivation
to raise profits.74
However, other European arms dealers were similarly one step ahead
of the aspiring diplomats. These upstarts’ efforts at a venture that took
on elements of a privatization project opened them up to be further
hoodwinked. It is a tale of money, fraud, and power, with the conniv-
ance of even African-descended peoples of West Indian origin resident
in Paris, with false expressions of pan-black sentiments, like Colonel
Lavignette and Dr Eugene Fresco. Some European dealers who claimed
to be connected within a conglomerate called Air Branco, presumed
to sell planes, for instance, also swindled the Biafran envoys of more
money in the guise of helping them navigate French bureaucratic red
tape that prohibited non-French citizens from acquiring planes directly.
These European dealers took the Biafran diplomats to a place passed
off as ‘the office of the Engineering Director’, but, which ‘sounded very
much like the V.I.P. lounge at the airport terminal’.75 There, the dealers
72
Ibid., 6.
73
Ibid., 3.
74
Ibid., 25.
75
Ibid., 29.
000 Fal book B.indb 346 13/06/2016 22:06

showed the envoys ‘a fleet of discarded but reconditioned Super Con-

stellation G planes’ on sale.76 Though at first suspicious, the diplomats
fell for the proposed deal all the same, spurred by persistent stories of
competitive offers being tendered by their Nigerian enemies, who were
said to be standing ready to clean them all out at any moment, and
persuaded that ‘the reinforcement of the Nigerian Air Force’ would
spell ‘tragedy for Biafra’.77 So the Biafran diplomats doled out huge
amounts of money: US $220,000 paid for the aircraft and another
$120,000 advanced for the spare parts that would ostensibly be needed
in the future. But the Biafran envoys had hardly paid all of the money
requested in cash to a third party called CONAREX when new develop-
ments arose.
The depiction of the endlessly winding maze of conditions required
of the Biafran envoys then took a Kafkaesque turn. To say that one
would be remiss to miss the absurdity of the complications is an under-
statement; for instance, shortly after the conclusion of this payment
procedure, Air Branco ratcheted up the pressure on the purse of the
Biafran regime. Air Branco put forward a fresh request for ‘ten thousand
dollars’ in advance payments to be made to ‘the pilot, co-pilot, and flight
engineer per round trip for each of the four round trips to Biafra’ for the
three-month duration. Next, Air Branco asked the Biafran envoys to dip
further into their pockets and cover ‘the cost of refuelling and necessary
repairs as well as airport charges at the ports of call and hotel bills of
the pilots while waiting in Lisbon to ferry the planes to Enugu and also
while in Enugu’.78
Soon after that issue was settled, another set of demands was intro-
duced, this time for insurance coverage for the plane. Then, the reader
learns, this was followed by the most bizarre requirement of all: the
envoys must find a company to buy the plane from CONAREX in Lisbon
‘since it would be difficult to get registration for it in France’.79 As if
the list was not long enough, the envoys were then asked for additional
money to buy spare parts. ‘The cost of the required spare parts was
$120,000 to be paid in cash to CONAREX, who would in turn issue a
cheque to Air Branco.’80
The diplomats managed to overcome all the financial hurdles Air
Branco placed in their path, and eventually saw the lift-off of the Super
Constellation plane. The plane did successfully take its delivery of arms,
ammunition, and other military hardware and chemical supplies to
Biafra, but not without further costs. The success of that Super Con-
stellation airlift operation opened up a floodgate of offers from other
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid., 31.
78
Ibid., 35.
79
Ibid.
80
Ibid., 37.
000 Fal book B.indb 347 13/06/2016 22:06

348 Ode Ogede
European arms dealers, precipitating a wild scramble for a piece of the

Biafran pie, and causing the dealers aggressively to play the Biafran
envoys who had been commissioned to award those contracts against
one another; thus unleashing a nasty power struggle within the ranks
of the diplomats which took no small toll on the group’s cohesiveness
as a unit.
One of these European competitors was Captain Henk, a retired
pilot who had survived a plane crash on a previous Biafran mission.
He wanted very badly to recoup his losses from that earlier disaster.
The unorthodox methods employed by him yielded the desired result.
The envoys in Germany carefully reviewed Captain Henk’s unsatisfac-
tory record, and unanimously decided against renewing his contract.
Onuoha, the self-appointed leader of the squad, was about to self-
importantly inform Captain Henk that he had been denied, when Henk
himself smugly announced that he had received approval from Lisbon
of a half million dollars, to the utter consternation and anger of the
envoys in France, compelling them individually to plot new strategies
for a power grab:
Mr Everly Nwomah was planning to go to Enugu and claim all the credit for
the purchase of the first plane, since the contract had his signature alone.
He would also claim credit for signing the Captain Henk contract. When
he came back to Europe, he would come back with increased powers to
rule and to control all operations. Mr Ifedi would not tolerate someone else
trying to control Biafran affairs in Europe, and Professor Obelenwata was
not going to sit idle and let Everly Nwomah take credit for a plane he had
personally negotiated and which had only been sold to Nwomah because
of the Chancellor’s special relationship with Colonel Ochar Lavignette. The
faces around became sour and confidence was broken.81
The consequences of the diplomats’ response to the perception of ‘this
encroachment on their prerogative’ were calamitous; the lines of action
they chose to pursue unleashed not only tension in their ranks but
total discord as each resolved not to be marginalized.82 Their collective
mission was put on the back burner, and the envoys worked at cross-
purposes, squabbled, called each other names, and undercut each other
instead of acting cooperatively together to achieve the common goal of
facilitating the war effort back home.
In the power tussle, for instance, Nwomah leveraged a key strategy in
his aspiration to become the ‘de facto leader of the envoys in Europe’.83
If he could be perceived as the one with the best plan to save the Bia-
fran regime lots of money by persuading Henk to accept payment in the
Nigerian currency being smuggled out of Biafra, he believed it would
81
Ibid., 51–52.
82
Ibid., 51.
83
Ibid.
000 Fal book B.indb 348 13/06/2016 22:06

catapult him into the leadership position. But Nwomah’s plot in turn
shifted prominence to the power of the smuggled Nigerian currency,
letting loose an unprecedented power skirmish for its control. The
brawl over authority unchained the animal in each of the diplomats.
The magnitude of each envoy’s hubris showed how every one of them
could do anything for power, just to seize it and exercise influence. For
instance, when they sensed Nwomah’s plans, Ifedi and Obelenwata
teamed up to employ it to undermine him through a relentless search
for buyers in Switzerland of the smuggled Nigerian pounds.
The Biafran envoys were afflicted with a compulsive demonstration of
a love of power. Dubien’s ploy to remedy the foreign exchange shortfall
was to bring in US dollars by securing loans for Biafra. A much-needed
loan proposal was put together by Dubien for $6,000,000, but Nwomah
would not be outdone and showed up in France, only to be accused by
Lawyer Afoukwu of ‘running around with women instead of carrying
out the very serious mission with which he had been entrusted’.84 The
struggle to grasp power was not going to be limited to money matters,
and Nwomah and Obelenwata extended it to a rival game of seduction
with Mrs Judith Gatwick, a married woman, as the grand prize. This
intense competition for her affections ramped up the mutual suspi-
cions, which had coalesced around the Nigerian currency transfer from
Biafra. During one confrontation, with Obelenwata accusing Nwomah
of ‘going home to claim credit for a job he had accomplished single-
handed after weeks of exertion’, the arguments got so heated that a
neighbor had to come out and knock at their door, threatening ‘to tel-
ephone the police if the disturbance continued’.85
One of the principal laws of power is that the man of power must
conceal his intentions. Robert Greene, in his 48 Laws of Power, identifies
this as Law Number 3.86 But the Biafran envoys so crudely craved power
that their intentions were all too obvious. Judith Gatwick’s husband
suspected that the two envoys were in adulterous relationships with his
wife, and so received unique privileges at their office. Nwomah’s ready
reciprocity was to secure Gatwick a contract both to appease him and
to guarantee unadulterated, unrestricted access to the contract recipi-
ent’s wife. Obelenwata employed his rival’s adultery as a pawn to curb
the reach of his power. Ifedi’s bargaining chip, in a scheme for Nwomah
to ‘control all the foreign exchange you want’, was securing a commit-
ment from Nwomah to use his order as the Commissioner of Lands and
Survey to ‘allocate to me two thousand acres of land in the Rivers Prov-
ince so that I can cultivate tobacco’.87 In return, Nwomah wanted the
favor of Ifedi to ‘get the government to assign to him during his travels
84
Ibid., 56.
85
Ibid., 58–59.
86
Robert Greene, 48 Laws of Power (New York: Penguin, 2000).
87
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350 Ode Ogede
abroad a nice-looking Igbo girl to act as his confidential secretary’, but

was informed that she already ‘belong[ed] to another distinguished
ambassador’.88
The Biafran envoys also had to contend with other forms of sabotage
from European contractors. Strangely enough, Captain Henk, for exam-
ple, while making many Biafran delivery flights, made sure that not all
of the cargo reached its destination. Captain Henk’s Super Constellation
plane carried ‘two million pounds of the new Biafran currency’ along
with a ‘million pounds worth of assorted guns, bazookas, ammunition
and a few 105 millimetre shells’. But Captain Henk would fly the plane
over the West Coast of Africa, complain of ‘engine trouble’, and then
make sure to throw into the Atlantic Ocean ‘more than three quarters
of the load of Biafran arms and ammunition’ after having ‘come into
Biafra and circled three times around the airport’, then ‘flown back and
later landed on the island of Sao Tome, a Portuguese possession off the
West African coast’.89
There was also Captain O’Donnell, ‘an Irishman who joined the ser-
vice of Captain Henk’, to fly relief materials to Biafra but who did not
know the safe route.90 So Captain O’Donnell had to ask Onuoha, one of
his passengers, for help mid-flight. When Captain O’Donnell ‘came over
to Onuoha and asked him to come to the cockpit and assist him with
some information about directions’, the reader learns, ‘Onuoha almost
fainted’ with the fear that ‘they might end up in the wrong airport’.91
There followed the impracticality of Captain O’Donnell’s action and
advice: he said that he ‘knew the exact location of the Annabelle air-
port, but wanted to find out from Onuoha the dangerous zones that
should be avoided, the zones controlled by Nigerians or where there
was fighting’.92 Captain O’Donnell also ‘spoke at length of the hazards
of the enterprise’, and added that the Biafrans ‘should try to obtain a
few jets to escort the supply planes and protect them against Nigerian
threats of destruction’.93
But Captain O’Donnell’s advice would aid the enemy more than the
nation he supposedly wanted to assist: ‘To avoid shooting down a Red
Cross plane, Captain O’Donnell said that if he were a Nigerian pilot, he
would follow the planes as they took off and mark out the ones that
belonged to Biafra, follow them out to sea and just shoot them down
over the Atlantic Ocean.’94 That way, ‘[n]o announcement would be
made about it’; and ‘if it happened two or three times, no other pilot
88
Ibid.
89
Ibid., 127.
90
Ibid., 132.
91
Ibid., 132.
92
Ibid., 133.
93
Ibid., 134.
94
Ibid.
000 Fal book B.indb 350 13/06/2016 22:06

would dare go into Biafra’.95 Was it any wonder Captain O’Donnell

should land the plane anywhere but at the designated Biafran airport?
Captain O’Donnell made what he believed was an emergency landing
in Libreville, Gabon. Though not exactly enemy territory, Libreville was
certainly not where the relief supplies were critically needed either.
However, O’Donnell had a ready excuse, claiming he had ‘circled at
least four times, called on the radio, given the code word and signal, but
there had been no reply, no contact’, and he was also ‘running short of
fuel after circling for such a long time at low altitude’.96
I.N.C. Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice

The Anonymity of Sacrifice’s contributions to Nigerian civil war lit-
erature are manifold. It reproduces the Biafran battlefield dynamics,
which were disorganized in the extreme, capturing action in the war
fronts with poignancy, and uncovers with deadpan verisimilitude the
perverted needs and aspirations of both the rank-and-file soldiers and
the officers in the Biafran armed forces. Readers learn about the events
from the perspectives of several officers who were involved in the plan-
ning and execution of those events. The profound attention given to the
intersection of the public and the private evokes the inherent tensions
that ranged officer against officer. From this novel, readers glean that
the Biafran army suffered from a variety of ailments, and a significant
part of these had to do with poor personnel training.
The bulk of the troops was composed primarily of children pulled out
of high school – ‘fresh-faced, easily frightened, and undisciplined, with
the corky air of boys who had had some education’.97 From this pool, a
few were invested with administrative authority and the rest sent to the
war front to fight:
New, young, and poorly trained officers are rushed in to take immediate
command of new, equally young and inexperienced troops, and without
any time for familiarization they are committed to the war front, not in a
routine defensive action but in a tough attack or counter-attack or, once in
a while, disastrous retreat and rear-guard action.98
Warrant Officer II Cyril Agumo’s eye-witness account attests to the
calamitous consequences: because ‘the recruits brought from the train-
ing depots to make up the strength of the new 101 Battalion seemed
not to have learnt much during their training’ they sometimes came up
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid., 137.
97
98
Ibid., 32.
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352 Ode Ogede
with very poor military tactics such as digging trenches, which, rather
than provide protection, actually threatened to kill the troops.99
Captain Onwura recalls how troops ‘had taken cover’ in a ‘well dug,
four man trench of the company commander’ with the ‘roof of the
trench covered with cut palm trunks and reinforced with huge sand-
bags’ and that ‘had looked impregnable when they dived into it’ only for
it ‘after a time’ to turn out ‘more like a trap’ as ‘loose sand pelted down
from the roof, and as the whine, chatter and reverberating thud of the
bombs increased they feared the trench would bury them alive’.100 Not
even the basics of self-defense and offense were taught to the youngsters,
so these untrained and undisciplined troops would sabotage themselves
as most of ‘the new officers threw away their rank insignias, anonym-
ity facilitating their escape from the war fronts’ while the ‘soldiers
themselves scattered in all directions, some running into the enemy to
be captured’.101 We learn that ‘seventeen Battalions had disappeared
overnight’.102 Biafran troop desertion was indeed high. After an enemy
attack subsided, Agumo discovers that when the trenches were hit by
the enemy fire they were all empty; his men had ‘all run like rats’, leav-
ing their arms behind.103 But reinforcements were so highly limited that
after sending out one ‘platoon reinforcement to each of his companies’,
Captain Onwura was left with only two soldiers in the headquarters.104
Yet, successful deserters ‘one way or the other, found their way to their
villages where for days they would brag about their imaginary exploits
and were feted by their kinsmen’.105
The high fear factor among the Biafran troops could not be allayed
because of the poor training available to them. For example, the troops
were ‘frightened of the shelling which had continued unabated, and
their officers could not give them the confidence they needed to over-
come this fear’.106 Having troops ‘not battle-worthy’ did not help mat-
ters; some, such as Lieutenant Dike, were even playboys in Biafran army
uniform.107 It was not unexpected that Dike should eventually desert
his command post. Not even the Ogbunigwe bomb concoction, Biafra’s
most dreadful weapon, could take away the fear factor from some of
these troops as testified by the ‘ogbunigwe men’ and ‘members of the
Biafran Army Engineers’ who abandoned their trenches without firing
their deadly weapon.108
99
Ibid., 29.
100
Ibid., 13.
101
Ibid., 32.
102
Ibid.
103
Ibid., 67.
104
Ibid., 84.
105
Ibid., 32.
106
Ibid., 47.
107
Ibid., 49.
108
Ibid., 68.
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The Anonymity of Sacrifice attests that the poorly trained Biafran

army had another handicap: a dearth of equipment and arms. Cyril
Agumo’s discovery summarizes the dire equipment situation faced by
this army: he asked for ‘a company strength reinforcement’ in the heat
of battle but would ‘get them, unarmed’.109 There was ‘back-loading of
ammunition and weapons’, but Biafra could not even ‘back-load suf-
ficient weapons and ammunition to arm a company’.110
Captain Onwura recalls the frustration of begging for arms for his
unit: ‘Benjy’s trip to the brigade headquarters was not quite successful.
He got a company strength reinforcement, but most of the men were
unarmed.’111 Biafran troops had to ration weapons and often find a way
to fight without guns and ammunition. They were outgunned by their
Nigerian opponents, and had to regularly beat a retreat, as Lieutenant
Dike recounts: enemy bullets were ‘all over the place as I started to move
back’.112 Dike did not want ‘a prolonged fire battle’.113 We learn that ‘[c]
onstant requisitions had been made but nothing had been supplied’.114
When they did have equipment, Biafran troops were saddled with some
useless ones, such as the signals, which were so slow that one soldier,
Madike, believed that he would get to the headquarters on foot with a
message from the front line before the signals got there. When sending
messages to headquarters for reinforcement, in the absence of effective
radios, ‘runners’ or soldiers who walked on foot were employed, though
the headquarters themselves would often have been moved before the
message bearers finally got there.
Part of the root of the disorder in the Biafran army could be traced
to misallocation of resources, which played no small role in the troops’
ineffectiveness. Brigade commander Captain Okoye, Captain Onwura’s
immediate supervisor, diagnoses the problem with pinpoint accuracy.
He refers, for instance, to the ‘petty jealousy’ which led to the mar-
ginalization of ‘all experienced army officers, that is, those formerly
with the Nigerian army’, who were sent to the frontline, leaving ‘the
administration of the army to the inexperienced’ officers who made all
the critical decisions about the war from the headquarters.115 Not only
did ‘the higher authorities’ fail to offer the commanders on the battle-
fields ‘something to counter the enemy’s known tactics’ whenever their
advice was sought, but they were often dismissive of such requests.116
Captain Okoye’s several arms requisitions failed to materialize because
the ‘brigades’ who were expected ‘to do the back-loading of weapons
109
Ibid., 44.
110
Ibid., 45.
111
Ibid., 54.
112
Ibid., 52.
113
Ibid.
114
Ibid., 89.
115
Ibid., 13.
116
Ibid., 49.
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354 Ode Ogede
had failed to do so’ after having given their word that they would ‘send
him some weapons the next day’.117 Okoye’s arms request was put to
one side, leaving the soldiers to battle without weapons. Officers in the
front line would put in requests for reinforcements that would end up
being denied by those at headquarters; Madike was warned not to put
too much hope on the promises he was given, because he ‘won’t get
any’.118 Consequently, the ‘list of the missing and the dead was long,
including the “A” Commander’.119
Just as far reaching in its undermining effects was that, contrary to
the popular belief, individuals who enlisted did so because they viewed
the Biafran army as an opportunity to live out their personal fantasies;
rather than responding to the sway of any coherent nationalist ideol-
ogy their driving force was the mundane, rather routine ambition of
achieving status. The recruits saw the Biafran army as a job like any
other, one that would provide opportunity for employment, promotion,
rank, and progress; there is ample evidence that it was not out of any
of the acclaimed lofty ideals of patriotic devotion to country that Bia-
frans joined their military services. The consequences of this proved to
be monumental. The recruits sought to obtain personal advancement
above anything else, and the performance of the soldiers ultimately
took its shape from that original enlistment aspiration.
That the motives for joining the Biafran army often have nothing to
do with commitment to the defense of the community can be illustrated
with the case of Second Lieutenant Ekemeize, who joined the army to
offset a lack of education, seeing the Biafran armed forces as his ticket
to a post-military service job. Ekemeize had to fabricate his age and
forge a certificate in order to qualify for enlistment. Right up until he
is killed in active duty as a platoon commander, Ekemeize never really
understands what the war is about; nor does he expect, when he joins
the army, to be deployed to fight. ‘This was why he was surprised and
frightened when, on the day he passed out of the School of Infantry, he
found himself in a gwongworo [old lorry], with many young men, head-
ing for the front, and a front where, from all he had heard, death was
a constant companion.’120 He decided to ‘desert as soon as possible’.121
Before he could act on his plan to give up the unit under his control and
hand over his duties to Sergeant Agumo, however, Ekemeize’s worst
fears came to pass and he was killed in battle.
The story of Cyril Agumo – even with all its extremities and sharp
edges – is perhaps the most apposite for closing our discussion of the
primary motives of Biafran soldiers for enlisting. Agumo is compelled
117
Ibid., 54.
118
Ibid., 43.
119
Ibid., 55.
120
Ibid., 58.
121
Ibid.
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to sign up by the taunts of his disrespectful and unfaithful wife, Maria.

Agumo and Maria are living happily. Then Maria starts sleeping around
with army officers and the affairs so embolden her that she is no longer
able to hide her contempt for her civilian husband. Incessant com-
plaints and bickering, which often flare up into open conflagrations,
begin to creep into the couple’s relationship, snapping the romantic
moments which wives and husbands customarily share. Things get so
bad that Maria refuses to sleep with her husband or to even cook for
him, incensing him to such an extent that he starts to give her severe
beatings, which result in more expletives from her:
‘Is that all you are capable of?’ Maria asked slowly. Her lips trembled slightly
and then her mouth tightened. ‘To beat a woman? And you think that
makes you a man?’ She paused, and even though she still spoke softly, the
words came out hard as palm kernels as she continued. ‘Let me tell you,
Cyril, men who are men are at the front fighting the Hausas. That is where
you should be if you think you are a man. No, you won’t go there. All you
know is to stay in the rear, drinking, and beating up women, whilst others
fight and get promotions. Even small boys who only stopped sucking their
mothers’ breasts yesterday are officers.’122
Cyril Agumo is so stung by the humiliating gauntlet thrown down by
his wife that he storms out of the house. He then goes to join the army
so that he ‘can have my own back’ with the wives of civilians when he
becomes an officer himself.123 Cyril Agumo is driven to excel in the army
by his wife’s unforgettable taunting, and so when it finally arrives, his
initial promotion to sergeant fulfills a great psychological need. ‘Cyril
sighed as he thought of the stars on his shoulders ... his pet dreams …
He just saw himself in the uniform, standing there proudly and looking
handsome, dashing and disdainful.’124
Cyril Agumo’s thoughts, upon his next elevation as a result of his
former boss Lieutenant Ikemezie being killed in battle, go as follows:
At last he had become an officer, a member of the elite, a commander,
and this had come about through his achievements in the field not in the
classroom. He had also been further impressed by death and the way it
brought about dramatic, far-reaching changes … ‘Now that practically all
my dreams are coming true’, he thought, ‘I cannot afford to relax. It’s won-
derful what death can achieve! Now I can understand why people risk their
lives to carry out a coup! This time yesterday I was a mere platoon sergeant,
now I am a company commander! I could never in my wildest dreams have
imagined it. Never. Now what was that song we used to sing on Easter days?
122
Ibid., 28.
123
Ibid., 37.
124
Ibid., 30.
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356 Ode Ogede
Yes, Oh, Death where is thy sting? I think. And something about where is thy
victory?’125
Agumo is truly elated: his star has risen from the fall of another man’s.
From the outset, as we have seen, that’s the way things have always
been: promotion over and above one’s peers – including over their dead
bodies – was a powerful fantasy in the Biafran army, the attainment
of which the soldiers were wont to celebrate individually with total
abandon as it marked the fulfillment of longstanding dreams. It is not
surprising, therefore, that, Agumo’s pride should swell uncontrolla-
bly. Cyril Agumo gets drunk with power, to the extent where he wants
everyone to know that he’s now the man in charge. So, Cyril opens his
commander’s account and shoots a corporal dead, in order to give an
example to the troops that he will be a tough officer who means what-
ever he says. He shouts at ‘the three privates who cowered in fright.
“That’s what I do to people who run from the enemy!”’126
Agumo then summons the Company Sergeant Major (CSM), and
orders him to bury ‘that man … pointing at the corporal’s body with
his pistol’.127 As we learn, when the CSM accepts his orders and salutes,
‘Cyril returned the salute carelessly. He had never felt so good before
and he was determined not to let that feeling go.’128 Agumo next ‘went
back into the office, sat down at his table, and opened his bible [sic]’, but
it is disclosed that his mission is to find a rationalization for his obvi-
ously unbiblical act – which he does through misquotation: ‘The holy
book immediately fell open at a marked place – Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3’,
where his ‘eyes went straight to the verse he wanted to read: A time to
kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up.’129
Agumo has been no stranger to the attitude of reducing the business
of the war to a means for self-promotion; this has been his approach as
a platoon commander, one who ‘kept reminding himself that he really
was the platoon commander’ and that it ‘would no longer be monkey de
work baboon de chop’ as ‘[w]hatever he did would now be ascribed to him.
He wanted to do something really noteworthy. Something that would
make his superiors take notice of him.’130
But Cyril Agumo’s promotion, on this new occasion, actually turns
lethal: it elevates his power giddiness to unprecedented heights. This pro-
motion gets into Cyril Agumo’s head, so much so that he puts on more
airs, and he begins to take things so personally that suspicion takes over
completely in his relationship with those under his command. When
one of his former colleagues comes to give him a situation report from
125
Ibid., 87–88.
126
Ibid., 92–93.
127
Ibid., 93.
128
Ibid.
129
Ibid., italics original.
130
Ibid., 66.
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the war front, for instance, Cyril Agumo starts to erect social barriers,
resolved to ‘put people in their place’. Agumo does not want to obtain
all of the requisite information to enable him to conceive a meaningful
action plan because ‘he does not want to get too familiar with’ his sub-
ordinates; he ‘felt that the more they discussed, the more the barriers he
was trying to erect crumbled’. But, ‘“I must always remember I am now
the commander,” he thought, “and also an officer.”’131 Cyril Agumo
grows increasingly insensitive to the situations of the troops, and is con-
sumed by his personal agenda of heroics and the accolades to follow;
and so, ‘whenever excitement took possession of him, most, if not all
of his actions became instinctive and thus he gained some measure of
invincibility, and personally took over the heavy machine-gun installed
in his trench’.132 Cyril Agumo acts like a lone ranger, discarding the
customary military team spirit. The men under Cyril Agumo’s watch
are retreating from persistently overpowering enemy fire, but he opens
fire at them, ‘cutting down those at the head’.133 Cyril Agumo’s cruelty
comes into focus in his uncompromising determination to enforce his
firm stand on deserters, irrespective of the grounds for their actions
such as having no weapons to fight back with.
Cyril Agumo adopts aloof, mercurial leadership styles, and detaches
himself from all under his command, fashioning a single-minded and
inflexible war strategy underlining confrontation with the enemy under
all circumstances. Agumo is even prepared to waste weapons, getting
the dreaded Ogbunigwe in the trenches and exploding them just to revel
‘in their doom-filled reverberations’. Captain Benjy Onwura, the bat-
talion commander, could not have made a more costly mistake than
to create the environment for a violent confrontation with Agumo, a
man he himself had promoted as a company commander. It all begins
with Agumo’s disobeying a retreat order from Onwura over the una-
vailability of food for the fighting men. Agumo takes it that ‘his bat-
talion commander was a saboteur’. Agumo’s argument is that ‘[o]nly
a saboteur could ask Biafran soldiers to withdraw as though they were
fighting on enemy territory and not in defence of their own hearths.
Only a saboteur would be prepared to surrender easily to the enemy an
area defended with precious Biafran blood.’134 This act of disobedience
by Agumo leads to a multitude of Biafran soldiers being killed, includ-
ing John, his assistant; but Agumo tries to take emotion out of the situ-
ation, determined ‘never to get attached to any soldier’ so as to avoid
‘moments of anguish, gloom, and loneliness’.135
Captain Onwura becomes embroiled in an ominous confrontation
131
Ibid., 91.
132
Ibid., 94.
133
Ibid., 95.
134
Ibid.
135
Ibid., 97.
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358 Ode Ogede
with Agumo. The turning point is Onwura’s issuing a warrant for the
out-of-control company commander’s immediate arrest. Onwura artic-
ulates a profoundly intelligent and persuasive intervention strategy, not
narrowly and obsessively focused on attempts to take out the enemy.
The core of Onwura’s mediation tactic stresses that realistic appraisal
of all conditions is absolutely essential to ensure troop safety. Because of
his eloquent tenderness toward the soldiers, Onwura warns the officers
to factor their resources into all military plans so as to mitigate troop
losses; he wants the officers to steer the troops judiciously, in a manner
devoid of heroic excesses. However, when Onwura announces his plans
to use Agumo as a disciplinary example before he himself could have
time to take an offensive action, threatening the subordinate officer
with the humiliation of a court-martial, the move proves to be mortally
tactless: the altercation gets completely out of hand, as Agumo peremp-
torily pulls out his pistol and fatally shoots his own commander.
The publisher’s blurb on the dust jacket of The Anonymity of Sacrifice
describes Captain Onwura as an ‘elitist … career officer’; there could be
no better characterization of him, in our use of that term in its original
sense to mean something cut out from the best tradition of its kind.136
But, as often happens, wars have the terrible habit of placing men of
noble stature on paths which bring them into ghastly collision with
characters of lesser mettle. Wars are horrible affairs and the motives
of those involved may be tangled; they may not always be noble. This is
what happens to Captain Benjy Onwura: he brings exceptional sobriety
and prudence to a topic of genuine importance – troop welfare during
war situations. That is why his death at the hands of the very man that
he himself has promoted is savage in the extreme and elicits pathos of
the highest order; it is an undeserved end to an outstanding soldier’s
career and life, and Cyril Agumo’s devious act is a vivid demonstration
that there is no length to which some unscrupulous characters in the
Biafran army would not go to secure a promotion and then preserve it.
When a commander of Agumo’s ilk does not even care about his own
troops, that is not civil: it is uncivil. Cyril Agumo does get arrested in the
end and is sent to a remand facility to await his trial, along with other
detainees, where he may face a sentence which could see his own brand
of justice served on him and so give him a taste of his own medicine.
But that is only a mild consolation, because nothing can fully compen-
sate for the loss of an accomplished officer and essentially good man of
Onwura’s caliber, cut down in his prime in a cowardly manner.
136
Ibid., dust jacket.
000 Fal book B.indb 358 13/06/2016 22:06

Conclusion
Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun and Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice are
landmarks in the history of Nigerian civil war literature, being the first
comprehensive attempts at an evocation of the external plot and the
internal rot that were the downfall of beleaguered entity of Biafra to
be written by authors who observed the events first hand and clearly
understood what was going on there. Both novels are written in direct,
clear language that is devoid of embroidery to convey the horror of the
Biafran War. Both novels provide compelling and thorough evidence for
the inevitability of Biafra’s defeat, which lay embedded in the war strat-
egies it employed and the impulses of its servicemen, allowing readers
to see that the troubled enclave actually wielded in its own hands the
very instruments that brought about its eventual collapse; the Nigerian
army served only as the catalyst for the onslaught. Both novels convey
that the concept of ‘civil war’ is a misnomer when applied to this con-
text. This war was an ‘uncivil’ and ungracious war that was not fought
by well-bred, courteous, polite, chivalrous, and gallant men of the mien
of Captain Onwura.
This war let loose the worst instincts in mankind and enabled unscru-
pulous individuals to thrive. Aniebo reports in The Anonymity of Sacri-
fice that the federalists and the secessionists find out the hard way that
each side would deploy any weapon of mass destruction at its disposal
against the other and were willing to visit on each other the worst forms
of atrocities imaginable. The Nigerian army used new weapons that
had never been seen before by Biafrans; these weapons created scenes
of horror and terror. Sometimes, ‘a new enemy gun’ with ‘cumulative
delayed effect’ left a surviving enemy ‘weak and soaked with cold sweat’
and produced a ‘sinking [feeling] in the pit of his stomach’.137 At other
times, the more conventional ‘continuous harsh sound of automatic
rifle fire, interspersed with the heavy note of exploding mortar bombs’,
which made ‘the sun hotter than it really was’ and destroyed ‘most of
the trees in the area’, left the landscape looking ‘more of a grassland
than a secondary forest area’.138 At times, an ‘extremely heavy explo-
sion suddenly tore the air. The ground trembled. Three more giant
explosions followed in quick succession, and the air filled with cries of
agony.’139
In return, Biafra improvised the astonishing Ogbunigwe bomb,
described by Chinua Achebe in his unforgettable Biafran War
memoir There Was a Country as the most ‘important instrument of war
at the disposal of the Biafrans’, which ‘struck great terror in the hearts
of many a Nigerian soldier’ and was ‘used to great effect by the Biafran
137
Ibid., 14–15.
138
Ibid., 15.
139
Ibid., 16.
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360 Ode Ogede
army throughout the conflict’.140 The Nigeria-Biafra War was truly a

no-holds-barred armed conflict, one that has left permanent scars on all
the survivors on both sides.
140
000 Fal book B.indb 360 13/06/2016 22:06

17 Neo-Colonialism, Biafra, and the
Causes of War as Imagined in
Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra
Françoise Ugochukwu
Introduction
Emecheta is mostly known for her novels reflecting on the domestic
sphere, on women’s lives, and issues of marriage and children. Regret-
tably, Destination Biafra, her novel on the war, seems to have been largely
ignored.1 Described in the author’s foreword as ‘a historical fiction’
which ‘simply had to be written’, the work follows the long journey of
Emecheta’s dream character Debbie from Lagos to the heart of Biafra, a
journey that both reveals the various sides of the war and deeply trans-
forms Debbie’s character and viewpoint.2 This chapter will consider the
novel’s presentation of the war through its using thinly veiled historical
characters and events as a background, the novelist’s reflection on the
causes of the conflict, and her presentation of the role neo-colonialism
and ethnic realities played in the conflict to show its unique contribu-
tion to the Biafran War literature.
A Novelist on History
The Biafran War, which ‘reflects the divisions between the various ethnic
groups carelessly yoked together in the colonial construction of Nige-
ria’ has been a defining moment in Nigeria’s contemporary history3.
It has also generated an impressive number of books, ‘a largely Igbo
tradition’, with Adichie and Emecheta being the only female authors to
represent that conflict within a larger historical context in their novels.4
Emecheta’s novel, described as ‘a bold and daring departure from the
normal domestic preserve of most fictional works of African women
1
Ann-Marie Adams, ‘It’s a Woman’s War. Engendering Conflict in Buchi Emecheta’s Des-
tination Biafra’, Callaloo 24:1 (2001), 288.
2
Buchi Emecheta, Destination Biafra (London: Allison & Busby, 1982), first quote ix, sec-
ond quote vii.
3
Niyi Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past and Still Counting the Losses: Evaluating Narrative of
the Nigerian Civil War in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra’, Epiphany: Journal of Trans-
disciplinary Studies 5:1 (2012), 35.
4
Hugh Hodges, ‘Writing Biafra: Adichie, Emecheta and the Dilemmas of Biafran War Fic-
tion’, Postcolonial Text 5:1 (2009), 2.
361
000 Fal book B.indb 361 13/06/2016 22:06

362 Françoise Ugochukwu
writers’, is however unique on two counts: for its author’s interest in

the country’s pre-war politics and for her overt criticism of the Biafran
stance.5 Within the confines of her text, she ‘dramatizes 12 years of
political mismanagement, civil commotion, personal and communal
greed, unabated selfishness and corrupt leadership which lead ulti-
mately to social chaos, deprivation and death’.6 Yet the only major book
on Emecheta, edited by Umeh in 1996, devotes only two chapters to
Destination Biafra, while Porter and Sumalatha regret the ‘prominent
absence’7 of that novel from ‘most critical discussions of the war novel
in Africa’.8
For Morrison, Destination Biafra is the only novel ‘highly specific in its
historical engagements’ including ‘explicit meditations on the nature of
justice of the Biafran project’,9 ‘more committed and more detailed in
its political and ideological analysis than many other texts of the genre’,
going beyond the ‘documentation of suffering’ and looking at the situa-
tion from a distance to better grasp events which led to the war.10 Eme-
cheta attempts to answer some of the questions already formulated by
previous writers about the war from a different perspective: as an exiled
female novelist from a minority group, bringing into the sum of writ-
ings on the war an ‘unconventional and compelling description of the
probable causes of the war and the roles of women during that war’.11
For her, ‘some of the manipulations by external forces which became so
flagrant during the civil war – and which are written quite extensively
by her male compatriots – actually had their genesis at some earlier peri-
ods’.12 She looks back at pre-independence history to throw some light
into the later behavior of the main protagonists, and endeavors first of
all to reveal ‘the essentially ambiguous nature of Nigeria’s creation’.13
For Porter, one of the major points in the novel ‘is that the political
legacy that was bequeathed to Nigerians by the British after independ-
ence was not only bound to fail but also had the potential of leading
to inevitable chaos’, a fact now widely acknowledged.14 Emecheta’s
5
D. Sumalatha, ‘Privileging Politics as the Overriding Denominator in Social Transforma-
tion: A Study on Buchi Emecheta’s Fiction Novel Destination Biafra’, Language in India
13:9 (September 2013), 426. Also see J.O.J. Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta: Poli-
tics, War, and Feminism in Destination Biafra’, in Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta,
edited by Umeh Marie (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996), 388.
6
Sumalatha, ‘Privileging Politics’, 424.
7
Abioseh Porter, ‘They Were There, Too: Women and the Civil War in Destination Biafra’,
in Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, edited by Umeh Marie (Trenton: Africa World
Press, 1996), 313.
8
9
Jago Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras: Fabricating Nation in Nigerian Civil War Writing’,
Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 36:1–2 (2005), 13.
10
Ibid., 19.
11
Porter, ‘They Were There, Too’, 314.
12
Ibid., 316.
13
Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past’, 39.
14
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Buchi Emecheta Destination Biafra 363
viewpoint is that this had little to do with genuine democratic principles,

being based primarily (if not solely) on ensuring that the Hausa kept the
power. Right from the start of her novel, she seeks to foreground the fact
that of paramount importance to the British was ensuring the safety
of their economic interests. It was, in fact, the only criterion in their
choice of a successor at the helm of affairs in the country they were
about to leave: finding ‘the man who would offer the least resistance to
British trade’.15 A discussion between two outgoing colonials, Governor
Macdonald and Captain Alan Grey, clearly shows their preference for
the northerners and their anxiety over the Sarduana’s refusal to leave
his palace and move south.
Emecheta was obviously aware that the British were not the sole
culprits, and ‘demonstrates how some of the causes of this war were
directly attributable to the actions of some of the Nigerian politicians
themselves’ and their use of tribalism.16 These included
the imposition of an ineffective and nominally independent administration
by a greedy foreign power [Britain], the desperate desire for and manipulation
of power by local politicians who were interested only in the trappings of gov-
ernment and the material advantages that come with it, tribal and regional
chauvinism, and, of course, political corruption and economic exploitation.17
Emecheta presents a cynical yet accurate picture of Nigerian politics:
‘as a responsible person in Nigeria, one did not just go into politics to
introduce reforms but to get what one could out of the national cake
and to use part of it to help one’s vast extended family, the village of
one’s origin and if possible the whole tribe’.18 She equally insists on the
‘crass and unprogressive nature’ of exacerbated tribalism, encouraged
and fueled by regional leaders, whom she considers as partly responsi-
ble for the progressive breakdown of the country’s political structure.19
This is aptly illustrated by the paragraphs devoted to the rigged 1966
elections in the North, including the repetition of the word bakodaya
(nil, nothing) from the lips of journalists broadcasting the election
results, who compared the massive voting in favor of northern candi-
dates to the ‘nothing, nothing at all’ gained by their opponents.20
Events covered by her novel include ‘the Tiv riots of 1960–66, the
Western Nigeria emergency of 1962, the national census controversy
of 1962–63 and the Western election crisis of 1965–66’.21 These and
15
Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 1.
16
Ibid., 16.
17
18
19
20
21
Godfrey Mwakikagile, Ethnic Politics in Kenya and Nigeria (New York: Nova, 2001), 10.
For more details, see Eghosa Osaghae, Crippled Giant: Nigeria since Independence (London:
Hurst, 1998), 10, 36.
000 Fal book B.indb 363 13/06/2016 22:06

subsequent events – the elections, the Independence, the first and the
second coups, the massacres, the Aburi meeting, the Biafran Independ-
ence, and the ensuing war – again closely follow reality. The vital role
of women is equally brought to the fore, as when Emecheta describes
their trade in the no-man’s land between Biafra and Nigeria as ‘between
the fronts’.22 The Yoruba’s perceived betrayal, another key moment of
the pre-war events, is equally mentioned in the novel, which did not
shy away from including this bruising experience: after devoting sev-
eral pages to the trouble in the Western Region, the planned Yoruba
secession is dealt with in detail, with Odumosu informing Abosi that he
‘intended to declare the West a separate State; Abosi should do the same
in the East. So if the worst came to the worst, any war would be between
the north and the south.’ 23
Recalling events ‘just before and, especially, after the first coup’ is
crucial to understand the causes of the war, particularly the fact that
‘not a single top Ibo [sic] politician had been killed’ and the arrogance of
northern Igbo rejoicing after the coup.24 In addition, Emecheta alludes
to the importance of the oil discovery in the East shortly before Biafra’s
secession.25 When riots begin, it was
being noised about that the Ibos were striking it rich from the oil that was
being discovered in the Eastern Region, and one of the new legislations was
that the nation’s wealth would be shared almost equally between the regions
with only a slightly higher share going to the areas from where the wealth
originated. This the Ibos regarded as unfair … There were demonstrations in
the East itself.26
Paraphrasing Reality
During the civil war, Emecheta, who had moved to London in 1962,
‘was an active campaigner against British arms supplies to the federal
government’, and she personally witnessed the scene of a rowdy dem-
onstration in Trafalgar Square.27 But as an outsider to the events she
chose to chronicle, she had to rely on insiders’ reports from relatives and
friends who experienced the war first hand. This included the massa-
cre of Asaba residents and the Biafrans’ blowing of the bridge on River
Niger: ‘Debbie recorded all this in her memory, to be transferred when
22
Marion Pape, ‘Nigerian War Literature by Women: From Civil War to Gender War’, Ma-
tatu: Journal for African Culture and Society 29–30 (2005), 106, 230.
23
Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 48, 52, quote on 99. On the Yoruba secession, see Emefiena
Ezeani, In Biafra Africa Died: The Diplomatic Plot (London: Veritas Lumen, 2012), 71.
24
Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 66. Emecheta uses the colonial spelling of ‘Ibo’, now dis-
carded and replaced with the official ‘Igbo’.
25
Ibid., 6.
26
Ibid., 59.
27
Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, quote on 13 and 241.
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possible to the yellowing scraps of paper she dignified with the name
of manuscript’.28 For that reason, Emecheta’s ‘artistic depiction of the
historicity of the genesis of the post-independence Nigerian political
setbacks cannot be dismissed outrightly as inaccurate’.29
Emecheta’s note to the reader ‘is directed more towards readers who
are not really familiar with Nigerian history, as she briefly explains
the historical point of departure and key figures of her novel’.30 Her
decision to keep close to the reality of the ground, painting not only
the suffering and violence but also the political events and military
exploits, was possibly motivated by her desire to facilitate her readers’
identification with events described in the novel and support the politi-
cal reflections she explores in the text. Her occasional manipulation
and bending of history, regretted by some critics, is her way of using
the historical past as a basis and fitting it into her novel to interrogate
the role of the various Nigerian actors and foreign governments in the
political affairs of Nigeria.31 In Destination Biafra, Debbie’s friend, Babs,
reflecting on the casualties, comments that, for those outside, ‘the
women and children who would be killed by bombs and guns would
simply be statistics’.32 Emecheta’s novel is her way of translating these
statistics into reality.
The main protagonists bear fictitious names but are so close to reality
that they can be described as thinly veiled replicas of the real actors.
Ahmadu Bello (1910–1966), the Sardauna of Sokoto and traditional
ruler of the North, keeps his title; Odumosu represents Chief Awolowo
(1909–1987), Durosaro represents Akintola (1910–1966), Oladapo
represents Fajuyi (1926–1966), Ogedemgbe represents Okotie-Eboh
(1919–1966), Ozimba represents Azikiwe (1904–1996), Eze repre-
sents Mbadiwe (1915–1990), Abosi represents Ojukwu (1933–2011),
Momoh represents Gowon (1934 – ), Onyemere represents Ironsi
(1924–1966), Nwokolo represents Nzeogwu (1937–1967), and
Nguru Kano represents Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (1912–1966). The
British are presented in the same way: Sir James Wilson Robertson
(1899–1983) who served as Governor-General from 1955 to 1960
is MacDonald in the novel, and Alan Grey is John, the son of Sir John
Stuart MacPherson (1898–1971) who served as Governor-General
from 1948 to 1955.
In addition, the resemblance between the real players and their
fictitious counterparts, both in their physical and moral traits and in
their mannerisms and actions, is striking: Momoh and Gowon are both
28
Ibid., 216 and quote on 223. For more details on these events, see Emma Okocha, Blood
on the Niger: The First Black on Black Genocide. The Untold Story of the Asaba Massacre during
the Nigerian Civil War (New York: Triatlantic, 2004 [1994]).
29
Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta’, 388.
30
Pape, ‘Nigerian War Literature by Women’, 68.
31
32
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from minorities and from the same region – the current Plateau State
– although the first is Tiv and the other Ngas (another minority). Ozim-
ba’s nickname, ‘Zim’, is almost identical to the ‘Zik’ of Azikiwe; both
wear the same ‘famous smile and gold-rimmed spectacles’ and defect to
the federal side halfway through the war.33 Several authors have high-
lighted this fictionalization of the Nigerian political class of the time,
thereby offering a reading guide to the novel.34 Emecheta did not even
bother to change the names of the then-political parties: the Yoruba-led
Action Group, the Igbo-led NCNC, the Hausa-led NNP, and the NPC.
The novel, at least in its first part, foregrounds the viewpoints of poli-
ticians and the army, highlighting their responsibility in the events – a
choice that probably explains why Emecheta’s novel failed to capture
the public’s imagination. Her diary of events seems to be read from
the barracks, with unguarded sideline comments revealing fractures
within the military beyond the ethnic divide. These include the com-
petition between the poor, desperate to make it through the ranks, and
the Sandhurst-educated elite. The fracture between these two classes
is illustrated by the different opposing Momoh, ‘this man from the Tiv
tribe’ and Abosi, suspected of ‘regard[ing] soldiering as a rich man’s
sport’.35 Emecheta adds to these the slow rise of ambitious females such
as Debbie, Emecheta’s mouthpiece, which forces a change into that
‘masculine preserve’.36
We follow negotiations and verbal agreements ‘for the butchery of
Ibos to stop, for the Hausa soldiers to go back to their barracks and for
the East to be granted autonomy within the federation’.37 We witness
the Aburi meeting, the hopes it raised, and the subsequent British pres-
sure on Momoh, ‘uncertain what the word [autonomy] actually meant’
33
Ibid., 42. Sir Ahmadu Bello was the first premier of the Northern Nigeria region from
1954–1966. Obafemi Awolowo was the first Premier of the Western Region from
1952–1959. Ladoke Akintola was the deputy leader of the Western-led Action Group
Party under Awolowo. Festus Okotie-Eboh was a prominent Nigerian politician and for-
mer minister for finance during the administration of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Born to
Urhobo parents from Uwherun, he adopted the Itsekiri as his tribe after marriage into a
prominent Itsekiri family. He was assassinated along with Prime Minister Tafawa Bale-
wa in the January 15, 1966, military coup. K.O. Mbadiwe was a government minister in
the 1950s. Adekunle Fajuyi was the first Governor of the then-Western Region from Jan-
uary to July 1966. Nnamdi Azikiwe was Governor-General of Nigeria from 1960–1963
and the first Nigerian President from 1963–1966. Odumegwu Ojukwu was military gov-
ernor of the Eastern Region in 1966 and the Biafran leader from 1967–1970. Yakubu
Gowon was Head of State of Nigeria from 1966–1975. Aguiyi Ironsi was Head of State
from January to July 1966. Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu was born in Northern Nigeria
from Western Igbo parents from Okpanam in the Midwest, now Delta State. He led the
January 1966 failed coup; he was later killed in action in the first days of the Biafran war.
Tafawa Balewa was Nigeria’s only Prime Minister; he served from 1960–1966.
34
Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta’, 388–390; Adams, ‘It’s a Woman’s War’, 288;
Hodges, ‘Writing Biafra’, 4; and Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past’, 46.
35
36
Quote, ibid., 57. Also see Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past’, 43.
37
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and to what he had actually just agreed.38 We read of more massacres

and of the division of the federation into 12 states, followed by the dec-
laration of independence by the former Eastern Region – Biafra – two
events that followed each other closely, on May 28 and 30, 1967.
The Role of the British

London-based Emecheta had an opportunity to observe British politics
at close range, and she presents the British government ‘hovering in
the background of every negotiation, every reversal of fortune, every
attempt at resolution’ and dealing ‘by proxy – in arms, in oil rights, in
facilitating government borrowing and in weaving complex webs of
dependency’.39 As the novel ‘explores the political and historical impli-
cations of the Biafran war’, it reminds its readers that Nigeria is a coun-
try ‘where real power base lies outside its geographical boundaries’,
in the hands of the British.40 It is equally useful to remember that, at
the time, all the major players, with the exception of Azikiwe, who had
studied in the United States, had been educated in Britain, which still
maintained strong educational ties with the Nigerian civil and military
elite.
Unlike most novels on the Biafran War, Emecheta’s sets the scene
on the British side right from the start; her first chapter introduces the
reader to a discussion among colonial administrators about the forth-
coming independence and Nigeria’s perceived corruption and igno-
rance. It also discusses the British motivation for favoring the Hausa:
their fear of the then-Soviet Union and Communism and their con-
tempt of Igbos’ ambition and passion for education. The first hint in the
novel that the British were the source of the problems of the country,
including manipulating Nigerians and manipulating and consolidat-
ing ethnic divisions, is the discussion of the ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.41
This contributed to ‘the reversal and abandonment of the Aburi accord
… [which was] typical of British meddlesomeness in Nigerian political
problems’.42 This policy had only one aim: to ensure ‘that any profit
to come out of Nigeria should go to Britain rather than to other coun-
tries’.43 Emecheta explains the particular British interest in the Eastern
Region by their knowledge that ‘those vast areas are full of oil, pure
crude oil’ and by their wish to keep ‘Nigeria perpetually within their
38
Ibid., 103.
39
Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, 15.
40
Sumalatha, ‘Privileging Politics,, 427.
41
Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 113. Also see Akingbe, ‘Creating the Past’, 38 and Mor-
rison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, 14.
42
43
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sphere of influence, even after independence’.44 In addition, the British

Government’s Irish and European policy clearly dictated their support
for a united Nigeria: ‘How can we still maintain a united kingdom, with
the hope of joining a united Europe, and then come to Africa and disu-
nite another kingdom?’45
For Emecheta, the British Foreign Office is pleased about the war. The
office
[a]greed that a quick kill would be the best solution to the Biafran crisis; it
was worth investing in arms and giving aid to Nigeria … now that it looked
as if there was more oil in the country than they had imagined. It was
decided that Alan should go to the surplus section of the Ministry of Defence
and buy up the old unwanted ammunition that so much had been spent on
during the First World War. However people might describe this conflict, it
was still ‘jungle warfare’ as far as the members of the House were concerned
… A new trade in ammunition and human blood had begun.46
In addition to the ammunitions they sold Nigeria, the British encourage
the Head of State to buy the services of white mercenaries, whose pay-
ment is not a problem, as ‘the oil wells in the Midwest had been liberated
… and a British oil company could now go there and pump enough oil
to pay for the war’.47 More than 40 years after these events, the declas-
sification of documents dating from 1968 of the British Ministry of
Defence have proven these fictional details eerily accurate.48
The novel still concedes the British some insight and honesty for all
their flaws: they occasionally recognize – in private – the Igbos’ right to
decide for themselves and acknowledge their own ignorance of ‘what
democracy really mean[s]’.49 At one point, they even recognize the
validity of Igbos’ claims to independence: ‘many of [Abosi’s] people
believe that if they gave in … Well, many of them think that this has
44
Ibid., 3 and 6. Alan later moans that Abosi ‘has now collected “friends” from France, Ire-
land and Eastern Europe who would jump on the bandwagon of drilling oil from the East’
(ibid., 115).
45
Ibid., 115. Emecheta also writes, ‘Momoh signed away the greatest percentage of the oil
wells to some Western powers, on condition that they settled the Biafran question quick-
ly’ (154).
46
Ibid., 156.
47
Ibid., 201.
48
According to these documents in Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, the ‘present British policy
seems to be to provide conventional weapons and ammunition to Nigeria (on a rather
more lavish scale than we would probably be keen to admit in public) in the knowledge
that while this is not doing very much towards bringing the war to an end, Nigeria could
almost certainly buy the stuff somewhere else if we didn’t provide it and by letting her
have it we retain a certain degree of influence in Lagos and the possibility of emerging
with good relations when Nigeria ultimately wins, thereby ensuring access to the oil re-
serves of Eastern Nigeria’ (16).
49
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become a matter of genocide, judging from what Lawal is doing on the

Benin road.’50
The Igbo Factor

Emecheta has been accused by some Western critics of being biased in
favor of the Igbo, but a careful study of the novel proves otherwise.51
From the start, Destination Biafra places the ethnic factor high on the
agenda, as highlighted by many scholarly discussions.52 However, while
Igbos are shown as conscious of their Igboness, she presents them as
making every effort to prove their loyalty to the federal ideal. It is on
record that Igbo leaders were among the staunchest supporters of
the federal character of the newly independent Nigeria. This explains
the coup plotters’ decision to include Igbo politicians and ministers,
‘including Dr. Ozimba himself and Nguru Kano’, on the list of those to
be eliminated, to avoid the coup ‘look[ing] like an Igbo affair’.53 Onyem-
ere, when thrown at the helm of affairs that he took over from a Hausa,
worried about possible accusations against him. He ‘made up his mind
to try to curb tribalism’.54
In the same way, to prove her loyalty, Debbie later starts her army
career by singling out all Igbo soldiers in the barracks, rounding and
locking them up, before abandoning them into the hands of their tor-
mentors.55 Individual Igbos’ relentless efforts to prove their support
for the federal ideal can be seen as a self-defense tactic to avoid being
painted with the same brush as the rest of their community, but it was a
vain effort. As summarized by one of the northern soldiers:
an Ibo officer asking me what he has done? I will tell you. You people want to
rule the country, don’t you? You rushed into the army, into the government,
into all the lucrative positions in the country, not satisfied with that, you
killed all the politicians from the other tribes and then your man … became
the self-appointed Head of State.56
50
Ibid., 199.
51
Although Pape, in ‘Nigerian War Literature by Women’ (62), considers Emecheta’s use
of the words ‘some non-Igbos’ as evidence that she positions herself as an Igbo, it might
just be part of the novelist’s distinction between the Biafrans and the rest, given the focus
of her novel. Emecheta’s adopting the Biafrans’ report on the number of casualties in
the massacres – ‘30,000’ (9) has also been counted against her – a sign of the degree of
politicization of the war statistics, though confirmed by a number of publications since.
52
53
Ibid., 60–61. The coup plotters arranged for the Yoruba to kill the Igbo politicians, the
Igbo the Yoruba and for Nwokolo, a Midwestern man, to kill the Sardauna, but Igbo lead-
ers manage to escape their fate. Ozimba in particular had gone to Britain for health rea-
sons (64).
54
Ibid., 68.
55
Ibid., 81–83.
56
Ibid., 83.
000 Fal book B.indb 369 13/06/2016 22:06

Nevertheless, Emecheta seemed to believe that Igbos lacked leadership

qualities, as revealed by her brief sketches of their personality. Ozimba,
for example, ‘whose charm and charisma has once earned him the fore-
most position in Nigerian politics … seemed to have been plunged eter-
nally into a ditch of perpetual doubt’.57 When he tries to advise Abosi
that they now concentrate on keeping to the East, the Biafran leader
accuses him: ‘You never really wanted us to secede in the first place,
Doctor. You were busy dreaming about your Pan-Africanism’.58 Ozimba
tries to defend himself but knew that ‘in a situation like this, scapegoats
would be needed to explain the defeat to the rest of the people’.59
The northern Igbos’ reaction to the coup is equally presented as
both dangerous and unfortunate. Their noisy celebrations, provocative
banners, placards, and slogans are partly responsible for the riots and
slaughter in the North: ‘if nothing was done to restrain the southern-
ers, then the Hausa would be aroused to the point where a holy war
might result, with human blood running down the streets’.60 It looks
as if Emecheta, considering that adopting a low profile might well have
spared them most of the subsequent suffering, blames the Igbos for
being themselves. Her mention of the slaughter in the North and in
Lagos, where people ‘who had the remotest connection with Iboland
started disappearing’, could be read in that light.61 Igbos were being
killed ‘in places like the north, in Lagos, in the bushes surrounding Igbo
heartland, in towns like Ibusa, Asaba [and] Okpanam’.62 The passage
on the Nsukka battle, which alludes to the midnight surprise attack and
massacre of hundreds of ‘hungry student soldiers who were still wait-
ing for the sophisticated arms promised them’ and ‘died in their tens
and hundreds’, adds another dimension to the reflection.63 It hints at
the military weakness of the Biafran government. It also signals a shift
in the perception of what was at stake: ‘the inner cabinet met again. It
was then established that this was not just a war that the rest of Nigeria
wished to win, it was genocide.’64 It is at that point that photos and info
are sent to media abroad.
Destination Biafra joins scores of other publications – memoirs,
essays, novels, and media reports – in offering a sober reflection on the
northern massacres:
Only God knows how those who survived achieved that great feat. Ibos were
hounded from their homes, from the market places and many were killed
57
Ibid., 99.
58
Ibid., 182.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid., 69 and quote 72.
61
Ibid., 91
62
Ibid., 83.
63
Ibid., 185.
64
Ibid.
000 Fal book B.indb 370 13/06/2016 22:06

at the airport on their way to the East. Then the witch-hunt began … How
can politicians be preaching ‘one Nigeria’ when a tribe of people is being
massacred?65
The episode of trains bringing maimed Igbos back to the East is directly
inspired by widely disseminated press articles at the height of the war
that gave eye-witness accounts of the events that took place in Kano on
October 14, 1966. Part of Emecheta’s recounting of these events reads
thus:
The passengers on the platform were still alive – just – but the killers had
made sure that those Ibos who went back home would always remember
their stay in the North. Nearly all the women were without one breast. The
very old ones had only one eye each. Some of the men had been castrated,
some had only one arm, others had one foot amputated. All were in a
shocked daze.66
This terrible evocation winds down with the words of one of the sur-
vivors: ‘tell Abosi to forget talk of “one Nigeria”’, and closes on Eme-
cheta’s cold summary: ‘it was said that over thirty thousand Ibos died
in that first part of the troubles’.67
A Plea for Unity

Other novels’ presentations of the war usually set it firmly in Biafra and
on the Biafran side. Emecheta’s discourse is one of unity. Her ‘dream
woman’ Debbie, a Western Igbo who chose to join the Nigerian army,
claimed to be a detribalized Nigerian. She ‘incarnates Emecheta’s ideal
of nationhood’ and ‘her determinedly non-tribalistic nation-idea drives
the nation’s anti-war engine’.68 Debbie’s becoming a Nigerian soldier is
a public assertion of her support of the country’s unity and a demand
for participation ‘in making political decisions as well’.69 The choice of
Debbie, a minority girl, as a mouthpiece ‘affords Emecheta a conveni-
ent platform of neutrality and non-partisanship’ in presenting ‘a fair
assessment of the Nigerian civil war from the two divides’. Debbie con-
stantly displays her passion for the country’s unity. For example, she
listened to the radio
and learned to her horror that the people of the East already regarded
themselves as members of a different nation. There was talk of their poets
65
Ibid., 88.
66
Ibid., 89–90. See Françoise Ugochukwu, Torn Apart: The Nigerian Civil War and Its Impact
(London: Adonis & Abbey, 2010), 61, n79. This particular event was later used by Chim-
amanda Ngozi Adichie in her novel Half of a Yellow Sun (London: Fourth Estate, 2006).
67
68
Marie Umeh, Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press,
1996), 215.
69
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submitting words for their new national anthem … Patriotic zeal among
Ibos was twenty times more than that of the rest of Nigeria … What was
her position in all this mess? She was neither Ibo nor Yoruba, nor was she a
Hausa, but a Nigerian.70
She wonders: ‘doesn’t Abosi want a united Nigeria? He can’t cut the East
away from the federation.’71 At that point, there is a hint that she may
be used as a peace emissary because of her status as ‘neither Igbo nor
Yoruba’ and ‘because she personally believed that keeping the country
together was a good thing’.72
She embarks on her diplomatic journey to the East as a peace nego-
tiator sent by Momoh ‘to go and convince Abosi that a united Nigeria
was the thing to be fought for’.73 She passes through a disputed terri-
tory in the process. Debbie’s journey has been likened to a camera that
allows the reader to see everything and meet everybody, ‘including the
leaders of both of the warring sides’.74 At that point, the focus of the
novel shifts from the political and diplomatic scene to the gory reality.
On her way, she hears that Biafrans have taken Benin City and are now
moving towards Ore. The car in which she travels is later ambushed
by federal troops, who kill its Igbo occupants. The graphic description
of the brutal murder of the pregnant Igbo women and their children,
the soldiers’ attack and rape prove Debbie wrong.75 There is no ‘Nige-
ria’ and people are still tribal. Subjected to violence at the hands of the
Nigerians, ‘the very people she was trying to help’,76 and disillusioned
by the corruption, greed, selfishness, and inefficiency she discovers in
the ranks, Debbie’s confidence gradually erodes.
While the situation on the ground leads Emecheta to justify the Bia-
fran leader’s secessionist attempt, ‘Abosi is berated for insisting on facing
the enemy on the battlefield when he had little or no arms, when he had
no outlet to any ocean corridor’.77 Debbie blames the Biafran leader for
his resolution ‘to fight to the last’, thinking that he can still win, and
accuses him of ‘living in a dream world’.78 The religious argument he
puts forward is equally attacked as a bad move
because Britain is a protestant country. Most of the Irish are Catholics. I
understand that the nuns managing the Ibo hospitals and many of the
priests still running their schools are Irish. Britain would be blind not to see
70
Ibid., 126.
71
Ibid., 93.
72
Ibid., 123.
73
Ibid., 123.
74
75
Ibid., 130–136.
76
Ibid., 157.
77
78
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that if they backed Abosi there would be no reason for them not to look
sympathetically on their own Irish problem.79
The novel blames Abosi for rejecting Debbie’s plea for peace, for ‘having
led Igbos into this “holocaust”’, and for eventually leaving Biafra as the
Nigerian army closes in.80 Debbie’s position is strengthened by Ozimba’s,
the only other Nigerian whose national stature ‘cut across tribes’.81
Faced with mounting casualties, he shares his doubts on the viability of
Biafra: ‘had they been right to secede? … Should he advise Abosi to cut
his losses and give in now that the tide was turning?’82 Ozimba’s attempt
to initiate a reflection on the war will lead to his being reprimanded for
having been ‘busy dreaming about [his] Pan-Africanism’.83 He would
later swap sides and start advocating for ‘one Nigeria’.84
Meanwhile, both on the front and in the bush, orders were now shouted
in a language they knew was Nigerian, for they had heard it spoken so
many times before, either softly to welcome them or musically to wish them
good speed, but now it sounded more foreign still, for they had never heard
it spoken in this brutal guttural way. The Ibo language had become a lan-
guage of war.85
This change signals a gradual loss of identity and questions the pur-
pose of pursuing the warpath. It is interesting, in this regard, to note
Debbie’s embarrassment when confronted about her Oxfordian accent
and to discover her subsequent choice of Pidgin English, a supra-ethnic
Nigerian language facilitating communication across ethnic barriers.86
She displays a ‘great resourcefulness abroad as the propaganda officer
for Abosi and Biafra’.87 However, confronted with the people’s suffering,
she later asks herself whether her traveling between enemy lines had
been worth it and whether there was ‘really any point in her mission?
Or should she have stayed in Lagos and watch the stronger party win, if
at the end of the day, the result was going to be the same?’88
The Minorities’ Fate

Emecheta, of Western Igbo origin, reminds her readers of the heavy
losses suffered by her people before and during the war, stating that
79
Ibid., 147.
80
Ibid., 239 and quote on 252–254.
81
Ibid., 37. Azikiwe, born of Igbo parents in the north, later schooled in Calabar and Lagos
before moving to the United States for further studies.
82
Ibid., 183.
83
Ibid., 182.
84
Ibid., 235.
85
Ibid., 138.
86
Ibid., 231.
87
88
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‘Nigeria was plunged into the bloodiest carnage ever seen in the whole
of Africa. And the greater part of the blood that flowed was Ibo blood.’89
The novel presents a group of refugees from the North flocking to Abosi’s
house, telling their stories, such that ‘the anger of those listening was
stirred to fever point’ with many urging Abosi ‘not to bother to wait for
Aburi but to declare war immediately’.90 Abosi’s reaction to the massa-
cre of easterners highlights the crucial importance of the ethnic factor
in the decision-making process – a viewpoint explained by Emecheta’s
personal and family background. Pressed hard by Igbo victims’ pleas,
Abosi reminds them that ‘this misunderstanding is not just between the
Ibos and the rest of Nigeria but between Ibos from the West … Ibos from
the East and the minority tribes in the East, against the rest of Nigeria.
So before I make any move, all these people must be fully consulted’.91
The dividing of the federation into 12 states later effectively dismantles
the former Eastern Region:
Not only that, [Momoh] made sure that through the way it was divided,
the richest oil wells in the East fall into the hands of the non-Igbo speaking
people. In other words, he declared war against Abosi and his people. … How
long [would] the non-Ibo speaking peoples of the East rally round Abosi,
knowing that they can have their own state and that the richest oil wells lie
in their villages? The seeds of doubt have already been sown.92
Momoh himself expresses the view that ‘the minority peoples in the
East have to be protected, you know. You do realize that there are many
groups who are not Ibos living in the East too? We seldom hear about
them, because Abosi and his Ibos are busy shouting as if they own the
whole world.’93
The issue of ethnic minorities was a sensitive issue, but Emecheta’s
novel seems to give the impression that neither Momoh nor Abosi
really cared about them. In any case, the concentration of early federal
attacks on Biafra’s northern and southern borders soon led to a rapid
change in Biafra’s ethnic identity, with the peripheral, non-Igbo areas
of the former eastern State being taken back into the Nigerian federa-
tion. In the early months of 1968, when international media coverage
of the war really took off, the war had practically become an Igbo war
89
Ibid., 78.
90
Ibid., 96–97.
91
Ibid., 97.
92
Ibid., 120. Records from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office prove the British support
for Shell-BP’s huge expansion plans in the Nigerian Midwest, in Morrison, ‘Imagined Bia-
fras’, 16–17.
93
Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 124. See Osaghae, Crippled Giant, 63–64: ‘although seces-
sion was proposed in the name of the Eastern Region, it was primarily an Igbo affair.
Minorities had also tended to suffer the same fate as the Igbos in the northern massacres
and some of their leaders supported secession, but the fear of Igbo domination and the
desire to be free from Igbo control influenced their half-hearted and reluctant involve-
ment in the war.’
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and was therefore rightly presented as such.94 Later in the novel, the
author foregrounds the Igbos’ heavy contribution not only to the mas-
sacres but also to the war casualties. In the Mid-West alone, ‘over 2,000
Ibo men died along the Benin-Asaba road on “Operation Mosquito”.
But, as they say, that was war.’95 The huge number of Igbo casualties
and the absence of details about the non-Igbo dead and wounded – a
direct consequence of their being reclaimed by the federal State – may
explain Emecheta’s silence on the minorities’ contribution to the war.
She aptly summarizes this herself: ‘How many Ibos were killed yester-
day? How many Nigerians? As far as [Debbie] was concerned, they were
all Nigerians.’96
For Pape, the novel ‘expresses the perspective of “being between the
fronts” through a noticeable dissociation both from the Igbo East of the
River Niger and from the Nigerians’.97 This point is illustrated by Deb-
bie’s mission: ‘Momoh would wait for news of Debbie. If she gave any
indication that Abosi was unwilling to budge, then he would send a con-
quering army into the Ibo heartland.’98 A whole paragraph is devoted to
Western Igbos and their difficult relationship with Eastern/core Igbos.99
It is a subject that Emecheta, from Ibusa, knows well. ‘Someone raised
the problem of the Western Ibos … but it was agreed that it was not yet
an important issue. These could even be given the choice of joining the
Eastern Ibos or following the rest of the country.’100
Narrated through the eyes of Debbie, the Mid-Western girl, the fate
of Western Igbos looms large in the novel. Their leaders, Ugoji and
Nwokolo, are presented as scapegoats sacrificed to appease Igbo lead-
ers’ anger after the botched Biafran military sortie and capture of Benin
and Ore.101 Ugoji, a military officer from the Mid-West, had expressed
fears that if the federal soldiers retake Ore and Benin, Mid-Western
Igbos may be at risk: ‘we should have left a standing army, we should
have our men guarding our towns, our wives and children, our young
girls and old mothers’.102 Abosi was made aware of the risk for the Mid-
Westerners to be slaughtered if the attack was not going to plan, but he
refused to rescue them. Nwokolo, ‘the conqueror of the Hausas in the
north, the leader of the great Ore mission’, is later thrown into jail and
94
Comments by Western critics do not, unfortunately, take the shrinking Biafran landscape
and the geographical modifications to its territory into account when blaming the pres-
entation of the war as an all-Igbo war. It must be noted, in addition, that many of these
criticisms fail to recognize Nigeria’s complex reality. This has led to some irrelevant and
erroneous assessments concerning the war and the way it is rendered in literature.
95
96
Ibid., 195.
97
98
99
Ibid., 55.
100
Ibid., 99.
101
Ibid., 184.
102
Ibid., 145.
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executed.103 What he did not know was that Abosi decided that those
responsible for the Ore retreat must be punished, saying that ‘these so-
called Mid-Westerners have … no loyalty at all’.104
These feelings explain the Western Igbo reaction to the visiting Bia-
fran squad sent to the Mid-West to find out about the situation. They
meet women in the bush and discover the Mid-Westerners’ hatred:
‘Biafra, Biafra, what is Biafra? You killed our man from this part, Nwok-
olo; the Nigerian soldiers came and killed what your soldiers left. We
are Ibuza people but we now live in the bush, thanks to your Abosi and
your Biafra.’105 For Nwachukwu-Agbada, Emecheta ‘used her privi-
leged position as a writer … to draw attention to the plight of her people
during a senseless war. The truth anyway is that it was not her own
group alone which faced the scourge of Biafra or Nigerian soldiers once
any of the sides was losing ground.’106 He goes on to remind his readers
about the very mobile front:
the truth is that the civil war on the Biafran side was fought on continu-
ously shifting grounds. The loss of land occupied by Biafrans meant that
on each occasion they were more concerned with protecting areas yet to be
attacked. Once any part of it was captured by the federal forces, the Biafran
soldiers retreated and got fortified in areas nearest to such a part.107
Emecheta’s foreword, aimed first and foremost at her Nigerian
readership, discloses her sources of information as well as her political
position which, as she openly admits, is biased: ‘I have tried very hard
not to be bitter, and to be impartial – especially as I hail from Ibuza …
where the worst atrocities of the war took place, which is never given
any prominence.’108 These words tell of her identification with her place
of origin and the way its inhabitants suffered during the war alongside
with others from the West of the River Niger, thereby opposing the
Igbo’s claim to be the war’s sole victims. The injustice meted out above
all on her hometown is one of the reasons why the book, for her, ‘is one
that simply had to be written’.109 Another reason – as is hinted at in her
preface – seems to be that Emecheta suffered a kind of survivor’s guilt
because she was not in Nigeria during the war and could only protest
against it as a student on London’s Trafalgar Square. For Nwachukwu-
Agbada, although Emecheta’s interpretation of the Nigerian political
crisis
103
Ibid., 102
104
Ibid., 178.
105
Ibid., 231.
106
Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta’, 390–391.
107
Ibid., 391
108
Emecheta, Destination Biafra, vii.
109
Ibid.
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may lack the class perspective, the major issues raised by her historicism
remain accurate. She has no overt philosophical statement about the war,
but invariably she fires our imagination to enquire why … the Eastern and
Western Igbo could so easily suspect each other.110
It seems that, until the very end, Emecheta shared her protagonist’s
belief in the national unity of the federation.
Dreaming of a New Nigeria

Morrison, reflecting on the novel, considers that ‘in his Ahiara Declaration
of June 1969 … Emeka Ojukwu offers the most developed formulation
of Biafran nationalism to emerge from the writing of the civil war’.111
He further perceives Ojukwu’s presentation of the Biafran project as a
rejection of Nigeria itself as a ‘ramshackle creation that has no justifica-
tion either in history or in the freely expressed wishes of the peoples’
and ‘a positive commitment to build a healthy, dynamic and progres-
sive state such as would be the pride of black men the world over’.112
Far from being driven by petty regionalism, he insists, secession from
Nigeria arose from ‘a conflict between two diametrically opposed con-
ceptions of the end and purpose of the modern African state’.113
Building on the Biafran leader’s vision, Destination Biafra goes further.
Indeed, its title announces both Debbie’s trip to the East and heralds
a new country yet to be born. In the novel, the Biafran leader himself
elaborates on this ‘new and happy country’ yet to emerge, adding: ‘I
would rather say our destination is “Biafra” since as far as I am con-
cerned, we’re not yet independent.’114 Akingbe rightly points to the
depth of the text, insisting that ‘through abundant use of metaphors,
allegory and allusive names, the writer demands a second-level reading
of the novel as both historical and political statements on an important
segment of Nigeria’s political history’.115
Several critics have described Emecheta’s Biafra as rather different
from the Eastern independent republic as plebiscited by ‘the young
people at the University of Nsukka … voicing their opinions openly and
offering their services and even their lives for their fatherland’.116 The
novel foregrounds it as ‘a political utopia, an idyllic country of hope
without ethnic conflicts in which people can truly live independently
and autonomously’.117 It is a detribalized nation ‘where wealth will be
110
111
Morrison, ‘Imagined Biafras’, 7–11.
112
Ibid., 7.
113
Ibid., 10.
114
115
116
117
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equally distributed’, a new Nigeria ‘where there would be no corruption,

no fighting in the streets, where traders need not fear being waylaid by
gangs of armed robbers and there would be jobs for everybody’.118 The
novel gradually ‘develops an understanding of “Biafra” as an alternate
paradigm of Nigerianness itself ’, free from gender, ethnic, and class
prejudices.119 Emecheta describes it as a ‘land of hope’.120
But the Biafra that Debbie and the coup perpetrators dream of will
turn to be very different from the real historical Biafra. At the end of the
novel, it ‘remains a destination yet to be reached, a liberation that the
privileged and positioned Nigerian elite have not yet elected to grasp’.121
Debbie herself embodies this new country, feels responsible for it, and
fully engages in the building of it. The unfortunate thing is that her own
vision of Biafra as an idyllic state is not shared by any of the people
she meets. The violence meted to her body – first gang raped by Yoruba
soldiers and then by a Hausa officer, nails the coffin on her dreams.122
Emecheta fleshes out the hopes, efforts and pain associated with
the war of independence in her presentation of Biafra as a pregnant
dream whose birth is eagerly expected amidst fears and threats. This
is a typically feminine imagery according to Virginia Coulon for whom
these ‘scenes of rape, pregnancy and aborted birth symbolize the Bia-
fran nation and are part of the female writers’ common “own language
and grammar.”’123 The novel develops, in parallel, a powerful allegory:
that of the child Biafra. Neither of the two leaders, Abosi and Momoh,
manage to father a child. While Abosi’s wife suffers repeated miscar-
riages, Momoh’s wife eventually delivers a stillborn ‘monstrosity’ that
is immediately taken away.124 Meanwhile, somewhere between Agbor
and Benin, a dying pregnant woman gives birth to an underweight
baby whom the refugees decide to call ‘Biafra’.125 Adopted by the refu-
gee community and carried by Debbie, he eventually died of dysentery,
triggering the anguished cry: ‘is our land Biafra going to die like this
baby, before it is given time to live at all? … I think the death of this child
is symbolic. This is how our Biafra is going to fall. I feel it in my bones.’126
The fate of the two baby boys demonstrates that for the novelist, neither
Nigeria nor Biafra were viable national projects.
118
Emecheta, Destination Biafra, first quote 128, second quote 60.
119
120
121
122
Emecheta, Destination Biafra, 133–134 and 174–176.
123
Cited in Pape, ‘Nigerian War Literature by Women’, 27.
124
In real life, Ojukwu divorced his first wife, Elizabeth Okoli, because she did not give him
any child.
125
126
Ibid., 212.
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Conclusion
Interviewed in 1994, Emecheta explained that she saw herself as a sto-
ryteller with no other mission than ‘telling stories … to tell the world
our part of the story while using the voices of women’.127 Yet, a detailed
analysis of her novel reveals that she definitely went far beyond, adding
to the growing body of historical writing from Africa and enriching it
with a fictional unique viewpoint. It has been argued that her novel
was not only describing ‘the current state of a nation, plagued by politi-
cized ethnicity, but also the feasibility of overcoming this state’.128 As
a diasporic Nigerian, all Emecheta could do was to stage a protest, and
her novel has been seen as ‘a work expressing indignation and bitter-
ness at both the causes of the civil war and the affliction and undue
punishment brought upon a good number of ordinary Nigerians and
Biafrans’.129 One of the lessons of the novel, and of the fast growing
literature on the Biafran War, is that ‘a nation that fails to remember
what it should remember or forget what it should forget is in danger of
reliving its nightmares all over again’.130
127
Oladipo Joseph Ogundele, ‘A Conversation with Buchi Emecheta, July 22, 1994’, in
Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, edited by Umeh Marie (Trenton, Africa World
Press, 1996), 449.
128
129
130
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18 No, This is Not Redemption
The Biafra War Legacy in Chris Abani’s
GraceLand
Hugh Hodges
‘That no one is any longer made accountable … that the kind of being mani-
fested cannot be traced back to a causa prima … thus alone is the innocence of
becoming restored.’
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 54 (original emphasis)
‘John Wayne is not in movies anymore.’ Chris Abani, GraceLand, 190

GraceLand’s protagonist Elvis Oke recalls how when he was younger
he and his friends used to evaluate the characters in Hollywood action
films: they were all either John Wayne, the uncomplicated embodiment
of good citizenship; Bad Guy, the equally uncomplicated embodiment
of evil; or Actor, the ‘rogue’ who is ‘part villain, part hero’.1 By the time
Elvis is 16 years old, however, the movies have changed. ‘Now dere is
only Bad Guy and Actor. No more John Wayne’, his friend Redemption
explains.2 The shift mirrors the anomie that has descended on Grace-
Land’s Nigeria: good citizenship is no longer a possibility; one must
choose (or have chosen for one) either the sociopathic evil of Bad Guy
or the uncertainty of Actor.
Throughout the novel, Elvis struggles with the latter and with what
it means to be Actor in a world where the certainties that underwrote
John Wayne’s actions are gone. Elvis seems to understand that what
characterizes Actor is the will, that being Actor involves reclaiming
what Nietzsche calls ‘the innocence of becoming’. But like the Lagos he
inhabits, Elvis finds himself incapable of any creative act of will; instead
succumbs to the nihilism that GraceLand depicts as characteristic of
post-Biafra Nigeria.
In 1983, Elvis lives with his father and stepmother in Maroko,
then one of Lagos’s largest slums (it was bulldozed in 1990). Much
of the story concerns his interactions with his father and three people
he meets in Lagos: the Colonel, whose criminal ring employs Elvis;
Redemption, Elvis’s friend and cohort in crime; and the King of Beggars,
whom Elvis befriends and who subsequently takes Elvis in when his life
1
Chris Abani, GraceLand: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 147.
2
Ibid., 190.
380
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Biafra War Legacy in Chris Abani GraceLand 381
is endangered by the Colonel. Regularly interspersed with this story

are flashbacks to Elvis’s childhood in Afikpo beginning in 1972 and
working their way forward until they catch up with the main narrative.
What emerges is, in some ways, a conventional coming-of-age story:
the Colonel, the King, and Redemption present Elvis with three possible
futures that he must choose between as he enters adulthood, and the
ending of the novel suggests that some sort of rite of passage has been
completed or at any rate undertaken. Indeed, much of the scholarly
attention GraceLand has attracted focuses on this feature of the book.3
The other principal focus of critical attention has been the novel’s
commentary on globalization and urbanization.4 As Ashley Dawson
puts it,
GraceLand represents an unequivocal failure of self-formation and socializa-
tion … Elvis traverses a world in which hopes for economic development and
political reform are systematically obliterated [and] spatial egress is substi-
tuted for temporal progress. Social and economic transformation on both an
individual and collective level, that is, cannot be found within the fictional
mega-city represented in the novel.5
There is no question that, on one level, the pervasive nihilism of
GraceLand does seem to be an effect of globalization: the novel may be
read, as Dawson observes, as ‘a damning allegory for a world in which
narratives of development have been abandoned’.6 However, Matthew
Omelsky, in an article addressed to the question of whether the ‘utopian
“idea of America” provide[s] youth [in GraceLand] with a sense of possi-
ble agency’, gestures towards a more concrete source of the novel’s ano-
mie.7 Discussing state-sponsored violence, he notes that the ‘memory of
the [Biafra] war … surfaces on several occasions’, and that
[b]etween this recurring residue of the civil war and the political violence
that pervades the quotidian experiences in GraceLand, Abani underscores
3
See Amanda Aycock, ‘Becoming Black and Elvis: Transnational and Performative Iden-
tity in the Novels of Chris Abani’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies
10:1 (January 2009), 11–25; Sita Maria Kattanek, ‘The Nigerian Coming-of-Age Novel
as a Globalization Device: A Reading of Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Rupkatha 3:3 (2011),
426–433; and Madelaine Hron, ‘“Ora na-azu nwa”: The Figure of the Child in Third-
Generation Nigerian Novels’, Research in African Literatures 39:2 (Summer 2008), 27–48.
4
See Rita Nnodim, ‘City, Identity, and Dystopia: Writing Lagos in Contemporary Nigerian
Novels’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44:4 (2008), 321–332; Chris Dunton, ‘Entropy
and Energy: Lagos as City of Words’, Research in African Literatures 39:2 (Summer 2008),
68–78; Ashley Dawson, ‘Surplus City: Structural Adjustment , Self-Fashioning, and Ur-
ban Insurrection in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Interventions 11:1 (2009), 16–34; Sarah
K. Harrison, ‘“Suspended City”: Personal, Urban, and National Development in Chris
Abani’s GraceLand’, Research in African Literatures 43:2 (Summer 2012), 95–114; and
Matthew Omelsky, ‘Chris Abani and the Politics of Ambivalence’, Research in African Lit-
eratures 42:4 (Winter 2011), 84–96.
5
Dawson, ‘Surplus City’, 19–20.
6
Ibid., 20.
7
Omelsky, ‘Chris Abani and the Politics of Ambivalence’, 90.
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382 Hugh Hodges
the ways in which the Nigerian sovereign has historically coerced and estab-
lished control of the populace through a political culture of violence and
intimidation.8
Omelsky does not explore these memories of the war. In fact, none
of the published criticism of GraceLand seems to do so, but these memo-
ries define Abani’s fictionalized Nigeria and those who inhabit it. Elvis
was born with Biafra; his mother’s cancer emerged with its defeat; the
war created both the Colonel and the King of Beggars, the two poles of
Elvis’s existence; more important, it was the historical moment at which
‘the Mbembean vulgarity of power’, to borrow Rita Nnodim’s phrase,
first announced itself in the Nigerian context.9 When Nnodim uses the
phrase ‘vulgarity of power’, she is referring to Achille Mbembe’s iden-
tification of ‘the grotesque and the obscene’ character of postcolonial
power.10 Nnodim is also concerned mainly with this power’s hold on
GraceLand’s Lagos, but her reference to Mbembe can be expanded to
include his discussion of ‘necropower’, that is, power under conditions
where ‘the state of exception and the relation of enmity have become
the normative basis of the right to kill’.11 Under these conditions, ‘sov-
ereignty means the capacity to determine who matters and who does
not, who is disposable and who is not’.12 The power that grips Grace-
Land’s Lagos clearly has this character too. In Abani’s mega-city, there
is a purely necropolitical relation between a sovereign military and the
‘bloody civilians’ who are treated as ‘disposable subjects’.13 This state of
8
Ibid., 85–86.
9
Nnodim, ‘City, Identity, and Dystopia’, 322.
10
Achille Mbembe, ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’, Africa: Journal of the International
African Institute 62:1 (1992), 4.
11
Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Translated by Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15:1
(2003), 16. I understand the phrase here and throughout in the sense developed by Gior-
gio Agamben, following Carl Schmitt. Agamben argues ‘on the one hand … the exten-
sion of the military authority’s wartime powers into the civil sphere, and on the other a
suspension of the constitution’, or of those constitutional norms that protect individual
liberties; see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Translated by Kevin Attell (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5.
12
Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, 27.
13
Abani, GraceLand, 288. I borrow the paradoxical turn-of-phrase ‘disposable subjects’
from Nouri Gana and Heike Härting, who argue that necropower, if it can be said to
produce subjects at all, produces only dehumanized ‘disposable people’ while itself defy-
ing ‘transcendence or convertibility’ (see Nouri Gana and Heike Härting, Narrative Vio-
lence: Africa and the Middle East (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1). In the
Nigerian context, O.B. Lawuyi writes: ‘They [successive military regimes] militarized the
space with commands, generating incessant chaos and promoting expedient decisions,
a murder instinct, a tactical withdrawal consciousness, and the shelling and ambush of
selected, targeted civilians. Uncertainty rules. They have simply depersonalized the civil
person into a state of confusion, identity crises, begging, and opportunism’ (O.B. Lawuyi,
‘Understanding the Nigerian State: Popular Culture and the Struggle for Meaning’, in
The Transformation of Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola, edited by Adebayo Oyebade
(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002), 514.
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exception, which shapes the character of GraceLand and formalizes its

nihilism, is in the first instance a product of the Biafra War.
GraceLand is certainly not the first Nigerian novel to comment on the
anomic repercussions of the Biafra War (as the very fact of this current
collection attests); nor is it the only Nigerian novel to explore the nihil-
ism that seems to pervade the globalized city. As Chris Dunton observes,
with reference to Lekan Oyegoke’s Ill Winds and Maik Nwosu’s Invisible
Chapters, ‘part of the task of the Lagos novel now, it seems, is to bear wit-
ness to the city’s resistance to positive change’.14 Dunton adds, however,
that what these novels (and others such as Akin Adesokan’s Roots in the
Sky and Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel) have in common is their
‘emphasis [on] the possibilities for cognition and action, and in particu-
lar the possibilities inherent in the act of writing [or some other form
of expressive activity] as a means to assert a meaningful existence’.15
Dunton includes GraceLand in this generalization, but the latter actu-
ally deeply despairs about any attempts to make meaning from within
the state of exception, any attempt to establish or restore some sort of
moral economy in a world where power observes no law. Despite its clos-
ing line, ‘Yes, this is Redemption’, GraceLand finds no redemption from
its nihilism.16
Nihilism and Redemption

I use the terms nihilism and redemption, borrowed from Nietzsche and
some of his recent commentators, because these related Nietzschean
concepts, particularly as explored by Karen L. Carr and Ted Sadler, fore-
ground certain key relationships in GraceLand that the novel’s commen-
tators have tended to marginalize or overlook entirely.17 Specifically,
they focus attention on the triangular relationship between Elvis, the
Colonel, and the King of Beggars, and on the relationship between the
Biafra War and the existential crisis dramatized in GraceLand. In turn this
explains what Elvis is doing when he says, ‘Yes, this is Redemption.’18
For Nietzsche, existential nihilism, the emptiness attending the con-
viction that life has no meaning, is a sickness which may, paradoxically,
lead the way to ‘redemption from an interpretation of life that [is] both
hypocritical and debilitating’.19 This is because existential nihilism is, in
the first place, a secondary effect of either ‘alethiological, epistemologi-
cal, or ethical nihilism’, the judgment that there is no God, no Truth or
14
Chris Dunton, ‘Entropy and Energy’, 72.
15
Ibid., 73.
16
Abani, GraceLand, 321.
17
Karen L. Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism (New York: SUNY Press, 1992); and Ted Sadler,
Nietzsche: Truth and Redemption (London: Athlone, 1995).
18
19
Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism, 4.
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384 Hugh Hodges
no Good.20 In other words, it follows from some sort of hermeneutical

crisis. For Nietzsche that crisis was announced by secular modernity,
‘the death of God and the self-dissolution of Christianity’.21 Later, for
Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre and Camus, it was the ‘collapse of the liberal
paradigm on the battlefields of the First World War’.22 Still later, for
Debord and the other Situationists, it was the postmodern rise of com-
modity culture. In all cases, some historically specific crisis is seen to
shatter the interpretive paradigms people rely on to make life meaning-
ful. For the characters in Chris Abani’s GraceLand, the crisis in question
was the Biafra War. For the victorious as much as for the defeated, and
for the military as much as for civilians, that war initiated a state of
exception in which there can be no becoming, only surviving.
Nietzsche argues that a person’s – or for that matter a people’s – nihil-
istic response to hermeneutical crisis may be either passive or active:
Passive nihilism merely succumbs to the nothingness that surrounds it,
being essentially an expression of weakness. [Nietzsche writes:] ‘The power
of the spirit can be so worn down that the previous aims and values are
inadequate and it [can] find no more faith’ … [For Nietzsche, to] will no
longer, to suffer existence merely passively without offering some sort of
interpretation, explanation, or justification, signifies the ultimate degenera-
tion of an organism, the final decay of its instinctual nature into nothing-
ness, a degeneration and decay that, left unchecked, can only culminate in
the death of that organism.23
This terminal form of nihilism will be seen in people who have based
their evaluation of the world on its relation to some causa prima external
to their own existence. When that causa prima fails (God is Nietzsche’s
particular example, but anything given objective, independent status
will do), the believer must either cease to will entirely or alienate the
will by making ‘one final nihilistic gesture’.24 To borrow the Situationist
International’s memorable image, ‘he throws dice to decide his “cause”,
and becomes its devoted slave’.25 Ted Sadler writes: ‘For Nietzsche, the
fundamental perversity and corruption of human beings is that they
give their heart to untruth, that their lives are therefore a constant
slander of truth, of something which is in fact the only proper object
of honour and reverence.’26 In this condition, their wills in thrall
to something over which they have no control – be it the Past or the
Gods, humans become resentful of their own existence. In Thus Spoke
20
Ibid., 19
21
Ibid., 48.
22
Ibid., 2.
23
Ibid., 37–38.
24
Christopher Gray, Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist Interna-
tional (London: Rebel Press, 1998), 103.
25
Gray, Leaving the 20th Century, 103.
26
Sadler, Nietzsche, 7.
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Zarathustra, it is the former, particularly, that Zarathustra identifies as

the source of the will’s ‘loneliest sorrow’:
That time does not run backward, this arouses the will’s fury: ‘That
which was’ – that is the stone which it cannot roll away.
And so it rolls stones in fury and ill-humour, and takes revenge on what-
ever does not, like itself, feel fury and ill-humour.
Thus did the Will, the liberator, take to hurting; and upon all that can
suffer it takes revenge for its inability to go backwards.
This, this alone is what revenge itself is: the Will’s ill will – will toward
time and its ‘It was.’27
Redemption from this ‘spirit of revenge’ can only be achieved by the cre-
ating will.28 Zarathustra says: ‘To redeem that which has passed away
and to re-create all “It was” into a “Thus I willed it!” – that alone should
I call redemption!’29 And the path to this redemption is through active
nihilism. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche writes:
That no one is any longer made accountable [i.e. to an external causa prima],
that the kind of being manifested cannot be traced back to a causa prima,
that the world is a unity neither as sensorium nor as ‘spirit’, this alone is
the great liberation – thus alone is the innocence of becoming restored … The
concept ‘God’ has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence … We
deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we
redeem the world.30
Crucially, this redemptive rejection of God (or more accurately the God
function) opens a space for Dionysian affirmation of life’s essential
unity. According to Nietzsche:
The word ‘Dionysian’ means: an urge to unity, a reaching out beyond per-
sonality, the everyday, society, reality, across the abyss of transitoriness …
an ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life … the eternal will to pro-
creation, to fruitfulness, to recurrence; the feeling of the necessary unity of
creation and destruction.31
It is this creative act of the will that seems to be ruled out in Grace-
Land; for the bewildered citizens either because they have rolled the dice
and bent their wills to some false causa prima or because, reduced to
a condition of mere survival, they lack will entirely; for the military
because their necropolitical power is merely the power to destroy – it
cannot create anything.
27
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody,
translated by Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 121.
28
Ibid., 122.
29
Ibid., 121.
30
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, translated by R.J. Hol-
lingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 54, original emphasis.
31
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values,
translated by Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 539.
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386 Hugh Hodges
Not coincidentally, it is also this creative act of the will, this inno-
cent becoming (innocent because not accountable to God, or the Past,
or some other causa prima), this redemptive life intoxication, that Wole
Soyinka famously associates with Ogun in his discussion of Yoruba
tragedy:
Yoruba tragedy plunges straight into the ‘chthonic realm,’ the seething
cauldron of the dark world will and psyche, the transitional yet inchoate
matrix of death and becoming. Into this universal womb once plunged and
emerged Ogun, the first actor, disintegrating within the abyss … Within the
mystic summons of the chasm the protagonist actor … resists, like Ogun
before him, the final step towards complete annihilation.32
For Soyinka, Ogun, destroyer/creator god of the forge and the road,
is the figure who by reconciling death and becoming redeems a frag-
mented humanity and restores the primal unity of existence. Facing his
own will’s dissolution, he asserts: ‘Thus do I will it’, and in so doing
reassembles himself. I introduce Soyinka here first because he is an
influencing presence in the novel: there are several explicit references
to the man and his work in GraceLand that encourage intertextual read-
ing, and that intertextual reading, particularly of Soyinka’s discussion
of Ogun, suggests a way of understanding the lack of redemption in
GraceLand.
Destruction and Creation

Wole Soyinka’s interest in Ogun, at least as he articulates it in ‘The Fourth
Stage’ and Myth, Literature and the African World, hinges primarily on
Ogun’s function as ‘the first challenger, and conqueror of transition’,33
the embodiment ‘the Prometheus instinct in man, constantly at the ser-
vice of society for its full self-realization’.34 The most important element
of Ogun’s mythology in this respect is ‘his role of explorer through the
primordial chaos, which he conquered, then bridged’.35 In this role, as
god of the road, Ogun seems the ideal patron deity for the postcolonial
nation – particularly for one trying to forge itself anew after the bloody
chaos of civil war (as Nigeria was when Soyinka wrote ‘The Fourth
Stage’). However, that chaos, far from being a bridgeable transition, was
32
Soyinka quoted in Biodun Jeyifo, ‘Wole Soyinka and Tropes of Disalienation’, in Jeyifo,
ed., Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity (Jackson: University of Missis-
sippi Press, 2001), 142–143.
33
Wole Soyinka, ‘The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba
Tragedy’, in The Morality of Art: Essays Presented to G. Wilson Knight by his Colleagues and
Friends, edited by Douglas William Jefferson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973),
119–134; and his Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1990), 145.
34
Ibid., 30.
35
Ibid.
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to become in Nigeria a seemingly permanent condition;36 Ogun, it turns

out, is a much more problematic patron deity than he at first appears.
For Soyinka what matters is the balance between Ogun’s roles as
creator and destroyer; there is something reassuring in the knowledge
that every act of destruction becomes in turn a forging of something
new. Less reassuring is the knowledge, present but never confronted
head-on in either ‘The Fourth Stage’ or Myth, Literature and the African
World, that Ogun’s destructiveness is quite arbitrary:
He kills suddenly in the house and suddenly in the field
He kills the child with iron with which it plays
Ogun kills the slave-owner and the slaves as well
He kills the owner of the house and paints the hearth with his blood.37
This is pure violence in Giorgio Agamben’s sense of the term, violence
that ‘exposes and severs the nexus between law and violence and can
thus appear in the end not as violence that governs … but as violence
that purely acts and manifests’.38 For this reason, mankind is ill-advised
to accede to Ogun’s sovereignty. Ogun warned men as much when they
first asked him to be their king. When they offered him the crown of Ire:
Ogun presented a face of himself which he hoped would put an end to their
persistence. He came down in his leather war-kit, smeared in blood from
head to foot. When they had fled he returned to his mountain-lair, satis-
fied that the lesson had been implanted. Alas they came back again. They
implored him, if he would only come in less terrifying attire, they would
welcome him as king and leader.39
Alas, indeed, because what is figured here is the foundation of political
life. Giorgio Agamben writes: ‘The first foundation of political life is a
life that may be killed, which is politicized through its very capacity to
be killed.’40 The myth of Ogun’s kingship dramatizes both this submis-
sion of life to sovereign violence, and the mystification of that violence,
which is the source of all political power. ‘Ogun finally consented. He
came down decked in palm fronds and was crowned king.’41 This dis-
guise – a mask of kingship – promises that violence will be constrained,
pure violence transcended to produce political power, the anomie of
naked force exchanged for political authority.
36
Symptomatically, when Soyinka accepted the job of creating a ‘Road Safety Corps’ in the
1980s, he did so in the belief that it might ‘stem the notorious hemorrhage on Nigerian
roads’ – Soyinka, You Must Set Forth at Dawn (New York: Random House, 2006), 182; the
job must have appealed to him as an opportunity to align his creative energies with those
of Ogun, but the only obvious effect was to attract accusations that he had ‘sold out’ to
the military government (182).
37
Obotunde Ijimere, quoted in Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 20.
38
Agamben, State of Exception, 62.
39
Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 29.
40
Agamben, State of Exception, 89.
41
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388 Hugh Hodges
However, the mask is only ever a mask and when that mask is
removed, the violence it releases knows no bounds.42 As Soyinka tells
the myth, Ogun always led his men to victory in battle, but the cost
could be terrible. The first time Ogun entered battle drunk, he ‘turned
on his men and slaughtered them’.43 Ogun, who Soyinka says ‘stands
for a transcendental, humane, but rigidly restorative justice’, becomes
here the figure of pure violence, the suspension of justice, and the inau-
guration of a state of exception.44
It is this face of Ogun that Nigeria saw altogether too frequently from
the late 1960s onward. Under successive military governments, Ogun
seemed to be permanently drunk. Even for Soyinka, faced with the failure
of the Road Safety Corps, this created a sense of sacrificial crisis.45 In You
Must Set Forth at Dawn he recalls that in the early 1960s, like ‘the many
faces of Ogun … the road was a violent host’, and even fatal accident
scenes ‘had a solemnity about them, a graceful pronouncement of leave-
taking where the precedent violence is gently absorbed’.46 Like Ogun after
his annihilating passage through chaos, the survivors of these accidents
experienced a form of tranquility, the catharsis of sacrifice. However,
Soyinka laments: ‘In the road’s later decay … is recorded a nation’s retreat
42
I am drawing here on Deborah Root’s observation that ‘political authority is always
underlain by chaos and death’ – Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Com-
modification of Difference (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview, 1996), 5. The context of
Root’s observation is her discussion of the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoātl and his brother
Tezcatlipoca. The former’s peaceful rule is sustained by the mystification of sovereign vio-
lence; his appearance as the ‘priestly ideal … occlude[s] his despotic function or, rather
purifie[s] and render[s] benign the idea of the despot or supreme lord’, much as the con-
ceit of the good shepherd does. The reign of this good shepherd ends, however, and his
kingdom falls when Tezcatlipoca shows Quetzalcoātl his reflection in a mirror, ‘revealing
the despot to be not the benign face of Quetzalcoātl, but the fearsome face of the enemy
on both sides’. Tezcatlipoca, demystifying his brother’s authority, reveals ‘that the state
operates and maintains its authority through violence and terror’ (5). This precipitates
what René Girard, in Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), calls a ‘sacrificial crisis’, a state in which previ-
ously legitimate violence can no longer perform its cathartic, governing function: ‘De-
mystification leads to constantly increasing violence, a violence perhaps less hypocritical
than the violence it seeks to expose, but more energetic, more violent, and the harbinger
of something worse – a violence that knows no bounds’ (Girard, 24–25). This ‘violence
that knows no bounds’, and which announces that ‘there are no longer any terms by
which to define the legitimate form of violence and to recognize it among the multitude
of illicit forms’ (24), is precisely what the rule of Ogun always threatens.
43
44
Ibid., 26.
45
In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard uses the term ‘sacrificial crisis’ to identify a state
in which previously legitimate violence can no longer perform its cathartic, governing
function: ‘Demystification leads to constantly increasing violence, a violence perhaps less
hypocritical than the violence it seeks to expose, but more energetic, more violent, and
the harbinger of something worse – a violence that knows no bounds’ (24–25). This ‘vio-
lence that knows no bounds’ announces that ‘there are no longer any terms by which to
define the legitimate form of violence and to recognize it among the multitude of illicit
forms’ (24).
46
Soyinka, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, first quote 49 and second quote 50.
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from humanism … I was fated to watch the nation turn both carrion and
scavenger as it killed and consumed its kind, the road remaining an oblig-
ing stream in which a nation’s fall from grace was duly reflected.’47 The
slaughter is no longer analogous to ritual sacrifice, no longer suggestive
of an ordered, balanced cosmos. The season of anomie, to borrow the
title of one of Soyinka’s novels, is infinitely extended. Over this anomie
Ogun presides, not as the embodiment of law-making violence, but as
the figure of a violence that leads to nihilism.
There is No Meaning in GraceLand

The pervasive nihilism of GraceLand is evident in the numerous ways
meaninglessness is dramatized in the novel: for example, in the decora-
tions that Elvis chooses for his private space: ‘Jesus Can Save and Nigerian
Eagles almanacs [and a] magazine cutting of a BMW’, which should be
icons for things that give Elvis’s life meaning, but which turn out to sig-
nify nothing.48 It is also evident in the exhausted manhood ritual that
initiates Elvis into nothing49 and in the ethnographic descriptions of the
kola nut ceremony that begin every chapter and which illuminate noth-
ing about the narrative. Most disappointing is that the notebook which
is all that Elvis has left of his mother reveals nothing about her.50
This last conclusion is anticipated in the way the notebook is intro-
duced. Elvis recalls watching his mother, Beatrice, write a recipe in the
notebook and seeing ‘her spidery handwriting spread across the page
as though laying claim to an ancient kingdom’.51 The suggestion is
that the notebook contains a meaningful inheritance – a kingdom’s
worth – but in grasping awkwardly for it the narration stumbles into
meaninglessness. The passive construction of the sentence removes
Beatrice as agent: the writing has no writer. Then what can it possibly
mean for handwriting to spread ‘as though laying claim to an ancient
kingdom’?52 What does that look like? The image, at first glance con-
crete, turns out to be an empty abstraction. The same, odd passive sen-
tence construction appears at the end of the episode:
‘Come closer,’ Beatrice said [to Elvis], pulling him close and handing him a
pencil. ‘Here, draw next to me.’
As he bent over the page next to his mother, his crude picture emerged next
to her sophisticated one.53
47
Ibid., 51.
48
49
Ibid., 22.
50
Ibid., 320.
51
Ibid., 44.
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid.
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390 Hugh Hodges
The absence that characterizes Beatrice’s notebook has infected Elvis:

his picture emerges without his agency. The ‘possibilities inherent in the
act of writing’ identified by Chris Dunton ‘as a means to assert a mean-
ingful existence’ seem to be unavailable in GraceLand.
This absence of agency is a symptom of the passive nihilism Elvis
himself diagnoses in Nigerian civil society: ‘That is the trouble with this
country’, he says, ‘Everything is accepted. No dial tones or telephones.
No stamps in post offices. No electricity. No water. We just accept.’54 But
passive nihilism is equally characteristic of the military which preys
on civil society. Jimoh, a soldier acquaintance of Elvis, tells him, ‘[D]
ere is no right or wrong with soldier. Just what we want.’55 The mes-
sage is repeated in even starker terms by another soldier when, after the
destruction of Maroko, Elvis attempts to claim his father’s body: ‘If you
annoy me I will kill you and add you to your father.’56 This capricious
malice is the mirror of civil society’s hapless acceptance, just as the sov-
ereign is the mirror of homo sacer.57 Both are symptoms of a sickness of
the will.
There is No God in GraceLand

GraceLand is also concerned, of course, with the source of that sick-
ness, with the alethiological, epistemological, and ethical nihilism that
underwrites that existential condition. I will focus here on the first, the
conviction that there is no God, because GraceLand dramatizes it in sev-
eral interlinked ways (although much of what follows is also evidence
that there is neither truth nor right and wrong in GraceLand). About
halfway through GraceLand, Elvis is given his mother’s Bible, which
from long use falls open at Psalm 23:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the
still waters.
He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his
name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear
no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me …
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the day of my life: and I
will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.58
54
Ibid., 58.
55
Ibid., 121.
56
Ibid., 306.
57
I borrow the term from Giorgio Agamben’s study of the figure in Roman law, homo sacer,
the non-person excepted from the protection of the law who can be killed without sanc-
tion (Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, 82–83).
58
Psalms 23:1–6 KJV.
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It is a psalm conventionally read for reassurance in times of distress,

and one can assume that Elvis’s mother turned to it repeatedly for pre-
cisely this reason during her illness. The psalm’s position in the novel
also encourages us to read it this way, contrasting the uncertainty of life
in GraceLand’s Nigeria with the surety promised by the heavenly guard-
ian. That is, in the chapter preceding the psalm, Nigeria’s government is
scorned as an ‘illegal and monstrous regime of military buffoons’ whose
chief of security the Colonel is the Devil, the ‘original gangster’.59 In the
succeeding chapter, venal politicians compete for the right to despoil the
nation, in an election that is compared to an uncontrolled forest fire:
‘the only creatures who love forest fires are kites … they soar above the
flames and ash, razor-sharp eyes hunting for prey, swooping down on
confused creatures, snatching them up to some distant height where
they can eat their catch in peace’.60 Where the alternatives are mon-
sters on one side and birds of prey on the other, the shepherd’s mercy
would seem a safe bet.
However, Elvis’s reaction to the twenty-third psalm hardly embraces
the promised redemption:
‘The Lord is my shepherd …’ he began, but stopped.
‘Go on,’ [his aunt] urged.
‘No,’ he said, shutting the Bible and putting it back on the table. ‘What else
have you got for me?’61
One of the first things we learn about Elvis at the beginning of the novel
is that he has a Jesus Can Save poster on his bedroom wall, but Elvis hesi-
tates here because he has learned there is not much to choose between
the shepherd’s mercy and the monster’s depredation, between having
Ogun on your side or on the enemy’s. Mercy, it emerges, is merely the
benevolent face of the same sovereignty that drives the monstrous; one
can only show mercy – as the Colonel does when Elvis annoys him at a
nightclub – if one also has the ability to withhold it and destroy one’s
victim without consequences to oneself. A shepherd, even a good one,
has absolute dominion over his flock and may do with it as he chooses;
if the twenty-third psalm began, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, he driveth
me to the abattoir’, the relationship between the psalmist and the Lord
would be fundamentally unchanged. As the long-suffering Job discov-
ered, God ‘destroys blameless and wicked alike’.62 The Christianity that
Nietzsche perceived as having failed relies on the optimistic proposi-
tion that the Good Shepherd chooses not to destroy the blameless. But
in GraceLand there are no good shepherds, as Elvis discovers when he
becomes a shepherd himself.
59
Abani, GraceLand, 162–163.
60
Ibid., 180.
61
Ibid., 167.
62
Job 9:22 KJV.
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392 Hugh Hodges
Elvis and Redemption are hired by the Colonel to shepherd kidnapped

children to the slaughterhouse: the children they are escorting will be
‘harvested’ for ‘spare parts’ to be used in organ transplants.63 The episode
ends, like so much else in the novel, ambiguously. Elvis and Redemption
do not escort the children to their deaths, but nor do they save them;
they merely run away and, appropriately enough, get lost.64 Later, Elvis
again becomes a shepherd, this time a ‘caretaker’ employed by homeless
beggar children to watch over them at night.65 In this undertaking his
partner is the beggar Okon, who takes sexual exploitation of his charges
as ‘de fringe benefits’ of the job.66 Elvis chooses not to do the same, but
again the episode ends ambiguously. Elvis does not exploit his charges, but
nor does he protect them: he falls ill and is unconscious for four days.67
In both episodes, there is little to choose between the shepherds and
the predators, and there are certainly no saviors. In fact, Elvis is just
one in a list of ironic, abortive Christ figures in GraceLand that includes
the King of the Beggars and the mob victim Jeremiah. I will discuss the
former at length in the next section, but will conclude these observa-
tions about Christian salvation in GraceLand with the episode involving
the unfortunate Jeremiah.
As Elvis and Redemption prepare to embark on their shepherding,
they witness the lynching of an accused thief. The scene – a malefactor
set upon and killed by a mob – has become something of a common-
place in contemporary Nigerian fiction.68 It is always tempting to read
this mob violence as resistance to the anomie of Lagos; its victims, after
all, are usually low-level 419 men, those agents of chaos that the poor
can actually get their hands on.69 However, the lynching that Elvis and
Redemption witness defies this interpretation. Jeremiah, a carpenter
trying to collect payment from a man named Peter, is accused by Peter
of being a thief; Peter claims not to know him (the ironic reference to
Peter’s denial of Christ is highlighted by the description of the scene as
‘comically biblical’).70 Jeremiah is bound and chased into the road:
‘Is he a thief?’ Elvis asked Redemption.
‘Maybe.’
63
Abani, GraceLand, 242–243.
64
Ibid., 243.
65
Ibid., 309.
66
Ibid., 312.
67
Ibid., 313.
68
See for example, Helon Habila, Waiting for an Angel (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004); Chi-
mamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus: A Novel (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2003);
and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, I Do Not Come to You by Chance (New York: Hyperion,
2009).
69
‘419’ refers to the section of the Nigerian penal code dealing with fraud. For an account
of how ‘419’ has become a general term for all form of corruption in Nigeria see Dan-
iel Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 166–190.
70
Ibid., 225.
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‘Or is he a carpenter?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Which one?’
‘Either. I don’t know and I don’t care.’71
This is not simple indifference on Redemption’s part nor is it a Pilate-
like refusal to judge; this is an assertion that it genuinely doesn’t matter
whether Jeremiah is a thief or not. His exclusion (and execution) is
entirely random and could be visited at any time on any person. His
death, rather than signaling some kind of communal salvation (which
the allusion to the crucifixion might anticipate) is a sign of general
annihilation. Jeremiah is doused with gasoline and set on fire, but he
breaks from the ring of people surrounding him and stumbles into an
adjacent lumberyard:
Within minutes, the timber was ablaze and the workers formed a chain,
throwing buckets of water and sand on the fire, but it was too big. The mob
of lynchers had melted away, as had the police.
‘We should help,’ Elvis said, not getting up.
‘What good is dat?’
‘The fire will spread.’72
All will be burned, all abandoned, the Christian promise of salvation
exchanged, as Jeremiah’s name anticipates, for an Old Testament
prophecy of destruction. The final, ironic comment on this series of
failed saviors is inscribed on a scrap of paper Elvis finds in the ruins of
his home after Maroko is destroyed (presumably all that remains of the
poster that was on his wall): Jesus Can Save. In GraceLand, he cannot.
Nowhere in the novel is the closure of this path to redemption more
clearly dramatized than in the recollections of Elvis’s cousin Innocent.
The episode in which Innocent remembers his experiences during the
Biafra War is notable for two reasons: it is one of only a handful of epi-
sodes in the novel in which Elvis is not the focalizer (all of which involve
necropolitical violence), and it is one of only two episodes that recall
events that predate Elvis’s narrative (both of which concern massacres
committed during the Biafra War).
The other episode involves the King and the Colonel; between them
these two episodes function as a sort of origin myth for Elvis’s Nigeria.
Innocent, we learn, was a child soldier and he is haunted by memories
of a Church that his platoon came upon towards the end of the war.
The priests and the congregation, refugees who had ‘converged on the
church … believing they would be safe … protected by God’s benevo-
lence’, had all been killed by the advancing federal troops.73 The only
survivors, two nuns, were subsequently raped and killed by Innocent’s
71
Ibid.
72
Ibid., 228.
73
Ibid., 211,
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394 Hugh Hodges
captain. Innocent observes that the combatants on both sides were ‘all
infected by the insanity of blood fever’, and concludes: ‘There is only
one God in war: the gun. One religion: genocide.’74
The State of Exception

Innocent, in his observation about genocide, identifies a particular kind
of modern warfare, lately theorized by a number of commentators as
not between two armed factions (although that may provide the pretext
for the conflict) but between the military and civilians.75 Which ‘side’
a particular army unit is on, or which ‘side’ a particular group of civil-
ians ostensibly belongs to is immaterial; the only meaningful distinction
is between the armed, who wield necropower, and the unarmed who
are the disposable subjects of that power. GraceLand provides a model
of this relation in the King and the Colonel, moment on the eve of the
Biafra War. As the King recalls it, he was working for the Public Works
Department in the North when the Hausas turned on the Igbos. He fled
south but the train was stopped by soldiers, and the Igbos – identified by
their inability to sing the Muslim call to prayer – were forced to debark;
then the Colonel, at the time a young lieutenant, executed them one by
one and photographed the corpses. The King fortuitously survived the
encounter only because he was bayoneted by a soldier and left for dead.
Dramatized here is the moment that, Mbembe argues, inaugurates
the present age. ‘What distinguishes our age from previous ages, the
breach over which there is apparently no going back’, he says, is ‘exist-
ence that is contingent, dispersed, but reveals itself in the guise of arbi-
trariness and the absolute power to give death any time, anywhere, by
any means, and for any reason.’76 The Colonel exercises necropower,
‘the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’.77 The King
survives only by chance. On the one hand is the sovereign; on the other
homo sacer.
Under these circumstances, in which people defined solely by their
capacity to be killed become ‘disposable subjects’ a permanent state of
crisis replaces ‘normality’. Tejumola Olaniyan suggestively calls this
state of crisis the ‘postcolonial incredible’:
The ‘incredible’ inscribes that which cannot be believed; that which is too
improbable, astonishing, and extraordinary to be believed. The incredible
is not simply a breach but an outlandish infraction of ‘normality’ and its
74
Ibid.
75
See, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005); Heike Harting ‘Global Civil War and
Postcolonial Studies’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 8:1
(2008), 1–10; Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of
Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2006).
76
Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 13.
77
Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, 11.
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limits. If ‘belief,’ as faith, confidence, trust, and conviction, underwrites the

certainty and tangibility of institutions and practices of social exchange,
the incredible dissolves all such props of stability, normality, and intelligibil-
ity (and therefore of authority) and engenders social and symbolic crisis.78
This postcolonial incredible is dramatized memorably in a conversation
Elvis has with a stranger on a bus crossing Lagos. The episode is worth
quoting at some length:
The motorways were the only means of getting across the series of towns
that made up Lagos. Intent on reaching their own destinations, pedestrians
dodged between the speeding vehicles as they cross the wide motorways. It
was dangerous, and every day at least ten people were killed trying to cross
the road. If they didn’t die when the first car hit them, subsequent cars fin-
ished the job. The curious thing though, was that there were hundreds of
overhead pedestrian bridges, but people ignored them. Some even walked up
to the bridges and then cross underneath them.
Elvis was pulled back to the present as the car in front of the bus hit some-
one. The heavy wheels of the bus thudded over the inert body.
‘We are crazy you know. Did you see that?’
‘Uh-huh,’ the man grunted.
‘Why can’t we cross with the bridges? Why do we gamble with our lives?’ …
‘We all have to die sometimes, you know. If it is your time, it is your time. You
can be in your bed and die. If it is not your time, you can’t die even if you
cross de busiest road. After all, you can fall from de bridge into de road and
die. Now isn’t dat double foolishness?79
In a different context the observation, ‘[i]f it is your time, it is your time’,
might be taken for an articulation of the belief in Fate, the belief that
one is born with a purpose and has a responsibility to serve it. This is a
belief that underwrites human agency and makes human action rich
with numinous meaning. However, in the context of GraceLand’s Lagos,
the observation becomes an assertion rather that humans have neither
agency nor meaning. We will be killed or not killed at the whim of a
drunken god. This is the world over which Ogun presides, not as protec-
tive god of the road, but as berserk destroyer. In this world, René Girard’s
famous assertion that there is ‘hardly any form of violence that cannot
be described in terms of sacrifice’80 is overturned by the discovery that
‘in our age all citizens … appear virtually as homines sacri’.81 There can
be no sacrifice at all.
This observation perhaps needs some expansion, because it hinges
on a characteristic of sacrifice that Agamben does not emphasize in his
discussion of homo sacer. That is, you cannot sacrifice something that
78
Ibid., 2.
79
Ibid., 56–57.
80
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 133.
81
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 111.
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396 Hugh Hodges
does not belong to you. Sacrifice is an exchange; you offer something

of yours to enjoin a god or some interceding spirit to do something for
you. In other words, sacrifice is the mechanism by which an otherwise
intractable universe is bound by contract. Once a sacrifice is accepted,
the receiver must fulfill his or her part of the bargain. This is why there
are no stories of gods who accept sacrifice and then refuse to deliver –
when sacrifices fail to produce results it is either because some malicious
middle-man has interfered or because the offering was unacceptable for
some reason. At the top of the list of unacceptable sacrifices are things
that do not belong to you.
Homo sacer does not belong to anyone. He has been permanently
removed from the protection of a human community and is no longer
either properly human or properly an animal. He is something else,
unnatural, the wolf-man ‘who is precisely neither man nor beast, and
who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither’.82
The qualification that homo sacer is not an animal is necessary because
animals can belong to someone and so they can be offered in sacrifice.
Homo sacer by contrast, though he can be killed, is not available for such
trade. His death can have no sacrificial function; it cannot repair or
redeem. So the death of Jeremiah, for example, cannot serve justice and
will, in fact, only deepen the anomie. In this perverse state, the function
of the so-called law is not to ensure justice, but to ensure futility.
Elvis’s conversation about road fatalities with the man on the bus
eventually turns towards precisely this topic:
Outside, the road was littered with dead bodies at regular intervals. ‘At least
take away the bodies,’ he muttered to himself.
‘Dey cannot,’ the man interjected into his thoughts. ‘Dis stupid government
place a fine on dying by crossing road illegally. So de relatives can only take
de body when dey pay de fine.’
‘What about the State Sanitation Department?’
‘Is dis your first day in Lagos?’83
The law against crossing the road, at least in its application, rather than
securing order actually exacerbates the chaotic situation. Similarly, in
the lynching scene, the police who should be there to impose order (if
only to assert the government’s sovereign right to kill) watch impassively
as the scene evolves and vanish once self-perpetuating chaos begins.
The Sovereign and the Disposable Subject

When the King and the Colonel meet again at the climax of the novel,
the result is the spectacle of the sovereign and homo sacer confronting
one another and becoming indistinguishable. Both are anomic figures,
82
Ibid., 105.
83
Ibid., 57.
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placed outside or beyond the human community: the Colonel because

he acknowledges no human bonds; the King because he is permitted
none. Both are killed; neither is sacrificed. That is, neither death is either
meaningful or consequential. The Colonel is simply replaced by other
soldiers wielding precisely the Colonel’s ‘blind, unreasoning power’.84
The King is merely erased. Although he is temporarily ‘deified’ by the
dispossessed, ‘turned into a prophet, an advance guard, like John the
Baptist, for the arrival of the Messiah’, the promise of salvation is as
empty as the sacrifice is illegitimate.85 The attempt to make the King’s
death meaningful, the failure of that attempt, and the continued domin-
ion of terror are all anticipated in the moment of the King’s death: ‘The
soldiers at the blockade opened fire and the bullets lifted the King bodily
into the air. He soared, arms spread, before falling to the ground in a
broken rumpled heap. The crowd scattered in panic, bullets and angry
soldiers chasing them.’86 An illusory glimpse of soaring transcendence,
of an angel announcing a new order of meaning which is nothing more
than an old and discredited causa prima, and then the crushing resump-
tion of necropower’s war on the population.
The King of Beggars cannot offer any redemption from the state of
exception because he is a symptom of the same nihilism it depends upon.
The Colonel turned him into the King of Beggars, and ever since he has
been seeking revenge, his will bent on something he cannot change: the
past. Elvis’s father, Sunday, warns Elvis that the King’s ‘political agita-
tion is a front, dat it is to help him find and kill de officer dat killed his
family during de war. Dis is not for change, but revenge.’87 The King’s
resentment of the world and his possession by what Nietzsche calls ‘the
Spirit of Revenge’ express themselves in two ways: dramatically in this
fixation on the moment of his dispossession, the moment when the state
of exception was invoked; more insidiously in the ‘political agitation’
that Elvis’s father talks about. The King gives public speeches in which
he argues articulately and passionately for a ‘return to the traditional
values and ways of being’, but Elvis is uncomfortably aware that his
passion, while ‘seductive’, is sterile.88 Nothing in the King’s speech sug-
gests a way ‘to cope with these new and confusing times’, a way out of
the state of exception.89 When another speaker takes over and begins to
articulate a genuine challenge to the nihilism of military rule, the King
takes fright. ‘How long can we continue to pretend we are not responsi-
ble for this?’ the new speaker asks.90 He adds: ‘we are both the jailer and
the inmates, imprisoning ourselves by allowing this infernal, illegal and
84
Ibid., 306.
85
Ibid., 303.
86
Ibid., 302–303.
87
Ibid., 205.
88
Ibid., 155.
89
Ibid.
90
Ibid.,
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398 Hugh Hodges
monstrous regime of military buffoons to continue’.91 The King tells

Elvis they should leave because the army will arrive soon. Elvis chal-
lenges him, ‘I thought you wanted to topple the government!’92 The
King has no answer.
Even the King’s encounter with the Colonel has this quality of empti-
ness. The people following him have no direction, no will:
The mob was comprised of the curious, thugs looking for some trouble,
market women and students. They all sang at the top of their voices as they
marched on Ribadu Road, the seat of government.
‘Who shall be free?’ the King sang.
‘Nigeria shall be free,’ the crowd responded.
Like a strange pied piper, he picked up more and more people as he marched.
No one had any clear idea where they were marching to.93
As the allusion to the pied piper suggests, wherever they are marching
to, it is not redemption.
On the other side, the Colonel despite all his power of death has no
power of life; he cannot create. If the King is fixated on a past he cannot
touch, the Colonel is fixated on an equally inaccessible cause. Redemp-
tion tries to explain the Colonel to Elvis:
‘Dey rumor dat he personally supervises de tortures, taking pictures
throughout,’ Redemption said …
‘Why take pictures?’
‘Dey say it is because he is an artist, looking to find de beauty of death … Like
de spirit, you know. He takes de picture just as de person die too, maybe he
want to get de ghost on film … But he is never satisfy, so he arrange de dead
body many ways, sometimes he cuts de leg or head off ’ …
‘So has he ever found it? … The spirit – or is it the beauty of death?’
‘How can he, when he don’t know what to look for?’94
The Colonel is capable only of this parody of creation, shuffling the
fragments of humanity without the spark of life. He becomes the furi-
ous Will, taking revenge ‘upon all that can suffer’.95
Conclusion: No Redemption
Chris Abani began his 2008 Technology, Entertainment, Design
(TED) Talk with this observation: ‘My search is always to find ways to
chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday
91
Ibid., 156.
92
Ibid.
93
Ibid., 299.
94
Ibid., 163–164.
95
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 121.
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people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence.’96

However, Matthew Omelsky observes: ‘These statements seem to be
purposely elliptical. Abani never clearly articulates what he means by
‘transformation’.97 Abani seems to recognize that some extraordinary
act of the will is required, but is unclear about what that act should be.
Elvis has a similar problem. Throughout GraceLand he recognizes that
people ‘mistak[e] … resignation for control’.98 Like the boy soldiers in
Innocent’s recollections of the Biafra War, they have ‘only one motto
… We shall survive.’99 It is a motto which at a glance suggests a will at
work, but which actually reflects a failure of will and a denial of life.
Towards the end of the novel, when he is on the road with the King’s
troupe of musicians and dancers, Elvis concludes that ‘it is only a small
group of people who are spoiling our country’, and the King responds,
approvingly: ‘De boy is becoming a man.’100 But if this is to become a
man, then to become a man is to succumb to nihilism, to accept a choice
between dispossession and death. ‘[W]hy don’t we revolt and overthrow
this government?’ Elvis asks. One of his colleagues replies, ‘Who want
to die?’101 The attempt would either be fatal for the rebels or succeed
only in replacing one set of nihilists with another.
As Elvis waits for the flight that will take him out of Nigeria, an exodus
he neither willed nor acted towards, he reads James Baldwin’s Going to
Meet the Man. He sees ‘parallels between himself and the description of
a dying black man slowly being engulfed by flame’.102 He feels he knows
‘that scar, that pain, that shame, that degradation no metaphor could
contain, inscribing it on his body. And yet beyond that, he was that scar,
carved by hate and smallness and fear onto the world’s face.’103 Con-
fronted with such brutal abjection (the dying black man’s, Elvis’s, Bia-
fra’s), Nietzsche’s Dionysian demand that we ‘redeem that which has
passed away and … re-create all “It was” into a “Thus I willed it!”’ can
only seem absurd. Better to not attempt redemption at all. And so Elvis
ends the novel with the nihilistic untruth that will spare him:
Elvis stepped forward and spoke.
‘Yes, this is Redemption.’104
96
Chris Abani, ‘On Humanity’, TED.com, www.ted.com/talks/chris_abani_muses_on_hu-
manity (accessed September 9, 2015).
97
Omelsky, ‘Chris Abani and the Politics of Ambivalence’, 93.
98
99
Ibid., 213.
100
Ibid., 280.
101
Ibid., 281.
102
Ibid., 319.
103
Ibid., 320.
104
Ibid., 321.
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000 Fal book B.indb 400 13/06/2016 22:06
Part IV
LOCATING GENDER IN
NIGERIA-BIAFRA WAR LITERATURE
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000 Fal book B.indb 402 13/06/2016 22:06
19 Gender and the Construction of the
Nigeria-Biafra War Scholarship
Egodi Uchendu
‘The narrative of Nigeria’s momentary disrepute and postulated disintegra-

tion, and of her supreme achievement in overcoming the threat – predomi-
nantly internal yet on occasion unmistakably external – to her sovereignty
is one that seems destined to be retold many times in our lifetime.’
A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria, vii.
Introduction
The apt prediction made in March 1970 by A.H.M. Kirk-Greene was
amply demonstrated both during the Nigeria-Biafra War (Nigerian Civil
War) of July 1967 to January 1970 and in the four and a half decades
after the cessation of hostilities. Indeed, each year witnesses the pub-
lication of fresh accounts of the war. Interest in the subject appears
to have reached an all-time high in the last decade as the amount of
research by individuals and institutions on different aspects of the con-
flict has increased tremendously. Issues investigated range from the legal
implications of Biafra’s secession to the variegated nature of the Biafra
versus Nigeria conflict, and to the impact of the conflict on Igbo dias-
pora communities after the war. Scholars have extended the scope of
their investigations on the war to include the interconnections between
the Biafra dream for independence from Nigeria, which resulted in one
of the world’s bloodiest and most politicized twentieth century conflict,
and the aspirations of second – and third-generation Biafrans – children
or grandchildren of Biafrans born and raised decades after the conflict
in different parts of the globe.1 Kirk-Greene could not have imagined
the full range of the subjects and research themes that would flow from
this singular event.2
1
One example is Emmanuella Asabor, ‘Memory, Nationhood and Belonging in Biafran
Literary Heritage, 1966–2014’ (MPhil dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2014).
Her research focuses on the historical memory of the Nigerian Civil War and the Biafran
state.
2
He observes in his preface: ‘How the one time showpiece of decolonization in Africa, its
Government repeatedly hailed as the continent’s exemplar of democratic institutions
and its Prime Minister the paragon of unstampeded statesmanship, could manage to
403
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404 Egodi Uchendu
Many of the issues that triggered the Nigerian Civil War lie in the
years preceding the actual fighting; some date as far back as the found-
ing of the country, notably the supposed racial incompatibility of the
North and South. In their analysis of the war, scholars have considered
the period of actual fighting – from July 6, 1967 to January 15, 1970 –
as well as a wide variety of happenings that occurred before the actual
fighting. The war was of such magnitude that all classes of Biafran soci-
ety felt the brunt of it, as did all gender groups within Biafra, irrespec-
tive of the age category.3
Biafra, previously Eastern Region of Nigeria, was populated by the
Igbo, Ijaw, Efik, Ibibio, Ekoi, and a few other smaller ethnic groups that
seceded from the Nigerian federation, but divested non-Igbo segments
just prior to the hostilities. It became the major theater of war, and it
has received the most attention in existing accounts of the war. Some
attention has also been paid to Anioma, the Igbo homeland, west of
the Niger River, located at the time of the fighting in Mid-Western
Region. The Anioma’s ethnic affinity with the Biafra Igbo (east of the
Niger) and strong support for the war effort led to their subjection to a
relatively shorter period of militarization by the federal army. Several
conclusions reached about the war posit its intense cruelty on all mili-
tarized societies and their citizens. Writing in the last weeks of the war
while representatives of the two sides to the conflict negotiated an end
to hostilities, Frederick Forsyth observed: ‘Too much blood has flowed,
too much misery has been caused and felt, too many lives have been
thrown uselessly away, too many tears have been shed and too much
bitterness engendered.’4
This chapter is not intended to rehash the Biafra-Nigeria conflict or,
as some writers have done, to decide the rights and the wrongs or where
to place blame, but to examine the ways in which gender is integral to
the construction – building, creation, and production – of the Nigeria-
Biafra war Scholarship. Gender is used here as a substitute for the term
‘woman’.5 To achieve the goal of this chapter, a textual study involving
a re-examination of existing accounts on the Nigeria-Biafra War was
plummet from such an apogee of grace in less than six years of its independence and
come so perilously close to collapse; how it could plunge first into brutal assassination,
then into constitutional chaos, and finally into the bloodiest civil war of the twentieth
century so that even African leaders themselves denounced the carnage as “a shame on
Africa”: how it succeeded in crushing rebellion and now accepts the challenge presented
by the years of reconstruction; how it all happened, why and who was to blame; all these
are issues that will arouse many sorts of minds to continuing analysis and arguments’.
A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook 1966–1970,
Volume 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), vii.
3
Egodi Uchendu, Women and Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War (Trenton, NJ: Africa World
Press, 2007).
4
Frederick Forsyth, The Making of an African Legend: The Biafran Story (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1977), 278–279.
5
Bonnie Smith, Women’s Studies: The Basics (Oxford: Routledge, 2013), 83.
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Gender and Nigeria-Biafra War Scholarship 405
undertaken. The evident limitation of this methodology is the exclusion

of non-English texts in the analysis. However, the magnitude of the
available works in English is more than adequate.
Foreign Authors and Representation of Women

Books in English reviewed in this chapter were selected randomly, and
they include works by Nigerians and non-Nigerians. The latter blazed
the trail in documenting the war and, for this reason, their accounts
are considered first. These early authors are drawn from different dis-
ciplinary and professional groups. The earliest accounts were from
journalists who covered the crisis. A good example is The Making of an
African Legend: The Biafran Story by the British journalist Frederick For-
syth. Overwhelmed with sympathy for Biafra, Forsyth wrote without
any consciousness for gender. Biafra, to Forsyth, was an asexual entity
where male opinion stood for the opinion of all Biafrans and was repre-
sentative of Biafra. But why should he have cared about Biafran women?
Women’s issues had yet to gain any serious acceptance in Britain and
other parts of the world by the time Forsyth penned his book in 1969.6
Moreover, his goal was to make a case for the newly created Republic of
Biafra to give it a chance to survive in the comity of nations. In doing
this, he gave detailed descriptions of the brutality perpetrated on the
Biafran people and at the same time bemoaned Britain’s indifference,
if not outright complicity, in ensuring the collapse of Biafra’s dream
of becoming an independent nation from Nigeria. Forsyth succeeded
in disturbing the consciences of his readers quite early in the conflict
to the degree that his account was much critiqued by both Nigerian
and British authors for its strong bias for Biafra. Incidentally, Forsyth’s
revised version of the Making of an African Legend, published nearly a
decade later in 1977, did not tone down his words or alter his convic-
tions despite his awareness of the criticisms of his views on the war, but
rather maintains: ‘Nothing can or ever will minimize the injustice and
brutality perpetrated on the Biafra people, nor diminish the shameful-
ness of a British government’s frantic, albeit indirect, participation.’7
Two decades after Making of an African Legend was first published,
it continued to evoke deep emotions in its readers. How effectively it
accomplished this is evident in several reactions to it. In 1989, Akin-
jide Osuntokun could not resist suggesting that Forsyth must have
been writing under the influence of a spell cast on him by Odumegwu
Ojukwu, the Military Governor of Eastern Region and leader of Biafra,
6
Bonnie Smith’s analysis of the history of women’s studies identified the 1970s as ‘its age
of discovery’ (Smith, Women’s Studies, 4).
7
Frederick Forsyth, The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend (New York: Pen and
Sword, 2007), 8.
000 Fal book B.indb 405 13/06/2016 22:06

406 Egodi Uchendu
that ‘beclouded his sense of judgment and objectivity’.8 The only excuse
Osuntokun could proffer for Forsyth’s disturbing revelations on the
human suffering in that war was that Forsyth wrote ‘instant history
and in the heat of the battle’, besides ‘being overwhelmed by the physi-
cal suffering of Biafrans which he witnessed in his several journeys to
the beleaguered republic’.9
What is important in all this is that Forsyth’s catalogue of the atroci-
ties perpetrated on Biafrans did not include the experiences of Biafran
women. Thus, he made no effort whatsoever to give them a voice in his
account, but clearly subsumed their experiences under the men’s. His
only direct mention of women was as he mused over the differences
between the authority structure in Biafra and Nigeria. On this, he noted:
The voice of the Biafran people is the Consultative Assembly and the Advi-
sory Council of Chiefs and Elders, and they are unanimous on that. Colonel
Ojukwu cannot go against their wishes – or on that topic their demands – no
matter how much vituperation is thrown at him for intransigence, obdu-
racy and stubbornness …
It is interesting to speculate what would happen if General Gowon were
obliged to follow the counsels on his war policy of a Consultative Assem-
bly which included strong representation of the farming community, the
academic community, the trade unions, the commercial interests and the
womenfolk; for all these people are presently showing increasing restiveness
at the war policy.10
Forsyth was aware of the existence of women in Biafra. He was also
aware that women in Biafra were not silent entities but spoke in the
society and could, like the men, show ‘increasing restiveness at the war
policy’ yet he did not provide details of this in his pioneering account of
the Nigeria-Biafra War.11 One is therefore left to guess whether the inte-
gration of women’s experiences early on would not have greatly helped
the cause of Biafra on which Forsyth was most engrossed.
In 1971, Kirk-Greene identified the target of his compilation pub-
lished in two volumes titled Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary
Sourcebook, 1966–1970 as follows: ‘to preserve the verbatim state-
ments made by the leading dramatis personae of the Nigerian tragedy
of 1966–70 as they were uttered and before they disappear or are
dangerously half-remembered’.12 Kirk-Greene’s work is purely docu-
mentary, containing all available documents starting from January
1966, including speeches and press releases, on the Nigeria-Biafra War.
8
Akinjide Osuntokun, ‘Review of Literature on the Civil War’ in Nigeria since Independence:
The First Twenty-Five Years, Volume 6, The Civil War Years, edited by T.N. Tamuno and S.
Ukpabi (Ibadan: Heinemann Educational, 1989), 87.
9
Ibid., 87.
10
Forsyth, The Making of an African Legend, 279–280, emphasis added.
11
Ibid., 280.
12
Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria, viii.
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Volume I covered the 19 months of spiraling and unrestrained crisis in

Nigeria. It began with the January 15, 1966, coup that saw the abrupt
end of Nigeria’s newly independent but densely corrupt government
and terminated in the outbreak of the civil war, a direct result of the
troubles of the previous 19 months. Both dates – January 1966 and
July 1967 – have since become landmarks in Nigeria’s history.
Underpinning the sourcebook is the author’s realization that, as the
years progressed, accuracy of memories was bound to become blurred,
which could have far-reaching effects for scholarship. For example,
individuals might gladly forget what they no longer wish to remem-
ber or falter in their recollection of what one wants to recollect. Kirk-
Greene’s addition to the literature on the Nigerian Civil War did not aim
at the evaluation or interpretation of events of this important period of
Nigeria’s history. However, the author’s systematic retrieval of raw data
from this period has been most useful especially as, in the face of the pos-
sibility of adulteration of sources, scholars are able to get more precise
facts to evaluate or interpret the events of January 1966 to July 1967.
Indeed some alterations of original sources on the civil war began to
occur soon after samples of the original were collated. The unfortunate
development buttressed the wisdom of Kirk-Greene’s project.13
With Kirk-Greene’s focus completely on preserving relevant docu-
ments on the Nigeria-Biafra War, his sourcebook was gender neutral. It
is either that his project did not conceptualize such an undertaking at
the time or that he lost it in the powerful current that drove his search for
written relics of the war. Mention of women was limited to speeches and
advertisements. The paucity of women, therefore, is a direct reflection
of the consideration given them by the speechwriters and presenters.
In Nigeria: Crisis and Beyond, John Oyinbo looked at Nigeria’s future
after the conflict. His long years of residence in Nigeria propelled him,
as it did several other expatriates with even less impressive résumé, to
add his perspective on the war and on Nigeria. He did not differ much
from other non-Nigerian writers such as Stremlau, who were on the side
of the Nigerian Government and whose support of the government’s
war-time agenda was directly linked to their own national interests and
what their countries hoped to gain from a united Nigeria.
Oyinbo was distressed that the war was not concluded quickly and
blamed it on what he called Nigerian authorities’ ‘improvidence in
13
A much-reported example of such an adulteration is the mutilation of the original text
of Lt Col Gowon’s broadcast to the nation after taking over leadership of the country in
the wake of the murder of the Head of State, General Aguiyi Ironsi. The exact text of the
broadcast monitored by the British Broadcasting Corporation (ME/2229/B/1) and repro-
duced in its entirety by Kirk-Greene differed from subsequent government accounts. The
latter deviated from the original by omitting a crucial word ‘not’ from the phrase ‘the base
for unity is not there’. See Forsyth, The Making of an African Legend, 60; Kirk-Greene, Cri-
sis and Conflict in Nigeria, 196–197; Federal Government of Nigeria, The Struggle for One
Nigeria (Lagos: Government Printer, 1967); and John Stremlau, The International Politics
of the Nigerian Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 29.
000 Fal book B.indb 407 13/06/2016 22:06

408 Egodi Uchendu
planning’, which manifested in the failure to pre-empt the need to set

up an administration in the areas freed by the federal army from Biafra
control during the hostilities.14 He wrote:
There were experienced administrators, including a handful of expatriates
who still loyally served the independent government, ready to do this. There
were even one or two available with considerable personal experience of the
former Eastern Region and well known to the people there … The war would
have been over sooner, and certainly with less loss of innocent lives.15
With respect to his predictions on post-conflict Nigeria, the knowledge of
hindsight locates him in between being both right and wrong especially
with respect to Igbo reintegration with Northern Nigeria and continued
economic dominance up to the pre-civil war standard at the expense of
‘the very class of person who had most to gain from the departure of the
[Igbo] in 1966 and took part in his dispatch’.16
Oyinbo’s only explicit mention of women is found towards the end
of his book where he discusses the revolutionary changes going on in
the North after the demise of the Sarduana of Sokoto, the Premier of
Northern Nigeria. These changes were the impacts of Nigeria’s multi-
ethnic composition on Muslim-dominated Northern Nigeria in the first
decade of independence following the relaxation of traditional attitudes
that stringently kept northern elites separate from their southern coun-
terparts after the death of the Premier. The dramatic changes triggered
thereafter were not restricted to men alone. They impacted as well
on the very small company of educated Muslim women whose social
restrictions ran deeper than men’s. He wrote:
The Northern woman too has come into her own. For years she has enjoyed
superior teaching in excellent secondary schools, thanks to the high quality
of expatriate women teachers and the dedication of modern minded nuns,
but has been unable to make use of it afterwards. Now she can, released at
last from a social purdah. Within a few days of the coup the Military Gover-
nor, son of an emir, drove to the football stadium in Kaduna accompanied
by his wife. In December 1969 the New Nigerian carried pictures of a per-
manent secretary, a native of Bornu, dancing in a tuxedo with a Northern
woman at a Kaduna dance, and of another dance in Kano, organised by
the Northern Women’s Association, at which Maitama Sule, a former min-
ister, also appeared in a tuxedo. There were pictures too of a dance at the
Hamdala hotel in which wives of senior officials were present, the tables
covered with beer bottles, the men in Western dress and an all Northern
pop group in skin tight trousers. The official Information Services calendar
for 1967 was an attractive twelve page production with a pretty Northern
14
John Oyinbo, Nigeria: Crisis and Beyond (London: Charles Knight, 1971), 111.
15
Ibid., 111.
16
Ibid., 122–123.
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girl delighting every month. Three years previously the calendar had had a
mosque on nearly every page.17
With this inset Oyinbo shows us the many sides of a country torn by
warfare and how much a society can harvest of social attitudes during
times of disorder. It was evident that outside the corridors of officialdom
and the tensions of the war, life continued as usual. Yet, the promise of
a relaxation of traditional habits was eventually not realized for by the
next decade another revolutionary wave swept through the region as
some reformist Islamic leaders campaigned for a return to strict reli-
gious observances that took women back to their pre-civil war status.18
John de St. Jorre, another British journalist, tried to document the
story of the Nigeria-Biafra War. He wrote The Nigerian Civil War (1972),
according to the author, ‘in an attempt to put the record as straight as
possible; to cut through the choking fog of myth and propaganda that
obscured the conflict and to clarify the causes and course of the war
while highlighting its rights and wrongs’.19 St. Jorre did not focus much
on women in the text, but he was reasonably generous in his pictorial
representation of them. By this, he outdid other foreign authors who
wrote in the same decade. There was no chapter devoted to women, but
scattered through the book were occasional references to them and pic-
tures detailing several episodes of the drama unfolding around them:
There was a very efficient Biafran Red Cross, a Women’s Voluntary Service
and the school girls, their hair invariably bound up neatly in those spiky
‘sputnik’ plaits so common in West Africa, were knitting, sewing and cook-
ing for the boys at the front, many of whom were their former classmates. 20
It would seem that St. Jorre’s secondary motivation to ‘hold the real-
ity of Biafra’ for the historical time traveler drew him to those segments
of the society, especially women, that his contemporaries ignored.
The above extract captures women’s sense of duty towards their male
counterparts, classmates, brothers, and husbands, who went to war
voluntarily or otherwise out of necessity. For some, St. Jorre’s account
introduced them to a hairstyle common among women of that gen-
eration, described as ‘sputnik-like’. Thus, intertwined with journalistic
reports were historical elements to aid generations after the war to
understand Igbo communal life in the mid-1960s. Interestingly, much
of what St. Jorre failed to write about the female gender are documented
in the pictures he took in the course of several trips to Biafra. Herein
17
Ibid., 139–140.
18
For details of this, see Ousmane Kane, Muslim Modernity in Postcolonial Nigeria: A Study of
the Society for the Removal of Innovation and Reinstatement of Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
19
John de St. Jorre, The Nigerian Civil War (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1972). The book
was also published as The Brothers’ War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1972), 17.
20
Ibid., 224.
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410 Egodi Uchendu
lies a major strength of his book as far as gender representation is con-

cerned. There were a total of 62 pictures found on 21 different pages
in The Nigerian Civil War. Ten of these are about women. A rundown of
these depictions is found in the adjacent table.
Page Inset and Story

96 Biafran Colonel Achuzia’s wife
176 A mixed crowd at a folk dance in Owerri
177 A girl dug out alive after a shelling by federal troops
256 An underground operating theatre run by the International
Committee of the Red Cross with mostly Biafran female nurses
assisting in an operation
257 A group wedding
288 Mixed crowd of women and children mourning victims of air raid
289 A scene at the Bank of Biafra, Owerri branch, with nearly an all-
female team; comment under the picture reads: ‘Biafra survived
until the last hours as an organized state’
353 Kwashiorkor victims (a woman and two children)
384 Mixed group of kwashiorkor children waiting to be flown to Ivory
Coast for treatment.
One may say that this was the first depiction of a real war-time soci-
ety. Just from the pictures, life during hostilities could be recreated, and
gender roles appreciated. With the men out in the frontlines, women
took over the running of the communities. They featured in many roles,
both to support the war effort and to maintain a semblance of order in
the society when all around was chaotic. Their efforts kept Biafra going,
as St. Jorre notes, until the last hours, yet many treated these efforts
with silence leaving the impression that the war was fought only by
men and the society kept going also only by men.
Suzanne Cronje in The World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of
the Biafran War 1967–1970 is one of very few early writers on the
Nigeria-Biafra War to integrate women alongside children and old men
in her discussion of propaganda and policy in the Nigeria-Biafra War.21
Cronje wrote precisely about how propaganda determined the foreign
policy initiatives of the contending parties. She scored on two impor-
tant points: she was the earliest female English writer on the war and
one of the few voices discussing the war soon after the crisis. Although
she did not give any significant attention to women, her inclusion of
how the popular British weekly, The News of the World, unwittingly
21
Suzanne Cronje, The World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of the Biafran War
1967–1970 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972).
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joined the propaganda machinery of Biafra by calling for help for the
beleaguered republic from British citizens became one of the earliest,
direct, and powerful mentions of Biafra women in the literature on the
civil war. Following from this, women and children, instead of men and
soldiers, eventually became the international image of starving Biafra,
all thanks to The News of the World. Cronje, illustrating the power of
media propaganda reproduced the report as follows:
The News of the World sent a team to report ‘From the hell that is Biafra’,
and carried the huge bannerhead message: ‘FOR GOD’S SAKE SEND HELP
– QUICKLY’.
The report opened in a dramatic manner: ‘Twelve vultures strutted confi-
dently on the rain-sodden grass of the yard … And all around was the prey
they awaited. Women, children and old men. Hundreds of them – standing,
squatting, sprawling. All still and silent. And all dying.22
Coming at a time when there were ‘official attempts in most major capi-
tals to conceal the facts’ of the Nigeria-Biafra War, the impact of the
advert was like an explosive on many consciences that became disturbed
by it.23 From all indications, it strengthened Biafra’s claim of genocide,
made the crisis more of a humanitarian crisis than a political dilemma,
but it did not necessarily swing the fortunes of war to her advantage.
Of interest is the fact that Cronje was aware that several authors
had difficulty integrating women’s experience in accounts dealing with
diplomacy, foreign policy, military operations, arms procurement, and
oil politics, all factors that lent themselves to the dominant engagement
on male domain. The result, therefore, was that whatever women did
in these sectors was highly peripheral and largely ignored. As Cronje
went on to argue, women’s roles in this sector were either as clerical
staff or very junior workers whose behind-the-scenes role rarely cap-
tured a writer’s gaze. What Cronje did not add is the fact that the his-
tory of the marginal class, mostly represented by women, was as yet not
conceived in scholarship and to an extent in journalism at that time,
when the center, the pivotal cause of events, was dominated by men
and revolved around men.24 Anything that mattered was what men did
and so women in the diplomatic service all belonged to the margins.
Women’s unskilled positions were, therefore, incapable of capturing a
fellow woman’s gaze. It took the rise of women’s studies in the 1970s in
Western scholarship, and the United Nations’ (UN) Beijing Conference
of 1985 that concluded the UN Decade for Women, for gender-sensitive
writers to emerge in the African continent. Even then, engagements
with the social aspects of the war and especially with issues about
women are still not complete.
22
Ibid., 211.
23
Ibid., ix.
24
Smith, Women’s Studies, 36.
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412 Egodi Uchendu
John Stremlau in The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War

1967–1970 grappled with issues very similar to Cronje’s in that he
addressed foreign policy and propaganda.25 His work is quite different
from Cronje’s for these reasons: First, he queried the fundamental dif-
ference between prevailing attitudes about Biafra in Africa and public
opinion in Western Europe and the United States. He centered on the
issue of whether the survival of Biafra as a state was a necessary condi-
tion for the survival of the Igbo people. Second, he sought to understand
how Nigerian and Biafran authorities dealt with the political implica-
tions of differing positions on Biafra. Anchored on the belief that very
little had been published about how local parties in a modern civil war
seek to attract or discourage foreign intervention, Stremlau studied the
foreign policies of the two warring states, especially Nigeria’s, to see
how she reacted to this ambiguity.
Stremlau spent two years in Lagos researching Nigeria’s war-time
foreign policy and only traveled in Biafra after the war. His greater
familiarity with the Nigerian experience is evidenced in his documenta-
tion of what essentially transpired in Nigeria. Thus, principally, he did
for Nigeria what Forsyth did for Biafra. From Stremlau’s submission,
Nigeria’s foreign policy makers had very little opportunity to initi-
ate international action in their favor during the civil war as a result
of which she waged largely defensive diplomacy by reacting mostly to
demands from foreign powers concerned about the deteriorating condi-
tions in Biafra.26 One of the few exceptions to this foreign policy trajec-
tory was Lieutenant General Gowon’s move to secure Russian support
in response to Britain and United States’ reluctance to arm Nigeria
against Biafra at the onset of the crisis, thereby providing the neces-
sary gateway for the then Soviet Union to strengthen her influence over
Nigeria. Britain and United States quickly revised their decision and
began to sell arms to Nigeria, essentially to prevent the weakening of
Western influence over Nigeria.
Cronje and Robert Legvold both addressed the Nigeria-Russia rela-
tionship during the civil war.27 Both authors voiced the concerns in the
West in particular over Soviet involvement in the Nigerian Civil War.
No doubt, the civil war provided a platform for British-Russian con-
test over Nigeria. It was the Russian success in securing arms supply
rights for the Nigerian Government that forced Britain to abandon its
no-supply stance in the bid to prevent Lagos becoming over-dependent
on Russia, with Russian influence in Nigeria increasing to a level above
that in August 1968. Stremlau, however, regards this relationship as a
last resort for arms supply for a desperate federal government of Nigeria
25
Stremlau, The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War.
26
Ibid., 28.
27
Robert Legvold, Soviet Policy in West Africa (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press,
1970), 31–38.
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committed to preventing the breakup of the country. Its requests for

arms early on in the conflict were turned down by Britain and the
United States as well as by a number of other West European nations.
Beyond culminating in the formal signing of a cultural agreement with
Russia, Gowon turned this alliance into the greatest good for his war
effort as it became characteristic of his administration to invoke ‘the
threat of greater reliance on Moscow to ensure the flow of British small
arms and to restrain the Western powers from pressing too vigorously
for a compromise settlement on terms he considered contrary to the
national interest’.28 Gowon’s successful moderation of that relationship
altered his international standing, vesting the much-needed confidence
on his regime at home and abroad that had been lacking since the July
1966 coup that he not only took part in, but emerged from to become
Nigeria’s head of state.29
Quite unlike Forsyth and Cronje, Stremlau did not concern himself
with issues of which side of the warring party was right or wrong either
before or during the conflict. Similarly, he was also hesitant to criticize
the various ways the international community reacted to the Nigeria-
Biafra conflict. His account of the Nigerian Civil War was essentially a
showpiece of international haggling featuring diplomats and national
leaders, each of whom responded to the Nigeria-Biafra conflict from
the angle of their respective internal circumstances and future ambi-
tions for favorable spoils from the conflict. Given that the foreign policy
departments of both Biafra and Nigeria were entirely the domains of
men, gender was not an issue in this work except if we consider that
Stremlau dedicated his work to his wife, Carolyn.
Nigerian Authors and Representation of Women

Nigerian writers on the Nigeria-Biafra War made more references to
women than foreign authors who wrote before the 1980s. One of the
earliest accounts from Nigeria was N.U. Akpan’s personal story of the
Nigerian Civil War written in 1972. His Introduction alone contained
no fewer than six instances where women appeared in the narrative.
We first see this recognition of women in the third page, which reads:
Even if there had been no secession, there was bound to be a fight – if not a
full-scale civil war – in Nigeria. The killings in the North, particularly those
of September 1966 and afterwards had, understandably, so enraged and
28
Stremlau, The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War, 80–81.
29
See the following: Forsyth, The Making of an African Legend, 52–63; Stremlau, The Inter-
national Politics of the Nigerian Civil War, 81; A.A. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the
Biafran War (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980); and A. Ademoyega, Why We Struck: The
Story of the First Nigerian Coup (Ibadan: Evans Brothers, 1981).
000 Fal book B.indb 413 13/06/2016 22:06

414 Egodi Uchendu
embittered the Ibos that practically all of them – men and women, young
and old, soldier and civilian – were bent upon revenge against the Hausas.30
Akpan followed up this recognition of women in the next paragraph; he
stated how, after giving a sermon at the University of Nigeria in which
he called for Christian charity, love, and forgiveness towards the per-
petrators of the 1966 atrocities on the Igbo, ‘hostile and disapproving
groups of women surrounded [him] and remonstrated against that por-
tion of [his] sermon concerned with love and forgiveness’.31 One elderly
woman, he continued, had said: ‘As far as what the Hausas have done
to our people is concerned, we shall neither love, nor forgive, nor forget.
If that is what will send us to hell, then we are prepared.’32 Akpan’s
account of the Biafran War contained the appalling experiences of
the Igbo in Northern Nigeria between September and October 1966:
victims with severed limbs, broken heads, and worse. He not only gave
women a voice, but also went further in the body of his work and in
the index to highlight their contributions to the war effort through the
formation of cooperative societies and voluntary organizations.33
Readers of Akpan’s account could discern female agency as well as
their opinions on, and reactions to, the difficult events of 1966 that led
up to the civil war. Besides clear instances of individual female agency
in the book, group agency was also identifiable in women’s responses to
the events unfolding around them. Whatever its weaknesses, the fact
that he takes the voiceless seriously and draws attention to their inca-
pacitation amid the overwhelming elite public opinion that influenced
events within Biafra during the war makes Akpan’s account one of the
first grassroots’ treatment of the war by an indigenous writer.
Akpan mentioned how most people considered secession unfortu-
nate, but he could not publicly express such an opinion in the face of the
overwhelming support for secession. The important contribution of Bia-
fran women to the Biafran War, documented by Akpan, was the sudden
emergence of women’s voluntary organizations early in the conflict in
response to allegations of neglect of and food shortages among the fight-
ing corps. He writes, a ‘number of the women and girls actually went to
the fronts to cook and assist the soldiers in other ways’, exactly what St.
Jorre captured roughly a year later in pictures.34 Akpan’s inclusion of
women’s experiences and roles in his introduction, body and the index
was a clear departure from several early texts on the war.
Incidentally, Akpan did not set out to write about women. His con-
cern was to expose the mistake called Biafra and the heinous nature
30
N.U. Akpan, The Struggle for Secession 1966–1970: A Personal Account of The Nigerian Civil
War (London: Frank Cass, 1972), xi.
31
Ibid., xvi-xvii.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid., 99, 128–30.
34
Ibid., 99.
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of its leader, his former boss and war-time compatriot, Governor

Odumegwu Ojukwu. Akpan’s motivation for writing The Struggle for
Secession creates more questions than answers. It calls into question
his involvement in the Biafran government. Despite his obvious reser-
vations as a member of one of Biafra’s minority ethnic groups about
the Biafran dream of independence and the Biafran determination to
pursue it, he served Biafra in various capacities as Chief Secretary to the
Military Government, Head of the Civil Service, Member and Secretary
to the Cabinet of the Eastern Region Assembly, and other positions until
the end of the civil war.35
Akpan proffered no reason for becoming deeply involved with the
Biafran dream against the dominant minority belief that their great-
est chance and scope lay in a united Nigeria.36 What reads as post-war
name-calling and disgust at developments and actions he was privy to
and abetted cast a big shadow on his narrative, giving the reader the
impression that the book’s agenda transcends his claim of correcting
‘hearsay, second-hand information or incomplete records’ from the
war.37 Could it be read not as a personal vendetta against the ordinary
Biafrans but as a criticism of selected members of Biafran leadership?
His discussions of hostilities within Biafran society and of the formation
of illegal women’s cooperatives all over the enclave also buttress this
fact. Men and women, soldiers and civilians all exploited the situation
to their perceived best advantage. If this is true, then maintaining real
order amid so much chaos, both internal and external, was a difficult
task for any leader. However, Akpan was not prepared to concede as
much to his chief executive and governor of Biafra. In spite of this, his
account is reasonably balanced by its incorporation of women along-
side men.
A.A. Madiebo, the Biafran army commander, describes the motiva-
tion for The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War as
rather a genuine attempt on my part to render a dispassionate account of
the Nigerian revolution and the civil war which took place from January
1966 to January 1970. I believe I owe it as a duty to Nigerians particularly
… to initiate a post-mortem on those events in which I was deeply involved,
first as the Head of the Nigerian army Artillery and later as the General
Officer that commanded the Biafran Army throughout the war.38
Madiebo’s concern was to explain the events of 1966 to 1970 through
authentic, eye-witness accounts and inside stories of how Biafra fought
a war with virtually nothing and yet survived for almost three years
despite a total blockade and complete isolation from the world. His story
35
Ibid., ix.
36
See ibid., xvi.
37
Ibid., x.
38
Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution, x.
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416 Egodi Uchendu
was purely a military account in which he answered military questions,

not least of all the complexities of the military situation in Nigeria
exemplified in the coup of January and the reactionary coups of May,
July, September, and October 1966. Madiebo, in his detailed epilogue
dedicated to ‘Why We Lost the War’, echoed Akpan’s disenchantment
with some members of the Biafran leadership.39 His disenchantment
centered on the frequent struggles for power and position inside Biafra
that, in his opinion, derailed the war effort. However, his generous use
of the phrase ‘the civilian population of Biafra’ throughout his book
displays his consciousness of the relevance of all gender groups in the
happenings during the war. Madiebo’s book contains generous obser-
vations of what different gender categories did. He did not isolate any
gender group for undue attention at the expense of the other. In his
discussion of the activities of Biafra soldiers, he incorporated the mili-
tia, a paramilitary organization set up to assist the Biafran war effort.
Unlike the regular army composed only of males, the militia had several
female members in its ranks who performed a variety of functions for
the regular army including acting as spies. Indeed, they scored much
success as Biafra’s spies during the crisis.
R.N. Ogbudinkpa deviated from the general discussion of the historic
and political aspects of Biafra’s secession to consider what economic ben-
efits Nigeria derived from the war. The focus on the gains from destruc-
tion balances the gloomy imagery drawn of the war by such authors as
Cervenka40 and Madiebo; they recounted much of the military opera-
tions of Biafra’s ill-equipped and unskilled armed forces. Ogbudinkpa’s
thesis was that Nigeria’s federal army war strategy prompted techno-
logical innovations in isolated, war-torn, and unrecognized Biafra, but
not within its own territory. Biafra’s technological innovations in engi-
neering, agriculture, and welfare-promoting ventures were intended to
meet its military needs and civilian welfare. Ogbudinkpa argues that
these innovations, more than other factors advanced by other analysts,
helped Biafra to prosecute the war for as long as it did. Some manu-
factures were replicas of foreign hardware reproduced from indigenous
resources. All the credit for these achievements did not go to Biafra men
alone. The author notes that women’s efforts, especially in food process-
ing, greatly boosted the war effort.41
The food-processing innovation was first recorded in Arochukwu
where women dried and packaged foods that remained edible up to
ten days after production despite the humid environment and lack
of modern preservative equipment. The success of the Arochukwu
39
Ibid., 377–392.
40
Zdenek Cervenka, The Nigerian War, 1967–1970: History of the War – Selected Bibliogra-
phy and Documents (Frankfurt: Bernard & Graefe, 1971).
41
R.N. Ogbudinkpa, The Economics of the Nigerian Civil War and its Prospects for National
Development (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1985), 62–63.
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experiment led the Calabar branch of the Biafran Women Voluntary

Service organization to install a packing factory in the town. The food-
processing revolution spread beyond Arochukwu. In testimony of this
innovation, The Biafran Sun published in November 1968 the news
about Nnewi Division of Women Council of Social Services produc-
ing 34,718 dry-packs for distribution to soldiers in their trenches at
Onitsha.42 Over time, there emerged in Biafra different women’s sup-
port organizations bearing community-specific names. This discussion
enriched our sparse knowledge about women and their contributions
to the war.
Another Nigerian Igbo writer on the war was Dike Ogu. In The Long
Shadows of Biafra, he acknowledged female agency towards survival
during the civil war. He captured this in the detailed dedication he wrote
to his wife:
This book is dedicated to my late wife Rebecca Ogochukwu who saw me
through the unforgettable experiences of the war as narrated here and who
bore all the burden of the negative aspects of the experiences. She stood by
me at all times and in all vicissitudes. She filled my mind with noble and
graceful images. She comforted me in times of danger and sorrows of the
savage war but later made a supreme sacrifice for the crass incompetence of
a doctor who used her for experimentation so that others may live.43
Ogu, who described himself as ‘a living victim of the [Biafran] holo-
caust’, set out in his work to recount ‘his horrifying experience in the
heroic struggle by an embattled people to survive’ and ‘his personal
studied assessment of the devastating war’.44 The Long Shadows of
Biafra can roughly be divided into two halves. One half, comprised of
the first six chapters, tells the story of the war with the author’s richly
documented reminiscences. The second half, the last five chapters, deals
with the rewards of conquest: the extensive looting of national wealth
by the long military and short-lived civilian heads of state between
1970 and 1999, along with the growing cruelty perpetrated by suc-
ceeding regimes. An important marker of the Nigerian leadership class
from 1970 to 1999, which the author was quick to point out, was their
origins from Northern Nigeria. The only exception was Brigadier Oluse-
gun Obasanjo, Head of State from 1975 to 1979.45 The gross misrule of
three decades left its mark on different sectors of the society.
Many narratives similar to that of Ogu abound on the civil war
from the former Biafran enclave. One closely related, but more-recent,
account is Achike Udenwa’s Nigeria/Biafra Civil War-My Experience.46
42
The Biafran Sun, November 28, 1968.
43
I. Dike Ogu, The Long Shadows of Biafra (Nsukka: AP Express, 2001), iii.
44
Ibid., viii.
45
Ibid., 67–73.
46
Achike Udenwa, Nigeria/Biafra Civil War: My Experience (Ibadan: Spectrum, 2011).
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418 Egodi Uchendu
Achike’s purpose was ‘to fill the gap and further highlight the role played
by the lower command – the platoons, companies, battalions and bri-
gades’.47 The author told how young officers, consumed with patriotic
fervor but without professional training, fought in the war. Very little
could be considered new in this account. It is simply one more review of
Nigeria’s colonial and postcolonial histories. What may be regarded as
the author’s personal experiences and the social effects of the war in the
form of rapes of women and prostitution are discussed in three out of
the seven chapters of the book. Neither the military aspect of the work
nor its social effects was given any incisive or elaborate treatment.48
In Egodi Uchendu’s Women and Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War, wom-
en’s experiences of the Nigeria-Biafra War differed considerably from
one person to the other and were defined by each woman’s location at
any point in time during the crisis and also by individual circumstances
among other factors.49 A clear distinction could be made for the two
groups of Igbo women – those in Biafra, east of the Niger and the major
war theater, and their sisters in Anioma, west of the Niger who suffered
as well, but whose homeland was not militarized for as long as was the
case east of the Niger.
So far, the two main works specifically focused on these categories of
women are Gloria Chuku’s ‘Women in the Economy of Igboland, 1900
to 1970: A Survey’, which considers the experience of Biafra women,
and Egodi Uchendu’s Women and Conflict in the Nigerian War, which was
about the experiences of Anioma women during and after the conflict.50
Chuku integrated an analysis of Biafra women’s economic roles within
a broader discussion of Igbo rural women’s participation in agricul-
ture and local industries, and urban women in trade and commerce in
Igboland over several decades from 1900 to 1970. Her discussion paid
attention to women’s ingenuity in trade during the war, highlighting in
particular the trans-border trade with the Anioma Igbo, a theme that
both Emezue and Uchendu further explored.51 Uchendu, who studied
Anioma women during the years spanning 1966 to 1975 with the goal
of understanding and documenting the experiences of women who
lived in one of the marginal Igbo homelands in the course of the civil
war, incorporated the Anioma angle of the border trade along with
several other ingenious contributions of women, in this supposedly
47
Ibid.
48
Chukwuma Osakwe, Nigeria/Biafra Civil War: My Experience by Achike Udenwa (Ibadan:
Spectrum Books Ltd., 2011), reprinted in Scientia Militaria 41:1 (2013), 155–157,
http://scientiamilitaria.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/1057 (accessed July 23, 2014).
49
Uchendu, Women and Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War.
50
Gloria Chuku, ‘Women in the Economy of Igboland, 1900 to 1970: A Survey’, African
Economic History, 23 (1995), 37–50; and Uchendu, Women and Conflict in the Nigerian
War.
51
Sydney Emezue, ‘Women and the War’, in A Social History of the Nigerian Civil War: Per-
spectives from Below, edited by A. Harneit-Sievers, J.O. Ahazuem, and S. Emezue (Enugu:
Jemezie Associates, 1997).
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borderline Igbo society, that enabled the women’s survival and those of
their menfolk during the war.
One peculiar quality of Anioma war-time society was the horrendous
massacre of the male population by Nigerian soldiers in several com-
munities. The death of the men placed women in a disturbingly exposed
frame and eventually spurred them to an amazing degree of resilience
that enabled them to survive the war. At the same time, it protected, at
great cost, their embattled menfolk who had to remain hidden from the
federal army and their children. Anioma women were involved in the
very risky trans-border trade, which sometimes involved transporting
trade goods with coffins to escape detection by the ever-watchful and
prowling federal soldiers. This trade was, on one hand, a humanitarian
action geared at helping the Biafra Igbo to survive the war and, on the
other hand, a calculated offensive against the Nigerian army. The frus-
trations the federal army encountered in their attempts to arrest and
break the trans-border trade between Anioma and Biafra was evident
in their repeated, but unsuccessful plea throughout the hostilities for
the Anioma to give up the trade.52 The trade served in undermining
the federal army’s goal to crush Biafra through starvation. It also spoke
volumes of Anioma women’s agency and capability in deciding the out-
come of an intractable problem.
The civil war posed a multi-faceted challenge to women in Anioma;
survival took different forms and was understood differently by indi-
vidual women. Clearly, they exploited every available opportunity to
survive. However, some became too adventurous in their attempts to
manage the situation; they wandered away from societal restrictions
by going into short-term, war-time prostitution alongside a variety
of other liaisons. Others created innovative and daring ways to cope.
Varying degrees of these coping strategies existed in Anioma. Several
women abandoned traditional roles and stepped into the shoes of men,
performing functions that were the normal preserve of men. For exam-
ple, the cream of Biafra militia was from Anioma. Nicole Dombrowski
had argued that when women opt for the frontlines, they claim a place
for themselves with men who traditionally enjoy much respect by their
willingness to risk their lives for their communities.53
An important aspect of the war was the challenge it posed to Anioma
women’s uncritical submission to social norms. Decades of adherence
to these norms left women disadvantaged during such a major crisis
as the civil war. For instance, the majority had accepted the creed that
education was for men. War-time reality proved that theory very wrong
as only the few slightly educated women were employed during the
crisis. The larger percentage without any education were severely cash
52
The Nigerian Observer, June 8 and July 9, 1968.
53
Nicole Dombrowski, Women and War in the Twentieth Century (New York: Garland, 1999),
2.
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420 Egodi Uchendu
strapped and were forced to depend on their own whims and imagina-
tion to survive and ensure their survival as well as that of their relatives.
Little wonder that after the war women in Anioma championed educa-
tion, especially of their daughters to give them a better grounding in
the society than they had and to guarantee their security in case of a
future crisis.
In 2012, Chinua Achebe published There was a Country: A Personal
History of Biafra. In this comprehensive memoir of his life, Achebe told
‘Nigeria’s story, Biafra’s story, our story and [his] story’.54 Women and
their worlds – specifically those of his mother, wife, sisters, and sisters-
in-law – abound in Achebe’s story. From his reminiscences, dating back
to the last decades of the nineteenth century, we follow the Igbo female
world, the cultural restrictions on the female gender that could often
easily translate into an insult to Igbo tradition, and conflicts over gender
roles.55 In Part Two, which deals with the war, Achebe captures several
atrocities meted out to women by federal troops, including indiscrimi-
nate executions. Achebe recalls an August 1968 article in The Times of
London: ‘In Oji River … the Nigerian forces opened fire and murdered
fourteen nurses and the patients in wards.’56
Among other military atrocities visited on women in Biafra were
rapes and intentional starvation. Achebe interspersed his narrative
with an interesting repertoire of poems that captured many aspects of
Biafra women’s war-time trauma. One such poem, ‘Refugee Mother and
Child’, tells of a mother’s tender care of her very sick child. It is remi-
niscent of many Biafra women’s fortitude in the face of overwhelming
hopelessness. Excerpts from the poem read:
No Madonna and Child could touch
Her tenderness for a son
She soon would have to forget.
The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea,
Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs.
And dried up bottoms waddling in labored steps
Behind blown-empty bellies.
Most members there
had long ceased to care, but not this one;
She held a ghost-smile between her teeth,
And in her eyes the memory
Of a mother’s pride … She had bathed him
And rubbed him down with bare palms.57
54
2012), 3.
55
Ibid., 10.
56
Ibid., 137.
57
Ibid., 168.
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The strict divide in gender roles collapsed during the war as women and
young girls, unsolicited, took over several male duties everywhere. They
did this in addition to their normal social responsibilities.
There Was a Country is as much the story of Chinua Achebe as it is of
his wife Christie Achebe during the Nigeria-Biafra War. In its pages, one
reads about Christie and her civil war experiences. This unintentional,
third-hand biography of Christie Achebe has enriched the Nigeria-
Biafra War scholarship because it partially fills the gap created by an
evident paucity of women’s stories on the war. Her elite education and
lifestyle were relinquished because of the crisis. She made many neces-
sary adjustments and filled several roles in efforts to both survive and
to contribute to the survival of others. She took on the task of teaching
school to help her children and those of her hosts continue with their
studies amidst the chaos everywhere, and by so doing tried to lessen the
scars of the war on the next generation. In her own way, she was a war
hero as many other women were.
Conclusion
The Nigeria-Biafra War has provided a platform for all manner of writ-
ings: military reports, biographies, autobiographies, and others. No
doubt it has also provided an important platform for all classes of par-
ticipants – observers, victims, and victors – who were drawn from dif-
ferent generations of Nigerians and from expatriates of all classes and
walks of life to engage with the subject from any angle whatsoever. It
is most interesting that, within two years of the conflict, several books
discussing Nigeria and its unfortunate civil war emerged in different
languages, but mostly in English, French, and German. The majority of
these works were written by foreigners.58
Nigerians woke up slowly to the duty of documenting the war, per-
haps because of their preoccupation with the conflict itself, but since
that time they have risen to the task. Impartial and definitive studies
on the war have continued to emerge, but few do justice to gender and
women’s studies. The majority of the literature on the conflict is gender
58
A few examples include François Debré, Biafra An II (Paris: Julliard, 1968); F. de Bonne
ville, La Mort du Biafra (Paris: Soler, 1968); Jean Buhler, Tuez les Tous! Guerre de Seces-
sion au Biafra (Paris: Flammarion, 1968); Eduardo dos Santos, Biafra: A Questão de Biafra
(Porto: Portucalense, 1968); Paul Iyorpuu Unongo, The Case for Nigeria (Lagos: Town and
Gown, 1968); Forsyth, The Making of an African Legend; Paola Antonello, Alex Chima,
and Obi Benue Joseph Egbuna, Nigeria gegen Biafra? Falsche Alternativen oder über die Ver-
schärfung der Widersprüche im Neokolonialismus (West Berlin: Wagenbach, 1969); Captain
Armand, Biafra Vaincra (Paris: France-Empire, 1969); Bruce Hilton, Highly Irregular (New
York: Macmillan, 1969); Ulf Himmelstrand, Varlden: Nigeria och Biafra (Stockholm: Aldus
Aktuellt, 1969); C.C. von Rosen, Le Ghetto Biafrais tel que je l’ai vu (Paris: Arthaud, 1969);
Jean Wolf and Claude Brovelli, La Guerre des rapaces: La vérité sur la guerre du Biafra (Par-
is: Albin Michel, 1969); and A. Waugh and S. Cronjé, Biafra: Britain’s Shame (London:
Michael Joseph, 1969).
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422 Egodi Uchendu
neutral with little distinction in how different gender groups and seg-
ments of the society felt about the war. As it is, one is even tempted to
conclude that Nigerian authors have shown more gender conscious-
ness in their writings than non-Nigerian authors.
On the whole, few authors set out ab initio to discuss women and the
war. Writers like Cronje and Ogbudinkpa included them only to buttress
their arguments; they simply provided skeletal references to one act or
another performed by women during the war. Such inclusions fall short
of providing a holistic picture of women’s varied roles, activities, and
experiences during that conflict. What is particularly obvious is that
more gender-conscious and women-focused narratives are needed on
the Nigeria-Biafra War.
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20 What is the Country? Reimagining
National Space in Women’s Writing on
the Biafran War
Jane Bryce
We are judged by the stories we tell.

But only the dead know the true stories;
they who speak to us, deaf that we are,
in signs and ellipsis.
(from ‘A Biafran War Survivor Remembers Africans Who Did Not Survive’,
in Four Decades of Silence, by Chielozona Eze)
Part 1: Overview
Writing, history, memory
As the benefit of hindsight has revealed, the Nigerian Civil War was
to become the very sign of post-Independence African wars, from the
invasion of Uganda by Tanzania in 1978–1979, to conflicts, whether
brief or long-drawn-out, in Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Liberia,
Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe, and as a tropologi-
cal prefiguring of today’s situation in the Niger Delta. Occurring when
they did, so soon after Nigerian Independence in 1960, the secession of
Biafra and the subsequent civil war signified the shaky foundation of
the nation-state in ex-colonial Africa, the potential for ethnic discord,
competition over resources and the quest for power on the part of the
new elites. Women have played a part in all these wars, both as fighters
(including child soldiers) and, in some rare instances, as leaders, but to
a far-greater extent as providers of army supplies, traders and producers
of food, nurses, relief organizers, protectors of the weak and ensurers
of collective survival. In the case of Biafra, although their role was pre-
dominantly non-combative (reflecting, no doubt, the gender politics of
the time), the burden of suffering was none the less for that. This suffer-
ing is a strong thematic link in women’s war narratives, whether of the
immediate post-war period or those which have emerged from what is
now called the Third Generation of Nigerian writers. These narratives,
moreover, depending as they do on personal and collective memory, are
inevitably marked by trauma, which notoriously leads to both obsessive
repetition and to repression, effects which may impede memory. If the
Civil War constitutes ‘the wound that speaks’ in Nigeria’s construction
of itself as an independent state, how do women’s narratives of the
423
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424 Jane Bryce
Civil War negotiate questions of memory, trauma, memorializing and

forgetting?
Contemporary research on post-conflict trauma emphasizes the
importance of memory, both individual and collective, as the basis for
narrativizing the past:
Collective memory is thus a socially constructed representation of the past
that is shared by members of a group, such as a generation or nation-state,
and thus marked by power relationships … Memory therefore organises
present and future, as every culture creates a ‘connective structure’ by rein-
scribing the past into the contemporary horizon.1
Memory, however, is not a cohesive archival object accessible on
demand, but partial, fragmented, subjective and selective, and as a
result, we are cautioned that ‘the representational media, in which
cultural memory might be forged, stored and perpetuated, need careful
attention.’2 According to Chima Korieh:
In addition, little empirical scholarship has been conducted researching the
event. Especially missing is documentation of the perspective of ordinary
people who experienced the war as combatants or civilians. Moreover, the
systematic attempts to ‘forget’ the war at several levels – attempts made by
the state for political reasons and by individuals mainly for psychological
reasons stemming from the desire to move on – have limited both postwar
discussions of the war and the scholarship that could perhaps vindicate
those who endured the war’s trauma.3
In the case of the Civil War, the pre-eminent medium performing this
task has been literary. According to Nduka Otiono: ‘Two historic experi-
ences have continued to dominate the consciousness of contemporary
Nigerian writers … The first is the Nigerian Civil war of the 1960s and
the second, the reign of military dictatorship, especially in the 1990s.’4
Biyi Bandele Thomas, in adapting Achebe’s Biafran short story, ‘Girls at
War’, for the screen, was mindful that ‘the Civil War certainly holds a
key to a lot of things and … all too often what we have done, especially
as writers, certainly as a society, is we have tried to unremember it …
we have to kind of open those wounds and look at things, study them
very carefully and we can move on’.5 Earlier commentators agree on
both the significance of the Civil War and the difficulties posed by its
1
www.postconflict.group.cam.ac.uk/glossary-memory.html (accessed February 19,
2015).
2
Ibid.
3
Chima Korieh, The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory (New York:
Cambria, 2012), 3.
4
Nduka Otiono, ‘“Narrations of Survival”: Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel’, Wasafiri
19:41 (2004), 70.
5
Bandele Thomas, Interview, cited by Jane Bryce, ‘Half and Half Children: Third Genera-
tion Women Writers and the New Nigerian Novel’, in Research in African Literatures 39:2
(2008), 49–67.
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Reimagining National Space in Women’s Writing 425
representation. By the 1980s, Civil War literature had achieved enough

of a critical mass for check-lists to be drawn up by Craig McLuckie and
Chidi Amuta. McLuckie refers to ‘the unresolved nature of this period
in Nigeria’s history’ and the way Nigeria’s war fiction encapsulates ‘the
country’s uncertainty and unease over the position and unity of a mili-
tarily won “imagined community”’.6 According to Amuta, meanwhile,
Nigerian literature post-1970 was dominated by the Civil War, to the
extent that ‘it can safely be said that in the growing body of Nigerian
national literature, works, directly based on or indirectly deriving from
the war experience, constitute the largest number of literary products
on any single aspect of Nigerian history to date’.7
Considering the contribution of women writers to this key literary
corpus raises an interesting question: how far was what Amuta calls the
‘social experience’ of the civil war inflected by gender, and was the ‘imag-
ined community’ of Biafra therefore imagined differently by women?
Writing in 2005, Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo calculated that ‘more than
two-thirds of those who recorded their experiences of the Nigerian Civil
War are male’, with only two non-fiction accounts by women out of 55
and 10 or so out of 50 creative works.8 On the one hand, why have so
few women writers embraced the War as a narrative subject? Ezeigbo
attributes this to ‘cultural constraints and social limitations under which
women operate in Igboland’ and the emphasis on ‘collective rather than
individual memory’.9 Marion Pape politicizes this point by posing the
question of ‘who has the right to war memories’, and counters Ezeigbo’s
more conservative reading with the idea of conflicting gendered discours-
es.10 Women, she suggests, self-consciously introduce new elements into
both ‘the male war discourse [and] existing gender relations: namely,
their negotiability’.11 Both agree, however, on the limited number of
women’s texts. Marie Umeh, on the other hand, puts another slant on
it, suggesting that, rather than being absent, they are ignored: ‘African
women writers have not been treated as major contributors to the general
output of war literature … one does not get the impression that post-war
writing comprises any other than the male sex.’12 This is borne out in the
6
Craig McLuckie, ‘A Preliminary Checklist of Primary and Secondary sources on Nigerian
Civil War/Biafran War Literature’, Research in African Literatures (henceforth RAL) 18:4
(1987), 510–527, 510.
7
Chidi Amuta, ‘Literature of the Nigerian Civil War’, in Perspectives in Nigerian Literature:
1700 to the Present, Vol. I, edited by Y. Ogunbuyi (Lagos: Guardian Books, 1988), 85.
8
A. Adimora-Ezeigbo, ‘From the Horse’s Mouth: The Politics of Remembrance in Women’s
Writing on the Nigerian Civil War’, Matatu, 29:30 (2005), 221–230.
9
Ibid., 6.
10
Marion Pape, Gender Palava: Nigerian Women Writing War (Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher,
2011), 1.
11
Ibid., 4.
12
Marie Umeh, ‘The Poetics of Thwarted Sensitivity’, in Critical Theory and African Litera-
ture, edited by Ernest Emenyonu, Calabar Studies in African Literature 3 (Ibadan: Heine-
mann, 1987), 194.
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426 Jane Bryce
essay collection A Harvest from Tragedy, from which Emecheta, Nwapa

and Onwubiko are missing, even while the editor claims that Nigerian
war writing ‘continue(s) to function as the mirror of society [and] also
serves as a compass for social redirection’.13
So what is the real extent of women’s writing on the Civil War? From
the end of the War to the late 1980s, it included a handful of short
stories by Flora Nwapa and her semi-fictionalized memoir, Never Again
(1975); three novels: Rosina Umelo’s Felicia (1978), Buchi Emecheta’s
Destination Biafra (1982), and Pauline Onwubiko’s Running for Cover
(1988); two memoirs: Rose Njoku’s Withstand the Storm (1986) and
Leslie Jean Ofoegbu’s Blow the Fire (1986); a collection of poems, Nige-
ria in the Year 1999 (1986) by Catherine Acholonu; and the plays, King
Emene: a Tragedy of a Rebellion (1975) by Zulu Sofola and Into the Heart
of Biafra (1986) by Catherine Acholonu. These were subsequently
joined by Flora Nwapa’s play, Two Women in Conversation (1993), and
the novels, The Seed Yams Have Been Eaten (1993) by Phanuel Egejuru,
Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) by Chimamanda Adichie, and Roses and Bul-
lets (2011) by A. Adimora-Ezeigbo.
Flora Nwapa, whose novels Efuru and Idu were published in 1966
and 1970 respectively, claimed she wrote nothing during the War itself
except for one story, ‘My Soldier Brother’, which appears in the collec-
tion This is Lagos (1971). Already this early story manifests an oppo-
sitional stance and gender dichotomy typical of her later writing. It
describes, through the eyes of his younger brother, the emergent man-
hood of Adiewere, who enlists for Biafra, and is killed. He is unequivo-
cally a hero to his brother, who says, ‘I was so proud of him. I told all
my friends about him and they came to see him to touch his uniform
and his gun.’14 When Adiewere dies, the only audible dissent from the
conventional celebration of heroism and sacrifice comes from the trou-
blesome Aunt Monica, who embarrasses her listeners by bursting out:
‘I am tired of people coming here and talking rubbish. What death is hon-
ourable? Death is death. A good intelligent boy died, and old men who
should die say he died honourably. The sooner they stop talking of honour-
able death, the better.’ Nobody answered her. Jolly good. Why shouldn’t
Aunt Monica keep quiet and behave like other women?15
A week later, the younger brother is called up. His final comment: ‘I
was going to get ten heads of the enemy before they got me’, ironically
encapsulates, not only the speaker’s short-sightedness, but the way a
13
Chinyere Nwahunanya, ed., A Harvest from Tragedy: Critical Perspectives on Nigerian Civil
War Literature (Owerri: Springfield, 1997), 14.
14
Flora Nwapa, This is Lagos (Enugu: Tana Press, 1971), 132.
15
Ibid., 134.
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brainwashed populace manifests a more general blindness to the reali-

ties of war.16
When Nwapa returns to the War in her semi-fictional account, Never
Again (1975) and in stories in the collection, Wives at War (1980), the
dissent from officially sanctioned ‘patriotism’ becomes more explicit
and sustained.17 There is little in her writing of the political rights
and wrongs of the War or the emotive pull of nationalism. Instead,
her hard-headed pragmatism and instinct for survival, combined with
distaste for rhetoric and for Biafran as well as Nigerian soldiers, recalls
Virginia Woolf ’s pre-World War II anti-war tract, Three Guineas. Here,
the English writer, muses on the difference in the meaning of ‘patriot-
ism’ for men and women:
But the educated man’s sister – what does ‘patriotism’ mean to her? Has she
the same reasons for loving England, for defending England? Has she been
‘greatly blessed’ in England? History and biography when questioned would
seem to show that her position in the home of freedom has been different
from her brother’s; and psychology would seem to hint that history is not
without its effect upon mind and body. Therefore her interpretation of the
word ‘patriotic’ may well differ from his.18
The reason Woolf puts forward for this divergence, in the context of the
Britain of the 1930s, is women’s historic inequality in terms of educa-
tion, property and the ability to earn a living. Though Ifi Amadiume
and Judith Van Allen have shown how the colonialist imposition of Vic-
torian attitudes on Igbo society eroded women’s traditional autonomy
and the powers vested in women’s organizations, Igbo women were
nonetheless far in advance of their English sisters in terms of economic
independence, and retained a voice in local affairs.19 In the case of the
anti-taxation rebellion of 1927, known as the ‘Women’s War’, they
exhibited a high degree of organization and political determination
despite, as Amadiume tells it, colonialist attempts to marginalize and
make women invisible. The Women’s War was all the more remarkable
in the light of, as Van Allen puts it, the colonial failure ‘to discover or
protect Igbo women’s political or economic roles by their assumption
that politics and business were not proper, normal places for women’.20
The historian, Nina Mba, documenting the impact of colonial legis-
lation and administration on Nigerian women, concluded with
16
Ibid., 135.
17
Nwapa, Wives at War, and Other Stories (Enugu: Tana Press, 1980); Never Again. (London:
Heinemann Educational, 1975).
18
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938), 17–18.
19
Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands (London: Zed, 1987); Judith Van Al-
len, ‘“Aba riots” or Igbo “women’s war?”: Ideology, Stratification, and the Invisibility of
women’, in Women in Africa, edited by N.J. Hafkin and E.G. Bay (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1976).
20
Van Allen, ‘Aba riots’, 81.
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428 Jane Bryce
the dismal finding that there has been scarcely any increase in the political
power of Nigerian women from 1965 to 1979. This is despite the fact that
since 1965 more women than ever before have graduated from universi-
ties, many have become professionals, and a number have become judges,
permanent secretaries, business executives and media executives. However,
there is no spillover from educational attainment and professional diversifi-
cation to political power.21
If, as it would seem, by 1967 the political position of the women of East-
ern Nigeria was one of dependency on male power-brokers, does this
suggest that women may have felt constrained in writing about the War
because to do so was to enter a peculiarly masculine discourse? Chidi
Amuta in 1984 analysed the War as a crisis of the bourgeois elite and
an indictment of the political leadership, suggesting that the heroes of
novels by Biafran writers Eddie Iroh, I.N.C. Aniebo and John Munonye
are ‘repudiations of a specific phase of bourgeois hegemony in Nigerian
history’.22 What is important in his analysis is the concept of ‘hero’ and
what constitutes ‘heroism’. First, as he points out, war novel heroes
reflect the class position of the writers, and also their frequently criti-
cal perspective on the War. Certainly, fictional treatments of the War by
non-Biafrans, such as Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy (1973), Elechi
Amadi’s Sunset in Biafra (1973), Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy (1985) and
Festus Iyayi’s Heroes (1986), are overtly critical of the political machi-
nations of both Nigerian and Biafran leaders. Festus Iyayi’s novel makes
its statement in explicitly class terms:
You get rid of the greed by getting rid of the ruling class, the generals and
politicians and businessmen and traditional rulers and church leaders and
professors … I tell you that the Ibo [sic] soldier is not the real enemy, nor are
you the real enemies of the Ibo soldiers.23
But if class position defined both writers and heroes, there is still the
question raised by Virginia Woolf: ‘But the educated man’s sister – what
does ‘patriotism’ mean to her?’24 Texts by male writers, whether they
endorse the notion of Biafra, like Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn
(1976), or question it (see above), nonetheless assume the centrality
of masculine experience in the events of the War. As a rule, in male-
authored accounts there is an intrinsic and inevitable marginaliza-
tion of women’s role as neither combative nor concerned with policy
making, but centered on survival. Though both Rose Njoku and Flora
Nwapa give a very good account of the sacrificial effort involved in
21
Nina Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilised: Women’s Political Activity in Southern Nigeria,
1900–1965 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1982), 303.
22
Chidi Amuta, ‘History, Society and Heroism in the Nigerian War Novel’, Kunapip. 6:3
(1984), 69.
23
Festus Iyayi, Heroes (Harlow: Longman, 1986), 131.
24
Woolf, Three Guineas, 17–18.
000 Fal book B.indb 428 13/06/2016 22:06

surviving and ensuring the survival of others, this effort is not figured
as heroism in any conventional sense. Amuta, exploring the relation-
ship between heroism and history, maintains:
critical discourse of modern African literature must delve deeper into the
ontological configurations of the very literary works in order to decipher
the truth value of the texts as systems of aesthetic signification of meanings
that ultimately derive from history.25
The elements of this statement: ‘ontological configurations’, ‘truth
value’, ‘aesthetic signification’, and ‘history’, combine to project an
assumption that the primary value of a war novel is its mimetic faith-
fulness to history perceived as externally verifiable events. Within
the social realist genre it espouses, the protagonist assumes a kind of
universal representativeness: accordingly, the various portraits of the
hero in these novels derive ultimately from the position of writers in the
structure of the Nigerian society up to the period of the war at least.26
Writers, Amuta suggests, had been schooled for power, ‘nurtured in the
colonial educational system as logical successors to the colonialists’.27
The universality of Amuta’s statements, rife with easily disprovable
assumptions about the nature of reality and its relationship to narra-
tive, nonetheless provides a useful starting point for questioning their
applicability on gender terms. Is it true, for example, that women writ-
ers were ‘schooled for power?’ What of ‘the educated man’s sister?’
What was she nurtured for? According to Van Allen: ‘The missionary’s
avowed purpose in educating girls was to train them for Christian mar-
riage and motherhood, not for jobs or citizenship.’28 Nwapa’s Women are
Different bears witness to this in the education her protagonists receive
at the Archdeacon Crowther Memorial Girls’ School, Elelenwa, in the
early 1950s, which leaves them entirely unfitted for survival in the
Nigeria of the 1970s.29 Similarly, in One is Enough (1981), the protago-
nist, Amaka, learns from her aunt and mother – free of Western educa-
tion and closer to Igbo tradition – not to be dependent on a man: ‘The
good missionaries had emphasized chastity, marriage and the home.
Her mother was teaching her something different. Was it something
traditional which she did not know because she went to school and was
taught in the tradition of the white missionaries?’30 The logic of this is,
at the very least, that women indeed had a different relationship to the
War from men, who did the actual fighting and held the command posi-
tions. This certainly does not imply that women were inactive or passive
– indeed, in the longue durée, Njoku and Adams quote from Equiano’s
25
Amuta, ‘History, Society and Heroism’, 57.
26
Ibid., 60.
27
Ibid.
28
Van Allen, ‘Aba riots’, 76.
29
Nwapa, Women Are Different (Enugu: Tana Press, 1984).
30
Nwapa, One is Enough (Enugu: Tana Press, 1981), 11.
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430 Jane Bryce
mid-eighteenth century memoir on the ‘propensity to violence of Igbo

women’ and speculate as to ‘a possible connection between the women’s
predisposition to protests and violence and the societal trends emerging
from the preceding centuries’.31 In the context of Biafra, both Van Allen
and Amadiume stress the centrality of women to the war effort. Van
Allen cites the demonstrations by Igbo women against the killings of
30,000 Igbos in other parts of the country in 1966, urging secession
and protesting against Soviet involvement in the War. They also played
an essential supportive role: ‘During the war, the women’s market
network and other women’s organizations maintained a distribution
system for what food there was and provided channels for the passage
of food and information to the army.’32. They joined civil defense militia
units and, in May 1969, formed a Women’s Front and called on the
Biafran leadership to allow them to enlist in the infantry. This is cor-
roborated by Amadiume, who says:
Women fed and sustained the economy of Biafra through ‘attack’ trade,
which involved market trips through enemy front lines. Women mobilised
Biafrans for all public occasions. Women formed a strong core of the militia,
task forces, etc., while mothers cooked for and fed the whole Biafran nation.
Women became the cohesive force in a shifting, diminishing people who
were slowly losing what they saw as a war of survival.33
If these then are the historical facts of women’s involvement in the Civil
War, it becomes clear that women’s writings on the War can be expected
to offer a ‘truth value’ and relationship to history qualitatively different
from that of men/male writers. Given patriarchal political and military
structures in both Nigeria and Biafra, and the masculinist rhetoric of
‘patriotism’ and ‘heroism’, any divergent perspective will inevitably find
itself at odds with these received truths. Nor is realism necessarily, as
Amuta avers, the most fitting mode for exploring violence, trauma, and
memory. Rather than mimetic faithfulness, the more interesting line of
enquiry is not so much what as how writers have narrativized the war,
and the meanings generated by particular narrative strategies. For later
writers, especially, the prevailing question is, through what ‘connective
structures’ do they ‘reinscribe the past into the contemporary horizon’?
Women at war
That earlier women writers are conscious of writing as a gendered act,
and thus of stepping out of masculine territory, is borne out by the titles
31
Ibrahim Umaru and Theophilus D. Lagi, ‘Women in the Aftermath of Ethnic Conflicts:
the Egbirra-Bassa Crisis, 1986–2000’, in Shaping our Struggles: Nigerian Women in His-
tory, Culture and Social Change, edited by Obioma Nnaemeka and Chima Korieh (Trenton,
NJ and Asmara: Africa World Press, 2011), 116–117.
32
Van Allen, ‘Aba riots’, 84
33
Ifi Amadiume, ‘Women’s Political History’, West Africa 10 (September, 1984), 1839.
000 Fal book B.indb 430 13/06/2016 22:06

and preambles of their works. Buchi Emecheta, for example, prefaces

with the statement: ‘I am glad this book is published; it is different from
my other books, the subject is, as they say, “masculine”.’34 Rose Njoku,
wife of a highly placed Nigerian officer, who personally knew all the
major actors of the 1966 Nzeogwu coup, and Generals Gowon and
Ojukwu, humbly entitles her own account of the War after a religious
tract given to her by the Bishop of Ikot Ekpene when she was on the run
with her children.35 We have only to compare such self-aggrandizing
titles as Obasanjo’s My Command: an Account of the Nigerian Civil War
1967–1970 and Ademoyega’s Why We Struck: The Story of the First
Nigerian Coup with her Withstand the Storm: War Memoirs of a House-
wife to be conscious of a shift of emphasis, from the centrality of the
first person actors and the militaristic actions ‘command’ and ‘struck’,
as well as away from the named specificity of the events described.36
Instead, the generality of the indefinite article and the unassuming
descriptor ‘housewife’ downplay the author’s role, while the nature
metaphor ‘storm’ implies assault by an impersonal and external phe-
nomenon that must be survived (note the collective injunction, ‘With-
stand’) rather than overcome by individual endeavor. Flora Nwapa’s
Never Again speaks for itself, though she amplifies the title in the first
few lines of the narrative:
Death was too near for comfort in Biafra. And for us who had known no
danger of this kind before it was hell on earth. I meant to live at all costs. I
meant to see the end of the war … so that I could tell my friends on the other
side what it meant to be at war.37
‘I meant to live at all costs’, the motif of both Nwapa and Njoku’s
accounts, naturally suggests a different emphasis from the young boy
of ‘My Soldier Brother’, with his determination ‘to get ten heads of
the enemy before they got me’. What is dramatized here is the social
change brought about by war and the new choices for women it opens
up. Umaru and Lagi, assessing the impact of ethnic conflicts in Nigeria,
state:
Women typically do not remain mere onlookers or innocent vic-
tims of conflicts. They often take on roles and responsibilities, partake
in combat and political struggle, and build new networks in order to
obtain needed resources for their families. While civil wars impose tre-
mendous burdens on women, they often contribute to the redefinition
34
Buchi Emecheta, Destination Biafra (London: Allison & Busby, 1982), viii.
35
Rose Njoku, Withstand the Storm: War Memoirs of a Housewife (Ibadan: Heinemann Edu-
cational, 1986), xi.
36
Olusegun Obasanjo, My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War 1967–1970 (Lon-
don: Heinemann, 1981); Adewale Ademoyega, Why We Struck: the Story of the First Nige-
rian Coup (lbadan: Evans Brothers, 1981).
37
Nwapa, Never Again, 5, emphasis added.
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432 Jane Bryce
of traditional roles and the reconfiguration of gender relations in the

society.38
In the story which gives its title to the collection, Wives at War, Flora
Nwapa gives an ironic account of women’s roles through the tongue-
in-cheek story of Ebo and Bisi, who marry in Lagos before the War and
subsequently find themselves in Biafra. Unlike Fatima in Sunset at Dawn,
a Hausa woman who espouses the Biafran cause almost to the extent of
rejecting her own parents, Bisi, a Yoruba, demands to be sent elsewhere:
‘The people are hostile to us. They will poison us, they will kill us. You
and your people, you and your propaganda.’39 Ebo therefore smuggles
her and the children onto a relief plane.
The rumor gets round that a group of women have been sent to
London to represent Biafran women, and women leaders go to see the
Foreign Secretary to protest against their non-inclusion. The Foreign
Secretary regrets not staying in his safe overseas posting, instead of
returning ‘home to face Biafra and her women. The women. How could
he cope with them? … Why could not the women organise themselves in
one body and have just one leader? Why must every one of them want
to lead?’40.
His attempts to mollify them are briskly dismissed, with the warn-
ing: ‘You wait until the end of this war. There is going to be another
war, the war of the women. You have fooled us enough. You have used
us enough. You have exploited us enough.’41 The story is satirical in
that the women are agitating about nothing: a delegation did not go to
London, and they are obviously more concerned with recognition of
their position than with more pressing matters of the War. This ironic
perception of its ludicrous and less heroic aspects informs all Nwapa’s
writings on the War, though the women do also make a serious point:
Your offence is that you bypassed us. Without the women, the Nigerian van-
dals would have overrun Biafra; without the women, our gallant Biafran
soldiers would have died on the war fronts. Without the women, the Biafran
Red Cross would have collapsed.42
The leader of a rival group claims: ‘Right from the word go, we organ-
ised the women for a real fight. We asked for guns to fight the enemy.
We asked to be taught how to shoot. Did not women and girls fight in
Vietnam?’43 This analogy with the then contemporary war in Vietnam
38
Ibrahim Umaru and Theophilus D. Lagi, ‘Women in the Aftermath of Ethnic Conflicts:
the Egbirra-Bassa Crisis, 1986–2000’, Nnaemeka and Korieh, Shaping our Struggles:
Nigerian Women in History, Culture and Social Change, edited by Obioma Nnaemeka and
Chima J. Korieh (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011), 251.
39
Nwapa, Wives at War, 3.
40
Ibid., 11
41
Ibid., 13
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid., 14
000 Fal book B.indb 432 13/06/2016 22:06

reveals the extent to which women were aware of their position and
their relationship to internal and external power. In the absence of
guns, their most deadly weapon is ‘feminine intuition’, by which the
Foreign Secretary is entirely defeated, conceding that he will have to
investigate the women’s complaint.
The comic element of self-seeking masquerading as patriotism recurs
in Nwapa’s Never Again, a thinly disguised account of her own war
experiences, in which the narrator Kat’s skepticism contrasts with her
husband’s reluctance to concede that Biafra is going to be defeated. This
skepticism also contrasts with the ruthless hypocrisy of some of those
in positions of power, notably Kate and her husband’s friend, Kal, who
says she should be in detention for disbelieving the Biafran propaganda.
This polarization is evident early on at a village meeting, where most of
those in attendance
were the old politicians. I did not like them. To my way of thinking they
caused the war. And they were now in the forefront again directing the
war. The women especially were very active, more active than the men in
fact. They made uniforms for the soldiers, they cooked for the soldiers and
gave expensive presents to the officers. And they organised the women who
prayed every Wednesday for Biafra. In return for these services, they were
rewarded with special war reports exclusive to them and them alone.44
The fact that one of those who is most vocal, the woman leader, claims
to have lost her husband in the War when Kate and Chudi know he died
of diabetes, ironizes her exhortations to the people to stay and not flee
the Nigerian soldiers:
Why am I a woman? God, you should have made me a man. I would have
said to the young men, to the youths whose blood I know is boiling now
in their veins, follow me. I’ll lead you. I’ll fight the Vandals. They will not
be allowed to pollute our fatherland. They will not be allowed to set their
ugly feet on the soil of Ugwuta. Never in history, my grandfathers and great
grandfathers never told me that Ugwuta had suffered from any aggressor.
This will not happen in my life time!45
The fact that she is the first to crack and run underlines not only the
emptiness of her rhetoric, but the cynicism and hypocrisy of war leaders
in general, who require people to do what they will not do themselves.
The terms in which it is expressed implicitly question assumptions of
gendered heroism, even while the specific history and larger context of
the War are not spelled out. However, in objecting that all these mass
meetings achieve nothing, Kate implicitly addresses the wider context
through a critique of political and class privilege:
44
Nwapa, Never Again, 10–11.
45
Ibid., 12
000 Fal book B.indb 433 13/06/2016 22:06

434 Jane Bryce
Committees could achieve something. Later I had discussed this point with
one of the leaders. It was after our discussion which went very well that the
‘elites’ decided to form a ‘war cabinet’. My husband was not one of them.
He was not an ‘elite’. But it was our idea, and nobody remembered us. Obvi-
ously, we could not be trusted.46
In a work that profoundly questions nationalist discourse, Nwapa
highlights the way that discourse is constructed and controlled by those
in power through a process of exclusion that has potentially deadly con-
sequences. Kate’s perfectly logical insistence that the best thing to do is
to run elicits a threat of arrest, diverted by her husband’s plea that she
is suffering a mental breakdown. Meanwhile, her capacity for a surgical
deconstruction of the pieties and dangers of nationalism demonstrates
mental clarity rather than confusion:
No, the Nigerians should not have fought us. We had left Lagos for them.
They should have left us in peace in our new-found Biafra. We could have
built up our Biafra ‘where no one would be oppressed’. Was anybody sure
of this? ‘Where no one would be oppressed’? There was already oppression
even before the young nation was able to stand on her feet. Wasn’t it even
possible that war could have broken out in the young nation if there was
no civil war? Perhaps Nigeria did well to attack us. If they hadn’t we would
have, out of frustration, begun to attack and kill one another.47
It is easy to criticize Never Again, as does Obododimma Oha, for being
‘propagandistic’ and over-emotional.48 What it does very well, however,
is to give an insight into the situation of ordinary, non-combatant and
non-political people, trying to live their lives in a situation of unbear-
able contradictions. The narrowness of focus – the village of Ugwuta
and the vacillation of its inhabitants about when to run in the face of
direct frontal attack – and the simplicity of the narrative style, throw
into relief the horrors of the panic-stricken evacuation: a woman dying
in childbirth at the side of the road, a man’s grief-stricken account of
his wife’s death. The simplicity has the virtue also of clarity of purpose.
Nwapa’s disgust and utter rejection of the War and the way people are
manipulated within it can be read as articulating dissent from a domi-
nant masculine political narrative. Describing their return to Ugwuta,
Kate asks:
Where was everybody? What folly? What arrogance, what stupidity led us to
this desolation, this madness, to this wickedness, to this war, to this death?
46
Ibid., 17
47
Ibid., 50.
48
Obododimma Oha, ‘Never A Gain? A Critical Reading of Flora Nwapa’s Never Again’, in
Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa, edited by Marie Umeh (Trenton, NJ and Asmara,
Eritrea: Africa World Press, 1998), 430.
000 Fal book B.indb 434 13/06/2016 22:06

When this cruel war was over, there will be no more war. It will not happen
again, never again.49
This emotional statement with its concatenation of evils and rhetorical
repetitions, may have the force of a spontaneous, unconsidered outburst,
but in its uncensored outrage it expresses the effects of trauma – later
to be returned to in retrospect by writers who were at the time children
(Chris Abani, Dulue Mabachu) or did not directly experience the War
(Chimamanda Adichie, Sefi Atta, Helon Habila, Uzodinma Iweala), for
whom the trauma is a lingering trace and must be reimagined into life.
Nwapa’s forceful dissent reverberates in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will
Come (though not a ‘Biafran’ novel, one of the most significant novels
by a third-generation Nigerian woman writer, and strongly affiliated to
novels I will examine later) some 30 years on: ‘What was the country
I loved? The country I would fight for? Should it have borders?’50 These
questions, dependent as they are on a retrospective stance on postcolo-
nial Nigeria, are questions Nwapa’s Kate, caught in the tide of Biafran
patriotism, could not so easily articulate. The poet, Olu Oguibe, 30 years
later, answers them thus: ‘It occurred to me that the country that I was
willing to fight and die for, the country that I celebrated in song and
poetry, had set out not so long ago to destroy me and my own in order to
save its pride.’51 To read these later utterances against Nwapa’s shows
how the contradictions have only intensified with time. Nwapa’s strong
and uncompromising ideological statement in Wives at War is therefore
all the more remarkable. As in Never Again, in the short story, ‘A Certain
Death’, in which a woman pays an 18-year-old volunteer to take her
brother’s place in the army, she refuses to turn away her eyes from the
social effects of suspicion and insecurity, accusations of sabotage and
victimization. Nor does her determination to save her brother blind her
to the moral dilemma of paying someone to replace him. Oha’s asser-
tion, that ‘Never Again does not transcend the emotional weakness of
the pro-war propaganda that it seeks to undermine and demystify …
the narrative undermines itself as a critique on the demerits of senti-
mentalizing war’, fails to take into account the relative power of these
opposing discourses and the irony with which they are juxtaposed.52
The same emphasis on survival at all costs and at the price of personal
sacrifice is evident in Rosina Umelo’s (1978) Felicia, which addresses the
social changes, particularly the new choices for women, brought about
by the immense upheavals of the War.53 Like Never Again, it critiques
hypocrisy and false values, but affords a more optimistic celebration of
personal integrity and community support. Felicia, a young Red Cross
49
Nwapa, Never Again, 70.
50
Sefi Atta, Everything Good Will Come (Adlestrop: Arris, 2005), 299.
51
Olu Oguibe, ‘Remembering Biafra’, Chimurenga 8 (2005), 30.
52
Oha, ‘Never A Gain?’, 430.
53
Rosina Umelo, Felicia (London: Macmillan, 1978).
000 Fal book B.indb 435 13/06/2016 22:06

436 Jane Bryce
nurse, returns home to her village at the end of the War, at a time when
songs are being sung about girls who have ‘spoilt’ themselves. When her
pregnancy becomes apparent, she refuses to reveal the identity of the
father to her mother and the elders. Her mother becomes so distraught
that Felicia is sent to Enugu to stay with a relative and have the baby.
Her determination to have the baby, whom she names Nkemakolam –
‘Let me keep what is my own’ – and her refusal to accept the elders’
alternative to local disgrace – to go to Lagos and become a prostitute
– eventually win her the respect of her people. She is given a second
chance to make good and sent back to school. Returning home after
exams, she meets a delegation from the family of her deceased lover.
A letter written to his brother about his intention to marry Felicia was
delivered after his death and remained unopened, till one day it dropped
from his mother’s prayer missal. Felicia is thus vindicated and her son
accepted into his father’s family.
The novel touches on many issues to do with the disruptive effects of
the War on many aspects of people’s lives, from the traditional system
to education and the new lawlessness that reigns in the city of Enugu.
The tension that arises from Felicia’s individual pride and insistence on
privacy in the face of communal values and customs illustrates the far-
reaching effects of change. No longer is the choice for a woman that
between respectable marriage and leaving the village to seek her for-
tune in Lagos. Felicia demonstrates the possibility of making a personal
choice to remain at home as an unmarried mother, despite public dis-
pleasure. Education offers the promise of an even more different future,
the chance for a mother to support her child herself in the absence of
a husband – a theme Nwapa was to take up in the 1980s novels, One is
Enough and Women Are Different. When Felicia’s school principal pon-
ders: ‘Class three with illegitimate children or even babies born in mar-
riage? Why be surprised? Before the war, what did class three personally
know of such things apart from carrying around the regular arrivals
within their own families?’54
We can see how Felicia implicitly questions the ‘imagined commu-
nity’ of pre- and post-war Biafra by showing profound social change as
an unintended consequence of that war. Lee Erwin has usefully read
this novel as participating in the ‘mixed generic codes’ of the Pacesetter
Series by which it was published, so as to ‘recast those genres in order
to suggest other possibilities for women’ in an ‘attempt to reattach their
protagonists to multivalent kinship structures that offer women oppor-
tunities for alliance with other women and greater social authority in
their own right’.55 He suggests that novels of this period – the 1970s
and 1980s – share a common project of ‘rereading women’s roles in
54
Ibid., 113
55
Lee Erwin, ‘Genre and Authority in Some Popular Nigerian Women’s Novels’, RAL, 33:2
(2002), 95.
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traditional social structures outside a Western feminist paradigm’, both

through generic affiliation and representations of an alternative (non-
Western) femininity.56 I want to propose that this suggestive symbio-
sis of genre and gender has a far wider application than Pacesetters,
including both Nwapa and Umelo, and later writers like Ezeigbo and
Adichie, beneath whose surface realism can be detected a muted semi-
otics rooted in traditional forms of femininity and indigenous belief
systems.
Gendering heroism
Rose Njoku and Buchi Emecheta, two other authors of earlier nar-
ratives, take a different approach from Nwapa and Umelo by depict-
ing events from the point of view of a protagonist who is very much
bound up in the macro-politics of the War. Rose Njoku’s first-hand
story is a remarkable document of danger and suffering, considering
she is not describing the front but simply how she and her family sur-
vived as civilians. Her situation, similarly to that of Nwapa’s Kate, was
complicated by the fact that her husband was detained early on as a
saboteur, and therefore she was ostracized by all but a few and had to
fend for herself. Withstand the Storm makes an eloquent counterpoint
to Emecheta’s Destination Biafra, in the sense that Rose Njoku actually
underwent many of the experiences Emecheta ascribes to the fictional
Debbie Ogedemgbe. In terms of definitions of heroism and patriotism,
and the relationship of the individual to history, these two texts provide
interesting contrasts, not least in their approach to their protagonists.
The most obvious of these is that, while Njoku endures pain, privation,
and anxiety with stoical fortitude and underplays her own role as that
of a dutiful wife, Emecheta makes all sorts of claims for Debbie as a new
type of African woman. Debbie, indeed, has been co-opted as a West-
ern-defined feminist heroine by the critic Katherine Frank who asserts:
‘Debbie is an unabashed feminist, but she is so completely Europeanized
that one may ask if she is still an African woman.’57
It is a pertinent question: what is a ‘true’ African woman? Is she
what Molara Ogundipe-Leslie has derided as a stereotype, the ‘pot of
culture, who is static as history passes her by, who wants the old ways
of life, who speaks like a lobotomised idiot of “iron snakes” and “our
husband”’?58 In 2005, Sefi Atta’s Enitan objects to being classified in
the following terms: ‘I didn’t know how to think like an African woman.
I only knew how to think for myself.’59 And, ‘If a woman sneezed in
56
Ibid.
57
Katherine Frank, ‘Women without Men: The Feminist Novel in Africa’, African Literature
Today, edited by Eldred Durosimi Jones, Eustace Palmer and Marjorie Jones (London:
James Currey, 1987), 26.
58
Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, ‘The Female Writer and her Commitment’, Association of Nige-
rian Authors (ANA) Review 1:1 (1985), 12.
59
Atta, Everything Good, 294.
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438 Jane Bryce
our country, someone would call her a feminist.’60 Since both terms,
‘African woman’ and ‘feminist’, are used to undermine and enforce obe-
dience to a conservative status quo, it is the status quo itself that Enitan
rejects. In seeking to claim Debbie as a feminist heroine – a woman who
forges her identity independently of men – Frank overlooks the extent to
which it is her privileged background that enables her to confront men
on equal terms, a forerunner, perhaps, of Olanna and Kehinde in Half
of a Yellow Sun. Emecheta herself calls her ‘a very radical modern girl of
Africa’, and says, ‘one of the criticisms of Heinemann readers was that
‘this is not an African woman. People have to decide here what people
should read there.’61
However, as Njoku’s story shows, Debbie does not, in fact, do any-
thing that thousands of ordinary women did not do. The only differ-
ence is that she has a mission – to reach Abosi, the Biafran leader, and
persuade him to stop the War. When she does eventually confront him,
her way of presenting herself lays claim to a class position inherited
from her father: ‘I am me. Debbie, the daughter of Ogedemgbe. Tell
me, if I were a man, a man born almost thirty years ago, a graduate
of politics, sociology and philosophy from Oxford, England, would you
have dismissed my mission?’62 The parameters by which Debbie judges
herself – her father’s status and her foreign education – at Oxford, no
less – suggest that she is not, indeed, a representative ‘African woman’
of her time but a self-conscious exception. In contrast, Rose Njoku, also
a member of the elite, unconsciously subverts the cause she purports to
serve – that of her husband as male ‘hero’. The fact that her husband
is first, Brigade Commander under General Ironsi, then Biafran War
Commander, then detained by Ojukwu as a saboteur, only adds to Rose
Njoku’s problems, since, besides her own and her children’s survival,
she has the added burden of her husband’s absolute dependence on
her – for information, for support, as a go-between. Throughout, she is
alone with her children, surviving on her own resources. Like Debbie
Ogedemgbe, at one point she has a personal interview with Ojukwu to
intercede on her husband’s behalf. The contrast is telling:
I presented my husband’s points as forcefully as the explosive situation could
permit. I did my best to convince him that my husband never intended to
split the loyalty of the troops but that zeal for the common good of the mili-
tary and civilians had influenced all his actions. I told him that their quarrel
had never been personal but official and that every man needed recognition
in his own sphere. I never knew I would be as bold as I was in discussing the
many other areas of their conflict. He also started with a catalogue of what
60
Ibid., 200.
61
Interview with Jane Bryce, London, 21 January 1986.
62
Njoku, Withstand the Storm, 239.
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my husband had said to him in the presence of those who owed him much
respect.63
The writer’s self-effacement does not disguise the fact that she was at
the center of events. Yet she makes no claims for herself, continually
harping on her ‘wifely duty’ and rationalizing her husband’s neglect
and, it seems to the reader, at times crass egoism. Yet even with all her
Christian submissiveness, she cannot suppress her resentment that her
husband always puts the army first. The following quotation is typical.
He had absolutely no conception of the mental strain I had been suffer-
ing since that fateful 29 July day. I decided to keep quiet and swallow that
bitter pill. I did not want to mar my gratitude to God for preserving his life.
I was still too excited at my husband’s escape from death to argue or defend
myself. Under normal circumstances, I would have been very sad at such a
seemingly inconsiderate remark.64
This level of self-control is, indeed, ‘heroic’, though it is neither drama-
tized nor presented as such. Emecheta’s novel, by comparison, is charac-
terized by a straining for significance, particularly in the symbol-laden
trek through the jungle in which Debbie carries the baby ‘Biafra’ on her
back. The effect is, in both cases, the opposite of what was intended.
Neither writer explicitly questions the accepted notion of ‘heroism’,
but, by implicit contrast between herself and her husband, Rose Njoku
exemplifies a different (and devalued) feminine manifestation of heroic
qualities. Debbie Ogedemgbe remains a product of her class and a male-
defined ‘exceptional’ woman, doing a man’s job.
Part 2: Recent Novels and Retrospective Imagining

After the forgoing survey of women’s war writing of the 1970s and
1980s and its critical reception, I want to adopt a somewhat different
framework in the following two sections. Obioma Nnaemeka points to
the way ‘physical distance seems to determine narrative distance’ in
the earlier women’s writing, and cites Ernest Emenyonu’s emphasis
on ‘distance [as] a crucial element in reimag(in)ing and narrating the
Nigeria-Biafra conflict’.65 Turning to imaginative recreations of the War
by writers at a distance in time and/or space, I want to place in com-
parative perspective three novels: Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra
(1981), Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Akachi
Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Roses and Bullets (2011). I focus in each case on the
question of subalternity and the representation of rape as metonymic
63
Ibid., 85.
64
Ibid., 65.
65
Obioma Nnaemeka, ‘Fighting on All Fronts: Gendered Spaces, Ethnic Boundaries, and
the Nigerian Civil War’, Dialectical Anthropology 22:3–4 (1997), 239, 240.
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440 Jane Bryce
of violence. Second, I read these novels for traditional tropes which I

see as signs of a ‘suppressed semiotic’ beneath a realist textual surface.
Although Destination Biafra belongs chronologically in the earlier
group, the author’s physical distance from the War provides a useful
touchstone for the way writers have been able to reimagine it only
within the context of where they stand at the time of writing. Emecheta
stated: ‘I was not in Nigeria during this War, but was one of the students
demonstrating in Trafalgar Square in London at the time.’66 Important,
too, is the fact that Emecheta approaches Biafra, not only as one who
was absent, but as one whose affiliations place her somewhat outside
its putative terrain. ‘I hail from Ibuza, in the Mid-West, a little town
near Asaba where the worst atrocities of the War took place, which
is never given any prominence’, because, she says, it was not ‘the Ibo
heartland’.67 She claims, too, to have been inspired by Wole Soyinka’s
The Man Died, as a result of which her protagonist is ‘neither Ibo, nor
Yoruba, nor Hausa, but simply a Nigerian’.68 This statement, made in
1981, 11 years after the War ended, is strikingly different from positions
taken at a greater distance in time – by Chinua Achebe, for example, in
There Was a Country, where he castigates Nigeria for its continued failure
to integrate his people. Similarly, the younger Igbo poet, Olu Oguibe, has
written of how, after the War, ‘the country draped a blanket of silence
over Biafra and set about repressing its memory’.69 He describes his
realization, after years as a political activist, that ‘we weren’t simply all
Nigerians, and that the old beast of ethnic distrust and clan loyalty was
alive and well’, leading him to conclude that, ‘I became an exile not the
day I left Nigeria, but the day Nigeria stepped over Biafra and reclaimed
its territorial integrity’.70 In fiction, Sefi Atta’s Enitan, born in 1960,
offers a reflection on her generation’s relationship to the War:
In university, I finally acknowledged the holocaust that was Biafra, through
memoirs and history books, and pictures of limbless people; children with
their stomachs bloated from kwashiorkor and their rib cages as thin as
leaf veins. Their parents were mostly dead. Executed. Macheted. Blown up.
Beheaded. There were accounts of blood-drinking, flesh-eating, atrocities of
the human spirit that only a civil war could generate, while in Lagos we had
carried on as though it were happening in a different country.71
Distant in both time and space, this account is an attempt at coming
to terms with what it means to be Nigerian in the twenty-first century
in the face of a partially effaced collective memory. Atta here reclaims
memory through its traces in the official record – memoirs, history
66
Emecheta, Destination Biafra, viii.
67
Ibid., vii.
68
Ibid., viii.
69
Oguibe, ‘Remembering Biafra’, 30.
70
See Ibid., 30, 31.
71
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books, and pictures – so as to ‘reinscrib[e] the past into the contempo-

rary horizon’.72 For her, this refusal of amnesia means there can be no
such thing as being ‘simply a Nigerian’, as Emecheta positions Debbie.
Despite Emecheta’s conscious conformity with the post-War slogan ‘No
victor, no vanquished’, by which Nigeria’s East was invited to rejoin the
polity, there is clearly a gap between the unproblematic homogeneity
of Debbie’s identity and the crude anti-Hausa (and to some extent anti-
British) racism that pervades the novel, suggesting that ‘Nigerianness’
itself is built on a set of unexamined collective assumptions. Those who
witnessed the War saw those assumptions radically challenged; Destina-
tion Biafra, while it adopts an anti-war position, arguably reinscribes the
very binaries that caused the war in the first place.
Reinscribing the past, representing trauma

Although women’s war texts generally have come in for criticism (for
their limited vision, their narrow ‘feminine’ concerns) or been entirely
overlooked, Destination Biafra has had a mixed reception. Nwachukwu-
Agbada, for example, notes of Emecheta ‘her feminist temper [which]
remains unassuaged and unmitigated’,73 her condemnation of the
treatment of the Western Igbos from whom she comes, rather than
any larger critique of the War itself,74 and her over-valuation of rape:
‘The women are merely raped but the men are killed. Why the author
bemoans the rapes more than the deaths is not explained.’75 What is
clear, however, is: ‘Feminism in African fiction is an intrusive voice
which calls our attention to the “failures” of male African writers with
respect to the portrayal of women in their works.’76 Despite Emecheta’s
‘cartoon-like portrayal of the atrocities and consequences of the war
itself (where we often see her biases leading her to create some highly
implausible, idealized and even preposterous situations and charac-
ters)’, Abioseh Porter calls the novel ‘unconventional’, ‘compelling’,
‘complex’, and ‘insightful’.77 Some female critics, who have tended
towards a more positive reception, have valorized the novel as a femi-
nist intervention in masculine discourse, to the occlusion of other key
elements.78 In particular, Obioma Nnaemeka and Oike Machiko, in
taking up the question of subalternity, thereby unsettle the feminist
consensus. Debbie Ogedemgbe is unapologetically a member of the elite,
daughter of a politician, educated abroad, wealthy and able to choose
72
Ibid., viii.
73
J.O.J. Nwachukwu-Agbada, ‘Buchi Emecheta: Politics, War and Feminism in Destination
Biafra’, in Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta., edited by Marie Umeh (Trenton, NJ
and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 1996), 388.
74
Ibid., 391.
75
Ibid., 393.
76
Ibid., 392.
77
Abioseh M. Porter, ‘Second-Class Citizen: The Point of Departure for Understanding Buchi
Emecheta’s Major Fiction’, in Umeh, Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, 314–315.
78
Frank, ‘Women without Men’; Umeh, ‘The Poetics of Thwarted Sensitivity’.
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442 Jane Bryce
her lovers without regard to social or parental censorship – all of which

attributes she shares with Olanna and Kainene, protagonists of Half of
a Yellow Sun. It is instructive, however, to note the difference in reception
between the two novels, separated by 25 years, and to speculate how far
perceptions have changed in that period. Debbie’s outspoken articula-
tion of feminist positions on a range of issues, from joining the military
to personal relationships with men, is approvingly cited as making her
‘a veritable symbol of Emecheta’s African New Woman’, while Destina-
tion Biafra is the novel where Emecheta reaches the peak of her femi-
nism. Critical responses to Half of a Yellow Sun, highlighting sexuality
over gender, and personal relationships over public politics, no doubt
reflect developments in critical theory and what readers expect from
a female-authored novel in the twenty-first century, as opposed to the
oppositional feminism of the 1980s. Writers, as observed by Amuta,
reflect their class, but Third Generation writers show a marked degree
of self-reflexivity on this score. Sefi Atta’s Enitan, for example, deter-
mines: ‘I would no longer speak for women in my country, because,
quite simply, I didn’t know them all.’79 In Destination Biafra, Debbie’s
journey into Biafra reveals to her how much she is defined by her class
position: ‘Her education, the imported division of class, still stood in the
way. She was trying hard to shake it off, to belong, but … she knew that
achieving complete acceptance was indeed a formidable task.’80 This
idea of ‘belonging’ is figured in terms of a certain kind of femininity,
represented by Uzoma, one of her fellow-refugees, whose resourceful-
ness, strength and down-to-earthness Debbie admires, yet the narrative
never positions Uzoma as other than a source for Debbie’s observations
on women’s role in the War, and certainly never as a spokesperson.
While it is given to Uzoma to express the hope ‘that history will be able
to chronicle all this’,81 Debbie is the one who
recorded all this in her memory, to be transferred when possible to the yel-
lowing scraps of paper she dignified with the name of manuscript. They had
survived with her so far, because most of the incidents were written down in
her personal code which only she could decipher. If she should be killed, the
entire story of the women’s experience of the war would be lost.82
Debbie is figured, in other words, not only as privileged possessor of the
women’s narrative but also of their subjective experience of the War.
Her public role is confirmed when she returns to London, instigates the
demonstration in Trafalgar Square, speaks at press briefings and makes
sure Biafran counter-information is distributed. On her return to Biafra
with a second mission to Abosi, she tells her hostess she is writing ‘an
79
80
81
Ibid., 222.
82
Ibid., 222–223, emphasis added.
000 Fal book B.indb 442 13/06/2016 22:06

interesting story’ called Destination Biafra.83 In the closing pages, after

Abosi’s desertion, she refuses to leave with Alan Grey, her British lover,
with the words:
there is my manuscript to publish. I shall tell those orphans the story of
how a few ambitious soldiers from Sandhurst tried to make their dream a
reality … If future generations should ask what became of Biafra, what do
you want us to tell them?84
Debbie’s right to chronicle the war is, unlike that of Richard in Half of a
Yellow Sun, or even Adichie herself, unequivocal. According to Machiko,
Destination Biafra is ‘the story which Debbie, an elite woman, has com-
posed from the memory of the subaltern’ and as a result, it ‘exposes the
limit of storytelling [and] records the impossibility of representing the
Other’.85
How do Adichie and Ezeigbo negotiate this impossibility? Half of a
Yellow Sun is told through the narrative point of view of three of its
characters: Olanna, Richard, and Ugwu. These perspectives are inter-
spersed with excerpts from a different, parallel narrative-in-process
known as ‘The Book’, which, since he is a writer, we at first attribute to
Richard, the British writer who struggles to write the story of the War,
only to reveal at the end that it is Ugwu, the houseboy, who is its ulti-
mate chronicler. This device enables Adichie to relinquish her position
as narrative authority in favor of a subaltern spokesman at the level of
metanarrative. The protagonist of Ezeigbo’s Roses and Bullets occupies
a somewhat different subject – and class – position from either Debbie
or Olanna. For Ginika, daughter of a Port Harcourt-based Igbo doctor,
London and Lagos are beyond her horizon. When the story begins, she
is a secondary schoolgirl staying with her aunt in Enugu. At her father’s
insistence, she reluctantly moves to Mbano, where he is stationed, and
then to the home village of Ama-Oyi for the duration of the war. Ginika,
though educated and anticipating going to university like her brother,
is patently not a liberated elite woman. Both the style of the novel and
the frequent use of Igbo expressions position her closer to being a vil-
lage girl, subject to parental control and traditional conventions of
femininity. She tells Eloka Odunze, later her husband: ‘We speak a mix-
ture of dialects – Ama-Oyi, Ikwerre, Mbano, Onitsha and a smattering
of Owerri dialect introduced into the family by Auntie Lizzy … I take
a bit of every dialect and get them together.’86 The cultural context is,
therefore, highly specific, geographically situated in what was known
as ‘the Igbo heartland’ where spoken Igbo is colored by minute shifts in
83
Ibid., 246.
84
Ibid., 258–259.
85
Oike Machiko, ‘Becoming a Feminist Writer: Representation of the Subaltern in Buchi
Emecheta’s Destination Biafra’, in War in African Literature Today 26, edited by Ernest N.
Emenyonu (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2008), 68, 69.
86
A. Adimora-Ezeigbo, Roses and Bullets (Lagos: Jalaa, 2011), Part 1. Ch. 2, n.p.
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444 Jane Bryce
location; Ezeigbo signifies this specificity by a conversational, leisurely,

oral-inflected style of storytelling, dense with detail of the domestic
and village environment, more reminiscent of Nwapa’s early novels
than the creative writing-workshopped English of Adichie. Though the
narrative point of view is third person, the fact that the focalization is
almost exclusively expressed through Ginika privileges her perspective
and intensifies reader-identification with it.
Again, it is a story of survival, but without the tone of outrage that
places Nwapa’s Kate as external witness to events. Like Olanna, Ginika
undergoes the privations of the war, including extreme hunger border-
ing on starvation, all the while seeking solutions to her own and other
people’s problems. Like Olanna, privations do not impede love and sex
from playing an important role in her life, including an unremarked inci-
dent of intimacy with a female friend which, rather than being labeled
transgressive, is allowed to take its place in the realm of the normal. Like
Olanna, Ginika experiences love and passion with her chosen partner,
Eloka, and like Debbie, she is raped by an officer on her own ‘side’. Most
importantly, like Half of a Yellow Sun, the novel moves back and forth
in time, revisiting the past so as to ‘create a connective structure’ that
reveals the underlying power relations between the characters. The
second section of Roses and Bullets, ‘Before the Beginning’, set before
the war, thus explains why we meet Ginika at her aunt’s, and not her
father’s house, in terms of a previous act of violence, which functions
as the ‘future anterior’ of patriarchal forms of violence perpetrated
during the war itself.
Though rape features in all three of the novels under discussion, the
extent to which it functions as metonymic of other forms of violence
varies widely. The growth of trauma theory87 has enabled us to read
rape as more than the act of gendered physical violence by which it is
figured in Destination Biafra, and to reconsider the value-laden state-
ment: ‘The women are merely raped but the men are killed. Why the
author bemoans the rapes more than the deaths is not explained.’88 In
an analysis of violence in the 1990s novels of Yvonne Vera and Calixte
Beyala, Régine Jean-Charles argues for the term ‘victim-survivor’ as
more appropriate than simply ‘victim’ or ‘survivor’ to African women
writers’ accounts of rape, stating: ‘The rape victim-survivor narrative
is a fundamentally processual mode, demonstrating that surviving rape
is not an accomplished, but an extended – often unresolved – act.’89
87
See, for example, Susannah Radstone: ‘Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics’, Para-
grap. 30:1 (2007), 9–29; and Paul Kirby: ‘How is Rape a Weapon of War? Feminist In-
ternational Relations, Modes of Critical Explanation and the Study of Wartime Sexual
Violence’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:4 (2012), 797–821.
88
89
Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, ‘Toward a Victim-Survivor Narrative: Rape and Form in
Yvonne Vera’s Under the Tongue and Calixthe Beyala’s Tu t’appelleras Tanga’, Research in
African Literatures, 45:1 (2014), 42.
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Zoe Norridge addresses the simultaneous presence of ‘explicit sexual

descriptions and graphic violence’ in novels by Aminatta Forna and
Chimamanda Adichie, arguing that the interweaving of sex and vio-
lence offers ‘both a language and strategy with which to explore and
contest violence against women’.90 This, she suggests, is qualitatively
different from the representation of violence in earlier writers like
Njoku, Nwapa, and Emecheta, whose attempt ‘to place rape on the
agenda in a West African context’ has been superseded by writers who
‘seek to explore the varied nuances of how and why rape is experienced
in specific situations’.91
Tracing Adichie’s genealogical link to Achebe, Susan Andrade states:
‘Adichie extends further [in 2006] what Achebe was able to imagine
and write in 1958.’92 Shifting from a paternal to a maternal filiation,
one could observe that Adichie and Ezeigbo extend further what Eme-
cheta was able to imagine and write in the early 1980s. Like Olanna,
Kainene, and Ginika, Debbie Ogedemgbe chooses her lover (Alan Grey)
and freely expresses desire; unlike the detailed sensual descriptions,
focalizing the female protagonists, of the other two novels, however, the
one time we see them in bed together it is entirely from Grey’s point of
view, contemplating ‘the richness of (her) shapely lips’ as she lies sleep-
ing.93 When Debbie is raped on the road 100 pages later, though she is
focalized there is a curious exteriority to the scene:
She felt herself bleeding, though her head was still clear. Pain shot all over
body like arrows. She felt her legs being pulled this way and that, and at
times she could hear her mother’s protesting cries. But eventually, amid all
the degradation that was being inflicted on her, Debbie lost consciousness.94
Later, in the car, we are told: ‘She was still too numb physically and emo-
tionally to say a word; but her brain was ticking like a tireless clock.’95 In
fact, it is her mother, who witnessed the whole attack, who experiences
something like trauma, while Debbie remains calm and collected: ‘She
could not shut out the horrible way the Ibo woman with the child was
killed, how they had pushed the butt of a gun into her, how they had
cut her open, how the unborn baby’s head had been cut off and the
older child kicked to death … oh, it was too horrible.’96 This is trauma
by observation; in Debbie’s case, the rape leaves her angry but articu-
late and logical. In the chapter, ‘The Tainted Woman’, despite the ‘deep
90
Zoe Norridge, ‘Sex as Synecdoche: Intimate Languages of Violence in Chimamanda Ngo-
zi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love’, RAL 43:2
(2012), 18.
91
Ibid., 27.
92
Susan Andrade, ‘Adichie’s Genealogies: National and Feminine Novels’, RAL 42:2 (2011),
93.
93
94
Ibid., 134.
95
Ibid., 135.
96
Ibid., 136.
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446 Jane Bryce
mental ache’97 of a memory that causes ‘the hollowness in her stomach

(to get) deeper, and bitterness (to come) to her mouth’,98 she remains
able to argue with and resist her mother and determined to carry out
her mission to reach Abosi. When she is raped again, by a Hausa officer,
she withstands him both physically – slapping him – and verbally, tell-
ing him:
Allah will never forgive you now because you tried to violate a woman who
has been raped by so many soldiers, a woman who may now be carrying
some disease, a woman who has been raped by black Nigerian soldiers. You
thought you were going to use a white man’s plaything, as you called me,
only to realize you held in your arms a woman who has slept with soldiers.99
The politics of rape arises again when, at the end of the novel, Debbie
rebukes Alan Grey: ‘I had expected the son of Sir Fergus Grey to behave
differently from an unsophisticated Moslem African … tell me, would it
have made a difference if I had been raped by white soldiers?’100 This
does not however stop her from co-operating with him and undertaking
another mission to Abosi, but when he makes clear that her usefulness
lies in her sexuality, which she is expected to trade to her advantage
(‘Do your woman bit tonight’), she slaps him ‘for the way you and your
country have fallen in the eyes of the black nations’.101
As should be clear from this summary, the representation of rape
in Destination Biafra is of a different order from that in the novels of
Vera, Forna, Adichie, or Ezeigbo. Debbie does not betray symptoms of
what Jean-Charles calls ‘rape trauma syndrome’, manifest in Vera’s
and Beyala’s novels ‘through narrative devices, ruptures in temporal-
ity, and the use of language’, emphasizing ‘the character’s struggle
to reconstitute him or herself following the original trauma of sexual
violence’.102 The linear realist mode of the narrative remains unbroken,
and despite her ‘mental pain’, Debbie does not disintegrate emotionally,
nor does she suffer flashbacks, loss of language nor the sense of stasis
that overcomes trauma victims, the inability to incorporate their experi-
ence into the narrative of their life. The multiple rapes neither inhibit
her from acting nor articulating her feelings, and in this sense the scene
of violation takes precedence over the consequences. The Debbie who
stands up to and slaps Lawal and Grey is not fundamentally changed
from the Debbie we meet at the glittering Lagos party at the start of the
novel; she is, temporarily, a victim, but cannot be called a survivor since
there are no long-term processual effects to be overcome. The answer to
Nwachukwu-Agbada’s question as to ‘[w]hy the author bemoans the
97
Ibid., 157.
98
Ibid., 165.
99
Ibid., 176.
100
Ibid., 243.
101
Ibid., 255.
102
Ibid., 44.
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rapes more than the deaths’103 is thus ideological: Emecheta’s feminist

project requires a discussion of rape in the context of a sexual politics
where the specificity of women’s experience and rights is only just being
articulated in African women’s writing. The difference in perspective
between her, Adichie and Ezeigbo is therefore partly a matter of the
temporal ground from which they perform their reinscription of the
past into the contemporary horizon.
In Half of a Yellow Sun, the rape is, unusually, told from the perspec-
tive of the perpetrator, Ugwu, one of the three focalizers of the novel.
It occurs almost incidentally in a bar, alongside drinking and getting
high, after a military engagement that has earned him the nickname
‘Target Destroyer’.104 The rape of the bar-girl is one incident in a series
of experiences Ugwu has at the front, told in simple descriptive lan-
guage with a minimum of commentary: blowing up an enemy trench
and taking boots and guns from the corpses; commandeering a car from
civilians looking for their missing son; seeing his captain blown up by
a shell before being blown up himself. The rape therefore takes its place
alongside other forms of traumatic suffering undergone or witnessed
by the characters, including Olanna’s escape from Kano after her family
has been slaughtered, and the refugee train journey south. Throughout
his time at the front, Ugwu thinks of his girlfriend, Eberechi, shaping his
experiences into a story for her ears while comforting himself with the
‘thought of Eberechi’s fingers pulling the skin of his neck, the wetness
of her tongue in his mouth’.105 As Norridge has pointed out, violence
and sensuality occur simultaneously in this novel, so that Ugwu the
rapist is also Ugwu the lover who longs for a remembered tenderness.
Olanna, not herself a victim of rape or extreme violence, nonetheless
manifests post-traumatic symptoms as a result of what she has wit-
nessed, described as ‘dark swoops’. In a sense, these symptoms may be
read as a collective experience, undergone by Olanna on behalf of the
other characters:
A thick blanket descended from above and pressed itself over her face, firmly,
while she struggled to breathe. Then, when it let go, freeing her to take in
gulp after gulp of air, she saw burning owls at the window grinning and
beckoning to her with charred feathers.106
After the war, when Ugwu returns to his home village, he discovers that
his sister was raped and beaten by five Nigerian soldiers; later, Richard
finds out that Eberechi was killed by a shell; meanwhile, Kainene, his
wife and Olanna’s sister, has disappeared. In the face of universal collec-
tive and personal trauma, rape figures on a spectrum of violence which
103
104
Chimamanda Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (New York: Knopf/Anchor, 2006), 362.
105
Ibid.
106
Ibid., 157.
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448 Jane Bryce
makes everyone concerned a victim-survivor, part of a long drawn-out

process of coming to terms with loss that, arguably, is still being played
out in subsequent generations.
As the back-and-forth chronology of Roses and Bullets makes clear,
however, particular forms of sexual violence are not confined to the
war. Patriarchal power relations, by which women are framed as unsta-
ble, vulnerable, and weak, subject them variously to protection, punish-
ment, and possession by men. Part 2: ‘Before the Beginning’, is devoted
to life before the War, when Ginika is a student at the Girls’ School at
Elelenwa near Port Harcourt (incidentally, the same school attended
by Nwapa and some of her characters). Returning late from a dance,
the reaction she meets from her father is symptomatic of forms of vio-
lence to which she will be subjected during the war itself. She first fears
flogging when he tells her to go to his room; then he subjects her to an
internal examination to make sure she has not been interfered with.
As a result of ‘this ugly incident … this violation of her body’, Ginika’s
relationship with her father breaks down completely and she prefers
to live with her aunt. When her brother, Nwakire, challenges her for
being rebellious, and she reveals what she has hidden for two years, the
forcefulness of his reaction to ‘the immoral and tyrannical invasion of
Ginika’s privacy’ is an indicator of the taboo that has been broken. The
very fact that he confronts their father is a sign of its seriousness, since
disrespecting an elder is also a taboo: ‘You should not have done what
you did; it was wrong, it was immoral and cruel. Your profession as a
medical doctor and your position as her father were no justification for
your conduct.’107 In response, their father tells the story of his sister’s
pregnancy by her primary school teacher and her death as a result of
an attempted abortion, and spells out the code by which he conducts
himself as Ginika’s male protector:
it is my conviction that a female child should be watched more closely in her
relationship with the opposite sex than a male child. It is the female who
usually gets hurt in any escapade between a man and a woman … it is the
parents’ responsibility to watch over their daughter until she gets married,
and only then can her parents disengage from that responsibility.108
The ‘ugly incident’, thus legitimated as acceptable discipline, leaves
Ginika with nowhere to stand. Nor is it the only time she will be pun-
ished for a perceived transgression of which she is innocent. Consid-
erable space is given to the mutual desire and intense pleasure that
characterize the relationship between Ginika and Eloka, both before
marriage and after, but Ginika’s lack of pregnancy does not please her
mother-in-law whose possessive attitude towards Ginika’s fertility is
similar to her father’s towards her virginity. Her carping and bullying,
107
Adimora-Ezeigbo, Roses and Bullets, Part 2.
108
Ibid.
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indeed, lead to an act of rebellion when Ginika agrees to attend a party

at the barracks with her co-worker at the refugee camp. Here, she is
drugged and raped while unconscious, resulting in a pregnancy for
which her parents-in-law throw her out of the house. She takes refuge
with her aunt where the baby is born deformed and dies; together with
her aunt’s family she faces kwashiorkor and starvation which she tries
to counteract by engaging in the attack-trade. When the war ends,
Nigerian soldiers occupy the local army camp where she sells akara
(spicy fried bean cakes) to raise money, attracting the attention of Sule
Ibrahim, a soldier who proposes to her. She puts him off by saying she
cannot have sex with an uncircumcised man. Eloka returns from the
war but, like everyone else, refuses to give her rape story any credence:
How could a man have sex with her without her realizing it, without her
crying out and calling for help … In other words, she claimed that the officer
had raped her and she had not resisted him … The thought of it almost
unhinged his mind … He thought that what she did was deceitful and irre-
sponsible and he could not bring himself to overlook it. It was all about trust
– and not about forgiveness or about trying to understand.109
After this rejection, the Nigerian soldier dies from undergoing circumci-
sion and Ginika is accused of murdering him. She is dragged off to the
army camp, beaten and serially raped before being rescued by her aunt
and cousin, but not before Nwakire, hearing of her fate, has shot and
killed both Eloka and himself. In a coda, ‘After the End’, Ginika returns
to Enugu six months later to the family group she has made her own,
having been accepted to study at the University at Nsukka.
This truncated summary of a lengthy narrative is intended to show
the extent to which this novel cleaves to a subaltern perspective: that of
an innocent but powerless young woman whose words remain unheard
by those with power over her, including the man she marries. The sto-
ry’s location, moving from Enugu back to Port Harcourt and forward
to Mbano and Ama-Oyi, signifies the narrowly focused lens through
which the war will be seen. Atrocities are not lacking – as when Ginika
sees the train arriving at Port Harcourt station with dismembered bodies
from the North, or the air raid on Oke-Ohia market where she and Udo
escape with their lives – but the most significant violence in the novel
is that meted out to Ginika by her father, parents-in-law, and the men
who rape her, one of whom is a Biafran officer. As Jean-Charles puts it,
in African women’s texts of the 1990s and after, forms of violence may
range from emotional abuse to physical assault, but … rape operates as a
core and constitutive form of violence … because it is an event open to inter-
pretation and definition by those who experience it … the intimate stories
of rape can be linked to a larger history of violence against women and of
109
Ibid., part 4, section 36.
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450 Jane Bryce
the exclusion of women’s narratives of violation from the larger historical

record.110
Not only the two novels considered here, but others (Adichie’s Purple
Hibiscus and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, but also Chris Aba-
ni’s Song for Night and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water) participate in the
reclamation of those occluded stories and the dismantling of patriar-
chal assumptions about women’s sexuality, voice and social roles. The
writers and protagonists of these novels tell a different story, not only
through their feminine focus and point of view, but through the adop-
tion of particular tropes and narrative techniques. I want to suggest, for
example, that Emecheta’s un-reflexive realism is the sign of a discourse
in which paternal authority is never interrogated – Debbie Ogedemgbe
never questions her father’s political or parental position. As a result,
though Destination Biafra may be the most overt of the post-War texts
in its challenge to masculine authority, ultimately that challenge is
recuperated for the cause of national unity. By contrast, the Civil War
novels of Third Generation women writers are part of a wider corpus
that fundamentally questions, not only the authority of fathers, but the
legitimacy of official history by which nationalism is configured.
Traditional tropes and the semiotics of femininity

I want to turn now to the ‘suppressed semiotic’ by which Adichie and
Ezeigbo figure their protagonists as simultaneously ‘radically modern’
and inflected by an Igbo orality and traditional belief system that speak
to an alternative social reality. In ‘The War’s untold Story’, a short story
of 44 pages published more than a decade before Roses and Bullets,
Ezeigbo narrates the story of Olewo, a young woman displaced by the
war and driven to survive by her wits.111 The piece is structured so as to
postpone the resolution and along the way deliver several surprises. In
the first 24 pages, we see Olewo escaping from two marauding ‘vandals’
who are threatening to rape her, only to realize she is dreaming. She
wakes up in bed with Emman, a Biafran captain, with whom, however,
she is in a familial rather than a romantic relationship. We see her
return from the refugee camp where she works, stricken by the deaths,
from eating poisonous mushrooms, of two children whose grave she
has helped to dig. We hear how Ndubisi, an older man with the title
Deputy Director of Fuel Directorate, with whom she is in a relationship,
let her down by abandoning her when the village was ordered to evacu-
ate. Emman deals with him and urges Olewo to join his own mother and
sisters in Ogboji, where they are growing food to feed the war effort.
The story could end there, but the equally long second section
switches to Ogboji, ‘Biafra’s food basket’ and ‘an important base of the
110
Jean-Charles, RAL, 44.
111
A. Adimora-Ezeigbo, ‘The War’s Untold Story’, in her Echoes in the Mind (Lagos: Founda-
tion, 1994).
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land army’.112 Here, ‘the war’s untold story’ is played out, its heroes
the women who labor daily under the hot sun to grow crops, or answer
the call of the Community Council to shell sacks of groundnuts. As in
Nwapa’s ‘A Certain Death’, where a sister pays a stranger to replace her
brother in the army, the dread of conscription leads Emman’s mother,
Nwalemu, to conceal her younger son from ‘the patriarchs controlling
the war [who] send off to the fighting zone boys armed with sticks’.113
At first, Ogboji seems to offer peace and relative safety. As they return
from the farm, Otaru, the spring where the women stop and bathe, is a
focus of feminine activity, a ‘woman-manned … hive of industry’, with
women cleaning cassava, collecting water, and bathing.114 Immersion
in the water is a source of pleasure and purification for the women,
who leave ‘refreshed, cleansed and invigorated by the healing water of
Otaru’.115
Sacred bodies of water feature in Emecheta’s Destination Biafra and
other novels (the River Niger and the streams of Ibuza) and Nwapa’s
Never Again, as well as Efuru and Idu (the lake presided over by the god-
dess Uhamiri who protects the town of Ugwuta). Though not explicitly
addressed as such, Otaru is another of these sacred waters, signifying
feminine power, fertility, and the collective harmony that has been dis-
rupted by the war. After bathing in the spring, and despite her realiza-
tion that ‘nowhere in Biafra was safe, after all’, when Nwalemu’s son is
conscripted Olewo understands that her role is to use her contacts to
get him back: ‘One should do what one could to stay alive. And do what
was possible to help others stay alive.’116 Nwapa’s Uhamiri is inter-
preted as the spiritual mother who stands in opposition to a patriarchal
Christian god; by the same token, she signifies a traditional feminin-
ity that was sidelined by colonization and is still under threat from a
contemporary masculinist politics driven by greed. Uhamiri is one of
a series of water spirits ranging from tutelary goddesses to Mamiwata
(water goddesses with mermaid-like features), who populate Igbo ico-
nography and appear in the form of female avatars in Nigerian writing,
from Christopher Okigbo, a devotee of the water goddess Idoto, whose
poetry is filled with images of water spirits, to the novels of Adichie and
Ezeigbo. In Half of a Yellow Sun, Okigbo himself is invoked in the figure
of Okeoma, the poet who visits Odenigbo in Nsukka and is captivated by
Olanna whom he describes as a ‘mermaid’, In Roses and Bullets, Eloka,
who becomes Ginika’s husband, first approaches her to ask her to play
‘mermaid, the sea princess’, in the play he has written, titled Mam-
myWata, which he describes as ‘a political allegory of the war between
112
Ibid., 81.
113
Ibid., 168.
114
Ibid., 88.
115
Ibid., 89.
116
Ibid., 97.
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452 Jane Bryce
Nigeria and Biafra’.117 Thereafter, Ginika is repeatedly referred to as his

‘mermaid’.
If Olanna and Ginika are figured as Mamiwata, another recurring
trope from traditional iconography is that of the Ogbanje, the trouble-
some child that grieves its mother by dying, and whose characteristics
are said to include ambiguity and duality. While duality is indeed an
aspect of the female protagonists of these two novels, signified by their
restlessness, their refusal of convention and determination to find love
on their own terms, there are also more obvious Ogbanje figures. I have
argued elsewhere that Olanna’s sister, Kainene, plays an Ogbanje role by
disappearing at the end of the narrative;118 but there are also Baby, the
child of Odenigbo – an Ogbanje who survives because Olanna adopts
her as her own, as well as the stillborn child to which Ginika gives birth
after her rape.119 This deformed baby is reminiscent of baby Biafra in
Destination Biafra, who dies after being carried for miles on Debbie’s
back through the bush, and the lost child of the pregnant woman
who dies on the road out of Ugwuta in Never Again. One of the ways in
which Eloka’s play, MammyWata, may be ‘a political allegory of the war
between Nigeria and Biafra’, is the use of childlessness as a signifier.
The fact that the great beauty of the play’s childless woman also makes
her desirable and enticing could explain why Nigeria has gone to war
to take possession of Biafra, the Mamiwata country that sacrifices its
children.
The use of what I am calling a ‘suppressed semiotic’ has been
addressed by other critics, notably Madhu Krishnan. For Krishnan,
‘the occluded feminine’ (her term) so far permeates male- and female-
authored novels by Igbo writers, from Achebe to Abani, as to constitute
‘an alternative paradigm for discourses of gender’. 120 By embodying
pre-colonial womanhood, this occluded feminine, discernible in the
shape of water spirits like Idemili and Mamiwata, signifies an alternative
to postcolonial modes of theorizing identity, emphasizing ambivalence,
instability and heterogeneity. The feminine emerges, she concludes, ‘as
a tongue spoken in a distinct code uncontainable within the dominant
discourse of the Nigerian novel, and instead reclaims its centrality as
a marker of the ambivalence which marks the postcolonial Nigerian
condition’.121 By extending the paradigm from a defining feature of
117
Adimora-Ezeigbo, Roses and Bullets, Part 1, Ch. 2.
118
See Jane Bryce, ‘“Half and Half Children”: Third-Generation Women Writers and the
New Nigerian Novel’, RAL 39:2 (2008), 49–67, for a more detailed discussion of Half of
a Yellow Sun and the use of traditional tropes.
119
‘Ginikanwa’: ‘Nothing is greater than a child’, www.umuigbo.com/igbo-names/g.html
(accessed February 19, 2015).
120
M. Krishnan, ‘Mami Wata and the Occluded Feminine in Anglophone Nigerian-Igbo Lit-
erature’, 43:1 (2012), 2.
121
Ibid., 15.
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women’s writing to a foundational trope of Nigerian writing in general,

this insight invites a further elaboration.
Discussing the traditional ontological concepts that can be gleaned
from African orality, Ghanaian philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu, speaks of
a ‘normative’ idea of personhood – personhood as something to be
aspired to and achieved through one’s own efforts. Yoruba belief, for
example, tells us that humans choose their ori – literally, their head, or
personal destiny – and are therefore responsible for what they become.
In other words, to be human is to have a code of ethics; not to have one,
or to be subjected to a situation where no-one around you has one, is
to be less than human, to be animalized, as Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy and
Abani’s child soldier in Song for Night, very well know; as Ginika experi-
ences when she is imprisoned, raped and beaten. In Yoruba, this aspira-
tional condition of personhood is known as eniyan; in Bantu languages
it is known generically as ubuntu; while onipa in Akan, means ‘a human
individual of a certain moral and social standing’, which, Wiredu says,
‘is naturally uppermost in the mind in contexts of social commentary or
moral self-examination’.122 The novels I have discussed, I believe, offer
such commentary and self-examination in the context of the Biafran
Civil War, an event which called personhood into question. The Igbo chi,
described by Echeruo as ‘probably one of the most complex theological
concepts ever devised to explain the universe’, is at the root of the Igbo
sense of personhood, of what it means to be human.123 Wiredu tells
us that in African orality, communalism, kinship, and reciprocity are
‘the source of a sense of human connectedness’;124 it follows that the
breaking of that connectedness – through acts of violence, war, rape,
etc. – reduces the perpetrator, no less than the victim, to something less
than human. In this regard, war novels that draw on a suppressed semi-
otic through the use of traditional tropes raise questions, not only about
femininity, but about what it means to be human. These questions,
contextualized as arising from the War, reverberate in the twenty-first
century and make Biafra a key signifier in the construction of Nigerian
personhood.
122
Kwasi Wiredu, ‘An Oral Philosophy of Personhood: Comments on Philosophy and Oral-
ity’, RAL 40:1 (2009), 16–17.
123
M.C. Onukawa, ‘The Chi Concept in Igbo Gender Naming’, Africa 70:1 (2000), 107.
124
Wiredu, ‘An Oral Philosophy’, 15.
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21 Female Participation in War and the
Implication of Nationalism
The Postcolonial Disconnection in
Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra
Ofure O.M. Aito
Introduction
War is a subjective experience defined by idealistic whims of leadership
through which leaders seek to maintain a system of ideological par-
ticipation. Further, war is purposeful as one group attempts to destroy
or weaken the other in order to gain greater access and/or control, or
convert the other into a form more beneficial to the dominant group. It
starts as an idealism that results in disruptions such as, victimization,
rebellion, and resistance, and it finally ends in conflict. Often, violence,
victimization, and genocide are major consequences of war ignited in
the ‘spirit of patriotism’.
Nigeria as a nation is vast in territory, diverse in ethnicity and lan-
guage, and has been confronted with issues of disputed borders and
boundaries. With a history of violent conflicts, Nigeria’s first major
experience of political transition was marked by military coups, geo-
political rebellion, and civil war from 1967 to 1970 (indicated as a
nationalist/liberation war with ethnic-political undertones), which
have resulted in historical and fictional literary works. The Civil War
of 1967–1970 was the culmination of the geographical contradic-
tions and political imbalances that existed in the nation since she came
under colonial occupation. The geographical contradictions depict ele-
ments of tribalism/ethnicity, political and ideological ‘accidentals’ of
the Western economic agenda, administrative miscalculations, local
political rivalries, the 1963 census recount, the 1964/65 election, bor-
ders and boundaries disparities, dominant ethnic control, the discovery
of and struggle for control of oil wealth, and individual betrayal and
disillusionment.
This chapter focuses on Buchi Emecheta’s fictionalization of the his-
torical ‘accidentals’ of the 1967–1970 ‘pogrom’ – termed the Biafran
War. Her work focuses on the struggle for national and ethnic identi-
ties, female participation, the negotiation of identity performance,
and conflict resolution. It also focuses on the consequences of these
historical ‘accidentals’ on the current political dispensation from a
futuristic literary perspective. Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1983),
as a part of a womanly, fictional continuum that helps define national
454
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Female Participation: Emecheta Destination Biafra 455
and individual identities, is a narrative placed within a specific cul-

tural location and context. On the one hand, she explores the points
of conflict between the dominant identities represented by the West,
the political leaders, and the Army, who latched on the manipulation
of ethnic sentiments in their bid to access and control the oil wealth.
On the other, the dominated identities are represented by the masses,
particularly the women, in the pursuit of nationalism, personal redis-
covery, and development.
Emecheta’s narrative moves beyond being a journalistic repertoire of
past events to a skeptical account of the corrupt governance that tends
towards neo-colonialism. It is a foregrounding of history in fiction, from
a woman’s perspective, to depict the facts of a national conflict and the
challenges of the postcolonial transition process that disconnected and
degenerated into disillusionment and war. Thus, the focus here is to
investigate Emecheta’s view of the motifs of pain and disillusionment,
socio-political disconnection, and the attendant victimization of vari-
ous parties involved in the conflicts. In addition, the work highlights the
female negotiating power in national and political conflicts, drawing
upon the issues of war and the inter-group rivalry over ethnicity and
the struggle for control of oil wealth.
The paper takes various approaches, including an interrogation of
the implications of nationalism within the notion of postcolonialism in
Nigeria and its ambivalences in ethnicity through the blend of facts and
fiction of civil war. In addition, the novel considers the disconnection
in ethnic formation of Nigeria, and focuses on the burgeoning trend of
female participation in war and significance in national and individual
recognition, especially in the changing values of female identity in con-
temporary society. All lead to revealing how the novel represents the
disconnection in human ideals and the significance of female presence
in conflict resolution.
The Nigeria-Biafra War: Facts and Fiction of a

Postcolonial Disconnection
In Destination Biafra, the readers encounter a realistic recollection of
history of Nigeria’s transition from colonialism to postcolonial self-rule.
Emecheta has been greatly influenced by male literary chronicles about
Civil War that failed to address the gender make-up of the imagined
community. The writing of the novel is particularly influenced by Wole
Soyinka’s The Man Died, which provides the idea about the plights of the
minority tribal groups in Nigeria who are non-Igbos – the Mid-Western
peoples on whose grounds the battle of personal idealism was fought
– in the quest for ‘unitary nationalism’. The novel presents the conse-
quences of the imperial carve-up of borders and boundaries (an admin-
istrative balkanization underwritten by British and French powers),
which perennially assures Nigerians of nominal political control and
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456 Ofure O.M. Aito
unity.1 Unfortunately, lumping together people with divergent histories,

cultures, tribes, religions, and languages raises questions about their
social and political balance and consolidation in the shadows of the
Western imperialism, even in the more-recent religious terrorism. The
manipulation of political structure laid out by the colonialists glaringly
depicts difference and pre-empts rebellion.
Difference and rebellion are the beacons of independent Nigeria to
date, with each ethnic group seeking to protect its own territorial iden-
tity. In other words, the ‘imaginary’ independent structure of Western
creation is defined by contradictions, struggles, divisions, and constant
threats of secession. The background difference and resistance in post-
colonial Nigeria inform Emecheta’s literary writing, which explores the
issues of difference by measuring it against the social and political con-
ditions in the post-independence era also referred to as ‘post-contact’
disconnection by Elleke Boehmer.2
Destination Biafra, like many other Nigerian fictional narratives, rep-
resents these social and political events that have shaped the societies
since the outset of Western imperialism, and refract the dynamism of
the people since independence. The contemporary or postcolonial nar-
ratives have focused on anti-colonial struggles that have galvanized into
war. Consequently, Nigerian fiction has become a veritable weapon for
resistance, depicting postcolonial disillusionment with the economic
and political imbalances in the societies that result from colonial expe-
rience and a corrupt postcolonial leadership system. It has also become
the intellectual site for representing the confusion and contradiction
that clearly mark the ethnic divisions of the colonized nations.
Joya Uraizee, aligning with Eric Hobsbawm’s argument, comments
that the postcolonial divisions and conflicts are the consequences of the
random structure of the West for administrative zones and ‘economic
control’. Uraizee’s view is that the omissions of the colonized nations
are a result of colonialists’ lack of cultural knowledge of the people and
their diversity.3 Her view implies that the agenda behind lumping eth-
nically and politically diverse people in hybrids or collective groups is
an economic prognosis for granting independence that has left several
African nations mired in ethnic conflict, and political and ideological
states of confusion. Nigerian history of civil war, reflecting a typical
Western lack of knowledge, presents a new experience of transition to
new rule (self-rule) that deposits upon literature a new genre of literary
interest about the anarchy that followed the political transition.
1
Wole Soyinka, The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (London: Rex Collings, 1973).
2
Elleke Boehmer, ‘Introduction’, in her Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postco-
lonial Nation (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 115.
3
Joya Uraizee, ‘Fragmented Borders and Female Boundary Markers in Buchi Emecheta’s
Destination Biafra’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 30:1–2 (1997),
16.
000 Fal book B.indb 456 13/06/2016 22:06

The Implications of Nationalism and Postcolonial Ambivalences

The contestations of political imbroglio, ethnic conflicts, election
abuses, and nationalist confusion are borne of idealistic attachment in
one’s collective (familiar) space – tribal loyalty marked by the nation’s
arbitrary history of transition. In this context, many Nigerian novels
by male writers, such as Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died (1973), Chinua
Achebe’s Girls at War (1972), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991),
Festus Iyayi’s The Heroes (1986), and Helon Habila’s Measuring Time
(2007), conceptualize the created spaces (national order) or regions as
structured by continual drawing and redrawing of imaginary and arbi-
trary boundaries. These boundaries ignite conflicts of ethnicity, political
differences, corruption, disillusionment, rebellions, war, gender imbal-
ance, and the discovery of oil wells. Modern African fiction features
these ambivalences that emerge from the artificial or hybridized, socio-
political, and cultural mapping of the West and also raises doubts about
the authenticity of postcolonial experience and nationalism struggle.
Scholars have mobilized postcolonialism as a theory and period
marker to engage in critical assessment of literary texts produced in
countries and cultures that have come into contact with the Western
imperialist mission. However, scholars’ interrogations are based on
existing colonial structures, which are questionable in the face of post-
independence challenges. In Edward Said’s Orientalism, postcolonialism
focuses on correcting the colonizer’s invented false images, myths and
other (mis)representations of the ‘Third World’ in stereotypical images
to conveniently justify Western exploitation and domination of Eastern
and Middle-Eastern cultures and people.4 Homi Bhabha also shows how
certain cultures (mis)represent other cultures, thereby extending their
political and social domination in the modern world order.5
Postcolonial theory recognizes cultural identities in colonized socie-
ties and deals with the danger of developing a national identity after
colonial rule, particularly the ways in which writers articulate and
celebrate their colonialism via images of the colonized as perpetually
inferior peoples, societies, and cultures. Nonetheless, many critics have
expressed concerns about the authenticity of this theory in address-
ing the binary opposition structures of superiority versus inferiority of
cultures and peoples. Critics like Kwame Anthony Appiah have further
questioned the term postcolonialism and argued that it is frequently
misunderstood as a temporal concept about the time after colonial-
ism, or following the politically determined Independence Day, when a
4
Edward Said, Orientalism (Atlanta, GA: Vintage Books, 1979), 83.
5
Homi Bhabha, ‘Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative’,
The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
000 Fal book B.indb 457 13/06/2016 22:06

458 Ofure O.M. Aito
country breaks away from its governance by another state.6 To Said, it

is an engagement with and contestation of the colonialist’s discourses,
power structures, and social hierarchies. It is, thus, the colonized reply to
the colonizer’s legacy by writing back to the center, when the indigenous
peoples write their own histories and legacies using the colonizer’s lan-
guage. However, the theory addresses matters of identity, gender, race,
and ethnicity and the challenges of developing a postcolonial identity.
Martin Japtok in the introduction to his collection of essays builds
upon the argument about the meaning of postcolonialism and its
authenticity by re-examining its advantages in the present war-torn
independent African nations that are weighted by historical and cul-
tural differences, despite the imaginary sense of geographical unity.7
Japtok questions the significance of independence or postcolonialism:
is it a new, possibly invidious form of perpetuating Western hegemony
through relating all ‘peripheries’ to a ‘center’ like the spokes of a wheel,
thus, constricting the ability to interact with one another as long as
change is focused on the West.8 These issues may be paramount in
Emecheta’s Destination Biafra, representing an anti-imperialist attitude
in the nationalist conflicts, negotiation, and transformation that have
trailed postcolonial Africa, especially Nigeria, where attention focused
on the West for resolution. In his attempt to answer the questions and
implications of post-independence and postcoloniality tags, Japtok
adopts Françoise Lionnet’s alternative proposal to postcolonialism
which is ‘post-contact’. Lionnet infers that the ‘post’ in postcolonialism
implies more than the static periodization after colonialism: ‘In fact, I
find it useful to think of “postcoloniality” in terms of “post-contact”:
that is as a condition that exists within, and thus contests and resists the
colonial moment, itself with its ideology of domination.’9
To many, postcoloniality defies specific answers; it has become a the-
oretical adoption to understanding the contest between the colonizers
and the colonized as well as the continued imperialist domination by the
West and by African leaders. It is an interrogative approach to the spin-
offs of colonialism and post-independence African leadership systems
in order to analyse the ‘truth’ and the meaning of independence. In this
chapter, Martin Japtok’s submission of postcoloniality as before and
post-contact as after, as an interchange for postcoloniality, will be con-
stantly referred to in the critical interrogation of the post-independence
6
Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Is the “Post” in “Postcolonial” the “Post” in “Postmodern”?’
in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, edited by Anne McClin-
tock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997),
420.
7
Martin Japtok, ed., ‘Introduction’, Postcolonial Perspectives on Women Writers: From Africa,
the Caribbean and the U.S. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998), x.
8
Ibid., x–xi.
9
Françoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1995), 4.
000 Fal book B.indb 458 13/06/2016 22:06

disconnection in the Nigeria-Biafra War in Destination Biafra. The refer-

ence to the ‘post-contact’ line of argument is as a result of the skepti-
cism that has trailed the notion of ‘marginal’ independence of Nigeria,
which is subjective in terms of the unsettling continued Western influ-
ence and the failed liberation/nationalist impetus for independence. The
failure of the ‘nationalist’ revolutionaries and the military reactionaries
to attain a national unity in Nigeria has justified the doubt about the
truth of postcolonial freedom and the illusionary/nominal unity.
The Nigeria-Biafra War: A Fundamental Conflict

The Nigeria-Biafra Civil War of 1967–1970 was premised on the nation-
alist vision of an ideal national unity, freedom from Northern oligarchy,
and military ‘personal’ idealism in what is seen as a conflict between
nationalist revolutionaries and the military reactionaries. The conse-
quences of this conflict defined the future structural bases of Nigeria
and its peoples in terms of politics, religion, ethnicity, and economy, and
it represented the first of many conflicts after colonialism. It marked the
tragedy of evolution into a postmodern society in which the historical,
socio-political conflict deposited a new genre of literary interests. The
postcolonial contact or post-independence experience, which was trig-
gered by a Nigerian Army revolutionary coup to overthrow the corrupt
civilian government of Sir Abubakar Tafewa Balewa and to correct the
electoral malpractices of 1964/65, resulted in different reactions and
responses. The Army reactionary coup that instated the military rule
of Yakubu Gowon was motivated by the ideals and principles of ‘one
Nigeria’ and the desire to establish a new post-independence era, stamp
out corruption and, above all, end the reign of terror in Western Nige-
ria. Accordingly this fact was established by Adewale Ademoyega in his
extraction of Major Kaduna Nzeogwu’s revolutionary radio declara-
tion: ‘Our enemies are the politicians’ profiteers, the swindlers; the men
in high and low places that seek bribes and demand ten percent … the
tribalists; those that have corrupted our society … and the ethno-religious
terrorism of Boko Haram.’10
The survival of Nigeria was severely under the siege of corrupt lead-
ership and influential presence of the Western imperialist who navi-
gated the crisis to their respective economic advantages. The factors
of the war stated by the Army were the results of the existing threats
to national stability. According to Theodora Ezeigbo, ‘the 1966 coup
hastened Nigeria’s collapse … from independence to January 1966, the
country had been in serious turmoil; but the coup put the country in an
10
Adewale Ademoyega, Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup (Ibadan: Evans
Brothers, 1981), 84, emphasis added.
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460 Ofure O.M. Aito
even graver situation’.11 The reactions regarding the eventful periods

before the civil war were results of various and divergent perceptions
that determined the grave actions that followed the coup, such as disil-
lusionment, idealism, geographical ambivalence, ethnic rivalry, desires
for political and economic control, and the imperialists’ double-deal
strategy. All these historical determinants of modern Nigeria created
an imbroglio in the notion of a nation, and planted the seeds of ethnic
distrust and struggle for identity and recognition that characterized the
nation.
Such characteristics snowballed into present situations such as the
constant religious conflicts, ethnic rivalry between the Hausas and the
Igbos, and the militancy of the Niger Delta, and informed the new gen-
eration of writers’ thematic focus in Nigerian literature. Through their
art, literary writers interrogated the morality of the war in order to jus-
tify the behavioral patterns of the people in the contemporary political
dispensation. The war may thus be regarded as a ‘political intercourse’.
This means that the ambivalences of geographical contradiction in the
form of ethnicity (borders and boundaries) and cultural differences as
they culminate in conflicts have inherent political significances, even
though the responses or perceptions are represented differently. War in
this sense becomes ‘accidental’ in the collective human intentions that
defy a concise prediction. Yet, it is a historical reference and a fictional
material for investigating its morality and shocking into consciousness
the people’s sensibility in the post-war era, in order to reshape the future.
In order to give insights into the reality of the past and make a case
for anti-war views in the present socio-political contestations, divergent
perceptions about the violence and human suffering during the civil
war became biographical narratives or fictional documentations or eye-
witness accounts. Male writers such as Wole Soyinka in The Man Died
represent the plights of the masses, while Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset
at Dawn (1976) and Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty (1976) portrayed
the common man as the real hero. The female fictional expressions of
the war as documented by Flora Nwapa in Never Again (1975), Buchi
Emecheta in Destination Biafra, and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of the
Yellow Sun (2006) provide characteristic stark details of female sexual
violation and political sacrifices on the altar of negotiation, degrada-
tion, and victimization unleashed on the people. This category of writ-
ers depict from the feminist point of view Nigeria’s political history
from the days of independence, highlighting the corruption, the lack of
vision and incompetence of the men who ruled the nation.
11
Theodora Ezeigbo, Fact & Fiction in the Literature of the Nigerian Civil War (Lagos: Unity
Publishing & Research, 1991), 15.
000 Fal book B.indb 460 13/06/2016 22:06

Nationalism and Female Negotiation: The Postcolonial

Disconnection in Destination Biafra
Buchi Emecheta’s nationalist postcolonial narrative presents an ambiv-
alent position of war and female roles in national conflict and peace.
It is more or less a chronological eye-witness account given to her by
her people in Ibuza who were victims of the Nigerian Civil War. In fact,
Destination Biafra was informed by survivors of the civil strife like Maria
Nwukor. Her personal experience as a victim and survivor of the war
in her struggle to reunite with her estranged family is embodied in the
journey motif of the character Mrs Madako, Bonny, the kettle boy, and
Ogo. By subjecting history into a realistic mode, Emecheta depicts the
tragic events and the dehumanization of the ordinary people (especially
women and children) in her skeptical fictionalization of history. Thus in
rewriting history in order to ‘write home’ her bitterness about the war,
she presents gender-conscious commentary on Achebe’ epochal oeuvre
and recasts Flora Nwapa’s narrative endeavor.
Emecheta, one could assume, reconstructed Nwapa’s Biafran wives’
and market women’s survival struggles by portraying a militant-fem-
inist heroine on a mission of historical/war intervention and nation-
alist redefinition. The novel, a chronological documentation of war, is
focused on re-imagining nationality, subjectivity, and sexuality as reac-
tions to the disillusionment in postcolonialism. Her work reveals that
these are interwoven with the nationalist quest for identity. In order
to strengthen her submission, she projects the changing conditions
of women in a changing society in Africa that was once an imperial-
ist colony. In no other novel, however, is she more vociferous about the
issues of nationalism woven around subjectivity and sexuality, with the
woman as a peacemaker or conflict negotiator in the nation’s heteroge-
neous imaginary make-up, than in the ironic novel, Destination Biafra.
Emecheta, like Nwapa, recasts the African social space of women and
attempts to redefine ironically the postcolonial nation from her points
of view. However, her narrative of female socio-political space during
the emerging nationalist consciousness and civil war is taken from
the standpoint of ambivalence about the implications of ‘one nation’
and female sexuality, which deviates from Nwapa’s Never Again repre-
sentation of Biafran women’s survival strategies. Indeed, Emecheta’s
Destination Biafra methodologically has been categorized as ‘temporal/
territorial’ by Elleke Boehmer, who regards it as (auto)biographical, in
so far as Emecheta’s heroines play out episodes from her family’s matri-
lineal history throughout the novel.12 That is, she (auto)biographically
transforms key experiences in her national history and life into the leit-
motifs of her narrative: she extracts events and images that represent
12
Elleke Boehmer, ‘Introduction’, 114.
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462 Ofure O.M. Aito
women’s day-to-day struggles and realities to define the socio-political

space of African women, especially Igbo women, in order to capture
their identity or significance. Emecheta’s chronology of the civil war,
such as the conditions and the contradictions before and during it, is
literarily demonstrated in identity and sexual evolution, and in the
significance of women in the national transformation process. In this
vein, she reconstructs Nwapa’s narrative from the opposing ends of the
war on the grounds of seeking unity in Nigeria through a contempo-
rary heroine who reflects the can-do assertiveness of traditional Igbo
women.
Destination Biafra demonstrates Emecheta’s commitment to histori-
cal intervention and the national redefinition of socio-political ideals.
Male writers have represented the war in patriarchal terms. Thus, the
novel represents a female, anti-imperialist fictionalization of the plights
of the ordinary people and women’s sexual subjectivity, victimization,
and negotiation during war, and their participation in peace-making. In
short, the fictional reconstruction of the painful history of national divi-
sion and discrimination is based on ethnicity and imperialist overtures
in national order and female sexual subjectivity. The novel represents
the emergence of new women from the private sphere into the national
discourse. The literary assertion depicts the inner strength and identity
perceptions of traditional and ‘newly’ independent women as well as
their ability to manage and respond to conflicts. It is a representation of
the challenges of ‘post-contact’ process in Nigeria, featuring national
division occasioned by the imperialist economic mission and the ethnic
disaster through border and boundary divisions.
Thematically, Destination Biafra portrays the ambivalent position of
women in nationalist discourses. It questions the notion of political
idealism and depicts the ambivalent reality of nationalism, the stark
truths of violence and victimization, and the significance of negotia-
tions during violent war. In the novel, women and children suffer just as
ethnicity becomes the weapon of war. In Joya Uraizee’s view, the frag-
mented borders and boundaries of a nation are outlined symbolically
in the identity and conditions of women. In essence, women are the
‘repositories’, however, ambivalent.13 This position is taken from Deniz
Kandiyoti’s argument in another context that, as the nation transitions
to neo-colonialism from the threshold of postcoloniality, the female
status also transports into the ‘privileged repositor[ies] of uncontami-
nated national values’.14 Uraizee explains that the female characters as
‘privileged repositor[ies]’ in Destination Biafra become at various times
the ‘boundary markers’, or the negotiators in the various communities
13
Uraizee, ‘Fragmented Borders’, 16.
14
Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Identity and Its Discontents: Women and Nation’, in Colonial Discourse
and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 376–91.
000 Fal book B.indb 462 13/06/2016 22:06

within the constantly fluid geographical structures.15 Her submission is

that Emecheta’s narrative suggests that the position of Nigerian women
within fluctuating borders is ambivalent. Sometimes they are victims
of violence and at other times symbolic of the transition process of the
nation.
The novel focuses on a young Oxford-trained unmarried woman,
Orisha Debbie Ogedemgbe, a self-consciously patriotic ‘new woman’
of the federated Nigeria who refracts the scene of the war, and even-
tually, redefines the nation. This woman is not a combatant or militia
woman, as one finds in Achebe’s Girls at War, probably as a result of
the intractability of the war materials. Yet her solution is aimed at the
heart of male-dominant idealism in politics and narratives of the war.
Thus, Emecheta, boldly rewriting Biafra’s history from a women-cen-
tered perspective, invents an idealized heroine who is caught in the web
of male idealism. The heroine attempts to negotiate the consequences
of such idealism by claiming Nigerianness, rather than becoming a
member of one of the dominant ethnic groups – Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa
– who are in conflict for political and economic control. The novel is
premised on the awareness of the relationship between literature and
its historical context(s), which Susan Andrade describes as a recast of
the Igbo Women’s War or Aba Riot of 1929.16 Importantly, it examines
the consequences of the civil war: victimization and rape, corruption,
the notion of nationalism, and the disillusionment occasioned by ideo-
logical differences and geo-political or ethnic conflict.
Destination Biafra represents the disconnection in the ideals of nation-
alism in the national, ethnic, and individual transitional changes after
colonialism. Thus, it presents the transition process of Nigeria from
colonialism to postcolonialism to ‘new’ colonialism, resulting in a com-
plex war of idealization in a triangular form. For the Nigerian forces,
the war was to unite the nation; for the Biafran force, it was a war of
freedom; to the soldiers in the Nigerian forces, it became a revenge
mission for the death of their religious and political leaders in the first
revolution; to the heroine, Debbie, it marked the death of idealism and
vision and the birth of division and disillusionment. Symbolically, it
marks the transition of Nigerian women from traditional roles as politi-
cally suppressed, economically dependent, and educationally backward
to an idealized status of new women and ‘the privileged repositories’ of
nationalist notions.
The initial postcolonial disconnection is marked by the imperialists’
political miscalculation about the ethnic unification of a diverse soci-
ety. This Western political/economic motivation posits a number of
15
Uraizee, ‘Fragmented Borders’, 17.
16
Susan Andrade, ‘The Joys of Daughterhood: Gender, Nationalism, and the Making of
Literary Tradition(s)’, in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, edited by Deidre Lynch and Wil-
liam Warner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 249–75.
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464 Ofure O.M. Aito
responses, such as rebellion, ethnic distrust, and war. The first sign of
political disconnection and national conflict is marked by the 1964/65
election. This is followed by other forms of conflicts or rebellions such
as the military coup that idealized ‘a new meaning of independence’.17
The idealized utopia ‘Destination Biafra’ projects both individual and
national significance. Each situation and character in the novel nur-
tures a personal meaning of ‘Destination Biafra’.
The individual and national utopia is symbolized by Debbie as the
new African woman, on an identity transformation mission, when she
declares her interest in joining the Army, a male-dominant profession,
in order to contribute to the development of her nation. Her desire is
informed by the political vision of a new world for her society and the
women based on the idealized part within the framework of psycho-
feminist impulses. The military utopia and Debbie’s impulsive idealism
interrogate the implications of independence in the face of new imperi-
alism, and also undercut the political visions of the party leaders, who
are leaders without power: ‘A president without the power.’18
The novelist’s characterization is skeptical of the mainstream of
political transformation, which suggests that the postcolonial project
as a whole is a fraud and is a time bomb about to detonate based on
the various idealized visions and impulses of the characters. The ide-
alized impulses reflect political and sexual fractions, the belief in the
possibility of a future without the imposing presence of the Western
control, and the refraction of past visibility of African women before the
advent of colonialism. Thus, Emecheta’s Destination Biafra is an ironic
questioning of the imperialists’ imaginary civilization project, political
veniality, the conditions of war, the vulnerability of the human soci-
ety to social and political idealization of a group and the viability of a
new-woman image in a patriarchal society. These ironic musings are
played out in the various events that chronicle the war. On the road
to national and female redefinition of identity, the answers are figured
out. The journey motif in the novel, rather than mark a rediscovery or
regeneration, symbolizes the death of innocence, unity, and growth for
Nigeria and the people. Emecheta’s literary work simply acknowledges
that women are intrinsic to national imagination through their articu-
lation as determinate subject positions.
However, within Emecheta’s symbolic representation of the socially
and politically disconnected civilization project of the West, the issue of
nationalism consciously emerges. In fact, the trailblazer of idealism is
the national consciousness for one Nigeria flagged by the imperialists,
the politicians, the Army, and the new-generation women like Debbie.
The narrative is significantly a representation of female perspectives
towards national unity, their participation or long-suffering and, in
17
Buchi Emecheta, Destination Biafra (Glasgow: Fontana and William Collins, 1983), 60
18
Ibid., 34.
000 Fal book B.indb 464 13/06/2016 22:06

essence, endorses the nationalistic commitment to war narratives of

Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died and, more recently, Helon Habila’s Meas-
uring Time. Emecheta, on a mission of seeking the truth in a country
influenced, defined, and structured by the Western economic imperi-
alist system, takes up the nationalist mission through the character
of Orisha Debbie, a non-partisan who is neither Igbo, nor Hausa, nor
Yoruba. Debbie must either reconcile her differences or reconstruct
the disconnection in the postcolonial nation and unveil the facade of
nationalist commitment. Either way, as the protagonist, she takes up
the mission of connecting and reconstructing history in order to make
sense of the present claims to the nation’s integrity and political and
economic independence. Her idealist impulse of being a national figure
contributing to the development of her country, leads her on a pilgrim-
age of national rescue and self-discovery, which counters the oppres-
sive formation of the elites’ interest and traditional perception of female
identity as docile.
In the representation of the issue of nationalism, Emecheta portrays
ethnic differences in the interpretations of and the implications for
nationalism. To the politicians, nationalism means power, corruption,
empty promises, and personal gains. This is depicted in the corrupt
practices of characters like the Minister of Finance, Samuel Ogedemg-
be’s dealings with the West, the incessant tussle for power and hostility
between Chief Odumosu and Chief Durosaro, and Alhaji Manliki’s elec-
tion promise: ‘I shall feed you every Jimoh Day.’19 To the colonialists,
African nationalism means political skirmishes to the advantage of the
crown. This is summed up by Alan Grey’s description of the three ethnic
groups, and his interchange with Governor Macdonald:
‘The Yoruba have been dealing with us for decades … There is no doubt that
[the Igbos] are extremely intelligent. But they are greedy as well, and their
arrogance could lead them into trouble. Also, the greater portions of the oil
areas are in their region; so one has to be very careful how the country is
divided constitutionally.’ …
‘But are Hausas not greater in number? … Then there is no problem. Intro-
duce democracy, and let the Hausas rule forever. You did say they are not so
ambitious, and they are happy in the Moslem faith?’20
Emecheta sums up the colonialists outlook on the colonized nation by
depicting their perception and lack of understanding of the ethnic ties
and hegemony that exist and also define the colonized political struc-
ture. Governor Macdonald pontificates the imperialist mission and
motif:
19
20
Ibid., 7.
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466 Ofure O.M. Aito
I think it’s about time we let them go, but not completely … now is the right
time to introduce the type of government they should have. It means our
type of democracy, may be adjusted here and there to suit the local people.
All independence will give to them is the right to govern themselves. That
has nothing to do with whom they trade with.21
Macdonald’s statement justifies both the mission of colonialism and
postcolonial independence. In this sense, each group strives for domi-
nance and personal gains to the detriment of national development.
The Army, entrusted with the security issues of the nation that ranged
from protection of land and properties to ensuring successful transition
from colonialism to postcolonialism, also carries a flag of nationalism
with connotations. The Army has been involved in governance for 33
years – from the outset of independence – yet the its nationalist com-
mitment is idealized: defined by ethnicity and personal betrayals. The
Army as a national conscious group, proposing a national cleansing of
corrupt politicians and Western type of democracy, is informed by the
patriotic spirit of national development, but individual members exhibit
different notions of nationalism. For Brigadier Onyemere Nwokolo,
Major John, and other majors, it means the ideal independence: the
salvaging of Nigeria from corrupt politicians and British colonialists in
order to create ‘a new Nigeria’ free of the ethnic preposition of Major
Chijioke Abosi. To individuals like Major Abosi, Dr Eze and Dr Ezimba,
nationalism means secession (ethno-nationalism) and regional control
of natural resources predominant in the Mid-Western Region. Major
Abosi ambitiously rides on other nationalists’ vision for a state of Biafra
even at the expense of suffering, pains, and disillusionment of the
people he plans to rule.
The nationalist project of re-imaging Nigeria is thus defined by eth-
nicity – Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa notions of nationalism, which esca-
lated into an internecine war. The nationalist ambitions of the Eastern
Igbos and Hausas precipitate the conflicts and the civil war: ‘Many Ibos
[sic] in Sabon Garri quarters of the North regard the coup as an Ibo
success and were arrogant in their joy.’22 Thus, the civil war targets the
Igbos in retaliation for their lack of nationalist sacrifice:
An Ibo officer asking me what he has done to deserve this? I will tell you. You
people want to rule the country, don’t you? You rushed into the army, into
the government, into all the lucrative positions in the country, not satisfied
with that you killed all the politicians from other tribes and then your man
the brigadier became self-appointed head of state … going round the regions
preaching ‘One Nigeria’.23
The perceptions and attitudes towards the notion of ‘one Nigeria’ are
21
Ibid., 7.
22
Ibid., 69.
23
Ibid., 82.
000 Fal book B.indb 466 13/06/2016 22:06

further encapsulated by Major Abosi and Sergeant Salihu Lawal, each

depicting individual’s tribal sentiments, which escalated the war. Lawal
expresses the Northern attitude towards a united nation by advocat-
ing an independent ethnic grouping supported by the West. However,
to Major Oladapo from the Western Region (Yoruba), the notion of
nationalism implies self-sacrifice and loyalty to all tribes.24
The notion of national emancipation, development, and tribal inte-
gration also catches on the new breed of educated women like Debbie
and Babs Teteku who enlisted into the Army.25 Their entrance into that
male-dominated world initiated a new world of women and decon-
structs patriarchal dominance, especially in the tense socio-political
atmosphere of the time. This deconstruction is further manifested in
subsequent war situations in contemporary Africa such as in the war-
torn Liberia and the myth of the Colonel ‘Black Diamond’, whose par-
ticipation in war and media image subvert the notion of war as a male
prerogative. That is, in the recently reconciled nations like Liberia, the
dominant and powerful presence of Colonel Black Diamond impresses
the involvement or agency of women in conflicts and resolutions.
According to Mats Utas, as the head of the Women’s Auxiliary Corps
in Liberia, she commanded a group of girls and young women who
spread fear, if not respect, among Monrovians at the time of Liberians
United for Reconciliation and Democracy’s final advance on the city. Her
appearance in Western media drew popular attention to young female
fighters in African Civil Wars. For a few weeks, the media responded to
the depictions of Black Diamond and her sister rebels by constructing
images that directly challenged the dominant gender discourse. Women
in war are generally discussed only as victims, but Black Diamond and
her sisters emerged as actors – killers portrayed as just as lethal as
their male counterparts but wearing fashionable attire. Even though
Black Diamond stories offered new ideas about women in war to media
observers, in many ways these narratives reproduced and reinforced a
broader dominant media frame that has established Liberia as a case
of difference – of the ‘African Other’ to the rest of the world and even
within the continent itself:
In other African conflicts, like Uganda and Congo, women have participated
in rebel movements, but usually in supporting roles. They cook, clean, and
often sleep with soldiers – not always by choice. But here in Liberia, often
out of revenge for husbands slain at the hands of the enemy, women have
fought on the front line as part of an elite and feared unit unique on the
continent.26
24
Ibid., 78–9.
25
Ibid., 74.
26
Mats Utas, ‘Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering: Tactic Agency in a Young Woman’s Social
Navigation of the Liberian War Zone’, Anthropological Quarterly 78:2 (Spring 2005), 404.
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468 Ofure O.M. Aito
In the Nigerian Civil War case, women’s participation subverts the

general perception of women as victims yet maintains the African
notion of women as nature/nurturer. Though these women are not
combatants or militia members, the nationalist vision is embodied
by Debbie, who carries a torch of such idealistic impulses of ‘a new
Nigeria’ with the passion of a woman. Thus, when the ‘honeymoon of
independence’ erupts in national conflict, the negotiator is the female
soldier flagging on with undiluted nationalistic spirit: ‘You’d do well as
a peace ambassador between the two warring leaders since they both
like and respect you.’27
Betrayal is a key element that disconnects the Nigeria-Biafra desti-
nation to an ideal independence. Betrayal has always been an issue in
postcolonial struggles and resistance. In the novel Destination Biafra,
every character stands guilty of betraying the ideology of one nation.
The politicians are untruthful in their promises to the electorate, the
colonialists double-dealing with the notion of independence, and the
‘saviors’ – the Army – betray the nation and themselves. Thus, rather
than have the utopic vision of unity, the novel in a journalistic approach
reports the disconnection in the utopian impulses of each player. Debbie
as the national negotiator is betrayed by the Nigerian and Biafran forces
through her experiences of trauma and efforts to diffuse the conflict.
Abosi, carried away by personal ambition, betrays the cause of
Biafra to such a degree that he forgets his original aim of liberation to
the extent of sacrificing his fellow combatants like Nwokolo and the
innocent ones among Mid-Western Igbos who trusted him. Momoh
and Abosi, along with the British perpetuators like Alan Grey, betray
the Nigeria-Biafra spirit of trust and nationalism. Adewale Ademoyega
in his eye-witness account of the 1967–1970 civil war concludes that
the war ‘was a clash of personalities – not really of principles nor of
politics’.28 Describing further the atrocities of the clash, Ademoyega
views the Federal leader (Saka Momoh) Gowon as conciliatory and the
Biafran leader (Chijioke Abosi) Ojukwu – whose principle is based on
revenge and power – as intransigent. Based on the eye-witness accounts
and refracted materials, Emecheta argues that the postcolonial project
as a whole is a fraud that falls short of the original utopian impetus,
that is, a betrayal by the Western imperialists and the politicians, with
implications reflected in the contemporary restructure of democracy. In
the same vein, she advocates for an acknowledgement of female partici-
pation in governance.
The issue of reconstructing the symbolic disconnection in the politi-
cal configuration of Nigeria is feminized. Importantly, the attendant
chaos of war and the mission of restructuring the nation symbolically
merge with the emergence of a new-woman image in Nigeria, who is
27
28
Ademoyega, Why we Struck, 160.
000 Fal book B.indb 468 13/06/2016 22:06

militant, yet culturally maternal. The devastated nation finds relevance

in the devalued roles of women during the war. Thus, the war becomes
multi-dimensional in function as a turning point for restructuring the
national image as well as for the emerging significance of women in
national/political discourses. In addition, the horrors of the war find
significance in the plights of the women who symbolize Nigeria being
pulled apart by the two warring leaders, just as Debbie is caught in the
cross-fire of the war and the two ambitious leaders. Emecheta’s Destina-
tion Biafra at this juncture becomes an avant-garde of women as nego-
tiators, mothers, militants, and national heroes. It is a text that brings
to the consciousness of the readers the ‘forgotten’, the ‘scapegoats’ of
war: children like Boniface and Ogo, who simply wanted plantain and
chicken stew, the women and the Asaba/Ibuza women militia strategy
for self-defense, and the murdered innocents in the cross-fire between
the federal soldiers and the Biafran warriors.
One perspective that Emecheta introduces in the text is that the
nationalist impulses of the leaders are actualized by the feminine
powers of conciliation and negotiation. This is seen in Debbie’s mission,
which is both symbolic of national commitment and a representation
of female courage. However, her position is defined by gender-discrim-
inatory undertones that graphically portray the implications of war,
and which are not part of the documented reports of the Nigeria-Biafra
disconnection. The first instance of female symbolic entanglement in
national discourse is the desire expressed by Debbie’s joining the Army:
‘Chijioke, I want to join the army.’29 This is contrary to the traditional
roles expected of the few educated women that include being secretar-
ies or wives taking care of their husbands and nursing babies.30
The second perception is drawn from Debbie being accepted into the
army; her relevance is defined by her ‘feminine charms’. It may be said
that national identity or difference is constituted through the medium
of sexual binary, using the figure/sexuality of a woman as a primary
vehicle. This view plays a significant function in the mission of recon-
structing the ‘status quo’ in order to affect a conflict resolution. In this
view, the woman becomes the ‘scapegoat’ or sacrificial lamb on the
altar of conflict resolution. Debbie is known to be close to Major Chijioke
Abosi, a key player in the war, and the Western negotiator, Alan Grey.
In all senses, her feminine charms are evoked towards the resolution of
conflicts, as indicated by Grey:
Debbie, Debbie look, if it really comes to the crunch, could you make the
journey to the East and remind Abosi of that simple fact? That will be all
you’d have to do. You know how that man adores you, because his father and
yours so respect each other. You can use that to try and save the situation.
29
Ibid., 57.
30
Ibid., 108.
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470 Ofure O.M. Aito
Mind you, it’s more complex than that; I’m only suggesting a simplistic solu-
tion to a complicated problem … Please, Debbie, do this for your country.31
Saka Momoh pinpoints Grey’s insinuation about Debbie’s role in con-
flict resolution and female identity: ‘Your family and his were friends
for a very long time, and of course you were both at Oxford, although
you’re a woman … Not that that should be a handicap. It might help:
you can use your feminine charms to break that icy reserve of his.’32
These two quotations reflect that the definition of female socio-polit-
ical relevance is based on ‘feminine charms’, and from this emerges a
female national figure who fights all odds to reconcile and redefine her
society. However, Emecheta’s portrayal of nationalism and its implica-
tions for women, especially their sexuality, suggests ambivalences in
politics and gender equality in Nigeria. By contrast, towards the end
of the novel, Uzoma Madako, one of the women with whom Debbie is
traveling and shares her travails across the war-torn country, voices the
irony and divergence between the reality and the idealism of national-
ism, the present harsh conditions of war and its implication for women:
A few years ago it was independence, freedom for you, freedom for me: We
[women] were always in the background. Now that freedom has turned into
freedom to kill each other, and our men have left us to bury them and bring
up their children.33
Thus, from the traumatized women’s point of view, nationalist politics
makes up a harsh tale of socio-political conflict and betrayal in which
women have a place only at the beginning and at the end. Madako’s
comment sums up the ambivalence in the male socio-political utopia or
musing: it contrasts the reality with the ideal. It also takes the readers
back to the beginning of the novel when the Army officers deliberated
on the shambles of independence in Major Oladapo’s house.34 Eme-
cheta’s ironic presentation does not challenge the ambivalent position
of women in the socio-political structure; rather it is expressed in the
structure itself.
That is, Biafra as a notion and as a cause is an ironic representation
of Nigerian independence and her political structure: ‘I would rather
say our destination is “Biafra”, since as far as I am concerned, we’re
not yet independent … I think this country needs a military respite, so
to Biafra we will go. Destination Biafra!’35 Biafra symbolizes the discon-
nection in the notion of independence and reconstruction process of
ethnic identity and freedom. The ironic twist is further enhanced by the
internecine war, which is basically a scheme of the Biafran group to
31
Ibid., 114.
32
Ibid., 123.
33
Ibid., 214.
34
Ibid., 60.
35
Ibid., 60.
000 Fal book B.indb 470 13/06/2016 22:06

control another, by the betrayal of the ideals of postcolonial liberation,

and by the economic influence of the West under the guise of political
independence and the plight of the victims of the conflict as summed up
by Debbie: ‘You men make all this mess and call on us women to clear
it up.’36 In a sense, Debbie becomes the bearer of national culture by
living the Biafra of her dreams, and discovering not angels, just people
who are corrupt and exploitative.37
Debbie, in the novel, is objectified as an ironic portrayal of male
notions of social and political nationalism in the sense that she is an
image of a new woman just as Nigeria is a newly independent nation
and both are traumatized by misconceptions about patriotism and
sexuality. Contrary to Mrs Ogedemgbe’s view that Debbie ‘wants to be a
man’, Debbie seeks her own ‘Biafra’. Marie Umeh reflects on the ideal-
ism that went into the creation of the character when she observes that
Debbie ‘is symbolic of Nigeria in search of its rightful place in world
history’.38
She is an allegory and a metaphor in the process of nationalism that
reassesses the historical past in order to cross over to the present and
probably shock the readers into consciousness about the contemporary
postcolonial conditions. Emecheta, by gendering nationalism, affirms
Boehmer’s reference to Sangeeta Ray ‘that no theory engaging fully
with either [national] resistance or sociality at both micro-political
and macro-political levels can adopt “a gender-neutral method of
inquiry”’.39 In the face of it, many progressive, self-assertive women
appear caught in the dilemma of liberation and the transformation
project, through their political action. In Destination Biafra, Debbie is
initially taken by the idea of Biafra led by Chijioke Abosi’s truly inde-
pendent Igbo nation, an ironic imagining of a new nation, free from
corruption and Western economic influence: ‘I have a feeling that this is
going to be the real fight for independence. What we’ve had up till now
was a sham – the Europeans leaving but putting greedy “yes men” in the
government. Now the young men are fighting for our real freedom.’40
However, her ideals are undercut by the reality or the truth of Biafra
as ‘a dream’, which only Debbie believes to be a reality, thereby affirming
Stella Ogedemgbe’s prediction: ‘I only hope you don’t get disappointed
with yours [Biafra] when you find it.’41 The protagonist caught between
the reality of her ideals and the idealism of postcolonial leaders portrays
the betrayal and the trauma of thwarted ideals. For instance, on the
36
Ibid., 14.
37
Ibid., 161.
38
Marie Umeh, Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta: Critical and Theoretical Essays
(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996), 203.
39
Sangeeta Ray, En-gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 152.
40
41
Ibid., 161.
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472 Ofure O.M. Aito
road to Biafra, Debbie and her co-travelers watch soldiers’ grisly rape
of her traveling companions and murder of a pregnant woman.42 The
literary representation of historical tragedies of the war and the victim-
ization awaken a consciousness about the futility of violent conflict: ‘a
conflict waged by brutalized troops, directed by an alienated leadership,
and masterminded by foreign powers’.43 Boehmer’s comment summa-
rizes the entire historical portrayal of a symbolic disconnection in the
noble ideals of Destination Biafra.
As a figure counterbalancing the hopelessness of a national condi-
tion and male idealization, Debbie Ogedemgbe reinterprets the male
notion of Biafra. The new form of national image was integrative, inclu-
sive, tolerant, and motherly – yet equally assertive. Thus, she carries the
burden of a generalized hope for the future having been disillusioned by
the failed concept of Biafra. In other words, rather than being a soldier
in the federal forces, Debbie becomes, in the course of the narrative,
a peacemaker/negotiator in conflict resolution. Emecheta represents
women in the politics of war who, in spite of being its victims, act as
negotiators/peacemakers, and also mop up postcolonial mix-up. Debbie
starts off her symbolic mission to Biafra as a representative of a small
elite, yet learns in the course of the mission to identify with the masses
of women in flight; in the course of their suffering together as women,
bonds form.
Although, she fails to participate in the ‘men’s war’ after joining the
army and, unable to follow the path of her mother by ‘doing something
more than child bearing and being a secretary’, Debbie attains her per-
sonal ‘Biafra’ by being a volunteer to care for war orphans and writ-
ing the memoirs of the war experience.44 Her task, as a victim in a war
of ‘no victor, no vanquished’, is to reconcile maternal values with her
nationalistic instincts and to uncover the reality of male idealization
about nationalism. Florence Stratton affirms in her review of the novel
that what constitutes heroism (nationalism) in a war situation is not
military acts but that which affirms and promotes life.45
In a sense, Emecheta, in representing the history of national conflict,
depicts the resourcefulness of African women especially during crises.
Dovetailing Uzoma Madako’s skeptical comment about conflict resolu-
tion, the Ibuza women in Asaba (Mid-Western) build up their own local
army of female militia, while their men fight for Biafra and the Federal
forces rape their girls.46 Apart from their militant defense strategy, these
women economically sustain themselves amid scarcity by cultivating
new farms and even opening and developing a new trading outlet in
42
Ibid., 136.
43
Ibid., 116.
44
Ibid., 244–6.
45
Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (London:
Routledge, 1994), 123.
46
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Upper Volta, as Mrs Elina Eze and Mrs Ozimba did. The economic and
militant resourcefulness of these women runs parallel with Flora Nwa-
pa’s representation of female survival strategy during crisis in Never
Again. The inner strength of these women is a cultural fact that finds
its root in the past history of women’s reaction and responses, like the
Aba Riot or Aba Women’s War of 1929. Thus, the Mid-Western women
negotiate their survival through economic and military strength that is
found lacking in men, who seem to have been bought over by Abosi’s
Biafran skirmishes.
Within the context of negotiation and resourcefulness, Emecheta
presents another quality of women that negates the notion that war is a
solution, thereby mocking the male utopian impulses. This is the hind-
sight and analytic nature of the women. The novelist implicates that
women are better political strategists who, by virtue of their maternal
nature, both anticipate the unexpected and oftentimes guard against
it. Mesdames Eze, Ozimba, and Ogedemgbe discover new trade links for
making money and surviving during the crisis. These links, to Upper
Volta and Gabon, provide the Ozimbas and Mrs Eze an escape before Dr
Eze’s arrest. Mrs Eze’s resourcefulness, hindsight, and perception of the
motives behind the war are voiced as she asks her husband to forget the
Biafran War, because it is a holocaust not a destination to a new identity
and, to her, the holocaust is the result of oil. For this reasons, she pre-
empts the failure of Biafra:
He will not win this war … Come and let us escape together. It wouldn’t be
betrayal. He has lost. We have lost … But they have taken all our oil lands
… Even if we win now, how can we maintain a Biafra without a drop of oil?
Wasn’t the oil the reason for all this mess in the first place?47
The war is all about oil. The male utopic destination Biafra is all about
oil. Mrs Eze’s hindsight and courage are belied in her maternal instinct
to survive, protect, and even forgive all wrong doing of the men. The
strength of character and courage of the women is further contrasted
in her view about the war and the male idealism of Dr Eze:
Pity at the shortsightedness of her husband and his sex came over Elina.
How could grown men make such blunders, and yet elevate themselves
with such arrogance that one could not reach them to tell them the truth?
She did not want to perish with him … Yet the maternal thing inside her
made her pity this childish man who thought he knew all. She forgave him
his foolishness, just as she would many times forgive her own son.48
Emecheta’s authorial classification of men as childish people who
live in the world of dreams is to condemn the male-dominant power
derived from tradition and colonialism. To her, the male power conceals
47
Ibid., 252–3.
48
Ibid., 253.
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474 Ofure O.M. Aito
an inner weakness that reflects their fear of failure, greed, and short
sight. Indeed, Dr Eze hallucinates his ‘greedy’ Biafra – marked by oil
wealth, power, and betrayal of the many believers (dead and living)
in Biafra. The purpose of this contrastive representation of male and
female ideological views regarding the war is to depict the shallowness
of patriarchal identity and to represent female identity in its depth,
strength, and resourcefulness. Symbolically, the female identity repre-
sentation reflects the nation Nigeria, whose patriarchal ‘childish’ ideal-
ism is bastardized and betrayed. In other words, given the opportunity
on a fair-play ground, women are depicted as rational political analysts
and economic strategists, rather than as emotional amazons.
The oil that indirectly motivates the conflict also informs the greed
and corrupt desires of the major players in the war politics. Major Abosi
is aware of the controlling power the oil in the western Igbo region will
accord him, especially over the Western superior presence. His utopian
view of war is similar to that of the politicians and nationalists who
initially demanded independence for Nigeria. Chijioke Abosi’s vision
of Biafra ‘the symbol of Biafra’ is captured in Dr Eze’s dreams about
his Biafra, ‘which would be the richest land for black people, where
he would be so wealthy that he would not know what to do with the
money, where he would be so powerful that Europeans from all over the
world would come to seek his friendship’.49 The natural resources that
should have provided a basis for development and unity become the
symbolic motif for destruction. The symbolism of ‘oil’ implies divergent
implications and responses and these are prophetically summed up by
the thoughts of Alan Grey:
After all, his mission is complete. Nigeria had been successfully handed
over to the approved leader, Saka Momoh. The fact that he came from the
minority tribe, and had an ample supply of guns and bombs, would stabilize
his position. Nigeria badly needed that stability to allow foreign investors to
come in and suck out the oil. Nigeria would need the money, too, to repay
the debts she owed the ‘friendly nations’ for their generosity in supplying her
with arms, during the time when one tribe was fighting against the other.50
This statement categorizes the idealism in nationalist discourse on
war and establishes the disconnection in attaining an ideal society. The
essence of the Nigeria-Biafra War is motivated by political struggle to
control the economic resources of the nation. The author, using the
technique of authorial intrusion, implicates men for destroying the soci-
ety, and she expresses her anti-imperialist stand on Grey’s view of the
war as an imperialist, ‘post-contact’ overture to decenter the nation in
order to continue the colonizers’ mission of being the all-seeing god, the
49
Ibid., 253.
50
Ibid., 259.
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white people from whom ‘the black people could not hide [anything]’.51
The war is about the oil and the conflict of control wrapped up in the
aborted ideals of utopic ‘destination to Biafra’ that hinders any ‘post-
contact’ development in Nigeria to date, such as, incessant security
threats occasioned by terror attacks and kidnapping in the Niger Delta,
pollution, and corruption. Thus, at the end of the narrative, the major
male characters in the conflict fail to contribute positively to nation
rebuilding while the women suffer in the spin-off of the war and, in
fact, mop up the mess caused by oil and politics of oil and ethnicity. For
instance, Debbie is asked by Alan Grey to ‘do your woman bit tonight’
in ensuring Abosi surrenders. Debbie, however, harnesses her negotiat-
ing power and draws up the initially misplaced motherly instinct for the
can-do-assertiveness by taking up the duty of caring for the orphaned
children of war, and documenting the narrative about ‘a part of life’ of
a people.52
Conclusion
Destination Biafra is an overview of several factors that undermine
development in Nigeria. But particularly, it is a female perspective of
the historical narrative of Nigeria-Biafra War and acknowledgement of
the unsung heroines and victims of war: the forgotten. This is captured
in Debbie’s question in the novel about whether the participation of
women like herself, Babs, Uzoma, and the nuns in Biafra would ever be
ever mentioned at all.53
The novel performs two ideological roles: to bring to awareness the
plight of women’s experience of the war, and to challenge male idealism
that constructs the notion of nationalism. Writing from a diametrically
opposing stance to the dominant gender idealism about nationhood,
Emecheta represents the reality of the war from the female perspective,
using a meta-narrative approach that sets to bring to consciousness the
post-war conditions in Nigeria and female power. The novel is prophetic
apart from being a historical memoir of the war. Regarding utopian
visions, it calls to mind in a prophetic way, the implications of the notion
of patriotism, especially now that Nigeria has returned to democracy,
and more than five decades after independence. Nationalism/patriotism
to Emecheta is affirmation and promotion of life. However, the infant
democratic dispensation is besieged by political issues that sparked the
war of 1967–1970 and marked the 33 years military interregnum.
One major factor the author projects in this narrative is the maternal
quality in female leadership distinct from the men, which is propelled by
patriarchal dominance and quest for power. This is seen in Alan Grey’s
51
Ibid., 158.
52
Ibid., 255.
53
Ibid., 195.
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476 Ofure O.M. Aito
closing remarks about the civil war and Debbie’s personal odyssey and
her efforts in the aftermath to reconcile victims.
Biafra in this context becomes a baby aborted by patriarchal idealistic
vision as a result of the seeds of ethnicity, economic power, and politi-
cal divergence planted by the colonizers and entrenched by Nigerians.
In the present dispensation, Nigeria is still watering and nurturing the
seeds of ethnicity and underdevelopment while dealing with issues of
electoral malpractices and corrupt politicians, and the fierce struggle
over oil that precipitated the conflict in the Niger Delta; these struggles
also spur insecurity, terrorism, and ethnic cleansing. The civil war is a
historical reality that is ‘a part of life’, which all ethnic groups, how-
ever, treat like leprosy. The failure to address the 1967–1970 discon-
nection has created elements of ethnic distrust and vendetta, especially
between the Northern and Eastern ethnic groups. The constant trigger
of conflicts between these groups is framed as religious, but in reality, is
an ethnic/political vendetta that has existed since the civil war of 1967.
The disconnection is thus that the past cannot be separated from the
present and, unless the past errors/omissions are addressed, they will
continue to plague the present and truncate the future.
Apart from the complications of an aborted idealism, women’s par-
ticipation, sacrifices, and negotiation – particularly by the people like
Debbie, the women of Ibuza, Mrs Madako, the children, and other
victims of the war – are unsung, without any reparation ever made.
The failure to acknowledge these victims and the issues that caused the
war perhaps is still responsible for the disparity in politics and power in
twenty-first century ‘post-contact’ Nigeria.
To further complicate the ‘post-contact’ disconnection, the reality of
the historical aspect of the Nigeria-Biafra War has been deleted from
the high school curriculum in order to simplify its implication on con-
temporary perceptions particularly among the youth, and to override
ethnic motivations. This move implies that history of the war is lost
except in the memories of the participants and victims, and that means
that a particular aspect of national identity is lost. Researches like this
one can serve to document the past events and as a reference for resolv-
ing more-recent conflicts/threats of war. Literary fiction, at this junc-
ture, functions as the custodian of the history of human development
in postcolonial Nigeria and offers a bridge through negotiation in the
gap of ethnic differences.
000 Fal book B.indb 476 13/06/2016 22:06

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000 Fal book B.indb 485 13/06/2016 22:06

Index
Abakaliki 274 Akintola, Samuel Ladoka 25, 27, 28,

Abani, Chris 380–99, 450, 453 83, 132, 135, 181, 215, 216, 227,
Abiraya 319, 320, 321, 322 249, 250, 365
Abosi, Major Chijioke see Ojukwu, Col. Akpan, Chief Nkere Uwem 35, 58, 72,
Emeka Odumegwu 173, 413, 414, 415
The Aburi Accord 32, 34, 36, 55, 56, Alakija, Adeyemo 44
84, 133, 175, 185, 186, 364, 366, Alao, Col. Shittu 187
367, 374 Algeria 66, 77
Achebe, Chinua 58, 166, 171, 172, Amadi, Elechi 172, 272
179, 200, 203, 204, 245, 246–64, Angola 246, 247
314, 315, 327, 359, 365, 420, Anioma 418, 419, 420
421, 440, 445, 457, 463 Ankrah, Gen. Ankrah Joseph 185
Addis Ababa 33 Apolo-Gyamfi, Kwame 323, 325
Adebayo, Col. Robert 84 Arochukwu 274, 416
Adekunle, Col. Benjamin 189,190, 191, The Arusha Declaration 85, 86, 88, 89,
203 104, 105
Ademoyega, Maj. Adewale 170, 178, Asaba 102, 190, 370, 375, 440, 469,
180, 181, 215, 216, 218, 249, 472
468 Awka 63, 274
Adichie, Chimamanda 10, 12, 166, Awolowo, Chief Obafemi 25, 28, 36, 44,
195, 202, 266, 267, 279, 435, 82, 112, 120, 126, 131, 139, 143,
439, 443, 445, 446, 447, 450, 144, 147, 149, 172, 181, 182,
451, 460 187, 192, 203, 214, 219, 249,
Afoukwu, Lawyer Peter 331, 332, 333, 258, 259, 261, 364, 365
335, 336 Azikiwe, Nnamdi 44, 58, 82, 103, 120,
After-Africa 315, 316, 318, 320, 322, 131, 132, 144, 145,180, 192, 217,
323, 325 218, 228, 229, 365, 366, 367,
AG 25, 28, 82, 120, 121, 131, 132, 369, 370, 373, 466, 473
262, 366 Azuka, Fr. Zachary 304, 305
Aguiyi-Ironsi, Col. Johnston 20, 47, 48, Azumini 63
83, 84, 121, 124, 126, 127, 128,
132, 136, 140, 141, 142, 143, Balewa, Sir Tafawa 44, 45, 47, 82, 83,
145, 146, 147, 180, 182, 183, 131, 132, 134, 181, 206, 208,
184, 185, 216, 217, 219, 220, 249, 285, 322, 365, 369, 459
221, 222, 223, 224, 228, 229, Belgium 69, 70, 72
339, 365, 438 Bello, Sir Ahmadu 29, 82, 83, 131, 132,
Agumo, Cyril 330, 351, 352, 353, 354, 181, 214, 215, 216, 217, 220,
355, 356, 357, 358 227, 261, 363, 365, 408
The Ahiara declaration 7, 62–80, Bemedi, Salisha 319, 320, 321, 324,
85–107, 273, 377 325
486
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Index 487
Benin 64, 102, 130, 257, 372, 375 Echeruo, Joseph 58

Benin Republic 69, 157 Edet, Inspector-General 184, 216
Biafra Effiong, Gen. Philip 86, 87, 173, 174,
Constitution of 81 177, 180, 226
Recognized by 330 Egbe Omo Oduduwa 250
Size of 81 Egbe Omo Olofin 250
University of see Nsukka, Egypt 62, 66, 77
University of Ejoor, Lt. Col. 133, 155
The Biafra-British Association 39 Ekpo, Margaret 58
Bonny, Island 274, 461 Ekukinam, Bassey 58
Brass 274 Emecheta, Buchi 12, 361–79, 426, 431,
Britain 3, 18, 19, 20, 23, 26, 27, 32, 437, 438, 439, 440, 441, 442,
33, 38, 39, 43, 51, 53, 54, 62, 65, 445, 446, 450, 451 454–76
66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 78, Emir of Zaria 45
79, 104, 111, 122, 176, 202, 321, Enahoro, Chief Anthony 143, 181,
338, 343, 367, 372, 405, 413, 187
427, 438 England see Britain
British colonial policy 18, 33 Enterprises Promotion Decree 193
Amalgamation xvi, 21, 22, 40, 43, Enugu 21, 30, 36, 50, 63, 64, 112, 220,
120, 213, 326 226, 333, 334, 345, 347, 348,
Clifford Constitution xvi 436, 449
Lyttleton’s Constitution xvi Equatorial Guinea 288
McPherson’s Constitution xvi Eritrea 65, 423
Problems of Federation 19–25, 43 Ethiopia 65, 122, 423
Richard’s Constitution xvi, 44 Eyo-Ita, Dr. 229
British Union Jack 81 Eze, Dr. see Mbadiwe, Dr. K. O.
Calabar 112, 130, 162, 257, 259, 275, Fajuyi, Col. Adekunle 84, 122, 132,
417 365, 467, 470
Caritas 62, 112 Fani-Kayode, Remilekun 181
Churchill, Winston S. 54, 58 Fay, Rev. Fr. Myles 312, 313
Clifford, Sir Geoffrey Miles 38 Ferguson, Clyde 191
Cold War 41, 50, 51, 65, 66, 70, 79 Forsyth, Frederick 176, 219, 224, 274,
The Colonel 380, 381, 382, 391, 393, 275, 404, 405, 406, 412
394, 396, 397, 398 France 62, 69, 70, 72, 112, 214, 330,
Congo 66, 467 343, 347, 348
Constitutional conference, 1950 44 Friends of Nigeria 28
Cookey, Prof. Sylvanus J. 94, 95
Cronje, Suzanne 176, 410, 411, 412, Gabon 65, 81, 202, 330, 335, 336, 351
413, 422 Gender issues 403–76
Cumming-Bruce, Francis 32 Germany 70, 72, 214, 338, 340, 343,
Czechoslovakia 202, 343 348
Ghana 66, 122, 133, 161, 163, 185,
Debbie 361, 365, 366, 371, 372, 375, 311
377, 378, 437, 438, 439, 441, Goodell, Senator Charles E. 70, 189
442, 443, 445, 446, 450, 463, Gowon, Yakubu 31, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40,
464, 465, 467, 468, 469, 470, 48, 50, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61,
471, 472 84, 122, 124, 126, 127, 128, 132,
Decree number 34 see unification 133, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147,
decree 148, 154, 157, 158, 171, 172,
Dublin 286, 294, 300 184, 185, 186, 187, 191, 216,
Dukana 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 217, 224, 225, 229, 270, 272,
238, 239, 240, 243, 244 273, 296, 323, 365, 366, 374,
Dunn, Charles W. 70 378, 406, 412, 413, 431, 459,
Durosaro see Akintola, Samuel Ladoka 468, 470, 474
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488 Index
Grey, Capt. Alan 363, 365, 443, 445–6, Lumumba, Patrice 66, 321, 322
465, 468–70, 474–5
Macdonald, Governor see Robertson, Sir
Haiti 62, 65, 66, 81, 330 James Wilson
Hamisi 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, Macpherson Constitution 23, 46
324, 325 Macpherson, John 365
Haruna, Ibrahim 184, 189, 190, 191 Madiebo, Alexander 171, 182, 204,
Henk, Capt. 348, 350 209, 210, 212, 213–29, 415, 416
Herebefore 315, 318, 322, 324, 325 Mailamari, Brig. 216, 220
Hunt, David 32, 51, 53, 56, 57, 58 Mamiwata 452
Mbadiwe, Dr. K. O. 58, 180, 265, 365,
Ibadan 30, 44, 84, 122, 125, 141 466, 473, 474
Ibiam, Sir Francis 58, 220 Mbanefo, Sir Louis 58, 108
Ibuza 370, 376, 440, 461, 469, 472, Mbano 443, 449
476 Mbakwe, Chief Samuel 58
Ifedi, Obiora 331, 332, 334, 339, 340, Mene 232, 233, 236, 238, 239
348, 349 Mitchell 305, 306
Igboba, Maj. 216 Mojekwu, C. C. 106
Ikeja 84, 216 Momoh, Saka see Gowon, Yakubu
Ikoku, Alvan 45, 58 Muhammed, Lt. Col. Murtala 183, 184,
Ikot-Ekpene 63, 277, 431 190, 191
Ikwerre 283, 443
Ireland 62, 286, 288–9, 292, 295, 296, The National Guidance Committee 85,
300, 303, 306, 308, 309 94
Irish parliamentary debate 78 NCNC 25, 28, 82, 120, 131, 132, 137,
Israel 62, 102, 330 262, 366
Ivory Coast 62, 65, 81, 111, 122, 202, Ndem, Prof. Eyo Bassey 106
330, 423 Niger Delta 230, 231, 232, 235, 237,
Iweka, Chief Tobias 332, 334 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243,
244, 423, 460
Kaduna 30, 45, 84, 220, 331, 408 Niger, Bridge 63
Kaduna, Lt. Col. Hassan Usman 133 Niger, River 376
Kainene 274, 281, 282, 442, 445, 447, Nigeria
452 Benue-Plateau State 54
Kano 30, 54, 84, 158 Colony and Protectorate of Lagos 43
Kano, Nguru see Balewa, Sir Tafawa Demarcation of 23
Katsina, Usman 184, 187 East-Central State 54
King of Beggars 380, 381, 382, 383, Eastern Region 28, 36, 37, 40, 44,
392, 393, 394, 396, 397, 398 47, 49, 52, 53, 54, 81, 83, 84, 106,
Kirk-Greene 406, 407 111, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127,
Kogbara, Ignatius I. 106 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 138,
Kutzenov, Arthur 345, 346 139, 141, 143, 147, 150, 152,
154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 161,
Lagos 21, 30, 43, 44, 51, 84, 125, 130, 162, 164, 183, 184, 218, 228,
150, 154, 157, 213, 272, 286, 230, 237, 239, 241, 249, 260,
361, 370, 383, 395, 412, 443 265, 270, 271, 273, 286, 310,
Last, Murray 174, 175, 186, 273 367, 404
Legislative Council 213 First Republic 18, 23, 25, 26, 28,
Legum, Colin 30, 37, 49 131, 154, 217, 262
Lennon, John 71, 72 Indigenization Decree 259
Liberia 423, 467 Mid-Western Region 25, 47, 54, 121,
Libreville see Gabon 154, 183, 218, 230, 257, 263, 404
Lord Selbourne Committee Report 23 Mid-Western State 54, 230
Lugard, Lord Frederick Daltry 18, 19, Nigeria-Biafra War
24, 43, 326 Arms dealing 59, 60
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Index 489
Books on 170–7, 200–6, 209–399, 155, 156, 158, 161, 162, 163,
405–22, 424–76 164, 165
Casualty figures 62 Niger Coast Protectorate 43
Coups 6, 20, 21, 27, 46, 48, 83, 111, Nixon, Richard M. 69, 71, 188, 191,
129, 132, 134, 178, 182, 183, 202
184, 185, 186, 210, 218, 219, Njoku, Col. Hilary 182
221, 220, 224, 225, 227, 248, Njoku, Rose 12, 437, 438, 445
250, 252, 253, 270, 407, 431 Nkrumah, Kwame 66, 323, 322
Duration of 1, 6, 36, 40, 111, 130, NNA 27, 249, 255
211, 314, 403, 404, 415, 454, Nnewi 225, 226
459, 475 NNDP 25, 27, 120, 121, 250, 366
Election boycott 27 North-Central State 54
Igbo massacre 20, 26, 27, 29, 30, North-Eastern State 54
34, 46, 48, 51, 61, 73, 83, 111, North-Western State 54
121, 134, 164, 170, 184, 186, Northern Elements Progressive
187, 191, 202, 203, 204, 218, Union 262
248, 252, 253, 256, 285, 305, Northern Protectorate 40, 43, 213
371, 413, 414 Northern Region 37, 44, 45, 47, 49, 54,
Independence, declaration of 26, 36, 82, 83, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133,
286 135, 136, 137, 141, 143, 150,
International involvement, theories 152, 154, 156, 157, 161, 162,
65–70 181, 218, 228, 239, 255
Islamic factor 25, 31 NPC 25, 28, 82, 120, 121, 131, 132,
Fodio, Uthman Dan 227 135, 136
Boko Haram 174, 182, 459 Nsukka 331, 370
Minor Ethnic Groups, effect on 230– Nsukka, University of 271, 285, 377,
44, 265–83 414, 449
National Census Crises 27, 214, 454 Nwankwo, Lt. Andrew 184, 203
Newspaper involvement 130–65 Nwapa, Flora 12, 426, 427, 428, 429,
Operation Hiroshima xvi 431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436,
Operation Tail Wind xvi 437, 444, 445, 451, 460, 461,
Operation Tiger Claw xvi 462, 473
Secession, date of xvi, 33, 35, 57 Nwokolo, Brig. Onyemere see Nzeogwu,
Start of 36 Major Chukwuma K.
Starvation, use of 187, 188 Nwomah, Everly 348, 349
State of emergency xvi, 28 Nzeogwu, Major Chukwuma K. 27, 28,
Theories on 41–2, 114–20, 123–9 47, 48, 121, 132, 178, 215, 219,
War fronts xvi, 63, 370 220, 221, 222, 227, 228, 248,
Newspapers 249, 251, 330, 331, 365, 375,
Daily Service 131 376, 431, 459, 466
Eastern Outlook 133, 163
Morning Post 133, 134, 135, 137, OAU 30, 31, 33, 37, 66
140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 150, Obanikoro 45
151, 165 Obasanjo, Olusegun 170, 171, 188,
New Nigerian 131, 133, 134, 135, 214, 219, 417, 431
138, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, Obelenwata, Prof. Chancellor 332, 334,
148, 149, 152, 153, 154, 155, 335, 341, 348, 349
157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164 Odenigbo 7, 278
Nigerian Citizen 131 Odomosu see Awolowo, Chief Obafemi
Nigerian Tribune 131, 134, 135, 139, Ogbanje 452
144, 146, 148, 149, 151, 153, Ogedengbe see Okotie-Eboh
156, 160, 161 Ogoja 162, 274
West African Pilot 131, 134, 137, Ogoni 205, 231, 243, 244, 265, 275,
138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 283, 327
144, 146, 149, 150, 151, 153, Ogun 386, 387, 388, 389, 391, 395
000 Fal book B.indb 489 13/06/2016 22:06

490 Index
Ogundipe, Brig. Babafemi 84 Painter, Michael 291, 292, 293, 294,

Ogundipe, R. N. 416, 422 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300
Oji River 420 Paris 331, 334, 340, 346
Ojukwu, Col. Emeka Odumegwu Plateau State 366
After the war 39, 176, 190, 279, Port-Harcourt 63, 64, 112, 226, 234,
290, 302, 405, 406, 415, 431 257, 259, 274, 345, 443, 448, 449
Before the war 21, 28, 33, 34, 36, Portugal 330, 333, 344
38, 40, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54,
55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 81, 84, Red Cross 62, 112, 189, 288, 302, 350,
85, 111, 112, 113, 114, 143, 410
146, 152, 154, 155, 156, 159, Redemption 380, 381, 383, 392, 396
160, 161, 163, 175, 183, 185, Rivers State 21, 54, 230, 242, 298, 300
186, 201, 202, 224, 225, 228, Robertson, Sir James Wilson 363, 365,
229, 270, 271 465, 466
During the war 7, 63, 64, 65, 66, Rosen, Carl von 95
67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, Russia 66, 67, 78, 79, 104, 345, 412,
77, 78, 79, 80, 86, 87, 93, 94, 413
100, 104, 106, 107, 203, 226, Rwanda 6, 118, 423
246, 273, 274
In fiction 323, 364, 365, 368, 371, Sabon Garri 466
372, 373, 374, 376, 377, 378, Salem, Alhaji Kam 216
438, 443, 446, 466, 467, 468, Sarduana of Sokoto see Bello, Sir
471, 473, 474, 475 Ahmadu
Ojukwu, Sir Louis P. O. 100, 103 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 9, 172, 205, 230, 231,
Okafor, Maj. Donatus 180 243, 327, 453
Oke, Elvis 380, 381, 382, 389, 391, Schwarz, Walter 34, 46, 59
392, 393, 395, 396, 397, 398 Senghor, Leopold Sedar 326, 323
Okeji, Dr. 338,339 Shell BP 21, 53, 54
Okpala, Dr. Michael I. 28, 58, 180, 219, South-Eastern State 54, 230, 242
220, 223, 249 Southern Protectorate 40, 43, 213
Okpanam 370 Soviet Union 62, 65, 66, 68, 70, 72, 79,
Okigbo, Christopher 10, 201, 314–27, 430
451 Soyinka, Wole 6, 28, 285, 314, 323,
Okigwe 63 386, 387, 388, 389, 440, 445,
Okotie-Eboh 249, 365, 473 457, 459, 465
Okoye, Brig. Comm. Capt. 353, 354 Sozaboy 9, 230–44, 453
Oladapo, Maj. see Fajuyi, Col. Adekunle Stremlau, John 412, 413
Olanna 7, 278, 442, 443, 444, 445, St. Jorre, John de 409, 410
447, 451, 452 Supreme Military Council 183
Onitsha 63, 102, 274, 417, 443 Switzerland 70, 343, 344, 349
Onuoha 342, 344, 348, 350
Onwura, Capt. Benjy 329, 330, 352, Tanzania 65, 81, 87, 88, 89, 92, 94,
357, 358, 359 104, 202, 330, 423
Oputa Panel 189, 220 Teteku, Babs 365, 467, 475
Ore 372, 375, 376 Date of 66, 94
Orizu, Nwafor 132, 228, 229 Principles of 97, 98
Orlu 307 Nyerere, President Julius 65, 85, 86,
Osuntokun, Akinjide 405, 406 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94
Owerri 63, 64, 102, 410, 443 Trafalgar Square 376, 440, 442
Oyekan, Oba Adeyinka 162 Twenty-pound policy 192
Oyibo, John 407, 408, 409
Ozimba see Azikiwe, Nnamdi Udoji, Chief Jerome 58
O’Brien, Fr. Anthony 304, 305, 306 Uganda 106, 122, 423, 467
O’Donnell, Capt. 351, 352 Ugwuta 433
000 Fal book B.indb 490 13/06/2016 22:06

Index 491
Uli, Airport 81, 85, 188, 288, 290, 291, UPGA 28, 132, 178, 249, 251, 262
298, 301, 311 Uyo 274
Umuahia 63
Unegbu, Maj. Arthur 182, 219, 220 Western Region 25, 44, 47, 54, 81, 83,
Unification Decree 83, 132, 134, 136, 125, 126, 131, 132, 137, 156, 157,
137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 222 161, 164, 182, 183, 184, 218, 239,
United Kingdom 68 249, 250, 255, 363, 364, 467
United Nations Western State 54
Beijing Conference 1985 411 Wilson, Harold 31, 32, 33, 38, 39, 50,
Security Council 65 52, 57, 74, 191
United States 38, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68,
69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 111, 122, 338, Zambia 65, 81, 202, 330
344, 345, 367, 412, 413 Zaria 84, 136
000 Fal book B.indb 491 13/06/2016 22:06

Writing Nigeria-Biafra war_PPC_33mm v9_B+B 01/06/2016 17:01 Page 1
Writing the
EZEKWEM
FALOLA &
Edited by
The Nigeria-Biafra War lasted from 6 July 1966 to 15 January 1970, during
which time the postcolonial Nigerian state fought to bring the Eastern
Nigeria-
region, which had seceded as the State or Republic of Biafra, back into the
newly independent but ethnically and ideologically divided nation. This
volume examines the trends and methodologies in the civil war writings,
both fictional and non-fictional, and is the first to analyse in detail the
Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War

Biafra
intellectual and historical circumstances that helped to shape these often
contentious texts.
The recent high profile fictional account by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in
War
Half of a Yellow Sun was preceded by works by Ken Saro-Wiwa, Elechi
Amadi, Kole Omotoso, Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Edited by
Chukwuemeka Ike and Chris Abani, and strongly convey the horrific TOYIN FALOLA &
human cost of the war on individuals and their communities. The non- OGECHUKWU EZEKWEM
fictional accounts, including Chinua Achebe’s last work, There Was a
Country, are biographies, personal accounts and essays on the causes and
course of the war, its humanitarian crises, and the collaboration of foreign
nations. The contributors examine writers’ and protagonists’ use of
contemporary published texts as a means of continued resistance and
justification of the war, the problems of objectivity encountered in memoirs
and how authors’ backgrounds and sources determine the kinds of biases
that influenced their interpretations, including the gendered divisions in
Nigeria-Biafra War scholarship and sources. By initiating a dialogue on the
civil war literature, this volume engages in a much-needed discourse on the
problems confronting a culturally diverse post-war Nigeria.
Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the
Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the
University of Texas at Austin; Ogechukwu Ezekwem is a PhD student in
the Department of History, University of Texas at Austin.
Cover image: Niger Delta Militancy II. Mixed Media. 2011 (24"x30") by dele jegede
(reproduced by kind permission of the artist © dele jegede)
JAMES CURREY
an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd ISBN 978-1-84701-144-2
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and
668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US)
www.jamescurrey.com 9 781847 011442

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Writing Nigeria-Biafra war_PPC_33mm v9_B+B 01/06/2016 17:01 Page 1

Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War

The recent high profile fictional account by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in

000 Fal book B.indb 1 13/06/2016 22:06

000 Fal book B.indb 3 13/06/2016 22:06

Boydell & Brewer Inc.

First published 2016

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 978–1–84701–144–2 James Currey (Cloth)

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Typeset in 11/12pt Photina

000 Fal book B.indb 4 13/06/2016 22:06

Notes on Contributors viii

Scholarly Trends, Issues, and Themes

ON THE HISTORY OF THE

Background to the Nigerian Civil War

Connecting Theory with Reality

The Ahiara Declaration and the Fate of Biafra

The Ahiara Declaration: Polemics and Politics

Beyond the Blame Game

000 Fal book B.indb 5 13/06/2016 22:06

Confronting the Challenges of Nationhood in

Local Writers and Commitments to Ethnic Sentiments

THE WAR IN FICTION, MEMOIR,

Memoirs and the Question of Objectivity

First, There Was a Country

Ethnic Minorities and the Biafran National Imaginary

Biafra in the Irish Imagination

Magical Realism or Science Fiction

000 Fal book B.indb 6 13/06/2016 22:06

Biafra, an Impractical Mission?

Neo-Colonialism, Biafra, and the Causes of War as

No, This is Not Redemption

Gender and the Construction of the Nigeria-Biafra

What is the Country? Reimagining National Space

Female Participation in War and the Implication

Select Bibliography 477

000 Fal book B.indb 7 13/06/2016 22:06

Adebanwi, Wale, Associate Professor in African American and Afri-

Aito, Ofure is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Liter-

Alabi, Adetayo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mis-

000 Fal book B.indb 8 13/06/2016 22:06

of Saskatchewan. Before joining the University of Mississippi, he taught

Anyanwu, Ogechi E. is Associate Professor of history at Eastern Kentucky

Bateman, Fiona is based at the National University of Ireland Galway,

Bryce, Jane is Professor of African Literature and Cinema at the Univer-

000 Fal book B.indb 9 13/06/2016 22:06

freelance journalist and fiction editor, and has published in a range of

Coffey, Meredith is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the

Ezekwem, Ogechukwu is a PhD candidate in the Department of History,

Hugh Hodges is Associate Professor of English Literature at Trent Uni-

Jeyifo, Biodun is Emeritus Professor of English at Cornell University and

000 Fal book B.indb 10 13/06/2016 22:06

Obi, Cyril is currently Program Director at the Social Science Research

000 Fal book B.indb 11 13/06/2016 22:06

is widely published internationally. His publications include, The Rise of

Odoemene, Akachi holds a PhD in African History from the University

Ogede, Ode is Professor of English at North Carolina Central Univer-

Ojeleye, Olukunle currently teaches African History at the University of

000 Fal book B.indb 12 13/06/2016 22:06