There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (30 page)

Source
: May 30, 2005, © The Achebe Foundation. Interview number 6: Senator Francis J. Ellah.

6.
Eyewitness account.

7.
Ibid.

8.
Author’s recollection.

9.
Achebe and Okafor, eds.,
Don’t Let Him Die
.

The Major Nigerian Actors in the Conflict: Ojukwu and Gowon

1.
On the Biafran side, aside from General Odumegwu Ojukwu: Major General Philip Effiong,
chief of General Staff; Brigadier Tony Eze; Brigadier Pat Amadi; Colonel Joe (“Air
Raid”) Achuzie; Colonel Nsudo; Colonel Iheanacho; Colonel Archibong; Brigadier Patrick
Amadi, Biafran army; Colonel Patrick Anwunah, chief of logistics and principal staff
officer to Ojukwu; Colonel David Ogunewe, military adviser to Ojukwu; Patrick Okeke,
inspector general of Biafran police; Sir Louis Mbafeno, chief justice of Biafra; and
the young and talented Matthew Mbu, Biafran foreign minister.

On the Nigerian side, apart from Major General Yakubu Gowon, the Nigerian head of
state, there were: Obafemi Awolowo, deputy chairman, Supreme Military Council; Brigadier
Emmanuel Ekpo, chief of staff, supreme headquarters; Brigadier Murtala R. Muhammed;
Brigadier Mobalaji Johnson; Lieutenant Colonel Shehu Musa Yar’Adua; Brigadier Hassan
Katsina, chief of staff, Nigerian army; Brigadier Emmanuel Ikwue, chief of air staff;
Rear Admiral Joseph Wey, chief of naval staff; Dr. Taslim Elias, attorney general;
H. E. A. Ejueyitchie, secretary to the Federal Military Government; Anthony Enahoro,
commissioner for information; Olusegun Obasanjo; Colonel Benjamin Adekunle; Theophilus
Y. Danjuma; and the twelve state governors.

Sources
: Luckham,
The Nigerian Military
; Nwankwo and Ifejika,
Biafra
; Achuzia,
Requiem Biafra
; Madiebo,
The Nigerian
Revolution and the Biafran War
; Schabowska and Himmelstrand,
Africa
Reports on the Nigerian Crisis
; Metz,
Nigeria
.

2.
Gowon and Ojukwu were the two main protagonists of the Nigerian Civil War, yet they
only ever met face-to-face once, and that meeting took place before the war. They
never gave themselves the opportunity to actually sit down and discuss their views
on the war, but even if such a conversation had taken place, there would likely have
been no positive result. At least one thing becomes clear when their respective points
of view are juxtaposed and analyzed: In their own minds, both Gowon and Ojukwu saw
their own positions as non-negotiable.

Source
: Smith,
Stopping Wars
, pp. 131–32.

T
HE
A
RISTOCRAT

3.
Ojukwu,
Encyclopedia Britannica
, retrieved July 20, 2005; interviews with former Nigerian and Biafran soldiers, diplomats,
and government officials, Achebe Foundation; McCaskie, “Nigeria”; Nelson,
A Country Study
; Nwankwo and Ifejika,
Biafra
; Schabowska and Himmelstrand,
Africa Reports on the Nigerian Crisis
; Smock,
Ibo Politics
; Metz,
Nigeria.

4.
Kalu Ogbaa,
General Ojukwu. The Legend of Biafra
(New York: Triatlantic Books, 2007).

5.
Frederick Forsyth, as quoted in Ralph Uwechie,
Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War: Facing the Future
(published in cooperation with Trafford Publishing [Bloomington, IN], 2004), p. 146;
© Ralph Uwechie.

6.
Biafra: Fighting a War Without Guns,
BBC documentary; producer: Michael Stewart; editor: Laurence Rees (1995).

7.

Despite all odds, Gowon and Ojukwu had ample opportunity to resolve the crisis without
further bloodshed, but their personal dispositions toward each other would not let
them put their egos behind them in the pursuit of a course nobler than the feelings
of two individuals.

Source
: Kalu N. Kalu,
State Power, Autarchy, and Political Conquest in Nigerian Federalism
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008).

T
HE
G
ENTLEMAN
G
ENERAL

8.
J. Isawa Elaigwu,
Gowon: The Biography of a Soldier-Statesman
(London: Adonis & Abbey Publishers, 2009); Achebe Foundation interviews. Number 15:
General Yakubu Gowon in conversation with Pini Jason October, 16, 2005.

9.
Madiebo,
The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War.

10.
Gowon was invited to Great Britain for a state visit soon after the war ended—the
first Commonwealth African head of state to be treated this way—for a three-day affair.
Gowon pulled all the stops and mesmerized the British.

11.
Nigerian Institute of International Affairs,
Nigeria: Bulletin on Foreign Affairs
8, iss. 6–10 (1978).

12.
Henry Robinson Luce, “General Gowon: The Binder of Wounds,”
Time
95 January 26, 1970.

13.
Statement attributed to Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu published in the
Nigerian Outlook
(Enugu) March 21, 1967, as quoted in Luckham,
The Nigerian Military
, p. 77, fn. 1.

14.
Ojukwu is often referred to by his detractors as a warmonger, but his life experiences
and actions prior to the war challenge that assumption:

One of the most compelling ironies of Nigerian history is the fact that it was Ojukwu
who freed Chief Obafemi Awolowo (of starvation is a legitimate weapon of war infamy)
from Calabar prison even though historical revisionists would love this inconvenient
fact to just disappear somehow and give the credit to Gowon. In addition, Ojukwu’s
choice of Ado Bayero, the Emir of the ancient city of Kano in Northern Nigeria as
chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, stemmed not only from a deep affection
for Kano and its people, a city he had spent several years in, but clearly a feeling
that Nigeria’s diversity was a strength and not a weakness!

Source
: Ogbaa,
General Ojukwu.

15.
There has been great debate about Gowon’s role in the July 1966 coup. In his landmark
study,
The Nigerian Military
, Robin Luckham sheds a great deal of light on the feelings of Eastern military officers
concerning Gowon’s involvement. He finds these sentiments difficult to substantiate,
but his analysis serves as an important illumination of the thoughts and mood of the
Eastern military elite (see chapter II, “July 1966: The Junior Officers’ and NCOs’
Coup,” in the section Three Different Views of the Coup, pp. 62–63).

There are several sources, mainly Nigerian, that report that Gowon had an indeterminate
role in the coup; other international sources, such as the following, are more candid
in their opinions.
The Economist
of July 26, 1975, reported: “Brigadier Murtala Mohammed [
sic
], who has now taken over as Nigeria’s leader, was an instigator of General Gowon’s
own 1966 coup and nearly got the top job then. He is alleged to have been involved
in plots against General Gowon since then.”

According to editor Roy Godson, in
Menace to Society: Political-Criminal Collaboration Around the World
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003): “On July 29, 1966, a company of
Hausa Army officers attacked and killed [Aguiyi Ironsi] and installed their own man,
Major General Yakubu Gowon, in August 1966.” (“Slicing Nigeria’s National Cake,” by
Obi N. I. Ebbe, p. 141).

16.
Asked in 2005 whether he thought the war was inevitable, Gowon had this to say:

No! It was the action of the leaders! When it got to the stage whereby the leaders
would not agree then a decision had to be taken. There would not have been a civil
war had there not been secession! If there was no decision to break away from the
country, certainly there wouldn’t have been any reason to start fighting. The civil
war was as a result of the East and the leadership of Ojukwu deciding to break away.
Now, I had a duty and responsibility. I swore allegiance to Nigeria, and Nigeria is
composed of all the various parts. And the East was part of Nigeria. But the Ojukwu
leadership, because of whatever reasons it had, and, of course, I know there were
very strong reasons why he made certain decisions; but I know it was personal ambition
more than anything else. Yes, unfortunate events had occurred, and I can assure you,
if anyone had any sleepless night, it is because of the sort of thing that happened
in Nigeria from 1966 up to that time.

Honestly, if you think that one enjoyed seeing the harrowing experiences of the Igbo
in various parts of the country, especially in the Northern part of the country in
1966, I can assure you, you are wrong. Well God knows! And that was why one had to
use certain expressions at the time in order to keep control of the people. I was
accused of using the words: “God had called another Northerner, again, to lead.” But
it was the only way I could bring sanity to bear on a situation galloping out of control.
And we were able to bring the situation under control. Now I accept that those were
very trying experiences for the Igbo that can make anybody say: well, you don’t want
us, so we will go. At least, with our honest and sincere effort to get the situation
under control, no matter what anyone would say, you can rest assured that we tried
not to allow the situation to get to the stage whereby it resulted in civil war.

Source
: Achebe Foundation interviews. Number 15, part 2: General Gowon in conversation with
Pini Jason, October 31, 2005.

Ojukwu’s own take on the calamity that befell our nation is also salient:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

21.
Supported by the work of Smith,
Stopping Wars
.