There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (31 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

T
HE
F
IRST
S
HOT

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

The Biafran Invasion of the Mid-West

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

2.
Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

8.
Nwankwo and Ifejika,
Biafra
; The Library of Congress Country Studies;
CIA World
Factbook: Nigeria, the 1966 Coups, Civil War, and Gowon’s Government
; Achuzia,
Requiem Biafra
; Madiebo,
The Nigerian
Revolution and the Biafran War
.

9.
See Appendix for details of the speech.

10.
Achebe Foundation interviews: Nigerian soldiers from the former Mid-Western Region.
© Achebe Foundation, 2008.

11.
Ibid. Nwankwo and Ifejika,
Biafra
; Achuzia,
Requiem Biafra
; Madiebo,
The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War
; The Library of Congress Country Studies;
CIA World Factbook.

12.
“Victor Banjo’s Third Force [was] a movement opposed to both Gowon’s Federal Military
Government and Ojukwu’s separatist regime in Biafra, ‘which thinks in terms of a common
denominator for the people.’”

Source
: Holger G. Ehling, ed.,
No Condition Is Permanent: Nigerian Writing and the Struggle for Democracy
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p. 51.

13.
Achebe Foundation interviews: Biafran and Nigerian soldiers. © Achebe Foundation.

14.
Interview with Odumegwu Ojukwu in
New Nigerian
, July 21, 1982.

15.
Olusegun Obasanjo,
My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970
(London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980); Wole Soyinka,
The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka
(London: Africa Book Centre, 1972) ; David A. Ejoor,
Reminiscences
(Lagos, Nigeria: Malthouse Press, 1989); Nwankwo and Ifejika,
Biafra
; Achuzia,
Requiem Biafra
; Madiebo,
The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War
.

Gowon Regroups

1.
Anthony Clayton,
Frontiers Men: Warfare in Africa Since 1950
(London: Routledge, 2004), p. 94.

2.
Ibid.

3.
Michael Leapman of
The
Independent,
in a brilliant article on the subject, provides great illumination of the British
reaction to the Mid-West offensive:

[T]he Biafrans scored a military success (their only one, as it turned out) when they
marched into the Mid-West Region and occupied Benin. This provoked a rethink in Whitehall.
The Commonwealth Office set out five choices. A and B involved maintaining or increasing
arms to Nigeria, C was to stop all supplies, D to promote a peace initiative and E
a combination of the last two. Thomas wrote to Wilson [the prime minister], holidaying
in the Scillies, recommending Option E. That view might have prevailed had not Sir
David Hunt, British ambassador in Lagos and a keen advocate of the Federal cause,
flown to Britain and persuaded the government to continue providing arms.

Soon the war turned in Gowon’s favor and in November the flexible Thomas wrote to
Wilson again, proposing this time that arms supplies be stepped up: “It seems to me
that British interests would now be served by a quick Federal victory.”

Source
: Leapman, “British Interests, Nigerian Tragedy,”
The Independent,
on cabinet papers that recall the starving children of the Biafran war.

4.
Interview with retired Nigerian army officer who prefers to remain anonymous.

5.
Nigerian Radio news broadcasts monitored from Enugu. There has been no credible corroboration
of these claims that I found.

The Asaba Massacre

1.
Ibid. One year later Muhammed’s forces would invade Onitsha, where he lay siege to
the largest market in West Africa. During the “Otuocha market massacre,” as it came
to be known, over five hundred innocent women and children visiting or working in
the market were killed.

2.
Interviews with Nigerian and Biafran army officials.

3.
Monsignor Georges Rocheau (sent down on a fact-finding mission by His Holiness the
Pope), April 5, 1968, as reported in
Le Monde
(the French evening newspaper) and Forsyth,
The Biafra Story,
p. 210.

4.
Austin Ogwuda, “Gowon faults setting up of Oputa Panel,”
Vanguard
, December 9, 2002.

5.
General Haruna, who was under cross-examination by the Ohanaeze Ndigbo (a pan-Igbo
group) counsel, Chief Anthony Mogbo, senior advocate of Nigeria (SAN), said whatever
action he or his troops took during the war was motivated by a sense of duty to protect
the unity of the country.

Source
: Ogwuda, “Gowon faults setting up of Oputa Panel.”

Biafran Repercussions

1.
Madiebo,
The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War
; Nwankwo and Ifejika,
Biafra
; Achuzia:
Requiem Biafra
.

2.
Ibid.

Blood, Blood Everywhere

1.
Clayton,
Frontiers Men
, p. 94.

The Calabar Massacre

1.

Rev. David T. Craig, writing in the
Presbyterian Record
of December 1967 (Scotland), gave more revelation of Nigerian acts of genocide under
the caption of “Operation Calabar”: “A group of Efik people (the local inhabitants)
brought two young men in civilian dress to the soldiers. The young lads looked like
secondary school students. With the Northern soldiers was an Efik-speaking soldier.
It was his duty to question prisoners in the Efik language. His job was to see if
any spoke Efik with an Ibo [
sic
] accent. These two young lads did. The soldiers took aim and they were shot on the
spot.” (Emphasis in original.)

Source
: “The Violations of Human and Civil Rights of Ndi Igbo in the Federation of Nigeria
(1966–1999): A Call for Reparations and Appropriate Restitution, A Petition to the
Human Rights Violations Investigating Committee, by Oha-na-Eze (The Apex Organization
of the Entire Igbo People of Nigeria) for and on Behalf of the Entire Ndi Igbo, October
1999,” http://magazine.biafranigeriaworld.com/oha-na-eze/october-1999-human-civil-rights-petition.html.

2.
The quote is from Alfred Friendly Jr., “Pressure Rising in Nigeria to End Civil War
as Military Standoff Continues,”
New York Times
, January 14, 1968; see also, M. S. Armoni,
The Minority of One
, Vol. 10 (1968); Forsyth,
The Biafra Story
.

3.
The Times
(London), August 2, 1968.

4.
Ibid.

5.
“The Violations of Human and Civil Rights of Ndi Igbo in the Federation of Nigeria
(1966–1999), October 1999.”

6.
The American Jewish Congress reports:

Some Nigerian commanders, notably Colonel Benjamin Atakunle [
sic
], maintain that the denial of food to Biafran-held areas and to Ibo [
sic
] people in Federally-controlled areas, is a legitimate and necessary strategy. As
Colonel Atakunle [
sic
] himself told a Dutch newspaper: “I want to see no Red Cross, no Caritas, no World
Council of Churches, no Pope, no missionary, and no UN delegation. I want to prevent
even one Ibo [
sic
] having even one piece to eat before their capitulation.

Source
: Quoted in Baum, American Jewish Congress, “Memorandum,” December 27, 1968, from
the
London Economist
, August 24, 1968, as cited in the
Village Voice
, October 17, 1968.

7.
Thirty-four years later, in a Nigerian
Guardian
newspaper article published on July 25, 2004, with the caption “I Did Not Dislike
Igbos, But I Had A War to Win,” Adekunle provides his perspective on his duties as
a soldier for the federal forces:

Brigadier-General Benjamin Adekunle has finally dispelled the notion that he is a
hater of the Igbo. “I don’t dislike Igbos. But I learned one word from the British
and that is “sorry.” 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!”

He is referring to the 30-month Nigerian Civil War that lasted between 1967 and 1970.
This explanation is contained in the book, “The Nigeria-Biafra War Letters: A Soldier’s
Story (Vol. 1),” an explosive account of his role in the war. Brigadier Adekunle was
the Commander of the “Third Marine Commando,” the dreaded force that operated in controversial
circumstances during the war.

Source:
www.igbofocus.co.uk/html/biafra_news.html#I-did-not.

8.
Achebe,
Transition
, pp. 31–38.

9.
Clayton,
Frontiers Men
, p. 94.

10.
Hugh McCullum reports:

By this time, it appeared as if the Igbo people had lost all their cities including
the oil centre of Port Harcourt and the capital, Enugu. Soon 5 million people were
squeezed into a tiny oval-shaped enclave of 2,000 sq km around the market town of
Umuahia, the new capital . . . touting his now infamous ‘final offensive,’ [underestimating
the Biafrans] “Gowon boasted that war would be over in two weeks. The war in fact
turned into a bloody and bitter one . . .” painfully stretching out over a 30 month
period.

Source:
Hugh McCullum. “Biafra Was the Beginning
.
”
AfricaFiles
, no. 8 (May 27, 2004) © AfricaFiles; www.africafiles.org/article.asp?ID=5549.

11.
African-American Institute,
Africa Report
14 (1969).

12.
Solange Chaput-Rolland,
The Second Conquest: Reflections II
(Montreal: Chateau Books, 1970); Peter Schwab,
Biafra,
Interim History
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).

13.
Newspaper clippings; radio broadcasts monitored in Biafra; travelogues seen during
diplomatic trips.

B
IAFRA, 1969

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

The Republic of Biafra

T
HE
I
NTELLECTUAL
F
OUNDATION OF A
N
EW
N
ATION

1.
Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the
Random House Dictionary
© Random House, Inc. 2012. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/republic?s=t.

2.
For the full text of the Ahiara Declaration, please visit: http://www.biafraland.com/Ahiara_declaration_1969.htm.

3.
Ezenwa-Ohaeto,
Chinua Achebe,
p. 140.

4.
Author’s recollection of events.

The Biafran State

1.
“Republic of Biafra,”
The Columbia Encyclopedia
, 2008. Encyclopedia.com, April 2, 2010; Nwankwo and Ifejika,
Biafra
; Achuzia,
Requiem Biafra
; Madiebo,
The Nigerian
Revolution and the Biafran War
; www.worldstatesmen.org/Nigeria.htm; Metz,
Nigeria.