The emirs and sultans opposed democracy firmly until it was pointed out that, as they had the numerical majority, they could form a single political party, win the coming election, and rule the whole country. Then they agreed, but only on that condition. A party was formed, the election was held, and of course the Northern People’s Congress won. The army had also been intensively northernized, with the infantry entirely Hausa and the southerners taking the “technical” commissions. Independence was accorded on October 1, 1960, under a northern-dominated federal government.
All this I learned from the old sweats visiting the Progress Hotel, from Deputy High Commissioner Jim Parker, and from books, as the first four weeks of this eventless pseudo-war drifted by. I was still bound by my instruction not to file anything but to wait for the coming Federal Army conquest of the “rebel enclave.”
Trouble really began in January 1966, with the first of two coups d’état of that year. It was a very odd one, planned and carried out not by generals as usual, but by a cabal of radicalized, educated, and left-wing junior officers. These were the days when a portrait poster of Che Guevara was on every student’s bedroom wall.
It was later accused of being an Ibo coup. Actually, the junior officer plotters were multi-ethnic, but six Ibo officers among them were the most prominent, because they had attended courses in England, where they had become radicalized. When they returned, everything about northern feudal rule posing as democracy offended them. So did institutionalized corruption, the scourge of Africa.
They struck fast and accurately. It was a virtually bloodless coup, but the dozen victims were the national leadership. In one night, the federal prime minister, the prime ministers of the North and Western regions, and several other ministers were assassinated. But the coup plotters did not take over. The army woke up, mobilized, and arrested them all. But, that done, the government was gone. An army regime was the only alternative. It took over as the plotters were led off to jail. The chief of general staff, General Ironsi, took over. By chance (and it was chance), he was also an Ibo, but a traditional, by-the-book stickler. It did not save him. The north seethed with quiet rage.
Ironsi appointed a military governor to each of the federal republic’s four regions. A Fulani to the north, a Yoruba to the west, a midwesterner to the midwest, and Ojukwu to the east.
In July, the north struck back, and this time it was spectacularly bloody. Hausa soldiers raced through barracks across the country, killing their colleagues of southern ethnicity. Hundreds died that way, but that was just the start.
Northern mobs, with local encouragement, swept into the ghettos and put thousands to the sword. The survivors fled south in waves. The total death toll will never be known; Biafran propaganda later said 30,000 Ibos alone died up there. The British government pooh-poohed it all as several hundred.
This was the “storm in a teacup” that had been mentioned to me in the London briefing as the frivolous reason for the east’s secession. The expatriates briefing me in Enugu were not racially bigoted, but they had watched it all happen and concluded it was by any standards a major program. But the east did not secede from the federal union. The killings were in July and August 1966. Secession was in late May 1967. It took ten months of blithering incompetence by Lagos to achieve it.
General Ironsi had been assassinated and every Ibo officer and technician had fled east. A group of Hausa/Fulani officers formed the new government, but on British advice they appointed a harmless Middle Belt junior colonel as the new head of state. Colonel Yakubu Gowon was totally unknown, an “office wallah” and a token mission school–educated Christian from a Muslim-majority part of the country. Ethnically, he was a Tiv and had done a course at Sandhurst, England. He was friendly, agreeable, and polite, but not very bright. He was a puppet leader; the real power behind the throne was Colonel Murtala Mohammed, who would later topple him.
After August 1966, relations between the pretty traumatized Ibos of the east and the federal government in Lagos deteriorated. In London the mandarins of the Commonwealth Office and later the Foreign Office quickly showed a passionate favoritism toward the federal regime, stoked by the resident high commissioner. British governments do not habitually show such adoration of military dictatorships, but this was an exception that stunned even Jim Parker.
Sir David Hunt quite liked Africans, so long as they showed him respectful deference. Colonel Gowon apparently did. When the high commissioner entered his office at Dodan Barracks, he would leap to his feet, slap on his cap, and throw up a quivering salute. Just once, as the crisis became deeper and deeper, David Hunt came east to visit Ojukwu in Enugu, and quickly developed a passionate loathing for the Ibo leader.
Emeka Ojukwu did indeed rise as his visitor entered the room, but in the manner of one welcoming a guest to his country home. He did not throw up a salute. It quickly became plain he was the sort of African, meaning black man, that the former Greek don Hunt could not stand. Emeka was a British public schoolboy, an MA of Oxford, once a first-class wing three-quarter for the college rugby team, and almost a Blue, an award earned for competition at the highest level. His voice was a relaxed drawl. He showed no deference. Jim Parker, who told me this, was standing a few feet away. Hunt and Ojukwu detested each other on sight, something that was made clear in my London briefing.
Early in his time as governor of the Eastern Region, Ojukwu tried, against all the prevailing wisdom elsewhere, to reinstitute a form of democracy. He formed three bodies to advise him; one was the Constituent Assembly, mainly the professional class, doctors, lawyers, graduates. Second was the Council of Chiefs and Elders, vital in an African society, where age and experience at clan level are revered. Third, surprising to Western eyes, was the Market Mammies Association.
Jim Parker explained to me that Ibo society is almost a matriarchy. In contrast to women in the north, Ibo women are hugely important and influential. The market was the core of every village and city zone. The mammies ran them and knew everything there was to know about the mood on the streets. These were the forces urging Ojukwu to pull eastern Nigeria out of the federal republic.
The public mood was not aggression but fear. Radio broadcasts out of the north threatened that the Hausa were preparing to come south and “finish the job.” Most Ibos believed these threats, the more so as neither federal nor northern government would close them down.
But the real secession point was eventually compensation. Ojukwu had about 1.8 million refugees, all penniless. They had fled, leaving everything behind. At the one single meeting that might have saved the day, at Aburi, in Ghana, Gowon had conceded a withholding of federal oil taxes as an income stream to cope with the crisis. After Aburi, Gowon returned to Lagos and, under pressure, reneged on the lot.
British official sources in Lagos and London briefed the British media that Ojukwu had been grossly unfair to Gowon. He had turned up fully briefed and was simply smarter. That sort of behavior, journalists were told, was obviously unacceptable. After that, the path slid downhill to May 30 and formal secession, and on July 6 to war.
And yet there was no war. My first four weeks in Enugu were very solitary. Sandy Gall and his team had flown out via Cameroon after their single week. I had been assigned a cameraman from another agency, Comtel. He just happened to be there on another assignment. In dumb amazement, we both sat with other expatriates around the hotel radio listening to the BBC news broadcast out of London but emanating from Lagos. It was quite extraordinary.
In Lagos, a discredited former politician named Anthony Enahoro had been charged to set up the Ministry of Information, meaning propaganda. Each day, he issued the weirdest claims.
According to his morning bulletins, the rebel situation was dire and becoming ever worse. There were anti-Ojukwu riots, brutally put down; the Nigerian army was advancing on all fronts and even now at the outskirts of Enugu.
(We expats were on loungers around th
e pool, the others staring at me pityingly.)
The reason was simple. Out of Lagos, Angus McDermid, 300 miles from the Niger River, was reporting all this as BBC-endorsed fact. Every journalist will know that he may have to report what a dictatorship is saying, but must make plain early on that it is the government talking, not him. This is the “attribution”—the words “according to the Nigerian government.”
To be really fair, add the words “no independent confirmation could be achieved.” And early on, in the first paragraph. Failing that, the listener will gain the impression that the allegations are all true and endorsed by the mighty BBC. The broadcasts out of Lagos that first month had attribution, if at all, in the fourth or even fifth paragraph. It sounded like the BBC itself talking. Sitting and listening to it as the expats around me roared with derisive laughter made me frustrated as hell. It was not the bias, it was the sloppiness that Reuters would not have tolerated for a minute. Then at last I got a message from London.
It released me from my instruction not to file out of Enugu. The ten-day war was three weeks old and nothing had happened. I was asked for a “matcher” to the dailies out of Lagos.
In journalistic parlance, a matcher is both confirmation and endorsement. I was supposed to file that everything being said was absolutely true.
The only “riots” were actually queues of Biafran youth trying to join up. The entire Nigerian army was stuck behind a roadblock on the border. I could not report “in voice,” but at least a telex connection had been established for written messages. So I sent one.
All right, I agree it was probably intemperate. Deep in the obedient editorial bowels of the Broadcasting House newsroom, it did not go down well. What I had actually done was point a Colt .45 at the forehead of my reporting career with the BBC and pull the trigger.
It was not out of mischief but naïveté. I was trained by Reuters. I had never covered a controversial story in my two years with the BBC. I did not realize that when broadcasting for the state, a foreign correspondent must never report what London does not want to hear.
And that is what I had done. I had told them that my briefing had been garbage and the reports out of Lagos were tripe. Then something very peculiar happened. Tiny Biafra invaded Nigeria.
Ojukwu or one of his staff had noticed that Lagos had transferred the entire Nigerian army across the Niger River way up on the northern border. There was a huge bridge at Onitsha crossing to an arrow-straight road to Lagos. The bridge was intact, the road undefended. The sheer amateurishness was breathtaking. So the Biafrans put together a column of Land Rovers and trucks, scraped together their meager supply of rifles and Bren guns, and rolled over it, heading west at a steady cruise. I went with them.
There was no opposition. A platoon of Nigerians at the western end of the bridge took one look and ran. The column rolled on across the Mid-Western Region to its capital at Benin City. This, too, was abandoned, and that included the British deputy high commissioner (there was one for each federal state), who hightailed it into the bush. That was how the news got out; someone in the radio room alerted Lagos, which spun straight into panic.
It was the success that was the undoing. The Biafrans could not believe their own speed of progress. Instead of refueling and pressing on for the Carter Bridge, and access to Lagos, they paused for two days.
The next day of motoring brought us over the next border into Western Region, land of the Yoruba, with whom the Biafrans had no quarrel. In several village doorways, there were hands waving. The jeep I was in reached the small town of Ore. There had clearly been a clash. Several dozen Nigerian soldiers lay dead round the village square. Wild pigs had been feeding on the soft parts of their faces. Without cheeks or lips, the dead heads stared up in insane greeting. Then I noticed the shoulder-flash insignia. They were Colonel Gowon’s personal Praetorian Guard.
As my colleague from Comtel filmed the scene, I remarked to my escorting officer that if they were using the elite of the elite as a stopgap panic measure, the road must be open and undefended. He nodded, but a second panic was setting in. The sheer nerve was receding like an ebbing tide.
Later, much later, it was reported that the British High Commission in Lagos was preparing to shred documents, and Gowon’s personal aircraft was at Lagos International Airport with propellers turning and a flight plan for the north. It was really that close.
It all went wrong, of course, and as usual the flaw was betrayal. Ojukwu had appointed a certain Colonel Banjo to lead the mission but, arriving in Benin, Banjo had contacted Lagos by High Commission radio and tried to cut a deal—for himself. He was later tried and shot for it, but too late.
The column began to retreat, back to and over the Onitsha Bridge. Then engineers blew it up. It remained uncrossable until the end of the war two years later.
Back in Enugu, I noticed the tone of messages out of London had changed again. The early ones begged for every detail of the invasion across the Niger. Once it was known that it had failed, I was peremptorily ordered back to London. So I packed and said good-bye to (by now) General Ojukwu, and an army jeep was assigned to take me to the Cameroon crossing point on the eastern border.
Thence with a local mammy wagon to Mamfe and another bus south to Douala. Finally in the Cocotiers Hotel, I would get a phone connection to London. The instructions were the same. No reports, thank you, just get the next flight home.
I did so, walked into Broadcasting House, to be met with an urgent instruction to talk to no one but to report at once to Arthur Hutchinson. It was a brief interview and to the point. According to him, my reporting must have been biased, and I was summarily fired.
But the BBC does not actually fire people; it sends them to a form of internal Siberia, hoping they will resign, serve out their three-month notice, and leave quietly. I was out of the Foreign News team and reduced back to home reporter. I should report to that department’s head, Tom Maltby. I would never travel abroad for the BBC again and the charge was biased reporting.
That is a serious charge, but no one could explain why a seasoned foreign correspondent, sent to cover an obscure African war, would lose his mind to the political ambitions of an African tribe he had never heard of. However, the decision was final and there was no appeal.
There was no point in appealing to Sir Hugh Carleton Greene; he was struggling with his own resignation dilemma in the face of the departure of far bigger bananas than I after the imposition of Lord Hill on the whole corporation.
So I wandered along the third-floor corridors until I came to the office of Tom Maltby.
FAREWELL, AUNTIE
Tom Maltby was a very decent man and kindly. He had been in the Navy during the war and seen combat but never made a fuss about it. He knew exactly what had happened to my BBC career and why. I tried to explain anyway.
I had reported out of Nigeria only what I had seen or, if reported speech, with immediate attribution. Where was the bias? He explained that was missing the entire point.
What I had done, he explained as to an erring nephew, was contradict the High Commission in Lagos; Sir Joseph John Saville Garner, the senior mandarin at the Commonwealth Office (and thus the British government); the BBC World Service; and Mr. Hutchinson.
But they were all besotted by the original flawed analysis, I protested. Nevertheless, it is the only analysis that is acceptable, he pointed out. Then he added the argument that prevented me from resigning straightaway.
“It is about duration,” he said, “if this ten-day or two-week war goes on for, say, six months, they will surely have to reconsider.”
It made sense and he could be right. If the Biafran insurrection did indeed collapse rapidly, the analysis of the mandarins would have been proved right, if somewhat delayed; and my own voiced predictions that this was no storm in a teacup would have been shown to be mistaken.
To avoid the strained atmosphere of my moo
ning about in the reporters’ room, he suggested I be transferred to the Parliamentary Desk down at the House of Commons. The political correspondent, Peter Hardiman Scott, had a vacancy for an assistant. So in October 1967, that is where I went.
It was a small and friendly office that over the five months I was there taught me much about the way the country is actually run. It also wiped away an awful lot of benign illusions about the merits of MPs and peers. I was able to avoid the vipers’ nest going on up at Broadcasting House as rival coteries vied for power and influence. Then, in February 1968, something happened to change my mind.
In the interim, the Nigerian Civil War had not ended nor improved. It had got worse. The Lagos government had instituted a call-up and hugely increased the size of its army. This was being quietly equipped with torrents of British weaponry, shipped out covertly by the Wilson government, which was assuring one and all that it was neutral.
But the Biafrans had not collapsed. On the contrary. Before secession, Ojukwu had moved the entire financial reserves of the Eastern Region beyond the reach of Lagos and was increasing the size and equipment of his own army on the international black market. Biafra had also set up a representation office in London and engaged the services of an agency to handle media communications.
It had also secured the agreement of Spain to use its colony on Fernando Po island as a staging base and the agreement of Portugal to use offshore São Tomé island for the same purpose. It was no longer cut off. In February Biafra organized a mass-media visit. Just about everyone accepted, with the notable exception of the BBC, which was still filing Nigerian propaganda out of Lagos.
I found the decision so weird that I went to visit Arthur Hutchinson to ask why and to volunteer to return with the rest of the invited British media group to see what was going on. Existing reports indicated that military action was slowly increasing, the Federal forces had made a few gains, but that casualties, mainly among civilians, were increasing.
The Outsider Page 15