It was another short interview. I was told bluntly that I was going nowhere, and as for another BBC man going, he told me verbatim: “You have to understand, we are not covering this war.”
This struck me as bizarre. Every day, the horrors of Vietnam were copiously reported, but that was an American mess. Nigeria was a very British one, apparently to remain clothed in secrecy.
The all-media group duly flew out, stayed a week, and returned. I sought out a few whom I knew and asked them about their experiences. It was clear the Biafra War did not even seem to be achieving a quick resolution and was indeed getting worse. So I decided to take a week of owing leave and go independently.
I thought it wise not to tell anyone, including the Biafran office in Kensington. I just took some of my savings and flew to Lisbon. From what I had learned, the covert arms flights were leaving from there, and the shipper was a sort of aviation mercenary called Hank Wharton, an American and an amusing rogue, whom I traced to his hotel in the Portuguese capital.
He was very laid-back when I explained that I could not pay him, but said he had a four-prop Constellation leaving in the morning and I could hitch a ride. There were no seats in the clapped-out old airliner, so I perched on a crate of mortars in the back.
It was a long, droning flight, to which I would become much accustomed, the only diversions being trips up to the flight deck to talk with the crew and seek yet another cup of coffee.
Wharton had absolutely no overfly rights, because the members of the Organization of African Unity, all military or civilian dictatorships, sided with Lagos. So we flew out at sea, with the Atlantic through the right-hand portholes and the smudge of the African coast to the left.
There was a refueling stop at Portuguese Guinea, also gripped by an independence war. Coming in to land, low and slow over the jungle, some bright spark from Amilcar Cabral’s nationalist fighters fired up at the Constellation. The bullet came through the floor, missed the crate of mortars by two inches, went between my parted thighs and out through the ceiling. Welcome to Africa.
On the tarmac, the crew examined the holes, pronounced that there was no harm done and we would refuel and fly on. It got a bit drafty in the back after that. In the middle of the night, with no lights showing, we drifted into the old Port Harcourt, eastern Nigeria’s only airfield. I was immediately arrested.
I explained to a highly educated major who had been an accountant until he enlisted what I was doing there and why. He contacted Enugu and was told to put me in a jeep for the capital. Once there, I was taken to state house to see General Ojukwu, who greeted me with huge amusement. When I explained I had come alone to see for myself, he mused that he had played host to a score of British journalists, so one more would make no difference. He assigned to me a jeep with an army driver, a billet in the old Progress Hotel, and said I could go anywhere and see anything I wanted. He would put me on a Wharton plane on Friday for London.
Within three days, it was clear this war was not going to end anytime soon. The popular mood was that Nigeria would realize the futility of continuing the fighting with the close-down of its revenue-producing oilfields, all now inside Biafra, and respond to Ojukwu’s standing proposal of a cease-fire and a second peace conference.
He had offered to share the oil and was quietly negotiating with Shell-BP, the main concessionaire. France under de Gaulle, never slow to exploit a British disadvantage, was making covert gestures of support, and weapons were arriving in a steady stream.
For the record, there were no starving children visible at that time. They would appear later, and the ghastly images of them, splashed across the world’s media, would transform everything.
On the Friday, I left for London, confident that I would fly from Lisbon to the UK on the Sunday, ready to reappear at work on the Monday, the end of my leave. Then things went wrong. The first stage was to São Tomé island, and there Hank Wharton’s plane broke down. I could not contact London to say I would be back late; I just had to kick my heels until we flew on Monday. I was in London on Wednesday morning. A call to a friend inside the BBC indicated all hell was let loose.
When I reached my flat, it had been broken into. It was a pretty hammy job. The lock was only a Yale, which could have been opened with a credit card or artist’s palette knife. The two goons had smashed in a door panel to reach the lock from inside. My neighbors told me there had been two of them, from the BBC, who said they had been “worried” about me, the inference being that I might have committed self-harm under the pressure of career stress.
But my body would have been pretty obvious. These guys had gone through everything. I knew I had left no traces of where I had been. But it was pretty clear that, once again, the party was over.
I packed a suitcase, left a note abandoning the lease with a friendly neighbor destined for the landlord, and decamped to spend two days and nights on the sofa of a friend.
When a reporter is told by his employer to publish something he knows to be a pack of lies, there are only three things he can do. The first is to look to his security, his salary, his pension pot, and do what he is told.
The second is to sit in the corner, blubbing his heart out at the unfairness of it all. The third is to raise a rigid middle finger at the lot of them and walk out. I sat down and wrote a long letter of resignation. It was to Tom Maltby.
I thanked him for his consideration toward me, but informed him that in my view the Nigerian Civil War was going to be a major story with considerable duration and many casualties. In view of the BBC’s policy of non-coverage (except from a Lagos hotel), I was going to cover the story myself as a freelance.
I signed off and posted the letter late on Friday, aware it would not be opened and read until Monday morning. On the Friday-night plane, I was back in Lisbon, confronting a bewildered Hank Wharton and asking for another hitch to the war zone. By Sunday night, I was in Port Harcourt, under arrest again, and on Monday morning, about the time Tom Maltby was opening his mail, I was shown into the office of an even more bewildered Emeka Ojukwu.
The practice of embedding war reporters into military units was unknown back then, so the question of paying my way arose. I said I wanted to stay, but had no funds and no employer behind me.
Ojukwu offered me half a tin-roofed Nissen hut, food from state house kitchens, a Volkswagen Beetle, and a petrol allowance. Plus access to the communications company he had engaged to get news dispatches from Biafra to Geneva and thence to the world. After that, I could go anywhere, see anything, and report anything.
I made plain I would not report what his own propaganda bureau wanted, but only what I saw with my own eyes or learned from reliable sources. But what I wrote would be fair.
“That’s all I want,” he said. “Fair. After that the story will tell itself.”
So our deal was struck. I was a freelance with no clients. All I had was a story that deserved to be told and the opposition of a British establishment that seemed determined no one should hear about it.
And somewhere, deep in the bush, the children began to wither and die, but no one knew.
Biafra had been in lockdown since the start of the secession ten months earlier. That meant all borders were closed and the blockade included food. The native Ibos grew their own cassava and yams in ample quantities. Pounded cassava root and pounded yams made the staple diet and never ran out. But both are totally carbohydrate.
It is a fact that an adult needs one gram of pure protein per day to stay healthy. A growing child needs five.
The native population had always raised a few chickens and some small pigs for their eggs and meat. Other than these, there was no protein source and, unperceived, the hens and pigs had been consumed.
The traditional protein supplement had always been fish; not river-caught fish but enormous quantities of Norwegian-imported dried cod called stockfish. These rock-hard sticks of cod went
into the family stew pot, became rehydrated, and served as the family protein ration. For nine months, no stockfish had entered the surrounded and blockaded enclave. The meat/milk sources were gone. The national diet was now almost 100 percent starch.
In the deep bush, mothers noticed their babies’ limbs were withering to sticks. Heads with glazed eyes lolled on weakened neck muscles. Bellies swelled to great drums but full only of air. Thinking their children were hungry, the mothers of the bush fed their offspring more carbohydrates. It would not be until May that they would come out to show their babies to the missionaries, who would know what they were looking at.
My first two months were almost idle. There was little movement on any of the fronts. I had some savings left and decided to take up a long-standing offer from a friend to be his guest on a visit to Israel. So I did.
LIVING HISTORY
Israel in the spring of 1968 was still infused with a spirit of bemused euphoria deriving from its smashing victory of the Six-Day War.
The size of its territory had virtually doubled, more so if one includes the barren wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula, long since conceded back to Egypt. The old, confused borders left over from the 1948 war had been swept away. The Nablus Salient was gone. The city of Jerusalem had been conquered, and the holy places, forbidden to Jews by the Mandelbaum Gate, were open for worship.
Diggers were still revealing foot after foot of the long-buried Wailing Wall, the last remaining section of the old Temple of Solomon. There was a countrywide mood of slightly intoxicated optimism.
But the country that had always contained some Palestinian Arabs had now absorbed half a million more, and the problems of the future were still too far ahead to contemplate, had anyone wished, which they did not.
While some have deemed this mood to be conqueror’s arrogance, I choose to accept it as the euphoria of a Dr. Pangloss and his belief that “all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” There seemed no problem, including that of a negotiated and lasting peace, that could not be surmounted. Seen from forty-five years later, it was the product not of gloating but of a slightly touching naïveté.
During my stay I determined to see as much as possible of the land, and with the help of my London-based friend, had set up a few points of contact. Starting at the Dan Hotel, Tel Aviv, I headed south out of town for Beersheva and the Negev Desert. There was a man living in almost complete isolation in the Negev writing his memoirs who had agreed to give me a few moments of his valuable time.
There is only one way to see the real Israel, and that is to travel everywhere by the Egged buses, so I took one from the Tel Aviv terminal to Beersheva and changed for the connection to Eilat. They may not be fast and they stop everywhere, but they are cheap and my funds were meager.
Out of Beersheva, we passed the nuclear research facility at Dimona, birthplace of Israel’s nuclear weapons array and mockingly referred to as a “jeans factory.” Then it was the desert.
During National Service, the Hastings in which I had hitched a lift from Lyneham to Malta had refueled at the RAF air base of El Adem in Libya. Otherwise, I had never seen a real desert, let alone motored through one. Later I would see many more, but they are all the same. They just seem to go on and on, a wasteland of dun brown sand and gravel. Only the Bedouin choose to live in them.
After hours of bumping along, we came around the curve of a hill, and far ahead and below was a brilliant patch of green, like a pool table dumped in the middle of nowhere. The green was the irrigated crops of the moshav, or collection of smallholdings, I had come to visit. The bus stopped at the gate, I descended, it broke wind noisily, and headed on to Eilat.
Inside the compound, I was pointed toward a residence that was little more than a Quonset hut standing alone. Outside was a single giant Israeli paratrooper, apparently the only security. He examined my passport, turned, and knocked. A middle-aged housekeeper answered, also looked at the passport, and beckoned me in. “Twenty minutes,” she snapped in English, evidently housekeeper and dragon-guardian. She knocked on a study door and showed me in. Behind a desk cluttered with papers, a tiny man beneath a snow-white candyfloss cloud of hair rose and smiled. I was meeting David Ben-Gurion, once one of many, but now regarded by many as the founding father of Israel.
He explained in perfect English that I created a perfect excuse to break from his labors at his memoirs. We sat in opposing chairs and he looked expectant. I wondered how many interviews to journalists he had given; thousands, probably, many famous, and now to a complete unknown.
I calculated that old men can often recall with total clarity what they did in their youth, while having completely forgotten whom they had dinner with last week. I know the feeling too well. It seemed to me he must have been badgered many times for details of the Six-Day War, even though it was Levi Eshkol who was premier at the time.
“When you landed on the shore of Israel for the first time in 1906, sir, what was it like back then?”
He stared for several seconds, then came alive, as if jolted by an electric charge. Then he started to talk, eyes closed, recalling those very first early days. He was not a statesman back then, he was a penniless immigrant from a poor Jewish shtetl in Russian Poland.
He and his companions had berthed at the Arab port of Jaffa, but they were not welcome and could get no lodgings, so they trekked north and camped among the sand dunes. They spoke Russian and Yiddish, not modern Hebrew, which had not yet been standardized.
They were camped in a range of low sandhills and it was spring. The Hebrew word for “hill” is tel, and for “spring” aviv.
It took six days on a donkey to travel from the coast of this Turkish province to Jerusalem, a journey he made with a petition to the Ottoman governor for land. He was there ten years later, when the Ottoman Empire fell. He saw General Allenby of the conquering British Army enter Jerusalem.
He told me how the general had abandoned his horse and entered on foot, in deference to the holiest shrine of three religions. Somewhere out to the east, Lawrence, at the head of the Arab Revolt, was moving toward his own treasure: Damascus.
Over the years, he had seen it all: both world wars; the Mandate between them; the rise of Zionism; the utterance of the Balfour Declaration; the creation on a Franco-British map of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. He had seen dictators and monarchs come and go, rise and fall, as the Jews pursued their single goal of, one day, a nation of their own. He had not only seen it all, he had been at the epicenter. He had met the generals and the giants, Roosevelt and Churchill.
Several times, the dragon popped her head around the door to object that it was time for his nap, but he waved her away. What struck me was his tolerance. He had fought all his life for his dream yet seemed to hate no one, not even Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who so admired Adolf Hitler and wanted every Jew on earth dead. He had huge forbearance for the Palestinian Arabs, whose language he spoke perfectly. The only people he had no time for were the fanatics of the Irgun and the Stern Gang. At their mention, he sneered and shook his white-clouded head.
The British, for so long the unwilling army of occupation, he liked, even though he had helped form the Haganah, the Palmach, and the Mossad to outwit and outmaneuver them.
I could have filled ten notebooks, but I just sat and listened to an old man who was sixty years of living history and who had seen it all. Finally tired, he indicated that he needed his sleep. I went to fetch the dragon, who glared at me and escorted him to his sleeping quarters. At the door, he turned and said, “Good-bye, young man. I hope you have been interested. And stay lucky.”
I had been indeed. Fascinated. I was shown out and walked to the gate. It was dusk. An Egged bus came by. I waved, and it stopped and took me on to Eilat as darkness fell. David Ben-Gurion died six years later, at the age of eighty-seven. He was one of the greatest men I had ever met.
EILAT
As recently as 1945, what is now the huge port and vacation resort of Eilat hardly existed. It was a motley collection of shacks with orange-crate furniture, clinging to the water’s edge opposite the bigger Jordanian port of Aqaba, captured by Lawrence in 1917.
The early settlers and pioneers must have been tough as boots. There was nothing there, but they began to build and to plant. Among the earliest to arrive were Dr. and Mrs. Fay Morris from Manchester. He had flown with the RAF in the war, qualified as a doctor, and emigrated with his young wife. By 1968, both were pillars of the community, but lived modestly in a house they had built themselves.
The previous summer, the Israelis had swept across Sinai as General Israel Tal and his elderly British tanks pushed Nasser’s forces back to the Suez Canal. That three-day conquest, although fought along the northern rim of Sinai, brought the entire triangular peninsula under Israeli control. And that included the Sinai Bedouin, to whom Dr. Morris had been appointed official medical officer. The Egyptians, who had always treated the Bedouin contemptuously, had never accorded them a doctor.
Because Sinai is girt on the west by the Suez Canal, which runs down to become the Red Sea, and on the east by the Gulf of Eilat and the Gulf of Aqaba, which also run down to become the Red Sea, and along the north by the Mediterranean, it is virtually an island. And the Bedouin seldom cross water.
From their desert wilderness, the Bedouin have watched the Romans, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the armies of Islam cross and recross their land, in conquest or in defeat. Later came the Crusaders, Napoleon’s legions, Allenby’s British Tommies, and the Israelis.
The Bedouin have witnessed them throughout the centuries. The marching and the fighting were mainly along the northern rim, up by the Mediterranean. The hinterland was always theirs. And their policy was always the same: to withdraw into their deserts of sand and rocks, to not interfere, to not take sides, to watch, and to survive. After July 1967, the Israelis were the first people to treat them decently.
The Outsider Page 16