Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  The first journalist to talk to Isaac was, by coincidence, an Owo contemporary from the 1930s. Anthony Enahoro, the son of the headmaster at the government school, came from a more privileged background than Isaac, and, at the time when many young men were joining the Army, Anthony was a pupil at the elite King’s College in Lagos, where ‘he read as much as he ate’ according to a friend, devouring every single book in the school library.* In the past few years, Anthony had become interested in politics, often missing classes to attend meetings organised by the fiery lawyers and journalists in the capital who were beginning to demand an end to British rule. Now six feet tall with a round handsome face marked by an intense stare and scholarly glasses, Enahoro was a rising star of the newspapers with a growing reputation as ‘the angriest young man in Nigeria’.* Dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt and matching white trousers, he briskly strode onto the hospital ship, saw that Isaac’s leg was in plaster, and asked him directly whether he would ever regain its full use. When Isaac replied that he would not, a cloud passed over Enahoro’s face. It was as though, thought Isaac, Enahoro was asking himself why a young man should be permanently maimed in support of a cause that meant so little to Nigeria and its future.

  At Enahoro’s instruction, Isaac’s war experience featured prominently in the West African Pilot’s report the following day. The paper’s account was more or less accurate:

  One man had a stirring story of pathos and drama to relate. He was Private Isaac Fadoyebo of the Nigerian Medical Corps, who left Lagos in July 1943, bound for the Burma inferno. When his party fell into the hands of the Japanese Fascists on March 2, 1944, they did not find sanctuary until December 6, when they were aided by some Burmese peasants. Had it not been for the fact that the party of West Africans feigned unconsciousness, the Japanese guard who came daily to inspect them might have done something tragic.

  For Isaac, it was a moment of fleeting fame in a lifetime spent largely in respectable obscurity. None of the other injured soldiers on board – who, according to the Pilot, included a shell-shock victim from Benin and a man from Calabar who’d had his toes amputated by the Japanese – were named in the newspaper reports. Even in their own country, Nigeria’s soldiers were largely anonymous.

  At three o’clock, Sir Gerald finished his inspection. The police band was ordered to continue running through its repertoire of marching songs while the big moment, the disembarkation of the wounded, finally started. Most climbed down the gangway without any assistance. The blind – ‘never to see the land they love again’, wrote the Pilot – were guided down to the wharf. Last came the stretcher cases, carried by the teams of stretcher-bearers who had been left waiting and wiping sweat from their brows this whole time. The soldiers were loaded onto ambulances and driven to the nearby military hospital at Yaba. The public, held back by the police, strained for a glimpse of the war heroes. They looked at us, Isaac thought, with respect and amazement.

  None of those waiting on Apapa wharf that afternoon could have imagined that the British Empire was so close to collapse, and few would have had any intuition of the political changes that were about to sweep across their continent. Britain may even have appeared stronger than ever to many in Nigeria and the other African colonies – victory in the war was all but assured, and the King’s mighty ships were starting to carry His Majesty’s soldiers home. When Japan surrendered, Lagos society came out to celebrate. There was a ‘Great Victory Dance’ at Glover Hall (admission: four shillings, with promises that the bar was ‘fully stocked for a grand celebration’) and special events at the Island and Polo Clubs. The Victory Service was held on 19 August in the neo-Gothic splendour of the Cathedral Church of Christ on the Marina. The church was packed, maybe two thousand British and Nigerians crammed in together, rows of fluttering hand-fans barely stirring the hot and still air. The Bishop of Lagos, A.B. Akinyele, gave a rousing address, comparing the Empire to the great rock at Akure, the granite inselberg that rises over the Yoruba bush not far from Isaac’s village of Emure-Ile. ‘So long as the British Empire remain steadfast on the Rock of Age,’ said the bishop, ‘that Empire shall never perish.’*

  There were many soldiers in the congregation that day, and the generals who had led Nigerians in Burma assumed the sun would not be setting on their Empire any time soon. The service included a special message from Lieutenant General Montagu Burrows, the Commander in Chief for West Africa, who described the triumph of the Allies as the greatest victory in the history of mankind, in which ‘the achievements of the West African soldiers are now famous throughout the Empire’.* Major General Hugh Stockwell, who had led the 82nd Division in Burma, was blithely confident about the future. He looked forward to seeing a new generation of African soldiers ‘uphold the traditions of their fathers when taking their place alongside other soldiers of the British Commonwealth of Nations in the furtherance of Imperial strategy’.*

  Not everyone was prepared to accept that things should just carry on as before. Maybe it was Anthony Enahoro, upset about Isaac’s injuries, who wrote the leader in the West African Pilot entitled ‘Welcome Heroes!’ It said that the Nigerian journalists who saw the injured soldiers ‘felt an intrinsic pride that, after all, backward though some of us had been labelled in certain quarters, we had done our humble bit and fulfilled our fair share in the effort not only that democracy might live but also in order that the stature of man might be revived’.* In other words, some Nigerians sensed that a new world order was coming, and they felt they deserved to be part of it.

  Just eight years after his brief encounter with Isaac on the Apapa wharf, the same Anthony Enahoro, by now a politician, would stand up in the Nigerian parliament and move a motion for independence from Britain. A decade further on, Britain would have left most of its African territories, including Nigeria, and was making final preparations to quit the remainder. To many of the African soldiers who’d fought for King and Empire, this must have been an astonishing, and deeply confusing, turnaround. And yet it was the war itself that was the catalyst for change.

  Britain had won a pyrrhic victory that had reduced its place in the world. At the end of the fighting, it was economically exhausted, like all the other old European powers. In the general election of July 1945, the British people voted Winston Churchill out of office. The new Labour government would concentrate its scarce resources on building a welfare state at home, rather than on defending an Empire abroad. The United States and the Soviet Union, the new undisputed superpowers, vied to spread their influence, but both were vocally opposed to old-fashioned European imperialism.

  Nigeria’s educated elite, keen readers of the Pilot, had drawn their own conclusions from both the conduct of the war and its consequences. They read of how the civilised white man had bombed cities and committed unspeakable atrocities; in many parts of Europe, the people had been reduced to starvation and begging. They read about the Atlantic Charter, which, at America’s insistence, proclaimed ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live’. And they read that Britain had decided to give India complete independence once the war was over. This last piece of news, according to a British intelligence officer in Nigeria, created ‘an electric shock throughout Lagos’.* If India could have it, then why not Nigeria? That was the inevitable question, and the British did not have a satisfactory answer.

  During the war, Nigeria, like several other British African colonies, had suddenly become a much more important place. There was global demand for its rubber, palm products, tin and cocoa, its ports were busy handling massive convoys on their way to Asia, and, of course, some 120,000 of Nigeria’s young men had enlisted in the armed forces, of whom about one-third ended up in Burma like Isaac. These men had left their hitherto isolated villages and towns and been exposed to a whole new world – many had set off merely looking for adventure, but all of them would be changed by their experiences.

  The African soldiers had crossed two oceans, encountered an ancient civilis
ation and emerged victorious in a struggle with a mighty enemy. They had risked their lives alongside British and Indian soldiers. They had seen that, when put to the ultimate test, all peoples, regardless of colour, share the same mix of qualities and frailties that make us human: courage and cowardice, wisdom and foolishness, altruism and selfishness.

  Britain had depended on Africa and African soldiers to save its Empire, but had not necessarily understood all the consequences that would follow. The soldiers came back as travelled, more confident men. Some were prepared to criticise aspects of colonial society, and a few to even question its existence. Robert Kakembo, the Ugandan author of the censored booklet ‘An African Soldier Speaks’, put it eloquently:

  Having fought for liberty, equality and for all the four freedoms expressed in the Atlantic Charter, we are determined not to remain behind in the world race. We have every right to claim a share in the future advantages and opportunities of development. We have a very long way to catch up with the senior races, but the war has shown the world that we are men, and given the opportunity, we are a match of anybody else in the world. I speak with the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill:

  Give us the tools and we will finish the job.*

  So had the British actually sown the seeds of their African Empire’s dissolution? By defending their imperial interests in the short run, did they ultimately undermine them?

  Waruhiu Itote was not yet twenty years old when he joined the King’s African Rifles in 1941. He signed up out of boredom and poverty, but also because of the British propaganda that warned that his homeland, Kenya, was in danger of being overrun by Germans and Italians, whom, he would write in his memoir, ‘we could only imagine as the worst monsters on earth’.* And yet Waruhiu had already felt the injustice of British rule in Kenya, from the seizures of land by white settlers in the Highlands, to the separate public toilets for different races. There was much about the Army that he would also learn to dislike. He was frustrated at the discrepancies in pay between African and British junior officers and humiliated by the separate messes and lavatories. But it was his experiences in Burma that would turn him into a nationalist and committed anti-colonialist. A young British soldier, lying by his side in the jungle, asked him why Africans were fighting to protect the Empire, rather than fighting to free themselves. ‘“At least if I die in this war,” the British man said softly, “I know it will be for my country. But if you’re killed here, what will your country have gained?”’*

  In Calcutta, a black American soldier gave him further reason to doubt his choice, warning him that the British who fought in the war would always be heroes in their own country, whereas the Africans would quickly be forgotten. Waruhiu also met an Indian nationalist in Calcutta, who told him that Africans should have demanded independence in return for fighting on the British side, just as the Indians had done. Each of these encounters, Waruhiu would later write, made him think of himself as Kenyan for the first time. Travelling to India and Burma had helped him understand where he came from, and what needed to change in his homeland.

  By the time Waruhiu returned to Africa, he was determined to help bring independence to his people. He would go on to become a leader of the Mau Mau movement, adopting the nom de guerre ‘General China’ in a guerrilla campaign to force the white settlers from his native Kikuyu land.

  By December 2009, John Nunneley must have been one of the last men alive in Britain who could say that his father had fought in both the Boer War and the Great War, and he was surely the only one who had led a future Mau Mau general through the jungles of Burma in 1944. He still had clear memories of Corporal Waruhiu Itote crouched in a foxhole beside him, clutching his rifle and peering through the jungle in anticipation of a Japanese attack. Waruhiu was ‘a good looking young man, diligent…an almost silent presence in the officer’s mess, responding to orders, “Whisky and soda, please”’.* It was only natural, said Nunneley, that Waruhiu went on to try to remove the British from Kenya: ‘why shouldn’t he harbour those thoughts?’

  During the Mau Mau rebellion, Waruhiu would use the same tactics in jungle fighting that the British had taught him in Burma. Many of the soldiers, white and black, who pursued him through Kenya’s mountain forests were former colleagues from the Second World War. He was eventually caught and sentenced to death. But the British decided not to execute him. His life term in prison became more comfortable when a district officer recognised him from their time together in Burma and insisted that Waruhiu be released from solitary confinement.

  Waruhiu Itote was not the only African soldier who said that his travels to India and Burma had converted him to nationalism. The political atmosphere in India was extremely volatile in the early 1940s, as the British struggled to control the ‘Quit India’ movement. Marshall Kebby from Nigeria recounted how he went to see Mahatma Gandhi give a speech at the Madras racecourse. Kebby travelled there by bus, the only black soldier among a million Indians, and managed to make his way to Gandhi’s side, he said. He asked him what he was going to do for Africa now that India was on the verge of being free. Gandhi replied that India would give Africa moral support, provided the struggle against the British was not violent. The day made a profound impression on the Nigerian. He said, ‘Gandhi taught us that the worst home rule is better than the most benevolent foreign rule. We wanted freedom first, before anything else.’*

  Whatever the fears of British officers, the vast majority of African soldiers were unlikely to pick up subversive ideas from Indian nationalists. They had few opportunities to meet ordinary Indians, and it was rare that they shared a language in common. African soldiers were overwhelmingly illiterate and from rural backgrounds. Most came from conservative regions, such as Northern Nigeria with its strong tradition of loyalty to local emirs, and it was to these conservative regions that they returned when the war was over. Back in his remote village, without decent road or rail connections, much less a telephone, such a soldier was not in a strong position to challenge the colonial order, even if it had occurred to him that he should. Instead, the agitation for independence came from small and educated groups in the cities – lawyers, doctors and newspaper publishers who had gone to secondary school and even university, and most of whom, if anything, looked down on military service during the war. This was the elite that Isaac had aspired to join in 1941 when he asked his father to pay for him to go to a prestigious secondary school. It was his father’s initial refusal that had impelled him to volunteer for the Army. Military service was the option Isaac had grasped only when other doors had closed on him.

  Isaac had expected to die in Burma. On his journey home, he was relieved simply to be alive. But the mood of many other African soldiers at the end of the war was not so benign. After they withdrew from Burma in March 1945, Isaac’s colleagues in the 81st Division were transported to a camp near the town of Karvetnagar, some one hundred miles from Madras. It was a bleak and isolated place. ‘The whole area appeared under-populated and decaying,’ John Hamilton wrote, and ‘few Indians were to be seen and those almost all looked half-starved.’* Initially, the British generals had planned to give the West Africans a period of rest after their time in Burma before sending them on to Malaya, the next colony they were aiming to recapture from the Japanese. Thankfully, the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945 made this plan irrelevant. Soldiers from the Gold Coast stationed near Karvetnagar celebrated with the slaughter of a bony bullock, much beer and dancing. It was time to go home.

  But the Africans would discover that they were not a priority. Britain’s shipping resources were stretched, and officials in London decided to concentrate on first bringing home British soldiers, as well as the tens of thousands of British prisoners-of-war who had suffered in camps in Singapore and Malaya. The Africans waited in India, with little information as to when they would be travelling, and their resentment grew. It wasn’t until the end of 1945 that the British made any ships available for the 81st Division. ‘One cannot help but wonder what would
have happened if British troops, after more than a year in the jungle, had been stuck for nine months or more in bamboo huts on a featureless, hot and dusty plain remote from anything more closely resembling civilisation than the railwayman’s club at the nearest junction,’ wrote John Hamilton.*

  The soldiers watched films while they waited. They saw newsreels showing the aftermath of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, which horrified them. The Nigerian soldier J.O. Ariyo attempted to put the devastation into context for those back home. ‘Man will kill himself by his own hands,’ he wrote, ‘if one of these bombs lands in Lagos, within one minute, all the people up to Ota, all the trees and all the animals, will just disappear. Even those in Abeokuta would not escape the aftereffects. The following day, another bomb would make Ibadan disappear. It wouldn’t be long before all of Nigeria disappeared.’*

  Aside from mulling over such grim thoughts, the West Africans had precious little by way of distraction. To make matters worse, many of the division’s British officers had managed to secure passage home, leaving behind their bewildered and resentful troops.