Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  Most of the 81st Division showed remarkable patience during this long hiatus, but, in October 1945, a mutiny broke out involving several hundred soldiers in the Sierra Leonean regiment. The Sierra Leoneans chased and beat up their commanding officer, and were threatening to kill another. When they tried to raid the armoury, they were beaten back by a group of Gambian soldiers. The dispute that sparked off the trouble, a disagreement over a special haircut allowance, was relatively trivial. Some officers were convinced that their men, who suddenly began to refer to their commanders as ‘Britishers’, had been ‘got at’ by Indians hostile to the Raj, though many of the mutineers simply complained about the long delay in their repatriation. Some ninety were arrested; a portion of these men were sentenced to prison in a court martial. A British officer, writing almost forty years later, was still deeply saddened by the memory. The mutiny was, he said, very unexpected, ‘a devastating blow to our pride in what we regarded as a cheerful, hard-working and disciplined unit’.*

  That was not the end of the unrest. Headley Vinall, a soldier attached to the 82nd Division who had repaired wireless radios behind the frontlines in Burma, wrote in his diary that West African soldiers went on strike in October 1945 as they waited to sail from Bombay to the Gold Coast. Then, in the days before the soldiers embarked on a Dutch troopship, the SS Ruys, on 6 November, Vinall feared there was ‘plenty trouble brewing’. By 11 November, he was writing that his prediction had come true, and that the main instigators of the disturbances would have to be taken off the ship by armed guards. The SS Ruys put in at Port Said on 14 November, where eighty British soldiers armed with machine guns and ‘stacks’ of military police were called in to quell the trouble. One policeman was stabbed, and fifty African soldiers were arrested.*

  Hugh Lawrence, also in the 82nd Division, was in Burma until April 1946, when he returned to West Africa with his Nigerian soldiers. On the journey home, he had the definite impression that the men had run out of patience; ‘they started being less punctilious with their manners’. When they eventually arrived in Lagos, Lawrence found the streets full of soldiers who had just disembarked from India. ‘I was very struck,’ he said, ‘by the fact that, as I walked past these chaps on the streets, nobody saluted me, they didn’t see me. They’d had enough of the Army and wanted out. I don’t think it was an anti-British sentiment, but they’d had enough of Army discipline.’*

  Life after the Army often proved to be disappointing to these West African men. Whatever hardships the soldiers had endured in India and Burma, they had at least had the security of an income, decent food and housing. Now the British sought to dissolve their African army with, if anything, even greater haste than they had recruited it. Britain was bankrupt, and so the pre-war principle – that each of the African colonies should be physically and financially responsible for its own defence – was quickly re-adopted. This meant a rapid scaling down of the enormous force that had been built up during the war. By the end of 1946, more than 160,000 West African soldiers had been demobilised, almost two-thirds of them from Nigeria.

  The vast majority of war veterans returned to farms in rural areas, but there were others who had been hoping for paid employment, and the chance to use newly acquired skills. Robert Kakembo wrote that these soldiers ‘have learnt the value of money and they have been taught to love necessary luxuries – things like cinemas, wireless broadcasts, newspapers…Toilet, soap, hair cream, razor blades, cigarettes are becoming indispensable in a soldier’s life…The African must get a reasonable salary to enable him to get some of these things at least.’ The British imposed some quotas, forcing companies to employ a proportion of ex-servicemen, but the supply of jobs could not meet the demand. In 1947, just under half of the demobilised soldiers in Nigeria were listed as unemployed. Many felt that they had been badly let down.

  Letters from African soldiers to their British officers in the years after the war testify to their frustrations. Gyam, from Ashanti, in the Gold Coast, wrote to John Hamilton in January 1947. He had been on a waiting list for a post office job since the previous May, but had ‘given up all hope of being employed there’. He had gone on a training course but felt he was being given menial tasks: ‘the ex-servicemen who attend the course do all the nasty works there. We learn practically nothing…There is not much happening in this country at present,’ he reported to Hamilton. A former soldier from the Gambia also wrote to Hamilton, expressing his alarm at shortages of soap and rice, ‘just like we did not finish the war in Burma’.*

  Across Africa, soldiers were complaining of woefully inadequate gratuities and disability allowances, and that promised pensions had not materialised. In Nigeria, the West African Pilot, not a newspaper to understate the situation, described the ex-servicemen’s plight: ‘Our World War II veterans must be made to enjoy the fruits of victory just as they were made to pass through the furnace of horror, by baptism in the crucible of savagery and by communion in the vortex of the whirlpool of human and mechanical barbarism’.*

  In 1948, in the Gold Coast, the anger of the former soldiers boiled over. On Saturday, 28 February, the Ex-servicemen’s Union marched to Christiansborg Castle in Accra to present a petition to the governor that complained of the high level of unemployment among their members and demanded larger pensions for the disabled as well as the payment of war-service gratuities. Policemen blocked their way and opened fire, killing three former soldiers, including one Sergeant Cornelius Adjetey who had fought in both World Wars and had recently returned from Burma. Dozens of other protestors were injured. The very men who’d risked their lives for Britain lay on the ground, dead and dying. Riots broke out in Accra and several other towns, and British-owned shops and businesses were burnt and looted. Victor Nunoo, a Burma veteran remembered, ‘every white man we saw, we had to stop him, beat him and burn his car…any white man’s store, we had to break it, loot it. I took part in this myself. We became furious. It turned us back into reliving our experiences in Burma – that war type of madness.’*

  The historian Basil Davidson wrote, ‘looking back it may not seem much in comparison with the tumults of the world today. But the effect then was shattering. There went up in the smoke of those burning stores the whole myth of the model colony, law-abiding and content, always prepared to be patient and respectful in its every-day behaviour.’*

  The British responded by arresting leading local politicians, but their bluff had been called; they had neither the means nor the desire to rule the Gold Coast by force. British officials in Nigeria agreed to an immediate request to send soldiers to the Gold Coast, but soon began to worry about the consequences for the whole region. When they were asked to send reinforcements a few days later, a senior civil servant in Lagos wrote in his diary, ‘I am opposed as there is always a danger of the trouble spreading and we are getting too thin on the ground.’*

  A new, emboldened nationalist movement emerged in the Gold Coast in the aftermath of the riots, in the form of Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP). The CPP toured the countryside with loudspeaker vans, used clever posters and slogans and made bold appeals in the newspapers. In fact, it used the same tactics, and often the very same personnel, that the British had relied on to mobilise support for the war only a decade earlier.* In 1957, the Gold Coast became the first British colony in Africa to achieve independence, with Nkrumah as its president.

  This was probably not what the former soldiers who marched on Christiansborg Castle that February day had envisaged. They were certainly frustrated and disillusioned, but their grievances were more economic and social than overtly political. They were thinking about their own welfare, not freedom for the Gold Coast. But, by the time of independence a few years later, the ex-servicemen had already become part of Ghana’s national story – they were the ‘Burma Boys’, and remembered as freedom fighters. The three who died were now seen as having paid the highest price in the noble cause of liberation. They had become martyrs.

  It wasn’t only in
the Gold Coast that former soldiers were hailed as heroes of the nationalist struggle, and, as the years passed, it might have become difficult for them to claim otherwise. In his old age, Marshall Kebby from Nigeria insisted that ‘every soldier who went to India got new ideas and learnt new things. He came back with an improved idea about life. We the ex-servicemen gave this country the freedom it’s enjoying today, we brought this freedom, and handed it over to our people.’*

  Isaac’s experiences were less romantic. Even after his return to Lagos, he rarely thought about politics, or questioned Nigeria’s place in the Empire. Neither did a majority of his friends or family. In the 1940s, he recalled, people from Lagos still liked to boast they lived in a Crown Colony – ‘we’re in the Colony!’ – whereas the rest of Nigeria was a mere protectorate.

  A new breed of Nigerian nationalist was emerging – the likes of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and, of course, Anthony Enahoro – and they would soon inspire others to join them. It was these men, who didn’t go to Burma, who campaigned for independence, not the likes of Isaac Fadoyebo, who did.

  On a fine morning in Emure-Ile in August 1945, Isaac’s mother Ogunmuyonwa woke up early, with a feeling of happiness that she could not explain. The news of the Japanese surrender had not reached the village, and, anyway, what would it mean to her? And yet she had a strong premonition that something was about to turn out well. In the market, she bought a large bag of bush-meat, to prepare a stew with onions and peppers. She returned to her house to cook.

  Isaac stood on the back of the Armels Transport lorry as it bumped down the dusty road from Osogbo. Through the forest they went, jolting to a halt when they reached a village in a clearing. People got on and off, possessions were handed down and lifted up, but he barely noticed all the comings and goings. He held on tight to his new bicycle and was wrapped deep in his own thoughts. The weeks since he had returned to Nigeria had been difficult. At the military hospital in Yaba, the British doctor had removed Isaac’s plaster, and taken X-rays of his leg. He showed Isaac the damaged femur. The doctor said that, if Isaac had been able to arrange an improvised splint straight after the attack, he might have stood a chance of making a complete recovery. Still, Isaac had been lucky. The bullet had passed within a whisker of his femoral artery. If the artery had been hit, or later severed by the sharp pieces of broken bone, Isaac would have bled to death. The challenge for him now was to try to walk on his stiff leg without the assistance of a stick or crutches.

  His first steps in the hospital had been slow and tentative, and he leaned clumsily on the doctor to stop himself from falling over. He was, he thought, like a little child learning to walk for the first time. Day after day he had practised, until he reached the point where he could hobble up and down the ward by himself and without a stick. The doctor congratulated him. For the first time in fourteen months, Isaac was walking unassisted.

  He left the military hospital, and at the beginning of June he was formally discharged from the Army on medical grounds. But much to his frustration his leg swelled up once more, and so the Army arranged for him to be sent to a civilian hospital in Ibadan. His wound had again turned septic, and the doctors removed a small fragment of dead bone. Despite the objections of a nurse, a British doctor insisted that Isaac should be treated in the ‘clerks’ ward’ instead of the general ward. It was, Isaac noted with satisfaction, an honour to be in what he called a ‘VIP apartment’.

  Despite his limited mobility, Isaac had been relieved to discover that he could ride a bicycle well enough. Granted, he was still perfecting his technique, but he was pleased with his purchase. It was something to show for his earnings as a soldier. Now, at last, he was going back to his village, to see his people.

  He banged on the side of the lorry, and the driver came to a halt, surprised. ‘How can I stop for you here? No house, only bush!’

  But Isaac knew exactly where they were. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I beg, pass my bicycle.’

  The lorry drove off in a cloud of dust, leaving Isaac alone under the mango trees, with the bicycle and a large suitcase. Emure-Ile was about a mile away, down a track that descended into the gentle valley to the north. He saw a labourer walk by, a road-mender on his way back to his camp, and offered him four pence to help carry the load. ‘Why not?’ replied the road-mender. And so Isaac went ahead, limping but pushing his bicycle, and the road-mender came behind, the suitcase on his head. He had not walked such a long distance since he had left hospital, but he was determined to return to his village on his own feet. The sun was low in the sky. He smelled the dust and wood smoke, he heard the wail of the plantain eaters, he saw the hornbills gliding high overhead. It had been more than two years.

  It was his sister, Adedeji, who first heard the commotion. People seemed to be shouting, up by the track that ran past the Anglican church. She wondered why, and went outside. A young man with a bicycle was coming down the hill, walking in a strange way. He looked like Isaac, only taller and thinner. But it was unmistakable now. The crowd was saying his name, again and again: ‘Isaac, Isaac, Isaac.’ Part of her wanted to run towards him, part of her wanted to run back to the house, to fetch her mother. But Ogunmuyonwa must have also heard something, because she had already come out of the house, and was running up the hill. Mother and daughter ran as fast as they could towards the young man with the bicycle.

  Ogunmuyonwa could not believe it. It was her son, the son she had loved and then mourned. She embraced Isaac, then fainted and fell to the ground. Someone poured water over her, Isaac wasn’t sure who. Now it was his father, Joshua, who was hugging him so tight that it almost hurt. There were drummers, and people were dancing, and a procession was forming round him, as they approached his family’s house. He tried to push his way through the crowd, but it was no use. ‘So many people,’ he would love to say for the rest of his life, ‘you would have thought I had stolen a goat!’ Some people were shouting that he had come back from heaven, but there were others who were frightened, who said that he was a ghost. ‘It was as if a dead man was back to life – resurrection of a sort,’ Isaac later wrote.* He stood in the middle of the tumult, happy but also confused. He had sent them letters. They should have been expecting him. They must have known he was alive.

  Only later did he find out that his letters had been greeted with disbelief. In the village they had simply said, ‘If he is alive, where is he?’ Isaac understood their scepticism, when he played it over in his mind. After all, what did Emure-Ile know of the World War? How could he explain to them everything he’d seen? Of ships and oceans and far-off cities, of the jungle and the fateful Kaladan River? How could he ever describe the anguish and despair, the courage and the friendship, of the days, weeks, months, after the attack? All they knew in Emure-Ile was that Isaac was the only one who had gone from their place to fight, and that the Oyinbo had brought them a letter saying that he was missing. Then, some months later, they sent another letter saying he had been seen. But no one had seen him in Emure-Ile, despite the passing of so much time – until today.

  The crowd stopped Isaac from going into the house. They chanted, ‘Ma wo’le, ma wo’le!’ – ‘Do not enter, Do not enter!’ Emure-Ile had mourned the loss of Isaac. Now the villagers needed to perform a ritual, to confirm that he was not a spirit, before he would be allowed to cross the doorway of the family home. He could not resist them. In fact, he longed for their acceptance, to belong in his own village once more. They threw dust at him. If he were a ghost, he would disappear, but, if it were really Isaac, the dust would stick to him. And so they all bent down to fill their hands. He saw his grandmother, Aleke, bending down with them. Then the red dust of Emure-Ile was in Isaac’s eyes, in his throat, on his sweating black skin. He was choking. But the dust stuck to him, and he did not disappear. He was not a ghost, just a young man who had cheated death and come home.

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  ‌12

  ‌The cries turn to laughter

  Your son went to the army
>
  You were crying

  The soldier returns now

  The cries turn to laughter.

  Popular Yoruba verse at end of the war*

  August 1945

  Lagos

  There are some very old people in Emure-Ile who still remember the day when Isaac came back from the war, though they disagree on what had happened to him while he was in Burma. There are those, the majority in fact, who say that he returned with a limp because he had fallen out of an aeroplane while flying over the jungle and landed awkwardly in a tree before being rescued by passing hunters. His sister, Adedeji, would confidently dismiss that story, and share her own version of events. ‘He was shot with another soldier,’ she said, ‘and a farmer found them in the forest. He hid them behind a big tree, and brought them bread. They lay there, beaten by the rain, exposed to the sun, their hair like Bob Marley people. Then one day a British helicopter was flying over. The farmer blew his whistle so the helicopter pilot would hear him. It landed, and flew them away to Bombay.’* Whatever had happened, everyone agreed that Isaac’s return was one of the most memorable days in the history of Emure-Ile. ‘There was joy on everyone’s face,’ said Olajide, a cousin of Isaac’s, who was twelve years old at the time. ‘Absolute joy.’*

  Joshua arranged the slaughter of his fattest goat. Family and friends feasted long into the night, and those who could not squeeze into Joshua and Ogunmuyonwa’s house danced on the street outside. Isaac would remember the tears that filled his grandmother Aleke’s eyes. She had visibly aged in the time he’d been away, and she looked tired. When he held her, he too began to cry. She told him, ‘I knew I will see you alive before leaving the world, and now that you are back home it is time for me to bid you all farewell.’ She said she had never given up, because the traditional oracles and fortune-tellers that she’d consulted had always insisted Isaac was alive. One had even told her that Isaac had been threatened with a knife, and was left in just a pair of shorts. Now that the oracles had shown themselves to be true, she was at peace. Aleke would die six months later in her sleep.