Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  When black Africa’s other giant, the Congo, had won its independence from Belgium just three months earlier, the mood had not been nearly so conciliatory. The ceremony in Leopoldville was a disaster. The Congolese had listened in fury as the Belgian King Baudouin hailed the ‘genius’ of his rapacious and cruel great-uncle, King Leopold, in establishing Belgian rule in the Congo.* The new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, responded with a bitter speech, in which he denounced the ‘humiliating slavery [and] atrocious sufferings’ imposed by the Belgians, who, he said, had run a regime of ‘oppression and exploitation’. In Nigeria, in contrast, people spoke of forgiveness towards the departing colonial masters. ‘Nigerians, in their hour of triumph, deliberately forgot the errors that the British had made yesterday,’ wrote Drum. ‘They did not seek revenge. To millions of Nigerians the goodness of the British in Nigeria outweighed their badness.’*

  The Congo would unravel almost instantly, and Belgian settlers fled amid recriminations and racial killings. By the time Nigeria celebrated its independence, Patrice Lumumba had already been deposed in a military coup, three regions in eastern Congo were in armed revolt, and the Americans and Soviets were vying for influence from the shadows. Lumumba, whose legend endures today as a symbol of the strangled hopes and ambitions of an independent Africa, was murdered a few weeks later. Nigeria would not experience such a precipitous collapse, but many had a nagging feeling that all was not well, despite the exhilaration on the streets during the independence ceremony. As Aduke Alakija observed more than half a century later, ‘I think we rushed independence. I mean, it was happy, we all had a wonderful time, but I think the handing over was too sudden. We should have taken another two or three years.’*

  Isaac did not live in the world of high society or political intrigue. He had no distinguished ancestors, and few friends close to the levers of power. He rarely ventured over to Ikoyi, where the British, and now a few Nigerians, lived comfortably in fine bungalows set in spacious gardens. He didn’t get invited to the smart parties that Aduke Alakija frequented, where white-clad stewards served whiskey and gin and small chop, little plates of olives and canapés. But he had secured his own precarious foothold in the Lagos middle class, and he was trying his hardest to make sure he stayed there.

  He married Florence, a Yoruba woman who worked as a clerk in a bank and whose family came from Abeokuta, the town in Southern Nigeria where he’d signed up for the British Army and spent his first months of military training. She had been married before, and had a daughter, Nike, whom Isaac raised as his own, while also encouraging the girl to stay close to her real father. By the end of the 1950s, Isaac and Florence had two more daughters, and the rooms at Tokunboh Street were beginning to feel too small. He could see the changes on the surrounding streets: the steel and cement high-rises going up all over Lagos Island, shining white, their plate glass glinting in the sunlight. And he could see the political changes coming at the Department of Labour.

  When he joined the department, almost all the senior officials had been white. They had drafted Nigeria’s Labour Code, negotiated with the trade unions, carried out the factory inspections and drawn up the rules to ensure the health and safety of Nigeria’s workers. But in the late 1950s Isaac’s British colleagues began to leave, one by one, and Nigerians took their places. ‘Africanisation’ was sweeping through the government. Chinua Achebe, the celebrated writer, was working at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation at the time, and saw a similar process under way there. ‘Officers began to retire and return home to England…They left in droves, quietly, amiably, often at night, mainly on ships, but also, particularly the wealthier ones, on planes.’* There had never been a large number of British officials in Nigeria – just a few thousand civil servants, policemen and soldiers spread across this enormous country. Now they were going home.

  However, there was one institution to which the British would cling until the very end. In 1948, three years after the end of the Burma campaign, Lieutenant Louis Victor Ugboma became the first Nigerian to receive an officer’s commission in the Army, but, at the time of independence in 1960, the vast majority of officers were still British.

  The 1960s were Isaac’s ‘golden age’. His studying paid off, and he began to rise up the ranks of the new Ministry of Labour. Promotion brought with it opportunities to travel. He went on a training course to Oxford with a group of similarly earnest young men from Ghana, East Africa, Malaysia, India, Fiji and other parts of the Commonwealth. The 38th Labour Administration Course for Overseas Officials was an exercise in post-colonial hospitality, held by the British Department of Employment and Productivity. He also went to Washington in a group of fifteen young African civil servants. He was always smartly dressed on these trips abroad, in a suit and tie, and, when he posed on a cold sunny day for a photo outside the US Capitol, a proud smile beamed across his face. Africa’s place in the world was changing, and Isaac was enjoying opportunities his parents could never have imagined. He had become, in Nigerian parlance, a ‘Been-To’. He had been to the United Kingdom and the United States. In a modest way, perhaps, and not with the sense of entitlement of the sons and daughters of politicians who returned to Lagos from their British schools flaunting new accents and the clothes they had bought on Oxford Street, but he had achieved something nonetheless.

  There were occasions on those trips abroad, in airport terminals or in the hotel bar, when the conversation would drift to the war, and then Isaac’s travel companions would ask him about his limp, and his time in Burma. He told his story in a courteous and self-deprecating way. David Kargbo had been his ‘comrade in adversity’. The Muslim villagers who had saved them were ‘gentlemen and generous hosts’. The Japanese had been cruel but they were also ‘dogged fighters…a tiny set of men with big hearts’.* But, if Isaac felt that he could recall events with equanimity after the passing of so many years, he did have one strange encounter that jolted him right back into the past.

  It was at the end of the Oxford trip, on a grey December day, and he was passing through London on his way home. He sat in a restaurant near Victoria Station and noticed that an older white man was staring at him. The man walked over to him and spoke in Hausa. ‘Sano,’ he said – ‘Greetings’. He had seen Isaac entering the restaurant, and wanted to know why he was limping. As Isaac started to explain, the man’s face lit up in recognition. He was a retired major who had led Nigerian soldiers from the 81st Division in Burma, and he knew all about the story of the 29th CCS, and the improbable survival of two of its men. ‘By the way,’ said the Major, ‘that chap who hid you and looked after you, we made sure he did well. We gave him piles of rupees, and some cows as well. He became a rich man.’

  Isaac listened, astonished. The Major put his hat on and walked out of the restaurant, and into the London gloom, swallowed up by the crowds heading towards the station. For years afterwards, Isaac would wonder why he didn’t run after him, grab him and ask him what more he knew of Shuyiman’s fate.

  In 1962, Isaac and his growing family left Tokunboh Street and Lagos Island, and did what so many aspiring middle-class families were doing in Lagos at that time: they moved to a new neighbourhood, Surelere, which was being methodically laid out on the adjacent mainland. It was within easy reach of the city, and offered more space and more comfort. The meaning of surelere in Yoruba – ‘patience is rewarded’ – seemed to fit with Isaac’s efforts to better himself. He’d secured a mortgage, and would be one of the development’s very first homeowners. He had picked a bungalow on a cul-de-sac cleared from the bush, with newly laid electricity cables and water pipes.

  His daughters remembered the sense of excitement of arriving in what was called ‘new Lagos’. ‘We would picnic under the trees, and a milkman delivered fresh milk every day from a nearby dairy,’ Nike recalled.* There were parks, and a clean stream to play alongside. These may seem to be unremarkable memories, but for what Lagos became in the following decades. The houses were neatly laid out, for the civi
l servants, but also headmasters, writers, teachers and musicians who moved into the neighbourhood alongside them. Nigeria was a new country, and everything seemed possible. Almost fifty years later, Isaac would joke that he was the oba, or king, of the street – the first to arrive in Surelere and now the only remaining survivor from the early days. The neighbours had come and gone.

  His leg continued to trouble him. He had a further operation in 1946, and two more in 1953, but the limp remained. He’d been excited to discover in the 1960s that he could drive a car provided it had automatic gears. His first car was a light-blue Hillman. It was that now distant time when Britain sold cars to the rest of the world and an ordinary Nigerian civil servant’s salary went far enough to pay for one.

  Isaac’s only failure in this period, he said later, was that he never managed to secure a university degree. He had passed the preliminary exams to take a BSc in economics through his correspondence course with Wolsey Hall in Oxford, but somewhere along the way he lost impetus, and dropped out. He put this down to his ‘laziness’, but that seems an overly harsh self-assessment. Children – he and Florence had six daughters by 1965 – consumed much of his time after work each day. And, degree or not, he had risen to the eminently respectable rank of chief labour officer.

  Back in Emure-Ile, he was hailed as a local boy made good. When parents from the village were sending a teenage son or daughter to Lagos to try to make their fortune, they’d tell them to go and see Isaac Fadoyebo first. ‘Go see that man, im go help you find work,’ they’d say.

  Isaac was prospering but Nigeria was beginning to lose its way. The precarious structure the British had left behind did not take long to crack apart. The competition between the regions for power and resources grew more pronounced, and none of the politicians proved capable of attracting any real support from beyond their own ethnic group. Oil, which was discovered in the 1950s, began generating more and more revenue but this encouraged corruption as much as economic growth. Nigeria’s first republic collapsed in the military coups of 1966, amid a flurry of assassinations and then ethnic massacres. Worse was to follow.

  One day at the end of May 1967, Isaac was washing himself at home when the news on the radio brought him to a sudden stop. The Eastern Region, dominated by the Igbo people, had unilaterally seceded, and declared itself the independent Republic of Biafra. The radio announcer said Nigeria’s military government was not recognising this illegal act and would recover its territory. There was going to be a civil war. There were some in Lagos who were excited at the prospect, but not Isaac. ‘I wasn’t happy,’ he said, ‘because I knew what war was. People would be killed, people would be maimed, people would be impoverished, over what?’

  The Nigerian government announced a general mobilisation of all ex-servicemen under the age of fifty. It didn’t affect Isaac, who was not fit to fight, but thousands of the men who’d been with him in Burma more than twenty years previously were called up. The younger soldiers jokingly referred to these veterans of the Second World War as ‘’Yam-Maza’ or ‘Mazan Jiya’ – ‘Yesterday’s Men’.

  The civil war lasted for two-and-a-half years and resulted in more than a million deaths. And yet, at a superficial level, life for the people of Lagos stayed the same. Even after the panicked exodus of Igbos from the capital to the East in 1966, a Nigerian journalist wrote that Lagos was ‘alive with girls, cars, parties and dances’.* In the clubs, people kept on swaying to the Highlife music and the bandleaders kept on singing, ‘Lagos, na so so enjoyment, you get money, you no get money, Lagos na so so enjoyment’ – ‘Whether you have money or not, Lagos is a place to enjoy life’.

  Isaac visited England on work during the siege of Biafra, and remembered being amused when his hosts asked how he had managed to travel at a time of war. They had seen disturbing pictures on television of starving people in Biafra. Isaac tried to explain to them that the impact of the war was not felt in the capital, as it was being fought out in the east, where he and many Lagosians knew practically nobody. It didn’t affect him directly, he said.

  However, Isaac was wrong. Biafra would surrender in 1970, but the impact of the war would last much longer, and would be felt by all Nigerians. It entrenched the military’s hold over politics. Cliques of soldiers would rule the country for much of the next thirty years, presiding over ever-worsening corruption and the collapse in morale and integrity of a once-respected civil service. The various juntas became more and more reliant on oil revenues, and agriculture and industry fell into disrepair. Nigeria was in a downward spiral, and nobody, in any part of the country, would escape.

  Isaac and Florence separated in 1976. His daughters remembered that their parents had been having disagreements for a while. The second youngest, Adetoun, was thirteen years old when her parents split up. She had been told her birth had been like a funeral, so desperate were Isaac and Florence for a son after four daughters. During the pregnancy, Isaac had passed on a message from his own mother, who said that Florence should take a potion from a traditional healer that would ensure she gave birth to a boy. Florence refused to do this. In fact, in an earlier pregnancy, she had delivered a little boy, who was tragically stillborn. After Isaac and Florence broke up, he took up with a younger woman. The relationship lasted only two years, and afterwards Isaac said he wanted nothing more to do with women. Except that, with six daughters, he was surrounded by them.

  Tayo, Isaac’s third-born, said that, as she and her sisters grew up and pursued successful careers in medicine, teaching and business, Isaac got over his yearning for a son. ‘He’s a human being and this is Africa so it was only natural he wanted a boy,’ she said, ‘but he could also see how many young boys got into trouble, and we never gave him headaches.’* His parenting style could be quirky; he forced all of his daughters to take a daily concoction of a raw egg and milk when they were young to ensure they grew up strong. In later years, he said he was blessed to have had so many girls, and his pride at their achievements was obvious. And he grew closer to Florence again. In their old age, Isaac and Florence went to family celebrations together, even as they continued living apart. After Florence died in 2011, her coffin, in accordance with Yoruba tradition, ‘lay in state’ at Isaac’s house, as friends and family came to pay their respects before the funeral.

  In 1980, Isaac took voluntary retirement from the Ministry of Labour. It was an amicable parting; he was in his mid-fifties and had been there long enough – thirty-four years – to qualify for a civil service pension, to go with the small disability pension he’d been collecting since 1946. He was relieved to discover that his years at the ministry gave him some ‘second-hand value’, and he moved into the private sector. But the Nigerian economy was in severe difficulties, and neither of the two factories where Isaac worked in the early 1980s would survive the downturn. Thus, he found himself definitively retired in 1986, at the age of sixty.

  In theory, Isaac’s pensions should have put him in a comfortable position. In reality, inflation had eroded their value and he could never rely on them to be paid on time. The Nigerian Ministry of Defence had taken over responsibility from the British Army for his disability pension at independence, and in the 1990s the payment was increasingly erratic. Sometimes Isaac waited for a whole year before it was disbursed. He magnanimously put this down to ‘administrative problems’, but his daughters more caustically said the delays were the result of ‘the Nigerian factor’. It was they who made sure that, pension or no pension, Isaac always had enough money to keep him going each and every month. Not that his needs were great. He took pleasure in looking after his children, and a growing brood of grandchildren, and from walking across Surelere to the nearby football stadium, where he could take in a match from the cheap seats. ‘I live a simple and contented life,’ he wrote in the late 1980s. ‘My habits can almost be termed monastic.’*

  Like almost every Nigerian, Isaac liked to spend time diagnosing where his country had gone wrong. And, as he got older, he had more and
more time to think about this. He had lived through not only a civil war, but also half a dozen successful military coups and any number of failed ones. Soldiers had ruled Nigeria from 1966 to 1999, save for one brief interlude when the politicians unsuccessfully tried to re-establish a democratic government. In the 1980s and ’90s, Isaac watched in frustration as living standards fell, and universities, schools and hospitals decayed to become pale imitations of what they had once been.

  In part, Isaac repeated the mantras voiced by many others. ‘If you build on a faulty foundation, the super-structure can’t last,’ he would say, in a rebuke to the British legacy.* But the dire quality of Nigerian leadership in the fifty years since the British had gone had made an unpromising situation much worse. ‘Corruption and bad governance have delayed our progress,’ Isaac said. ‘They say Nigeria is the giant of Africa, and maybe they’re right. But a giant should be able to perform like a giant.’ A lack of cohesion seemed to be holding the country back, according to Isaac. ‘We’re too worried about ethnicity. If we see a Yoruba man up there, we support him whether he’s doing well or not doing well, because he’s our blood. That’s not good, that’s our main problem in this country.’

  Yet, though Isaac’s diagnosis was unremarkable, some of his proposed solutions were bold. The country, he said, needed a revolution. This would no doubt be accompanied by ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’ of those who saw their privileges threatened, but that was too bad. He found inspiration in an eclectic range of political heroes, ranging from Chairman Mao – ‘who changed the fortunes of China and perhaps the world’ – to the former president of Ghana, Jerry Rawlings. ‘If you have conservatives they will leave things as they are and just let sleeping dogs lie,’ he said, warming to his theme. ‘No, no, no, we want radicals. We can be as good as England, even better, if we have a revolution; why not?’