Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  In this way, perhaps, Isaac showed himself to be typically Nigerian. He had an enduring faith in the potential greatness of his country, no matter how faltering its actual progress. ‘Nigeria’s going to be a good place. We have the resources, we have the manpower, we have the brains. Go to America – you’ll see Nigerian doctors, scores of them, practising along with the white boys.’ Rip the old structure down, he said, put the right people in charge, and just watch this country go.

  In spite of everything, Nigeria is a country of optimists. It was not in Isaac’s nature to be bitter about the past. Much better, he said, to carry on thinking positively about the future instead.

  ‌

  ‌Part II

  ‌Debt

  ‌

  ‌13

  ‌Into a ravine

  The shining, beautiful car Nigeria inherited in 1960 had indeed crashed into a ravine. She will surely pull it out again and, re-fashioned, re-modelled, drive it forth once more into a surer future.

  Sylvia Leith-Ross,

  Stepping Stones‌*

  April 2011

  Lagos, Nigeria

  If Isaac regretted anything, he would say half in jest to his grandchildren, it was that he’d never had the chance to become a great sportsman. ‘World footballer of the year, undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, fastest man in the Olympics, four-hundred yards,’ he mused, painting the scene with his hands. ‘Isaac Fadoyebo, lane 1. I take off my tracksuit, I break the tape before any other boy in the world, the world will yell, “The boy is good!” The whole world will know me, respect me.’ Then he laughed at his own foolishness. ‘That has gone, gone for ever. I thought they would fix my leg in hospital, and I’d get my normal body. That didn’t happen.’ ‌

  Isaac didn’t resent the British, who took him off to fight in a war the cause of which he barely understood, nor the Japanese, who nearly killed him and left him with a disability for the rest of his life. ‘I take it to be my fate,’ he’d say, ‘I was destined to go to the battlefield, destined to be wounded. I can’t blame myself, I didn’t know what I was doing.’ Besides, look at everything he’d achieved since. He was only nineteen when he’d returned from Burma, and he believed that, by and large, he’d overcome the challenges that he’d faced in the lifetime that followed. He would count his accomplishments on his fingers. One: ‘I had to improve my education.’ Two: ‘I got O Levels.’ Three, four, five: ‘A levels, promotion, I got a car.’ Six: ‘I got coupled.’ Seven: ‘I trained my children.’ He’d look at his extended fingers with clear pride and satisfaction. ‘So, taking into account my humble beginnings, I am a successful man, and God help me.’

  It can’t have been easy for Isaac, being a Nigerian veteran of the Burma campaign. As the war receded into history, his experiences became less and less relevant to the concerns of his fellow Nigerians. That soldiers feel unappreciated when they come home is almost a truism of any time and any society. There were many British men who fought in the Second World War who afterwards said that those who had not been there could never truly understand what they had gone through. And, as Britain changed in the decades that followed, some felt that their sacrifices were not properly valued by younger generations. Some veterans struggled, with the passing of time, to even recognise the country they had fought for. But at least the Second World War is woven into the British national consciousness. Not just the course of its events, but also the belief that Britain was on the right side and that it was a ‘good war’, one worth fighting, a belief that still holds firm for most people even today.

  Things were very different in Nigeria. The Second World War played almost no part in forming the independent country’s self-identity. Many, perhaps most, Nigerians learnt nothing of the tens of thousands of their countrymen who fought in Burma. Today, Nigeria is a country of overwhelmingly young people; almost seventy percent of Nigerians are under thirty years old. Those aged over seventy represent less than two percent of the current population. To the youthful majority, the Biafran War feels like ancient history, let alone the Second World War.

  Forget history; making a life in Nigeria was struggle enough: to bring food home to children at the end of the day, to find enough money to pay for hospital fees, to escape the violence inflicted by ethnic, religious and criminal militias. Most people didn’t have time to contemplate the past, and never had the chance to receive the sort of education that would help them to do so. But even those who knew something about the West African soldiers who went to Burma often felt ambivalent about the role these men had played. Why, after all, should they celebrate the defence of the British Empire? Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and others achieved self-rule with a speed no one had anticipated in 1945, casting the contribution of Isaac and others in a less flattering light. New countries had new identities to forge and new myths to write as they struggled, not always successfully, to create a sense of national unity. From this perspective, the men who fought for the Empire could even be something of an embarrassment. Safer, perhaps, to concentrate on what they did after they came back from Burma, and their role in helping drive the British out, than remember the sacrifices they made in the war itself.

  By the time Isaac reached his mid-eighties, he belonged to a fast-dwindling group of Burma veterans. The Nigerian Legion offices in Lagos were a couple of dank rooms, dilapidated brown paper files piled high against one wall, and a bare desk, no computer in sight. Captain John Adolie, a quiet and thoughtful man, ran this modest operation. He spent most of his time helping veterans of more recent conflicts – the Biafran War and Nigerian peacekeeping expeditions to the Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone – rather than Second World War soldiers. But the Legion was still in touch with some 120 men who had fought in Burma. ‘At least that was the number a couple of months ago, but they are dying very quickly now,’*Adolie said. Many of the ‘Burma Boys’ were in a ‘miserable condition, demobilised by the British with peanuts and no follow up’.* The Legion had few means to help them, and relied on irregular handouts from a charity in London. The majority of the Burma veterans were living in Northern Nigeria. Their health varied, according to Adolie; ten were blind, but some were active, ‘very strong’, he called them. A handful were employed as security guards for the Legion’s offices in the northern states of Bauchi and Kano. Given the fierce Islamist insurgency raging in Northern Nigeria at the time, in which thousands of people were killed and soldiers and policemen often targeted, this virtually constituted active service. It’s hard to imagine that there were Second World War veterans anywhere else in the world who were not only still working, but also doing so in such dangerous conditions. What would the religious fanatics of Boko Haram, who carried explosives, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, have made of these venerable guards, dressed in khaki and armed only with sticks and pangas?

  Isaac, at least in comparison with most other veterans, was comfortably off, but he too had had to adapt to bewildering changes. In his retirement, Surelere was unrecognisable from the neighbourhood to which he had moved. The trees and parks were long gone, and so was the orderly sense of progress. Isaac’s house was typical, surrounded by high walls topped off with jagged glass shards, to keep out the dreaded armed robbers. There were heavy iron gates at the end of each street, painted black and gold. In the evening Isaac would watch the residents heave these gates shut. ‘Surelere is a slum,’ he would say matter-of-factly. Then he would chuckle, shake his head and retreat back into his compound.

  When Isaac made one of his slow walks down his street, there were no birds to be heard, only the ugly roar of the generators that had become the ubiquitous background noise to modern Lagos. His neighbours tried to speak to him, but often he could not hear them above the din. Beyond his street, Surelere had grown into a collection of shabby concrete apartment blocks; traffic clogged the streets and the neighbourhood was trapped by a ring of raised motorways. ‘Area Boys’, gangs of unemployed youths, gathered on the dusty roundabouts, waiting to prey on passers-by who
needed directions or whose cars broke down in the ‘go-slows’. Walls were plastered in lurid posters for ‘Nollywood’ movies (Baby Police, Dangerous Maiden 2) or evangelical churches (The Mountain of Fires and Miracles Ministry, Deep Life Bible Church). These jostled for space with signs announcing cures for sexual ailments and unlikely educational opportunities abroad (‘Gain Admission Into Universities in Ghana, Ukraine, Cyprus, Canada, Georgia etc’).

  Isaac’s sense of dislocation between past and present was reinforced whenever one of his daughters drove him along the expressway to Lagos Island. Two concrete and steel white elephants rose above the monotonous urban landscape close to his house. One was the former national sports stadium; the other was the circular modernist design of the national theatre, once the setting for a grandiose arts festival. Both had been built in the oil-boom years of the 1970s, when Nigeria was flush with money, and both had since decayed and were all but abandoned. In their sad condition, they spoke of the disappointed hopes of an earlier time, and also of Nigeria’s sometimes baffling indifference to its own history. This is a country, Isaac would say, where the best from the past is barely noticed, let alone maintained. When the Nigerian government moved the capital to Abuja, prestigious buildings in Lagos were left to rot. Build a new stadium, build a new theatre, think of the money that can be made from all those new contracts – that was the national ethos.

  Then his daughter’s car would cross Eko Bridge, and descend on to the Island. The old Lagos that Isaac knew, the port where Yoruba culture and handsome colonial buildings existed side by side, a place of cool breezes and juju music, had been swept away, replaced by something noisier, uglier and far less manageable. The little blue Brazilian house at 92 Tokunboh Street, the home where Isaac started his family, had been demolished in the 1980s and replaced by a three-storey concrete block. Tokunboh Street was full of such anonymous buildings, sprouting innumerable satellite dishes and air-conditioning units coated in dust. Shops and stalls encroached onto the narrow road, and the sky above was a tangled mess of telephone and electrical wiring, much of which had not worked for years. The old Marina, the tree-lined promenade that was once the pride of Lagos, survived in Isaac’s memory but was buried under concrete and gravel, and overshadowed by an elevated expressway.

  The decades of relentless population growth, the oil boom followed by bust, the corruption and misrule, had all swallowed up Lagos’ history, and left snarling traffic jams and mountains of rubbish in their wake. By the beginning of the twentieth-first century, nobody seemed to have known how many people lived in Lagos, although everyone could see that the city never stopped growing. The British, at least, had tried to keep track of the changes. The 1921 census, shortly before Isaac was born, listed a population of 99,700. By 1931, this had risen to 126,100, and that number had more than doubled to 276,400 by 1951. At independence in 1960, there were more than 600,000 people in Lagos. From this point, population growth accelerated, and estimates as to how many people lived in the city started to diverge wildly. The United Nations said there were roughly 2 million people in Lagos in 1970. By 2025, it projected this number will be close to 19 million.* Others put it much higher. In Isaac’s lifetime, Lagos went from being a large town to a megacity, a monster that was out of control.

  It’s not that Lagos, or Surelere for that matter, had become a place without hope. Far from it. The city was bursting with creative and entrepreneurial energy, and was booming in its way. In the early 2000s, Nigeria’s economy had picked up after a long slump, and that was particularly true in and around Lagos. Surelere became the home of Nollywood, the multi-million-pound Nigerian film industry. But, in the new, cut-throat Nigeria, those who thrived needed cunning and wits. Many of those who made fortunes were ruthless hustlers. A decent, hard-working man, a man like Isaac in fact, who played by the rules and expected the state to give back to him what was his due, was in danger of being left behind.

  Through the decades, he never forgot his village. Emure-Ile, if anything, became more important to Isaac the older he got. As a young man, he had been determined not to ‘rot away’ there, but in his later years he was a generous benefactor on his regular visits to see those who had stayed behind. He was the most successful member of the family, and in his mind this brought with it responsibilities. He looked after his mother, Ogunmuyonwa, who died in 1981, but also his surviving sisters, and paid for any number of nephews and nieces to go to school. ‘They are on his payroll,’ Isaac’s daughters would say, rolling their eyes, exasperated to discover that the money they had given him to look after himself in his old age had once again been divided up and handed on to a diverse group of villagers and relatives. He had pushed his own daughters to ensure they got a good education, and now he wanted to try to give the same opportunities to his extended family. His daughter Tayo, a doctor, liked to say that one of her cousins, a nurse, would ‘be frying gari by the roadside if it was not for Isaac Fadoyebo’.

  On the edge of Emure-Ile, beyond a little stream that runs through stands of bamboo, in a clearing hacked out of the scruffy bush, there is a large, modern bungalow set back from the dirt road. It’s an incongruous building, at odds with the wooden Hezekiah African church immediately opposite, and with the older village houses up the hill, some of which have elegant framed doorways decorated with motifs of lions and crowns. Isaac built this house, in fits and starts, over the years, whenever he had a little bit of spare money. It was, he said, where he would enjoy the end of his retirement. There was, his daughters suspected, another unspoken motive. They had been raised as city girls, and Isaac worried, not entirely without reason, that they looked on village life somewhat unenthusiastically. By building this house, he and his family would always have a comfortable place to stay in Emure-Ile. He was trying to tie his daughters, and their children, to the land of his ancestors. He liked to give visitors a guided tour of the house’s bare concrete rooms, still without doors and windows. ‘This will be the kitchen, and here we have a bedroom,’ he would say, as he proceeded from room to room, pointing from right to left, before always ending in the large room in the middle. ‘And this is the living room that I have named after my chief host in the Burma jungle. This is Shuyiman’s room.’

  It wasn’t only the village that preoccupied Isaac as he reached old age. His memories of Burma had never left him. From the very day he had been discharged in 1945, he had wanted to put his experiences down in writing. It was a British colleague at the Department of Labour, Mr H.S. Smith, who pushed and nudged him to get started, sometime in the 1950s. Mr Smith introduced Isaac to Michael Crowder, a distinguished historian who was living in Lagos. Crowder visited Isaac at his house and together they drew up a structure for telling his tale. But it wasn’t until Isaac retired many years later that he found the time to complete his work, sixty pages hammered out on an ancient typewriter. He called it A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck.

  Tayo encouraged Isaac to look for a publisher, but by the late 1980s the book industry in Nigeria was in a sorry state. Publishers were interested in the autobiographies of wealthy politicians and businessmen, essentially subsidised vanity projects, not in the life of an unknown like Isaac Fadoyebo. Nobody would touch his manuscript, so he sent it to Britain. A few publishers wrote back, asking if Isaac had any photographs to accompany his account. He did not, and suspected that they thought his story was ‘a sort of fairy tale’. The correspondence with the British publishers dried up, and A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck gathered dust on a shelf in his home.

  In 1989, the BBC World Service marked the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Second World War with a programme on Africa’s involvement in the conflict. Isaac read an advertisement in a Nigerian newspaper in which the BBC appealed for contributions from any readers who might have interesting stories from the war years. In an act of enormous faith in Nigeria’s creaking postal service, Isaac sent his one and only typed manuscript to London, where a producer recognised its significance and passed it on to a grateful British hist
orian.

  A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck was eventually published in the United States, as a university monograph in a low-key, academic sort of way. Isaac received a few copies to distribute to his daughters, but no money. It reads like the quintessential Isaac – understated, and is slightly dated in its language. He tells the story of his Burma adventure and concludes with a few idiosyncratic musings, on the folly of funding space exploration while so many still live in poverty on Earth, and on the need for the United Nations to enforce world peace. He dedicated it to his parents, ‘who innocently passed through deplorable mental torture’, to Shuyiman, ‘alias “Gulasha Bap”, who did more than any other person regarding my safety and welfare’ and to all those, ‘friend or foe…who fell in South East Asia during the Second World War’. Sadly, there are only a handful of written accounts by African soldiers from the entire war. None is as complete, as powerful and as elegant as A Stroke of Unbelievable Luck.

  I stumbled across a copy in the library of the Imperial War Museum in London in 2009. I had lived for several years in Nigeria, where I was a reporter, and had become intrigued by the story of the African soldiers who fought in Burma. Although I had left Lagos in 2001, I had always wanted to learn more about this forgotten aspect of the Second World War. But, at least initially, the museum’s library was something of a disappointment. There was plenty of material on the Burma campaign, and some even about African soldiers, but all of it written by British officers. Even the most colourful and perceptive accounts gave only a limited insight into the Africans’ point of view. Why did they go to Burma? Were they forced to do so? Did they believe in the British cause? How did their experiences change them? These questions intrigued me, but answers were elusive. So I was surprised and delighted when I found Isaac’s memoir on the library shelves. I had never heard of Isaac Fadoyebo, but after reading his story I knew that I had to try to track him down. Here was the man who could bring the Burma Boys to life, who could help me understand the thoughts and motivations of these African soldiers. Moreover, Isaac’s unusual tale of tragedy and survival had already raised new questions in my mind about the war, Africa and Burma.