Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  VERY EARLY ON IN MY career, Nigeria became something of a turning point. I’d worked and studied in London, got myself professionally qualified and after a year or two in the big city, I started hankering after what the media disparagingly referred to as the ‘Dark Continent’.

  London was fine, for a while at least, but after all that crush and bother, unabated noise and unwashed masses, this wild soul hankered after places that might offer some kind of challenge. I actually started to miss Africa and the quietude of the bush. Also, I needed action, lots of it. More importantly, I knew exactly where to find it: back in Africa, of course.

  ‘Untamed’ is how the travel magazines of the day would refer to the vast landmass to the south of Europe and in a sense they were right. In their own manner – clichéd and often repetitive – Hollywood and Hemingway had entrenched a bit of that mystique as well as some of the more glamorous aspects of a continent that was as uncertain of its future as mysterious. With books such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Robert Ruark’s Uhuru as well as films like King Solomon’s Mines and Where No Vultures Fly, they did a good job of creating the kind of mystique, particularly about East Africa, that appealed to the younger generation. Elspeth Huxley and Karen Blixen had originally set the scene: those who came later followed a well-travelled road.

  Almost overnight, there was a casual Western drift towards Africa involving young people intent on uncovering some of these ‘New Frontiers’ for themselves. They would hang about The Thorn Tree in the forecourt of Nairobi’s New Stanley Hotel, or drink endless Tuskers on the verandah of the old Norfolk Hotel, all the while talking about their experiences, which they would embellish once they returned home. President Kennedy’s newly created Peace Corps was an integral part of it.

  Meanwhile, the euphoria of new-found independence and charismatic and well-educated black leaders all had a hand in igniting some of the emerging torches of egalitarianism, almost like the Free Slavers of previous centuries. Sadly, it wasn’t long before some of this enthusiasm was tempered by a series of military mutinies and violence, much it coupled to corruption on an almost biblical scale. We were to learn soon enough that on the African continent, all these upheavals were extensions of the same equation: power and money in the hands of the few. It is also fair to say that black people had no monopoly in this truck: they’d already been well-tutored in the wiles of making a fast buck by their friends in Europe and America. For all this, I was still keen to go back. In fact, the more I heard the more eager was I to have a look for myself.

  That was about the time that I returned to Britain from South Africa. In theory, I could have flown directly to London again, but instead, I decided to hitchhike. In practice, a white man in undeveloped countries doesn’t cadge lifts from poor people. Instead, he pays.

  Though it took me four hard months, the trip was remarkable, if only because I survived an escalating guerrilla war in Portuguese Angola. That liberation struggle was my first real taste of things military and I found it both unusual and exciting. I was also to take one of the last flights out of Luanda to Pointe Noire in Congo Brazzaville, at that stage in a de facto state of war with Lisbon.

  I even managed to cadge a lift on a ship from Pointe Noire to Port Gentil in Gabon, from where I travelled two days upriver on an open boat to Lambarene in a quest to meet the great Dr Albert Schweitzer.

  Prior to that escapade, these were only places on the map in my mind, but they had always caught my interest. While at boarding school, I’d spent many hours pouring over maps – Papua New Guinea, the Okavango Swamps, Niger’s Delta, the Mississippi and the rest. One day, I swore, I’d visit them all. To some extent, I eventually did.

  In the course of that trans-Africa expedition, for that was what it was, I went down with malaria several times, travelled overland and totally alone for lengthy stretches through the wilds of Liberia and spent a while in Dakar in Senegal, which was idyllic because it was almost like being on the Mediterranean coast in France, except that almost all the faces were black and this was the Atlantic. From Dakar I got a lift on an old oil-service tug to the Canary Islands.

  Of all the countries along the way, I found Nigeria the most intriguing. It had become independent just five years before and it was possible to go anywhere you liked in complete safety. Equally, you didn’t have the level of criminality for which the country has since become notorious nor anything like the number of murders that now take place. Though some of this mayhem may since have been limited by the combined efforts of both the army and the police, it is only recently that people were still being murdered for the Nikes on their feet, sometimes on the way into town from the airport.

  During that first 1960s visit I managed to explore almost the full extent of Africa’s most populous state and I loved it. I adored the people and their disjointed, garish, cacophonic cities. Even the food appealed: plantain, gari and fu fu, which was sometimes so hot it could sear leather.

  Moving overland in Peugeot taxis (or the more cumbersome, cutprice mammy wagons – trucks with seats on the back and with something of a roof for cover), it took me about a month to cross from the Cameroon Republic to what was then known as Dahomey (Benin today). Along the way, I found a Nigeria that was a very different kind of country before a series of army mutinies and civil wars ripped it apart and moulded it into the crooked, inefficient and brutal catastrophe it has since become.

  I would have liked to make even better acquaintance with the place, but I had to get back to Britain, if only to put bread on the table. If I was ever to come back, I told myself, I would need the cash to do so.

  I spent five or six months establishing a daily shipping service between Tilbury and Calais. The ship was called The Londoner and we offered return fares to Paris for less than six pounds. It was owned by that imperturbable Swede Sten Olsson who established Stena Line – now run by his son – that still plies many British ferry routes.

  Having accomplished that much, I hung around the Moorgate offices of one of the subsidiaries of the shipbrokers Clarksons while waiting for the next project, but it never arrived. There were lots of promises: a Chinese trade show when Beijing was still Peking (getting a visa was almost like winning the lottery), Angola’s Cassinga iron ore project and others. Angola offered promise, but then the project was stymied by a guerrilla insurrection. Though I was given a couple of raises while I waited, nothing caught my fancy and frankly, I was bored.

  Nigeria was a happy place to start with: then came the bloodletting. Tony Cusack from Liverpool (left), shown in a Yoruba costume, and the author (on the right) quickly slotted into the routine at John Holt Shipping Services in Lagos. The Nigerian Army mutiny changed all that. (Author’s collection)

  Finally, in the summer of 1965, I applied for a shipping job in Nigeria. In fact, I wrote three letters for three different positions in that country and got back firm offers from them all.

  I took the one offered by John Holt Shipping Services in Lagos, in part because it enjoyed the illustrious title of Export Shipping Manager. The job came with an apartment, my own personal steward – his name was David and he was there solely to attend to my personal needs – a new blue Ford Corsair and an office at the country’s principal commercial airport at Ikeja on the northern outskirts of this great rambunctious metropolis mutiny changed all that. (Author’s collection) that, like Cairo, was as noisy and dirty then as it is today.

  I arrived in Nigeria with bags and baggage as well as Tony Cusack in tow, the same individual with whom I was afterwards to travel through Spanish Guinea (Equatorial Guinea today), the Cameroons, both Congos and Angola.

  There were problems almost from the moment the plane landed in Lagos. The first Nigerian Army mutiny had taken place weeks before, during which a number of prominent Nigerian politicians and Islamic religious leaders were murdered by recalcitrant southerners, most of them Christians. Sadly, the country never recovered from those early strikes; over subsequent years, a three-year civil war and half-a-dozen mo
re military revolts followed; a million people were to die as a consequence.

  The Nigeria of January 1966 was a very different place from the one that I had left the year before. Tribal enmities that had been kept firmly under control by the exiguous British administration were now becoming a serious political factor.

  Some junior Ibo army officers with a few Yorubas of the Western Region assassinated the most prominent Northern and Western political figures as well as some Nigerian household names like Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Hausa-Fulani Premier of the Northern Region. Also murdered were Chief Akintola, Premier of the Western Region, and two Federal ministers, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh.

  Though the names of these victims might stare at you out of the history books, they, in their day, were the leading lights of the African independence movement. Their efforts – and those of others like Nelson Mandela, Mzee Kenyatta and Angola’s Agostinho Neto – eventually freed the continent from many of its colonial constraints, even if it did involve bloodshed along the way.

  Consequently, in Nigeria – as anybody with realism will tell you – if you wanted a civil war, all you had to do was to start killing prominent political (or tribal) entities, and that, basically, was what took place.

  The murders that wiped out some of Nigeria’s most senior political leaders shocked the Federation as no other acts of violence had done since independence, irrespective of the fact that by then there had already been thousands of innocents slaughtered in factional violence. Also, there had been two Northern religious leaders murdered in their own homes in particularly brutal circumstances. All this was a serious business, and certainly not helped by being viewed as something distinctly tribal, a filthy word in Nigeria at the time.

  The Ibos of the South-East (they’re listed as Igbo in today’s reference books, a strident community that had always caused much resentment in the North) were suddenly cast as dangerous enemies of Islam.

  During Nigeria’s ‘Imperial Period’, the Northern Region in particular, was largely left to govern itself, a legacy of what in its day was termed Lord Lugard’s ‘Indirect Rule’. The Islamic faith was held in great respect and the British never meddled with it. That the Ibos, of all people, should perpetrate such violent acts was insufferable to Muslim people everywhere, but in those days it took them a little longer to react. The subsequent coup was to cost these Christian Southerners dear.

  Islam, we all know, is a deeply conservative religion. In Nigeria it enjoyed a certain respect not always then seen elsewhere in Africa. However, even then Muslims were not all that happy with what was referred to as ‘progressive’ American norms, especially with regard to sex. More importantly, the education of people from Nigeria’s North was almost exclusively Koranic; they were to that extent ‘backward’ by the criteria of the Western world.

  The Ibos, in contrast – a bush and village people – had no such comprehensive Arabic culture as the North had enjoyed for more than a dozen centuries. Originally animists who worshipped the spirits of their forefathers, they took readily to the sort of education offered by Christian mission schools. It may have been limited, but at least it turned the Ibo people into employable clerks and government servants. As such they spread all over Northern Nigeria; the Muslim people, by contrast, offered little in the way of competition.

  Instead, the majority of people of Islamic faith had to stand by and watch while good steady jobs were filled by these detestable aliens. They were taking the bread out of their childrens’ mouths, was the universal complaint in places that were mainly north of the great Niger River. The not unnatural result was a series of outbursts and quasi-massacres in the Sabon Gari (the Stranger’s Quarter) of the old walled cities of Kano, Zaria and Katsina. So far this was a sociological matter rather than anything political.

  Then came independence, that blessed word, after which oil was discovered on the coast of the Eastern region. Looking back, it seems almost to have been a curse. Most of all, it made the Ibos greedy. Hitherto the majority of Easterners had been quite content with their place in the Federation. It brought them many benefits. Now that they found themselves standing on top of mind-bending potential riches, their avarice was aroused.

  At the time of independence, only about 15 per cent of the officer corps in the Nigerian Army came from the North and the West. Most of those who replaced former white officers were Ibo. To avoid friction between the three regions, it was now determined that the army should be recruited by quota: 50 per cent from the North and a quarter each from the Ibo East and the Yoruba West.

  However, by 1965 – five years after much-vaunted independence, it was Ibo officers who filled nearly half of the places at Sandhurst offered to Nigeria by Britain. Once again the Easterners were showing that they were pushier than all the rest, and in so doing, they became all the more despised. The fact that they seemed to be taking over the whole Federal Army was regarded by some Nigerians as positively dangerous.

  In the event, the officers responsible for the first military insurrection disclaimed any tribal motive. All they wished to do, they said, was to get rid of corruption in government, which even a fool could see was rampant. Only the armed forces could be trusted, was the word in many barracks.

  Most Nigerians were less convinced, especially after an Ibo became head of the new government after the coup. This man was Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi the former General Officer Commanding, or GOC. He declared that he had nothing to do with the revolt, but his protests were heard with scepticism and for good reason.

  Most of those who had taken part in the murders were plainly Ibos or other Easterners. It was there for everyone to see. The majority of those killed belonged to other tribes. What that first coup did arouse was an overall fear of Ibo dominance in the northern and western parts of Nigeria. Aguiyi-Ironsi consequently found himself presiding over an increasingly tense and volatile country as it teetered towards more violence, which was roughly when I stepped off the plane at Lagos.

  Those who have studied subsequent developments in Nigeria tell us that the Northerners began to prepare a military counter-coup the morning after the murders of their leaders. In May 1966, five months later, Hausas and Fulanis set upon any Ibo they encountered who was living in the North. This action was to become an extremely violent and bloody pogrom in which these Eastern Nigerians were specifically targeted.

  Nobody was spared: the sick, the lame and the old – together with women and children – were slaughtered in their thousands. If you were Ibo and the mob got you, you were dead.

  I travelled a great deal in Nigeria in the months after my arrival: among other cities, to Kano, Kaduna, Maiduguri and Gusau in the North and Port Harcourt, Calabar as well as Onitsha – that great Ibo city on the east bank of the Niger – which became a focal point in the civil war. Everywhere there was tension. In the Sabon Gari in Kano I saw places that had been gutted and plundered, stalls burnt, the owners dead or gone.

  ‘If the Ibo comes back again, we shall kill him too’, said one old Hausa. He had been among those who had instigated the riots.

  Refugees from a succession of internecine slaughters throughout Northern Nigeria streamed back into Eastern Nigeria in their hundreds of thousands. (Author’s collection)

  No town or village in the North was spared. There were many Ibo dead. A hundred thousand were hacked to death with cutlasses or set on fire. Most abandoned all their possessions. The survivors fled back to their traditional homes in Eastern Nigeria.

  The Premier of the Eastern Region, General Odumegwu Ojukwu, whom I’d met before the war, watched these events with dismay. He voiced his fears aloud. The North was systematically trying to kill off his people, he proclaimed over the radio. If the killings did not stop, the Eastern Region would have to take ‘appropriate action’, were his words.

  The idea of secession was already being discussed in Enugu and Onitsha. The new-found oil resources in the East, it was generally agreed, would give the Ibos the e
conomic power to secede from the Nigerian Federation and we know now that the Easterners had already begun to buy weapons from Europe.

  More importantly, they were no longer the Eastern Region of the Federation of Nigeria: they were already a nominally independent ‘Biafra’.

  Then it happened as we knew it would, though most of us got the timing wrong.

  Suddenly, on the morning of 19 July 1966, on my way to work, I found myself in the middle of what – less than an hour before – had been an extremely tough battle for Lagos’ Ikeja Airport (today Murtala Mohammed). Dozens died, almost all of them soldiers.

  I had just turned off the main road to the airport when I saw bodies strewn all over the place, along the kerb, with more in adjacent fields where they’d been cut down by automatic fire as they tried to flee. British-built Ferret armoured cars, Nigerian Army troop-carriers and civilian vehicles, some burning, some capsized, lay in disarray.

  I’d made a terrible mistake by turning off the main road. Suddenly I found myself directly in the line of fire, though the shooting by then had stopped.

  Of course, I could have turned round, but that might have drawn attention to my presence, and possibly worse, as not any one of the soldiers across the way would have missed my car turning into that critical airport road in the first place. Consequently, I did the only thing I could: I drove slowly and deliberately ahead, straight towards the airport, just as I had done every morning since I had been in the country.