by Al Venter
Everybody was delighted. At last, the Federal government was showing a bit of muscle! For the first month these brand new warplanes were almost mollycoddled. Each morning they were carefully washed down and polished. Come the end of the day, someone would emerge from the hangars and close the cockpits. It was all meticulously done. Additional canvas covers would be spread over the planes so that nothing would be damaged if it rained. By the second month, the covers had disappeared. Weeks later nobody even bothered about rain, or whether the cockpits were open or closed to the weather.
A squadron or two of Czechoslovakian Delphin jet trainers/fighters was bought by the Federal government for service against the ‘Dissident East’. They were parked outside my office and for the first few months kept in tip-top condition. Afterwards nobody even bothered to close their cockpit canopies when it rained and it wasn’t long before they became inoperable. (Photo courtesy of Michael Draper, author of Shadows: Airlift and Airwar in Biafra and Nigeria, 1967–1970)
Obviously the Delphins weren’t operational for very long thereafter, which was when Lagos started shopping around and eventually bought Soviet MiG-17 fighters.
Meanwhile, as part of my job, I continued to travel. Most of all, I enjoyed heading out towards the East, near the Cameroon frontier. Though unsettled because of the refugee problem – a million Ibos had been forced to return to their roots because they were being slaughtered elsewhere – this was still the most ordered part of the country.
When I had first entered Nigeria – impecunious and overland from the Cameroon Republic the year before – I’d managed to visit the delightful little port of Calabar that nestles like a cherub at the head of a river inlet in the extreme east of the country. It was a tropical hideaway from all the country’s travails and I made friends with a group of British and American volunteers. Also a charming place was Jos, a big area in the interior with its tin mines and strange, primitive tribes who wanted only to be left alone.
The North was pleasant enough, at least when there weren’t people slitting each other’s throats. Anyway, whites were regarded as very much apart from that kind of violence. Then things started to get nasty and one couldn’t escape the tension.
Meanwhile, the military governor of the Eastern Region, Lieutenant Colonel (later General) Ojukwu, watched all these events with dismay. The son of a wealthy Ibo businessman and an Oxford graduate (see Chapter 6), he was outspoken about the long-term consequences of these killings. The nation was being irrevocably split, he warned. War might follow, if only because the minority that was being persecuted simply had to do something to survive.
The idea of seceding from the Nigerian Federation was already a hot issue in Enugu, Port Harcourt and Onitsha. Among the arguments that Ojukwu and his people liked to use, was that the boundaries of the country had been arbitrarily drawn by the British colonial government a century before.1 Consequently, they were of little use now, they maintained.
Of course, by then, matters relating to oil had become a very substantial issue. The new-found oil deposits, it was agreed, would give the Ibo Nation (it had been the Ibo ‘people’ before) the economic power to go it alone.
We were aware that Ojukwu had already sent his emissaries abroad to acquire what weapons they could from Europe. The word that came back was that some of his requests were being met, with France and several Eastern European countries willing to sell arms for cash. It was all over-the-counter stuff, and the problem was getting it back to Ojukwu’s already-embattled enclave.
At about this point, things moved quickly. Violence in the Northern reaches continued, with killings in the Yoruba-dominated West abating markedly over the months that followed. No fools, the Yoruba were already well aware that this was a North–South thing, with the preponderant Islamic militants in the North doing what they could to cripple the largely Christian Eastern Nigeria.
Indirectly, that led to questions being asked in Lagos and Ibadan and they went something like this: once the Ibos and the East have been dealt with, are we likely to be next? The phrase ‘Islamic Jihad’ was being bandied about as if this threat was already a reality.
Undeterred, the Eastern Region was soon to be declared. The Republic of Biafra it was called, and its symbol was the rising sun again a black backdrop. Then, as some of us knew it would, came the counterrevolution launched by the Nigeria’s Islamic north, though most of us got the timing wrong. Worse, with my offices at the airport, I seemed to be in the middle of it.
At that early stage, there was very little known about the man who had taken over after Nigeria’s second military coup.
General Yakubu Gowon was a quiet-spoken Christian soldier who originally came from a small northern tribe, the Angas. Though he had a minor role in the July 1966 counter-coup, he emerged as a compromise head of the new government.
Frederick Forsyth remembers him emerging out of the gathering chaos as the mild-mannered adjutant of the Nigerian Army. He was the typical young Nigerian officer. More important, he wasn’t Muslim. Being, as it was termed, ‘Middle Belt’ – neither from the North nor the South – he couldn’t be tarred with a brush of being an Ibo. In fact, recalls Forsyth, he suited everybody.
As far as the coup leaders were concerned, their attitude was that ‘we can run the country behind this man’. So too with Sir David Hunt, the British High Commissioner: Gowon was the perfect choice.
Sir David was a traditionalist, and liked the fact that Gowon would snap to attention whenever the British High Commissioner walked in… that pleased the old Brit. In contrast, there were those among us who regarded the Nigerian military leader as an overgrown boy scout.
In contrast, Sir David’s relations with Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu were ‘frosty’, recalls Forsyth:
The British High Commissioner, very much a product of the old British colonial establishment, viewed black people in ‘their proper place’. Certainly, Ojukwu didn’t fit into that mould: he was the product of a British public school education and could actually be regarded as a black Englishman. He’d been to Oxford, played a good game of rugby, his father had been knighted by the King and was a self-made millionaire… this was a man of substance.
Ojukwu, recalls Forsyth:
regarded Sir David Hunt with the direst suspicion, well-merited as it eventually turned out. From the outset the British High Commissioner detested the Ibo military leader and the sentiment was thoroughly reciprocated.
On Hunt’s part, there were two reasons. Unlike Ojukwu, Hunt was not public school, despite a brilliant classical brain demonstrated at Oxford. But he was a simply crushing snob and covert racist. Two, he divorced his wife and married Rio Myriantusi, the favourite niece of the mega-rich, Lebanese-Greek Nigerian-based tycoon A.G. Leventis… and what complicated matters here was that she had been Emeka’s [Ojukwu’s] girlfriend, with the younger man vastly better endowed!
A career army officer, Yakubu Gowon was very different, though he was also a contemporary of the rebel leader Ojukwu. The two men actually served in the same units on occasion and knew and understood each other’s foibles, which could have been one of the reasons why the Biafran leader believed that he could pull off his wager to withdraw from the Nigerian Federation and go it alone, much as Rhodesia had successfully done just a few years before.
Indeed, the two men were very different. Gowon wasn’t one for publicity: in fact, says Forsyth, it took him an age to get his first interview with a man whom he always found extremely reserved and quiet-spoken.
Never recalcitrant, he was reticent to talk about his own life and though he could have claimed one of the presidential palaces as his own, he never did. None of his successors wasted any time in moving into the biggest and most lavish palaces on hand, most times with excessive brass and hoopla. Gowon preferred to stay on in the barracks with his family, in part, it has been said, because the presence of his own soldiers offered better protection.
Eschewing limelight and controversy, General Gowon was different in other re
spects as well. The media made a thing about his having been trained in England at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, as well as in Ghana. The truth, says Forsyth, ‘is that while it sounds like the full three-year permanent commission background, it was actually a threemonth summer course which Commonwealth officers literally couldn’t fail’. Gowon did get involved in two tours of duty with the Nigerian Army during the Congo’s upheavals and, by all accounts, did a sterling job in putting down uprisings in the interior.
Conditions in the east of the country were difficult from the start. Biafran troops had to manage with improvised training and instruction, which often involved no weapons at all because everything available had been shifted to the frontlines. (Author’s collection)
When the Biafran War ended, it was General Yakubu Gowon who initiated the remarkable reconciliation that took place between the victors and the vanquished, in itself an astonishing gesture because it avoided still more unnecessary bloodshed. That this happened at a time when the Nigerian military clamoured to bring the entire Biafran command and their supporters to trial, made his efforts even more commendable.
There were those who wanted them all executed. The fact that Gowon managed to sidestep this bristling, emotional matter underscores the measure of his resolve. After all, his opponents argued, hundreds of thousands of their own peoples’ lives had been lost in what they regarded a senseless war.
Gowon had a ruthless (and some say, a pragmatic) side to him that went unheralded. He was the first African leader to hire foreign pilots to fight his war: first Egyptians to fly his MiG-17s and then a batch of South African and British mercenaries who eventually played a seminal role in turning the war around. He was also powerfully opposed to any direct humanitarian aid going into Biafra without the aircraft first landing at Nigerian airports to be checked. As a consequence, he was implacably opposed to organizations like Oxfam and Joint Church Aid, which flew their planes into Biafra from the offshore Portuguese island colony of Sao Tomé and from Libreville in Gabon.
In the political climate in an unstable Nigeria that was both unpredictable and volatile, General Gowon simply couldn’t last. On a diplomatic mission to Uganda in July 1975, the army deposed him.
Forsyth commented that:
Both the harsh and the gentle side of Gowon were deceptive because he was throughout like a glove puppet; either of the Fulani/Hausa zealots like Murtala Mohammed or of British advisors who might spot a brilliant opportunity for hood PR. Visiting correspondents and residents like Angus McDermid were constantly briefed by the High Commissioner, almost as if he were in total charge in all matters. In fact Hunt wasn’t: he constantly deferred to his British and Northern advisors.
Not many mercenaries flocked to Biafra, because conditions generally were bad. Taffy Williams, a South African Welshman, shown with the Biafran flag behind him, was one of the few. Another was Rolf Steiner, who liked to draw attention to himself in front of his troops by firing his pistol in the air. He was eventually removed from the country in shackles. (Author’s collection)
Before the war started there was one crucial effort to prevent conflict at Aburi. It was staged by the British High Commissioner before David Hunt and Sir Francis Coming-Bruce (aka to the hack community as ‘Cunning Brute’). All the parties involved were represented, with the idea of finding a compromise settlement and heading off secession and a Nigerian civil war.
Forsyth comments:
Ojukwu turned up at Aburi wholly focused and minutely briefed. While he ran rings around the poor, floundering Gowon, the deal was nevertheless signed to general jubilation and relief. But Lagos had made concessions that some of the country’s leaders didn’t like. For instance, the East was allowed to retain federal taxes to cope with her almost two million penniless refugees who had fled the North and the West with only the clothes on their backs, leaving behind 30,000 dead and bringing with them the same number of machete-mutilated victims.
Back in Lagos afterwards, the Northerners exploded and denounced it all as a charade. The British briefed the Press that Ojukwu had taken gross advantage of the not-too-bright Gowon [who could have brought a team of scholars, but chose to negotiate alone]. Lagos then reneged on every point that had earlier been agreed to at Aburi.
Ironically, accused by Sir David Hunt of being a dictator, Ojukwu was the only one of the two who bowed to the will of his people. The Nigerian attitude, as we have seen, was ‘good riddance’… until London pointed out exactly where the oil lay.
The war that everybody regarded as inevitable became a reality when the secessionist West African state of Biafra unilaterally declared itself independent from Nigeria in May 1967. The split came months after I left Lagos, when tens of thousands of Ibo people in the Northern Region were massacred. Perhaps a million more fled southwards to Eastern-dominated areas. In turn, huge numbers of non-Ibos were expelled from the East.
While hostilities started well enough, with the secessionists marching half-way across the country to take Benin and much of the central regions, the Biafran Army was hesitant to continue on to Lagos. It was Ojukwu’s worst mistake of the war. The city was wide open and government forces – though not in disarray – were on the back foot and unable to respond to this brilliant Biafran initiative.
Then came betrayal. Ojukwu himself today admits that the role played by Colonel Victor Banjo – a non-Ibo, but one of his senior planners – had a significant effect on the outcome of that early, extremely critical phase. His forces were never supposed to have taken the mid-west city of Benin. They wasted weeks and a lot of lives in doing so. Then Banjo clandestinely made contact with Federal Army officers in Lagos. It didn’t work, because Banjo was unmasked, court-martialed and shot.
As Frederick Forsyth wrote – he spent a lot of time in Biafra and wrote a classic book on the war Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend – ‘it was also clear that the Nigerian Army was a rabble, a shambles from beginning to end’.
Government forces did get their act together after a while, in part because either they did so or went down. Lagos’ forces then proceeded to blockade all eastern ports in the hands of Ojukwu’s troops and within months the conflict had degenerated into one of the most brutal tit-fortat wars of attrition that Africa had seen in post-colonial times.
Fighting everywhere was both ferocious and confused. Towns changed hands, sometimes three or four times in as many months. Eventually, the preponderance of Federal power prevailed and the Biafrans were pushed back, first from the coast and finally into several loosely linked enclaves in the heavily forested interior. Government atrocities at the hands of what had become a Northern-dominated, mainly Islamic force soon convinced the rebel nation that secession from the Federation was no longer the principal issue. Rather, it had become a battle for survival.
One of the reasons why the Biafrans were initially so successful was that only a small percentage of the officer corps came from the North and the West at the time of Nigeria’s independence from Britain in 1960. Most of those who replaced white officers were of Ibo extraction.
As war gathered pace during the latter part of 1967, I was determined to get back to West Africa and cover it. My sojourn in Lagos had provided me with some valuable connections. Since Vietnam tended to hog the headlines (and most of the more experienced foreign correspondents) there weren’t too many scribes either eager, or willing, to go into a conflict that, from abroad, looked only a step removed from disaster.
Because of censorship on both sides of the front, nobody got the entire picture right. The reason was basic: one of the first measures taken by both the Biafran and the Federal government was to hire a succession of crack European PR companies to push their military claims, most of them inflated. There were some battles that took place that – if you had to judge by respective PR reports – might have happened on different continents. One of the consequences was that just about everything about the war, from start to finish, was clouded by fogs of duplicity and equivocation.
Still a cub reporter – and an untrained one at that – I thought I knew better. After all, I’d seen developments from the inside. I’d been living there from the start, right at the core of it. I also knew that if Biafra came into being, the resolve of these persecuted people wouldn’t make for an easy pushover. Of course, it didn’t happen like that.
Biafra at that stage was recognized by only four countries, and then only circumspectly. Tanzania, with a revolutionary cauldron brewing along its borders in neighbouring Mozambique – then still ruled from Lisbon – was one of them. For all that, though, there was a Biafran diplomatic legation in Dar es Salaam.
I decided early on that I’d get myself to Nairobi, make my way by road to Dar es Salaam and with my Daily Express press card in hand, bang on the door of the Biafran Embassy. While it took time for the West Africans to check my bona fides, a visa eventually came through, delivered to the office of my foreign editor in Fleet Street. It was sent to me in South Africa and from there I headed for what antiquarian maps have always displayed as the Bight of Benin.
In theory, I expect I could have covered the war from the Nigerian side, but things there were ultra-difficult at the time. For a start, the media was suspect. Individual Nigerian commanders weren’t shy to show their displeasure if somebody reported something contrary to the official line.
One senior Nigerian Army officer, Colonel Benjamin ‘Black Scorpion’ Adekunle, commander of Nigeria’s 3rd Marine Commando Division, was a psychopathic bully who was quite happy to shoot his own men if he thought he needed to make an example. He did so once in the presence of foreign journalists and dared them to file their stories. Adekunle often blasted off about the kind of journalism then coming out of West Africa, blaming his nation’s woes on the CIA, Westminster, the Pope and who knows who else.