by Al Venter
It was even worse if the object of his venom happened to be white. Europeans were responsible for all of the ills of Africa, he would proclaim. He was much more rancorous when he was drunk.
Mike Williamson, in A Measure of Danger, mentions a dinner at which Adekunle drew a pistol and pointed it, in turn, at each of the journalists at the table. Eventually he pressed it against Williamson’s temple and pulled the trigger. It went click. Black joke from the Black Scorpion, as somebody commented.
With all this in mind, I didn’t really want to cover the war from the Federal side. In any event, the Biafran effort had much more appeal in the eyes of this eager youngster. I’d be going in by air and from accounts already published, you didn’t have to go looking for action because the Nigerian Air Force – with mercenaries flying their aircraft – provided it every day of the week, Sundays included.
But first, how to get there? I could enter the beleaguered state from one of three places: Lisbon, which had regular flights to the island of Sao Tomé, from where there were nightly, mainly Church Aid, relief flights across the Nigerian coast into Biafra. However, that would have meant starting off in Portugal and I didn’t feel like doubling back to Europe just then. Also, it was expensive.
The only viable alternative was Gabon, another of the four countries that had recognized Ojukwu’s cause. Trouble was, most flights into the rebel territory out of Libreville were military, which meant getting to the war on an aircraft loaded with ammunition, artillery shells and a variety of explosives that the rebels needed to enhance their fortunes.
I was candid when I spoke to the Biafran press officer in Dar es Salaam. ‘Put me on one of the relief planes carrying food or whatever. I’ll give the military flights a miss for now.’ He could only smile, well aware that even that had become dangerous after one of the British mercenaries flying a Nigerian Air Force MiG-17 shot down an International Red Cross flight loaded with baby food.
Having covered a story in the Ivory Coast for a European magazine, I found myself in Ghana shortly afterwards. From there I reviewed my options. For a start, money was tight and I had to budget carefully. I knew that I could only afford perhaps one flight and that I would have to make the best of that.
As I had decided early on that Gabon was my best option, I now had the problem of getting there from Ghana. Any flight between Accra and Libreville, the Gabonese capital, would have meant changing planes at Lagos. I hesitated for several reasons, not least that having worked at Ikeja International Airport for six months, everybody knew me by my first name. Embarrassing questions might have been asked.
Also, because I had lived in the country, the Nigerians would have been interested to learn what it was that had brought me back to West Africa at a time of war. They were familiar with what I had done before and, anyway, people involved in shipping don’t go traipsing about Africa without good reason. I could probably have talked my way out of that one, but I didn’t relish the hassle. Who knew where it could lead?
By then, we all knew, mercenaries had already become an issue. Lagos had Egyptian and South African pilots while Biafra had started recruiting British, South African and French mercs, among them Bob Denard. I might have been mistaken for one, particularly since I was headed for Gabon.
So instead of going by air, I did the next best thing. I made for Tema docks, Ghana’s biggest port where, for a few days, I shopped around. I eventually found what I wanted: a cargo ship that would take me to Cameroon, to the immediate east of Nigeria. My saviour was the Norwegian-registered 12,000-ton freighter Titania.
No, the captain assured me, there would be no layovers in Nigerian ports. Yes, he said, he was going to Douala. Problem solved. We discussed a price and ten minutes later, over a couple of glasses of aquavit, we had a deal. I knew that I could fly from Douala to Libreville, the capital of Gabon.
What I hadn’t factored was that cargo ships all over the world are subject to the prerequisites of their owners. If there’s a cargo waiting to be picked up along the way and there’s financial return in doing so, the master will get his orders. So too, with the Titania.
We’d barely slipped moorings at Tema when he called me to the bridge. There was a change of plan, he said. The ship was going into a Nigerian port after all. Some oil drilling equipment had to be hauled out of the Niger Delta port of Warri. But first, he said, there would be a stop in Lagos.
As expected, I was closely questioned about the reasons for my visit to Nigeria when the Titania berthed at Apapa Docks. My name was on file and so was the fact – very clearly imprinted in my passport – that I’d been in South Africa a short while before. That half-hour was gruelling and uncertain, but eventually the man – clearly linked to one of the Nigerian intelligence offices – let me continue my journey.
When I disembarked at Douala, my troubles started afresh, largely over what was termed the mercenaire issue.
Many of those who have travelled the West African coast refer to Douala – in the middle of hundreds of square miles of swamp – as the original ‘Armpit of Africa’. It is hot and clammy, with mushrooms often sprouting on the carpets of your hotel.
The colonizing Germans, no doubt, had good reasons for settling at the estuary of one of the unhealthiest rivers in Africa, although they’ve always escaped me. Victoria – the British-controlled enclave along the western fringe of the Cameroon, lying at the foot of the great Mount Cameroon – is a much more appealing setting. Also it’s healthier.
At Douala, in contrast, the river is nearly always shrouded in a tropical mist after dark and the mosquitoes are legion. There was an appalling number of deaths among the colonists in the early years, with most dying of yellow fever.
Travellers arriving at Douala these days are still greeted by that same almost impenetrable swamp. An aircraft flying to Europe from Johannesburg in the 1960s crashed immediately after take-off with more than a hundred passengers and crew on board. Although it went down almost within sight of the airport, it took French Army and Navy rescue teams three days to reach the wreckage, though one must ask the obvious: were there no helicopters? Nobody survived and the word went out that crocodiles feasted on the bodies, which was perhaps just as well in that heat, though that was something you could hardly convey to the families.
History repeated itself when a Kenya Airways Boeing jet crashed after take-off from Douala in May 2007. Again there were more than a hundred people onboard, all of them killed and once more, it took days for the authorities – this time working with helicopters – to discover the site of the wreck. As with the crash more than 40 years earlier, it came down just a short distance from the airport…
After leaving the Titania, my intention was to fly to Libreville from Douala and make contact with the Biafran Embassy there. From Gabon, hopefully, I’d be able to hitch a lift on a plane to Uli, Biafra’s main runway in the jungle, which after dark was lit by paraffin wicks set in jam jars. Because of a powerful Nigerian Air Force presence, we could only go in at night. That part of my trip, I knew, had been arranged two months prior by Ibezim Chukwumerije at the Office of the Biafran Special Representative in Dar es Salaam.
I had no difficulties in Douala, except that I was kept for an hour by an officious immigration officer who quizzed me repeatedly about my intentions.
‘You’re not going into Biafra?’ he asked in good English. He looked hard at me and it didn’t help that I was sweating in his airless office above the harbour.
‘Not at all, Sir, I’m going south.’
‘Strange that you should come through here, through Douala,’ was his comment. Because the man was obviously suspicious, I said something about preferring sea to air travel. In fact, I had served in the navy and liked ships, were my words.
Hardly an inspiring picture of Biafran troops in training. The country was starving and so were these soldiers: it took four of them to move the kind of ammunition box a reasonably fit man could handle on his own. (Author’s collection)
I was on
ly to discover later, that a couple of weeks before, two young Americans had arrived in Douala, very much as I had, though they’d flown in directly from New York. They’d heard about the plight of Biafra and their motive was strictly humanitarian, as they confessed ‘to offer help to the starving millions’. At least that’s what they told an immigration official at Douala Airport, perhaps even the same official who grilled me.
When things started to get tough, one of them pointed to the fact that newspapers all over the world had made it known that Biafra needed medical help. These two youngsters were obviously sincere dogooders.
In their case, however, simply mentioning their intention of going to the rebel state set off a chain of events that they could never have foreseen. First they were arrested. Then, for several days they were interrogated and savagely beaten. The Agence Camerounaise de la Presse declared that they were mercenaries, but that was after they had been taken to hospital and the American Embassy in Yaounde had delivered a protest note.
The youngsters were nothing of the sort, of course. Both could show that they had solid medical backgrounds; both believed that they had a role to play in a country at war.
The two young men were flown out as soon as the American Consul in Douala could get them released and he had to do so against hefty guarantees. One of them spent months in hospital after he got back home.
CHAPTER SIX
Survival in a West African Conflict
This author reckons he’s the only journalist to have been rocketed by the aircraft of both sides of an African war, the first time, when two rebel Swedish-built MFI-9B ‘Minicons’ hit the Titania, the merchant ship on which he was travelling. That attack came while it lay moored at Nigeria’s Warri harbour. Later – while reporting from inside Biafra – he came under fire from Nigerian Air Force MiG-17s that were flown by South African and British mercenary pilots.1
EVERY WAR HAS A ‘PERSONALITY’ of its own. It’s mostly idiosyncratic, like the Taliban or a recalcitrant Arab government in Khartoum overseeing developments in Darfur.
One needs to understand the vagaries of combat and the circumstances in which particular wars are fought in order to write about them. That applies as much to Iraq, Vietnam, Lebanon, the ongoing insurgency in the Philippines or Israel’s Yom Kippur War as it does to what is going on in Afghanistan today, whether it be along the Tora Bora or in the plains beyond Kandahar.
Likewise, in Somalia in the early 1990s, where the majority of journalists lived in town, I made vigorous efforts to stay on base because I felt more comfortable with good security. Those away from the military were on extra alert when gangs of local youths got busy, especially when stoned on Qat.2
Most had been influenced by Islamic fundamentalists who had been coming across the Red Sea by dhow from Yemen. They have been doing so in increasing numbers and continue to arrive as I write. What we observe going on in that sad country today is nothing short of a totalitarian disaster.
As far as the Jihadis were concerned, the ‘bad guys’ in their sights included us media folk, who were almost exclusively Western anyway. That we had some females in our ranks only accentuated the issue.
Such influences tend to have a profound effect on what some journalists report, especially if they are made aware that they might become a target if they stayed critical of a so-called ‘popular’ cause. We saw that kind of undercurrent taking place in Beirut, especially on the Muslim side of the Green Line.
The same holds for Sudan today. If you highlight government mismanagement in Darfur – and to be fair, it is impossible not to implicate Khartoum in what is going on there – chances are that you’ll find yourself on an aircraft home.
Biafra was different. You simply couldn’t help but relate to the proverbial underdog. In a sense, this was a colonial war. The only difference from other African conflicts (Darfur excepted) was that the ‘imperialists’ involved were black. The devil in disguise there was the Nigerian government itself.
Each one of us was aware that the Ibo leader had tried to break free from Federal Nigeria after tens of thousands of Easterners had been massacred by Muslims. Men, women, the frail, the old, the lame and the halt, as well as children of all ages were targeted. Nothing mattered as long as there were Ibos murdered.
Ultimately, as we have already seen, it was the discovery of oil in the Eastern Region that caused the Biafrans to cut that sacrosanct umbilical cord that incontrovertibly linked their part of the country to Lagos. However, made the break, options were severely limited. It was a decision fraught with imponderables, because self-styled Biafra had neither the men nor the resources to succeed, nor at very least did the rebel state enjoy the support of any of the Great Powers, a sine qua non in this kind of adventure.
Inevitably, in today’s difficult world just about everything hinges on politics. You can get away with most things if you have the clandestine support of Beijing or Moscow (as with Zimbabwe, North Korea and Iran). But if, like Biafra, you have nothing to offer or even something useful like a port, or a strategic asset (Egypt at the head of the Red Sea and Suez, Guinea-Conakry with a major port on Africa’s Atlantic coast and Mozambique, straddling a large swathe on the Indian Ocean), your cause is a non-starter.
The Ibos had oil, granted, but anybody who wanted to get at it would have had to go through Nigeria anyway.
Nigeria was another matter altogether. The Biafran War, for all its disjointed priorities and mismatched participants, was a near-run thing, especially at its start. In the three years that it lasted, there were severe casualties on both sides, with almost a million people dead by the time the guns stopped firing. Tragically, only a tiny proportion of those who did the actual fighting were killed. Most of the casualties were children, the majority of whom starved to death. Biafra was the first of the more recent Third World wars to claim an inordinate number of war victims.
The miniscule Biafran Air Force had a few successes, including attacks on several Nigerian installations. One of these targeted a Nigerian Air Force base in the MidWest, where an Illyushin-28 (pictured here), originally flown by Egyptian pilots, was destroyed on the ground. (Photo courtesy of Michael Draper, author of Shadows: Airlift and Airwar in Biafra and Nigeria, 1967–1970)
It was in Biafra that I made my first acquaintance with a remarkable young Englishman who was quadrilingual in English, French, German and Spanish, and who had flown de Havilland Vampire jets for the Royal Air Force in the days when military conscription was still obligatory in Britain.
Freddie to us all, then and now – or more formally, Frederick Forsyth – had worked for Reuters in Paris and Berlin before accepting a job with the BBC and heading out to West Africa, where he became a friend and confidante of the rebel leader Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu. This enthusiastic young Brit eventually became so close to the rebel hierarchy that he was actually attached to the main Biafran invasion army that struck out in force in a lightning raid to capture Lagos, then the Federal capital. The fact that he’d fallen out with his bosses in London because of their partisan approach to the crisis, which ignored the slaughter of the innocents, had a good deal to do with it. He deplored British support for a government that had caused so many innocent deaths. In the end, he resigned from the BBC but stayed on in the disputed rebel enclave to work as a freelance.
Had the Biafrans succeeded in their attempts at secession, Forsyth has always said, Nigeria would probably have another name today. But they didn’t, because of Colonel Victor Banjo’s betrayal. Freddie also maintains that there were also other factors that contributed.
The experience of Biafran troops’ almost taking Lagos, the country’s biggest city, as Forsyth will tell you, taught Nigeria a lesson. Once the Biafrans had pulled back to their own lines, the Nigerian government completely changed its military policy. To bring the recalcitrant Biafra to heel, Lagos needed tens of thousands of soldiers and there was no option but to ‘to recruit, recruit and recruit’. As Forsyth explains, ‘within almost no time at all, the
Nigerian government increased its army up from the original 6,000 to something like 150,000’.
The newcomers came from all over. The Nigerian authorities used the prisons, such as Lagos’ awful Kiri Kiri Prison, which was nearly emptied of every thug, gangster and killer. Murderers were summarily released and put into uniform. Then the recruiters virtually emptied Lagos University. They grabbed every student they could find, gave him a rifle, and, as was the case in Angola 30 years later, all these young men were turned around and transported to the front. There was never any question of training this new group of improvised soldiers.
It was about then that the prospect of Nigerian oil supplies entered the picture. Suddenly there were those who became aware that if Biafra were to succeed in pulling away from the Nigerian Federation, Nigeria’s oil supplies to Britain and America might be disrupted. London panicked when it realized that perhaps this civil war thing was not going to be quite as simple as Whitehall had originally said it would.
The man who made all this disruption happen – and who was to become a close friend and confidante of Forsyth – was the self-appointed Biafran leader Ojukwu, the son of Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu, a transport tycoon and one of the first native multi-millionaires of Nigeria.
The old man had originally started out as a typical West African working-class man with one truck. From there, he built up an entire pan-national transport chain and made a fortune during World War II in his not altogether altruistic bid to help the British war effort. He was eventually knighted for services to the Empire.
His son, also Odumegwu, who must have been born round 1933, was sent to Epson College, one of the best fee-paying schools in England. From there he went up to Lincoln College, Oxford, one of the world’s oldest academic institutions, with its 15th-century façade, its medieval hall, a 17th-century chapel and its famous baroque library.