Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  Forsyth states:

  He ended up playing rugby for the college, so in a sense, young Odumegwu was one of those very Anglicized young Africans that the British were seeking to turn out, right across all the old Dominions, Africa, especially.

  He returned to Africa and was expected to take over the reins of his father’s commercial empire. Instead, Ojukwu decided to join the Nigerian Army and that surprised everybody at the time because they presumed he would just live the life of a young hyper-privileged Nigerian.

  In terms of education and culture, there was just nobody that could begin to match him. The Nigerian military establishment in those days was commanded by a Scot, Brigadier or Major General, Mackenzie, I think his name was. He was supported by a number of British officers, so it was all the chaps together.

  Ojukwu, by now a subaltern, rose rapidly through the ranks. Then came the 1960s and independence and he progressed even further, followed in 1966 by the first army mutiny that January.

  According to Forsyth, there were not only Ibo officers involved in the putsch. There were even a few Northerners.

  The Ibos, we know, were the driving force, the motivators. But there were other officers as well and the revolution’s orientation was much more left wing than tribal. Many of these young officers had returned from training in Europe with very distinct radical or egalitarian sentiments. I wouldn’t say Marxist, but it could be viewed as close to the Marxist or Leninist view of life. These people were idealists for a better world. One and all they abhorred the nepotism and corruption then rampant throughout Nigeria.

  With that, the chaos started. Every single minister, in the wake of the killings, literally disappeared: ‘gone for bush’, as they used to say, or vaporized into the jungle.

  As with more recent African conflicts – Sierra Leone and Liberia included – few prisoners were ever taken in the Nigerian Civil War. Those held, even for brief periods, were displayed solely for propaganda purposes. POW camps, as such, didn’t exist. In any event, the Biafrans had neither the means nor the ability to feed anyone but their own.

  We were all aware that Federal forces would murder any of the enemy they captured. In fact, the vast majority of those taken by the Nigerian Army were lucky to survive much longer than a few hours of hard interrogation. There were exceptions, but only when scribes were around.

  Journalists saw it all in a curious light. As ‘guests’ – on both sides – they made the best of brief, distorted and slanted handouts, erratic and sometimes dangerous transport (especially in the air) and a frontline that could waver by as much as three, and once or twice 20, miles overnight. Never mind vile accommodation – or no accommodation at all – and food that never warranted close inspection. Most of the journalists took their own food and nobody entered the country without a wide range of antibiotics.

  There were often scarcely veiled threats of expulsion if you got the story wrong. You’d get a friendly visit from an official and get the message. You saved the juicer bits for after you’d left the country.

  Biafran air raid drills. These were hardly worth doing because the soldiers didn’t have the ammunition to retaliate when strafed. (Author’s collection)

  Intimidation – as with Beirut at its worst – was routine. If you followed the Biafran line while in Lagos, you were kicked out unless you had first-class contacts within the Federal government, as was the case the BBC’s Angus McDermid when he first reported on the Ibo secession.

  Conflict in Nigeria had as much to do with the people as with the money to fund the fighting. With a population of about 60 million (double that today) the Federal government had a distinct preponderance where numbers were concerned – and naturally, as much hardware as Britain and Russia could sell to them because Lagos usually paid in cash. That was a good deal more than Biafra could muster, even had it had the funds.

  While Federal forces had their ‘hero’, the psychopath Colonel Adekunle, Biafran Colonel J.O. ‘Hannibal’ Achuzia – who commanded the Biafran Red Commando strike force, one of the best unconventional units of the war – was a totally different kind of person.

  Achuzia had fought in Korea as a soldier in the British Army and at one stage was taken prisoner and tortured by the Chinese. He applied much that he’d learnt abroad to his own tactics in Biafra and sometimes sent his men on long-range raids. In one attack, his men caught more than a hundred Nigerian Army trucks in an ambush. Munitions and equipment not destroyed were later put to good use by his own forces.

  Towards the end of the war, Colonel Achuzia was ordered to take his force south. It was a last, desperate attempt to stem a Federal advance from the town of Aba across the Imo River. Since his forces were outnumbered ten-, sometimes twenty-, to-one, and his men were often down to a couple of rounds of ammunition each, with no artillery support, it was hopeless.

  A charming, perspicacious man, Joe Achuzia was married to an English woman and was very much the antithesis of the dreaded Adekunle. Like the urbane former Federal Supreme Court Judge, Sir Louis Mbanefo, and the Biafran Chief of Staff, Major General Philip Effiong – another product of Sandhurst – he was a gentleman of great dignity. In that respect the Biafrans were streets ahead of their former comrades-in-arms. Many Federal officers we met were boorish in manner and uncooperative in their dealings with us and in this regard Frederick Forsyth was spot-on. They despised and often ridiculed us scribes. How different the Biafrans.

  Early on the morning of my arrival at Uli, I was taken to State House at Ihiala where I was to have my passport examined.

  The grey-brick building was well camouflaged from the air with palm fronds spread over the roof. The Biafrans wanted to confirm that I was who I said I was. The suspicion of infiltrating Federal Nigerian agents had become an obsession. Also, the stamp ‘Enugu Airport – Biafra’ looked incongruous in my passport considering that the former capital of the Eastern Region had fallen to Federal troops more than a year before and lay a week’s march up the road, were that possible.

  There I met Brigadier Okorafor of the Overseas Press Service. He was responsible for ‘processing’ those like me who had entered the rebel territory overnight; ‘putting you through your paces’ he liked to call it. Some reporters were spared the routine, such as those, like Forsyth, who were there by special request of H.E., that is, His Excellency Odumegwu Ojukwu.

  The brigadier, a distinguished-looking former diplomat, welcomed me warmly. ‘You obviously haven’t had breakfast; please join me.’

  The meal was revolting. He apologized and said it was the best he could offer under the circumstances. Anyway, gari is an acquired taste, especially when smothered in eye-watering pepper: I usually gave it a miss, even while I was living in Lagos before the war. The bread was half sawdust, but it was all part of the daily fare. At least the tea was Earl Grey.

  ‘If you’d come last week’, said the brigadier, ‘I would have offered you an egg. We get three a month. Ours arrived last week. Sorry about that.’ He was contrite.

  My host himself ate as if we were at the Savoy Grill. I could have done with a steak, but by then meat was equally scarce in Biafra and what there was, usually enjoyed a dubious provenance. Every cat and dog in the country had long since gone. Rats – especially West Africa’s huge cane rats – were a rare delicacy and made for a feast when caught or shot. Not bad as meat dishes go, I’d savoured some earlier in Togo where it came with a spinach and hot pepper sauce.

  At Ihiala, I also met another of the stalwarts who had led the country into war after some of his family had been wiped out in faction killings in Kaduna in the Northern Region. This was Major G.C. Akabogil, a former high-school principal, then the security officer at Uli Airport. Genial but tough; ‘G.C.’ scrutinised all new arrivals.

  He quoted Virgil like an Oxford don as he compared the war to the Roman rebellion against the cruel Etruscan king Mezentius. The analogy was good, he thought, because Yakubu Gowon, the Nigerian military leader, in the guise of Mezentius, would ultimately
be vanquished, even if it had to be with foreign help. With his excellent English he sounded rather like a black version of Richard Burton.

  Until I had travelled from Ihiala to Owerri – which was to be my base while I was there – I had no idea how badly the war had been going for Ojukwu’s people. The Biafran High Command consisted of optimists who constantly spoke of victory. They continued to do so to the very end, even though the Feds were banging on their back and front doors, and as Forsyth once quipped, ‘trying to climb in through their windows as well’.

  The country was desperately short of food, other than starch, and it showed. At the airport it took four men to lift a single ammunition case that I could have handled on my own with ease.

  It was the same in the towns. The people were listless and debilitated, their eyes sunk deep into their heads and their pathetic arms and legs displayed little of the kind of muscle that the average Nigerian these days is proud to display when the opportunity allows.

  It was worse for the kids. Every child that hadn’t been placed in one of the scores of camps that were dotted about the territory was swollenbellied. Most had distinct white patches in their hair, the most visible evidence of kwashiorkor, a disease which is caused by starvation.

  ‘Thank God all the children haven’t yet been sent off into bush. They’re our most effective air raid early warning system’, said one old man. I hadn’t been in Owerri for an hour before the first MiG-17 streaked across the sky, its arrival preceded by long, loud whistles. Like domestic pet dogs – if there had been any – the children could hear the whine of jet engines long before we could. At their signals we scuttled into improvised underground bunkers.

  The walls of the one that I ducked into were crumbling and I could see sky through the roof. ‘Why didn’t they finish the job?’ I asked my escort, Emeka Nwofor, formerly a teacher. His sister was at Kilometre Onze in Gabon looking after Biafran orphans. ‘Because we haven’t got the energy to do it’, he admitted. ‘The men take it easy when they aren’t working or fighting. We have to conserve what little strength we have. If I want it mended, I must do it myself.’ It was hardly a matter for debate.

  At Owerri I was unceremoniously installed in a caravan, the same standard box-on-wheels commonly used all over Nigeria before the war. This one was barely habitable. There was a latrine pit at the back, and for a shower I used a bucket under the palms. Anywhere else in Africa, it might have made for a pleasant safari camp.

  Several more caravans were clustered together in the shade of some big trees. The exposed sides were also camouflaged with palm fronds, elephant grass and bushes.

  My nearest neighbour was the Italian photographer, Romano Cagnoli, who – like the Cockney lensman Don McCullin – seemed to have taken up permanent residence in the country. Between them they were responsible for many of the colour spreads of wounded, dying and emaciated Biafran children that appeared in Life, the London Sunday Times colour supplement, Paris Match, Bunte and others on all five continents. The Biafrans made good use of the stuff, as images of dying children stabbed at the conscience of the West. Europe was responsible, not Africa, they said and gradually people started to listen.

  Mohammed Amin repeated the process not long afterwards by bringing back the first alarming scenes of millions of starving civilians in Ethiopia. That set in train the largest international aid programme ever, of which Somalia – and the war in Africa’s Horn that followed – was an offshoot. Amin garnered a decoration from the Queen in the process.

  In Biafra, in contrast, General Ojukwu was effectively helped in his campaign by the public relations firm Markpress of Geneva. The company thoroughly vetted everybody who wanted to go into Biafra, and again, the paranoia with Federal agents was palpable.

  Cagnoli and the rest of the bunch of news gatherers into which I was thrust at Owerri lived pretty well. They’d brought with them all the booze they needed and trunkloads of food. I’d been led to believe in Libreville that we would be catered for while we were there; since we weren’t, I all but starved during my entire stay. I should have known better because pictures of the breakaway state’s starving children were in every newspaper in the West. Certainly, the Biafran representative in Gabon failed to warn me that his government not only wouldn’t, but, more to the point couldn’t, feed me.

  So, while at Owerri, I was almost entirely dependent on Cagnoli’s goodwill and let’s face it, he could only help so much. Nobody was sure how long they’d be around or how long the war would last and they weren’t taking any chances.

  I ended up famished, and it made for a novel, if disagreeable experience. Everybody has fasted for a day or two and generally speaking, you’re that much the better for it. However, when it goes on for a week or ten days, it starts to get to you. Life becomes difficult. I could hardly complain because the Biafrans had been hungry for two years.

  The author went on assignment to Biafra for the London Daily Express, having first called at the country’s ‘embassy’ in Dar es Salaam to obtain clearance. He eventually flew into Uli ‘Airport’ from Libreville in Gabon. His clearance document specified entry from the Portuguese island of Sao Tomé, but he pushed his luck in Libreville, in mainland Gabon instead, and succeeded. (Author’s collection)

  By the time I got back to Nairobi I couldn’t stop eating. I also found it difficult to stop hurling myself to the ground each time a car backfired. I was bomb-happy for a while afterwards.

  It was the little everyday things about life in a country at war that astonished those of us who visited Biafra for the first time.

  We discovered an inordinate will to survive, which was natural enough, except that the odds were powerfully stacked against Ojukwu’s people. I saw conditions at fairly close quarters, since my escort Emeka and I went just about everywhere on foot. Cars or pick-ups were a luxury reserved for longer trips.

  The Biafran social code was enforced with the rigour of an Amish settlement in the MidWest. Civil and criminal courts were held from Monday to Friday in all big towns. The Biafran Supreme Court of Appeal sat in session in Owerri when it was in rebel hands or in Umuahia when it wasn’t. Colonial traditions were strictly observed: wigs and robes for all senior members of the bar, which was absurd in that climate; such flummeries still persist in most of the former British territories, although wigs are no longer worn in British courts. The prisons had not been abolished either. Inmates could be seen in working parties under guard on the last day of the war.

  Ojukwu printed his own money, now of good value among collectors. The notes, gaudy and in every colour of the spectrum, were professionally printed in Europe. A planeload of it disappeared on the way back from Switzerland. Biafra also had its own coins, stamps and postal orders. In spite of restrictions necessitated by conflict and a breakdown in communications, Biafran welfare officers continued to pay pensions to war widows until the end and postal deliveries always remained efficient, even after hostilities ended.

  When an area had to be evacuated – as in the case of Owerri before its recapture (following the fall of Umuahia to the east) – the first to be moved were the wounded and civil prisoners, the latter carrying litters or supplies. Likewise, entire hospitals disappeared into the bush. Former inmates of mental institutions had long since been released to fend for themselves in the jungle and by all accounts, they seemed to manage.

  Medicines, or rather the lack of them, were a constant problem. Whatever drugs were brought into the country went straight into the tummies of hundreds of thousands of sick and starving children. Adults, civilians and combatants had to make do with bush remedies and potions. Witchdoctors thrived.

  I spent many a night at the French Red Cross Hospital in Owerri watching the forerunners of Médecins Sans Frontiéres (Doctors Without Borders) treating the wounded. There were no formalities and I could walk into the operating theatre at will, with or without a mask over my mouth and nose. Operations were carried out without anaesthetics because there were none. Only the officiating surg
eon and his theatre sister wore surgical gowns. The rest of us were in our everyday gear. There was no sterilization, not even scrubbing soap.

  The wounded were brought in from the various fronts at night in mammy-wagons, the universal means of transport in West Africa. During the day there was very little movement on the roads, as MiGs fighters were an omnipresent threat, as I discovered for myself a few times. The wounded had to wait for nightfall before they could be moved and for those with gut wounds, the delay could be serious; septicaemia is fatal in about six hours if not treated.

  The wounded were brought back from the front, usually at sunset (to avoid being strafed by MiGs), in the backs of so-called ‘mammy wagons’, one of which can be seen in the background. These were used as improvised ambulances. The expatriate medical staff that dealt with casualties (foreground) was mainly French and forerunners of Médecins Sans Frontiéres. Because there were few dressings, and as one exclaimed, ‘no anesthetics, no antibiotics, no nothing’, the survival rate was pathetic. (Author’s collection)

  In every mammy-wagon that arrived in Owerri with its 25-odd casualties, three or four of the wounded were already dead.

  ‘We have to work fast when the first ambulance gets here’, said one of the French doctors who’d volunteered to come to Biafra to gain trauma surgery experience.

  The wounded, some walking, others supported, as well as a few on makeshift bamboo litters, were taken to an ‘emergency station’, usually an empty room lit by paraffin lamps. The worst cases would be separated from the others and the young doctors would go to work, often through the night. It was harrowing.