by Al Venter
By nightfall some of the patients would have gangrene, which sets in very soon in the heat and humidity of tropical Africa. At Owerri arms and legs were hacked off without ceremony. A piece of wood would be thrust between the victim’s teeth, several soldiers would hold him down and the doctor would get to work with a saw.
‘What else can we do?’ said Dr Michel Fontainebleau. ‘If we didn’t amputate the limb, he’d be dead by morning.’
Bullet holes in the chest, unless a vital organ had been pierced, were simple by comparison. Many bullets of large calibre – such as the NATO 7.62mm – passed straight through the body. The holes were washed out with disinfectant, usually with a narrow garden hose.
I’d watch these dedicated young Frenchmen plunging steel rods tipped with a length of lint into a bullet hole in the chest and push it through to the other side. It was like cleaning a rifle. While most amputees would scream, none of the soldiers given the rod treatment so much as whimpered.
I never found out what proportion of casualties survived, but it must have been a fair number. The Biafrans I discovered, famished or not, were a remarkably tough bunch. They rarely complained and, let’s face it, their fortitude was exemplary to us Western softies.
The nightly flights into Biafra, which concentrated mainly on the needs of the children and the military, could hardly have been expected to supply the demands of four million people cut off from the world outside. As a result, prices in Biafra were the highest in Africa.
A meal of roots at the Progress Hotel in Owerri, for example, cost the equivalent of two dollars, an ounce of meat was as much again. Salt for this meal would be priced one Biafran pound or two US dollars, all of which we had to exchange on our arrival at Uli for foreign currencies, at par with sterling at pre-secession rates. By the end of the war, inflation was rising at several hundred per cent a month.
The cost of ‘non-essential’ goods was greater. A single cigarette in the last two months cost ten Biafran shillings, roughly a dollar. So did a cup of tea with goat’s milk. What sugar there was mostly went to mission hospitals, where it was used as a substitute for glucose intended for starving children.
Petrol (as they still called it) was a strategic material and not sold on the open market, although a gallon of gas could be bought easily enough on the black market for $30 or $40, although only in American dollars. A pair of men’s flannels cost $20, a shirt sometimes as much as $50. Second-hand clothes were barely any cheaper and it puts things in perspective when you realize that 40 years ago, that was a lot of money!
I was soon confronted by inflation. After breakfast on my first morning at State House, I was told to wait because there was no transport, something I soon got used to. The morning newspaper arrived: a single folded sheet of school exercise paper that, I was assured, had a circulation that ran well into four figures. I was charged a dollar.
‘It’s the only paper we’ve left’, said the youthful editor of Jet, the Biafran daily; ‘but it gives us what we need: objective news of the outside world’. Anything from Federal Nigeria was tainted. Propaganda!
The news was printed in bright red ink, which looked like a compound of shoe polish and ochre and probably was: they certainly didn’t have money to spare for the real thing. That particular issue of 4 November 1969 celebrated Ojukwu’s 36th birthday. Half-page advertisements on the crammed sheet had been taken by two expatriate companies that had formerly traded in the Eastern Region: the United Africa Company (Unilever) and the African Continental Bank.
A two-column advertisement on the last page of Jet urged subscribers to book in time for their Christmas cards and New Year greetings.
All foreign companies that formerly operated in Eastern Nigeria were now managed by their Ibo staff and though little happened – for instance at the local office of Caterpillar, or Bata shoes – many were surprised after the war ended to find that nearly every branch office had kept up-to-date books.
In spite of some lighter moments, the grim reality of conflict was omnipresent. Cripples were everywhere and there were many. Young boys, some barely into their teens, hobbled legless on crutches. Anywhere else they’d have been in an institution, or being prepared for prosthetics. Only the very worst cases could be dealt with at Red Cross and government clinics.
I came across several groups of shellshocked youngsters, and these were experiences that remained fixed in my mind for many years. Huddled in small groups almost like zombies, they communicated with grunts and gestures in an absent-minded sort of way. Most were tended by some older person until they recovered. Quite a few got better and some were even posted back to their units. Quite a number, one of the Red Cross people told me, never would.
Decades later, some of these poor souls are still afflicted.
It was at the headquarters of 44-year-old Major General Philip Effiong – the Biafran Chief of Staff and a Sandhurst-trained veteran of two Nigerian operations in the Congo – that most strategy in this war was planned. It was a sandbagged and well-camouflaged camp on the outskirts of Owerri (it would have made a marvellous film set).
My visit there promised to be an experience and we went by car. Because of the MiGs, each of us carefully observed his quarter of the horizon as we drove. I sat behind the driver, so my responsibility was rear quadrant, on my side of the vehicle. The system worked well because the Biafrans had become pretty adroit at recognizing distant dots in the sky. We weren’t bothered on that trip.
Major General Phillip Effiong, the Biafran Chief of General Staff, hosted us several times at his improvised headquarters in the jungle. Because of constantly changing front lines, we met him at a different location each time having, along the way, run the gauntlet of being strafed by Nigerian Air Force MiG17s flown by Ares Klootwyk and his bunch of British and South African mercenary pilots. (Author’s collection)
The road to General Effiong’s camp was littered with the ruins of previous battles and obviously the area had seen some pretty intense fighting. Bridges had been destroyed and the burnt-out hulks of a number of armoured cars were scattered along the verge. As at Uli, the foliage of palms and tall trees had been stripped clean by God knows how many shells and mortar-bombs fired by two opposing armies. The bare stumps reminded me of photos that one of my grandfathers had shown me of Delville Wood in World War I.
Near the camp there was a petrol tanker that had been strafed from the air. A line of bullet holes ran its length. Farther on, there was a large road-safety poster also riddled: a legacy of the pre-war days. ‘Better be late than the late’, it proclaimed. The driver chortled as we passed.
From the road it was impossible to see the camp until we reached the gates of the Biafran Army base. Suddenly, the car turned into a wide clearing lined with palms and guarded by a machine-gun turret. Everybody saluted as we passed. For all they knew it might have been Ojukwu himself. He travelled about unannounced and seldom used the same vehicle two days running. Now and again he turned up where he was least expected.
Discipline was strict: all the men wore freshly washed khaki and officers’ uniforms were starched.
General Effiong, showing none of the egotism that some of us had found on the Federal side, walked at a brisk pace to greet us, his swagger-stick comfortably under one arm; a black Englishman, complete with tailor-made uniform. With his trademark smile, he greeted us kindly. We’d risked our lives by coming into Biafra, and he was honoured, he said, his English like something out of the Old Country. His adjutant, a captain, looked us over carefully. We were unarmed, but if there were to be any trouble, this young officer would be ready for it.
It seemed difficult to believe that people like Effiong and Adekunle had actually served and trained together in the Nigerian Army during the pre-secession era. Indeed, the two men were as unlike as their respective armies.
What was his worst difficulty? I asked of the general. ‘Air power’, he affirmed. Federal air-strikes both at the front and behind the lines had created havoc, he admitted. H
e said he always knew when the next Nigerian offensive was coming.
‘They like to soften the place up for a few days with air-strikes. How can our men hold their own against modern jet fighters armed with Russian and British weapons?’ he queried.
‘Still, we’ve survived against great odds for two-and-a-half years, so we can’t be doing too badly.’
And manpower? How was he coping? ‘Not so simple’, he answered. Speaking from behind a heavy mahogany desk with a little Biafran flag dominating one of the corners, he pointed at a large map studded with coloured pins behind him.
‘Biafra is divided into 20 provinces. The central government in Owerri levies men on a quota system, even in those parts overrun by the Feds. It’s easy to bring groups of civilians through the lines for training’, he explained. Lagos was asleep when it came to controlling movement, he reckoned, though he did admit to a serious shortage of young men. ‘So we’ve just got to make do with what we’ve got’ he declared.
‘Before the war started, we had the highest literacy rate in Africa. That means we’ve never been short of men of officer calibre. They lead every attack, just like the Israelis, from the front… most effective way, but we’ve lost many of our best men as a result.’ We could all faintly hear the rumble of artillery. It couldn’t have been that far away.
What about prisoners of war? Yes, his people took prisoners and held them, was all he was prepared to say before he changed the subject. Later, one of his officers told me that the Biafrans would have taken larger numbers of POWs, but that the Federals shot their wounded whenever they were in the retreat.
‘A nation of over 60 million can easily afford that sort of thing’, was his parting comment.
It was hard to grasp, as the war continued, that Biafra was completely surrounded by the enemy. At best, 200 tons of ammunition was being brought in by air at night. Whenever Uli was knocked out, and it happened routinely, there would be nothing coming in for days. And that was all they had to keep a couple of hundred thousand Federal Nigerians at bay.
Also, throughout hostilities the casualty rate rose steadily. It puzzled us all, considering that this was a strictly African war, how the Biafrans were able to hold out so long? There were several reasons.
Biafra’s ability to survive, it was agreed afterwards by those of us who were able to observe conditions from up front, was due largely to the remarkable competence of the ordinary Biafran. This was – and still is – a community that is able to improvise, plan for the unexpected and take the initiative. Their adversaries, often disparagingly, call them the Jews of Africa and of course they’re right. Ibos like to roll up their sleeves and get things done.
Also, Ibos make money; they work and succeed where others fail. Like the Luo in Kenya and the Mandingo of Guinea, they are sometimes thoroughly disliked by less pushy tribes, much like American Southerners are wary of New Yorkers. It’s a patchy analogy, but you get the picture. In that regard (with notable exceptions) they are consequently very different when compared to the average Yoruba, Hausa or Fulani. Success, as they say, breeds distrust.
What I do know is that with time, I became friendly with many Ibos, and any day of the week I’d put my life in their hands.
We, who favoured the Ibos, also shared somewhat in their unpopularity. Frederick Forsyth resigned his job at the BBC not because he was vociferously committed to the Biafran cause, but because the British Broadcasting Corporation ended up being partisan in a conflict where, in keeping with a tradition that went back to its first days on the air, it should have shown impartiality. It was all oil politics, we knew, and in the end it made a difference.
Richard Hall, one of the most experienced Africa hands, was greatly taken by this rebel community. Dick, as we all knew him, was the cofounder and editor of Zambia’s Central Africa Mail and no newcomer to this volatile continent. His comments about Biafran people are instructive. He described them in the Sunday Times of London at the time as:
a people I respect and like [who] are threatened with persecution and death. I cannot therefore pretend to be impartial. But Biafra is more than a human tragedy: it is the first place I’ve been to in Africa where the Africans themselves are truly in charge… where there is a sense of nationhood… free from the African vices of graft, superstition and ignorance.
It had suddenly become a furious debate.
Some of the best stories to come out of Biafra were not so much about the war as the ability of the Biafrans to do their own thing. Certainly, they were ingenious.
We could walk through any Biafran town, even at the end, and discover that life continued as if nothing were happening. Shops were open, though their stock was exiguous, post offices were selling stamps and money orders and, with fair warning, you could even buy foreign exchange in the banks, although you had to have a very good reason.
There were dozens of home industries repairing or recycling old things or making new ones: iron bedsteads, car engines rebored on makeshift lathes, stoves and, of course, there were the market mammies at their stalls. The army took most of what was left after a proportion had been set aside for the children, so their offerings were meagre.
That was what you were allowed to see and obviously, there was much else besides. Behind the towns, in forest and bush clearings, hundreds of factories turned out all sorts of things, such as boots for soldiers and ammunition. Emeka took me on guided tours through some of them.
In a factory near Umuahia, engineers were making – or rather recycling – motor parts for an otherwise ageing fleet of army trucks, mostly mammy-wagons that had been seized. Brake-linings, I was told, were among the items on the urgent list, which was one of the reasons why some were modified from crashed aircraft parts at Uli.
There were jungle workshops making uniforms. Since there was no cloth, long lines of women were busy making a rough substitute from bark. It was not the best or most supple of materials and was probably tough on the skin, but it was better than nothing. The army needed boots and since there was no leather, they added chemicals to raw rubber latex and made a strong and pliable material for the uppers. The soles were made from old tyres.
They refined their own oil in cooking-pot refineries, rather like illicit Arkansas gin stills. Up to the end they produced enough fuel to keep several hundred vehicles running.
To me just then, the most interesting aspect of this remarkable ability to continue fighting was the varied array of home-made weapons. These included hand-grenades – almost like the German potato-mashers of the two great wars and known locally as the Giraffe – and a primitive rocket with a range of about five miles. There were also anti-personnel mines, and what was probably the most destructive improvised explosive device of all, developed long before the Iraqi IED became ubiquitous. This one was known to us all as the Ojukwu Bucket. In simple terms, it employed the same principle as the American claymore.
It was said that a series of Ojukwu Buckets detonated electrically once killed a couple of hundred Federal troops in convoy. They knocked out Nigerian Army armoured cars so effectively that for some time the Federal forces stopped using their Ferrets in the jungle.
The ‘bucket’ was also used at Uli. Aircraft of the Federal Air Force regularly bombed and strafed the landing-strip during daylight hours, swooping low across it. The devices were placed at various points along the runway and were detonated when a jet passed over. We learnt afterwards that some mercenary pilots in the NAF had a few close calls. Ares Klootwyk, a South African gun-for-hire who had flown as a mercenary in the Congo, told me: ‘On two occasions the blast caught me unawares and my MiG nearly flipped. But the MiG-17 is a strong machine. Had it been a prop-engine, with less speed, they’d have got me.’
Not surprisingly, towards the end, a certain amount of lawlessness became manifest within Biafran ranks. This was particularly evident on the fringes of the fighting. Reports emerged of soldiers waylaying trucks and stealing food intended for children. Others took provisions from aircraft off
-loading in the dark. Those caught were hauled off into the nearby bushes and shot.
There were many deserters. Because of the ever-changing military situation, there was nobody to stop them, not that anybody had the energy to do so, anyway. Entire units were sometimes caught on the wrong side of the front when a Federal attack closed its pincers. The fact is, everybody was starving, not only the children. Soldiers sometimes drove refugees out of their camps and seized their stores.
To be fair, such reports were not as commonplace as they might have been. There was certainly far less lawlessness on the Biafran side than among the Feds. When a Nigerian Army rabble went berserk and started killing, looting and raping, there was little their officers could – or would – do.
It says much for President Gowon’s command at the end of the war in January 1970 that he managed to hold his Federal forces in check. Had he not done so, a lot of old scores would have been settled. Slaughter might have become the norm, because the Biafrans, by then, were hardly able to defend themselves, never mind retaliate. But then that’s another amiable Nigerian trait; they can be enemies one day and friends the next. A few years later, travelling through the Eastern Region, it was as though there’d never been a war.
One of the first of the journalists into the ravaged east after it had all ended was Colin Legum, another old pal from my days as a scribe. He went to the army barracks in Onitsha, that huge Ibo city on the Niger that I so often visited while I lived in West Africa.
‘There in the officers’ mess’, he wrote, ‘were the Biafran officers and the Federal officers drinking beer together as though it was the end of a cricket match. They’d fought very sternly and they were now chums again, as they’d been chums before.’
The end, when it came, was mercifully quick. Once Biafran lines had broken, Federal forces overran all that was left of the rebel territory in a day. So much effort, so many dead, and let’s face it, how many people these days have even heard the name ‘Biafra’?