There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (16 page)

When the history of this war comes to be written, the
ogbunigwe
[
sic
] and the shore batteries will receive special mention as Biafra’s greatest saviors.
We’ve been able to wipe out more Nigerians with those devices than with any imported
weapons. . . .

You must have heard that the Nigerians are now so mortally afraid of
ogbunigwe
[
sic
] that each advancing battalion is now preceded by a herd of cattle.
³⁰

B
IAFRAN
T
ANKS

The first Biafran “tanks” turned out to be steel-reinforced Range Rovers. By their
third incarnation these armored fighting vehicles, or AFVs, had become quite sophisticated,
with rocket launchers added.

Let me give one more dimension of what we were hoping to do in Biafra, and what this
freedom and independence was supposed to be like. We were told, for instance, that
technologically we would have to rely for a long, long time on the British and the
West for everything. European oil companies insisted that oil-industry technology
was so complex that we would never ever in the next five hundred years be able to
figure it out. We knew that wasn’t true. In fact, we learned to refine our own oil
during the two and a half years of the struggle, because we were blockaded. We were
able to demonstrate that it was possible for African people, entirely on their own,
to refine oil.
³¹

We were able to show that Africans could pilot their own planes. There is a story,
perhaps apocryphal, that a Biafran plane landed in another African country, and the
pilot and all of the crew came out, and there was not a white man among them. The
people of this other country—which is a stooge of France—couldn’t comprehend a plane
being landed without any white people. They said, “Where is the pilot? Where are the
white people?” They arrested the crew, presuming there had been a rebellion in the
air!

There was enough talent, enough education in Nigeria for us to have been able to arrange
our affairs more efficiently, more meticulously, even if not completely independently,
than we were doing.
³²
I tell these stories to illustrate the quality of the people available to Nigeria.
One thinks back on this and is amazed. Nigeria had people of great quality, and what
befell us—the corruption, the political ineptitude, the war—was a great disappointment
and truly devastating to those of us who witnessed it.
³³

A
T
IGER
J
OINS THE
A
RMY

A great shot in the arm, and perhaps the single most effective tool for enlistment
into the Biafran army, came in January 1968, when Richard Ihetu, also known as Dick
Tiger, hung up his boxing gloves and enlisted in the army. Ihetu was a world-renowned
boxer from Amaigbo in Imo state—“the land of the Igbos”—a town comprised of thirty-seven
villages and steeped in ancient Igbo history.
³⁴
Ojukwu made Dick Tiger a lieutenant in the army of Biafra as soon as he enlisted.
³⁵

Even though I was never a boxing fan, I remember how the whole of Nigeria was gripped
by a feverish excitement at Dick Tiger’s victories, first locally, as Nigeria’s most
celebrated boxing champion, then also later, after he emigrated to the United Kingdom
and knocked over famous boxers across the British Empire, and ultimately won world
championships both as a light-heavyweight and as a middleweight. We were all very
impressed that this young man from a town near Aba in Imo state had traveled so far.
³⁶
Dick Tiger’s decision to enlist, and to return the MBE (Member of the British Empire)
medal to Great Britain’s government in protest of its support for Nigeria, caused
a great stir internationally.
³⁷

Excitement at the news of Dick Tiger’s arrival created a rippling sensation throughout
Biafra. The government seized on this development and created jingles on the radio
summoning young men to “follow the example of Dick Tiger and join the great Elephant
(Enyi) of a new nation.” But the realities of war—the death, the despair, the suffering—soon
dampened any euphoria that we all had about having a champion fight for the cause.

F
REEDOM
F
IGHTERS

Ojukwu created an organization called the Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters
(BOFF) as a unit that would improve the overall relationship between the Biafran army
and the people it served and on whose behalf it fought. Colonel Ejike Obumneme Aghanya
was appointed the chairperson. He had been president of the Nigerian Broadcasting
Service Staff Union in Enugu when I was the controller of the Nigerian Broadcasting
Service Eastern Region. Aghanya’s BOFF staff included Dr. Ukwu I. Ukwu, Dr. Oyolu,
and Major Okoye. Aghanya invited me to join the group and help develop an education
strategy that would improve civilian-military relations.

Although this desire to bridge the civilian-military divide is nothing new, Ojukwu
wanted the Biafran military to be different, to pay careful attention to the welfare
of the people of Biafra. One interesting direction they took was to get young women
into BOFF, and indirectly into the army.
³⁸

Ojukwu’s Oxford education afforded him the luxury of having been exposed to both the
great world philosophers and the revolutionaries of the day. He was heavily influenced
by the writings of Fidel Castro, and he called the Biafran army the People’s Army
of Biafra. He also admired the way the Chinese army was structured, and it is relevant
to note that BOFF arose at a time when China was making diplomatic inroads in Biafra.
Ojukwu clearly was not a communist, but he borrowed some ideas from their revolutions.
³⁹

After I left the BOFF outfit I heard that it was engaged in the more militaristic
and controversial aspects of war, such as enemy infiltration, guerrilla warfare, and
propaganda.
⁴⁰

Traveling on Behalf of Biafra

In addition to working with BOFF, Ojukwu also asked me to serve the cause as an unofficial
envoy of the people of Biafra. Being invited to serve by the leader of Biafra was
both an important and satisfying opportunity, but it also came with great anxiety.
What were we getting into? I thought. I never solicited the post, so being asked from
the very top to come and help, especially from the angle of the intellectual, was
very important to me. I wasn’t absolutely sure how things would work out, but I thought
I would do my best.

The first trip I undertook on behalf of the people of Biafra was at the direct request
of General Ojukwu. He called me to his office soon after the conflict started and
asked me to travel to Senegal to deliver a message to President Léopold Sédar Senghor.
I was to be accompanied on this trip by a young academic, Sam Agbam, who spoke several
European languages fluently. He was among the young intellectuals in the Biafran diplomatic
service involved in one way or another in the framing of the “Biafran argument.��

Sam and I set out for Senegal. During these “trips for the people” envoys were often
put on a plane—a private plane . . . any plane, at midnight, from Uli airport, flying
out of Biafra across the Sahara, occasionally to Europe or an African capital, from
whence we would travel more freely to the destinations of our choice.

During this particular flight the pilot announced at about twenty thousand feet that
the plane was experiencing “technical problems.” It was marked by a great deal of
turbulence and sudden losses of cabin pressure. We were all experiencing motion sickness,
some were vomiting, and all were stricken by a sense of impending doom. The plane
was diverted to an airport in the Sahara, where we disembarked, changed to a Senegalese
airline, and flew to Dakar.

Sam Agbam “vanished” at some point during our travel; I was never told why he did
not continue the journey. Soon thereafter he got in trouble with the Biafran government—accused
of being part of a mutiny—and was executed with others for allegedly plotting a coup
against Ojukwu, as discussed earlier.

After we lost each other I decided to take control of the journey, despite the language
barrier. I arrived in the beautiful capital of the Republic of Senegal, Dakar, and
checked myself into one of the city’s many smart hotels.

I visited the presidential offices the day after my arrival and tried to get the letter
from General Ojukwu in my possession to President Senghor. I couldn’t get past the
presidential aides. The officials there, all expatriate administrators, responded
to my request with looks of incredulity. They could not even imagine anything like
opening the door and showing me in to see the Senegalese president. They must have
thought I was crazy!

There was one very tall man who spoke very good English, and he said to me that there
was no way I could see the president.

“What do you want to see him for?” he asked.

I said that I would like to present my new novel,
A Man of the People
, to him. I also added that I knew that President Senghor was a great writer and poet,
and I thought I should show my appreciation of his writing by presenting my humble
effort at writing poetry. Clearly that was not what I wanted to do, but I was not
about to disclose my true intentions to this uncooperative gentleman.

“Oh, that is easy enough: You give me the book and poems and I will take it to him,
and I am sure he will be delighted,” the official said.

I said that I would like to deliver it myself, that that was the reason I had come
all this way. There was nothing more the official could tell me, and I was sent away.

The next day, and the next, I went back and repeated the process in an attempt to
see Senghor. Either my tenacity was working or the staff was getting tired of seeing
me every morning, because I got a new message five days into this ritual: “President
Léopold Sédar Senghor will see you tomorrow.” This message was brought in a black
limousine. A member of the hotel staff ran up to my room, knocked on the door, and
excitedly relayed that I had a message from the presidential palace. The esteem in
which I was held in the eyes of the people and staff in the hotel, you can imagine,
rose dramatically. After that my stay was very different. Soon after my arrival I
had complained to the hotel front desk that the fan in my room was not working well,
but nothing was done about it until the limousine visit from the presidential palace,
soon after which I was informed that the fan had been attended to.

The next day I had my audience with President Léopold Sédar Senghor, a very extraordinary
man. I was guided along a stone path in the gardens of the presidential palace and
up the grand staircase to a secluded room. The first thing that struck me was the
loneliness. We were standing in a room in this huge mansion, I in my Biafran attire,
Senghor in his French suit, and he seemed all alone. He knew that I came from Biafra,
in West Africa. I handed Senghor the letter that informed him of the real catastrophe
building up in Biafra, and I told him that it was a message from the Biafran head
of state, who had asked me to deliver the sealed envelope directly to him. Senghor
regretted that I had spent several days in the country trying to reach him and apologized
for the treatment I had received. Senghor was a profoundly adept diplomat, and he
took on the business I brought: He glanced through the letter quickly, and then turned
to me and said that he would deal with it overnight . . . as soon as possible.

Our conversation then turned to other things intellectual—writing, education, the
great cultural issues of the day, including the movement he was spearheading called
Négritude
.
La Négritude
,
as it was called, was already widely known in serious intellectual circles around
the world: “The founders of la Négritude,
les trois pères
(the three fathers) [Léopold Sédar Senghor; Aimé Césaire, from Martinique; and Léon
Gontran Damas, from Guyana] met while they were living in Paris in the early 1930s.”
¹

—

It is important not to view Négritude in isolation but in the full context of the
black consciousness movements of the first half of the twentieth century, a period
that gave rise to a number of ideological and intellectual movements in America, the
Caribbean, and Africa and a great deal of cross-fertilization and complexity.

Négritude in Africa can be seen as an extension of the earlier work of W. E. B. Du
Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and C. L. R. James, among others; they
all established black intellectual and political liberation struggles but from very
different albeit equally important vantage points in America. In the African context
it was a reaction to the colonial experience through literature and political thought.
It had powerful political allies in Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana,
Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, and,
later, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, and Walter Sisulu in South Africa. It is pertinent
to note that the independence movement in Africa in turn had a profound impact on
the civil rights movement in America.

I found what these intellectuals were trying to achieve—the reclamation of the power
of self-definition to recast Africa’s, and therefore their own, image through the
written word—incredibly attractive and influential. Here were highly sophisticated
individuals who believed in the need for blacks who had been victims of historical
dispossession to appreciate and elevate their culture—literature, art, music, dance,
etc. They encouraged Africans (in the word’s broadest definition) to celebrate and
espouse their culture as not only not inferior to European culture and civilization
but equally acceptable even if fundamentally different.

Négritude also held that the rest of the world would benefit from such an intellectual
black renaissance, which would at last produce an environment where race, a core fact
of our existence, and the negative baggage linked to its definition and meaning, would
be effectively deemphasized, liberating the world’s people to work together unencumbered.
It was very heavy stuff indeed!
²
It is perhaps a great testament to the importance of this new thinking that it drew
admirers as diverse and important as Frantz Fanon (who studied with Aimé Césaire),
the great French writer Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Haitian writer Jacques Romain, as
well as critics such as Wole Soyinka, who famously dismissed it.
³

Senghor told me about the education minister who had been trained under him and had
submitted a bill to Parliament to abolish the use of all French texts in all institutions
of education in Senegal. Senghor smiled and told the young minister, “Thank you for
your bill, but that would be too much Négritude.” We both laughed, and then talked
for about two hours—discussing his poetry and that of others from the black diaspora—Okigbo,
Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, etc. He took me to one
of the great windows of the presidential palace and showed me two hills; he observed
that the mountaintops looked like “a lady lying down.”

—

I also made an extensive trip to Scandinavia on behalf of the people of Biafra around
this time. The Scandinavians had made great humanitarian gestures to alleviate the
suffering in Biafra. I was also curious to visit the land of one of the most legendary
of all the Europeans who came to our aid—the Swedish aristocrat Carl Gustaf von Rosen.
On this trip I visited Sweden, Finland, and Norway.

I remember Norway vividly. Even though I visited during the winter, it appeared a
lovely country– subdued, calm, and temperate. The people seemed very serious-minded,
and businesslike, and very progressive in their thinking. My hosts took me almost
immediately after I arrived to the Parliament. What struck me about this particular
day was the importance the Norwegians place on time, even more than I had encountered
in England. Here was a people that knew that time was critically important, and it
was to be used judiciously. Another observation of significance had to do with the
items on the program. It appeared to be like a service—a hymn or anthem was sung,
followed by deliberations and readings—all in Norwegian, so I can’t tell the reader
exactly what was being said, but it sounded almost like a religious service. When
they were done, I was ushered into this wonderfully built, ornate Parliament room,
and a gentleman said to me: “Now Mr. Achebe, you can tell us what you came for.” And
I spent about twenty minutes telling my hosts about the humanitarian disaster that
was Biafra. I received a warm round of applause and promises of continued humanitarian
support.

The other thing that happened during my trip to Norway was, unfortunately for millions
around the world, very sad. As I walked back to my hotel with my hosts, I was able
to tell from the conspicuous news flashing on a huge screen that Robert Kennedy had
been assassinated. I was able to figure out the devastating news from the flashing
words, even without help from my hosts, and it struck me how bad news is so much more
easily recognizable across languages than good.

My trip to Canada was very different from the others. I was invited to speak about
the Biafran tragedy by the World Council of Churches and the Canadian Council of Churches.
The World Council of Churches was one of the most magnanimous supporters and suppliers
of humanitarian relief for the suffering and dying of Biafra, so I felt deeply obliged
to attend their gathering. The general secretary of the WCC, Eugene Carson Blake,
and the honorary president of the WCC, Willem Visser ’t Hooft from The Netherlands,
were very decent men. Blake, an American, was an ardent supporter of the American
civil rights movement and a coauthor of the WCC’s antiracism policies. Hooft helped
set up the Ecumenical Church Loan Fund for the poor around the world.
⁴

It is important to point out that the Protestants did not hold a monopoly on generosity
during the war. Several Jewish groups and Roman Catholic orders also came to the aid
of the destitute.

Reverend Father (Dr.) Georg Hüssler, former president of Caritas International, is
particularly celebrated till this day by former Biafrans for his towering role in
providing humanitarian and other aid during the conflict.

In any case, our hosts, the Canadian Council of Churches, organized a dinner in my
honor and invited a number of very distinguished Canadians and religious leaders from
around the world. When they brought out the first course—smoked salmon with steamed
spinach—Eugene Carson Blake announced to the guests that we were about to eat a piece
of Uli airport at night, which, many of them at the table were aware, was famously
and effectively camouflaged with palm fronds and leaves to hide it from Nigerian air
force reconnaissance missions. That statement was greeted with boisterous laughter.
It occured to me once again how different Biafra had become from other places, where
laughter was still available.

In May 1968, I was part of the Biafran delegation that attended the Kampala, Uganda,
talks—one of the world’s failed attempts (in this case, the British Commonwealth and
the OAU) to forge a peace between Nigeria and Biafra. President Milton Obote of Uganda
hosted the deliberations that also involved Commonwealth secretary Arnold Smith.
⁵
Sir Louis Mbanefo was the leader of that delegation, which also included Professor
Hilary Okam, Francis Ellah, and a few others. It was at that meeting that I met Aminu
Kano for the first time. As the Nigerian delegation, led by Anthony Enahoro, espoused
their resolve to “crush Biafra” unless there was a complete surrender, Aminu Kano
seemed very uneasy, often looking through the window. This was a man who was not pleased
with either side or how the matter was being handled. That meeting made an indelible
mark on me about Aminu Kano, about his character and his intellect.