There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (5 page)

A Lucky Generation

It has often been said that my generation was a very lucky one. And I agree. My luck
was actually quite extraordinary. And it began quite early. The pace of change in
Nigeria from the 1940s was incredible. I am not just talking about the rate of development,
with villages transforming into towns, or the coming of modern comforts, such as electricity
or running water or modes of transportation, but more of a sense that we were standing
figuratively and literally at the dawn of a new era.

My generation was summoned, as it were, to bear witness to two remarkable transitions—the
first the aforementioned impressive economic, social, and political transformation
of Nigeria into a midrange country, at least by third world standards. But, more profoundly,
barely two decades later we were thrust into the throes of perhaps Nigeria’s greatest
twentieth-century moment—our elevation from a colonized country to an independent
nation.

The March to Independence

The general feeling in the air as independence approached was extraordinary, like
the building anticipation of the relief of torrential rains after a season of scorching
hot Harmattan winds and bush fires. We were all looking forward to feeling the joy
that India—the great jewel of the British Empire—must have felt in 1948, the joy that
Ghana must have felt years later, in 1957.

We had no doubt where we were going. We were going to inherit freedom—that was all
that mattered. The possibilities for us were endless, at least so it seemed at the
time. Nigeria was enveloped by a certain assurance of an unbridled destiny, of an
overwhelming excitement about life’s promise, unburdened by any knowledge of providence’s
intended destination.

Ghana was a particularly relevant example for us subjects in the remaining colonies
and dominions of the British Empire. There was a growing confidence, not just a feeling,
that we would do just as well parting ways with Her Majesty’s empire. If Ghana seemed
more effective, as some of our people like to say, perhaps it was because she was
smaller in size and neat, as if it was tied together more delicately by well-groomed,
expert hands.

So we had in 1957 an extraordinary event. I remember it vividly. It was not a Nigerian
event. Ghana is three hundred or more miles away from us, but we saw her success as
ours as well. I remember celebrating with Ghanaian and Nigerian friends in Lagos all
night on the eve of Ghana’s independence from Britain, ecstatic for our fellow Africans,
only to wake up the next morning to find that we were still in Nigeria. Ghana had
made it, leaving us all behind. But our day came, finally, three years after hers.

Now let it be said: There was a subtle competition between the two countries. There
was a sense in which one could say that Ghana and Nigeria resented each other and
competed for supremacy in every sphere—politics, academia, sports, you name it. It
is possible that Nigerians were less accurate in thinking of our “rival neighbor”
as being perhaps “too small to matter.” Of course Ghanaians came right back by saying
that “Nigeria is bigger than Ghana in the way in which threepence was bigger than
sixpence.” If one were to look at the various denominations of coins in those days,
one would discover that three-pence was very huge, much larger than sixpence, and
the quality of metal used in making the smaller denomination was clearly of inferior
value and had less purchasing power in the marketplace, where it mattered most. So
the relationship between Ghana and Nigeria has always been very important. Ghanaian
nationalists were heavily influenced by their Nigerian counterparts.

—

The father of African independence was Nnamdi Azikiwe. There is no question at all
about that. Azikiwe, fondly referred to by his admirers as “Zik,” was the preeminent
political figure of my youth
¹
and a man who was endowed with the political pan-Africanist vision. He had help,
no doubt, from several eminent sons and daughters of the soil.

When Azikiwe came back from his university studies in the United States of America,
in 1934 or thereabout, he did not return to Onitsha, his hometown. He settled at first
in Accra, in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), where he worked as the editor of
the
African Morning Post
, a new daily newspaper. There were stories of inter-ethnic friction in the Gold Coast,
so he moved to Lagos. Despite initial problems in Ghana, Azikiwe had acquired admirers,
especially young aspiring freedom fighters, including Kwame Nkrumah, the greatest
of them all. Nkrumah was still a student in Ghana, but he was motivated to go to America
to study largely as a result of Azikiwe’s influence. Zik opened the historically black
college in the United States that he attended—Lincoln University—to other West Africans
and Nigerians. Quite a number of young Africans who left the country for America did
so because of Azikiwe. It didn’t hurt that Azikiwe wrote glowingly about America in
his newspaper articles on almost a daily basis. America, you see, seemed to a number
of those young people to provide an escape from the chains of colonialism.
²

Soon after Azikiwe arrived in Lagos he established his own paper,
The West African Pilot
. At this time there were two or three families of newspapers: Azikiwe’s and an even
older group from Freetown, Sierra Leone;
The Accra Herald
from the Gold Coast;
The Anglo African
;
Iwe Ihorin
(a prominent Yoruba newspaper) in Lagos; and Herbert Macauley’s
The
Daily News
. These newspapers had different traditions. There used to be a joke about the quality
of newspapers that were founded by aristocratic Lagosians.
³
Some of these papers went out of their way to be highbrow; it was said that occasionally
large chunks of the editorials of some were written in Latin.

In contrast to his competition Azikiwe’s newspaper was written in accessible, stripped-down
English—the type of prose educated members of society often snickered at. And that
was Azikiwe’s intention, to speak directly to the masses. His strategy was an incredible
success.
The West African Pilot
’s anticolonial message was spread very quickly, widely, and effectively. From the
time of its establishment through the 1940s and 1950s,
The West African Pilot
was the most influential publication of its type throughout British West Africa—from
Sierra Leone through Ghana to Nigeria.

Azikiwe wanted to remain financially autonomous from the British, so he established
the African Continental Bank in 1944 and invited wealthy and influential Nigerians
such as Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu to join the board. Azikiwe also started newspaper
outposts in Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, Port Harcourt, and the market town of Onitsha. I
remember in particular that traders in Onitsha and other markets throughout Nigeria
relished
The West African Pilot’
s daily political analysis and editorials. Many learned to read with the help of
The Pilot
. The traders, in their eagerness to read Azikiwe’s paper, often ignored early-morning
customers who visted their stalls.

The West African Pilot
served other purposes. It became the nurturing ground for top journalistic and future
political talent. Anthony Enahoro, who became the paper’s editor, and Akinola Lasekan,
the legendary political cartoonist, are just two examples that come to mind
.
The
West African Pilot
enjoyed an exponential level of commercial as well as critical success after it supported
striking Nigerian workers against the British government in the 1940s. Its circulation
was in the tens of thousands. That was an outstanding achievement for its time.
⁴

The Cradle of Nigerian Nationalism

Here is a piece of heresy: The British governed their colony of Nigeria with considerable
care. There was a very highly competent cadre of government officials imbued with
a high level of knowledge of how to run a country. This was not something that the
British achieved only in Nigeria; they were able to manage this on a bigger scale
in India and Australia. The British had the experience of governing and doing it competently.
I am not justifying colonialism. But it is important to face the fact that British
colonies, more or less, were expertly run.

There was a distinct order during this time. I recall the day I traveled from Lagos
to Ibadan and stayed with Christopher Okigbo that evening. I took off again the next
morning, driving alone, going all the way from Lagos to Asaba, crossing the River
Niger, to visit my relatives in the east. That was how it was done in those days.
One was not consumed by fear of abduction or armed robbery. There was a certain preparation
that the British had undertaken in her colonies. So as the handover time came, it
was done with great precision.

As we praise the British, let us also remember the Nigerian nationalists—those who
had a burning desire for independence and fought for it. There was a body of young
and old people that my parents’ generation admired greatly, and that we later learned
about and deeply appreciated. Herbert Macauley, for instance, often referred to as
“the father of Nigerian nationalism,”
¹
was a very distinguished Nigerian born during the nineteenth century and the first
president of the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), which was founded in 1922.
²

The dawn of World War II caused a bit of a lull in the organized independence struggles
that had been centered mainly in the Western Region of the country up to that time.
Across the River Niger, in Eastern Nigeria, I was entering my teenage years, bright-eyed
and beginning to grapple with my colonial environment. At this time most of the world’s
attention, including Nigeria’s, was turned to the war. Schools and other institutions
were converted into makeshift camps for soldiers from the empire, and there was a
great deal of local military recruitment. A number of my relatives quickly volunteered
their services to His Majesty’s regiments. The colonies became increasingly important
to Great Britain’s war effort by providing a steady stream of revenue from the export
of agricultural products—palm oil, groundnuts, cocoa, rubber, etc. I remember hearing
stories of valiant fighting by a number of African soldiers in faraway places, such
as Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia), North Africa, and Burma (today’s Myanmar).
³

The postwar era saw an explosion of political organization. Newspapers, newsreels,
and radio programs were full of the exploits of Nnamdi Azikiwe and the National Council
of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC, which later became the National Council of Nigerian
Citizens) that was founded in 1944. Azikiwe built upon lessons he had learned from
earlier forays in political activism and successfully persuaded several active members
of the Nigerian Youth Movement to form an umbrella group of all the major Nigerian
organizations.

By the time I became a young adult, Obafemi Awolowo had emerged as one of Nigeria’s
dominant political figures. He was an erudite and accomplished lawyer who had been
educated at the University of London. When he returned to the Nigerian political scene
from England in 1947, Awolowo found the once powerful political establishment of western
Nigeria in disarray—sidetracked by partisan and intra-ethnic squabbles. Chief Awolowo
and close associates reunited his ancient Yoruba people with powerful glue—resuscitated
ethnic pride—and created a political party, the Action Group, in 1951, from an amalgamation
of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, the Nigerian Produce Traders’ Association, and a few other
factions.
⁴

Over the years Awolowo had become increasingly concerned about what he saw as the
domination of the NCNC by the Igbo elite, led by Azikiwe. Some cynics believe the
formation of the Action Group was not influenced by tribal loyalities but a purely
tactical political move to regain regional and southern political power and influence
from the dominant NCNC.

Initially Chief Obafemi Awolowo struggled to woo support from the Ibadan-based (and
other non-Ijebu) Yoruba leaders who considered him a radical and a bit of an upstart.
However, despite some initial difficulty, Awolowo transformed the Action Group into
a formidable, highly disciplined political machine that often outperformed the NCNC
in regional elections. It did so by meticulously galvanizing political support in
Yoruba land and among the riverine and minority groups in the Niger Delta who shared
a similar dread of the prospects of Igbo political domination.
⁵

When Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto,
⁶
decided to create the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) in the late 1940s, he knew
that the educationally disadvantaged North did not have as rich a source of Western-educated
politicians to choose from as the South did. He overcame this “shortcoming” by pulling
together an assortment of leaders from the Islamic territories under his influence
and a few Western-educated intellectuals—the most prominent in my opinion being Aminu
Kano and Alhaji Tafewa Balewa, Nigeria’s first prime minister. Frustrated by what
he saw as “Ahmadu Bello’s limited political vision,”
⁷
the incomparable Aminu Kano, under whom I would serve as the deputy national president
of the Peoples Redemption Party decades later, would leave the NPC in 1950 to form
the left-of-center political party, the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU).
⁸

Sir Ahmadu Bello was a schoolteacher by training. He was a contentious and ardently
ambitious figure who claimed direct lineage from one of the founders of the Islamic
Sokoto Caliphate—Shehu Usman dan Fodio. It was also widely known that he had “aspired
to the throne of the Sultan of Sokoto.” By midcentury, through brilliant political
maneuvering among the northern ruling classes, Sir Ahmadu Bello emerged as the most
powerful politician in the Northern Region, indeed in all of Nigeria.

Sir Ahmadu Bello was able to control northern Nigeria politically by feeding on the
fears of the ruling emirs and a small elite group of Western-educated northerners.
His ever-effective mantra was that in order to protect the mainly feudal North’s hegemonic
interests it was critical to form a political party capable of resisting the growing
power of Southern politicians.

Ahmadu Bello and his henchmen shared little in terms of ideological or political aspirations
with their southern counterparts. With the South split between Azikiwe’s National
Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) and Awolowo’s Action Group, his ability to hold
the North together meant that the NPC in essence became Nigeria’s ruling party. A
testament to its success is the fact that the NPC later would not only hold the majority
of seats in the post-independence parliament, but as a consequence would be called
upon to name the first prime minister of Nigeria.
⁹

—

The minorities of the Niger Delta, Mid-West, and the Middle Belt regions of Nigeria
were always uncomfortable with the notion that they had to fit into the tripod of
the largest ethnic groups that was Nigeria—Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo. Many of
them—Ijaw, Kanuri, Ibibio, Tiv, Itsekiri, Isang, Urhobo, Anang, and Efik—were from
ancient nation-states in their own right. Their leaders, however, often had to subsume
their own ethnic ambitions within alliances with one of the big three groups in order
to attain greater political results.

The British were well aware of the inter-ethnic tensions and posturing for power among
the three main ethnic groups. By 1951 they had divided the country into the Northern,
Eastern, and Western Regions, with their own respective houses of assembly, to contain
this rising threat.
¹⁰
There was also what many thought was an inane house of chiefs—a poor copy of the
House of Lords of the British Parliament. Clear-eyed pundits saw this mainly as a
political ploy to appease the Northerners and Westerners who wanted their traditional
rulers to play a greater role in Nigerian affairs.

Initially the British resisted any agitations for independence, often by handing out
stiff jail terms for “sedition” to the “disturbers of the peace.” They knew the value
of their colonies, and the natural resources they possessed—in Nigeria’s case oil,
coal, gold, tin, columbite, cocoa, palm oil, groundnuts, and rubber, as well as the
immense human resources and intellectual capital. Surely Great Britain had no plans
to hand all these riches over without a fight.

Over time, however, it became clear to the colonizers that they were engaged in a
losing battle. By the end of World War II Great Britain was financially and politically
exhausted. This weakness was exploited by Mohandas Gandhi and his cohorts in India
during their own struggle against British rule. Nigerian veterans from different theaters
of the war had acquired certain skills—important military expertise in organization,
movement, strategy, and combat—during their service to the king. Another proficiency
that came naturally to this group was the skill of protest, which was quickly absorbed
by the Nigerian nationalists.