The Africans (57 page)

For thirty months the Ibos fought for their republic, receiving little sympathy at first from the outside world and getting no substantial support from any European country except France, whose policy was dictated not by sentiment but by the need for oil.
^*
The rest of Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union saw an opportunity to gain a foothold in Africa by backing the likely winner (the Nigerian government), and for the first time an African country was
able to fight a war using the modern weaponry of outside powers—heavy artillery, automatic rifles, Russian MiGs and Czechoslovak Delfin jets. The Ibos were forced out of Enugu by the federal advance and set up other capitals, from which they were also soon driven. Packed into forests and swamps that could not support them, the Ibos began starving to death at the rate of a thousand a day. A shocked world saw pictures of swollen-bellied, hollow-eyed children whose survival depended on the daring nighttime runs free-lance Western pilots made into jungle airstrips with food and medical supplies. Finally, in January 1970, the Ibos—denied access to the major cities, low on ammunition and virtually without food—surrendered. Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu went into exile.
^*

“It was a very strange thing,” a Nigerian colonel who fought the Ibos recalled one evening over a drink, “but when the war ended, it was like a referee blowing a whistle in a football game. People just put down their guns and went back to the business of living. You wonder now why the war was ever fought in the first place.”

The man who led the federal forces to victory as Nigeria’s head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, the thirty-three-year-old son of a Methodist missionary and a Sandhurst graduate, displayed both skill and style in his postwar conduct of national affairs. Although fellow soldiers criticized his handling of the economy, Gowon pursued a popular policy of reconciliation instead of retribution in dealing with the Ibos, decreeing that there were to be no witch hunts. And there weren’t. When you fly today into Enugu, you find no reminders of the war other than an occasional bullet hole that no one got around to patching. The same people who nearly destroyed Nigeria have re-entered the mainstream of society. They have rebuilt their towns and again become a prosperous, industrious community. Ibos serve today as ambassadors and executives in large companies, as state administrators and army officers. The University of Nsukka in Enugu, leveled in bombing attacks during the war, flourishes once more, this time with a student population reflecting the nation’s ethnic diversity.

Enugu, like many towns a visitor sees after escaping from Nigeria’s cities, is a lovely place. The trees along the tidy main street
provide welcome shade, the little houses are whitewashed and tidy, their grassy backyards clipped and ablaze with flowers. Life moves slower here than in the cities, and people are more at peace with their surroundings, less the victims of change. The green hills roll through little-used pastureland, dripping with mist in the first light of dawn, and barefoot women in colorful print dresses walk single file along the dirt shoulders of the roads, balancing atop their heads produce they will sell at the market. At night the air is crisp and cool and the town falls quiet very early, almost as soon as the darkness creeps in from the east. In the distance, charcoal embers glow like fireflies from dozens of backyard cooking pits. A dog barks and ever so briefly the crickets are still. Sitting alone one night, beside the empty swimming pool of a hotel on the outskirts of Enugu, I tried to imagine, but could not, what the sound of gunfire and the sight of starving children was like in this soft, silent setting. It was an alien thought and I soon put it out of my mind.

“Europe still discusses its war after thirty-five years, so you can’t expect us to forget ours entirely in just a decade,” said C. O. D. Ekwensi, a noted Ibo novelist. “There is still work to be done for true reconciliation, but we have gone a long way, probably further than any people in Africa. It is more than just a beginning.”

The lesson of the terrible Biafran war seems to be that nationhood is possible in Nigeria—and perhaps in Africa as a whole—if there is a strong central government, a willingness to put nationalism ahead of tribalism, a united leadership capable of establishing priorities for the population as a whole, and a people with something to gain, materially and spiritually, by fulfilling their national potential. In pursuit of these goals, the soldiers who in 1975 replaced General Gowon’s administration (he was overthrown in a bloodless coup while attending an African summit in Uganda) began the long and arduous task of returning the country to a civilian government. It was a promise often made and seldom kept in Africa. But most of Nigeria’s senior officers were trained at Sandhurst, the British military academy, and they understood that a soldier’s place was to serve, not to govern. They were keenly aware of Nigeria’s rich ancient history and chagrined by how low Nigeria had sunk since independence. Most important, they knew that Nigeria could neither win international legitimacy nor earn the leadership role it sought in black Africa with a military government that had come to power in a coup d’état.

So the soldiers set off on the unusual mission of working themselves out of office. Planning was meticulous and every deadline was met. The army was reduced from 250,000 to 138,000 men; study groups flew off to the United States, Australia and Western Europe to examine various forms of democracy. A constitution was adopted after much debate. To diminish tribalism the constitution stipulated that there would be nineteen states with boundaries that
overlapped
, thus parceling out monolithic ethnic groups into different political entities;
^*
a cabinet with at least one minister from every state; and political parties that needed a national, not just regional base of support to gain federal recognition.

Significantly, the political system Nigeria chose was modeled after that of the United States, with a president and vice president serving four-year terms, a supreme court, a senate and a house of representatives. In rejecting Britain’s form of parliamentary democracy (because governments are easy to topple through a no-confidence vote) the Nigerians were, in effect, telling the United States that its form of democracy—and capitalism—were the best hope for black Africa’s most important country. It was hardly the kind of praise Washington was used to hearing from the Third World.

Within two weeks after the ban on political parties was lifted in September 1978, no fewer than fifty-two parties had been formed to contest the elections. (Forty-seven of them were eventually banned for failing to gain a national base of support.) The parties’ platforms ranged from socialistic to capitalistic, and as in any election in the West, were full of more idle promises than obtainable pledges: when, for instance, farmers complained that wildlife was trampling their crops, the eventual president-elect promised to shoot all the elephants in Nigeria. (He didn’t.) There was, though, no disagreement on one major theme: Nigeria needed a strong government that would put national interests ahead of self-interests and would implement realistic, cost-conscious plans for the country’s growth.

Nigeria went to the polls in 1979—a rare event in itself in Africa—and elected as its president Alhaji Shehu Shagari, a wealthy businessman and former headmaster of a primary school. He is a northern Moslem, one of the Hausa-Fulani people, and in accordance with a constitutional requirement that the vice president be from a different tribe, he picked an Ibo as his running mate. With a capitalistic economy and a foreign policy favoring the West, Shargari built a solid foundation for democracy. He was reelected in 1983 by more than four million votes in an election carried off as smoothly as anyone had dared hope. It was a mark of how far Nigeria had progressed that in the 1983 election, there were more polling places in the country (166,000) than there were soldiers in the army (138,000).

Many formidable challenges lie ahead for Nigeria. Will the soldiers stay in the barracks if the civilians falter? Can oil really be put to work to benefit the majority instead of a chosen few? Will tribalism again surface as the most powerful force? Can corruption and greed be contained and national energies channeled toward common goals? These may remain unanswered questions for years to come, but the most encouraging sign, I think, that the Nigerian experiment will succeed is the presence of a growing middle and upper class. It is the largest, most substantial one in black Africa, and it is certainly worth remembering that it was the birth of an English middle class in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that enabled Britain to become stable and powerful. If Nigeria can hold together the pieces of nationhood, its return to civilian government is perhaps the single most significant event to have happened in postcolonial Africa. If Nigeria can succeed, other struggling black African nations will surely try to follow.

N
OW
WE
COME
TO
THE
PAYOFF
, South Africa, the continent’s only developed, First World nation. Were it not for its institutionalized racism, South Africa is what every African country would aspire to become. Built with cheap black labor, white ingenuity and a seemingly endless supply of gold and diamonds, South Africa is advanced enough to have the capability to make an atomic bomb, powerful enough to withstand the condemnation of the entire world, prosperous enough to make any government in Europe, not to mention Africa, full of envy. The great irony of all this is that South Africa’s resources are no greater, its farmland no more fertile, its people no more inherently intelligent than those of other countries whose economic and social infrastructures have collapsed.