the Biafra Story (1969) (19 page)

The Nigerians came up the road standing upright with no attempt at taking cover, chanting their war cry "Oshe-bey". They were swaying oddly from side to side. Williams, who had done time in the Congo, took one look and said, 'They're doped to the eyeballs'.

Erasnius started to let go the ogbunigwes at point-blank range. The Nigerians were cut down like corn. The survivors swayed, moved on. On the first day Erasmus triggered over forty ogbunigwes. One of the Saladin armoured cars had its tyres shredded and withdrew. Biafran ammunition ran out, but the leading Nigerian Brigade had been ruined. Impeded by anti-tank ditches, they had filled them in with shovels, one relay team taking over from the previous one as the teams were cut down. Faced with fallen trees weighing many tons, they lifted them bodily out of the way, the team doing the work being blown to fragments as the mine beneath the tree went off automatically.

As the leading Nigerian brigade was changed, Williams urged his exhausted men to take advantage of the disorder in front of them and charge. They won back the three miles they had lost during the day and returned to their original positions. Waiting for the next day the troops slept while Erasmus started preparing more booby traps and Williams returned to Aba for ammunition. But the ammunition planes were not arriving. Steiner, promoted Lieutenant-Colonel, who had moved his headquarters to Aba, appealed to the Army Commander, then to Colonel Ojukwu. There was no ammunition. Williams returned to the front. For Sunday 25 August his men had two bullets each.

That Sunday was a repeat performance of Saturday, and Monday followed suit. Then for six days there was calm. Later it was reported that Adekunle had filled the hospitals of Calabar, Port Harcourt, Benin and even Lagos with his wounded from the Aba column. How many dead never got off that road was not counted, but Williams put the number at close to 2,500.

After licking its wounds the Third Division launched another attack on Aba, but not up the main road. They took the Commandos' right flank and the flank crumbled as the armoured cars rushed through. Aba fell on 4 September, not from the front but from the side. Steiner fought his way out with a handful of cooks armed with machine pistols. Colonel Achuzie nearly had a head-on collision with a Nigerian Saladin as he swept round a corner. Williams was still six miles south of the town holding the axis when Aba fell behind him. He came out with his men across country.

Colonel Ojukwu ordered the Commandos to return to base camp, recruit fresh men, re-form and re-fit. From both axes, Aba and Okpuala, 1,000 returned of the 3,000 who had moved to Awka nine weeks previously. In mid-September Steiner went on leave for a fortnight and Williams took over acting command.

The assault on Aba of 24 August had been the signal for the all-round 'final assault on Ibo-land' which the British Parliament had been told would never happen. Every sector burst into flame, in the south from Ikot Ekpene which had already changed hands six times, to Owerri; in the north Haruna made one spirited attempt to burst out of Onitsha and link up with his men, at Abagana, while the First Division threw all its force against the demilitarized Red Cross airstrip at Obilaga. This fell on 23 September.

On I I September the Nigerians launched a fast attack by boat up the river Orashi towards Oguta, a lakeside to.... not far from Uli Airport. Unspotted, the boats crossed the lake and the men disembarked. Oguta was still full of people and there was a lot of killing. After the Right of the townspeople Oguta was systematically looted, -and more Nigerians came across the River Niger from the Midwest, An angry Colonel Ojukwu called his commanders and told them to get Oguta back in forty-eight hours. Ojukwu himself directed the operation, with Achuzie as operational commander. The Biafrans swept back into the town and the Nigerians fled for the river' leaving several hundred dead behind them, including their commander.

But Oguta had a by-product. Some of the Biafran troops used there had been taken from the right flank at Umuakpu, and on 13 September a Nigerian patrol probing the flanks discovered the weak spot. An attack was launched which outflanked the defences and brought the Nigerians to Obinze, ten miles south of Owerri. From there, on 18 September, they ran on into the town, led by armoured cars.

In the north the First Division moved on from Obilagu and captured Okigwi town, also undefended as it had been the Red Cross distributing centre for the relief food arriving at nearby Obilagu. Here they distinguished themselves by shooting down a couple of elderly English missionaries, Mr. and Mrs Savory, and two Swedish Red Cross workers. This was on 1 October.

From that date the situation began to change. The ar@s shipper who had let the Biafrans down over Aba and Owerri had been dismissed and a new air bridge set up from Libreville, Gabon. Pilots of British, South African, Rhodesian and French nationality ran it. Acquiring more funds, Colonel Ojukwu gained access to a wider European arms market and greater quantities began to flow in. The Biafrans went on to the counter-attack.

Steiner returned from leave, but he was still a tired man. Made commander of the newly formed Commando Division, he was clearly not up to the task. Suffering from nervous exhaustion, the mental illness of which he had a history began to reassert itself, giving him delusions of grandeur combined with a persecution mania. His behaviour became increasingly undisciplined, ntil he gave his men orders to hijack three Red Cross jeeps for his own use.

Summoned to explain, he chose to remonstrate with Colonel Ojukwu, and the Biafran Head of State had no choice but to order him to leave. Six others of the officers he had brought back from leave with him went also. Williams took over again as Acting Commander, later to hand over command -to a Biafran Brigadier. But while he was in charge two more battles were fought under his direction. Between 10 and 12 November one of the Division's three brigades launched a series of attacks on Onitsha which, though they did not capture the town, cut the Nigerian perimeter down to a half its size and relieved the danger of a break-out.

The attacks might have gone on, had the Nigerians at Awka not launched an attack southwards to capture the villages of Agolo and Adazi, which threatened the Biafran heartland. The Commandos in the area fought back, assisted by two battalions of the Biafran infantry. The Nigerians took another beating and retired back to Awka.

Elsewhere it was the same story through November and December. The Biafrans counter-attacked in most sectors, notably at Aba and Owerri. At Aba Colonel Timothy Onuatuegwu pushed the Federal forces back to the outskirts of the town, then swung his men down the right and left flanks. At Owerri Colonel John Kalu retook 150 square miles of ground around the town and laid siege.

This bare recital of events over eighteen months may seem to give the impression that the Nigerian advances into Biafra were a smooth and steady progression. This was not the case. Apart from the occasional instance where Nigerian forces had an easy run, they fought for every foot of the way. Often objectives were not taken until the -third or fourth attempt. Sometimes they were blocked for months. Their expenditure in ammunition is conservatively estimated at several hundreds of millions of rounds, their losses several tens of thousands of men.

Nor did they achieve an ability to control and administer what they had captured. Sticking closely to the main roads and the towns, avoiding the bush which covers over ninety per cent of the country, the Nigerians were able to draw lines on maps which bore little relation to the realities of the situation. Their own appointed administrators sitting in the towns vie for authority wit h the Biafran administrator sitting out in the bush in the overrun areas, and often the Biafran appointee's flat covers the majority of the land and the bulk of the largely rural population.

The secret of Biafra's survival lies partly in the leadership of Colonel Ojukwu, but far more in the people of Biafra. Neither the leader nor the army could have fought without the total backing of the people. The support from behind has to be there before an army can'do more than put up a token resistance. The people contributed everything they had got; poor villages took collections, rich men emptied their foreign accounts to donate dollars and pounds. Tailors made uniforms out of curtain material, cobblers turned out army boots from canvas strips. Farmers donated yams, cassava, rice, goats, chickens and eggs. Bushmen came forward with axes and blunderbusses. Taxi drivers and Mammy-wagon owners drove troop convoys, priests and schoolteachers handed over their bicyclesThere were some traitors, and cheats, defectors, profiteers and racketeers; they come to the surface in every war. But from the people there was not a riot, nor a demonstration, nor a mutiny. As they watched their land devastated and their kinsfolk killed two things were born among the debris; a sense of nationhood and a hatred of the Nigerians. What had started as a belief was transmuted to total conviction; that they could never again live with Nigerians. From this stems the primordial political reality of the present situation. Biafra cannot be killed by anything short of the total eradication of the people who make her. For even under total occupation Biafra would sooner or later, with or without Colonel Ojukwu, rise up again.

Chapter 10. The Role of the British Government.

As has been observed, Britain's traditional interest in Nigeria had nothing to do with the good of the people of that country, and in that respect nothing has changed. The interest that did exist was borne by a small caucus of British politicians, civil servants and businessmen, and it was purely imperialistic. The policy was aimed at the maintenance of law and order, the raising of taxes to pay for the administration of the colony, the stimulation of the production of raw materials for British industry and the establishment of a consumer market to purchase manufactured goods from British industry. With independence the first two functions were handed over to selected and suitably friendly indigenes, while the latter two remained as before in the hands of the British. For those inside Britain who concerned themselves in any way with Nigeria, that country represented, like the others, not a land with a population of real people, but a market. Any tendencies inside Nigeria that might be viewed as harmful to the market were to be discouraged, and Biafra's desire for partition from the rest of the country fell squarely into that category.

When evaluating British Government policy towards the whole question of the Nigeria-Biafra war, two schools of thought emerge: one claims that the policy was in fact the absence of a policy, the hopeless outcome of a mish-mash of stupidity, apathy, indifference, callousness and ignorance in high places; the other maintains there was a policy from the start, that it was one -of total support not for the Nigerian people but for the regime presently in power in Lagos, that it was carefully masked from public view for as long as possible, and that the stupidity of the politicians and the ignorance and apathy of the general public and the men controlling the mass-communication media were used either in the furtherance or the dissimulation of that policy. As an increasing amount of research into the growing pile of documentation available takes place, it is becoming plainer that the evidence supports the latter view.

That British leadership should privately wish to see a single and unified Nigeria so long as this was practically feasible is not blameworthy; but what happened was that in its total determination to see a single economic unit no matter what the cost in suffering to the people of the country, through the grossest interference in the internal politics of that country the British Government chose to ally itself not with the people or their aspirations, but with a small clique of army mutineers. The fact that this clique has shown itself throughout to be largely unrepresentative of Nigerian grass-roots opinion, far from changing the 'support' policy has merely hardened it until a point where British Government policy is so inextricably entwined with the survival of the present Nigerian regime as to be publicly committed to total complicity in anything that regime may do.

On the morning after Gowon's coup of 29 July 1966 it was clear that the British Government's advisers considered that Gowon's legitimacy was sufficiently doubtful to require a top-level decision whether or not to recognize his regime at all. This was quite different from the first coup in January 1966, which failed but which led to General Ironsi being asked by the rump of the Cabinet to take over control. On 25 January the British Commonwealth Secretary Mr. Arthur Bottomley told the Commons that the British Government did not consider a formal recognition of General Ironsi even to be necessary.

But in July when no semblance of legality attached to Gowon's government, when the partially successful mutineers only controlled the capital and two out of four regions, the position was quite different. Just when and by what reasoning it was decided to recognize Gowon has not yet been revealed. But, it was not until November 1966 that Gowon's nominee as Nigerian High Commissioner in London, the fastmoving Brigadier Ogundipe, presented his credentials to the Court of St James. And, oddly, it was not until 20 December that the House of Commons was informed that Britain had decided to give full recognition to Gowon's regime. In February 1967, Sir David Hunt took over in Lagos as Britain's new High Comissioner to Nigeria. Gradually, he escalated a previously decided policy of unalloyed support for Gowon.

There seems little doubt that the motivating force behind the formulation of British policy in Nigeria since July 1966. has come not from the politicians but from the senior civil servants in the High Commission in Lagos and the Commonwealth Office in London who advise them. The then Commonwealth Secretary, Mr. Bottomley, although acknowledged by those who knew him to be an agreeable soul, apparently knew little about the situation; his successor Mr. Herbert Bowden was unable to make himself remarkable for his grip of the facts of the issue, and his successor, Mr. George Thomson, showed publicly and privately that his greatest interest lay in efforts to solve the vastly more publicized Rhodesia issue. None of these three were at any time supported either in the Commons or the Lords by a Junior Minister of notable calibre, and those aware of what went on behind the scenes in Whitehall were not surprised to find that the formulation of policy on Nigeria, the writing of Ministers' answers to questions in the House, and the very important briefing of the accredited press correspondents, fell entirely to the civil servants. This did not displease the civil servants, many of whom are known to hold that the complexities of any situation more involved than catching a bus are above the intellectual level of professional politicians. Unfortunately the civil servants showed in the course of time that they too could only bring to bear on the issue a mixture of ignorance, misinformation, prejudice, cynicism and on occasion the traditional British upper-class contempt for all Africans and assertive ones in particular. It was out of this potpourri of crassness, which later became tinged with hints of viciousness, that Britain's support for an African military junta and for the latter's war policy, and for Britain's complicity in the bloodiest episode in Commonwealth history, was born.