There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (14 page)

The Asaba Massacre

The federal forces were soon able to snatch Benin from Biafran military hands and
advance quickly toward the River Niger, arriving in Asaba in early October 1967. There
are multiple versions of what transpired in Asaba. The version I heard amounted to
this: Murtala Muhammed—chief commander (GOC) Division Two—and his lieutenants, including
Colonel Ibrahim Haruna, felt humiliated by the Biafran Mid-Western offensive. Armed
with direct orders to retake the occupied areas at all costs, this division rounded
up and shot as many defenseless Igbo men and boys as they could find. Some reports
place the death toll at five hundred, others as high as one thousand.
¹

The Asaba Massacre, as it would be known, was only one of many such postpogrom atrocities
committed by Nigerian soldiers during the war. It became a particular abomination
for Asaba residents, as many of those killed were titled Igbo chiefs and common folk
alike, and their bodies were disposed of with reckless abandon in mass graves, without
regard to the wishes of the families of the victims or the town’s ancient traditions.
²

His Holiness Pope Paul VI, having received no commitments from either the Nigerians
or the Biafrans for a cease-fire, sent his emissary, the well-regarded Monsignor Georges
Rocheau, to Nigeria on a fact-finding mission. The horrified Roman Catholic priest
spoke to the French newspaper
Le Monde
following the visit, recounting what he witnessed:

There has been genocide, for example on the occasion of the 1966 massacres. . . .
Two areas have suffered badly [from the fighting]. Firstly the region between the
towns of Benin and Asaba where only widows and orphans remain, Federal troops having
for unknown reasons massacred all the men.
³

General Gowon broke his silence thirty-five years later on this matter and apologized
for this atrocity to the Igbos in Asaba:

It came to me as a shock when I came to know about the unfortunate happenings that
happened to the sons and daughters . . . of [Asaba] domain. I felt very touched and
honestly I referred to [the killings] and ask for forgiveness being the one who was
in charge at that time. Certainly, it is not something that I would have approved
of in whatsoever. I was made ignorant of it, I think until it appeared in the papers.
A young man wrote a book at that time.
⁴

Testifying at the Justice Oputa Panel (a Nigerian version of South Africa’s Truth
and Reconciliation Commission), Major General Ibrahim Haruna, belligerent and unremorseful
as ever, proclaimed:

As the commanding officer and leader of the troops that massacred 500 men in Asaba,
I have no apology for those massacred in Asaba, Owerri, and Ameke-Item. I acted as
a soldier maintaining the peace and unity of Nigeria. . . . If General Yakubu Gowon
apologized, he did it in his own capacity. As for me I have no apology.
⁵

Murtala Muhammed advanced quickly following the abomination in Asaba to cross the
Niger River Bridge to Onitsha. Muhammed’s federal troops sustained many casualties
in that guerrilla warfare, and from sniper attacks by Achuzia’s Biafran troops, and
they failed to take the market town in the first attempt.

Biafran Repercussions

The exhausted, fleeing Biafran soldiers crossed the River Niger and arrived in Enugu,
Biafra’s capital. Their actions had unanticipated consequences. Ojukwu, nursing the
wounds of, as he saw it, a “self-inflicted defeat,” summarily court-martialed the
leaders of the exercise. The accused men—Brigadier Victor Banjo, Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna,
Sam Agbamuche, and Major Phillip Alale—were found guilty of planning a coup d’état
to overthrown Ojukwu’s regime, a treasonable felony punishable by death. All four
men were executed on September 25, 1967.
¹

It is important to point out that at the time Enugu had a conspiratorial atmosphere,
and some in Ojukwu’s inner circle added fuel to the fire. There was talk of alleged
plots to overthrow the government. Rumors swirled that Major Ifeajuna, a mastermind
of the January 15, 1966, coup, was spotted by Biafran intelligence in covert meetings
with British secret service agents. Others alleged that the British had paid Victor
Banjo a large commission—to the tune of several thousand pounds—to bungle the Mid-Western
advance. Such was the climate of fear and paranoia.
²

Blood, Blood, Everywhere

The Biafrans found themselves under heavy assault after the Mid-West offensive. Mohammed
Shuwa’s First Army Division, advancing with Theophilus Danjuma, quickly overran the
university town of Nsukka, and then relentlessly bombarded Biafra’s capital with heavy
armaments. The military operation was aided by Egyptian mercenary pilots flying the
Nigerian army’s brand-new British, Czech L-29 Delphins, and Soviet MiG-17 and Ilyushin
Beagle II-28 aircraft. Most of us in the civilian population had fled with family
members into the hinterlands, ahead of the advancing Nigerian troops. By the second
week of October 1967, overwhelmed by the Nigerian military pounding, the Biafran central
government also receded southward, to Umuahia, where a new capital was set up.
¹

By now the world had started taking notice, and a number of international organizations
were visiting Nigeria to try to broker a peace between the two warring parties. One
of the first to intervene was the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which appointed
Ghanaian lieutenant general Joseph Arthur Ankrah their emissary to Biafra. Ankrah
had some experience with the conflict, having hosted the Aburi meeting in January.
Many Biafrans, myself included, had mixed feelings about the OAU’s choice, as Ankrah,
widely regarded as “a Cold War pawn,” was the man responsible for deposing one of
the heroes of the African liberation struggle—Kwame Nkrumah. It was little surprise
to those of us in Biafra, therefore, to discover that under his guidance the OAU supported
“a unified Nigeria” stance despite Biafra’s protests.

The Calabar Massacre

The Nigerian forces overran Calabar in early 1968 without much resistance or investment.
A seat of the ancient kingdom of the same name, Calabar is in the southeastern part
of Biafra, on the banks of the majestic Calabar River. It had for decades been a melting
pot of Easterners—Efik, Ibibio, Igbo, and others—that had produced a beautiful cultural
mosaic of traditions and dialects.

In actions reminiscent of the Nazi policy of eradicating Jews throughout Europe just
twenty years earlier, the Nigerian forces decided to purge the city of its Igbo inhabitants.
¹
By the time the Nigerians were done they had “shot at least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000
Ibos [
sic
], most of them civilians.”
²
There were other atrocities, throughout the region. “In Oji River,”
The Times of London
reported on August 2, 1968, “the Nigerian forces opened fire and murdered fourteen
nurses and the patients in the wards.”
³
In Uyo and Okigwe more innocent lives were lost to the brutality and blood lust of
the Nigerian soldiers.
⁴

In April 1968, the Nigerians decided to mount a major strategic and tactical offensive
designed to cut Biafra off from the seacoast. The over forty thousand troops of the
Third Division, lead by army colonel Benjamin Adekunle, engaged in an amphibious,
land, and air onslaught on the Niger River Delta city of Port Harcourt. After several
weeks of sustained air, land, and sea pounding, a period reportedly characterized
by military atrocities—rapes, looting, outright brigandry—Port Harcourt fell to the
Nigerians on May 12, 1968.

The Third Division slowly marched north, crossing the Imo River, toward the market
town of Aba. With heavy casualties along the way, Adekunle and his men shot gleefully
through a fierce Biafran resistance and took Aba in August and Owerri in September.
The Aba offensive was particularly gruesome:

On entry into Aba, the Nigerian soldiers massacred more than 2000 civilians. Susan
Masid of the
French Press Agency
reporting this horrifying incident had this to say:
“Young Ibos
[sic]
with terrifying eyes and trembling lips told journalists in Aba that in the villages
Nigerian troops came from behind, shooting and firing everywhere, shooting everybody
who was running, firing into the homes
.
”
(Emphases in original.)
⁵

Colonel Adekunle, no doubt a Nigerian war hero, had by now earned a reputation, at
least in Biafran quarters, for cruelty and sadism. After a number of provocative public
statements illustrating his zeal for warfare, coupled with verbal clashes with international
journalists and observer teams, Adekunle became the subject of the local and international
spotlight. I was told, away from the media glare, that his conduct became a source
of embarrassment for Gowon’s wartime cabinet.

Perhaps Adekunle’s most heinous statement during the war was this: “[Biafran aid is]
‘misguided humanitarian rubbish. . . . If children must die first, then that is too
bad, just too bad.’”
⁶
That statement caused such an international uproar that the federal government of
Nigeria found itself in the unenviable position of having to apologize for the actions
not only of Adekunle but also of Haruna, leader of the Asaba Massacre infamy. Unbeknownst
to Adekunle, a quiet retirement from the Nigerian army was in the offing.
⁷

I have often thought of the man who returns after an “operation”—this is what it is
called, an “operation”—and has a wash and goes into the bar of his hotel and drinks
whiskey. He has been on an “operation,” and on the other side you have maybe 120 people
cut to pieces. A friend of mine had his three children—just like that, they went
out to buy books—five minutes later, it was over—it does not take long—10 seconds.
It is quite frightening.
⁸

—

Meanwhile, on the northeastern front, Mohammed Shuwa’s First Division easily overran
Abakaliki and Afikpo.
⁹
Umuahia was the only major urban area in the secessionist republic that had not been
overtaken by the Nigerians.

Gowon rapidly increased the size of his army to well over a quarter of a million men
and women. His final offensive, which would be mounted on the three fronts that surrounded
the Biafrans, was supposed to end the war swiftly, in three months. As he advanced
for what he thought was to be a final push to claim a Biafran surrender in September
1968, he was met by fierce Biafran resistance—sniper fire and guerrilla warfare.
¹⁰
Several unanticipated events coalesced to form a perfect storm that bought the exhausted
Biafran army much needed time to regroup, repair the much damaged Uli airstrip, and
develop a defensive strategy. Antiwar sentiment worldwide was reaching a peak. Bombarded
constantly with war imagery through their television sets and newspapers, particularly
pictures of babies and women perishing and starving, several individuals and international
human rights agencies started mounting demonstrations in world capitals—London, Washington,
Lisbon—against the war.

Jean-Paul Sartre and François Mauriac in France
¹¹
and John Lennon in London made public statements condemning the war. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., long a champion of universal justice, had to suddenly cancel his planned
trip to Nigeria over fears for his safety. Joan Baez and Jimi Hendrix were some of
the famous musicians who took part in a Biafran relief concert in Manhattan, on August
29, 1968. Other British and American artists led peaceful protests of song to draw
American public attention to the conflict. The newscasters in America were mesmerized
by the story of a young college student, Bruce Mayrock, who set himself on fire to
protest the killing of “innocent Biafran babies.” Mayrock, sadly, later died in the
hospital from his wounds. It was reported that he wanted to draw the attention of
the media, delegates in session at the United Nations, and United States government
officials to what he believed was genocide in Biafra.
¹²
Henry Kissinger, now under heavy pressure from civil society groups, found himself
encouraging the Nixon administration to rethink their policy on the Nigeria-Biafra
conflict.
¹³

B
IAFRA, 1969

First time Biafra

Was here, we’re told, it was a fine

Figure massively hewn in hardwood.

Voracious white ants

Set upon it and ate

Through its huge emplaced feet

To the great heart abandoning

A furrowed, emptied scarecrow.

And sun-stricken waves came and beat crazily

About its feet eaten hollow

Till crashing facedown in a million fragments

It was floated gleefully away

To cold shores—cartographers alone

Marking the coastline

Of that forgotten massive stance.

In our time it came again

In pain and acrid smell

Of powder. And furious wreckers

Emboldened by half a millennium

Of conquest, battering

On new oil dividends, are now

At its black throat squeezing

Blood and lymph down to

Its hands and feet

Bloated by quashiokor.

Must Africa have

To come a third time?
¹

The Republic of Biafra

T
HE
I
NTELLECTUAL
F
OUNDATION OF A
N
EW
N
ATION

For most of us within Biafra our new nation was a dream that had become reality—a
republic, in the strict definition of the word: “a state in which the supreme power
rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives
chosen directly or indirectly by them.”
¹
We could forge a new nation that respected the freedoms that all of mankind cherished
and were willing to fight hard to hold on to. Within Biafra the Biafran people would
be free of persecution of all kinds.

It did not escape Biafra’s founders that a great nation needed to be built on a strong
intellectual foundation. Our modest attempt to put the beginnings of our thinking
down on paper resulted in what would be known as the Ahiara Declaration.
²

In the Harmattan Season of 1968, Ojukwu invited me to serve on a small political committee
that the Ministry of Information was creating. The Ministry of Information was the
only place that an author would be comfortable, he told me, because that was the venue
of intellectual debate—where philosophy, cultural matters, literature, politics, and
society with all its elements were discussed. The ministry had to play an important
role in the new nation, he insisted, as Biafra tried to free itself from the faults
it saw in Nigeria.

So I joined this group and set to work. The questions that we raised within the committee
and later presented for broader discussion included: How would we win this war and
begin the creation of a new nation with the qualities we seek? What did we want Biafra
to look like? What would be the core components of our new nation-state? What did
we mean by citizenship and nationhood? What would be Biafra’s relationship to other
African countries? What kind of education would the general population need to aid
Biafra’s development? How would Biafra attain these lofty goals?

The Biafran leader was pleased with the committee’s work and invited me to serve as
the chairman of a larger committee that he wanted to set up within the state house.
He called this new group the National Guidance Committee, and our business would be
to write a kind of constitution for Biafra—a promulgation of the fundamental principles
upon which the government and people of Biafra would operate. The final work would
be a living document that could be modified over time and include at its core a set
of philosophical rules that would serve as a guide for the people of Biafra. The Biafran
nation, Ojukwu explained, had to have special attributes—the very principles that
we approved of and were fighting for: unity, self-determination, social justice, etc.
The final version of the document, we hoped, would also tell our story to the world—how
Biafra had been pushed out of Nigeria by Nigerians and threatened with genocide. The
only thing left for persecuted Easterners to do, we would stress, was to establish
our own state and avert destruction. That, essentially, was the basis of the establishment
of the Biafran nation.

Ojukwu then told me that he wanted the new committee to report directly to him, outside
the control of the cabinet. I became immediately apprehensive. I was concerned that
this arrangement could very easily become an area of conflict between the cabinet
and this new committee that I was going to head. Who would be reporting to whom? And
it seemed to me that Ojukwu wanted a hold on the organs of government—these two organs,
plus the military—not so much separated but working at a pace and manner of his design.
Nevertheless, I went ahead and chose a much larger committee of experts for the task
at hand. I asked Ojukwu who he had in mind to be members of this larger committee.
Several names were thrown about. Finally we arrived at quite an impressive group:
Chieka Ifemesia, Ikenna Nzimiro, Justice A. N. Aniagolu, Dr. Ifegwu Eke, and Eyo Bassey
Ndem.
³
But the group still lacked a scribe and secretary.

There was a healthy competition for the position between Professor Ben Obumselu, who
was an Oxford graduate like Ojukwu, and Professor Emmanuel Obiechina, who held a PhD
from Cambridge University. I remember telling Ojukwu that Obiechina was educated in
Cambridge, and he said, in the tradition of classic Oxbridge rivalry, “Oh, he is from
the other place,” and we all laughed. In the end, Emmanuel Obiechina was appointed
scribe and secretary.

—

The work of the National Guidance Committee eventually produced the treatise widely
known as the Ahiara Declaration. It was called “Ahiara” because Ojukwu’s headquarters
at this time was a camouflaged colonial building in the village of Ahiara. Ojukwu
was in hiding at that point of the hostilities. The retreats he had before, in Umuahia
and Owerri, which became famously referred to as “Ojukwu bunkers,” were no longer
available to him, having been bombed by the Nigerian army.

The concept of the Ahiara Declaration was taken from a similar one issued by President
Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, called the Arusha Declaration. The importance of Julius
Nyerere in Africa at that time was immense. Nyerere particularly caught the attention
of African scholars because he stood for the things we believed in—equality, self-determination,
respect for human values. I particularly liked how he drew inspiration from traditional
African values and philosophy. He was admired by all of us not just because of his
reputation as an incorruptible visionary leader endowed with admirable ideological
positions, but also because he had shown great solidarity for our cause. He was, after
all, the first African head of state to recognize Biafra.

Though we shared an admiration for President Nyerere and the Arusha Declaration, members
of the National Guidance Committee came to work with diverse political beliefs, backgrounds,
and influences; we did not all come from the same ideological or political school
of thought. There were those on the committee who admired the American, British, and
French notions of democracy. There were those who harbored socialist, even communist,
views, who were influenced by the writings of Marcus Garvey, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin,
Fidel Castro, and the Argentine physician and Marxist revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevera.
Others liked local intellectuals such as the centrist socialist Julius Nyerere, Patrice
Lumumba, and Kwame Nkrumah. And still others like me preferred democratic institutions
not in the purely Western sense but in a fusion of the good ideas of the West with
the best that we had produced in our own ancient African civilizations.

In my case, I drew heavily on my background in literature, history, and theology.
I also tapped into what I call “the observation of my reality”—an extension of the
things taught in the formal education of secondary school and university into the
education from life I picked up from our tradition. One influential group were the
orators, a group that fascinated me because they always seemed to be able to find
the right things to say to stop a crisis! I looked out for people like that, who embodied
a wholesome African wisdom—African common sense; they were within our communities,
and within the group that would be called “the uneducated.” But they were arbiters
of the traditional values that had sustained our societies from the beginning of time.

One man, an Ozo title holder whose eloquence I always remembered, personified what
I thought was the essence of what we were trying to write and should try to communicate.
I remember distinctly watching as Okudo Onenyi, with his fellow Ozo title holders,
dressed in their impressive traditional regalia, red caps and feathers, assembled
for one of their Ozo meetings. One of the things that struck me was the dignity of
these old men, who arrived at the site of the gathering carrying their little chairs
that they would sit on.

At one particular meeting Okudo Onenyi was given a piece of chalk to mark his insignia
on the mud floor or wall, as these men were wont to do. What surprised me was that
Okudo took the piece of chalk and put down his initials. I did not realize that this
man had gone to school, but he obviously had. My admiration for him rose, because
he was one of those who was not easily persuaded to abandon his ancient traditions,
like the rest, to join a new culture or religion, but he was willing to make a type
of accommodation to his world’s new dispensation. This man represented those who were
still holding fort and not putting up a physical fight. So it was not enough in my
view to state that we wanted to be radical and create a left-wing manifesto, but we
also certainly did not want to be right wing. It was that ancient traditional virtue
I wanted to channel into the Ahiara Declaration.

It took us several weeks to get the work we had done into one document. We worked
day and night. Chieka Ifemesia, Emmanuel Obiechina, and I did the editing after the
committee had spent days brooding over our situation and prospects. Chieka Ifemesia,
an emeritus professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and a leading authority
on Igbo history, would come to the table with much more than his own memories or abstract
intellectual concepts, but with a great deal of relevant historical background and
context. He was a solid historian—serious, studious. He came from my own village of
Ikenga in Ogidi. At the time of the war he was regarded as a rising intellectual star
and a person who many of us relied upon for intellectual and cultural stimulation
and ideas. Emmanuel Obiechina pulled all the ideas together and transcribed the committee’s
work. My role was to keep some kind of control over the radical elements in the group
who had more extreme left-wing thinking, for instance, the popular firebrand professor
Ikenna Nzimiro.
⁴

Nzimiro always had trouble with the establishment from his Nnamdi Azikiwe youth wing
“Zikist days.” He did not like the direction Nigeria was going in, and he had no trouble
expressing his dissenting views. He was perhaps the youngest representative on the
local government council in those days, and he was very well-known everywhere for
his radical positions. He was educated in Germany and England, and his escapades were
legendary. His stories kept us all laughing for weeks.

Nzimiro disappeared in the middle of our writing the Ahiara Declaration, and we were
all very concerned. One day we were informed that the police had locked him up. Apparently
he had gotten into an argument with a police officer who did not care for his radical
views. Insults were exchanged and Nzimiro was subsequently arrested. Emmanuel Obiechina
told me what was going on. So we went to Ojukwu and informed him of what was happening
to a member of our committee. Ojukwu called the chief of police, and we went to the
police station to pick up our ultraradical colleague.

On June 1, 1969, very close to the end of the war, Ojukwu finally delivered this major
speech, the Ahiara Declaration. It was an attempt to capture the meaning of the struggle
for Biafran sovereignty. He provided a historical overview of the events that had
led to the secession from Nigeria and the founding of the Republic of Biafra. The
speech was as notable for its concentration on a number of issues that Biafra stood
for—such as the rights to liberty, safety, excellence, and self-determination—as it
was for the things the republic was against: genocide, racism, imperialism, and ethnic
hatred, which were squarely condemned. The speech also decried the blockade of Biafra
imposed by the federal government of Nigeria that was creating an avoidable humanitarian
crisis, particularly among children, who were dying in the hundreds daily, and attacked
the support of Nigeria by the major world powers.

The day this declaration was published and read by Ojukwu was a day of celebration
in Biafra. My late brother Frank described the effect of this Ahiara Declaration this
way: “
Odika si gbabia agbaba
” (“It was as if we should be dancing to what Ojukwu was saying”). People listened
from wherever they were. It sounded right to them: freedom, quality, self-determination,
excellence. Ojukwu read it beautifully that day. He had a gift for oratory.