There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (29 page)

6.
Metz,
Nigeria
; Frederick Forsyth,
The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend (
London: Penguin, 1969); John de St. Jorre,
The Nigerian Civil War
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972); N. U. Akpan,
The Struggle for Secession 1966–1970: A Personal Account of the Nigerian Civil War
(London: Frank Kass and Co., 1972); Elechi Amadi,
Sunset in Biafra: A Civil War Diary
, African Writers Series (London: Heinemann, 1973); Falola and Heaton
, A History of Nigeria
; Madiebo,
The Nigerian
Revolution and the Biafran War
, p. 14; Effiong,
Nigeria and Biafra
.

7.
John W. Young,
The Labour Governments 1964–70,
Vol. 2:
International Policy
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).

8.
As quoted in Alain Rouvez, Michael Coco, and Jean-Paul Paddack,
Disconsolate Empires: French, British, and Belgian Military Involvement in Post-Colonial
Sub-Saharan Africa
(Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994), p. 148.

9.
Senators Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Charles
E. Goodell of New York, and Donald E. Lukens of Ohio were well-known American legislators
who “became strong supporters of the Biafran regime, and urged relief organizations
and the State Department to supply desperately needed funds [at least for humanitarian
efforts].” Collectively, they put significant bipartisan pressure on the Nixon administration
to act on the growing humanitarian catastrophe in Biafra.

10.
Karen E. Smith,
Genocide and the Europeans
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 71; Roger Pfister,
Apartheid South Africa and African States: From Pariah to Middle Power, 1961–1994
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 52–53.

11.
Jacques Foccart,
Foccart parle: entretiens avec Philippe Gailland
(Paris: Fayard, 1997).

12.
Pfister,
Apartheid South Africa and African States
, pp. 52–53.

13.
A 1968 article published in the journal
Africa Today
provides a self-congratulatory overview of the role of the United States in the war:

The United States is the only great power that has followed a neutral course. She
has supported humanitarian efforts to bring relief to starving civilians, and even
recently released several transport planes to religious relief agencies as dramatic
testimony of concern for saving human lives. While the Nigerians have been unhappy
over the opposition of the United States to a “starve them into submission” policy,
they have recognized that the United States has not given military support to the
Biafran secession or encouraged in principle diplomatically. However, other great
powers have committed themselves. The French now privately back the Biafrans through
Gabon with arms, and the Russians and British supply Lagos with arms, planes, and
bombs.

Source
: Council on Religion and International Affairs,
Worldview
12 (1969).

14.
A letter written by Mrs. Betty C. Carter of Washington, D.C., to Dean Rusk, dated
July 25, 1968, illustrates this point:

Yesterday evening while eating dinner and watching the news I was unable to finish
eating upon seeing the faces of starving children, babies, men, and women in Biafra.
I felt nauseated because of having so much when these people were in obvious pain
and in dire need of food. I cannot bear to see anyone in need when I have something
to share. Though it is not possible for me to go to Biafra at this time, I felt the
least I could do was write to you and express my concern for these people and ask
that the U. S. and other concerned governments and the United Nations press for a
cease fire. I am sending a check to the World Church Service today to help the starving
Biafrans.

Source
: “BIAFRA-NIGERIA 1967–1969 POLITICAL AFFAIRS,” Confidential U.S. State Department
Central Files, A UPA Collection from LexisNexis.

15.
The signatories to the declaration were the leaders of fifteen organizations at the
vanguard of American organized labor, women’s groups, and the civil rights movements.
The list now reads like a who’s who of African American civil rights history, with
names such as: Roy Wilkins, executive director, National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP); Dorothy Height, president, National Council of Negro Women;
and James Farmer, chairman, National Advisory Board, Congress of Racial Equality.
Other leaders who signed the document included: A. Philip Randolph, president of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and vice president of the American Federation
of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations; and Bayard Rustin, executive director,
A. Philip Randolph Institute.

Sources
:
The Crisis Magazine
75, no. 8 (October 1968), p. 291. This is the official publication of the NAACP.
See also: Baum, American Jewish Congress, “Memorandum,” December 27, 1968;
1968 Annual Report
, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

16.
Ibid.

17.
Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, “Why the Soviets Chose Sides,”
Africa Report
(February 1968), p. 4. Also: Interviews with Nigerian and Biafran former military
officers.

18.

The Soviets have broadened their technical assistance and trade programs, and have
announced plans to erect a $120 million steel mill and, if Gowon is agreeable, intend
to expand their embassy staff and open consulates in other Nigerian towns to put them
in closer contact with labor and student groups.

Source
: “Britain: Loss of Touch?”
Time
, March, 29, 1969.

19.
Ibid. Robert Guest, in
The Shackled Continent: Power, Corruption, and African Lives
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004), writes:

Visitors to the Ajaokuta steel plant in Nigeria are surprised to see goats grazing
among the gantries and children playing by the silent rolling mills. Nigeria flushed
away a total of $8 billion trying to build a steel industry at Ajaokuta and elsewhere
[which] operated fitfully, at a loss, and usually at a small fraction of capacity
when the present government came on board.

See also:
The Economist
354, iss. 8152–55; Daniel Jordan Smith,
A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Colin Nicholls, et al.,
Corruption and Misuse of Public Office
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Yingqi Wei and Balasubramanyam, V. N.,
eds.,
Foreign Direct Investment: Six Country Case Studies
, New Horizons in International Business Series (Northampton, Mass: Edward Elgar Publishing,
2004);
Africa Confidential
42–43 (2001); Mary Dowell-Jones,
Contextualizing the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights:
Assessing the Economic Deficit
(Herndon, Va.: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers/Brill, 2004).

20.

The [Nigerian] House of Representatives asked the Federal Government to investigate
the alleged “massive” looting of equipment at the Ajoakuta Steel Company Limited and
the National Iron-Ore Mining Company, Itakpe, and bring the perpetrators to book.
The House, in a resolution in Abuja, observed that the Ajaokuta steel plant had cost
Nigerian tax payers over $4.6bn without producing one sheet of steel in its many years
of existence.

Source
: John Ameh, “Reps move to halt looting of Ajaokuta Steel Company equipment
,”
Punch
, October 30, 2009.

21.
Achebe, “Chinua Achebe on Biafra,”
Transition.

22.
On this point, the American Jewish Congress goes even further:

The crazy-quilt grouping of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the UAR (Egyptian
pilots fly most of the MIG’s for the Nigerian Air Force), on one side, and France,
China and Portugal on the other (Portugal allows the use of the island of Sao Tome
for relief flights) makes clear, at least, the unmitigated and cynical pursuit of
selfish interests on the part of the Great Powers, while hundreds of thousands of
Africans die each month.

Source
: Baum, American Jewish Congress, “Memorandum,” December 27, 1968.

The tragedy is also captured succinctly here by the American scholar Stanley Diamond:

Commentators of such divergent views as Richard Sklar and Auberon Waugh have pointed
out [that] it is unlikely that the war would have been declared or, if declared, that
it would have followed its tragic course, had the interests of the Big Powers not
been decisive. In so critical an area as Nigeria, which attained formal independence
as recently as 1960, imperial and internal dynamics can hardly be divorced from each
other.

Source
: Diamond, Reply,
New York Review of Books
.

The Writers and Intellectuals

1.
The following passage from Kurt Vonnegut highlights his keen sense of perception
and irony and captures, ultimately, the cruel absurdity of war:

The young general [Ojukwu] was boisterous, wry, swashbuckling—high as a kite on incredibly
awful news from the fronts. Why did he come to see us? Here is my guess: He couldn’t
tell his own people how bad things were, and he had to tell somebody. We were the
only foreigners around.

He talked for three hours. The Nigerians had broken through everywhere. They were
fanning out fast, slicing the Biafran dot into dozens of littler ones. Inside some
of these littler dots, hiding in the bush, were tens of thousands of Biafrans who
had not eaten anything for two weeks and more.

What had become of the brave Biafran soldiers? They were woozy with hunger. They were
palsied by shell shock. They had left their holes. They were wandering.

Source
: Kurt Vonnegut, “Biafra: A People Betrayed,”
Wampeters Foma & Granfalloons
(New York: Delacorte Press, 1979).

2.
Ezenwa-Ohaeto,
Chinua Achebe
, p. 143.

3.
Todd F. Davis,
Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade, or, How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism.
SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture (Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press,
2006), p. 141.

4.
Ezenwa-Ohaeto,
Chinua Achebe
, p. 143.

5.
The term “intellectual warrior” was coined by Biafran writers to describe Stanley
Diamond during the war. Christopher Okigbo might have been the first to use the phrase.

6.
Achebe,
The Education of a British-Protected Child
.

7.
Ezenwa-Ohaeto,
Chinua Achebe
, p. 143.

8.
Ibid.

The War and the Nigerian Intellectual

1.
Version of events told during writers’ discussions.

2.
Achebe, “Chinua Achebe on Biafra,”
Transition
.

3.
Alexander O. Animalu,
Life and Thoughts of Professor Kenneth Onwuka Dike
(Nsukka, Enugu State, Nigeria: Ucheakonam Foundation, 1997); also, conversation with
Onwuka Dike at his home in Dedham, Massachussetts, shortly after the war.

4.
A few of the roving ambassadors for Biafra were: Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe (who later left
the breakaway republic), Dr. Kingsley Ozumba (K. O.) Mbadiwe, Professor Eni Njoku,
Chukwuma Azikiwe, Dr. Hilary Okam, Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiani, as well as Cyprian Ekwensi.

5.
Animalu,
Life and Thoughts of Professor Kenneth Onwuka Dike
; also, conversation with Dike at this home.

6.
Author’s recollections.

7.
Ibid.

8.
Marie Umeh,
“
Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa: Critical and Theoretical Essays,”
Africa World Press
(February 1998). Also Femi Nzegwu, “Flora Nwapa,”
The Literary Encyclopedia
, first published October 20, 2001, http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3364,
accessed February 6, 2012.

The Life and Work of Christopher Okigbo

1.
Chinua Achebe,
Hopes and Impediments
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1989), p. 118.

2.
Obiageli Okigbo,
A Biographical Sketch of Christopher Okigbo (1932–1967
) © Christopher Okigbo Foundation, 2010; Donatus Ibe Nwoga,
Critical Perspectives on Christopher Okigbo
(Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1984); Dubem Okafor,
Dance of Death: Nigerian History and Christopher Okigbo’s Poetry
(Trenton, NJ, and Asmara, Eritrea: African World Press, 1998); James Wieland,
The Ensphering Mind: History, Myth and Fictions in the Poetry of Allen Curnow, Nissim
Ezekiel, A. D. Hope, A. M. Klein, Christopher Okigbo and Derek Walcott
(Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1988); Uzoma Esonwanne, ed.,
Critical Essays on
Christopher Okigbo
(New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 2000); Sunday Anozie,
Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric
(London: Evan Brothers, and New York: Holmes and Meier, 1972).

3.
Chinua Achebe and Dubem Okafor, eds.,
Don’t Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo
(Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1978).

4.
Ibid.

5.
Francis Ellah, our colleague in Ibadan and beyond, remembers Okigbo this way:

Chris was a very sociable type. . . . [H]e talked all the time, telling everyone he
met what he thought of the person. Chris read classics but nobody knew that his poems
meant anything. We read them and then he published a few of them, and they turned
out to be monumental works. The last time I saw Chris was when I came back from London,
and he regaled us with a detailed account of his exploits. At one time, when he was
librarian at UNN [University of Nigeria], and I had just started work with the Foreign
Service, I built a home near Enugu campus and was within three hundred yards to Chris
Okigbo’s home on the campus. This brought us closer together. Then, of course, I met
his older brother, Pius.