Chinua Achebe and the Moral Obligation to be

Intelligent

By

Damola Awoyokun

A writer should not be an accomplice to lies. Even when

thorns infect the land, a writer must embody and defend

the perennial destiny of high values and principles. It

is not the business of a writer to side with the

powerless against the powerful; the powerless can be

thoughtless and wrong. (The Nazi party was once a

powerless group). A writer should not prefer falsehoods

to reality just because they serve patriotic ends. In

times of great upheavals in a multi-ethnic society, a

writer should get out and warn the society that the more

perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.

Pride in one’s ethnic identity is good, patriotism is

fantastic but when they are not properly moderated by

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other higher considerations, they can prove more

destructive than nuclear weapons.

I was in Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife when another

round of the war of self-determination and secession

broke out between Modakeke and Ife. As the war escalated,

a single bullet wasn’t enough to kill the “enemy,” he had

to be butchered into little pieces and the severed heads

displayed at each other’s market squares to huge approval

and celebration. Such was the power of the mutual hatred

unleashed from their pride in their respective ethnic

identities that these two communities were not rebuked by

the fact that were both Yoruba, both Nigerians, or that

the massacres were being conducted around the famed

cradle of Yoruba civilization.

Patriotism when deployed must always be simultaneously

governed by something higher and lower than itself like

the arms of a democratic government.  These provide

checks and balances so that patriotism doesn’t become a

false conception of greatness at the expense of other

tribes or nations. It is for this reason that we proceed

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to discuss Achebe’s patriotic autobiography, There Was a

Country: A Personal History of Biafra in the light of something

higher than it: 21,000 pages of Confidential, Secret, Top Secret

US State Department Central Files on Nigeria-Biafra 1967- 1969 and

something lower: The Education of a British Protected Child by

Chinua Achebe himself.

…A Country is written for modern day Igbos to know from

where the injustice of their existence originated.

Achebe’s logic is neat and simplistic: Africa began to

suffer 500 years ago when Europe discovered it (that is,

there was no suffering or intertribal wars before then in

Africa!) Nigeria began to suffer when Lord Lugard

amalgamated it. And Igbos began to suffer because of the

event surrounding the Biafran secession. To Achebe, there

should have been more countries in the behemoth Lord

Lugard cobbled together called Nigeria.  What Achebe does

not take into account is the role rabid tribalism plays

in doing violence to social cohesion which makes every

region counterproductively seeks a perfect answer in

demanding its own nation state. There are over 250 tribes

in Nigeria and there cannot be over 250 countries in

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Nigeria. There are officially 645 distinctive tribes in

India and only one country. All over the world there are

tens of thousands of tribes and there are only 206

countries. What the tribes that constitute Nigeria need

to learn for the unity of the country is the

democratization of their tribal loyalties. And that

inevitably leads to gradual detribalization of

consciousness which makes it possible to treat a person

as an individual and not basically a member of another

tribe.  That is the first error of Achebe.

Instead of writing the book as a writer who is Igbo,

Achebe wrote the book as an Igbo writer hence working

himself into a Zugzwang bind. In chess once you are in

this bind, every step you make weakens your position

further and further. All the places that should alarm the

moral consciousness of any writer, Achebe is either

indifferent to or dismisses them outright because the

victims are not his people. However, in every encounter

that shows Igbos being killed or resented by Nigerians,

or by the Yoruba in particular, Achebe intensifies the

spotlight, deploying stratospheric rhetoric, amassing

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quotes from foreign authors with further elaborations in

endnotes to show he is not partial. Achebe calls upon

powerfully coercive emotive words and phrasings to

dignify what is clearly repugnant to reason. Furthermore,

not only does he take pride in ignoring the findings of

common sense, he allocates primetime attention to facts-

free rants just because they say his people are the most

superior tribe in Nigeria. The book, to say the least, is

a masterpiece of propaganda and sycophancy. And yet it is

not a writer’s business to be an accomplice to lies.

First let’s take Achebe’s Christopher Okigbo.  Throughout

the book, Achebe presents Okigbo in loving moments

complete with tender details: Okigbo attending to

Achebe’s wife during labour, Okigbo ordering opulent room

service dishes for Achebe wife in a swank hotel while

Achebe was out of the country, Okigbo being a dearly

beloved uncle to Achebe’s children, Okigbo opening a

publishing house in the middle of the war. Out of the

blue he writes that he hears on Radio Nigeria the death

of Major Christopher Okigbo.  Major? The reader is

completely shocked and feels revulsion for the side that

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killed him and sympathy for the side that lost him.

Unlike other accounts like Obi Nwakanma’s definitive

biography of Okigbo, Achebe skips details of Okigbo

running arms and ammunition from Birmingham to Biafra and

also from place to place in Biafra; he suppresses the

fact that Okigbo knew of the January 1966 coup beforehand

through Emmanuel Ifeajuna; he omits the fact that Okigbo

was an active-duty guerrilla fighter killing the other

side before he himself got killed. Like many other

episodes recounted in the book, Achebe photoshops the

true picture so that readers would allocate early enough

which side should merit their sympathy, which side should

be for slated for revulsion. Pities, cheap sympathy,

sloppy sentimentalism, one-sided victimhood are what are

on sale throughout the book. Achebe of course is

preparing the reader for his agenda at the end of the

book.

To Achebe, the final straw that led to secession was the

alleged 30,000 Igbos killed in the North. He carefully

structures the narrative to locate the reason for this

systematic killing/pogrom/ethnic-cleansing in the so-

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called usual resentment of Igbos and not from the fallout

of the first coup in the history of Nigeria. Achebe

dismisses the targeted assassinations as not an Igbo

coup. The two reasons Achebe gives are because there was

a Yoruba officer among the coup plotters and that the

alleged leader of the coup, Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu

was Igbo in name only. “Not only was he born in Kaduna,

the capital of the Muslim North, he was widely known as

someone who saw himself as a Northerner, spoke fluent

Hausa and little Igbo, and wore the Northern traditional

dress when not in uniform(pg 79).” Really? First, it was

not mysterious that Azikiwe left the country in October

1965 on an endless medical cruise to Britain and the

Caribbean.  Dr. Idemudia Idehen his personal doctor,

abandoned him when he got tired of the endless medical

trip.  Not even the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’

Conference never held outside London but hosted in Lagos

for the first time in early January was incentive enough

for Azikiwe to return and yet he was the  president of

the nation. In a revelation contained in the American

secret documents, it was Azikiwe’s presidential

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bodyguards from Federal Guards that Major Emmanuel

Ifeajuna, the coup’s mastermind, used to capture the

Prime Minister, Abubakar Balewa.  Once Ifeajuna and Major

Donatus Okafor, the Commanding officer of the Federal

Guards tipped off Azikiwe about the planned bloodshed,

Okafor, Godfrey Ezedigbo and others Guards became freer

to meet in Ifeajuna’s house in Apapa to take the plan to

the next level. The recruitment for the ringleaders was

done between August and October 1965.  Immediately

Azikiwe left, planning and training for the execution

began.

Second, the eastern leadership was spared when others

were brutally wasted. Third, the head of state Major-

General Aguyi-Ironsi, an Igbo, didn’t try and execute the

coup plotters as was the practice if it were a pure

military affair. (Ojukwu told Suzanne Cronje, the

British-South African author that he asked Aguyi-Ironsi

to take over and told him how to unite the army behind

him. That was the reason he made him the governor of

Eastern Region.) Four, when Awolowo, Bola Ige, Anthony

Enahoro, Lateef Jakande, etc were imprisoned for

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sedition, they served their terms in Calabar away from

their regions as was the normal practice. When Wole

Soyinka was imprisoned for activities at the beginning of

the civil war, he was sent to faraway  Kaduna and Jos

prisons but the ring leaders of coup plotters were moved

from Lagos back to the Eastern Region, among their people

on the advice of Ojukwu. Five, during the Aburi

negotiations, why was full reprieve for the coup plotters

put on the table? Six, a freed Nzeogwu by April 1967

before the secession declaration joined in training

recruits in Abakaliki  for the inevitable war with

Nigeria. He later died on the Nsukka front fighting for

Biafra. Yet that was Achebe’s Hausa-speaking, kaftan-

wearing Kaduna man, who is Igbo in name only.  It was an

Igbo coup. (The same repackaging was attempted for the

invasion and occupation of the Midwest. It was called

liberation of the Midwest from Hausa-Fulani domination

when it was simply another Igbo coup for Igbo ends

planned in Enugu albeit headed by a Yoruba, Colonel

Victor Banjo)

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The January coup didn’t foment a much more viscera

response in Western Region since their assassinated

political leader was part of the corrupt, troublesome,

election-rigging class. To Westerners, the coup was good

riddance to bad rubbish. However to the Northerners who

were feudal in their social organization and Hobbesian in

their consciousness, it was different matter. Sir Ahmadu

Bello, the slain Sardauna of Sokoto was their all in all;

he was the heir to the powerful Sokoto Caliphate and

descendant of Usman dan Fodio. More than Azikiwe and

Awolowo, Sardauna was the most powerful politician in

Nigeria (pg 46). Murdering him was murdering the pride of

a people. Achebe chooses to ignore this perspective and

more importantly was the fact that Igbos in the North

were widely taunting their hosts on the loss of their

leaders with Rex Lawson’s song “Ewu Ne Ba Akwa” (Goats

are crying) and others celebrating “Igbo power”, the

“January Victory.” Posters, stickers, postcards, cartoons

displaying the murdered Sardauna begging Nzeogwu at the

gates of heaven or Balewa burning outright in pits of

hell, or Nzeogwu standing St George-like on Sardauna the

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defeated dragon began to show up across Northern towns

and cities. These provocations were so pervasive that

they warranted the promulgation of Decree 44 of 1966

banning them. The Igbos didn’t stop.  Azikiwe is more

honest than Achebe. In his pamphlet, The Origins of the Civil

War, he writes: “…some Ibo elements who were domiciled in

Northern Nigeria taunted Northerners by defaming their

leaders through means of records or songs or pictures.

They also published pamphlets and postcards which

displayed a peculiar representation of certain

Northerners, living or dead, in a manner likely to

provoke disaffection.”  It was these images and songs

that eventually led to the so-called pogroms/ethnic-

cleansing/genocide not the coup. The coup was in January,

the pogroms started late in May, and the provocations

were in between.

However Igbos in the East did not sit idly by. They

started the massacre of innocent Northerners in their

midst. Achebe chose to ignore this account since it

doesn’t serve his agenda so we return to Azikiwe:

“Between August and September 1966, either by chance or

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by design, hundreds of  Hausa, Fulani, Nupe and Igalla-

speaking peoples of Northern Nigeria origin residing in

the Eastern Nigeria were abducted and massacred in Aba,

Abakaliki, Enugu, Onitsha and Port Harcourt.” It is

important to note that these Northerners never published

nor circulated irreverent or taunting pictures of Eastern

leaders unlike the Igbos of the North, they were just

massacred for being Northerners. The government of

Eastern Region did not  stop these massacres. Neither did

the Igbo intellectuals. Ojukwu, the military

administrator even made a radio broadcast saying that  he

can no longer guarantee the security of non-Eastern

Nigerians in the East, Easterners who did not return to

Igboland would be looked on as traitors. This was when

Professor Sam Aluko who was the head of Economics

department at University of Nigeria, Nsukka and a

personal friend of Ojukwu fled back to the West. Azikiwe

continues in his book: “Eyewitnesses gave on-the-spot

accounts of corpses floating in the Imo River and River

Niger. [Faraway]Radio Cotonou broadcast this macabre

news, which was suppressed by Enugu Radio.  Then Radio

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Kaduna relayed it and this sparked off the massacres of

September – October 1966 [in the North]”.

Achebe, like Enugu Radio, suppressed this information and

goes on to pivot the ‘pogrom’ on the fact that Igbos were

resented because they were the most superior, most

successful tribe in the country. He claims they were “the

dominant tribe(pg 233)” “led the nation in virtually

every sector – politics, education, commerce, and the

arts(pg 66),” which included having two vice chancellors

in Yoruba land; they the Igbos are the folkloric

“leopard, the wise and peaceful king of the animals

(pg177),”  they “spearheaded”(pg 97) the struggle to free

Nigeria from colonial rule: “This group, the Igbo, that

gave the colonizing British so many headaches and then

literarily drove them out of Nigeria was now an open

target, scapegoats for the failings and grievances of

colonial and post-independent Nigeria(pg 67).” An

Igboman, Achebe writes, has “an unquestioned advantage

over his compatriots…Unlike the Hausa/Fulani he was

unhindered by a wary religion, and unlike the Yoruba he

was unhampered by traditional hierarchies…Although the

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Yoruba had a huge historical head start, the Igbo wiped

out their handicap in one fantastic burst of energy in

the twenty years between1930 to1950 (pg 74).” Beside the

fact that this has a language consistent with white

supremacist literature, Achebe, to demonstrate he is not

partial or a chauvinist, based himself on a 17 page

report by Paul Anber in Journal of Modern African Studies titled

Modernization and Political Disintegration: Nigeria and

the Ibos.

I looked up the 1967 journal. Curiously this ‘scholar’

was designated as “a member of staff of one the Nigerian

Universities.” Why would a scholar hide his place of work

in a journal? I checked the essays and book reviews in

all the 196 issues of Journal of Modern African Studies from

Volume 1 issue 1 of January 1963 to the last issue Volume

49 November 2011, there was nowhere a piece was published

and the designation of the scholar vague or hidden. Also

this Paul Anber never published any piece before and

after this article in this or any other journal. I wanted

to start checking the academic staff list of the five

universities in Nigeria then until I realized again that

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it says “he is a staff of Nigerian university;” I would

have to check the names of janitors and cleaners, and

other non-academic staff too. The truth is Paul Anber is

a fake name under which someone else or a group of people

possibly Igbo is masquerading. And he/they never used

this name again for any other piece or books. So that

this ruse would not be found out was the reason he/they

hid his/their university. And this piece like The Protocols

of the Elders of Zion has been the cornerstone of books and

widely quoted by other journals over a period 45 years.

It is the cornerstone of the chapter A History Of Ethnic

Tension And Resentment which Achebe used to skew the

motive for Igbo people’s maltreatment from the fallout of

January 1966 coup and the inflammatory provocations they

published to resentment for being allegedly the most

successful and dominant tribe in Nigeria.

Had Achebe not been overdosing on rabid Igbo nationalism,

he would have had his chest-beating ethnic bombasts

inflected by a deeper and more sobering analysis of the

Nigerian situation in the next essay in the Journal: The

Inevitability of Instability written by a real and

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existing Professor James O’Connell, an Irish priest and

professor of government in a real and existing

institution: Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.  O’ Connell

argues that the lack of constitutionalism and disregard

for rule of law fuel psychology of insecurities in all

ethnic groups. He fingers as an inevitable cause of our

national instability, Nigerians’ “failure to find an

identity and loyalty beyond their primordial communities

that lead them constantly to choose their fellow workers,

political and administrative, from the same community,

ignoring considerations of merit.”

The symbolism of Igbos heading the University of Ibadan

and University of Lagos both in Yoruba land was a

positive image to assist Tiv, Hausa, Ijaw, Urhobo,

Yoruba, Ibibio, Igbo, Efik, etc students  shed their

over-loyalty to their respective primordial communities

and to fashion a higher sense of identity that is

national in character and federal in outlook.  To Achebe,

the symbolism was an example of the dominance and

superiority of Igbos.  “It would appear that the God of

Africa has created the Ibo nation to lead the children

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of  Africa from the bondage of ages,” Paul Anber quotes

Azikiwe saying in his West African Pilot, “History has

enabled them not only to conquer others but also to adapt

themselves to the role of preserver… The Ibo nation

cannot shirk its responsibility.” Anber says in his/their

essay: “The Ibo reaction to the British was not typically

one of complete rejection and resistance, though Ibos

were militantly anti-colonial. Since modernisation is in

many respects basically a process of imitation, the Ibos

modelled themselves after their masters, seeing, as Simon

Ottenberg put it, that ‘The task was not merely to

control the British influence but to capture it.’ To some

degree, it may be said that this is precisely what they

proceeded to do. Faced with internal problems of land

hunger, impoverished soil, and population pressure, the

Ibos migrated in large numbers to urban areas both in

their own region and in the North and West…”

The spirit of inclusive humanism, the Martin Luther King

Ideal, the Mandela Example, the conscience of a writer

should necessitate that if a child in Sokoto goes to bed

hungry someone in Umuahia should get angry. If a pregnant

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woman in Kotangora needs justice someone in Patani should

be able to stand up and fight for her. If an Osu group is

being maltreated in Igboland, someone in Zaria should

stand up and defend them. But to Achebe, there should be

no mercy for the weak in so far as he or she belongs to

the other side. Take for instance the butchering of the

lone shell-shocked “Mali-Chad mercenary” wandering around

“dazed and aimless” in the bush Achebe witnessed. To show

the fight-to-finish courage of his people in face of

overwhelming force, he describes how Major Jonathan

Uchendu’s Abagana Ambush succeeded in destroying Colonel

Murtala Mohammed’s convoy of 96 vehicles, four armoured

vehicle killing 500 Nigerians in one and a half hours.

“There were widespread reports of atrocities perpetrated

by angry Igbo villagers who captured wandering soldiers.

I was an eyewitness to one such angry bloody frenzy of

retaliation after a particularly tall and lanky soldier –

clearly a mercenary from Chad or Mali wandered into an

ambush of young men with machetes. His lifeless body was

found mutilated on the roadside in a matter of seconds

(pg 173).”

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Achebe does not tell us if he tried to prevent this cold-

blooded butchering even though there was an episode where

he intervened to save the life and chastity of a Biafran

woman arguing with some wandering Nigerian soldiers who

wanted to requisition her goat for food (pg 201). If

Achebe couldn’t intervene in the butchering, what did he

think of the killing then or now that he is writing the

book with the benefit of hindsight? Shouldn’t the man

have been handed over as a prisoner of war? Was his

killing not a violation of Geneva conventions which he so

much accused the Nigerian side of disrespecting (pg 212)?

Did villagers behaving this way not rebus sic stantibus blur

the lines between soldiers and civilians hence making

themselves fair game in war? Also notice how Achebe

starts the narration with an active first person voice:

“I was an eye witness to…” and how he quickly switches to

a passive third person voice in the next sentence: “His

body was found…” Achebe quickly goes AWOL “in a matter of

seconds” leaving a moral vacuum for the Igbo writer to

emerge and the conscientious writer to go under.

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When atrocities were committed against Biafrans, Achebe

deploys strong active voice (subject + verb), isolates

the aggressive phrases of military bravado with italics

or quotation marks. But when Biafra is caught committing

the atrocity, he employs passive sentence structures,

modal verbs of likelihood, euphemisms and he never

isolates pledges of murder in italics or quotation marks.

Take the “Kwale Incident (pg 218)” that eventually became

an international embarrassment for Biafra. Based on an

unsubstantiated source, he writes, “Biafran military

intelligence allegedly obtained information that foreign

oilmen…were allegedly providing sensitive military

information to federal forces – about Biafran troop

positions, strategic military manoeuvres, and training.”

So Biafra decided to invade. “At the end of the

‘exercise’,” Achebe writes, “eleven workers had been

killed”

Also compare these two accounts: the background is the

Biafran invasion of Midwest. Despite Ojukwu’s assurance

to them before the secession that he would absolutely

respect their choice of belonging to neither side, he

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invaded them, occupied their land, foisted his government

on them, took charge of their resources, looted the

Central Bank of Nigeria in Benin, set up military check

points in several places to regulate the flow of goods

and human beings, imposed dawn-to-dusk curfews, flooded

the airwaves with Biafran propaganda, imprisoned and

executed dissidents on a daily basis according to Nowa

Omoigui’s The Invasion of Midwest and Samuel Ogbemudia’s Years

of Challenge. In fact, “The Hausa community in the Lagos

street area of Benin and other parts of the state were

targeted for particularly savage treatment, in part a

reprisal for the pogroms of 1966, but also out of

security concerns that they would naturally harbour

sympathies for the regime in Lagos,” Omoigui writes. The

Midwesterners regarded Biafrans as liars and traitors.

And the Nigerian army came to their rescue.

Achebe writes: “The retreating Biafran forces, according

to several accounts, allegedly beat up a number of Mid-

Westerners who they believed had served as saboteurs.

Nigerian radio reports claimed that the Biafrans shot a

number of innocent civilians as they fled the advancing

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federal forces. As disturbing as these allegations are, I

have found no credible corroboration of them (pg 133).”

Yes, he can’t find it; they were not his people. Also

note his euphemisms: “allegedly beat up”… “shot a number

of innocent civilians”(shot not killed). He writes: “a

number of innocents” to disguise the fact that massacres

took place. He also writes: “saboteurs.” Midwesterners

collaborated with federal forces to liberate their lands

from Biafran traitors and occupiers, Achebe calls them

“saboteurs.” Now note in the next paragraph how he

describes what happened to his people when the Federal

army in hot pursuance of the Biafran soldiers reached the

Igbo side of the Midwest. It is noisily headlined: The

Asaba Massacre(pg 133).

“Armed with direct orders to retake the occupied areas at

all costs, this division rounded up and shot as many

defenceless Igbo men as they could find. Some reports

place the death toll at five hundred, others as high as

one thousand. The Asaba Massacre, as it would be known,

was only one of many such post-pogrom atrocities

committed by Nigerian soldiers during the war. It became

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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.” Then he goes on to quote lengthily from

books and what the Pope’s emissary said about it in a

French newspaper, what Gowon said, what was said at Oputa

panel etc etc. He found time to research. They were his

people unlike the  sufferings, the Eshan, Benin, Ijaw,

Isekiri, Urhrobo people underwent at the hands of the

Biafrans which he couldn’t find “credible corroboration

of.”  Achebe is incapable of being interested in the

sufferings of others.

In the chapter The Calabar Massacre, Achebe not only

totally avoids the well-documented atrocities including

massacres Biafran forces committed against the Efiks,

Ibibios, Ikwerre,  when they occupied their lands, he

goes on to tell lies against the Federal forces. Achebe

writes: “By the time the Nigerians were done they had

‘shot at least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos[sic], most of

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them civilians.’ 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.’”

Achebe continues still referring to the same  Times

article: “In Uyo and Okigwe more innocent lives were lost

to the brutality and bloodlust of the Nigerian

soldiers(pg137).” How the fact checking services of his

publishers allowed him to get away with these is

baffling. I looked up the 1968 piece of course.  It is a

syndicated story written by Lloyd Garrison of the New York

Times to balance the piece by their own John Young which

appeared three days before. In the London Times piece

Achebe quotes, there is no mention of  Uyo or Okigwe or

Oji River at all.

This is what is in the piece – the journalist was quoting

Brother Aloysius, an Irish missionary in Uturu 150km away

from Abakaliki: “But when they[Federal forces] took

Abakaliki, they put the 11 white fathers there on house

arrest. In the hospital outside Enugu, they shot all the

fourteen Biafran nurses who stayed behind, then went down

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the wards killing the patients as well. It was the same

thing in Port Harcourt.” This missionary had believed the

ruthlessly efficient Biafran propaganda service. Because

of the atrocities Nigeria soldiers committed earlier in

the Ogoja –Nsukka front and the revenge killings in

Asaba, the world had been alerted and it was hurting

Nigeria’s arms procurement from Britain. So Gowon agreed

to an international observer team made of representatives

from UN general secretary and OAU  to monitor the

activities of the three Nigerian divisions  against the

claims Radio Biafra was sending to the world and its

people. In their first report released on 9th October

1968, there was no evidence of the killings even though

it was brought to their attention. Even  Lloyd Garrison

and other members of the international press corps in

Biafra couldn’t find evidence of that particular killings

in the hospital.  Also note Achebe’s statement: “By the

time the Nigerians were done they had ‘shot at least

1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos[sic], most of them

civilians.’” How can an intelligent mind write “they had

shot at least 1,000” which is an uncertainty, and then

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following it up with another uncertainty: “perhaps 2,000

Ibos” and then say with certainty “most of them are

civilians”? How can you say for sure that most of them

are civilians when you are not even sure whether they are

1000 or 2000? It defies sense and logic to build a

certainty on two concurrent uncertainties and then offer

it as the truth.  But that is the meaning of propaganda.

William Berndhardt of Markpress and Robert Goldstein of

Hollwood were on contract from Ojukwu to handle  Biafra’s

marketing and propaganda. Nathaniel Whittemore’s seminal

thesis, How Biafra Came to Be: Genocide, starvation and American

Imagination of the Nigerian Civil War revealed how they did it

and how it worked.

Achebe proceeds to celebrate “the great ingenuity” of

scientists from Biafran Research and Production Unit who

developed “a great number of rockets, bombs, and

telecommunication gadgets, and devised an ingenious

indigenous strategy to refine petroleum.” Then he drops

the most disingenuously incongruous jaw-dropping

statement in the book: “I would like to make it crystal

clear that I abhor violence, and a discussion of the

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weapons of war does not imply that I am a war enthusiast

or condone violence (pg 156).”  That is Achebe who pages

before lamented the lack of weapons for his people; that

is Achebe who travelled the world soliciting material

relief including arms for Biafra; that is Achebe who

watched the butchering of a lone mercenary without

flinching; that is Achebe who told Rajat Neogy on pg 105:

“Portugal has not given us any arms. We buy arms on the

black market. What we cannot get elsewhere, we try and

make.”

But there is a reason why he drops this dishonest

statement here; he is preparing us for what is coming

next. We all know what happened in The Godfather when Don

Michael Corleone renounced Satan and all his evil works:

Achebe begins to praise the indigenously manufactured

bomb, “Ogbunigwe” (meaning mass killer, a translation

unlike others Achebe doesn’t include in the book for

obvious reasons: one of which is a people he is trying to

attract the world’s pity to as victims must not be caught

killing en mass). Achebe continues: “Ogbunigwe bombs

struck great terror in the hearts of many a Nigerian

27

soldier, and were used to great effect by the Biafran

army throughout the conflict. The novelist Vincent

Chukwuemeka Ike captures the hysteria and dread evoked by

it in a passage in his important book Sunset at Dawn: A Novel

about Biafra: When the history of this war comes to be

written, the ogbunigwe[sic] and the shore batteries will

receive special mention as Biafra’s greatest saviours.

We’ve been able to wipe out more Nigerians with those

devices than with any imported weapons”

If the other side dare uses “wipe out,” Achebe would have

flagged it as an evidence of the plan to “annihilate the

Igbos” but here, he let it pass without comment. It is

from his side.  And Ogbunigwe was not a product of Igbo

ingenuity; it was a “bespectacled” American mercenary

from MIT uncovered by the Irish journalist Donal Musgrave

that was secretly training Biafrans on how to use

fertilizers to make bombs (cf 13 August 1968 cable from

American embassy in Dublin to the one in the Lagos).

In the book, Achebe narrates the many diplomatic missions

– official and unofficial – he embarked on for the

28

secession. A particularly telling one was to the

President of Senegal, Leopold Senghor(pg162). He and

Ojukwu were attracted to Senghor because of his Negritude

philosophical movement. [This story of course is not

true. Sam Agbam who Achebe claimed he travelled with was

executed alongside with Victor Banjo, Emmanuel Ifeajuna

and Philip Alale in Enugu on Saturday 23rd September 1967.

What Achebe went to warn Senghor about didn’t become an

issue until June 1968 when Biafra was  losing and Ojukwu

had to move the capital further south to the heartland of

Umuahia then to Orlu. And there was a monstrously

centripetal migration of Igbos towards the new capital

which resulted in the humanitarian catastrophe. And the

Uli airport Achebe claimed they flew from hadn’t being

constructed before his travel companion Sam was executed

on 23rd September 1967. It was constructed and opened for

use in August 1968 because Enugu and Port Harcourt which

were Biafra’s only airports had fallen into the hands of

the Federal forces.  So let’s take Achebe’s story as

story and move on]. Achebe tells us after days of

bureaucratic obstacles, he directly delivered to Senghor,

29

Ojukwu’s personal letter that “informs him of the real

catastrophe building up in Biafra.” Senghor, Achebe

writes, “glanced through the letter quickly, and then

turned to me and said he would deal with it overnight…as

soon as possible (pg 162).”

Throughout the book Achebe never says what Senghor

response was. That alone should alert the reader that the

response wasn’t flattering to the Biafran cause since

Achebe usually suppresses unfavourable views and

information. In the Foreword Senghor wrote during the war

for Raph Uwechue’s book Reflections on Nigerian Civil War: Call for

Realism, we see the reason why Achebe chooses to omit

Senghor’s stand. Senghor delivers a classic rebuke to

Achebe, Ojukwu and the very idea of Biafra. First,

Senghor effusively praises Uwechue: “here at last, is a

man of courage and sense,” who didn’t forgo “his ibotism,

but because in him this is transcended by a national

will, he thus acquires the force to judge both facts and

men with serene objectivity.” He said reading the

manuscript and encountering arguments “for the unity of

Nigeria,” Raph Uwechue “won him over at once.” Note that

30

with Ojukwu’s letter which Achebe brought, Senghor

“glanced through” “quickly” and promised to do something

overnight. Then he started discussing philosophy and

literature with Achebe. Ojukwu’s letter never “won him

over at once.” Yet the letter warned of the urgency of

Biafran humanitarian calamity. Clearly, Senghor wasn’t

falling for the emotional manipulations the Biafrans are

using the humanitarian situation to market like salesmen

of dubious artefacts. Uwechue’s says that all the

countries (African) that recognised Biafra as a state did

so because of the humanitarian catastrophe not that they

saw any value in a sovereign Biafra. He writes:

“The leaders of Biafra should understand that the

sympathy which compelled these countries to give them

recognition was provoked by the suffering of the ordinary

people whom the Biafran leadership despite their earlier

assurances proved unable to protect and that the act of

recognition was not a premeditated approval of the

political choice of secession. Like the secession itself,

it was more a REACTION AGAINST than a DECISION FOR.”

31

I recommend Ralph Uwechue’s book to every Nigerian not

only because of the analysis and conclusions he supplies

about the war, but because the man is coruscatingly

intelligent. President Senghor praises him further: “what

he proposes to us, after presenting us with a series of

verifiable facts, is more than just a solution. It is a

method of finding solutions that are at once just and

effective. Herein lies his double merit. Uwechue is a man

well informed and consequently objective. He is a man of

principle who is at the same time a realist. All through

the length of the work, which is clear and brief, we find

the combination of practice and theory, of methodical

pragmatism and moral rationalism – a characteristic which

marks out the very best amongst the anglophones.” In other

words, he is everything Achebe is not.

Of course the epic humanitarian catastrophe was Biafra’s

golden goose. Their leaders were drumming give-me-guns-o-

I-want-to-fight-o songs and dances on the bloated bellies

of those kwashiorkor children. Achebe writes revealingly:

“Ojukwu seized upon this humanitarian emergency and

channelled the Biafran propaganda machinery to broadcast

32

and showcase the suffering of Biafra to the world. In one

speech he accused Gowon of a ‘calculated war of

destruction and genocide.’ Known in some circles as the

‘Biafran babies’ speech, it was hugely effective and

touched the hearts of many around the world. This move was

brilliant in a couple of respects. First, it deflected from

himself or his war cabinet any sentiment of culpability

and outrage that might have been welling up in the hearts

and minds of Biafrans, and second, it was another

opportunity to cast his arch nemesis, Gowon, in a negative

light (pg 210; italics mine).” Ojukwu never made efforts

to take care of those little children as any leader with

a heart would do. Instead, Achebe continues: he

“dispatched several of his ambassadors to world’s

capitals hoping to build on the momentum from his

broadcast.” But the world capitals refused to be duped.

Their spies and diplomats were collating objective facts

and insider’s accounts and sending them. Sir Louis

Mbanefo, the Biafran chief justice, then emitted a nessum

dorma howl: “…if we are condemned to die, all right, we

33

will die. But at least let the world, and the United

States, be honest about it (pg 211).”

Uwechue did what Achebe never did: acting from a firm

moral base, he berated Ojukwu and all the Biafran leaders

for rallying Igbos to die en mass for the secession.

“Sovereignty or mass suicide,” he writes “is an irresponsible

slogan unworthy of the sanction or encouragement of any

serious and sensible leadership.”  What could have caused

a thinking man to at least flinch, Achebe rejoices in.

Here the unthinking man is narrating the “explosion of

musical, lyrical, and poetic creativity and artistry

(pg151)” that the Biafran war had brought about: “But if

the price is death for all we hold dear,/ Then let us die

without a shred of fear…/Spilling our blood we’ll count a

privilege;…/We shall remember those who died in mass;…(pg

152)”  That was the Biafran national anthem, Land of the

Rising Sun.  Achebe continues: “The anthem was set to the

beautiful music of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius….”

For Igbos to ever compare the Biafran deaths to the

Holocaust is to desecrate the Holocaust and cast insults

on the memory of the Jewish dead. European Jewry never

34

had an anthem rallying themselves to mass deaths this

way.

Another telling episode in the book is the war-ready

celebrations amongst Biafran Christians in their houses

of God: “Biafran churches made links to the persecution

of the early Christians, others on radio to the

Inquisition and the persecution of the Jewish people. The

prevalent mantra of the time was ‘Ojukwu nye anyi egbe ka anyi

nuo agha’ – ‘Ojukwu give us guns to fight a war.’ It was

an energetic, infectious duty song, one sung to a well-

known melody and used effectively to recruit young men

into the People’s Army (the army of the Republic of

Biafra). But in the early stages of the war, when the

Biafran army grew quite rapidly, sadly Ojukwu had no guns

to give those brave souls(pg 171).” Yes Achebe’s words:

‘sadly’… ‘brave souls’… in the house of God? Yet pages

before, Don Michael Corleone told us he had renounced

Satan and all his evil works.

The wrongheaded intransigence of Ojukwu to take another

path in place of secession that was even alarming to

35

neutral observers never makes it into this book unlike

other books that recounted the stories.  Nnamdi Azikiwe’s

Origins of Civil War lists the properties Ojukwu stole even

before he declared secession: how “he obstructed the

passage of goods belonging to neighbouring countries

like, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, and expropriated them.”

Achebe writes that wealthy Biafrans’ private accounts

were used to buy hardwares for the war. He never tells us

that Ojukwu stole via armed robbery, money worth billions

in today rates at the CBN branches at Benin, Calabar and

Enugu because he had no money to prosecute a war he was

obsessed with fighting without thinking the consequences

through very well. Achebe never berates Ojukwu both then

and now that he is recollecting with benefit of hindsight

on clearly stupid judgements. For instance, swindled by

propaganda, Dick Tiger, the Liverpool-based Nigerian

boxer renounced his MBE to come and fight on the side of

Biafra. Achebe writes: “Ojukwu made Dick Tiger a

lieutenant in the army of Biafra as soon as he enlisted

(pg 158.)” That was a man with no military training or

36

background  given over hundred fighters to command as an

assistant of a captain by just showing up in Nigeria.

Achebe goes on to praise Ojukwu as a man who needed

little or no advice. “This trait would bring Ojukwu in

direct collision with some senior Biafrans, such as Dr

Nnamdi Azikiwe, [Dr] Michael Okpara, Dr Okechukwu

Ikejiani and a few others who were concerned about

Ojukwu’s tendency toward introversion and independent

decision making (pg119).” The Americans did not dignify

dictatorship with fanciful language the way Achebe does;

they called it by its proper name. Here is a telegram

cabled to Washington and some other American embassies

worldwide:

“Internal situation has changed a great deal since

secession was first declared. Ojukwu now rules as a

dictator and moves about surrounded by retinue of

relatives and yes men. Responsible Ibos who had been

advising him at the start of the war have been eliminated

in one way or the other from the picture because they

came to believe accommodation of some sorts would have to

37

be reached with FMG[Gowon’s Federal Military Government].

Situation so bad that Biafran representative in Paris

Okechukwu Mezu has quit in disgust. Azikiwe refuses to go

back to Biafra and is sitting in London as an exile.

Ojukwu’s propaganda machine, by succeeding in creating

the impression of some forward movement, masked the cold

fact that Biafrans are unable to break out of FMG’s

encirclement.”

That was 2nd of February 1969 – 11months to the end of the

war. Had Ojukwu listened to the advice of “responsible

Ibos” in his inner caucus all along, more lives would

have been saved, instead he surrounded himself with

irresponsible Igbos like Achebe and other yes men. Take

the chapter The Republic of Biafra: The Intellectual

Foundation of a New Nation. Achebe’s committee was

National Guidance Committee; his office was in Ojukwu’s

state house. “Ojukwu then told me he wanted the new

committee to report directly to him, outside the control

of the cabinet. I became immediately apprehensive…

Nevertheless I went ahead and chose a larger committee of

experts for the task at hand (pg 144).” Then the experts

38

started to work on what was to become the Ahiara

Declaration which Ojukwu read on radio June 1, 1969 “very

close to the end of the war.” There was starvation, great

panic, epidemic, anxiety, bereavements and despair in the

streets. Even according to Biafra’s propaganda statistics

over a million  were already dead. The war was obviously

unwinnable. Federal forces had captured Enugu Biafra’s

first capital, Umuahia, the second capital, Onitsha, Port

Harcourt, Calabar, Nsukka and many places in Biafra.

Biafran troops were desperately fleeing and hiding. Yet

Achebe and his Oxford and Cambridge Igbo intellectuals

who clearly had the ear of Ojukwu and put truth into it

in order to prevent further deaths were busy writing

sycophantic declarations. [N.U. Akpan too who was the

secretary to Biafran government was particularly scathing

on these “arrogant” “ignorant” intellectuals in his own

book, The struggle For Succession] “The day this declaration

was published and read by Ojukwu was a day of celebration

in Biafra,” Achebe writes. “My late brother Frank

described the effect of this Ahiara Declaration this way:

‘Odika si gbabia agbagba’ (It was as if we should be dancing

39

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(pg 149).”

It was a day of celebrations indeed. Now we know that

Abacha’s Ministers of Lies and Dishonest Fabrications,

Comrade Uche Chukumerijie and Dr Walter Ofonagoro had a

common precedent.

The Americans too took note of the two and a half hour

long Declaration and cabled this commentary to

Washington:

“Ojukwu repeatedly develops the theme that ‘our

disability is racial. The root cause of our problems lies

in the fact that we are black.’ Considering the

humanitarian and political support in response to Biafran

propaganda, the level of relief flown in, and the concern

expressed by private organizations and governments,

Ojukwu’s speech is almost unreal as he omits even a

passing reference to the International Red Cross, Caritas

or French military assistance.” That was people whom

40

Ojukwu accused of being racists. The Americans continue:

“In his efforts to foster solidarity and support for

continuing the war and maintaining the secession, Ojukwu

appeals as much to fear and xenophobia… Ojukwu sees the

Nigerian civil war in almost conspiratorial terms. For

example: he describes the war as the ‘latest

recrudescence in our time of the age-old struggle of the

blackman for his true stature of man. We are the latest

victims of a wicked collusion between the three

traditional curses of the blackman: racism, Arab-Muslim

expansionism and white economic imperialism.”

All along the Americans knew of the ruthlessly efficient

Biafran propaganda. They questioned how they arrived at

the 20/30/50,000 killed in  the North before the war.

Reviewing Ojukwu’s radio broadcast of 14th November 1968,

the Americans cabled this to Washington: “Ojukwu claimed

50,000 were ‘slaughtered like cattle’ in 1966, adding

that in the course of war ‘well over one million of us

have been killed, yet the world is unimpressed and looks

on in indifference.’ (Comment: this is the highest figure

we have seen him use for the pre-war deaths, and the one

41

million claimed killed since the war began is

inconsistent with his assertion in the same speech that

6,700 Biafrans have been killed daily since July 6,

1967.)

They also noted Ojukwu’s fabrications in his broadcast of

31st of October 1969 that President Nixon “had

acknowledged fact of genocide,” that earlier on, he,

‘General’ Ojukwu called on Nixon “to live up to his

words.”  When at the inception of secession, Biafran

Radio broadcast the countries that had recognised Biafra,

the Americans informed Washington: “Following countries

have denied recognition of Biafra: US, USSR, Ethiopia,

Israel, Australia, Ghana, Guinea…wording of statements

varies greatly, but all disapprove of  secession, or use

words such as recognition, integrity of Nigeria, support

for federal government. (June 9, 1967)” In fact, Ojukwu

and the Biafran project were one long crisis of

credibility. In the cable of 22nd of May 1969, the

Americans cabled Washington: “How he (Ojukwu) can

continue to deceive his people, and apparently get away

42

with it, is minor miracle, but difficult to see how much

delusions can last much longer.”

By the time truth finally triumphed over propaganda, the

Biafrans had to find another man to blame for the war and

the deaths: Enter Chief Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo, the

Losi of Ikenne (whom Achebe falsely claimed Ojukwu

released from prison). First to what the autobiography of

Harold Smith, one of the colonial officers the British

Government sent to rig Nigeria’s pre-Independent

elections in favour of the North had to say about

Awolowo:

“But the British were not treated as gods by the Yoruba.

In my experience, the Yoruba regarded themselves as

superior to the British and one only had to read a book

written by Awolowo, the Western leader, to know why. The

Yoruba were often highly intelligent and they taunted the

British with sending inferior people to Nigeria. The Igbo

would be humble and avert his eyes in the presence of a

European. The Yoruba child would look at an important

43

European and shout, ‘Hello, white man,’ as if he were a

freak.”

What is more: “Awolowo in the West had taunted the

British by claiming that his Government had accomplished

more in the space of two or three years for his people

than the British had since they arrived in West Africa.”

Of course Achebe knows about these facts because he

quoted from the book but only the part favourable to his

agenda. Smith again:

“The thrust of the British Government’s policy was

against the Action Group led by Chief Awolowo which ruled

in the Western Region. Not only was the British

Government working hand in glove with the North which was

a puppet state favoured and controlled by the British

administration, but it was colluding through Okotie Eboh

with Dr Azikiwe – Zik – the leader of the largely Igbo

NCNC which ruled in the East.” More: “We tricked Azikiwe

into accepting to be president having known that Balewa

will be the main man with power. Awolowo has to go to

jail to cripple his genius plans for a greater Nigeria.”

44

Achebe reveals his own mentality we never suspected

before: “We [intellectuals] were especially disheartened

by the disintegration of the state because we were

brought up in the belief we were destined to rule [pg

108].” He uses this mind-set of his to judge Awolowo:

“It is my impression that Chief Obafemi Awolowo was

driven by an overriding ambition for power, for himself

in particular and for his Yoruba people in general…

However Awolowo saw the dominant Igbos at the time as the

obstacle to that goal, and when the opportunity arose –

the Nigeria – Biafra War – his ambition drove him into a

frenzy to go to every length to achieve his dreams. In

the Biafran case it meant hatching up a diabolical policy

to reduce the number of his enemies significantly through

starvation – eliminating over two million people, mainly

members of future generation (pg233).”

This is a blood libel and an evil lie. It will taint

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe forever.  Awolowo built the

first stadium in Africa, the first TV station in Africa,

the first high rise building in Nigeria, first industrial

45

estate, cocoa development board, Odua Investment Group

like the current Dubai World or Chinese Investment

Corporation. He offered free universal education and free

universal primary healthcare that America has been

struggling to achieve for the past 200 years. What is

more important, Awolowo never situated all these in his

hometown of Ikenne in Ogun state; he spread them round

the region he presided on. And the free universal

education and free primary healthcare were available to

anyone of any tribe or nationality including Nupe, Igbos,

Ijaw and Ghanaians living in the Western Region. Awolowo

was interested in bettering the lives of everyone not

just the Yoruba.

Of course we know that the lasting legacy of the Biafra

war was the creation of a well-organized Yoruba-bashing

industrial complex headquartered in Igbo consciousness

working with machine regularity from generation to

generation and whose genuine aim is to fundamentally

deflect blame from Ojukwu and the Biafran hierarchy until

misunderstandings are perverted into evidence of Yoruba

guilt, outright lies are perverted into undisputed

46

truth.  Yes, Awolowo was a master architect of the war to

defeat the secession, the American documents called him

“the Acting Prime Minister” to the 32 year old Gowon. So

let us proceed to examine the case made against him one

by one.

On the so-called Awolowo Blockade

To talk about a blockade of Awolowo on Biafra is to

concede that the control of Biafra’s borders was already

under his control. The control or defence of borders is

the main aim of any war since the beginning of war making

all over the world. That is why the best of US

battleships and fighter jets are currently patrolling

east and west coasts and airspace.  That was why Troy

built impossibly high fortifications around their city.

One of the main reasons Roman Empire collapsed was that

its boundaries were getting too vast to be defended by an

incommensurate number of men and resources. But the

34year old General, Lt Colonel Ojukwu led Biafra to

secede based on only two thousand professional soldiers

and extremely few artillery; they didn’t have enough to

47

defend their borders. “If the Nigerian side had known the

state of Biafran troops including their morale, they

would have pursued them even on canoes across the River

Niger. Had the Nigerians taken up such pursuit, they

might have taken Onitsha, Awka and Enugu that same day.”

That is Achike Udenwa who was a Biafran soldier and later

became the governor of Imo writing about the Federal

defeat of Biafra in the Midwest during the early weeks of

the war in his own recollection Nigerian/Biafra War. Even,

the so-called January boys, Nzeogwu and Ifeajuna both

voiced their concern that the Biafran soldiers were

vastly underprepared for any kind of war. Achebe also

admits that: “Biafran soldiers marched into war one man

behind the other because they had only one rifle between

them, and the thinking was that if one soldier was killed

in combat the other would pick up the only weapon

available and continue fighting(pg 153).”

Therefore, before the first bullet was fired, the

secession was not only a failure but was an epic

humanitarian catastrophe waiting to happen. Awolowo told

Ojukwu one of the reasons the West won’t be able to join

48

the secession was because the region already occupied by

Northern troops didn’t have enough loyal men in the

Nigerian army to defend the region. Weaned on the

hermeneutics of Yoruba history, Awolowo was not persuaded

by the seductive but senseless logic that the Nigerian

forces would lose because they would not be able to

prosecute war on two fronts if the West joined the East

in seceding. At one point during the Kiriji war in the

19th century, Bashorun Ogunmola(omo arogunde yo) the Kingdom

of Ibadan’s generalissimo  was simultaneously warring

with five neighbouring and far-flung kingdoms. Ibadan

never lost. To defeat Ibadan you don’t have to defeat

even its retreating soldiers only, you have to defeat

those dull-looking but patriotic hills surrounding it. In

fact, one of the reasons why Ibadan was so belligerent in

its history was that those mighty hills allowed her to

spend little resources defending and more on attacking.

But Biafra was not surrounded by hills literarily or

figuratively. Her borders were so porous that   they fell

easily into the opponent’s hand. Days after declaration

of secession, the sea boundary of Biafra was already

49

being manned by Nigeria’s battleships. By the sixth week

all the boundaries of Biafra were already under the

control of Nigerian government.

I conducted an experiment with my Igbo colleagues. Let us

assume that Awolowo or the entire West adopted a ‘siddon

look’ approach. Draw the map of Biafra complete with the

Atlantic Ocean, Niger and Benue bridges as Golden Gate

Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge and call the place USA. I

asked them to outline the strategies to capture USA in

the event of a war.  Their strategies were not different

from the path the Biafran propaganda accused Nigerian

government of taking. And in fact had only Awolowo’s

Western Region seceded, the strategy to recapture it

would not be at variance with the one used against Biafra

because the West is geographically an enantiomer of the

East. It was the same blockade Major Nzeogwu used before

going in to capture and kill in cold blood their targets:

the Sardauna and his senior wife, Ademulegun and his

eight months pregnant wife, Mrs. Latifa Noble in the

presence of their two children Solape and Kole. (As

Solape recollects years later, Nzeogwu  was a family

50

friend who used to come often to their house to eat

pounded yam and egusi soup.) It was the same blockade

Captain Emmanuel Nwobosi imposed to capture Fani-Kayode

and kill Akintola, the Western Premier. It was the same

blockade American Navy Seals imposed around Osama Bin

Laden’s hideout before they zoomed in.

“What about the neighbouring country, (Cameroon) whose

side was it on?” One of my participants asked. Of course

Cameroon was firmly on the Nigerian side yet they have a

sizeable Igbo population and Azikiwe’s Igbo party was

NCNC – National Council for Nigerian and the Cameroons.   

But Ojukwu had stepped on their toes: he had stolen

enough of their goods and supplies that they helped the

federal side to take Calabar and cooperated with the

naval blockade of Biafra. As the US State Department’s

cable of 29th November 1968 discloses: “GFRC[Government of

the Federal Republic of Cameroon] continues to support

FMG [federal military government] and recently ordered

the dissolution of newly formed Cameroon relief

organisation(CAMRO) which was being organized to receive

Biafran children in west Cameroon.” Note to Ojukwu in

51

case of next time: Be careful of the message your actions

send to your friends. When they turn against you, they

won’t be nice.

On the so-called Awolowo’s starvation policy.

In Achebe’s book one could see several places where

Biafrans violated the basis of Geneva conventions. You

could see where villagers who were non-combatants and

should have been protected under Geneva conventions were

taking machetes to the necks of Federal soldiers hence

becoming legitimate targets of war themselves. Another

striking instance was when Achebe was with his extended

family and overnight their compound was turned into

military base without their consent (pg 172). Heavens

forbid the Nigerian side bombed the base. Yes, the

Biafran propaganda machine would go to work that an

innocent illustrious family had been eradicated by the

“genocidal Nigerian army” and may even use it as an

evidence of war crime. But the truth is that, the Biafran

52

army deserved condemnation for compromising Achebe’s

household.

As part of security preparation for the last Olympics,

the British Army commandeered a strategic high-rise

residential building and placed surface-to-air missiles

at the top. The residents protested and went to court.

Let us assume a war broke out and the enemy flatten the

whole building. He has not committed a war crime because

it was the British army that made the civilian residents

a legitimate target in the first place. Unfortunate

though it may sound, schools, hospitals, churches,

mosques, relief centres become legitimate targets once

military activities begin to go on there in the event of

a war. Check for instance the current Hamas tactics

against Israel or the bombing of the University of

Nigeria, Nsukka  when it allowed itself to become  the

headquarters of local Biafran army with several

professors joining in expedition force to hunt down lost

Federal soldiers in the bush and their wives back on

campus took care of wounded Biafran soldiers and students

were going for daily drills and rifle shooting practice

53

under Prof  John C. Ene, Dean of Faculty of Sciences and

Commander University Defence Corps as revealed in the US

secret cable of 16/06/1967. Or the Federal raid on the

Catholic Cathedral of The Most Holy Trinity, Onitsha when

it was discovered Biafran snipers with their ammunitions

were operating from there.

When a plane or ship is designated as flying relief

supplies to war sufferers, it must not be used to supply

arms. Once it does, it is no longer covered by Geneva

conventions.  There was an Austrian Count, Carl Gustaf

von Rosen whom Achebe praises a lot for his humanitarian

assistance in flying relief efforts to Biafra. This is

what the Count’s wife had to say: “He told me he was

going to Biafra but he didn’t say he would be bombing

MIGs (pg 300).” Achebe writes of the von Rosen: “He led

multiple relief flights with humanitarian aid into Uli

airport – Biafra’s chief airstrip. Fed up with Nigerian

air force interference with his peaceful missions, he

entered the war heroes’ hall of fame after leading a

five-plane assault on Nigerian aircraft in Port Harcourt,

Benin City, Ughelli, Enugu, and some other locations. He

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took the Nigerian air force by total surprise and

destroyed several Soviet-supplied aircraft in the

process.” That was someone flying humanitarian aid. How

would the Federal side begin to see other humanitarian

flights that were supposed to be carrying food and

medical supplies to war-ravished children?   Cyprian

Ekwensi a writer and head of external publicity for

Biafra admitted in his post-war reminiscences that the

relief materials had arms built into them. (The American

documents too confirmed it. The same Hank Warton which

the relief agencies were using to fly food into Biafra

was the one Ojukwu was using to deliver arms. Lt Col.

Merle, the French military attaché in Gabon was in charge

of  shipments of French arms from France through Gabon to

Biafra. He was also the head of French Red Cross

operating in Biafra)

Of course the Nigerian side knew this and mandated all

relief flights to Biafra to submit themselves for

inspection at the Port Harcourt airport. That was the

interference Achebe claimed the Count was fed up with.

(Anyway the Count never claimed such in that 6th July 1969

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interview he gave the London Observer) Those planes that

passed their inspection delivered their relief. Those

that did not were shot down. One particular case was the

Swiss Red Cross DC7 Flight heading towards the Uli strip

(pg 101). After repeated warnings to change course and

land for inspection, it was shot down.  The Biafran

propaganda went to work saying it was part of the

genocide policies of Nigerian military to destroy

merciful food supplies meant for the malnourished

children.

Never mind that many of the relief supplies meant for the

children were either ambushed by soldiers or ended up in

the black markets. Ekwensi again: “People were stealing

and selling the food. You could buy it in the market but

you couldn’t get it in the relief centres.” But why would

Biafra rely on food from thousands of miles away when

their normal antebellum route of supply was merely tens

of miles nearby in the Midwest and Northern Nigeria, the

food basket of the nation? It was because of the supply

of arms and ammunition. Ojukwu and the Biafran leadership

never cared about those poor children. In a memorandum to

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the White House, Benjamin Read, the Executive Secretary

of US State Department writes: “Because of the absence of

other airlines willing to make hazardous flights into

Biafra, the ICRC[International Committee Of The Red

Cross] has been forced to charter planes from Henry

Warton, an American citizen, who is widely known to be

Biafra’s only gun runner. In engaging Warton, the ICRC is

risking its good relations with the FMG, which has long

feared that ICRC flights might provide opportunity for

gun running.” When Awolowo offered to reopen the usual

food corridors, Ojukwu flatly refused. Achebe writes:

“Ojukwu like many Biafrans, was concerned about the

prospect that Nigerians could poison the food supplies

(pg211).” Awolowo let in the food supplies for the

children anyway working with the cover of Caritas and Red

Cross. Achebe can tell lies: “In America, the Nixon

administration increased diplomatic pressure on the Gowon

administration to open up avenues for international

relief agencies at about the same time, following months

of impasse over the logistics of supply route.(pg 221)”

There was neither pressure nor its increment.

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“The problem of disaster relief in Biafra is not the lack

of supplies or means of transport but the lack of access,

particularly by a land corridor to Biafra.” William B.

Macomber, Jr, the Assistant Secretary for Congressional

Relations wrote in a letter dated 20 December 1968 to

Congresswoman Florence Dwyer when she sought

clarification on the plight of Biafran refugees she kept

seeing in the media. “The authorities [Biafran] on the

spot, under the conditions of civil war have given a

higher priority to politico-military considerations than

to arranging food to be delivered to Biafra. In early

November [1968] the Nigerian government told the ICRC

[International Committee of the Red Cross] that it would

agree to daylight relief flights to the major airstrip

now held by Biafra if the ICRC could give assurances that

the strip would handle only relief flight in daylight

hours. We welcome this step by the Federal Government

(FMG), which would substantially increase the flow of

relief. So far, however, the Biafran authorities have

refused to agree. We find it incomprehensible that

despite the millions of Biafran lives at stake, the

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Biafran leadership has not yet given its agreement. The

Nigerian government has also offered to cooperate in

efforts to open a land corridor to Biafran-held

territory. We hope that the Biafran authorities will

respond positively to this but heretofore they have

alleged they fear the food may be poisoned while

transiting FMG territory.”

Later when Awolowo visited the battlefronts and saw the

heartrending impact of  kwashiorkor on the children, he

asked about the  food supplies, only to discover that

soldiers were ambushing the supplies, feeding themselves

and the top hierarchy so as to continue the war. They

never cared about those suffering children. Awolowo

decided this “dangerous policy” must stop. To protect

those children who were suffering because of the war, he

asked for a stop to the food supply that was inevitably

going to the soldiers and the Biafran plutocrats

unnecessarily elongating a war they would never win.

It takes deep wisdom to understand Awolowo’s concern for

the poor Biafran children. As he himself repeatedly said

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“only the deep can understand the deep.”  So let’s distil

this wisdom for Achebe to understand. There was a family

of beggars from Niger Republic I once saw at Falomo

roundabout, in Ikoyi, Lagos. The useless parents lay idle

all day and night under the bridge and sent their

children around to beg for alms. One would literarily

have a big stone in place of a heart not to help those

children once they approached you. They were really

suffering and stinking. Church members from of Our Lady

of Assumption, Falomo (one of the richest in the country)

decided to help the children, bathing them, sprucing them

up in decent clothes and giving them nourishing food. By

the following day, their parents have redressed the

children in tattered and stinking clothes because that

was the form that was needed to compel emotions from

people and get huge alms.

As someone who now understood clearly what the parents

were using their kids for, are you still supposed to be

giving those children alms?  (Once Cameroon too realised

that to the Biafran authorities, the suffering

kwashiorkor children existed for show business and arms

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trade, they not only refused to take them into their

country, they disbanded the newly formed relief agency

dedicated to their welfare.)  Now consider what these

manipulative parents of filthy children in Falomo, Ikoyi

would say when they discover alms are no longer coming

in? ‘Look at these rich people from a rich house of God;

aren’t they supposed to be kind and merciful to suffering

little children?’ This perspective of irresponsible

parents was the basis of accusing Awolowo of genocide

through starvation. What is more, Achebe boasts of

Biafran prowess in manufacturing Ogbuniwe, ‘the mass

killing bombs’, he boasted of Biafran innovative

refinement of petroleum that kept Biafran vehicles on the

road throughout the war without western technological

help, but the most basic of human necessities – the

production or the supply of food  – they had no clue. And

the farmers that were supposed to grow food as the US

documents noted were conscripted into the Biafran army

during planting season of 1967. The fertilizers that

could have been used to better their lands were used to

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make Ogbunigwe, the mass-killing bombs. And yet Achebe

claimed the starvation was Awolowo’s fault.

On The Twenty Pound Policy

Throughout the war, as the US State Department’s

confidential files disclose, there was no shortage of

people and “isms” to blame for the failure of war.  At

different times and to different audiences, Biafrans

blamed racism, neo-imperialism,  colonialism for the war.

When Ojukwu sent Pius Okigbo to the mainly  Latin America

to solicit for funds and arms for Biafra, he blamed the

war on “the desire of Arab Muslims who saw Biafra as the

only obstacle to the spread of Islam in Africa”. Okigbo

noted to his audiences that “Biafra is 60%  Catholic and

40% Protestant.” He told them what they wanted to hear.

Also, during several of his radio addresses, Ojukwu

blamed the war on the British Prime Minister, Harold

Wilson who supplied 15% of Nigeria’s arms. He called the

Kwashiorkor afflicting Biafran children Harold Wilson

Syndrome or Herod Disease. Like the biblical King Herod,

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Ojukwu said, Harold Wilson wanted to exterminate the

children of Biafra. They believed him.

While the blame-Arabs/Hausa/Islam narrative, blame

Wilson/racism/imperialism narratives that were so

potently alive during the war are now safely dead, the

blame Awolowo for starvation narrative is well alive

going viral from generation to generation because it

serves a political purpose, appeals to prejudices. To the

Americans who monitored and documented everything about

the war, there was no time Awolowo was blamed for the

starvation or deaths in these 21,000 pages. However,

after the war, it was through this twenty pound policy

that the blame – Awolowo narrative began. To develop it,

they seized on this policy and worked their way back to

include what Awolowo may have said or done and mix them

together form a pernicious narrative.

The twenty-pounds-for-every-Igbo was a myth; it never

happened. What happened then was a currency crisis. On

the 30th of December 1967 during the war, Awolowo decided

to change the Nigerian currency in circulation in order

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to render the £37 million Ojukwu had stolen useless for

buying foreign weapons. The Biafran leadership quickly

took the loot, mopped up the ones they could get in

circulation and headed to Europe to exchange them for

hard currencies. Eventually they introduced Biafran notes

as the only legal tender. There were around £149 million

Biafran pounds in circulation by the end of the war – an

average of £10 per every Igbo. After the war, there was a

general scramble to exchange these notes for the new

Nigerian notes. As Awolowo explained, he didn’t know on

what basis these notes were produced. It is like someone

bringing a single fifty billion Zimbabwean dollar note to

the bank and expected to be given fifty billion naira.  

The exchange rate should be known to determine the worth

of the Zimbabwean dollar. Currently, 39 billion

Zimbabwean dollars is worth 1 US dollar. In the case of

Biafra, the worth of the currency was unknown; they were

produced out of desperation with lax security features to

boot. In his statement of 1st February 1968, Dr Pius

Okigbo, Biafra’s Commissioner of Economic Affairs said

that “the lack of international acceptance and lack of a

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commensurate exchange rate was immaterial since the

currency was intended only for circulation in Biafra.” In

other words, it is worthless outside Biafra. After the

war those that had this junk money were carting them to

Nigerian banks hoping to get equivalent new Nigerian

notes. No banker or economists of sense would approve

that. Awolowo in his move to rehabilitate the Igbos and

restore economic normalcy approved the payment of 20

Nigerian pounds flat rate for every Biafran notes

depositor. It was never £20 for every Igbo. £20 for every

Biafran? That would have been around £300 million when

Nigeria’s  annual budget  before the war was £342.22

million for a population of 57million.

On the Indigenization Decree.

The true winner of the civil war was  the Nigerian

military class who succeeded in using everybody against

everybody and continue their indefinite aggrandizement

of  the self by fleecing the country to the bone as the

next 30 years confirmed. After the January coup, Aguyi-

Ironsi used Dr Nwafor Orizu, the acting president, to

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capture power. What Nzeogwu and Ifeajuna wanted to use

bloodletting to achieve, he grabbed it on “a scrap piece

of paper” as Shehu Shagari’s eyewitness account Beckoned

to Serve discloses. The New York Times describes it as a

coup within a coup. Gowon used Awolowo  for the war and

to keep the country economically viable. He took

advantage of the failed secession to perpetuate himself

in power. “Go On With One Nigeria (GOWON),” he stumped.

He was not only Nigeria’s longest serving head of state,

he was the longest looter of Nigeria’s treasury. Ojukwu

too as Wole Soyinka observes in his own ipsissima verba You

Must Set Forth At Dawn, was also interested in conquering

Nigeria not only in seceding. Unknown to Victor Banjo and

his Third Force, Ojukwu had embedded special companies

within the Third Force to topple Banjo and hand control

of Nigeria to him in case Banjo succeeds in conquering

the West and Lagos.

The indigenisation decree had nothing to do with

disenfranchising the Igbos or other Biafrans of economic

power. As was the vogue in 14 African nations then,

indigenisation and nationalisation was the ruling

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military class and their friends’ way of dressing their

bottomless impulse to loot  with the populist cloak of

fighting western imperialism and neo-colonialism. For

their roles during the war, Awolowo or Chief Anthony

Enahoro should be getting major oil blocks. But no, they

were interested in nation-building not treasury-looting.

How can Achebe explain someone like Achike Udenwa who as

a Biafran soldier fought for the so-called liberation and

self-determination his people only to become a governor

40years later and rob his people of billions? And yet he

is one of those still propagating the myth indigenisation

decree was to disenfranchise the Igbos  The Nigerian

ruling thieves span all tribes and so are their victims.

Indeed Awolowo could be ‘ethnocentric.’ The Yoruba region

like pre-European Union Europe was always in a state of

constant war. Ibadan vs Ekiti vs Egba vs Ondo vs Ijebus

vs Ife vs Ijesha vs Egbado etc. It was because of this

internecine war that made Yoruba land susceptible to easy

French colonialism to the west (Dahomey, Benin Republic)

and British Royal Niger Company taking the rest. When

Awolowo “resuscitated ethnic pride,” he used it to rally

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Yoruba to stop fighting and killing each other. This

resuscitation wasn’t to elevate the Yoruba so that they

would dominate other tribes. Achebe observes:  “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 similar dread of the prospects of Igbo political

domination (pg45).”

Achebe never addresses this dread even though he mentions

it in two other places. Nowhere in the book does he stump

for brotherliness or make a stand for tribal harmony. In

1961, the British Cameroonians had to decide their fate

through a UN plebiscite since their lands were too small

and landlocked to stand as a country. The peoples of the

Northern Cameroons voted to belong to northern Nigeria

while the peoples of the Southern Cameroons not wanting

to belong to the Igbos dominating the Easter Region of

Nigeria decided to belong to the Republic of Cameroon

even though they were French-speaking. The reason why

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minorities need to be very afraid at the prospects of

collaborating with Igbos is an important topic Achebe

conspicuously skips, instead he spends the final pages of

the book resurrecting the 44 years old propaganda of

genocide.

To prepare us to be swindled, Achebe litters the book

with hyped phrases and sentences like “Smash the

Biafrans,” “presence of organized genocide”(pg 92)… “the

Nigerian forces decided to purge the city of its Igbo

inhabitants (pg137)”… “the cost in human life made it one

of the bloodiest civil wars in human history(pg 227)…

“prospect of annihilation (pg 217)”… “Standing on the

precipice of annihilation (pg 217).” Whereas those that

can rightly talk of annihilation were the people of

Abudu. The American document of 15/10/67 noted: “As the

‘Biafrans’ retreated from Benin to Agbor, they killed all

the men, women and children they could find who were not

Ibos. The town of Abudu, one of the larger places between

Agbor and Benin, lost virtually all of its population

with the exception of a few who had escaped to the bush.”

Those that can rightly talk of annihilation were the

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Jews. Not only do Nazi policy documents say so, on-the-

ground facts support that. In Poland, Germany, Austria

and the Baltic countries alone, Hitler aiming for 100%,

killed 90% of Jews. The writer, Cyprian Ekwensi, a chief

of Biafran propaganda says: “We gave the number of

children dying per day as 1,000. Can you prove that? Can

you disprove it? But can you believe it? That is

propaganda.” So let us take the Biafran propaganda at its

highest and assume 3 million, i.e. 100,000 per month died

in the 30months war. The Vietnamese  genuinely lost close

to 3 million to the Vietnam War but they do not talk of

America’s plan to annihilate them.

Neither do the Japanese, the world’s first and only

victims of nuclear explosion. Azikiwe repeatedly argued

that though Igbos were killed in the North, it doesn’t

mean the tribe was “slated for slaughter” as a policy.

Even Colin Legum whom Achebe claims was the first to

describe the 1966 revenge killings of Igbos in the North

as pogroms does not think so too. On pg 82 instead of

stating the source of Legum article, Achebe references

his own interview in Transition. However in the London

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Observer of 26 May 1968, Legum writes: “It is clear that

there is no systematic attempt at exterminating Ibos to

justify charge of genocide.” Also Ojukwu’s hitherto

unknown Director of Intelligence and External

Communications, the Irish priest Rev Fr Kevin Doheny too

said in a secret but frank conversation with an American

diplomat that the claim of genocide is “highly

exaggerated but without it Biafrans would have given up

fighting long time ago.” Biafra’s biggest arms donor,

France sent a five man delegation  headed by Aymar

Achille-Fould and Louis Massoubre on 5th February 1969 to

investigate the genocide claims, they reported back to

Charles Gaulle, the French president, there was no

genocide.

If there was any intention to exterminate Igbos,  after

Ojukwu had fled and the Biafran military had been

completely paralysed, why didn’t  the Nigerian military

seized the opportunity to  turn the guns on the

defenceless Biafrans and mow them down, or carpet bomb

them? They never did that. Instead there were steps to

welcome them back into the fold. It is wicked and

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irresponsible of anyone to keep on talking    of

“genocide” or “prospect of annihilation” when the context

and facts on ground had been revealed to say otherwise. 

It is insulting to the memory of true genocide victims. 

“If you are blind, describing an elephant is easy.”

Achebe writes in The Education of a British-Protected Child. “You

can call it, like one of the six blind men in the fable,

a huge tree trunk; or perhaps a gigantic fan; or an

enormous rope, and so on. But having eyes, far from

making such descriptions easy, actually complicates

them.” Achebe throughout the book choose the easy path

of the blind over the complex task of a conscientious

writer. Having taken a low road, he wants to arrive at a

high point by invoking the Mandela Example in the final

pages.  Mandela described Achebe as the writer “in whose

company the prison walls fell down.” With this his

presumably last book, There Was A Country, Achebe is the

writer in whose company dangerous walls are rising up:

walls of tribal hatred, walls of lies, walls of sloppy

thinking and lazy research, wall of propaganda and walls

of moral ineptitude.

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-          Damola Awoyokun, a Structural and Marine

Engineer in London is also the Executive Editor of Pwc

Review. He can be reached at executiveeditor AT pwc-review

DOT com

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