Azikiwe’s lecture could not have come at a more critical time. I remember many of us in Biafra were hoping that his intervention would bring about a breakthrough in the stalemate. That hope was crushed when, following his triumphant lecture at Oxford, his strategy, which was submitted to both United Nations officials and the federal government of Nigeria, was soundly rejected as “unworkable.”
It is instructive to note that many of Azikiwe’s strategies and suggestions—international conflict resolution with United Nations peacekeeping forces, the use of international observer teams and military personnel to complement existing resources on the ground, etc.—have become standard United Nations practices today. Nevertheless, exactly six months later Nnamdi Azikiwe decided to discontinue any public support for the secessionist aspirations of Biafra and turned in his diplomatic credentials.
There has been a great deal of speculation as to why Azikiwe withdrew his support for Biafra. He was in a tough position and made a very difficult decision after his counsel went mostly ignored by Ojukwu. The late Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiani provides for posterity a rare insight into Azikiwe’s thinking, apprehension, and intellectual struggle:
His [Azikiwe’s] feeling was that when a leader of a nation wants to go to war, he should consult people. Primarily Ojukwu should have consulted Zik. Secondly, he should have consulted [Michael] Okpara [premier of eastern Nigeria]. Thirdly, he should have consulted other leaders. The only people that Ojukwu consulted were [Louis] Mbanefo and [Francis] Ibiam. I have Ibiam’s letter here. It was a great mistake. I told Ojukwu [to] invite these people [and inform them]. He told me they would compromise. That’s what he said. He didn’t invite them, never asked them questions. That’s not how to lead. That’s what led us into trouble. There are many areas we would have compromised. Ojukwu did not compromise. That’s one of the mistakes we made in the war. . . . It wasn’t that Zik opposed the war. Anybody with an intellect, with a sense would consider carefully the implications of a war. War is destructive. There’s no country that went to war that didn’t suffer, not one. When we went to war, we destroyed everything we had. That’s true.2
One must also remember that Azikiwe had spent his entire life first fighting for Nigerian independence under the One Nigeria mantra. In a curious twist of irony he found the same position manipulated by the British he had helped oust from his homeland. To add insult to injury, Azikiwe watched helplessly as the words he helped invent were then used by the Nigerian army—made up of some of the very same people who from the get-go had rejected the concept of a unified Northern and Southern Nigeria. Azikiwe supporters allege that the refusal by Ojukwu to consider many peaceful strategies to end the conflict, coupled with the prospects of annihilation of his people, was, I was told, just too much for the “great Zik of Africa” to bear.
The Recapture of Owerri
The psychologically devastated Biafrans were wrestling with two dire prospects in the latter part of the Harmattan Season of 1969: mass starvation or death by organized “ethnic cleansing” at the hands of Gowon’s military. A third possibility, surrender, was not in the cards. By this time there were close to one hundred thousand men, women, and children, mainly children, perishing every six weeks. The Biafrans would get an emotional reprieve at the news of the recapture of Owerri, one of Biafra’s largest cities, from the Nigerian troops.1
Gowon was furious to learn that Owerri had fallen back into the hands of the army he had sworn to defeat in three months. He instituted a major reorganization of his army’s leadership. The Nigerian Third Battalion was now to be commanded by Olusegun Obasanjo, the Second Division switched commanders from Haruna to Lieutenant Colonel Gibson Sanda Jalo, and the First Battalion was now led by Brigadier Iliya Bisalla, in place of Shuwa.
The next several weeks saw an energized Biafran army engage the federal troops with heightened vigor. They were able to keep the Nigerian army at bay on several fronts—across the Imo River; through Uzuakoli to the seat of power in Umuahia and around the perimeter of Owerri, Nekede; and on the road to Aba. Colonel Joseph Achuzia, who had been placed in charge of the Biafran offensive by Ojukwu, even contemplated a major military push to Port Harcourt. The lack of ammunition or military supplies made this lofty goal a suicide mission, and even the radical Joseph “Air Raid” Achuzia knew his limitations.2
Achuzia was one of the most complicated, some say eccentric characters of the war. He was well-known throughout the East as a “no-nonsense, disciplined, tactical and strategic military genius,” and was highly respected, if not feared by the Nigerian federal forces for his mastery of guerrilla warfare and for giving them a “run for their money” on the battlefield. Military experts report that Achuzia remained Ojukwu’s “ace commander” throughout the conflict, and he was often called upon to solve problems or build upon military theater advantages. His detractors, who refer to him as “a war zealot,” provide the counterpoint that no action on the battlefield should be elevated to the level of “genius,” and that Achuzia’s desire for military discipline often, allegedly, meant shooting a number of Biafran soldiers in order to get the others to fall in line.3 Achuzia survived the conflict and was appointed the secretary general of the influential pan-Igbo group Ohaneze NdiIgbo in later years.
Biafra Takes an Oil Rig: “The Kwale Incident”
In the middle of the rainy season of 1969, Biafran military intelligence allegedly obtained information that foreign oilmen, particularly staff from the Italian government’s oil conglomerate, Eni,1 were aiding the Nigerian army. The foreign workers were allegedly providing sensitive military information to the federal forces—about Biafran troop positions, strategic military maneuvers, and training.
This information was quickly made available to the Biafran command, which swiftly sent soldiers on a stealth dawn operation during which they invaded Eni’s combine in Kwale, in the Niger River Delta’s oil reserve known as Okpai oil field. By the end of the “exercise” eleven workers had been killed—ten of the dead were Italian and one was from Jordan. The Biafrans took eighteen Eni employees hostage. Fourteen were Italian, three were German, and one was Lebanese. What happened next would stir international outrage of epic proportions and threaten the fragile emotional and moral support that the Biafrans had developed during the course of the war.
The men were quickly detained on Biafran soil, tried, and found guilty of supporting the enemy—the federal troops of Nigeria—to wage a war of genocide. Predictably, there was a spontaneous outcry and appeals for clemency from disparate groups and countries. The Vatican and the embassies of Italy, Germany, Portugal, and Biafra’s African supporters—Ivory Coast and Gabon—were at the vanguard of those asking for the release of the prisoners.2
Biafra’s local and international supporters were dismayed. One observer commented at the time: “This indeed was not what the cause was about. . . . [W]e were engaged in a fight for self-determination. . . . [T]his was an unnecessary and costly distraction.”3 Biafran officials were adamant, even obstinate; the enclave’s minister for information, Ifegwu Eke, had this to say about the incident: “Oilmen are more dangerous than mercenaries. . . . These are the people responsible for our suffering.” Ojukwu’s own radio pronouncements about the incident were equally irascible:
Oscillating amid impassioned outrage and constrained eloquence, the Biafran leader exclaimed: “For 18 white men, Europe is aroused. What have they said about our millions? Eighteen white men assisting in the crime of genocide. What do they say about our murdered innocents? How many black dead make one missing white? Mathematicians, please answer me. Is it infinity?”4
After Ojukwu received a private letter from the pope in June 1969, personally pleading for the release of the oilmen, many in Ojukwu’s inner circle were concerned about an international backlash. If the situation was not resolved swiftly, they feared, it could precipitate an instant sinking of Biafra’s international reputation and a permanent l
oss of Vatican, Italian, indeed international humanitarian support. Eventually, in late June 1969, the eighteen detained men were released and flown out of Biafra in the custody of diplomats from the Ivory Coast and Gabon.
Some scholars believe that Ojukwu’s calculation was that a combination of Biafran military resistance and the disruption of oil operations in the region would reduce oil revenue flowing to Nigeria’s supporters and into the Nigerian treasury, crippling their war machinery and bringing about an accelerated negotiation to end the war.5 Others are less charitable and feel that the whole affair was a blunder for the record books; they ascribe Ojukwu’s decision to free the men as informed as much by the pope’s letter as by the prospect of Italian “armed intervention to free their citizens”6—and his own rapid tumble from power in such a scenario.
Be that as it may, the fact that seemed to have completely escaped the Biafran leaders was this: As a people proclaiming victimization at the hands of Nigeria, and rightfully so, we could not be seen as victimizers in any situation or setting, in order to continue receiving the widespread moral and humanitarian support we needed to survive. This failure to recognize this fundamental principle, I believe, contributed immensely to the downturn in Biafra’s fortunes. I personally believe that this fiasco was the clearest evidence of the mental fatigue of the Biafran military leadership.
—
The summer of 1969 would prove a busy one on the diplomatic front. Pope Paul VI, buoyed by the success of his emissaries in diffusing the Kwale incident, focused his energies next on procuring a lasting peace between the warring parties. During an official trip to Uganda the pontiff met the Biafran and Nigerian emissaries separately in lengthy talks, during which he expressed his desire that a peaceful resolution be found.7
The pontiff addressed the Ugandan Parliament on August 10, following an exhausting ceremony during which he consecrated twelve new African bishops, and repeated the Vatican’s desire to mediate a lasting peace between Nigeria and Biafra:
[I]n a region of Africa dear to us . . . there still rages an agonizing conflict. . . . We have not only sought to secure goods and medical assistance, impartially and by every means available, but have also tried to apply the remedy of a certain initial reconciliation. Up to now we have not succeeded and this gives us heartfelt pain. But we are resolved to continue our modest but affectionate and fair efforts of persuasion to help heal this fatal dissension.8
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 routes. Many congressmembers, government officials, indeed lay citizens were increasingly exasperated by the endless streaming television imagery of dying Biafran babies, and by the blockade imposed by the Gowon government. Biafra had in Senator Edward M. Kennedy a humane and sympathetic ear. Kennedy called for early and sustained U.S. humanitarian intervention throughout the bloody conflict.9 Strom Thurmond, a senator from South Carolina, also became particularly vocal about America’s intention to continue providing relief supplies to the needy irrespective of the Nigerian federal government’s obstinate blockade measures.10
Thurmond, an unlikely supporter of the breakaway Republic of Biafra, was a former “‘Dixiecrat”11—a member of the conservative base of the “old Democratic party of the 1950s and early 1960s” that fled to the safety of the Republican Party following the reverberations of the civil rights period. He also had a not too flattering reputation for commandeering the filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He was, however, a well-respected and high-profile congressman and a particularly effective legislator—all the characteristics that the desperate Biafrans needed.12
Biafran diplomats began to see some of the repercussions of the Kwale incident by the end of 1969, and the erosion of the goodwill that had been built up so successfully over the previous twenty-seven months. Neutral countries like Canada, hitherto officially silent, more or less, while engaged in spirited humanitarian support of the suffering, openly criticized the Ojukwu administration as one “that was more interested in getting arms than food or medical supplies and had made up reasons for rejecting [humanitarian aid].”13 For the Biafrans, particularly those of us who had made trips to Canada to secure their humanitarian support, this rhetoric was particularly devastating.
1970 and The Fall
In Biafra, the Harmattan Season leading into 1970 was particularly harsh. I remember vividly the suffering of the people; everything seemed particularly bleak. The dry, sandy air seemed to be an additional torment, delighting in covering the body with layers of the Sahara Desert’s fine dust, blown in from hundreds of miles away. This made it impossible for bare, weeping, vulnerable skin lesions to heal. It was particularly hard on the children. Looking around one could see a proud, devastated people.
The Nigerians at this point were also worried about the physical and psychological impact that this war was having on their troops. The federal government, it was well-known, increased the recruitment of a great number of mercenaries from the neighboring countries of Chad and Niger, and from far away Mali, to supplement their numbers. The federal ranks were also plagued by widespread dissatisfaction with the war effort, the escalating number of casualties, and the lack of a clear vision for ending the conflict. To make matters worse for Gowon, the general population had grown impatient with what now appeared to be an endless conflict that had entered its thirtieth month.
Gowon was clearly in a bind. He responded to this predicament by sending off secret memos to relay the details of his final offensive, a scorched-earth policy to crush the Biafran resistance once and for all. By the middle of January 1970, the Nigerian troops had regained the upper hand decisively. Biafra, for all terms and purposes was crushed emotionally, psychologically, financially, and militarily, and it came crashing down soon after the new year began.
After failing many times over the thirty-month period, Gowon finally had Biafra surrounded on three fronts. In mid-January 1970, after Owerri had been recaptured by the federal troops and Uli airport was under heavy air and land assault by federal troops led by Olusegun Obasanjo, I knew the end for Biafra was near. That feeling was confirmed for millions of others in Biafra when Ojukwu went on the radio and announced that he was “leaving the People’s Republic of Biafra to explore alternative options for peace.” We all learned later that he had traveled to Ivory Coast, one of Biafra’s early African supporters, where his longtime friend president Félix Houphouët-Boigny, with French backing, had offered him asylum. Nigeria mounted attempts to repatriate Ojukwu for at least five years following the war in order to try him for war crimes, but they failed mainly because the French made access to him impossible.
After that announcement there was sheer pandemonium throughout Biafra. Millions of Biafrans could be seen scrambling to get away from the Nigerian military forces, which at this point seemed to be advancing from every direction. Many of the classic Time and Life photos of this era were taken during this time of great panic, despair, and anxiety.
There have been several debates over the decades since about why Ojukwu, the resistance leader of a people so wronged, left (some say fled) Biafra at this critical juncture, declaring in his classic style: “Whilst I live, Biafra lives.”1 His detractors, many of whom are still alive, still believe that this particular act was one of great cowardice, and that true heroes go down with the cause.
I think Ojukwu’s departure, like many things that he did before, during, and after the war, was a complicated matter. It was clear to the Biafran leader that the end was near, that his troops had been defeated, at least militarily, and that the mostly Igbo Easterners on whose behalf he had waged this war were broken in every respect and were standing at the precipice of annihilation. By taking himself out of the equation, so to speak, Ojukwu robbed his old nemesis Gowon of the war booty he so
ught the most—his head. Therefore, the protracted internal rivalry between the two men that I have referred to had no resolution, and he had robbed Gowon of closure and complete satisfaction in victory. Indeed, many psychologists believe that Gowon may not have been as conciliatory as he ended up being had Ojukwu stayed behind.
Gowon does not stray far from my conclusions on this subject:
What you should remember about the time—and, at least, give us some credit for it—is that we did not take what would be considered normal action under such circumstances. In such an instance, all the senior officials involved—politicians as well as in the military—would have been strung up for their part in the war. This is what happened at the end of the Second World War in Germany; it happened in Japan at the end of the campaign in that part of the world. This is the civilized world’s way of doing things. But we did not do even that. We did set up committees to look into cases such as where rebel officers had been members of the Nigerian Armed Forces, and their loyalty was supposed to be to the Federal Government. When the war ended, we reabsorbed practically everyone who was in the Army. But there were officers at a certain senior level [who] we insisted had to accept responsibility for their role in the secession. It was the only thing to do. Probably I could have given pardon; however, I was not the one who gave pardon to Ojukwu. . . .