Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  Similar scenes were enacted in Ibadan, the western capital, where Chief Akintola was shot and his house burned down. In the exclusive lagoon-front district of Lagos, a handful of men marched to the homes of the federal Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who was known to be a puppet of the Sardauna, and the Finance Minister Festus Okotie-Eboh, an Igbo man, known throughout Nigeria as the king of ‘dash’, a word which was used in West Africa at the time for bribery. Balewa was summoned from his prayers and submitted with dignity. He emerged, with his hands held aloft, ready for handcuffs. The corrupt Finance Minister behaved with less decorum. Producing a thick wad of bills, he tried to buy off the soldiers and then, still in his pyjamas, he ran outside, screaming, ‘Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!’ Two soldiers knocked him down and jumped on him. His body was found three days later in a ditch thirty miles from Lagos. Near by lay the corpse of Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. The army officers who had co-ordinated the successful coup were young men, largely educated at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. The organization they showed prompted one resident Englishman to remark, ‘Sandhurst training certainly leaves its mark.’22

  The coup solved very little. Initially, it was welcomed, even in parts of the north, where the Sardauna had made too many enemies for his assassination to be widely mourned. The death of Tafawa Balewa, a well-respected figure, disturbed the north more deeply. In the south, by contrast, the coup was greeted with scenes of wild rejoicing.23 There was an initial calm, although there remained the fear that the north would react in some violent way, waging, some feared, a ‘Moslem holy war of reprisal’.24 The young majors were open about who they regarded as the enemy; they were opposed, in the words of one contemporary Igbo writer, to the prevailing system, especially the ‘hegemony which the Northern Region wielded at the behest of British neo-colonialism’. The northerners and the British were the particular culprits whose wickedness was frequently invoked to justify the coup.25

  There was calm for the first few months after the coup, but this was largely deceptive as events moved swiftly after the new President, General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, abolished the federation in May 1966 and proclaimed Nigeria to be a unitary state. He also announced that the regional civil services would be unified. From that point, Igbo immigrants in the north began to be victimized. The abolition of the federal constitution prompted calls for the north to secede. Crowds in Northern Nigeria began to shout ‘Araba! Araba!’ (Let us part). Almost inevitably, at the end of July, a group of northern army officers led a counter-coup. They killed General Ironsi, the man the majors had installed as president, and they also killed scores of eastern military officers. The motives of the northern officers in launching the counter-coup were simple: they wanted to reverse the unitary decree which had abolished the federation, and they wished to reassert northern dominance of the country. The time was ripe for yet more armed conflict. During the second half of 1966, hundreds of Igbo immigrants were slaughtered in a tide of violence which swept Northern Nigeria. The figures have been exaggerated over the years, and the ‘massacres’ formed part of the myth of the Igbo resistance, with some accounts claiming that between 80,000 and 100,000 Igbo immigrants were killed.26 The truth was that not more than 7,000 had been killed between May and October. Sir David Hunt, the British High Commissioner at the time, writing in 1970, remembered that Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, the Igbo leader, had spoken to the Italian Ambassador in January 1967, only three months after the massacre, and had confided in him that the number killed was ‘as high as 7,000’. Hunt added that ‘whatever the figures, the massacre was a very great crime indeed’.27

  By early 1967, it was clear that Nigeria, which had been independent for just over six years, was now in serious crisis. The new president whom the northern officers had installed was a thirty-one-year-old army officer, Yakubu Gowon, the son of a Methodist minister. A small, dapper man, Gowon hailed from the north, but from a minority tribe, so he had never really been part of the Muslim feudal aristocracy. The easterners remained unimpressed by his attempts to conciliate them. He immediately rescinded Decree no. 34 which had abolished the federation. In 1966 the government had installed a military governor in each of the regions of Nigeria and now there were four regions, as a new division named the Mid-Western Region had been created in July 1963. This new region did not change the overall weight of influence, since the Northern Region continued to have ‘more land and a few more people than the rest of the country combined’.28 The military governors of each region were in a powerful position and their personalities began to shape the future of the country. As the British High Commissioner told the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Affairs, in Africa ‘personalities generally speaking are more important than policies’.29 This statement may have been true, but its veracity extended far beyond Africa, right through the entire British Empire.

  It was at this time that the Igbo leader Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, Military Governor of the Eastern Region, suddenly emerges as a central player in the affairs of Nigeria. To the High Commissioner, he was a ‘questionable figure about whose sanity there could be some doubts’. Ojukwu was an interesting man, the prime mover in the eventual secession of the Eastern Region and the establishment of the nation of Biafra. He was the son of an Igbo businessman who had been described as the richest man in Nigeria and had been knighted for his achievements. Sir Louis Ojukwu had made money in a road-haulage business in the 1940s; he then sold the business and invested the proceeds in property, reputedly leaving a fortune of £8 million on his death in 1966.30 The wealthy father had spared nothing in educating his son and packed him off to England in the late 1940s to continue his education at Epsom College, a public school in the stockbroker belt of Surrey. The presence of Nigerians at British private boarding schools, though commonplace by the 1970s, was unusual in the 1940s, and Ojukwu remembered later that he had been ‘swamped’ by ‘a sea of white faces’. He claimed that he found it very difficult to recognize his teachers. His powers of argument and his charisma won him a place on the debating team at Epsom, where he also distinguished himself in sports, playing rugby for the school and setting the school record for the discus throw in 1952. School was followed by Oxford University, where he started studying Law but then switched to Modern History, in which he graduated with a third-class degree from Lincoln College in 1955. Ojukwu remembered Oxford as the happiest days of his life; his father’s wealth allowed him to own a red MG sports car, in which he would ‘burn up the A40 between Oxford and London’ at weekends.31 The young man had developed an extreme self-confidence and self-reliance in his schooldays, as he had not got on with his housemaster in what must have been, for a young Nigerian in an English boarding school in the late 1940s, a strange environment.

  His background as a public schoolboy and Oxford undergraduate was, in itself, part of the fascination he held for members of the English establishment. Although Britain was steadily behind the federal government during the ensuing conflict, Ojukwu was a romantic character for whom the British had some instinctive sympathy. His education legitimized him in the eyes of many British officials. The High Commissioner, David Hunt, spoke of one of ‘Colonel Ojukwu’s invariable late night drinking and talking sessions’. Hunt reported that his own predecessor as high commissioner, ‘who was himself educated at one of the best known universities in East Anglia, was apparently of the view that he [Ojukwu] had learnt these habits at Oxford’. ‘One of the best-known universities in East Anglia’ was a sly reference to Cambridge University, and the phrase reflects the jovial, rather smug and clubbish atmosphere of the British Foreign Office of that time.32 Ojukwu himself, according to Hunt, was an ‘outstandingly intelligent man’, who was ‘34 and was educated at a public school in England and at Oxford’. One wonders if the official would have been so complimentary about his intelligence if, like Gowon, Ojukwu had been educated at a missionary school in Nigeria. In Hunt’s view, Ojukwu was responsible for the propaganda campaign which had fomented an intense atmosphere of sepa
ratism in the Igbo-dominated Eastern Region. ‘As soon as you cross the Niger bridge’, the High Commissioner wrote, ‘the atmosphere becomes more sulphurous and lurid.’ There were ‘warlike’ posters which would ‘certainly fall under the condemnation of the recent British Race Relations Act and [are] reminiscent of some of the . . . manifestations of Der Stürmer’, the Nazi newspaper of the 1930s and early 1940s. In the context of the tensions of early 1967, Hunt also observed that it was ‘a melancholy fact that racialism (I almost wrote apartheid) is the primary political emotion in Africa south of the Sahara’.33

  The atmosphere of suspicion was plain for all to see. In March 1967, Ojukwu had written to Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister, that since ‘July 1966, the Nigerian Federation has teetered on the brink of disintegration’. The murder of General Ironsi, the man who had been installed by the coup of January 1966, by ‘Northern Nigerian Troops and the indiscriminate killing of Eastern Nigerian military officers’ had ‘destroyed the unity of the Army’. Ojukwu was clearly warning Wilson that war was likely: ‘I have counselled Lt. Col. Gowon’, Ojukwu added, ‘against military action which can only lead to civil war and the disintegration of the country.’34 By March 1967, in fact, Ojukwu’s Eastern Region government had already employed an advertising company in New York to push its propaganda and an advertisement appeared in the New York Times with the heading ‘Nigeria’s Last Hope’. The agency was Ruder Finn, based on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In April 1967, the High Commissioner reported a US assessment of Ojukwu: according to the Americans, he was now ‘determined to obtain early de facto independence for the east’. Ojukwu was confident that Nigeria would break into four or more countries and was using his ‘propaganda apparatus’ in the east to ‘stir up tribal animosities’.

  As the tension grew, British and American diplomats in Nigeria believed that a vital determinant of the crisis would now be ‘the attitude of foreign governments’. It was clear that the United Kingdom and the USSR supported the federal government, but according to British diplomats the position of the French was more uncertain: ‘France seems willing to do business with the east through the back door,’ even though it may have been unwilling to commit itself openly. The Americans would also support the federal government and they believed that, if other governments complied with its economic measures against the east, resistance would collapse ‘within six months’. Ojukwu did not believe that the Americans were serious in their support for the unity of Nigeria. He was apparently convinced that ‘the US government were only going through the motions of opposing Eastern secession’, that ‘true American sympathies were with the East’ and that, if the secession came, the US ‘would not be long in granting recognition’ to the east. American officials were keen ‘to dispel this impression’.35 Hunt was now convinced that Ojukwu had ‘decided to secede’. In his view, the Igbo leader was now ‘paranoid’; he was also being increasingly dictatorial and had ‘got the whole of the Eastern Region goose-stepping in violent demonstrations; his press and radio can only be compared to those of Nazi Germany for their deliberate pursuit of the policy of the big lie’ and their ‘poisonous incitement to racial hatred’.36 Hunt was firmly against secession and suspicious of the Igbo, who he believed were naturally inclined to paranoia. Other British officials were complaining of ‘Ibo [sic] chauvinism’.37

  As Nigeria slid into civil war during May and June 1967, Britain’s position became more difficult, even though the final decision would be to side with the federal government and support the unity of the Republic of Nigeria, which Britain had created. The Commonwealth Office issued a memorandum in May in which, obviously enough, it was declared that the previous year’s ‘events in Nigeria, in which the government was twice toppled by coup d’état and many thousands of Igbos from the Eastern Region were massacred in the North have left an indelible scar on the Eastern Region’s relations with the Northern-orientated Federal Government’. It was, according to the memorandum, clear where British allegiance should lie: ‘in these circumstances our policy has been to support the Federal Government in all reasonable efforts to maintain a unified Nigeria’.

  The support of Britain for the federal government was unwavering: ‘we will do our utmost to avoid contributing to any measure which would lead to the break-up of the country’. Typically, however, there was an escape clause. The British government ‘declined to give an assurance that we would in no circumstances recognise a separate Eastern State’. This was a classic case of diplomatic fence-sitting. While Britain ‘sympathised’ with the federal government, it could not ‘afford permanently to alienate the East with whom we may one day have to do business as an independent state’.38 The problem with coming down unequivocally on the side of the federal government was that, as so often, Britain’s financial interests could be compromised. The east of the country was where most of Nigeria’s oil was situated. ‘Our investments [in Nigeria] are estimated at over £220 million,’ of which £130 million was in oil, mostly in the east. British interests in the east were ‘far larger than those of any other country’ and ‘an open split between the Eastern Region and the rest of Nigeria’ would ‘face us with an immediate dilemma’. Britain simply could not afford to ‘alienate either side’. The conclusion of this gutless state paper from the short-lived Commonwealth Office (created by joining the old Colonial Office to the Commonwealth Relations Office) was that in the event of ‘Eastern secession we should aim to keep in informal contact with the Eastern Government, having particular regard to our oil interests and the safety of British nationals’, but ‘we should be extremely cautious in recognising a separate Eastern State’. If possible, Britain should ‘not move faster than other influential Governments’.39

  At the end of May 1967, the final rupture between the Eastern Region and the federal state of Nigeria occurred. ‘At 6 o’clock in the morning of 30 May, the Military Governor of Eastern Nigeria, Lieutenant-Colonel Ojukwu, made a broadcast declaring the Region, together with its continental shelf and territorial waters, to be an independent sovereign state under the name of the Republic of Biafra,’ wrote Hunt, the High Commissioner. In Hunt’s view, Ojukwu bore sole responsibility for what had happened. Ojukwu was an ambitious man who had ‘a high opinion of his own talents’. Hunt did not believe that ‘the impersonal forces . . . would necessarily have produced secession under a different Military Governor’. The attitude of Hunt was an important factor in Britain’s position and he remained, while he resided in the federal capital, Lagos, as high commissioner, fully committed to the cause of Nigerian unity. His deputy, J. R. W. Parker, who was based in the Biafran capital of Enugu, was less convinced. The official papers reveal an open split between two of the highest-ranking British diplomats in Nigeria; as an official wrote in 1970, ‘it is fairly unusual to detail for posterity differences between civil servants of this sort’. But it was useful for the ‘historical record’.40 Parker had a ‘cordial personal relationship with Colonel Ojukwu’. He believed that eastern secession had not just been a matter of Ojukwu’s personal ambition, as his superior Hunt believed, but reflected genuine fears felt by the Igbo people about northern aggression.41 Ojukwu’s view about Biafra’s future prospects is neatly captured in a letter he wrote to Harold Wilson on the very day he declared independence for Biafra. ‘In size, population, and potentialities the new state of Biafra compares with many countries of Africa in particular and the world in general.’42 The new country, with a population of 14 million and large oil reserves, was indeed a viable country.

  The difficulty of London’s position was further reflected in the suspicion which both sides in the Biafran War, the easterners and the federal government, felt towards the British. Hunt would later confirm that it was ‘widely believed in Lagos that Britain was behind secession in order to consolidate her control on Nigeria’s oil resources’.43 At the same time, the easterners were firmly convinced that the British favoured the Muslim emirs in the north.

  On 7 July 1967 the federal gov
ernment under Gowon finally moved against the east and started the Biafran War. The war itself has spawned dozens of books, memoirs and accounts. It has inspired many novels and remains one of the seminal events of modern African history. Much of the writing has been conceived from an Igbo standpoint. Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel published in 2007, portrays the lives of an Igbo professor and his girlfriend against the backdrop of the tragedy of Biafra. The story is set in a gentle, somewhat rarefied university campus whose tranquillity serves as a contrast to the terror of the war. The book reflects the well-rehearsed view that Biafra was a romantic experiment in civilized statecraft crushed by brute force. The atmosphere of the novel is sympathetic to the Biafrans, which is not surprising, given that the author, Chimamanda Adichie, is an Igbo who lost both her grandfathers in the war.44 Biafra remains contentious, and, because many of the actors, in particular Gowon and Ojukwu, were still in their early thirties when the conflict started, some memories of the conflict have lasted a long time. It would be simplistic to blame the conflict entirely on the legacy of British rule, but it is not too bold to suggest that some of its causes originated in policies adopted in the colonial era.