The Biafra Story

by Frederick Forsyth

  The war began in a spirit of confidence on both sides. General Gowon told his people and the world he had undertaken ‘a short, surgical police action’.† Victory was forecast in days rather than weeks. In the North Colonel Katsina sneered at the Biafran ‘army of pen-pushers’ and forecast a swift victory as the largely Northern Nigerian Federal infantry marched in. The Biafrans, confident of their greater speed, ingenuity and resourcefulness, felt if they could resist for a few months the Nigerians would realize the folly of the war and go home, or negotiate. Neither proved to be correct.

  Fighting starting on 6 July 1967, with an artillery barrage against Ogoja, a town near the border with the Northern Region in the northeast corner of Biafra. Here two Federal battalions faced the Biafrans in what Colonel Ojukwu realized was a diversionary attack. The real attack came further west opposite Nsukka, the prosperous market town recently endowed with the handsome University of Nsukka, renamed University of Biafra.

  Here the remaining six battalions of the Nigerians were massed on the main axis, and they marched in on 8 July. They advanced four miles and then stuck. The Biafrans, with about 3,000 men in arms in that sector against the Nigerians’ 6,000, fought back tenaciously with Eastern Nigeria Police .303 rifles, an assortment of Italian, Czech and German machine pistols, and a fair sprinkling of shotguns, which in close bush country are not as harmless as they sound. The Nigerians captured the town of Nsukka which they then destroyed, university and all, but could advance no further. In Ogoja province they took Nyonya and Gakem, brought Ogoja into range of their artillery and forced the Biafrans to cede the township and draw up a line of defence along a river south of the town. Here too the fighting bogged down, and the situation looked, and might have remained, stationary.

  After two weeks, discomfited by this immobility of their redoubtable infantry, Lagos began to broadcast the fall of numerous Biafran towns to the Federal forces. To those living in Enugu, which included the whole population, expatriates included, it appeared someone in Lagos was sticking pins at random in a map. At the Hotel Presidential it was tea on the terrace as usual, water-polo with the British Council staff, and jackets for dinner.

  After three weeks the Nigerians got into trouble when two of their battalions, cut off from the rest, were surrounded and broken up to the east of Nsukka between the main road and the railway line. Two more scratch battalions composed of training staff and trainees were hastily armed and thrown into the Nsukka sector from the Nigerian side.

  In the air, activity was confined to the exploits of a lone Biafran B-26 American-built Second World War bomber piloted by a taciturn Pole who rejoiced in the name of Kamikaze Brown, and to six French-built Alouette helicopters piloted by Biafrans from which they rained hand-grenades and home-made bombs on the Nigerians.

  On 25 July the Nigerians staged an unexpected sea-borne attack on the island of Bonny, the last piece of land before the open sea far to the south of Port Harcourt. In prestige terms it was a spectacular coup in an increasingly newsless war, due to the fact that Bonny was the oil-loading terminal for the Shell-BP pipeline from Port Harcourt.

  But militarily it was unexploitable, for, once warned, the Biafrans relentlessly patrolled the waters north of Bonny and subsequent Nigerian attempts to launch further water-borne attacks northwards on to the mainland round Port Harcourt were beaten back.

  On 9 August the Biafrans struck in earnest with a coup that shook observers both in Biafra and Lagos. Starting at dawn, a mobile brigade of 3,000 men they had carefully prepared in secret swept across the Onitsha Bridge into the Midwest. In ten hours of daylight the Region fell, and the towns of Warri, Sapele, the oil centre at Ughelli, Agbor, Uromic, Ubiaja, and Benin City were occupied. Of the small army of the Midwest nothing was heard; nine out of eleven senior officers of that army were Ica-Ibos, first cousins to the Ibos of Biafra, and rather than fight they welcomed the Biafran forces.

  The capture of the Midwest changed the balance of the war, putting the whole of Nigeria’s oil resources under Biafran control. Although she had lost about 500 square miles of her own territory in three small sectors at the perimeter, she had captured 20,000 square miles of Nigeria. More important, the whole of the Nigerian infantry was miles away opposite Nsukka, with the broad Niger separating them from the road back to the capital and helpless to intervene. For the Biafrans the road to Lagos was open and undefended.

  Colonel Ojukwu was at pains to placate the non-Ibo majority of the Midwest and to assure them that he bore them no harm. For a week delegations of tribal chiefs, bankers, traders, Chamber of Commerce stalwarts, army officers and church dignitaries filed into Enugu on invitation to see the Biafran leader and be reassured. Colonel Ojukwu hoped that an alliance of two of the three Southern regions would swing the West into agreement and force the Federal Government to negotiate.

  After a week it appeared this was not going to happen and Colonel Ojukwu gave the order for a further advance westwards. On 16 August the Biafrans reached the Ofusu River bridge which marks the border with the Western region. Here there was a brief scrap with Nigerian troops, who then withdrew. Inspecting the Nigerian dead, the Biafrans were elated; the Nigerian soldiers were from the Federal Guard, Gowon’s own bodyguard of 500 Tivs, normally garrisoned in Lagos. If he had had recourse to using these, it was reckoned, there must be nothing else available.

  On 20 August the Biafrans stormed into Ore, a town on a crossroads thirty-five miles into the West, 130 miles from Lagos and 230 miles from Enugu. This time the Tivs facing them took a worse beating and disconsolately pulled back in disorder. To observers at the time it appeared that barely ten weeks after the Arab-Israeli war another military phenomenon was to be witnessed, with tiny Biafra toppling the government of the enormous Nigeria. A sudden motorized push at that time along any one of three major roads available would have put Biafran forces deep into the Yoruba heartland and at the gates of Lagos. Such was the order Colonel Ojukwu gave.

  It was later learned from sources inside the American Embassy that on 20 August the Westerners were teetering on the verge of going over to a policy of appeasing the Biafrans to save their skins; that Gowon had ordered his private plane to be made ready, the engines warmed and a flight plan prepared for Zaria in the North; and that the British High Commissioner Sir David Hunt and the American Ambassador Mr James Matthews had had a long and serious talk with Gowon in Dodan Barracks, as a result of which the nervous Nigerian Supreme Commander agreed to carry on.

  News of this intervention, if intervention it was (and it was reliably reported as such), reached Colonel Ojukwu within a week and caused anger among British and American citizens in Biafra, who felt their ambassadors were playing fast and loose with their safety, for if the news had got out to the Biafran public their reaction could have been violent.

  The decision of Gowon to stay on saved his government from collapse and ensured the continuation of the war. Had he fled, there seems little doubt the West would have swung over, and Nigeria would have developed into a confederation of three states. Biafran suspicions since that day have been that the carrot that tempted Gowon and his fellow minority men to stay in power was the pledge of British and American aid. Certainly the aid followed hard and fast from that date.

  The taking of the Midwest had one other by-product. It opened Nigeria’s eyes to the fact that they were fighting a war. From the first they had underestimated Biafra and the latter, in taking advantage of this once-for-all opportunity, had got the war in her grasp. It was allowed to slip. In fact Ore was as far as the Biafran forces got, for in the meantime another remarkable aboutturn had taken place. Unknown to all, the commander of the Biafran forces in the Midwest had turned traitor.

  Victor Banjo was a Yoruba and had been a Major in the Nigerian Army, imprisoned by General Ironsi for allegedly plotting against him. His prison had been in the East, and it was from here, released by Colonel Ojukwu at the outbreak of war and offered a commission in the Biafran Army, that he came to join Biafra rath
er than go home to the West and face the possible danger of revenge from the Northerners ruling there. Why Colonel Ojukwu chose the one senior Yoruba in the Biafran Army to command the forces destined to march into Western Nigeria he has never revealed, but the two men were known to have been close friends, and Colonel Ojukwu had implicit trust in him. With the rank of Brigadier, Banjo commanded ‘S’ Brigade when it moved into the Midwest.

  According to his own confession when he was later unmasked, he decided soon after 9 August he wished to enter into talks with the leaders in the West, notably Chief Awolowo. He discovered the hideaway in Benin City of the Midwest Governor Colonel Ejoor, though he did not report this to Ojukwu, who wished to talk to Ejoor. Instead he asked Ejoor to act as intermediary between himself and Awolowo, but Ejoor declined to take the risk.

  Banjo said later he relayed messages using the sideband radio of the British Deputy High Commission in Benin. A British official communicated the messages in German to another official in the High Commission in Lagos. The message was passed on to Chief Awolowo. The plot Banjo later revealed was typically Yoruba in its complexity. In conjunction with two other senior Biafran officers with political ambitions he was to cause the ruin of Biafra by withdrawing the troops from the Midwest on a variety of pretexts, arrest and assassinate Ojukwu, and proclaim the ‘revolt’ at an end. As a Nigerian hero he would then re-enter his home Western Region with all his past forgiven and forgotten.

  He added that the second part of the plot, which was to come later, was that he and Awolowo were to rally the newly-recruited Yoruba Army to his standard, and depose Gowon, leaving the Presidency of Nigeria for himself and permitting Awolowo his long-desired premiership. It seems unlikely that the Gowon government was informed of this postscript.

  Banjo managed to recruit into his scheme Colonel Ifeajuana, also released from prison, a Moscow-trained Communist officer called Major Philip Alale, a Biafran Foreign Service official called Sam Agbam, who did some of the negotiating between the two sides while out of Biafra, and several other junior officers and functionaries.

  By mid-September he was ready to move. In Enugu Colonel Ojukwu, although frustrated by the lack of action in the west, continued to trust Banjo and to accept his assurances of administrative difficulties, man-power shortage, lack of enough guns and ammunition, and so forth. It was true the Nigerians had grown stronger in the intervening three weeks. With a crash recruiting programme putting into uniform after a brisk one-week training course such diverse elements as college students and prison inmates, the Nigerians had formed first one fresh brigade and then another. These forces, named the Second Division and commanded by Colonel Murtela Mohammed, had been fighting back from the Western Region. The use of fast, motorized columns could still have put the Biafrans in a dominating position in the West as late as the first week in September, but on 12 September Banjo gave orders without authority to evacuate Benin City without firing a shot. Mohammed did not enter Benin until 21 September.

  Banjo followed up with orders to withdraw from Warri, Sapele, Auchi, Igueben and other important positions without fighting. Baffled and bewildered Biafran junior officers did as they were told. Simultaneously the Biafran defences south of Nsukka collapsed and the Federal forces pushed several miles down the road to Enugu, lying forty-five miles from Nsukka.

  At this point Banjo decided to strike directly at Colonel Ojukwu. He conferred in the Midwest with Ifeajuana and Alale, and they worked out the final arrangements for the assassination, which was to take place coincidentally with Banjo’s presence in Enugu on 19 September, where he had been summoned to explain what he was doing in the Midwest.

  None of the three seemed to realize time had run out for them. Amazingly they had broached their plan to a number of other officers and civilians, without any attempt to check first to see if those people would not remain loyal to Ojukwu. In fact most did, and several had already been to see him with details of the plot.

  He took a lot of convincing, but the facts were beginning to speak for themselves. Ifeajuana and Alale were summoned separately to State House where Ojukwu coldly confronted them, then ordered their arrest. Banjo was also summoned, but arrived with a strong escort of men loyal to himself, whom he wished to bring into the grounds. He was persuaded they could stay at the gate well within call, while he went in alone but armed. He agreed. While he was waiting in the ante-room Colonel Ojukwu’s police ADC, a shrewd young Inspector, went out to the guard posse with a bottle of gin. After passing it round, he invited them to come to his house nearby and sample some more. They agreed and trooped off.

  Inside State House watchers observed their departure, then swung their automatics onto Banjo. He was disarmed, then ushered in to see the Head of State. It was six hours to the time Colonel Ojukwu should have died, being close to midnight on 18 September.

  It was impossible to keep the scandal quiet as the main culprits freely confessed their parts and the smaller fry were arrested. The effect on the army was traumatic and swift demoralization set in. The entire officer corps was discredited in the eyes of the soldiery, themselves fiercely loyal to Colonel Ojukwu. Although torn by his one-time friendship with Banjo, and a relation by marriage to Alale, Colonel Ojukwu was heavily pressured by his army colleagues to the view that examples had to be made to stop the rot. He gave his assent.

  The four ringleaders were tried by special tribunal, sentenced to death for high treason and shot at dawn. The date was 22 September.

  The exact degree of complicity or awareness of some British officials in Nigeria remains a matter of speculation in Biafra. Banjo, in his confession (backed by a file of documentary evidence taken from Banjo which Ojukwu showed the author), heavily implicated the British Deputy High Commission in Benin and the High Commission in Lagos as having been his liaison men with Awolowo and Gowon. Correspondents in Lagos later remarked they had noticed a sudden buoyancy among British officials in the middle of September, confident assurances that ‘it’ll all be over in a few days’. This was in stark contrast to the near panic of 20 August and a prophecy hardly merited by the military situation.

  But after the attempted coup things did change. The damage in Biafra was enormous. By 25 September the Biafrans had withdrawn from Agbor in the Midwest, half way between the Niger River and Benin City, and by the 30th were back in a small defended perimeter around Asaba with their backs to the river. North of Enugu the demoralized infantry retreated disconsolately before the Nigerians coming south from Nsukka, and Enugu came within shelling range by the end of the month. On 6 October the Biafrans at Asaba crossed the Niger to Onitsha and blew up the newly completed £6,000,000 bridge behind them to prevent Mohammed crossing. They were highly disillusioned. Two days previously, on 4 October, the Nigerians had entered Enugu.

  Abroad it was generally presumed that Biafra must collapse. Two things saved the country from disintegration; one was the personality of Colonel Ojukwu, who took a grip on the army and gave officers and men a talking to; the other was the people of the country who made it clear they did not intend to give up. As the soldiery was, and always had been, the people in uniform, the army soon got the message.

  Colonel Ojukwu felt obliged to offer his resignation, which the Consultative Assembly unanimously refused. That marked the end of the Banjo episode; Biafra buckled down to getting on with the job of fighting. The long, hard slog had begun.

  By this time the enormous weight of firepower imported by Nigeria, notably from Britain, Belgium, Holland, Italy and Spain, was becoming overpowering. A further recruiting drive had enabled them to boost the Federal Army to over 40,000 men. The troops in the northern part of Biafra now formed the First Division, those across the Niger under Mohammed the Second. The First was commanded from Makurdi, miles away in the Northern Region, by Colonel Mohammed Shuwa. With Colonel Ekpo the Chief of Staff Armed Forces, and Colonel Bissalla Chief of Staff Army, four Hausas controlled the Nigerian Army. Bissalla’s predecessor, the Tiv Colonel Akahan, had been killed in a
helicopter in such odd circumstances that it was suspected a bomb had been planted.

  The late autumn and winter was not a happy time for Biafra. In the north Enugu fell, while further east in the Ogoja sector the Nigerian troops had pushed down from Ogoja to Ikom, astride the main road to the neighbouring Cameroons. Then on 18 October the newly formed Third Federal Marine Commando Division, under the command of Colonel Benjamin Adekunle, made a sea-borne landing at Calabar in the southeast. With Bonny still festering and the menace of Mohammed trying to cross the Niger, that made five fronts on which the Biafrans had to fight.

  Despite fierce counter-attacks the Nigerians could not be dislodged from Calabar, and with massive backing their beachhead grew steadily stronger until Adekunle burst out and forged northwards up the eastern bank of the Cross River in an attempt to link up with the First Division at Ikom. In closing the second road (out of Calabar) to the Cameroons, the Nigerians cut Biafra off from road contact with the outside world.

  The single air link that now remained had been transferred to Port Harcourt and the lone B-26 at Enugu, having been riddled with bullets on the ground, had been replaced by an equally lone B-25 flown by a former Luftwaffe pilot known as Fred Herz.

  Throughout the autumn foreign correspondents glibly forecast that Biafra was finished. It was a cry that had been heard several times before and has been heard many times since. The Biafrans did not worry much about it.