There Was a Country: A Memoir

by Chinua Achebe

  It is important to point out that at the time Enugu had a conspiratorial atmosphere, and some in Ojukwu’s inner circle added fuel to the fire. There was talk of alleged plots to overthrow the government. Rumors swirled that Major Ifeajuna, a mastermind of the January 15, 1966, coup, was spotted by Biafran intelligence in covert meetings with British secret service agents. Others alleged that the British had paid Victor Banjo a large commission—to the tune of several thousand pounds—to bungle the Mid-Western advance. Such was the climate of fear and paranoia.2

  Blood, Blood, Everywhere

  The Biafrans found themselves under heavy assault after the Mid-West offensive. Mohammed Shuwa’s First Army Division, advancing with Theophilus Danjuma, quickly overran the university town of Nsukka, and then relentlessly bombarded Biafra’s capital with heavy armaments. The military operation was aided by Egyptian mercenary pilots flying the Nigerian army’s brand-new British, Czech L-29 Delphins, and Soviet MiG-17 and Ilyushin Beagle II-28 aircraft. Most of us in the civilian population had fled with family members into the hinterlands, ahead of the advancing Nigerian troops. By the second week of October 1967, overwhelmed by the Nigerian military pounding, the Biafran central government also receded southward, to Umuahia, where a new capital was set up.1

  By now the world had started taking notice, and a number of international organizations were visiting Nigeria to try to broker a peace between the two warring parties. One of the first to intervene was the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which appointed Ghanaian lieutenant general Joseph Arthur Ankrah their emissary to Biafra. Ankrah had some experience with the conflict, having hosted the Aburi meeting in January. Many Biafrans, myself included, had mixed feelings about the OAU’s choice, as Ankrah, widely regarded as “a Cold War pawn,” was the man responsible for deposing one of the heroes of the African liberation struggle—Kwame Nkrumah. It was little surprise to those of us in Biafra, therefore, to discover that under his guidance the OAU supported “a unified Nigeria” stance despite Biafra’s protests.

  The Calabar Massacre

  The Nigerian forces overran Calabar in early 1968 without much resistance or investment. A seat of the ancient kingdom of the same name, Calabar is in the southeastern part of Biafra, on the banks of the majestic Calabar River. It had for decades been a melting pot of Easterners—Efik, Ibibio, Igbo, and others—that had produced a beautiful cultural mosaic of traditions and dialects.

  In actions reminiscent of the Nazi policy of eradicating Jews throughout Europe just twenty years earlier, the Nigerian forces decided to purge the city of its Igbo inhabitants.1 By the time the Nigerians were done they had “shot at least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos [sic], most of them civilians.”2 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.”3 In Uyo and Okigwe more innocent lives were lost to the brutality and blood lust of the Nigerian soldiers.4

  In April 1968, the Nigerians decided to mount a major strategic and tactical offensive designed to cut Biafra off from the seacoast. The over forty thousand troops of the Third Division, lead by army colonel Benjamin Adekunle, engaged in an amphibious, land, and air onslaught on the Niger River Delta city of Port Harcourt. After several weeks of sustained air, land, and sea pounding, a period reportedly characterized by military atrocities—rapes, looting, outright brigandry—Port Harcourt fell to the Nigerians on May 12, 1968.

  The Third Division slowly marched north, crossing the Imo River, toward the market town of Aba. With heavy casualties along the way, Adekunle and his men shot gleefully through a fierce Biafran resistance and took Aba in August and Owerri in September. The Aba offensive was particularly gruesome:

  On entry into Aba, the Nigerian soldiers massacred more than 2000 civilians. Susan Masid of the French Press Agency reporting this horrifying incident had this to say: “Young Ibos [sic] with terrifying eyes and trembling lips told journalists in Aba that in the villages Nigerian troops came from behind, shooting and firing everywhere, shooting everybody who was running, firing into the homes.” (Emphases in original.)5

  Colonel Adekunle, no doubt a Nigerian war hero, had by now earned a reputation, at least in Biafran quarters, for cruelty and sadism. After a number of provocative public statements illustrating his zeal for warfare, coupled with verbal clashes with international journalists and observer teams, Adekunle became the subject of the local and international spotlight. I was told, away from the media glare, that his conduct became a source of embarrassment for Gowon’s wartime cabinet.

  Perhaps Adekunle’s most heinous statement during the war was this: “[Biafran aid is] ‘misguided humanitarian rubbish. . . . If children must die first, then that is too bad, just too bad.’”6 That statement caused such an international uproar that the federal government of Nigeria found itself in the unenviable position of having to apologize for the actions not only of Adekunle but also of Haruna, leader of the Asaba Massacre infamy. Unbeknownst to Adekunle, a quiet retirement from the Nigerian army was in the offing.7

  I have often thought of the man who returns after an “operation”—this is what it is called, an “operation”—and has a wash and goes into the bar of his hotel and drinks whiskey. He has been on an “operation,” and on the other side you have maybe 120 people cut to pieces. A friend of mine had his three children—just like that, they went out to buy books—five minutes later, it was over—it does not take long—10 seconds. It is quite frightening.8

  —

  Meanwhile, on the northeastern front, Mohammed Shuwa’s First Division easily overran Abakaliki and Afikpo.9 Umuahia was the only major urban area in the secessionist republic that had not been overtaken by the Nigerians.

  Gowon rapidly increased the size of his army to well over a quarter of a million men and women. His final offensive, which would be mounted on the three fronts that surrounded the Biafrans, was supposed to end the war swiftly, in three months. As he advanced for what he thought was to be a final push to claim a Biafran surrender in September 1968, he was met by fierce Biafran resistance—sniper fire and guerrilla warfare.10 Several unanticipated events coalesced to form a perfect storm that bought the exhausted Biafran army much needed time to regroup, repair the much damaged Uli airstrip, and develop a defensive strategy. Antiwar sentiment worldwide was reaching a peak. Bombarded constantly with war imagery through their television sets and newspapers, particularly pictures of babies and women perishing and starving, several individuals and international human rights agencies started mounting demonstrations in world capitals—London, Washington, Lisbon—against the war.

  Jean-Paul Sartre and François Mauriac in France11 and John Lennon in London made public statements condemning the war. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., long a champion of universal justice, had to suddenly cancel his planned trip to Nigeria over fears for his safety. Joan Baez and Jimi Hendrix were some of the famous musicians who took part in a Biafran relief concert in Manhattan, on August 29, 1968. Other British and American artists led peaceful protests of song to draw American public attention to the conflict. The newscasters in America were mesmerized by the story of a young college student, Bruce Mayrock, who set himself on fire to protest the killing of “innocent Biafran babies.” Mayrock, sadly, later died in the hospital from his wounds. It was reported that he wanted to draw the attention of the media, delegates in session at the United Nations, and United States government officials to what he believed was genocide in Biafra.12 Henry Kissinger, now under heavy pressure from civil society groups, found himself encouraging the Nixon administration to rethink their policy on the Nigeria-Biafra conflict.13

  BIAFRA, 1969

  First time Biafra

  Was here, we’re told, it was a fine

  Figure massively hewn in hardwood.

  Voracious white ants

 
Set upon it and ate

  Through its huge emplaced feet

  To the great heart abandoning

  A furrowed, emptied scarecrow.

  And sun-stricken waves came and beat crazily

  About its feet eaten hollow

  Till crashing facedown in a million fragments

  It was floated gleefully away

  To cold shores—cartographers alone

  Marking the coastline

  Of that forgotten massive stance.

  In our time it came again

  In pain and acrid smell

  Of powder. And furious wreckers

  Emboldened by half a millennium

  Of conquest, battering

  On new oil dividends, are now

  At its black throat squeezing

  Blood and lymph down to

  Its hands and feet

  Bloated by quashiokor.

  Must Africa have

  To come a third time?1

  The Republic of Biafra

  THE INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATION OF A NEW NATION

  For most of us within Biafra our new nation was a dream that had become reality—a republic, in the strict definition of the word: “a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them.”1 We could forge a new nation that respected the freedoms that all of mankind cherished and were willing to fight hard to hold on to. Within Biafra the Biafran people would be free of persecution of all kinds.

  It did not escape Biafra’s founders that a great nation needed to be built on a strong intellectual foundation. Our modest attempt to put the beginnings of our thinking down on paper resulted in what would be known as the Ahiara Declaration.2

  In the Harmattan Season of 1968, Ojukwu invited me to serve on a small political committee that the Ministry of Information was creating. The Ministry of Information was the only place that an author would be comfortable, he told me, because that was the venue of intellectual debate—where philosophy, cultural matters, literature, politics, and society with all its elements were discussed. The ministry had to play an important role in the new nation, he insisted, as Biafra tried to free itself from the faults it saw in Nigeria.

  So I joined this group and set to work. The questions that we raised within the committee and later presented for broader discussion included: How would we win this war and begin the creation of a new nation with the qualities we seek? What did we want Biafra to look like? What would be the core components of our new nation-state? What did we mean by citizenship and nationhood? What would be Biafra’s relationship to other African countries? What kind of education would the general population need to aid Biafra’s development? How would Biafra attain these lofty goals?

  The Biafran leader was pleased with the committee’s work and invited me to serve as the chairman of a larger committee that he wanted to set up within the state house. He called this new group the National Guidance Committee, and our business would be to write a kind of constitution for Biafra—a promulgation of the fundamental principles upon which the government and people of Biafra would operate. The final work would be a living document that could be modified over time and include at its core a set of philosophical rules that would serve as a guide for the people of Biafra. The Biafran nation, Ojukwu explained, had to have special attributes—the very principles that we approved of and were fighting for: unity, self-determination, social justice, etc. The final version of the document, we hoped, would also tell our story to the world—how Biafra had been pushed out of Nigeria by Nigerians and threatened with genocide. The only thing left for persecuted Easterners to do, we would stress, was to establish our own state and avert destruction. That, essentially, was the basis of the establishment of the Biafran nation.

  Ojukwu then told me that he wanted the new committee to report directly to him, outside the control of the cabinet. I became immediately apprehensive. I was concerned that this arrangement could very easily become an area of conflict between the cabinet and this new committee that I was going to head. Who would be reporting to whom? And it seemed to me that Ojukwu wanted a hold on the organs of government—these two organs, plus the military—not so much separated but working at a pace and manner of his design. Nevertheless, I went ahead and chose a much larger committee of experts for the task at hand. I asked Ojukwu who he had in mind to be members of this larger committee. Several names were thrown about. Finally we arrived at quite an impressive group: Chieka Ifemesia, Ikenna Nzimiro, Justice A. N. Aniagolu, Dr. Ifegwu Eke, and Eyo Bassey Ndem.3 But the group still lacked a scribe and secretary.

  There was a healthy competition for the position between Professor Ben Obumselu, who was an Oxford graduate like Ojukwu, and Professor Emmanuel Obiechina, who held a PhD from Cambridge University. I remember telling Ojukwu that Obiechina was educated in Cambridge, and he said, in the tradition of classic Oxbridge rivalry, “Oh, he is from the other place,” and we all laughed. In the end, Emmanuel Obiechina was appointed scribe and secretary.

  —

  The work of the National Guidance Committee eventually produced the treatise widely known as the Ahiara Declaration. It was called “Ahiara” because Ojukwu’s headquarters at this time was a camouflaged colonial building in the village of Ahiara. Ojukwu was in hiding at that point of the hostilities. The retreats he had before, in Umuahia and Owerri, which became famously referred to as “Ojukwu bunkers,” were no longer available to him, having been bombed by the Nigerian army.

  The concept of the Ahiara Declaration was taken from a similar one issued by President Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, called the Arusha Declaration. The importance of Julius Nyerere in Africa at that time was immense. Nyerere particularly caught the attention of African scholars because he stood for the things we believed in—equality, self-determination, respect for human values. I particularly liked how he drew inspiration from traditional African values and philosophy. He was admired by all of us not just because of his reputation as an incorruptible visionary leader endowed with admirable ideological positions, but also because he had shown great solidarity for our cause. He was, after all, the first African head of state to recognize Biafra.

  Though we shared an admiration for President Nyerere and the Arusha Declaration, members of the National Guidance Committee came to work with diverse political beliefs, backgrounds, and influences; we did not all come from the same ideological or political school of thought. There were those on the committee who admired the American, British, and French notions of democracy. There were those who harbored socialist, even communist, views, who were influenced by the writings of Marcus Garvey, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, and the Argentine physician and Marxist revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevera. Others liked local intellectuals such as the centrist socialist Julius Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba, and Kwame Nkrumah. And still others like me preferred democratic institutions not in the purely Western sense but in a fusion of the good ideas of the West with the best that we had produced in our own ancient African civilizations.

  In my case, I drew heavily on my background in literature, history, and theology. I also tapped into what I call “the observation of my reality”—an extension of the things taught in the formal education of secondary school and university into the education from life I picked up from our tradition. One influential group were the orators, a group that fascinated me because they always seemed to be able to find the right things to say to stop a crisis! I looked out for people like that, who embodied a wholesome African wisdom—African common sense; they were within our communities, and within the group that would be called “the uneducated.” But they were arbiters of the traditional values that had sustained our societies from the beginning of time.

  One man, an Ozo title holder whose eloquence I always remembered,
personified what I thought was the essence of what we were trying to write and should try to communicate. I remember distinctly watching as Okudo Onenyi, with his fellow Ozo title holders, dressed in their impressive traditional regalia, red caps and feathers, assembled for one of their Ozo meetings. One of the things that struck me was the dignity of these old men, who arrived at the site of the gathering carrying their little chairs that they would sit on.

  At one particular meeting Okudo Onenyi was given a piece of chalk to mark his insignia on the mud floor or wall, as these men were wont to do. What surprised me was that Okudo took the piece of chalk and put down his initials. I did not realize that this man had gone to school, but he obviously had. My admiration for him rose, because he was one of those who was not easily persuaded to abandon his ancient traditions, like the rest, to join a new culture or religion, but he was willing to make a type of accommodation to his world’s new dispensation. This man represented those who were still holding fort and not putting up a physical fight. So it was not enough in my view to state that we wanted to be radical and create a left-wing manifesto, but we also certainly did not want to be right wing. It was that ancient traditional virtue I wanted to channel into the Ahiara Declaration.

  It took us several weeks to get the work we had done into one document. We worked day and night. Chieka Ifemesia, Emmanuel Obiechina, and I did the editing after the committee had spent days brooding over our situation and prospects. Chieka Ifemesia, an emeritus professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and a leading authority on Igbo history, would come to the table with much more than his own memories or abstract intellectual concepts, but with a great deal of relevant historical background and context. He was a solid historian—serious, studious. He came from my own village of Ikenga in Ogidi. At the time of the war he was regarded as a rising intellectual star and a person who many of us relied upon for intellectual and cultural stimulation and ideas. Emmanuel Obiechina pulled all the ideas together and transcribed the committee’s work. My role was to keep some kind of control over the radical elements in the group who had more extreme left-wing thinking, for instance, the popular firebrand professor Ikenna Nzimiro.4