There Was a Country: A Memoir

by Chinua Achebe

  [I]n the case of Ojukwu, he had committed treason against the country! No matter how you see it, as far as the Nigerian context was concerned, he was the guilty party. In other areas, he would have been eliminated, and I thank God that He never put him in my hands. Otherwise I would have found it very difficult to save his life, even though I would try my best to save his life, because he was an old colleague, an old friend. But the public pressure would have made it impossible. So that was what happened in the case of people like Effiong. A few of the senior ones [who] were directly involved, we felt they should go. I think Effiong was dismissed. All that happened to the others was that they lost the few years of seniority gained during the period of the civil war.2

  In Ojukwu’s absence, Sir Louis Mbanefo, the chief justice, and General Philip Effiong, the defeated republic’s leading military officer, met with a small group of Biafran government officials and made the fateful decision to surrender to the federal government of Nigeria. Effiong went on Biafran radio to announce the capitulation, and he spoke to the fear-stricken populace, urging calm and encouraging the troops to lay down their weapons. He announced that he was currently negotiating an armistice with the federal government of Nigeria, and that General Ojukwu had left the nation. This drew a very clear line between what was going on in the country and what was about to happen—which was the fall of Biafra.

  Before that the defeat was already quite apparent. There were a few people who refused to recognize it and planned to continue to fight. I did not feel that continuing the conflict was an option at all. I felt that the best way to deal with this tremendous disaster was to not prolong the agony but to bring it to a close.

  —

  In the end, Biafra collapsed. We simply had to turn around and find a way to keep those people still there alive. It was a desperate situation, with so many children in need, kwashiorkor rampant, and thousands perishing every week. The notoriously incompetent Nigerian government was not responding to those in need quickly enough. With ill-advised bravado Gowon was busy banning relief agencies that had helped Biafra.3 It was in this environment of desperation that some people said, Let’s go into the forest and continue the struggle. That would have been suicidal, and I don’t think anybody should commit suicide.

  We had spent nearly three years fighting, fighting for a cause, fighting to the finish . . . for freedom. But all that had collapsed, and Biafra with it. A very bitter experience had led to it in the first place. And the big powers prolonged it.

  You see we, the little people of the world, are ever expendable. The big powers can play their games even if millions perish in the process. And perish they did. In the end millions (some state upward of three million, mostly children) had died, mainly from starvation due to the federal government of Nigeria’s blockade policies.4

  General Gowon made a national broadcast on the eve of the official surrender to announce the end of the thirty-month war that he said had claimed over one hundred thousand military service men and women and over three million Biafrans. His “no victor, no vanquished” speech5 as it has come to be known, strove to strike a conciliatory tone, calling for the full reintegration of Igbos into the fabric of Nigerian life. There was great celebration throughout Nigeria and Biafra at the news of the end of the hostilities.

  A day later, on January 15, 1970, the Biafran delegation, which was led by Major General Philip Effiong and included Sir Louis Mbanefo, M. T. Mbu, Colonel David Ogunewe, and other Biafran military officers, formally surrendered at Dodan Barracks to the troops of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Among the Nigerian delegation were: General Yakubu Gowon; the deputy chairman of the Supreme Military Council, Obafemi Awolowo; leaders of the various branches of the armed forces, including Brigadier Hassan Katsina, chief of staff; H. E. A. Ejueyitchie, the secretary to the federal military government; Anthony Enahoro, the commissioner for information; Taslim Elias, the attorney general; and the twelve military governors of the federation.

  At the end of the thirty-month war Biafra was a vast smoldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 percent of the entire population. This high proportion was mostly children. The cost in human lives made it one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history.6

  The sequelae of wars often begin with an armistice. The suffering and humanitarian disaster left in the wake of war’s destruction goes on long after the weapons are silenced—for months and years. Entire towns and villages, schools and farms in Biafra were destroyed. Roads and the rural areas were littered with landmines that continued to maim and kill unsuspecting pedestrians well after the hostilities ended. Many people had lost all that they owned. Loved ones in the thousands were reported missing by families. There were stories of scores of suicides. This was not just a case of Ani, or the land and its protector, the land goddess, “bleeding,” as my people would describe catastrophic events of this nature. It was worse: a case of Ani nearly “exsanguinating to death.”

  My generation had great expectations for our young nation. After the war everything we had known before about Nigeria, all the optimism, had to be rethought. The worst had happened, and we were now forced into reorganizing our thinking, expectations, and hopes. We (the former Biafrans) had to carry on in spite of the great disaster that was military defeat and learn very quickly to live with such a loss. We would have to adjust to the realities and consequences of a Nigeria that did not appeal to us any longer. Nigeria had not succeeded in crushing the spirit of the Igbo people, but it had left us indigent, stripped bare, and stranded in the wilderness.

  The Question of Genocide

  I will begin by stating that I am not a sociologist, a political scientist, a human rights lawyer, or a government official. My aim is not to provide all the answers but to raise questions, and perhaps to cause a few headaches in the process. Almost thirty years before Rwanda, before Darfur, over two million people—mothers, children, babies, civilians—lost their lives as a result of the blatently callous and unnecessary policies enacted by the leaders of the federal government of Nigeria.1

  As a writer I believe that it is fundamentally important, indeed essential to our humanity, to ask the hard questions, in order to better understand ourselves and our neighbors. Where there is justification for further investigation, then I believe justice should be served.

  In the case of the Nigeria-Biafra War there is precious little relevant literature that helps answer these questions: Did the federal government of Nigeria engage in the genocide of its Igbo citizens through their punitive policies, the most notorious being “starvation as a legitimate weapon of war”? Is the information blockade around the war a case of calculated historical suppression? Why has the war not been discussed, or taught to the young, over forty years after its end? Are we perpetually doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past because we are too stubborn to learn from them?

  We need not get into the prickly thicket of diagnosing the reasons for the federal government’s attempts to fool the world about what happened in Biafra. However, it may be helpful to start by defining the term genocide. Robert S. Leventhal provides this description:

  The term genocide derives from the Latin (genos = race, tribe; cide = killing) and means literally the killing or murder of an entire tribe or people. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group. . . .” By “genocide” we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group. The UN General Assembly adopted this term and defined it in 1946 as “ . . . a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.”2

  The Arguments

  Throughout the conflict the Biafrans consistently charged that the Nigerians had a design to exterminate the Igbo people from the face of the earth. This calculation, the Biafrans insisted, was predicated on a holy jihad proclaimed by mainly Islamic extremists in the Nige
rian army and supported by the policies of economic blockade that prevented shipments of humanitarian aid, food, and supplies to the needy in Biafra.1

  The argument extended by Harold Wilson’s government in defense of the federal government of Nigeria is important to highlight:

  The charges of Jihad have also been denied by British officials who assert that more than half the members of the Federal Government are Christian, while only 1,000 of the 60–70,000 Federal soldiers are Muslim Hausas from the North. (House of Commons Debate, cited earlier.)2

  Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, professor of history and politics and an expert on genocide, reminds us that supporters of the Biafran position point not only to the histrionic pronouncements of the leaders of the Nigerian army—often dismissed as typical outrageous wartime rhetoric—but to an actual series of atrocities, real crimes against humanity, that occurred on the battlefield and as a result of the policies of the federal government of Nigeria.

  The International Committee in the Investigation of Crimes of Genocide carried out exhaustive investigation of the evidence, interviewing 1082 people representing all the actors in the dispute (the two sides of the civil war and international collaborators). After a thorough painstaking research, the Commission concludes, through its Investigator (Dr. Mensah of Ghana): “Finally I am of the opinion that in many of the cases cited to me hatred of the Biafrans (mainly Igbos) and a wish to exterminate them was a foremost motivational factor.” [Emphasis in original.]3

  In his well-researched book The Brutality of Nations, Dan Jacobs uncovers a provocative paragraph from an editorial in the Washington Post of July 2, 1969:

  One word now describes the policy of the Nigerian military government towards secessionist Biafra: genocide. It is ugly and extreme but it is the only word which fits Nigeria’s decision to stop the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other relief agencies, from flying food to Biafra.4

  Jacobs also reveals the lamentations of Pope Paul VI over the Nigeria-Biafra War:

  The war seems to be reaching its conclusion, with the terror of possible reprisals and massacres against defenseless people worn out by deprivations, by hunger and by the loss of all they possess. The news this morning is very alarming. . . . One fear torments public opinion. The fear that the victory of arms may carry with it the killing of numberless people. There are those who actually fear a kind of genocide.5

  The distinguished American historian, social critic, and political insider Arthur M. Schlesinger provides this contribution on the dire situation in Biafra:

  The terrible tragedy of the people of Biafra has now assumed catastrophic dimensions. Starvation is daily claiming the lives of an estimated 6,000 Igbo tribesmen, most of them children. If adequate food is not delivered to the people in the immediate future hundreds of thousands of human beings will die of hunger.6

  In what is likely to be the most compelling statement of the era from an American president, Schlesinger provides this powerful extract from Richard Nixon’s campaign speech on September 10, 1968:

  Until now efforts to relieve the Biafran people have been thwarted by the desire of the central government of Nigeria to pursue total and unconditional victory and by the fear of the Ibo [sic] people that surrender means wholesale atrocities and genocide. But genocide is what is taking place right now—and starvation is the grim reaper. This is not the time to stand on ceremony, or to ‘go through channels’ or to observe the diplomatic niceties. The destruction of an entire people is an immoral objective even in the most moral of wars. It can never be justified; it can never be condoned.7

  Two distinguished Canadian diplomats, Mr. Andrew Brevin and Mr. David MacDonald (members of the Canadian Parliament), “reported that genocide is in fact taking place [and] one of them stated that ‘anybody who says there is no evidence of genocide is either in the pay of Britain or being a deliberate fool,’” following a visit to the war-torn region.8 New York Times journalist Lloyd Garrison, who covered the conflict, submitted harrowing accounts of genocidal activity on the part of the Nigerian troops: “The record shows that in Federal advances . . . thousands of Igbo male civilians were sought out and slaughtered.”9

  Supporters of the Nigerian federal government position maintain that a war was being waged and the premise of all wars is for one side to emerge as the victor. Overly ambitious actors may have “taken actions unbecoming of international conventions of human rights, but these things happen everywhere.” This same group often cites findings from groups (sanctioned by the Nigerian federal government) that sent observers to the country during the crisis that there “was no clear intent on behalf of the Nigerian troops to wipe out the Igbo people, . . . pointing out that over 30,000 Igbos still lived in Lagos, and half a million in the Mid-West.”10

  The British government, wary of the morally bankrupt position that Harold Wilson had toed from the onset of the conflict, sought to explain away their reckless military adventure in Africa. There were real excesses to account for: If the diabolical disregard for human life seen during the war was not due to the Northern military elite’s jihadist or genocidal obsession, then why were there more small arms used on Biafran soil than during the entire five-year period of World War II?11 Why were there one hundred thousand casualties on the much larger Nigerian side compared with more than two million—mainly children—Biafrans killed? The government of Harold Wilson proffered what it called a “legitimate strategy” excuse in which it postulates that the indisputable excesses seen during the war were due to the Nigerian military’s “excellence”—clearly making it the strongest candidate for an all-time foot-in-the-mouth prize.12

  The Case Against the Nigerian Government

  It is important to point out that most Nigerians were against the war and abhorred the senseless violence that ensued as a result of the conflict. Gowon���s wartime cabinet, it should also be remembered, was full of intellectuals like Obafemi Awolowo and Anthony Enahoro and superpermanent secretaries like Allison Akene Ayida among others who came up with a boatload of infamous and regrettable policies. A statement credited to Chief Obafemi Awolowo and echoed by his cohorts is the most callous and unfortunate:

  All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see why we should feed our enemies fat in order for them to fight harder.1

  It is my impression that Chief Obafemi Awolowo was driven by an overriding ambition for power, for himself in particular and for the advancement of his Yoruba people in general. And let it be said that there is, on the surface, at least, nothing wrong with those aspirations. However, Awolowo saw the dominant Igbos at the time as the obstacles 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 numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation—eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations.

  If Gowon was the “Nigerian Abraham Lincoln,”2 as Lord Wilson would have us believe, why did he not put a stop to such an evil policy, or at least temper it, particularly when there was international outcry? Setting aside for the moment the fact that Gowon as head of state bears the final responsibility of his subordinates, and that Awolowo has been much maligned by many an intellectual for this unfortunate policy and his statements, why, I wonder, would other “thinkers,” such as Ayida and Enahoro, not question such a policy but advance it?3

  The federal government’s actions soon after the war could be seen not as conciliatory but as outright hostile.4 After the conflict ended

  the same hard-liners in the Federal government of Nigeria cast Igbos in the role of treasonable felons and wreckers of the nation and got the regime to adopt a banking policy which nullified any bank account which had been operated during the war by the Biafrans. A flat sum of twenty pounds was approved for each Ig
bo depositor of the Nigerian currency, regardless of the amount of deposit.5

  If there was ever a measure put in place to stunt, or even obliterate, the economy of a people, this was it.

  After that outrageous charade, the leaders of the federal government of Nigeria sought to devastate the resilient and emerging Eastern commercial sector even further by banning the importation of secondhand clothing and stockfish—two trade items that they knew the burgeoning market towns of Onitsha, Aba, and Nnewi needed to reemerge. Their fear was that these communities, fully reconstituted, would then serve as the economic engines for the reconstruction of the entire Eastern Region.

  The Enterprises Promotion Decree of 1974, also known as the Indigenization Decree, was ostensibly pushed through by the leaders of the federal government in order to force foreign holders of majority shares of companies operating in Nigeria to hand over the preponderance of stocks, bonds, and shares to local Nigerian business interests. The move was sold to the public as some sort of “pro-African liberation strategy” to empower Nigerian businesses and shareholders.

  The chicanery of the entire scheme of course was quite evident. Having stripped a third of the Nigerian population of the means to acquire capital, the leaders of the government of Nigeria knew that the former Biafrans, by and large, would not have the financial muscle to participate in this plot.6 The end result, they hoped, would be a permanent shifting of the balance of economic power away from the East to other constituencies.7 Consequently, very few Igbos participated, and many of the jobs and positions in most of the sectors of the economy previously occupied by Easterners went to those from other parts of the country.