The Muslim north
was ruled by sultans and emirs who resisted the British until the white men used their Maxim machine guns to urge a rethink. Missionaries arrived by sea to convert the animists of the rain forests—not to Islam but to Christianity. So, two countries, and for fifty years the British ruled them as two countries.
Northern Nigeria continued on its sleepy way, with nominal rule by the British but real rule by the emirs and sultans, with British agreement. There was no middle class, education and technology were shunned, and the common people were slavishly obedient to their liege lords. This extreme deference was extended to the British civil servants, who loved it.
But in the Christianized south, the two main ethnic groups, the Yoruba of the west and Ibos of the east, became avid for education and technical mastery, which they learned from the British. One of the two, the Ibos, passionate for knowledge, consumed education with both hands, and became the effective motor of the country. And they spread throughout Nigeria, north and south.
In the north, southerners had to live in closed ghettos, but they enabled the British to run the place with a minimum of white faces. The Ibos especially were the drivers, mechanics, switchboard operators, masters of machinery, office staff, and junior civil servants. They were also entrepreneurial; they became the traders, shopkeepers, bankers, and money changers.
And they made themselves unpopular. I once heard a British civil servant, in London but originally from northern Nigeria, refer to the Ibos as “the Jews of Africa,” and it was not meant as a compliment. By the fifties, there were over a million Ibos resident in the north. That was when the trouble began.
London decided that Nigeria had to be independent within a decade, and that it had to be a united Nigeria. Having run the place for so long on the basis of a schooled but controlled mutual antagonism between north and south, that was a tall order. Even taller was the decree that it had to become a democracy, a concept wholly alien to the feudal north.
The emirs and sultans opposed democracy firmly until it was pointed out that, as they had the numerical majority, they could form a single political party, win the coming election, and rule the whole country. Then they agreed, but only on that condition. A party was formed, the election was held, and of course the Northern People’s Congress won. The army had also been intensively northernized, with the infantry entirely Hausa and the southerners taking the “technical” commissions. Independence was accorded on October 1, 1960, under a northern-dominated federal government.
All this I learned from the old sweats visiting the Progress Hotel, from Deputy High Commissioner Jim Parker, and from books, as the first four weeks of this eventless pseudo-war drifted by. I was still bound by my instruction not to file anything but to wait for the coming Federal Army conquest of the “rebel enclave.”
Trouble really began in January 1966, with the first of two coups d’état of that year. It was a very odd one, planned and carried out not by generals as usual, but by a cabal of radicalized, educated, and left-wing junior officers. These were the days when a portrait poster of Che Guevara was on every student’s bedroom wall.
It was later accused of being an Ibo coup. Actually, the junior officer plotters were multi-ethnic, but six Ibo officers among them were the most prominent, because they had attended courses in England, where they had become radicalized. When they returned, everything about northern feudal rule posing as democracy offended them. So did institutionalized corruption, the scourge of Africa.
They struck fast and accurately. It was a virtually bloodless coup, but the dozen victims were the national leadership. In one night, the federal prime minister, the prime ministers of the North and Western regions, and several other ministers were assassinated. But the coup plotters did not take over. The army woke up, mobilized, and arrested them all. But, that done, the government was gone. An army regime was the only alternative. It took over as the plotters were led off to jail. The chief of general staff, General Ironsi, took over. By chance (and it was chance), he was also an Ibo, but a traditional, by-the-book stickler. It did not save him. The north seethed with quiet rage.
Ironsi appointed a military governor to each of the federal republic’s four regions. A Fulani to the north, a Yoruba to the west, a midwesterner to the midwest, and Ojukwu to the east.
In July, the north struck back, and this time it was spectacularly bloody. Hausa soldiers raced through barracks across the country, killing their colleagues of southern ethnicity. Hundreds died that way, but that was just the start.
Northern mobs, with local encouragement, swept into the ghettos and put thousands to the sword. The survivors fled south in waves. The total death toll will never be known; Biafran propaganda later said 30,000 Ibos alone died up there. The British government pooh-poohed it all as several hundred.
This was the “storm in a teacup” that had been mentioned to me in the London briefing as the frivolous reason for the east’s secession. The expatriates briefing me in Enugu were not racially bigoted, but they had watched it all happen and concluded it was by any standards a major program. But the east did not secede from the federal union. The killings were in July and August 1966. Secession was in late May 1967. It took ten months of blithering incompetence by Lagos to achieve it.
General Ironsi had been assassinated and every Ibo officer and technician had fled east. A group of Hausa/Fulani officers formed the new government, but on British advice they appointed a harmless Middle Belt junior colonel as the new head of state. Colonel Yakubu Gowon was totally unknown, an “office wallah” and a token mission school–educated Christian from a Muslim-majority part of the country. Ethnically, he was a Tiv and had done a course at Sandhurst, England. He was friendly, agreeable, and polite, but not very bright. He was a puppet leader; the real power behind the throne was Colonel Murtala Mohammed, who would later topple him.
After August 1966, relations between the pretty traumatized Ibos of the east and the federal government in Lagos deteriorated. In London the mandarins of the Commonwealth Office and later the Foreign Office quickly showed a passionate favoritism toward the federal regime, stoked by the resident high commissioner. British governments do not habitually show such adoration of military dictatorships, but this was an exception that stunned even Jim Parker.
Sir David Hunt quite liked Africans, so long as they showed him respectful deference. Colonel Gowon apparently did. When the high commissioner entered his office at Dodan Barracks, he would leap to his feet, slap on his cap, and throw up a quivering salute. Just once, as the crisis became deeper and deeper, David Hunt came east to visit Ojukwu in Enugu, and quickly developed a passionate loathing for the Ibo leader.
Emeka Ojukwu did indeed rise as his visitor entered the room, but in the manner of one welcoming a guest to his country home. He did not throw up a salute. It quickly became plain he was the sort of African, meaning black man, that the former Greek don Hunt could not stand. Emeka was a British public schoolboy, an MA of Oxford, once a first-class wing three-quarter for the college rugby team, and almost a Blue, an award earned for competition at the highest level. His voice was a relaxed drawl. He showed no deference. Jim Parker, who told me this, was standing a few feet away. Hunt and Ojukwu detested each other on sight, something that was made clear in my London briefing.
Early in his time as governor of the Eastern Region, Ojukwu tried, against all the prevailing wisdom elsewhere, to reinstitute a form of democracy. He formed three bodies to advise him; one was the Constituent Assembly, mainly the professional class, doctors, lawyers, graduates. Second was the Council of Chiefs and Elders, vital in an African society, where age and experience at clan level are revered. Third, surprising to Western eyes, was the Market Mammies Association.
Jim Parker explained to me that Ibo society is almost a matriarchy. In contrast to women in the north, Ibo women are hugely important and influential. The market was the core of every village and city zone. The mammies ran them and knew everything there was to know about the mood on the streets. These were the forces urging Ojukwu to pull eastern Nigeria out of the federal republic.
The public mood was not aggression but fear. Radio broadcasts out of the north threatened that the Hausa were preparing to come south and “finish the job.” Most Ibos believed these threats, the more so as neither federal nor northern government would close them down.
But the real secession point was eventually compensation. Ojukwu had about 1.8 million refugees, all penniless. They had fled, leaving everything behind. At the one single meeting that might have saved the day, at Aburi, in Ghana, Gowon had conceded a withholding of federal oil taxes as an income stream to cope with the crisis. After Aburi, Gowon returned to Lagos and, under pressure, reneged on the lot.
British official sources in Lagos and London briefed the British media that Ojukwu had been grossly unfair to Gowon. He had turned up fully briefed and was simply smarter. That sort of behavior, journalists were told, was obviously unacceptable. After that, the path slid downhill to May 30 and formal secession, and on July 6 to war.
And yet there was no war. My first four weeks in Enugu were very solitary. Sandy Gall and his team had flown out via Cameroon after their single week. I had been assigned a cameraman from another agency, Comtel. He just happened to be there on another assignment. In dumb amazement, we both sat with other expatriates around the hotel radio listening to the BBC news broadcast out of London but emanating from Lagos. It was quite extraordinary.
In Lagos, a discredited former politician named Anthony Enahoro had been charged to set up the Ministry of Information, meaning propaganda. Each day, he issued the weirdest claims.
According to his morning bulletins, the rebel situation was dire and becoming ever worse. There were anti-Ojukwu riots, brutally put down; the Nigerian army was advancing on all fronts and even now at the outskirts of Enugu.
(We expats were on loungers around th
e pool, the others staring at me pityingly.)