Biafra in the News

The Nigerian Civil War Seen from a London News Desk

Jonathan Derrick

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781787386860
• eBook ISBN:
  9781787388451
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia africana

Fifty years ago, Nigeria endured a period of violent disturbance leading to the breakaway of the Eastern Region under the name Biafra. The resulting conflict (1967–70) aroused shock and protests around the world because of mass starvation in the war zone. While Britain supplied arms to the federal Nigerian government, and France to the Biafrans, relief agencies with contributions from countless individuals organised a memorable airlift of food and medicine to the Biafrans’ Uli airstrip.

Jonathan Derrick, then a journalist for the London weekly West Africa, followed these events closely and recorded the war in the magazine’s news pages, right up to the federal forces’ final victory and the remarkable reconciliation between supporters of Biafra—predominantly Igbo—and other Nigerians. He later worked for some years in Nigeria, and has studied much of the material published on the war since 1970. Here, he recounts the history of the conflict as documented in West Africa, referring to later literature on and analysis of the events, which inspired passion at the time and have provoked debate ever since. His account deals with myths, misapprehensions and controversies surrounding the conflict, while recalling the tragic facts of a grim episode in African history.

1

NIGERIA

BUILD-UP TO THE CRISIS

Biafra. There is no country of that name on a map of Africa. But the name lives on in the memories of millions of Africans who attempted, fifty years ago, to break away from the Nigerian Federation and create an independent Republic of Biafra. The Biafrans, mostly of the Igbo¹ people, fought hard in a brutal war aggravated by a terrible famine. They lost, and then resumed life in Nigeria in a splendid reconciliation. But they did not forget their struggle and suffering; nobody in their place could.

Among other Nigerians, too, the civil war in their country is well remembered, at least among the over-sixties. But in the West, far from the equatorial forest region where the war was fought, does the name of Biafra still ring a bell?

Among many British people who were of secondary school age or older in 1967–70, it surely does. During those years, the newspapers proclaimed that name constantly. The breakaway state, while it held out, was better known to the British public than Nigeria had been before. It was a household word, and was linked closely with images that must remain in many minds: images of starving skin-and-bone children. People who lived through the war, of course, remember the reality of those children, among many thousands of war victims.

No event in newly independent Africa hit the European and North American headlines as Biafra did—not even the first Congo crisis, the years of chaos, conflict and destruction that followed the Belgians’ departure in 1960. The coming of independence in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, peaceful in almost all cases, was followed in the British press, but with limited interest where many of the new countries were concerned. However, there was considerably more interest in eastern and southern African countries where British settlers had migrated since the 19th century and were still powerful for a time. And in West Africa, Ghana had a high profile as the first black African colony of Britain to become independent, in 1957, under a famous leader, Kwame Nkrumah, who aroused admiration around Africa and considerable interest, often unfriendly, in the Western media.

Nigeria, the most populous country of Africa, became independent on 1 October 1960, as a Federation (from 1963 a Federal Republic) of three regions—Northern, Western and Eastern—plus the Federal Capital Territory of Lagos. It enjoyed good relations with Western countries and a generally “good press” there. British firms did good business with Nigeria, an important trade partner for the UK, and investors flocked to a country with obvious good prospects. Thousands of British people lived and worked in the country, never as settlers, but as business staff, teachers, lecturers, technical staff, and so on. For them, and for home-based officials, academics and others interested in Nigeria, the sporadic coverage of the country in the British press was supplemented by a specialist weekly magazine, West Africa, founded back in 1917; this magazine, while published in London and British-owned, was by the 1960s read mainly by Nigerians and other West Africans.

Nigeria’s federal government was called, in the common Western language of the time, a “moderate” one. That meant that it was different from the governments of President Nkrumah of Ghana, President Nyerere of Tanzania, and some other African leaders who promoted economic nationalism and socialism and were strongly and vocally committed to the liberation of Africans still under colonial or white settler rule in South Africa, Rhodesia and the Portuguese colonies; in Britain and the US these were often portrayed as on the Communist side in the Cold War paranoia of that time.

There was in fact a division among African states over foreign relations, though it was not dictated by the Cold War. It was shown in the creation of two blocs of states in 1961, the Casablanca group (in which Nkrumah and President Nasser of Egypt were prominent) and the Monrovia group, which included Nigeria. In 1965 the division was sharply revealed over the question of Rhodesia. That was a major African preoccupation, and also the number-one African issue in Britain in the year before Nigeria fell into a disaster attracting all the world’s attention.

After Northern Rhodesia became independent under African rule, headed by President Kenneth Kaunda, in 1964 the white settler leaders in Southern Rhodesia, now renamed as simply Rhodesia, resolved under the leadership of their prime minister, Ian Smith, to avoid having to hand power to Africans there. After months of negotiation and tension with the British government—now the first Labour government of Harold Wilson, whose policies towards Africa were almost identical with those of the Conservatives, who had presided over decolonisation—Ian Smith’s government made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on 11 November 1965. In response, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the continental inter-government body created in 1963, called on all members to break off diplomatic relations with Britain for its failure to suppress Smith’s rebellion. Ghana, Tanzania and seven other countries carried out the resolution. Nigeria’s prime minister did not, choosing rather to travel to London to suggest a special Commonwealth summit to discuss the Rhodesia question.

This federal prime minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, had since independence been head of the federal government, which had been a series of coalitions dominated by his party, the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), the ruling party in the Northern Region, which covered 80 per cent of the country’s area. The head of that party and the real ruler of the whole country was the premier of the Northern Region, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto.² Both men had been knighted by Queen Elizabeth, but it was Sir Abubakar who was best known to the British and the rest of the world, where he was much respected as a peaceable, diplomatic character. The “distinguished Prime Minister of Nigeria”, as Wilson called him, was as well fitted as anyone to attempt the task of resolving the Rhodesia stand-off. But that task was in fact impossible for anyone then, as Britain refused to use force to end Rhodesian UDI, depending instead on international sanctions which came into force but which the white settler regime was well able to withstand with help from South Africa, Portugal and some less public friends. Nevertheless, the special Commonwealth summit met in Lagos and passed resolutions in January 1966.

As it did so, just a short distance away there was serious political violence in the Western Region. The democratic system installed at Nigeria’s independence had never functioned like a proper democracy, and was undermined by ruthless power seeking and blatant corruption among political leaders. The Yoruba people, who formed most of the population of the Western Region and Lagos, were divided politically from 1962; their main party, the Action Group (AG), split and lost power over the regional government. The new party ruling in the West, the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) under Samuel Akintola, was allied to the NPC. When it secured re-election by flagrant rigging of regional elections in October 1965, violent protests broke out and there was soon something like a low-intensity civil war. There was no danger to the Commonwealth leaders in Lagos, but their host had deep trouble on his doorstep.

After seeing off the Commonwealth delegates, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa received the commercial editor of West Africa, Bridget Bloom, for an interview at his official residence in Lagos in the evening of 14 January 1966.³ A few hours later, soldiers commanded by Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna arrested him and took him away to be shot dead and buried by a roadside.

The coup of 15 January 1966

This action was part of an attempted coup d’état by a group of junior army officers. Their leader, Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, struck at the heart of the NPC-dominated government, in Kaduna, capital of the Northern Region, killing Sir Ahmadu Bello. Other conspirators killed S.L. Akintola in Ibadan, capital of the Western Region. The plotters also killed the federal minister of finance, Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, and seven senior army officers: six from the Northern and Western Regions (Brigadier S. Ademulegun, Brigadier Zakariya Maimalari and four others) and one Easterner, Lt Colonel Arthur Unegbe.

The shocking violent events of 15 January 1966—remembered by Nigerians simply as “January the Fifteenth”—have been repeatedly studied and described, by some of the men responsible and many other writers, ever since.⁴ Here only the essential facts need be recalled. The conspirators sought to take power and end the multiple criminal activities linked with the politicians who had ruled the country. Nzeogwu, in a broadcast, declared,

Our enemies are political profiteers, swindlers, the men in high places that seek bribes and demand ten percent, those that seek to keep the country divided permanently so that they can remain in office as ministers and VPs of ease, the tribalists, the nepotists, those that make the country big for nothing before international circles …⁵

In the event they failed to take power, but the Federal Government that Tafawa Balewa had headed was unable to retain power and handed over full authority to the head of the army, Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi. A military regime took over, not including the officers who had carried out the attacks—these were in fact arrested—but including new military governors of the regions (which now numbered four, as explained below). The country was now ruled by a Supreme Military Council, under Ironsi as supreme commander of the armed forces, and a Federal Executive Council. All the federal and regional civilian governments were abolished, as was the office of the titular president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, who had been in Britain when the coup occurred; all the political parties were outlawed.

Very many Nigerians celebrated the prospect of an end to the evils the coup promised to end. Nigerian politicians had aroused public contempt not only because of their self-enrichment but also because their political manoeuvres exploited and aggravated the ethnic divisions in the country. They, however, did not invent or monopolise what was then generally called “tribalism”. The peoples of Nigeria were then always described in English as “tribes”, and the word is still common among Nigerians, although many of them dislike it as it is redolent of colonial attitudes (after all, who calls the Welsh and the Scots “tribes”?). Whatever word is used, the importance of belonging to one of Nigeria’s constituent peoples is a key factor that every account of the Biafran conflict necessarily has to consider at the outset.

Peoples, regions and politics

In each of Nigeria’s three regions at independence there was a predominant ethnic group. In the Western Region it was the Yorubas, in the Eastern Region the Igbos. In the Northern Region it was the Hausa–Fulani people, commonly so called because the Habe people, called “Hausa” by others and speaking the Hausa language, had for some centuries mingled with the separate Fulani people, whose Islamic reformist leaders had in the 19th century conquered the Hausa emirates. The emirs and other urban Fulani people speak Hausa and the Hausa–Fulani people are often called simply “Hausas” by other Nigerians. The Hausa language is widely spoken or understood by non-Hausas, and is the common language of the Nigerian army.

The Hausas, Igbos and Yorubas are the most numerous and best-known peoples of Nigeria; there have been suggestions of changing the country’s name to Wazobia, from the three main languages’ words for “come”: wa (Yoruba), zo (Hausa), bia (Igbo). But millions of Nigerians belong to other tribes, which by the 1960s were commonly called “minorities”, and their position was a very important part of the background to the civil war. In the Northern Region at independence, the Hausa–Fulani emirates and their allied party, the NPC, held hegemony that went beyond the areas where the emirs—the emirs of Kano, Zaria, Bauchi and Katsina, and several other greater and lesser emirs, with the sultan of Sokoto at their head—actually reigned. The emirate system, traditional but fostered by the British, also included non-Hausa states of the Kanuri people (Borno) and the Nupe people (Bida). In addition, much of the North’s vast area was peopled by dozens of tribes in what was called the Middle Belt of Nigeria, such as the Tiv people along the Benue River and the cluster of tribes on the Plateau. These were mostly non-Muslim, unlike the majority in the emirates; at first called Pagans by the British, by the 1960s they were increasingly Christian.

There were also important “minorities” in the South, notably the Ijaw people in the Niger Delta and the Ibibios in the south-east corner of the Eastern Region. As party politics developed in the run-up to independence, there were demands on behalf of the minorities which caused concern to the British, who therefore set up in 1958 the Willink Commission to inquire into “the fears of minorities and the means of allaying them”. Why was this thought necessary? What did those people fear?

The explanation of this goes to the root of Nigerian politics as it developed to decide who would occupy the widening government positions open to Nigerians under the constitutions enacted by Britain in 1947, 1951 and 1954. To simplify a complex and varying picture: Nigerians, not only their political leaders, consider politics and government from the perspective of representation or non-representation of the community to which they feel they belong. And usually this community is, to use the word still commonly used by Nigerians, the tribe. The question about federal, regional, state or local government is: do those in power represent the tribe I belong to, or at least treat it favourably? Or are they of a different tribe or group of tribes and likely to ignore, neglect or even mistreat my people?

The writer Elechi Amadi wrote after the civil war, “Ours was, and still is, a tribal society. The herd instinct is strong, and most people feel far more at home among members of their own tribe than in any other community.” He added,

Poverty, with its concomitant low standard of living, lends strength to this herd instinct. People see the tribe as an island of survival in a seething, unstable socio-economic sea. Who else would give you a job, if not your brother? How could a policeman caution you for a minor offence and let you go if he was not your tribesman? How could a scholarship board know the needs of your community if your son was not a member of the board? Red tape was cut, all formalities brushed aside, if your man was at the top … It is wrong to think that only the poorly educated have these notions.⁶

Tribal identity can be fluid, or vague, or even contrived. Amadi’s Ikwerre people, very much under Igbo cultural influence, are sometimes considered an Igbo subgroup, sometimes not. The Igbos living west of the lower Niger are sometimes considered distinct from the mass of Igbos living east of the river, and are called Anioma, but they speak Igbo and are widely described as Western Igbos. And identifying with a community below the level of a major ethnic group can be important, as with the Ijebu, Egba and other sections of the Yorubas. But with variations, a feeling that ethnic identification is very important is general.

When it comes to political attitudes and activity, it is easy to arouse feelings that “our people” ought if possible to be in power, and if others are in fact in power, these are likely to favour their own at the expense of “our people” and exert what is commonly described as “domination”—a constantly recurring word in Nigeria in the years leading up to the civil war, and indeed later. Whether correctly alleged or not, it means treating a certain region or ethnic group with neglect, disregard or discrimination in such matters as provision of services, economic development, and especially employment. The group feeling disfavoured can see the party or government run by the other group as alien and ill-intentioned.

Such situations recur in other parts of Africa and, indeed, around the world. While free elections can voice or incite divisive feelings, and Africans establishing one-party regimes gave that as a reason, that did not in fact avoid such problems. Under both democracy and dictatorship, people of a certain region in any country can come to feel in a particularly acute way that the government in power does not represent them, is remote from them and simply gives them orders. In Britain that feeling has recently existed in Scotland, the North of England, and Wales under prolonged Conservative government. There, resentment remained peaceful, but across the Irish Sea it was very different. In the Northern Ireland troubles which started at the very time of the Nigerian civil war (but went on for much longer), the basic grievance—exclusion and discrimination—of the Nationalist/Republican/Catholic community resembled that of many peoples in Nigeria who saw themselves as disadvantaged.

But there was a big difference. In Northern Ireland, people of the disadvantaged community still enjoyed the modern amenities of the West and all the benefits of the British welfare state. In Nigeria, such benefits did not exist and modern amenities were thinly spread for a population of over 50 million, most of whom earned low incomes, mainly from smallholder farming, whether they grew food for themselves or for trade within Nigeria, or crops for export or industrial use. An increasing number lived in cities and towns where better incomes could be had by some, but many had no jobs and there was no unemployment benefit. Great numbers of people lived by trading but did not usually make big money. Health services were scarce and could be of poor quality when provided by the state, or of good quality but costly when provided by the churches and other private agencies.

Description of the deprived lives of the majority in Nigeria then, and still today, could go on. The facts are well known and explain—to enlarge on Elechi Amadi’s point—why it matters so much whether people can expect their government to provide more clinics, schools, tarred roads, piped water, electricity, and above all jobs for their district, or alternatively are convinced that these things will be denied them by an alien government exercising “domination”.

It is irrelevant that their ancestors had lived without those amenities of life for centuries. Now that they were possible, people obviously needed them—this was the “revolution of rising expectations”. The government was expected to provide them, especially as in fact, on a very inadequate scale, it did. The British, in the latter part of their rule, had seen the need to provide some improvements in Africans’ daily lives through Colonial Development and Welfare (CD&W). When Nigerian governments were elected to power in the regions in 1951, they expanded state health services, built better roads, and notably provided more education, that being seen by everyone as the way for every man and woman to get ahead. For example, the Western Region government of the AG under Chief Obafemi Awolowo introduced universal primary education. However, resources were limited; not every part of the country could be satisfied even if all governments had the best intentions, and that is what governments were commonly perceived not to have.

These sentiments lay behind the political calls for separation, or devolution, to bring the government nearer to one’s home area. They were often made in the name not of an individual tribe (of which Nigeria has 200 or more) but of a wider group of several tribes. An example was the movement on behalf of peoples of the Middle Belt, who widely felt alienated from the party which controlled the whole region. The Middle Belt campaigners against the Northern regime had their own party, the United Middle Belt Congress (UMBC), led by Joseph Tarka. His people, the Tivs, were at the forefront of the campaign, and there were two localise...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Biafra in the News Photos
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1. Nigeria: Build-up to the Crisis
• 2. 1966: The Year of Self-Destruction
• 3. The Break-up
• 4. The First Six Months of War (July–December 1967)
• 5. Retreat and Recognition (January–June 1968)
• 6. Famine and Relief in the Headlines (June–December 1968)
• 7. Biafra on Life Support (December 1968–November 1969)
• 8. Nigerian Victory and Reconciliation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover