There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (12 page)

The Life and Work of Christopher Okigbo

I have written and been quoted elsewhere as saying that Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo
was the finest Nigerian poet of his generation, but I believe that as his work becomes
better and more widely known in the world, he will also be recognized as one of the
most remarkable anywhere in our time. For while other poets wrote good poems, Okigbo
conjured up for us an amazing, haunting, poetic firmament of a wild and violent beauty.
¹
Forty years later I still stand by that assessment.

Christopher and I kept in touch after we graduated from Government College, Umuahia,
and our friendship grew during our time at University College, Ibadan. He studied
the classics and took classes in Latin—a subject that was not available at Government
College, Umuahia. A rumor I heard at the time was that a teacher at Yaba Higher College
who had been Pius Okigbo’s teacher (Christopher’s senior brother), Professor E. A.
Cadle, had wanted Pius to study classics, but Pius did not want to, and instead traveled
to America to study economics at Northwestern University. Pius later became arguably
the continent’s leading thinker in that field. By the time Christopher got to University
College, Ibadan, Professor Cadle was now a professor of the classics and later dean
of the Faculty of Arts. He persuaded Christopher to take a major in the classics.
Christopher did, although he had a myriad of other interests. He was involved in all
aspects of campus life and had a very active social calendar. He was a member of every
cultural, literary, intellectual and political organization, club, and association.
He and I were founding members of the notable Mbari Club, which was led by Ulli Beier,
our professor. Okigbo was also the editor in chief of the
University Weekly
, the campus newspaper.

His legendary creative work was first noted at Umuahia, where the teachers encouraged
this budding talent. Later, at the University College, Ibadan, he published a number
of poems in
Horn
, the university magazine edited by J. P. Clark. He also published his work in Wole
Soyinka’s
Black Orpheus
and
Transition
, and then produced a number of critically acclaimed poetry collections, including
the groundbreaking classics
Heavens Gate
and
Labyrinths.
²

After graduation, his reputation as a talented intellectual spread like a savannah
bush fire. He was highly sought after. He rapidly ran up a list of jobs that read
like a manual of careers: civil servant, businessman, teacher, librarian, publisher,
industrialist, and soldier. I am told that Chike Momah, a professional librarian,
was somewhat scandalized when Okigbo announced that he was going to Nsukka to be interviewed
for a position in the library of the new university. Reminded that he knew nothing
about librarianship, Okigbo blithely replied that he had bought a book on the subject,
which he intended to read during the four-hundred-mile journey to the interview. And
he got the job!
³

Christopher could not enter or leave a room unremarked, yet he was not extravagant
in manner or appearance. There was something about him not easy to define, a certain
inevitability of drama and event. There was a day, back when my family still lived
in Lagos, when my wife, Christie, overheard some people talking quite early in the
morning on our patio. Startled and a bit frightened, she wondered what was going on.
A few minutes later she smelled the aroma of food, and at this point her curiousity
was piqued. “What was the cook doing so early in the morning?” she thought out loud.
She put on her robe and went to find out. It turned out that it was Christopher Okigbo.
There he was sitting on the kitchen table with the food that the cook had prepared
for him, munching away. He had arrived very early in the morning, went to the “boys’
quarters,” and woke up the cook, described what he wanted him to cook, and said, “Don’t
tell them anything.” That was quintessential Okigbo.

Christopher’s vibrancy and heightened sense of life touched everyone he came into
contact with. It is not surprising, therefore, that the young poet Kevin Echeruo should
have celebrated him as an Ogbanje—one of those mysterious, elusive, and highly talented
beings who hurry to leave the world and to come again. Equally profound was the fact
that Pol Ndu, who died in a road disaster he had predicted every gory detail of in
a poem five years earlier, proclaimed Christopher a seer.
⁴

Christopher never took antimalarial drugs, because he rather enjoyed the cozy, delirious
fever he had when malaria got him down, about once a year. He relished challenges,
and the more unusual or difficult, the better it made him feel. Although he turned
his hand to many things, he never did anything badly or half-heartedly.
⁵

—

The experiences of the Igbo community from the pogroms onward had different effects
on different people. There were a multitude of reactions—anger, loathing, sorrow,
concern, depression, etc. These sentiments in Christopher’s case somehow transformed
into a very strong pro-Biafra feeling. He had no doubt at all in his mind about Biafra
and the need for the country to be a free and separate nation. That strong stance
was something new for Christopher.

The intensity of Christopher’s dedication to the Biafran cause was so deep that I
remember hearing him get into a raucous debate with his elder brother Pius.
⁶
Apparently the cause of the flare-up of emotions was a discussion about Biafran sovereignty
and its importance for the Easterners, particularly the Igbo, to create a state of
their own and secede from the federal republic of Nigeria. Pius Okigbo was not, at
least initially, very strong in his support of the idea of separation. This position
outraged the much younger Christopher, who rebuked Pius by saying: “Don’t let what
happened to Ironsi repeat itself,” implying that Pius, in his determination to preserve
One Nigeria, should be careful not to be destroyed by Nigeria like Ironsi was during
the time he was trying to appease extremists. Pius was so shocked by the rebuke that
he turned to me, raised his hands in disbelief, and said, “Uncle Chris!”
⁷
in a sarcastic tone. Pius Okigbo was a very senior economist and part of the diplomatic
corps representing Nigeria in several capacities, so he was a bit wary about what
was going on in the East, and in Nigeria as a whole, and rightfully so. Later, as
the atrocities against the Igbos in particular intensified, Pius Okigbo’s position
solidified squarely on Biafra’s side. At that point the pressure of war was being
felt. Now unbeknownst to us, Christopher had joined the army. Whereas I did not find
the army particularly exciting or interesting, for whatever reason Okigbo was enthralled
by the military. He would keep you up at night telling stories of what Nzeogwu and
the other officers said.
⁸

When Okigbo decided to join the army he went to great lengths to conceal his intention
from me, for fear, no doubt, that I might attempt to dissuade him. I probably would
have tried. He made up an elaborate story about an imminent and secret mission he
was asked to undertake to Europe that put me totally off the scent. But to make absolutely
certain, he borrowed my traveling bag and left his brown briefcase with me. When I
saw him again two weeks later he was a major, by special commission, in the Biafran
army, though I never saw him in uniform.
⁹

The Major Nigerian Actors in the Conflict: Ojukwu and Gowon

A number of individuals played key roles during the Nigeria-Biafra War.
¹
The principal actors in 1967, however, were both young Sandhurst-trained soldiers—Odumegwu
Ojukwu, who was thirty-three, and Yakubu Gowon, who was thirty-two. One was from a
highly privileged background and the other was the so-called darling of the British
establishment.
²

T
HE
A
RISTOCRAT

General Chukwuemeka (Emeka) Odumegwu Ojukwu was born on November 4, 1933, in Zungeru,
in Northern Nigeria, to Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu and Grace Oyibonanu. The senior
Ojukwu was already a legendary figure while I was growing up in Eastern Nigeria, known
far and wide for his great wealth and success in business. Indeed, by midcentury Sir
Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu had established himself as one of West Africa’s leading entrepreneurs,
with business interests spanning several sectors of the Nigerian and West African
economies—agriculture, mining, transportation, and banking.

Sir Louis Ojukwu at some time or other sat on the boards of a number of the largest
corporations of the time—Shell BP, United Africa Company (UAC), Nigerian Coal Corporation,
and African Continental Bank. For his services to the empire, Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu
was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II during her official visit to Enugu in 1956.

It was in this privileged environment that General Emeka Ojukwu was raised. Like a
number of other children of privilege, Ojukwu was educated at one of the leading secondary
schools in the nation, King’s College, Lagos. Later he was sent to Epsom College,
England, and then on to Lincoln College—University of Oxford.
³

When Emeka Ojukwu returned to Nigeria after his studies in England, he spent a short
time “finding himself.” Against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to attend
law school and join the family business in some capacity, the young Ojukwu decided
to first work in the Eastern Nigeria civil service as an assistant district officer
(ADO). Then, in a move likely designed to enrage his father even further, the young
Ojukwu joined the colonial armed forces known as the Queen’s Own Nigeria Regiment.
Emeka Ojukwu’s decision caused quite a sensation at the time, because most educated
Nigerians, particularly those of privileged birth like him, sought jobs in the business,
academic, or civil service sectors, but not in the army. The Nigerian army did have
educated officers, but they were few in number.

Emeka Ojukwu went back to England to attend the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and
returned shortly after to Nigeria, where he joined the officer corps and rapidly rose
through the military ranks. He was accorded a great deal of respect by his military
colleagues, who admired his pedigree and education.
⁴
Frederick Forsyth, Ojukwu’s close friend, who would become a close Biafran ally during
the war, reports of his days in England: “[H]e developed a private philosophy of total
self-reliance, an unyielding internal sufficiency that requires no external support
from others.”
⁵
This trait would bring Ojukwu in direct collision with some senior Biafrans, such
as Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Michael Okpara, Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiani, and a few others who
were concerned about Ojukwu’s tendency toward introversion and independent decision
making.

Emeka Ojukwu received a mixed reception among the expatriate, mainly British, population
in Nigeria. Many admired him for his background, as well as for his oratorical skills,
and took great pride in the fact that he had been educated extensively in England.
There is a magnificent story of how Emeka Ojukwu’s professors at Oxford enjoyed taking
a spin or two in his sports car while he was a student there. Others, in contrast,
felt that Ojukwu was some sort of spoiled rich kid. This impression made it more difficult
for him to be cast as a sympathetic figure in the Western media when the war broke
out. Complicating this image problem was the fact that some important wartime actors
and observers, such as Sir David Hunt, the British ambassador to Nigeria during the
conflict, and the eminent British journalist John de St. Jorre, believed Ojukwu looked
down on Gowon. Ojukwu felt, they believed, that as an Oxford man he was far better
prepared for leadership.
⁶
Those of us who knew Ojukwu did not feel he harbored such sentiments. Whatever the
case may be, Ojukwu’s background and temperament, for good or ill, influenced the
decisions and choices that he made throughout the crisis and during much of what many
believed was “a personal war and collision of egos”
⁷
with Gowon.

T
HE
G
ENTLEMAN
G
ENERAL

Yakubu Gowon was born on October 19, 1934, in Pankshin, Plateau State, under circumstances
very different from those of his military nemesis Emeka Ojukwu. Yakubu Gowon’s parents
were Christian missionaries. His family spent several years during his early development
in Zaria in Hausa land, where he received his early education and learned to speak
the language of the dominant Hausa/Fulani fluently.
⁸
Yakubu Gowon then received military training in Ghana and Eaton Hall in England before
proceeding to the legendary officer training school in Sandhurst. “He then attended
Young Officers’ College, Hythe Warminster, in 1957, Staff College, Camberley, England
(1962), and Joint Services College, Latimer, England (1965).”
⁹
He returned to Nigeria soon thereafter and became a star officer; his ability to
assimilate would serve him well as he advanced rapidly in the Nigerian army.

Alexander Madiebo recounts the perception of Gowon’s contemporaries in the army:

Gowon for unknown reasons has always been very popular with the British authorities,
both during his training in Britain and throughout his military service in Nigeria.
For this reason, his progress in the army was so remarkable and extraordinary that
even his fellow Northern officers were beginning to grumble. For instance, when he
was chosen to attend the Camberley Staff College, England in January 1962, Major Pam,
a Jos [Joint Service] Officer senior to him, called him a “sneaky sucker.”
¹⁰

Yakubu Gowon was a particular favorite of the queen and other members of Britain’s
royal family, a fact that he relished immensely.
¹¹
“[He] impressed the British monarchy as a sincere God-fearing leader who was determined
to work for the development of his country under conditions of international peace
and stability.” He did not fail to impress Britain’s cousins across the Atlantic either,
at any opportunity. Henry Luce, the wealthy and highly influential American publisher
of
Time
magazine, found Gowon

[a] spit-and-polish product of Britain’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Gowon
is sometimes dismissed as “Jack the Boy Scout” in Lagos diplomatic circles. He neither
smokes nor drinks, and keeps his 5-ft. 10-in. frame trim at 140 lbs.
¹²

Whether or not one can ascribe this resentment held by his fellow officers toward
Gowon to soldiers’ envy isn’t clear, but what was evident was that Gowon was a charismatic,
eloquent, personable soldier who utilized a number of his skills to impress the rich
and powerful. General Aguiyi-Ironsi, who became Nigeria’s first military head of state
following the failed coup d’état of January 15, 1966, was one of many who were fond
of Gowon, and the general appointed him chief of army staff. While I was watching
events unfold in Nigeria in 1966, I found it instructive that when Ironsi was killed
in the counter–coup d’état of young Northern officers on July 29, 1966, it was Yakubu
Gowon who was chosen to become head of the federal military government and commander
in chief of the armed forces.

Gowon’s elevation to head of state was a tactical compromise to assuage most ethnic
groups that Nigeria was not coming under an Islamic Hausa/Fulani leadership intent
on Christian and Southern domination. It did not help matters that many officers did
not feel that Gowon was the most qualified to be in the role of head of state. In
the
Nigerian Outlook
of March 21, 1967, Ojukwu revealed the sentiments of many military officers in Eastern
Nigeria:

The point here and the crux of the whole matter is the fact that the North wants to
dominate. . . . Gowon is not capable of doing anything. He is only a front man for
the whole NPC/NNDP coalition. . . . [I]n fact the officers and men who took part in
the July massacre were being used as tools. . . . But the NNDP/NPC coalition which
master-minded this pogrom definitely wanted to continue the old policy of the North,
that is to dominate and dictate.
¹³

Behind the scenes, Murtala Muhammed was nursing his wounds. It was well-known that
Muhammed, a favorite son of the Muslim Hausa/Fulani military establishment, was initially
tapped to be head of state—an idea that was quickly shelved in favor of Gowon, the
charismatic Christian and ethnic minority candidate from Plateau State. This snub
was not lost on Muhammed, who harbored an unrelenting resentment toward Gowon and
would later, in 1975, mount the decisive coup that ousted him from office.

In what was widely seen as an attempt to soothe growing ethnic hostility, particularly
in Eastern Nigeria, Gowon appointed Emeka Ojukwu, a fellow Sandhurst alumnus, to the
post of military governor of the Eastern Region, a post similar to that which he had
held within Aguiyi-Ironsi’s Supreme Military Council. It was said that Emeka Ojukwu
served in this new capacity reluctantly, because of what he believed was Gowon’s unclear
role in the coup that led to the assassination of General Aguiyi-Ironsi and nearly
two hundred Igbo officers. The relationship between the two men, shaky from the start
of Gowon’s new government, suffered several other setbacks in the months to come,
particularly following the series of pogroms that left over thirty thousand Easterners,
mainly Igbo, murdered, and nearly one million fleeing to their ancestral homes in
1966.
¹⁴

—

There are a number who believe that neither Gowon nor Ojukwu were the right leaders
for that desperate time, because they were blinded by ego, hindered by a lack of administrative
experience, and obsessed with interpersonal competition and petty rivalries.
¹⁵
As a consequence, according to this school of thought, these two men failed to make
appropriate and wise decisions throughout the conflict and missed several opportunities
when compromise could have saved the day.
¹⁶

No small number of international political science experts found the Nigeria-Biafra
War baffling, because it deviated frustratingly from their much vaunted models. But
traditional Igbo philosophers, eyes ringed with white chalk and tongues dipped in
the proverbial brew of prophecy, lay the scale and complexity of our situation at
the feet of ethnic hatred and
ekwolo
—manifold rivalries between the belligerents. Internal rivalries, one discovers, between
personalities, across ethnic groups, and within states, often fuel the persistence
of conflicts.
¹⁷
Conflicts are not just more likely to last longer as a result of these rivalries
but are also more likely to recur, with alternating periods of aggression and peace
of shorter and shorter duration.
¹⁸
A “lock-in period”—the intensification of war with ever-shortening times of peace—is
also classically seen.
¹⁹

The internal rivalries that existed between Gowon and Ojukwu, and the pathological
intraethnic dynamics that plagued the Nigerian military and wartime government, contributed
in no small measure to the scale of the catastrophe that was the Nigeria-Biafra War.
The fractured respect and unenthusiastic reception Gowon received following his ascendancy
to the position of head of state was only the beginning. There was a stifling anger
at the dissolution of the Nigerian state, with all its ramifications. These sentiments
were borne particularly by the Easterners overlooked by the young general at the helm
of Nigerian affairs, with disastrous consequences.

There are a few other factors that merit consideration. There was an obsessive tendency
by both belligerents—Gowon and Ojukwu—to seek positions of strength and avoid looking
weak throughout the conflict. I am not referring to the propaganda statements, however
over the top, which one expects in times of war, but to the ego-driven policies that
were clearly not about the conflict at hand. Some of Ojukwu’s and Gowon’s civilian
advisers aggravated the crisis by transforming themselves into sycophants. Rather
than encourage their respective leader on each side of the conflict to consider a
cease-fire, they massaged their egos and spurred them on to ever-escalating hostility.
²⁰

The longer the war dragged on, the more difficult it was for both sides to give in
to anything that might lead to a peaceful resolution. In Biafra there was a widely
held belief that “a cease-fire would lead to genocide or retribution of equal magnitude,
or at least the relinquishing of self-determination and freedom.” Biafrans widely
believed that the gap between our ideological position and that of our Nigerian brethren
had simply grown too wide to bridge.
²¹
Complicating matters was the fact that most intellectuals in Biafra viewed Nigeria,
now under military dictatorship, as a neocolonial state under the iron grasp of its
former colonial master, Great Britain, with a very willing steward at the helm.

There are some scholars who believe that the Igbo turned to Emeka Ojukwu by virtue
of the fact that he was the governor of the Eastern Region of Nigeria at the time
of the crisis—the “man in power” theory. Others have gone as far as to suggest that
the war would have been prevented if there was a leader other than Ojukwu in place.
The first statement will be debated for generations. As for the second, I believe
that following the pogroms, or rather, the ethnic cleansing in the North that occurred
over the four months starting in May 1966, which was compounded by the involvement,
even connivance, of the federal government in those evil and dastardly acts, secession
from Nigeria and the war that followed became an inevitability.