Frederick Forsyth’s account of the Nigerian Civil War, mainly from the Biafran lens, is perhaps one of the most riveting you would find. Yet, it is remarkably deficient in its one-sidedness, for which the author made no pretences or apologies.
As Nigeria marks the 60th anniversary of the beginning of events that changed the country forever this week, I reread, not Forsyth’s The Biafra Story, but John de St. Jorre’s The Brothers’ War: Biafra and Nigeria, a book that contains some of the most intimate accounts of January 15, 1966, highlighting the tragedy of elite failure.
The Day Before
People often talk about ‘The Day After,’ but ‘The Day Before’ sets the stage. It is quite remarkable how ‘The Day Before’ can appear so ordinary, sometimes with hardly any telltale signs, only for an eruption to follow. According to de St. Jorre, Friday, January 14, was a day like that. It was a day, he said, that began more hopefully than most, only to yield to a tragic dawn.
Nigeria, considered by many to be the star of independent black Africa, had just finished hosting the meeting of the Commonwealth in Lagos, the first outside London. Contrary to the British colonial rule principle of no independence before majority rule, Ian Smith had unilaterally declared independence in Rhodesia in November 1965, a country with 250,000 whites and over five million black Africans.
Rhodesia was the hot topic at the Commonwealth conference in Lagos, hosted by Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, with British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and 24 other foreign leaders in attendance. I laughed the other day when former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he felt perfectly safe in Nigeria, concluding his flattery by saying, apart from oil, the country was also an “exporter” of future prime ministers to the UK.
The house that Britain built
Barely a year after Johnson was born, Nigeria was, in fact, a shelter for a British prime minister. Wilson, assailed at home for his weakness in handling Rhodesia, was pleased by the respite to travel to Nigeria as Balewa’s guest. If only Wilson knew that the house built by Britain’s squalid duplicity was about to collapse.
Nigeria was the toast of the world, especially after its role in reconciling rival pan-African blocs that had been at loggerheads, and also sending troops to Central Africa.
Nigeria’s Western region was in deep political turmoil as a result of the disputed Federal elections and the crisis in the Western House. Despite reports of widespread violence, however, Prime Minister Balewa had stated on January 13 that the Federal Government would not intervene.
‘Operation Damisa’
The worst was yet to come. As delegates to the Commonwealth conference departed (Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus stayed back in Enugu), the old Nigeria was to die that weekend. That was the weekend of ‘Operation Damisa’, the codename for the first military coup, and the first shot in what would later degenerate to Nigeria’s 30-month civil war.
“Nigeria awoke on Saturday (January 15) morning in total confusion,” de St. Jorre wrote. “In three major cities (Lagos, Ibadan and Kaduna), there had been the most violent and bloody coup d’etat Africa had ever seen; but only in the Northern capital had it been fully successful, leaving its leaders in control…the political leadership and government of the day had been swept away. The old order, for better or for worse, had gone.”
Many accounts suggest that at least 22 persons, including Balewa, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Akintola, Okotie-Eboh, and several top military officers, were targeted and killed that morning.
De St. Jorre’s book covers much more than what happened on January 15. The first chapter, however, is quite extraordinary in highlighting some key aspects of Nigeria on the eve of January 15.
Once upon a Force
The role of the police force, for example. It’s difficult to imagine that the police we’re now trying to save from the ruins of run-down barracks and menial duties for very important persons was the institution that soldiers ran to for refuge after turning on themselves and the country.
“Within an hour and a half of the first shots,” de St. Jorre wrote, “the counter coup had begun. ... office exchange and external telecommunications office were successfully taken over, but the plotters failed to secure the police headquarters and the radio station.”
Major-General Aguiyi Ironsi, who had been alerted by the wife of one of the murdered officers, ran to the police headquarters in his car to plot a counter-offensive. According to the book, Ironsi spent most of the morning of January 15 in the Lagos police headquarters trying to consolidate his position.
Sixty years later, no one can say where a general confronted with a similar situation might turn for refuge and reinforcement. However, most would likely agree that it certainly would not be the police headquarters in Lagos or Abuja.
Igbo coup?
As for the roles of Ironsi and Lt.-Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu, and whether it was an “Igbo coup,” de St. Jorre takes a nuanced position. His argument, quite plausible, is that the number of Igbo officers involved is best understood in context.
“The fact is that about 50 percent of the middle officer ranks in the Nigerian army, the pre-independence ‘Sandhurst generation’ who were commissioned between 1954 and 1960, were Ibos, and it was from this group, some of whom had also been to university, that discontent with the old order and the older generation was likely to come,” he wrote.
De St. Jorre agreed with several accounts from January 15 that Ojukwu, deeply distrusted by Nzeogwu, was essentially an outsider – the core plotters being Majors Emmanuel Ifeajuna and Don Okafor. Ojukwu’s decision to close the Kano airport and hold inbound aircraft and passengers suggested that he could have been acting for or against the coup – or just playing a self-interested game of watch and see.
Of course, other issues tend to inflame the suspicion of the so-called “Igbo plot:” the failure of the coup in Enugu, where Ifeajuna was in charge and his unexpected escape into Kwame Nkrumah’s warm embrace in Ghana; Ironsi’s prevarication and the role of his top advisers like Francis Nwokedi, and the lack of restraint amongst the ordinary Igbo folks in the streets, especially in the North.
‘January boys’
If the ‘January boys’ thought that striking on January 15 was a patriotic duty to save Nigeria from the ten-percenters, the corrupt politicians and ethnic chauvinists, their action only unleashed the worst of the demons they set out to defeat.
Yet, there was something that de St. Jorre captured in the deadly gunfire on January 15 which gives a rare insight into the courage of the human spirit even in the face of danger: how the Premier of the Western Region, Samuel Ladoke Akintola, refused to surrender without a fight, exchanging gunfire with them until he ran out of ammunition; how at least 30 members of the Federal parliament still managed to show up for an emergency meeting, at a time when Ironsi had told journalists that the situation in Lagos was “very bad indeed.” And how unarmed Nzeogwu addressed soldiers in Kaduna (nearly all Northerners) who didn’t know about the coup, nearly all Northerners, even when the soldiers had loaded rifles.
Collapse of trust
While Forsyth’s The Biafra Story is exceptional for its moral charge, and Brigadier Samuel Ademulegun’s Why We Struck provides the legal brief for January 15, de St. Jorre’s book frames the tragedy as a collapse of elite trust.
As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into decisive months, I wonder if the ‘January boys’ might have acted differently if, as de St. Jorre said, they knew that the country they were trying to save would be far worse than anything they might have imagined on the morning of January 15.
Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the new book A Midlifer’s Guide to Content Creation and Profit.