There was enough talent, enough education in Nigeria for us to have been able to arrange our affairs more efficiently, more meticulously, even if not completely independently, than we were doing.32 I tell these stories to illustrate the quality of the people available to Nigeria. One thinks back on this and is amazed. Nigeria had people of great quality, and what befell us—the corruption, the political ineptitude, the war—was a great disappointment and truly devastating to those of us who witnessed it.33
A TIGER JOINS THE ARMY
A great shot in the arm, and perhaps the single most effective tool for enlistment into the Biafran army, came in January 1968, when Richard Ihetu, also known as Dick Tiger, hung up his boxing gloves and enlisted in the army. Ihetu was a world-renowned boxer from Amaigbo in Imo state—“the land of the Igbos”—a town comprised of thirty-seven villages and steeped in ancient Igbo history.34 Ojukwu made Dick Tiger a lieutenant in the army of Biafra as soon as he enlisted.35
Even though I was never a boxing fan, I remember how the whole of Nigeria was gripped by a feverish excitement at Dick Tiger’s victories, first locally, as Nigeria’s most celebrated boxing champion, then also later, after he emigrated to the United Kingdom and knocked over famous boxers across the British Empire, and ultimately won world championships both as a light-heavyweight and as a middleweight. We were all very impressed that this young man from a town near Aba in Imo state had traveled so far.36 Dick Tiger’s decision to enlist, and to return the MBE (Member of the British Empire) medal to Great Britain’s government in protest of its support for Nigeria, caused a great stir internationally.37
Excitement at the news of Dick Tiger’s arrival created a rippling sensation throughout Biafra. The government seized on this development and created jingles on the radio summoning young men to “follow the example of Dick Tiger and join the great Elephant (Enyi) of a new nation.” But the realities of war—the death, the despair, the suffering—soon dampened any euphoria that we all had about having a champion fight for the cause.
FREEDOM FIGHTERS
Ojukwu created an organization called the Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters (BOFF) as a unit that would improve the overall relationship between the Biafran army and the people it served and on whose behalf it fought. Colonel Ejike Obumneme Aghanya was appointed the chairperson. He had been president of the Nigerian Broadcasting Service Staff Union in Enugu when I was the controller of the Nigerian Broadcasting Service Eastern Region. Aghanya’s BOFF staff included Dr. Ukwu I. Ukwu, Dr. Oyolu, and Major Okoye. Aghanya invited me to join the group and help develop an education strategy that would improve civilian-military relations.
Although this desire to bridge the civilian-military divide is nothing new, Ojukwu wanted the Biafran military to be different, to pay careful attention to the welfare of the people of Biafra. One interesting direction they took was to get young women into BOFF, and indirectly into the army.38
Ojukwu’s Oxford education afforded him the luxury of having been exposed to both the great world philosophers and the revolutionaries of the day. He was heavily influenced by the writings of Fidel Castro, and he called the Biafran army the People’s Army of Biafra. He also admired the way the Chinese army was structured, and it is relevant to note that BOFF arose at a time when China was making diplomatic inroads in Biafra. Ojukwu clearly was not a communist, but he borrowed some ideas from their revolutions.39
After I left the BOFF outfit I heard that it was engaged in the more militaristic and controversial aspects of war, such as enemy infiltration, guerrilla warfare, and propaganda.40
Traveling on Behalf of Biafra
In addition to working with BOFF, Ojukwu also asked me to serve the cause as an unofficial envoy of the people of Biafra. Being invited to serve by the leader of Biafra was both an important and satisfying opportunity, but it also came with great anxiety. What were we getting into? I thought. I never solicited the post, so being asked from the very top to come and help, especially from the angle of the intellectual, was very important to me. I wasn’t absolutely sure how things would work out, but I thought I would do my best.
The first trip I undertook on behalf of the people of Biafra was at the direct request of General Ojukwu. He called me to his office soon after the conflict started and asked me to travel to Senegal to deliver a message to President Léopold Sédar Senghor. I was to be accompanied on this trip by a young academic, Sam Agbam, who spoke several European languages fluently. He was among the young intellectuals in the Biafran diplomatic service involved in one way or another in the framing of the “Biafran argument.��
Sam and I set out for Senegal. During these “trips for the people” envoys were often put on a plane—a private plane . . . any plane, at midnight, from Uli airport, flying out of Biafra across the Sahara, occasionally to Europe or an African capital, from whence we would travel more freely to the destinations of our choice.
During this particular flight the pilot announced at about twenty thousand feet that the plane was experiencing “technical problems.” It was marked by a great deal of turbulence and sudden losses of cabin pressure. We were all experiencing motion sickness, some were vomiting, and all were stricken by a sense of impending doom. The plane was diverted to an airport in the Sahara, where we disembarked, changed to a Senegalese airline, and flew to Dakar.
Sam Agbam “vanished” at some point during our travel; I was never told why he did not continue the journey. Soon thereafter he got in trouble with the Biafran government—accused of being part of a mutiny—and was executed with others for allegedly plotting a coup against Ojukwu, as discussed earlier.
After we lost each other I decided to take control of the journey, despite the language barrier. I arrived in the beautiful capital of the Republic of Senegal, Dakar, and checked myself into one of the city’s many smart hotels.
I visited the presidential offices the day after my arrival and tried to get the letter from General Ojukwu in my possession to President Senghor. I couldn’t get past the presidential aides. The officials there, all expatriate administrators, responded to my request with looks of incredulity. They could not even imagine anything like opening the door and showing me in to see the Senegalese president. They must have thought I was crazy!
There was one very tall man who spoke very good English, and he said to me that there was no way I could see the president.
“What do you want to see him for?” he asked.
I said that I would like to present my new novel, A Man of the People, to him. I also added that I knew that President Senghor was a great writer and poet, and I thought I should show my appreciation of his writing by presenting my humble effort at writing poetry. Clearly that was not what I wanted to do, but I was not about to disclose my true intentions to this uncooperative gentleman.
“Oh, that is easy enough: You give me the book and poems and I will take it to him, and I am sure he will be delighted,” the official said.
I said that I would like to deliver it myself, that that was the reason I had come all this way. There was nothing more the official could tell me, and I was sent away.
The next day, and the next, I went back and repeated the process in an attempt to see Senghor. Either my tenacity was working or the staff was getting tired of seeing me every morning, because I got a new message five days into this ritual: “President Léopold Sédar Senghor will see you tomorrow.” This message was brought in a black limousine. A member of the hotel staff ran up to my room, knocked on the door, and excitedly relayed that I had a message from the presidential palace. The esteem in which I was held in the eyes of the people and staff in the hotel, you can imagine, rose dramatically. After that my stay was very different. Soon after my arrival I had complained to the hotel front desk that the fan in my room was not working well, but nothing was done about it until the limousine visit from the presidential palace, soon after which I w
as informed that the fan had been attended to.
The next day I had my audience with President Léopold Sédar Senghor, a very extraordinary man. I was guided along a stone path in the gardens of the presidential palace and up the grand staircase to a secluded room. The first thing that struck me was the loneliness. We were standing in a room in this huge mansion, I in my Biafran attire, Senghor in his French suit, and he seemed all alone. He knew that I came from Biafra, in West Africa. I handed Senghor the letter that informed him of the real catastrophe building up in Biafra, and I told him that it was a message from the Biafran head of state, who had asked me to deliver the sealed envelope directly to him. Senghor regretted that I had spent several days in the country trying to reach him and apologized for the treatment I had received. Senghor was a profoundly adept diplomat, and he took on the business I brought: He glanced through the letter quickly, and then turned to me and said that he would deal with it overnight . . . as soon as possible.
Our conversation then turned to other things intellectual—writing, education, the great cultural issues of the day, including the movement he was spearheading called Négritude. La Négritude, as it was called, was already widely known in serious intellectual circles around the world: “The founders of la Négritude, les trois pères (the three fathers) [Léopold Sédar Senghor; Aimé Césaire, from Martinique; and Léon Gontran Damas, from Guyana] met while they were living in Paris in the early 1930s.”1
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It is important not to view Négritude in isolation but in the full context of the black consciousness movements of the first half of the twentieth century, a period that gave rise to a number of ideological and intellectual movements in America, the Caribbean, and Africa and a great deal of cross-fertilization and complexity.
Négritude in Africa can be seen as an extension of the earlier work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and C. L. R. James, among others; they all established black intellectual and political liberation struggles but from very different albeit equally important vantage points in America. In the African context it was a reaction to the colonial experience through literature and political thought. It had powerful political allies in Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, and, later, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, and Walter Sisulu in South Africa. It is pertinent to note that the independence movement in Africa in turn had a profound impact on the civil rights movement in America.
I found what these intellectuals were trying to achieve—the reclamation of the power of self-definition to recast Africa’s, and therefore their own, image through the written word—incredibly attractive and influential. Here were highly sophisticated individuals who believed in the need for blacks who had been victims of historical dispossession to appreciate and elevate their culture—literature, art, music, dance, etc. They encouraged Africans (in the word’s broadest definition) to celebrate and espouse their culture as not only not inferior to European culture and civilization but equally acceptable even if fundamentally different.
Négritude also held that the rest of the world would benefit from such an intellectual black renaissance, which would at last produce an environment where race, a core fact of our existence, and the negative baggage linked to its definition and meaning, would be effectively deemphasized, liberating the world’s people to work together unencumbered. It was very heavy stuff indeed!2 It is perhaps a great testament to the importance of this new thinking that it drew admirers as diverse and important as Frantz Fanon (who studied with Aimé Césaire), the great French writer Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Haitian writer Jacques Romain, as well as critics such as Wole Soyinka, who famously dismissed it.3
Senghor told me about the education minister who had been trained under him and had submitted a bill to Parliament to abolish the use of all French texts in all institutions of education in Senegal. Senghor smiled and told the young minister, “Thank you for your bill, but that would be too much Négritude.” We both laughed, and then talked for about two hours—discussing his poetry and that of others from the black diaspora—Okigbo, Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, etc. He took me to one of the great windows of the presidential palace and showed me two hills; he observed that the mountaintops looked like “a lady lying down.”
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I also made an extensive trip to Scandinavia on behalf of the people of Biafra around this time. The Scandinavians had made great humanitarian gestures to alleviate the suffering in Biafra. I was also curious to visit the land of one of the most legendary of all the Europeans who came to our aid—the Swedish aristocrat Carl Gustaf von Rosen. On this trip I visited Sweden, Finland, and Norway.
I remember Norway vividly. Even though I visited during the winter, it appeared a lovely country– subdued, calm, and temperate. The people seemed very serious-minded, and businesslike, and very progressive in their thinking. My hosts took me almost immediately after I arrived to the Parliament. What struck me about this particular day was the importance the Norwegians place on time, even more than I had encountered in England. Here was a people that knew that time was critically important, and it was to be used judiciously. Another observation of significance had to do with the items on the program. It appeared to be like a service—a hymn or anthem was sung, followed by deliberations and readings—all in Norwegian, so I can’t tell the reader exactly what was being said, but it sounded almost like a religious service. When they were done, I was ushered into this wonderfully built, ornate Parliament room, and a gentleman said to me: “Now Mr. Achebe, you can tell us what you came for.” And I spent about twenty minutes telling my hosts about the humanitarian disaster that was Biafra. I received a warm round of applause and promises of continued humanitarian support.
The other thing that happened during my trip to Norway was, unfortunately for millions around the world, very sad. As I walked back to my hotel with my hosts, I was able to tell from the conspicuous news flashing on a huge screen that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. I was able to figure out the devastating news from the flashing words, even without help from my hosts, and it struck me how bad news is so much more easily recognizable across languages than good.
My trip to Canada was very different from the others. I was invited to speak about the Biafran tragedy by the World Council of Churches and the Canadian Council of Churches. The World Council of Churches was one of the most magnanimous supporters and suppliers of humanitarian relief for the suffering and dying of Biafra, so I felt deeply obliged to attend their gathering. The general secretary of the WCC, Eugene Carson Blake, and the honorary president of the WCC, Willem Visser ’t Hooft from The Netherlands, were very decent men. Blake, an American, was an ardent supporter of the American civil rights movement and a coauthor of the WCC’s antiracism policies. Hooft helped set up the Ecumenical Church Loan Fund for the poor around the world.4
It is important to point out that the Protestants did not hold a monopoly on generosity during the war. Several Jewish groups and Roman Catholic orders also came to the aid of the destitute.
Reverend Father (Dr.) Georg Hüssler, former president of Caritas International, is particularly celebrated till this day by former Biafrans for his towering role in providing humanitarian and other aid during the conflict.
In any case, our hosts, the Canadian Council of Churches, organized a dinner in my honor and invited a number of very distinguished Canadians and religious leaders from around the world. When they brought out the first course—smoked salmon with steamed spinach—Eugene Carson Blake announced to the guests that we were about to eat a piece of Uli airport at night, which, many of them at the table were aware, was famously and effectively camouflaged with palm fronds and leaves to hide it from Nigerian air force reconnaissance missions. That statement was greeted with boisterous laughter. It occured to me once again how different Biaf
ra had become from other places, where laughter was still available.
In May 1968, I was part of the Biafran delegation that attended the Kampala, Uganda, talks—one of the world’s failed attempts (in this case, the British Commonwealth and the OAU) to forge a peace between Nigeria and Biafra. President Milton Obote of Uganda hosted the deliberations that also involved Commonwealth secretary Arnold Smith.5 Sir Louis Mbanefo was the leader of that delegation, which also included Professor Hilary Okam, Francis Ellah, and a few others. It was at that meeting that I met Aminu Kano for the first time. As the Nigerian delegation, led by Anthony Enahoro, espoused their resolve to “crush Biafra” unless there was a complete surrender, Aminu Kano seemed very uneasy, often looking through the window. This was a man who was not pleased with either side or how the matter was being handled. That meeting made an indelible mark on me about Aminu Kano, about his character and his intellect.
In late 1968, I traveled to the United States with Gabriel Okara and Cyprian Ekwensi as part of an extensive university tour to bring the story of Biafra to the mainly progressive American intellectuals and writers. We visited scores of campuses, gave what seemed to be hundreds of interviews, and met with several very influential American leaders of thought.
During my visit we were educated about Igbo (Ebo) landing in St. Simons, Georgia. According to the local lore, “Ebo Landing” was the site where an ill-fated slave ship called The Wanderer had run aground. The valuable cargo—the captured Igbos—were taken onshore while the crew rescued what they could from the bowels of the ship. While the crew was distracted, the story continues, the Igbos made a suicide pact, deciding to walk into the ocean and drown themselves rather than allow the slave merchants to sell them into bondage. Locals swear that the shores of the tragedy are still haunted, and that on a clear moon-lit night a visitor who stands really still can hear the howls and agony of death.6