The Biafra Story

  In June Colonel Ojukwu, welcoming the Emir of Kano, his contemporary and friend, with whose aid he had been able to keep Kano without bloodshed in January, as the new Chancellor of the University of Nsukka, publicly called on his people to return to their homes and jobs in the North. Many of these Easterners had fled after the May massacres to seek safety in the East. Colonel Ojukwu asked them to believe that these killings had been ‘part of the price we have had to pay’ for the ideal of One Nigeria.

  Throughout June the Ironsi Government groped for a remedy to the problem of the rising tension in Nigeria. To none did it occur, and least of all to Colonel Ojukwu, that the Northerners might be permitted to fulfil their age-old wish and set up their own state. Eventually General Ironsi left for a tour of the country to sound out local opinion, on the broadest possible basis, as to the future form of Nigeria that its people wished to see. He never returned to Lagos.

  * ‘The Nigerian Revolution’, African World, March 1966.

  * 12 February 1966.

  * Conversation with the author at Enugu, July 1967.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Second Coup that Failed

  Some of those seeking to explain away the coup of the junior army officers of Northern origin on 29 July 1966 have suggested it was motivated by ideas of righteous revenge for the deaths in January of three senior army officers of Northern birth. Certainly, prior to the second coup there were growing cries in the North for the execution of the mutineers of January, not as retribution for the deaths of the politicians, whose passing remained largely unregretted, but for the shooting of Brigadier Maimalari and Colonels Pam and Largema.

  This argument is not convincing. Apart from these three, two Yoruba colonels and two Ibo majors were also killed in January. It seems far more likely that the key to the motives of the officers who mutinied in July is to be found in the codeword that triggered the operation – ARABA. It is the Hausa word for ‘Secession’; and although there was undoubtedly a strong element of revenge inside the movement and the subsequent activities of its perpetrators, their political aim was to fulfil the long-standing wish of the mass of the Northern people and quit Nigeria once and for all.

  In this and in other points the two coups were utterly different. In the first coup there had been a fiery zeal to purge Nigeria of a host of undoubted ills; it was reformatory in motivation; bloodshed was minimal – four politicians and six officers. It was extrovert in nature and non-regional in orientation.

  The July coup was wholly regional, introverted, revanchist and separatist in origins and unnecessarily bloody in execution.

  A few years earlier it had been noted that, although the great majority of the infantry were of Northern origin, and about eighty per cent of this majority were Tivs, almost seventy per cent of the commissioned ranks were from the East. This was no accident; but neither was it the design of the Easterners that this should be so, as has since been alleged. In its early days the Nigerian Army had emphasized the importance of education when granting commissions. As can be seen from the dispersion of primary schools (mentioned earlier) the North was chronically short of educated personnel.

  In 1960, independence year, there had been only six commissioned officers from the North in the army. The new Defence Minister, Alhaji Ribadu, a Hausa, had decreed there should be fifty per cent Northerners in the commissioned ranks; but this could not be done overnight. By 1966 there were, however, far more junior officers of Northern origin in the army; and although the planning of the July coup was undoubtedly done by a small group of senior officers, the execution fell to these lieutenants.

  Inside the army the dispersion of the officers reflected regional characteristics, again not deliberately, but on the basis of education and tendency. The great majority of the Northern officers were in infantry battalions, while the technical sections – stores, radio, engineering, maintenance, armoury, transport, medical, intelligence, training and ordnance – were the preserve of the Easterners. When the July coup came the mutineers had only to take possession of the various garrison armouries and to arm their men to have the rest of the army and therefore the country at their mercy. This in fact was what they did.

  General Ironsi was dining on the evening of 28 July with Lieutenant-Colonel Fajuyi, Military Governor of the West, but at the latter’s residence in Ibadan. Ironsi had just completed his nation-wide tour. With them was Colonel Hilary Njoku, the Ibo commander of the Second Battalion base at Ikeja outside Lagos.

  The coup started with a mutiny at Abeokuta Barracks in the Western Region where a Hausa captain led a group of troops into the officers’ mess at 11 p.m. and shot three Eastern officers, a lieutenant-colonel, a major and a lieutenant. They then besieged the barracks, disarmed the Southern soldiers among the guard, seized the armoury and armed the Northerners. They also sounded the call to action, which brought the garrison from its sleep to line up on the parade ground. The Southern soldiers were singled out and locked up in the guardroom, while the Northerners made a house-to-house search for those not present. By daybreak most of the Southern officers and senior NCOs had been rounded up. They were led out of the guardroom at dawn and shot.

  Meanwhile the mutineers had apparently telephoned the adjutants (both Northerners) of the Second Battalion at Ikeja and the Fourth Battalion at Ibadan to inform them of the news. But at 3.30 a.m. an Ibo captain among the prisoners at Abeokuta escaped: he too telephoned, but to Army Headquarters in Lagos. He reported what he thought was a simple mutiny. At AHQ the man in charge in the absence of Ironsi was his Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-Colonel Gowon.

  It was he who now took charge. Whether he did so to better the direction of the coup and the massacres that it entailed, or whether he tried to prevent it, is still hotly debated. He claims he had nothing to do with the coup, but his subsequent behaviour would appear to cast doubt on this and he may have been a not-too-hesitant accomplice during and after the fact.

  The news also reached General Ironsi. The three officers conferred shortly after midnight and agreed that Njoku should return to Lagos in a civilian vehicle and in mufti to take over control and counter the ‘mutiny’. He left in order to return to his chalet and change. Once outside, he noticed troops dismounting from two parked Land Rovers. They gave him a burst from Sten guns and he ran off, wounded in the thigh. Later, after treatment at Ibadan Hospital he wended his way back to the East disguised as a priest, while patrols scouted the West for him and roadblocks had orders to shoot on sight. It was the tenacity of the hunt for Eastern officers, and the duration of it long after Colonel Gowon had taken over supreme control in the name of the mutineers, that cast doubts on both the political aspect of the coup and Gowon’s innocence of events.

  In fact the Southern troops in Ironsi’s bodyguard had been disarmed before midnight by their Northern counterparts who had been stiffened by twenty-four extra Northern troops sent from the Fourth Battalion headquarters in Ibadan. This battalion, after the death of Colonel Largema in January, had been under the command of Colonel J. Akahan, a Tiv from the North. The newly-arrived party was commanded by Major Theophilus Danjuma, a Hausa, who is now Second-in-Command of the First Division of the Nigerian Army and Garrison Commander of Enugu.

  Inside the house Ironsi and Fajuyi heard the shooting and sent down Ironsi’s Air Force ADC, Lieutenant Nwankwo, to find out what was going on. (Ironsi’s Army ADC, Lieutenant Bello, a Hausa, had quietly disappeared, although there is no evidence to connect him with the coup.) Downstairs Nwankwo was arrested and his hands tied. After waiting almost till dawn Colonel Fajuyi descended to find out what had happened to Nwankwo. He too was arrested. Finally at 9 a.m. Major Danjuma went upstairs to find General Ironsi, and arrested him. He too was brought downstairs.

  Among those who know what happened after that, only Lieutenant Nwankwo has ever given testimony. From the Federal Government side a discreet veil is drawn over everything. What follows then is Nwankwo’s evidence.

  All three men were stripped and flogged w
ith horsewhips. After being put into separate vans the convoy set off with Major Danjuma leading. At the Mokola road junction where the roads divide, one going to Oyo town and the other to Letmauk Barracks, garrison of the Fourth Battalion, the convoy split. Danjuma headed back to Letmauk after giving whispered orders to Lieutenant Walbe, the commander of General Ironsi’s escort. The rest of the convoy proceeded. After ten miles the three detainees were ordered down and made to march along a narrow footpath in the bush. They were stopped, and were beaten and tortured again so badly that they could hardly walk. After being pushed on they came to a stream which in their weakened state they could not jump across. They were carried over the stream and a few yards down the path, where they were laid face down and given another beating. At this point Nwankwo had managed to untie the wire round his wrists and made a dash for it. He got away. The other two men, nearly dead from their sufferings, were finished off with bursts of Sten gun. Later the police found the bodies and buried them in Ibadan cemetery, from where they were taken six months later and laid to rest in their respective home towns.

  After dawn on 29 July the massacre of officers and men of Eastern origin took place all over Nigeria with a speed, precision and uniformity of pattern that took away any subsequent excuse of spontaneity. At Letmauk Barracks, Ibadan, the commanding officer Colonel Akahan claimed at sunrise that he had known nothing of the midnight movements against General Ironsi. But it is unlikely that the troops, transport, arms and ammunition used for the siege of Government House were removed without the CO’s knowledge. At 10 a.m. Colonel Akahan called an officers’ conference, from which he himself stayed away. When the officers were assembled the Easterners were taken away to the guardroom, then later to the tailor’s workshop. At midnight that night thirty-six hand grenades were lobbed through the windows. The survivors inside were shot down. Eastern soldiers were then made to wash the blood away, before being taken out and shot. The Easterners in Ironsi’s retinue were also finished off. On the afternoon of the 30th Colonel Akahan called together the Northern soldiers and congratulated them, saying at the same time that there would be no more killing ‘since events had now balanced out’.

  On the basis of this statement Eastern soldiers in hiding came out; but that night they too were hunted down and those caught were killed. The killing went on for several days, accompanied by the raping of the wives of Eastern men and the spreading of terror to the city of Ibadan itself. Colonel Akahan later became Gowon’s Army Chief-of-Staff.

  At Ikeja things went much the same. About breakfast time on the morning of the 29th Colonel Gowon arrived from Lagos fifteen miles away. From five in the morning onwards Northern troops of the garrison had been rounding up the Easterners, including scores of civilians, policemen and customs officials of Eastern origin working at the nearby airport. By midday of 29 July there were 200 held in the guardroom. In the evening Lieutenant Walbe arrived and reported to Colonel Gowon the capture and death of General Ironsi. The next day the civilians in the guardroom were released while the names of the soldiers were taken. From this list the execution squad called out the officers and men in order of seniority. Eight officers ranging from Major to Second Lieutenant and fifty-two other ranks from Warrant Officer downwards were killed. The killing was accompanied by the usual beatings, but after one Ibo corporal escaped (and lived to tell the tale), the rest were handcuffed and led away to the killing ground behind the guardroom. When weary, the Northern soldiers exchanged knives and carried on cutting throats. Before death many of the prisoners were whipped, made to lie in puddles of urine and excrement and consume the mixture. Captain P. C. Okoye was on the way to attend a course in the United States when he was caught at Ikeja Airport and brought to the barracks. Tied to an iron cross he was flogged almost to death, then thrown into a cell, still tied to the cross, where he died.*

  All this happened less than 200 yards from the office where Colonel Gowon had set up his headquarters and from where he had been vested with the title of Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. It was from this office that he told the world he was trying to hold the country together in a time of crisis.

  Despite subsequent assurances that it was a quick and shortlived affair, there is eyewitness testimony that it went on sporadically for four weeks. On 22 August a young Northern officer brought from Benin prison the detainees who had been concerned in the January plot (ostensibly the reason for the July coup). The five of them were killed. The same day news came through that in the East Colonel Ojukwu had asked for the repatriation of all Eastern officers and men. Lieutenant Nuhu then gave orders that the remaining twenty-two Eastern prisoners, all NCOs, be executed, which they were.

  Long before that date Colonel Gowon had told the world that the killing had ceased and that ‘conditions have returned to normal’.

  Colonel Akahan and Major Danjuma were not the only ones to achieve promotion after acts which customarily lead to the gallows. At Makurdi in the heart of Tiv-land a detachment from the Fourth Battalion at Ibadan had arrived between 11 and 14 August. Fifteen soldiers of Eastern origin were arrested and detained. On the 16th the detachment commander Major Daramola told them they would be driven to Kaduna, then sent back to the East by air. The convoy set off along the road with Major Daramola bringing up the rear in a Mini-moke. After fifty miles the convoy stopped and reversed into the bush where a firing squad was waiting. One by one the men were called out for execution. Three escaped by darting out of the lorry and running off into the long grass, later to come home on foot and tell the tale. Lieutenant-Colonel Daramola today commands the Eighth Brigade of the Second Division, Nigerian Army, which garrisons the Enugu to Onitsha road from Abagana village to Udi.

  Enough of the July massacres. They have been adequately detailed elsewhere. Suffice it to report that in all barracks and garrisons, in Lagos and throughout the Western and Northern Regions the pattern was the same. Northern soldiers took over the armouries and armed themselves, arrested and locked up their colleagues of Eastern origin and subsequently led many of them out to execution. Some escaped and wended their way back to the East, to form the basis of the Biafran Army of a year later. Among the senior officers most of those in the infantry were killed; most of the survivors were in the technical cadres, which is why, of the present Biafran Army commanders who held the rank of Major or senior in the old Nigerian Army, the majority were in the technical rather than the combat units. By the time it was all over nearly 300 officers and men were dead or unaccounted for. As a coherent unit, as a truly Nigerian institution in which men of all tribes and nations, cultures and creeds could live side by side and call each other comrade, the army was shattered beyond repair. And the army had been the last such institution. Despite what happened before and after, despite all the efforts (which might have succeeded) to hold Nigeria together in some form, if any moment can be identified as the moment when Nigerian unity died it was when the General called Johnny Ironside crashed down in the dust outside Ibadan.

  The aim of the coup was partly revenge on the Ibo for what had been an all-party coup in January, and partly the secession of the North. As soon as Lieutenant-Colonel Gowon set up base at Ikeja barracks a strange flag was seen flying from the main gate, and it remained there for eighteen days. It had lateral red, yellow, black, green and khaki stripes. It was the flag of the Republic of Northern Nigeria. For three days buses, lorries, cars, trains and planes were commandeered in Lagos and the Western Region to transport the enormous reflux of Northern families home.

  The garrisons in Lagos, the West and the North were under the control of Northern-officered and -manned units. While the killing of the Eastern soldiers went on Lieutenant-Colonel Hassan Katsina, Military Governor of the North, rallied to the rebel cause, giving grounds for suspicion that if he had not been one of the instigators he had at least known roughly what was afoot. The West had no one to speak for it, Colonel Fajuyi being dead, and there was no one either to speak for Lagos.

  In the Midwest, however, ther
e had been no coup; but neither were there any soldiers stationed there. As usual it was too small to bother about. In the East there was a strong Governor, a loyal garrison and no attempt at a coup. As a result the rule of the old régime continued unbroken in that Region.

  When it became clear that the Northern officers intended to secede, a cold wind swept through several quarters, not least through the British High Commission. From the East Colonel Ojukwu saw the writing on the wall, and by telephone urged the Yoruba Brigadier Ogundipe, senior ranking officer in the army and legally the successor of General Ironsi, to take over and declare himself Supreme Commander. Ojukwu promised that if he did, he (Ojukwu) would recognize Ogundipe as such. The Yoruba did not rate his chances very highly and, after a crass radio speech of three minutes asking everyone to be calm, he disappeared to Dahomey and thence to London, where some months later he agreed to become the Nigerian High Commissioner. In the meanwhile frenzied efforts by the British High Commission and others had been going on to try to dissuade the North from seceding. But the Northern officers were not alone in their demand; separate independence, the message of the rioters’ banners the previous May and of the Emirs’ memoranda of June, was still the wish of the great majority of the North. There was only one way to keep them inside Nigeria; by putting into effect the old alternative, ‘We rule the lot or we pull out’. According to later accounts from highly placed civil servants then working in Lagos, the British High Commissioner Sir Francis Cumming-Bruce had a six-hour private session with Gowon on the morning of 1 August. Gowon then reported back to his fellow-Northerners. By the afternoon Colonel Ojukwu, telephoning from Enugu to ask Gowon what he intended to do, was told the group intended to stay in Lagos and take over the running of the country. When Ojukwu protested, Gowon replied: ‘Well that’s what my boys want and they’re going to get it.’ And stay they did. Gowon’s first broadcast to the nation, already prepared and tape-recorded, had to be hastily but not very skilfully edited. What he said was: