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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
The Lesson Of 888 Days In Biafra
Late last month, the BBC World Service broadcast a documentary about Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Literature Laureate’s famous – or infamous, depending on which side you were on - journey 40 years ago to the Biafran enclave to meet with rebel leader, then Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu. Soyinka’s version of the story was that he went to persuade Ojukwu to rethink his rebellion. The Nigerian authorities thought he went there to conspire with Ojukwu in the rebellion. Consequently they jailed him for 26 months, 22 of them in solitary confinement. In the documentary BBC’s Mark Richards accompanied Soyinka on a trip last month that retraced his fateful journey. At the beginning the Nobel Laureate, Richards reported, was collected by a group of “Sea Dogs” – a fraternity Soyinka and six other undergraduates of University College of Ibadan founded in 1952 and which is widely credited with sewing the seed of today’s terrible university cults – in Benin from where the group escorted him to Enugu via Asaba and Onitsha to meet with the former rebel leader. According to Richards, Soyinka’s journey to Biafra, and eventually to his 26 month incarceration, started with a meeting of some Nigerian intellectuals in London which decided someone must meet with Ojukwu to ward off the impending conflict. “It fell to Wole Soyinka to undertake that dangerous mission to a jittery and volatile region,” said Richards. Soyinka went but on his return to Lagos, said Richards, the Nigerian authorities suspected him of involvement in the sale of military aircraft to the rebels and jailed him. The Nobel laureate’s “emotional” return to Enugu to see Ojukwu and then come back to Lagos to meet with General Yakubu Gowon who headed the Nigerian government that jailed him, was yet another reminder that the concept of Biafra is far from dead and buried. During the meeting with Ojukwu, said Richards, the former rebel leader “was polite but firm.” He was, Richards also said, “blind and infirm yet fiercely unrepentant”. “If you want Nigeria” Ojukwu told Soyinka, “I do not think it is impossible – but you will just have to train yourselves into really believing the equality of citizenship. If you are not prepared for it, forget Nigeria.” It was on this note that Soyinka left Ojukwu for the return journey to Lagos to meet with Gowon. The Nobel Laureate initially feared Gowon would pull out of the meeting at the last minute, but it went ahead in the end as scheduled. During the meeting, the two talked through the background of the Biafran war and Gowon acknowledged that there was suffering on both sides. Soyinka spoke of “terrible atrocities” committed by federal troops which Gowon reportedly admitted. Finally, Soyinka challenged Gowon on his own incarceration. “Ah, yes”, Gowon reportedly exclaimed, “You were my house guest.” Soyinka then told him of the hardship he endured in solitary confinment and Gowon seemed genuinely surprised. “I had no idea,” he said. Soyinka then broke the “sombre mood” that ensued with a “flash of humour”. “Let me tell you publicly,” he said, “if the boot had been on the other foot, I would have slung your arse in jail much earlier.” Thus ended Soyinka’s re-enactment of his journey to former Biafra and back to Nigeria straight into detention.. “It is,” concluded Richards, “where some of his finest poems were written. The ghosts of Biafra can be found in the pages of his work, scribbled on scraps of paper as the terrible history of the civil war itself was being written.” Without doubt the most famous of Soyinka’s work written in prison was The Man Died. As a prison memoir of sorts the book was more emotional than factual and analytical. Too it was a difficult book to read. It did, however, provide an insight into the politics of Nigeria at the time, in spite of its unrestrained anger with those who jailed him. The book, as far as I know, remained the only – and probably the most authoritative – prison memoir on events surrounding the Nigerian civil war until this year when a little known retired radio engineer, Mr. Samuel E. Umweni, published the account of his prison experience inside Biafra. Umweni, an Edo, was born in 1930. After his secondary education he joined the then Department of Post and Telegraph (P & T) (today’s NIPOST) as an assistant technical officer. After attending several courses at home and abroad, he eventually left the P & T and joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) in Lagos in 1962. Four years later he was posted to start the new NBC station in Benin City, capital of the then Mid-West Region that had been carved out of the old Western Region in 1963. It was as the Officer-in-Charge of the Benin Station that he was “abducted” on August 12, 1967 to Enugu by the rebel troops that had invaded the region on August 9. Along with Mr. Joseph Adeola, the region’s Commissioner of Police (famous as the “Flying Policeman” on account of his athletic prowess), Mr. Joseph Imokhuede, the region’s head of service, and Chief Olu Akpata, the Permanent Secretary of the region’s Trade and Industry ministry, the four were taken to Enugu under the false pretence of an invitation to an executive council meeting under Ojukwu for only a day. Their misfortune was that they were the few who responded to a radio announcement that invited the political and bureaucratic leadership of the region to meet with the military administrator Ojukwu had appointed for the Midwest. The four did meet with Ojukwu all right, but the executive council meeting in question never held. Instead they became detainees in Biafra for the next 887 days. As a piece of wartime literature, the book hardly compares to The Man Died in its composition. It is also unlikely to become as famous, especially given the author’s relative obscurity. As a piece of literature the book also contains many avoidable punctuation and grammatical errors. In page 53, for example, the author writes, “I started weeping became (instead of because) I just could not believe what was happening to me.” Again on page 55 he writes, “Within the first ten minutes. I started to feel some irritating bites on my back, arms and legs…” (Note the full stop instead coma between “minutes” and “I”). Yet again on page 63 the author writes “Cells that were not normally expected to take more than 34 prisoners were now made to accommodation (instead of accommodate) 60 – 70.” All told I encountered no less than a dozen of such irritating, if not unpardonable, punctuation and grammatical errors for a book which, bar arguably Soyinka’s The Man Died, is the first of its kind on the events leading to our civil war. Despite these errors, the 220 page book reads well and, much more than The Man Died, has a simple narrative which is easy to digest. What truly makes Umweni’s book a first is that, as its blurb says, no book about our civil war had provided an account of the prison conditions in war time Biafra. However, beyond the rebel enclave’s prisons, the book also provides insights into the interplay of forces in the enclave with the usual mix of greed, betrayal, abuse of power, sex, ethnic and even sub-ethnic persecution. The book, for example, exposes the deep divisions between Onitsha Ibos and Ika-Ibos who claim descent from the old Benin Kingdom and hinterland Igbo – divisions which Ojukwu manipulated to remain in power, something which in turn showed that the rebel leader did not practice the “equality of citizenship” he preached to Soyinka in their encounter last month. Umweni begins his book with his “invitation” to Enugu to meet Ojukwu, along with the three others on August 12, 1967. It then takes us through their “house” detention for weeks at Presidential Hotel, Enugu, and finally to their conviction without trial as “saboteurs” (the most dreaded status in Biafra) and their subsequent harrowing experience in various prisons at Aba, Okigwe, Umuahia and on to Biafra’s most dreaded maximum security prison at Ntueke where Chief Superintend of Prisons Okeke, “the devil – incarnate,” to use Umweni’s words, reigned supreme. The book also gives us some insight into how Colonels Victor Badejo and Emmanuel Ifeajuna and others involved with the ill-advised Biafra invasion of the Mid-West fell from the grace of being Ojukwu’s most trusted lieutenants into becoming saboteurs who had to pay for their change in fortune with their lives at the hands of a firing squad. The book paints a picture of Ojukwu as a “vainglorious braggart” who boasted that even the Biafran grass would fight the northern “vandals” and also said that if he had wanted he would have followed his invasion of the Midwest with a march on to Lagos to snatch Gowon. Umweni quotes Ojukwu as saying oil from Biafra and the Midwest would easily fund his war to success. On the other hand, he reportedly said, “By the time Gowon finishes selling all the cattle in the north, we shall see who will come on his bended knees.” In the end it was Ojukwu, not Gowon, who ate crow, as Umweni’s book vividly documents in the last of the book’s 11 chapters. It does not give an account of how Ojukwu left the enclave for Ivory Coast in “search of peace” but it gives a vivid account of how rebel soldiers and their officers guarding the prisoners, most of whom were minorities from the Delta region, threw away their weapons on Biafra’s very last day and even begged the prisoners for their civilian clothes to escape capture by the federal troops. Umweni’s book is significant not merely because it is the first to provide an insight into what went on in Biafran prisons. It is also significant as a timely reminder that those who canvass for war or finance and fan its embers are invariably those who are well shielded from its terrible consequences. This probably best explains why 40 years after Ojukwu started our civil war, he remains “fiercely unrepentant,” in the words of BBC’s Richards. Umweni’s book is one that all Nigerians, especially those insistent on re-enacting the break-up of Nigeria, must read. |