tsephanyah:
Bifrans soldiers- hid in a cave when the war ended, waiting for the slaughter to begin. As an officer in the short-lived West African nation called Biafra, he had every reason to expect death.
Nwankwo had heard rumors that the victorious Nigerian federal forces, having fought for three years to win back the southeastern corner of their country, had a secret plan to kill every male of the secessionist Ibo tribe. After a tribal war, tradition was on the side of vengeance.
Yet, after four days in his cave, it dawned on Nwankwo that something else was going on. "We sent out a scout to see if the Nigerians were killing people," Nwankwo recalled. "They were not."
Like tens of thousands of Ibos, the young officer then walked out of the bush and surrendered. He accepted the death of Biafra, an Ibo nation, and resumed life in the fractious, tribal amalgam called Nigeria. Now the president of a profitable publishing house in this city that once was Biafra's capital, Nwankwo argues that if Nigeria had done the expected, the 1967-70 war never would have ended.
"If there had been mass killings," he said, "there would be a guerrilla movement in Biafra today."
In the calculated act of not wiping out a rebellious people, Nigeria brought a full stop to the bloodiest conflict in the history of independent Africa. The government invited the Ibos, an industrious people who now number about 30 million, back into the country's economy. Nigeria laid to rest the cycle of tribal violence that continues to torment much of the African continent from Ethiopia to Angola, from Liberia to Uganda.
"I believe that Nigeria as a result of the war has learned that an ethnocentric political movement, no matter where, would not be viable," said Chukwueeka O. Ojukwu, the man who led the Biafra revolt, in a recent interview in Lagos.
Ojukwu, now 54, once said that "whilst I live, Biafra lives." The Oxford-educated son of a millionaire Ibo businessman, he was the stony heart and strategic brain behind the long refusal of Biafra to surrender to an army far larger and better-equipped. Historians and Ibos who fought along with him accuse Ojukwu of pointlessly prolonging the war as tens of thousands of Ibos starved.
Ojukwu fled Biafra two days before the war ended and spent 13 years in exile. After a pardon in 1982, he returned home and served as a vice president in a civilian government. Now, as a private citizen, he says he has "every political ambition that a citizen of Nigeria legitimately has."
"I do believe the nation has benefited from this rather painful education," he said. "I believe that any leader of any group in Nigeria today should be seeking greater integration. I believe the name of the game is nation-building."
Like most conflicts in modern Africa, the origins of the Biafran war lie in the colonial era. A British invention called Nigeria roped together three of the most highly developed ethnic groups on the continent: the Ibo, the Hausa-Fulani and the Yoruba.
Of the three, the Ibo were the quickest to adapt to the English language and English ways. The Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, himself an Ibo, writes that "unlike the Hausa-Fulani, Ibo man was unhindered by a wary {Moslem} religion and unlike the Yoruba {he was} unhampered by traditional hierarchies.
"This kind of creature, fearing not God nor man, was custom-made to grasp the opportunities . . . of the white man's dispensation."
From the 1930s to the mid-1960s, Ibos settled across Nigeria. They were prosperous traders and they excelled in medicine and the law. Ibos accounted for 60 percent of officer ranks in the Army, and they were dominant in the civil service. Their often ostentatious prosperity was particularly resented in the north, home of the Hausa-Fulani.
An abortive but bloody coup attempt in 1966 gave the Hausa an opportunity to cash in on their resentment. The coup plotters were mostly Ibo officers. Their victims were mostly non-Ibos. The notion of an Ibo conspiracy to dominate political power in Nigeria seized the imagination of Hausa mobs. Riots and mass killings of Ibo began in the north.
More than 1 million Ibo were forced to flee eastward to their homeland. A year later, Biafra was born and civil war broke out. Before the war ended, an estimated 1 million people died.
The "painful education" that Nigeria underwent does not appear to have taught much to the rest of black Africa. The continent continues to harbor more civil wars and generate more refugees than any region on earth. Tribal violence continues in the blood-stained soil of old conflicts.
The governments of Uganda and Sudan are struggling to end civil wars that have their origin, in large measure, in the failure of the current leaderships to value national unity and individual human rights above tribal and regional loyalties.
Three years ago in the small West African nation of Liberia, an abortive coup again demonstrated the enduring power of tribal logic.
Soldiers in the government of President Samuel K. Doe, after putting down the ill-organized military operation, savagely turned on both the coup makers and innocent members of the tribes suspected of backing them.
The coup leader, Thomas Quiwompka, was killed, mutilated and eaten by government soldiers, according to witnesses. Hundreds of members of Quiwompka's tribe also were killed, many of them publicly dismembered. Doe's government never punished the soldiers responsible nor did it publicly condemn the savagery. Several soldiers involved received promotions.
The legacy of the killings in Liberia is tribal rage directed at Doe and his tribe, the Krahn. If Doe's government were to fall, many western observers say that the Krahn could be exterminated.
It turned out differently here in Nigeria, according to Ojukwu and other insiders in the Biafran cause, because of Gen. Yakubu Gowon, commander of the military government that crushed Biafra. He was feared by the Ibo people as a leader with "genocidal" tendencies.
That fear had been planted by Biafra's Directorate of Propaganda to motivate Ibos to fight on. Fear of Gowon sent well-educated men such as Nwankwo to hide in caves.
On the day the war ended, however, Gowon delivered a nationwide radio address that Ibos still point to as the main reason they are alive.
"I solemnly repeat our guarantees of a general amnesty for those misled into rebellion. We guarantee the personal safety of everyone who submits to federal authority," Gowon said. The general insisted that the war had produced "no victor and no vanquished."
"I believe that Gowon is personally responsible for the way the war ended," said Nwankwo. "It must be said for Gowon that he had the integrity to keep his word."
Under Gowon's orders, no war reparations were demanded of the Ibos, nor were any medals granted for war service. Many Ibos returned to the national Army or the civil service, and much of their property in the north and west of Nigeria was restored to them.
"In the history of warfare," noted John de St. Jorre, author of what is regarded as the foremost history of the Biafran war, "there can rarely have been such a bloodless end and such a merciful aftermath."
Ben Gbulie, a military engineer trained at the Sandhurst Royal Military Academy in England, was a senior officer on the Biafran side. For his role in the 1966 coup attempt that helped spark the conflict, he was jailed by Gowon's government.
The five years he spent in prison have left him bitter and he shares little of the admiration that other Ibos express toward Gowon. But he acknowledges that the Nigerian general did what he himself would not have done. "Gowon had every right to shoot us," said Gbulie, now a businessman here in Enugu. "Probably if we had won the war, we would have shot him."
While Gowon's vow to ensure the personal safety of the Ibos was kept, many Ibos argue that his promise of "reconciliation, reconstruction and rehabilitation" was not.
Many middle-class Ibos became paupers when the Nigerian government, in the immediate aftermath of the war, confiscated their bank accounts. Two years later, when the government ordered all foreign companies to sell out to Nigerian nationals, the Ibos had no money to invest. Accordingly, they had little chance to move into senior positions in industry and business.
Ibos make up nearly a quarter of Nigeria's 112 million people. But their votes control only two of the federal government's 21 states. Gerrymandering, the Ibos grumble, has slashed their fair share of political power in half.
Ibos claim they are consistently shortchanged. They point to quotas that limit Ibo access to the country's best universities. They complain that tribal prejudice keeps major federal projects outside of Ibo land.
"Because we are now one polity, these inequities strike us as unfair," said Ojukwu, the former Biafran leader who continues to command a wide following among the Ibo. "We are constantly asking ourselves, are we being treated as the underdog?"
The answer to that question, according to a number of influential Ibo businessmen and war veterans, is yes. But those same influential Ibos maintain that postwar Nigeria allows ambitious people from any tribe to succeed.
"Let's face it, Nigeria is one of the freest African countries," said Nwankwo, the book publisher who once hid in a cave. "You can speak out. You can get ahead. We Ibo don't feel hopeless. We are self-reliant. The country needs our skills to grow." OK. Check your DM please |
