BIAFRA: On The 45th Anniversary Of The First Shot

"It was clear even to the most undiscerning observer that civil war as Murtala predicted months before, was inevitable...It is true that on July 6th, 1967, Nigeria fired the first formal shot in the civil war.".........Patrick A. Anwunah

"I want see no Red Cross, no caritas, no World Council of Churches, no pope, no missionary and no United Nations delegation. I want to prevent even one Igbo from having even one piece to eat before their capitulation. We shoot at everything that moves and when our troops march into the center of Igbo territory, we shoot at everything even at things that don't move".........Benjamin Adekunle

It was a shocking realization. It was beyond comprehension. Women were raped. Pregnant women were eviscerated. Men were forced to drink their own urine before being hacked to death. Men were lined up and shot execution style; the ones that escaped drowned. Women, infants and children were desperately starved to death. Churches were burnt down to the ground. Market stalls were were plundered and demolished. When it was over, three million souls had perished...

BIAFRA: Chief Akpan Bassey Press Interview In London

The following is an abstract from ITN on Chief Akpan Bassey's Interview with the press conducted August 31, 1967, in London, England, asking Britain to be mediator in peace talks with the Nigerian federal government.


Lead in Q: Who would you like to act as mediator?

Akpan Bassey: Well, I have every confidence that Britain could be a possible mediator, failing that America....

Q: But you've accused the British of siding with the Federal Nigerian Government, can you expect her to mediate in these conditions?

Akpan Bassey: It is not too late for Britain to withdraw and then to come in with us, we still have confidence in Britain and that Britain can still track back what has happened in the past, we are prepared to allow it, and then go on with the....

Q: But you have said that Britain has sold arms to the Federal Nigerian Government, does this accusation still stand?

Akpan Bassey: It is not a matter of - it is true, it is a fact that Britain sold arms, and they've admitted that by representative from Whitehall. So it is a fact. But not withstanding the fact that they've sold arms, we've asked them to stop now and talk about mediation.

Q: Now presumably Biafra has also been able to get arms from somewhere, can you say from where?

Akpan Bassey: We do a lot of local manufacture, we make our own bombs, we make our own rockets and we make our rifles.

This Phase Of Igbo Genocide

By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

The concept “failed-state” carries an understandable melodramatic import! It refers to the inability or failure of a state to fulfil some of its key roles and responsibilities to its people(s) and others domiciled within its territory and consequently to its neighbours and the wider global community of states. State failure materialises at three broad spheres of the lives of the people(s): social, political and economic. The following would feature among the key empirical determinants of this failure:

1. The state’s inability to provide security to its population – crucially, a catastrophic failure as the state’s primary existence is predicated on this provision of security to its citizens. This failure may have arisen because the state no longer exercises control across part/parts or all of its territory. Several factors could account for this including, for instance, calamitous breakdowns in vital internal sociopolitical and economic relations, intra-regime fractionalism and rivalries and the unmanageability of natural disasters. As we shall note shortly, it could also be due to the state’s actively pursued violation of the human rights of the people(s) including, most gravely, a deliberate state policy to embark on the destruction of one or more of its constituent nations/peoples/religious groups, etc., etc.

2. The state’s inability to provide essential social services (communication infrastructure, health care, education, housing and recreation, development of culture) to its people(s) or the state’s deliberate policy to deny or partially offer such services to some of its constituent nations/peoples/religious groups…

There remains a lack of consensus among scholars studying the failed states of contemporary Africa on the terms of the evaluative parameters of this enterprise including the critical constitutive timeframes of assessing and therefore concluding when this or that African state ‘began to fail’ or/and when indeed it “failed”. There is a tendency by many to arbitrarily circumscribe the limit of the focus of interrogation to the so-called African post-conquest epoch (i.e., post-1 January 1956, following the presumed restoration of independence date in the Sudan) with the underlying presumption that the state, as formulated and constituted on the eve of the “restoration of independence”, has a definitive and enduring internal logic to its being. Of course what such a staggeringly ahistorical arbitrariness does to this scholarship is that it attempts to freeze layers and layers of vital record and practice off sustained scrutiny as it wishes to project this era of all-Africa external conquest and occupation as “largely unproblematic”. Undoubtedly, as has been demonstrated all too clearly since January 1956, a post-(European)conquest African Studies corpus built on such a blatantly contrived edifice is hopelessly trapped in a debilitating and eventual terminal crisis.

1945 & 1953

For Nigeria, the country at the focus of this roundtable, it is at once a failed and genocide state. It is to Jos, a city in its northcentral region, that we locate the start of the trajectory to its “failed state” status. The year is not 2000 or 2001 or any other year in this last decade nor indeed in any of the three years of the current decade but 1945, eleven years before 1956 and fifteen years before 1960 – the year of the “termination” of the British occupation of the country. In October 1945, in the wake of a very successful anti-occupation countrywide strike, Hausa-Fulani muslim north regional leaders, those much endeared clients of the occupation-regime who were not only opposed to this strike but also the ultimate goal of Nigeria’s liberation from the British conquest in which Igbo people played a vanguard role, organised and launched a pogrom against Igbo immigrants in Jos and the surrounding tin mining towns and villages on the plateau. Hundreds of Igbo were murdered during the massacre and tens of thousands of pounds sterling worth of their property looted or destroyed. No perpetrators of these murders were ever apprehended or punished by the occupation-regime. As a result, emboldened Hausa-Fulani leaders organised yet another pogrom of Igbo immigrants in the north, this time in Kano, 180 miles further north, in May 1953, which coincided with the heightened debates among Nigerian politicians on the possible date for the formal termination of the occupation and the restoration of independence. Hundreds of Igbo were murdered during this massacre and tens of thousands of pounds sterling worth of their property looted or destroyed. Once again, no perpetrators of these murders were apprehended or punished by the occupation-regime.

1966-2012

On the contrary, as the world would witness 13 years later, these dual pogroms became dreadful dress rehearsals for the most gruesome, most devastating, and most expansive stretch of state-organised mass murders of a people not seen in Africa since the German-organised genocide of the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of contemporary Namibia in the early 1900s. Beginning 29 May 1966 to 12 January 1970, the composite aggregation of the Nigeria state – military officers, the police, Hausa-Fulani emirs, muslim clerics and intellectuals, students, civil servants, journalists, politicians and other public figures – planned and executed the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. This is also Africa’s most destructive genocide of the 20th century. A total of 3.1 million Igbo people, a quarter of this nation’s population at the time, were murdered during those harrowing 44 months. Most Igbo were slaughtered in their homes, offices, businesses, schools, colleges, hospitals, markets, churches, shrines, farmlands, factories/industrial enterprises, children’s playground, town halls, refugee centres, cars, lorries, and at bus stations, railway stations, airports and on buses, trains and planes and on foot, or starved to death – the openly propagated regime-“weapon” to achieve its heinous goal more speedily. In the end, the Igbo genocide was enforced, devastatingly, by Nigeria’s simultaneously pursued land, aerial and naval blockade and bombardment of Igboland, Africa’s highest population density region outside the Nile Delta. The genocidists also sequestrated and pillaged the multibillion-dollar Biafra economy, one of the most advanced and enterprising hubs in Africa of the era.

Most of Africa and the world stood by and watched, hardly critical or condemnatory of this wanton destruction of human lives, raping, sacking and plundering of towns, villages, community after community in Biafra and elsewhere... The consequences for Africa have been catastrophic. In this genocide of the Igbo, Nigeria inaugurated the “age of pestilence” that defines contemporary Africa. Several regimes elsewhere in Africa are “convinced” of the conclusions that they have drawn from this crime by their Nigerian counterpart: “We can murder targeted constituent people(s) at will within the state we control … Haul off their prized property and livelihood … Comprehensively destroy their cities, towns, villages, communities – precisely their agelong, priceless, inheritance ... There will be no sanctions from Africa – and the world”. As a result, the Igbo genocide becomes the clearing site for the haunting killing fields that would crisscross the African geographical landscape in the subsequent 40 years with the murders of additional 12 million Africans, since January 1970, by regimes in further genocide in Rwanda, Darfur and Zaïre/Democratic Republic of Congo and other killings in Liberia, Ethiopia, Congo Republic, Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, south Sudan, Burundi.

One would perhaps be forgiven if they thought that, after such a frenzied indulgence in indescribable depravity in mass slaughtering and a trail of destruction, capped by its occupation of Biafra, Nigeria would tire out of its appetite to continue the murder of Igbo people. No, not really. This obligatory haematophagous creature continues its murder of the Igbo unabated – almost routinely and ritualistically during the course of subsequent years, signposted here by the eerie columns that chart the contours of fresh pogrom outrages: 1980 ... 1982 ... 1985 ... 1991 ... 1993 ... 1994 ... 1999 ... 2000 ... 2001 ... 2002 ... 2004 ... 2005 ... 2006 ... 2007 ... 2008 ... 2009 ... 2010 ... 2011 ... 2012. According to the December 2011 research by the International Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule Of Law, a human rights organisation based in Onicha, 90 per cent of the 54,000 people murdered in Nigeria by the state/quasi-state operatives and agents since 1999 are Igbo people. Since last Christmas Day, the Boko Haram islamist insurgent group spearheads these murders. At least 80 per cent of people murdered by the Boko Haram across swathes of lands in north/northcentral Nigeria since then are Igbo. Hundreds of thousands of Igbo families have abandoned homes and businesses in the affected region and have returned to Igboland. Arguably, the Igbo are the world’s most brutally targeted and most viciously murdered of peoples presently. Not since 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 has Igbo life in Nigeria acquired such a gripping existential emergency…

The Boko Haram now issues its threats to murder quite habitually, at times on a daily basis, and, true to its words, executes its mission most ruthlessly, most remorselessly. After each of its outrages, Boko Haram acknowledges responsibility and does this most dispassionately… The regime in Abuja appears cruelly powerless to protect Igbo people (and others) emplaced within the jurisdiction of the supposedly sovereign state it controls with the well-known consequences in international law that this shocking relegation of responsibility entails. Regime-head Goodluck Jonathan says as much in a recent astonishing radio and television broadcast to his country and the world: “Boko Haram is everywhere in the executive arm of [my] government, in the legislative arm of [my] government and even in the judiciary. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security [services] … Some continue to dip their hands and eat with you and you won’t even know the person who will point a gun at you or plant a bomb behind your house”. Following from Jonathan’s proclamation, it is conceivable that right there closeted in his regime, there are operatives deeply complicit in these ongoing murders. And it doesn’t appear that the regime can halt the
murdering nor the insurgency. On the contrary, Jonathan is essentially saying in his broadcast: “I don’t know how to solve this problem; I can’t solve this problem”. The seriousness of this situation cannot be exaggerated. Presently, Nigeria is a grave danger to itself. Nigeria is a grave danger to its constituent peoples and nations, to its neighbours, to the west Africa region, to Africa and the wider world. Nigeria has indeed now run the course of its bloody trail in history. The ongoing murders have exposed, particularly, the lethal fissures in a hitherto seemingly compact genocidist monolith. This fractionalisation cannot be contained.

REFERENDUM AND SUCCESSOR STATE(S)

Whilst Jonathan’s broadcast is undoubtedly a desperate acknowledgement of helplessness if not hopelessness, it however opens up an historic opportunity to overcome this tragedy. There is undoubtedly a silver lining over this cloud. What is critically at stake here is the right of the peoples domiciled in Nigeria, each and every constituent people, to democratically decide their future. This right to self-determination for every people is inalienable and is guaranteed by the United Nations. No people is exempt from exercising this right. To proceed to the realisation of this goal, two key features are called for forthwith:

1. The requisite institutions of the world must now embark on initiating the process for an internationally organised, supervised, and binding referendum across Nigeria for the peoples, themselves, to decide whether they wish to remain in Nigeria or form new state(s) of their choice.

2. To support Igbo people’s participation in this referendum, Igbo intellectuals should double up their efforts to work for the restoration of Igbo sovereignty, Biafra. The Igbo genocide is one of the most comprehensively documented crimes against humanity. Nonetheless, Igbo intellectuals must contribute, robustly, to continue to inform the entire world of the nature and extent of the genocide, examining, particularly, the variegated contours of the expansive trail of this crime, the parameters and strictures of the monstrosity of denialism of the crime (especially by some clusters of the core perpetrators of the crime in Nigeria and their collaborators abroad including some in academia and media) and the debilitating and oppressive burden of 40 years of occupation.

Let it never be forgotten that, four decades ago, Igbo intellectuals, many very talented and widely accomplished men and women in their varying fields of expertise (writers, academics, artists, students, diplomats, military officers, scientists, physicians, lawyers, engineers), contributed most profoundly to the eventual survival of the Igbo during phases I and II of the genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, when only few in the world thought that they would accomplish such an improbable feat. We surely have an historic legacy to contend with.

*(Paper presented at “Roundtable on Nigeria’s future: The challenges to security and economic development caused by Boko Haram and the way forward”, held at E. Franklin Frazier Center for Social Work Research, Howard University Law School, Washington, DC, United States, Thursday 12 April 2012. Roundtable moderator: Robin Renee Sanders, former US ambassador to Nigeria and Republic of Congo; other roundtable panellists – Pat Utomi, professor and senior fellow, Lagos Business School, Pan-African University, Lagos, Nigeria; Augustine (Gus) Fahey, senior desk officer for Nigeria, Bureau of African Affairs, US State Department, Washington, DC; Oguchi Nkwocha, physician, Biafra Foundation, Los Angeles; Michael Maduagwu, professor and senior fellow, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, Kuru, Nigeria and Eric Guttschuss, Nigeria researcher, Human Rights Watch, Washington, DC; roundtable coordinator: Chima Korieh, professor of history, Marquette University, Milwaukee; roundtable co-sponsors: Apollos Nwauwa, president of Igbo Studies Association and professor of history, Bowling Green State University, Ohio; Kanayo Odeluga, physician and executive director, Igbo League, Chicago and Mike Mbanaso, professor and director, E. Franklin Frazier Center for Social Work Research, Howard University, Washington, DC.)

Please follow Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe on twitter: @HerbertEkweEkwe

C. Odumegwu Ojukwu's Press Conference On Aburi Meeting

You are already aware that we have just ended the meeting of the Supreme Military Council in Ghana. It has come to my notice that the public is anxious to have more details of decisions taken.

The meeting opened with a joint declaration by all of us, the military leaders, renouncing the use of force as a means of settling the present crisis in Nigeria and holding ourselves in honor bound by that declaration. That declaration also reaffirmed our faith in discussions and negotiations as the peaceful means of resolving the Nigerian crisis. having regard to the great fear and suspicion on all parts about the use of force, we thought that this declaration should precede any other business; and I am sure that all Nigerians will welcome it as a source of great relief.

The next important matter discussed, and upon which a lot of other things hinged, was the organization of the Nigerian army. Let me say here that our discussions right through went on in a calm atmosphere, understanding, and realism. We in the East have always felt that realism and understanding were lacking in the past in the approach to our problems, and it was very encouraging that our meetings on the two days showed the sincere determination by all to find realistic solutions to our problems.

it was agreed that the army will be henceforth be governed by the Supreme Military Council, the chairman of which will be known as Commander-in-Chief and Head of the Federal Military Government. There is to be a military headquarters on which the regions will be equally represented and which will be headed by a Chief of Staff. There shall be an area command in each region under the charge of an area command in each region under the charge of an area commander -- the regions corresponding to the existing ones. There will be a Lagos garrison, which will include Ikeja. For the duration of the military government, military governors will have control over their area commands in matters of internal security. All matters of policy, shall be dealt with by the Supreme Military Council. Any decision affecting the whole country must be determined by the Supreme Military Council, and when a meeting is not possible, such a matter must be referred to the military governors for comments and concurrence.

Subject to the above arrangements, we felt that the existing governmental institutions, namely, the Supreme Military Council and the Federal Executive Council, as well as regional executive councils, are workable and should be retained.

It was agreed that the Supreme Military Council must collectively approve appointments to the following offices: a) diplomatic consular posts; b) senior posts in the armed forces and the police; c) superscale federal corporation posts.

This particular decision was made as a means of removing friction, it being our unfortunate experience that friction and misunderstanding had in the past bedeviled these appointments. What it means is that no one person will have the right and power to make these appointments alone in the future.

Politically, it was unanimously agreed that it was in the interest of the safety of this nation that the regions should move slightly further apart than before. As a prelude to this, it was decided that all decrees and parts of decrees promulgated since the military regime, and which detracted from the previous powers of the regional governments, should be repealed by the twenty-first of this month. Once this is done and the agreements are implemented, the aim of allowing the regions to operate more independently and of ensuring fairness to all will be achieved.

The question of displaced persons was exhaustively discussed. As regards civil servants and employees of government corporations who had to flee their places of work as a result of the current situation, it was decided that such people will be paid their full salaries up to the end of March this year, unless they have found alternative employment.

On the question of other displaced persons, it was decided to set up a committee to look into the problems of rehabilitation and recovery of property. I took that opportunity to repeat my assurance that those non easterners who had to be ordered to leave the region in the interest of their own safety would be welcomed back as soon as conditions become more normal.

I have hurried to make this statement to you because of the misgivings which I understand are prevalent in the region as a result of this meeting. I recall that just before my departure, when the public did not even know that our meeting was so close, students and other groups of individuals issued resolutions advising me against attending any meeting with my counterparts. You will now be convinced that this meeting was more than necessary and worthwhile. Our duty is to reduce or remove tension, in order to leave ourselves free to tackle the most urgent and constructive tasks of economic and social development, which cannot be possible in a state of tension and fear. I have no doubt that all of us who participated in the last discussions are determined to implement the agreements reached. Once this is done, we shall have gone a long way to relieving tension and banishing fear among us. It is our plan to meet again soon, this time in Nigeria, to consider other matters arising from our last discussions and those which were not touched.

I want here to place on record my personal indebtedness to the government and people of Ghana for making a plane available to convey me to and from the meetings on the two days, and for making other arrangements to make this meeting possible. Provided our aims are achieved, we in this country will have cause to remain eternally grateful to Ghana for their constructive initiative.

For our part in this country, we must keep calm and avoid actions or words which might create difficulties for our progress in the solution of our problems.

God will certainly rescue this nation from collapse and perdition.

January 6, 1967 - Government House, Enugu, Eastern Nigeria

C. Odumegwu Ojukwu On The July 29, 1966 Mutiny And Massacre

I have considered with my Executive Committee the very grave events in some parts of the country regarding the rebellion by some sections of the Nigerian army against the National Military Government which resulted in the kidnapping of His Excellency the Head of the National Military Government and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Major General J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi, and the cold premeditated murder of officers of eastern Nigerian origin.

In the course of this rebellion, I had discussions with the Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters, Brigadier Ogundipe, who, as the next most senior officer in the absence of the Supreme Commander, should have assumed command of the army; my colleagues, the other military governors; and the Chief of Staff, Army Headquarters, Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon. During this discussions it was understood that the only conditions on which the rebels would agree to cease-fire were:

1). That the Republic of Nigeria be split into its component parts;

2). That all Southerners resident in the North be repatriated to the South, and all Northerners resident in the South repatriated to the North.

In spite of the fact that the only representations made at these cease-fire negotiations were those of the rebels and and their supporters in the North, and notwithstanding that the views of the people of the Eastern group provinces had not been ascertained, it was agreed to accept these proposals and stop further bloodshed.

The public is aware of the wanton and deliberate massacre of several people of Eastern Nigerian origin in last May’s disturbances in parts of the Northern group of provinces. In view of the very strong feelings aroused among the people of the east at that time as to whether their membership in the Nigerian nation was desirable, I appealed to chiefs and leaders of the people to use their influence to stop any retaliation or precipitate action, in the hope that this would be the final act of sacrifice Easterners would be called to make in the interest of Nigerian unity. However, the brutal and planned annihilation of officers of Eastern Nigerian origin in the last few days has again cat serious doubts as to whether the people of Nigeria after these cruel and bloody atrocities, cn ever sincerely live together as members of the same nation.

I have noted the action taken to stop bloodshed in the country, and I now consider that the next step is to open discussions at the appropriate level to allow other sections of the igeria eple to express their views, as their Northern compatriots have recently done, as to what form of association they desire for themselves in accordance with the ceasefire terms.

As a result of the pressures and representations now being made to me by the chiefs, leaders and organizations in the Eastern group of provinces, I am arranging for representatives of chiefs and organizations in these provinces to meet and advise me.

Meanwhile, I appeal to our people of these provinces not to give expression to their feelings in any violent form but to cooperate with the law enforcement authorities in he assurance that their rights of self-determination will be guaranteed.

I have further conveyed to the Chief of Staff at Supreme Headquarters, my fellow military governors, and the Chief of Staff at Army Headquarters my understanding that the only intention of the announcement made by the Chief of Staff at Army Headquarters today is the restoration of peace in the country, while immediate negotiations are begun, to allow the people of Nigeria to determine the form of their future association.

August 1,1966 Broadcast, Enugu, Eastern Nigeria Government House.

Odumegwu Ojukwu's Message on the Pogrom to Biafran Students in America

“The people of the former eastern region of Nigeria had believed, as if it were an article of faith, in the concept of a united Nigeria. No section of then Federation of Nigeria worked assiduously for the attainment of this ideal as did Eastern Nigeria and her people. No section made as many and varied positive contributions toward the realization of true unity.

Having, over the years, spearheaded the movement for closer union, having demonstrated our faith in Nigeria in concrete terms by allowing our sons and daughters to sojourn in other parts of the country, thereby contributing tremendously to the development of such areas to the neglect of our own, it was a hard decision for us to opt out of a federation in which we had invested so much. But we had no other choice.

Over the years, our erstwhile compatriots made it clear in unmistakable terms that they did not want us in the Federation. Since the 1950s our people were expropriated and discriminated against in parts of Nigeria other than their own. Furthermore, the experience of three harrowing waves of remorseless genocide in 1945, 1953, and especially in 1966, involving a total of nearly 50,000 dead and countless others maimed or destitute, provided an object lesson which could not be but taken seriously.

Self-preservation is probably the strongest human instinct, and it is this that has compelled the harassed and prosecuted people of eastern Nigeria to seek refuge in their own home and among their kindred. As a proverb of one of our Biafran languages has it, “A man who is rejected by others cannot reject himself."

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu's "Message on the Pogrom to Biafran Students in America," November 24, 1967

Ojukwu on "Our Role In The Development Of Nigeria"

Christian education and Western training stimulated and enriched our native resourcefulness, industry, and dynamism and so contributed in no small measure to the leading role we played in the development of Nigeria during the half century before 1966. In all spheres of life in the former Federation of Nigeria--economic, social, cultural, political, and constitutional--we were in the forefront of the struggle for unity and equality, justice and progress. Economically, down to the late 1950s, our territory was relegated to the backwaters as a destitute area. national institutions, projects, and utilities were deliberately sited outside our territory.

Nevertheless, we invested confidently in the development of whole of Nigeria. We unhesitatingly built houses, hotels, shops, market stalls, etc,. in various parts of the country, sometimes on the strength of mere certificates of occupancy which could be, and indeed often were, revoked at will in Northern Nigeria. We provided intermediate and high-level manpower for the development of Nigeria, only to be later frustrated and expelled from positions we had earned on merit.

After the fashion of the Christian missionaries, we built schools and colleges and supplied teachers and lecturers for general education throughout the country. In the same manner, we established hospitals and nursing homes and provided doctors and nurses for healing and tending the sick. We strove in every way to identify ourselves with the peoples of the areas in which we settled. We spoke their language; we intermarried with them; and Northern Nigerians even declared that, because we wore their dresses, they had conquered us culturally. Yet, in spite of all this, in Northern Nigeria we were physically and socially segregated from the indigenous people. In contrast, the people of Western Nigeria who shared the same education and cultural experience, took pride in being “traditionally reluctant” to settle in and contribute to the development of places outside their region...”

In the field of political and constitutional development, while we advocated a strong united Nigeria and had for our watchword one country, one constitution, one destiny, Northern Nigerians consistently and openly maintained that the Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria in 1914 was “a mistake.” Not surprisingly, in January 1950, at the General Conference Summoned at Ibadan to discuss proposals for the review of the Nigerian Constitution, the Northern Nigerian delegates announced that “unless the Northern Central Legislature it would ask for separation from the rest of Nigeria on the arrangements existing before 1914.” In other words, Northern Nigeria would secede. Eventually, to avoid breaking up the country, we conceded this demand.

At the Ibadan conference of 1950, also, Northern Nigerians insisted that “only Northern Nigerian male adults of twenty five years or more, resident in the region for three years, should be qualified for election to the Northern House of Assembly.” In reply, our delegates were obliged to enter a minority report in which they raised an issue of fundamental principle. They asserted:

“It is our view invidious that any Nigerian could under a Nigerian Constitution be deprived of the right of election to the House of Assembly in any region in which he for reason of the accident of birth or ancestry.”

Three years later, in May 1953, during one of the recurrent constitutional crises of those years, Northern Nigeria again agitated for secession. They published an eight point proposal for the establishment of a “Central Agency” to maintain what was in effect a Common Services Organization. To secure the implementation of this proposal by force, Northern Nigerian leaders organized and carried out violent demonstrations, during which they slaughtered and wounded hundreds of our people then resident in Kano, Northern Nigeria, acts of genocide which they had perpetrated at Jos in Northern Nigeria earlier in 1945. In the end, we had to abandon the idea of a strong and united country which we had been advocating and, with difficulty, persuaded Northern Nigeria to accept a stronger federal system of government than that which was envisaged by them.

The following year, as a result of its failure to absorb Lagos, Western Nigeria also threatened to secede and was only prevented from proceeding to make good the threat by a stern and timely warning from the British Secretary of State for the colonies, Mr. Oliver Lyttleton (afterward Lord Chandos).

Address Delivered at the OAU Special Session, Addis Ababa, August 05, 1968

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu (1933-2011)

“Our struggle is a positive commitment to build a healthy, dynamic, and progressive state which will be a bulwark against neocolonialism, and the pride of Black men the world over. The failure of the Nigerian experiment was a tragic result of a refusal by both Nigeria and the world to recognize, accept, and accommodate the obvious and painful fact that Nigeria was not and could never be a nation. The nations comprising the Federation lacked all the necessary factors for cohesion, and her peoples the necessary will. The center, therefore, could not hold.”

----------------------Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, 1969

Mississi, ele ebe umuazi gara? where have the kids gone, my father would ask my mother upon his return from his daily routine of trading at Mokola market in Accra, Ghana. My father never called the woman (my mother) he spent his lifetime savings to marry, by her first name until death did them part. It had always been mississi, and my father never added the letter “m” to lay a claim. It was just respect for the lady who bore all his children. Mma and Mpa, we hope you are all doing well out there in the environment only our Creator knows, and, still, beyond our reasoning.

We talked a lot about a country and ethnic group we knew nothing of; just that our parents spoke the language to us even though we talked back sometimes in Ga, having identified themselves as a people with distinct language and culture, way far from where we lived.

We were little brats, diversified in culture and ethnic origin, growing up, playing together on the playgrounds and amusement parks at Ruga, Nima and Kanda Estates. We watched all the television movies and knew all the casts by their names, including the sports telecasts--Bonanza, High Chaparral, “Marverick,” The Lone Ranger, The Saint, Ghanaian National Football League engagements and often times, the Black Fire card playing games in our neighborhood--together with my childhood pals; Theodore Onyeji, Eugene Onyeji, John Bull and Hellistus and on occasions, with Chukwu Egbejimba.

While growing up in that multi-ethnic, multicultural multireligious community, I watched my father and his Igbo kins in the neighborhood, gather and talk about developments in their homeland, the fate of their brothers, sisters and relatives. I had noticed something out of the ordinary brewing in my native-land as my father’s gestures and expressions obviously indicated, which as it appeared, was full of uncertainties. It was not to be pleasant; the consequences would be ominous when Yakubu Gowon’s-led genocidal campaign quest against the Igbo nation was all over.

Afrter my first experience during the time Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in Ghana, February 1966, some five weeks before the military juntas carried out a coup that would fail in Nigeria from around which the Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and a few northern Nigeria politicians and military personnel lost their lives. My father and his kinsfolk within the Accra metropolis wore troubling looks, and had been restless on what they have been hearing over the air waves and reading all along from the news reels, including the speculations which spread all over, in form of propaganda about declaration of war.

Major General Johnson Thomas Umunnakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi had been flogged, kidnapped and brutally murdered in a counter coup, organized by a Murtala Mohammed-led northern Nigeria military mutineers, six months after taking the nation’s affairs of state, during which time he sacked the regional administrations and appointed military governors, promulgating new decrees, particularly Decree no. 34, also known as the Unification Decree in attempt to unite the country after the January 15, 1966 coup.. Lt.-Col Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu was assigned to the Eastern Region. “Decree 34 was intended to establish a National Executive Council for the whole country with the regional military governors as members and to unify the top cadres of the civil service to ensure the efficient administration of the country for the duration of the military regime. Ironically enough, it was this decree that sparked off widespread rioting and violence directed against the lives and property of Eastern Nigerians in Northern Nigeria. It did not seem to matter to the leaders who planned the riots that Eastern Nigerians were in a terrible minority (3 out of 9 members) in the Supreme Military Council that too the collective decision.”

But the pogrom which would erupt in the aftermath of Ironsi’s assassination by the bloodletting nihilists would be a case of a shocking realization to my father and his kinsfolk who had become worried on the sudden about face in the country’s state of affairs that would place Nd’Igbo in fear, being sought from place to place, persecuted and murdered in the most brutal way; and which would eventually lead to the thirty-month civil war Igbos would be desperately starved to death, outnumbered, plundered and demolished.

While my father and his folks focused on the next line of action as to the fate of their country men all around Nigeria, coupled with the fear of what was unfolding; we, the little kids, also, wondered what was going on, even though we were clueless of what had become of my native-land, especially on relatives in a far away land we knew nothing of or have seen, and yet to encounter.

However, it came to a point when we got the drift--that war had broken out in my native-land between the federal Nigerian vandals and a newly created sovereign nation of Biafra. The chant of Biafra begun to fill the air in our neighborhood with my father and his folks clung on to the transistor radio my father used to check for updates and the goings on in and around a war torn Biafra-Nigeria world. A new nation had been born and, Ojukwu had justified the declaration of Biafran nationhood from series of consultation with the international and diplomatic community; his regional kith and kins; the Consultative Assembly and Council of Elders and Chiefs; and a war-mongering Yakubu Gowon-led federal Nigerian invaders and vandals who would not respect and uphold the decisions reached at Aburi, Ghana.

Ojukwu was born on November 4, 1933, in Zungeru, Northern Nigeria, a very small town the colonial administrator Frederick Lugard picked as capital over Jebba and Lokoja on the basis Zungeru was in the center. Before the crisis of 1966, many Igbo people lived in its proximity. Zungeru, also, the birthplace of the Great Zik of Africa, the nation’s keystone founder, as well, had a population of about 3000 by then.

Ojukwu’s military conversion took place in 1957 when he joined the Nigerian Army as the first indigenous university graduate. He would enter Eaton Hall Cadet School in Chester, England, that same year, and would be commissioned with the rank of second lieutenant. He would later attend officers courses at the Hythe and warminister and would return to Nigeria in 1958; and would be appointed Company Commander of the Fifth Battalion of the Nigerian Army, in Kano, immediately. In May 1969, he was promoted to general by unanimous decision of the Biafra Consultative Assembly. Upon his return from the Ivory Coast on unconditional pardon by President Shehu Aliyu Shagari in 1982, countless honors were bestowed on him. Among the honors, the first title granted an Igbo by his kith and kin, the Ikemba 1 of Nnewi; Dike Di Oranma 1 of Igboland; Eze Igbo Gburugburu and numerous other titles as title holding in Igboland had become paramount.

Ojukwu had been the subject of uncountable literary works by writers, journalists, documentaries and scholarly projects. Practically everything known about Ojukwu up to his return to Nigeria from exile through his jail time under the despotic Muhammadu Buhari-Tunde Idiagbon military juntas, had been based on what he said and wrote in his books, and countless newspaper articles by writers and journalists; and speeches and interviews.

And like in his book “Biafra: Selected Speeches and Random Thoughts,” (Harper and Row Publishers, New York: 1969) he talked about a Nigeria the Igbo had given much to in order to make it work only to be faced with bigotry and hatred by a collaborative Hausa-Fulani-Yoruba and foreign backed nihilists who had proclaimed Igbos to be the nation’s problems. Nevertheless, as it was clearly known that the Hausa-Fulani northern Nigeria had been the architects of secession with a mandate to opt out of a Nigerian national state they had said was not workable, until they ate up their words from a British guided thinking to stay put with the opportunity to take control of the fabricated nation, in its time of uncertainties and foreseeable conflicts leading to the pogrom of May 1966 through Declaration and then a terribly costly civil war which by all accounts could have been avoided had Gowon and his murderous gang heeded to the genuine mandate at Aburi.

And despite all the efforts for Nigeria to work, avoiding the current trend of friction in the country after the July 29, 1966 murder of Ironsi and a continuous pogrom that followed, which had begun to spread all over the country from region to region as Igbos flee wherever they were and a federal Nigeria guaranteeing no Eastern Nigerian lives, the Consultative Assembly and the Advisory Committee of Chiefs and Elders of eastern Nigeria in its ever tasking assignments after its August 31, 1966 session, passed the following resolution:

1. We the representatives of the various communities in Eastern Nigeria gathered in this Consultative Assembly, hereby declare our implicit confidence in the military governor for Eastern Nigeria, Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, in all the actions he has so far taken to deal with the situation which has arisen in Nigeria since May 29, 1966.

2. In view of the grave threat to our survival as a unit in the Republic of Nigeria, we hereby urge and empower and advise him to take all such actions that might be necessary to protect the integrity of Eastern Nigeria and the lives and property of its inhabitants.

3. We advise constant consultation by His Excellency with the Consultative Assembly.

4. In view of the gravity of the present situation, we affirm complete fault in and urge the need for solidarity of eastern Nigeria as a unit.

On September 12, 1966, Ojukwu’s broadcast with regards to the Eastern Region delegation to the regional conference in Lagos was seen as a move to seek mediation to the crisis in the country and possible agreement on agitated confederation. As it turned out, all said and endorsed was negated by a preplanned Gowon’s-led nihilists, erupting a new cycle of pogrom in Makurdi, Minna, Gboko, Kaduna, Kano and several other cities agains Eastern Nigerian indigines, killing thousands of people in a body count that included women and children.

It was not until January 1967, that after much bloodshed and, looting and coercion and theft of Igbo properties by the bloodthirsty cannibals of northern Nigeria, that another mediation was sought by the international community on advisory and, on how the pogrom brought to an end; giving peace a chance. Gowon’s-led genocidal campaign to wipe out Igbo from the face of the earth had agreed to submit to a meeting that probably would amount to cessation of the widespread killing of Igbos in the north and elsewhere in the country with resolutions seeking and mandating moderate ways and means to living as neighbors. Ojukwu had organized his entourage in an occasion to be chaired by Ghana’s Joseph Ankrah, who had called for the meeting in Aburi, Ghana. The meeting was well attended and a resolution reached after presentations were made from both sides.

I remember the time when the federal Nigeria delegation and and Ojukwu’s-led Eastern Nigeria entourage had arrived Aburi, and my father and his kinsfolk listened and watch each other talk about the conference, and the ongoing conflict in Nigeria; being bold and confident that a presentation so compelling and posturing brought along by Ojukwu and his eastern Nigerian delegates presenting its case of pogrom, an act carried out on a wholesale enterprise to eliminate the Igbo nation, would come to an end and bot sides could move on until a path to good and normal governance was generated. But that wouldn’t be the case; Gowon and his murderous gang would change their minds disagreeing with the decision, and would fire the first shot to declare a full blown assault on the Eastern Region.

Even as little kids, we were conscious of these things and able to read the dailies including the late editions. I remember the day Teddy’s father walked in one evening with a copy of the “Evening News” its headline read, “Ojukwu wants Gowon.” I had read out loud the headline as Teddy’s father held the newspaper. Teddy’s father was uplifted in spirit though somehow astonished that a kid my age could read and perhaps knew more about the forbidden war.

The year was 1967, and Biafran troops, in a minute, on August 9, had overrun Benin, and had mounted a flag, proclaiming the Midwest a republic of its own, the Republic of Benin, with Lagos, its next target of invasion to end the unnecessary war, had a simple resolution held at Aburi was respected and upheld; which was what begun all the betrayals. First, the Igbos were determined to distance themselves from their Igboness by collaborating with a federal Nigeria initiatives on the quest for pogrom ideologically well ingrained it became so plausible like telling a child misleading stories by way of good ideas being planted in the child’s brain which ultimately becomes difficult to erase. The case of one of Igbo intellectuals in the likes of Anthony Ukpabi Asika who had taken up the assignment of administrator of the East Central State Gowon had mapped out as war strategy to plunder and demolish the Igbo nation, was a typical example of intellectuals of Asika’s magnitude who succumbed to gullible, vulnerable rhetorics in a situation their own people were massacred anywhere they were found by the British-Russia backed federal Nigeria vandals. Asika was in Lagos as absentia administrator of the East Central State when his own very kith and kins had been denied access to the outside world, capsulated and destroyed beyond comprehension, Ojukwu compassionately mentioned of those who had betrayed “our” confidence in a blink of an eye to wipe out Igbo in its totality, and from its existence. Asika would turn out to be the worst thing ever to happen to Igbo people when he had returned to Enugu after the war to sit in as administrator on his own slogan that “onye ube ruru le ya rachaa” which was the beginning of bribery and corruption in post-civil war Igbo nation.

The Lagos government of Gowon had panicked on Biafra’s fast pace development in catching up with federal Nigeria war of annihilation which extended to the military governor of the Northern Nigeria, Lieutenant Colonel Usman Hassan Katsina, “not ruling out compulsory military service for Northerners” bragging Biafra would cease to exist in “a matter of hours.” A very long war and the most blood soaked event in the entire continent’s history, would continue apace, even when the Midwest governor Lieutenant Colonel David Ejoor had sworn while addressing Asaba people, said he would not live to see a Midwest turned into battlefield, while Gowon, in his so-called “tactical move” warns against tuning in to Biafra radio, arresting “500 people” in its violation.

The external service of the Broadcasting Corporation of Biafra (BCB) was indeed a powerful tool by way of its efficient, effective and thorough broadcasting, announced by Ikenna Ndaguba, among others. My little neigborhood on the outskirts of Accra would be unusually spooky and normal when Ndaguba is on the air proclaiming that:

“Nigerian troops had entered Ogoja. Chief Awolowo, leader of of the Nigerian delegation to OAU meeting in Kinshasha, leaves Lagos for Congo. He tells the press that before the end of the meeting Biafra will be crushed and the Biafran government will be overthrown.”

Though such announcements did not fly, it was something serious and a more formidable, strategic Biafra, well placed to resolve the drama, ending the war after Major A. Okonkwo had made the “Declaration of the Republic of Benin.”

But there would be an interference in that major breakthrough which gave Benin its sovereignty as Biafrans were Western hinterland bound to Ore and then in a move that would have closed the ugly chapter. On September 20, 1967, the Biafran Liberation Army under the order of Brigadier Victor Banjo would withdraw Biafran troops from Benin to Agbor for no apparent reason which would bring about the fall of Benin to federal Nigerian troops, shattering all the hopes of liberation and “ceasing hostilities” by “offering peaceful settlement and by publishing proposals for a future relations bewteen Nigeria and Biafra.”

With the unfolding events as Ojukwu had prepared to present to OAU in its next meeting to be held in Kinshaha, Congo, a coup plot would be uncovered to overthrow the Biafran government through a high profile Biafran intelligence. Lieutenant Colonel Emmanuel Ifeajuna who would collaborate with Banjo and two others in their command, would be apprehended while leaving the compound of the British High Commission. During the course of Biafran intelligence work, thousands of Nigerian pounds would be found at Banjos apartment given to him by the British High Commission as fee to mastermind the overthrow of the Biafran government, with intention to abrogate the sovereign state of Biafra.

As it happened, Ojukwu would make a national broadcast with the notification of the fall of Benin because of the “deliberate withdrawal of our troops by the coup plotters.” On September 23, 1967, the four major actors of the coup--Banjo, Ifeajuna, et al.--would be court-martiled and summarily executed, which begun a whole new chapter in a war that was almost done with a Biafran victory--liberation, jubilation and celebration.

Upon the summary execution of Ifeajuna and his sabo-colleagues, traitors, the name Ifeajuna instantly became a notoriously household name as the brother who sold his own brother on the way to fight the enemies. There was a song for it: “awee mu na nwanne kwuru gaa ogu, Ifeajuna di na uzo ree nwanne ya...”

Ifeajuna had fled to Ghana on the warmth embrace of Nkrumah (who had applauded the first coup of January 15, 1966 masterminded by Ifeajuna and his colleagues in the Nigerian Army) but would return home an Ironsi’s amnesty.

As seemingly the war would drag on accounts of banjo, Ifeajuna, et al. betrayals conniving with the Gowon-British High Commission deal, and the recapture of Benin by federal Nigerian troops, Ojukwu, before addressing the joint meeting of the Council of Chiefs and Elders, January 27, 1968, to introduce Biafra’s new currency in circulation, compiled the following in his diary:

December 25, 1967: Pope Paul VI sends two representatives to Lagos on a peace mission.

January 1, 1968: Gowon gives March 31, 1968, as the deadline for crushing Biafra...Lagos government announces change of currency as an economic measure against Biafra.

January 5, 1968: Gowon boasts about his “biggest military machine in Africa” which is to crush Biafra by March 31, 1968.

January 6, 1968: Collin C. MacDonald, Headmaster, Hope Waddell Training Institute, Calabar, in a letter to the London Times, accuses the Lagos government of not providing the “fundamental requirements” of security of life and property of law abiding citizens. This letter arouses protest from the International Red Cross against the conduct of the war by Gowon’s troops.

January 16 1968: Poisoned foodstuffs being smuggled to Biafra by Lagos government are seized by Nigerian troops at Ena Ora (Midwest) and mistakenly distributed to areas in Benin, Western Nigeria, and Okene in the North. Cases of death.

January 22, 1968: Nigerian currency notes cease to be legal tender in Biafra.
January 27, 1968: Biafra new currency introduced at meeting of the 7th Session of the Consultative Assembly and the Council of Chiefs and Elders.”

The nasty war would, however, rage on; losing all options to have overcome a British-Russian backed vandals, until formal ceasefire in January 1970. The war, would be declared “no victor, no vanquished,” by the leadership of a blood-lust Gowon. Ojukwu would leave and seek exile in the Ivory Coast, where he would spend thirteen years.

In Accra, the reactions was a cold feeling for a lost battle, and warmth feelings of euphoria for a bitter war begun from the pogrom, eventually ended with staggering casualties. Without much ado, my father summoned meetings, like he had done during the course of the conflict, to monitor and analyze the effects; but this time around by which the war ended, the meetings had been on body counts, family loses and what would be next step to follow. Apparently, every of my father’s kins residing in the Accra metropolis lost at least one soul to the civil war. Some had left immediately back to homeland while some had stayed for reason or the other. My father did not leave for reasons behind his children’s education until he was able to figure something out, especially for this writer who had to be homeward bound; and getting to know a people whose history had been unique and profoundly rich in culture, and whose history would turn out to be of political impotence and violence, of late.

As the relative discourse of the war and the wondering of Ojukwu’s plight which took center stage in every aspect of life among my father’s kinsfolk, and with the mental exhaustion of a pogrom-civil war era, and a downsizing Ghana’s workforce and collapsing economy due to an inept, corrupt and mismanaged Ghanaian resources by the Emmanuel Kotoka-Joseph Ankrah-Akwasi Amankwaa Afrifa-led military juntas, upon overthrowing Nkrumah’s administration, most Igbo residents in Accra made up their minds to leave with their families back home and start life anew or seek life elsewhere.

Ojukwu would arrive lagos on the coach of Chuba Okadigbo, the presidential adviser on Political Affairs to Shagari, and who also had been Ojukwu’s personal friend and counsel, and chief negotiator and spokesman on matters of pardon to the erstwhile Biafran leader. Okadigbo had left a legacy during the political debates and series of television interviews that led to Ojukwu’s pardon. And when asked why Gowon had to be pardoned before Ojukwu on the basis Ojukwu was the first casualty of the nation’s most wanted men. Okadigbo, in a nutshell, came up with the riddle of the African continent where big trees falls on one another, on the road, and that lifting the one on the ground one must start from lifting up the one on top of the one on the ground.

Lagos had to be “bursting loose” upon Ojukwu’s return clouded all around the coast by Igbo men and women from all walks of life, gracefully appreciating a pardon and return that was seen in some circles as politically motivated. Ojukwu’s pardon was preceded by that of Gowon, who, too, had been declared a fugitive for masterminding on February 13, 1976, the brutal murder of Mohammed, who had relieved Gowon of his post in a coup, six months earlier, and had begun the immediate purge of the civil service that had no sense of purpose and mostly corrupt.

Within the trend of inexplicable events, Ojukwu would register his membership with the ruling party, National Party of Nigeria (NPN) that granted him unconditional presidential pardon, declaring his senate candidacy for Nnewi Senatorial District, his home base, on the platform of the NPN. There would be shouting matches, fights organized on political thuggery, deadly gangs road rage in bitter political campaigns at Nkpor Junction, incitements of division among the Igbo elite, and all sorts of friction between Ojukwu and his political opponent, Dr. Edwin Onwudiwe, in the senate race.

Ojukwu would lose in that bitter election, and the administration that had granted him pardon would be overthrown in a bloodless coup three months after the incumbent, Shagari was inaugurated for a second term.

Ojukwu’s political rebirth would surface again in the Fourth Republic when the Abdulsalami Abubakar’s-led military juntas had lifted the ban on political activities. In Ojukwu’s political reawakening, Chekwas Okorie, who had founded a new political party, All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) with intention of Igbo stock, had shopped around the United States for a Igbo Diaspora alliance and stalwarts to add flavor to the party’s agenda. I was in many of the meetings on the arising matters regarding the direction of APGA before Okorie went back home to place APGA’s agenda on table and ballot for the presidential election.

As it also happened, Ojukwu was nominated APGA’s presidential candidate and a shot at the presidency with incubent President Olusegun Obasanjo, and numerous other parties’ presidential candidates. Ojukwu lost the presidential election to Obasanjo and would henceforth be active in all Igbo-related politics which came with making political enemies along the way, typical of the saying, politics makes strange bedfellows.

Ojukwu would be struck with a major stroke and would be flown to a London hospital for treatment. On saturday, November 26, 2011, Ojukwu died after more than a year battle trying to recover from the stroke. He was seventy-eight years old.

You paid your dues and will be missed. Adios, Amigo!

Ambrose Ehirim

Story Never Ends For Igbo Writer In America

Just like any other day in Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the universe, and a world that stomps on the Hollywood Walk of Fame twenty four hours a day, seven days a week and three hundred and sixty five days in a year, sightseeing and appreciating the good things of life brought about by inspiration and the wisdom of humankind.

With a flexible schedule and as things happen, and with all the stuff in my head -- some mysterious voices -- the projects I carry on my shoulders keeping up with time, thinking that I have it all together and figured out, not knowing it’s a whole lot of bunch untouched; that kept piling up as I lay pretending to be unperturbed; that it’s all fine, when a caseload of stuff yet to be done, drives me crazy.

Now overwhelmed and all mixed up; looking more and more like going through stuff I have crossed in the past while shuffling. But again, I was only visualizing from what I had been encountering all these moments, I dabbled myself into something of a long, packed closet boxes, that now needs to be dusted off; going back to the past like starting all over again.

Like one of the days back in the day, I usually keep the tabs of the goings on within my schedules every popped out events I had imagined was worth the take for keeping up toward the scheme of things in making the surroundings one lives in, a place that should be known for what it produces, characterizing it as trademark and universally accepted.

It has been a year or something now I have not been that outgoing due to the circumstances I found myself in -- diverting my course of direction, devoting more time on projects I had thought should get going before not catching up anymore and wasting all the precious time that may not be regained again; coupled with a whole lot of writing assignments -- notes on the facts and logic about a complicated Nigerian national state, affairs of state of a jumbled and bellicose Igbo nation I have been weary of pointing out, an all time Igbo Diaspora life, the African Union and an organization without rhythm, African Americans I have encountered in Los Angeles and all around the United States.

Moreover, it also did not keep out my contribution to creation, knowing my value by way of growth doing scholarly work, helping folks at public institutions who needed me on a variety of their quest for knowledge, and meeting new people in a new era; going with the flow as filmmaker, actress and friend, Esosa Edosomwan would tell me.

In my own world, what I thought I had accomplished in this day and age of madness in a dramatically changed world I have been very slow catching up.

The times of turmoil and triumph-trending women in my life; experiences with Igbo professionals, accomplished scholars and intellectuals; my colleagues in the media and generally the entertainment landscape I never imagined in a lifetime would be so, as in thoughts, passion, and actively the way it streamed along to my liking.

Reflections and the streaming days of the playgrounds at Ruga Park, by 37 Barracks of the Ghana Army at Accra; the childhood buddies -- Eugene Onyeji, Theodore Onyeji, Edward Chukwumezie, Hillary Akabuilo, Chukwu Egbejimba, Ijeoma Egbejimba, Hellistus Eke, Fanmi “Polo” Ahmed, Oko Ahmed, Emmanuel Kudjo, John Kudjo, Zakary Ibrahim, Adamu Ibrahim, Manma Sani, John Satorji, Paapa, John Bull whose Mary Go Round crash got us all cracking up but with feelings for the spoiled brat who could not hang with us at the Kanda Estate playgrounds, the Adangbe friends, Akan friends, Ashanti friends, Hausa friends, Wangara friends, Tamale friends and friends too numerous to mention, including Said Usman whom I had bumped into some few months ago while on research work and he looking for an ideal place for recess before his routine prayers at the Mosque on Exposition and Vermont, just by the corridors of University of Southern California. Usman was the last guy I could have thought grew on the same block with me in Ghana, I would meet after all these years.

With all that interest, friends long lost I have found and friends long forgotten that found me in this new age of social networking -- Silas Onyeiwu Snr. (during our Lagos days of uncertainties and our future), Gordy Ekechukwu (our Lagos days of projected higher learning pursuits), Kendryx Alfadoh (colleague in disc-jockeying, rooftop dancing, pub-crawling and partying all around Eko), Emmanuel Okafor-Ize (my hangout guy at FESTAC Town who shovelled me around and showed me the way of Los Angeles upon my arrival), Pius Obasi Totti (from the high school days of NASCO and Ikeji Arondizuogu), Aloysius Duru (from high school to the days of invading my village and me paying back invading Umuowa in return, just for the girls), Tony Ike Okpara (from high school to bad bay image days in Los Angeles), Destiny Anorue (my little cousin who saw me last when I bid the village bye), my nephews Tobechukwu, Kelechi, Iwgebuike, Ezenwa, Chika, Chidera and Uchechi (who finally caught up with me and getting it straight, eventually, in the long run.

The hurdle, inspiration, motivation and getting orderly coming to terms with reality on life being what you make it.

And, of course, that little boy about to be six-years-old in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, held to his hand by his father while they walked down the street to Nima Roman Catholic School in what would be a journey to eternity, commencing his first day at school, learning every day of his life that he would be an obedient boy and become the youngest ever to receive the Holy Communion and Confirmed according to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. The little kid talked about in the Diocese -- Rev. Fr. Lobianco, Rev. Fr. Tonti, Sister Mary, Brother John, and Arch Bishop Joseph Bowers.

The little kid on his way to school on that morning of February 24, 1966, grabbed by soldiers of the Ghanaian Army. Not scared and having no clue what the siege was all about, the soldiers comforted him just by the barriers of Flagstaff House and Nima, telling him that Ghana has changed, heading toward a new order on a calculated operation for a better Ghana. Nkrumah’s regime had been toppled by the Emmanuel Kotoka-led military juntas (upcoming memoirs), and a new era in the nation’s history, which would lead to many, many inexplicable events -- the counter coup, Arthur-Yeboah, Ankrah, Afrifa -- and the Afrifa transition -- to the nation’s Second Republic taken away by Kofi Busia.

Life’s journey -- the trails, good, bad and ugly -- never ceases to be amazing, amusing and fascinating. It has been what kept humankind going, the inspiration and hope of getting it straight that the future is well abound, the expectations -- high and fortunate -- not to give up.

It is with these high expectations that humankind continues to explore, work very hard to meet these goals on the ideological bearings there is no substitute for hard work, which pays off, eventually.

So, as I sat down in my little study with heaps of junked literature, neglected newspapers and magazines needed to be dumped in the waste bin, clipped articles, abstracts from archives culled from libraries around my state and other channels open for learning and research work elsewhere in America, I venture into using what I have acquired by way of the endeavors to gather and provide, in order to appreciate and extend to others what had been given to me, which makes a better world that we live in today -- the gift of sharing.

Through the gift of sharing and things like that, I have approached many institutions noted for collaborative works on research, philanthropy, welfare and other related social programs, to stand by my worthy causes as the chain and community grows.

So, as it happened, I bumped into folks while snacking and freelancing at the Wilshire Corridor hangout around the Miracle Mile in Greater Los Angeles, meeting diversified folks and going through “L.A. Rebellion: Creating A New Black Cinema,” the ongoing project playing for about a month now and ends on December 17, 2011 with closing remarks and special presentation by Ben Caldwell of “Spaces Looking In Looking Out” taking place at the Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum, in collaboration with the Pan African Film Festival; and also initiated by the Getty Foundation, bringing together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene with presenting sponsors -- bank of America, The Getty, Pacific Standard Time: Art In L.A. 1945-1980, The warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, California Council for the Humanities and the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences.

What had captured my attention in this phenomenal epic project launched by UCLA School of Theater, Film And Television were: “Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification,” directed by Barbara McCullough; “Penintentiary,” directed by Jamaa Fanaka; “Sankofa,” directed by HaileGerima; “To Sleep With Anger,” directed by Charles Burnett, featuring Danny Glover; “Daughters of the Dust,” directed by Julie dash, about the story of descendants of escaped slaves living on the Southern coast of the U.S. in 1902 preparing for qa move to the mainland; “Bush Mama,” directed by Haile Gerima, inspired by seeing a Black woman in Chicago evicted in winter which he developed as his UCLA thesis, and many others.

“Penitentiary,” in particular, I had watched at the Roxy Cinema, Apapa-Lagos, upon its release, reading the movie’s preview in the Right On Magazine, way back when the movie premiered. Seeing it gain took me back to this Fanaka film, depicting prison as a microcosm of African Americans, seeing the prison system as a site of continual violent struggle against bot external (the prison itself) and internal (fellow prisoners) forces played out on the bodies of inmates, who are either sexually exploited or “beasts” (the exploiters).

As the historical event unveils at UCLA through December, the African American community, the African American Association of Journalists, scholars in film, television and the arts have focused on the need to bring forth the awareness of the history and origin of Black cinema, including the director of the project, Dr. Jan-Christopher Horak who had called it “seen the amazing expression of a unified and Utopian vision of a community and in “over three years getting to know the filmmakers, collecting their work.”

In one of my travels to see a couple of films at the event and while poking around the complexes before heading home I met South African born Razianna Myeni, Cassandra Pinson, Julius Baxter, Britney Johnson, Dee Dee Richardson and Ted Calloway who had just walked out seeing “Daydream Therapy,” directed by Bernard Nicolas while we sat on the balcony of one of the eateries talking about the festival over some coffee and light drinks, applauding Horak, the events director and Shannon Kelley, the events head of public programs for collectively coordinating with the filmmakers Haile Gerima, Zenaibu Irene Davis, Barbara McCullough, Charles Burnett, Fanaka, O. Fumilayo Makarah, Jaqueline Frazier, Billy Woodbury, Ben caldwell, Larry Clark, Julie dash, Carroll Parrott Blue, Allie Sharon Larkin, Alicia Dhanifu and many others, for the approach and allowing their works to be used at the festival.

Britney, who had been working on a documentary about inner city youths in South Central Los Angeles, simply put by Dr. Jan-Christopher Horak as “there are projects that take on a life of their own, as if reality suddenly asserts itself, grabbing an idea and shaking it so that it grows and grows,” which was the case when Britney took center stage in our round table discourse giving us a hint on one of the best documentary texts, pulling out from her bag Jack C Ellis and Betsy A. MClaine’s book “A New History Of Documentary Film,” in which every discussant (besides myself who’s yet to have a take on documentary films of sort), acknowledged Ellis and MClaine’s book being a guideline for those in documentaries and stuff of that nature.

Britney, who aspires to take her projects to the shores of Africa which would be part of her knowledge-based programs in the near future, with focus on Africa and its ever growing turmoil and cases of sad reality in the continent on varieties of complicated, ethno-cultural and religious issues and differences. As related, we begun to cite series of the continent’s problems from its precolonial state to its present day, in which, I, personally, have seen many unfold -- Ghana and Nigeria -- the many coups and counter coups I bear witness.

Within this very perspective, the troubled and unstable nature following independence of the number of nations in the continent and the purpose of that pursuit being able to rule on its own standard and based on its culture, I am compelled to ask, who are the Africans? How did they get there? How was it fabricated?

In reading Ali A. Mazrui’s “The Africans: A Triple Heritage,” with regards to the African question, I came across a passage of inquiring minds and the conduct by which the continent named Africa came into being, popping out the question, “Where is Africa”? and Mazrui’s explanation:

“It could be said that Africa invented man, that Semites invented God and that Europe invented the world, or rather the concept of the world. Archaeology indicates that man originated in Africa. The Semitic people gave us the great monotheisthic world religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Europe developed the concept of the world in the wake of its voyages of discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but it even imposed its form of that concept on the outlook of peoples in other continents including Africans.”

And:

“ It is not possible to overestimate the enormous impact of Europe upon our perceptions of ourselves as Africans and upon our view of the universe...Even with regard to the size of the African continent, it is quite remarkable how far European ethnocentrism has influenced cartographic projections over the centuries.”

Mazrui would go on to be mad at African ancestors on considering the actual names of the different continents of the world. Mazrui, wondering about the political stupidity of Africa when other nations and continents had chosen its own name that conforms to the nature of their being, noting on the consequences and tragedy of the African continent and with a close look, may have provoked the ancestors and obviously could be seen all around “us” by which ancestral voice could be heard in the curse depicting neglect and abandonment:

“Warriors will fight scribes for the control of your institutions;
wild bush will conquer your road and pathways;
your land will yield less and less,
while your off-springs multiply;
your house will leak from the floods,
and your soil will crack from the drought;
your sons will refuse to pick up the hoe,
and prefer to wander in the wilderness;
you shall learn ways of cheating,
and you will poison the cola nuts you serve your own friends
Yes, things will fall apart...”

Of course, it all fell apart and the walls came tumbling down. Nkrumah predicted the fold, saw the debacle in and around the African continent which he forewarned in his earlier fear of a linkage between nuclear tests in the Sahara, racism in South Africa and recolonization of the entire continent; and astonishingly revealing from what he had said over fifty years ago. In April 1960, Nkrumah had addressed an international meeting in Accra on what he had seen with his two naked eyes in vision, which would be exploding sooner than later. Nkrumah said:

“Fellow Africans and friends, there are two threatening swords of Damocles hanging over the continent and we must remove them. These are nuclear tests in the Sahara by the French Government and the Apartheid policy of the Government of the Union of South Africa. It would be a great mistake to imagine that the achievement of political independence by certain areas of Africa will automatically mean the end of the struggle.”

In a statement made by the sage half a century ago and twenty-first century African continent, should it not be mind-boggling that Nkrumah who engineered the concept of a Pan African national state and had he been around today seeing the sorry state of the continent, would he not be worried and would he not be asking, what happened?

In Wole Soyinka’s “The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness,” lectures the Nobel Laureate delivered as the inaugural for the Dubois Institute Macmillan Lecture Series at Howard University in April 1977 citing President Nelson Mandela’s open confrontation with African National Congress (AFC) on “its own dismal record of needless cruelty and abuse of human rights, especially in prisons and detention camps run by the movement within friendly front-line states,” when the legendary Mandela had launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate human right abuses during the Apartheid era on which Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison. The commission was established to heal the nation’s wounds through fact findings of the demons engaged in the human enterprise of unnatural taste, and to seek resolve by way of apologies and reparations.

And Soyinka had asked on such grounds, and in retrospect using the South African post-Apartheid model, if the same could be said of post-dictatorships in other African countries with its new democratic order, following in the foot steps of the Truth and reconciliation Commission. Soyinka writes:

“Would the Truth and Reconciliation ethic have been applicable, even thinkable in post-Acheampong Ghana? In post-Mobutu Zaire? Will it be adaptable in post-Abacha Nigeria? That circumstances make such a proceeding expedient is not to be denied, but we must not shy away from some questions: would it be just? And, more important, how does it implicate both the present and the future? The crimes that the African continent commits against her kind are of dimension and, unfortunately, of a nature that appears to constantly provoke memories of the historic wrongs inflicted on that continent by others.”

No question, I too had seen many documentaries, stories and newsreels of most atrocities in Africa by Africans. In my native land on which I have written extensively to near exhaustion on too many of the subjects. I weep each time I reflect to the atrocities, with the never ending question; Is humankind alert and would it happen again? Of, course, given the necessary circumstances, it would, and still happening, and would continue, over and over again while the world watch it unfold.

And my reaction to this had always been that when the unthinkable happens in a world that deliberately inflicts wounds on its own with the thought that at the end of every tragedy, there must be a moment of reconciliation. But what would reconcile what Elemi John Agbomi, in what he had told me not too long ago when I had interviewed him (this part not published) and narrating to me his experiences as a little boy in high school, then Government Secondary School, Afikpo, and how the federal Nigeria vandals invaded the land, sacking the place and cutting short his secondary education upon declaration of war by the vandals, thus firing the first shot. “Certainly, the Biafran War was a tragedy,” Agbomi would say. And what he had seen as a nation that deliberately ignored the ominous consequences of the pogrom and civil war, Agbomi begins to talk about his experiences during the war.

At barely fifteen years old when the vandals invaded and sacked his hometown of Adadama in what is now Cross River State, and while in refugee camp at a location near Mbano in what is now Imo State, he had been drafted and enlisted in the Biafran Army with badge number BA 30 400. He talked about all sorts of atrocities committed by the vandals upon arrival to any village or town they seem to have run down. Rape, looting, kidnapping was just the order. Agbomi, just young as to not knowing what had cut his education short, a full blown assault on his homeland and all the displaced persons he could not fathom how it came about “as people like “us” were all put together at one place (refugee camp) with rationing meals, not knowing when the next order will be made for evacuation as enemy attacks draws near and becomes imminent.” “Us” means Biafra, the Igbo speaking people (Ibibio, Kalabari, Efik, etc.)

Even with hunger and food rationing, some no doubt, at the camps, hopeless and having lost some of their relatives, held on, despite all the uncertainties, until the end of the war when he had felt liberation in a war torn eastern Region; and starting life anew, all over again, with a clean slate. But Agbomi’s eyewitness account of an Orwellian drama, did not stop, short of tales horrific in human nature -- the widespread raping of Igbo women, looting of properties, demolition and plundering of the Igbo nation by the vandals.

In Minna, then northern region of the fabricated Nigeria, and under the premiership of Ahmadu Bello, the Sarduana of Sokoto who ran the affairs of state and controlled the power block of the nation even though the central capital, Lagos, was the seat of government with Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as prime minister on the platform of the Northern People Congress (NPC). Minna was another town of orgy revenge for the assassination of Balewa, Bello and other northern politicians who perished in the first military coup of 1966.

Michael Achebe Okongwu, only six years old, was in a Minna classroom as a primary school pupil when elements of the northern Islamic Jihadists, who were also hoodlums and nihilists, struck, invading the primary school where Okongwu attended, attacking every Eastern looking persons. In Okongwu’s classroom, where they were taking lessons from their teacher, a female and Yoruba by tribe, mistaken for Igbo, was brutally slain in the presence of her pupils by the nihilists who had been instructed to kill every Igbo. Even if the bare facts were known, almost no one understood the full intentions of the Hausa-Fulanis, including their Yoruba allies’ attempt to exterminate all Igbos. It was simply beyond the power of most peoples imagination. Okongwu, who now calls Southern California home, still cannot fathom the chaos, callousness, bigotry, hatred and ignorance of the premeditated pogrom of 1966 and 1967. In most times that we speak, and especially on the related pogrom and what he saw with his eyes as a little boy beginning the long walk and hauling, from Minna to Ogbunike and the continual assault by the vandals who violated every order, bombarding every enclave in Igboland, until vanquished, indicated there no such thing as one Nigeria. “I will never, ever forget,” Okongwu would always say.

Or the case of the late Egbebelu Ugobelu, born Samuel Obi, in Class 2, at the Nnamdi Azikiwe Grammar School, Abagana, when, also, the vandals invaded the land in the quest to wipe out the Igbo nation from the face of the earth through its war strategy of economic blockade, hunger, starvation and stone-walling. Growing up in Port Harcourt before admission to Nnamdi Azikiwe Grammar School for his secondary education, Pot Harcourt was an Igbo dominated town and had flourished with Igbo men of commerce and industry; higher education, academia and intellectuals.

During Gowon’s genocidal campaign against the Igbo nation, Ugobelu was enlisted in the Biafran Army and stationed at the Umuahia Brigade Command before Umuahia fell to the federal Nigeria vandals. The post-civil war would see him through National Grammar School, Nike, Enugu, completing secondary school and obtaining his West African School Certificate (WASC); employment at the Federal Ministry of Water Resources, Lagos; and selection for the “Crash Program” during the Murtala Mohammed-Olusegun Obasanjo-led military juntas’ projected courses, getting a shot at the United States and studying Accounting and Management Science before returning home and coming back to the shores of America four years later on the grounds of a failed state.

Ugobelu and I spoke uncountable times, and each time was about the pogrom, the civil war, Nd’Igbo and their place in history, and his experiences during the disturbances and conflicts that swallowed over two million people.

In his book, “Biafra War Revisited: A Concise And Accurate Account Of Events That Led To The Nigerian Civil War,” Ugobelu had suggestede “Biafra War,” on a title based on his notion that the war was “virtually” fought on Biafra. In many of our related discourses, he had thought I was one of the child soldiers, just from around my narratives of the northern Islamic nihilists and Gowon’s-led genocidal campaigns, until we had both begun to know each other very closely as we continued to learn from one another, detail by detail, what happened in the killing fields, the refugee camps, Obafemi Awolowo’s orchestrated “Economic Blockade,” the starvation to death of women, infants and children; and the aftermath of the projected pogrom --the horrific rape of Igbo women, and where many of the women (some tired, some reduced to animal and skeletal nature from being desperately starved), having no choice but to embrace the vandals, proclaimed liberators, to the chagrin of the survived Igbo men, who were too tired, poor, plundered and inhibited to take part in anything like that when the women were taken away, becoming the vandals’ stock.

And yet, after all these acts of human tragedy perpetrated on a people by the vandals, the Truth and Reconciliation commission created by the Olusegun Obasanjo-led regime in the Fourth Republic modelled after Mandela’s earlier commission in South Africa, under the chairmanship of Justice Chukwudifu Oputa was laughable and had no intention from its set up to investigate and find, arriving to conclusions acts of genocide committed by the blood thirsty cannibals. It is ironic, that most of these blood-lust vandals could not be asked to testify during the Oputa commission.

During Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Nigeria was already going through the hands of the despot, Sani Abacha. Soyinka’s W.E.B. Dubois’ Lecture at Howard University, particularly bent on the Truth and Reconciliation anticipating similar situation in his native country while on exile trooping the planet promoting his movement of democratic dispensation, and away from a country that had been ravaged by the despot Abacha, wishing it was the other way round. Abacha had wanted Soyinka dead or alive for inciting a pro-democracy movement that generated all the anger and frustration which was actually not concretely grounded because of its original base, and with that base, centered, on a section of the country that Abacha sought, to which they have been Abacha’s victims, and by which in the name of democracy, advocates for democracy joined without regard to the particular section being persecuted or looked for reasons behind the friction.

In “The Open Sore Of A Continent: A Personal Narrative Of The Nigerian Crisis,” Soyinka indeed lost every hope of a Nigeria that would one day become an entity again. However, I was not sure why the movement had assured itself of victory when most of the staunch advocates had already fled the country, and could not stay to have faced the consequences, for freedom and democracy does not come by a distant pen alone, but by proxy movements, relative activism and fighting in combat.

Many did not align with the movement on the grounds of its related, fractured foundation which had a lot to do with the interest it protected, and again, the generators of the movement were not viable and intact to have gathered enough following being one of the reasons the platform of the movement was not taken seriously, at all, until luck struck, leaving Abacha dead, and a swift transition that would usher in a fabricated Fourth Republic.

But Soyinka bent on the annulled “June 12,” 1993, election his cousin Moshood Abiola was allegedly said to have won in a landslide, suddenly to be reversed and cancelled by the Ibrahim Babangida-led military juntas on the grounds of election wuruwuru and magomago, rigging, which in a 180-degrees about face erupted a set of civil disobedience resulting to Gestapo-like regimes which inevitably chased the junta, Babangida out of power in a twist of transition through Ernest Shonekan, then civilian administrator, paving way for Abacha to usurp power which chased all the pro-democracy backers out of sight.

Soyinka, in series of his books, essays and lectures, had been about frustrated efforts and anger, on the continent in its leadership woes having no sense of purpose to have propelled the states to the forefront of democratic orderliness. And, like Soyinka, I, also, ask why a continent, first in natural resources, first in human capital, second most populous and second largest in the world could not utilize its overwhelmingly abundant natural resources and its unquestionable, enormous human capital to have formed a one, strong unified entity to have subdued colonial conquests of peoples and cultures, by all accounts?

And, angry Soyinka questioning the kind of country his native land was, lamented:

“In a world tormented by devastation from Bosnia to Rwanda, how do we define a nation: is it simply a condition of the collective mind, a passive, unquestioned habit of cohabitation? Or is what we think of as a nation a rigorous conclusion that derives from history? Is it geography, or is it a bond that transcends accidents of mountain, river, and valley? How do these varying definitions of nationhood impact the people who live under them?”

And, as developed, just like the African Union and its Organization of African Unity (OAU) parent could not take any serious measures in all the years the entire continent had problems fixing and putting all its loopholes together beginning from the first shot opening the doors for coup plots and assassinations of government officials and heads-of-state in the Republic of Congo, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, etc. And, looking at South Africa and, Apartheid, why was OAU not able to form an army to liberate South Africa? Why could OAU not to have form an army to liberate the Congo from the mess well orchestrated by the West and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in savagely axing Patrice Lumumba? Why could OAU not swiftly to have reinstated Nkrumah in Ghana when the military juntas wrestled power from him? And why would OAU to have sat idly and watched Samuel Doe forcefully remove William Taubman from power in a bloody coup? And why would OAU do practically nothing when Tafawa Balewa and some of his cabinet members were kidnapped and shot execution style by a murderous gang of mutineers? And why would OAU, the most powerful union in the continent’s history allowed and endorsed the diabolical nature of the anti-Igbo pogrom, when Igbos were sought from place to place and murdered in the most brutal of circumstances? Why would OAU, upon Hassan Katsina and his northern Nigeria blood thirsty Islamic nihilists could not be stopped in its genocidal campaigns against the Igbo nation? Why in what had erupted in Sierra Leone, the chaotic civil war, OAU could not arrest the situation until a terribly, costly price had been paid? And, all in all, why could OAU not seize the moment to have stopped the Western Hemisphere’s consistent dominance of Africa through coercion and theft? And as the case goes on and on, and on, what is OAU/AU doing?

The Nigerian crisis and the rest in Africa during the sixties was very unique with a OAU that had no alternative, especially with the first military coup in Nigeria and all the stories that followed when Aguiyi Ironsi was flogged and murdered in what OAU could have stopped from spreading. Even when Joseph Akahan, according to Frederick Forsyth in his book, “Making Of An African Legend,” the northern nihilists under Akahan had concluded that its by the brutal murder of Ironsi that he (Akahan) and his group of mutineers at the Government House, Ibadan, agreed that it has been made even and there should be no more bloodletting, “balancing out” the act in allegedly what the top Igbo Military brass had begun, the “Igbo Coup.”

And never minding the fact that it had been made patently clear the first military coup was not an instigated Igbo coup from its plot, the mutineers would continue in their widespread wholesale massacre of Igbo personnel and military officers. The air force aide-de-camp who witnessed the brutal murder of Ironsi while fleeing into the bush and other slaughtering campaigns of the Igbos around the Ibadan area recorded the following account:

“At Lemauk Barracks, Ibadan, the commanding officer Col. Joe 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 C.O’s knowlede. 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 squadron, then later to the taylor’s shop. 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 was 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 been balanced making it even.”

Ironsi’s murder would be the key ignition to bring about the wanton killing of Igbos around the nation in a “premeditated and diabolical” act which continued apace through the Civil War until now, with an end not yet in sight. Despite Ironsi’s attempt in assuring the northern nihilists that he was for the stability of the country announcing the shuffle of the military governors and ordering the immediate transfer of several military units trading places with the Fourth Batallion in Ibadan and the First Batallion in Enugu, putting away fears of another possible coup, which would pave way for a unitary government he promulgated and was declined by the northern hoodlums and Vandals, and with too many blood in their hands, rounded Igbos, torturing them and killing all execution style.

Such would be the case and Nigeria would not be the same again. In Ghana, there were similar cases, too, but short of wholesale massacre, pogrom and civil war. The overthrow of Nkrumah in February 1966, by the Kotoka-led military juntas was followed two months later by the bloody assassination of Kotoka by a group of mutineers from the Ho, Volta Region Camp led by Moses Yeboah. In the Congo, similar events had occurred previously when Patrice Lumumba was captured and assassinated. Such had been the pattern; the assassination-coup-war dance in the 1960s Africa -- the aftermath of Independence.

Like Ironsi, whose story had never been told at length by those who were close to him and knew him very well, things like his life before the combat in Congo, his series of casual and not casual affairs, his increasingly heavy drinking days as told partly by some of the stories, while most of his counterparts elswhere in the continent whose tenure and era had been covered and written by close friends, relatives, haters, admirers and authors of varied flavors, I requested a copy of Ironsi’s biography “Ironside,” written by one of the nation’s finest journalists, Chuks Ilogbunam.

Ilogbunam, this past September 15, on wishing me well on my birthday told me that “Ironside” had been out of print, and that no immediate plans to continue since Ironsi’s story had been told in many ways, that he could embark on “second edition by next year”, and that the copy he had, had been worn out. Ilogbunam writes;

“I throway salute. Ironside sold out "centuries" ago. But if I locate a tattered copy anywhere, might just send it on to you. I chose not to do a reprint because about 10 books dealing with the same period have since appeared. It will make little sense, I think, to reprint without due scrutiny of alternative opinion. But I scarcely had the time the past five years to do anything connected to scholarship. Now that I am in some "freedom" I should redo Ironside for a second edition by next year. Regards.”

Iloegbunam, I will look forward to that second edition, and I do hope that more is yet to be known in what had been the most blood-soaked event in the entire continent where the major actors, some still alive, living in denial as if those innocents that perished was a mere political dance on which Igbos have to start all over again, which was the case in a Nigeria that had been doomed to fail.

But nevertheless, despite all the failed talks resulting to Gowon’s-led assault which shouldn’t have erupted in the first place had the Aburi Accord been respected and upheld, followed by related faile meetings, the British-Russia aided Nigerian vandals did not find the combat easy. Biafra fought. Against all odds, in what President Julius Nyerere had seen as worthy and on the principles of self-reliance, the government of Tanzania recognized Biafra as a Sovereign National State. That profound recognition was followed by Ivory Coast’s President Houphouet Boigny on May 08, 1968; President Omar Bongo of Gabon on May 14, 1968 and President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, May20, 1968.

Several other countries in and outside the continent had planned to join the league recognizing the new nation, but were dissuaded by a contingent led by former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, Alfred Palmer, who had met with these country’s leaders and public intellectuals, charging that a Biafran recognition for sovereignty would not be proper at the moment for the ongoing conflict, which was upon Ojukwu’s Special Squad “S Brigade” invaded and captured the Mid-West, which sent shocking waves to the rest of the world.

The shocking waves resulted to the failed talks in Kampala, Uganda, when the Biafran delegation led by Justice Louis Mbanefo went back home on a breach of the peace talks. The Nigerian delegation which was obvious of deceit and betrayals was led by Anthony Enahoro the traitor, Aminu Kano and the three “Biafran renegades”--Dr. B.I. Ikpeme, Brigadier George Kuruba and Anthony Ukpabi Asika, with proposals meaning a ceasefire should be on the terms of the conqueror, mandated by a British-Russian support.

Thus a whole lot happened, a whole lot is still happening and a whole lot will be happening as time goes on. The question here is, what should be done? Evidently, the saga continues and the Story Never Ends For Igbo Writer In America!

Ambrose Ehirim


Notes: See;

Apologies, Reparations and the Path to Healing; Ambrose Ehirim, BNW/Igbonet/The Ambrose Ehirim Files, (2000)

L.A. Rebellion: Creating A New Black Cinema; UCLA School Of Theater, Film & Television. (2011)

The Burden Of Memory, The Muse Of Forgiveness; Wole Soyinka, Oxford University Press, New York: 1999

The Open Sore Of A Continent: A Personal Narrative Of The Nigerian Crisis; Wole Soyinka, W.E.B. Dubois Institute

The Africans: A Triple Heritage; Ali mazrui; Little Brown and Company; Boston: 1986

The Igbo Of South Eastern Nigeria: Victor C. Uchendu, Holt Reinhart and Winston, New York: 1966

Without Bitterness; Nwafor Oritzu, Creative Press, New York: 1944

Making Of An African Legend; Frederick Forsyth; Pen & Sword