January 24, 2010
The Biafran War of July 6, 1967, to January 15, 1970, was the “second media war” of modern history. The Spanish War of July 17, 1936, to April 1, 1939, was the first. Both wars were fought for nearly three years. Among the coalition of writers and journalists who spoke and fought for Spain were Roy Campbell, Ernest Hemmingway, Uys Krige, George Orwell, and Stephen Spender. In Biafra the vanguard of global writers and journalists included Renata Adler, Norman Cousins, Suzanne Cronje, Stanley Diamond, Frederick Forsyth, Nadine Gordimer, and Auberon Waugh. As in the Spanish crisis, Biafra did not become a media war because of the influx of the international brotherhood of the pen. On the contrary, the international media responded mostly to the Biafran Brotherhood of the pen.
The idea of a nationalist brotherhood or brotherhood of nation building would, of course, evoke psychic relations with the sinister Martin Bormann and the “Borman Brotherhood” in Nazi Germany (as reinvented by William Stevenson) or the vicious “Afrikaner Broederbond” of late South African minority racist regime. The Borman Brotherhood and the Afrikaner Broederbond were both power cults: the former a mystified phantom of Hitlerite Germany overwhelmed by fraud, disease, concentration camp, and the Holocaust for two decades, 1925-1945; the latter an automaton of oppressive divestment going through eight decades, 1918-1994. The Hitler-Bormann and Afrikaner Brotherhoods shared great similarities: the cover of Christian Catholicism and Calvinism, Dutch-German racial purity and Aryan Supremacy, absolute power of the fascist National Party, vast network of intriguers’ intriguers, and exclusivity of white Alpha male hero worship. The German National Party (NSDAP) or “Nazi Party” founded the totalitarian Third Reich and launched the Second World War with a genocidal frenzy. The Afrikaner “Purified National Party” partly supported the Nazi while launching the separatist apartheid order that locked down entire black and colored populations in enforced “black spots” and “Homelands” for fifty years.
The Biafran Brotherhood, by contrast, was irrevocably altruistic and sacrificial. The Biafran “brothers” did not declare war, like the Hitler-Bormann and Afrikaner Brotherhoods; war was declared on them and their land in Southeast Nigeria. They did not go to war to covet other people’s land, women, or gold, as the Dutch-German Brotherhoods respectively did in Germany and South Africa; they went to war to keep and protect their fundamental human rights to life and property. They were not warmongers who fight for laurels and aggrandizement; they were warriors who believed – as all reasonable, cultured, and noble people – that “it was better to fight and be defeated than to be defeated without fighting.” Biafra, unlike Nigeria and the Dutch-German Brotherhoods, did not fight a war of choice; it fought a war of necessity to save itself and its land from annihilation and extirpation. Unlike the Dutch-German Brotherhoods, the Biafran Brotherhood had no business or party affiliation. Biafra had neither a chamber of commerce nor a political party. The “brothers” had no “Big Brother” fetish like the Aryan Hitler or the Afrikaner Hertzog. They had no designs either for domination and superpower linkages or for racial and religious supremacy. They were simply childhood playmates, grade school and college pals, and literary associates.
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The members were among the best and the most distinguished of the Nigerian literati of the period. The oldest of them Gabriel Okara (poet, b. 1921) and Cyprian Ekwensi (novelist, b. 1921) were forty-six years of age, and the youngest of them Michael J. C. Echeruo (poet and professor, b. 1937) and Uche Chukwumerije (journalist, b. 1939) were thirty and twenty-eight, respectively. Other prominent members were Chinua Achebe (novelist and broadcaster), John Munonye (novelist and administrator), Christopher Okigbo (poet and librarian), Flora Nwapa (novelist), Chukwuemeka Ike (novelist and administrator), Ben Obumselu (professor and critic), Soni Oti (professor and dramatist), Chukwuemeka Ojukwu (soldier and historian), and Emmanuel Ifeajuna (soldier and athlete). Still there were such eminent scholars and professionals as Pius Okigbo, Kenneth Dike, Edward Kobani, Ignatius Kogbara, Ikenna Nzimiro, Sylvanus Cookey, Okoko Ndem, Emmanuel Obiechina, and G. E. K. Ofomata.
General Ojukwu (Biafra’s leader) raised funds to finance his initial war effort from his own father, Sir Louis, who was noted as the richest man in post-Independence Nigeria. Major Ifeajuna (leader of Nigeria’s first military coup) and Lt. Col. Ojukwu were the only college graduate Igbo commissioned officers of the Nigerian Army at the start of the Civil War. Ojukwu and Obumselu had their graduate studies at Oxford University. Ifeajuna and Obumselu were mates at Dennis Memorial Grammar School (DMGS), Onitsha. Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, and Ike were mates at the Government College, Umuahia. Many of the “brothers” studied at the University College, Ibadan, including Achebe, Chukwumerije, Echeruo, Ifeajuna, Ike, Kobani, Munonye, Nwapa, Obumselu, and Christopher Okigbo. Many of them belonged to either one or both of Nigeria’s campus literary groups (Mbari at Ibadan and Anthills at Nsukka), including Achebe, Echeruo, Munonye, Nwapa, Obumselu, and Okigbo.
The boldfaced denegation or defection of several compatriots from the Biafran cause was a source of constant chagrin to the Brotherhood. Emma Okocha gives a good account of this phenomenon in his riveting study of the first black on black genocide in history, Blood on the Niger (2004). The economist Philip Asiodu, for instance, was a permanent secretary in the Nigerian aggressor government whose military exterminated all boys and men of his Asaba hometown, Midwestern Nigeria, in October 1967. His brother Sydney Asiodu, Nigeria’s best prewar Olympian, was among those killed in cold blood. Ike Nwachukwu, journalist and Ojukwu’s prewar aide-de-camp, was a captain in the Nigerian army that blitzed through Asaba as Lt. Col. Ibrahim Taiwo’s contingent unleashed a reign terror. Ukpabi Asika (scholar) and J. O. J. Okezie (medical doctor) continued their respective services as state administrator and federal minister in a regime that supervised the incineration of their home cities of Onitsha and Umuahia. Emeka Anyaoku and S.G. Ikoku were two of the most vociferous diplomats of a brutal administration that ransacked their own ancestral lands.
Equally regrettable as the preceding, was the betrayal of the life of the party and the 1954 Vancouver Commonwealth Games hero Ifeajuna. Ifeajuna led the first student demonstration at DMGS, Onitsha, and the first student riot at the University College, Ibadan. He led the first military coup in Nigeria which assassinated Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa, Premier Ahmadu Bello, Premier Samuel Akintola, and Brigadier-General Samuel Ademulegun. He led the only military coup in Biafra with the singular aim to kill Ojukwu and to overthrow Biafra. The tribunal that tried and convicted him and his co-plotters was comprised of his peers who had known him all his life, and who had to bear the searing pain of his tragic end. But his peers also knew that with two million lives perishing in the worst genocide in Africa since the transatlantic slave trade, Biafra was not an anthill for a gadfly’s gamboling. In a conversation of January 19, 2010, the secretary of that special tribunal described Ifeajuna to me as “a very turbulent personality.” As Achebe demonstrates with his protagonist Ezeulu in Arrow of God (1964), a man of unbridled pride leads his own god to self-destruction. The bizarre volte-face of the Biafran deniers and defectors, like the eleventh hour denial of the Apostle Peter, illustrates that humanity is reified and edified by the courage and affirmation of immortal truth.
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Given its imaginative antecedents it is appropriate that the poetics of struggle defined the spirit of Biafra as enshrined in the republic’s national anthem, “Land of the Rising Sun.” Ironically, the song was adapted from a poem of the same title which Nnamdi Azikiwe, father of Nigerian nationalism and Ojukwu’s godfather, had composed inside Biafra in 1968 after Claude McKay’s American race conflict anthem poem “If We Must Die” (1919). The idealism of the Biafran revolution is especially evident in the green book, Ahiara Declaration (1969), which the Brotherhood had constructed in a last ditch effort to cast the letter and mission of the people on a canvas of eternity.
As Nigeria’s midnight bird cackles again at the primeval abyss in this fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second Biafra (for there had been a historical Biafra before 1967!), the lesson of the Biafran Brotherhood is that a forest that spawns wasps and arrows need not fear war. Pen and discourse are forever at the core of nation building. Every nation thrives or totters according to the vision and mission of its literary brotherhood.
• Obiwu is a public intellectual. This preliminary report on “The Biafran Brotherhood” is dedicated to the nation and people of Haiti, to whom the January 12, 2010, magnitude 7.0 earthquake is a reminder that the revolutionary imperative against human and natural oppression is a lifetime project. Contact: [email protected].
The idea of a nationalist brotherhood or brotherhood of nation building would, of course, evoke psychic relations with the sinister Martin Bormann and the “Borman Brotherhood” in Nazi Germany (as reinvented by William Stevenson) or the vicious “Afrikaner Broederbond” of late South African minority racist regime. The Borman Brotherhood and the Afrikaner Broederbond were both power cults: the former a mystified phantom of Hitlerite Germany overwhelmed by fraud, disease, concentration camp, and the Holocaust for two decades, 1925-1945; the latter an automaton of oppressive divestment going through eight decades, 1918-1994. The Hitler-Bormann and Afrikaner Brotherhoods shared great similarities: the cover of Christian Catholicism and Calvinism, Dutch-German racial purity and Aryan Supremacy, absolute power of the fascist National Party, vast network of intriguers’ intriguers, and exclusivity of white Alpha male hero worship. The German National Party (NSDAP) or “Nazi Party” founded the totalitarian Third Reich and launched the Second World War with a genocidal frenzy. The Afrikaner “Purified National Party” partly supported the Nazi while launching the separatist apartheid order that locked down entire black and colored populations in enforced “black spots” and “Homelands” for fifty years.
The Biafran Brotherhood, by contrast, was irrevocably altruistic and sacrificial. The Biafran “brothers” did not declare war, like the Hitler-Bormann and Afrikaner Brotherhoods; war was declared on them and their land in Southeast Nigeria. They did not go to war to covet other people’s land, women, or gold, as the Dutch-German Brotherhoods respectively did in Germany and South Africa; they went to war to keep and protect their fundamental human rights to life and property. They were not warmongers who fight for laurels and aggrandizement; they were warriors who believed – as all reasonable, cultured, and noble people – that “it was better to fight and be defeated than to be defeated without fighting.” Biafra, unlike Nigeria and the Dutch-German Brotherhoods, did not fight a war of choice; it fought a war of necessity to save itself and its land from annihilation and extirpation. Unlike the Dutch-German Brotherhoods, the Biafran Brotherhood had no business or party affiliation. Biafra had neither a chamber of commerce nor a political party. The “brothers” had no “Big Brother” fetish like the Aryan Hitler or the Afrikaner Hertzog. They had no designs either for domination and superpower linkages or for racial and religious supremacy. They were simply childhood playmates, grade school and college pals, and literary associates.
articleadslinks
The members were among the best and the most distinguished of the Nigerian literati of the period. The oldest of them Gabriel Okara (poet, b. 1921) and Cyprian Ekwensi (novelist, b. 1921) were forty-six years of age, and the youngest of them Michael J. C. Echeruo (poet and professor, b. 1937) and Uche Chukwumerije (journalist, b. 1939) were thirty and twenty-eight, respectively. Other prominent members were Chinua Achebe (novelist and broadcaster), John Munonye (novelist and administrator), Christopher Okigbo (poet and librarian), Flora Nwapa (novelist), Chukwuemeka Ike (novelist and administrator), Ben Obumselu (professor and critic), Soni Oti (professor and dramatist), Chukwuemeka Ojukwu (soldier and historian), and Emmanuel Ifeajuna (soldier and athlete). Still there were such eminent scholars and professionals as Pius Okigbo, Kenneth Dike, Edward Kobani, Ignatius Kogbara, Ikenna Nzimiro, Sylvanus Cookey, Okoko Ndem, Emmanuel Obiechina, and G. E. K. Ofomata.
General Ojukwu (Biafra’s leader) raised funds to finance his initial war effort from his own father, Sir Louis, who was noted as the richest man in post-Independence Nigeria. Major Ifeajuna (leader of Nigeria’s first military coup) and Lt. Col. Ojukwu were the only college graduate Igbo commissioned officers of the Nigerian Army at the start of the Civil War. Ojukwu and Obumselu had their graduate studies at Oxford University. Ifeajuna and Obumselu were mates at Dennis Memorial Grammar School (DMGS), Onitsha. Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, and Ike were mates at the Government College, Umuahia. Many of the “brothers” studied at the University College, Ibadan, including Achebe, Chukwumerije, Echeruo, Ifeajuna, Ike, Kobani, Munonye, Nwapa, Obumselu, and Christopher Okigbo. Many of them belonged to either one or both of Nigeria’s campus literary groups (Mbari at Ibadan and Anthills at Nsukka), including Achebe, Echeruo, Munonye, Nwapa, Obumselu, and Okigbo.
The boldfaced denegation or defection of several compatriots from the Biafran cause was a source of constant chagrin to the Brotherhood. Emma Okocha gives a good account of this phenomenon in his riveting study of the first black on black genocide in history, Blood on the Niger (2004). The economist Philip Asiodu, for instance, was a permanent secretary in the Nigerian aggressor government whose military exterminated all boys and men of his Asaba hometown, Midwestern Nigeria, in October 1967. His brother Sydney Asiodu, Nigeria’s best prewar Olympian, was among those killed in cold blood. Ike Nwachukwu, journalist and Ojukwu’s prewar aide-de-camp, was a captain in the Nigerian army that blitzed through Asaba as Lt. Col. Ibrahim Taiwo’s contingent unleashed a reign terror. Ukpabi Asika (scholar) and J. O. J. Okezie (medical doctor) continued their respective services as state administrator and federal minister in a regime that supervised the incineration of their home cities of Onitsha and Umuahia. Emeka Anyaoku and S.G. Ikoku were two of the most vociferous diplomats of a brutal administration that ransacked their own ancestral lands.
Equally regrettable as the preceding, was the betrayal of the life of the party and the 1954 Vancouver Commonwealth Games hero Ifeajuna. Ifeajuna led the first student demonstration at DMGS, Onitsha, and the first student riot at the University College, Ibadan. He led the first military coup in Nigeria which assassinated Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa, Premier Ahmadu Bello, Premier Samuel Akintola, and Brigadier-General Samuel Ademulegun. He led the only military coup in Biafra with the singular aim to kill Ojukwu and to overthrow Biafra. The tribunal that tried and convicted him and his co-plotters was comprised of his peers who had known him all his life, and who had to bear the searing pain of his tragic end. But his peers also knew that with two million lives perishing in the worst genocide in Africa since the transatlantic slave trade, Biafra was not an anthill for a gadfly’s gamboling. In a conversation of January 19, 2010, the secretary of that special tribunal described Ifeajuna to me as “a very turbulent personality.” As Achebe demonstrates with his protagonist Ezeulu in Arrow of God (1964), a man of unbridled pride leads his own god to self-destruction. The bizarre volte-face of the Biafran deniers and defectors, like the eleventh hour denial of the Apostle Peter, illustrates that humanity is reified and edified by the courage and affirmation of immortal truth.
articleadsbanner
Given its imaginative antecedents it is appropriate that the poetics of struggle defined the spirit of Biafra as enshrined in the republic’s national anthem, “Land of the Rising Sun.” Ironically, the song was adapted from a poem of the same title which Nnamdi Azikiwe, father of Nigerian nationalism and Ojukwu’s godfather, had composed inside Biafra in 1968 after Claude McKay’s American race conflict anthem poem “If We Must Die” (1919). The idealism of the Biafran revolution is especially evident in the green book, Ahiara Declaration (1969), which the Brotherhood had constructed in a last ditch effort to cast the letter and mission of the people on a canvas of eternity.
As Nigeria’s midnight bird cackles again at the primeval abyss in this fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second Biafra (for there had been a historical Biafra before 1967!), the lesson of the Biafran Brotherhood is that a forest that spawns wasps and arrows need not fear war. Pen and discourse are forever at the core of nation building. Every nation thrives or totters according to the vision and mission of its literary brotherhood.
• Obiwu is a public intellectual. This preliminary report on “The Biafran Brotherhood” is dedicated to the nation and people of Haiti, to whom the January 12, 2010, magnitude 7.0 earthquake is a reminder that the revolutionary imperative against human and natural oppression is a lifetime project. Contact: [email protected].
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