Raymond Chilaka Ejiogu, World War II veteran, and the father of public intellectual/activist E. C. Ejiogu is dead.
Raymond Chilaka Ejiogu, World War II veteran, and the father of public intellectual/activist E. C. Ejiogu is dead.
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He was 97 years old. Mr. Ejiogu started his work life as a teacher right after he obtained the standard six school certificate in 1939. He became disenchanted with teaching at the Saint Dominic’s Mission School Ezinihitte where he also schooled, over the high-handed and corrupt practices of his superiors. He resigned his position in 1940 and proceeded to the provincial capital, Enugu to try his luck at seeking civil service employment the same year.
On a day while he was out hawking some perishable food items, the proceeds from which he sustained himself while job-hunting, he learnt that someone he knew whose father was well-placed in the city at the time had taken the initiative to enlist in the army, he took a spur of the moment decision himself and went to the enlistment depot where he was accepted into the Queen’s Own Nigeria Regiment in the Signal Corps. That day was February 2, 1941. In the detailed autobiographical diaries that he ardently kept most of his life, he wrote: “When I had no luck for civil employment, I went and joined [the Army] by Feb, 2, 1941. My entering [the Army] was not judged by age or height, but education [because] by then I was very small and young”. Years later, he would often disclose that for one like him who was from the most humble background, learning that the son of one of the well-placed men in Enugu had gone out of his way and enlisted in the Army, was more than sufficient reason for him to decide without any hesitation at all to find his way to the enlistment depot and embrace army life.
Apart from this indication of the singleness of purpose in Mr. Ejiogu, there are countless others that stand out about him. Who amongst today’s youth would dispatch all of the two pounds, ten shillings that he had to his name right after he enlisted, to his single-parent father who raised him in his village Ubonukam Onicha, and top it off with an allotment of fifteen shillings out of his new enlistee monthly salary of one-pound, ten shillings for his father to draw each month-end at the district capital, Owerre? That was exactly what new enlistee Ejiogu did on the rationale that his father needed the money more than him when he found out that the Army would cater for him, room board, and even clothing to a good measure. He was no doubt, not cut for the profligate life style that soldiers are, even then, associated with.
The contingent of new enlistees in the Signal Corps left Enugu November 7, 1941 after basic training and journeyed by train to a destination that was undisclosed to them in keeping with military security precautions at war time. Upon arrival, they then knew that they were in Lagos. They later left Lagos and sailed out and arrived the Gold Coast, now Ghana where they laid over for five days, before they sailed again and arrived Freetown, Sierra Leone where they spent three months and twenty days waiting for all-clear signal that the seas were safe to sail on at a time when German submarines were prowling around.
What became their ultimate destination when they sailed again from Freetown was Nairobi, in Kenya, East Africa, which they arrived March 23, 1942 after their vessel passed through Cape Town, East London, Port Elizabeth, and Durban, all in South Africa, and subsequently, Mombasa in Kenya. Their brief stops in Cape Town and Durban for four and six days respectively were remarkable for Mr. Ejiogu. Their stay in Cape Town which he described as “enjoyable” gave him and his colleagues the chance to witness first hand, aspects of the militarism, which characterized Afrikaneer nationalism in South Africa. This was only a few years before that racist nationalism blossomed into the advent of the rigid racist apartheid socio-political system sequel to the victory of the Afrikaneer National Party (NP) in the general all-white elections that took place in 1948 in South Africa.
On the same day that the new Signal Corpsmen arrived in Nairobi, they also proceeded to the Signal Training School located seven miles away in a place called the Karin Estate near Mount Kenya for their training in wireless operation. After training and qualification as first class wireless operators, they were deployed outright as Signal corpsmen in Nairobi for the duration of two years, five months and three days.
Noticeable to him then was that his contingent of new enlistees in the Signal Corps from Nigeria was composed of only Igbo, Yoruba, Efik and others from the south of Nigeria. His apt observation tallied quite well with findings from research on the recruitment of indigenous men into the Nigeria Regiment right from its inception. Until the outbreak of the World Wars, especially the Second, which created an acute manpower shortage in military occupation specialties that required Western education qualifications, recruitment of indigenous men into the Regiment especially in the other ranks given that the officer and NCO corps were British, was stipulated by official policy by the War Office, London to strictly target individuals from the so-called martial tribes, i.e. the Tiv, Numan, Tangele, Dakakori, et al that inhabit the remote parts of the Middle Belt and other parts in the north of Nigeria. But there is little doubt that the actual rationale, which inspired that policy was political and not military: it was a deliberate measure taken by the British who were determined to build and preserve a loyal infantry force of indigenous men that would be trustfully and effectively deployed to quell the anti-colonial disturbances that were regular occurrences amongst inhabitants of the south of Nigeria in the hinterlands and the colonial urban centers.
Indeed, the Army was a veritable safety net, which provided provincial youths such as Mr. Ejiogu and his comrades with the opportunity to improve their human capital and for adventure. As he put it in one of his diaries: “During our stay in East Africa, I visited a place called Mariakani just 70 miles from Nairobi, Uganda and some other places in Uganda area.” On the same adventurous token, when their deployment abroad ended in 1944, and they embarked on the journey that subsequently brought them home, they embarked ship in Mombasa, passed through Arden, in North Africa, the Suez from where they took a train to Qassasine, and then on to Haifa, in Palestine, Gibraltar, Sierra Leone, Gold Coat and Lagos, which they arrived on October 10, 1944 where he gushed: “Here, we were more than happy for everybody had been longing to return to the happy capital of Nigeria.”
Mr. Ejiogu’s Army career continued in Nigeria where he rotated between Apapa, Lagos and Kaduna until 1956 when he applied for and was granted meritorious discharge. Thereafter, he relied on his qualification, skills and experience as a first class wireless operator to land well-paying employment first with the Nigerian Railway Corporation, and then oil multinational, Shell British Petroleum with whom he worked in Owerre, Aba and Port Harcourt until the outbreak of the Nigeria-Biafra war in 1967 when he left Port Harcourt and joined the Biafra war efforts as a Signal personnel.
Mr. Ejiogu lived an enviable and accomplished life, which his family of two wives, eleven children, thirty grand, and six great grand children insist they must celebrate. Amongst his children are Mrs. Margaret Ednah I. Ibe, nee Ejiogu of Houston, Texas, US; and Professor E. C. Ejiogu of the University of the Free State, South Africa. At his death, he was the oldest man in his village, Ubonukam Onicha Ezinihitte in Imo State, where he will also be buried on August 13, following Christian and other accompanying rites that befit him.
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