You Must Set Forth at Dawn (19 page)

REVEREND FATHER MARTINS was the chaplain for the federal army, a blunt-speaking soldier, compact in build and rock-solid. He had the reputation of not permitting his priestly duties to interfere with his lover's ardor. Once, a totally reliable source informed me, his fellow prelates had gone to remonstrate with him over an affair that, they warned, was causing embarrassment for the church. They picked an unfortunate moment when Father Martins was ministering to the young parishioner in question, and they entered without knocking—or perhaps Father Martins had simply not heard them. Finally becoming aware of their presence, Martins snatched his priestly garb from the floor, flung it over the heads of the intruders, and, while they were still entangled in the robes, pummeled the muffled mass, kicked it down the stairs, and went back to his interrupted offices.

This was the soldiering prelate whom we decided upon as a logical intermediary with the federal government for my visit to Biafra. We met again thirty-five years after the civil war, at a social reception, when the reverend father was eighty. I thought of asking him what the truth was about the story that we had all enjoyed for upward of thirty years. Fortunately, I first made the mistake of offering him my seat when he came around to say hello. He sat me down with such indignant force, truly unbelievable even in a sixty-year-old, that I decided that it would be wiser to let him take his secrets to the grave.

As expected, Father Martins was delighted to learn that not everyone had given up and gave his blessing to the effort at a last-minute appeal to Ojukwu. He promised to speak to General Gowon, brought out his best noncommunion brandy, poured us both generous shots, and wished me luck.

Even so, it was with great reluctance that Femi reconciled himself to my going. The very thought of guns going off was something to which he was allergic; little did he imagine that, as the war endured, he himself would visit some of the towns liberated by the federal troops, drawn by the demands and opportunities of his insurance profession and sometimes within earshot of bombardments across the firing lines. In 1967, a battlefront still signaled for him the nearest that any mortal could conceive of the promised end of the world—a point over which not many people would disagree.

I set out from his house with the doleful face of a normally ebullient friend staring at me across the table. He was especially troubled by the latest rumors, that attempts by the federal troops to infiltrate Biafra had moved the skirmishing to Auchi, a border town in the Midwest state, next to my destination. The Midwest, separated from the seceded state by the Niger River, served as a buffer state between breakaway Biafra and our Western Region. Nothing would dispel Femi's forebodings until I returned a week later, in one piece, but in far greater danger than I had ever been while close to the firing lines.

THE IGBO ARE the predominant ethnic group in the region that became Biafra, but they also shared the Midwest state with other ethnic groups, such as the Itshekiri, Urhobo, Ijaw, and others. This link across the Niger made it logical that the Midwesterners remain neutral, not be forced to take arms against their kin in Biafra. I spent the night in Asaba, the riverside border town of the Midwest and an Igbo stronghold, as guest of Professor Edozien, once master of Tedder Hall at the University of Ibadan. We spoke late into the night, a discussion that brought in his friends and neighbors, eager to learn the news from Lagos and the West. The atmosphere in that Igbo town was predictably one of apprehension. This anxiety, so evident in my host and his companions, did make me feel that perhaps, after all, I had not embarked on a pointless journey. That sense of futility had begun to gnaw into my setting-out confidence as I drove farther and farther from the comparative stability of Ibadan and deeper into that territory of tensions.

Although Biafra was supposed to be under a blockade and the Asaba bridge—the link across the southward-flowing Niger River—was blocked on both the Midwest and secessionist sides, traffic, both human and of goods, flowed both ways through bush tracks to the riverbanks, both north and south of the Asaba bridge. From Asaba, paddle canoes ferried virtually every commodity to the town of Onitsha on the Biafran side and returned just as heavily laden. These tracks were patrolled by federal soldiers based in Asaba, ostensibly to enforce the blockade. I ran into the patrols from time to time and was stopped only once, and that when a soldier wished to be absolutely certain that his eyes did not deceive him, marveling at what W.S. could be doing in the bush so far from Ibadan or Lagos.

Onitsha, a market town on Biafran soil, can be described as the twin city to Asaba, situated directly across the Niger River from the latter. From the moment of my disembarkation from the canoe, it was clear that secession was not just a word to the Igbo but a total alteration of existence, even down to a collective psychology. Any stranger was spotted immediately and either followed, reported, or accosted. In the end he would be arrested and interrogated. Crossing the effervescent market in Onitsha to find a taxi park, I was often recognized and stopped for news. However, the inevitable confrontation was only a matter of time. It included some mild roughing up by young Biafran vigilantes who were on constant and often manic prowl for “sabos”—saboteurs, but a word interpreted to mean “all strangers.” I was arrested—at the point of wooden guns, aimed at me in all earnestness!—but generally well treated, especially once I was handed over to the local uniformed officer, who found me a seat in his office. I had taken the precaution of bringing my passport with me, to make everyone understand that I accepted that I was visiting a sovereign territory. Transferred for interrogation to Enugu, now elevated from a regional to a national capital, I was routinely locked up in a police cell and treated as a regular suspect—all possessions confiscated, belt, shoes, and underpants taken away. Then the senior police officer in charge returned and ordered that the latest batch of sabos be brought before him. The moment I appeared, he underwent a moment of utter disbelief, then leaped out of his chair and released me, with a torrent of abuse for his subordinates.

It was while I was waiting for my transfer to a hotel that Christopher Okigbo drove in, kitted for war—in casual civilian clothing, but complete with rifle and ammunition belt. He screeched to a halt in front of the station. He was coming from the front, the excitation of battle still fresh in his eyes. For one brief, nostalgic moment, I believe I envied this friend and colleague who would rather be a poet but had thrown himself fully into a self-defining cause. But he was alone, not within a column of the writers and artists brigade of our student dreams, heading south to demolish the apartheid kingdom. Was there really much difference? How is one craving for liberation to be faulted but not the other?

Christopher had come for promised reinforcements, of both men and weapons. The police commissioner let him into the office, having first made me hide behind the door. When the door was shut and I stood revealed, Christopher let out a screech that brought everyone out of their offices. He broke into a mad jig in front of the astonished officers and wanted to drag me off to wherever. Finally, he had to content himself with accepting that the head of his new state exercised priority over my presence in Biafra. We promised to meet later in the evening, when I would have fulfilled my immediate mission. I watched him load some guns and ammunition into his car, waved to him as he drove off in a small cloud of dust. That was the last time I would see my excitable friend and poet Christopher Okigbo alive. He perished on the Okigwi front, we later learned, with that chant from the Spanish Civil War issuing from his throat: “¡No pasarán!”
²⁶
One person, at least, had given his life to the dreams of youth, but how sad that it should have been on a fratricidal field.

THE HOTEL PRESIDENTIAL, where I was lodged as a guest of the government, said it all. Sanctions and a blockade to enforce them had taken their toll, and this once-splendid lodging with a commanding view of the city had nothing left that was remotely presidential—except perhaps the size of its rats! Since I was the sole occupant of that vast, derelict space, perhaps they looked to me for company and even sustenance. They accompanied me everywhere—from the dining room to my bedroom suite, with its discolored ceiling—and formed guards of honor along the corridors of moldy carpets and peeling paint. If I sought a pessimistic portent for the future of Biafra, the Presidential offered itself most assertively. I tried my best to dismiss this pessimistic image, however, eyeballing the rats while I awaited my summons to the leader of the secessionist state.

We met the following morning in an ornate office, a kind of converted hall, its spaciousness a marked contrast to the cluttered office of his predecessor in office, Dr. Michael Okpara, who had shielded me in that city after the radio holdup. The irony was striking: on that visit, I had discussed the logistics of popular insurrection with the civil leader; now I was cast in the role of a mediator between professionals at war making, a role to which I felt distinctly ill fitted. Preaching pacifism, even of a limited, tactical kind, in the midst of evident wrongs has always struck me as a task specially designed to separate saints from mere mortals, and I have never succeeded in finding my proper size in haloes. It became possible to actually exercise conviction in the mission only when I reminded myself that I had really come to call for restraint, even temporary, while accompanying moves were made to reassure the Biafrans of the recognition of their just cause.

Meeting Ojukwu face-to-face, I tried unsuccessfully to remind myself that I was now facing His Excellency Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, head of an independent state, not the young “Emeka” whom I had known in Yaba, Lagos, in the early fifties. Then I had been laying siege to the heart of the younger sister of his own object of attention, envying the jazzy sports car that brought him to his trysts while I pedaled to battle on my bicycle. He was heavily bearded and already balding from the forehead, self-conscious of his new status to the point of unintended self-parody, especially when taken with his exaggerated upper-class British accent, but his delight at my visit was genuine enough.

I outlined my mission: I was there to persuade him to call a halt to the firing from his side while one more effort was made to resolve the conflict between the federal government and his now-seceded state. The sticky point, however, was that this would require placing a hold on the secession.

Ojukwu reiterated his charges against the federal side and painted for me the mood of his people: it was the people themselves, not he, who had pressed for secession. No one, he insisted, could have withstood the tide of that resentful outpouring. It was a plausible case, but one that I found difficult to swallow entire. Ojukwu himself had played a role in manipulating emotions.

I joined in his midmorning snack, watched him daintily pick
akara
²⁷
balls from a silver salver served by a waiter in immaculate white uniform complete with white gloves. It all seemed rather incongruous, impossible not to feel that one was watching an act. The exchange was anything but staged, however; we were, after all, engaged in an exchange of life and death—not merely of human beings but of his dream of Biafra.

He would not commit himself. Instead, he insisted that I speak first to a few civilian leaders, some of whom I did meet later on. In turn, I requested to speak with Major Wole Ademoyega, an officer from the West who had been imprisoned for his role in the January 15 coup and transferred to Enugu prisons. That transfer had saved his life. When the countercoup had taken place in July that year, the plotters had invaded prisons under federal control, abducted the officers, and subjected them to cruel forms of death. Ademoyega, however, lived to write of his role in the January 15 coup in Why We Struck.

MOST FATEFUL OF ALL my meetings in the seceded enclave was that with Victor Banjo, a Yoruba officer. Following some convoluted chain of incidents, Victor Banjo had been accused of menacing the former head of state, General Aguiyi-Ironsi—and had ended up in Enugu prisons. After the declaration of Biafran independence, he was released by Ojukwu, as were other Yoruba officers and soldiers from the Western Region, some of whom had certainly been involved in the original January 1966 coup.

Loose-limbed and slightly bandy-legged, Victor Banjo reminded me very strongly of a browsing
igala,
that rangy, powerful deer, when it is totally unconscious of any intruder. He exuded a quiet, commanding presence, as one who would be at ease in any environment, looking as if he were in studious contemplation of a world devoid of strife. A total contrast to Ojukwu, his bearing still struck me as a contradiction to the frenzy of war, as if the outer reality had nothing to do with him personally. Yet the war map on the wall, the guns, even the Spartan nature of his office and the stiff, attentive poise of his batman told a different story. I noticed the lenses of his glasses at once—very thick— and from the way his eyes appeared to adjust to distance, I guessed that he was shortsighted. Impeccably groomed even in his khaki uniform, this stranger soon revealed himself as an idealist whose politics were quite close to ours in the Third Force. He made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was subjecting me to some deep scrutiny—or perhaps that was simply the effect of his thick lenses—then abruptly appeared to have made up his mind.

A stream of indignation followed as he castigated the failure of Western leaders to condemn the massacres of the Igbo and ridiculed the visits of traditional rulers who had come to the East to commiserate with widows and orphans—too little, too late, and short on sincerity, was his verdict. For the leader of the Biafran secession, he had even harsher words. If Odumegwu Ojukwu had displayed true leadership, the secession, he insisted, would never have taken place.

Then, again abruptly, he shrugged it all off, dismissed the past with a wave of his hand. He had relieved himself of a long-pent-up resentment, and now he had no further use for it. A slim, light-complexioned, quite good-looking man in uniform joined us and was introduced as Phillip Alale. He was a complete contrast, restless and excitable. Alale spoke agitatedly and volubly of the lack of ideological grounding in the conflict, slashing the air right and left as he outlined the cleansing that was needed for the diseased polity called Nigeria. For him also, Ojukwu was not the answer to the threat of Northern domination in Nigerian politics. What was desperately needed was a third force, though he did not actually use the expression; still, his prescription was for a new entrant that would neutralize the two combatants. It was Phillip Alale, however, who was fated to be neutralized at the firing stake in Biafra, convicted of treason against Ojukwu's government, together with Victor Banjo and two others.