Chinua Achebe and the Moral Obligation to be Intelligent By Damola Awoyokun A writer should not be an accomplice to lies. Even when thorns infect the land, a writer must embody and defend the perennial destiny of high values and principles. It is not the business of a writer to side with the powerless against the powerful; the powerless can be thoughtless and wrong. (The Nazi party was once a powerless group). A writer should not prefer falsehoods to reality just because they serve patriotic ends. In times of great upheavals in a multi-ethnic society, a writer should get out and warn the society that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Pride in one’s ethnic identity is good, patriotism is fantastic but when they are not properly moderated by 1
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Chinua Achebe and the Moral Obligation to be Intelligent
By
Damola Awoyokun
A writer should not be an accomplice to lies. Even when thorns infect the land, a
writer must embody and defend the perennial destiny of high values and principles. It
is not the business of a writer to side with the powerless against the powerful; the
powerless can be thoughtless and wrong. (The Nazi party was once a powerless
group). A writer should not prefer falsehoods to reality just because they serve
patriotic ends. In times of great upheavals in a multi-ethnic society, a writer should
get out and warn the society that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its
consequences. Pride in one’s ethnic identity is good, patriotism is fantastic but when
they are not properly moderated by other higher considerations, they can prove more
destructive than nuclear weapons.
I was in Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife when another round of the war of self-
determination and secession broke out between Modakeke and Ife. As the war
escalated, a single bullet wasn’t enough to kill the “enemy,” he had to be butchered
into little pieces and the severed heads displayed at each other’s market squares to
huge approval and celebration. Such was the power of the mutual hatred unleashed
from their pride in their respective ethnic identities that these two communities were
not rebuked by the fact that were both Yoruba, both Nigerians, or that the massacres
were being conducted around the famed cradle of Yoruba civilization.
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Patriotism when deployed must always be simultaneously governed by something
higher and lower than itself like the arms of a democratic government. These provide
checks and balances so that patriotism doesn’t become a false conception of greatness
at the expense of other tribes or nations. It is for this reason that we proceed to discuss
Achebe’s patriotic autobiography, There Was a Country: A Personal History of
Biafra in the light of something higher than it: 21,000 pages of Confidential, Secret,
Top Secret US State Department Central Files on Nigeria-Biafra 1967- 1969 and
something lower: The Education of a British Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
himself.
…A Country is written for modern day Igbos to know from where the injustice of
their existence originated. Achebe’s logic is neat and simplistic: Africa began to
suffer 500 years ago when Europe discovered it (that is, there was no suffering or
intertribal wars before then in Africa!) Nigeria began to suffer when Lord Lugard
amalgamated it. And Igbos began to suffer because of the event surrounding the
Biafran secession. To Achebe, there should have been more countries in the behemoth
Lord Lugard cobbled together called Nigeria. What Achebe does not take into
account is the role rabid tribalism plays in doing violence to social cohesion which
makes every region counterproductively seeks a perfect answer in demanding its own
nation state. There are over 250 tribes in Nigeria and there cannot be over 250
countries in Nigeria. There are officially 645 distinctive tribes in India and only one
country. All over the world there are tens of thousands of tribes and there are only 206
countries. What the tribes that constitute Nigeria need to learn for the unity of the
country is the democratization of their tribal loyalties. And that inevitably leads to
gradual detribalization of consciousness which makes it possible to treat a person as
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an individual and not basically a member of another tribe. That is the first error of
Achebe.
Instead of writing the book as a writer who is Igbo, Achebe wrote the book as an Igbo
writer hence working himself into a Zugzwang bind. In chess once you are in this
bind, every step you make weakens your position further and further. All the places
that should alarm the moral consciousness of any writer, Achebe is either indifferent
to or dismisses them outright because the victims are not his people. However, in
every encounter that shows Igbos being killed or resented by Nigerians, or by the
Yoruba in particular, Achebe intensifies the spotlight, deploying stratospheric
rhetoric, amassing quotes from foreign authors with further elaborations in endnotes
to show he is not partial. Achebe calls upon powerfully coercive emotive words and
phrasings to dignify what is clearly repugnant to reason. Furthermore, not only does
he take pride in ignoring the findings of common sense, he allocates primetime
attention to facts-free rants just because they say his people are the most superior tribe
in Nigeria. The book, to say the least, is a masterpiece of propaganda and sycophancy.
And yet it is not a writer’s business to be an accomplice to lies.
First let’s take Achebe’s Christopher Okigbo. Throughout the book, Achebe presents
Okigbo in loving moments complete with tender details: Okigbo attending to
Achebe’s wife during labour, Okigbo ordering opulent room service dishes for
Achebe wife in a swank hotel while Achebe was out of the country, Okigbo being a
dearly beloved uncle to Achebe’s children, Okigbo opening a publishing house in the
middle of the war. Out of the blue he writes that he hears on Radio Nigeria the death
of Major Christopher Okigbo. Major? The reader is completely shocked and feels
revulsion for the side that killed him and sympathy for the side that lost him. Unlike
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other accounts like Obi Nwakanma’s definitive biography of Okigbo, Achebe skips
details of Okigbo running arms and ammunition from Birmingham to Biafra and also
from place to place in Biafra; he suppresses the fact that Okigbo knew of the January
1966 coup beforehand through Emmanuel Ifeajuna; he omits the fact that Okigbo was
an active-duty guerrilla fighter killing the other side before he himself got killed. Like
many other episodes recounted in the book, Achebe photoshops the true picture so
that readers would allocate early enough which side should merit their sympathy,
which side should be for slated for revulsion. Pities, cheap sympathy, sloppy
sentimentalism, one-sided victimhood are what are on sale throughout the book.
Achebe of course is preparing the reader for his agenda at the end of the book.
To Achebe, the final straw that led to secession was the alleged 30,000 Igbos killed in
the North. He carefully structures the narrative to locate the reason for this systematic
killing/pogrom/ethnic-cleansing in the so-called usual resentment of Igbos and not
from the fallout of the first coup in the history of Nigeria. Achebe dismisses the
targeted assassinations as not an Igbo coup. The two reasons Achebe gives are
because there was a Yoruba officer among the coup plotters and that the alleged
leader of the coup, Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu was Igbo in name only. “Not
only was he born in Kaduna, the capital of the Muslim North, he was widely known
as someone who saw himself as a Northerner, spoke fluent Hausa and little Igbo, and
wore the Northern traditional dress when not in uniform(pg 79).” Really? First, it was
not mysterious that Azikiwe left the country in October 1965 on an endless medical
cruise to Britain and the Caribbean. Dr. Idemudia Idehen his personal doctor,
abandoned him when he got tired of the endless medical trip. Not even the
Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference never held outside London but hosted in
Lagos for the first time in early January was incentive enough for Azikiwe to return
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and yet he was the president of the nation. In a revelation contained in the American
secret documents, it was Azikiwe’s presidential bodyguards from Federal Guards that
Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna, the coup’s mastermind, used to capture the Prime
Minister, Abubakar Balewa. Once Ifeajuna and Major Donatus Okafor, the
Commanding officer of the Federal Guards tipped off Azikiwe about the planned
bloodshed, Okafor, Godfrey Ezedigbo and others Guards became freer to meet in
Ifeajuna’s house in Apapa to take the plan to the next level. The recruitment for the
ringleaders was done between August and October 1965. Immediately Azikiwe left,
planning and training for the execution began.
Second, the eastern leadership was spared when others were brutally wasted. Third,
the head of state Major-General Aguyi-Ironsi, an Igbo, didn’t try and execute the coup
plotters as was the practice if it were a pure military affair. (Ojukwu told Suzanne
Cronje, the British-South African author that he asked Aguyi-Ironsi to take over and
told him how to unite the army behind him. That was the reason he made him the
governor of Eastern Region.) Four, when Awolowo, Bola Ige, Anthony Enahoro,
Lateef Jakande, etc were imprisoned for sedition, they served their terms in Calabar
away from their regions as was the normal practice. When Wole Soyinka was
imprisoned for activities at the beginning of the civil war, he was sent to faraway
Kaduna and Jos prisons but the ring leaders of coup plotters were moved from Lagos
back to the Eastern Region, among their people on the advice of Ojukwu. Five, during
the Aburi negotiations, why was full reprieve for the coup plotters put on the table?
Six, a freed Nzeogwu by April 1967 before the secession declaration joined in
training recruits in Abakaliki for the inevitable war with Nigeria. He later died on the
Nsukka front fighting for Biafra. Yet that was Achebe’s Hausa-speaking, kaftan-
wearing Kaduna man, who is Igbo in name only. It was an Igbo coup. (The same
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repackaging was attempted for the invasion and occupation of the Midwest. It was
called liberation of the Midwest from Hausa-Fulani domination when it was simply
another Igbo coup for Igbo ends planned in Enugu albeit headed by a Yoruba, Colonel
Victor Banjo)
The January coup didn’t foment a much more viscera response in Western Region
since their assassinated political leader was part of the corrupt, troublesome, election-
rigging class. To Westerners, the coup was good riddance to bad rubbish. However to
the Northerners who were feudal in their social organization and Hobbesian in their
consciousness, it was different matter. Sir Ahmadu Bello, the slain Sardauna of
Sokoto was their all in all; he was the heir to the powerful Sokoto Caliphate and
descendant of Usman dan Fodio. More than Azikiwe and Awolowo, Sardauna was the
most powerful politician in Nigeria (pg 46). Murdering him was murdering the pride
of a people. Achebe chooses to ignore this perspective and more importantly was the
fact that Igbos in the North were widely taunting their hosts on the loss of their
leaders with Rex Lawson’s song “Ewu Ne Ba Akwa” (Goats are crying) and others
celebrating “Igbo power”, the “January Victory.” Posters, stickers, postcards, cartoons
displaying the murdered Sardauna begging Nzeogwu at the gates of heaven or Balewa
burning outright in pits of hell, or Nzeogwu standing St George-like on Sardauna the
defeated dragon began to show up across Northern towns and cities. These
provocations were so pervasive that they warranted the promulgation of Decree 44 of
1966 banning them. The Igbos didn’t stop. Azikiwe is more honest than Achebe. In
his pamphlet, The Origins of the Civil War, he writes: “…some Ibo elements who
were domiciled in Northern Nigeria taunted Northerners by defaming their leaders
through means of records or songs or pictures. They also published pamphlets and
postcards which displayed a peculiar representation of certain Northerners, living or
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dead, in a manner likely to provoke disaffection.” It was these images and songs that
eventually led to the so-called pogroms/ethnic-cleansing/genocide not the coup. The
coup was in January, the pogroms started late in May, and the provocations were in
between.
However Igbos in the East did not sit idly by. They started the massacre of innocent
Northerners in their midst. Achebe chose to ignore this account since it doesn’t serve
his agenda so we return to Azikiwe: “Between August and September 1966, either by
chance or by design, hundreds of Hausa, Fulani, Nupe and Igalla-speaking peoples of
Northern Nigeria origin residing in the Eastern Nigeria were abducted and massacred
in Aba, Abakaliki, Enugu, Onitsha and Port Harcourt.” It is important to note that
these Northerners never published nor circulated irreverent or taunting pictures of
Eastern leaders unlike the Igbos of the North, they were just massacred for being
Northerners. The government of Eastern Region did not stop these massacres.
Neither did the Igbo intellectuals. Ojukwu, the military administrator even made a
radio broadcast saying that he can no longer guarantee the security of non-Eastern
Nigerians in the East, Easterners who did not return to Igboland would be looked on
as traitors. This was when Professor Sam Aluko who was the head of Economics
department at University of Nigeria, Nsukka and a personal friend of Ojukwu fled
back to the West. Azikiwe continues in his book: “Eyewitnesses gave on-the-spot
accounts of corpses floating in the Imo River and River Niger. [Faraway]Radio
Cotonou broadcast this macabre news, which was suppressed by Enugu Radio. Then
Radio Kaduna relayed it and this sparked off the massacres of September – October
1966 [in the North]”.
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Achebe, like Enugu Radio, suppressed this information and goes on to pivot the
‘pogrom’ on the fact that Igbos were resented because they were the most superior,
most successful tribe in the country. He claims they were “the dominant tribe(pg
233)” “led the nation in virtually every sector – politics, education, commerce, and the
arts(pg 66),” which included having two vice chancellors in Yoruba land; they the
Igbos are the folkloric “leopard, the wise and peaceful king of the animals (pg177),”
they “spearheaded”(pg 97) the struggle to free Nigeria from colonial rule: “This
group, the Igbo, that gave the colonizing British so many headaches and then literarily
drove them out of Nigeria was now an open target, scapegoats for the failings and
grievances of colonial and post-independent Nigeria(pg 67).” An Igboman, Achebe
writes, has “an unquestioned advantage over his compatriots…Unlike the
Hausa/Fulani he was unhindered by a wary religion, and unlike the Yoruba he was
unhampered by traditional hierarchies…Although the Yoruba had a huge historical
head start, the Igbo wiped out their handicap in one fantastic burst of energy in the
twenty years between1930 to1950 (pg 74).” Beside the fact that this has a language
consistent with white supremacist literature, Achebe, to demonstrate he is not partial
or a chauvinist, based himself on a 17 page report by Paul Anber in Journal of
Modern African Studies titled Modernization and Political Disintegration: Nigeria
and the Ibos.
I looked up the 1967 journal. Curiously this ‘scholar’ was designated as “a member of
staff of one the Nigerian Universities.” Why would a scholar hide his place of work in
a journal? I checked the essays and book reviews in all the 196 issues of Journal of
Modern African Studies from Volume 1 issue 1 of January 1963 to the last issue
Volume 49 November 2011, there was nowhere a piece was published and the
designation of the scholar vague or hidden. Also this Paul Anber never published any
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piece before and after this article in this or any other journal. I wanted to start
checking the academic staff list of the five universities in Nigeria then until I realized
again that it says “he is a staff of Nigerian university;” I would have to check the
names of janitors and cleaners, and other non-academic staff too. The truth is Paul
Anber is a fake name under which someone else or a group of people possibly Igbo is
masquerading. And he/they never used this name again for any other piece or books.
So that this ruse would not be found out was the reason he/they hid his/their
university. And this piece like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been the
cornerstone of books and widely quoted by other journals over a period 45 years. It is
the cornerstone of the chapter A History Of Ethnic Tension And Resentment which
Achebe used to skew the motive for Igbo people’s maltreatment from the fallout of
January 1966 coup and the inflammatory provocations they published to resentment
for being allegedly the most successful and dominant tribe in Nigeria.
Had Achebe not been overdosing on rabid Igbo nationalism, he would have had his
chest-beating ethnic bombasts inflected by a deeper and more sobering analysis of the
Nigerian situation in the next essay in the Journal: The Inevitability of Instability
written by a real and existing Professor James O’Connell, an Irish priest and professor
of government in a real and existing institution: Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. O’
Connell argues that the lack of constitutionalism and disregard for rule of law fuel
psychology of insecurities in all ethnic groups. He fingers as an inevitable cause of
our national instability, Nigerians’ “failure to find an identity and loyalty beyond their
primordial communities that lead them constantly to choose their fellow workers,
political and administrative, from the same community, ignoring considerations of
merit.”
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The symbolism of Igbos heading the University of Ibadan and University of Lagos
both in Yoruba land was a positive image to assist Tiv, Hausa, Ijaw, Urhobo, Yoruba,
Ibibio, Igbo, Efik, etc students shed their over-loyalty to their respective primordial
communities and to fashion a higher sense of identity that is national in character and
federal in outlook. To Achebe, the symbolism was an example of the dominance and
superiority of Igbos. “It would appear that the God of Africa has created the Ibo
nation to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of ages,” Paul Anber quotes
Azikiwe saying in his West African Pilot, “History has enabled them not only to
conquer others but also to adapt themselves to the role of preserver… The Ibo nation
cannot shirk its responsibility.” Anber says in his/their essay: “The Ibo reaction to the
British was not typically one of complete rejection and resistance, though Ibos were
militantly anti-colonial. Since modernisation is in many respects basically a process of
imitation, the Ibos modelled themselves after their masters, seeing, as Simon
Ottenberg put it, that ‘The task was not merely to control the British influence but to
capture it.’ To some degree, it may be said that this is precisely what they proceeded
to do. Faced with internal problems of land hunger, impoverished soil, and population
pressure, the Ibos migrated in large numbers to urban areas both in their own region
and in the North and West…”
The spirit of inclusive humanism, the Martin Luther King Ideal, the Mandela
Example, the conscience of a writer should necessitate that if a child in Sokoto goes to
bed hungry someone in Umuahia should get angry. If a pregnant woman in Kotangora
needs justice someone in Patani should be able to stand up and fight for her. If an Osu
group is being maltreated in Igboland, someone in Zaria should stand up and defend
them. But to Achebe, there should be no mercy for the weak in so far as he or she
belongs to the other side. Take for instance the butchering of the lone shell-shocked
10
“Mali-Chad mercenary” wandering around “dazed and aimless” in the bush Achebe
witnessed. To show the fight-to-finish courage of his people in face of overwhelming
force, he describes how Major Jonathan Uchendu’s Abagana Ambush succeeded in
destroying Colonel Murtala Mohammed’s convoy of 96 vehicles, four armoured
vehicle killing 500 Nigerians in one and a half hours. “There were widespread reports
of atrocities perpetrated by angry Igbo villagers who captured wandering soldiers. I
was an eyewitness to one such angry bloody frenzy of retaliation after a particularly
tall and lanky soldier – clearly a mercenary from Chad or Mali wandered into an
ambush of young men with machetes. His lifeless body was found mutilated on the
roadside in a matter of seconds (pg 173).”
Achebe does not tell us if he tried to prevent this cold-blooded butchering even
though there was an episode where he intervened to save the life and chastity of a
Biafran woman arguing with some wandering Nigerian soldiers who wanted to
requisition her goat for food (pg 201). If Achebe couldn’t intervene in the butchering,
what did he think of the killing then or now that he is writing the book with the
benefit of hindsight? Shouldn’t the man have been handed over as a prisoner of war?
Was his killing not a violation of Geneva conventions which he so much accused the
Nigerian side of disrespecting (pg 212)? Did villagers behaving this way not rebus sic
stantibus blur the lines between soldiers and civilians hence making themselves fair
game in war? Also notice how Achebe starts the narration with an active first person
voice: “I was an eye witness to…” and how he quickly switches to a passive third
person voice in the next sentence: “His body was found…” Achebe quickly goes
AWOL “in a matter of seconds” leaving a moral vacuum for the Igbo writer to
emerge and the conscientious writer to go under.
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When atrocities were committed against Biafrans, Achebe deploys strong active voice
(subject + verb), isolates the aggressive phrases of military bravado with italics or
quotation marks. But when Biafra is caught committing the atrocity, he employs
passive sentence structures, modal verbs of likelihood, euphemisms and he never
isolates pledges of murder in italics or quotation marks. Take the “Kwale Incident (pg
218)” that eventually became an international embarrassment for Biafra. Based on an
unsubstantiated source, he writes, “Biafran military intelligence allegedly obtained
information that foreign oilmen…were allegedly providing sensitive military
information to federal forces – about Biafran troop positions, strategic military
manoeuvres, and training.” So Biafra decided to invade. “At the end of the
‘exercise’,” Achebe writes, “eleven workers had been killed”
Also compare these two accounts: the background is the Biafran invasion of Midwest.
Despite Ojukwu’s assurance to them before the secession that he would absolutely
respect their choice of belonging to neither side, he invaded them, occupied their land,
foisted his government on them, took charge of their resources, looted the Central
Bank of Nigeria in Benin, set up military check points in several places to regulate the
flow of goods and human beings, imposed dawn-to-dusk curfews, flooded the
airwaves with Biafran propaganda, imprisoned and executed dissidents on a daily
basis according to Nowa Omoigui’s The Invasion of Midwest and Samuel
Ogbemudia’s Years of Challenge. In fact, “The Hausa community in the Lagos street
area of Benin and other parts of the state were targeted for particularly savage
treatment, in part a reprisal for the pogroms of 1966, but also out of security concerns
that they would naturally harbour sympathies for the regime in Lagos,” Omoigui
writes. The Midwesterners regarded Biafrans as liars and traitors. And the Nigerian
army came to their rescue.
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Achebe writes: “The retreating Biafran forces, according to several accounts,
allegedly beat up a number of Mid-Westerners who they believed had served as
saboteurs. Nigerian radio reports claimed that the Biafrans shot a number of innocent
civilians as they fled the advancing federal forces. As disturbing as these allegations
are, I have found no credible corroboration of them (pg 133).” Yes, he can’t find it;
they were not his people. Also note his euphemisms: “allegedly beat up”… “shot a
number of innocent civilians”(shot not killed). He writes: “a number of innocents” to
disguise the fact that massacres took place. He also writes: “saboteurs.”
Midwesterners collaborated with federal forces to liberate their lands from Biafran
traitors and occupiers, Achebe calls them “saboteurs.” Now note in the next paragraph
how he describes what happened to his people when the Federal army in hot
pursuance of the Biafran soldiers reached the Igbo side of the Midwest. It is noisily
headlined: The Asaba Massacre(pg 133).
“Armed with direct orders to retake the occupied areas at all costs, this division
rounded up and shot as many defenceless Igbo men as they could find. Some reports
place the death toll at five hundred, others as high as one thousand. The Asaba
Massacre, as it would be known, was only one of many such post-pogrom atrocities
committed by Nigerian soldiers during the war. It became a particular abomination for
Asaba residents, as many of those killed were titled Igbo chiefs and common folk
alike, and their bodies were disposed of with reckless abandon in mass graves,
without regard to the wishes of the families of the victims or the town’s ancient
traditions.” Then he goes on to quote lengthily from books and what the Pope’s
emissary said about it in a French newspaper, what Gowon said, what was said at
Oputa panel etc etc. He found time to research. They were his people unlike the
sufferings, the Eshan, Benin, Ijaw, Isekiri, Urhrobo people underwent at the hands of
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the Biafrans which he couldn’t find “credible corroboration of.” Achebe is incapable
of being interested in the sufferings of others.
In the chapter The Calabar Massacre, Achebe not only totally avoids the well-
documented atrocities including massacres Biafran forces committed against the
Efiks, Ibibios, Ikwerre, when they occupied their lands, he goes on to tell lies against
the Federal forces. Achebe writes: “By the time the Nigerians were done they had
‘shot at least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos[sic], most of them civilians.’ There were
other atrocities throughout the region. ‘In Oji River,’ The Times of London reported
on August 2, 1968, ‘the Nigerian forces opened fire and murdered fourteen nurses and
the patients in the wards.’” Achebe continues still referring to the same Times article:
“In Uyo and Okigwe more innocent lives were lost to the brutality and bloodlust of
the Nigerian soldiers(pg137).” How the fact checking services of his publishers
allowed him to get away with these is baffling. I looked up the 1968 piece of course.
It is a syndicated story written by Lloyd Garrison of the New York Times to balance
the piece by their own John Young which appeared three days before. In the London
Times piece Achebe quotes, there is no mention of Uyo or Okigwe or Oji River at all.
This is what is in the piece – the journalist was quoting Brother Aloysius, an Irish
missionary in Uturu 150km away from Abakaliki: “But when they[Federal forces]
took Abakaliki, they put the 11 white fathers there on house arrest. In the hospital
outside Enugu, they shot all the fourteen Biafran nurses who stayed behind, then went
down the wards killing the patients as well. It was the same thing in Port Harcourt.”
This missionary had believed the ruthlessly efficient Biafran propaganda service.
Because of the atrocities Nigeria soldiers committed earlier in the Ogoja –Nsukka
front and the revenge killings in Asaba, the world had been alerted and it was hurting
14
Nigeria’s arms procurement from Britain. So Gowon agreed to an international
observer team made of representatives from UN general secretary and OAU to
monitor the activities of the three Nigerian divisions against the claims Radio Biafra
was sending to the world and its people. In their first report released on 9th October
1968, there was no evidence of the killings even though it was brought to their
attention. Even Lloyd Garrison and other members of the international press corps in
Biafra couldn’t find evidence of that particular killings in the hospital. Also note
Achebe’s statement: “By the time the Nigerians were done they had ‘shot at least
1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos[sic], most of them civilians.’” How can an intelligent
mind write “they had shot at least 1,000” which is an uncertainty, and then following
it up with another uncertainty: “perhaps 2,000 Ibos” and then say with certainty “most
of them are civilians”? How can you say for sure that most of them are civilians when
you are not even sure whether they are 1000 or 2000? It defies sense and logic to
build a certainty on two concurrent uncertainties and then offer it as the truth. But
that is the meaning of propaganda. William Berndhardt of Markpress and Robert
Goldstein of Hollwood were on contract from Ojukwu to handle Biafra’s marketing
and propaganda. Nathaniel Whittemore’s seminal thesis, How Biafra Came to Be:
Genocide, starvation and American Imagination of the Nigerian Civil War revealed
how they did it and how it worked.
Achebe proceeds to celebrate “the great ingenuity” of scientists from Biafran
Research and Production Unit who developed “a great number of rockets, bombs, and
telecommunication gadgets, and devised an ingenious indigenous strategy to refine
petroleum.” Then he drops the most disingenuously incongruous jaw-dropping
statement in the book: “I would like to make it crystal clear that I abhor violence, and
a discussion of the weapons of war does not imply that I am a war enthusiast or