The Biafran Brotherhood

The Biafran War of July 6, 1967, to January 15, 1970, was the "second media war" of modern history. The Spanish Civil War of July 17, 1936 to April 1, 1939 was the first. On both occasions the wars were fought for nearly three years. Among the coalition of writers and journalists who spoke and fought for Spain were Roy Campbell, Ernest Hemingway, 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 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" or "black zoos" for fifty years.

The Biafran Brotherhood, by contrast, was irrevocable altruistic and sacrificial. The members were among the best and the most distinguished of the Nigerian literati of their generation. The oldest of them Gabriel Okara (poet) and Cyprian Ekwensi (novelist) were born in 1921; and the youngest of them - Michael J. C. Echeruo (professor and poet) and Uche Chukwumerije (journalist) - were respectively born in 1937 and 1939.

Other prominent members were John Munonye (novelist), Chinua Achebe (novelist and broadcaster), Christopher Okigbo (poet and librarian), Flora Nwapa (novelist), Chukwuemeka Ike (novelist), 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. Unlike the Borman and Afrikaner 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 Nazi Hitler or the Afrikaner Hertzog. They had no designs for racial supremacy or power domination. They were all childhood playmates, grade school and college pals, and literary associates.

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) grew up with Ojukwu, since his father worked for the latter's father.

Ojukwu and Obumselu were graduate schoolmates at Oxford University. Ifeajuna and Obumselu were mates at Dennis Memorial Grammar School (DMGS), Onitsha. Ike, Achebe, and Christopher Okigbo were mates at the Government College, Umuahia. Many of the "brothers" were college mates at the University College, Ibadan, including Pius Okigbo, Christopher Okigbo, Munonye, Achebe, Ike, Obumselu, Ifeajuna, Echeruo, Kobani, and Chukwumerije. Many of them belonged to either one or both of Nigeria's campus literary groups (Mbari at Ibadan and Anthills at Nsukka), including Munonye, Achebe, Okigbo, Obumselu, and Echeruo.

The boldfaced denegation or defection of several compatriots from the Biafran cause was a source of constant chagrin to the Biafran Brotherhood. The economist Philip Asiodu, for instance, was a permanent secretary in the Nigerian government whose military exterminated all boys and men of his Asaba town in October 1967. His brother Sydney Asiodu, Nigeria's best prewar Olympian, was among those killed.

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 struck. 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 an 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 he led 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 first military coup in Biafra with the singular aim to kill his childhood friend Ojukwu and to overthrow Biafra.

The tribunal that tried and convicted him was comprised of his peers who had known and played with him all his life, and who had to bear the searing pain of his tragic end. Biafra was not an anthill for a gadfly's gamboling. 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 example of Apostle Peter illustrates that humanity is reified and edified by its affirmation of truth rather than by its denial of life.

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 "If We Must Die" (1919).

The idealism of the Biafran revolution is, most 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 month's 40th 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. Thunder can break.

This essay is a preliminary report on "The Biafran Brotherhood." Obiwu is a writer and public intellectual based in the US.