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The Nigerian Civil War Years

Ken Saro-Wiwa seemed destined for a quiet academic life. However, the chain of events that began with the January 1966 coup forever altered the studious young man’s life. When the Nigerian military government, then headed by Major General Yakubu Gowon, transformed the country into a federal republic consisting of twelve states, Saro-Wiwa saw an opportunity to correct the disproportionate power the major ethnic group held in the country and better integrate the Ogoni. He claimed an influential role in this process.

In his memoirs, Saro-Wiwa portrayed himself as a loyal Nigerian citizen trapped inside the secessionist Biafran state. According to Gowon’s federal plan, Ogoniland was to be situated within one of the new states carved out of the secessionist Eastern Region, namely Rivers State. Saro-Wiwa managed to position himself as a leader of the Ogoni community within the new Rivers State. After fleeing Biafra, he returned with the conquering Nigerian military and established himself as civilian administrator of the oil depot city of Bonny. His actions established him as an Ogoni leader firmly devoted to Nigeria who would agitate for his people’s inclusion in the life of the nation. His new position as a leader was made challenging because of some significant events occurring just before the end of colonial rule, however.

On January 10, 1966, the first meeting of the British Commonwealth prime ministers held outside the United Kingdom convened in Lagos. Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Nigeria’s prime minister, convened the special meeting to discuss steps to end white minority rule in Rhodesia. The gathering showcased Nigeria’s growing influence in international affairs and the country’s emergence as an important regional power in Africa. However, as the last delegations left the country on the night of January 15, a group of mostly Igbo military officers, known collectively as the Five Majors, attempted to overthrow the Nigerian First Republic and take control of the government in a coup d’état.¹

General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, the Nigerian chief of staff and also Igbo, quickly quashed the coup the following day. However, Tafawa Balewa died in the attack, along with Ahmadu Bello, the premier of the Northern Region, and his Western Region counterpart Samuel Akintola. Festus Okotie-Eboh, the finance minister, and most of the military’s top commanders also died in the bloody attempt. Nnamdi Azikiwe, known popularly as Zik, Nigeria’s first president, was in Britain receiving medical treatment and therefore escaped injury.

With the bulk of the First Republic’s leadership now dead, the republic itself soon died as well, to be replaced by a series of military dictatorships. Saro-Wiwa was then in his last year at the University of Ibadan. Like many in the country, the events of that night took him by surprise. He later recalled the moment he arrived at the university campus in the early afternoon of January 16 and first learned about the coup: “A coup? Impossible! I did not believe it.” By late afternoon, Radio Nigeria confirmed the news, urging calm. However, rather than panic, the campus at the University of Ibadan erupted in celebration: “There was such wild joy, general dance and great jubilation as I had not seen there in all four sessions I had spent in Ibadan. . . . Students forgot themselves in their joy; they embraced and hugged one another, male and female alike.”²

The scenes Saro-Wiwa described were hardly unique. By 1966, the First Republic had become so unpopular that the coup was initially welcomed across the country, and the jubilant scenes repeated even in Ibadan despite the fact that the Western Region’s premier, Akintola, was a victim of the coup attempt. Akintola was not well liked, owing in no small part to the manner in which he ascended to power in the Western Region; he had displaced the visionary Yoruba leader Obafemi Awolowo in 1962 after Akintola orchestrated a riot inside the Western Region’s House of Deputies that gave Abubakar’s federal government justification to declare a state of emergency in the Western Region and order Awolowo imprisoned. The Yoruba leadership found this so repulsive they refused to cooperate with Akintola, who was now regarded as a stooge for the Northern-led Northern People’s Congress (NPC) federal government. Saro-Wiwa recalled the crisis as showing that “bare-faced opportunism had become the prevailing characteristic of Nigerian politics.”³

In his memoir, On a Darkling Plain, Saro-Wiwa posited a theory of the unfolding of the January coup and why it was remembered as an ethnic Igbo coup. For Saro-Wiwa, the coup was not perpetrated as an Igbo ethnic putsch: “Since 1966, there have been enough coups to convince everyone that a coup is a conspiracy, a dangerous conspiracy, and only friends and trusted associates engage in it.” Most of the conspirators were either schoolmates at the various government colleges or otherwise trusted friends belonging to the same military cohort. The fact that many of them were Igbo was the product of British colonial policies that favored Igbo access to school and military institutions and not an explicit attempt to form an exclusively Igbo conspiracy.

This argument did not persuade other Nigerians, especially in the north, who saw the coup as a southern plot to take over the country. Saro-Wiwa detested the political definition of a north-south divide in Nigeria, calling it a dangerous fiction that fed the “cankerworm of tribalism” around the country and oversimplified existing ethnic and linguistic complexities. For Saro-Wiwa, the northerners victimized by the coup consisted of over two hundred unique ethnic, language, and religious groups, and could not be thought of as a single entity. The south was equally heterogeneous, but the Igbo and Yoruba together dominated the political sphere in the south of the country at the expense of the Ogoni, Mbembe, Ijo, and others. Saro-Wiwa concluded that it was “on the basis of such false assumptions, hard lines are taken and hatred bred!”⁴

Ironsi became head of state of the new Federal Military Government (FMG) after the senate president, Nwafor Orizu, handed power to the military, officially ending the Nigerian First Republic. The fact that Orizu, who was Igbo, and President Azikiwe did nothing to attempt a continuation of civilian rule in the wake of the failed coup helped reinforce notions of a broad Igbo conspiracy. To make matters worse, the coup plotters themselves faced no punishment for their mutiny, despite their arrest and the fact that their actions constituted a capital offense. Saro-Wiwa sympathized with Ironsi, reasoning that if the new leader executed the plotters, many in the country who saw the majors as heroes would rebel against him. If he released them, those aggrieved by the coup would act in much the same way. Ironsi’s solution was to keep them incarcerated without charge, a ploy he hoped would placate both sides, but in reality it only increased rumors of conspiracy. Saro-Wiwa saw Ironsi as a man in an impossible situation, rather than as an active manipulator of the ethnic tensions engulfing the country. Ironsi’s regime began on shaky footing and would end after barely six months, when he was assassinated in another coup attempt. Saro-Wiwa lamented, “We must shed a tear for Ironsi, for he was an honest man.”⁵

Saro-Wiwa learned of the second coup as part of a joke when one of his schoolmates approached him and declared, “You are the new premier!” Unlike the celebrations that accompanied the January coup, the atmosphere on the campus at Ibadan in July was tense and insecure. Ironsi, who began his tenure as head of state in an unstable situation, had only exacerbated matters in his attempts to stabilize the country. On May 24, 1966, Ironsi issued Decree No. 34, which abolished the regional federal system of Nigeria, replacing it with a single unitary structure. This move stripped the regional leaders of their power, grouping the various areas of the country into provinces. Additionally, all appointments to the civil service bureaucracy and the military would now be handled by the central government in Lagos.