Guidebook to Disaster
Jervis, Steven
BOOKS Nigeria, by Walter Schwarz. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. 328 pp. $7.50. GIVEN THE IMMEDIACY of war and starvation, it is tempting to regard the Nigerian conflict as a mere...
...Schwarz makes the important observation that Ironsi's ascendancy was at first welcomed even in the North, despite the killing of the region's two major politicians and several popular military officers...
...The closer he gets to the outbreak of war, the more detailed Mr...
...Forced back into the old partnership on the North's terms, they found themselves farther than ever from government control...
...Yet Ojukwu emerges as a victim of Igbo resentments, particularly of refugee tribesmen returning to the East...
...Although Igbos were the only large group spared in the coup, a fresh wind seemed to have blown tribalism right out of the country...
...thousands of Igbos have been living quietly in Lagos throughout the war and an Igbo administrator has been installed at Enugu, the captured Biafran capital...
...In Igboland especially thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands doomed to starvation or permanent disability...
...This was not what the reformers had intended—they wanted to obliterate the old order, highest army officers included...
...It was they more than the settled Easterners who forced secession...
...The bulk of his army promotions went to Igbos, as did a sole commissionership for the study of civil service unification, a topic the North dreaded...
...Life is near normal in the West and North, but the war zones have been devastated...
...Only a few brave spokesmen, exceptions to a rule of expediency, ignorance, and sloth, have acted from truly extra-tribal motives...
...Although Nigerians have been able to patch bitter feuds with surprising amiability, there can be no telling the aftermath to the current horror...
...Mr...
...My too optimistic BOOKS letter in the July—August 1966 DISSENT reflects the mood of those days...
...No account of Nigerian politics can make sense without discussing ethnic composition and pressures...
...They then joined with a divided West, but lost out badly in the national elections...
...Menaced and rejected in regions where they had lived for years, these men saw no future in "One Nigeria" and wanted out of it...
...But the wind proved hardly a puff...
...It now seems one of the costliest miscalculations in African history, one which no sense of oppression could justify...
...A YEAR of strenuous maneuvers brought not reconciliation but fracture...
...The author does not indicate when the Eastern leadership resolved to leave the federation—Biafra's enemies believe it was as early as September 1966, eight months before the final break...
...Should Biafra collapse, two big problems will emerge: the role of the Igbos and the workability of the 12-state structure proclaimed by Lagos in May 1967...
...Schwarz is sympathetic to Biafra's controversial leader, Colonel Ojukwu, whom he regards as vastly more sophisticated than Ironsi...
...Perhaps...
...That terrible word means the deliberate destruction of a race, and, however convinced Igbos may be that only that fate awaits them, there is little to support the accusation...
...The first half of his account is the less interesting: Nigeria from prehistory to independence (1960) . It is well done, but the ground has been covered before...
...GIVEN THE IMMEDIACY of war and starvation, it is tempting to regard the Nigerian conflict as a mere calamity, without considering causes...
...Tribal nationalism, Mr...
...With non-Igbo territory in Biafra under federal control, there are hints of disunity among the Igbos themselves, particularly among the commercial Onitshans who stood to lose most by secession...
...A veteran British reporter of Nigerian affairs, Mr...
...the census disputes...
...With no promise of diplomatic recogntion, much less aid, and with shaky assent at best from the millions of Easterners who were not Igbos, Ojukwu took an immense risk in proclaiming the Republic of Biafra...
...His chapter "Three Coups" neatly sets down the last steps to disaster, from the "revolt of the majors" in January 1966 to the invasion of the newly-seceded East 18 months later...
...This book will assist those who search be yond the horror...
...two violent elections and two coups in which a pair of regional premiers, a prime minister, and a commander-in-chief were coldly murdered...
...All this was reversed in January 1966, when a reformist coup forced the civilian regime to cede power to the army...
...Education has intensified rather than diminished tribal feeling, with intellectuals and civil servants the most disappointing exemplars...
...Ojukwu has promised guerrilla action, a serious threat but by no means a certainty...
...Schwarz frames his narrative with chapters about tribes and tribalism...
...Schwarz regards the new states arrangement as crucial, a "third coup" which brought to power not Igbo, Yoruba, or Hausa, but the country's many minority tribes, of whom General Gowon, an Angas, is the chief representative...
...BOOKS Nigeria, by Walter Schwarz...
...Meanwhile neither side seems deeply concerned by the plight of civilians: in this war, women and children come last...
...It is a question one would like answered, since the decision has brought such misery...
...The rest of the book, which reaches to the beginning of the war in 1967, compels immed iate attention...
...There are two nationalisms in Nigeria," he argues, and the deeper "is not concerned with Nigeria but with Igbo, Yoruba or Hausa...
...He manages a fair balance between the precision of political analysis and the impressionism of ethnic judgment...
...And not only with them, but with a mass of smaller tribes...
...As an Igbo propelled into power, however accidentally, by other Igbos, Ironsi had to free himself from the taint of tribal chauvinism...
...Igbos may slowly accept and be accepted by Nigeria, but even the flimsy stability of prewar days will be hard to regain...
...But the old tribally-based political parties retain much strength...
...Each of these events shook the entire country and imperiled its survival—the present con flict had adequate preparation...
...When he precipitately abolished the old regional structure, he gave reactionary forces their opening: preying upon Northern fears of domination by the entrepreneurial Igbos, they stimulated the tribal rioting which led to Ironsi's downfall in a second coup and drove the Igbos out of the North...
...It has been denied by international observers, including U Thant's representative...
...While fashioning a tranquil image for its Western friends, Nigeria had a tumultuous time after Independence: Chief Awolowo's treason trial...
...Schwarz ironically adds, "is by no means confined to the illiterate...
...He failed badly, in a series of blunders which made him seem more an Igbo than the national figure he wanted to become...
...Unfortunately the military commander and new head of state, General Ironsi, like the coup leaders was Igbo...
...The most ambitious of Nigeria's big tribes, the Eastern Igbos formed an alliance with the North and shared federal power until mid1964...
...One of the lesser crises of recent years followed the politically-motivated replacement of the Igbo Vice-Chancellor of the University of Lagos with a Yoruba, who was (literally) knifed on his inauguration...
...Schwarz writes with fluency and understanding...
...But this bloody African conflict must be the subject of historical contemplation as well as humanitarian response: we need to know why it happened...
...Schwarz becomes...
...About the miserable war, much has at last been said...
...After months of indifference the American press has made good copy of star vation, and even the fighting itself has had some attention...
...In a war with few soldiers, civilians have suffered most...
...Nevertheless the Biafran charge of genocide seems inaccurate...
...There is still the dreary possibility that Nigeria's future will resemble its past...
Vol. 16 • January 1969 • No. 1
