Momentous events took place in southeastern Nigeria in January, 1970. That was the month the secessionist Biafra collapsed as federal Nigerian troops finally overran it. The Biafran leader, Gen. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, had given up command on 8th January; three days later abandoning ship. He delayed his departure for three days because the relief planes that were still bringing in supplies were too small to evacuate all the property he didn’t want to leave behind as he went into exile. U.S. President Richard Nixon, who was then clocking one year in office, had decided some months earlier to begin supporting the Biafran revolution and end the genocide he claimed during the 1968 presidential campaign was already occurring in the enclave, even before a Nigerian victory on the battlefield. Nixon: “We must save these gifted people.” But he was now confronted with the shock of the sudden collapse of Biafra. He was very disappointed and very upset, and the CIA had provided no intelligence warning. U.S. agencies were obviously not aware that the Biafran soldiers were completely, physically exhausted as of early December 1969 and were surviving on just three meals a week. Most were getting only a few spoonfuls of garri and water a day.
Ironically, the Biafrans were better armed at this time than in previous months and years. According to the CIA, they had recently taken delivery of some T6-G American-made fighter planes. French President and De Gaulle’s successor Georges Pompidou told Nixon the French had spent $30 million on aid to Biafra. The Nigerian side had always been very well equipped, but had newly received some multiple-warhead Soviet artillery pieces, albeit with more destructive power than what they had before. Beginning in late November 1969, Biafran soldiers began to succumb to mass starvation, and extreme thirst and dehydration. Consider that many Biafran and Igbo leaders of consequence had pushed hard on Ojukwu to make peace with Gen. Yakubu Gowon and Nigeria after Biafran forces recaptured Owerri in the previous April, well aware that there was no viable path to victory, and hundreds of thousands of Biafran civilians were dying of hunger and disease. For a few weeks after the liberation of Owerri in April 1969, Biafra was on a [temporary] high and Gowon had long been making the offer: “just renounce [the] session and everything else will be negotiable.”
The news of Biafra’s defeat upset President Nixon so much that he declined to receive Nigeria’s ambassador, Joe [Tonye Fubara] Iyalla, at the White House. Joe Iyalla had requested a farewell visit as he was returning to Nigeria after being in Washington since 1968. Mr. Iyalla had had several talks at the White House with senior officials of the National Security Council during those months, but what he had achieved was raise Nixon’s resentment over the suffering in Biafra.
The President didn’t want Ojukwu to become a prisoner of war (POW) and be humiliated in a show trial or even killed “in mysterious circumstances” as Gen. Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi before him [and Samora Machel of Mozambique, Jonas Savimbi of Angola and John Garang of Sudan, years later]. So, the American Government sent a Lockheed Super Constellation aircraft to finally whisk Ojukwu away to safety. Gen. Ojukwu flew out of the battered enclave early in the morning of Sunday, January 11, 1970, joined in the large aircraft (which was carrying his prized Mercedes) by the 35-year-old European royal, political activist and humanitarian, Paris-born Princess Cécile Marie of Bourbon-Parma. The French Government had requested the rescue of Princess Cécile, who had been working in hospitals in Biafra for the previous 15 months, as a delegate of the Catholic Sovereign Order of Malta, a lay religious order founded in Jerusalem in the 11th Century, and carries out medical and humanitarian services and projects in over 100 countries. The General also had a few others in his company, including his friend Mr. C. C. Mojekwu, and Mr. N. U. Akpan, Secretary to the Biafran Government.
What Ojukwu left behind was a mess and chaos as usually happens when a bitterly fought conflict ends with a sudden, complete rout. Nigerian troops fanned out in all the villages throughout Igboland to engage in one of the modern world’s worst episodes of the war crime of sexual violence against women. Continuing their heinous activities during the war they kidnapped, held as sex slaves, and raped thousands, scores of thousands, of Igbo women and girls. Many of those innocent victims were impregnated, all were despoiled and ravished right in front of their husbands, fathers, mothers, grandparents, brothers and sisters. To their everlasting shame. In one demented and macabre case of necrophilia in Amandugba, in the old Orlu Division, in today’s Imo State, a town then noted for its Biafran military arms depot and a major hospital, a Nigerian soldier raped a freshly dead Igbo nurse (excuse the oxymoron).
A Nigerian Army Third Marine Commando Division brigade commander, Lt.-Col. Alani Akinrinade, was questioned by foreign white journalists in Owerri, a few weeks after the Biafran surrender, about reports that Igbo women and girls were being raped en masse. Akinrinade tried to rebut the accusation although he acknowledged that there were “some” undisciplined soldiers in their ranks. But he didn’t accept it was a widespread problem. That was obviously a falsehood, as all Igbos alive at the time knew what had been happening, were witnesses to the atrocities that were being perpetrated by Nigerian soldiers. No Igbo family was spared.
Every Igbo female who was not a grey-haired old grandmother subsequently went to hide in the ceiling in houses in urban centres such as Aba and Owerri and Onitsha; in the villages they went to hide in the forests from early morning to nightfall. Even early in the war, notably in Asaba during the period when the Nigerian Army massacred hundreds of Igbo civilian men and boys in and around that town, Nigerian military officers there such as Joshua Dogonyaro were reported to be kidnapping women and holding them as sex slaves, often under the guise of having married them or befriended them. That is, relationships enforced with the gun. Just like Boko Haram terrorists do nowadays in the North. In what is today called the Owerri North Local Government Area some Nigerian Army soldiers seized my great uncle’s far younger wife in late 1968. When he protested, they told him to sit down, saying he was too old to be her husband. The woman was not seen again until January 1970, and people were shocked when she reappeared; they had long thought that she had died, and a wake had even been held for her.
In that same January, 1970, my 26-year-old elder cousin, who had been a Biafran Army lieutenant and until the war broke out an A’ Level student at the Federal School of Science at Onikan, in Lagos, was one afternoon alerted that a Nigerian soldier had seized his fiancée on the road in the village. So he left the house and went to see what was happening. He confronted the Nigerian soldier. While they were arguing, a Yoruba Nigerian officer came along and saw the commotion. He ordered the junior Nigerian soldier, “Leave her alone! Why do you want to force the wife of your fellow young man?” As the officer walked away, the Nigerian NCO ordered my elder cousin to kneel down. Then the soldier slammed the butt of his assault rifle three times on the back of my cousin and went away. Some years later my roommate at university told me how Nigerian soldiers had showed up at his family’s home in Abagana, in today’s Anambra State, one night during that January 1970, and told his father they had come for his daughter. His distressed father had a bolt of inspiration and lamented to them that a captain had come during the day and told him to keep his daughter for the captain. The Nigerian soldiers, looking very disappointed, went away.
How did the mass rapes of Igbo women and girls end – by February, 1970? Answer: It was ended by the action taken by Major-General Philip Effiong.
When Gen. Ojukwu fled for his dear life on 11th January 1970, the command of Biafra fell to his deputy, Major-Gen. Philip Effiong, a native of Ibiono Ibom, near Ikot Ekpene, in today’s Akwa Ibom State. Gen. Effiong threw his lot in with Igbos when the military coups and concomitant crisis exploded in 1966. For siding with Igbos the Northerners hated him with passion. He escaped from Kaduna during the July 1966 massacre of Igbo and Eastern Nigerian officers and soldiers, and again escaped an assassination attempt on Carter Bridge in Lagos, when a look-alike officer was shot instead. Gen. Effiong’s wife, Josephine, who passed away at the end of last May, was of mixed race, her father, a Welsh from Wales in the UK, her mother, an Igbo from Ukwuani, in today’s Delta State. Two of his children have extended their blood relationship with Igbos. For instance, his son Prof. Philip Effiong, Jr., who is a staff of the Michigan State University, is married to a lady from Ezinihite, Mbaise, in Imo State, Prof. Chinwe Effiong. Chinwe had been an Assistant Dean at the same university. The General’s daughter Philippa is married to an Igbo man. Many years ago I accorded the honorific “Honourary Igbo Man” to the General, without having ever met him or any member of his family. It was not until 2017 that I became acquainted with Philip, Jr. [By the way, I awarded the same title to Mr. Matthew Tawo Mbu.]
When he bravely accepted directly from Gen. Ojukwu the role of leading the collapsing Biafra, Gen. Philip Effiong knew he was taking a big risk, and that the victorious Nigerian soldiers, known for their savage brutality and indifference to the Laws of War and the Geneva Convention (the three treaties concerning combatants, and the fourth treaty concerning protection of civilians in time of war), could execute him summarily if they captured him. The same risk that Ojukwu faced. Days before the end some Biafran soldiers under him brought his wife and small children to see him at his billet before they were flown out with others in a returning relief plane. Gen. Effiong was so torn with emotion that he could not say goodbye to them. He just kept quiet.
So, Gen. Effiong, the brave, honourable officer, and the few top commanders with him, called on Lt.-Col. Lambert Ihenacho, commander of the 63rd Brigade of the Biafran 14th Division (the young officer who had led the sensational recapture of Owerri barely eight months earlier), to rally some of the retreating and disorganized Biafran troops outside Owerri and hold the advancing Nigerian troops for a little while. Colonel Ihenacho’s task was to gain some time for Gen. Effiong to go into the bush with a handful of other Biafran leaders to the hidden location of the short-wave Radio Biafra, and make a broadcast. Once there, he made the announcement of Biafra’s decision to cease fighting and accept an armistice. First, he played the Biafran national anthem, then he made the brief speech, and then he played the Nigerian national anthem. Biafra had ceased to exist.
Major-Gen. Philip Effiong, Chief Justice Sir Louis Mbanefo, Brigadier Ogbugo Kalu, Brigadier Conrad Nwawo, Brigadier Patrick Amadi, Brigadier David Ogunewe, Brigadier Patrick Anwunah, Col. Ben Gbulie (Effiong’s top aide) and others sat in a house in Amichi, in Nnewi South LGA, in today’s Anambra State, and waited for then-Col. Olusegun Obasanjo and his officers of the Third Marine Commando Division (including Lt. Col. Alani Akinrinade and Major Sam O. Tomoye) to meet them. They were very lucky that a Yoruba officer was the one in command of the Nigerian soldiers who conquered the last area under Biafran Army control, and not Northern military officers. Division Commander Obasanjo later wrote that when he met the Biafran military and civilian leaders in the room in that house in Amichi, they looked at him with fear and embarrassment. Lt.-Col. Ihenacho wrote that when Biafran officers like him who previously served in the Nigerian Army were summoned to Owerri, to a man they went with trepidation. And sure enough they were subjected to very harsh and abusive treatment. However, after they were taken to Port Harcourt, Brigadier Adeyinka Adebayo, later appointed by Gen. Yakubu Gowon to carry out the task of reconciliation, and the re-integration of Biafrans and Igbos into the Nigerian fold, was sent to inspect and interview them and he treated them very well, with dignity, even granting them bags of rice and cash allowances.
It is noteworthy that when the Nigerian Army captured Ikot Ekpene and environs months earlier, some Ibibio and Annang residents – Gen. Effiong’s own people – joined them to burnt down all the houses and structures in his father’s compound. Similarly, when Col. Murtala Mohammed’s Second Division of the Nigerian Army recaptured the Mid-West Region in October 1967, approaching from Benin City, they began their killing spree of civilians all the way from Agbor to the River Niger, murdering an estimated one thousand civilian Igbo men and boys, and raping an untold number of women and girls. In the same vein, the Nigerian soldiers who invaded and captured Calabar, massacred an estimated 2,000 people, Efiks siding with Igbos, including about a dozen chiefs who were tied to motor vehicles and dragged on the tarred road to die. The reason that the feared massacre of Igbos at the end of the war failed to materialize was because the Yoruba military commanders on the ground were not going to let it happen. Gen. Effiong helped out somewhat with his last-minute white-flag broadcast, and Gen. Gowon had more control over the Nigerian Army than he had during the earlier stages of the war. Even before he was replaced as the commander of the Third Marine Commando Division in mid-1969, Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle did not countenance the maltreatment of Igbos and several times threatened to arrest and deal with the architect of Igbo mistreatment in Port Harcourt, then Rivers State Governor Navy Lt. Commander Alfred Diete-Spiff, who was a much junior officer, in rank and in position.
“My father was dismissed from the army without any benefits. So, we struggled with poverty. We struggled to eat, we struggled to find accommodation, and my parents struggled to take care of and educate their seven (and later eight) children. My parents had to occasionally borrow money to pay my fees when I attended the University of Calabar. The hardship brought on a lot of sadness and stress to me and my family.” In an interview later in his life, Gen. Philip Effiong commented: “I have no regrets whatsoever of my involvement in Biafra or the role I played. The war deprived me of my property, dignity, my name….”
As stories of the mass rapes of Igbo women and girls quickly spread in the days following the end of the war, Gen. Effiong sought audience with Col. Obasanjo at the latter’s headquarters in Port Harcourt. He implored Obasanjo to withdraw Nigerian soldiers from the rural towns and villages to school buildings in the main cities, using the facilities as temporary barracks. He warned that if the rapes did not stop, ex-Biafran soldiers would retrieve their weapons they had hidden and start a guerrilla war, even if only to defend their womenfolk. And this was not an idle threat, I personally knew that some top commanders of the former Biafran guerrilla army BOFF had secretly assembled as of March 1970 over 60 Biafran Army officers to commence a guerrilla campaign. Fleeing Biafran soldiers, especially from the Aba and Owerri sectors, had gone home and hidden their rifles and ammunition before Nigerian soldiers arrived in their villages. As a child I hid a box of ammunition for my father’s automatic handgun in the ceiling of a building where we were taking refuge in Orlu after we fled Owerri that mid-January. Obasanjo took heed. Obasanjo got the nod from the Head of State, Gen. Yakubu Gowon, moved the soldiers away, and that was how the atrocities ended.
After the war and for the rest of his life, Gen. Philip Effiong was severely punished by Nigeria’s military leaders; and the civilian national leaders were coerced to do the same. Nigeria’s military rulers in various degrees and in various positions made sure that no rehabilitation assistance of any sort was provided to Philip Effiong. They thoroughly marginalized him. Even as late as 2002, the year before he died, the organizers of the World Igbo Congress 2002, held in Houston, Texas, USA, had traced him to his village to give him a special invitation to attend and address the Congress. The Committee had issued a similar invitation to Major-General Alexander Madiebo, the former Biafran Army Chief of Staff. In response, the government of President Olusegun Obasanjo approached officials at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja and prevailed on them to deny Philip Effiong’s visa application, but did not oppose their granting a visa to Madiebo.
In the same vein, a number of the most senior Igbo Biafran officers, who had been ex-Nigerian military officers, received significant assistance afterwards from Nigeria’s military leaders who had been their friends and colleagues before the war. I know about the cases of Gen. Alexander Madiebo and Col. Hilary Njoku, the Biafran Army’s first Chief of Army Staff. Many erstwhile Biafran Army officers of high rank (but excluding in some cases those from today’s Delta State) were rehabilitated along with their relations back into Nigeria’s economic and political system. Philip Effiong was given special punishment for daring to support the much hated Igbo people, when he himself was not even Igbo. For the Northerners, Effiong’s original sin was alerting Gen. J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi that Northern military officers were plotting a counter-coup against Aguiyi-Ironsi’s government.
But what pains me the most is that Igbos forgot all about Philip Effiong since the end of the civil war. It was like they suffered mass amnesia when it concerned Gen. Effiong. For decades after the war they didn’t care about what happened to him and his family. Not one single help was offered to him, not one single honour was accorded to him. They didn’t know, didn’t care that he and his family became homeless and destitute. Shameful.
As my friend, Prof. Philip Effiong, Jr., wrote in his 2023 memoir “Nigeria’s Un-Civil War. The Memories of a Biafran Child [ available at Amazon],”
Gen. Philip Effiong died on 6th November, 2003, at the age of 77, and he was laid to rest without fanfare, unlike his former boss Gen. Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu who was given a grand Nigerian national funeral. His widow, Josephine, who had been living at the family home in Ikot Ekpene, has just passed away on May 21, 2024, about five and half weeks short of her 89th birthday. She is scheduled to be laid to rest on Friday, 12th July, 2024.
We Igbos should make amends to the family of late Gen. Philip Effiong; we should seize the opportunity now to honour the memory of the late General and his late wife. It is not too late. Delegations representing Igbo town unions, local governments, state governments, civil society groups, major business enterprises and organizations should make their presence known at the coming funeral of Gen. Effiong’s widow. Individuals who are able to should make whatever contributions they can to the family. It is not too late.
By: Hector-Roosevelt Ukegbu
July 7, 2024
H-R Udunna Ukegbu
u_ukegbu@yahoo.com
X @HectorRUkegbu
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