Obviously the Delphins weren’t operational for very long thereafter, which was when Lagos started shopping around and eventually bought Soviet MiG-17 fighters.

Meanwhile, as part of my job, I continued to travel. Most of all, I enjoyed heading out towards the East, near the Cameroon frontier. Though unsettled because of the refugee problem – a million Ibos had been forced to return to their roots because they were being slaughtered elsewhere – this was still the most ordered part of the country.

When I had first entered Nigeria – impecunious and overland from the Cameroon Republic the year before – I’d managed to visit the delightful little port of Calabar that nestles like a cherub at the head of a river inlet in the extreme east of the country. It was a tropical hideaway from all the country’s travails and I made friends with a group of British and American volunteers. Also a charming place was Jos, a big area in the interior with its tin mines and strange, primitive tribes who wanted only to be left alone.

The North was pleasant enough, at least when there weren’t people slitting each other’s throats. Anyway, whites were regarded as very much apart from that kind of violence. Then things started to get nasty and one couldn’t escape the tension.

Meanwhile, the military governor of the Eastern Region, Lieutenant Colonel (later General) Ojukwu, watched all these events with dismay. The son of a wealthy Ibo businessman and an Oxford graduate (see Chapter 6), he was outspoken about the long-term consequences of these killings. The nation was being irrevocably split, he warned. War might follow, if only because the minority that was being persecuted simply had to do something to survive.

The idea of seceding from the Nigerian Federation was already a hot issue in Enugu, Port Harcourt and Onitsha. Among the arguments that Ojukwu and his people liked to use, was that the boundaries of the country had been arbitrarily drawn by the British colonial government a century before.¹ Consequently, they were of little use now, they maintained.

Of course, by then, matters relating to oil had become a very substantial issue. The new-found oil deposits, it was agreed, would give the Ibo Nation (it had been the Ibo ‘people’ before) the economic power to go it alone.

We were aware that Ojukwu had already sent his emissaries abroad to acquire what weapons they could from Europe. The word that came back was that some of his requests were being met, with France and several Eastern European countries willing to sell arms for cash. It was all over-the-counter stuff, and the problem was getting it back to Ojukwu’s already-embattled enclave.

At about this point, things moved quickly. Violence in the Northern reaches continued, with killings in the Yoruba-dominated West abating markedly over the months that followed. No fools, the Yoruba were already well aware that this was a North–South thing, with the preponderant Islamic militants in the North doing what they could to cripple the largely Christian Eastern Nigeria.

Indirectly, that led to questions being asked in Lagos and Ibadan and they went something like this: once the Ibos and the East have been dealt with, are we likely to be next? The phrase ‘Islamic Jihad’ was being bandied about as if this threat was already a reality.

Undeterred, the Eastern Region was soon to be declared. The Republic of Biafra it was called, and its symbol was the rising sun again a black backdrop. Then, as some of us knew it would, came the counterrevolution launched by the Nigeria’s Islamic north, though most of us got the timing wrong. Worse, with my offices at the airport, I seemed to be in the middle of it.

At that early stage, there was very little known about the man who had taken over after Nigeria’s second military coup.

General Yakubu Gowon was a quiet-spoken Christian soldier who originally came from a small northern tribe, the Angas. Though he had a minor role in the July 1966 counter-coup, he emerged as a compromise head of the new government.

Frederick Forsyth remembers him emerging out of the gathering chaos as the mild-mannered adjutant of the Nigerian Army. He was the typical young Nigerian officer. More important, he wasn’t Muslim. Being, as it was termed, ‘Middle Belt’ – neither from the North nor the South – he couldn’t be tarred with a brush of being an Ibo. In fact, recalls Forsyth, he suited everybody.

As far as the coup leaders were concerned, their attitude was that ‘we can run the country behind this man’. So too with Sir David Hunt, the British High Commissioner: Gowon was the perfect choice.

Sir David was a traditionalist, and liked the fact that Gowon would snap to attention whenever the British High Commissioner walked in… that pleased the old Brit. In contrast, there were those among us who regarded the Nigerian military leader as an overgrown boy scout.

In contrast, Sir David’s relations with Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu were ‘frosty’, recalls Forsyth:

The British High Commissioner, very much a product of the old British colonial establishment, viewed black people in ‘their proper place’. Certainly, Ojukwu didn’t fit into that mould: he was the product of a British public school education and could actually be regarded as a black Englishman. He’d been to Oxford, played a good game of rugby, his father had been knighted by the King and was a self-made millionaire… this was a man of substance.

Ojukwu, recalls Forsyth:

regarded Sir David Hunt with the direst suspicion, well-merited as it eventually turned out. From the outset the British High Commissioner detested the Ibo military leader and the sentiment was thoroughly reciprocated.

On Hunt’s part, there were two reasons. Unlike Ojukwu, Hunt was not public school, despite a brilliant classical brain demonstrated at Oxford. But he was a simply crushing snob and covert racist. Two, he divorced his wife and married Rio Myriantusi, the favourite niece of the mega-rich, Lebanese-Greek Nigerian-based tycoon A.G. Leventis… and what complicated matters here was that she had been Emeka’s [Ojukwu’s] girlfriend, with the younger man vastly better endowed!

A career army officer, Yakubu Gowon was very different, though he was also a contemporary of the rebel leader Ojukwu. The two men actually served in the same units on occasion and knew and understood each other’s foibles, which could have been one of the reasons why the Biafran leader believed that he could pull off his wager to withdraw from the Nigerian Federation and go it alone, much as Rhodesia had successfully done just a few years before.

Indeed, the two men were very different. Gowon wasn’t one for publicity: in fact, says Forsyth, it took him an age to get his first interview with a man whom he always found extremely reserved and quiet-spoken.

Never recalcitrant, he was reticent to talk about his own life and though he could have claimed one of the presidential palaces as his own, he never did. None of his successors wasted any time in moving into the biggest and most lavish palaces on hand, most times with excessive brass and hoopla. Gowon preferred to stay on in the barracks with his family, in part, it has been said, because the presence of his own soldiers offered better protection.

Eschewing limelight and controversy, General Gowon was different in other respects as well. The media made a thing about his having been trained in England at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, as well as in Ghana. The truth, says Forsyth, ‘is that while it sounds like the full three-year permanent commission background, it was actually a threemonth summer course which Commonwealth officers literally couldn’t fail’. Gowon did get involved in two tours of duty with the Nigerian Army during the Congo’s upheavals and, by all accounts, did a sterling job in putting down uprisings in the interior.