Understanding Yoruba Mindset in context of “Igbos as traitors”—A Tribute to Bishop (Prof) Funmilayo Adesanya-Davis
By Nwankwo Tony Nwaezeigwe, PhD
In October 1966 my late father Lawrence Obi Nwankwo Nwaezeigwe escaped the pogrom by the whiskers in the Northern city of Bauchi. Many of his relations and Igbo ethnic compatriots were not so lucky. In 1991, my Mother’s only brother Mr. Vincent Onyeachonam—a Brave and Brilliant Biafran Soldier during the Nigerian Civil War then working with Blackwood Hodge Nigeria Limited escaped the anti-Igbo Kano riots by the act of Providence, only to die in a ghastly motor accident shortly after along Warri-Sapele Highway. This is just my own side of the gory story of the Nigeria experience.
Thousands of my Igbo compatriots have their own sides of the story to tell. And as things are moving in Nigeria today with the dominance of the present band of crass and self-centred Southeast Igbo political leadership, more Igbo people will have similar stories to tell in the future.
My father had after the May anti-unification riots against the Igbo in the Northern Region or Group of Provinces as General Aguiyi-Ironsi chose to call it, relocated us temporarily to Jos at the home of his Uncle—Mr. Adudu, since Jos was relatively friendly to the Igbo at that stage of the crisis. From Jos we were finally sent back to our hometown Ibusa. Back in Bauchi, while resuming his duty with the then Italian Construction giant—Stalin Astaldi as a Store-Keeper with caution like every other Igbo man then, he made several attempts to convey his property back home; but no Hausa-Fulani transporter was willing to transport them even to Jos from where he could have accessed another transportation to the South. His long frustration was eventually brought to an end by the outbreak of the Pogrom in October.
On that fateful day in October 1966, my father was alerted in his office by one of his Igbo colleagues who came panting, informing him that the people had started killing the Igbo. He immediately left his office and rushed back home where he took some money, put few belongings in his portfolio and left the house without knowing where he was going. As soon as he entered the streets, he was confronted by a Policeman who ordered him to open his portfolio for him to examine the contents.
My father knew that the tactic was for the Policemen to accost Igbo people, pretend to be interrogating them, and thereafter give sign to the mob which would then emerge and descend on their victims. So he pretended to be opening his portfolio while watching the Policeman with the corner of one eye. As soon as the Policeman thought he was fully concentrated on the business of opening his portfolio and beckoned on the mob, my father left everything and took to his heels with the mob pursuing him with murderous intensity. He managed to outwit the irate mob by miraculously jumping over the Public Works Department (PWD) fence, an incredible feat which left his assailants mopping with awe and panting with anger. He subsequently found himself in the hyena-infested jungle caves of the wild Bauchi Hills.
Two days after his sojourn in the forest caves he met his fleeing kinsman from Okpanam in the same Cave. With that he thus had a companion in suffering. They had pulled-off their shirts and were bare-footed. There was no food except Mbembe (Wild Blackberry) which they could only gather and eat during the night, since during the day they hid themselves in the caves like wild animals do and which they changed quite often for security purposes.
At a stage, his Okpanam kinsman who was much older than him in age became so hungry that my father was forced to follow him to the direction of the sound of a mortar to beg for food. When they got there they met a Fulani woman pounding dawadawa (Guinea corn) and before they could conclude their request for food the woman immediately raised alarm. Both men fled back into their cave haven as their assailants emerged, pursuing them deep inside the cave. My father informed me that even after the fruitless search one of them insisted on staying back in the cave and continued to search for them.
But as providence would have it, they were concealed by the perpetual darkness of the cave. In the night they relocated to another cave where after two days his Okpanam kinsman resolved he was no longer going to bear the hunger and suffering, left my father and moved back to the city. My father never saw him again.
After one week of loneliness in the caves my father again felt he was no longer willing to continue with the sufferings and decided to go back to the city even if it meant being killed this time. He waited until it was getting to midnight and then left his cave residence. When he got to the outskirts of the city, he discovered that some children were still keeping-wake around a burn-fire and so he tactfully retreated to a nearby bush. Around 2 am he resurfaced, found every place dead quiet and proceeded into the city with cautious steps. His port of call was the residence of his Yoruba friend and co-worker. The fact is that his friend was not expecting him at any point in time since the news of his death had spread all over Bauchi city.
So when he knocked on the door of his Yoruba friend and identified himself as Lawrence Nwankwo Nwaezeigwe his friend had every sense of belief that his late Igbo friend had visited him from the land of the dead.
So he refused to open the door informing him that the Lawrence he knew was dead. After several fruitless attempts to convince his friend that he was not dead, he decided to sleep on the table outside the house.
Early in the morning when his friend opened his door, he saw my father dozing on the table outside. He shouted, Lawrence so you are alive! Immediately he took my father inside the house and informed him he was doing it at the risk of his life because the order was that anybody found hiding any Igbo should be killed as well. He however informed my father that already some survivors were being gathered at the Police Station for safety and that he would do all he could to safely take him them.
My father took his bath and was provided breakfast.
He was thereafter concealed at the back-seat of his friend’s car covered as a Muslim woman and driven to Bauchi Police Station, where he joined the throng of Igbo people including the wounded. His cousin Mr. Mgbede of Achalla-Ibusa who was married to a daughter of Ashibuogwu my maternal Grandmother’s relation at Umuosowe, Umuodafe Quarters, Ibusa, was not so lucky. He was blockaded in his car while fleeing from Bauchi, dragged out and hacked to death. It was from the Police Station that they were eventually airlifted to Enugu, from where my father found his way back home westward across the Niger.
I remember the moment he arrived at home the kind of tumultuous celebration that followed in our village. We had rushed back to our village with my mother from Umuosowe village where we were temporarily staying with her mother—my maternal Grandmother—Adaozele. On getting to our village, we met my father bare-bodied, bare-bodied with swollen-feet, and torn pair of trousers in the midst of excited crowd of our family members and villagers. As the celebration was going on, his mother—my paternal Grandmother—Mgboma got hold of a live hen which had been chased and caught for that occasion, smashed it dead on my father’s feet, and forced her tired breast into my father’s mouth to suck—exclaiming: “nwam a natagoo”, “nwam a natagoo” (My son is finally back). My father’s case was not an isolated scene in my town. Many families were in similar mood of jubilation as much as many others were in the mood of sorrow, having either heard of the death of their kinsmen or no news about their whereabouts.
My father was not alone in this stream of Yoruba magnanimity towards their Igbo Southern kinsmen. In one of my previous articles on this subject matter I was rudely informed by a deluded man from Awka that I did not do my research properly and that I should go and read Major Ademoyega’s book when I made reference to Col. Adekunle Fajuyi’s sacrifice of his life in defence of General Aguiyi-Ironsi. I did not have time to remind him that at that moment in question Major Ademoyega was convalescing in Warri Prisons after his boxing bout with Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna in Calabar Prisons over Ifeajuna’s sabotage of the noble objectives of the January 15, 1966 Coup.
Strikingly enough, Mrs. Aguiyi-Ironsi during her last ninety-year birthday celebration informed us that his first son who accompanied his father to the ill-fated tour narrated how Fajuyi was resisting the arrest of Aguiyi-Ironsi and subsequently elected to be taken along with him.
Brigadier-General Benjamin Adekunle—Black Scorpion was nearly killed by Murtala Mohammed for providing safe-passage for his besieged Igbo compatriots during the July 29, 1966 counter-coup. He was later relieved his post as Commander of 3rd Marine Commandos because of his unilateral withdrawal from Owerri Sector to save Biafra’s lifeline in which he was accused of deliberately leading Federal troops into vantage positions of the Biafran troops. The then Col. Olusegun Obasanjo assisted by Major Bajowa prevented the Igbo from being massacred at Ibadan by Hausa-Fulani elements who were subsequently quarantined for that reason.
The then Acting Vice Chancellor of University of Ibadan after the exit of Prof; Kenneth Dike, Prof. J. F. Ade-Ajayi paid all the Igbo Staff of the University four-month-salary advance to enable them go back home when Governor Adebayo ordered the whole Igbo in Western Region to go back to the East after the bomb explosion at the Nigerian Tobacco Company, Ibadan. Chief Obafemi Awolowo later cancelled the expulsion order and ordered both Major Mobolaji Johnson of Lagos State and Col Adebayo of the Western State to protect every Igbo in their territory; yet it was the same Chief Obafemi Awolowo that was continuously vilified as the goddess of Igbo failure in the Civil War just because he refused to be bought into Col Odumegwu Ojukwu’s bogus imperial ambition in the name of fighting for the Igbo.
Chief Obafemi Awolowo instituted the policy of mass hunger against the Igbo they would always shamelessly say. But the question is where in the history of warfare did the feeding of an enemy become a part of war strategy? Were the Igbo themselves not feeding on the flesh of the enemy-Federal troops that crossed their way? The Igbo say: “A bojaba akwa agadi nwanyi, a ga-abochaputa ife n’ime ya” (If we decide to probe deeply into an old woman’s cloth, something messy will definitely be discovered).
For the Igbo any group that did not buy into Col Ojukwu’s inordinate imperial presumptuousness even if opposed to the pogrom of the Igbo was the cause of Biafra’s failure. It has always remained the culture of blame allocation instead of sober reflections over their mistakes in the past—the case of the Yoruba did this against us, the Ijaw and Efik-Ibibio abandoned us, or the Hausa, Fulani and Middle Belt killed Gen. Aguiyi-Ironsi and our people. What did the Igbo do to all these groups before their actions? Or does it mean the Igbo have been all the while in Nigeria’s history Angelic in their dispositions to other ethnic groups? Who do you blame for the invasion of a throng of fowls in your compound: the man who brought the termite-infested fire-woods into your compound or the fire-wood itself?
I once asked Chief Anomneze from Orlu in Imo State who was a one-time Patron of Igbo-Speaking Community in Lagos State how he was able to reclaim his large Estate in Ikate, Surulere, Lagos after the Civil War. He informed me that when he was fleeing to the East in the wake of the 1966 Pogrom, he handed over the buildings with their papers to his Yoruba friend; and after the civil war, his friend handed him back the houses with the papers and all the accruing rents collected during the period of his absence, with which he began life anew. Which Igbo can even do such to his fellow Igbo kinsman?
One fact is obvious! The Yoruba are more humane than any other ethnic group in Nigeria and ethnically united as much as they are historically conscious of themselves more than their often boastful Igbo counterpart. E. W. Bovil in his narration of Hugh Clapperton and Richard Lander’s journey through Yorubaland from Badagry in search of the Niger in 1825 described the Yoruba as: “a kindly hospitable people who gathered in thousands to welcome them at each of their stopping places.” From the mouth of Hugh Clapperton himself: “They were a mild and kind people, kind to their wives and children and to one another, and the government, though absolute, is conducted with the greatest mildness.” You can’t speak of Southeast Igboland in the same regard during the same period. Clapperton and Richard Lander with all their escorts should have within a moment of their appearance in the first Igbo village found their body-parts distributed in different soup-pots of their perceived hosts as rare delicacies. So humanitarianism ran through the historical blood vein of every Yoruba man, not by the impartation of European colonialism as is the case with the Igbo. It is therefore an incontrovertible fact that every act of a Yoruba man is founded on the fulcrum of historical construction of his primordial definition of Yoruba personality and not by the act of his association with either the Igbo or any other ethnic group in Nigeria.
This can be explained by the large number of seasoned and celebrated professional historians among the Yoruba who continue even after their retirements from active academic service to oil the wheel of their historical consciousness with nationalistic fervor. Indeed, looking at the first and second generations of Nigerian historians, apart from Kenneth Dike, J. C. Anene, Adiele Afigbo, F. K. Ekechi, Chinweizu, and John Asiegbu, no other class of Igbo historians can match the opulent intellectual harvests of successive Yoruba professional historians of the same class whose scholarly carriage and artistic intellectual craftsmanship have preserved the knowledge of history as a veritable weapon of political mobilization and ethnic consciousness among their people. These are the likes of Samuel Johnson, Saburi Biobaku, J. F. Ade-Ajayi, E. A. Ayandele, S. A. Akintoye, J. A. Atanda, A. B. Aderibigbe, R. A. Adeleye, B. O. Oloruntimehin, Patrick Cole, Bolanle Awe, I. A. Akinjogbin, and Anthony Asiwaju.
The extent of Yoruba pride in the subject of their history is noted by the fact that the Department of History at the University of Ibadan alone has produced five Vice Chancellors of the University, while the Department of History at the University of Lagos has produced two Vice Chancellors of the University. But to the Igbo of Southeast everything about their past is either Akuko-Iro (Folk-tale) or I go-Alusi (Idol Worship as they call it). This has given rise to successive generations of toothless band of decrepit political leadership surrounded by multitudes of insane sentimentally-driven moronic and lame-duck followership that only see their future political survival in Nigeria through the nose of primitive acquisition and accumulation of vainglorious wealth. The question is how far has this vainglorious pursuit of wealth provided the Igbo the path to collective national security, stronger political bargaining power, and pride of place in the collective definition of Nigeria’s nationality question?
There is no denial of the fact that right from the beginning of modern Nigeria the Yoruba have been far ahead of the Igbo in matters of intellectual development and historical assertiveness which have led to their tremendous advancement in ethnic consciousness, profound spiritual maturity and institutional cultural nationalism. And these three forces of political mobilization made the Yoruba to rely heavily on mentorship as the vehicle of recruitment into political and academic leadership against Igbo cliental approach. In other words while the Yoruba see politics as a framework of commonwealth interest, to the Igbo it is a matter of buying and selling, a case of cash and carry in their habitual commercial mentality.
One can clearly see the varying results of these two approaches from the enduring legacy of Awoism compared to Zikism. In other words, while Awoism depicts a political framework guided by a pragmatic ideology that looks inwards in which the leadership pulls his subordinates along as he rises; Zikism depicts a political framework which is lacking in a definitive ideology, and mainly characterized by a leadership that uses its followers as foot-stools for political ascendency. A major consequence of the first pattern is that an Awoist never crashes politically without supporting comrades to his rescue at the eleventh hour. Whereas a Zikist crashes and that often heralds the end of his political adventure, career, and influence.
Dr. Alex Ekwueme was the Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria for over four years but he could not influence the simple promotion of Dr. Chukwuemeka Ezeife who later became the Governor of his State, from Director to Permanent Secretary for three consecutive years after the latter was due for promotion and his subordinates were being promoted Permanent Secretaries over and above him. Whenever he met his Vice President kinsman from the same Aguata Local Government Area then to request his assistance over the matter of his stagnation, Dr. Ekwueme’s response was usually “nwa nnaa a wotarom ife ndi ugwu n’eme?” (My brother I don’t understand what these Hausa-Fulani people are doing).
It took an ordinary Hausa-Fulani contractor who was often assisted by Dr. Ezeife to expedite actions on his contract file to break the jinx which a Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria of Igbo extraction could not do. One day this Northerner entered Dr. Ezeife’s office and ask him, “Peter, what is happening to you? All your mates and even juniors have become Permanent Secretaries but you’re still a Director.”
Dr. Ezeife replied him and said: “My brother I don’t know oh.” The man then said he would help him and immediately gave his name to those that mattered in authority and consequently Dr. Ezeife was promoted to Permanent Secretary not long after.
This is the characteristic clay-footed giantism and lame-duck political carriage of the average Southeast Igbo political leader today who will often desire to drag the politically principled, mentally balanced, ideologically focused and intrepid South-South Igbo political leaders and their energetic people into their whirlpool of political servility and dysfunctional ethnic consciousness. This is kind of people that want us to support them become President and Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria; the kind of people that would first seek the permission of the Sultan of Sokoto before he appoints his brother to a responsible position.
The point of fact is that neither my father nor other victims of the 1966 pogrom, including subsequent victims of latter-day Hausa-Fulani victims, as well as the trending murderous activities of Fulani herdsmen, suffered this act of decimation because one Major Patrick Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu— a West Niger Igbo from Okpanam in Delta State led the coup of January 15, 1966 or because he killed Sir Ahmadu Bello the Sarduana of Sokoto in the process. For if that be the basis of judgment, what then should have been the reason for singling out the Igbo to be massacred in both the Jos riots of 1945 and Kano riots of 1953 when they were by every sense of judgment never the reason for the riots?
Major Kaduna Nzeogwu was explicit on the question of the ethnic dimension of the January 15, 1966 coup when he stated:
“In the North no!
