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Elsewhere it was the same story through November and December. The Biafrans counter-attacked in most sectors, notably at Aba and Owerri. At Aba Colonel Timothy Onuatuegwu pushed the Federal forces back to the outskirts of the town, then swung his men down the right and left flanks. At Owerri Colonel John Kalu retook 150 square miles of ground around the town and laid siege.

This bare recital of events over eighteen months may seem to give the impression that the Nigerian advances into Biafra were a smooth and steady progression. This was not the case. Apart from the occasional instance where Nigerian forces had an easy run, they fought for every foot of the way. Often objectives were not taken until the -third or fourth attempt. Sometimes they were blocked for months. Their expenditure

in ammunition is conservatively estimated at several hundreds of millions of rounds, their losses several tens of thousands of men.

Nor did they achieve an ability to control and administer what they had captured. Sticking closely to the main roads and the towns, avoiding the bush which covers over ninety per cent of the country, the Nigerians were able to draw lines on maps which bore little relation to the realities of the situation. Their own appointed administrators sitting in the towns vie for authority wit h the Biafran administrator sitting out in the bush in the overrun areas, and often the Biafran appointee's flat covers the majority of the land and the bulk of the largely rural population.

The secret of Biafra's survival lies partly in the leadership of Colonel Ojukwu, but far more in the people of Biafra. Neither the leader nor the army could have fought without the total backing of the people. The support from behind has to be there before an army can'do more than put up a token resistance. The people contributed everything they had got; poor villages took collections, rich men emptied their foreign accounts to donate dollars and pounds. Tailors made uniforms out of curtain material, cobblers turned out army boots from canvas strips. Farmers donated yams, cassava, rice, goats, chickens and eggs. Bushmen came forward with axes and blunderbusses. Taxi drivers and Mammy-wagon owners drove troop convoys, priests and schoolteachers handed over their bicyclesThere were some traitors, and cheats, defectors, profiteers and racketeers; they come to the surface in every war. But from the people there was not a riot, nor a demonstration, nor a mutiny. As they watched their land devastated and their kinsfolk killed two things were born among the debris; a sense of nationhood and a hatred of the Nigerians. What had started as a belief was transmuted to total conviction; that they could never again live with Nigerians. From this stems the primordial political reality of the present situation. Biafra cannot be killed by anything short of the total eradication of the people who make her. For even under total occupation Biafra would sooner or later, with or without Colonel Ojukwu, rise up again.

10. The Role of the British Government.

As has been observed, Britain's traditional interest in Nigeria had nothing to do with the good of the people of that country, and in that respect nothing has changed. The interest that did exist was borne by a small caucus of British

politicians, civil servants and businessmen, and it was purely imperialistic. The policy was aimed at the maintenance of law and order, the raising of taxes to pay for the administration of the colony, the stimulation of the production of raw materials for British industry and the establishment of a consumer market to purchase manufactured goods from British industry. With independence the first two functions were handed over to selected and suitably friendly indigenes, while the latter two remained as before in the hands of the British. For those inside Britain who concerned themselves in any way with Nigeria, that country represented, like the others, not a land with a population of real people, but a market. Any tendencies inside Nigeria that might be viewed as harmful to the market were to be discouraged, and Biafra's desire for partition from the rest of the country fell squarely into that category.

When evaluating British Government policy towards the whole question of the Nigeria-Biafra war, two schools of thought emerge: one claims that the policy was in fact the absence of a policy, the hopeless outcome of a mish-mash of stupidity, apathy, indifference, callousness and ignorance in high places; the other maintains there was a policy from the start, that it was one -of total support not for the Nigerian people but for the regime presently in power in Lagos, that it was carefully masked from public view for as long as possible, and that the stupidity of the politicians and the ignorance and apathy of the general public and the men controlling the mass-communication media were used either in the furtherance or the dissimulation of that policy. As an increasing amount of research into the growing pile of documentation

available takes place, it is becoming plainer that the evidence supports the latter view.

That British leadership should privately wish to see a single and unified Nigeria so long as this was practically feasible is not blameworthy; but what happened was that in its total determination to see a single economic unit no matter what the cost in suffering to the people of the country, through the grossest interference in the internal politics of that country the British Government chose to ally itself not with the people or their aspirations, but with a small clique of army mutineers. The fact that this clique has shown itself throughout to be largely unrepresentative of Nigerian grass-roots opinion, far from changing the 'support' policy has merely hardened it until a point where British Government policy is so inextricably entwined with the survival of the present Nigerian regime as to be publicly committed to total complicity in anything that regime may do.

On the morning after Gowon's coup of 29 July 1966 it was

clear that the British Government's advisers considered that Gowon's legitimacy was sufficiently doubtful to require a

top-level decision whether or not to recognize his regime at all. This was quite different from the first coup in January

1966, which failed but which led to General Ironsi being asked by the rump of the Cabinet to take over control. On 25 January the British Commonwealth Secretary Mr. Arthur Bottomley told the Commons that the British Government did not consider a formal recognition of General Ironsi even to be necessary.

But in July when no semblance of legality attached to Gowon's government, when the partially successful mutineers only controlled the capital and two out of four regions, the position was quite different. Just when and by what reasoning it was decided to recognize Gowon has not yet been re-

vealed. But, it was not until November 1966 that Gowon's nominee as Nigerian High Commissioner in London, the fastmoving Brigadier Ogundipe, presented his credentials to the Court of St James. And, oddly, it was not until 20 December that the House of Commons was informed that Britain had

Hansard, 25 January 1966, col. 21.

decided to give full recognition to Gowon's regime. In February 1967, Sir David Hunt took over in Lagos as Britain's new High Comissioner to Nigeria. Gradually, he escalated a

previously decided policy of unalloyed support for Gowon.

There seems little doubt that the motivating force behind the formulation of British policy in Nigeria since July 1966. has come not from the politicians but from the senior civil servants in the High Commission in Lagos and the Commonwealth Office in London who advise them. The then Commonwealth Secretary, Mr. Bottomley, although acknowledged by those who knew him to be an agreeable soul, apparently knew little about the situation; his successor Mr. Herbert Bowden was unable to make himself remarkable for his grip of the facts of the issue, and his successor, Mr. George Thomson, showed publicly and privately that his greatest interest lay in efforts to solve the vastly more publicized Rhodesia issue. None of these three were at any time supported either in the Commons or the Lords by a Junior Minister of notable calibre, and those aware of what went on behind the scenes in Whitehall were not surprised to find that the formulation of policy on Nigeria, the writing of Ministers' answers to questions in the House, and the very important briefing of the accredited press correspondents, fell entirely to the civil servants. This did not displease the civil servants, many of whom are known to hold that the complexities of any situation more involved than catching a bus are above the intellectual level of professional politicians. Unfortunately the civil servants showed in the course of time that they too could only bring to bear on the issue a mixture of ignorance, misinformation, prejudice, cynicism and on occasion the traditional British upper-class contempt for all Africans and assertive ones in particular. It was out of this potpourri of crassness, which later became tinged with hints of viciousness, that Britain's support for an African military junta and for the latter's war policy, and for Britain's complicity in the bloodiest episode in Commonwealth history, was born.

Britain was set on the road to supporting Gowon by her then High Commissioner in Lagos, Sir Francis Cummiing-

Hamard, 20 December 1966, col. 263.

Bruce. He later told Professor Eni Njoku, the Chancellor of the University of Nsukka and leader of the Eastern Delegation to the Ad Hoe Constitutional Conference, that when it became obvious to him that Gowon intended to announce in his broadcast of I August 1966 the dissolution of the Nigerian Federation, he managed to persuade Gowon to strike out the words and substitute other ones. He had thus, he told the Professor, saved the unity of Nigeria. A month later he was gone. However, it seems likely his act set Britain on a course. from which it became increasingly difficult to deviate, even though no real effort was made to do so.

In the ensuing months there appeared two occasions at least in which the British High Commissioner, had he been prepared once again to use the undoubted influence vested in his office, could have helped to avert disaster. The first was after the sitting of the Constitutional Conference when it became clear that the majority of Nigerians, from grass-roots level upwards, favoured a loose confederation with a weak central government. The second occasion was when the Regional Military Governors meeting at Aburi had jointly come, to the same conclusion and had appended their signatures to the resolution.

There is no evidence at all to indicate that on either of these occasions the British Government's representative on the spot suggested that this course should be followed. On the contr there are indications that the British on each oc sion n: stead of advising Gowon to go along with Nigeri n popu ar wishes encouraged him to threaten the use of force i he co Id not get agreement to the course of action that he and his own senior civil servants wished to see. Ironically, the loose confederation in Nigeria would have offered Britain all the advantages of the single market which she favoured from her own point of view, since the four Regional Market-ing Boards already in existence were so autonomous as to

constitute a kind of confederation in the economic field even at that time. In the event what has happened is that Britain's annual turnover of L170 million worth of trade has been irreparably eroded and may yet be lost almost completely.

The most charitable interpretation that can be put on the High Commission's decision to back Gowon against all comers including his own people,,and to persuade Whitehall to do the same, is that the British representatives out there shared Gowon's own view that the Nigerian Army could deal swiftly with

any dissidence and that therefore opposition to the Gowon ri6gime nedd not be taken seriously. At best this optimism was uninformed, at worst cynical.

The job of any ambassador is largely threefold: to maintain the most friendly relations possible between the country he represents and the country to which he is accredited, both on the official and at the popular level; to watch over the lives, safety, property and interests of his own fellow-nationals in the country to which he is accredited; to provide continuous reliable information to his own government on the state of affairs in all aspects within the country where he is stationed. No accepted order of priority of these three tasks ever seems to have been drawn up, but both the first two are likely to be profoundly affected by the policy adopted by the ambassador's own government towards the country in which he is stationed; and that policy is likely to be influenced by the information the diplomat provides. For although a diplomat may not formulate policy, it is unusual for his advice not to weigh heavily in the formulation of policy in his own country.

In the event of a policy review, the ambassador is habitually called home for consultations, and his account of the situation, political, economic and social, that prevails in the country to which he is accredited, is usually listened to with great and sometimes decisive interest. Consequently the 'information' aspect of an ambassador's job may be regarded as paramount among his functions. Thoroughly bad information not, only is the hallmark of a poor diplomat, but may well influence his own country's policy into the path of disaster.

In the case of a British High Commissioner in Nigeria, drawing up factual accounts of what is going on should not be difficult. Nigeria abounds in British businessmen, civil servants, traders, journalists, travellers, missionaries, doctors, teachers, professors and engineers who collectively have centuries of

experience and deep understanding. There is also a Deputy High Commissioner in each of the four regions.

To judge from Gowon's remarks before the war about a 'short, surgical police action' he genuinely seems to have thought the Nigerian Army could settle the Eastern Region's disaffection within a matter of days. That he should be uninformed is not surprising. All potentates in Africa are surrounded by sycophants, flatterers and opportunists who find it in their interest to tell the man of power what they know he would like to hear. Yet it appears that the British High Commission shared this euphoria; private conversations with journalists in Lagos at the time make clear the British officials were quite convinced that fighting when it broke out would be brief and almost bloodless, that Colonel Ojukwu would be brought down, and that the East would be reincorporated into Nigeria within a few weeks at most.

Officials, journalists, and socialites, refurbishing each other's illusions in the circular social sodomy of the diplomatic cocktail party round, had managed to convince themselves of this without any reference to what was actually going on in the Eastern Region.