USAfrica: Ojukwu’s a titan who sacrificed his possessions to secure a safe space for his people. By Okey Ndibe

Ojukwu’s a titan who sacrificed his possessions to secure a safe space for his people.

By Prof. Okey Ndibe. 

Special to USAfricaonline.com , CLASSmagazine and the USAfrica-powered e-groups of  IgboEvents, AnambraPolitics, Nigeria360 and UNNalumni

USAfrica, November 28, 2011: A telephone call startled me awake at 3:41 a.m. last Saturday. Still gripped by sleep, I fumbled in the darkness until I palmed my phone. “Hello?” I slurred, my tone testy, ready to chide whoever was on the other end for so thoughtlessly interrupting my sleep.

The caller was a friend of mine. I was still searching for a mild way to protest when he revealed that he’d

just heard that Ikemba Nnewi, Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, had died in a UK hospital where he’d been receiving treatment for several months. Had I heard the news, he asked?

Stunned, I told the caller that I needed to make a call to London to ascertain the veracity of the report. By this time, the fog of sleep had cleared, leaving my senses alert, my emotions a topsy-turvy. It took me one call to the UK – to one of Dim Ojukwu’s children – to confirm that the man who led Biafra – and, in several ways, epitomized it – had indeed died.

In life, Ojukwu was at once a spellbinding presence and approachable; he was both charismatic and truly larger than life. One measure of Ojukwu’s stature as a historical figure is that, among those who knew him – or merely knew of him – it’s extremely difficult to meet many who can honestly say they were indifferent to him. No, he inspired adoration or invited disdain; he drew fierce adulation and provoked fulsome hate, but none, friends or foes alike, could ignore him.

The death of such a personage often inspires a clatter of emotional responses from people, especially those who had the fortune of knowing him on a personal level. I was one of those fortunate ones.

As a fledging journalist in Lagos in the mid-1980s, I ran into Ojukwu in Enugu and received an open invitation to drop in at his 29 Queens Drive residence in Ikoyi, Lagos. Sometimes alone, sometimes along with a few colleagues – among them, Nnamdi Obasi and C.Don Adinuba – I’d often visit Ojukwu’s residence with that famous sign at the gate, “Beware of snake”.

Alone or accompanied by others, I’d spend several hours listening as Ojukwu discoursed. At these informal sessions, he’d smoke cigarette after cigarette and sip from his glass of cognac as he weighed in on Nigerian politics. His favorite subject, a theme he returned to again and again, was the failure of the Nigerian state to crystallize anything approaching a clear sense of citizenship. He was troubled that the Nigerian was in no position to affirm that there was any verifiable content to being a citizen.

Of course, Ojukwu was not alone in articulating that specific malady, that contradiction that easily betrays the hollowness at the heart of Nigeria’s claim to being a meaningful community and coherent idea. What made his voice urgent and lent poignancy to his stipulations was, apart from his uncommon prowess as a speaker, his stature as the man who led a war to resolve that contradiction. There was something heartrending, then, about the experience of sitting with Ojukwu as he eloquently, piquantly, and ruefully demonstrated that Nigeria had embarked on a ruinous war, but had failed – despite the sacrifice of more than a million lives – to address the central question that had triggered the war.

A few months into these informal exchanges, Ojukwu agreed to grant his first extensive interview since returning from exile to the African Guardian, the now defunct weekly magazine that I worked for at the time. One bitingly sunny afternoon, a team of us from the magazine – Editor Ted Iwere, senior correspondent Kingsley Osadalor, and I – spent several hours asking questions that ran the gamut of his life as a historian, soldier, war leader, exile, and refreshed Nigerian. What emerged from that encounter were two paradoxical, but far from inconsistent, considerations. One was Ojukwu’s declaration of his readiness to go to war in order to preserve the unity of Nigeria. The other was his insistence that Nigeria as a nation had not come to terms with its meaning, that its constituent elements had not hashed out the terms of their engagement, and that the country had yet to take seriously the redemption of its implicit pledge to all citizens, especially erstwhile Biafrans.

In the heady flush of emotions after his death, there are those who would leave the impression that Ojukwu was beloved by all Igbo. That impression fudges the evidence. No, he was no object of universal acclaim. Like all great men – and he was a great man in all the ways that count – he was too complex to command everybody’s affection. Many despised the haste with which, once home from exile, he entered the partisan political fray on the side of the widely unpopular National Party of Nigeria, thus seeming to spurn the going political sentiment of most Igbos at the time. He paid a stiff price for that precipitate decision, and seemed to reel from its effect till the very end. I regret that he never took time to offer the world his own written insider’s account of the darkest moments in Nigeria’s history.

Still, nobody would seriously deny that, when his people were tested by fire, he stood up to be counted. Born into privilege on a legendary scale, Ojukwu sacrificed his worldly possessions in the fight to secure a safe space for his beleaguered people. In a Nigeria where relative paupers shoot or rig their ways into office and loot their way out to obscene wealth, here was a man who went in as a leader wealthy and left (relatively) materially wretched.

That, and his other gifts, among them an inimitable way with language, an uncommon insight into the plight of dispossessed Nigerians, an ability to speak a language that resonated with the downtrodden, a deep historical acumen, and that incomparable sense of drama – these endowments defined his titanic personality.

Since the death of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, and Alhaji Aminu Kano, the Ikemba has given us our closest glimpse of a true leader’s mettle. I’m willing to predict that, with time, his leadership credentials are likely to receive wider appreciation and magnification whilst his flaws slip into insignificance. He’s physically dead, but his spirit will loom, will infuse the hearts of those he touched and whom he allowed to touch him in return. May his soul rest in peace.

•Ndibe, a professor of English at Trinity College in Connecticut and a novelist, is a contributing editor of USAfrica multimedia networks since 1995.  

USAfrica Exclusive: OJUKWU on Biafra, Nigeria’s problems, Mandela, Clinton and exile. By Chido Nwangwu

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