Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet
- Onuma, a writer, cultural critic, and historian of Nigerian political thought, is a contributing analyst to USAfricaonline.com. He is the co-editor of Times, Thoughts and Ideas, a collection of Anya O. Anya’s papers and speeches. He is the author of the Combing the Dust series on Medium.
When Nigeria’s retired General Yakubu Gowon finally broke his long silence last month (April 2026), releasing an 881-page memoir titled My Life of Duty and Allegiance, Nigeria held its breath. Here, at last, was the testimony of the last surviving titan of 1966 — the man who inherited a nation on the edge of disintegration, prosecuted the most catastrophic war in African post-independence history, declared “No Victor, No Vanquished” while a generation bled into the soil of the Eastern region, and then spent the following five decades as a kind of national elder statesman, praying for Nigeria on platforms around the world while saying very little about what he had actually done. He has spoken. And what he has given us — dressed in the weight of nearly nine hundred pages, launched at a ceremony attended by men who gave billions — is one of the most elaborate acts of evasion in the history of Nigerian public life.
I want to be precise about this charge, because it is a serious one and it deserves precision.
I am not saying the memoir is dishonest in the careless way — not the dishonesty of a man who invents events or fabricates conversations. The dishonesty of My Life of Duty and Allegiance is more sophisticated, and therefore more damning: it is the dishonesty of radical, strategic omission. It is the memoir of a man who knows exactly what he is not saying and has made his peace with not saying it.
After fifty years of silence, Gowon finally spoke. And he spent 881 pages saying nothing that matters.
The Immunisation Against Truth
The memoir announces its intentions in the opening pages. Gowon writes that he is telling his story “without access to my crucial personal records since many important documents taken from my desk after my removal in July 1975 were discarded by those who succeeded me.” Read that carefully. In one sentence, he lowers the bar for historical proof to floor level and assigns blame for the absence of evidence to his successors. He then proceeds, across the remaining 860-odd pages, to present this impoverished evidentiary foundation as definitive historical truth.
I cannot overstate how significant this rhetorical move is. It is not an honest disclosure of a genuine limitation. It is an immunisation against cross-examination. The British National Archives hold substantial documentation from this period. The United States National Archives hold more. The International Committee of the Red Cross holds records of humanitarian negotiations during the war. Scholars have spent decades in archives across four continents reconstructing the documentary history of the Nigerian civil war. But Gowon’s specific papers, taken from his specific desk — those are gone. And so we must trust his memory.
He then compounds this with a declaration of purpose that is equally revealing. He took a “conscious decision not to reopen old wounds” and to clarify his thinking about “a period often narrated by others.”
Consider that second phrase: a period often narrated by others. This is the complaint of the powerful man — that lesser people have been telling his story wrongly. The historians, the survivors, the children who starved, the mothers who buried them, the officers who fought and were denied their due — all of these are others whose narrations Gowon has arrived, at last, to correct. The silence lasted five decades. When it finally broke, it broke in the direction of grievance.
The Instant Decline That Was Not a Decline
The memoir’s central conceit — the one from which everything else flows — is the portrait of a reluctant man. Gowon would have us believe that power found him, not the other way around; that he was an innocent soldier ambushed by history, pressed into a burning building by men who would not stop screaming at him.
He writes of the July 1966 moment when junior officers demanded he take power: “The loud voices of the junior officers in the hall hit me with the force of a three-ton truck.” They told him he was the only officer acceptable to them. Otherwise, they would continue the coup to its “logical conclusion, which certainly would not be devoid of more bloodshed.” And then: “I certainly did not want this. I instantly declined the offer.”
“I never aspired to and was unprepared for the new role that fate had now thrust on me.”
Read that carefully. I instantly declined the offer. And yet he accepted. He held power for nine years. The instant decline that was not a decline — this single self-cancelling sentence is the key that unlocks the entire memoir. Gowon will claim virtue and then describe the opposite action, assert reluctance and then exercise authority, perform humility and then govern with the full weight of the federal State, page after page, for 881 pages, without ever noticing the discrepancy.
The language throughout is the language of victimhood. Fate had now thrust on me. Without warning. The rock and the deep blue sea. He was, in his own account, a man with no options, no agency, no culpability — a mule that did not ask for the load it was bearing. But the mule does not govern. The mule does not prosecute a three-year war. The mule does not preside over a federal blockade, silence political opponents, reverse a promised transition to civilian rule, or make the specific decisions that shaped the most consequential decade in Nigeria’s history. Only a man with agency does those things. And a man with agency is responsible for what his agency produces.
God as alibi
Having accepted the power he claims he did not want, Gowon pivots immediately to prayer. He sent everyone out of the room. He went down on his knees. He beseeched God to grant him “the wisdom of Solomon.” He prayed for “the courage of David to fight every Goliath on my path.”
“And what a relief I felt after that.”
What a relief. Let us sit with those three words. A prayer is offered. A relief is felt. And then a nation goes to war.
This is the memoir’s most audacious move: the deployment of God as moral cover. Gowon’s Christian faith is not in question here; it is clearly genuine and it has been consistent across his life. What is in question is the function that religiosity performs in this narrative. The prayer episode accomplishes two things simultaneously: it signals humility — the powerful man on his knees — and it transfers accountability. I asked God, God gave me relief, therefore God sanctioned what followed. It is the oldest trick in the history of power — divine invocation as ethical laundry.
The wisdom of Solomon he prayed for did not prevent the starvation of Biafran children. The courage of David he sought did not move him to confront the men around him who were making the war more brutal than it needed to be. What happened between that prayer and the catastrophes that followed? The memoir does not say. It is very good at describing the kneeling and very quiet about everything that came after.
That Was Not What We Were
The thirty months from July 1967 to January 1970 killed, by conservative estimates, between one and three million people. From combat. From deliberate starvation. From disease, from displacement, from the specific, documented consequences of a federal blockade that kept food and medicine out of territory where civilians were trying to survive. The images of starving children that circulated internationally from 1968 became the first great humanitarian media crisis of the television age. They shocked three continents. They shaped a generation’s understanding of what modern war could do to a civilian population.
Chinua Achebe, in There Was a Country, provided the most sustained personal account of the famine’s human consequences and directly accused the federal government of using starvation as a conscious instrument of war. Gowon’s response to this charge — in public statements over fifty years and now in this memoir — has been consistent and, in its consistency, revealing: “That was not what we were.”
Not: here is the evidence that the charge is factually wrong. Not: here is the documentary record of federal food supply efforts, here are the Red Cross negotiation transcripts, here is what the federal command structure understood and intended. Simply: that was not what we were. It is a statement about identity rather than evidence. It is the assertion that a good man cannot have done a bad thing — that because Gowon knows himself to be a man of conscience and faith, the things done under his command must be understood through the lens of his conscience and faith rather than through the lens of their consequences for the people who experienced them.
When Gowon, in Chapter 23, addresses the historians and writers who have documented the war’s human cost, he dismisses them as producers of “enchanting prose” making “pretensions to speaking truth” that are “far away from the truth.” The writers he is dismissing include Chinua Achebe — a Nobel-calibre voice whose account of the famine is among the most carefully documented personal testimonies produced by any participant in the war. They include Wole Soyinka, a Nobel laureate who was imprisoned for his opposition to the war. They include a generation of historians whose work has been subjected to peer review, archival cross-examination, and the rigour of competing interpretations across five decades. To reduce all of this to enchanting pretension, without engaging a single specific claim, without offering a single counter-document, without doing the work that honest historical rebuttal requires — this is not a historical argument. It is the response of a man who has decided that his own memory is the only admissible evidence and that everyone else is simply wrong.
“No Victor, No Vanquished”: The Most Expensive Phrase in Nigerian History
Gowon spoke those words on January 15, 1970, at the formal end of the war. I am willing to extend the charity that he meant them — that the declaration was a genuine statement of intent rather than a cynical performance. The man’s personal benevolence is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the gap between that intent and the policies that followed it, and the memoir’s refusal to reckon with that gap.
The twenty-pound currency exchange — implemented immediately after the war — gave every Biafran, regardless of what they had saved or owned before the conflict, twenty pounds. A trader who had spent twenty years building a business received twenty pounds. A civil servant with a lifetime of careful savings received twenty pounds. The Igbo middle class — the most educationally ambitious, economically mobile social formation in Nigeria — was materially reset to the position of people with nothing in a single administrative stroke. This is not peripheral to the story of post-war Nigeria. It is foundational to it. The patterns of Eastern Nigerian under-representation in the commanding heights of the economy, in the senior civil service, in the upper ranks of the military that consolidated over the following decade — these patterns have their roots in this policy. It was not inevitable. It was made.
Eastern Nigerians who had owned property in Lagos, Kaduna, Kano, and Port Harcourt returned to find their homes occupied. The legal mechanisms available to them were structurally indifferent to their claims. Biafran military officers were to be reintegrated at their pre-war ranks, which sounds equitable until you understand that the Biafran army had promoted on merit during the war in ways the federal side refused to recognise. The practical effect was the systematic demotion of Eastern officers relative to their Northern and Western counterparts who had continued advancing within the federal structure. Within a decade, Igbo officers had largely disappeared from the senior levels of the Nigerian military — an institution that was, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the primary site of political power in the country.
The memoir presents the Three Rs — Reconstruction, Rehabilitation, Reconciliation — as genuine achievement. It does not ask why, if reconciliation had worked, MASSOB accumulated the force it did. It does not ask why IPOB found a popular base among a generation with no personal memory of the war. It does not trace the line from the twenty-pound policy to the political economy of Igbo marginalisation that defines Nigerian political geography today. The phrase “No Victor, No Vanquished” was the most beautiful lie in Nigerian political history — spoken by a man who may have believed it, and used for fifty years as a substitute for the actual work of making it true.
The Wound He Left at Home
There is a section of this failure that is particularly inexcusable, and it is the one closest to home. Gowon is from Plateau State. He is Angas, a son of the Middle Belt — that complex, contested belt of territory across the centre of Nigeria that has never been simply Northern or simply Southern, that has always occupied the structurally marginalised middle, its identity claims squeezed between the gravitational pulls of the Muslim North and the Christian South.
The Middle Belt today is one of the most acute humanitarian crises in Nigeria. The violence between indigenous farming communities and Fulani herders has killed tens of thousands in Benue, Plateau, Kaduna, and the surrounding states over the past three decades. It has displaced hundreds of thousands more. It has structural roots in specific decisions made during the period of military rule — decisions about grazing reserves, about land rights, about the political architecture of the states created in the Gowon era. T.Y. Danjuma, another Middle Belt man and former Defence Minister, made a remarkable public statement a few years ago calling on Middle Belt communities to arm themselves because the federal government could not be trusted to protect them. This was a damning indictment from a man who was himself part of the military establishment that made the decisions being indicted.
Gowon had, in this memoir, both the personal authority and the structural insight to engage seriously with this legacy. He came from there. He understands its geography of belonging and exclusion. He had the opportunity to trace how the decisions of his era seeded the conditions for the current violence — to offer the kind of reckoning that only a man with his specific biography could offer. What he gave instead was a few paragraphs, a gesture of generic concern, and the turn to something more comfortable. An anticlimax where there should have been a confession. In a region that is currently bleeding, that choice is not a neutral literary decision. It is a form of abandonment.
What This Costs Us
Nigeria in 2026 is living the accumulated structural consequences of the decisions this memoir refuses to examine honestly. The security emergencies across the country are not separate phenomena. They are manifestations of a common failure: the failure of the Nigerian state to develop legitimate, inclusive, accountable institutions capable of commanding the allegiance of the diverse communities it claims to govern. The roots of that failure run through the specific rooms and decisions of the Gowon era. He was in those rooms. He is the last man alive who was. And he has chosen, in 881 pages, not to tell us what happened in them.
President Tinubu reportedly called this memoir “a compass for Nigeria’s future.” A compass points somewhere. This memoir points nowhere except inward, toward the author’s self-regard. It offers no honest diagnosis of what went wrong and therefore no prescription for what must change. As a model for how leaders should reckon with the consequences of their rule, it is the opposite of a compass: it is a hall of mirrors, every reflection showing the same serene face.
There is a burden that falls on the very old who were also the very powerful. Not the burden of self-flagellation. Not the performance of public humiliation. The burden of honest witness — the obligation, before the final accounting, to contribute the fullest possible truth of what was decided, what was understood, and what was deliberately not understood. This burden grows heavier with time, not lighter, because as witnesses die and documents disperse, the testimony of those who were present becomes more precious, not less. Gowon is the custodian of a history that does not belong to him. It belongs to all of us — to the dead, to the survivors, to the grandchildren of both.
He has declined the obligation. One is left, at the end of 881 pages, not with rage alone but with something closer to grief: for what could have been said and was not, for the historical gift that was in his hands and that he chose to withhold.
I Decline to Speak Gently
Somewhere in this memoir, in the literary register that sits oddly against the military plainness of the rest, there is a line that reads: “Every generation that inherits peace must learn to speak gently about the choices made in the season of peril.”
Gently.
There it is. After the starvation.
After the twenty pounds.
After the abandoned officers, the occupied properties, the broken transition promise, the Middle Belt left to bleed.
After fifty years of silence broken at last into 881 pages of carefully constructed evasion — the request, dressed in the language of wisdom, is for gentleness.
Not an apology.
Not a confession.
Not a single specific acknowledgment of a single specific failure.
Just: be gentle with me.
This book should not be celebrated. It should be read — carefully, critically, in sustained conversation with the scholarship it refuses to engage and the testimony it dismisses as enchanting prose — as a document of what accountability looks like when it is refused. In that sense, it is historically instructive. It confirms, across 881 pages of elaborate and high-quality evasion, what we already suspected: that those who held power in Nigeria’s foundational era were always more committed to the management of their own legacies than to the honest accounting that their country required and that their history demanded.
Gowon will die a celebrated man. He will receive the State honours due to a man of his standing. His memoir will be cited by people who have not read it and praised by people who have a professional interest in the founding mythology of Nigerian statecraft remaining undisturbed. This is the way these things go.
But history — real history, not the managed kind — is patient. The survivors are still alive. Their children are reading. The archives are open. And the ghost of 1966, which this memoir was the last great opportunity to lay to rest, remains exactly where it has always been: unquiet, unreconciled, and waiting.
I decline to speak gently. The dead were not gently dead. iagbeze@msn.com
