•Victims of Asaba Civil War genocide
The soldiers took him away and after some days his decomposing body, still covered in his native wrapper clothing, was discovered at Ogwu’s rubber plantation. Many years later Elue’s first son “Deputy”, confronted the Obi on why he did not make a move to save his father. The Obi replied: “when they went to Isheagu they buried the Chief alive. I’m sorry about your father, I was just not ready for that kind of death”.
George Ngwuamaka Ozieh – ‘Jalla the Incomparable’
Few days to the outbreak of the Nigerian civil war, the nation was shocked by the violent death of the army Chief of Staff. A helicopter crash had claimed the lives of Lt. Colonel Joe Akahan, his navigator Lieutenant Salami and his young Igbo pilot.
The late pilot, George Ngwuamaka Ozieh, popularly called “Jalla’ by his friends and colleagues had recently returned from an Air Force training course in West Germany. He was among the second batch of the Nigerian graduating air force pilots returning to the uncertainty of the Nigerians civil strife.
On arrival in Nigeria, the Midwesterners in that group moved to Benin City for posting. It was in Benin that George made his decision to join forces with the federal side. According to his sister, Mrs. Grace Iloanya, the circumstances of “my brother’s birth and the obvious mysteries surrounding his many actions convinced us that George would not stay long with us.” The saddest day for the family, recalled Mrs. Iloanya, was when he resigned his lucrative job with the Federal Ministry of Finance and enlisted with the armed forces. Our fears for his life increased and for that matter, it was the first step in the fulfillment of that prophesy by a Yoruba seer, who after the stormy weather and many deaths by lightening that heralded George’s unusual birth, predicted that he was a child of war, he was therefore going to die by the sword…”
George, born April 9, 1942, was picked specifically by the Army Chief of Staff to fly his official tour of duty. Completing this particular mission to the army base in Makurdi, George on the orders of the Chief of Staff diverted to an unscheduled trip to Gboko, a few miles from Makurdi in Benue State. Gboko is Col. Akahan’s hometown. It was in this semi-equatorial forest, where the Savannah tapers off the hilly topography of the expanding forest that George, his navigator and the Nigerian Chief of Army Staff saw their last action. His cousin, Police Commissioner Nzemeka of the Lagos Police Command, identified his body.
Bringing his remains to Ogwashi-Ukwu was to take another month, following the surprise offensive of the Biafran Army that took over the Midwest on August 9, 1967. His body, which arrived Benin City August 3, was to lie in the mortuary for another 12 days as power changed hands in the capital city. Ironically, George Ozieh was to be given a decent burial by the Biafran Command.
Like the late Nzeogwu, it was a sad irony that the army they fought against could not help but give them recognition and honour. These two fine soldiers who fell defending their beliefs and ideas, earned respect on both sides of the fighting lines.
The Biafran Command, at the pilot’s funeral, saluted his passage by conducting a parade of full military honours at Ogwashi-Ukwu on August 15, 1967.
Joe Obiakpani – Death of a Prophet
The last born of the brilliant Obiakpani family, Joe was an all-star sportsman with great inclination to the Physical Sciences. By 1966, he was already admitted into the very competitive higher school programme of the College of Immaculate Conception, Enugu. It was the tradition laid out by the Reverend gentlemen managing that school at that time, that all their ‘prophets’ on completing the secondary school education earned automatic enrolment into higher school.
The ‘prophets’ were those students expected to make distinction in the School Certificate Examination. On the strength of his academic records, Joe was a ‘prophet’.
On October 7, 1967, he could not prophesy the tide or the shape of the war. He allowed the decision and his fate to be determined by his ageing father. When the soldiers came they gunned down the “prophet”.
Benedict Ikenye Okocha – The End of Infinite Variety
My father, Ogbueshi Nnayelugo Benedict Okocha, had no reasons for staying back when the bullets started flying into Asaba. A retired Civil Servant, he had many of his friends in Onitsha and beyond. His last station, the Uzuakoli Leper Colony, dreaded on account of society’s attitude to that disease, would have been a welcome refuge.
But my father never considered himself or his family first in times of emergencies. Just as there was no counseling before the family ran into those patients for the first time in Uzuakoli, my father did not show any emotions, as my mother cried and begged him to evacuate us from the booming mortars and the rattle on the machine guns. My father was rather most concerned with the safety of the whole community. At one of the meetings, he thought it would be discreet to ask the Biafran army to withdraw in time across the river to avoid civilians coming under crossfire if the Federal army was to fight for the town.
My father’s community inclination was a product of his background, as a character that needed applause, he bought it with laughter and generosity. For example, when the Barclays Bank needed an office in Asaba and approached him for a deal he selflessly went to Oji Joseph Nwokolo, a descendant of an Asaba ruling family and offered him a new house, if he would vacate his more visible estate on Nnebisi road for the bank. In one stroke, he made money for the Nwokolos, gave them a new home and succeeded in co-founding the first major banking facility for Asaba and parts of Aniocha areas. A self-taught historian he was the richest philosopher in that community. No wonder, he read so wide, kept files and clippings of the activities and speeches of the leading philosophers of his era. John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khruschev, Mohandas Gandhi, Josef Goebells, Sukarno, Gamel Abdul Nazeer, Adolf Hitler, Churchill, De Gaulle, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, Dias Bandaranaike, Mao Tse Tung, Josep Tito, Francisco Franco, Ahmed Ben Bella, Kwame Nkwumah, Dunduzu Chisiza, Nwalimu Nyerere, Yuri Gagarin (first man in outer space) Nnamdi Azikiwe, Aminu Kano, Olu Akinfosile, Obafemi Awolowo, Adegoke Adelabu, Sanya Onabamiro, Peter Enahoro, (Peter Pan) Justice Udo Udoma, Dennis Osadebay, Chike Idigbe, Obi Eluaka, Okafor Edozien, F. H. Utomi, Okonkwo Adigwe and Nduka Eze.
There were also his very close friends, fellow activists and sartorial pacesetters with whom he exchanged correspondences. Those letters border on community developments, on politics, history, education and of course the latest fashion from Ozendale, Manchester! In those days the African civil servants ordered their wears direct from England. Those circle of friends included “Clever” Nwokobia, “Smart” Ijeh, “Confidential” Okonweze and Gwam the “Insurmountable”.
As an accountant, he frowned at the fraud that reigned within the Umuezei land transactions. Umuezei, the richest quarters in Asaba owned the sands and swamps of the River Niger, Cable Point and much of the property across the Asaba Textile Mills. When the chiefs in charge did not present good books, he led the youths to sue. He thought that the villagers, instead of sharing money from the community land proceeds, should organize scholarship funds and build their own schools and hospitals.
Under the early guidance of Madam Christy Okocha, a wealthy trader and the first African to marry E. C. Palmer, an English Resident Officer for Asaba Division, my father steadily grew in community influence. Using the wings of his sister to shape opinions and confer status, he kept files on notable personalities, history of the world and community events leading to his gruesome death.
A lover of the diary and newspaper clippings, his hobby included European War History, Geography and listening to the World News by the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the Voice of America. “This is Paul Park reporting in special English from the Voice of America in Washington D.C.”, that was my first contact with the electronic media back in 1966.
As a teacher, he approached us in the evenings and with the exact dramatic panache of Josef Geobells, the German War Minister of Enlightenment, he would describe to his bewitched audience the panza military offensive that toppled the old European order. Then, momentarily replacing the rim of his glasses, playing the stages and pathos leading to the capitulation of Paris “the most beautiful, my father would suddenly announce: “Gentlemen, King Hawkin of Norway is a king without country. And General Charles de Gaulle of France is a general without an army”.
My father was Josef Geobells! With his background, my father regarded the war on the Niger as something romantic, to be added to his rich archives. That would be his last assignment as a war correspondent without media accreditation.
As the federal army moved into Asaba after a bloody contact on the outskirts, my father took notes and filed his reports. When he was being taken away, few took notice. My father at that point became a victim of the potent forces of the native African civilization which at that period in history, were in collusion with the law and-order system set up by the emerging brutal colonial leviathan. Their Christian dogma would not accept the Africans’ tested prowess that by and large fulfilled the cardinal pivots of scientific research. For universality, the native African did not know of any other world but their own. For example “Onyema Na Eke” was a regular visitor to Okocha Mkpagbu. They experimented together and my grandfather who crossed the River Niger in seconds but never was a swimmer also returned his visits in far away Eke. Was it not a statement of fact as observed by living Asaba centurions that Okocha Mkpagbu could metamorphose from man to a lion? When others were dancing, he danced in the air, catching the rythmn by stomping from one rooftop to another, then, all of a sudden, he was gone. He could disappear into thin air…
Okocha Mkpagbu! Agogo Wa oba!
The Lion that devours his friends!
… the living Python!
My father knew the incantations but as a Christian was never schooled in the methodologies of the native occult or their metaphysics. Because he was never an apprentice as required by the custom, Okocha Mgbagbuwa Attah, when he saw his death coming, had in 1923 buried his box of medicine (akpati ogwu). Okocha Mkpagbu apparently never forgave his Christian first son for abdicating the great traditions of his forefathers. Now my father at that terrible exigency wished he could do those notable tricks. That was when he suddenly realized my presence and he shouted. “Move and go with your mother! Awolo adi efu uzor”. The Lion dynasty can never get lost! At this time Cable Point was burning. My father would be among the first victims of the soldiers whose mission to Asaba on October 7, 1967 was to destroy and take no prisoners. We may never know the amount of “treasure” that was destroyed at No. 38 Nnebisi Road. For the custodian of those archives, an irreplaceable soul of infinite variety went with the ball.
E.C. Philips (MBE) – The Last of the Origins
In 1970, the war was over. The military government of the Midwest State, appalled by the state of destruction at Asaba, rushed relief materials to the returning refugees.
Only one individual could be trusted to posses the honesty and the organizational capability to distribute the relief materials so as to reach all the refugees. Therefore, the government requested for Mr. E. C. Philips, (MBE), to take charge. When the materials arrived, Mr. Philips, a highly regarded civil servant honoured with the title of Member of the British Empire by the Queen of England, failed to turn up. The government agents moved the relief materials to the Catholic Mission. The Reverend gentlemen in the mission knew the fate of E.C. Philips and at once set up an organization to distribute relief to the refugees. But unknown to the government, Mr. E. C. Philips had been felled with the other pensioners by Federal troops during the blind rage and the subsequent killings that devoured Asaba natives, on October 7.
A keen historian, Philips had observed in the 40s “that the fundamental problem of the African education was the mechanical imitation of British education” He denounced the requirements of a “foreign syllabus as unsuitable for students of this country”, explaining that “teachers, using books written by Englishmen for English boys are talking about things they do not understand”. He was among the pioneers that encouraged Africans to write their own books. He reintroduced the African Syllabus for examination purposes. As a teacher who was familiar with the histories of the American civil war and of the two world wars, Mr. Philips had advised the people to receive the Federal troops and stay calm. He did not budge with his friends from the East, led by the former Justice of the World court, Sir Louis Mbanefo, asked him to cross over and seek sanctuary in Onitsha.
Mr. E. C. Philips pioneered education projects in Udi, Ajalli, Onitsha and in parts of the old western Nigeria at Ibadan. A winner of the Victoria Cross For Service To Humanity, Philips was also the first African Justice of Peace in the old Asaba Division.
As the first commissioned Higher Cambridge University Examination Invigilator in Onistsha, he invigilated the papers of such future geniuses as Professor Chike Obi, Professor Nwabueze and Justice Kaine. It was therefore, a sad irony that such an accomplished gentlemen, one of the last of the diminishing stock of Nigerians who made it by merit, was executed by gunmen dangerously ill equipped to understand the worth of their victim.
His monument of artifacts, pre-colonial historical documents, merit awards and mementos were not spared. Those collections that could fill a state library and embellish the life and times of this influential light of the pre-independence era were obliterated along with the foundation of the Philips family riverside home at Otuogwu, Asaba.
We are not likely to ever meet his kind of meteor for a long time. Indeed, he was the last of the ‘Origins’.
Augustine Egbuiwe – Pioneer Without Claims
Pioneer graduate of St. Thomas’ Teachers College, Ibusa, Augustine Egbuiwe started teaching in 1924. Standing in front of a class of men of his father’s age, he would be provided with a stool to enable him reach the blackboard. As the headmaster of Sacred Heart School, Warri, he prepared and influenced the career of some of the present leaders of the Delta region.
Shortly before independence, the colonial government mindful of his excellent contributions towards the education of the African people, moved him to the Local Government Division. He served as the District Officer of Oshun, Midwest from the Western Region, he was named the (DO) District Officer for Benin and later promoted Senior Divisional Officer (DSO) for Warri and Western Urhobo provinces.
His adept knowledge of the people’s culture, his reputation for forthrightness and discipline, were to be a major asset whenever the government appointed him arbiter to many of the traditional chieftaincy feuds in the communities under his charge. In 1967, as the war approached the Urhobo Provinces, the Ovie of Ughelli sent a message to the Igbo senior divisional officer. The royal father in appreciation of Mr. Egbuiwe’s contributions to the development of his division promised him the security of his palace in case he decided to remain at Ughelli.
A touched Egbuiwe remembered two of his sons abandoned in Benin.
Other members of his family were at Asaba. But on October 15, 1967, Tony Egbuiwe, his second son lay prone, crying all day in a ceiling hideout in Benin. His host had reported to him that his father’s car with plate numbers MA 1018 had been located in Benin. Soldiers were driving about in his father’s car and were telling horrible stories of the wipe out operations in Asaba.
