20 Jan 2008 |
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Victor Banjo's Gift To The Nation
Last week, Lt. Col. (General, he insists) Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, former Commander in Chief of the defunct Biafran Armed Forces received the first cheque of his restored pension and gratuities from the Nigerian Military Pensions Board. This is the practical effect of his having been pardoned by the Federal Government for leading the rebellion against the Nigerian state between 1967 - 70. It was a happy occasion for General Ojukwu and other former Biafran officers who were re-integrated into the Nigerian Army. For the rest of us, it was a symbolic development, which pointed towards a putative attempt to heal the wounds of the past and allay some of the unending fears raised by the civil war. Ojukwu had caviled against the idea of being referred to as a Lt. Colonel, his last rank before the Biafran secession but he was in remarkably good humour, and he spoke about the possible emergence of a new Nigeria. It is important that the Nigerian government continues to place the right accent on the need for reconciliation, rehabilitation and reconstruction after a civil war whose embers, 38 years later, continue to smoulder in many ways. The war brought physical and spiritual destruction on the Nigerian spirit. But the bitterest residue of the civil war, the period between 1960 and 1970, the circumstances of the early history of the Nigerian Armed Forces and indeed after, is to be found in the scars that many families continue to bear. These are families whose relations had served in the Nigerian Army or were involved in the civil war or who had been soldiers on Nigerian soil, but who had been badly treated with much collateral damage to others. Their survivors continue to feel much pain. They want the pensions and gratuities of their loved ones to be paid. They raise questions of honour and justice and they want family names that have been smeared to be cleared with the brush of truth. They want the spirit of their loved ones to rest seeing that justice has been done. The Nigerian military may have taken the first step in addressing some of these grievances, but sheer symbolism is not enough. The Federal Government must embark on a closer scrutiny of the books, In its many years of intervention in politics and governance, the military and its protagonists managed to build many empires of pain. The Federal Republic of the Nigerian Army was a sordid land of treachery and abuse. The most recent story is that of the Mamman Vatsa family and their anger about the injustice meted out to their breadwinner occasioned by the treachery of his own friend. There is also the story of Emmanuel Ifeajuna, Nigeria's first Commonwealth gold medallist, whose achievement has been constructively erased from Nigerian history, through official amnesia, simply because he was involved in the coup of January 15, 1966... But today, I tell the story again of Lt. Col. Victor Banjo. He had featured in this column before, when I commented on the book written about his travails by his elder sister, Professor Adetowun Ogunsheye titled "Breaking the Silence". In it, the author had tried to tell her brother's story and it was the first full-length discussion of the life and times of Victor Banjo, one of the idealists who got caught up in the maelstrom of 1966 -1970. My return to Banjo, here, is inspired by a book I have been reading titled "A Gift of Sequins: Letters To my Wife," by Victor Banjo with Olayinka Omigbodun. Published in December 2007 by Mosuro Publishers, Ibadan, the 281-page book tells the Banjo story, in Banjo's own words and handwriting. It is essentially a compilation of letters that he wrote to his wife, Taiwo Lucretia Banjo between January 1966 and July 1967. Olayinka Omigbodun, Banjo's daughter provides a prologue and an epilogue in which she ties the Victor Banjo story to the story of the larger family, a moving account of the pain that she and her siblings and their mother endured. Mrs Omigbodun describes the difficult transformation that crept into their lives and the special challenges they faced growing and living without a father, who had been publicly executed and whose grave remains unknown. It is an exceptionally moving book, a human story of peaks and valleys, high and low moments, coping with trauma and vicissitudes, and a deeply instructive book about life and its many short ends. It is more importantly, Victor Banjo's unexpected gift to the Nigerian nation. Through his letters, he writes back to the nation and those who tormented his life and finally took it. It is the writing of a man who knew the importance of history and who through his twice a week letters to his wife from prison, managed to hide his own side of the story for posterity. He says on page 102 for example in a letter dated September 15, 1966: "The letters I wrote to Ironsi, even when I knew he was thoroughly dishonest were not intended to make him release me, but to make sure that ample records of my story exist in the event of my being done to death, for those who would come after me." The same could be said of all the letters. They are treasures for Banjo's own children, and straight arrows to the Nigerian nation, as the fallen soldier conveyed his immediate thoughts about Nigeria, the Nigerian Military, the inevitable civil war, the future of the nation and stridently about certain key personalities in early Nigerian history. In addition to its usefulness as a piece of autobiography, as a further advertisement of the epistolary form; The Gift of Sequins is a remarkable contribution to prison literature. Lt Col Victor Adebukunola Banjo, born April 1, 1930, was the first Nigerian Director of the Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Corps of the Nigerian Army. He joined the Army in 1953 as Warrant Officer 52 and he was the sixteenth Nigerian to be commissioned as an officer. (NA 16). A product of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, he also obtained a B Sc. in Mechanical Engineering. His travails began immediately after the January 15, 1966 coup, which brought Major-General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi to power. Three days later, Banjo was summoned to the office of the Supreme Military Commander and was arrested while he was still waiting to see the Head of State. He was accused of planning to kill the Head of State and detained. It is however believed and this much has been suggested in other writings on that tumultous moment in Nigerian history that Banjo was detained because it was thought that he had a hand in the January 15, 1966 coup. It was a difficult moment for Nigeria as the January 15 coup had inflamed tribal passions and divided the military, and Aguiyi-Ironsi more or less did not know what to do. Banjo was detained in various prisons between January 1966 and May 1967. He had a young family of four children, and a young wife, his incarceration expectedly destabilised his family life. In A Gift of Sequins, we see how through letter writing, he tried his best to keep in touch with his wife and children, playing the dutiful husband and father by correspondence. Banjo's letters reveal much about his character and personality and his views about the circumstances of his time. He was a doting father and an affectionate husband. His letters to his wife drip with love and care. He was a well-read man of ideas, a lover of books and a frank, forthright intellect. He understood both English and French and communicated with his wife in both languages, not hiding his preference for the latter, which he considered far more flexible and romantic. Through a period of one year and half, we are taken through Banjo's life in prison and how he tried to cope with the ordeal of incarceration. His letters are shot through with anger and disappointment. A fiercely principled man, repeatedly insisting on dying rather than accepting any form of humiliation, Banjo comes across as a stubborn and completely independent-minded soldier and officer. He knew quite well that his letters were being censored by his captors and yet he never pulled the punches in criticising them. In addition to enquiries about his children and other members of the family and requests for books, or medicaments, Banjo poured out his heart to his wife. He accused Aguyiyi Ironsi and Yakubu Gowon of treachery, but he held the former who had ordered his detention in the first place in utter contempt. Ironsi was "egregiously incompetent" (p. 93) and "thoroughly dishonest" (p. 102), he says. His letters also provide informed analysis of the Nigerian situation in the 60s. Long before Ironsi was killed in a counter-coup d'etat, Banjo had written that the situation in the country at the time was not sustainable. He dismissed the Nigerian Army as an idiotic collection of corrupt officers serving tribal interests, and the "spearhead of organised anarchy" (p. 129). He detested the collapse of military values and traditions, the culture of waste that had overtaken the governance process and the greed of the emergent power elite. He wanted the Nigerian Army disbanded. At every turn, he insisted on his innocence: "...this imprisonment of mine is illegal, unjust, treacherous and morally indefensible" (p. 159) These are the letters of a man whose spirit remained unbroken in the face of adversity. He even occasionally laughed at his captors. A natural optimist, he dreamt about the possible contributions that he could still make to Nigeria as soon as he regained his freedom. He was sustained, it is now obvious, by his strong spirit and his optimism. Presciently he predicted that the crisis of the First Republic may have endless implications for Nigeria's future. On this score, he was surely right. Banjo was not released by Aguiyi-Ironsi. Gowon did not do so either. But when the Republic of Biafra was declared on May 30, 1967, Banjo was one of the prisoners released from the Federal Prisons in Ikot Ekpene by the Biafran authorities. Lt Col Ojukwu was Banjo's good friend. He still wanted to return to Nigeria in spite of the situation, and although he wrote letters to General Gowon offering his services, he was ignored. The fact that his own colleagues had conspired to render him redundant and keep him out of circulation under the excuse that they were doing it for his own safety infuriated Banjo to no end. He was a very proud man. Between March and May 1967, his wife received no letters from him. When the letter writing resumed, a note of urgency had crept in, He wanted his family to leave Nigeria and go to Sierra Leone where his wife hailed from. The last letter in A Gift of Sequins is dated July 2, 1967. Four days later, the civil war broke out. Victor Banjo became involved with Biafra and played a prominent role in the Biafran story. But there are no letters in A Gift of Sequins covering this aspect of his life. He later rose to become a Brigadier in the Biafran Army and was the Commander of the Liberation Army that captured the Mid-West. In various civil war writings, details of Banjo's role in Biafra have been offered with the most extensive being perhaps the account by General Philip Efiong in his Nigeria and Biafra: My Story (Songhai Books, 2004). What is known however is that Banjo and three others were accused of treasonable felony by the Supreme Military Council of Biafra. On September 22 1967, the public execution of the following was ordered: Brigadier Victor Banjo, Lt Col Emmanuel Ifeajuna, Major Alele and Mr Sam Ironka Agbam, a civil servant. The exact truth about Victor Banjo's role as a soldier in Nigeria and in Biafra may never fully be known, especially as he constantly found himself being the target of intrigues and suspicions about his motives. A Gift ofSequins like Adetowun Ogunsheye's Breaking the Silence brings out the strongest part of his story: his humanism. His daughter, through the prologue and the epilogue to the book, succeeds in conveying the uncertainties in the lives of young widows and young, fatherless children, and the special anguish that is experienced by the families of soldiers who find themselves on the wrong side of the competition within the ranks. This book is also a special salute to the life and memory of Victor Banjo's wife, now also deceased, who suffered so that her children could have a future. The ending is happy, with all four children now telling stories of triumph, but the ending could be happier still, if the mystery about Banjo's service in the Nigerian Army could be resolved. Finally, A Gift of Sequins reminds us of the potency and force of the art of letter writing, now a dying culture. How many people write letters these days? How many can even put down their emotions and thoughts in writing?
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