Biafra and the British Establishment: Tools You Can't Trust

If you read Frederick Forsyth’s autobiography 'The Outsider' (2015), you’ll come away with a long list of British institutions to mistrust and deplore.

His experience in Africa illustrates why. In 1967, as the world was recovering from the surprise victory of Israel over Egypt in the Six-Day War, the BBC sent Forsyth to cover a civil war in Nigeria, whose Eastern Region, known as Biafra, had decided to secede.

Forsyth knew nothing on the subject, but was briefed by a man from the BBC’s World Service, based in Bush House, London. According to this expert, the Ibo (or Igbo) tribe of Biafra were chronic troublemakers who had been misled by their regional military governor, Colonel Ujukwu, into rebelling against ‘the very fine republic’ of Nigeria. The rebel army were a rabble and would soon be defeated by the British-trained Nigerian army. Forsyth was not to file a report but simply find the Deputy High Commissioner and stick with him as the Nigerian army swept down into Biafra, then be taken back by boat to neighbouring Cameroon, from where he could file an ‘upsummer’ report on the inevitably short revolt.

When Forsyth repeated this briefing to the Deputy High Commissioner based in the eastern regional capital Enugu, the latter put his head in his hands. It turned out that the official line had come from the High Commissioner (Ambassador) in Lagos, who had sold this to the Commonwealth Relations Office and they in turn to Bush House and the BBC’s foreign news department. ‘The London briefing was wrong on every point,’ says FF, and confirmed ‘the old adage for foreign correspondents. Never mind what the embassy says: go and ask the old sweats who have been there for years.’

The problems had started in the 1950s with the British decision that Nigeria, previously ruled by the British Empire as two countries, should be united and become a democracy.  Northern Nigeria, says FF, was Islamic, feudal and with no middle class, shunning education and technology. The South had largely been converted to Christianity and the Ibos of the eastern part were clever and entrepreneurial, used by the British to run the technical and office support in the North.

The emirs and sultans of the North resisted democracy until it was pointed out that as their people were numerically superior they would dominate the federation, which came into being on 1 October 1960. Six years later a group of Ibo officers who had been trained in England led a coup against what they saw as Nigeria’s sham democracy and corruption. The plotters were soon overthrown and a military governor appointed to each of the new country’s four regions. The North then retaliated against the Ibos there, first by killing hundreds of Ibo soldiers in the region’s  barracks, then by mob violence against Ibo ghettoes that left thousands dead (FF’s London briefing had called it ‘a storm in a teacup’).  The survivors fled south.

Over the next ten months relations between the Ibos of the east and the Lagos government deteriorated. ‘In London the mandarins of the Commonwealth Office and later the Foreign Office quickly showed a passionate favouritism towards the federal regime, stoked by the resident High Commissioner,’ says FF. Biafra seceded on 30 May 1967.

Reporting from Lagos in western Nigeria, the BBC’s Angus McDiarmid repeated propaganda from Nigeria’s Ministry of Information, alleging anti-Ojukwu riots among the Ibo and successful advances by Nigerian military forces. The reports were false but the BBC was relaying them sloppily: ‘The broadcasts out of Lagos that first month had attribution, if at all, in the fourth or even fifth paragraph. It sounded like the BBC itself talking.’

Three weeks after the conflict started, FF was asked to provide a ‘matcher’ report from Biafra, confirming the statements from Lagos. Instead, he sent a telex saying that ‘my briefing had been garbage and the reports out of Lagos were tripe.’ FF had thereby killed his BBC career: ‘I did not realize that when broadcasting for the state, a foreign correspondent must never report what London does not want to hear.’ FF was recalled to London and reassigned to the BBC’s home news department, whose head explained to him his error in contradicting the High Commission in Lagos, HMG’s Commonwealth Office, the BBC World Service and the recently-appointed foreign news editor at the BBC, Arthur Hutchinson.

The official line was that the war would be short, but instead of collapsing the Biafran army crossed the river Niger and almost got to Lagos before the expedition was subverted by a traitorous officer. By February 1968 the Biafrans had secured their finances, were increasing their own army and had set up an agency for media communications, inviting international press to come and see.

The BBC boycotted the visit. Hutchinson (who had never wanted Forsyth in his department in the first place, having lined up his own protégé) forbade him to go, saying, ‘You have to understand, we are not covering this war.’

FF secretly used leave time and his own savings to fly back out to Africa. Mechanical failure on his return flight meant that he could not return on time and found his flat had been broken into by two people from the BBC claiming to be ‘worried’ about him. He wrote a resignation letter to his new boss saying that the Nigerian war ‘was going to be a major story with considerable length and many casualties.’ He decided to go out to Biafra again, as a freelance reporter.

As the conflict stretched out to ten months, children in rural Biafra began to starve to death. There was plenty of starch from cassava and yams, but where an adult needs one gramme of protein a day a growing child needs five. The government blockade of food imports had forced the Biafrans to eat their pigs and chickens, and their main protein source, dried cod from Norway, was shut off. FF agreed to provide on-the-ground information for MI6. Meanwhile the head and deputy at the Commonwealth Relations Office had both resigned over the government’s policy.

The CRO had then merged with the Foreign Office to form the new FCO, whose head was in thrall to his civil servants, who maintained the policy recommended by the Ambassador to Nigeria. Despite the humanitarian argument for a ceasefire the British Government resisted, for reasons FF calls vanity and cowardice: HMG would have had to admit they had been wrong. Instead, the strategy of supporting the Nigerian federal government continued, with increased British assistance to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible, despite marches and protests:

‘There were times when Harold Wilson appeared almost under siege and twice, I learned later, the “reconsider” policy was almost adopted.  Had the opposition Conservative Party lent its weight, the change of policy might have gone through and the dying of the children ended, but Edward Heath, the Tory leader, shared with the FCO his European Union obsession and he was their man.’

Part of Britain’s help to Nigeria was in the form of secret arms shipments to supply the Nigerian Army that had introduced conscription to bring up numbers.

‘Behind a mendacious screen of “neutrality”, the Wilson government poured in the equipment, without which the war could not have proceeded […] Another early lie was that no weapons at all were being shipped from Britain to fuel the war. The key word was “from”, not “by”. In fact, the supplies were coming from British stocks at the immense NATO weapons park outside Brussels, and thus technically from Belgium. They were then replaced by shipments from Britain to Belgium.’

The war dragged on. In Biafra, the clergy recognized the children’s protein-deficiency illness – kwashiorkor – and began to appeal for funds and medications. In June, the Daily Express and Daily Sketch each sent a reporter and photographer; Forsyth escorted the former. The Express reporter stayed at his base, working through the supplies of whisky he had brought with him, so Forsyth took the cameraman to the battlefronts and composed the staff writer’s despatches for him (the Express reporter later ‘filed the lot for the international Reporter of the year award – and won.’)

Then the photographers found starving children at a local mission and the pictures shocked Britain and eventually Europe and the USA, prompting a large-scale church-organised relief operation that (illegally) flew in supplies through Nigerian airspace.

Even then the British authorities did their best to suppress the truth. One ‘ex-public-school product’ at the FCO’s media relations office claimed a small group of suffering children had been taken to one place after another to mislead everyone as to the scale of the disaster.

‘On another occasion the war hero Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC was asked to go to visit, be shown around Nigeria only, and return to peddle the official line. He duly went to Nigeria but then refused not to go to Biafra. What he saw on the second visit so shocked him that he came back and denounced the official policy. He was immediately smeared as a gullible fool.’

The final toll of dead children in Biafra numbered around a million, and would have been perhaps twice that without the relief flights. Forsyth compares the situation to the Holocaust, in that it was not only the immediate doers that carried the blame, but also the bureaucratic enablers without whom such crimes could not have been carried out.

‘That is why I believe that this coterie of vain mandarins and cowardly politicians stained the honour of my country for ever and I will never forgive them.’

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See also Forsyth's article in The Guardian on 21 January 2020, 'Buried for 50 years: Britain’s shameful role in the Biafran war':

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/21/buried-50-years-britain-shamesful-role-biafran-war-frederick-forsyth