THE GOWON LIE: How The North Was Fooled And How His Own Memoir Convicts Him

 By Khaleed Yazeed

I have completed reading General Yakubu Gowon's 881-page memoir, My Life of Duty And Allegiance. I read every page, from the opening reflections on his childhood in Daura and Wusasa to the closing chapters on his exile, his prayers, and his long twilight as an elder statesman. 

*Gowon

I read it slowly, the way a man reads a document he knows will settle something inside him, and I read it with a question burning in my chest: how was the North led into a war that consumed more than a million lives, and how was that story sold to us? 

From my own understanding of those 881 pages, one conclusion stands above every other. Gowon is judging himself. He has convicted himself. He has written the indictment in his own hand, signed it with his own name, and published it for the world to see. A prosecutor becomes unnecessary here. A truth commission becomes redundant. Historians need not comb through archives in London and Lagos, because the general has laid the evidence on the table himself, chapter by chapter, page by page, and invited us to examine it.

Remembering Christopher Okigbo Fifty Years On

By Kola Omotoso

Mbari Club was a natural draw for an aspiring writer. Situated a mere street walk from Mokola Roundabout, past the ancient Palm Chemist and you were there in the midst of Chinua Achebe, Ulli Beier, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, Duro Ladipo and Christopher Okigbo. Lindsay Barrett had arrived from Kingston Jamaica via London perhaps. Poetry published in their journal Black Orpheus was available at the counter bookstall. There was a bar somewhere at the back and a small performance and rehearsal stage, again somewhere in the two-storey building.

*Christopher Okigbo and Chinua Achebe

It was my second year as an undergraduate at the University of Ibadan. Student Union activities had been part of the life since my closest friend Ladipo was running for PRO of the student union government. Nigerian electoral politics was boiling over. The Action Group had imploded and the federal government of Ahmadu Bello in collusion with SLA Akintola had put Obafemi Awolowo out of action away in prison in Calabar for treasonable felony. Of course, nobody in Western Region believed any of this fable about treasonable felony. Awolowo as far as the region was concerned was still very much in action.

The federal elections of 1964 came and went. It was heavily rigged in the Western Region ensuring victory for the Akintola party now in alliance with Ahmadu Bello’s Northern People’s Party (jamiatu mutenen arewa).