Between Safehouses in Kano and the Spy who loved Biafra
By Ahmed Yahaya-Joe
This piece is in a commemoration of Sir Frederick McCarthy Forsyth, Commander of the British Empire (CBE) as he turns 85 on August 25, 2023.
The title of what is widely considered and arguably the most comprehensive and unbiased account containing “declassified hitherto hidden dispatches from British diplomats and intelligence officers” on the horrific events of January 15, 1966 by Damola Awoyokun is actually very instructive, British Secret Files on Nigeria’s First Bloody Coup, Path to Biafra (2016)
While Alastair Trevor Clark (1923-2005), a towering Scotsman at 6’ 6” and erstwhile officer of the Nigerian Regiment in 1943 who later become a colonial administrative official in 1948 onwards in retrospect claims in his must-read, “British intelligence in Lagos knew no more than Nigeria’s local sources, and suffered from the same distortions by biased intermediaries,” there is ample evidence to show that the British actually knew an awful about an impending military coup in enough time ahead to perhaps even nip it in the bud.
While those details are beyond the scope here what is not is the question, “How could the Nigerian Army be patriotic?” as asked by former Major Ademola Ademoyega who goes on in his 1981 memoirs entitled Why we Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup, “Actually, the British themselves saw the Nigerian Army as purely mercenary. From the colonial point of view, this was true. The British looked upon the Nigerian soldiers under their command as soldiers of fortune, who had no personal stake in the continuity of the British Empire.”
This begs another fundamental question of whether or not the slew of internal unintended consequences that culminated into Nigerian Civil War were actually preventable?
As Nigerians, we collectively have poor political memory. Have we effectively abandoned the sustained quest for “True federalism” and “Restructuring” for a transient “Emi lokan”? Or will that clamor resurrect when power shifts again in future?
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana (1905)
It is often said, “An Englishman’s home is his castle,” perhaps why with any espionage agent tradecraft is operating under cover from a safe house, “a dwelling place or building whose unassuming appearance makes it an inconspicuous location where one can hide out, take shelter, or conduct clandestine activities.”
With Hanns Vischer CBE (1876-1945) the Swiss-born naturalized Briton it was no different during the First World War years, 1914-1917 as chronicled in Nigel West’s Historical Dictionary of World War I Intelligence (2014)
Based in Kano from 1907 to 1919 where Gidan Dan Hausa, now a national monument was his official residence. The building had been in existence for about a hundred years before Kano was even conquered by the British in January of 1903.
It had previously served as the base of the overseer of the royal farming plantation outside the ancient city walls known as Rumada. Vischer rebuilt it from scratch.
Kano was crucial to the British because it was (and still is) an important cross road in monitoring Francophone territories and the German colony of Kamerun now the Francophone Cameroon as the First World War commenced on July 28, 1914.
By November 14, 1914 in Istanbul the Ottoman Empire through Sultan Mehmud V exhorted Muslims who were subjects of Britain, Russia, and France to rise up against their colonial overlords in support of the Ottoman war effort in alliance with Germany. Professor Emeritus Akinjide Osuntokun in page 149 of his 1979 book, Nigeria in the First World War elaborates;
“Nigeria had the largest number of Muslim subjects in a British African territory. Arabic letters calling for jihad in the Sultan-Caliph’s name were found in mosques in northern Nigeria, although it is more likely that these came from northern Africa rather than directly from Istanbul.”
Yet, Lord Lugard in a letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies dated 31 December 1914, titled, The War: Muslim Feeling; Expressions of Loyalty wrote, “Letters of loyalty had come in from all the northern Nigerian Muslim emirates as well as the small Muslim communities in southern Nigeria, and from diaspora communities such as Tripolitanians living in Lagos…”
What happened to turn around the dynamic for the British?
With good reason referred to as “Dan Hausa” due to that cognoscenti’s mastery of the Hausa language which he first learnt in Tripoli before crossing the Sahara to Kukawa, he was also prolific in Arabic, Fulfulde and Kanuri in addition to Greek, French and German.
This invariably made him an important agent of immense influence in many an emirate, “One had only to watch him in his daily avocations in those early days to realize how completely at home he was with every class of society—whether he was engaged in grave deliberations with emirs, viziers and other high personages of the ruling hierarchy, or whether he was chaffing the hucksters at the market stalls as he rode through Kano city……
No less revealing was it to see him in his own home pick up a native drum and, squatting on the floor, croon local Hausa songs to his own accompaniment. So inimitably did he do it that, if he had been hidden behind a screen, one would have said that an African musician had been engaged to entertain his guests.”
The spymaster first came to Nigeria in 1901 was based in Lokoja before he was reassigned to Maiduguri in 1903. By 1906, he crossed the Sahara Desert. He recounted his journey in a 1911 book entitled; “Across the Sahara from Tripoli to Borno”, another book he wrote is; “Rules for Hausa Spelling” printed in 1912.
Vischer’s close friendship with the traditional institutions from Maiduguri to Sokoto including his in-depth knowledge of the languages, customs and culture of all the peoples in-between came in handy in convincing the North’s prominent monarchs to put aside Sultan Mehmud V’s fatwa.
Concurrently, the Vischer residence served as a school for sons of emirs from all over the North. With his wife who joined him in 1912, the couple molded the young aristocrats teaching them how to read and write in English and Ajami (Arabic in Roman script); the school started with 30 pupils in 1909. Their hostel was within the Nasarawa palace of Kano emirate nearby.
Enrollment increased to over 200 princes by 1913 from the 11 provinces of the Northern Protectorate that eventually became the first members of the House of Chiefs and Assembly both in Kaduna.
Vischer’s school relocated becoming Katsina College in 1921, which is now Barewa College in Zaria. It produced the first Western educated counter-elites in the North that came to be known as “Yan Koleji” – a veritable proving ground described by the 14th Fulani Emir of Kano, Khalifa Muhammadu Sanusi II, “The King’s College of the North.”
Vischer and his wife had two children at Gidan Dan Hausa. Their photographs including that of their house maid still adorn the main living room of the historic house to date.
Instrumental to Pax Britannica the likes of Sir Hanns are described as “capax imperii” – capable of ruling an empire by understanding and study of languages.
At Gidan Dan Hausa, Vischer reorganized traditional Hausa building materials of “Tubali” and “Azara” by creatively using “Chafe” for plaster and “Makuba” for relieve motifs retaining “Zankwaye” (the horns at the top) and “Dakali” (the horizontal platform at the base)
Who used Vischer used local labor and skill sourced within the ancient city of Kano from the famous Unguwan Gini of generational builders and craftsmen to modify his safehouse to his taste and specifications.
He was conferred with CBE by George V, King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Emperor of India for distinguished services to the victorious allied forces at the end of the World War alongside Sultan Muhammadu Maiturare of Sokoto and Shehu of Borno, Abu Bakr Garbai b. Ibrahim Al Kanemi who had specifically written to Lugard on November 18, 1914 just 4 days after Sultan Mehmud V’s proclamation;
“The Resident (Captain Upton Fitz Herbert Ruxton) told us that the amir of Istanbul took arms against the Resident’s Kabir, amir of England, when the (in July) Germans told him. We have mercy on ourselves to hear this news and we ask you to tell him (King George V of England) that our hearts are subordinated to him and our delight is for the amir of the English,” the future Sir Abu Bakr who wrote by the hand of Wazir, al-imam Ibn Hafsa on the First Day of 1333 AH concluded, “I have assisted the Resident with all that is required, horses, donkeys, bullocks, carriers and corn, and everything that he has asked for.”
By the 1940s the southern entrepôt of the caravan driven Trans Saharan trade for millennia had had a paradigm shift with modern trade winds blowing to and from the Lagos port by rail that reached Kano in 1911. With the Second World War already started in 1939 the Vichy France rump state posed a clear and present danger to the Britain’s colonial possession south of Colonie du Niger as an insider those days explains;
“The collapse of France had left Nigeria with a complete vacuum on her northern and northwestern borders. No such development had ever been contemplated. Not only had we no knowledge of what was going on in the neighboring French territories now in the hands of anti-British Vichy administrators, we had no means of finding out.”
“The plan was that a politico-military organization should be set up, based in Kano, which would take care of the northern and northwestern borders of Nigeria from Chad to athwart the Niger and of the territories that lay beyond. The Dahomey (now Benin Repulic) border, from south of the Niger to the sea, and the Spanish island of Fernando Po (now Equatorial Guinea) would be the responsibility of Area Headquarters at Lagos…..”
“Could the Emir of Kano be asked if he would let us have the Gidan Shettima, a twin-storied house of many chambers which stood, protected by a high mud wall, in the very center of the city?
This building had been used as a town rest house by the Resident when last, I had served in Kano and would be admirably suited for our purpose.”
“Could, also, the Chief Commissioner be asked if he would secure for me the services of three old friends who had worked with me in earlier days, chief among them, Hassan, who was still in Argungu as Head Messenger. All were skilled gleaners of news, and as ex-warrant officers of long and unblemished service, they would be completely trustworthy. Both requests were granted, and some days later we arrived in Kano with three crates of stationery and office equipment, a French travel book about the Colonie du Niger, a Michelin Guide of the Sahara, and Rodd’s own classic, The Veiled People of the Sahara.”
“The Gidan Shettima, originally the residence of the Bornu envoy at the Kano court at the time when Kano was a Bornu tributary, was to prove as adaptable to our purpose as I had hoped.”
“Masked from inquisitive eyes by a fifteen-foot wall, its one and only gateway opened directly into a vaulted chamber where guards could be permanently on duty. Beyond, in the center of a shady courtyard, stood the main building, which we converted for ourselves to living quarters and offices. Adjoining the entrance was a long rectangular room which Rodd made his own during the time he was in Kano. Finally, at the rear, there were kitchens, servants’ quarters, and stables.”
While the foregoing reminiscence of British colonial espionage are excerpts culled from Bryan Harwood Smith’s epic Recollections of British Administration in the Cameroons and Northern Nigeria, 1921-1957: But Always As Friends (1969), today, Gidan Shettima is an upgraded modern edifice housing the Kano Emirate Council secretariat.
Its architectural parameters are reminiscent of that at Villa Savoye (pronounced savwa) designed by Le Corbusier in 1926 at Poissy in the outskirts of Paris that became the foundation of modern architecture which came to be known as International Style;
Pilotis (reinforced concrete columns that support a building above ground to allow a free space under) and large horizontal windows among others.
So, between the erstwhile British safehouses in Kano what is the challenge for present-day Nigeria particularly against the background of recent events in neighboring Niger Republic?
According to the British Prime Minister, 1855-1858 and 1859-1865, Henry John Temple later known as Lord Palmerston, “We have no eternal allies, we have not perpetual enemies.”
Simply put, Brits neither have permanent friends nor enemies meaning they have only permanent interests which in turn begs another pertinent question for us as Nigerians, “What are our shared values? What are the things that bring us together apart from the Super Eagles?”
The sepia image of a crouching Biafra soldier with a bolt action rifle looking into the camera perhaps in forlorn hope for a Federal target on a Penguin book cover of “The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Revolution” (1969 edition) by Frederick Forsyth off my late father’s modest bookshelf still subconsciously gazes at me from a bygone halcyon period as back as my primary school days.
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While that haunting image is still deeply etched in my memory, in the ensuing years I have gazed back at quite a number pages of different plots in various remarkable “faction” titles from the stables of that accomplished writer from “The Day of the Jackal” (1971) to “The Fist of God” (1994) back to “The Negotiator” (1989) to “The Kill List” (2013) with the classic “The Odessa File” (1972) not excluding “The Afghan” (2006) and in the not too distant past his 2015 memoirs of 60 chapters some as short as just 3 pages aptly entitled, “The Outsider: My Life In Intrigue” that still surprisingly adorns my collection well away from the grasp those notorious friends, ever borrowing but never returning books, a charge yours truly is also tangentially guilty of.
Annoyingly, one of such is my personal copy of Professor Samson Chukwuma Ukpabi’s, The Origins of the Nigerian Army: A History of the West African Frontier Force, 1897-1914 printed in 1987.
Within 10 years after the Second World War three intercommunal disputes took place. First, was at the Naraguta Potato market in Jos between the supporters of Alhaji Inusa Maidankali and Mr. Joseph Onyeama over the leadership control of the said market concerning the General Strike called over the national minimum wage.
Second, was in 1949 at Gusau (the present-day Zamfara capital and railway terminus) between migrants from the Western and Eastern Regions respectively.
Third, was in 1953 at Kano concerning the call for national independence slated for 1956 of which Sir Bryan reacted, “Militant nationalism requires an enemy, and we the British were not the enemy. The enemy lay beyond the (River) Niger in the persons of the political leaders, who desired political independence for Nigeria before the North was ready.”
Sir Bryan’s classic template for Nigeria’s “We versus Them” is still reverberating across our nation even nearly 63 years after national independence.
Is Nigeria worth the sacrifice?
One is compelled to pay due compliments to Chief S.C. Ukpabi, a onetime traditional leader of Okpanku in Aninri LG of Enugu State who was already a professor of Military History at the University of Nigeria by the time the Nigerian Civil War broke out in 1967.
Assuming the rank of Colonel he was appointed commanding officer of 53rd Brigade of the Biafra Army in the Nsukka sector. By April 1984 nearly a decade and a half after those hostilities over 50,000 young and eager Nigerian youth sat for Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) entrance examinations of which 950 were shortlisted to face the Armed Forces Selection Board in Kaduna.
Only 205 made it to become the first set degree-earning cadet officers under Professor Ukpabi’s watch since appointed Academic Provost, a position he held for 7 years to 1992.
The present corps of Defence and Service chiefs indeed the top echelon of the brass under them are his esteemed products.
The High chief and erudite scholar from from Aninri had Kaduna as his Magnum Opus.
According to Mr. Forsyth who is fluent in French, German, Russian and Spanish in his 2015 memoirs insists, “The trouble with Nigeria was that historically it had never been one country, but two.”
The challenge for Nigerians is how to dispel that notion.
What external reason really triggered the Nigerian Civil War?
Although, Prof. AHM Kirk-Greene in his must read seminal, The Genesis of the Nigerian Civil War and the Theory of Fear (1975) admonishes, “One must be careful to distinguish between the cause of the long-term tensions and that of the final crack in the edifice; between the origin and the flashpoint; between the months of crisis and the moment of conflict,” he admits, “the ultimate casus belli was oil.”
Against that background including well documented French mischief, Prof. Chibuike Uche adds in, Oil, British Interests and the Nigerian Civil War (2008);
“Nigerian crude oil export to the United Kingdom, at the onset of the war, was worth only £47 million, representing 10.3 per cent of the volume of UK’s crude oil imports, it had great potential and was increasingly becoming vital to the UK economy.
This was because the Six Day War, which resulted in the blockade of the Suez Canal, extensively disrupted the supply of Middle East oil to Europe. With the inaccessibility of the Suez Canal route, oil tankers from the Middle East were forced to travel a longer route by going around the Cape.
For the British government therefore, the continued production of Nigerian oil was important in order to mitigate the precarious oil supply position in the United Kingdom at the time. Supporting Nigeria was considered its safest bet.
The importance of Nigerian oil was perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that while it took only 20 days for a round trip from Britain to Nigeria, a round trip from Britain to the Persian Gulf took 68 days…..”
Those currently dancing to the drumbeats of the ECOWAS standby force should therefore pause and carefully understudy the overall dynamics.
Unfortunately, our predecessors at home on both sides of the divide during the mid-1960s never really understood the international chessboard moves that were simultaneously playing out abroad.
The ceremonial parade was not in Enugu because it had fallen within weeks of the Nigerian Civil War the previous year.
Umuahia, the new capital had also been by the time the parade took place under constant attack through artillery barrage and air strafing from MiGs flown by Egyptian pilots to the extent that if Lagos had approved the original plan for Operation OAU (Owerri, Aba, Umuahia) the anniversary would not have even taken place.
Therefore, due compliments to Generals Gowon and Hassan Usman Katsina (1933-1995) Commander in Chief and Army chief respectively for not approving the initial OAU battle plan due to its projected heavy toll on hapless civilians and Biafra’s soldiers alike.
The moral here is in the title of John de St. Jorre’s epic book, The Brothers’ War: Biafra and Nigeria (1972)
Mr. Forsyth who earned his fighter-pilot Royal Air Force wings at only 19 offered his full confession of being a British spy despite his avowed allegiance to Biafra after 46 years.
This was long after the torrent of his best seller novels that have sold a reported of total 70 million copies translated into 30 different languages – the difference being his first book was a true-story published in 1969 about seven or so months before the armistice of January 15, 1970.
That maiden book has many factual errors. Perhaps why it had to be represented to the public with additional 10 chapters under the title of, The Making of an African Legend: The Biafra Story. Unfortunately, some of those errors were repeated in the 1977 reprint while new ones were added.
For instance, the issue of Federal soldiers lost at Abagana on March 31, 1968 after an audacious ambush using the famed “ogbunigwe” improvised explosive device which Mr. Forsyth twice put as 6,000 (in 1969 and 1977) but in his 2015 memoirs he escalated the figure to 8,000.
Meanwhile, Prof. Chinua Achebe in his 2012 book, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra puts it on the same dramatic attack, “All told the Nigerians suffered about five hundred casualties. There was minimal loss of life on the Biafran side.”
Another avoidable (perhaps even deliberate error) is how Sir Frederick described General Gowon as being from “the Sho-sho tribe of Bauchi” as if that is not enough in his memoirs, Mr. Forsyth went to further claim the former Head of State is “Tiv”.
These are just a few examples including the false claim that southerners across northern Nigeria, “live in closed ghettos.”
There were other mischaracterizations too numerous to repeat here. Perhaps they were even deliberate to create a sceptre of negative profiling.
Ta-Nehisi Coates once rhetorically asked, “Why do so few Blacks study the American Civil War?”
“Preposterous notions abound.” He answered himself.
Not the least that of Flora Louise Shaw, Lady Lugard, Dame Commander of the British Empire (1852-1929) who is largely claimed to have coined the name “Nigeria” in the January 8, 1897 edition of The Times newspaper when there is already mention of that coinage in a verifiable publication dated 1862 entitled, Life on the Niger – Journal of a Trader by William Cole.
The Nigerian Army declared Mr. Forsyth wanted, dead or alive with a bounty of 5,000 pounds on his head as reported by The Nigerian Observer newspaper edition of Thursday, September 26, 1968.
In his memoirs, Sir Frederick, that prolific master of spin cleverly obscures his real involvement with the British against Biafra by definition, “The true spy is almost certainly a foreigner employed deep inside the clandestine fabric of his own country who is prepared to abstract his country’s covert information and hand it over to his real employers.”
By implication, he however tangentially admits being some sort of operative for the international arch enemies of the nascent breakaway republic in the title of the chapter detailing his entanglement, “Of Mice and Moles” but still issues a very important caveat to absolve himself, “I did what I did, not in order to do down the Biafrans – far from it.”
A master of impeccable punchlines, his boundless imagination unleashed in anecdotal prose and wry humor, Sir Frederick describes in his memoirs, a “mole” as actually, “a long-term spy who is recruited before having access to secret intelligence, subsequently managing to get into the target organization,” meanwhile a, “double spy” is, “an agent who pretends to act as a spy for one country or organization while in fact acting on behalf of an enemy.”
Mr. Forsyth could have been either. He was certainly neither. He vehemently claims his clandestine work for the British intelligence in Biafra was geared toward creating a conducive environment to, “urge a ceasefire, a peace conference and a political solution.”
How?
In his 1980 book, The Nigerian Revolution and The Biafra War, the Nigerian Army Colonel (but Biafra Army Major General and General Officer Commanding) Alexander Madiebo extensively recounted his deep suspicions on the Briton’s actual mission in Biafra, “I didn’t know if he was a spy for someone or a genuine sympathizer.”
Umuahia eventually fell on Christmas Eve, 1969 after Biafra’s leader fled whom Mr. Forsyth was so close to.
The pals were billed to flee Biafra together on-board Ivorien President Houphouet-Boigny’s personal jet from the Uli airstrip the night of December 23, 1969 but as the author explained, it was “a very crowded flight with no room for hitchhikers.”
The fleeing Head of State’s friend instead hitchhiked on another plane under circumstances he elaborated upon in his 1974 novel, The Dogs of War.
Madiebo, General Gowon’s Sandhurst course mate was however on the manifest of Boigny’s jet.
Did the Nigerian Army’s first commander of Artillery share his suspicions with Biafra’s leader?
I have my doubts because Colonel Madiebo was made Army chief after his predecessor the veteran Brigadier Hilary Mbilitem Njoku was summarily sacked after looking at his Commander in Chief eyeball to eyeball to tell him some home truths on why truce was a better option with Nigeria than prolonged conflict.
Njoku’s 1987 book, Tragedy without Heroes: The Nigeria-Biafra War should be a must-read for every student of our national history.
In conclusion, what is the abiding challenge for us as a nation in Sir Frederick’s 2015 claim that, “The trouble with Nigeria was that historically, it had never been one country, but two.”?
It is in knowing the difference between a country and a nation, “A country is a territory from the Latin, “Contra terra” – a land that lies ahead of you. A nation is an association peoples who identify their shared core values.”
Sir Hanns, Sir Bryan and Sir Frederick, no doubt very conflicted men with a lot of flaws between them albeit had a common denominator in Nigeria – a greater good bigger than themselves for the United Kingdom.
Their various services to the British crown at different epochs was unequivocally in abeyance to Lord Palmerston’s dictum of, “no eternal allies, no perpetual enemies.”
The primary loyalty of those Britons was sacrosanct beyond their prejudices, biases and other allegiances.
That is the main challenge for Nigerians including this writer – our collective inability to be firmly loyal to core national values beyond our different ethnicities and faiths.
The foregoing 3-part series is a commemoration of Sir Frederick McCarthy Forsyth, Commander of the British Empire (CBE) as he turns 85 on August 25, 2023.
What challenges are there for us in present-day Nigeria arising?
An opportunity for some national soul searching mostly containing culled excerpts, modified and edited for brevity from an ongoing book project;
British Spies, Soldiers & Scholars in Nigeria, 1824-1984 by Ahmed Yahaya-Joe
Kidnapped School Children
Yauri FGC Students, Kebbi (Freed)Baptist School Students, Kaduna (Freed)
Tegina Islamiya Pupils, Niger (Freed)
Report By: PRNigeria.com