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Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa

Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa’s The Port Harcourt Volunteer; A review

A review by Prof. Onwuchekwa Jemie

Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa
Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa

The Port Harcourt Volunteer is the harrowing story of the Nigerian Civil War, July 1967- January 1970, two and half years of blood and death, told by a teenage child-soldier on the Biafran side.
When we read of child-soldiers, or see pictures of them hauling machine guns taller and heavier than their skinny little bodies, we usually think of Sierra Leone or Liberia or Sudan or some other deadly conflict in some faraway place. Rarely do we remember that we’ve actually seen such horrors right here in Nigeria!
Ohuabunwa was such a teenage child-soldier. That he survived all the gunfire, bomb explosions and starvation, which consumed some two million lives, and has not only lived to tell his story but, after a magnificently full and successful life, is today celebrating his 65th Birthday—that is the greatest thriller of them all!!
Mazi, we wish you a very Happy Birthday! May you celebrate many more!
Ohuabunwa calls The Port Harcourt Volunteer “a thriller”—and what a thriller it is! It is one of those books that are hard to put down. The book is packed with action and excitement. It opens with a chapter with the ominous title “The Day I Tasted Death.” The scene is Okrika Grammar School in present-day Rivers State. It is July 1967. The war has begun. The air is heavy with expectancy. At breakfast the Principal announces that the school is to close to enable the teachers join the army. The students are sent on indefinite holiday. Freed from strict discipline, some of the boys go on a drinking binge. Young Sam ends up in a drunken stupor lasting 18 hours. But this is only “the beginning of sorrows”; much worse is to come: he and his friends will taste death in bitter dregs in virtually every chapter of the book.
As the weeks of joyful freedom turn to boredom, our 16-year old hero attempts to enlist in the Biafran Navy at Abonnema Wharf in Port Harcourt but is turned down on account of age. But he is determined to serve. He joins a team of volunteers providing support services and theatrical and musical entertainment to Biafran forces defending Enugu. These volunteers gradually slip into the status of auxiliary “soldiers without number”; and as the war grows hotter they are permitted to enlist as regulars. Our hero runs home, obtains the permission and blessings of his parents (who meanwhile had moved from Port Harcourt when that city fell to the Nigerian forces), and enlists as a serving soldier in the School of Infantry at the Bishop Shanaham College in Orlu.
The cadets were all undergraduates and school certificate holders, plus some gifted and capable younger boys like our hero. Four weeks of rigorous basic training, with strict discipline and regimentation, was followed by eight more weeks of advanced training. Many could not take the rigour of basic training, and either dropped out or were weeded out.
A few weeks after completion of basic training, our hero is appointed the Student Company Commander. He is chosen because he is so outstanding; but then, we are hardly surprised to learn that he also inflated his age. Now he will discover how tough it can be to get your peers, not to speak of boys older than yourself, to obey your orders!
Two weeks to graduation from advanced training, the cadets are woken up at 2 am. 21 of them, including our hero, are selected, appointed Second Lieutenants, and sent to the Uzuakoli sector where a fierce battle is raging to prevent Nigerian forces from advancing to Umuahia, the interim Biafran capital. First they drive to Umuahia where they are duly commissioned by the Commander-in-Chief, General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu; then on to Uzuakoli. By 8 am the 21 new Officers are on the battlefield! Now the real action begins!
At this point Ohuabunwa pauses from his narrative to share with his readers the following valuable insight on the military ethos:
“[After the Commandant of the School of Infantry had finished speaking to the new Officers] We saluted him and marched out. Many of us had questions on our minds but you could not ask questions on occasions like this. In fact, it is not normal to ask questions in the military. What you do is to obey orders issued by a superior officer reflexively. There was no allowance for questions, but for clarification, yes, sometimes. But that is at the discretion of the superior officer. If he says, “Do you understand?” it is not necessarily a question, rather a request for affirmation and there is only one answer, “Yes, Sir!” or “Yesop!” No allowance for “No, Sir!” whether you understand or not. But if the officer asks, “Any questions?” the expected response is, “No, Sir!” If you answer “Yes, Sir!” you will be looked at with suspicion and that can attract detention or other forms of punishment. If you do that a second time, you will be identified as a troublemaker. Now the officer, depending on his disposition and the calibre of officers he is directing, may say “let me repeat” or “let me clarify” in which case he asks the question and answers it himself. That is often the only opportunity you may have, to get a clarification or get better understanding.
That is not to say that officers do not ask or tolerate questions. At planning meetings and at strategy review meetings, questions can be asked and answered but not on parade grounds or when operational instructions are being issued, just as the commandant was issuing to us that fateful morning.”
Now follows a graphic account of battles, battles, and more battles. The Battle for Uzuakoli, the Battle for Umuahia, the Battle for Aba, the Battle for Ngwa High School. At Umuahia we meet the commanding Officer, the indomitable Col. Hannibal Joseph Achuzia, a diminutive soldier whose image was larger than life and fearsome. From him we learn about The Enemy Behind. Says the author:
“Then he shocked us by informing us that we had to confront two sets of enemies–– one in the front lines and the other behind the lines. He went further to explain that the enemy in front was easier to deal with than the one behind, and therefore encouraged us to squarely face the enemy in the front.”
But who was this Enemy Behind? Was it saboteurs, land mines, hunger or kwashiorkor? No, it was Col Achuzia himself! His orders were “forward ever, backward never.” If you dare turn and run, you’re a dead man. Miserable coward!
Well, what happened next? Hear the author:
“We went into action that same morning and by midday, I had lost up to a third of my troops to injuries, with some dead. The battle was fierce and the opposing troops were really in an offensive mood. Two of my plantoon commanders were soon knocked out of action, one dead and one seriously injured. The third got so frightened that he shot himself on the palm of his hand with his barriter rifle, so that he could leave the front line. I was so incensed because I caught him in the act. I cocked my rifle so that I could finish him, but he fell down on the ground and began to beg me. I told him that since he wanted to be wounded, I was going to inflict such a serious wound on him that he would remember for life if he did not die from the wound. I finally restrained myself and let him leave the front line with his self-inflicted bullet wound.”
This encounter notwithstanding, our hero, finding his troops greatly depleted in only one day of battle, decided on a “tactical withdrawal” to a safe spot while he sent for reinforcements. Instead of reinforcements the Second-in-Command came, marched them all back to the front, and promised to shoot anyone who dared run away.
“From that day, [says the author], I decided that I would never expose myself to the ridicule of being insulted in the presence of my troops.”
The Aba Sector was remarkable in that the war had reached a stalemate there, and the troops on both sides had entered into an unwritten truce, peacefully trading goods (“ahia attack”) and socializing with one another. Now, Commander Ohuabunwa was deployed to Aba—and everything changed. In particular, he led the spectacular liberation of Ngwa High School, located at a critical junction of the Aba-Owerri road, which Nigerian troops had occupied for months. The battles were epical in scope, with takings and re-takings of the position, back and forth until the Biafrans managed to hold on to it. Ohuabunwa’s fame spread all over the land. He became a real hero. Liberating Ngwa High School, says Ohuabunwa, was the “crowning glory” of his military career. It is, indeed, the climax of this amazing book.
I won’t give away any more of this exciting narrative. You must read it for yourself. The hero escaped death so many times it is a miracle. Finally, he does get shot—on the arm, thank God—and he was in the infirmary recovering when Biafra collapsed, Ojukwu flew out “in search of peace,” and his Second-in-Command, General Philip Effiong, was left to hand over the instruments of surrender. Some massacres of Biafran soldiers as well as civilians took place; but it could have been much worse. Gowon’s “No Victor, No Vanquished” had some effect.
When the war ended, Sam Ohuabunwa was only 19. He had lived several lifetimes in less than three years!
It is only right to conclude this review with Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa’s thoughts on the significance of this momentous historical event, the civil war.
Ohuabunwa believes that the war could have been avoided if Gowon had stood firm on the Aburi Accord which would have dismantled Aguiyi-Ironsi’s centralized military command structure and restored the autonomous four-Region structure. As it developed, dividing the country into 12 mostly unviable states (progressively proliferated to 36) has resulted in an unbalanced, unstable federation, especially since, with the arrival of crude oil, the states abandoned virtually every economic activity and began to depend exclusively on hand-outs from the federal government which, with centralization, seized all the receipts from oil. The war kept Nigeria one but disunited. To achieve unity, says Ohuabunwa, we must first go back to the Regions—or, failing that, to the Six Geopolitical Zones as the federating units. Each Region or Zone must reclaim ownership of the resources in its territory, and must be left alone to develop as it sees fit and at its own pace. In any case, we must avoid another civil war. “We have had enough,” he says.
Ohuabunwa’s views and recipes for Nigerian unity are much more elaborate. I have merely stated what seems to me the most critical.
*******
The Nigeria-Biafra War has given birth to a considerable literature—histories, commentaries, memoirs, novels, short stories, plays, poems and movies. Many more works are sure to come. Judging from its quality, I venture to predict that Sam Ohuabunwa’s The Port Harcourt Volunteer will become a classic in the library of works on the Biafra War.

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