The Conrad Dibie Nwawo I knew

Ifirst met Colonel Conrad Dibie Nwawo shortly after the civil war. I was less than 10 years old. He was in the company of his cousin; my father he had come to visit. He looked my father’s age but when the latter greeted him “Akwe” – which is our traditional greeting, then I knew he was older than my father.

There was something unusual about the man as I looked on in my pristine innocence. His face was drawn and somber, and it was evidently mournful. His eyes roved    probingly about the small sitting room. I was frightened. Perhaps noticing my predicament my father explained that Nwawo was immediately ahead of him, except for one or two other persons, in the lineage of Umu-Ozolumana kindred of Ogbe-Obi Onicha Olona, Aniocha North of Delta State; that he was born in 1924 while, as I already knew, my father was born in 1926. The man, he explained, was also my father according to custom. I was still uneasy. As he was later seen off, I noticed that my bigger cousins, one or two of whom had also returned from the Biafran war, looked at him with awe. They were later to tell tales of the great Biafran warlord and his exploits in Biafra.

That was how I became interested in the man Nwawo. Although I had been with his first son the late Conrad Nwawo Jnr in Government College Ughelli, I did not encounter the man again until I was eighteen. Then I was a budding student of Political Science at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and Nwawo had signed on with the National Party of Nigeria (NPN). He was in fact the regional Head of a rather “militant unit” of the party christened the “Strategic Assignment Group (SAG)”. I was doing a term paper which sought to explore the chances of making a nation out of the Nigerian state. I followed him one day and sought to find out how and why he joined the army, all in the hope of finding out the role the army could play in helping to actualize the goal of my study.

The great hero of the Biafran war had explained that there were two objects central to becoming a soldier or, and, an officer. He talked about resolute discipline, and “being of a fighting pedigree”. He pointed out that the first was central for a regimental life, while the second engrained in the prospect, bravery and strength. He had noted: “when I applied to join the army in the late forties – I joined the army in 1950 – the then colonial masters came here (to Onicha-Olona) and right to this our kindred to find out if we were fighting people.” He further noted that when they discovered he was a descendant of the great warriors of the legendary Ekumeku wars – one of the most organized guerrilla resistance campaigns in the history of the British Empire – it was relatively easy to sign him on.

He joined the Army on the 1st of December, 1950 and was commissioned on the 28th of May, 1954 as a 2nd Lieutenant in the then Queen’s Own Regiment, as the colonial Nigerian Army was then called. His service number was 10. The late Nwawo was in fact the most senior officer in the Biafran Army; even ahead of Ojukwu and General Philip Effiong, in the erstwhile Nigerian Army. Nwawo was Commissioned in 1954, Effiong in 1956, and Ojukwu in 1957.

In spite of being a very senior military officer, Nwawo was an excellent foot soldier who led his troops by being in the front lines of attacks. His uncommon bravery was severally demonstrated in the crises years of both Nigeria and the Congo. Most notable included his unusual encounter with the late major Chukwuma Nzeogwu in the aftermath of the January 1966 coup, in Kaduna. Nwawo had the rather unpleasant task of persuading a victorious and very popular Nzeogwu to surrender to the federal authorities right in the presence of his heavily armed troops. Nwawo had recalled the experience, noting that not only was he able to “disarm” the troops, it was garnished with a parade of honour, after which Nzeogwu willingly followed him to Lagos.

But that was not the beginning. Five years earlier during the UN-sponsored Congo campaigns, Nwawo’s gallantry was widely reported in both African and the global media. In a particular incident, then a Major, troops from his company (he was a company commander) personally led by him, were cut off from the rest of the UN Forces in both supplies and communication right in the Congo forest. Putting his intelligence, training and bravery to work, he had shot his way through eventually returning his troops to the main UN fold. His exploits in the Congo eventually earned him the prestigious Royal Military Cross from the Queen of England herself; an honour held only by himself and the late Adekunle Fajuyi, in the history of the Nigerian Army.

As fate would have it Nwawo repeated the “Congo feat” in an incident in Umuahia during the Biafran war. Here again he and his troops had been cut off from the rest of the Biafran Army in supplies and communication. He fought gallantly with virtually nothing, holding the federal troops for over 48 hours. He eventually cleared the lines in favour of Biafra after two days of fierce battle.

Nwawo graduated from the School of Agriculture in Ibadan in 1946. He worked as a civil servant beginning from a local plantation in the Moore Plantation in Ibadan, Nigeria. He further had a stint in the then Southwest Cameroons which was part of Nigeria, until 1950 when he joined the Nigerian Army as a regular soldier. He later received officer training at the prestigious Mons Officer Cadet School in Aldershot, the United Kingdom and got commissioned in 1954.

No doubt, Col. C.D. Nwawo was one of the few Midwestern Igbo Officers who believed in, and fought for, Biafra. He insisted that Biafra represented justice, equity and fairness. And unless these ideals are engrained in out body polity, Nwawo believed the blood of those who died in the war will keep yelling for justice. The man had written his war memoirs which came to about ten volumes of the regular 80-leaf short exercise books when I last discussed it with him in 2010. All lovers of history must hope that Nwawo’s Biafran war notes do not die with him.

Chuba Keshi