Lost history · 5–7 October 1967
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The town put on white and marched out singing loyalty to Nigeria, hoping that would make the killing stop. It didn't.
To see why Asaba suffered, look at a map. The town sits on the west bank of the River Niger in what is now Delta State, right across the water from Onitsha. Its people are Igbo, Anioma Igbo, but in 1967 Asaba was part of the Mid-Western Region, not the East. When Biafra broke away that year, Asaba found itself on the Nigerian side of the river and the Biafran side of most people's assumptions.
In August 1967, three months into the war, Biafran troops pushed west across the Niger into the Mid-West. They moved fast, took Benin City and got as far as Ore before the Nigerian Second Division under Colonel Murtala Muhammed stopped them. Then the Federal side pushed them all the way back to the river. The Biafrans crossed the Niger Bridge into Onitsha and blew up its eastern spans so the Federal troops could not follow.
That left the Second Division sitting in Asaba, facing a river it could not cross, in a town full of Igbo people its soldiers saw as the enemy's kin. Many men in Asaba had nothing to do with Biafra. That did not matter much to the soldiers who arrived around 5 October.
For two days the troops went from house to house. They searched, they looted, and they killed men they said were Biafran sympathisers, sometimes one at a time and sometimes in small groups at different spots around the town. Families hid their sons in ceilings and back rooms. The town's leaders could see this would not stop on its own. So they came up with a plan, and it was a brave and hopeful one.
The leaders asked the whole town to come out on the morning of 7 October. They would march through Asaba and show the soldiers, loudly and in public, that they were loyal. If the army saw that Asaba was for Nigeria, the killing would surely end.
So the people came out. Hundreds of men, women and children walked down the main street, and many wore akwa ocha, the white ceremonial cloth of Anioma people, the cloth you wear on a proud day. They sang, they danced, and they chanted "One Nigeria." Try to picture it: a frightened town dressed in its finest, dancing to save its own life.
At a junction the soldiers split the crowd. Women and small children were sent one way. Men and teenage boys were sent the other, into an open square at Ogbe-Osowa village. There the troops brought out machine guns. Witnesses say the order to fire came from the division's second-in-command, Major Ibrahim Taiwo. Then they fired into the crowd.
Most of the killing was over by the end of that day. Nobody has ever made an exact count. In 1981 the Asaba Development Council drew up a list of 373 names and said plainly that it was incomplete. A Quaker relief worker reported 759 men and boys killed, and a journalist wrote 700. The researchers S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser Ottanelli, who spent years interviewing survivors, put it at between 500 and 800. Some eyewitnesses believed it was over a thousand. Some families lost dozens of their men and boys in one morning.
Some families managed to carry their dead home and bury them properly. Most victims went into mass graves with no rites at all, which for Anioma families is a wound of its own. And the soldiers stayed. Federal troops occupied Asaba for months. Much of the town was destroyed. Women and girls were raped or forced into so-called marriages with soldiers, and many residents fled and did not come back until the war ended in 1970.
What's striking is how long the story stayed quiet. The war ended with the slogan "no victor, no vanquished," and the country wanted to move on. Asaba's dead did not fit that story easily. They were Nigerians, killed by the Nigerian army, while they were cheering for Nigeria.
The record also got muddled. When the Oputa Panel looked into human rights abuses after military rule, a report of testimony by General I.B.M. Haruna had him apparently taking responsibility as commander. But Haruna was not in Asaba in 1967. He took over the Second Division only in the spring of 1968. He gets blamed for it to this day.
The work of setting the record straight came largely from survivors and their children, together with Bird and Ottanelli's Asaba Memorial Project. They recorded witnesses on video, gathered names and dug through archives. In October 2017 Asaba held a two-day commemoration for the fiftieth anniversary, and the pair's book, The Asaba Massacre: Trauma, Memory, and the Nigerian Civil War, was launched there.
Akwa ocha is still worn in Asaba. Most days it means celebration. But for many families it also brings back that morning, when a town put on its best white cloth and marched out to say it belonged to Nigeria.
