People · 29 July 1966 · Disputed
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Adekunle Fajuyi is remembered as the man who chose to die rather than hand over his guest. The killing is certain. What he actually said and chose on that last morning is still argued over.
Francis Adekunle Fajuyi was born in Ado-Ekiti on 26 June 1926. Before he ever wore a uniform he worked as a teacher and a clerk, ordinary jobs for a bright young man in colonial Ekiti. In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, he joined the army as a non-commissioned officer, and he rose the slow way, from the ranks.
His record is full of small moments of steadiness. In 1951, as a sergeant in the Nigeria Signal Squadron of the Royal West African Frontier Force, he was given the British Empire Medal for helping to calm a mutiny in his unit over food rations. In 1954 he went to Eaton Hall in England for officer training and came back commissioned. In 1961, serving in the Congo with the 4th Battalion of the Queen's Own Nigeria Regiment, Major Fajuyi led his company out of an ambush in North Katanga and won the Military Cross.
When the Congo operation ended he became the first Nigerian to command the 1st Battalion in Enugu, which tells you how far he had climbed. Just before January 1966 he was moved to Abeokuta as garrison commander. Then the country turned upside down. On 15 January a group of young majors killed the Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa, the Northern and Western premiers, Ahmadu Bello and Ladoke Akintola, and several senior officers. The coup was stopped, and the army commander, Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, took over. Two days later Ironsi named Fajuyi the first military governor of the Western Region.
It was a hard seat. The West had just come through years of violent party fighting. Fajuyi released Action Group politicians who had been detained, and he was seen by some northern officers as too friendly to the coup makers. Meanwhile Ironsi pushed through a decree in May 1966 that abolished the regions, and in the North many saw it as a plan for Igbo domination. Riots broke out. Ironsi decided to tour the country to explain himself.
On 28 July 1966 Ironsi was in Ibadan to meet traditional rulers from across the country, and Fajuyi, his host, gave a state dinner for him at Government House in Agodi. According to later accounts, northern soldiers that night were passing around a code word, araba, meaning separation. Trouble started first in Abeokuta, where the garrison commander and many Igbo soldiers were killed. In Ibadan a gun went off by accident while being loaded, and some soldiers took it as the signal to move.
On the morning of 29 July, troops led by Major Theophilus Danjuma came for Ironsi. The officer in charge of Ironsi's own guard, Lieutenant Walbe, was, without Ironsi knowing, in touch with Danjuma. According to the main accounts, the two men met Ironsi and Fajuyi on the staircase of Government House. The soldiers, it is said, only wanted the head of state.
This is the moment the whole story hangs on. The best-known version says Fajuyi was told he could go, and refused. His biographer Sanmi Ajiki puts words in his mouth that many Nigerians can quote: that he was with Ironsi soul, spirit and body, and that whatever happened to Ironsi that day would happen to him. Fajuyi's brother, who was at Government House, later said on television that Fajuyi pleaded frantically and insisted he would not be separated from his guest. Other unnamed informants claimed he even asked to be killed first.
The two men were driven out of Ibadan. They were killed near Lalupon, a quiet village about twelve kilometres from Agodi. One version says the abductors only went that far because Fajuyi would not get out of the Land Rover and leave Ironsi alone. Fajuyi was forty. For nearly six months the new government under Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon did not even say officially that the two were dead. That only came in January 1967, after the Eastern governor, Odumegwu Ojukwu, insisted on it at the Aburi talks in Ghana.
When the deaths were finally announced, the newspapers poured out praise. The Nigerian Tribune said no soldier could have died more honourably than a man who chose to die rather than betray a guest. The Nigerian Outlook in the East mourned him too, and Ojukwu called him a hero and martyr. To Yoruba readers, the story fitted an old idea: a host does not hand over the stranger under his roof.
But not everyone accepts the famous version. The historian Isawa Elaigwu, in his biography of Gowon, argued that there was no evidence Fajuyi was killed for standing by his guest. He wrote that Fajuyi had himself been marked by northern soldiers, suspected of links to the January plotters, and that he was scared. Elaigwu said Lieutenant Walbe, one of the abductors, told him it was a lie that Fajuyi chose to die with Ironsi. The soldier and writer James Oluleye took a middle line, saying both men paid the price willy-nilly and that Danjuma's claim to have promised Fajuyi safety did not hold up. Those who honour Fajuyi answer that Elaigwu was economical with the truth.
The political scientist Wale Adebanwi has pointed out something else: for about thirty years Fajuyi was barely remembered at all. A few streets, a hall at the university in Ile-Ife and a barracks in Ibadan carried his name. Then in 2001, at the 35th anniversary, the Yoruba group Afenifere launched a memorial book called The Road to Lalupon. At the ceremony in Ibadan, Eunice Fajuyi and Victoria Aguiyi-Ironsi, the two widows, walked towards each other and held each other for minutes while the hall stood. In Enugu that same year, Igbo leaders honoured Fajuyi as a true friend of their people.
So what really happened on that staircase? We may never know exactly. What is certain is that a former schoolteacher from Ado-Ekiti died beside his commander, and that his memory has been carried, and used, ever since.
