25/11/2025
History often feels like a distant landscape—until you find yourself standing inside it, tracing its contours with your own emotions. When I look back at the life of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu after the fall of Biafra, I do not see a defeated general fleeing into the night; I see a man carrying the weight of an entire people, walking into exile with dignity, purpose, and the unbroken knowledge of who he was.
When Ojukwu left for Côte d’Ivoire in January 1970, he did not vanish. He simply moved his struggle to a quieter place. Under the protection of President Félix Houphouët-Boigny—who had recognized Biafra even when the world hesitated—Ojukwu lived in exile for more than twelve years. Those years were not an escape; they were a long pause, a breath held by the Igbo nation, waiting for the day their voice would return home.
And when that day came on June 18, 1982—after his official pardon by President Shehu Shagari—the reception in Enugu was something more than a homecoming. It was a resurrection. The Igbo heartland poured into the streets, not merely to welcome a man, but to acknowledge the return of a symbol, a question, and an unresolved chapter of Nigerian history.
Yet Ojukwu did not step off that plane calling for another war. Instead, he entered politics through the National Party of Nigeria, choosing civilian engagement over armed rebellion. But make no mistake: he never apologized for Biafra, and he never buried its meaning. To him, Biafra was not a mistake—it was a necessity forced by pogroms, persecution, and a Nigeria unwilling to protect its own citizens.
In interviews, especially the 1983 ITN conversation, he made it clear:
“Biafra was created as an act of self-defense.”
And he warned—calmly, logically, without theatrics—that if Nigeria ever returned to the same failures, the same persecutions, then the idea of Biafra could rise again. Not out of aggression, but out of survival.
In a rare mid-1980s interview in New York, he said the words that still echo today:
“Biafra will rise again, if…”
—if Nigeria refuses to restructure,
—if ethnic realities remain denied,
—if the Igbo continue to live under the shadow of marginalization.
He did not blame foreign powers. He blamed Nigeria for its unwillingness to build a true federation. He reminded us of the abandoned Aburi Accord and pointed back to the Ahiara Declaration—Biafra’s philosophical backbone—where justice, self-determination, and equality were not luxuries but rights.
During his 1982 welcome speeches, he spoke of peace and reintegration, yes, but he also said the struggle had not been in vain. He told his people to engage politically, stand united, stay vigilant. He made it clear that sovereignty—if pushed to the wall—remained an inalienable right.
And in private, according to memoirs, he said something even more human, more piercing: that no amount of regret could erase a people’s right to “go home” to self-rule if the world around them insisted on denying their place.
That is the heart of Ojukwu’s post-war message.
Not a call to arms.
Not a surrender to silence.
But a guarded, principled warning that identity, when suppressed, does not disappear—it waits.
You asked:
“No matter how you deny your identity... the one who judges you knows your real identity and will treat you according to it. True or false?”
True.
History proves it, especially in the story of the Igbo people. You may change your clothing, your language, or even your political alignment. But those who see you through the lens of ethnicity, race, or inherited identity will still treat you according to the truth they believe about you.
This is why Ojukwu insisted that identity must never be denied.
It is better to embrace it with dignity than to run from it only to be judged by it anyway.
--- UC Reality Watch
