People · 1938–1969
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A year before Biafra, a 27-year-old Ijaw student leader trained young men behind his father's house in Kaiama and declared the Niger Delta a republic. It lasted twelve days. Then the same government that jailed him set him free to fight for Nigeria.
Isaac Jasper Adaka Boro was born on 10 September 1938 in Oloibiri, in today's Bayelsa State, the same place where crude oil was first found in Nigeria. His people called him Adaka, which in Ijaw means lion.
His father, Pepple Boro, was a school headmaster, and headmasters get moved around. Boro later wrote a book about his life called The Twelve-Day Revolution, and in it he remembers being carried from town to town. Before he was old enough to understand where he was, he said, the family was already in Port Harcourt, where his father ran a mission school in the early 1940s. Later his father was posted to head a school in Kaiama, the family's home town.
After secondary school in Warri, Boro first did what his father had done and became a teacher. Then he joined the police. In 1961 the Eastern Regional Government gave him a scholarship to study at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
At Nsukka he ran for president of the students' union and lost twice. He believed he lost because of tribalism, which treated Ijaw people as strangers in their own region. On the third try he won, and served as president for the 1964/65 session. He was a bold student. He even took the federal government to court, asking that the 1963 general election be cancelled.
When he left the university in 1965, Boro went to Lagos. There, with other Ijaw men such as Samuel Owonaro and Nottingham Dick, he started a political movement called the Integrated WXYZ. Its aim was to win the Ijaw a bigger share of the benefits of the oil coming out of their land.
Then came January 1966. A group of army officers led by Kaduna Nzeogwu carried out a coup, and the Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, was among those killed. Boro admired Balewa and called him the protector of all Ijaw people. He condemned the coup, refused to accept the new military government, and decided, by his own account, that only a revolution could help the Ijaw.
Behind his father's compound in Kaiama, Boro set up a camp and trained hundreds of young men. His younger brother David later told the Punch that their father knew what was going on. He did not approve. He told Isaac to go back to his books, because he was a student.
Isaac did not listen. On 23 February 1966, he and his comrades proclaimed the Niger Delta Republic. It was the first time anyone had tried to break away from independent Nigeria, more than a year before Biafra.
His speech that day has been quoted ever since. He told his men it was a great day, perhaps the greatest for a very long time, not because they would bring the heavens down, but because they would show the world how they felt about oppression. Then he asked them to remember their grandmothers of seventy who still had to farm before they could eat, their poor families, and the petroleum being pumped every day, as he put it, out of their veins.
His argument was simple. The land that produced the country's wealth had been neglected for years, and minority peoples were being pushed down by bigger groups. He dreamed of a Delta that could stand on its own and use its riches to build itself up.
Not everyone took the declaration at face value. Some historians have called it more of a provocation than a real attempt to secede. The scholar Ruth First, as quoted by Kathryn Nwajiaku, thought Boro may have been working with senior Northern officers. His brother David said there had been some encouragement from the North, and Boro himself admitted close ties to the Balewa government. As for winning, Boro wrote that it was better simply to call the world's attention to how uncomfortable the people of the Delta felt, and leave success to Providence.
The government under General Aguiyi Ironsi crushed the rising, with help from the Eastern Region's governor, Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, the same man who would declare Biafra a year later. More than 150 people died in what became known as the Twelve-Day Revolution.
Boro, his chief of staff Samuel Owonaro and other leaders of the Niger Delta Volunteer Force were arrested and charged with treason. At the High Court in Port Harcourt, before Justice Phil-Ebosie, they were sentenced to death. The sentence was later reduced to life in prison.
Then the country turned upside down again. In 1967 Ojukwu declared Biafra, and in August that year the government of Yakubu Gowon released Boro and his comrades. They joined the Nigerian Army to fight against Biafra. Boro was allowed to raise his own force of about a thousand men. Olusegun Obasanjo, in his book My Command, was not kind about them; he called them ill-disciplined and poorly trained.
Boro's force won a number of celebrated victories. But in 1969, before the war ended, he was killed. His death has never stopped causing argument. Many people have claimed that his own commanding officer, Colonel Benjamin Adekunle, had him murdered out of jealousy at his fast rise. It remains a claim, not a settled fact. Owonaro survived the war, but he was badly wounded and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair until he died in June 2020.
Recognition came slowly. In 1982 President Shehu Shagari gave Boro a national honour after his death. In April 2013 his remains were dug up from Ikoyi cemetery in Lagos, and on 18 May 2013 they were reburied at Heroes Park in Yenagoa. Bayelsa State now marks 16 May, the anniversary of his death, as Isaac Boro Day.
His brother David, looking back, had no doubt about it. Isaac did the right thing, he said. Without that move, the Ijaw people would never have been politically freed.
