Lost history · 1967-1970
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Short of guns and bullets, Biafra's scientists and engineers made their own rockets and mines. A missile meant for the sky was turned sideways at a bridge, and the war changed shape.
When the Nigerian Civil War began in 1967, the new Republic of Biafra had a problem that no speech could solve. Its soldiers did not have enough weapons, and they did not have enough ammunition for the weapons they had. The Nigerian army was far better armed, and as the months passed the gap only grew wider.
So Biafra tried to make its own. Scientists, many of them from the University of Biafra, the institution we now know as the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, came together in a body called the Research and Production Agency, usually shortened to RAP. Inside it was a group devoted to weapons, headed by Colonel Ejike Obumneme Aghanya. Their job was nothing less than to build an arms industry from almost nothing.
They began with the basics: ammunition, grenades, even armoured cars. But the thing they became famous for, and feared for, was a weapon they called Ogbunigwe. The word is usually translated as "mass killer", and since the war it has come to mean anything from a landmine to, in a looser sense, any instrument that kills many at once. Ordinary people had another name for it. They called it the Ojukwu bucket, after Biafra's leader.
The engineers whose names are tied to its design and making include Seth Nwanagu, Willy Achukwu, Sylvester Akalonu, Nath Okpala, Gordian Ezekwe and Benjamin Nwosu, along with others whose names are less often remembered.
What surprises people today is that the first Ogbunigwe was not a mine at all. It was a rocket, and it was meant to point at the sky. Nigerian MiG-15 fighter planes had been attacking around Enugu airport, and the Biafran engineers set out to build a missile that could fight them off. They were making it in Enugu itself.
They never got the chance to test it properly against aircraft. In October 1967, Nigerian troops captured Enugu, and the workshops were lost with the city.
After Enugu fell, Biafran soldiers fell back along the old road between Enugu and Awka. At the Ugwuoba bridge, a small group of them was trying to hold off a heavily armed Nigerian battalion so that others could get away. Then their ammunition ran out.
What they still had were some of the new missiles, built to be fired upward at planes. Their commander gave an order that nobody had planned for. Fire them flat, he told them, straight along the ground at the enemy, instead of up into the air.
The result was terrible for the men on the receiving end. From that day the rocket was rebuilt as a ground-to-ground weapon, and it stayed that way for the rest of the war. It was even fired at ships during the second invasion of Onitsha.
The Biafran government made a large claim for it at the time. It said the flying Ogbunigwe was the first rocket wholly designed, developed, mass-produced and launched in Africa, and it pointed out that the first South African rocket of its own design went up in December 1968, more than a year later. Whether every word of that claim holds, it shows how proud Biafra was of what its own people had made.
Production grew quickly. At its peak, about 500 Ogbunigwe were being turned out in Biafra every day.
They came in many shapes. The flying version was usually about two metres long and a third of a metre wide, set off with electricity and fired from a stand. Smaller ones were lined up on racks and fired one after another, taking the place of artillery that Biafra did not have. There was the foot cutter, a row of knee-high lead pipes packed with explosive and metal. There was the bucket, a cone full of explosive set off by a wire, and the coffin box, a bigger version of the same thing. There was even a beer bottle kind, a grenade made from a bottle that burst when it struck.
On the battlefield, these weapons did what they were made to do. The mines could reach anywhere between 180 and 800 metres and could wipe out a whole company of soldiers. The rockets could fly about eight kilometres. They were used against infantry and against Nigerian armoured cars, the Saladins and Ferrets.
The British journalist Frederick Forsyth wrote about one Nigerian attack in 1969 in which soldiers advanced in tight packed lines and were caught by the flying Ogbunigwe. He reported an American's estimate, made after looking over the ground, that of 6,000 men who went forward, 4,000 did not come back. The weapons were also part of the Abagana ambush in 1968, which is said to have destroyed nearly all of the Nigerian 2nd Division. Chinua Achebe and Vincent Chukwemeka are quoted as saying the Ogbunigwe struck terror into Nigerian soldiers, and that Biafra killed more of the enemy with it than with any imported weapon.
It had limits. Fired at planes, the rocket had no guidance, so it was hopeless against fast jets. It was meant to burst near an aircraft and shake it or clog its engines with debris. Some Russian pilots flying for Nigeria reported close calls, but there is no sign that any plane was actually shot down by one, even in the defence of the Uli airstrip. Biafra's own bombers, old B-25s and B-26s, also carried home-made Ogbunigwe rockets and bombs.
The weapons outlived the war. As late as 2010, teams clearing old battle areas in the former Biafra destroyed 646 live Ogbunigwe bombs, along with 426 other home-made explosive devices. Forty years on, the soil was still giving them up.
