“The Peace Corps Blew It” by Bob Criso (Nigeria)

 

I HAD JUST GRADUATED from college in January 1966 when I picked up the New York Times and read about the bloody military coup in Nigeria. The Prime Minister and a number of other top government officials were killed. Nigeria’s budding democracy ended two weeks before I’d be leaving for Peace Corps training.

Mmmm. “Do you know what you’re getting into?” my Uncle Ralph asked.

 

FOUR MONTHS LATER  I was settled into a teaching assignment in Ishiagu, Eastern Nigeria, and pretty content. Nice house, great students, companionable colleagues and a village culture that fascinated me. I rolled up the sleeves of my new dashiki and plunged right in — lots of palm wine, kola nuts and cultural-exchange-talk in mud homes, my Igbo vocabulary expanding in the process. When I was invited to a local wedding, I felt like I had been granted honorary citizenship.

It wasn’t long before the BBC reported a counter-coup and a new military leader, General Yakubu Gowon. No one in Ishiagu trusted him.

Sometime around June 1966, I started hearing talk about Igbos being killed in Northern Nigeria. It was described as “payback” for the first coup which many believed was plotted by Igbo army officers. Then some Hausa were killed in Eastern cities. Then reports of Igbos frequently being massacred in the North. Ibrahim, the one Hausa student at my school and a popular fellow with his peers, disappeared in the middle of the night. “He would have been killed,” the principal said.

Refugees from the North returned to Ishiagu with horrific stories of pregnant women being cut open and houses being burned to the ground while children screamed inside them. Then, there was the story about the train. The Hausa reportedly sent a train filled with cut-up Igbo body parts back to the East “as a warning.” Listening to the BBC, Radio Enugu and talking with the locals, it was often hard to distinguish fact from fiction. Then I saw a woman, returning to Ishiagu from the train station, carrying a human head.

In January of 1967, it was the other teachers who first told me about a meeting of Nigerian regional leaders in Ghana to discuss a possible confederation of states as a solution to the country’s divisions. In Ishiagu, the talk was about secession as the only solution. Changes started to affect daily life in the village. The meat that had come from the Hausa herdsmen in the North got scarcer at the market until it stopped completely. Mail from outside the East was no longer being delivered. The chickens that I was raising behind my house were stolen in the night.

By April of 1967, I was getting nervous about the situation and went to Enugu to find out what was happening. Ruth Olsen, the Eastern Regional Director, gave me the keys to a blue van and told me I was a designated pickup driver in case of an emergency evacuation. “Stay in Ishiagu,” she said emphatically, “and we will contact you if there’s an emergency. You will be responsible for picking up six people in your area.”

At the end of May 1967, Eastern Nigeria seceded and declared itself the Republic of Biafra. There was a new flag, a new national anthem and a new army. Fighting started along the Northern border. All able-bodied men in the village and many of my students were prepared to join the army. “It’s kill or be killed,” one of my students said. A darkness came over Ishiagu. I saw the fear in the students faces. People in the village became suspicious of white people. There were reports of mercenaries working for the Hausa, posing as Peace Corps Volunteers and priests, spying and collecting information in preparation for an invasion. War fever, fueled by the paranoia stirred up by the refugees, had infected the village.

I was teaching a class one morning in July 1967 when Biafran soldiers pulled up to the school in a jeep and ordered the school closed. They said it would be turned into military barracks. Getting more anxious by the hour, I decided to drive to Afikpo, a nearby town, where I had two Peace Corps friends, Lois and Jim. Maybe they knew more. When I reached the first paved road, I was shocked. All signs identifying anything or anywhere had been taken down. Every few miles there were road blocks with chopped down trees and confrontational, ragtag militias waving clubs and machetes. “Where are you going?” “What is your purpose?” “Empty your Pockets!” “What is that map in your van?”

I felt like I was already caught in the middle of a war. The good reputation of the Peace Corps, my improved Igbo and pure luck got me through those roadblocks. I picked up Lois and Jim but didn’t go further to pick up Alan, another Volunteer deep in the bush — the roads and the crowds were too dangerous. Lois, Jim and I made it back to my house, but we were soon confronted by a bloodthirsty mob. (Years later, Jim would write a play about what happened there.) With the help of local friends, we made it out of what was clearly a life-threatening situation. With local help again, Lois and Jim took a train to Enugu the next day. Thinking there were other Volunteers who needed to be picked up, I stayed and waited for the Peace Corps to contact me.They never did. I eventually made it to the coast with the help of a Biafran army escort and left the country on the boat that was waiting for the last evacuees.

 

IT TOOK ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE  YEARS  before I started writing about what happened. It’s been fifty years now and I still think about it. There were several times when I thought I wouldn’t make it. During the mob confrontation at my house, I imagined the headlines of The Staten Island Advance: “Peace Corps Volunteer killed in Nigeria.”

Mine wasn’t the only horror story. I spoke to another Volunteer who was thrown into jail for days during those last weeks as a suspected spy. He thought he would never be heard from again. Len, an African-American Volunteer from my training group who looked like a Hausa, recently told me he was repeatedly harassed and confronted until he finally made it out of the country over the Onitsha bridge. I also spoke to another Volunteer who had been teaching at the University in Nsukka, close to the Northern border. Caught up in the circumstances of the time, he ended up sorting living from dead bodies on the back of trucks coming back from the North.

Let’s face it, the Peace Corps blew it. It’s difficult for me to say that about an organization that has always been rather sacrosanct for many of us, but we should have been pulled out much sooner. What future could the Peace Corps possibly have had in Biafra as the country drifted deeper into the full-scale madness of war?

Uncle Ralph was right. I didn’t really know what I was getting into. But what about the people who were running the program? Where was the organizational breakdown from Enugu to Lagos to Washington? Has there ever been an administrative autopsy? How many other stories are out there that have not been written about?

Bob Criso

Bob Criso

Bob Criso (Nigeria 1966-68) worked as a psychotherapist at Princeton University Counseling and Psychological Services and also had a private practice in Princeton. Now retired and living in New York City, he currently reviews plays and works on a memoir when he is not traveling. He can be reached at: bobcriso@gmail.com

10 Comments

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    • I picked him up in the blue van accompanied by Biafran soldiers in a jeep. It was harrowing and we almost didn’t make it.

  • On my first diplomatic assignment in Panama in 1967 at the instruction of Washington we had the Panamanians seize a plane that had landed there en route to South America. I became the point man on this case. The next day the crew came to the embassy protesting the seizure. I explained that we were waiting for instructions on what to do with the plane. Later I got a call from the hotel where the crew was staying telling me that the crew had gone but had left a packet for the embassy. I picked it up and found that I had the papers and keys to a WWII bomber plane. I would take visitors out to the airport to see “my” plane.

    Weeks went by and I telegraphed Washington to inquire about what to do with the plane. The response was that a Mr Smith would be arriving the next day to pick up the plane and I was to give him the papers and keys. The next day a Mr Jones showed up to take the plane. I said no, I was waiting for Mr Smtih. He said Smith was ill and he had come in his place. I called Washington and was told that indeed Jones had replaced Smith and to give him the keys. I took careful note of the person who gave me the instruction Thank God, after handing over the keys Washington called again to ask me if I could have the Panamanians seize the plane again. I said no way. They asked if I could follow the plane back to Florida which was the plan according to Mr Jones. I asked if they wanted me to ride shotgun but finally said we could have the FAA station in Panama follow the plane, which we did and the plane was taken back to Florida. Only then was I told why we had seized the plane in the first place. We had assumed it was engaged in some type of smuggling. But no, it was one of a whole series of old bombers being flown from the USA through Central and South America to Brazil where they would then fly to Biafra to avoid embargoes we had on arms to the Biafran rebels. I was congratulated for my stopping this major arms smuggle.

    Epilogue. The following year I was reading a magazine article about arms smuggling. The most valuable items in arms smuggling were war planes and the most notorious smuggler was, drum roll please, my Mr Jones. I had handed over a smuggled plane to the world’s most notorious war plane smuggler. Fortunately in my case the plane got back to the USA. But the flow of war planes to Biafra continued.

  • Bob,

    I appreciated the opportunity to read your article, “The Peace Corps Blew It.” In addition to sharing a career with you as a psychotherapist, I shared time with you in Nigeria with the Peace Corps. You doubtlessly knew a number of my group, Nigeria XX. There are some links that I’d like to share with you if you have not visited them already.

    The first is to a description of the lead up to our pre-evacuation experiences in the Midwest Region, as well as the evacuation itself from the Midwest. It was written by John Buchanon who was the Director of PC Nigeria-Midwest.. Another is a book by Larry Gabriel, RPCV entitled “From Kansas to Nigeria,” which is available on Amazon.com. And possibly there is a third, which is an article which appeared in the first (?and last?) issue of the PC-Nigeria journal by volunteers just prior to our evacuations from the country.

    Alas. You may have enjoyed our 50th Anniversary reunion in Washington DC. RPCV’s from members of groups before and after Nigeria XX joined in and celebrated our mutual survival, etc.

    Your account is a welcome contribution. Thank you for posting it!

    Dick Stanton

  • I recently spent 19 months as a volunteer English teacher in Plateau State, Nigeria, only suddenly evacuated in March due to the pandemic. It was not Peace Corps but I did spend two years in Peace Corps China 2010-2012. It was always fun drawing parallels between service in China and service in Nigeria. Having read the works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah and The Thing Around Your Neck, I have a bit of a feel for the Biafra period. A friend of mine and her husband served in northern Nigeria in the PC in Katsina during the Biafra period and noted that they were not evacuated. What really would interest me would be to know why the Peace Corps left Nigeria in 1995. Did the Nigerian government ask them to leave? Does anyone have any idea?

  • Your story about your Peace Corps exeriences in Nigeria 1966-68 are very interesting. Very different from my 1969-1972 Peace Corps service in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia.

    I have a colleauge who wrote about missionary experies in Southweat Nigeria. The Peace Corps is mentioned many times.
    In celebration of Nurse Week, electronic copies of Martha Farrar Highfield’s book, A Time to Heal:Missionary Nurses …Southeast Nigeria, on amazon are only $1.99 (reg $16).

    https://sulisinternational.com/2021/05/03/pr-discount-a-time-to-heal/#respond-to-heal/

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