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Road to Slaughter. The cost of survival weighs heavily on Ojukwu. Clad in an orange and gold shirt, the Biafran leader sat looking out a window last week as monsoon rains pounded down. "I am haunted at night by the faces I see in those refugee camps," he said. Some of the hunger—"about 30%"—he admits is the Biafrans' own fault. "There is more we could do ourselves." One thing he has done is go to his home town and eat snails in a public demonstration. The Ibos scorn snails as food "only for the lowest." Ojukwu told TIME Correspondent James Wilde: "What you are seeing now is the end of a long, long journey. It began in the far north of Nigeria and moved steadily southwards as we were driven out of place after place. Now this path has become the road to the slaughterhouse here in the Ibo heartland."
Ojukwu's early schooling took place among the Yorubas of Lagos, Nigeria's bustling seaport capital. At twelve, he was shipped off to the best British education that an Ibo millionaire could buy, first at Epsom public school in Surrey and then at Oxford's Lincoln College. "When I first went to England as a boy," he recalls, "I was swamped by that sea of white faces. I didn't even recognize people who had been my teachers, once they were immersed among their own kind." On the debating team at Epsom, he developed a keen gift for words and also played rugby; and in 1952 set the school record for the discus throw (115 ft. 81 in.). He is remembered at Oxford as a good history student—though his grades were only average—and for a bright red MG sports car, with which he frequently burned up the A40 highway between Oxford and London on weekends. It was only one of several high-speed sports cars that he has owned, and Ojukwu can still hold forth at length on the fine points of fuel injection. "Those were the good days," he says, "the carefree days."
His return to Lagos was scarcely less carefree, judging by the swath he cut through capital society while an administrator in the government. Then, in anticipation of the role of the military in post-independence Africa, Ojukwu joined the Nigerian army as an officer trainee. He felt little attachment to the army as such, but realized that it was "the only truly federal organization in Nigeria that appeared likely to remain intact." Until the very end, Ojukwu tried to use his influence to bridge the gap between Nigeria's cultures.
Wartime Democracy. His dedication to Ibo nationhood dates from the same day as his now luxuriant beard, which he let grow during the 1966 fall massacres "as a sign of mourning." He sleeps from dawn to midmorning, lives and works in his tightly guarded Umuahia villa. He evacuated his wife Njide-ka and two small children after a bomb was dropped near his home. Slouched at his desk, pacing the grounds impatiently in darkness, chain-smoking State Express filter cigarettes, he is a lonely figure in his besieged land. Ojukwu often is pictured in Nigerian propaganda as a power-mad Hitler. In fact, he runs Biafra as a wartime democracy, frequently seeking the advice of his consultative assembly of Ibo elders. Biafra also has a functioning judiciary, a ministerial executive government