General Gowon: The Binder of Wounds

WHEN a U.S. diplomat called on Major General Yakubu ("Jack") Gowon last week, he noticed a well-thumbed volume of Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln on the desk of Nigeria's 35-year-old military leader. Gowon had apparently read it carefully. He quoted Lincoln on the problem of "binding up the nation's wounds" and the need to ensure that "the dead shall not have died in vain." Throughout Nigeria's civil war, Gowon operated on the Lincolnesque proposition that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." In the process, he became quite a Lincoln scholar; he once remarked that he had got so that he could recognize the Grants and Shermans among his own commanders.

A spit-and-polish product of Britain's Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, Gowon is sometimes dismissed as "Jack the Boy Scout" in Lagos diplomatic circles. He neither smokes nor drinks, keeps his 5-ft. 10-in. frame trim at 140 Ibs. by playing squash or polo every day, and laces his conversation with such mission-school phrases as "goodness me." He once apologized to newsmen for saying "hell" and added, "I forgot that I am a soldier." When asked how he hoped to be remembered for his conduct of the war, he replied, "I want to feel that I played my part like a good sportsman."

The Boy Scout nickname does a disservice to the man. Gowon was at once tough enough and shrewd enough to win an ugly civil war without splintering what was left of the fragile Nigerian coalition. At a time when hardliners within his government were urging a more ruthless prosecution of the war, Gowon told them: "We have no enemy, the Ibos are not our enemy." Looking to war's end and the problem of reintegrating the Ibos, he ordered his government to collect rent on Ibo-owned property outside the breakaway area and keep the money in trust for its owners. "I swear to you," he told reporters recently, "there will be no genocide, no settling of old scores, no punishments."

Whether Gowon will be able to restrain the tribal hatred and blood-bred vindictiveness of his army and his people remains to be seen. Few observers question the sincerity of his intentions. They see him as a reluctant leader who nurses a nostalgia for the private life he has left behind. "I should be doing all the things young men of my age are doing," he once said. "Instead, here I am in this prison. Honestly, this is a prison." The leadership of his stricken country was thrust upon him suddenly, almost by accident, in July 1966. He was chosen largely because he could be trusted, had no known enemies and be longed to a minor tribe. In other words, he was acceptable to all.

Reserved and modest, Gowon (the name, pronounced "go on," means "maker of rain") is an odd hybrid in Nigerian life. A Northerner, he comes from the tiny Angas tribe. He is the son of a Methodist evangelist who managed to send all eleven of his children to mission school. Graduated from Sandhurst in 1954, Gowon later served with the United Nations peace-keeping forces in the Congo. He had just returned from an advanced military course in Britain when the Ibos staged their bloody coup of January 1966. Gowon's life may well have been saved that night because an Ibo girl friend sheltered him in her home. A dozen of his closest army friends were slain. "The army was one happy family," he said. "But the trust and confidence we had was gone from that day." Six months later, a Northern countercoup thrust him into power.

During his three years in office, Gowon has refused to occupy the sprawling State Palace. He prefers a two-story house in the Dodan barracks, the army's main garrison in Lagos, where he lives with his wife Victoria, a former nurse whom he married last April. From a small, bare barracks office, he administers the affairs of Africa's largest nation. He has rarely visited the war front. Instead he has directed operations from the same office, relying heavily on a radio and six telephones.

Gowon has said repeatedly that he intends to return Nigeria to civilian rule. Last week he reaffirmed his promise that as soon as reconstruction is under way, he will call a constituent assembly to consider an overhaul of the country's political structure. Whether Nigeria will then follow the lead of Ghana, where a military junta stepped aside for a civilian government, or the pattern of the Congo, where General Joseph Mobutu turned himself into an autocratic president, remains to be seen. Observers have long noted that Gowon sometimes seems to be dominated by such strong personalities in his government as Chief Anthony Enahoro, the Information and Labor Minister, and Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Vice Chairman of the Federal Executive Council. But Gowon, already popular, was notably strengthened by last week's victory. Moreover, he is an attractive figure, and unlike many of his country's former leaders, he bears no taint whatever of corruption. "I have no political ambitions," Gowon said last week. "Do I look like a politician?" To many Nigerians, not to mention other Africans, he is looking more and more like one. It may well be that his return to the barracks will be indefinitely delayed.

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