Dick Tiger strikes a
boxer’s pose in Biafran Army Uniform
Richard
Ihetu, better known by his nom de guerre Dick Tiger, was more than a three-time
world champion boxer and a national hero to Nigeria. He also became a supporter
and spokesman for the secessionist state of Biafra.
He officially
renounced all associations with Nigeria at a press conference held in Enugu in
June 1967, a little over two weeks after Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuemeka
Odumegwu Ojukwu had declared the birth of the rebel republic. The news wires
quoted him as saying:
Nigeria is
dead. I am a Biafran.
Then sometime
in December of that year he received a direct commission into the Morale Corps
of the Biafran Army as a second lieutenant.
This was not revealed to the public until the end of the following month
when he was interviewed by foreign news journalists in the city of Port
Harcourt. He told them that he had been touring the new nation and putting new
Biafran military recruits through their paces at induction centres.
This rarely
seen footage shows Tiger doing precisely that and ends with him driving his
Mercedes Benz to his family home where he is welcomed by his wife Abigail,
mother Rebecca and his children.
© Adeyinka
Makinde (2018)
Adeyinka
Makinde is the author of the biography Dick
Tiger: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal. He is also a contributor to
the forthcoming Companion to
Boxing to be
published by Cambridge University Press.
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