The Supreme Undercover by V. Alily. John Bull Publishing, 2022, 240 pages, illustrations. ISBN 979-8843073428.
Nightwings by V. Alily. John Bull Publishing, 2023, 233 pages, illustrations. ISBN 979-8399828275.
The genre of historical fiction received an inestimable boost in 1971 when the ex-Reuters journalist and sympathiser for the cause of Biafran secession, Frederick Forsyth, published his political thriller The Day of the Jackal. It set the standard for writing a story within the confines of an unchanged historical reality in which the survival of Charles de Gaulle from an assassin’s bullet was assured, as much as Robert Harris’ Fatherland did for the genre of alternative history which situated a murder mystery within an imagined victorious German Third Reich.
With an emphasis on the former genre Valentino Alily, a Nigerian-born author, merges both writing species to some degree in two novels set against the backdrop of the Nigerian Civil War. The Supreme Undercover and Nightwings respectively published in 2022 and 2023 are styled by the author as works of ‘faction’, that is “fiction woven around facts.” While the plot of The Supreme Undercover is centred on intrigues at Federal Nigeria’s Supreme Military Headquarters where a Biafran mole operates, the storyline of Nightwings revolves around the mercy flights orchestrated by a range of organisations to bring relief to the humanitarian catastrophe which developed within the shrinking polity of Biafra. Like its predecessor, the theme of espionage lies at its pith.
In The Supreme Undercover a host of fictitious characters interact at a distance from real civil war era personalities such as Colonel Benjamin Adekunle, the fierce Commander of the Third Infantry Division and Lieutenant Colonel Emeka Ojukwu, the former military governor of the Eastern region who became the head of state of the breakaway Republic of Biafra. The storyline revels in a series of hypothesised causes of setbacks suffered by the Federal side during the civil war, and rumours at Nigerian headquarters surrounding several characters such as the Arab-Nigerien ‘Lieutenant Colonel Ali Ahmadu Barah’ and ‘Brigadier Ibrahim Saliba Dabar’, a confidant of Major General Yakubu Gowon, the head of the Federal Military Government. It reaches a dramatic denouement featuring a series of escapes and assassinations on the eve of the surrender of Biafra.
The plot of Nightwings centres on a race for time by Biafran intelligence agents to discover sabotage in the midst of the relief flights to Uli airport from destinations including Sao Tome and Libreville. It is a task which reaches its climax in the throes of the crumbled dream of Biafra. Before this, the author provides with a good measure of forensic detail the work carried out by pilots, Holy Ghost Fathers and aid workers under the severe circumstances of encirclement, blockade and famine. Scenes are crafted to reflect the international dimension of the civil war and as with The Supreme Undercover the plot is soundly developed to fit in with the chronology of developing events on the battlefields.
While the plots for both works are fictional, Alily, who comes from an extended family who have served in the armed forces both of Nigeria and Biafra, strengthens his creativity as a storyteller with the deployment of a tremendous amount of default knowledge of military culture and the history of the war. Each book is provided with a glossary of terms, maps and a range of bibliographic resources.
The use of espionage as the central theme for a novel is of course a long-established one. But those which are centred on the Nigerian Civil War are not only few and far between, they have been written by non-Nigerians such as the Britons William Boyd and Jeremy Duns. Boyd’s Solo which was published in 2013 is actually an Ian Fleming estate-approved James Bond novel set in a fictional African country which is a thinly veiled reconstruction of Biafra, while Duns’ Free Agent, published four years earlier, provides the Nigerian Civil War as the backdrop of a Cold War era intrigue involving the intended defection of a diplomat at the Soviet embassy in Lagos where British Prime Minister Harold Wilson may be targeted for assassination during a state visit in March 1969.
The area of espionage and its role in the Nigerian Civil War has been under explored by Nigerian academics and journalists. But the reason for this may indeed be that there are no known feats of infiltration and counterintelligence performed by either side. One missed opportunity as recounted by P.J. Odu, a Nigerian naval officer who aligned himself to the Biafran state, was his regret in not leaving a spy at naval headquarters after most of the navy’s personnel of Igbo origin defected to Biafra. Some did choose to remain and served on the Federal side during the war. And if an effective mole had been in place his first task would have been to ensure that the landmark amphibious operation by the Nigerian Navy in Bonny in July 1967 which effectively paved the way of Biafra’s encirclement would have met with disaster.
Alily’s efforts provide a pathway towards popularising a genre which if developed among a pool of sufficiently talented and historically informed Nigerian writers, would not only serve as a reservoir of entertainment, but also as a tool of education. History, many Nigerians are ruefully aware, has for decades been a neglected part of the basic curriculum.
There could of course be pitfalls associated with the growth of this sort of literature. In Nigeria where the narratives and facts associated with the war are still vigorously and poisonously contested, the difference between fact and fiction can often be extremely blurred. Also, key facts that could serve as a point of unifying divergent views about the conduct of the war can often be left out. For instance, while Nightwings provides a compelling background of the dedication and willpower associated with effecting airlifts, it inevitably leaves out the fact that the war was prolonged by a “Keep Uli Open Campaign” by mercenaries on both sides of the conflict. The pact between highly paid foreign pilots on both sides ensured that the Federal air force did not knock out the landing strip.
That being said, Valentino Alily has produced two highly suspenseful and entertaining books, that reflect the dab hand of a creative writer and the ferocious attention to detail of a seasoned researcher.
They deserve the attention of a wide book reading audience.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2025).
I just ordered a paperbook copy of "The Supreme Undercover". I see Alily also has a book called "The Ojukwu Papers" that, judging by the scant Amazon description, seems to imagine what if the Biafrans had built some sort of nuclear weapon.
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