Frederick Forsyth (1938–2025): The master storyteller who changed my life

By Gbenro Adegbola

I never met Frederick Forsyth in person, but he unwittingly altered my life in ways he could never have imagined. This is my story—a tale of chance, Frederick Forsyth, a biography titled Emeka, and an unplanned journey into book publishing.

In 1982, Emeka Ojukwu returned from exile in Côte d’Ivoire after receiving a presidential pardon. Within weeks, a manuscript for a slim, fast-moving biography by Frederick Forsyth was also delivered to an Ibadan publisher. It was simply titled Emeka. That book would change my life in ways no one could’ve predicted.

I was a precocious (some say cocky) 24-year-old, fresh from NYSC, working as a TV news editor and anchor. We were pioneer staff at the station. It was innovative, bold, and fresh, and I was starting to become a well-known face. It was partly why Spectrum Books Ltd felt it needed to invite a number of us to a press conference heralding the publication of Emeka.

Truth be told, I didn’t like Ojukwu, the subject of the book. I felt he never paid for the war—not for the lives shattered, not for the souls wasted on both sides. I still consider the civil war a needless war. He got away too lightly in my view. I raised this with him years later when I came to know him. He seemed uninterested in discussing it.

I was also wary of Forsyth, who had lived in Biafra as a 29-year-old ‘reporter.’ He’d left the BBC in frustration and embedded himself (or was embedded by his handlers) in Biafra, with access to Ojukwu and other big wigs. He obviously genuinely admired Ojukwu and hardly could hide it. The book Emeka would later reflect that admiration and loyalty.

But he had other not-so-obvious loyalties as it came out. He was to reveal, many years later, his 20-year unpaid link with MI6. Some called him a reporter. Some, a propagandist. Others, a double agent. With some of these on my mind, I decided to be provocative at the book event.

I’d seen a phrase in a West Africa Magazine piece. It spoke of a “Nigerian crisis industry.” I liked it and filched it. I asked: Is Emeka not just a cynical investment in Nigeria’s big crisis industry? To my astonishment, the MD of Spectrum Books seemed impressed. I was quite perplexed. I’d aimed to make them feel guilty. Not only did the gambit fail, but I got validated instead.

We discussed at length around the subject after the event. They offered me a junior managerial job! Somehow I couldn’t take the offer then. But the MD was persistent. He made the offer several more times. Two years later, after completing an MA in UI that proved more tiring than I had imagined, I finally accepted. That’s how I entered publishing.

It turned fortuitous; our darling station had suffered some setback in the wake of the 1983 old Oyo State political crisis. Our entire staff set had been dealt political short shrift and rudely dispensed with. That’s how I ended up in UI PG School.

Emeka the book was part tribute, part exoneration; certainly not reckoning. Forsyth reportedly wrote it in just a few days. In truth, it was no more than an extended magazine feature, penned by an admiring fanboy! The writing was smooth and confident. The analysis? Extremely thin. Still, it sold. Very fast. Like piping hot Mr. Biggs meat pie!

An initial run of 250,000 copies was produced and shipped in from the UK, timed to ride the popular excitement of Ojukwu’s return. Then came an unexpected kerfuffle: the mighty Azikiwe threatened legal action. There was no love lost between Ojukwu and Zik, you see, from back when he lost faith in Biafra.

A passage in the book had discussed financial dealings between him and Ojukwu’s father that had gone awry. Zik said his recollection of the matter was different and threatened legal action unless Ojukwu could prove it. Ojukwu said his evidence had been destroyed in the war.

Wahala! Stalemate! The entire print run had to be trashed on account of those few offending paragraphs. There was no time to return abroad for a reprint; two weeks’ production and three weeks’ sailing time, plus port clearing protocols, was not going to work. Yet most Nigerian presses in 1982 couldn’t handle 250,000 copies quickly. With tight timelines, the job had to be farmed out to multiple small presses, each delivering a few thousand every few days. Somehow, it worked. The book sold out. Every single one. All 250,000 copies of it!

Emeka the book remains to date one of the more logistically and commercially remarkable Nigerian publishing successes of that era.

Managing to push my views on the book through at the company, we approached Forsyth to expand or revise the book. There was still a large appetite for it; in a broader, more reflective edition. He was evasive. Seemed uninterested. Finally declined. He didn’t even agree to a reprint of the original. His contract was a fee-based one-off, and he had delivered, he argued. Endless telex exchanges and phone calls for a new deal. No dice. He seemed to have moved on firmly.

It was all rather mystifying. I later developed a theory about the whole episode. I believe he needed to begin to put a distance between himself and the whole Biafra saga. Biafra had been the real catalyst of his writing. He put out The Making of an African Legend: The Biafra Story, a middling non-fiction work, to get by financially as a jobless Biafra returnee.

But Biafra had also traumatized him deeply. He needed to close its chapter. My suspicion is that Ojukwu’s conduct over the period of negotiating his presidential pardon was the final prodding that signaled to him it was time to begin to put Biafra behind him. In any case, he was now in a totally new career world, settled in a 26-bedroom Manor House!

Still, I will never forget that my journey into book publishing began with a single, pointed question at Spectrum’s Frederick Forsyth’s Emeka press event. Sometimes, a book can change more than a reader. It can change a life.

Forsyth no doubt believed in Ojukwu. In writing Emeka, he contributed to shielding him—not from the law (he was already pardoned)—but from the weight of his choices in the judgment of ordinary Nigerians. Emeka wasn’t history. It was a gesture of loyalty and admiration. But beyond his fawning devotion to Ojukwu, Forsyth was undoubtedly a giant in modern fiction writing. He virtually singlehandedly created the modern political thriller.

He was a saturation reporter and researcher, as seen in the fictional but authentic details and high-stakes intrigues he created in prose. He was a true master of suspense. He used that to create super thrillers that sold in combined total more than 75 million copies!

One after the other, he rolled out blockbusting thriller novels like The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The Devil’s Alternative, and The Fourth Protocol. Tight plots, super realism, sparse prose, and suspenseful geopolitical webs were his storytelling hallmarks. Not bad for a broke Biafra returnee who started writing to earn small change.

For all my misgivings, Forsyth was a courageous soul. He went where others wouldn’t. He threw himself into a cause he seemed to believe in. He lived through air raids and artillery battles in Biafra. It’s said if one truly appreciates the full context of a man’s actions and choices, if one understood the pressures and traumas that drive him, one might find one’s anger at them melting away. This was a theme that Forsyth pursued in his Cold War-era masterpiece, The Odessa File. He finely distilled it in his characteristic sparse prose: “To understand everything is to forgive everything.” How profoundly true!

Sir Frederick died at 86. He lived a full and fulfilling life. It’s now time for him to take a deserved rest. The platform of your book outing gave me my career-defining job. Thank you so much, Sir.

Rest well, Sir Freddy. “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

*Adegbola is CEO First Veritas Educational Content Delivery Ltd.