May 08 2020 | Radio Biafra
Remembering The Young Lad – Daniel Lawrence
Daniel Lawrence was born a mulatto boy to a British Woman from Liverpool, at the outbreak of the war he enrolled into the Biafran Army and he was known as ‘Pampas’ by his team mates in the Army. Daniel Lawrence’s father is a Biafran man from Ikom in Ogoja land of Biafra who was a Sailor while he met his British wife. Daniel Lawrence was a “lone child” because his mother died of Malaria during her first visit to Nigeria.
Daniel Lawrence’s father later died passed-on in a shipwreck. As an orphan he lived in Onitsha with his paternal uncle and worked as a young driver in his uncle’s business. As fate would have it, during the time the war broke out, the young and very handsome Daniel Lawrence alias (Pampas), quickly volunteered to serve in the Biafran Army at barely seventeen [17] years of age. He was soon fighting as a tank driver in a Panhard armoured car captured from the Nigerian government Federal troops at Onitsha.
Daniel Lawrence most memorable contribution to the Biafra war was aboard another more formidable captured armoured fighting vehicle, a Saladin which he drove for nearly eighteen [18] months. Pampas’ Saladin with Sasa Nwoke as the tank gunner, was a nightmare to the enemy – the Nigerian Federal troops and served as a force multiplier for the Biafran infantry by providing fire support. With Sasa Nwoke, Pampas’ Saladin knocked out more than ten [10] assorted Nigerian Federal troops tanks made up of Saladins, Panhards, Saracens and Ferrets in different sectors of the war.
He Daniel Lawrence field-craft as a tank driver complimented Sasa’s gunnery skills such that the Biafran Military high command rewarded them with the highest military honour for bravery when their divisional commander Brig. Ogbugo Kanu presented them with the Biafra-Cross. Sadly, shortly after that he lost his tank in a freak accident and evacuated it clutching his AK-47 rifle. The people of Biafra happiness are that he survived the war.
Come 30th May, 2020. The Indigenous people of Biafra will remember your frantic efforts during the war of genocide to liberate them from being extincted by Jack Yakubu Gown’s war of Biafra extermination.
Bravo to your memory.
Published by:
Chibuike John Nebeokike
For: Radio Biafra Media
