There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

Yesterday evening while eating dinner and watching the news I was unable to finish eating upon seeing the faces of starving children, babies, men, and women in Biafra. I felt nauseated because of having so much when these people were in obvious pain and in dire need of food. I cannot bear to see anyone in need when I have something to share. Though it is not possible for me to go to Biafra at this time, I felt the least I could do was write to you and express my concern for these people and ask that the U. S. and other concerned governments and the United Nations press for a cease fire. I am sending a check to the World Church Service today to help the starving Biafrans.

Source: “BIAFRA-NIGERIA 1967–1969 POLITICAL AFFAIRS,” Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, A UPA Collection from LexisNexis.

15. The signatories to the declaration were the leaders of fifteen organizations at the vanguard of American organized labor, women’s groups, and the civil rights movements. The list now reads like a who’s who of African American civil rights history, with names such as: Roy Wilkins, executive director, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Dorothy Height, president, National Council of Negro Women; and James Farmer, chairman, National Advisory Board, Congress of Racial Equality. Other leaders who signed the document included: A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and vice president of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations; and Bayard Rustin, executive director, A. Philip Randolph Institute.

Sources: The Crisis Magazine 75, no. 8 (October 1968), p. 291. This is the official publication of the NAACP. See also: Baum, American Jewish Congress, “Memorandum,” December 27, 1968; 1968 Annual Report, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

16. Ibid.

17. Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, “Why the Soviets Chose Sides,” Africa Report (February 1968), p. 4. Also: Interviews with Nigerian and Biafran former military officers.

18.

The Soviets have broadened their technical assistance and trade programs, and have announced plans to erect a $120 million steel mill and, if Gowon is agreeable, intend to expand their embassy staff and open consulates in other Nigerian towns to put them in closer contact with labor and student groups.

Source: “Britain: Loss of Touch?” Time, March, 29, 1969.

19. Ibid. Robert Guest, in The Shackled Continent: Power, Corruption, and African Lives (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004), writes:

Visitors to the Ajaokuta steel plant in Nigeria are surprised to see goats grazing among the gantries and children playing by the silent rolling mills. Nigeria flushed away a total of $8 billion trying to build a steel industry at Ajaokuta and elsewhere [which] operated fitfully, at a loss, and usually at a small fraction of capacity when the present government came on board.

See also: The Economist 354, iss. 8152–55; Daniel Jordan Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Colin Nicholls, et al., Corruption and Misuse of Public Office (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Yingqi Wei and Balasubramanyam, V. N., eds., Foreign Direct Investment: Six Country Case Studies, New Horizons in International Business Series (Northampton, Mass: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004); Africa Confidential 42–43 (2001); Mary Dowell-Jones, Contextualizing the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Assessing the Economic Deficit (Herndon, Va.: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers/Brill, 2004).

20.

The [Nigerian] House of Representatives asked the Federal Government to investigate the alleged “massive” looting of equipment at the Ajoakuta Steel Company Limited and the National Iron-Ore Mining Company, Itakpe, and bring the perpetrators to book. The House, in a resolution in Abuja, observed that the Ajaokuta steel plant had cost Nigerian tax payers over $4.6bn without producing one sheet of steel in its many years of existence.

Source: John Ameh, “Reps move to halt looting of Ajaokuta Steel Company equipment,” Punch, October 30, 2009.

21. Achebe, “Chinua Achebe on Biafra,” Transition.

22. On this point, the American Jewish Congress goes even further:

The crazy-quilt grouping of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the UAR (Egyptian pilots fly most of the MIG’s for the Nigerian Air Force), on one side, and France, China and Portugal on the other (Portugal allows the use of the island of Sao Tome for relief flights) makes clear, at least, the unmitigated and cynical pursuit of selfish interes

ts on the part of the Great Powers, while hundreds of thousands of Africans die each month.

Source: Baum, American Jewish Congress, “Memorandum,” December 27, 1968.

The tragedy is also captured succinctly here by the American scholar Stanley Diamond:

Commentators of such divergent views as Richard Sklar and Auberon Waugh have pointed out [that] it is unlikely that the war would have been declared or, if declared, that it would have followed its tragic course, had the interests of the Big Powers not been decisive. In so critical an area as Nigeria, which attained formal independence as recently as 1960, imperial and internal dynamics can hardly be divorced from each other.

Source: Diamond, Reply, New York Review of Books.

The Writers and Intellectuals

1. The following passage from Kurt Vonnegut highlights his keen sense of perception and irony and captures, ultimately, the cruel absurdity of war:

The young general [Ojukwu] was boisterous, wry, swashbuckling—high as a kite on incredibly awful news from the fronts. Why did he come to see us? Here is my guess: He couldn’t tell his own people how bad things were, and he had to tell somebody. We were the only foreigners around.

He talked for three hours. The Nigerians had broken through everywhere. They were fanning out fast, slicing the Biafran dot into dozens of littler ones. Inside some of these littler dots, hiding in the bush, were tens of thousands of Biafrans who had not eaten anything for two weeks and more.

What had become of the brave Biafran soldiers? They were woozy with hunger. They were palsied by shell shock. They had left their holes. They were wandering.

Source: Kurt Vonnegut, “Biafra: A People Betrayed,” Wampeters Foma & Granfalloons (New York: Delacorte Press, 1979).

2. Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Chinua Achebe, p. 143.