The Republic of Biafra lasted for less than three years, but the war over its secession would contort Nigeria for decades to come. Samuel Fury Childs Daly examines the history of the Nigerian Civil War and its aftermath from an uncommon vantage point – the courtroom. Wartime Biafra was glutted with firearms, wracked by famine, and administered by a government that buckled under the weight of the conflict. In these dangerous conditions, many people survived by engaging in fraud, extortion, and armed violence. When the fighting ended in 1970, these survival tactics endured, even though Biafra itself disappeared from the map. Based on research using an original archive of legal records and oral histories, Daly catalogues how people navigated conditions of extreme hardship on the war front, and shows how the conditions of the Nigerian Civil War paved the way for the country's long experience of crime that was to follow.

A fearless act of journalism in 1960s Nigeria and the true story behind the international bestselling novel The Dogs of War. The Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s was one of the first occasions when Western consciences were awakened and deeply affronted by the level of suffering and the scale of atrocity being played out in the African continent. This was thanks not just to advances in communication technology but to the courage and journalistic skills of foreign correspondents like Frederick Forsyth, who had already earned an enviable reputation for tenacity and accuracy working for Reuters and the BBC. In The Biafra Story, Forsyth reveals the depth of the British Government’s active involvement in the conflict—information which many in power would have preferred to remain secret. General Gowon’s genocide of the Biafran people was facilitated by a ready supply of British arms and advice. Still tragically relevant in its depiction of global affairs, this powerful book also launched Frederick Forsyth to literary stardom by providing him with the background material for The Dogs of War. The dramatic events and shocking political exposures, all delivered with Forsyth’s bold and perceptive style, makes The Biafra Story a compelling lesson in courage.

In 1966, several waves of rioting in northern Nigeria culminated in the brutal massacre of thousands of easterners by their northern Nigerian counterparts. Sensing that their safety could no longer be guaranteed, the easterners fled to the eastern region and established an independent nation called Biafra. Refusing to accept her sovereignty, Nigeria waged a thirty-month war against Biafra, targeting air assaults at civilian locations, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of children, women, and the elderly. Nigeria used land and sea blockade to prevent relief food from reaching hungry masses in Biafra and thousands of children died from a form of malnutrition called kwashiorkor. At the end of it all in 1970, two million people had perished.

From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart—a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil war For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There Was a Country is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.

The Politics of Biafra is a reflection on the importance of history in addressing present realities and the future co-existence of Nigeria's multi ethnic society. It analyzes the ideological struggles and conflict in Biafra during the war with Nigeria from 1967-1970, the impact of the war and the relevance of those struggles to the current agitations for a new state of Biafra. In this historical and analytical work, the author observes that nearly fifty years after the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war in 1970, Nigeria remains confronted with the Biafra dilemma. No matter its pretensions, Nigeria will at some point have to reform its present pseudo federal arrangement to create a more inclusive, equitable and proper federal structure. If not, the country will continue to face epileptic developmental thrusts, militancy in the Niger Delta and a ruinous intensifying clamor for self-determination by disadvantaged ethnic groups, especially the Igbo. Appendix - Three part essay by Professor Chukwuma Soludo.

A global history of 'Biafra', providing a new explanation for the ascendance of humanitarianism in a postcolonial world.

This text demonstrates that the Biafran War, 1967-1970, was the second phase of the Igbo genocide, following the initial massacre of 100,000 Igbo across the principal towns and cities of northern Nigeria. It shows how the slaughter was sanctioned and organised by the State, with its leading institutions - the military, police, religious, media and academia - implicated therein.

21 Female Participation in War and the Implication of Nationalism: The Postcolonial Disconnection in Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra -- Select Bibliography -- Index

Some were paid. Some felt compelled by a duty to God. Some volunteered. Some died doing it. All flew on rickety old aircraft into a nighttime, wartime patch of African forest called Biafra. Far Away in the Sky gives the personal account of one of them, a young American volunteer who joined the largest international humanitarian relief airlift ever attempted. In 1968 millions of people, mostly children, were starving due to a military blockade of Biafra, the former Eastern Region of Nigeria. The World Council of Churches and Caritas International mounted a relief airlift. Flying at night to avoid Nigerian Migs, without radar or any modern navigational aids, landing amid bombs on a stretch of road in the rain forest, the old planes delivered thousands of tons of food and medicines. UNICEF recruited six former United States Peace Corps Volunteers, including the author, to help unload the planes. The former volunteers had served in Nigeria and were familiar with the area and the people. To David Koren the people of Biafra, his former students and fellow teachers, constituted his motive for joining the airlift. More than just a memoir of events, Far Away in the Sky promotes a discussion of international aid, of the balance between the grace of giving and the dignity of receiving aid, and the policies of governments toward intervention or non-intervention in humanitarian disasters. How do the lessons of Biafra apply to modern eruptions like Rwanda, Darfur, Libya, Syria and those yet to come? .