Nation states or self-determination: The case for Biafra [size=14pt][/size]

by Hugh McCullum

The story of Biafra is also a story of the times: a story of church leaders who believed the church belonged in the midst of God’s world; a story of a peoples’ right to self-determination; a story of tribalism, colonialism and the influence of first world development in the third world.
Biafra’s breakaway from Nigeria on May 30, 1967 was a crushing, if inevitable, blow to Africa’s most populous country and perhaps an even greater blow to the policies of British neo-colonialism. It was the beginning of a seemingly endless round of rebellion, bloody coups, military dictatorships, appalling corruption and ethnic and religious strife. From its independence from Britain on Oct. 1, 1960, loudly hailed from within and without as a model for Africa of a happy and harmonious state, Nigeria became a state of chaos caused by colonial attempts to forcibly merge three distinct regions into one federal state.

Nigeria’s chaos[/size]
Nigeria sprawls over 993,774 sq km with an estimated 125 million people of enormous ethnic diversity. In the southwest are the Yoruba with a long history of developed kingdoms. In the southeastern region, which would become Biafra, lived a variety of peoples, the most prominent being the Ibo, or Igbo as they are known today. The North proper was the land of the Hausa, Kanuri and the Fulani who are Muslims.
The easterners quickly assimilated with the Yorubas and into British forms of development while the North, opposed to modernization, was open territory for the adaptable and resourceful Ibos who ran the trains, the civil service and small businesses. By 1966, an estimated 1,300,000 Ibos were living in the Northern Region and another 500,000 lived in the West. Ibos really made Nigeria run fairly efficiently in the early days of independence but, being Christian and modern, they were segregated from the northern Muslims.
Nigeria was exceptionally rich in natural resources. Immensely valuable oil and natural gas resources were discovered, mostly in the Eastern Region.
National government and administration had been largely in the hands of the colonial power, Britain. Unlike other parts of Africa, Nigeria did not fight a unified liberation struggle but has been struggling for the last 44 years for its unity. Independence brought intense rivalries and a mounting volume of corruption and nepotism. The year 1966 was a disaster for the Ibo who occupied much of the civil service posts and a commanding position in commerce. Scathingly referred to in the Muslim north as the “black Jews of Africa”, although they were about 90 percent Christian, as many as 40-50,000 were slaughtered in pogroms in 1966 and some 2 million fled for their lives back to their Eastern Region homeland, after their property and homes were destroyed. A huge refugee crisis faced the nation. It was ironic because Easterners had always been the strongest supporters of national unity.

The blockade of Biafra and starvation[size=12pt]
Although Ojukwu was military governor in the Eastern Region and a Sandhurst classmate of Gowon’s, relations between the East and the Central government deteriorated until meetings were no longer possible and Eastern leaders were pressing for secession. On May 30, 1966 Eastern Nigeria proclaimed itself the independent state of Biafra and declared a state of emergency. The central government imposed a naval blockade and fighting began between the east and the rest of Nigeria. After some initial victories Biafra, which started with a population of 12 million, two-thirds of them Ibos, lost all its cities including the oil centre of Port Harcourt and the capital, Enugu. Soon 5 million people were squeezed into a tiny oval-shaped enclave of 2,000 sq km around the market town of Umuahia. Gowon boasted that war would be over in two weeks.

The war in fact turned into a bloody and bitter one. It was a low tech struggle where Biafran soldiers were chronically short of supplies, going into major battles with 10 bullets each. The Nigerians, heavily armed by Britain and Russia, odd allies in that Cold War period, withheld food supplies openly stating that food was a legitimate weapon of war. As the Biafrans were pushed back from the best agricultural land into their own barren heartland, and as the crops and stores fell into the hands of the Nigerian soldiers starvation and famine appeared, flapping their wings like the vultures that hovered over the feeding centres and refugee camps. Casualties were huge among the civilians. Yet somehow Biafran morale remained high despite the fact that their military campaign had gone irretrievably wrong.
For the first time in history and just by accident, the mass media zeroed in on an African humanitarian disaster. New technology and a new generation of young, bright, media-savvy church people and NGOs made this possible. As happened again in Rwanda thirty-five years later, it was all too often and easily dismissed as a consequence of tribalism. White governments in Britain, America and Canada, as well as Europe, could not comprehend. “There are forces let loose in Biafra, wrote the London Sunday Times Magazine, one of the papers most sympathetic to the Biafran cause, “that white men cannot understand.”
“For the first time in history and just by accident, the mass media zeroed in on an African humanitarian disaster. New technology and a new generation of young, bright, media-savvy church people and NGOs made this possible.”

But the large European and British oil companies with billions of dollars of investment in Nigerian-Biafran oil could understand it all too well. Companies like Gulf, Mobil, Texaco and Standard, and participants like Britain, Holland, France and Italy knew that 75 percent of Nigeria’s oil was in the secessionist state. Some of them began to threaten Gowon’s government that they could get a better deal with Biafra. Nigeria was furious but also frightened. Who was going to get the oil revenues? In the complex diplomatic negotiations, the posture of the oil companies would be decisive in determining who would eat and who would starve, who would get guns from racist Rhodesia and communist USSR and oil-hungry France and who would be defenseless. Nigeria had to prove it was still the powerhouse of Africa, “the working democracy with a sound economy, a free press and a moderate pro-Western government” that Time magazine once described it as.
Could Biafra, with only four African countries recognizing it officially, display “effective sovereignty”? It was the same size as some of the Gulf states, just a platform for oilrigs. But Lagos did begin to win its war of starvation, and secession was very costly for the oil companies. The British government was irrevocably committed to federal Nigeria and all the pipelines and storage facilities were home again in federal territory when Port Harcourt fell.
But Biafra couldn’t simply give up. It wasn’t just the stubborn arrogance of the Ibos, nor the megalomaniac bravado of Ojukwu, there was that genuine fear on the part of all Easterners that the massacres of 1966 would resume. Surrender under the military’s new Federal structure would mean accepting the division of Biafra into three parts – with the Ibos crowded into a single section containing almost no oil at all. After the massacres of the North and the atrocities of the war, the Ibos saw it as the end of their people.

Making peace, feeding the starving[/size]
During all this time, the Presbyterian Church, because of its long connection with the people on both sides of the war played a unique role in trying to bring humanitarian aid to the suffering and a healing ministry to the whole desperate situation. In 1969, Johnson outlined three lines of activity for the church:
• seek to maintain fellowship and support to our Christian brethren and particularly our fellow Presbyterians on both sides;
• engage in a vigorous role in relief work on both sides; and
• try to promote a peaceful settlement by maintaining contact and conversation on both sides with colleagues who are high in government responsibilities.
“Look, for a long time, I was pretty much a one-Nigerian man,” he told The Globe and Mail’s Betty Lee in a 1968 interview. “Now I believe that if Lagos insists on trying to impose a military solution on the Biafrans, they’ll end up with nothing but a mass graveyard and concentration camps. There will be no such thing as what the British want – a quick kill. The Biafrans are fighting a peoples’ war.”
Lee questioned Johnson on his role as a propagandist.
“That isn’t true. About the only public relations was that which got around the world by word of mouth and by the mass media telling the world about the horrors being perpetrated against civilians. I helped a few journalists get into Biafra but they told their own story, not mine. The real story of Biafra was told to Canadians by David MacDonald and Andrew Brewin, both MPs. We couldn’t get humanitarian relief funds from the government so we went out and raised the money ourselves. I suppose that could be called ‘deliberate public relations’ but none of the journalists or politicians or church people who went to Biafra exaggerated the situation. I checked it out time and again with responsible doctors who had been in Eastern Nigeria for years and there’s no doubt that 6,000 people – mainly children and women – were dying daily during the summer.”
Stephen Lewis, who is now waging a high-profile struggle to stem Africa’s HIV/Aids pandemic, also went to Biafra and described the situation in 1968: “The Canadian people and the churches were magnificent in their concern over Biafra. The government was anti-human.”

Three meals a week[size=12pt]
In 1969 this reporter jumped, literally, from the cargo bays of a DC-6 and was hustled into a dugout in the rich red earth of Biafra for formal customs and immigration procedures. Bombs landed nearby, the Russian Ilyushin bomber, flown by Egyptians for the Nigerian federal forces and known to all as “The Intruder” was trying to bomb the airlift. With our passports duly stamped, we were hustled into the black African night for an immediate meeting with Biafran officials and a briefing; then to an abandoned plantation house where the moon shone through a bullet-holed roof. Early the next morning we awoke to the low drone of wailing children and the all-pervasive smell of death. It never goes away. It stays strong in the memory.
In April 1994, it was the same story as the RCAF Hercules flying between Nairobi and Kigali during the Rwanda genocide hugs the treetops to avoid radar and heat-seeking missiles. Suddenly it is on the ground, engines roaring, a tense loadmaster says ‘out you go we’re off the ground in 10 minutes’. Two journalists run for the bombed out French-built terminal and are waved to an APC (Armoured Personnel Carrier) into which we fall, literally, into the arms of a charming Ghanian brigadier wearing a blue helmet, Brigadier Henry Anidoho. As the APC pushed through the corpse-littered streets of the city, the knot of anxiety grows and the sense of chaos almost overwhelms the stench of death. There is no sign of the world community here - except these few brave blue helmets on whom, with Rwanda, the world has turned its back. Just as it did in Biafra.
“There is no sign of the world community here - except these few brave blue helmets on whom, with Rwanda, the world has turned its back. Just as it did in Biafra.”
Years earlier in Biafra it was in a village called Atani, a market which the day before had been strafed by the Russian MiG fighter jets, flown by Egyptians for the Nigerian air force. Cannon shells had burst in the middle of the market. A line of bullets traced their way down the middle of thatched huts. Bodies still lay by the side of dirt tracks. It was no military installation. The feeding station and sick bay run by the World Council of Churches was a long, low shed where 300 children mostly inert, lay on the earth floor on straw mats. Their hair was red, their bellies swollen; their skin scaly and limbs like bent twigs. Eyes stared blankly from hollow sockets. The low moaning sound that had greeted the first morning was louder. The children were in constant pain. They were being fed, when it was available, high protein food and milk, a few drops of fish oil flown in on the Jesus Christ Airline and Canairelief. These were the innocents. They had made no war, their bodies were ravaged by starvation and their parents were worse. Refugees for two or three years, they were getting three meals a week and they were dying, in the bush under thatch quietly by the side of road. There was not an animal to be seen, they had long ago been eaten. Lizards were a protein treat. Wander off the roads and into the bush almost anywhere in Biafra and the sight of starving people soon became one of the most harrowing sights visitors would see.
The churches were accused of manufacturing these horrendous images to raise money to keep Ojukwu in power. The brutal fact, Johnson told me, was that these and millions more children were innocent victims of an international power play for political influence in Africa and a struggle for control of one of the world’s great oil reserves.
The courage of the pilots, the Biafran relief workers who could unload a Super Constellation’s 15 tons of aid in 20 minutes in the darkness, and the missionaries and medical staff who were inside Biafra, was incredible.

In the end international politics and commerce won out. Biafra collapsed[size=14pt][/size].