by Helen Chukwuma
The town of Aburi in Ghana holds great significance for Biafrans because a number of Biafrans lived there during the war. The town hosted the two leaders of Nigeria and Biafra at a peace conference in 1967. The Aburi Accord held out a hope of cessation of hostilities, but it did not hold and the civil war broke out. Chief Philip C. Asiodu, a renowned administrator and technocrat asserted in an interview on April 11, 2012 that the breach of the Aburi Accord “is at the root of the crisis of structure and federalism in the country today.” Ghana yet again is playing host to a discussion of this war event 48 years after. Please accept our gratitude and appreciation.[1]
One of the main lessons to be taken from the Biafran war are how two parameters – arms humanitarianism and welfare humanitarianism – are in conflict. Here I define humanitarianism as philanthropy, a project to eliminate human pain and suffering, to provide help for human beings in need. Humanitarianism operates therefore on the realm of humanity outside of supernatural intervention, leaving humanity to follow its own ways. This, however, points back to the human enigma of building up peoples and civilizations and then tearing them down. The devastation then calls for foreign aid, which inevitably comes with a price.
Why is it worthwhile rehearsing the antecedents again is to bring to the fore the lessons of Biafra war of survival? African nations and peoples must learn from this to avoid its repetition in their nations. What later happened in Rwanda and the Sudan is because “Biafra is a lesson unlearned”. African leaders allow open gateway to their nations’ pillage, draw down strife to their people and turn around and plead for humanitarian aid. Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe stated that the Nigerian genocide is “the foundational genocide” in Africa, replicated in other countries. The fire that gutted our neighbor’s house and we did nothing, spread and consumed us all.
We shall now go back to the antecedents of humanitarianism in Biafra. In the beginning were the Igbo, the Effiks, Ibibios and the Ijaws, who lived in delicate harmony from the amalgamation of the Southern and Northern protectorates in 1914 and continued in the regionalization of the Federal Republic of Nigeria just before independence in 1960. The eastern region, later to secede as the Republic of Biafra, was one of the four regions that made up the Nigerian nation. This regional formation was fraught with distrust based on disparities of ethnicity, culture, religion and development, attributable to the colonialists who, in 1848, carved out Africa on a broad sheet of paper with no other motive than monopolistic gain. The colonies were therefore the platform of sustainability of the colonial empires. The British, who gained Nigeria, a place as foreign to them as planet Jupiter is to Earth, had to use force and wiles to govern. From the slave trade to the colonial era, Nigeria had no say in the matters of governance or, indeed, ownership and disbursement of their natural resources.
Prior to 1966, Nigeria had tried to build itself into a nation and only partially succeeded before the center caved in and things fell apart. One can argue that Nigeria was built on a shaky foundation, making the country to turn to Britain and other nations for solutions. Nigerian statehood is affected by mitigating factors of ethnicity, natural resources, governance and unequal development.
There are 250 nationalities in Nigeria, if a nation is defined as people of a common history, language and ancestry occupying a space of their own. Such attributes cannot be given up easily, even under military conquest, and language embeds culture, norms and belief systems. In Things Fall Apart, when the rhetorical question is asked: “Does the white man understand our custom about land?” it is answered: “How can he when he does not even speak our tongue?” However, with amalgamation of these different ethnicities into one national entity called Nigeria, English became the official language of communication, foisting “linguistic colonialism,” to borrow Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s terminology.
Nigeria’s natural resources have proved to be a blessing and a bane to national development. The world’s market dependency on crude oil and gas drastically changed the economic dynamics of the country in favor of the eastern region, where these are found, meaning that the eastern region was not allowed to secede. The Nigerian government blocked the region’s access to major economic pathways during the war, thus causing a great hemorrhage to the region’s survival.
The Igbo, the primary inhabitants of Biafra, are categorized as acephalous society (Ajayi and Crowther) with scattered towns, clans and lineages. They were not constituted into any kingdom or empire with a unified governance of kings. Thus the saying, “Igbo enwe eze” – the Igbo have no kings – symbolizes the hardcore republicanism and individualism that mark the Igbo character, different from the kingdoms of the Yoruba of western Nigeria, the Benin kingdom of the Midwest and the Fulani and Bornu kingdoms of northern Nigeria. The Igbo had no uniform governance that the colonialists could build on, making Igbo governance more tasking.
Educational pursuits, entrepreneurial skills and commercial enterprises made the Igbo the most travelled people in Nigeria. They made homes in every part of Nigeria, exposing them as easy prey to the Nigerian pogrom and genocide of the 1950s and 60s. The south consequently showed a faster pace of development than the north. The Igbo have over the years been singled out in the northern part of the country for attacks in killing and pillage. This tendency bred a deep sense of insecurity and animosity, which is unhealthy in the polity. Suspicion between the Hausa in the north and Igbo was rife and the leaders did not address this as a threat to national unity. The British entrenchment of northern ruler-ship in Nigeria tilted the power structure to the breaking point. The pogrom against the Igbo between 1966 and 1967 necessitated the Igbo people’s breakaway from the federation; 3.1 million Igbo, one quarter of Nigeria’s population, died between 1966 and 1970 (Ekwe-Ekwe).
Chimamanda Adichie, in her researched novel Half of a Yellow Sun, often brings up the theme of “The world was silent when we died” and links this silence to the alignment of world powers and their ideologies and spheres of influence. One of her characters argues, “Britain inspired this silence. The arms and advice that Britain gave Nigeria shaped other countries.” The war took on an ideological divide of western capitalism and Russian socialism. The West supported Nigeria in arms and aid, and Biafra was left in the abandoned shore of arms humanitarianism and limited mercenary trade. “Communist China denounced the Anglo-American-Soviet imperialism, but did little to support Biafra. The French sold some arms to Biafra but did not give the recognition that Biafra most needed. And many black African countries feared that an independent Biafra would trigger other secessions and so supported Nigeria.”
What surfaced in Biafra were two forms of humanitarianism – arms humanitarianism and welfare humanitarianism – that were both illustrative of global politics at the time. The Cold War forced many countries to take sides in the Biafran war, with external actors forcing something to happen and then leaving when conflict erupted, further complicating the domestic politics. Additionally, how gender played out here is indicative of the contradictions of fighter and victim roles, with people becoming pawns who continued to rely on donors of both arms and welfare to survive.
Arms Humanitarianism
It may be worthwhile to interrogate the real objective behind the sale and provision of heavy arms and ammunition to nationals to fight themselves. It was apparently both an economic and political venture for the donor countries, but certainly obvious that neither the Nigerian nor the Biafran governments could afford the huge cost of military hardware. Such military dependency weakened the nation’s sovereignty and economic base. Ekwe-Ekwe cites Gary Busch, who writes that “Africans pay for the bullets used to kill them” (Afrohistoroma website, 16th May, 2013). The result of these transactions looms into focus after the war ends. This situation drives the cycle of poverty, political instability, restiveness, war, suffering, pain and death and humanitarian intervention. The hazardous venture of arms supply to Biafra is best imagined. I did fly in one of these arms supply planes to Biafra. We took off from Lisbon in the dead of the night with a tall ladder as access to the plane. The plane, the Biafran Grey Ghost, stopped over in Guinea-Bissau to re-fuel.
Welfare Humanitarianism
The world broke its silence when Biafran men were dying at the war fronts, children and the elderly were dying of hunger, malnutrition and disease, and fleeing populations were displaced in concentric circles of refugees all within the enclave of war zones. With pictures of this human tragedy circulating worldwide, church and secular organizations rushed to the rescue. Of particular mention are Caritas, the World Council of Churches, Joint Church Aid and the Red Cross. Due acknowledgement and appreciation must be given to these bodies for contributing to Biafra’s survival. Some of these agencies are purely humanitarian with no underlying diplomacy. But indeed some humanitarian agencies are state-funded. The issues that emanate from the Biafran war are: why do you kill, maim, displace, impoverish only to then turn around and try to make amends? Can a broken pot be ever whole again? Can humanitarianism be better considered from a preventive than a restorative viewpoint? Can African nations especially work toward shielding themselves from dependencies of sorts? Can African nations break this stigmatic paradox of poverty and exploitation internal and external in the midst of such great enabling natural sources of wealth? There is need to break this one-sidedness of donation and beggarliness. In the Igbo ethos, charity is never completely one-sided; there is always some reciprocity even at the level of tokenism.
Gender Roles
One of the off-shoots of the Biafran war situation is the gender roles it brought to the fore. Women are often thought of as passive and docile with zero input in governance. Biafran women do not fit into this mold. They are docile and passive when there is peace and normalcy in the home and public sphere; however, they offer strong interventions during civil strife and warfare. When town wars and battles become extreme, women usher in peace, and men respect, honor and welcome their intervention. Burning zeal for community welfare drove the women to mount a powerful internal humanitarian intervention during the Biafran war. The women organized themselves into a food directorate. They cooked for the soldiers in the various war fronts and braved the harsh conditions. They farmed the crops in the available land and used the crops for the troops and their families. They went behind enemy lines to trade and buy scarce commodities as salt and medications. This dangerous venture is called “Affia attack,” or attack trade. (See also Nwapa’s Never Again and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.) The women’s efforts were the last resistance to be broken down with the Nigerians’ takeover of territory. When, fortuitously, humanitarian aid arrived, the women were part of the organized agencies of distribution. I served in that capacity at Uzuakoli before the town was evacuated.
The peak of the humanitarian venture in this hazardous war nation were the evacuations. Biafran future was assured by the evacuation of children who were on the brink of imminent death. Gabon and Ivory Coast remain the great receiving nations of Biafran destitutes and refugees.
We start and end with appreciation to humanitarian intervention. We must not, however, overlook the great contributions of the Church missions and their prelates who were on the ground. The church premise served as safe havens for refugees but for some time only. Rev. Fathers, Pastors and ardent Christians and non-Christians besides, people who identified with human suffering and aided accordingly. Biafra will not forget.
The final takeaway from this short paper is a prayer and a wish encapsulated in the title of Flora Nwapa’s novel Never Again. Never again will the events of pogrom and war be repeated in our beloved country Nigeria, and may the lesson of Biafra guide African nations especially and the world at large.
[1] An earlier version of this post was presented at the workshop on “Rethinking the Origins of Humanitarian Action in Africa: Religion, Secularism, and the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970),” held at Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana-Legon, October 2015.