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During the Nigeria-Biafra War, the Nigerian government employed shooting and economic blockade as powerful instruments of uniting the country and defending its territorial integrity. Starvation as a potent weapon was of a magnitude that arguably made it the worst catastrophe since the Second World War. The tension was between sovereignty and human rights. Public opinion in Canada strongly favored humanitarian support for Biafra, but the Canadian government argued that humanitarian aid for Biafra might be offensive to the Nigerian government. This article examines the attitude of Pierre Trudeau to the Biafran humanitarian crisis. It argues that Trudeau’s analogical arguments did not represent the true situation of the war. Although Trudeau’s reliance on information from the Commonwealth secretariat affected his understanding of the crisis, his policies were largely influenced by domestic political issues, particularly the Quebec separatist movement. The paper concludes that Canada’s foreign policy reviews that coincided with the Nigeria–Biafra War informed Trudeau’s kneejerk response to the Biafran humanitarian crisis.

The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967–1970, had significant international dimensions. On 7 May 1969, eleven employees of the Italian-run AGIP oil company were killed at Kwale while eighteen others were held...

This roundtable took place on 16 January 2020, at the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in Biafra. It brought together Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps, Lasse Heerten, Arua Oko Omaka and Kevin O’Sullivan. The roundtable was organised and chaired by Bertrand Taithe, University of Manchester.

Radio, as a modern communication technology, has played a revolutionary role in propaganda wars. Governments and revolutionaries find it indispensable because of its advantage in disseminating messages quickly across national borders. The Biafran government saw the enormous propaganda potential of radio and tactically exploited it. Despite this strategic role, scholars have failed to represent Radio Biafra as an important arm of the Biafran struggle for self-determination. Using archival documents, newspaper articles, and oral interviews, this article explores the role of Radio Biafra in the Nigeria–Biafra War. It argues that Radio Biafra not only sustained the support and loyalty of Biafrans but also created a community spirit that bolstered Biafrans’ confidence in the war.

The Nigerian Government's declaration of 'no victor, no vanquished' after the capitulation of Biafra on 12 January 1970, was applauded as the right step towards reconciliation and transition from war to peace. Despite this declaration and assurance of amnesty, the Nigerian Government and its soldiers still engaged in acts that amounted to retributive justice. They starved and killed innocent Biafran civilians, looted their property and raped their women. Surprisingly, these postwar atrocities committed against former Biafrans have been largely ignored in the historiography of the Nigeria-Biafra War. This paper seeks to fill the gap in the war literature by interrogating Nigerian Government's attitude towards the postwar humanitarian crisis and crimes against humanity in former Biafra. The paper argues that former Biafrans were not fully reintegrated into the Nigerian society and that the Nigerian Government deliberately neglected them to die in large numbers, thereby making it difficult for the war victims to recover from the hardships of the conflict.

Minority groups’ agitation for justice and fair representation in Nigerian politics has been a recurring theme in political discourses. Colonial administrative policies laid the foundation for ethnic rivalry and domination by lumping together diverse ethnic minorities with extremely incongruent majority groups in a federation. The unwieldy structure of the colonially designed federation made it difficult for minority groups to express their full political rights and assume significant leadership positions in the national politics. The domination of the minority groups in the federation, however, did not go unchallenged. This chapter explores the origins of the ethnic minorities’ agitation for autonomous states in the federation and the instrumentization of ethnic and regional associations as platforms for the struggle. It argues that, although ethnic minorities sustained the struggle for autonomous states and fair representation in the national politics until 1966, they could only gain ascendancy and create states for themselves after the 1966 coups and the Hausa–Igbo clashes that followed.

International humanitarian aid played an important role in the Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967-70. Relief aid was organized under two major umbrella bodies — the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Joint Church Aid (JCA). The JCA received support from Catholic and Protestant churches while the ICRC, an established humanitarian agency, relied on donations from many governments as well as from the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). This paper focuses on the formation of the JCA as a humanitarian organization and examines its efforts to provide health care for the war victims in Biafra. Though the JCA has not received adequate scholarly attention, its humanitarian aid in Biafra was the first of its kind in the developing world and involved the largest civilian airlift in history. As this paper argues, the JCA’s health care intervention in Biafra was restricted to minimal care because of a lack of essential medications, equipment, food, and epidemiological expertise. Despite these challenges, however, the JCA managed to provide basic health care to over ten million persons in Biafra during the war. Further, the organization succeeded in providing aid without creating long-term dependency.