Nigeria is the leading economic and political power in West Africa and is among the continent’s most prominent states. With over 180 million people, it is Africa’s most populous country and the seventh most populous country in the world. Comprising over 570,000 square kilometers, Nigeria is a large country by West African standards and consists of several distinct geographic zones. On the coast of the Atlantic’s Gulf of Guinea, southern Nigeria is heavily forested, and a riverine environment with mangrove swamps characterizes the Niger Delta. Above the coastal forest zone are the hills and plateaus of the Middle Belt. Moving north, the country becomes increasingly arid, turning from savannah to the semi-desert of the Sahel. Nigeria is divided by the Niger River, Africa’s third-longest river, which runs for almost 1,200 kilometers from the west and empties into the Atlantic at the Niger Delta and has many tributaries, the most important of which is the Benue River in the east. Although Nigerians represent several hundred different ethnic groups, the three largest ethnic identities also correspond with religious identities, and each originates in a distinct region of the country. Broadly, southern Nigeria is inhabited mostly by Christians, with the Yoruba in the west and the Igbo in the east, while northern Nigeria is dominated by the Muslim Hausa.
From the 1970s, oil production and export, which is based in the Niger Delta, became the most important sector of Nigeria’s economy, which vies with South Africa for the title of Africa’s largest economy. Politically, postcolonial Nigeria has been plagued by regional, ethnic, and religious conflicts that led to it being ruled by a series of military regimes for most of the years between 1966 and 1999. The defining event of postcolonial Nigerian history was the Civil War of 1967 to 1970, one of postcolonial Africa’s deadliest conflicts, in which the federal military government defeated the secessionist state of Biafra in the east, associated mostly with the Igbo ethnic group. In the lead-up to the conflict and during the fighting, the Biafran regime mobilized the language of genocide to justify its separation from Nigeria and to garner international diplomatic, military, and humanitarian support. Debates about whether the mass violence of the 1966 to 1970 period can be accurately characterized as genocide continue to this day and reflect persistent tensions over ethnicity and regionalism within the context of an economy based heavily on oil export from the formerly separatist area.
By the 15th century, the Hausa city states in what is now northern Nigeria were heavily involved in the Trans-Sahara trade, exporting such commodities as gold, cloth, hides, kola nuts, and slaves. As in other parts of Sahelian West Africa, Islam had spread south into the area via the Sahara trade routes, and an Arabic script had been adapted to Hausa language. By around 1700, the nominally Muslim Hausa rulers were illegally enslaving fellow Muslims and oppressively taxing their subjects. During the 18th century, leaders from the pastoral Fulani community were at the forefront of a series of jihads across Sahelian West Africa that sought to revitalize and purify Islam and establish new states. In the late 1700s, Fulani Muslim scholar Usman dan Fodio traveled throughout Hausa territory and built a network of supporters and allies who were dissatisfied with the Hausa states. In 1804 dan Fodio’s followers rebelled and declared jihad against the Hausa state of Gobir, which had been weakened by wars with its Hausa neighbors. By the end of 1808, the jihad had subdued all the major Hausa states, including those to the east that had been dominated by Borno. In 1809 dan Fodio established a new capital at Sokoto that became the center of a new Islamic caliphate. Within a few years, the old Hausa rulers had been replaced by Fulani emirs who owed allegiance to the caliph at Sokoto. While the jihadist army had initially been composed of infantry forces, it evolved into a predominantly cavalry force, like those that had been common on the Sahel for centuries. The army did not readily adopt firearms, which were beginning to come north from the coast where European seafarers exchanged them for slaves. With the death of dan Fodio in 1817, his son Muhammad Bello ruled the Sokoto Caliphate for the next 20 years—a time in which Islam was strengthened and expanded among the elite, inter-Hausa wars became less frequent, and the use of slave labor on plantations increased. The largest African empire of its day, Sokoto stretched from modern Burkina Faso in the west, across northern Nigeria, to what is now Cameroon in the east.1
Inhabiting what is now western Nigeria, stretching from the Sahel below the lower Niger River south to the coastal forest, Yoruba farmers produced a food surplus and began to form a series of city-states around 1,000 years ago. By the early 1500s, Oyo had used cavalry acquired from the north to expand west into the forest gap and became a major intermediary in the trade between coastal groups in the south and the Hausa in the north. During the 1700s, Oyo attempted to expand south but was blocked by Dahomey, which had acquired firearms through the coastal slave trade with Europeans. Oyo collapsed in 1833 when it was cut off from access to the coastal slave trade by a resurgent Dahomey and deprived of a supply of war horses from the hostile Sokoto Caliphate to the north, which had taken over the Yoruba states of Nupe and Ilorin. During the 1820s and 1830s, refugees from Oyo moved south into the forest zone, where some recreated their state at New Oyo and others founded new states such as Ibadan and Ijaye which built militaries based on firearms rather than horses. Those Yoruba states fought a series of 19th-century wars to fill the vacuum created by the fall of Oyo. In 1840, at the Battle of Osogbo, the military meritocracy of Ibadan halted the southward expansion of the Fulani jihad and then pushed associated Ilorin’s forces further north. Subsequently, during the 1850s and 1860s, Ibadan became an expansionist power and fought a series of conflicts with a competing alliance of Yoruba states headed by Ijaye, particularly over control of coastal trade. Since those Yoruba wars produced a large number of slaves for export and they were fought in the final stages of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Yoruba were some of the last West African slaves taken to the Americas, which meant that they sometimes retained a distinct identity such as in Brazil.2
Located in the forest east of the Yoruba states and west of the Niger River, the farmers and artisans of the Kingdom of Benin engaged in the Trans-Sahara trade at least 1,000 years ago. During the 1400s and 1500s, Benin expanded and became a successful military empire in what is now southwestern Nigeria and participated in the developing coastal slave trade. A civil war in the late 1600s and early 1700s contributed to the decline of Benin, which spent much of the 18th century suppressing rebellions and trying to reassert claims over the Lagos Lagoon to the west. The forested Niger River Delta in what is now southeastern Nigeria was (and is) inhabited by the Igbo people in the interior and the Ijo closer to the coast. The organizational structure of those communities varied from small centralized states to independent villages governed by councils of elders. During the 1700s, this area experienced an intensification of slaving and became the source for most slaves taken from West Africa, which led to a militarization of delta communities; warfare became more widespread and destructive. On the eastern delta, the basic unit of social organization shifted from traditional houses based on kinship to the “canoe house,” which was a small trading and fighting group that operated and maintained a canoe. As the primary instrument of capturing and exporting slaves, successful canoe houses could spawn networks of satellites. By the 1800s, eastern delta trading towns like Bonny and Calabar consisted of a dozen or more canoe houses with the head of the senior house also serving as head of the town and commander of its canoe fleet. Delta towns became fortified and decentralized groups banded together in federations for mutual defense. When the oceanic slave trade was curbed by the British in the early to mid-1800s, the same canoe houses that had been responsible for slaving easily switched to the export of palm oil, which was valued by industrializing Western Europe.3
In 1861 the British, as part of their effort to combat the West African slave trade, seized the coastal trading center of Lagos, which later served as a base for further colonial expansion into what is now western Nigeria. Concerned about French and German competition in the area and disruption of coastal trade, the British intervened to end wars between Yoruba states in 1886, and most Yoruba rulers agreed to call on the Lagos governor to solve future disputes. With the 1892 British conquest of Ijebu, which had refused to discuss trade terms, most Yoruba rulers signed away their sovereignty to the British the following year. In 1894 the British bombarded New Oyo, which became the last Yoruba state to come under British control. In the 1850s, the British consul in the Bight of Biafra, who had gained considerable power by negotiating disputes between local rulers and British traders, imposed treaties that promoted British free trade, suppression of the slave trade, and assisted missionaries. In 1885 Britain—having gained rights to control the foreign affairs of local states such as Calabar and intervene to promote free trade—declared the Oil Rivers Protectorate (renamed the Niger Coast Protectorate in 1893). In 1887 Jaja, a former slave who as the powerful ruler of Opobo had denied British traders free access, was lured into negotiations, arrested, and exiled to the Caribbean. The Kingdom of Benin, which had rejected several British treaty offers and executed a British diplomatic mission, was invaded and conquered by the British Benin Punitive Expedition in 1897. In 1886 George Goldie’s National African Company, an amalgamation of the three largest British trading firms on the Niger River, was granted a charter by the British government to gain control of the Niger and Benue rivers by making treaties with local rulers and suppressing the slave trade. While the British protectorate had secured the coast and Niger Delta, Goldie’s renamed Royal Niger Company (RNC) was meant to forestall French and German penetration of the navigable rivers of the Nigerian hinterland. The RNC signed a succession of treaties, though it is unclear if the signatories understood they were signing away their sovereignty, and created a monopoly by imposing high import duties that drove out other European and African merchants. The Brass people of the Niger Delta, who could no longer afford to import food because of the new trade regulations, resisted the RNC until their main town was bombarded by British forces from the coast. In 1897 the RNC, worried about French intrusion, used superior firepower to seize the Yoruba kingdoms of Nupe and Ilorin from the Sokoto Caliphate. The next year, the British government bought the RNC from Goldie, and British officer Frederick Lugard arrived to form the West African Frontier Force (WAFF), which conquered Borgu and convinced the French to withdraw into what became colonial Dahomey (later the Republic of Benin). In 1900 the RNC territory south of the Niger and Benue rivers was joined to the Niger Coast Protectorate to form the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. Former RNC territory in the north and Ilorin on the south side of the Niger became the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, with Lugard as its first commissioner. Subsequently, Lugard embarked on the conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate, which had rejected a British resident and seemed likely to serve as an avenue for French encroachment from the north. Since the caliphate was decentralized, each major town was conquered separately between 1900 and 1903. The British justified those actions based on suppressing slavery. In 1904, east of Sokoto, the British annexed Borno, which had been greatly weakened by recent conquest by Sudanese slavers who were in turn defeated by the French around Lake Chad.4
In 1914 the British combined the protectorates of Southern and Northern Nigeria into the single colonial territory of Nigeria, with Lugard as the first governor. However, for the next five decades, the British ruled this vast and populous territory as three separate regions. Each region was associated with a major ethnic group: the Igbo in the east, the Yoruba in the west, and the Hausa-Fulani in the north. Located close to the southern coast, the East and West regions became relatively prosperous as the scene of coastal trade, predominantly Christian given the activities of missionaries and with a significant Western-educated elite, who were products of mission schools. On the other hand, the North was predominantly Muslim and controlled by conservative local rulers (emirs) who governed on behalf of the British. Afraid of the mobilizing potential of Islam, the British limited access to the north by missionaries, which meant fewer opportunities for Western education, and the region became comparatively impoverished and marginalized. Indeed, northern Nigeria became one of the classic examples of the British colonial administrative system of indirect rule, which was meant to promote a cheap form of colonialism by relying on low-paid local traditional rulers and discouraging resistance by making it seem as if change was minimal. Since the British saw the Hausa as inherently martial and the colonial army represented one of the few employment opportunities for northern men, the rank and file of the colonial military in Nigeria became dominated by poorly educated northerners. The institutionalization of those regional divisions led to the rise of colonial ethnic stereotypes, which became popular within Nigerian society. In this view, the northern Hausa-Fulani were disciplined people and proud members of a broader Islamic civilization, the western Yoruba were lazy and duplicitous, as well as the most culturally unique, and the eastern Igbo were ambitious and highly educated in the Western context but the most prone to ethnocentrism.
During the 1950s, the decolonization process in Nigeria was characterized by negotiation between outgoing British officials and emerging African political leaders from each of the three regions over what form the future independent state would take. In 1944 American-educated Nigerian journalist and nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe formed the National Congress of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), which was an umbrella organization for many smaller groups that supported the idea of a broad Nigerian identity and self-government for the entire country. During the negotiations of the 1950s, NCNC advocated for a strong central government that would promote national unity rather than strong regional governments. Based in the south, one of its largest NCNC-aligned groups was the Igbo State Union, for which Azikiwe, an Igbo himself, was president. In 1951 Obafemi Awolowo, a Yoruba nationalist who had studied law in Britain, formed the Action Group to prevent the NCNC from gaining control in the west and to promote Nigerian self-government. Formed in 1949, the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) was a conservative Muslim movement that sought to encourage northern unity and uphold the regional autonomy of the north against southern Christian influences. It was led by Sir Ahmadu Bello, a Western-educated descendant of Usman dan Fodio, who was awarded with the title Sardauna (Warlord) of Sokoto. In 1954, with the adoption of a constitution that made Nigeria into a federation of three regions, Azikiwe became premier of the Eastern Region, Awolowo became premier of the Western Region, and Bello became premier of the Northern Region. The constitution tried to balance the powers of the regional and central governments, and in 1957 Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the NPC’s vice president, but who was not from the northern Fulani elite, became the first prime minister of Nigeria. In October 1960, Nigeria became independent and, based on the previous year’s election, the central government was controlled by an NPC-NCNC coalition with Balewa as prime minister and Azikiwe as ceremonial governor general. Awolowo’s Action Group formed the official opposition. In 1963, when Nigeria became a republic, Balewa continued as prime minister, and Azikiwe became ceremonial president.5
During the first years of Nigeria’s independence, Balewa’s coalition government was increasingly dominated by northerners from the NPC who gave out official appointments to northerners at the expense of more qualified southerners. The rapid Africanization of the military’s officer corps in the late 1950s meant that the rank and file remained mostly northern, but the officers were mostly southerners—indeed mostly Igbo, given their greater access to education. To address the issue, the Balewa government extended the new national recruiting quotas to the officer corps, which meant that half could come from the north and a quarter from each of the west and east. As such, northerners would control the military. Furthermore, state funds were used to develop the north, which had lagged behind in colonial times, but this alienated people in the south. Since oil had been discovered in the Niger Delta in 1958 and oil revenues became increasingly important to the Nigerian government and its development projects, easterners began to think that their wealth was being stolen for the benefit of other regions. Southern anger was also enflamed by the 1963 census, which was widely believed to have fraudulently inflated the northern population to national majority status so that the Northern Region could have greater control over the federal government and its resources. Lastly, the federal election of December 1964 and the Western regional election of October 1965, which saw a continuation of the political status quo, were conducted so poorly as to cause many Nigerians to lose faith in their democratic process.
In January 1966, a group of mostly Igbo army officers, popularly called the Five Majors, led by Major Kaduna Nzeogwu, staged a coup that ousted the civilian politicians from the north who were accused of electoral fraud and corruption. Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani leaders were killed, including Western Region premier S. L. Akintola and prominent northerners Prime Minister Balewa and Northern Region premier Bello. Eventually, given that the Five Majors lacked a clear plan on how to govern Nigeria, Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, another Igbo and commander of the Nigerian Army, took power. With similar goals as the Five Majors, Ironsi outlawed political parties and appointed military governors in each region. When Ironsi abolished the federal system in May, it seemed to northerners as part of a conspiracy to place them under the domination of southern, and particularly Igbo, civil servants and military officers. That prompted a late July countercoup by northern military officers and noncommissioned officers, led by Lieutenant Colonel Murtala Mohammed, in which Ironsi and several hundred Igbo officers and soldiers were killed. Appointed as head of state and commander of the armed forces by the coup makers, northerner Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon immediately reinstated the federal system.6
In the north, resentment toward southerners had been brewing long before 1966. Igbo merchants from the south had moved north before independence and dominated commerce in the historically marginalized region, where local people felt they did not have a chance to compete economically. Furthermore, extremist northern Muslims resented what they saw as southern Christian intrusion. Those factors led to violent incidents. The expansion of Igbo economic opportunities in the northern tin mining town of Jos during the Second World War led to two days of rioting between Hausa and Igbo in 1945 that left two people dead. The colonial army was brought in to restore order. In 1953, given southern political desires for self-government in 1956, which was opposed by northern leaders who felt they would not be ready, the arrival of a southern political delegation in Kano prompted rioting that targeted the city’s “strangers’ quarter,” in which 36 southerners, including 21 Igbo, were killed.7 During the second half of the 1950s, southerners were excluded from the Africanization of the northern civil service, and northern businessmen began to lobby the NPC regional government for preferential access to government contracts.
It is telling that the 1966 massacres of Igbo living in the north did not start in January when the Five Majors staged what was widely seen as an Igbo coup. In late May 1966, students at Ahmadu Bello University in the northern town of Zaria protested Ironsi’s decree that turned Nigeria into a unitary state and appeared to confirm their fears of southern domination. That led to a week of rioting in northern towns, including Kaduna, Kano, Jos, Katsina, and Sokoto in which mobs killed perhaps 3,000 southerners, particularly those identified as Igbo, and destroyed their property. The July countercoup, as stated above, also involved the killing of Igbo soldiers. In the north, massacres continued in September and October, with mobs now joined by northern soldiers who mutinied, killed their northern officers, who tried to stop them, and seized weapons from military armories. False reports of northerners being killed in eastern Nigeria originally broadcast by Radio Cotonou in Dahomey and then repeated by a Nigerian government radio station in Kaduna in late September contributed to the violence. In Kano, at the start of October, thugs and mutinous soldiers went to the airport and railway station, where they murdered Igbos trying to leave the region. Police and army officers were too fearful to intervene. The Kano violence stopped when Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Katsina, governor of the Northern Region, and the emir of Kano drove around the city in a jeep and shamed the mobs, looters, and mutineers into returning to their homes or barracks. The Fifth Battalion, the unit involved in the mutiny, was disbanded over the incident. Trains heading out of the north were stoned by mobs and sometimes stopped so that Igbo could be disembarked and killed. There was often confusion over how to identify an Igbo—with certain stereotypical names, accents, knowledge of English, and Western dress marking victims for death. In a few isolated incidents, northern army officers saved the lives of their Igbo colleagues or subordinates. Estimates of the number of fatalities resulting from the 1966 massacres vary considerably from 30,000 to 50,000. Around 1.5 million refugees left the north and flooded into the Eastern Region.8 At the end of 1966, the Eastern Region’s Ministry of Information published a booklet entitled Nigerian Pogrom that accused the Muslim elites and politicians of the north of plotting the extermination of easterners in their area. Calling the massacres a genocide, it compared them to the Ottoman killing of Armenians and the Nazi killing of Jews.9 Although historians who wish to claim that the 1966 massacres represented a genocide point to the seeming coordination of the violence in a number of cities and the absence of central government intervention as indicating the existence of an intentional plan to exterminate the Igbo living in the north, no direct evidence of that assertion has been presented. As Gowon stated, the new military government was simply unprepared, overwhelmed, and unable to act against mutinous soldiers and angry mobs.10
After the July 1966 military coup, Eastern regional military governor Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu refused to attend meetings of Nigeria’s Supreme Military Council (SMC) or to recognize Gowon as head of state and blamed the Gowon regime for the massacres of Igbos in the north. Almost immediately, the Biafran government transferred all oil revenues to its own accounts. At the beginning of January 1967, Gowon, Ojukwu, the other regional military governors, and other members of the Nigerian SMC attended a conference at Aburi in Ghana hosted by Lieutenant General Joseph Ankrah, who had recently come to power in his own military coup. On Ojukwu’s suggestion, they agreed to resolve the crisis without violence. During the negotiations, the historic political aims of Nigeria’s regional leaders were reversed: the northern-dominated federal government of Gowon advocated for a strong central government that they controlled, whereas the Eastern Region’s Ojukwu desired a federal system with strong regional governments. However, the articulate and clever Ojukwu dominated the talks, and the subsequent Aburi Agreement favored his agenda. Regions would gain confederal status without a boundary change, all members of the SMC would have veto power, all regions would have to agree on major decisions, salaries would be paid to displaced people, and the federal head of state would be recognized as commander of the armed forces. Nevertheless, by mid-March, it was clear that the Aburi Agreement would not be implemented, as Gowon’s federal government realized that it would deprive it of control of the Eastern Region’s oil revenues, which were needed to develop other parts of the country.11
On May 30, 1967, Ojukwu, authorized by the Eastern Region Consultative Assembly and Advisory Committee of Chiefs and Elders, declared the secession of the east as the independent Republic of Biafra, which was named after the geographic Bight of Biafra. Its capital would be Enugu. Around the same time, Gowon declared emergency powers, including press censorship and a ban on political activity, and reorganized the 4 large regions into 12 smaller states. When Biafra declared independence, the federal government began mass military mobilization and acquisition of weapons. The federal government received military assistance from Britain, which was committed to maintaining its former colony as a single country and was heavily invested in the Nigerian oil industry. The Soviet Union also supported Gowon’s regime, given that the need for oil overshadowed Cold War rivalries. The United States, embroiled in the Vietnam War, deferred to Britain on the Biafra issue and banned the sale of weapons to the breakaway state. While no country provided official military assistance to Biafra, several powers provided covert support such as France, which wanted to take over British oil interests in the separatist state, and the increasingly marginalized Portugal, Rhodesia, and South Africa, which wanted oil and were desperate for a black-ruled African ally. Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Zambia, and Tanzania were the only African countries to recognize Biafra.
On July 6, 1967, in what was initially called a police action, Nigerian federal forces launched an offensive to suppress the Biafran secession. Based in the north, the First Infantry Division advanced south into Biafra in two columns. In mid-July, the left column (on the east side) captured Garkem-Ogoja, and the right column (on the west side) took Nsukka. Biafran forces put up stiff resistance at Nsukka but lacked ammunition. In response, during July and August, Biafran forces invaded the Mid-Western Region west of the Niger River to threaten the federal capital of Lagos to distract federal forces in the north. Biafran troops advanced through Benin City and eventually halted at Ore, 160 kilometers east of Lagos, with limited federal forces opposing them. While the Biafrans had believed that the mixed Yoruba and Igbo population of the mid-west would support them, this plan backfired, as the invasion and subsequent looting discredited Biafra’s claims of fighting in self-defense. It was hoped that the Yoruba identity of Brigadier Victor Banjo, commander of the Biafran invasion force, would appeal to mid-westerners, but he was executed when discovered to be conspiring against Ojukwu. By late September, the federal Second Infantry Division under Brigadier Murtala Mohammed had advanced east and driven the Biafrans out of Benin City to the Niger River’s east bank. Between October and December, in a sequence of poorly planned and executed operations, the federal forces failed to cross the river. Around the same time, the Third Marine Commando Division, originating from Lagos, landed on the coast of the Niger Delta and captured the cities of Bonny and Okrika in late July and Calabar in mid-October. This federal amphibious campaign was facilitated by Biafra’s lack of a significant navy. Bonny was a vital oil industry terminal, and its capture blocked supply ships from access to Biafran-controlled Port Harcourt, where the local airport became Biafra’s only link to the outside world. With the First Infantry Division’s seizure of Enugu in early October, Biafran forces were surrounded in the Igbo heartland, which was packed with refugees. From the beginning of 1968, the war became a stalemate, with the gradually shrinking and overcrowded Biafra blockaded by federal forces. In early 1968, Mohammed’s Second Infantry Division abandoned attempts to cross the Niger River and took Onitsha by moving via the Enugu-Onitsha road. Given Biafran harassment of its supply lines, the division engaged in looting and abuse of civilians. A Nigerian offensive from April to June 1968 again reduced Biafran territory. At the end of April, the Third Marine Division traversed the Cross River from Calabar to Port Harcourt, which was taken a few weeks later in May and continued its advance to seize Aba in August and Owerri in September. To the north, the federal First Division advanced cautiously, capturing Abakaliki and Afikpo. By the end of 1968, the Biafrans clung to a small territory but were bolstered by international humanitarian airlifts that delivered aid and sometimes weapons and the arrival of some foreign mercenaries. Arguably, the relief operations that sustained the doomed Biafra prolonged the war and thus contributed to more suffering and loss of life. The federal forces then focused on maintaining a blockade to starve secessionist Biafra into submission, which, as discussed below, would lead to accusations of genocide.
In April and May 1969, the Nigerian First Division embarked on an offensive that captured the new Biafran capital of Umuahia. In June, Biafra launched a desperate offensive meant to knock the federals off balance and used mercenary piloted light aircraft to raid federal oil facilities and airfields. In December 1969, federal commanders initiated a final offensive to end the war. In January 1970, the Third Marine Commando Division, now under future president Colonel Olusegun Obasanjo, pushed up from the coast with armored vehicles penetrating Biafran lines. On January 9, federal troops once again captured Owerri and on January 13 took Amichi, which was the last Biafran-held town. Ojukwu flew to exile in Cote d’Ivoire, leaving General Phillip Effiong, Biafra’s army commander, to surrender formally. Biafran forces had been massively outnumbered. The federal military had expanded from 8,000 troops in 1967 to 250,000 in 1970, while Biafra began the war with 3,000 and ended with 30,000. The estimates of total combat casualties range from 90,000 to 120,000. However, estimates of civilian fatalities vary from 0.5 million to 3 million, and it is clear that the overwhelming majority were from the Eastern Region and died from starvation or disease related to the federal blockade.12
From early in the conflict, the Biafran regime mobilized the rhetoric of genocide in an effort to motivate its own people for the fight and enlist international sympathy and support. When South African–based mercenary leader Mike Hoare visited Biafra in May 1967 to assess the potential for external intervention in the emerging conflict, Ojukwu explained the independence movement to him by stating that “genocide stares us in the face. We want nothing more to do with a people that seek to destroy us.”13 In November 1967, Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Igbo former president of Nigeria who was hiding out in the Biafran enclave at Onitsha, wrote to a British newspaper calling on the world to “recognize the natural and inalienable right of the Ibo and fellow easterners to self-determination” and that “to do otherwise, is to turn a blind eye to an unjustifiable pogrom and inexcusable genocide of eight-million Ibo-speaking peoples . . . contrary to the international convention on genocide and the internationally accepted standards of civilized life.”14 Explaining the secession from Nigeria as a response to genocide, Biafran propaganda portrayed the breakaway republic as a stronghold of Christian modernity in Africa that was under attack by backward Muslim forces from the north. The Igbo were cast in the role of the “Jews of Africa,” who were threatened by a postcolonial African holocaust. Biafran propaganda was directed from a public relations ministry and distributed through local and international newsletters, which included written pieces and cartoons, and Radio Biafra, which broadcast in Nigerian and European languages and stayed on the air throughout the war. In late 1967, the Biafran government engaged Markpress, a Swiss-based public relations firm owned by an American, to facilitate its global media campaign. Markpress orchestrated the publication of thousands of pro-Biafra news pieces in various newspapers around the world and organized and funded visits by journalists to the separatist republic.15 By early April 1968, through the diplomatic efforts of Azikiwe, who visited Paris, presidents Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania had denounced the Nigerian campaign against Biafra as genocide.16 Accusations that the Gowon regime was conducting genocide against the people of Biafra were used to try to pressure the British government to halt arms shipments to Nigeria. In early August 1968, Ojukwu addressed the OAU in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he pointed to the 1966 massacres of Igbo in the north as genocide and claimed that Gowon was becoming the Hitler of Africa. Furthermore, Ojukwu played the neocolonial card by claiming that the current genocide against the Igbo was being financed and directed by non-African powers to further their economic aims. Although he did not mention Britain, it was obvious that London was the federal government’s primary backer.
Those genocide assertions gained traction after the fall of Port Harcourt in May 1968, which completed the Nigerian blockade and caused starvation in Biafra. The international media published pictures of starving people and compared the situation to Nazi concentration camps of the Second World War. Within Britain, church leaders, petition writers, and protestors called for an end to arms sales to Nigeria, and there were fiery debates within parliament, with some members warning against possible extermination and genocide. Radio Biafra reported that Biafran protestors carried signs reading “Britain responsible for genocide against Biafra” and broadcast a statement from Biafran commissioner for information Dr. Ifegwu Eke that “Britain continues massive arms sales in aid of genocide.”
To counter those accusations, the Nigerian government invited Canada, Sweden, Poland, Britain, the OAU, and the UN secretary-general to form a team of observers to be sent to the war zone, including occupied parts of Biafra, to investigate claims of “wanton destruction” and “charges of genocide.” From September 1968 to January 1970, the observers visited prisoner camps, refugee camps, and communities occupied by federal forces and dispatched numerous reports claiming that “there is no evidence of genocide against the Ibo people.” In November 1968, British foreign secretary Michael Stewart, eager to justify his government’s continued support for the Nigerian federal government, told parliament that “the story about genocide has been proved beyond doubt to be completely false.” On the other hand, the Biafran government, its supporters, and later scholars criticized the observer team for being in the pocket of the federal government, for not including any legal experts who could professionally investigate the allegations of genocide, and for not looking into the massacres of 1966.17
Cleverly playing on American religious and ideological sensibilities, Ojukwu called for direct intervention by the United States to end Muslim genocide against Christian Biafra and to counter the intrusion of Soviet Communism, which he claimed had been invited in by the federal Nigerian regime.18 In the United States, a pro-Biafra lobby developed quickly and included Christian church groups and the American Jewish Committee, which released a statement that this was “the first time that the American Jewish Community as a whole organized for the support of sufferers who were not Jews.” American television networks broadcast news and documentaries on Biafra; the Committee to Keep Biafra Alive published a full-page advertisement in American newspapers featuring a picture of Adolf Hitler with a caption reading “Welcome Back”; and a pro-Biafra lobby developed within the U.S. Congress. In addition, a number of state governors declared a Biafra Month, pressed for international action, described the federal military campaign as genocide, and compared what was happening to the Holocaust. During the 1968 presidential election in the United States, candidate Richard Nixon criticized the Lyndon Johnson administration for not acting against the “genocide” that was taking place in Biafra. However, once Nixon moved into the White House, his administration continued the existing American policy toward Biafra by not granting it diplomatic recognition and remaining neutral in the Nigerian Civil War. It appears that while Nixon wanted to shift toward a more sympathetic policy that would press for negotiations and facilitate the delivery of aid to Biafra, he was blocked by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and the U.S. State Department, which saw American interests as directly linked to supporting federal Nigeria.19
By the middle of 1968, pro-Biafran protest had increased dramatically in France, West Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, and to some extent in Ireland and Italy. In predominantly Catholic countries, reports from Catholic missionaries in Biafra were influential. A British government official speculated that “many Germans find a psychological compensation in protesting against allegations of genocide in Nigeria for their failure to make similar protests in Germany under Hitler.”20 In France, an opinion poll illustrated that Biafra had overtaken Vietnam as the greatest international concern among the population. Although France, Belgium, and the Netherlands had imposed an arms sales embargo on both sides of the Nigerian Civil War in June 1968, French President Charles de Gaulle quickly bowed to pressure from the French left, including students and workers’ movements, and initiated covert shipments of weapons and ammunition to Biafra through the former French colonies of Gabon and Cote d’Ivoire in August. The humanitarian services of French doctors in Biafra, including Bernard Kouchner, who much later became France’s foreign minister, and their criticism of Nigerian army violence against Biafran civilians led to the establishment of Medecins sans Frontier (Doctors without Borders). The Paris-based International Committee for the Study of the Crimes of Genocide, an informal group of lawyers from several countries, conducted an investigation and declared that genocide had been committed by Nigerian forces against Biafra, but this was ignored by most governments. The conclusion of this unofficial committee would later become the main piece of evidence mobilized by historians seeking to prove that the federal Nigerian war against Biafra constituted genocide.21
In Canada, the government of Pierre Trudeau, given its own problems with Quebec separatism, which had recently been enflamed by France’s de Gaulle, refused to acknowledge the Biafran secession. However, Christian and Jewish groups formed the Nigeria/Biafra Relief Fund of Canada and pressed the government to supply aid to Biafra. This position gained popular support from July 1968, when pictures of starving Biafrans were broadcast on television. With Trudeau’s refusal to act and Canada’s participation in the much criticized observer team, the Relief Fund organized Canairelief, which joined the Red Cross air relief effort based on the island of Fernando Po and flew 670 flights into Biafra to deliver more than 11,000 tons of food and medical supplies between January 1969 and January 1970. A Canadian Air Force C-130 transport aircraft flew eight relief missions but was withdrawn after the Port Harcourt airport was overrun by federal Nigerian forces, and it is likely that Nigerian diplomatic pressure was also a factor in the suspension of those flights. Furthermore, two Canadian opposition members of parliament accompanied by a Canadian journalist visited Biafra in October 1968 and returned home claiming that the accusations of genocide were true and strongly recommending that Canada help to negotiate a cease-fire and provide relief to Biafra. Stephen Lewis, another left-wing opposition parliamentarian, who did not visit Biafra, wrote that “genocide is an ugly, impossible word. I don’t know precisely how one defines it. But if it means, even in part, the deliberate, indiscriminate killing of a people or a tribe, then there is concrete evidence to be found in the terrible Nigerian-Biafran civil war.” Such pressure resulted in the Trudeau government pledging money to support the Canairelief in early January 1970, but Biafra surrendered several days later, which meant the end of relief flights.22
To counter the work of Markpress on behalf of Biafra during the war, the Nigerian government hired the British advertising agency Galizine, Grant, and Russell, which arranged for the publication of pro-federal accounts in the international press. For example, in June 1968, a British newspaper reported that Tony Asika, an Igbo political scientist who supported the federal government and was visiting Britain, undermined the genocide claim by pointing out that thousands of Igbos worked for the federal army and civil service, and he asked if it was likely that Igbos like himself would be engaged in the extermination of their own people. A long pro-federal advertisement in a British newspaper accused Igbo Biafran soldiers of carrying out “acts of genocide” against the minorities of Biafra such as the Ibibio, who were not supportive of secession.23 For British journalist John Young:
Highly charged emotional overtones have been added to the argument by the misleading use of the word genocide. Possibly there are hints of this in the 1966 massacres of Ibos in the north in spite of the bravery of many northerners who came to their aid. But to suppose that the victims of a civil war, however savage, are necessarily to be compared with those of systematic slaughter, such as Hitler perpetrated against the Jews or the Spanish colonists against the Indians of South America, is sheer self-delusion.24
Biafran genocide claims were seriously undermined in 1969 when Azikiwe, the Igbo former president of Nigeria who had once supported the separatist state, reversed his position on genocide and declared that the federal government had no intention of committing genocide and that “that accusation of genocide is palpably false.”25 Even after he had fled Biafra, Ojukwu kept pressing the international community on the need to prevent genocide in eastern Nigeria. In January 1970, he wrote a press release that urged the dispatch of food aid and an international peacekeeping force to the former secessionist state “to prevent a genocide that would make 1939–45 Europe a mere child’s play.”26 Despite the fact that no such force was created, Ojukwu’s fears proved unfounded. There would be no postwar revenge massacres or genocide.
At the end of the war, Gowon famously declared that there was “no victor and no vanquished.” As such, the Nigerian federal government embarked on a campaign of postwar national reconciliation, launched a reconstruction program in the east, and outlawed ethnically based political parties. Pardoned by the Nigerian government, Ojukwu returned home in 1982, and with the exception of a brief imprisonment during the military coup of 1984, he lived freely and participated in politics until his death in 2011. However, resentment among easterners lingered, because, during the war, many had lost their property in other regions, many did not get back previous government jobs, and minimal compensation was provided for worthless Biafran currency. Importantly, many easterners maintained that they were not receiving their fair share of oil revenue generated in their region and that the money had been squandered by Nigeria’s subsequent military regimes, which were seen as corrupt and wasteful.
The end of the Cold War and the rise of democratic ambitions across Africa at the start of the 1990s affected southeastern Nigeria. While the Niger Delta territory of the Ogoni minority generated about half of Nigeria’s oil wealth, their fishing economy was spoiled by oil pollution, and they derived little benefit from the petroleum industry. In the early 1990s, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) presented the Nigerian military government with demands for greater political representation, a share of oil revenues, and protection for their environment. When this was rejected, MOSOP and its supporters resorted to riots and limited violence that resulted in the death of four conservative chiefs. Consequently, in 1994, the military regime of General Sani Abacha arrested nine MOSOP leaders, including celebrated author Ken Saro-Wiwa, and convicted them in a farcical and internationally condemned trial, and they were hanged. Saro-Wiwa had written a series of newspaper pieces compiled into a book that accused the federal government and multinational oil companies (particularly Shell) of perpetrating genocide against the Ogoni and called on the international community for assistance.27 The killing of Saro-Wiwa led to international sanctions against Nigeria’s military regime and contributed to pressures that led to democratization. Although Shell Oil Company paid the Ogoni community $15.5 million (U.S.) in 2009 to settle an international legal action, the persistence of environmental problems and violence in Ogoniland prompted continued accusations of genocide.
The sudden death of military regime leader Sani Abacha and the transition to civilian rule in the late 1990s led to the rise of separatist movements in parts of Nigeria. Launched in the late 1990s, the Oodua People’s Congress demanded an independent state for the Yoruba of the southwest. In 1999 the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) was established with the aim of achieving independence for the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria. It engaged in peaceful protest, including mass rallies, displays of the Biafra flag, distribution of an unofficial Biafran currency, and the opening of a “Biafra embassy” in Washington, D.C. MASSOB also encouraged Igbos living in the north to defend themselves from violence by northerners. The Nigerian state of President Olusegun Obasanjo responded with force, and MASSOB leader Ralph Uwazuruike, an Indian-trained lawyer inspired by the nonviolent approach of Gandhi, was charged with treason in 2005; federal forces also arrested other key members. Central to MASSOB’s separatist ideology is that the federal military government engaged in genocide against the Igbo during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–1970 and from the late 2000s a number of Igbo scholars, perhaps partly inspired by the rise of global antigenocide campaigns such as related to Darfur, wrote articles and books in support of that view. While MASSOB maintained a nonviolent approach, armed groups emerged in southeastern Nigeria using the concept of self-determination as an excuse for piracy. Around 2005, armed groups—the most prominent of which was the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND)—began using small and fast boats to raid oil industry facilities and kidnap expatriate oil workers in the Delta area around Port Harcourt, with ransom money from the oil companies used to buy more weapons. Oil companies hired private security contractors, and the oil-dependent Nigerian government launched a major offensive in the Delta during 2009 and then offered insurgents amnesty.28
Violence in Nigeria’s southeast was overshadowed by the start of Islamist insurgency in the north. In 2009 a radical Islamist group called Boko Haram, Hausa language for “Western education is sinful,” emerged in Nigeria’s northeast within the context of poverty, unemployment, state corruption, and existing tensions between Muslims and Christians. It sought to impose a “pure” Muslim society and establish an Islamic state. Boko Haram launched a campaign of bombing, assassination, and kidnapping, which provoked a brutal security force response that some say exacerbated the problem and caused the declaration of a state of emergency in the north by the federal government. The U.S. government, concerned about Boko Haram’s links to the global jihadist movement, began to assist Nigerian security forces, though this was limited given the Nigerian military’s poor human rights record. Declaring allegiance to the Islamic State fighting in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, Boko Haram eventually spread into the neighboring countries of Cameroon and Niger.29
There is little reason to believe that the horrific mass violence that took place in Nigeria from 1966 to 1970 corresponds with the international legal definition of genocide. Those who argue the case for an Igbo genocide or a Biafra genocide claim to present incriminating evidence but then fail in the attempt, and in some instances employ self-referential citations and quote fictional novels. There is no evidence that the federal or Northern regional governments directed the terrible 1966 massacres of Igbo in the north. The soldiers who took part in the killings were mutineers. Similarly, if the federal siege of Biafra from 1968 to 1970 is seen as a program to intentionally exterminate part of all of the Igbo or Biafran people, then other military blockades such as the federal North imposed on the confederate South during the American Civil War or the Allies enforced against Nazi Germany during the Second World War must be seen in the same light, which would be ridiculous. Sieges and blockades have been an ugly but common feature of warfare since ancient times. As part of what Carl von Clausewitz called “policy by other means,” they target the inhabitants of specific fortifications, cities, regions, or countries in an effort to impose some political or economic agenda. In the Nigerian case, the federal intention in blockading Biafra was to eliminate the secessionist state, not to exterminate the population. Sieges and blockades could be genocidal if they form part of a campaign of intentional extermination, but most historical examples do not fall into this category. Ironically, genocide accusations by the Biafra regime and its international supporters, which played a major role in mobilizing support for the militarily weak secessionist state, likely caused the Nigerian Civil War to be longer and deadlier than it would have otherwise been. In this situation, the rhetoric of genocide caused many preventable civilian deaths within Biafra. The resurgence of genocide accusations related to southeastern Nigeria in the post–Cold War era is a product of regional marginalization and dissatisfaction, and such language is meant to mobilize people in pursuit of political agendas.