Nigerian Civil War (Biafra)

On May 30, 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, military governor of Nigeria's Eastern Region, declared it the independent Republic of Biafra. The federal government under General Yakubu Gowon went to war in July to reunite the country. Federal forces gradually captured Biafra's ports and cities and blockaded the shrinking enclave. By 1968 food could arrive only by night flights into a makeshift airstrip at Uli, and hunger, especially the protein deficiency disease kwashiorkor among children, killed far more people than the fighting. Biafra surrendered in January 1970.¹⁴

Nigeria had become independent from Britain in 1960 as a federation of regions dominated by different peoples: Hausa-Fulani in the north, Yoruba in the west and Igbo in the east. In January 1966 a coup led mostly by Igbo officers killed northern and western leaders; a counter-coup in July followed, and mass killings of Igbo in the north drove perhaps a million or more people back to the east. Talks at Aburi, Ghana, in early 1967 failed. Oil discovered in the Niger Delta raised the stakes for both sides.¹

The war became a Cold War oddity: Britain and the Soviet Union both armed the federal government, while France and a few others quietly aided Biafra. Images of starving children turned Biafra into one of the first televised humanitarian disasters and set off a huge church-led airlift. Estimates of the dead, mostly civilians who died of starvation and disease, range from about 500,000 to as many as three million. Gowon declared a policy of "no victor, no vanquished" and Nigeria stayed united.¹²