Biafra Revisited

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Biafra Revisited (Dakar & Reading: African Renaissance, 2006), ISBN 9780955205002,paperback,188pp.,  £19.50/US$33.95/CDN$34.69/EUR28,19/￥ 2,950

 

Forty years after the onset of the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe returns to the subject on which he published two seminal books in 1990. In Biafra Revisited, Ekwe-Ekwe demonstrates that the Biafra War (1967-1970) is the second phase of the Igbo genocide after the initial massacre of 100,000 Igbo people across the principal towns and cities and villages across north Nigeria and elsewhere in the country between May and September 1966. The slaughter was organised and carefully coordinated by the Nigeria state and its leading institutions – the military, police, religious, academic, media, business. In Biafra, 3 million Igbo or a quarter of this nation’s population were annihilated within 30 months. This is a holocaust of unprecedented proportions in recent African history. The study shows that the British government of the day fully supported this devastating stretch of genocide militarily, politically and diplomatically. On this, Ekwe-Ekwe insists: “It is evident that this genocide, the worst in 20th century Africa, would probably not have occurred without the active support that the perpetrators received directly from the British government … As a result, Britain, crucially, has played a key role in the emergence of the ongoing age of pestilence ravaging Africa” (emphasis in the original). The author contends that Nigeria is a failed state that does not serve the interests of the constituent peoples, a failure which, pointedly, occurred in 1945 under the “very watch of the British occupation regime” when the Igbo immigrant population in Jos (north Nigeria) were subjected to a harrowing pogrom organised by Hausa-Fulani (north) regional leaders, the much coveted British political allies opposed to the restoration of African independence. The British did not prosecute any of those responsible for the Jos massacre. This pogrom and another carried out once again against the Igbo, this time in Kano (north Nigeria) in 1953, became “dress rehearsals” for the 1966-1970 genocide.

Nigeria has now run the course of its bloody trail in this history. The greatest challenge currently facing the Igbo and other oppressed nations in Nigeria, Ekwe-Ekwe concludes this major study, is to negotiate the formal and orderly dissolution of this state and embark on the creation of democratic and extensively decentralised new states that guarantee and safeguard lives, human rights, equality and freedom for all peoples and individuals.

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