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Biafra: Britain's shame
Subjects
Genocide -- Nigeria.
Nigeria -- History -- Civil War, 1967-1970.
Nigeria -- Politics and government -- 1960-1975.
Genocide -- Nigeria.
Nigeria -- History -- Civil War, 1967-1970.
Nigeria -- Politics and government -- 1960-1975.
- GenresHistory
118 pages, Hardcover
First published December 4, 1969
2 people are currently reading
67 people want to read
About the author
Auberon Waugh
53 books22 followersAuberon Alexander Waugh was a British journalist and novelist, and eldest son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh. He was widely known by his nickname "Bron”.
Waugh's career spanned journalism, fiction, and editing; he authored five novels, including The Foxglove Saga (1960) and Consider the Lilies (1968), and contributed political columns to outlets such as The Spectator from 1967 and The Daily Telegraph. His most enduring satirical work was the "Diary" column in Private Eye, which he wrote from 1970 to 1986, often provoking outrage with its parodies and polemics. From the 1980s until his death, he edited Literary Review, shaping its profile through his editorial leadership and "From the Pulpit" essays.
Waugh's defining characteristics included an acerbic wit and a penchant for vendettas, leading to notable controversies such as a 1970 libel suit against The Spectator that he won and a 1979 parliamentary candidacy for the fringe Dog Lovers' Party. Despite health setbacks, including a spinal injury from National Service in 1958, he maintained a prolific output, earning two What the Papers Say awards for his influence in British journalism. His memoirs, Will This Do? (1991), encapsulated his irreverent worldview
Waugh's career spanned journalism, fiction, and editing; he authored five novels, including The Foxglove Saga (1960) and Consider the Lilies (1968), and contributed political columns to outlets such as The Spectator from 1967 and The Daily Telegraph. His most enduring satirical work was the "Diary" column in Private Eye, which he wrote from 1970 to 1986, often provoking outrage with its parodies and polemics. From the 1980s until his death, he edited Literary Review, shaping its profile through his editorial leadership and "From the Pulpit" essays.
Waugh's defining characteristics included an acerbic wit and a penchant for vendettas, leading to notable controversies such as a 1970 libel suit against The Spectator that he won and a 1979 parliamentary candidacy for the fringe Dog Lovers' Party. Despite health setbacks, including a spinal injury from National Service in 1958, he maintained a prolific output, earning two What the Papers Say awards for his influence in British journalism. His memoirs, Will This Do? (1991), encapsulated his irreverent worldview
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April 4, 2023
When I was a kid my dad would admonish me for leaving food on my plate. “There are starving Biafrans,” he would say, and for the longest time I had no idea what he meant. I just assumed “Biafra” was a corruption of “Africa” that he had made up to be funny.
Biafra was in fact a real place, a country that tried to break away from Nigeria between 1967 and 1970. That was at the same time as the Vietnam War, which is probably why it is overshadowed in our historical memory. Like Vietnam, Biafra was one of the first conflicts to play out on the television. Almost 2 million civilians—many of them children—starved to death. Do you know that crude stereotype of “Africa” as a dark continent filled with bony-ribbed, pot-bellied children gazing vacantly towards charity workers? Media coverage of Biafra likely has something to do with that.
Two journalists, Auberon Waugh and Suzanne Cronjé, saw the dire conditions as they played out. Based on their first-hand investigations, they became convinced that Britain, though formally neutral in the war, had permitted its escalation as a matter of self-interest. Biafra: Britain’s Shame is their exposé. Its format is rather strange and rushed, no doubt due to the urgency of the ongoing war. It is a collection of articles, each written more to persuade than to inform, having overall a rather faded and far-away impression, like all out-of-date news. Though this book is of limited importance as a history of Biafra, it nonetheless remains a fascinating time capsule into the public discourse of a now relatively forgotten conflict.
Biafra is located in eastern Nigeria at the delta of the Niger river. It is the second most densely populated region in Africa, after the Nile. The people here were traditionally of the Igbo ethnic group. They lived in small tribal units known as Ummunas, with administrative tasks carried out by councils “presided over by senior men who held office by virtue of their personal ability as much as age or lineage.” (23)
Northern Nigeria, on the other hand, was a feudalistic region, consisting of several Hausa emirates based on Maliki Islam. When the British arrived they tapped into this pre-existing political system, administering through the local emirs in a policy known as “Indirect Rule.” Preservation of the emirates entailed the preservation of Islam, thus Christian missionaries were forbidden from going to the north; as they were the ones who brought British education, this meant new ideas never really took hold in the north, at least not the way they did in the south. Surveying the country’s ethnic groups in 1957, the Willink Commission noted that “the northern region has remained behind the protective wall of the Colonial government as an Islamic society, singularly unaffected by change in the rest of the world.”
During the colonial period, there grew a disparity in the levels of development between north and south. Southern Nigeria (including Biafra) was one of the few British colonies able to sustain itself, with import tariffs totalling £1.5 million per year. Northern tariffs were only £0.3 million per year. As international pressure mounted for Britain to grant her colonies independence, it became clear that the establishment of a federal Nigeria would entail the subsidisation of the north with the wealth of the south.
Such unequal outcomes exacerbated ethnic tensions. When the British withdrew in 1960, the Igbo, having much higher levels of education, tended to be the ones filling in the top echelons of the military and government. They were also a more mobile and urban people, with thousands migrating out of the overpopulated Niger Delta to search for work in the cities of the north and the east.
The nascent republic lasted only six years. It ended with the assassination of all its major political leaders in the northern and federal governments, the result of a conspiracy by Igbo soldiers. This prompted Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, head of the army, to dissolve the constitution and assume power. Despite neutralising the coup, Aguiyi-Ironsi—an Igbo—was suspected of being in on the plot. Northern colonels doubted whether he would ever relinquish power. They killed him and replaced him with Yakubu Gowon—a Christian northerner from a minority ethnic group—to stitch the nation back together. At the same time, a wave of pogroms—some of them coordinated by Hausa soldiers—resulted in the death of tens of thousands of Igbos in the north. Millions of refugees streamed into the east, where military governor Odumegwu Ojukwu, unable to feed them, faced an imminent humanitarian crisis.
Ojukwu and Gowon met at Aburi to negotiate the terms of a new Nigeria. The Northerners, wary of Igbo domination, wanted to divide the east into several river states which would have deprived the Igbo of Nigeria’s oil wealth. The refugees wanted to return to their homes in the north under guarantees of security and fair treatment. By the end of the conference, both sides had agreed to a Nigerian confederation, but then Gowon unexpectedly reneged on the deal. It is still not entirely clear what happened today, but in addition to whatever differences of interpretation there were, the British and Americans had apparently encouraged him not to go through with it (Cronjé says this was related to Dr. Eni Njoku, Vice-Chancellor of Lagos University, by Sir Francis Cumming-Bruce, the British High Commissioner).
A looser form of government might have saved Nigeria from the civil war. Why didn’t Britain support the Aburi accord? As a matter of principle, they didn’t want to encourage secession or tribalism. The unity and integrity of the Nigerian nation was at hand. Though Auberon Waugh points out that neither Nigeria nor Biafra had a constitutional basis in the First Republic, it is the case that Nigeria wanted one state, while the existence of an independent or autonomous Biafra implied the possibility of further regionalism and secessionism.
Above all, Britain’s interests lay in Nigeria’s oil reserves. Most of these were located on the Biafran coast, where British companies extracted them. This was a significant percentage of Britain’s oil imports. The price of oil had also just seen a sudden spike, due to the recent Suez crisis. Faced with an independent Biafra or a unitary Nigeria, the latter seemed a better choice for securing Britain’s oil interests. Later, once the federal army had captured the coast and encircled Biafra, Britain’s formal neutrality shifted into covert support for Nigeria, including the sale of arms to its army, and instructions given to the BBC to only broadcast pro-Nigerian views.
The Nigerian blockade resulted in millions of Biafrans starving to death—thousands per day. Attempts to relieve the crisis—such as the establishment of a land corridor—were scuppered by Nigeria, who argued that food relief would only prolong the siege, which was a perfectly legitimate form of warfare. Britain was behind her. Both countries believed that Biafra would fall in a matter of months; therefore, argued those within the British government, the swiftest, most humane way to end the war would be to back Nigeria for a “quick kill”; this also became the rationalisation for not trying to alleviate the famine through international channels.
Biafra held out for almost two years, far longer than anyone expected. Its biggest problem was simply the lack of food. To feed its soldiers, the Biafran government offered seeds to farmers, for which they took 50% of the harvest. They were also helped by a major humanitarian effort to airlift supplies past the blockade. The airlift was opposed by the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Nations. Its major backers were the Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches, who arranged for enthusiastic volunteers to fly supplies in from Portuguese Africa; one of those pilots, the Swedish aristocrat and mercenary Carl von Rosen, even smuggled in a few light aircraft, establishing an implausible—almost comical—yet somehow effective Biafran airforce.
Yet alone on the world stage, outnumbered and outgunned, facing critical shortages of food and weapons, Biafra simply had no way to win the war. Through sheer force, Nigeria brought the region back into its fold. New states were carved out of it. Nigeria as a whole remained a military dictatorship. Its embattled path to democracy has seen five coups since 1960, with the last one being in 1993. Today Biafra is only the rallying cry for a few small secessionist groups; for everyone else, the name invokes the distant memory of a terrible famine during this now largely forgotten war.
Read this review and other writings on my blog.
Biafra was in fact a real place, a country that tried to break away from Nigeria between 1967 and 1970. That was at the same time as the Vietnam War, which is probably why it is overshadowed in our historical memory. Like Vietnam, Biafra was one of the first conflicts to play out on the television. Almost 2 million civilians—many of them children—starved to death. Do you know that crude stereotype of “Africa” as a dark continent filled with bony-ribbed, pot-bellied children gazing vacantly towards charity workers? Media coverage of Biafra likely has something to do with that.
Two journalists, Auberon Waugh and Suzanne Cronjé, saw the dire conditions as they played out. Based on their first-hand investigations, they became convinced that Britain, though formally neutral in the war, had permitted its escalation as a matter of self-interest. Biafra: Britain’s Shame is their exposé. Its format is rather strange and rushed, no doubt due to the urgency of the ongoing war. It is a collection of articles, each written more to persuade than to inform, having overall a rather faded and far-away impression, like all out-of-date news. Though this book is of limited importance as a history of Biafra, it nonetheless remains a fascinating time capsule into the public discourse of a now relatively forgotten conflict.
Biafra is located in eastern Nigeria at the delta of the Niger river. It is the second most densely populated region in Africa, after the Nile. The people here were traditionally of the Igbo ethnic group. They lived in small tribal units known as Ummunas, with administrative tasks carried out by councils “presided over by senior men who held office by virtue of their personal ability as much as age or lineage.” (23)
Northern Nigeria, on the other hand, was a feudalistic region, consisting of several Hausa emirates based on Maliki Islam. When the British arrived they tapped into this pre-existing political system, administering through the local emirs in a policy known as “Indirect Rule.” Preservation of the emirates entailed the preservation of Islam, thus Christian missionaries were forbidden from going to the north; as they were the ones who brought British education, this meant new ideas never really took hold in the north, at least not the way they did in the south. Surveying the country’s ethnic groups in 1957, the Willink Commission noted that “the northern region has remained behind the protective wall of the Colonial government as an Islamic society, singularly unaffected by change in the rest of the world.”
During the colonial period, there grew a disparity in the levels of development between north and south. Southern Nigeria (including Biafra) was one of the few British colonies able to sustain itself, with import tariffs totalling £1.5 million per year. Northern tariffs were only £0.3 million per year. As international pressure mounted for Britain to grant her colonies independence, it became clear that the establishment of a federal Nigeria would entail the subsidisation of the north with the wealth of the south.
Such unequal outcomes exacerbated ethnic tensions. When the British withdrew in 1960, the Igbo, having much higher levels of education, tended to be the ones filling in the top echelons of the military and government. They were also a more mobile and urban people, with thousands migrating out of the overpopulated Niger Delta to search for work in the cities of the north and the east.
The nascent republic lasted only six years. It ended with the assassination of all its major political leaders in the northern and federal governments, the result of a conspiracy by Igbo soldiers. This prompted Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, head of the army, to dissolve the constitution and assume power. Despite neutralising the coup, Aguiyi-Ironsi—an Igbo—was suspected of being in on the plot. Northern colonels doubted whether he would ever relinquish power. They killed him and replaced him with Yakubu Gowon—a Christian northerner from a minority ethnic group—to stitch the nation back together. At the same time, a wave of pogroms—some of them coordinated by Hausa soldiers—resulted in the death of tens of thousands of Igbos in the north. Millions of refugees streamed into the east, where military governor Odumegwu Ojukwu, unable to feed them, faced an imminent humanitarian crisis.
Ojukwu and Gowon met at Aburi to negotiate the terms of a new Nigeria. The Northerners, wary of Igbo domination, wanted to divide the east into several river states which would have deprived the Igbo of Nigeria’s oil wealth. The refugees wanted to return to their homes in the north under guarantees of security and fair treatment. By the end of the conference, both sides had agreed to a Nigerian confederation, but then Gowon unexpectedly reneged on the deal. It is still not entirely clear what happened today, but in addition to whatever differences of interpretation there were, the British and Americans had apparently encouraged him not to go through with it (Cronjé says this was related to Dr. Eni Njoku, Vice-Chancellor of Lagos University, by Sir Francis Cumming-Bruce, the British High Commissioner).
A looser form of government might have saved Nigeria from the civil war. Why didn’t Britain support the Aburi accord? As a matter of principle, they didn’t want to encourage secession or tribalism. The unity and integrity of the Nigerian nation was at hand. Though Auberon Waugh points out that neither Nigeria nor Biafra had a constitutional basis in the First Republic, it is the case that Nigeria wanted one state, while the existence of an independent or autonomous Biafra implied the possibility of further regionalism and secessionism.
Above all, Britain’s interests lay in Nigeria’s oil reserves. Most of these were located on the Biafran coast, where British companies extracted them. This was a significant percentage of Britain’s oil imports. The price of oil had also just seen a sudden spike, due to the recent Suez crisis. Faced with an independent Biafra or a unitary Nigeria, the latter seemed a better choice for securing Britain’s oil interests. Later, once the federal army had captured the coast and encircled Biafra, Britain’s formal neutrality shifted into covert support for Nigeria, including the sale of arms to its army, and instructions given to the BBC to only broadcast pro-Nigerian views.
The Nigerian blockade resulted in millions of Biafrans starving to death—thousands per day. Attempts to relieve the crisis—such as the establishment of a land corridor—were scuppered by Nigeria, who argued that food relief would only prolong the siege, which was a perfectly legitimate form of warfare. Britain was behind her. Both countries believed that Biafra would fall in a matter of months; therefore, argued those within the British government, the swiftest, most humane way to end the war would be to back Nigeria for a “quick kill”; this also became the rationalisation for not trying to alleviate the famine through international channels.
Biafra held out for almost two years, far longer than anyone expected. Its biggest problem was simply the lack of food. To feed its soldiers, the Biafran government offered seeds to farmers, for which they took 50% of the harvest. They were also helped by a major humanitarian effort to airlift supplies past the blockade. The airlift was opposed by the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Nations. Its major backers were the Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches, who arranged for enthusiastic volunteers to fly supplies in from Portuguese Africa; one of those pilots, the Swedish aristocrat and mercenary Carl von Rosen, even smuggled in a few light aircraft, establishing an implausible—almost comical—yet somehow effective Biafran airforce.
Yet alone on the world stage, outnumbered and outgunned, facing critical shortages of food and weapons, Biafra simply had no way to win the war. Through sheer force, Nigeria brought the region back into its fold. New states were carved out of it. Nigeria as a whole remained a military dictatorship. Its embattled path to democracy has seen five coups since 1960, with the last one being in 1993. Today Biafra is only the rallying cry for a few small secessionist groups; for everyone else, the name invokes the distant memory of a terrible famine during this now largely forgotten war.
Read this review and other writings on my blog.
Displaying 1 of 1 review