How Biafra Came to Be*

Genocide, Starvation, and the American Imagination of the Nigerian Civil War

Nathaniel WhittemoreNorthwestern University - Class of 2006

Department of History

Submitted May 4, 2006

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Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank a number of people for making this work possible. Firstly,

without the guidance and support of Professor Brodie Fischer, this thesis would simply

not have happened. Her patience and assistance were invaluable in developing my ideas

and keeping me sane. For the grounding in post-colonial African history and theory, I

would have been lost without Professor Will Reno. His passion for and commitment

working with students is a testament to good education. Thanks also to David

Easterbrook for long hours spent introducing me to the wonders of the Herskovitz library.

In general, the History Department has given me an incredible home, and I cannot thank

its faculty – Henry Binford, Mark Bradley, Carl Petry and all the rest – enough.

I’d also like to thank Monica Russel y Rordriguez and Jeff Rice for being my

oldest guardians and friends at this university. The four years I’ve spent at Northwestern

would not have been nearly so wonderful without their intellectual and emotional

support. This thesis provides me a particularly good opportunity to thank Professor Rice,

for we’ve shared a growing passion and interest in global conflict and humanitarian crisis

over the last few years.

Finally, to my friends and family, this thesis has demonstrated both your

incredible support and your total unwillingness to let me loose out on relationships by

falling to far into whatever endeavor I’ve found to consume myself. Family, thanks for

always calling to find out how it’s going. 1916 Maple, thanks for being the (in)sanity in

the boredom. 2003-2005 Chapin, thanks for providing constant inspiration. 2006 IYVS &

NUDAC - thanks for giving me context. MLE: thanks for the long hours, sweet relief,

and many citations.

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One Page SummaryFrom May 1967-January 1970, Nigeria was gripped by a civil war that killed

between one and two million individuals. The primary cause of death was a famine

resulting from a Nigerian economic blockade of the secessionist Eastern Region known

as “Biafra.” The starvation was exacerbated by political wrangling over the terms of aid

distribution. Images of hunger spread across the world, causing a particular media

sensation and public outcry in America.

This thesis focuses on the creation of the American image of Biafra during Spring

1967 and Spring and Summer 1968. It is guided by a theoretical question: “What makes

Americans feel connected to conflicts in far away places – especially when those places

are not within the national interest?” It seeks to understand the relationship between

Biafran propaganda and American media representation in creating a popular imagination

of Biafra held by United States citizens. More specifically, it seeks to understand the use

of an evolving discourse of “genocide,” in attempting to create this imagination.

The thesis argues that the response of both American citizens and press was

determined largely by the starvation and the development of ‘humanitarian’ crisis.

Indeed, rather than ‘creating’ Biafra, the discourse of genocide was used starting in mid

1968 in an attempt to control the terms of discussion surrounding the famine. In the end,

Biafran propaganda had a much greater effect on its domestic population than on foreign

opinion. The world press was primarily concerned with the suffering of Biafrans, rather

than the Biafran propaganda’s interpretation of that suffering.

Key words

Nigeria Genocide Humanitarianism Propaganda Famine

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Table of Contents

1. Cover Page

2. Acknowledgments

3. One Page Summary

4. Table of Contents

5. Introduction

6. Section One: Beginnings and Background

7. Section Two: Recognition and Rhetorical Change

8. Section Three: Starvation Sympathy

9. Section Four: Holocaust and Hunger

10. Conclusion

11. Bibliography

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Introduction

This thesis starts in Cairo of all places. It starts on the dusty courtyard of St.

Andrew’s Refugee Ministry and in the American University library, whose ugly concrete

architecture makes Northwestern students feel right at home. It starts during my Study

Abroad, fall 2004, when I taught English to Sudanese Refugees. I would later joke that I

had come to Egypt looking for the Middle East, and left having found Africa.

I began tutoring at St. Andrews on a whim. My interest in Cairo was the Middle

East, or so I thought, but I had noticed before leaving that Sudan was mighty close to

Egypt on a map. And Hey, hadn’t there been something going on in Sudan? Something

some were calling genocide?

I was a student of the 1990s. I had read about Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda and

Kosovo. I had read about all those places that made me wonder just where I had been to

not remember them from my childhood. Many of those situations shared that word –

Genocide – and so to hear of another one – a new Genocide – and to be so close to it

seemed a fascination worth exploring.

To get to St. Andrews, you walk down from Esaaf square, through the chaos and

bustle of fresh juice stands, shouting street venders, and the proud cacophony of one

thousand honking taxis. The metro spills its millions out onto the street and everywhere

there is the bustle of life lived in the open. Just before 26 July Street, though, you slip

through a unremarkable black gate. The only indications that this is your destination are

the small hanging sign and the little steeple that protrudes out from behind the few date

trees in the courtyard. No matter how unassuming it may seem, to enter that gate is to

cross the border into another world entirely.

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There is a palpable calm inside those walls that comes as close to any natural

feeling of “community” as anything I’ve experienced. The vast majority of students are

Sudanese. Most of them have come from the chaos of the 21 year old civil war in the

South. When you walk from that gate in past the chapel and to the main office, though,

you can hardly imagine their history and the tragic history of their home. All you can

think of is the smiling giggles of Sawsan and Faiza as they stealing cursory glances at the

various groups of boys and men, themselves mingling and talking. Your mind is filled not

with the tragedies of their past but of the hoop dreams of basketball players like Isaac and

Akook. You can spend quiet hours sitting on the steps of the chapel, basking in small

serenity from the coughing, hawking, honking congestion of outside. That place is, in the

most real sense of the world, sanctuary.

But it is not the whole story. It is a wonderful place, but it is a little chapter of

hope in a novel more often filled with terrible cruelty and misfortune. Indeed, even this

tiny refuge of utopia, crushing reality often invades. I was frustrated to begin to see that

even in the small safety of St. Andrews, there is often a cool distance maintained between

Southern Sudanese Christians and Northern Muslims. As I began to make friends, I

began to hear stories; I vicariously experienced remembrances of joy and a few of pain. I

started to see the incredible dedication to dreams of the future exist side by side with the

horror of overwhelming hopelessness. My walls slowly came down. My emotional

distance from tragedy, the great psychological privilege of my American birth, grew

smaller. Faces and names replaced the faceless and nameless victims of crisis I had read

about in newspapers.

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I tried to understand, to gain some insight into the monumental brutishness of the world. I

began to read David Rieff and Romeo Dallaire. I tried to dig deeper and further back. I

read accounts, first hand and second hand, journalistic and scholarly, of places like

Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan. These were places that before fit into my framework as

“that troubled African country” but were completely depersonalized, no matter how much

unspecific sympathy I had.

It was not that I didn’t care, but simply that there had been nothing human about

numbers of the dead, and nothing remarkable about yet another tragedy of the moment.

This is, itself, a great paradox in people; our ability to empathize with and sacrifice for

our fellow travelers to the grave is matched only by our knack at distancing ourselves

from the moral commitments that recognition of a common humanity demands.

I came to the Biafran war in the beginning because of its place in so many of the

works I was reading about the modern state of humanitarianism. Biafra, they said, was

where it all started. It was the first war that required a relief effort that the first generation

of aid organizations couldn’t provide. It was the war where famous humanitarians like

Bernard Kouchner and Frederick Cuny cut their teeth. For Kouchner, it was the impetus

to start Medicins San Frontieres – today the best privately funded NGO in the world.

Biafra, I knew, had been a largely but not totally ethnic separatist movement that

wanted to be a political entity unto itself – distinct from the united Nigeria that Britain

had left largely in the hands of their former native leaders at independence in 1960. The

road had been a rocky one from the start – but by 1967, the Biafrans – Easterners –

decided that they could no longer remain a part of the Nigerian political entity. Their

challenge, as I would find out, would be to either beat the Nigerians on the battle field (a

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daunting task, given British military support for its former colony) or to convince the

world to intervene on their behalf.

Authors like David Rieff (A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis) used

Biafra as a starting point, but without really explaining the details. I was left with the

vague notion that Biafra was remarkable for its propaganda; that it had sold the world on

a genocide that never really happened. Rieff used it to begin his discussion of the modern

era of humanitarian crises, in which aid organizations become partisans of their

benefactors with marketing that manipulates emotions and confuses political

relationships. But was this the case?

***

This thesis is about how Biafra came to exist in the American imagination. The

story is complicated. It is a story of overt forces: the Biafran propaganda, the

sensationalist American depictions of famine. It is also the story of forces more subtle:

collective memories and self-imaginations. At its best, it weaves the subtle and overt

together in a way which better explains why Americans engaged with the Nigeria-Biafra

war to the extent they did.

The theoretical question which drove the work is as devastatingly complex in its

answer as it is simple in its stating: “what makes Americans feel connected to far away

conflicts – particularly in the absence of a significant national interest?” I wondered if by

studying the evolution of American concern for the plight of Biafrans in the late 1960s, I

might discover something that would help me better understand the process of “raising

awareness” of African issues that has gone on ever since and continues to this day.

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I was also driven by both a general and a specific historical question. At the most

basic level, I wanted to ask: “How did Biafra sell itself to Americans, and how successful

was the pitch?” More specifically, I wanted to know how and why the Biafran rhetoric of

“genocide” evolved over time, and how successfully it was leveraged. Generally

speaking, I wanted to explore for myself what this lauded and lamented Biafran

propaganda machine really said, and more importantly, to ask if the correlation between

Biafran propaganda and American perception of the conflict was as strong as it seemed?

Specifically, I wanted to see how the early use of genocide – one of the most notable

aspects of Biafran discourse – had evolved and what sort of traction it had with American

audiences.

I chose to focus on news media to gauge United States citizen response to the

crisis for a number of reasons. Looking back at the media allows one to examine

evolutions of discourse over time. In a pluralistic and free environment, changes in news

tend to reflect updates in both information and understanding. I knew from preliminary

research that American discourse on Biafra was not monolithic, and focusing on news

media allowed me to attempt to reconstruct the dynamic evolution of that understanding.

I chose to focus on the New York Times because of its leading role in influencing

informed discourse. As noted by many scholars, even at its height, active discussion of

Biafra was limited to a relatively well-informed section of the public. Studies of

Americans and foreign policy during the 1960s suggested that to talk about “making an

issue politically salient” or “generating widespread concern…[and] mobilizing public

opinion,” was to talk “about reaching the attentive public (‘informed and interested in

foreign policy problems, and which constituted the audience for the foreign policy

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discussions among the elites’) and especially the policy and opinion elite at the top.”1 My

interest was to read what they were reading, in hopes of understanding how their

perceptions of the conflict might have been shaped, and how those perceptions were or

weren’t correlated to Biafran information.

My focus on media had a theoretical underpinning as well. Stated one way,

American news media is a crossroads where Americans and the world meet to share

understanding. For the majority of citizens, news media forms the bridge between

themselves and far-away conflicts. Examining the representation of the Biafra conflict in

US news media seemed essential to understanding how American imaginations of the

conflict developed. The Biafrans understood this point as well. The US-owned, Geneva-

based marketing firm, Markpress, which handled the majority of Biafra’s international

publicity after 1968, targeted journalists in a myriad of ways to attempt to influence the

conflict discourse on foreign shores.2

Throughout this thesis, I will argue that Biafran propaganda did not shape the

discourse about Biafra in America to nearly the degree assumed by many modern

scholars. This is certainly not for lack of trying; throughout the war, Biafran discourse

evolved, internalizing lessons and regularly updating its own rhetoric. The reality,

however, is that the relationship between Biafran foreign strategy and American

representation of the conflict was much more subtle.

Importantly, just as American perception of Biafra was not static, neither was the

Biafran identity shaping its representations. In many ways, whatever distinct Biafran

consciousness did exist was a product of the war, and for this reason, the reception of

1 Wiseberg, 5452 Laurie Wiseberg, The International Politics of Relief, 575

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Biafran propaganda sent out into the world reflected and affected the domestic identity of

that people at home. I spend much of my thesis exploring evolving Biafran self-

imagination because I believe that, fundamentally, it cannot be detached from

international representation and response.

While researching, a number of key themes emerged in both Biafran propaganda

and American media. First, there was the general discourse of genocide. Throughout the

conflict, the extent to which and the language by which Biafra presented itself as the

embattled victim of genocide evolved. If at the beginning, the concept was subdued and

buried in the discussion of massacres and argument of “secession for survival,” by the

time starvation hit, it was the word and rhetoric used to centralize all other discourses. As

this thesis will show, this had largely to do with the development of the famine and

‘humanitarian’ crisis, and the need for Biafra to control the political discussion of that

crisis.

Along with “genocide” came a strategic use of Holocaust allusion. Parallels to the

modern and ancient plight of the Jews form the second theme I explore. The beginning of

the conflict witnessed the regular appearance – in both Biafran and American sources - of

comparisons between the Ibo tribe that formed the core of the Biafran rebellion and

Israelites. By the peak of the starvation crisis in Summer 1968, both the Biafrans and

their humanitarian and political supporters in the United States were making frequent

allusions to the Holocaust. In particular, the number “6 million” became a portent for

how many Biafrans might die if the problem of starvation was allowed to persist. I

explore these from both a rhetorical and theoretical framework.

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Thirdly, I found it necessary to analyze the phenomenon of human “bridges”

between Biafra and America. I noticed (in no small part because people like William

Bernhardt of Markpress also noticed) that as the starvation took told, Americans and

Europeans – missionaries, humanitarians, and journalists – made regular appearances

both in Biafran propaganda and American news stories. I explore why it might have been

important for Americans to have people like themselves as reference points to connect

with the far away conflict. In particular, I spend some time thinking about the journalists

themselves – what forces were they subject to and how did their experience as people

reporting the war color their bias?

Finally, and most importantly, I deal with the phenomenon of starvation

sympathy. The single biggest factor in engaging American attention during the war was

the public discussion of starvation and its attendant imagery. As I dug back through the

news, I was startled to see the change in quantity and type of coverage given to the

conflict after the famine reached crisis levels in early Summer 1968. This realization

brought up a new host of questions. What was it about starvation that engaged Americans

so strongly? Who controlled the explanation of the famine? How did Biafran rhetoric

change to assimilate the fact of starvation and did this influence American discourse or

response to the mass hunger?

Like the perceptions of the conflict more generally, the American perception of

the famine had less to do with Biafran propaganda than has been previously suggested.

The rhetoric of genocide certainly influenced some Americans during the starvation –

citizens and leaders alike. Despite this, there was much more to American imaginations

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than the Markpress strategy of equating the miserable images streaming into American

homes with a Final Solution to the Biafra problem being cooked up in Lagos.

As with all aspects of the conflict, the representation of the famine took the shape

it did based on a combination of factors and people. The testimony of sympathetic

journalists, missionaries, doctors, and others raised the moral indignation of average

citizens. The political implications of that indignation were less clear. Indeed, the

intransigence of both the Nigerian and Biafran leadership in compromising on a strategy

for distribution of relief aid made Americans even more hesitant to “take sides,” and

become politically invested beyond demanding that relief be delivered promptly and

affectively to those in dire need. What seems clear now is that starvation had a particular

power to involve American collective self-imagination, and that this imagination – to a

far greater degree than Biafran propaganda - dominated the mostly humanitarian

response.

The sections of this thesis reflect the complication of the story and the importance

of attempting to understand the relationship between American media, Biafran

propaganda, and American citizen response in nuanced terms.

Section One provides the reader with some essential background for

understanding the conflict. Although this thesis is primarily focused on understanding

representations and imaginations, these cannot be wholly divorced from the military

context of the war. The section includes an analysis of early Biafran self-representation as

well as an examination of American discussion about the conflict in the war’s early

months. In some ways, it provides the necessary barometer of American interest in and

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discourse on the conflict before the starvation began. Importantly, it also demonstrates

the relative submergence of “genocide” in early Biafran rhetoric.

Section Two focuses on April through June 1968, a period of real and rhetorical

transitions in the conflict. It was during this period that the humanitarian crisis began to

become acute, and for the first time the suffering of the Biafran citizens resulted in

positive diplomatic gain for the Biafran leadership. The section examines the language

used by four African nations in their recognition of Biafra and situates it in an ongoing

evolution of the discourse of genocide and suffering. The section concludes with an

examination of the Biafran use of “genocide” immediately before starvation really hit the

American headlines.

Section Three returns the sphere of discussion back to America. At its most basic,

it is the story of how the famine came to dominate American imagination of the Biafra

conflict. It focuses on the representation of the famine in the New York Times during the

Summer 1968, and tries to offer some suggestions about why Americans responded to the

particular representations offered in that media. Importantly, it takes time to think

critically about the journalists embedded in Biafra and why they wrote the way they did.

Towards the end of the section, I explore how Biafra tried to influence the representations

of the famine by connecting starvation and genocide, and ask how successful the strategy

was.

Section Four moves beyond the historical narrative to explore two of the main

components of the Biafran rhetoric of genocide in terms of potentials to engage American

citizens. I first look at the allusions to modern and biblical Israelis and attempt to situate

the reader in the 1960s context into which Holocaust comparisons would have come.

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Secondly, I look at the power of hunger to engage and connect people across borders.

This exploration is routed in anthropological, psychological and humanitarian theory and

offers interesting conclusions about the language of suffering. Broadly, I argue that the

Holocaust comparisons had a limited ability to engage Americans while hunger had a

power to engage that was much greater than verbal communication.

I’ve used a variety of sources to complete this work. The Melville Herskovitz

Library provided me an invaluable bounty of Biafran press releases, pamphlets, and

more. These primary sources helped me specify the contextualized understanding of the

Biafran propaganda campaign I received from secondary sources like John de St. Jorre’s

The Brother’s War. On the American side, my primary sources were the New York Times

articles published throughout the war. Although I have only included analysis on Spring

1967 and Spring and Summer 1968, my research included reading articles throughout the

war, in order to better understand those documents I did focus on.

Although I haven’t presented the entire chronology of the war, I believe the three

sections I’ve focused on, Summer 1967 and Spring and Summer 1968 are essential in

understanding how Biafra achieved its particular place in American consciousness.

Summer 1967 provides a control for understanding Biafran rhetorical strategy and

American media representation of the conflict in the absence of humanitarian disaster.

Spring 1968 was a transition; the starvation was getting worse, the Biafran foreign

diplomatic gains were getting better, and the rhetoric was changing accordingly. Summer

1968 saw the onslaught of starvation imagery in American media that corresponded with

the most devastating period of famine during the war.

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In the end, I hope that this thesis might help reframe the discourse of cross-

cultural imaginations and help us think critically about how we engage with and

understand those far-away conflicts which continue to plague and shape our world to this

very day.

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SECTION ONE: Background and Beginnings

From May 1967 until June 1968, the world watched the implosion of Nigeria, a

country in which many had placed their hopes for a unified and successful post-Colonial

Black Africa. The first half of the war was characterized by an early military back-and-

forth that by Fall 1967 had calcified into a frustrating siege and stalemate that would last

more than two years.

From May 1967 through September 1968, the war went from avoidable to

inevitable to near Biafran triumph and finally to languishing. The Federal Military

Government, bolstered by British and Russian armaments, was in the better long term

military position, and after September ’67, was never under threat of “losing” the war

again. The period from October ’67 to June 1968 ushered in the long siege of Biafra and

in many ways, the most important battles were fought in the international diplomatic

realm.

This section of the thesis explores the early American perception of the Nigeria-

Biafra war. Specifically, it focuses on early Biafran self-representation and its influence,

or lack thereof, on American news coverage, exemplified by the New York Times. The

purpose of this section is to provide an initial reading of the context into which Biafran

propaganda was received.

Where the Times reporting reflected the reality of the situation, I have referenced

it like any other source. Where it departed, however, I have made particular note in order

to better understand the early perceptions of the conflict.

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On May 28th, 1967, Biafra became front page news. The Regional Assembly of

the Eastern Region of Nigeria3 was presented by regional leader Lt. Col. Emeka Ojukwu

with three choices; they could submit to domination from Northern Nigeria by accepting

Nigerian leader Colonel Gowon’s terms for a confederation of states, they could

“continue the present stalemate and drift,” or alternately ensure “the survival of [their]

people by asserting [their] autonomy.”4 The Consultative Assembly correctly read

Ojukwu’s tone, characterized by the “sulphurous” regional sentiment in which “anyone

who opposed secession was likely to be branded as a ‘saboteur.’5 The next day, they

passed a unanimous resolution giving Ojukwu a mandate to declare the sovereign

“Republic of Biafra.”

The next few days, called a “cliffhanger” by the New York Times6, must have

seemed more like inevitability come to pass in Nigeria. Even before the actual declaration

of secession, the leader of the Federal Military Government of Nigeria, Yakubu Gowon

had declared a state of emergency and assumed full powers. In the declaration he stated

that “We must rise to the challenge…what is at stake is the very survival of Nigeria as

one political and economic unit.”7

And so the terms were laid. On the one side was the Gowon’s call for One Nigeria

and on the other was Ojukwu’s Sovereignty for Survival. Even as early as May 1967,

these two refrains largely defined the political terms of the conflict. Over the course of

the war, they became increasingly calcified, their entrenchment and mutual exclusivity

3 The region that would later become known as “Biafra”4 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 121.5 Ibid., 121.6 “Eastern Nigeria Votes Secession,” The New York Times, May 28, 19677 Ibid.

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ensured by uncompromisingly hawkish leadership and internal propaganda campaigns to

match.

Between the Eastern Regional Consultative Assembly’s secession mandate on the

27th and Ojukwu’s declaration of independence three days later, a flurry of press coverage

introduced Americans to the conflict and its players like the actors in a Shakespearean

drama. Some of the coverage used language just as dated. Lloyd Garrison, a writer who

would provide much of the New York Times coverage of the crisis, suggested that the

country had for months “been on the verge of disintegration as a result of bitter tribal and

religious hatred.”8

While not without an element of truth, there was much more to the conflict.

Nigeria’s ethnic composition included three major tribal groups – the Western Yorubas,

Northern Hausa-Fulanis, and the Eastern Ibos. Each region had numerous minority

groups including the Ijaw and Efik in Eastern Nigeria, Kanuri and Tiv in the North, and

Nupe and Kamberawa in the West. At the time of the outbreak of war, the population of

the minority groups together approximately equaled that of the Yoruba, Ibo, and Hausa-

Fulani combined.9 The North was the sphere of the Muslims, most of who had been

converted hundreds of years earlier. The South tended to be Christian, particularly in the

East, which had the highest proportion of Catholics of any region in Africa. When the

conflict started, Nigeria had between 47-55million people, the majority concentrated in

the North (approximately 25 million) and East (roughly 13 million).10

The balance of power in the country had been historically determined by a

number of factors. In 1914 the British had amalgamated the North and the South, not for 8 “Nigeria on Brink of Breaking Up,” The New York Times, May 29, 1967. 9 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 15.10 Ibid., 15.

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the sake of unifying the people but rather to “achieve a coordinated and economically-

efficient administration.”11 To this end, the British-style of “indirect rule” was utilized to

keep the Northern emirs and sultans in positions of political power throughout the

country. The Eastern region was, if “second in population …first in natural wealth.”12 It

was characterized by rich crops like palm oil, and throughout the period of colonial

administration, an Ibo Diaspora had led entrepreneurial Ibos to positions of economic

prominence throughout the country.

Throughout the 60 year period of British rule before independence, policy

emanating from Whitehall had the effect – sometimes intentionally – of exacerbating

regional tension and providing incentives for loose tribal affiliations to harden into

competing ethnic factions. When independence was finally granted in 1960, the reactions

of the Nigerian people tended to be varied. Ironically, the only group that had a vested

interest in Nigerian unification was the Eastern Region that would later secede.13 This

point would later be leveraged in Biafran propaganda that argued that the economic

dispersion of the Ibo (along with a set of essential Ibo traits) had produced in Biafrans a

certain unique Nigerian cosmopolitanism. And as Biafran public relations would later

point out ad infinitum, it was in fact, the Northern Region that had first tried to secede in

1966 – only to be persuaded otherwise by extreme last minute pressure from British and

American diplomats.

Early New York Times articles tended to locate the origins of the conflict in the

overthrow of the first Nigerian constitutional government in January 1966. According to

11 Nwachuku, Levi Akalazu. U.S./Nigeria: An Analysis of U.S. Involvement in the Nigeria/Biafra War, 1967-1970, 42.12 Thompson, Joseph E. American Policy and African Famine: The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1966-1970, 313 Nwachuku, Levi Akalazu. U.S./Nigeria: An Analysis of U.S. Involvement in the Nigeria/Biafra War, 1967-1970, 49.

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popular perception, the coup had been led by Gen. Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Ibo. About

two hundred days later, in July, a countercoup left a couple hundred Ibo officers dead and

a group of largely Northern army officers took power.

One of those officers was Yakuba “Jack” Gowon, a soft spoken man who would

rise to full power during the Biafran conflict. The 32-year old leader of the Federal

Military Government, a member of a minority Middle Belt tribe, was in some ways an

unlikely choice for his powerful position. He was, according to a New York Times profile

that appeared in late July, 1967, “a soldier’s soldier,” – “the kind of staff officer who was

the first at his desk in the morning [and] the last to show up for a pre-dinner drink at the

officer’s mess.” In fact, it was for precisely these qualities that his fellow officers

organizing the second coup had turned to him – he hadn’t made any enemies and could

be trusted.14

This picture was in sharp contrast with his Biafran counterpart – the “chain-

smoking scholar” Odumegwu Ojukwu. He had attended Oxford compared to Gowon’s

Sandhurst military training. Ojukwu had been the least popular of the four regional

governors under Ironsi, but all that changed after the counter-coup in July. It changed

even more in September 1966 after the massacre of thousands of Ibos in the North that

produced an exodus of millions back to the Eastern Region. In the East, he became,

according to one commentator, a sort of “folk hero,”15 due to his defiance of Gowon in

the aftermath of the counter-coup. The personalities of each man and their beliefs about

the other would affect their hesitance to discuss realistic options for compromise during

the war.

14 “Nigeria: Two Men Who Are Preparing to Reap a Whirlwind,” The New York Times, June 25, 196715 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 81.

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It is important to briefly examine the late 1966 pogrom of Easterners by Northern

Nigerians. The event would be singularly important for the state of hypertension and fear

it produced in Ibos. As the war progressed, it would be held up as the ,best piece of

evidence for the Biafran government’s claim that the Eastern peoples faced a program of

genocide if they survived the war.16

The event started on September 19th, when a group of Northern soldiers began

killing Ibos in Tiv country in the Middle Belt area of the country. News of the killings

triggered reprisal violence in the East, which was, in turn, broadcast on Northern radio.

On September 29th, soldiers in Kano responded with a mass execution of Ibo refugees.

Mobs soon formed in most major Northern towns, killing and looting – particularly in the

sabon gari or “stranger’s quarters” where the Ibos lived. John de St. Jorre, a journalist

who spent time on both sides of the front lines and whose 1972 The Brother’s War

remains perhaps the most referenced source on the conflict suggested that, like earlier

riots in May of the same year, “the killings were organized though the form of planning is

obscure. In many cases it was simply an awareness that the government…did not

disapprove of – or would make no effort to stop – people who took the law into their own

hands.”17 Unlike earlier riots, he suggested that the Fall pogrom had significant

involvement by the Army and that the killing was far more indiscriminate; it was carried

out by all Northerners – rather than simply Northern Muslims - and targeted all

Southerners, rather than just Ibos.

For much of September and October the Northern Government lay supine as the pogrom burnt itself out. By that time thousands were dead or maimed and the entire Ibo

16 Interestingly, however, it was referred to as a “massacre” rather than genocide for more than a year in Biafran propaganda before being connected to the broader claim of genocide. This will be discussed in depth later. 17 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 84.

22

population of the North, about a million, had abandoned everything it possessed and was trekking back to the East.18

The mythology of the massacres, if “one of the hoariest [myths] of the Civil

War,”19 would go on to be perhaps the most important single historical factor in the

Biafran people’s deep belief that their security could never be assured in a federal

Nigeria. Indeed, its visceral impact on the population was leveraged by Biafran

leadership throughout their propaganda campaign, although the context in which it was

used evolved along with the general tone and strategy of the public rhetoric. Where

legitimate fear ended and manipulated fear began is hard to determine. Whatever the

case, the massacres played deeply on the collective imaginations of the Ibo people and

helped produce a sort of fatalism that led them to throw their whole lot for survival

behind Ojukwu.

Even before the long-term consequences sunk in, the immediate aftermath of the

killings was disastrous: “more than any other single factor, [they] sent [Nigeria] down the

slope of disintegration and war.”20 Despite the “appalling”21 numbers killed, outside

observers urged Ojukwu and the East to show restraint in the period between the

Consultative Assembly’s secession mandate and the declaration a few days later. “No one

needs to tell Colonel Ojukwu what a serious – perhaps even tragic – move it would be to

break Nigeria into pieces,” wrote the New York Times.

That particular article was fascinating in its combination of wishful thinking,

demonstration of American interest in the region, and genuine sensitivity and

thoughtfulness – rather than simple partisanship – to the fears and frustrations of the

18 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 85.19 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 87.20 Ibid., 87.21 “Nigeria’s Cliffhanger,” The New York Times, May 29, 1967.

23

Eastern Region. While underestimating the history of the conflict by remembering that

“only three years ago Nigeria could rightly be called… ‘a haven of stability,’” the editors

of the Times asserted their belief that “the Ibos of the East have the best of reasons to hate

and fear the northern Moslems.” The editorial also foreshadowed the oil question, which,

given the simultaneity of the Six-Day War, was at the forefront of American thinking.

The “exceptionally rich” oil fields, most of which were in the Eastern region, were being

“developed by American, British and French capital.” For this reason, “secession would

have an unhappy resemblance to the effort of the rich copper province of Katanga in the

Congo to be independent.”22 This specter of Katanga would hang over Biafra, in

particular in the minds of African nations.23

Still, there was little to be done. In response to the Consultative Assembly’s

mandate, Gowon replaced the four regions with a twelve state structure designed to give

minority groups a greater investment in the Nigerian federation by allocating them a

modicum of political autonomy and authority. The declaration effectively land-locked the

Ibos and was, as de Jorre wrote “the straw that broke the Camel’s back for the East.”24

On May 30th, the Biafran flag - red, black, and green horizontal bars behind a

symbolic rising sun - fluttered out over the State House in Enugu for the first time. The

new national anthem announced the dawn of the “Republic of Biafra” on Radio around

the country. A few short weeks later, the first shots rang out heralding the start of the

civil war, a conflict fought for reasons real and imagined. It would drag the country

through thirty months of war, taking with it the lives of millions of soldiers and civilians

and the hope of one of the most promising countries in Africa. 22 Ibid.23 See more on the discussion of “Balkanization” fears later…24 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 122.

24

***

The six weeks between the declaration of independence and the start of fighting

were possessed of a sort of anxious calm. On both sides of the line, armies trained,

recruited, and dug-in. The Federal economic blockade that had been implemented upon

Eastern secession quietly dug its teeth in, and some hopeful observers pleaded with

Gowon to give the sanctions time to work before completing the self-fulfilling prophecy

of war that had loomed for months. John de St. Jorre noticed that the environment in

Nigeria had a “dreamlike quality…the threat of war hung menacingly in the sodden air,

but no one seemed to know quite when and in what shape it would come. The only

constant was its inevitability.”25 On the other side, he remarked that “a siege psychology

was already a reality…

Ever since the second coup and the subsequent massacres a year before, the Easterners, especially the Ibos, had been drawing in their horns and looking fearfully across the Niger. The mood of heady nationalism with which they had greeted the declaration of Biafra’s independence a fortnight ago had passed. In its place was a more somber appreciation of their present diplomatic and physical isolation and a gnawing unease induced by the war which they too, knew had come.26

The war would vindicate de St. Jorre’s analysis. Indeed, what Nigeria – and much

of the Western world - seemed constantly to underestimate was just how powerfully the

Eastern’s own beleaguered imagination of itself as a people with its back to the wall of

extinction – that “drawing in [of the] horns” – would affect their determination to

struggle, like the chosen people of Canaan, for survival and ascendance.

The overwhelming character of the moment - as demonstrated by American

reporting and the flurry of propaganda and public relations emanating from Lagos and

Enugu – was that of everyone waiting to see what anyone else was going to do next. No

government wanted to make the first move lining up next to the belligerents – especially

25 Ibid., 126.26 Ibid., 130.

25

if there was still a chance that the story might have a peaceful ending - or at least one that

maintained a comfortable (and some would argue, delusional) status quo of ‘united’

Nigeria…

Ojukwu joked about it, saying with a chuckle that the Western Powers “were

hanging back waiting for the African powers and the Africans were hanging back for the

West.” Still, as de St. Jorre noted, “this point was probably worrying the Biafran

government more than any other at the time.”27

Nigeria sought to localize the conflict as much as possible; it wanted the external

perception to remain that the secession was an internal issue to be dealt with by the

‘legitimate’ sovereign government of Nigeria. The Biafrans sought exactly the opposite;

the more they were able to draw diplomatic, financial, and military support from the

outside, the more likely it was that they could achieve spoken and unspoken ends of the

conflict. Their strategy was one of globalization; while the mechanism would change, this

overarching framework would guide their foreign relations to the bitter end. The strategy

was reflected both in the development of universalizing discourse and in the dispatch of

emissaries around the world to raise support for the Biafran cause.

***

The interim period de Jorre called the ‘phoney’ war28 - after secession but before

fighting - provides a unique moment to attempt to understand early American media

discourse on the war and to try to see what the Biafrans were up against trying to buck

the status quo and how initially successful they were in shaping the American view of the

struggle. In the absence of battles and sound-bytes, the conflict was explored not simply 27 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 132.28 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972). 132

26

as an African problem but in its global context. Early reporting in papers like the New

York Times provides a wealth of material that helps explain how informed citizens were

relating to the news of the conflict, attempting to understand it and place it next to other

concerns and American foreign policy.

At the time of secession, the Times had two foreign correspondents stationed in

Nigeria. Alfred Friendly, Jr. was stationed mostly in Lagos while Lloyd Garrison wrote

from the East.29 Garrison’s personal story would be come emblematic of the pattern of

relationships formed between sympathetic journalists and the Biafrans. During the first

few months of the civil war, the Times coverage presented the conflict in terms resonant

with domestic American self-awareness. The reporting placed emphasis on the potential

impact on Nigerian oil, and more generally focused on the issue of regional and

continental stability. Both motifs were linked to contemporary world events – notably the

Six Days War and US adventuring in Congo and Vietnam.

To a much greater extent than would later be the case, early American media

discourse on Nigeria focused on the question of oil. Much of the refining and shipping

took place in or at least went through areas controlled by Biafra. At the beginning of the

conflict, oil was the most explicit connection between America and Nigeria. What’s

more, Nigerian oil gained a new prescience in the wake of the Arab-Israeli Six Day war

that closed down the Suez Canal for time and threatened to affect shipping of Middle

Eastern oil.

From the very first story following the Biafran declaration of independence,

almost every New York Times article about the Nigerian crisis made some reference to the

29 Adepitan Bamisaiye, “The Nigerian Civil War in the International Press,” Transition, no. 44 (1974): 30-32+34-35, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0042 1191%281974%290%3A44%3C30%3ATNCWIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y

27

foreign oil interest in the Eastern part of that country. In many of these references, the

issue was one of personnel. As opposed to the British, whose colonial legacy in the

country had left a large group of expatriates, the majority of American nationals in

Nigeria were oilmen and their families. As war began to look inevitable, the US recalled

all dependents – women and children. On June 2, some two to three hundred citizens

were evacuated from the Mid-Western regions to Lagos for flights back to America.30 A

few days later, the article “Americans Begin to Leave Nigeria,” reported 101 women and

children had been airlifted from the east, part of a larger “exodus of more than 700

dependences” coordinated by Mobil.31

The oil men, on the other hand “anxiously await[ed] the decision of their home

offices on which way the money will go.”32 The complication with the oil situation was

that both Lagos and Enugu were pressuring the foreign companies to report their taxes to

them. This problem loomed over the conflict and coverage from the moment of secession.

Reporting on May 28, the day after the Eastern Assembly empowered Ojukwu to leave

the Nigerian federation, the Times wrote that the “American, British, and French

petroleum companies have major stakes in the…area…[and are] expected to come under

heavy pressure to pay revenues to the Eastern Region’s treasury.”33

This prediction came to fruition. By mid-1967, Shell/BP had about 150 million

British pounds invested in the eastern region and 100 million in the Federal controlled

areas. Most of the “Nigerian” investment was in the Mid-West, which further

complicated the problem because most of that oil was refined at Port Harcourt and

shipped through the Trans-Niger pipeline – both in the East. When the conflict erupted in 30 Lloyd Garrison. “Nigeria Cancels American Airlift,” The New York Times, June 3, 1967.31 Lloyd Garrison. “Americans Begin to Leave Nigeria,” The New York Times, June 5, 1967.32 Ibid.33 “Eastern Nigeria Votes Secession,” The New York Times, May 28, 1967.

28

June, the oil companies were focused on protecting their investment by keeping the oil

flowing and tried to “offend neither side.”34

The Federal Military Government and Biafra each had certain types of leverage

over the foreign companies in the oil war. The Federal Military Government could lock

all the oil in the East by fully implementing the economic blockade which had thus far

left Port Harcourt open to petroleum shipments. At the same time, Biafra could simply

shut down the refinery and stop the flow. This issue came to a head on July 6 when the

FMG threatened to stop the oil totally “as a retaliatory measure if the producers met a

demand to pay royalties to the East.”35

The stakes of the conflict were more than simply financial. Who the oil

companies chose to pay had ramifications for the legitimacy of the belligerents involved.

It would be a coup for the Biafrans if Shell/BP gave even its grudging boiler stamp

approval to the Republic by redirecting monies that used to go to Lagos to Enugu.

In the long run, the question of Oil was of limited importance. A few months after

fighting began, Biafra’s size had been significantly reduced and the re-captured land, in

particular the newly formed River’s State, had many of those vital oil resources. Despite

this, the question of oil reflected a number of larger forces at work.

First there was the question of neutrality. In the first few months of the conflict –

indeed, throughout the duration of the war – foreign governments went out of their way

to suggest their own conditioned neutrality. The oil issue demonstrated just how difficult

and sometimes impossible real political neutrality would be to maintain. The oil

34 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 139.35 “Nigeria Threatens East’s Oil Exports,” The New York Times, July 7, 1967. In fact, the threat was warranted – as de Jorre describes in Chapter Five of Brother’s War. Shell/BP had decided to pay a ‘token’ payment of 250000 British pounds to the Biafrans to keep the oil flowing.

29

companies could not claim total neutrality, for whatever act they made, even an act of

omission, had some political connotation. If they continue to pay royalties to Lagos, it

was a political statement in favor of the status quo which amounted to support of Federal

Nigerian unity. On the other hand, redirecting that payment to Enugu was a de facto

recognition of the Biafran Republic. This was further complicated by the role that Britain

played in these negotiations.

The British government came into the picture because, rightly or wrongly, both sides saw it as the power behind Shell/BP and, indeed, with its forty-nine per cent shareholding in British Petroleum, the government could hardly not be involved.36

The New York Times recognized just how complicated the situation was in a dual

profile of Gowon and Ojukwu that appeared on June 25.

Today, to protect its oil interests, the West has two agonizing choices: to back General Gowon and risk a bloodbath in the East, or to recognize, diplomatically or tacitly, Biafra’s right to exist and allow the oil companies to now divert their revenues into the Biafran treasury.37

This confusion and complication of neutrality ominously forshadowed the trouble

“neutral” countries would have distributing aid when the humanitarian crisis of mass

famine began a few months later. If starving babies seemed the very antithesis of

‘political’, the myriad issues involved in alleviating that misery could not be divorced

from political wrangling. In particular, on whose terms and through what mechanisms aid

could be delivered would be a sticking point of the crisis, with both Nigerian and Biafran

leaderships remaining intransigent that food supplies be distributed through their

preferred means.

The question of oil also raised important questions of national interest. As

governments and citizens looked in on the Nigerian crisis, they were forced to ask

themselves what level of involvement was proportionate to their national interest –

36 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 139.37 Garrison Lloyd. “Nigeria,” The New York Times, Jun 25, 1967.

30

however they chose to define it. While the Americans were certainly concerned about

their few hundred citizens working for American companies in the conflicted region,

their investment in the area was no where near that of the British, who had been involved

in Nigerian affairs for more than seven decades. For this reason, at the beginning,

America was quite comfortable following the British lead and more or less keeping its

hands clean of the whole affair.

As I will later argue, however, the beginning of the famine and the associated

terrible images that stormed into American households starting in mid-1968

fundamentally changed the average American’s understanding of their relationship with

the crisis. The fact of hunger and starvation in particular allowed them to personalize the

otherwise inaccessible suffering, and in the process, opening the potential for

understanding the conflict in personal terms. Cynicism and complication aside, by the

time Biafra collapsed, many Americans had taken humanitarian relief of its civilian

population as part and parcel of their national interest.

Still, at the beginning of the conflict, the overwhelming issue for the American

government and, to the extent that governments determine citizen sentiments towards

unknown far-away places38, the American people, was that of stability. Even the oil issue

came down fundamentally to stability; viewed in domestic terms, the question was “who

and what can we support to ensure a stable situation in which the barrel price of crude

remains more or less the same?”

Many early conflict commentaries displayed a longing for a Nigeria which,

according to Biafrans (and most likely other Nigerians as well) might never have existed

38 I happen to think that the power of government’s to shape citizen opinion of foreign places is wildly underestimated – although whether this underestimation is a bad thing, I’m less sure.

31

except perhaps in Britain’s self-congratulatory imagination of the decolonization process.

That was the Nigeria that “only three years ago…could rightly be called, as a [New York]

Times correspondent then wrote, “a haven of stability in an area of increasing political

turbulence.””39 That was the Nigeria that “until her regional rivalries became

overpowering…was acclaimed in the West as Africa’s most promising democracy.”40

That loss of Nigeria as a shining example of African democracy was particularly

bitter to British and American policymakers who desperately sought stable democratic

counter weights to Soviet-backed African revolutionary governments. Africans in places

like South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Portuguese colonies still labored under racist

colonial or minority white governments. The Western powers stood on much shakier

ideological legs than did the Soviets on a continent bursting for freedom after centuries of

exploitation and subjugation. Some scholars have also suggested that American liberals

lamented the break up because it played into hands of racists just looking for examples of

African failure to attend to their own affairs.41

In an extended featured that appeared on June 11, the New York Times’ Garrison

wrote:

For Washington and London, Nigeria’s crisis means an end to the self-delusion that this former British colony, whose 55 million people make it Africa’s most populous nation, would develop into a showcase of what parliamentary government, Western aid and creative private enterprise in Africa could do.42

Early news coverage often tried to place the conflict in context of other foreign

problems. One comparison that would hover over the Biafrans like a fog was that of

Katanga. Katanga was the copper-rich southeast province of Congo that had seceded 39 “Nigeria’s Cliffhanger,” The New York Times, May 29, 1967.40 Lloyd Garrison. “Eastern Region Quits Nigeria; Lagos Vows to Fight Secession,” The New York Times, May 31, 1967.41 Adepitan Bamisaiye, “The Nigerian Civil War in the International Press,” Transition, no. 44 (1974): 30-32+34-35, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0042 1191%281974%290%3A44%3C30%3ATNCWIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y42 Lloyd Garrison. “The Ibos Go It Alone,” The New York Times, June 11, 1967.

32

soon after independence in 1960, setting off a three year war involving a long and bloody

suppression of the rebellion by the United Nations. The first editorial by the New York

Times staff in the wake of the Eastern Consultative Assembly’s secession mandate made

the comparison explicitly.43

The comparison did not try to draw similarities between the specifics of the two

secessions, but rather placed them both in the context of the widely-held fear of

balkanization. An extremely pervasive logic – one particular strong on the African

continent itself – held that secessions like Katanga and Biafra could set a dangerous

precedent for fragmenting fragile new nations. Different groups had different reasons to

look negatively towards this fragmentation. For the Cold War West, secessions

demonstrated the fault-lines of both its colonial experiment and its ability to transition

from colonial to autonomous leadership. Moreover, it provided an in-road for the USSR

to gain new spheres of influence. For Africans, the specter of fragmentation threatened

their fragile experiment with autonomy. More cynically, ethnic separatism was an

ominous potent for African autocrats with potentially troublesome minorities.

For leaders of many other African countries, presiding over nations composed equally fractious tribal elements, the fear has arisen that if the secession virus spreads it could become a disease from which few governments could claim immunity.44

In the case of Biafra, Ojukwu and his leadership had to contend with the fear that

the Biafran separation would lead to the total fragmentation of what was left of Nigeria,

as well as being exported to fragile nations around the continent. The mood in the

American press during the phoney war was pessimistic to say the least. “The East’s

secession has all but buried hopes that Nigeria’s three remaining regions…can hold

43 “Nigeria’s Cliffhanger,” The New York Times, May 29, 1967.

44 Lloyd Garrison. “The Ibos Go It Alone,” The New York Times, June 11, 1967.

33

together,”45 wrote the New York Times’ Garrison on May 31. That paper made the

connection again a couple days later, quoting an Ojukwu who frustratedly stated that

Congolese secessionist leader Tshombe was a puppet backed by foreign interests and

therefore the comparison to Biafra was inapt. Over the first two months of the crisis,

connections between Biafra and Katanga found their way not only into the Times writers’

vocabulary but the paper’s layout.

In a number of articles, Biafra and Katanga were paired as complimentary or

comparative situations. On July 9, the story “Congo: Once Again, Turmoil,” transitioned

in the last column with the line “if the fighting was diminishing in the Congo, however,

Africa was being wracked with violence elsewhere last week. In Nigeria…” The same tie

was made a week later in an article about Nigeria called “Africa: Arms Are the Arbiter.”

While the body is all about Nigeria, the last paragraph of that story begins, “in the Congo,

meanwhile, the insurgency…”

The Federal Military Government also experimented with the Katanga

comparison. On July 19th, the Times reported that America and the former colonial

powers had been assailed on radio for “not really regard[ing] Africa as free from their

“perpetual suzerainty.””46 It accused “Britain, America and their fellow travelers [of]

encourage[ing],” the secession in Biafra, connecting this policy to American military

assistance for the Congolese government in its campaign against a break-away region.

This reframing of the Kantaga comparison reflected Nigeria’s desire to localize the

conflict and keep the West out of it.

45 “Urbane Secessionist Chukuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu,” The New York Times, May 31, 1967.46 “Western Powers Assailed,” The New York Times, Jul 19th.

34

One of the strategies of Biafran propaganda was try to claim intellectual and

diplomatic high ground by confronting arguments against its existence head on. The

Enugu printer distributed a series of these arguments in pamphlet form. Number five was

“The Nigeria/Biafra Conflict: Fallacy of the Balkanization Theory.”47 The document was

produced in response to the argument “often raised against the independence of Biafra…

that the success of this revolution will lead to the break-up of most of the countries of

Africa.”48

The fallacy of this logic, Biafra argued, was three-part. First, the argument

assumed that all countries shared with Nigeria a history of political conflict and tribal

animosity. Second, it assumed that there had been as much “breach of faith” between

governments and citizens as had, according to the Biafrans, happened in Nigeria. Third,

the balkanization argument suggested that political break-up happens because of

precedent, not necessity.

Predictably, Biafra rejected all three arguments. One could not assume instability

simply because of arbitrary European boundaries. Additionally, “bad faith” towards the

governor-governed contract was not, in the way necessary to lead a group to secession, a

habit of most other African nations. Finally, what was important to consider about

whether or not a country would secede was not whether it had the example of other

successful rebellions, but rather to what extent the “marriage” of political association

remained mutually beneficial and safe-guarding.

47 It is sometimes hard to tell when exactly various pamphlets were published. There is no date found on the Balkanization Theory document. That said, it is most likely from after May 1968, and almost certainly post-1967. The final line is a quote from a “western expert,” a strategy implemented by Markpress when they took over public relations strategy in January 1968. Moreover, its use of the word genocide suggests that it might be from the rhetorical interim period from April-June 1968 when ‘genocide’ became a lynchpin term. For more, see the end of this section. 48 The Republic of Biafra, The Nigeria/Biafra Conflict: Fallacy of the Balkanization Theory, 1967, 1.

35

Whatever the rhetoric, the West’s instinct was to listen to the African voice on the

question of balkanization. The Organization of African Union had come into existence

three years earlier, after all, with precisely the purpose of preserving African unity and

colonial borders. The Times reflected this positioning in a June 4th article “Broader

Backing Sought by Lagos,” which referenced the strong support of Nigerian unity that

had come from respected Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and the Government of

Gambia.

Balkanization had another side as well. For average Americans, balkanization –

both real and imagined – added to the sneaking suspicion that the whole world was out of

control; too out of control, in fact, to spend much time worrying about. No one likes a

problem – political or otherwise – that’s impossible to solve, and as Vietnam burned and

Africa raged with post-colonial upheaval, the incentives for dropping out of the

conversation of new foreign action must have seemed high.

This attitude was reflected in early editorials relating to Biafra. During the first

two months following independence, mail at the New York Times focused on the Nigeria

conflict was sparse, and suggested, in tone and participation, that the primary concerned

audience at the beginning was very different than it would be few months later after the

famine began. Whereas later, citizens from all walks of life would write to deplore the

humanitarian crises, the early letters came mainly from what seems like a focused group

of internationally-minded citizens. Those that did write tended to lump Biafra in with

other places America shouldn’t get involved.

The tension of foreign involvement was not just written. A political cartoon

appearing in the July 16 Times Letters to the Editor page pictured a woman running from

36

a burning city with a sign over it that says “Racial problems at home,” towards a fireman

with a US hat in the foreground, hosing off a burning building labeled “Vietnam, the

Congo, and other Far Away Places.”49

One of the strongest expressions of the frustration and simple annoyance that

Americans felt towards the ‘third world’ was the editorial “Observer: Enough, Enugu,

Enough,” which appeared in the June 15, 1967 New York Times.50 The editorial was a

narrative story about “Carl Spillhouse.” Carl was a “well-meaning civil servant in the

Bureau of Stamp and Glue Standards,” who wanted to fulfill his duty of informed

citizenship by learning about Latin America. Moreover, he wanted to be able to talk to

his Chilean neighbor. He began learning, but suddenly had to switch his attention to

Vietnam, zone of the US’s new adventure. Just as he gave up ever trying to figure out the

Mekong Delta, he was shocked to discover that a country named Dahomey existed.

Africa confused him. He wasn’t able to keep Ghana straight from Gabon or Guyana.

Over a month, he went through the alphabet, clearing the M’s – Malagasy, Malaysia,

Malawi, and Mali – and the T’s – Tanzania, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago. Rwanda was

troubling because no one wanted to talk to him about Rwanda, save his Chilean neighbor,

who wanted to know why Americans cared more about Rwanda than Costa Rica? And

just when he had the demographics of Lesotho down, the Middle East crisis happened.

But Biafra was too much. Its “emergence…occurring while his back was turned,

defeated him.” The conclusion of the column was that the “trouble with the world today

[is that] it is impossible to keep up with the arrival of new nations. Take three weeks off

49 “Fire!”, The New York Times, July 16, 196750 “Observer: Enough, Enugu, Enough!,” The New York Times, June 15, 1967

37

from Africa and Asia to see a Middle East crisis through, and while your back is turned

up springs a Biafra.”51

If cynical, the editorial must also have held – indeed still holds – a certain

resonance. In 1967, the American experience as an active world leader was still only a

couple decades old. As recently as 1943, leading publisher Henry Luce could write a

piece like “The American Century,” in which he berated American citizens and

government for allowing the world to fall into the scourge of war by not asserting its

natural leadership. At the time, during the height of WWII, this made sense, but

America’s subsequent experiments in foreign involvement had given some clout and

legitimacy to resurgent isolationism. Failed Cold War experiments in Cuba and the

contemporary Vietnam morass played mightily on the minds of citizens loathe to become

embroiled in more foreign troubles.

Two of the three Letters to the Editor published in June and July 1967 that

referenced Biafra did so only as a passing example for why the US shouldn’t be involved

in more of these adventures abroad. Frustrated by LBJ’s shipment of Paratroopers to

Mobutu’s Congo, Edward Tiryakian asked “If Nigeria’s Federal Government invites our

troops to go into Biafra, if the Sudan asks us for military assistance to put down

dissidence in their southern province, if the Portuguese ask us for help in Angola, are we

going to add new commitments which can only perpetuate the image of American

imperialism?”52

Indeed, this liberal non-interventionism was the mirror of the domino theory

which had in part led to the mess in Vietnam. If we began intervening in the affairs of

51 Ibid.52 Letters to the Editor of the Times, The New York Times, July 16, 1967

38

other countries outside of our realm of interest, it’s just going to set a precedent for us to

do the same later. This was echoed in another letter that appeared a week later. “Why

intervene in the Congo…and not in Nigeria – or the Middle East – or Cyprus – or

Hungary?”53

This type of intervention would promote a false image of American imperialism.

“The Congo intervention…seems to indicate that the Administration…is assuming the

role of the dominant world power, with the right and responsibility to intervene overtly in

the affairs of small nations.”54

Ever since the days of Teddy Roosevelt in the Philippines and Spanish-America,

Americans had flirted with the idea that their peculiar place as the only big power without

a colonial past – in fact with an anti-colonial past, gave them the potential to be a

beneficent power throughout the world. The July 23 letter rejected this idea, suggesting

that “a durable world order, which we profess to desire, cannot be built on the unilateral

actions of one country, taken without consideration for or consultation with other

nations.”55 This issue would arise again later in the Biafra conflict, when Presidential

candidate Nixon tried to make the distinction between acting as the world’s moral

conscious and as its policemen. The letter writer was one Jacob Allen Toby, who taught

in Nigeria from 1962 to 1964.

The third letter to the editor published between June and August was also from an

“expert” source. T. Obinkaram Echew, Assistant Secretary (Publicity) for the Biafra

Students Association in the Americas wrote a vitriolic column in response to a Times

editorial that implored Gowon to continue his blockade, giving it time to work before

53 Letters to the Editor, The New York Times , July 23, 196754 Ibid.55 Ibid.

39

resorting to military action. To maintain the blockade would be utterly appalling in the

“useless suffering,” it would cause.

In your fond hope that the sanctions will bring the people of Biafra to their knees, you have complete misjudged their psychological makeup. The more they suffer, the more they will be prepared to suffer in order to uphold their inalienable right to survival….Gowon’s cause will prolong the present stalemate and consequently the suffering of millions of people in Biafra.56

To a tragic extent, the commentator would be exactly right. In retrospect, the

siege did not weaken the resolve of the Biafran people, but rather played directly into

their fears of slaughter at the hands of their former Nigerian fellows. Rather than

breaking them apart, the Federal blockade of Nigeria had the disastrous and unintended

consequence of drawing the Ibos together by killing them slowly with starvation. Indeed,

one of the great ironies of the Nigeria-Biafra war is that the actions of each side, designed

to break apart the unity of the other, had the opposite effect – making the foundation of

both Ibo nationalism and Nigerian unity much stronger than they ever were before the

war began.

The Ibo siege psychology was not necessarily, however, inevitable. Rather, it was

a self-fulfilling prophecy created by hawkish Biafran leadership and propaganda that

played upon legitimate Ibo fears routed most strongly in the fall 1966 massacres.

Inevitable or not, Ibo and Biafran psychology was a central feature of the early conflict

discourse both from the Biafran public relations machine and in the Western Media.

When the starvation struck in mid 1968, perceptions of Biafran psychology and identity

would come to bear in discourses of aid and politics. It is therefore worth trying to

understand the rhetorical relationship between Biafran self-understanding, created or

otherwise, and the early representation in American media. Two themes common to early

56 Letters to the Editor, The New York Times, July 4, 1967

40

Biafran discourse were a focus on the 1966 massacres as the cause of trouble and a

comparison of the Biafrans to the Israelis.

Most early New York Times articles and editorials started the chronology of the

crisis with the 1966 massacres. On May 29th, Lloyd Garrison wrote that “the crisis has

been growing since September, when thousands of Easterners were massacred in the

North and more than a million refugees left the North for the Eastern Region.”57 On the

same day, the editorial staff claimed that this gave “the Ibos of the East…the best of

reasons to hate and fear the northern Moslems.”58

According to the Times, the massacres set off a wave of negotiations about the

future of the political make-up, culminating eventually with Collonel Ojukwu’s

independence speech, a 3am affair that began “with a lengthy summary of the East’s

grievances, with special emphasis on the massacre last September.”59

Interestingly, as June and July progressed, the description of the massacres began

to include estimates of the dead. On June 18th, The Times Lawrence Fellows wrote that

“maybe 10000…maybe 30000” had been killed. A few weeks later, an article on the

Congo mentioned that “about 20000 Ibos in the north were killed there last October.”

The epidemiology of the 30000 number is vague. While it would become the

commonly referenced estimate of the dead during most of the war, it is unclear where it

came from and who was first to use it. John de St. Jorre traced the evolution of the

numbers game, calling the number citation of the massacres “one of the hoariest of the

civil war’s myths.”60 According to St. Jorre, Ojukwu escalated the number four times. In

57 Lloyd Garrison. “Nigeria on Brink of Breaking Up,” The New York Times, May 29, 1967.58 “Nigeria’s Cliffhanger,” The New York Times, May 29, 1967.59 Lloyd Garrison. “Eastern Region Quits Nigeria; Lagos Vows to Fight Secession,” The New York Times, May 31, 1967.60 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 86.

41

the forward to an early booklet entitled Pogrom, he wrote of “more than 7000 dead.” At

the Aburi conference in January 1967, it had become 10000. By the start of the war, the

figure “most often used by Biafran propaganda and most often accepted unthinkingly by

outsiders,” was 30000. By the June 1969 Ahiara Declaration, the number jumped again to

50000.61

More than any other single piece of evidence, the massacres were proof to the

Biafrans that the Nigerian’s wanted them dead. As the Ojukwu government more fully

articulated genocide and continuously connected sovereignty and safety, the massacres

provided the rhetorical lynchpin. Every wartime atrocity became part of that master plan

that began decades ago and came to a head in 1966.

It is important to examine how Biafra was representing itself at this early juncture

in the conflict. An important Biafran public relations strategy was to introduce its cause

to the world through a set of documents released by the government printers at Enugu.

These documents provided the narrative background for the Biafran struggle. They were

the stories and histories of the Biafran people – their independent streak, their self-

reliance, their ethnic intermingling and their sense of self. Most of all they were they

were designed to demonstrate the “nation-ness” of the Biafran people. The documents

sought to frame international discourse by situating the norms the Biafrans were up

against in a specific context.

One of the earliest of these documents - and one of the largest in its scope is

“Introducing Biafra,” published by the Government of the Republic of Biafra in 1967 and

soon thereafter distributed by organizations like the Britain-Biafra Association. The

document contained everything from history to religion to economic potentiality of the

61 Ibid., 86.

42

Biafran people. The thrust of the document as a whole, like the set of documents of which

it was a larger part, was to demonstrate just how particularly suited to nation hood the

new Republic of Biafra was. If the language of genocide was not brought to bear as it

would be later, the document discussed the principle that would shape that rhetoric,

namely that only Biafran sovereignty could safeguard the health of its people.

One notion that the Biafrans needed to dispel was that they were somehow the

“troublemakers” of the situation, upsetting an otherwise stable Nigeria with their political

greed. “Stability” was a major consideration for peripheral government actors, and as the

secessionist group, the Biafrans had to demonstrate that, in effect, they had had no

choice. At the same time, they had to do this in a way which did not diminish their own

standing by demonstrating a lack of agency. In the “Introducing Biafra” document, they

speak to this dual need by arguing that the Biafran people were in fact the people who

had tried most strenuously to preserve the Nigerian republic. They had made “desperate

efforts to save the Federation of Nigeria from disintegration. More than any other people

in the former Federation, Biafrans contributed their human and material resources to the

cause of national unity.”62 This was due on the one hand to Biafran “progress and

dynamism” as compared to “the tardiness and conservatism of their neighbors who were

generally unable to achieve the same standards of efficiency and prosperity.”63 Moreover,

they argued that as early as the 1914 British unification of Northern and Southern

Nigeria, an economic and industrial Biafran diaspora had placed Easterners in positions

of leadership around the country. For this reason, they were the only regional or ethnic

group with a clear vested interest in national unity.

62 Government of the Republic of Biafra, Introducing Biafra, 1967. 63 Ibid.

43

The substantive pieces of the document, sections titled “The People”, “Political

and Social Systems” and “Economic Resources,” all contained an implicit two part

argument; that Biafra was ideally suited for nationhood, and that indeed, that nation could

and should be a dynamic partner in West Africa for interested Western powers.

The document worked hard to reclaim the language of “tribe,” suggesting that in

fact, “national” consciousness was a more accurate descriptor of Eastern sentiment.

Almost four pages of the total eighteen are spent analyzing the processes of acculturation

and inter-dependence which had created an ethnically homogenous Biafra.64 As it says,

“these bonds were woven from the earliest times when the territory was people,”65 and

had been produced by “periodic movement of the population,” the development of the

“economic nexus,” the “growth of the oversea trade in slaves,” and the “division of

labour.”66 Together, these factors fostered the “tradition of mutual reliance and support,

now characteristic of Biafrans.”67

Politically, the Biafrans were “ultra-democratic, highly individualistic and

disliked or suspected any form of external government and authority.”68 Relationships

among Biafrans were moderated by matrilineal connections and the attitude toward

warfare was mild and inflected by an interest in third party moderation.69

It was in the realm of economics that the strongest support for Biafran partnership

seemed to spring. As the document stated, Biafrans had “long been famed for their

industry, initiative, self-reliance and…almost insatiable thirst for learning.”70 This

64 Ibid.65 Ibid., 6.66 Ibid., 7.67 Ibid., 8.68 Ibid., 10.69 Ibid., 7.70 Ibid., 12.

44

initiative was not simply individualistic, but had allowed her communities to develop an

incredible number of social service projects like bridges, roads, postal agencies, hospitals,

etc. Even with this, the human resources of Biafra were not her only economic asset. The

small territory had a wealth of natural resources as well; palm oil from trees, timber,

minerals, and now recently discovered reserves of oil. The document is not shy about

asserting Biafran potential: “few countries in Africa,” it says, “possess economic

resources, human and material, comparable to Biafra.”71

The conclusion brought the entire story together. “Biafrans have all the attributes

of a nation. They are capable of defending the integrity of their country and playing an

effective role in the counsels of Africa and the world. Above all they possess an

abundance of energy and an indomitable will to succeed.”72

Perhaps even more importantly, the conclusion articulated the stakes of the war.

Biafra was “a sovereign country which Biafrans see as their only salvation if they are to

survive as a people.”73 According to the document, the conflict started with the massacres

of Biafrans (or more accurately, Ibos) at Jos in 1945 and Kano in 195374. What’s more,

the 1966 pogrom “resulted in an irreversible movement of population”75 that had made it

impossible for Biafrans to feel safe under the current Nigerian regime. The language was

strong. In Nigeria, the Biafrans were “molested, taunted, hounded, murdered, and finally

driven away.” Indeed, whatever the other causes, the last page of the introduction makes

clear that when all other considerations are leveled, “it is the calculated and systematic

71 Ibid., 17.72 Ibid., 19.73 Ibid., 19.74 Ibid., 1.75 Ibid., 2.

45

persecution of Biafrans…that has driven us to seek…salvation in independence.” This

was, they said, “the struggle for our survival.”76

Still, what remains most notable about this indictment was the temperance of the

language in relation to the rhetoric that would come to dominate Biafran dispatches just a

few months later. This “struggle for survival” was only mentioned in the introduction and

conclusion of the document. Moreover, the statistics which become favorites of the

Biafran Minister of Information – namely that the 1966 pogroms killed 30,000 – were no

where to be found. The rawness of the language was not yet fully developed – “molested,

taunted, hounded, and murdered” sounds tame compared with how they would soon

come to describe their plight.

***

All throughout the early Times coverage, the Biafrans were presented much as

they tended to portray themselves – an independent, entrepreneurial group capable of

living with their backs to the wall. Indeed, they were portrayed as a group who others

sometimes didn’t like because of their success and industry. They were regularly

compared to both the modern Israelis and biblical Israelites.

Reporting the declaration of independence, the Times wrote that “the Ibo

tribesman is Eastern Nigeria’s most important and controversial resource.

Outside his region, the Ibo may be hated or mildly resented or publicly respected, but he is seldom loved. Like the Biblical Israelites, with whom the Ibos share some cultural parallels, the East’s predominant tribe is individualistic, clannish, enterprising, and with an unbending will that some describe as arrogance. Others equate it with the character of modern-day Israelis, a people the Ibos admire.77

Writing a few days later from inside Biafran territory, the same author framed the

discussion in terms of the foreign perception of Ibos. Vindicating the message of the

76 Ibid., 3.77 Lloyd Garrison. “Eastern Region Quits Nigeria; Lagos Vows to Fight Secession,” The New York Times, May 31, 1967.

46

Biafra Student Association, he wrote that “In the view of almost all outside observers in

Biafra, the more the sanctions bite…the most there will develop a “back-to-the-wall”

state of mind; like a beleagured Israel, Biafra will fight back. It will have nothing to lose.

For the Ibo it will be survival or death.”78

It wasn’t just the outsiders making this comparison. A profile of the “urbane

secessionist” Chukuemeka Ojukwu ended with a quote in which the Biafran leader

comments on the Leon Uris novel “Exodus” about the founding of Israel.

“There are parallels here,” he said, reflecting the widespread identification with Israel among the Ibos. “The Israelis are hard-working, enterprising people. So are we. They’ve suffered from pogroms. So have we. In many ways, we share the same promise, and the same problems.”79

A June 11 feature went so far as to find suggest deeper anthropological and

linguistic connection, shrouded in a dose of fascinating mystery. No one knew where the

Ibos had come from, yet their society had become “a source of endless fascination” for

anthropologists who “suspect[ed] they may have migrated from the Nile Valley centuries

ago.”80 Cited as evidence were similarities in Hebrew and Ibo speech patterns, similar

practices of “capital punishment, land tenure, child birth, circumcision, stealing,” and the

fact that “the faces on their masks and carvings [were] not Negroid, but Eastern.”

In 1967, the connection to Israel was loaded with potential meaning. The late

1960s witnessed a subtle but profound shift in the American imagination of Israel. Epic

movies of the 1950s such as the Ten Commandments reintroduced the idea of Biblical

Canaan, a set of metaphors that found room for analogy in the American imagination of

itself as a place imbued with a particular destiny. More concretely, the surprising military

78 “Nigeria: Hell-Bent for Dissolution,” The New York Times, June 4, 196779 “Urbane Secessionist Chukuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu,” The New York Times, May 31, 1967.

80 Lloyd Garrison. “The Ibos Go It Alone,” The New York Times, June 11, 1967.

47

resilience of Israel to foreign aggression had started to change America’s admiration for

and interest in cooperating with the island nation.

Perhaps most relevant to the Biafran discussion, the Holocaust was for the first

time working its way into the public conscious as an event separable from and indeed,

more terrible than, the general tragedy of World War II. When the discourse of genocide

came to fruition in 1968, the Holocaust would be a favorite reference point. Even the

number 6 million was used when estimating potential deaths from the famine.

So there was the Ibo; a “tenacious…tribesmen,” enterprising and independent, if

sometimes clannish. This impression would largely follow the Biafrans throughout the

war. Indeed, it had a demonstrable resonance with many of the journalists who found

themselves shunned by Nigerians looking to localize the conflict and welcomed with

open arms by the Biafrans who needed desperately to sell their cause to anyone who’d

listen. When the starvation hit, and still the Ibos fought, many Biafran supporters took it

as proof of all those earlier mythologies that had helped sell them on the Biafran cause.

By July, fighting had commenced. It would last for 30 months. The Federal

Military Government boasted that they would quickly finish the rebels. Others weren’t so

sure. The Times wrote “The betting of most outside observers here is that sanctions will

not be enough, that even if the industrial side of the Eastern Region’s economy buckles,

the tenacious Ibo tribsmen…could hold out for months on home-grown food.”81

Unfortunately for the Biafrans, the conflict would last longer much longer than that.

81 “Nigerian Region Hopes for Attack,” The New York Times, June 12, 1967

48

SECTION TWO: Rhetorical Transitions

By Spring 1968, the conflict had settled into a frustrating stalemate. Although

early military successes saw Biafra advance outside its own borders, its failed attempt on

Lagos in August 1967 and subsequent retreat back to the Eastern region represented the

last time that the Ojukwu and his government would think of “winning” the war in

military terms.

Instead, the emphasis turned – even more than it had been – to winning the war of

words. The Biafrans recognized that their best chance for success would be foreign

mediated negotiations that recognized Biafra as an equal partner in the discussions. The

weapons in the arsenal were no longer small arms and homemade land-mines, but instead

the pamphlets, press releases, and personal ambassadors it sent all over the world to

speak its cause.

1968 brought with it two new factors vital to Biafra’s propaganda war. On the one

hand, American-owned, Geneva-based Markpress accepted a contract to coordinate all

Biafran press and marketing. The myriad strategies employed by William Bernhardt and

his committed staff would be lauded or decried for launching the Biafran cause into the

main stream. Even more importantly, however, was the development of famine

conditions.

As early as December 1967, churches had begun to appeal for food aid and

warned of impeding starvation.82 In April, the Red Cross warned of full blown famine.

The development of mass hunger corresponded with Markpress organized journalist trips

82 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972)., 200

49

to the front lines, and it would not be long before images of starving Biafrans burst into

living rooms across Europe and America.

Even before the mass media attention of late summer 1968, foreign onlookers

were starting to change their relationship with the Biafrans due in large part to the

suffering of civilians. Four African nations – Tanzania, Gabon, Cote D’Ivoire and

Zambia – recognized the Republic of Biafra. Each of the recognitions was based in no

small part upon the emerging humanitarian crisis.

Importantly, there was an attending shift in rhetoric, and the language of

“genocide” began to achieve a more central role. The period between March and June

1968 demonstrated just how responsive to international discourse was the propaganda

machine.

***

Late in 1967, the Biafran mission in Paris contacted William Bernhardt asking

him to handle the marketing account for the secessionist republic. He was to replace the

New York P.R. firm Ruder and Finn, first hired by Ojukwu’s Eastern Region government

in February 1967.83 He agreed, on the condition that he could “re-write, edit and generally

adapt material from Biafra before it went out to the press.”84 His first releases went out in

February 1968.

Markpress had a distinct strategy for engaging world attention and generating

news coverage favorable to the Biafran cause. Step 1 involved a steady build up of

background information and stories that were sent with regularity to hundreds of

newspapers and governments. Step 2 was to contact foreign editors and their staff directly

83 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 307.84 Ibid., 306.

50

to certify the veracity of Markpress releases and encourage reliance upon them. Step 3

involved facilitating Western journalists to come to Biafra and check the facts

themselves. Step 4 was rolling out the red carpet for them upon arrival.85 A final

important part of the Markpress strategy was “cross-fertilization,” “which meant referring

enquirers to articles written by journalists rather than directly to Biafran government

handouts.”86

The first few months were difficult for Markpress, but by April, the deterioration

of civilian livelihood in Biafra and territories recaptured by Nigeria – particularly the

emerging starvation – started to fundamentally alter the world’s outlook on Biafra.

***

The early months of 1968 brought Biafra’s biggest international diplomatic

success to date, official recognition by four African states. This sign of acknowledgment

from Tanzania, Gabon, Ivory Coast and Zambia had significance beyond the act itself; it

could have had implications for the official status of Biafra within the Organization for

African Unity. The OAU was a newly created organization designed to provide a

common voice for African states and usher the continent into a new era of post-colonial

peace and stability. The Biafran experiment was a significant challenge to the

organization, in that it was the first post-colonial African conflict in which Africans were

demanding independence from other Africans. The OAU’s perception of Biafra was vital

not only to inter-continental politics, but to the way foreign governments treated Biafra as

well. One of the favorite languages of American policymakers arguing against direct US

involvement in the conflict was that it was an “African problem,” presumably to be

85 Wiseberg, The International Politics of Relief, 57586 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 306.

51

solved by Africans. This was the Johnson Administrations official line. For this reason,

the Biafrans needed the OAU to come out strongly in support of Biafran independence

before they could hope to engage “neutral” international actors like the US.

Of the recognitions, Tanzania held a particular importance. President Julius

Nyerere was an important leader on the continent – having been one of the founders of

the OAU in 1963. He was an avowed Pan-Africanist who would later provide shelter and

support for a number of African liberation movements including South Africa’s Pan-

African Congress and African National Congress as well as movements in Mozambique

to throw out the Portuguese and the white leaders in then Rhodesia. His support led

credence to the Biafran claim that it was enacting its right to self-determination and rule

by a state that could guarantee the safety of its citizens.

On April 13, 1968, the Minister of State (Foreign Affairs), Mr. C. Y. Mgonja

issued a statement on behalf of the Government of Tanzania that laid out the Tanzanian

understanding of the case for Biafra. The central points were that

a. The Biafrans had a justified fear of violence from Nigerians and the Nigerian government;

b. This fear entitled them to form a government that would allow them to live free of fear;

c. The desire for African unity was a desire for “greater well being…and greater security” for Africans, and that if the unity of Nigeria could not provide this, it was in the interest of African unity to work with the Biafrans to ensure their security.

The statement appealed to precedent as a way to demonstrate that Biafra was not

alone in having responded to the need for real self-determination in recent African and

world political history. Interestingly, the document does not follow the Biafran lead in

attempting to suppress the language of “tribe.” Notably, the document dramatically

52

utilizes the language of genocide, going so far as to compare the events transpiring in the

Eastern part of Nigeria to the Holocaust a quarter century earlier.

“The basic case for Biafra’s secession,” the document stated, “is that people from

the Eastern Region can no longer feel safe in other parts of the federation.”87 The fears,

according to the Tanzanians, were “genuine and deep-seated.” While the Nigerians and

their supporters had tended to say that these fears were dramatically over-stated or based

in propaganda rather than reality, the Tanzanian statement made the argument that this

did not matter.

Fears such as now exist among the Ibo peoples do not disappear because someone says they are unjustified, or says that the rest of Nigeria does not want to exterminate the Ibos.88 Taking this line of thinking even further, the document argued that the fears of the

Easterners overwhelm whatever political rights and wrongs there were regarding the

series of coup’s and counter-coups that led to the current configuration of the Nigerian

government. These factors were “irrelevant to the fear which Ibo people feel.”89

A particularly pressing political consideration was the terms by which the FMG

and Republic of Nigeria would enter mediated negotiations. The FMG demanded (and

had the support of her backers in demanding) that the Biafrans renounce their secession

before they talked cease-fire. This, the Tanzanians thought, was madness. “A demand

that [the Ibos] should renounce secession before talks are begun is equivalent to a

demand that they should announce their willingness to be exterminated…for human

beings do not voluntarily walk towards what they believe to be certain death.”90

87 Minister of State, Tanzania Gabon Ivory Coast & Zambia on Their Recognition of Biafra, April 1968, 1.88 Ibid., 1.89 Ibid., 1.90 Ibid., 2.

53

The Tanzanians argued that Nigeria had largely failed its duty to safeguard “life

and liberty for its inhabitants91,” and as such, had lost its right to territorial integrity in the

Eastern Region.

They claim now to be defending the integrity of the country in which they failed to guarantee the most elementary safety of the twelve million peoples of Eastern Nigeria…Surely when a whole people is rejected by the majority of the state in which they live, the must have the right to life under a different kind of arrangement which does not secure their existence.92

Importantly, the Tanzanians tried to make these considerations normative by

situating the specific Biafran context in the larger geopolitical and theoretical realm.

They discussed the contract between governing and governed in general terms, saying

that “states are made to serve people…[and that] it is on these grounds that people

surrender their right and power of self-defence to the government.” They pointed out that

African states have much to fear from disintegration, yet still make the case that the

Biafrans have a right to secede, thus heightening the legitimacy of their argument.

Indeed, rather than shirking from the FMG’s claim that the secession of Biafra

would increase the likelihood of balkanization and disintegration in Africa, the Tanzanian

statement of recognition attempted to reframe the discussion of African unity in the

context faced by the Biafrans – security. “The basis of our need for unity, and the reason

for our desire for it,” it says, “is the greater well being, and the greater security, of the

people of Africa…The general consent of all the people involved is the only basis on

which unity in Africa can be maintained or extended.”93

It is important to note the limits of Tanzanian recognition. In truth, it was inspired

not by politics but by humanitarianism. As de Jorre wrote, Neyere did not break from the

African crowd to recognize Biafra “in order to help [them] win, but primarily to give

91 Ibid., 2.92 Ibid., 3.93 Ibid., 4.

54

more power to their elbows and drive the Nigerians to the negotiating table to ensure they

survived…[he] made a clear distinction between Biafran security and Biafran

sovereignty.”94

Despite this, the feature of the recognition most relevant to the evolving Biafran

public discourse was the language of genocide it employed. In the first paragraph it said

that 30000 had been killed in the 1966 pogroms. Throughout the war, this number was a

key Biafran symbol of Nigeria’s brutality.

Most remarkably, the rhetorical crescendo of the document – indeed its strongest

appeal to the rest of the world – rested in an allusion to the world’s response to the

Holocaust. “Out of sympathy” and an understanding of its own failure to act, Tanzania

suggested, the world created the Jewish national homeland of Israel. What’s more, it

“utter[ed] many ill-informed criticisms of the Jews of Europe for going to their deaths

without any concerted struggle.”95 The Biafrans, the Tanzanians suggest, “have now

suffered the same kind of rejection within their state that the Jews of Germany

experience.”96 Fortunately, they already had a homeland – and were willing to defend it.

As Biafran rhetoric evolved over the course of the next few months, the reference to the

plight of European Jewry was one that would become increasingly important.

***

In mid-May, 1968, Gabon and Zambia recognized the Republic of Biafra, as well.

Their arguments tended to be similar to those of the Tanzanians. While their statements

of recognition did not contain nearly the same exposition of political and moral theory,

they tended to stick to the central points of the earlier recognition; the need for African 94 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 194.95 Ibid., 5.96 Ibid., 5.

55

unity was great but not at the price of countless civilian lives. Importantly, conservative

Gabon and Radical Zambia represented opposite sides of the African political spectrum.

The common language of their recognitions suggested the degree to which humanitarian

concern was infiltrating the international discussion of the Biafra-Nigeria war.

Both statements began with an appeal to unity. The Zambian government was

“most concerned about peace, stability and unity among the people of that area.”97

Likewise, “the Government of Gabon reaffirm[ed] its faith in African unity.”98 Despite

this, both governments saw the futility of trying to achieve unity through conquest and

war. Gabon was “convinced that this African unity can only be realized in peace,”99 while

the Zambians claimed that “it would be morally wrong to force anybody into Unity

founded on blood and bloodshed…for unity to be meaningful and beneficial it must be

based on the consent of all parties concerned, offering security…to all.”100

Both statements rooted their recognitions in the acute suffering of the Biafran

peoples and the horror of the war being perpetrated against them. The Zambians largely

adopted the Tanzanian tone. The war had wrought “indiscriminate massacre of the

innocent civilian population.”101 It was, all in all, a “horrifying war.”102

Gabon dramatically upped the rhetorical ante. Like the Tanzanians, they rooted

the right of the Biafrans to secede in the “massacres” they had faced outside of their

homeland and the need to “safeguard their right to existence.” The Government of Gabon

97 Government of the Republic of Biafra, Office of the Special Representative, Statement on the Recognition of the Republic of Biafra by the Government of the Republic of Zambia, May 1968.98 Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative, The Recognition of Biafra by Gabon, May 1968, 1.99 Ibid., 1.100 Government of the Republic of Biafra, Office of the Special Representative, Zambia Recognizes Biafra, May 1968. 101 Government of the Republic of Biafra, Office of the Special Representative, Zambia Recognizes Biafra, May 1968. 102 Ibid.

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went on, however, to indict the FMG, saying that “Lagos reacted…by perpetrating a real

genocide with the aim of wiping out the State of Biafra and the Ibo people.”103

Importantly, they metaphorically extended the victimization Ibos faced during the

1966 pogroms to the entire Biafran people, refusing to “maintain a guilty indifference in

the face of the pogrom organized against fourteen million Africans.”104 The obvious

conclusion for the Government of Gabon was that, in this circumstance, the “Biafran

drama [had] ceased to be an internal Nigerian problem and should force all African

countries to take a stand.” Indeed, “the Government and the People of Gabon could not

without hypocrisy take refuge behind the principle of the so-called non-interference in the

internal affairs of another country.”105

The other African country to recognize Biafra was Cote D’Ivoire. If Nyerere and

Tanzania’s recognition was important to the credibility of the Biafran cause with Pan-

Africanists and African liberation movements, the strong support of Biafra coming from

Ivory Coast president Feliz Houphouet-Boigny had the potential to elevate the standing

of Biafra with the French. Even after independence, Houphouet-Boigny remained

extremely close to the former French colonial power. Scholars still debate whether it was

the French who influenced Cote D’Ivoire’s recognition or the other way around.

Whatever the case, Houphouet-Boigny’s statement of recognition was made at the Ivory

Coast Embassy in Paris.

Houphouet-Boigny’s statement charted much of the same rhetorical territory as

the official Tanzanian statement of recognition. In fact, he brought up just how irregular

agreement between himself and Nyerere was to demonstrate just how irregular and 103 Government of the Republic of Biafra, Office of the Special Representative, The Recognition of Biafra by Gabon, May 1968, 2.104 Ibid., 2.105 Ibid., 2.

57

prescient was the situation facing Africa and, indeed, the world, in Biafra. “Nyerere and

myself,” he said, “who have different political and economic opinions are in agreement in

recognizing the necessity of withdrawing this conflict from a legal framework …which…

would restrict us.”106

Interestingly, his statement made a rhetorical comparison to Vietnam, although

never stating to what ends this comparison was being made. He claimed that “the

Vietnamese war cannot…compare in horror with the war in Biafra.” Indeed, early in his

speech he asked “do people know that there have been in Biafra in ten months more

deaths than in three years in Vietnam?”107 Whether this appeal is aimed at the American

or French government or citizens is unclear. It may have simply been a device to

demonstrate how little the great powers seemed to value African lives.

Insofar as we Africans form a part of the world, we could not but be astonished at how little we are valued; at the indifference with which people treat everything that concerns us.108

To an even greater extent than Tanzania or Gabon, Houphouet-Boigny used the

language of genocide. Like the Tanzanians, he asserted that 30,000 people were killed in

the Northern pogroms.109 He went further, though, suggesting that the “atrocious war”

had “already cost more than 200,000 human lives…[and] one will have to, one day, …

multiply by three, the number of these deaths.”110 He used the word “genocide” three

times, once referencing his own unwillingness to let his government be witness to it, and

twice admonishing the rest of Africa to take up a voice against it.111 It is likely that the

106 Government of the Republic of Biafra, Office of the Special Representative, Biafra: A Human Problem, A Human Tragedy, May 1968, 3.107 Ibid., 1.108 Ibid., 5.109 Ibid., 2.110 Ibid., 1.111 Ibid., 3-5.

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close relationship between Cote D’Ivoire and the Gabon influenced their shared language

of genocide.

The most remarkable and most revealing part of the speech was his language of

the “human” ness of the conflict. The title is revealing; “Biafra: A Human Problem, a

Human Tragedy.”112 Throughout the speech, he admonished the listener to expand his or

her framework to the realm of essential humanity. In this it mirrored appeals being made

around the world by the humanitarian relief organizations advocating for Biafra.

Although he was speaking as the president of a neighboring republic, his response was

colored by the very same media sources affecting popular perception of the conflict in the

West.

This is revealed directly when he located the particular urgency with which he

called the Paris press conference. It was not that he had received new information from

diplomatic sources, but rather that he had been moved by television!

In front of the French T.V. screen, in the course of the programme “Cing colonnes a la une” of May 3, the poignant film projected on this forgotten war carried my indignation to the state of paroxysm.113

Even more remarkable than this was that his speech indicated that he, like the

majority of foreigners who became engaged in Biafran advocacy, was captivated less by

the political idea of genocide and massacre than by the mechanism through which it was

being executed: hunger.

Although it was issued days before the Zambian recognition and within weeks of

the Tanzanian and Gabon statements, the most revealing rhetorical difference of the

speech was Houphouet-Boigny’s language of hunger and human concern. “So many

people,” he said, “in particular infants and the old…are dying of hunger.”114 Biafra had

112 Ibid., 1.113 Ibid., 1.114 Ibid., 1.

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“known for more than ten months neither fish nor meat.”115 Although they were

sometimes facing desperate situations, “in Vietnam, in the North as well as in the South,

people eat at least when they are hungry.”116 Indeed, “more people die in Biafra from

hunger than in Vietnam.”117

The discourse of hunger was accompanied by an appeal to humanity. His

continued general admonitions for his listeners to understand their own humanity – and

how it is threatened by the plight in Biafra – became specific when he appealed to the

French.

The French who, looking at their small television screen, have lived in a moment like the revolting drama going on in Biafra; the French who have known the horrors of war; the French who have a cult of human liberty and who are fundamentally attached to peace; could they remain for long insensitive to the sorrow which hangs on a people of admirable courage and who is fighting under the most difficult and the most inhuman conditions for its independence?118

It is fascinating and important that the greater rhetorical reliance and emotional

centrality of hunger was accompanied by a stronger appeal to humanitarian rather than

political ideals. This was precisely the sentiment that would eventually engage American

audiences; and precisely the type of sentiment that allowed them to break apart

humanitarian and political concern in a way which left the Biafrans inevitably defeated.

***

If the African recognitions represented an evolving international perception of the

Nigerian conflict, Biafran documents from that Spring 1968 likewise demonstrated an

evolving self-perception. Perhaps in response to that changing international environment,

Biafran pamphlets and public presentations from March through June centralize

“genocide” in a new way.

115 Ibid., 1.116 Ibid., 1.117 Ibid., 5.118 Ibid., 4.

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The logic of the evolving Biafran argument was that the Nigerian government was

perpetrating a war of genocide, that political sovereignty represented the only

counterweight the Biafrans had to the threat of full extermination, and that the genocide

could only be stopped by a conditionless cease-fire and mediated negotiations. For that

reason it was an international moral imperative that “neutral governments” supported this

cease-fire and that pro-Nigerian governments reconsider their position to support the

cease-fire.

In March, the Biafran Ministry of Information released a document entitled

“Biafra Deserves Open World Support,” which outlined in clear terms the many reasons

– political and humanitarian – that Biafra deserved support. While it used the word

“genocide” – something that happened rarely if ever in 1967 general information

documents – the term was still buried in a larger argument.

The document was connected to the past in its attempt to demonstrate the

illegitimacy of the Federal Military Government in Lagos. On page two of the Open

World Support document, the Ministry declared the Lagos government “illegal and

unworthy.”119 These two ideas, illegality and unworthiness, brought together the two

fundamental arguments the Biafrans have against the Nigerian government.

According to the Biafrans, The FMG was illegal in part because “the

conglomeration of territories formerly known as Nigeria was never a nation.” Indeed,

those territories were simply brought together to “foster British imperial interests.”120

Moreover, the “pack of criminal Army Officers” running the FMG were an illegal

government because they had “usurped power by…murdering the Supreme Commander

119 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, Biafra Deserves Open World Support, March 1968, 2.120 Ibid., 1.

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and over 200 Biafran Army Officers and men” in a 1966 coup. And if the Nigerian

government was illegal, so too was British and Russian support for the government in its

campaign against Biafra.

The government was unworthy because it had failed in its fundamental duty as a

government, to ensure the security of its citizens. In fact, “Nigeria, under Gowon, did not

only fail to protect the lives and property of Biafrans, she even planned and executed the

massacre and maiming of thousands.”121

The document also found roots in an earlier rhetoric in its lauding of the Biafran

people, leadership, and resources. Biafra deserved support because “Lt-Col. Ojukwu

[was] the only remaining legitimate Head of Government in Nigeria and Biafra since the

inception of the Military Regime in January 1966.”122 The section entitled “Biafran

Maturity and Statesmenship Vindicated” extended this tone. When independence was

declared, the government “was confronted by problems of such magnitude and

complexity as might have overwhelmed any government anywhere.”123 Despite this,

Biafra had maintained “peace and stability.” She had successfully “ordered the political

and constitutional life of her citizens,”; she had upheld the rule of law and “peacefully

organized…social...and…economic life.”124 Above all, she had fulfilled her raison d’etre:

“she has provided safety and security for her citizens and has, with much success,

stemmed a war of aggression.”125

Echoing the “Introducing Biafra” document, the “Open World Support” paper

went on to say that “Biafra is rich in human and material resources,” dedicating an entire

121 Ibid., 2.122 Ibid., 2.123 Ibid., 2.124 Ibid., 4.125 Ibid., 5.

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section of the document with the same name.126 As previously mentioned, Biafrans had

“long been famed for their industry, initiative, self-reliance, and an almost insatiable

thirst for learning.”127 Statistics were provided to demonstrate the veracity of such claims.

Additionally, Biafra was “blessed with enormous material resources.” Leaving the invite

open to future partnerships, some of these resources were “only recently being realized

and exploited.”128 The report listed the various crops, mineral deposits, and other

resources, concluding that “Biafra is a young nation with great potentialities for

commercial and industrial investment.”129

If the argument was legalistic, the language of genocide still found a new

prescience in “Open World Support.” Page three of the document referenced the forced

expropriation of Biafran property, for example, as a Nigerian violation of its

responsibilities as a signatory of the Convention on Genocide.130 More generally,

“genocide” tended to function rhetorically as the ultimate demonstration of Nigeria’s

failure to protect its citizenry, rather than a heinous crime against humanity.

Still, unlike previous documents, “genocide” became the crescendo of the

language of violence. Page one called for “a halt to the murderous activities of Nigeria

and her collaborators,”131 while on page two the Ministry of Information detailed the

“massacre and maiming of thousands of Biafrans.”132 The Nigerian campaign was “a

‘total war’ of genocide.”133

126 Ibid., 5.127 Ibid., 5.128 Ibid., 6.129 Ibid., 7.130 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, Biafra Deserves Open World Support, March 1968, 3.131 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, Biafra Deserves Open World Support, March 1968, 1.132 Ibid., 2.133 Ibid., 3.

63

Perhaps most notably, the document’s final page used the word three times. The

language of the inhumanity of genocide comes to the fore as Biafra restates her case for

open support. The “war of genocide against [Biafra] is senseless and in human.”134 Open

support from nations around the world “will enormously strengthen the position of Biafra

in her dedicated fight against the gravest crime in international law, the most heinous

crime against humanity – genocide.”135

***

The months of Summer 1968 “were the most action-filled of the entire war.”136

The Federal Military Government’s military victory seemed to hover constantly. Three

major towns - Aba, Owerri, and Okigwi - fell. The wet season brought with it attendant

consequences for those civilians trapped inside the diminishing Biafran borders. The

African recognitions had brought a renewal of hope to Biafra that did not necessarily

equate to the reality of daily life. Indeed, the success of Biafra in the realm of

international opinion continued to ascend as the success of Biafra in keeping her people

save from starvation, malnutrition and war continued to diminish.

Just as Biafra expected a new “diplomatic landslide” to follow from the African

recognitions137, the Nigerians continued to believe that their inevitable victory was closer

than it was. It was with these heady expectations that delegations from each government

met in Kampala for late May peace talks.

The opening statement by the Biafran delegation demonstrated just how far the

Biafrans had moved in using the genocide claim to connect their sovereignty to their

134 Ibid., 8.135 Ibid., 8.136 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 207.137 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 200.

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security. This discourse – and all its components – would come to full fruition a few

weeks later with the release of “The Case for Biafra (First Independence Anniversary

Edition)” by the Ministry of Information on June 12th.

These two documents represented the apex of pre-famine Biafran genocide

rhetoric and displayed a number of relevant themes including connection to the

Holocaust, reliance on the voices of “unimpeachable witnesses”, food poising, civilian-

targeted air raids, and the fallacy of the presented logic of “African unity.” Interestingly,

they also contained problems and contradictions; how to appeal to the West and accuse it

of neo-colonialism at the same time, and how to maximize diplomatic gain from the

claim of genocide while minimizing the notion that genocide reflected an inability on the

part of the Biafrans to keep their population safe.

African unity was a problem that plagued the Biafrans throughout the war. The

fear of secession and domino instability ran rampant in the corridors of African

parliaments and in the minds of their Western allies. Throughout the war, Biafra argued

that African unity could not be compelled by force, and that they had the right to leave

Nigeria because the Federal Government had failed in its fundamental responsibility to

maintain the safety of her Ibo and Eastern citizens. In “The Case for Biafra,” this idea

was further articulated in terms of broken social contracts and genocide. “Nigeria,” it

said, was “teaching Africans to hate fellow Africans; a negation of our basic belief in

African brotherhood, yes, universal brotherhood.”138 After discussing the horror of the

1966 massacres, the document asked “any wonder then that Biafrans are thoroughly

convinced that only separate political existence can guarantee their basic needs of

138 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 3.

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survival and security of life and property?”139 Indeed, most of all, it rejected the idea that

Nigeria was a contractual community in which Biafrans had agreed to participate: “To

break away from tyranny, oppression and genocide is a very different thing from

breaking away from the ideal of a contractual African community.”140

References to the Holocaust were, explicitly and implicitly, part of the new

genocide rhetoric. In their opening statements at Kampala, the Biafran diplomats likened

the Ibos to the Jews of Europe a quarter century earlier, saying that “to force Biafrans

back into the Federation would be like forcing Jews who had fled to Israel back to Nazi

Germany.”141 Quoting journalist Colin Legum from October 1966, the “Case for Biafra”

remembered the Northern pogrom; “the total casualties are unknown. The number of

injured who have arrived in the East runs in the thousands. After a fortnight, the scene in

the Eastern Region continues to be reminiscent of the ingathering of exiles into Israel

after the end of the last war. The parallel is not fanciful.”142 Bringing in Russian atrocity

simultaneously, it went on to lay the problem of witness in referential and terrible terms:

We know what the Nazis did to Jews at Auschwitz. In mass cruelty, the expulsion of the Germans ordered by the Russians fall not very far short of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. The atrocities committed by the Nigerians surpass these.143

Simultaneously, the presentations contained a linguistic undercurrent that either

consciously or subconsciously referenced the plight of the Jews. Importantly, by late May

and June, the 1966 fall “massacres” had become known as “pogroms.” Additionally, the

phrase “final solution” was used for the first time; “The main point which was quite clear

was that the final solution of the “Biafran problem” involved genocide.”144 Finally, the 139 Ibid., 4.140 Ibid., 15.141 Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative. Nigeria-Biafra Peace Talks Opening Statement by the Biafran Delegation, June 1968. 7

142 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 7.143 Ibid., 8.144 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 8.

66

descriptions of the “pogroms” tended to reference the sabon gari (“stranger’s quarters),

separated areas where Ibos living in the North congregated together away from others.

Although different, the sabon gari must have sounded all too reminiscent to the European

ghettos – especially to the American Jews who would become major advocates for

Biafran relief.

Precisely why the Biafrans chose so strongly to reference the plight of the Jews

remains an interesting question with many possible answers. On the one hand, it seemed

that the Ibos had a particular fondness for the parallels they drew between themselves and

the biblical and modern Israelis. The Eastern Region had been one of the quickest, easiest

converts to Christianity during the colonial period. Biafra’s imagination of itself as

connected to the Israelis might have had as much to do with Biblical as modern

knowledge.

At the same time, Western observers were quick to adopt the parallels as well.

Biafrans were sometimes disliked for their clannishness and cunning, but no one could

deny their success in the Nigerian financial and economic realm. And now that the

massacres had happened, the parallel seemed all the more relevant. However much stock

foreign reporters actually put in the allusion, they certainly utilized it frequently in their

writing.145 It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Biafrans, always shrewd readers of

international opinion, saw this and took it as evidence for the efficacy in the comparison.

The place of the Holocaust in American life will be explored in the final section of this

thesis.

The Holocaust imagery was not the only evolving discourse. The onus of

suffering often came down upon children. While this seems totally mundane – the

145 See Section 1 for more

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obvious choice of those wishing to demonstrate the horror of a war – it is worth spending

a minute for why this is the case. As humanitarian critics have noted, the protection of

children in situations of African famine is less important than protecting those of child-

bearing age. In terms of societal stability, the loss of a small child is much less

devastating than the loss of reproductive adults.

Yet in the West, children remain our icons of African misery. There is something

so fundamentally counter to our sense of the “natural” order things for children to die

before their parents. We rebel against the destruction of their innocence. Indeed, their

innocence is symbolic of our own wish to remain free from the tyranny of our capacity

for choice; as adults, we can and are fully expected to sort between right and wrongs,

ambiguous though they may be, to decide how to act in and upon our world. By focusing

on the plight of children we evade the commitment to a political stance that brings with it

the very real possibility that we will be wrong, complicit in misery, and as such, guilty.

“The Case for Biafra” brought children to the front of its story. “The worst

calamity of all,” it suggested, “is the strong feeling of hatred which the sight of a living

Nigerian will evoke in the minds of Biafran children, not to mention the permanent state

of fear in the minds of such children who for years to come will run in terror whenever

they hear the sound of an airplane engine.”146 Even more, it utilized the voices of foreign

observers to talk about the unnatural order of this war. During the 1966 massacres,

“pregnant women were cut open and the unborn children killed.”147 Children were

“roasted alive,” young girls “torn in two.”

146 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 2.147 Ibid., 7.

68

Strategically, the Biafrans employed their international press with ever increasing

frequency. Rather than forcing new foreign audiences to “take their word” for anything,

Biafran speeches of this period regularly referenced newspapers and magazines from

Europe and America, sometimes republishing large swaths of material just to hammer the

point home. As mentioned about, this strategy was one of the central tenants of

Markpress, the American-operated, Geneva-based marketing firm that ran the foreign

propaganda effort for the Biafrans after January 1968. Particularly effective were the

quotes from journalists who had “become believers,” so to speak. Appealing to Western

skepticism and latent mistrust of African belligerents, the journalistic converts were

propaganda gold. In the midst of the vitriolic indictment of Britain and Nigeria found in

“The Case for Biafra,” the document asks “Why should Gowon concentrate on killing

innocent African civilians if his objective was not genocide?”

‘Genocide’, writes Frederick Foresythe in the London Sunday Times, ‘is an ugly word, and even uglier reality, by my judgment that it really could be the extermination if an entire race does not go unsupported…whatever the original motivation of the Federal Army, hatred of the Ibos seems to be the prime stimulus. The Nigerian soldiers loot, rape, kill and torture. When asked why, the shrug and say – Kill Ibo. Have they a feeling for one Nigeria? ‘Yes – one Nigeria, without Ibo.’’148

In the same article, published in London in May 1968, Forsyth had written “At the

start, on my first visit to Biafra, I believed it had the most dangerous potential but that

Biafran claims that they faced genocide were wildly exaggerated. Ten months later I am

convinced that the very thing they claimed at that time has indeed become a reality."149

A number of rhetorical touchstones that would soon achieve a greater prescience

were also present. With some regularity, the “Case for Biafra” began to identify air raids

as evidence for the genocidal intent of the Nigerians. By 1968, then, the propaganda

machine seemed to have forgotten that the Biafrans were, in fact, the initiators of the air

148 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 29.149 Frederick Forsyth. “Gutted Hamlets, Rotting Corpses—This is Genocide,” The Sunday Times, May 12, 1968.

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war, bombing Lagos – albeit in amateur fashion – in late 1967.150 At the same time, the

documents continued to suggest that Nigeria was poising food coming into Biafran held

territory. This had been a Biafran claim since February, according to a New York Times

article from July 14.151 The first page of “Case for Biafra” references claimed that “the

tragedy of this war is that the vast majority of the dead and wounded are civilians:

innocent men, women and children killed by Nigeria’s army by shelling, bombing, brutal

massacres and poisoning of food.”152

“The Case for Biafra” articulated the horror of the air raids in incredible detail –

again relying on the testimony of foreigners. The London Sunday Times reported in

February that there had been air attacks deliberately aimed at Biafran civilians.153 The

same reporter, writing a few months later wrote in brutal detail about the “children

roasted alive, young girls torn in two by shrapnel, pregnant women eviscerated, and old

men blown to fragments,” all caused by “high-flying Russian Illyushin Jets operated by

Federal Nigeria.”154 A few pages later, a full account was given of the air-raid targets.

According to the Biafrans, 46 out of 112 were aimed at civilian residential areas.155

More than ever before, “The Case for Biafra” document mythologized the

genocide by putting it in narrative form. The Asaba massacres of late 1967 became, along

with the 1966 pogroms, food poisoning, and air raids, part of the Biafran belief that the

Nigerians were out to kill them all. According to a foreign source, Asaba saw 700 Ibo

males “lined up and shot.”

150 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 115151 _________ New York Times, July 14th152 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 1.153 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 22.154 Ibid., 22.155 Ibid., 24.

70

“The Case for Biafra” also included the story of Andrew Odinma Mordi, a boy

who had escaped and could confirm that “the vandals’ intention was the total

extermination of all males above the age of five years.”156 Both his father and brother

were killed. For a few months, there was a period of normalcy, then in April the

massacres re-started. All the boys were rounded up from school and arrested. Andrew

escaped again to the bush and crossed safely to the Biafran side.157

The Asaba massacres played viciously on Biafran fears – the news of them was

spread not only by fellow Ibos but by missionaries who had witnessed the atrocity.

Remembering his childhood during the war Alfred Uzokwe wrote that he came home one

day to his mother crying uncontrollably.

My mother’s father and several other relatives had been summarily shot by federal troops in Asaba. The news hit me like a thunderbolt…Just a little while before…my mother had said that her first priority after the war would be to go to Asaba and reunite with her father and others. Now her hopes would never be realized. I was exceedingly embittered by this latest atrocity…As a young Christian boy, I wondered why God would let such calamity befall us…when the federal troops entered Asaba, they conducted a holocaust of unimaginable proportion; they killed as many people as they could find, regardless of their ages. With that, the Nigerian war broke all the rules of conventional warfare. It started with the senseless killings of the defenseless Easterners in 1966 and was followed by the Asaba massacre. It was compounded by the starvation of many innocent people.158

While its easy to look back cynically, understanding that in fact the Asaba

massacres tended to be the exception rather than the rule of Federal Military conduct, that

air raids were a “regular” aspect of war, that it seems unlikely that Nigeria waged a large

scale campaign to poison the food coming into Biafra, the psychological terror that these

imaginations exerted over day to day Biafran life cannot be discounted. It is

extraordinarily difficult to try to discern which parts of Biafran official rhetoric were

forged, falsified or intentionally exaggerated, and which parts were simply reflections of

156 Ibid., 25.157 Ibid., 26.158 Alfred Ukokwe, Surviving in Biafra: The Story of the Nigerian Civil War (Writers Advantage, 2003), 69-73.

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a deeply-held if not factually accurate collective memory and imagination. Whatever the

case, the Biafrans were quite right when they said that “every act of provocation brought

the wounded people of Biafra more closely together.”159 A sort of fatalism and resolve

gripped the Biafrans and played into the hands of hardliner leadership who wanted no

compromise on the idea of Biafran sovereignty – even if it meant more dead by starvation

or any other means.

John de St. Jorre, the most level-headed, intelligent and thorough contemporary

analyst of the war wrestled deeply with this reality in September 1968. Despite that it was

“besieged, bludgeoned, starving,” de St. Jorre found the atmosphere charged – “‘If you

gave us the choice of 1000 rifles or milk for 50000 staving children’, a Biafran official

told me in Aba, ‘we’d take the guns.’ A callous, inhuman, brutal statement it would

appear, but the preference was widely held and seen to make sense.”160 The Biafrans, he

said, more or less believed that they were fighting for their lives – all sides, businessmen

and refugees alike, presented the “same grim and hopeless equation. The lowest common

denominator – personal fear, personal survival – was constantly present.”161

Despite his best attempts, de St. Jorre couldn’t dig beneath this belief. “The

isolation, the suffering, the propaganda, the countless personal horror stories – real and

imagined – the strong colours of war that admit no pastel shades or half-tones made

‘survival’ the central pivot of life and death.”162 The Biafrans talked about this survival

constantly; some, he believed, had already taken up a death wish. Simply comprehension

159 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 14.160 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 220.161 Ibid., 222.162 Ibid., 222.

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was difficulty. De St. Jorre found himself fighting to not let the Biafran sensibilities

overwhelm him.

To grasp the mood in Biafra one had to stick severely to the human issues and try to ignore much of the political wrangling and incessant propaganda. The bitterness, disillusion and almost pathological hatred and mistrust of the Nigerians generated by the 1966 massacres and refueled by fourteen months of warfare and traumatic isolation were rather terrifying. (I found myself…beginning to think of the Nigerians as a race of pariahs, blood-thirsty ‘vandals’ to a man.)163

The utterances of genocide were not without their problems and contradictions,

however. Both “The Case for Biafra” and the opening statements at the Kampala peace

talks simultaneously appealed to the West’s sense of itself – in particular playing up the

element of religious confrontation embedded in the conflict – and then tore the big

powers down for neocolonialism and imperialism. To make a full emotional impact,

Biafrans had to convince the West that Nigeria was an oppressive, genocidal regime,

while not coming of as a victim unable to defend itself.

In both of these presentations, the fact that the Northern Nigerians were Islamic –

as compared to the Christian East – received new emphasis, often in the form of italicized

or underlined statements. Quoting the London Daily Express from late 1966, the

Kampala delegation recounted that “another Englishmen who fled the town told of two

Catholic priests running for it, the mob after them. ‘I don’t know if they escaped: I didn’t

wait to see’…..a lot of massacred Ibos are buried in mass graves outside the Moslem

walls.”164 Later in the same article, “I talked with a saffron-robed Hausa, who told me:

‘We killed about 250 here. Perhaps Allah willed it’. …(Underline theirs).

They also quoted the Time magazine story about the Northern massacres,

underlining key Islam-focused words.163 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 222.164 Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative. Nigeria-Biafra Peace Talks Opening Statement by the Biafran Delegation, June 1968.

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Screaming the blood curses of a Moslem holy war, the Hausa troops turned the airport into a shambles, bayoneting Ibo workers in the bar, gunning them down….The soldiers did not have to do all the killing. They were soon joined by thousands of Hausa civilians who rampaged through the city, armed with…home-made weapons…[and] crying Heathen! and Allah!165

In addition to repeating those same articles and quotes, “The Case for Biafra”

moved the discussion of genocidal intent all the way to the top levels. Indicting Gowon

for staying silent on the massacres, the “Case” said that “[Gowon’s] one utterance was

that Allah in his infinite mercy had made it possible for “another Northerner” to guide the

affairs of the nation.”

Precisely why the Biafrans adopted this rhetoric after having spent many months

of the conflict downplaying the tribal and religious underpinnings is hard to discern. One

possible explanation was that it was calculated to bolster the voices of the priests and

missionaries who had, in their humanitarian capacity, become vocal supporters of the

Biafran right to survive. Regardless, if this rhetoric was designed to appeal to Western

sensibility; it was largely countered by the discussion of British neo-imperialism the

Biafrans claims was driving the war.

Almost as soon as “The Case for Biafra” began, it accused Britain of attempting

to destroy “Africa’s manpower and resources, which should be used for economic

development.”166 The blockade of Biafra which was wreaking such horrible hunger upon

the civilian population was a result of British collusion.167 Indeed, quite the opposite of

fracturing the O.A.U. as it was accused of, Biafra asserted that the “Gowon clique in

Lagos has failed to understand what is meant by independence in the African context and

has allowed itself to be used by neo-colonialist Britain and Russia to achieve their selfish

165 Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative. Nigeria-Biafra Peace Talks Opening Statement by the Biafran Delegation, June 1968. 5166 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 2. 167 Ibid., 14.

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economic objectives in the exploitation in Africa.”168 Indeed, even the United Nations

aroused the Biafran ire; “The world body pushed around by the United States of America,

Britain and Russia – accomplices in this crime of genocide, told us it was not its

business.”169 Still stinging from the oil fiasco at the beginning of the war, Shell-BP – a

“British dominated Company” symbolized for the Biafrans the economic exploitation on

view in the beleaguered would-be nation. How these two discourses – one vitriolic

against the Western involvement that had come before and one that would have seemed

to appeal to then-contemporary Western Manichaeism – could have been part of the same

strategy is somewhat unclear.

Whatever the case, the rhetoric of genocide had a more subtle and potentially

dangerous flipside: victimization. Throughout the conflict, Biafra worked to ensure that it

was perceived as a place that even when subjected to terrible forces – indeed, forces

which compelled the intervention of the humane external world – remained powerfully

determined and able to control its own destiny. For Biafrans and indeed, for most of the

world, this may have seemed simply like a matter of pride. The New York Times editorial

staff would later lament this intransigence as people starved to death. At the same time,

there may have been more to it than that.

In his The Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick explored the relationship of

victimhood and collective responses to genocide. Most notably, he recognized that the

current sanctification of victims in American culture – indeed, the “competition for

enshrining grievances” - was not at all the same in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.

There has been a change in the attitude toward victimhood from a status all but universally shunned and despised to one often eagerly embraced. On the individual level,

168 Ibid., 20.169 Ibid., 30.

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the cultural icon of the strong, silent hero is replaced by the vulnerable and verbose antihero. Stoicism is replaced as a prime value by sensitivity.170

The America to which the Biafra narrative was presented, however, was much

closer to the older model. Whether the strategy was designed to do so or not, it would

have been important for the Biafrans, in order to secure American public approval, to

demonstrate their self-reliance.

Evidence that Biafra recognized this reality can be found in many of the

documents examined. Indeed, the notion that only a Biafran government could safeguard

Biafran security was the fundamental tenant upon which Biafran arguments for secession

were placed. With the advent of wide-scale starvation however, this “have-your-cake-

and-eat-it-to” genocide discourse would be put to severe strain.

By the time “The Case for Biafra” was released, starvation had become a very

real problem. Of course, blame for it was placed on the Nigerians (and sometimes, by

proxy, the British) and their campaign of genocide. “The importation of food to Biafra

was banned,” it suggested, “in a Gowon-inspired effort to starve to death the two million

Biafrans who had fled to Biafra.”171 They quoted foreign supporters, citing one Letter to

the Editor of the Observer that read “the malnutrition of the children in Biafra to which

you refer, will inevitably increase so long as Britain observes the blockade to Biafra.”172

Interestingly, Biafra attempts to deal with the starvation-based threat to its

legitimate right to govern (it says it exists to safeguard the right of its people to exist; if

they starve, its mandate is forfeit) by placing the worst of the famine in Nigerian

controlled territory. “It took the International Committee of the Red Cross to rescue from

starvation a group of Biafran sympathizers, abandoned by Nigerians to die in the forest of

170 Ibid., 8.171 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 8.172 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 34.

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the Republic of Benin.”173 Stated more plainly on the first page, “a large number of law-

abiding and helpless Biafrans have died of starvation behind the Nigerian lines.”

The time was quickly running out that starvation could figure so mundanely into

the overall Biafran discourse. Indeed, as July came, the world took notice of a very

different Biafra – a starving Biafra – and the war would never be the same again.

173 Ibid., 26.

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Section Three: Starvation SympathyWhere once there had been a Nigerian war, the rapid onslaught of famine in mid-

1968 created a “humanitarian” crisis in Biafra. As starvation loomed, relief organizations,

American citizen support groups, and the Biafran propaganda machine changed their

language accordingly. In myriad ways, hunger redefined the stakes and terms of the war;

the political battle became focused on how to allow for proper relief, the question of

genocide was a question of the intentionality of the famine, the competition for

international attention was focused on governing the politics of explanation about the

famine. For many Americans looking back today, the pictures of starving children are

their only recollection of that far away war.

Even from the beginning, Biafra was at risk for developing famine conditions.

Despite ardent claims of self-sufficiency, citizens in the Eastern Region relied heavily on

protein from other regions and other countries174. The rain-forest vegetation and high

population density limited cattle production, and approximately 80% of the protein

consumed by the region (which was still, relatively speaking, far less than in other parts

of Nigeria), was imported.175 These imports tended to be financed by exporting Eastern

products like palm oil or purchased and sent home by the Diasporic Eastern wage earners

scattered around the country. The war would have cataclysmic effects on all of these food

networks.

Upon its declaration of independence, Biafra was one of the most densely

populated areas in all of Africa.176 This density was exacerbated by the influx of Ibo

174 Government of the Republic of Biafra, Introducing Biafra, 1967. 175 Laurie Wiseberg, “The International Politics of Relief: A Case Study of the Relief Operations Mounted During the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1973), 77.176 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 237.

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refugees – estimated at between 1 and 2 million – who had fled from other parts of the

country after the fall 1966 massacres in the North. Although extensive kin networks were

initially successful in assimilating the refugees, subsistence farming became even more

taxed.

The prodigious Ibo return was problematic in more than its additional strain on

the system of agriculture. The Federal Military Government blockade of Biafra, launched

upon the declaration of independence, made it much more difficult for the Easterners to

sell their goods outside of their region and to acquire food – especially protein – from

abroad. Because the Ibos living outside of the east had been such an important link in the

chain of food acquisition, their return made the effects of the blockade more dramatic.

As the war wore on, the Nigerian forces slowly hacked away pieces of Biafran

territory. Starting at just under 30,000 square miles, by March/April 1968, Biafra was

closer to 9000 sq miles.177 Despite this, there was not a proportionate decrease in

population. Acting on deep fears of the Nigerian army produced by a combination of

experience and collective self-terrorization, Biafrans – particularly Ibos – would flee

deeper into the hinterland or simply into the bush. Those who fled inward added further

stress to the limited pool of nutrient resources and those who hid in the forests were often

unable to acquire enough food through foraging or agriculture.

The Biafran famine was more than lack of resources. Following a pattern

identified by such famine theorists as Amartya Sen, it was also lack of entitlement to

resources. It was a conscious strategy of the FMG to deny Biafrans access to food and

177 Garrison, Lloyd. “The ‘Point of No Return’ For the Biafrans.” The New York Times, Sep 8, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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access to the resources to acquire food. This political and military strategy would come to

loggerheads with the international relief effort.

One of the most effective maneuvers undertaken by the FMG was to change the

Nigerian currency in 1968. The Biafran government was taken “completely by surprise,”

and the accelerated period of transition – a mere 19 days after the announcement –

initiated a flurry of activity as Biafran emissaries around the world tried to dump their

hoards of Nigerian currency. Although it managed to put out its own currency relatively

quickly, some have estimated that the Biafran government lost the equivalent of about 30

million British pounds as a result of the operation.178

But the move had a more significant long-term effect on the conflict. The switch

in Nigerian currency meant that the value of Biafran money was connected only to

Biafran supply and demand. In other words, there was no external stabilizing influence

on the value of the Biafran dollar relative to incredibly scare food essentials. As a result,

the price of food soared to exorbitant levels. The New York Times reported regularly in

1968 about the dramatic increase in prices of every day goods.179 In addition to increasing

the difficulty of buying food in Biafra, one of the Biafran survival strategies - the “afia

attack,” or trading behind enemy lines – suffered as a result of the change of currency.180

In addition to the risk of being discovered by enemy soldiers, the women who crossed the

lines had difficulty acquiring enough of the Nigerian currency to make the trip worth the

risk.

178 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 187.179 Garrison, Lloyd. “The ‘Point of No Return’ For the Biafrans.” The New York Times, Sep 8, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers180 Alfred Ukokwe, Surviving in Biafra: The Story of the Nigerian Civil War (Writers Advantage, 2003), 58.

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Inequitable distribution of what food existed threatened to tear apart the fragile

Biafran self-identity. In a memoir of the war, Alfred Uzokwe recalled his childhood

frustrations with food relief. He wrote

I always felt bad at the sight of refugees at the St. Mary’s School compound, struggling to get food from the distribution center in an adjacent building. I abhorred the fact that people who were already hungry and had lost strength had to fight to get relief food. It became survival of the fittest; those who were strong enough to shove others out of the way got more rations and those who had become exceedingly weak because of hunger could not get enough food.181

Indeed, as the famine set in, the suffering it caused was latched onto by the

Biafran leadership as a rhetorical touchstone to raise international ire against the

Nigerians, and perhaps equally as importantly to further bind Biafrans in the fear of

extermination. The new rhetoric was genocide by starvation.

Just like the rhetoric of genocide, the famine itself did not develop overnight. Its

incubation period was approximately ten months – from the June 1967 beginning of the

economic blockade to April 1968 when relief organizations started issuing their most dire

warnings.182 Still, determining precisely when the famine became a “crisis” is hard to do.

In a dissertation about the humanitarian aspect of the conflict, Laurie Wiseberg wrote that

the situation reached “critical dimensions,” in April/May 1968. On April 10, the Nigerian

Red Cross launched an international appeal warning that as many as 3.6 million women

and children were facing malnutrition and starvation.183 De St. Jorre located the problem

even earlier, suggesting that “by the end of 1967, the situation had reached crisis

proportions,” with the Churches in Biafra making their first public appeal for relief.184

181 Ibid., 59-60.182 Laurie Wiseberg, “The International Politics of Relief: A Case Study of the Relief Operations Mounted During the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1973), 78.183 Ibid., 78.184 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 237.

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And then there were the Biafrans themselves. Reading memoirs and

contemporary accounts, the most forward thinking Easterners recognized the danger early

on. Ukokwe wrote that as the famine became more acute and he witnessed friends and

classmates succumbing to malnutrition or starvation, he realized how hard his parents had

tried to save his family by mandating and rationing certain types of food and proteins

since the beginning of the conflict.185

Whenever the hunger may have officially begun, by July there could be no doubt

that the famine was a full blown crisis. The April fall of Abakaliki, the main food

producing area in Biafra, and even more importantly the fall of Port Harcourt in mid-May

virtually doomed Biafra to starvation. As Wiseberg wrote, “as long as Port Harcourt

remained in Biafran hands, the federal blockade was only partially effective,” for access

to the coast facilitated limited access to supplies and continuance of the local fishing

industry. But with it captured, the FMG “gained control of the Biafran rivers and coastal

region which supported that enterprise…by the end of May, Biafra was landlocked and

cut off from access to protein food.”186 On July 11, President Johnson made a plea for a

cessation of hostilities and consideration of the humanitarian problems of the war. His

comments were designed to precede the next day’s release of the Life cover story that

would blast Biafra into the American mainstream.

Regardless of America’s intense desire to keep Biafran hunger a “humanitarian”

problem, for both of the belligerents, it was an intensely political issue. “Was starvation a

legitimate weapon of war?” de St. Jorre asked.

185 Alfred Ukokwe, Surviving in Biafra: The Story of the Nigerian Civil War (Writers Advantage, 2003), 61-62.186 Laurie Wiseberg, “The International Politics of Relief: A Case Study of the Relief Operations Mounted During the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1973), 76.

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The hardliners in Nigeria and Biafra thought that it was, the former regarding it as a valid means of reducing the enemy’s capacity to resist, a method as old as war itself, and the latter seeing it as a way of internationalizing the conflict through appealing to the humanitarian instincts of the outside world.187

Whether the strategy was legitimate or not, it was what it was. The change in

Biafran rhetoric that accompanied the onslaught of starvation was designed precisely to

politicize the famine. The reason for this was simple. If the crisis was humanitarian, it

could be resolved by humanitarian means – namely, food relief. If the Biafrans could

some how convince the world that the Nigerians were intentionally starving the hapless

but worthy Biafrans as part of a demonstrable strategy of genocide, the response would

have to be political.

By this time, the main Biafran objective was to throw up insurmountable

diplomatic roadblocks against Nigerian victory in order to wrestle de facto recognitions

of sovereignty by getting to the negotiation table as a full partner in a conditionless cease-

fire. By Summer 1968, the Biafran leadership was posturing like the starvation had

forever been part of their plan: “Our aim all along has been to delay the enemy until the

world conscience can effectively be aroused against genocide.”188

This section of the thesis looks at the upheaval in discourse during the Summer

months of 1968. In part, it examines how Biafrans changed their rhetoric to calibrate their

message to the starvation. Even more though, it looks at the press coverage – focused on

the New York Times – given to the Biafra conflict from July-September 1968 in hopes of

better understanding how American citizens were reconciling with and attempting to

resolve the crisis across the seas.

***

187 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 237.188 Odumegwu Ojukwu, Biafra: Random Thoughts (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 242.

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For many Americans, the Biafra crisis began on July 13, 1968. Although the

conflict had been underway for more than a year, its resonance in America was still

largely limited to ultra-informed citizens with a pre-existing interest in Africa. All that

changed with the publication of Life magazine’s July cover story on the Biafran famine.

All of a sudden, Biafra – or more specifically the Biafran famine – became headline

news. Americans introduced to the conflict in terms of starving children were left to sort

through the noisome politics to try to figure out what could and should be done.

American coverage during those summer months focused largely on the

“humanitarian crisis” enveloping Nigeria. A primary emphasis was the scale and horror

of the famine. On-the-ground correspondents became not only journalists but

editorialists, human links between the suffering Biafrans and American readers. The

media grappled with framing the conflict in terms that its audience could understand; the

war tended to be – to a much greater degree than coverage from more than a year before

– reduced to tribalism and reciprocal violence.

The real editorialists tended to focus on the intransigence of the leadership to

accept compromise. More than British involvement or American noninvolvement, the

war lingered because of the totally unwillingness of each leadership to compromise

political goals for humanitarian ones. They assumed that this compromise was desired by

the civilians involved, particularly the Biafrans, but it may not have been so clear cut.

The focus on and concern with starvation was so pervasive that the politics of the

war began to be simply part and parcel of the politics of starvation and relief. In article

after article, the debate about “mercy-corridors” vs. cease-fires and massive airlifts was

repeated. Editorials and political statements demonstrated an incredible desire on the part

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of Americans – government and citizen alike – to imagine politics and humanitarian

causes as separable.

The news was not just concerned with the conflict itself but the whole realm of

stakeholders. Coverage about mercenaries and the French got their fair share of column

space. Even more importantly, articles about the American response gave people a sense

of what their fellow citizens were doing. A series of poignant advertisements by

concerned citizens groups tried to arouse public opinion in favor of the suffering

Biafrans.

What is clear is that the starvation brought with it an entirely different sense of the

conflict and an entirely different level of focus in the American media. Although the

Biafrans updated their rhetoric – particularly that of genocide – accordingly, the

perception of the conflict in America was mostly humanitarian and was created, in fact,

by journalists, citizen activists, and humanitarians; ironically, it was created mostly by

Americans themselves.

***

“There have never been more disturbing pictures in the news media than those

starving Biafran children. Day after day, month after month, they have stared at us with

sad, bulging, lusterless eyes that seem to ask so pathetically, “Why don’t you help us?””

-Howard A Rusk, M.D.

New York Times, Sept 22, 1968

The centerpiece of reporting about Biafra was calculating and capturing the

misery of starvation. Articles that dealt explicitly with the conditions of starvation in the

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country can be organized into three themes. Some emphasis was put on the scale of the

disaster – how many people were dying per week, and how many were estimated to die in

the long run. At the same time, a few articles by guest columnist doctors gave Americans

a better sense of the physiological effects of starvation and malnutrition. The most

profound articles, however, were those that dealt with the depravation of famine and its

profound effect on Biafran society.

Perhaps a bit surprisingly, the number of articles focused primarily on evolving

estimates of the famine toll was low. Around the time of the Life article, the International

Red Cross estimated that about 3000 Biafrans a week were succumbing to starvation.189

The British and Federal Military Government put the number closer to 200. These

numbers became the standards for American articles during Summer 1968. Despite this,

some suggested higher estimates – up to 6000 a day.190

In August, the starvation was accelerating, and what seemed terrifying was the

numbers at risk who hadn’t starved yet. According to an August 4 story, Oxfam estimated

that during the next week, 400000 children would pass ‘the point of no return’ after

which starvation and malnutrition became inevitable.191 The New York Times editorial

staff suggested that estimates of the total number facing starvation in the ensuing months

ranged from one to ten million.192 The Swiss Red Cross Representative in Biafra said

“Don’t ask me about August. I’ve stopped playing the numbers game.”193 By the end of

September, the number had rocketed to 8000 to 10000 and getting worse.194

189 “Nigeria: Little Time Left to Avery Disaster,” The New York Times, July 14, 1968190 Lloyd Garrison, “The ‘Point of No Return’ For the Biafrans,” The New York Times, Sep 8, 1968.191 “Biafra: and then the Children Die,” The New York Times, Aug 4192 “The Shame of Biafra,” The New York Times, July 16, 1968.193 Lloyd Garrison, “Editorial Article 2—No Title,” The New York Times, August 11, 1968.194 “Deaths In Biafra Put At 8,000 A Day,” The New York Times, September 28, 1968.

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These numbers are revealing for more than their approximation of the famine

situation. It seems, given the limited way they factored into other articles, that their

efficacy in keeping people’s attention was limited. Numbers of the dead are and always

have been depersonalized – it’s the context that matters. The higher the number, the more

difficult for people to personalize and conceptualize the horror. Stalin recognized this

when he said “To kill one person is murder; to kill a million is a mere statistic.”

Moreover, the focus on death tolls as the quantifier of the misery belies the very

different understanding of famine held by “the West” vs. Africans. Alex de Waal wrote

extensively about this in his book “Famine that Kills.” It didn’t take a famine theorist and

15 more years experience to articulate some elements of this.

Starvation…[does] not evoke quite the same emotions here as [it] does in richer, happier places. Around the continent there are people living on the margin of starvation from the time they are born until they die…Africans love their children as much as any others do, but death is commonplace, and if someone in the family has to go without eating, the smallest children represent the smallest investment in food and clothes already paid.195

And what of the mechanism of that death? The New York Times occasionally

featured reports by hunger specialists to explain more precisely what those “disturbing

pictures” represented. On August 5, an article by Jane Brody distinguished marasmus –

“the skin-and-bones look generally associated with starvation” – and kwashiorkor – a

“nutritional deficiency disease,” stemming from lack of protein. Kwashiorkor was

deceptive, “for its victims often swell up with water, giving them a round, almost healthy

look.”196 Unfortunately for victims, sufferers of malnutrition were extremely susceptible

to infection. Even minor ailments could and often did lead to death. Even those children

195 Lawrence Fellows, “Anger in Africa Over West’s Help to Biafra Rises,” The New York Times, September 30, 1968.196 Jane E. Brody, “Malnutrition Can Permanently Impair Those Who Survive It,” The New York Times, August 5, 1968.

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who survived face the reality that “severe malnutrition in the young may permanently

stunt physical and mental growth.”197

About six weeks later, Howard M. Rusk, MD, wrote a much more indignant and

vibrant narrative describing the symptoms of starvation. First the stomach shrinks and

bloats with cramps. During this period “starving children cry…and eat anything to stop

hunger pains. Rags, straw, clay, chalk and even poisonous weeds, berries and twigs have

been reportedly ingested.”198

Before long though, the cries turn to whimpers, and nausea follows. Thankfully,

“Nature becomes kinder to the starving at this juncture, kinder than the politicians

arguing about boundaries and power.”199 Lethargy sinks in and the sufferer begins to

sleep more. Lloyd Garrison, the New York Times correspondent in Biafra at the time of

secession, wrote about the horror of seeing children caught in this stage:

Their hair has turned reddish yellow…their bellies are the size of water melons, their arms and legs like matchsticks. You can offer them milk, sugar lumps, chocolate, anything. But no response. They stare back at you with glassy, saucer-like eyes. Death is inevitable. They are too dehydrated, too listless to eat.200

Returning to Rusk’s narrative, the abdomen distends with fluid and the organs

start to break down. The starving person becomes unable to fight other diseases. Even if

nutrition is restored at this point, the damage can be permanent; “What a price for

innocent people to pay for power politics.”201 The piece ends with a ringing indictment of

those politicians who belabor points while people suffer, and proactively suggests that

future negotiations take place in “an atmosphere of hunger.”202

***

197 Ibid.198 Howard A. Rusk, “Starvation in Biafra,” The New York Times, September 22, 1968.199 Ibid.200 “Biafra: And then the Children Die,” The New York Times, Aug 4, 1968201 Howard A. Rusk, “Starvation in Biafra,” The New York Times, September 22, 1968.202 Ibid.

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The Biafrans were incredibly fast to respond to the new representations of

starvation in American media. The Office of the Special Representative of the Republic

in New York called a press conference within days of Johnson’s public statements and

the Life cover story to try to take control over the discussion of the famine. Within the

week, starvation had become the mechanism of the genocide that Biafra had been

accusing the Nigerians of for months.

The connection was incredibly important; the Biafrans needed desperately to be

able to control the explanation of the starvation, and by extension, its response.

Concerned Americans calling for aid to starving children needed to understand the

political causality of the famine if the Biafrans were to achieve their aims.

The press conference that followed LBJ’s July 11th statements made these issues

plain. Its rhetorical cornerstones were found in the accusation of genocide and in the call

for an immediate cease-fire. Additionally, it gave the Biafran perspective on negotiating

with the Nigerians about aid distribution. This discussion would be dominant in

editorials, articles and letters to the editor of the New York Times throughout the Summer

1968.

The speech began on a note of thanks. Dr, Nyonye Otue, Special Representative,

was deeply appreciative of the concern of the American president and people, as well as

the relief drives being undertaken by various international organizations. Importantly,

however, “relief assistance [did] not alleviate [their] fear of genocide, and [came] at a

time when a number of people would have died before the relief [took] effect.”203

203 Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative. Text of a Press Conference by Dr. Nwonye Otue Special Representative, Republic of Biafra, July 1968.

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He reminded the audience that Biafra came into being as a secession for survival.

The Nigerian government could not protect the safety of the people of the Eastern

Region, and as such had forfeited its right to govern. Indeed, the execution of the war had

vindicated the Biafran belief that the 1966 massacres were part of a long term campaign

of genocide. Quoting the Spectator, London from May 31, Otue stated:

It is a war of extermination: a vast volume of evidence from unimpeachable witnesses – the International Red Cross, the churches, individual missionaries, doctors and teachers – proves conclusively that blood-crazed Federal forces are systematically massacring the civilian population, Ibo and non-Ibo alike.204 Over and over, Otue reminded the press the stakes of the conflict: “We are faced

with genocide and we are determined to fight to the end to survive.”205 Biafra could not

agree to any relief program that would compel her to “make a choice between

unconditional surrender and mass massacre that will follow it and death by starvation.”206

The politics of aid relief were extremely problematic. For the Biafrans, they were

shadowed by the genocide Nigeria was carrying out. Much to the chagrin of outside

observers, the Biafrans had rejected food channeled through the Nigerian government.

The Nigerians, for their part, had rejected any plans for airlifts – demanding that aid be

brought in through “mercy corridors,” land bridges from Nigerian occupied territory to

Biafra.

Throughout the Summer of 1968, New York Times readers and writers –indeed,

citizens from around the world - expressed frustration and disbelief that the two

leaderships could be so callous in the face of human suffering; the doctor Howard Rusk

was the rule, rather than the exception, in his indignation. Especially after the failed

Addis Ababa peace talks in early August, the intransigence of the Nigerian and Biafran

204 Ibid., 2. 205 Ibid., 2.206 Ibid., 3.

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rulers in the face of the generosity of world humanitarian sentiment had commentators

apoplectic.

On August 16th, the New York Times editorial staff wrote a column called “The

Heartless Leaders,” which suggested that “tragically, the people who seem least

concerned about the fate of millions of starving Biafrans are their own would-be leaders

on both sides of Nigeria’s savage civil war….the world may well wonder whether either

set of rival leaders is fit to rule over this unfortunate people.”207 A week and a half later it

was more of the same; “yet another hope for an immediate massive international relief

operation for the starving victims of Nigeria’s civil war has been dashed by intransigence

on both sides.”208

On August 18th, an article titled “In Nigeria’s Civil War, Humanitarianism Comes

In a Poor Second,” summed up the positions of the belligerents. The Nigerian

government wouldn’t accept airlift proposals on principle; “any suggestion that ‘any

portion of Nigeria should be internationalized and handed over to a foreign agency was

unacceptable.’”209 The Biafrans “object[ed] to the “land corridor” citing fear as well as

political principle.”210

For the Biafrans, the rejection of Nigerian proposals for aid was linked to the

strategy of genocide. During the press conference following President Johnson’s

statement, Otue described the various reasons why no Nigerian proposals could be

accepted.

207 “The Heartless Leaders,” The New York Times, August 16, 1968.208 “False Hope in Nigeria,” The New York Times, August 27, 1968.209 Alvin Shuster, “In Nigeria’s Civil War, Humanitarianism Comes In a Poor Second,” The New York Times, August 18, 1968.210 Ibid.

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Having stated publicly that starvation was “a legitimate instrument of warfare,”

the Nigerian Government could not be trusted. Even if this were not the case, Lagos did

not have the power to control its field commanders who would be charged with

implementing any agreements regarding food aid. Logistically, the months it would take

to repair and build those “land corridors” would cost the starvation related deaths of

millions more. Indeed, the land corridors might very well be a strategic tool for the

implementation of genocide; they would effectively “remove all obstacles to the rapid

enemy advance into Biafra to complete the genocide.” Even more maliciously, food

accepted from the Nigerians would likely be poisoned. Otue claimed that impartial

observers had confirmed poisoning, and importantly recognized that “no responsible

leadership would…even attempt to persuade [its people] to touch the food.”211

***

On the domestic front, the most powerful American articles to appear during the

Summer of 1968 were those that dealt with the on-scene horror of the starvation.

Journalists like the New York Times’ Lloyd Garrison became regular bridges between the

comfort of America and the suffering of Biafra. Their words put the horrors of starvation

in poetic, rather than clinical terms; terms which tore at the consciences of well-fed

Americans. In letters to the editor, readers testified to the power of their words. On Aug

1, a man from Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania wrote

I’ve seen nothing more compelling since I began reading newspapers (48 years) than Lloyd Garrison’s news story on the dying Biafra babies. I pray that President Johnson will send aid. We have the pilots, the planes, and the parachutes to put food where it is needed most.212

211 Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative. Text of a Press Conference by Dr. Nwonye Otue Special Representative, Republic of Biafra, July 1968.

212 Alphonso H. Caser, “Biafra’s Children,” The New York Times, August 7, 1968.

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These moving portraits of misery tended to share certain characteristics. For one,

they tended to focus on the plight of children. Articles had titles like “Despair Shrouds

Biafran Hospital as Children Die,” and “Biafra: And Then the Children Die.”213 They

included descriptions of the horror, such as the Garrison quote about listless children

“past the point of no return” above. Indeed, these mores repeated themselves so

frequently that the first question that popped into my head while reading the letter from

Mount Carmel was “Which story on the dying Biafra babies?”

Why so much time was spent on children related largely to audience. Throughout

the conflict, Americans demonstrated a desire to remain detached from the politics of the

conflict. Children, the ultimate symbol of innocence, provided an outlet for American

emotional anguish at the Biafran misery without threatening their coveted political

neutrality. By mythologizing children as the symbol of the war, sincerely concerned

Americans mapped the political neutrality legitimated by childhood innocence onto a

conflict totally inseparable from its politics.

What’s more, it’s important to remember that journalists experienced the same

human frustrations and sensibilities about the natural order of things. Most of them

shared an upbringing more like their readers than the subjects of their articles. Most of

them likely rallied against that denial of innocence and their frustration inevitably found

its way into their reporting. Indeed, since their mandate as journalists was some modicum

of objectivity, children would have again provided safe ground – a place where their

neutrality as reporters could nestle comfortably with their indignation as humans.

The gut wrenching stories from Summer 1968 shared other characteristics, as

well. They tended, like Biafran propaganda, to rely on the testimony of “unimpeachable

213 New York Times, August 1968

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witnesses.” White missionaries and humanitarians became the moral barometer for the

stories; in some stories, the focus on their anguish overwhelms that of the Biafrans. On

July 30, the story “In Biafra, Death by Famine Strikes Everywhere,” included quotes

from Reverends and Humanitarians alike. “They used to come here every night for a little

soup – milk or bean,” said Rev. Ken Doheny of the 7000 children who gathered nightly at

the Okpala Mission, “Now we have nothing left. This is a children’s war. They’re all

doomed, the lot of them.”214 Later in the same article, Dr. Herman Middlekoop of the

World Council of Churches was asked about the death toll: “This week I just can’t give a

figure. It’s accelerating every hour. It’s a desperate situation. That’s all I can say.”215

Perhaps the most pointed example was the story “Despair Shrouds Biafran

Hospital as Children Die.” Published on Aug 1, it told the unfortunate story of three

Maris Brothers – Scottish, Irish and American – who “work[ed] round the clock against

death… [and were]…on the verge of…spiritual breakdown.”216 Brother Aloysius, “a tall,

wiry man,” was on the verge of tears for the duration of the narrative. “How can the

world allow one country to starve out another?” he asks. Echoing Biafran sensibilities, he

continued “Whether you die by the bullet or from hunger, it’s still the same thing.

Genocide.”217 He went on to rant about the various European and American government

positions towards the war; about the blinding frustration of the relief impasse. He broke

down almost entirely when he was informed by one of his brothers that another child had

died. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid what you see is a very embittered, disillusioned old

man.”218

214 “In Biafra, Death by Famine Strikes Everywhere,” The New York Times, July 30, 1968.215 Ibid.216 Lloyd Garrison, “Despair Shrouds Biafran Hospital as Children Die,” The New York Times, August 1, 1968.217 Ibid.218 Ibid.

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In effect, the missionaries and humanitarians became the tragic heroes of the

story, fighting against a world made by cynical men in Ivory Towers across the globe. In

the same way, the journalists became the bards, spreading the epic and tragic tales across

the land. Like those heroes of the minstrel days, the missionaries and humanitarians were

not without their faults – indeed, they were human enough that those hearing their songs

could imagine themselves a part of the story. It wasn’t simply the fact that they could

become disillusioned and embittered; even their habits were not so far from the everyday.

Brother Aloysius told his story while taking a cigarette break.

Americans needed these bridges to far away places. The regular inclusion of

“white” voices in news articles can not simply be written off as racism or colonial

paternalism – although this certainly was certainly the case for some. The fact of the

matter is that it is hard to connect to people from far away places going through misery

that you likely never have and never will experience. The authority of the missionary and

humanitarian voice was that their anguish was the anguish of the reader; it was not

hunger but the frustration of trying to relieve that hunger.

When trying to explain this idea to friends, I often reference my relationship with

narratives about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. There are dozens of readily available books

on the crisis – many of which crush readers with their visceral descriptions of brutality.

“We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families,” by

Philip Gourevitch has become the American college standard for this type of

representation. Despite this, the Rwanda narrative that struck me most was Romeo

Dallaire’s “Shake Hands With The Devil.” Daillare was the UN Force Commander and

spent excruciating months trying anything and everything he could do, with his limited

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means and limited mandate, to prevent the slaughter from reaching even more terrible

levels. Still, his book is one of the most sanguine. Descriptions of the horror are few and

far between. The prose is plodding; basically it is a day-to-day description of his

frustration. So why is it that it resonated so strongly?

My ability to connect to certain types of pain is limited. I cannot draw upon

personal experience to understand the pain of those who have seen their families and

friends eviscerated in front of them and stuffed down toilets; the pain of those forced to

hide in mortal terror yet accept murder as their inevitable fate. But this is not Daillaire’s

story – his is a story of being a bystander to misery, witnessing the terrible things that

people can do to one another and feeling powerless to stop it. This is a frustration that I

do know and that I can feel. Indeed, it is the frustration I’ve felt over and over again

writing this thesis.

The American collective imagination has often thrived on archetypal narratives.

More than informing us about ourselves, they reaffirm our hope for what we are, or what

we might be. Whether its the Gilded Age’s Ragged Dick reminding us that hard work

brings almost limitless rewards, or the Tin Pan Alley Hollywood Cowboys of the

Depression and Dustbowl, reminding us of our deep independence in a time when we

needed to escape the frustration of living on the government dole, these narratives help us

identify ourselves as Americans.

Some of our most enduring mythologies are support of the underdog and the idea

of beneficent power. Again and again, they have come out in the realm of foreign

intervention. There were our adventures in the Phillipines – first helping kick out the

Spanish colonialists, but then taking up residence ourselves. More recently there were the

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Iraqs, which, as far as most of the decent American public supporters were concerned,

came down to helping the Kurds and Shiites kick some of the Baathist butt that had been

beating them down so long.

In Biafra, those mythologies were evident again. Letters to the editor bemoaned

the fact that a nation with such means should allow people to suffer for want of the food

we had so readily available. Some went further, suggesting that if the powers involved

refused to put their people above the politics, America should simply go over them and

deliver relief anyway.

The relief workers and missionaries served as the perfect bearers of these

mythologies. They had the authenticity of seeing the suffering up close. They had the

credibility of being beyond the realm of personal ends; why would they go to a place like

Biafra if they were self-interested? Most of all, they were like us – the vaguely concerned

but comfortable at home Americans - but not too like us. Their follies, emotions,

language, skin color, background – all of these things helped Americans imagine

themselves as like them. But the power (and problem) of collective imagination is that

self-mythologies allow you to participate in identity through belief rather than action.

In Biafra, to participate in the collective indignation of America, all we had to do

was read our stories and lament. To a large degree, Americans could achieve the moral

credibility of righteous anger without sacrifice or even participation in the problem or

solution. And because so much of our indignation dwelled in the realm of mythology, it

was easier for us to detach and detangle the pieces – selecting those that were simple –

humanitarian frustration – over those that weren’t – navigating a complex political

reality.

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***

If the story had a heady lead of cannibalism, endangered gorillas, or little girls being raped with machetes, then it might survive its journey across the Atlantic.

Everything else was like punting in a hailstorm. Stories left the desk and crashed straight into a watery grave, where a half-century of dispatches of bothersome African despair

boils at the bottom.”

- Bryan Mealer “Congo’s daily Blood: Ruminations from a Failed State” – Harper’s April 2006

Missionaries weren’t the only bridges to European and American communities.

For journalists, the war was a unique test to objectivity. John St. de Jorre suggested that

civil wars are the hardest conflicts to cover, not in small part because “neutrality in a civil

war cannot be maintained for long. Sooner or later one has to take sides.”219 In ways that

would be repeated in later wars, the international press core did more than report the

stories of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict; it became a part of them – for better or for worse.

Subject to wildly disparate conditions for reporting between Biafra and Nigeria, witness

to the horrendous affects of starvation, and engaged by both the propaganda and spirit of

the Biafrans, reporters of all stripes often found themselves consciously or

subconsciously acting as Biafran emissaries; indeed, the pro-Biafra American response to

the conflict can be at least partially attributed to the influence of respected journalistic

voices.

Part of the reason that reporters found themselves pro-Biafra partisans was that

there were smart people working tirelessly to engender this mindset. The Biafrans and

their marketing consultants knew precisely how important good international coverage

was. William Bernhardt and his Markpress firm, the Geneva-based marketing group that

219 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 135.

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handled the Biafra portfolio, believed that their relationship with the press needed to

include a few essential components. Good communications was a must, and the press was

never at a loss for materials; Markpress ensured that reporters always had access to

background briefings220. Perhaps even more important, Markpress coordinated regular

trips to Biafra for journalists that included incredible access to the front lines, officials,

and any communications infrastructure they might need to transmit their stories.

This “red carpet” treatment was not mirrored on the other side of the war.

Skeptical that foreign journalists were simply interfering interlopers, and generally

disinclined towards involving outside world in a conflict they viewed as an internal

problem, the Nigerians could be exceedingly hostile to journalists. What’s more, their

Ministry of Information tended to be in upheaval, and was never able to be as responsive

to reporter inquiries as its Biafran counterpart. As if this weren’t enough, the Nigerian

government had a nasty habit of kicking out those good reporters who were embedded,

such as Walter Schwartz of the Guardian and the New York Times’221 Lloyd Garrison,

both of whom became well-known for their work in the Biafran territories.

From the viewpoint of the belligerents, the difference in treatment of reporters

reflected the different aims of the conflict. By dictating the terms by which the conflict

was viewed, the Biafrans thought they could bring outside pressure to bear on the

Nigerians. Given how long they were able to hold out despite British and Russian arms

shipments to Nigeria, it seems reasonable to speculate that if world governments had

been more responsive to the perceptions of the conflict that dominated their citizens, the

220 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 306.221 Ibid., 354.

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conflict might have had a very different ending. It was with this in mind that the Biafrans

worked fervently – even months before the war began – to push its view of the conflict.

For the Nigerians on the other hand, any international involvement whatsoever,

except to support the status quo of the regime in Lagos, undermined its sovereignty in a

very fundamental way. The civil nature of the conflict meant that the question of

authority and sovereignty – played out in arenas like who was to be paid for oil contracts

involving the Eastern Region and how was aid to be delivered – was extraordinarily

relevant to the conduct of the war. To try to engage the world press on their side would

have brought the world to the conflict in a way that inevitably would undermine the

FMG’s claim that the conflict was a domestic dispute. As one writer put it, “to launch a

massive public relations effort abroad would invite the very internationalization of the

conflict that the Federal government was concerned, above all other considerations, to

prevent.”222

There was more to the posture of the international press than the intentions of the

belligerents, however. From a cynical standpoint, the conflict was ‘a rattling good

yarn,’223 a vicious, savage conflict from the Dark Continent that excited the humanitarian

emotions and long-standing prejudices of the Western readership. Dramatic reporting

often claimed that the conflict harkened back to the vicious wars of the 19th century,

indeed that the conflict was the sort of horrible that the white mind just couldn’t wrap its

head around. It is difficult to find an article that didn’t call the conflict a tribal war.

To some extent, this reflected an editorship – ignorant or not – pandering to its

audiences biases and creating self-fulfilling prophecies about their inability to 222 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 353.223 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 354.

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comprehend complexity. Then, as now, many editors were looking for “strongly

personalized ‘crocodile-infested river’ and ‘cannibal’ copy. More than simply failing to

representthe people involved in a fully human way, the accounts of the journalists in the

action rather than the action itself became primary fodder. One journalist had a full, 3000

word story of his journey to Biafra published before he even arrived.224 Additionally,

reporters tended to gloss over all but the most basic complexities of the conflict – relying

on the standard old myth that there were forces at work in Africa that the “white mind”

simply rebelled against understanding.225

There was the additional difficulty of remaining unbiased with horror all around.

Looking back, it is clear that many of the journalists embedded in Biafra became partisan

because their own minds refused to comprehend the terrible starvation they saw. What’s

more, the indefatigable underdog spirit of the Biafrans seems to have resonated strongly

with reporters – it was easy to like people who didn’t give up in the face of trouble. Even

the best reporters found themselves fighting the pressure to adopt the mindset and belief

of the Biafrans. John De St. Jorre – perhaps the most relentless foreign correspondent in

his pursuit of true, objective understanding of the war – said he felt schizophrenic moving

between the lines, and often felt himself beginning to think of the Nigerians as conniving

‘vandals’ bent on killing any and all Ibos they met, despite his personal knowledge that

this was generally not the case.226

Whatever the connection, the embedded journalists of Biafra pumped an image of

Biafra back to Europe and America that was virtually assured to engage citizen passion

224 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 354.225 Frederick Forsyth, “Gutted Hamlets, Rotting Corpses—This is Genocide,” The Sunday Times, May 12, 1968.226 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 222.

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and pity. The relief response was conditioned by the images Americans saw and the

words they read. Taken on its own terms, the Biafra cause was an entirely worthy one – it

was only in its all-important context that it became more complicated. Indeed, even 40

years later, I find myself lapsing into Biafran partisanship as I read through the

documents of their misery and determination. As an American socially conditioned to

value grit, resolve, steadfastness, individual agency, and at the same time conditioned to

sympathize with other’s plight and misery, it is simply hard not to connect with the

Biafrans – based on what they wrote about themselves and what was written about them.

From the war, a number of journalistic archetypes emerged; there were the

sensationalists like independent Frederick Forsyth and the intelligent-biased like the New

York Times’ Lloyd Garrison. If at least a part of the intention of writing this thesis is to

better understand and inform the discussion of representations of genocide and African

war today, it is worth thinking critically about these individuals, situated now almost

forty years away.

On May 12, 1968, the Sunday Times (London) ran the headline: “Gutted hamlets,

rotting corpses – this is genocide.” The story’s author, Frederick Forsyth, had been

working for BBC at the beginning of the war but was reassigned after the Nigerian

government complained about his reporting. From February through May 1968, he was

based in Port Harcourt and reported from “the bush with Biafran troops.”227 Towards the

end of the war, he would write a strongly partisan book called The Biafra Story. In a

vitriolic condemnation of foreign reporting during the war, Adepitan Bamisaiye wrote

227 Frederick Forsyth, “Gutted Hamlets, Rotting Corpses—This is Genocide,” The Sunday Times, May 12, 1968.

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that Forsyth, widely quoted in foreign press articles, became “one of the ‘instant’ experts

on African problems.”228

His frustration was understandable – Forsyth’s writing fell somewhere between

sensationalism and racism. The article mentioned above was littered with machine-

gunned menfolk, “women raped to the accompaniment of the all-too-ritualistic

mutilations,” and “children spitted on machete knifes.” By the end, he predicted “the

biggest bloodbath the Commonwealth has ever seen.”229 The lead quote, printed above

the headline in large font, was: “There are forces let loose in Biafra that white men

cannot understand.”230

Bamisaiye suggests that Forsyth’s book articles can “hardly disguise his contempt

for the black man.”231 Describing the Nigerian army, Forsyth wrote “After the Hause

come the Gwodo-Gwodo, giant black mercenaries from Chad; recruited through the good

offices of the Northern Emirs…These Chads are of very animaline intelligence and will

shoot anyone…Behind the Gwodo-Gwodo, one can hear British voices screaming,

“Come on you black bastards – MOVE.”232 After the war, Forsyth would go on to have a

moderately successful career as a pulp novelist.

Bamisaiye also had little love for the New York Times’ Lloyd Garrison, who he

suggested was the first reporter “to see the potential for journalistic success in the

228 Adepitan Bamisaiye, “The Nigerian Civil War in the International Press,” Transition, no. 44 (1974): 30-32+34-35, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0042 1191%281974%290%3A44%3C30%3ATNCWIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y229 Frederick Forsyth, “Gutted Hamlets, Rotting Corpses—This is Genocide,” The Sunday Times, May 12, 1968.

230 Ibid. 231 Adepitan Bamisaiye, “The Nigerian Civil War in the International Press,” Transition, no. 44 (1974): 30-32+34-35, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0042 1191%281974%290%3A44%3C30%3ATNCWIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y232 Frederick Forsyth, “Gutted Hamlets, Rotting Corpses—This is Genocide,” The Sunday Times, May 12, 1968.

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underdog status of Biafra and to exploit it shamelessly for his own advantage.”233 While

there might be an element of cynical truth in his argument, to read Garrison’s writing

now is to find a reporter whose bias seems to be a condition of his circumstances rather

than a conscious strategy. Garrison was kicked out of Nigeria almost as soon as the

conflict began and thus his only context was the Biafran context; how could he have

failed to be swayed, faced as he was with the misery all around him? John de St. Jorre

believed that the problem of many journalists was that they didn’t explore the Nigerian

side – for Garrison, he was physically unable to.

If his writing was sensational, particularly with the onslaught of famine, there

might have been forces at work above and beyond his simple identification with the

Biafran cause. Anthropologists have examined the phenomenon of collective suffering

and the problems of sharing that suffering with others. As will be explored in the final

section of this work, the suffering of others – particularly the suffering of pain and hunger

– is “in some ways beyond cognitive understanding…it is lost to…speech.”234 If “hunger,

violence, and evil are all brutal facts of social life,” then “their brutality is non-

lingusitic…and there is not way of transferring non-lingustic brutality to ‘facts.’”235

Importantly, there is a “discrepancy between the richness of the lived field experience

and the paucity of the language used to characterize it.”236 Given this, it is reasonable to

wonder to what extent the sensationalism of reporting – in the Biafran conflict and

233 Adepitan Bamisaiye, “The Nigerian Civil War in the International Press,” Transition, no. 44 (1974): 30-32+34-35, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0042 1191%281974%290%3A44%3C30%3ATNCWIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y

234 Kirsten Hastrup, “Hunger and the Hardness of Facts,” Man, vol. 28, no. 4 (December, 1993): 727-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1496%28199312%292%3A28%3A4%3C727%3AHATHOF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D235 Ibid., 735.236 Ibid., 735.

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perhaps any other – has to do with the reporter’s inability to properly verbalize their own

experience of trauma.

Reporters were not the only group involved in creating the American imagination

of the Biafra-Nigeria conflict. Citizen response groups in America sprung up and began

inserting their various messages into the public space. On the one hand, they worked to

engage Americans with visceral imagery. On the other, some sought to determine how

those images were received. Stated another way, these groups – in particular the

American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive – were attempting to be the “community

governing the politics of explanation.”237

The American Committee was started by three former Peace Corps participants

and a British student. One of the important things about the American Committee was

that it was one of the few organizations interested in dealing not only with the

humanitarian crisis, but the politics of the situation. It believed, as demonstrated by its

actions and publications, that the starvation of Biafra was tantamount to genocide, and

accordingly demanded a political response.

Throughout the Summer of 1968, the American Committee was a leader in

awareness raising events. Importantly, they designed and printed a powerful set of

advertisements in the New York Times and other papers. The timing of these ads

coincided with the July 12 Life cover story and they generally increased attention being

paid to the conflict by news editors around the country. The ads, they explained came

about after the Committee was contacted by “some people with money who asked us to

run a newspaper ad and didn’t want to sign it.”238 When the ads ran, the Committee “got

237 Ibid., 734.238 Roy M. Melbourne. “The American Response to the Nigerian Conflict.” Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 3, no. 2 (1973): 33-42, http://links.org/sici?sici=0047-

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an unbelievable response.”239 Throughout the summer, they blanketed the country with

information and organized pro-Biafran rallies in twenty-three cities. In the process, they

spent thousands of dollars a week raised from private contributors.240

Some of the earliest ads run by the American Committee depicted a set of young

boys withered from marasmus, with the powerful and confusing caption: “If you feel

sorry for these starving children of Biafra, you’re a victim of misguided humanitarian

rubbish.”241 The caption was a reference to a statement made earlier by one of the Federal

Military Government’s most infamous and brutal Army Colonels, Benjamin “the

Scorpion” Adekunle. The bottom of the ad presented the case for Biafra in brief and

compelling terms. A central focus of the Committee was the “protest the use of starvation

as a military weapon.”242 Using techniques reflective of the news coverage, it told the

story of the “Holy Rosary Mission Hospital” where “Sister Mary Helen, an Irish nun,”

held a “pain-racked” baby, now dead from starving.

Importantly, it labeled the situation in Biafra ‘genocide,’ and referenced the

Holocaust. “Six million will die in six months,” it claims; “Has mankind become so

immune to death that we can accept without protest these facts of life?...That once again

the world may be silent witness to the extinction of an entire population.”243

The American Committee was not the only group to place ads in the paper. In

early August, the American Jewish Emergency Effort for Biafran Relief, a coalition of

“the major Jewish religious, communal, relief and philanthropic bodies,” ran an add with

1607%28197322%293%3A2%3C33%3ATARTTN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4239 Ibid.240 Ibid.241 “Display Ad 83—No Title,” The New York Times, Jul 27, 1968.242 Ibid.243 Ibid.

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the headline “Have you ever seen millions of children starving to death? Now you

have.”244 The ad might seem, to modern eyes, conspicuously absent of Holocaust

references. After all, the Jewish organizations involved in the Darfur issue today – and

there are many – place the Holocaust at the center of their engagement. Survivor Elie

Wiesel states regularly that Jews are involved because when they were in the camps, no

one came for them.245 At the time of Biafra, however, Jews were only just starting to

discuss the Holocaust in its own terms. Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961 had

cleared the ground, but the main American representations of the Holocaust were not

conspicuously “Jewish.” In fact, the different sense in the 1960s of the value of victim

status provided incentives for Jews not to engage in much public Holocaust discourse.246

In mid-August, the Nigerian government countered with a series of ads called “A

Ghastly Game,” which decried the “manipulation of suffering for political ends.”247 The

accusation was certainly relevant and found many supporting voices in news editors from

around the country. The ads referenced various editorials from the Pittsburgh Post

Gazette, Washington Post and others and may have helped keep Americans focused on

the humanitarian aspect of the crisis, rather than its political causation. Still, if it gave

Nigeria a hand in “governing the politics of explanation,” it had little of the visceral

power of the images of starvation which dominated ads throughout the summer.

In addition to general awareness and fundraising ads, a variety of organizations,

led by the American Committee, used the New York Times to publicize events. On

August 8th, the Committee urged citizens to skip their lunch and come to the United

244 “Display Ad 21—No Title,” The New York Times, August 8, 1968.245 Speech heard by author at National Rally for Darfur, April 30, 2006246 For more, see the final section of this paper. 247 “Display Ad 47—No Title.” The New York Times, August 13, 1968,

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Nations to form a “lifeline” for Biafra.248 Its powerful imagery connected the American

experience and the Biafran experience. The picture in the center of the screen was a shot

of a white doctor holding an emaciated child. The key line of the appeal is “This is

August 8th. It may be the most memorable August 8th of your life. For the children of

Biafra it will be the last.”249 Other advertisements over the next few months, funded by

the American Committee and other citizen organizations, advertised concerts, dances,

political radio programs and more.

One of the most important aspects of the New York Times coverage of the conflict

was the amount of space given to telling the stories of regular Americans engaged with

the conflict. Throughout the summer, citizen actions from the mundane to the unique

found their way to readers. On August 19th, “three children from Biafra stood as

symbols…as 1000 people held a prayer service before the United Nations.”250 During the

same week, a 9 year old girl from New Jersey flew first to see the Archbishop of

Canterbury and then to see the Pope in order to appeal on behalf of the Biafrans.

A few weeks earlier, the Times had printed a sort of inventory of groups trying to

aid Biafra. The Committee for Nigeria/Biafra Relief was a group of doctors, nurses and

former Peace Corps volunteers willing to distribute food and medicine on either side of

the lines. The Jewish Emergency Effort for Biafra Relief was a coalition of twenty-one

major Jewish groups. Catholic Relief Services and other Christian groups had been

sending relief supplies to nearby islands, waiting for a break in the political impasse to

distribute aid, for months. The American Committee, it rightly recognized, was more

focused on the politics of the situation than relief.

248 “Display Ad 39—No Title.” The New York Times, August 8, 1968.249 Ibid. 250 Will Lissner, “1,000 Pray Before U.N. for Biafran Children,” The New York Times, August 19, 1968.

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***

Here it is important to think deeply about the fundamental difference in thinking

that separated Americans reading about the starvation and Biafrans experiencing it. As

the starvation took hold, the rhetoric of genocide had a dual purpose and a dual efficacy.

On the one hand, it represented the Biafrans attempt to demand a political response from

the world rather than just a humanitarian one. It was also, however, the driving force

behind the besieged mindset of Biafran citizens. Although it received less attention than

international propaganda, some have argued that domestic propaganda had “the greater

influence in shaping the course of the war.”251

Throughout the war, propaganda on the Biafran side was use to bolster support for

its leadership. Perhaps even more importantly, it was used to create and reinforce a

distinct Biafran identity rooted in collective persecution. Ever since the massacres of

1966, Biafran propaganda had “played incessantly on the fears aroused by [those] terrible

events.”252 It had played a key role in preparing the region for secession and throughout

the conflict, was the boogeyman to the Biafran suffering. John de St. Jorre wrote that “the

beauty of the genocide concept for the propagandist was that it left no loophole”:

It ensured that the masses, which firmly believed it, would support the leadership’s decision to fight on to the very last – even beyond the point where all reasonable hope of victory had faded – because they were convinced that there was no alternative.253

While this is certainly true, the power of the myth of genocide in Biafra should

not only be understood in these uni-directional terms. The Biafrans who gravitated to the

rhetoric of genocide assimilated it as part of their personal and collective narratives and

251 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 345.252 Ibid. 253 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 346.

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spit it back out. They took what evidence they could find – from the cartoons, radio

programs or pamphlets or simply hearsay – and passed it along.

Throughout the Summer, Times articles told the stories of normal Biafrans who

had resigned themselves to fight or death. Even in the face of terrible starvation, there

could be no surrender. As Garrison wrote in early August, “to even suggest surrender is

taken…as a slur, however unintentional.”254 Rather than talk of acquiescence then,

Biafrans raised money for their suffering compatriots. They would join together in a

public setting and reenact their own terrible history, often with “heavy and morbid

emphasis on the bloodiest incidents.”255 Indeed, “the Biafrans…actually seemed to enjoy

perpetuating the memory of their suffering.”256

The reality is that the collectivization of the trauma of war in the public life was

not simply about fear and propaganda but indeed about finding meaning in misery. The

acknowledgement and embrace of toil was a coping strategy for a wounded population.

In this way, the mythology of genocide was cyclically created and reinforced; the

propaganda was effective within Biafran territory not simply because it played on Ibo

fears but because it helped provide justifying explanations that created identity, albeit

beleaguered, out of misery.

***

Despite this, Americans were not Biafrans and the rhetoric of genocide had a very

different intent abroad. From the post-Life press conference onward, the international

rhetoric of genocide was used to influence the understanding of starvation. Perhaps the

254 Lloyd Garrison., “Give In? Biafrans in a Bar Say ‘Nevah’,” The New York Times, August 2, 1968.255 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 347.256 Ibid., 346.

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strongest single statement aimed at American audiences was released three days after

Otue’s initial press conference.

The document, “An Appeal: Don’t Let Your Righteous Indignation Rise Too

Late,” utilized all the same techniques as previous Biafran propaganda – in particular

focusing on the testimony of foreign journalists and other “unimpeachable witnesses,” –

but there was a unique force to the claim of genocide by starvation. The Nigerians had

“cleverly invented the [land] corridor problem and the political surroundings to conceal

their real intentions…completing their plans for another major assult…while about 3000

Biafrans die a day from starvation and malnutrition – THIS IS GENOCIDE.”257

The politics of “mercy-cooridor” is fashioned to compel Biafra to make a choice between death by starvation or surrender to our enemies with mass murder that will follow. Which alternative you choose is GENOCIDE.258

Importantly, that document and other speeches, press conferences and pamphlets

issued throughout the summer connected the plight of Biafrans to the Holocaust more

strongly than ever before. The final warning of the appeal to righteous American

indignation read:

A little over a quarter of a century ago the world was silent and 6 million people died. When it comes to GENOCIDE remaining silent means you’ve taken sides. Do not leave it to the historians to write about what should have been done.SPEAK OUT NOW!259

Two days leader, Ojukwu called an international press conference where he used

the same language. “In 1945” he claimed, a group of leaders “appalled by the wanton

destruction of human life which the world had just witnessed…bound themselves to

intervene and stop acts of genocide wherever they might occur in the world.”260

257 Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative. Don’t Let Your Righteous Indignation Rise Too Late, July 1968258 Ibid., 5.259 Ibid., 7.260 The Republic of Biafra. Address by His Excellency, Lieutenant-Colonel C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Biafra Armed Forces, to an International Press Conference, Thursday, 18th July, 1968, 1968.

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Throughout the speech, he equated the blockade and forced starvation with genocide. He

called the poising of food another example of Nigeria’s genocidal intent.

A few months later, after some of the rhetoric had sunk in, the Biafrans released a

document that countered some of the arguments that Nigeria and her supporters had used

to defend against the charge of genocide. Again, the main Biafran allusion was the

Holocaust. With regard to the charge that it was impossible to kill all Biafrans, the

document stated “Nazi Germany did not succeed in killing all the Jews and yet genocide

was the charge against German leaders at the Nuremberg trials.”261 In response to the

claim that Ibos living in Lagos indicated that the Nigerian leadership couldn’t possibly

want to kill them all, the Biafrans wrote “Many German Jews were working happily and

some collaborated with the Nazis during the extermination of the 6000000 Jews in nazi

Gas Chambers and concentration camps in Germany during World War II.”262 The

relationship of America and the Holocaust and the potential efficacy of the Holocaust

allusions is explored in the final section.

In the end then, how successful were the Biafrans in affecting the discourse of

starvation? Were they able to fundamentally change the American outlook on the war?

Unfortunately for the Biafrans, the American response to the Biafra conflict was created

more by the American press than by Biafran propaganda itself. Their suffering, much

more than their interpretation of it, was driving the journalism.

The Biafran propaganda strategy recognized that pressmen were the gatekeepers

to public opinion. What they wrote about the conflict would and did largely determine

how average citizens understood it. In this way, certain parts of the Biafran strategy were

261 The Republic of Biafra. Nigeria’s Weak Response to the Charge of Genocide. Oct 1968.262 Ibid.

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more effective than others. The Markpress-arranged visits for reporters and foreign

emissaries brought individuals into contact with the deprivation of the beleaguered

Biafrans, and no matter what the politics of representation, any honest accounting of their

misery would have been sure to affect indignation on the part of citizens.

It cannot be forgotten, however, that the Biafrans needed not only to show the

suffering but to be the community who controlled the explanation. This was the rationale

behind the briefings, press releases, and pamphlets that tried so desperately to

demonstrate that starvation was just another name for genocide.

They were not without some successes. Certain American action groups like the

American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive adopted the logic of the Biafrans entirely.

Throughout the war, they worked to introduce Americans to Biafra in political as well as

humanitarian terms. As it became a more political issue, certain members of the house

and senate, including liberal Senators like Russell and Kennedy and conservative

congressmen like Lukens, put pressure on the US Government to “recognize and assist

Biafra.”263

Perhaps most importantly, on September 9th, the campaigning Republican

candidate Nixon implored LBJ to give “all the time and attention and imagination and

energy he [could] muster,” to the issue of Biafra, saying that “the time is past for the

wringing of hands about what is going on…

While America is not the world’s policeman, let us at least act as the world’s conscious in the matter of life and death of millions…264

During his campaign, Nixon called the situation in Nigeria “genocide” and stated

strongly that, “This [was] not the time to stand on ceremony or ‘to go through channels’

263 Roy M. Melbourne. “The American Response to the Nigerian Conflict.” Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 3, no. 2 (1973): 33-42, http://links.org/sici?sici=0047-1607%28197322%293%3A2%3C33%3ATARTTN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4264 Ibid., 37.

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or to observe diplomatic niceties.”265 These inflammatory statements brought a swift

response, however, from his fellow Republicans and the other institutions of government

that were either invested in a united Nigeria or simply unwilling to be invested in Biafra.

As President, Nixon engaged the issue more deeply than had his predecessor, appointing

a Special Coordinator on relief, but at the same time, realized that those diplomatic

niceties were more difficult than he had given them credit for. Since humanitarian relief

was “in danger of interpretation by the parties as a form of intervention,” American relief

would “draw a sharp distinction between carrying out our moral obligations to respond to

humanitarian needs and involving ourselves in the political affairs of others.”266

The reality was that written Biafran self-imagination in the form of propaganda

press releases and background briefings did little to influence American journalists, and

as such, did little to influence the American public perception of Biafra. As mentioned

before, Markpress’ strategy for international public relations included building up

“steadily and consistently background stories on Biafra,” and “encourage[ing] the press

to rely on Biafran releases.”267 Writing in 1973, however, PhD Candidate Laurie

Wiseberg stated that “relief personnel, newspaper correspondents, and the government

officials I had occasion to discuss this with were in general agreement on one point:

namely, that no one who was at all sophisticated about politics put much credence on the

releases issued by Markpress…they were, quite simply, Biafran propaganda releases.”268

Even when Americans were assertive of the need for US political involvement, it

tended not to be follow the logic of Biafran rhetoric, but rather was an interpretation of

265 Ibid., 37.266 Ibid.,41.267 Laurie Wiseberg, “The International Politics of Relief: A Case Study of the Relief Operations Mounted During the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1973), 575.268 Ibid., 576.

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the intersection between moral abomination and American power. Those Americans that

did want a stronger US role in ending the conflict tended to be those Americans who

understood the role of US power as doing good by mitigating horror in the world. For

these people, it was not necessarily an acceptance of the Biafran connection of genocide

and starvation so much as the extent of the horror of the starvation itself that compelled

political action.

Michael C. Latham reflected the mood of much of the American public that did

support intervention. The United States and United Nations, he said, should issue an

ultimatum to both governments, saying that they planned to “organize a massive airlift of

food to those in need.” Indeed, if there were attacks, US planes should return fire. He

suggested that inevitably, there would be some criticism of the intervention, but that the

moral imperative of the situation was too strong to worry long about that: “We cannot

delay; we must act with vigor and compassion now.”269

Fundamentally, then, the American response to the war was determined by

humanitarian considerations; viewed as more or less separable from politics. Even when

Americans were willing to talk about the politics of the situation, the discussion tended to

be routed in the question of whether the scale of starvation was so terrible that America’s

beneficent power should be brought to bear in forcing the gate for relief open.

***

This coverage of American responses to the conflict is important for

understanding the way that citizens of the United States engage with far away places. On

one level, the individuals appearing in the articles – demonstrators outside the UN or the

little girl flying to meet religious leaders – functioned as bridges between America and

269 Michael C. Latham, “For Food Airlift to Biafra,” The New York Times, September 11, 1968.

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the rest of the world; if you couldn’t connect to starving children, you might connect to

those that cared about them. Perhaps even more, the citizen action groups provided an

outlet for the raw emotion inspired by images of starvation. Americans who were

shocked into noticing the plight of Biafrans had opportunities to then connect to one

another and form communities of the concerned. These groups were organized by every

different faith, profession, and political affiliation. The individual narratives of concerned

individuals became the basis for connection among the many; if the allusion of the Ibos

to the Biblical Israelites connected to you, an evangelical group might be your home. If it

was the memory of the Holocaust on the other hand, perhaps a Jewish support

organization would work better.

Although it is a bit beyond the scope of this paper, I believe that the role of

community formation in engaging Americans in international issues is the most vital and

perhaps least studied part of the answer to the question of why Americans come to care

about far away places. As mentioned above, the terrible images of Biafra could be

channeled into a response customized to personal belief systems and affiliations. For

many of the participants in these groups, it is likely that participation in the group was at

least as important to their involvement as their compassion for Biafra. This phenomenon

was not limited to Biafra. Indeed, today extraordinarily similar processes are on display

in Darfur activism. Support communities have been formed around faiths, professions,

identities, and political beliefs, and much of the swell in activism over the last few

months can be attributed, I believe, not to better access to information about Darfur, but

rather to more outlets for people to connect with others who’ve received similar

information, wish to do something about it, and perhaps most of all, are like them.

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117

Section FourWhile the first three sections of this thesis narrated the evolution of Biafran

propaganda and self-representation on the one hand and American imagination of the

Nigeria-Biafra conflict on the other, this section is devoted to a theoretical exploration of

two fundamental components of the rhetoric and engagement of the Biafra war.

The first part looks critically at the place of the Holocaust in American life during

the 1960s. What evidence is there that can help us determine how the rhetorical allusions

to the persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany might have been received by American

audiences? Although this rhetoric evolved over the course of the war, it seems to never

have taken hold in American collective imagination.

Starvation, on the other hand, drove the American response to the conflict. As we

explored in the last section, the images of hunger – more than any other single factor –

engaged citizens of the United States. Section Four examines the anthropology of hunger

and asks what gives physiological suffering a power to connect people across borders

above and beyond political concepts like genocide.

Holocaust, Jews, and Israel

Throughout the war – indeed, even before the first shots were fired – the Biafrans

tied their experience as the successful outcasts of Nigeria to the mythologies of both the

Biblical and modern Israelis. In this comparison, they drew upon archetypes of

independence, outcast status, intellectual and financial success, and finally - with the

onslaught of war and starvation - struggle and survival. Along with starvation came an

increased identification with the Holocaust.

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The precise epidemiology of these parallel is hard to discern. They might have

derived from biblical identification. Ibos in particular had been quick to adopt

Christianity. They may have first read about the Israelites of old in those verses and

mapped those stories onto their own experience. The status of Ibos around Nigeria before

the war might have also contributed to the parallel. The collective imagination seemed to

hold that they were both loathed and grudgingly respected, but never loved. At the same

time, there may have been an element of reciprocity between assertion and imagination;

as more foreign press took the Biafran cue in making the comparison, more Biafrans (or

perhaps just Ibos) might have taken the comparison to heart.

Whatever the case, it was not without certain demonstrable efficacy abroad.

Interestingly, the Israeli public seemed to have taken the message to heart. According to

journalists like de St. Jorre, they were “solidly behind Biafra.”270 This connection helps

demonstrate the powerful influence of self-imagination on public opinion. If Israelis

accepted the parallel offered by Biafra, they would in effect take Ibos as “Israelis once

removed.” The difference between thinking of foreign peoples as allies and thinking of

them as fundamentally within the bounds of how you define yourself is incredibly

important in the depth and type of support that follows. Later, I will argue that this was

precisely the psychosocial process introduced by hunger that shifted American public

opinion towards Biafra. However much this was the case in Israel is hard to determine.

Regardless, this favorable public opinion translated to pressure exerted on the Knesset to

break diplomatic relations with Nigeria.271

270 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 219271 Ibid., 219

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It is important to note that the Israeli public did not “discover” Biafra on its own.

As early as August 1966, Biafran emissaries had been hard at work trying to develop

favorable feelings – and more importantly, arms sales – from the small Mediterranean

nation. Despite the citizen support for Biafra, pressure on the Israeli government never

resulted in much more than small quantities of mostly captured arms.272 These were given

under heavy camouflage, thus mitigating the important diplomatic value of those

transactions.273

But what of America? How did they receive the parallel to the Jews and the

Holocaust? Perhaps as interestingly, how would we have expected them to receive it? It

is hard to answer these questions looking back from our time, in which the emotional,

moral, social, and political resonance of the Holocaust has been cultured by decades of

American appropriations, interpretations and mythologies. It is used for propaganda and

moral pedagogy. It is widely taken, to greater or lesser extent, as a guiding moral

compass. It figures into conversations of abortion, foreign policy, and free speech. The

Holocaust in American life is a wildly dynamic set of “lessons” couched by an ostensibly

historical event. Indeed, in some ways, the Holocaust in American life has become a

fundamentally ahistorical event, in which extrapolations of meaning have become

significantly more relevant to collective imagination and identity than firm historical

detail and ambiguity. But was this the case in the late 1960s?

In the aftermath of World War II, the Holocaust tended to be assimilated along

with other brutality as part of general Nazi horror. In the 1940s and 1950s, it did not have

the distinct individual identity it would later acquire. Part of this had to do with the

272 From Israel’s recent Six Day War273 St. John de Jorre, The Brother’s War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 220.

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healing process. In the wake of the war, American national attention was focused on

recovery and progress. International rehabilitation plans began to restore the institutions

of Europe and America invested heavily in its vanquished foes, Germany and Japan. By

the same token, Jews in America tended to be more focused on successful American

assimilation. After the debut of Schindler’s List, the critically-acclaimed 1993 film about

the Holocaust, journalists asked Steven Spielberg why “the many Jewish American

producers and directors before him” hadn’t ever made a holocaust movie. He replied that

“immigrant Jewish producers were having an identity struggle just wanting to become

Americans.”274 Scholar Hilene Flanzbaum wrote, “To make movies about the Holocaust

would mean to draw attention to their ethnicity in a way that would impede

assimilation.”275

The discussion of the Holocaust that did occur focused on universalizing evil. In

the early 1960s, the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials argued that a

principle established at those proceedings was that genocide was a crime against the

entire international community, “not a private matter for the aggrieved party.”276 Indeed,

whereas today much debate is spent on the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust –

commentators took offense, for example, to the equating of the Bosnia-Serbia war with

the Holocaust, saying that the comparison was “like calling a traffic cop a Nazi for

ticketing your car” – in the 1950s, the dominant representations of the Holocaust worked

in precisely the opposite fashion, sublimating the “aggrieved party” to the greater moral

importance of the event.

274 Hilene Flanzbaum ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust, 12275 Ibid., 12276 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 129

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This shift is demonstrated by the changing objectives of the Anne Frank

Foundation. Since the 1980s, the goals of the Foundation have been “to educate on World

War II, particularly the Holocaust, and to make known the current prejudice and

discrimination affecting Jews today.”277 This was a marked shift from the previous

mission statement, formed in the 1950s, “to use the name of Anne Frank as a symbol for

hope and to further intergroup understanding in an atmosphere of freedom and hope.”278

The 1960s witnessed a few dramatic changes in Holocaust discourse. In 1961,

Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, in Argentina

and transported him to Israel to stand trial. The trial and the outpouring of conversation

surrounding it significantly increased the public openness of American conversations

about the Holocaust. Importantly, scholars have noted that the trial was the first time that

the Holocaust was presented as a horror all its own, a distinct rather than simply

representative piece of Nazi evil.279

In some ways, the commentaries and cultural artifacts created around the trial

were as important to our perception of the Holocaust as the trial itself. Western coverage

tended to focus on the problems of totalitarianism. “The theme emphasized more than

any other in newspaper editorials was that of…a warning against the constant threat of

totalitarianism – that is, Communism. Insofar as editorials noted the responsibility of the

Western powers for the Holocaust, it was most often for the Allies’ having failed to resist

Hitler earlier.”280 This is extremely important in understanding the American response to

the Biafran propaganda – in particular as we try to understand whether appeals roughly

277 Hilene Flanzbaum ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust, 2278 Ibid, 2279 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 133280 Ibid, 134

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equivalent to the “never again” we hear to day with regard to Rwandas and Darfurs had

even close to the same invocative resonance.

Perhaps even more important to understanding the American response to the

Biafran war was the critical and public response to Hannah Arendt’s articles about the

trial that first appeared in the New Yorker. Arendt’s work, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A

Report on the Banality of Evil,” made several unpopular challenges not only to beliefs

but to the instincts that prefigure beliefs. She observed that Eichmann was abundantly

normal – a personally ambitious, mindless bureaucrat whose evil came not from deep

wickedness or anti-Semitism but “the most banal motives…not rooted anywhere.”281

Although her opinions later came to be accepted – supported in large part by a set

of experiments by Yale’s Stanly Milgram about the average person’s psychological

capacity for great evil - her reports set off a firestorm initially. Norman Podhoretz wrote

that “no banality of a man could have done so hugely evil a job so well.” Indeed, he

“was…vocalizing a widespread feeling when he wrote that the traditional version – pure

evil versus pure good – was preferable to her story: “complex, unsentimental, riddled

with paradox and ambiguity.””282

Literary critics were not the only people to take issue with Arendt’s challenging

assertions. During the third season of The Twilight Zone, series creator Rod Serling wrote

“Death’s Head Revisited,” which aired in November 1961.283

Like most episodes… “Death’s Head Revisited” uses supernatural situations and events…to explore social and ethical issues of general relevance to American audiences (in this case, issues raised by the Eichmann trial) in otherworldly “morality plays.”284

281 Ibid, 135282 Ibid, 136283 Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust, 36284 Ibid, 36

123

The plot of the episode follows the return of a former SS captain to his “old

haunt” of Dachau concentration camp. When he gets there however, he is confronted by

the returned spirits of the inmates he tortured and killed. They put Lutze, the former SS

man, to trial and condemn him to insanity. Lutze runs for it, but can’t escape. He’s led

from one part of the camp to another, having the suffering described at each site. At the

end, the lead prisoner stands over a Lutze wracked by seizures on the ground, concluding,

“Captain Lutze,…this is not revenge, this is justice. But this is only the beginning…Your

final judgment – will come from God.”285 The episode concludes with a message from

Serling

All the Dachaus must remain standing…because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all their reason, their logic, their knowledge – but word of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this,…then we become the gravediggers.286

The episode, aired just a few weeks after the televised Eichmann spectacle, fed

into the American expectations that had been shattered by the banality of the real trial, so

astutely characterized by Arendt. The imaginary trial of a “histrionically depraved sadist

who clearly delights in the torment of his victims”287 – quite in contrast with that of an

“all-too-efficient bureaucrat”288 – delivered clean, direct justice which appealed not to

American’s rationalism and scientific reason, but “Judeo-Christian principle[s] of free

will.”289

The Twilight Zone episode was only one of many cultural artifacts from the 1960s

to move the Holocaust from the realm of history to the realm of myth. Throughout the

decade, the Holocaust made appearances in crime dramas, law enforcement programs,

285 Ibid, 37286 Ibid, 38287 Ibid, 38288 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 135289 Ibid, 136

124

and science fiction. It began to take on symbols – certain visual imagery like the Swastika

and rhetorical touchstones like “Final Solution,” worked their way into the archetype of

evil.290 As exemplified by the “guest” appearance of the Holocaust on The Twilight Zone

and later, Star Trek, the science fiction genre used the its cinematic detachment from

reality to focus on the lessons, rather than stories, of the Nazi genocide.

During the 1960s, the Holocaust began to appeal to America’s mythology of itself

and its desire to see things in morally unambiguous and sometimes Manichean terms. The

Holocaust coincided with America’s ascendancy to world power. WWII had been the

final death of old Europe, and left in its wake was an America which could guide and

shape the creation of the new Europe, new Japan, indeed the new world. The “lessons” of

the Holocaust and confrontation of evil embodied by the American fight against Nazi

Germany (and by extension, totalitarian Communist USSR) helped root American

understanding of itself in unambiguous moral territory. When the Biafran starvation

began to demand American government attention, the campaigning President Nixon

asked America to be the world’s “moral conscience.”291

Of course, this moral authority – derived by proxy rather than from painful

confrontation with our own often atrocious past – was cheap, easy, and totally

manipulatable by cynical politicians. One needs to look no further than the Carter

Administration’s public outrage and regular Nazi references when describing Cambodia’s

genocidal dictator Pol Pot, and simultaneous military support (filtered through China and

Thailand, of course) to his regime to understand what I mean.292 The beauty and the

290 Hilene Flanzbaum ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust. 35291 Roy M. Melbourne. “The American Response to the Nigerian Conflict.” Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 3, no. 2 (1973): 33-42, http://links.org/sici?sici=0047-1607%28197322%293%3A2%3C33%3ATARTTN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4

292 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 248

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tragedy of that American moralism derived from the Holocaust is that it requires nothing

of us save for the recognition of the evil of others.

In some ways, Biafra was the first group to test the waters of America’s

universalistic understanding of the Holocaust.293 It is important to remember however,

that the Biafran relationship with the Holocaust was not the clear “never again” we hear

today.

The parallel that the Biafrans were trying to draw was not simply to the defeated

Jews of Europe. Indeed, in one document they recognize that world opinion had

(“wrongly”) condemned the Jews for not struggling against their own fate and tried to

distance themselves from this perception. Rather, it seems that they genuinely understood

themselves as linked to the Israelis both by characteristic – independence, self-

sufficiency, outcast status – and by struggle and toil. Biafran self-imagination and

propaganda did not reference the Holocaust in order to tie themselves to the Jews in

victimhood. Quite the opposite, they admired their struggle for survival and the right to

self-determination they had wrestled and won.

What is fascinating is that the specter of the Holocaust that infected American

discourse about the war tended not to reflect Biafran propaganda, but the understanding

of the conflict from Western third parties such as missionaries, aid workers, and citizen

support groups. Relief organizations and support groups sometimes used the suggestive

number 6 million to estimate the numbers threatened with death by starvation.294 Indeed,

for some the strategy was explicit. Peter Novick wrote that “one of Biafra’s American

supporters wrote of their efforts to conjure up “an image of the Nazi regime and Jewish

293 Ibid., 247294 Ibid., 247

126

victims.””295 Ironically, the image of victimhood was one the Biafrans worked tirelessly

throughout the war to avoid. Missionaries – particularly the Catholics who were some of

the strongest supporters of the largely Catholic Ibos – made the Holocaust connection

more explicitly:

To our eternal shame…we sat by while millions of Jewish people and others were put to death before our very eyes. We did practically nothing then. Have we learned nothing from those days?296

Still, if the Holocaust rhetoric was important to the Biafrans and their supporters,

it followed, rather than generated, the incredible American and Western response created

by the dissemination of information and images of starvation. What was it about hunger

that was so engaging?

Hunger Explanation

Why is it that hunger and starvation seem to have exhibited such a powerful

ability to connect Americans to Biafra, particularly when the language of massacre,

atrocity, and other forms of misery had been present since the beginning of the war

without the same response? Surely these massacres were just as terrible if not more so

than the famine; they showed intention and rational decision making on the part of the

perpetrators.

I believe that the power that hunger can exert over individual and collective

mythologies is wholly different than the power derived from language of atrocity or

genocide. Indeed, the horror of genocide is so deviant from the normal experience of

external observers that it is only knowable linguistically. Hunger is precisely the

opposite; its communication is veritably non-verbal. The common experience of hunger –

295 Ibid., 248296 Ibid., 247-248

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shared by every single person to have ever existed – facilitates imaginations of

connections across borders that can become real through positive action. Unfortunately,

these imaginations tend to be socialized in a way that leads to problematic clashes

between desires to alleviate pain and potentials to do so.

Victor Turner defined “states” as “relatively fixed or stable condition[s].”297 This

might include anything from social conditions to “the physical, mental or emotional

condition in which a person or group may be found at a particular time.”298 This was in

contrast to a “process,” which is “transition…a becoming…even a transformation – here

an apt analogy would be water in process of being heated to boiling point.” Importantly,

“a transition has different cultural properties from those of a state.”299

The different cultural properties he identified had to do with fixidity and

accessibility of understanding. Basically, while states are knowable, the liminal (or in-

between) process is “structurally…if not physically, “invisible.””300 While Turner dealt

specifically with life transition rituals and rites of passage, his sense of the “knowability”

of ambiguous processes versus rigid states is important for thinking about the relationship

between hunger and politics, or in the case of the Nigeria-Biafra war, starvation and

genocide.

Hunger is a state of being. We identify hunger in our own lives as the feeling we

get when we need or want to eat more food. Yet, as with any state, it has a process that

brings it into being. On one level, the process is the metabolic cycle which utilizes the

nutrients from food, pushing out the waste, and alerting the negative feedback systems in

our body when it is time for more food. The macroscopic extrapolation of this 297 Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols, 93298 Ibid.299 Ibid., 94300 Ibid., 95

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comparison is the state of having food resources available to resolve the state of hunger

versus its correspondent process - the system of entitlements that facilitate resource

allocation.

Both of these examples help to demonstrate the relative “invisibility” of processes

against the “knowability” of states. It is much harder to conceptualize metabolic and

hormone feedback cycles than the simple fact of being hungry. When we unload our

Wonderbread into the pantry, we almost never consider the process of growth, refining,

shipping, distribution that made that bread available, or the host of economic structures –

employment, for example - that provided us the financial entitlements to acquire it.

The concept of states and processes potentially has ramifications for our

understanding of politics, as well. To some extent, the relationship between citizens and

governments revolves around state and process. In exchange for certain costs – personal

financial obligation or surrendered autonomy – citizens align themselves with a

government whose primary task, over the long run, is to improve or at least secure their

general state of being. Governments engender these improved states of being – more

health, more resources – through political processes. Its much easier to conceptualize the

end result - for example better health care coverage - than it is to understand the debates,

exchanges, incentive systems, financial considerations etc that enabled that state of being

to arise.

But what does this have to do with starvation in Biafra? When people see images

of starving children on TV, they see a flawed state of being. When people read about the

perpetration of genocide, they read about a political process. When they see a flawed

state of being, they respond in a way that fixes that flaw, not the flaw in the process that

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brought that state into being. If we see people hungry, we give them food. It takes a

cognitive leap to say “fix the politics to ensure they have entitlements to access available

food.”

But perhaps this is not enough of an explanation. If we take it that states of being

are more visible than processes, it still does not explain the incredible change in

American engagement that happened when Biafrans started starving. So what was it?

Hunger is an individual experience. Each day, we rise to an anxious body that has

metabolized its immediate energy stores and waits for more. We replenish, and then a

few hours later, the pangs return. Sometimes we consciously disavow the signals – we

fast for cleansing, aesthetics, or politics. Sometimes, depending on what part of the world

we happen to have been born in and to whom, we don’t have a choice about when we do

and don’t eat.

Hunger is one of those “areas of culture about which no-one has information that

can be called up and expressed in discursive statements.”301 In its universality, hunger

tends to defy the logocentrism of the West; the inherent limitations of language manifest

themselves in descriptions of the experience of hunger. The word is descriptive only

insofar as it references a state which subjectively everyone has some claim over and

understanding of. “The connection between subjective states and overt manifestation is to

be found in one’s own experience.”302

Sitting at lunch in April with a friend who happens to be one of the directors of a

multi-million member, online, progressive political mailing list and action network, I was

301 Kirsten Hastrup, “Hunger and the Hardness of Facts,” Man, vol. 28, no. 4 (December, 1993): 727-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1496%28199312%292%3A28%3A4%3C727%3AHATHOF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D, 731-732302 Vendler 1984: 201.

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reminded of how much personal imaginations of hunger can determine – above and

beyond cognitive affiliations – responses to even political questions.

During the Terri Schaivo case, the organization in question had been one of the

leaders in promoting the public argument that her husband should be allowed to decide to

end Terri’s life. It was consistent with the general progressive response to the question.

As a leader of this organization, my friend needed to take a strong stance. Yet he told me

how hard it was for him – indeed, how much he had to wrestle with his emotional self –

to promote that believe. What got to him?

It wasn’t any of the political or legal arguments, but rather the imagery that

dominated the media: the slow starvation that Schaivo’s comatose body would endure

after the feeding tube was removed. Even though Terri couldn’t feel anything, my friend

had an extraordinarily difficult time moving past his visceral feeling of the un-naturalness

of starvation.

The connection between subjective states and personal experience is important

when placed in the context of the question: “How do we connect to the plight of people

far away?” Unlike genocide, which is descriptive of the fact of a government attempting

to destroy a segment of its population, “starvation,” by necessity requires us to reference

our own subjective experience as humans who experience hunger to understand. The

process of understanding the hunger of ‘others’ is a process of imagination; “with such

invisible facts as suffering in particular, there is no way of understanding people except

through one’s own experience and power of imagination.”303 Put another way, in

attempting to understand the suffering of others we are required to reference our own

303 Kirsten Hastrup, “Hunger and the Hardness of Facts,” Man, vol. 28, no. 4 (December, 1993): 727-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1496%28199312%292%3A28%3A4%3C727%3AHATHOF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D,732

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subjective experience; to imagine ourselves as part of the consequences of their plight in

order to contextualize and respond to that suffering.

Suffering, then, is embodied and is in some ways beyond cognitive understanding. As such it is “lost” to both gaze and speech. Yet implicitly we ‘recognize’ it, even when we have not felt exactly the same way or been exposed to similar disasters. Certain experiences are not literally shared at all, but we are, nevertheless, able to imagine their implications.304

There is a uniqueness to responding to suffering mediated through the context of

our physical bodies. As we imagine ourselves as part of that suffering, extrapolating our

own referential experiences, we build upon collective mythologies by projecting the order

of our lives onto the order of the universe. As Victor Turner wrote,

This use of an aspect of human physiology as a model for social, cosmic, and religious ideas and processes is a variant of a widely distributed initiation theme: that the human body is a microcosm of the universe…whatever the mode of representation, the body is regarded as a sort of symbolic template for the communication of gnosis, mystical knowledge about the nature of things and how they came to be what they are.305 Turner’s theories came out of his experience with the Ndembu tribe of Zambia, in

which colors were symbolic of bodily functions and the order of the world.306 The colors

– the whiteness of semen and milk, the redness of menstrual blood and blood shed by a

weapon, the blackness of bodily decay – “underlie or even constitute what Ndembu

conceive to be reality.”307 Another example is the Hindu myth of Purusha, the cosmic

man who’s body was divided at the beginning of time to give rise to the universe – his

mind the moon, his eyes the sun, his breathe the wind.

Even outside of their power to unify the collective mythological experience of

societies, our physical bodies are central to how we individually understand the order of

the universe. I grew up extremely overweight, even though my family was one of few in

my circle of friends which hardly ever indulged in pizza, snacks or anything fried. I was

304 Ibid., 733305 Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols, 107306 Ibid., 107307 Ibid., 107

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internally confident and assertive of my ideas but lived in terror of social interaction

which might draw attention to just how heavy I was. Growing up then, my body was the

ultimate symbol of world’s injustice. It was my first lesson in the limits of my own

agency.

When I got to college, however, I dedicated myself wholly to fitness and losing

weight. Through simple healthy eating and an intense exercise program, I lost more than

140 pounds by the time I left for the summer. My body had ceased to be Injustice and

was instead the reinforcing narrative of the power of Hard Work and Determination.

A final note: When you loose weight that quickly, your skin cannot shrink at the

same rate and you’re left with unsightly extra skin. Many people have it removed; I’ve

left mine, again, as a reminding symbol of my own history. In this way, my body has

been and in many ways remains the starting point for my sensibilities about Injustice,

Determination, and the need for empathy.

In her book “Hunger: An Unnatural History,” Sharman Apt Russell shares an

anecdote even more relevant to the story of Biafra. At thirty years of age, the pregnant

Russell had turned into “something of a hunger artist, collecting news clippings about

starvation and famine, labeling folders Somalia and Ethiopia.” The pregnancy had

opened a deep, emotional gate inside her that individualized the starvation of the entire

world and projected it upon her child, and collectivized her experience of mothering to all

who suffered.

I couldn’t understand why children were dying because they had no food. I gave birth to my daughter and fed her my body. Later, I had a son and he, too, drank from me. I was feeding the world. This was not aggrandizement so much as myth. At the center of our life, we are eve or Prometheus or Odysseus. At the center of my life, I fed the world, and yet children were dying.308

308 Sharman Apt Russell, Hunger: An Unnatural History, 13

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Yet, for the power of these individual narratives, the reality remains that hunger is

also a collective experience. Although “pain,” and in particular hunger, is “not knowable

apart from subjective experience,”309 our imagination of others’ suffering is culturally

mediated. This reality is particularly acute in studies of the American response to famine,

guided as it has been for centuries by the Malthusian notion that famine is directly

correlated to a lack of food resources. The general response pattern to famine, and

indeed, suffering more generally, in the last half-century tended to understand mass

hunger in terms socialized to the American experience with hunger. As such it has been

viewed as “a more or less accidental if catastrophic shortage of food.”310 The reception of

famine is directly correspondent to how the problem is conceived. If the problem is

simply a lack of calories, then a humanitarian response of more calories fixes rather than

simply salves the problem.

In the 1980s, the decade that witnessed the terrible and visible famines in Ethiopia

and Sudan, thinkers like Amartya Sen and Alex de Waal started to deconstruct the

notions of famine that had been acculturated to the American experience. Until then, the

anthropology of suffering had been left largely unexamined, according to Kirsten

Hastrup. Pain had “been dealt with mainly as an individual, if universal, human

experience.”311 Moreover, it tended not to be studied because of the “theoretical legacy of

anthropology, which favors studies of whole, well-functioning, and largely closed

systems.”312

309 Kirsten Hastrup, “Hunger and the Hardness of Facts,” Man, vol. 28, no. 4 (December, 1993): 727-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1496%28199312%292%3A28%3A4%3C727%3AHATHOF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D, 733310 Ibid., 728311 Ibid., 728312 Ibid., 728

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In this perspective, refugees are just people temporarily out of place, and hunger-stricken populations are people who have had tough luck with nature for some time.313

De Waal and Sen broke down these notions, in the process demonstrating the

extent to which our reception and imagination of famine (and corresponding responses)

are dictated by our socialized readings of the conditions. Perhaps the most important

contribution from Sen, one which has slowly started to permeate at least the educated

cultural conscious, is that famine tends to be more about lack of entitlements than lack of

resources. As he stated, “starvation is the characteristic of some people not having

enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.”314

Indeed, “hunger,” he recognized, related to “the operation of the political and social

arrangements that can, directly or indirectly, influence people’s ability to acquire food

and to achieve health and nourishment.”315

Studying famine in Sudan, Alex de Waal took to task our notions of the results of

famine, not simply their causes. Firstly, there is the problem of what Famine is, precisely.

With Malthus’ conception of famine as too little food for too many people, came a

perception that the end result of famine is mass starvation unto death. The “lived social

experience” of famine tends to be more nuanced and complicated, and often doesn’t

require mass death for an event to be called famine.316 De Waal also found important

evidence that not only were infectious diseases the primary cause of famine mortality, but

that the diseases paid little attention to food consumption levels after their onset, and as a

result argued that “measles immunization, malaria control and clean water supplies are at

least as important as emergency food relief.”317

313 Ibid., 728314 Sen, 1981: 1315 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, 162316 De Waal, Famine that Kills, x317 De Waal, Famine that Kills, xi

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All of this matters integrally to the driving question of why starvation had such a

powerful pull on Americans during the Biafra crisis – indeed, why it has always exerted

such a powerful ability to engage Western audiences, especially in comparison to

political language like that of atrocity or genocide. Moreover, it matters in understanding

how and why we responded the way we did. Explaining why American imagination of

the Holocaust is important to understand, Peter Novick wrote “It is our perceptions of

reality, not the reality itself, that shape our responses.”318 So it is, and so it was, with

starvation in Biafra.

The last section of Hastrup’s article discusses the hardness of facts; that is, the

extent to which we under stand facts as fixed or true outside of our subjective experience

of them. She argues that “relative ‘hardness’ is not located in the facts themselves, but in

the community that agrees upon it, that is, the community governing the politics of

explanation.”319 The reality of the American reception of the Biafran starvation was that it

reflected a particularly American – or at least rich, Western – understanding of famine.

At first, Americans were introduced to incredibly powerful images of starving

children. Just as the pictures where a nonverbal transfer or information, so too was the

experiential process by which Americans would have understood the agony of those

pictured. To understand the images, Americans were forced to imagine themselves as part

of the agony of those pictured – at least for a time. The recurrence of the imagery,

beamed in as it was every night on television and appearing regularly in newspapers kept

the gates open.

318 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 148319 Kirsten Hastrup, “Hunger and the Hardness of Facts,” Man, vol. 28, no. 4 (December, 1993): 727-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1496%28199312%292%3A28%3A4%3C727%3AHATHOF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D, 734

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One of the cultural forces mediating our reception of the images was our ability to

distinguish between starvation and politics. The refrain for the majority of American

politicians and citizens, with a few notable exceptions, was humanitarian aid over

political wrangling; it was “people before politics.” This had much to do with the

variance in visibility of states and processes.

Of course, the famine in Biafra was – in its causation, its ramifications, and the

circumstances of its alleviation – totally inseparable from politics. This was precisely

why it was so vital for the Biafran propaganda machine to quickly assimilate the

starvation into its use of genocide. Put one way, Biafra was trying to ‘govern the politics

of explanation.’ If accepted by the American public, the accusation of genocide would

prescribe a political intentionality upon the famine, mandating a response that was both

humanitarian and political. The example vindicates central tenets of both de Waal and

Sen. The famine was caused by a set of circumstances more expansive than a simple lack

of food, and moreover, was understood very differently by those looking in and those

suffering.

There was also the issue of children. Although I’ve explored the reasons that

children provided such a unique symbol for American interest in the conflict, it is worth

thinking deeply if briefly about how the actual process of starvation might have

contributed to the mythologizing of the starving Biafran child.

As described earlier, children are a symbol of innocence. In some ways focusing

on children is an easy way not to take sides. In her seminal “Compassion Fatigue,”

journalist and critic Susan Moeller wrote that children, not yet linked to biases and

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prejudices, “create an imperative moral statement…[which]…bring[s] moral clarity to the

complex story of famine.”320

Echoing de Waal, however, Russell argued that “the icon of children in famine is

a Western bias,”321 certainly not reflective of the social hierarchy that takes place in

famine stricken areas which puts children lower than those with reproductive capacity.

But the reasons why we focus on children are important to Russel:

In famine, a focus on women and children highlights biology: here is a mother who cannot feed her child, a breakdown in the natural order of life. This focus obscures who and what is to blame for the famine, politically and economically, and can lead to the belief that a biological response, more food, will solve the problem.322

This abrogation of the natural order seems to hold an incredibly compelling power

for outside observers of others’ suffering. Russel states it beautifully: “When an adult is

hungry, it happens in the present tense. When a child starves, there is another dimension.

It also happens in the future. For a child is potential, in the act of becoming.”323

Of the two types of famine, marasmus, which comes from total caloric deficit, and

kwashiorkor, which is a product of malnutrition, kwashiorkor is the more deadly and the

more irreparable. The skin and hair of victims turns a reddish yellow. Bacteria and the

gas collect in the small bowel, making the stomach puffy and distended. Sufferers

become listless, unwilling to exert themselves, or to play. When they do react to stimulus,

it is with rage and frustration. Sometimes they will cry uncontrollably for hours upon end.

There is a “quality of hopelessness and despair,” to those that suffer kwashiorkor, which

means literally “disease of the displaced child.”324

320 Susan Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, 122321 Sharman Apt Russell, Hunger: An Unnatural History, 179322 Ibid., 179323 Ibid., 180324 Ibid., 175

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Whatever the reasons for it, starving children have become the universal symbol

of the suffering of the modern world. With all the problems of response identified and

predicted by Sen and de Waal – responses that focus solely on food delivery for example

– there is another problem that begins even before the response. This is the very real

possibility that people will simply begin to shut down; the very real possibility that when

subjected to the constant emotional headrush of famine imagery, even good people will

turn inward, choosing all-too-reasonably to focus on problems closer to home, problems

that seem manageable.

Sen has argued that understanding famines in terms of lack of entitlement rather

than lack of food can greatly alleviate donor’s sense of famine intractability and their

own lack of power to influence the situation. He laments the “tacit pessimism” that “often

dominates international reactions to these miseries in the world today. This perceived

lack of freedom to remedy hunger can itself lead to fatalism and the absence of serious

attempts to remedy the miseries that we see.”325 At the same time, he asserts strongly that

better understanding the actual causation of famine helps us generate policies which

better relieve the problems.

Susan Moeller identified this problem as well, but gave it a different name.

“Compassion Fatigue,” is the idea that Americans have only so much compassion and, in

Moeller’s calculation, is the idea cynically used by news editors to ignore foreign

coverage if the event in question is not more horrible than previous similar events, focus

on issues closer to home in formulaic ways, and generally create a self-fulfilling

prophecy of American apathy towards international crises.

325 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, 160

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In a continuation of the same anecdote from above, Sharman Apt Russell wrote of

the gradual end of her “hunger artist” period. The phase, she said, lasted for a few years.

Sitting in restaurants with her children, she would see new pictures of a hungry child. She

looked out at the children playing on restaurant’s playground, she looked at her son. She

wanted the child in the newspaper to be hers, to be able to bring her up, provide for her.

The gate to grief opened yet again.

This grief, whose was it? This was not my baby. I did not burst our crying. I did not frighten my son in the middle of the fast-food restaurant. Instead, I assembled his cardboard prize and turned to another page of the newspaper. I felt tired, but only deep down, so far down it was hardly noticeable. Most of us know this exhaustion. We are afraid that the pain of other people will subtract the joy from our life, that our joy will be impossible next to their pain. A child dying of hunger cannot be juxtaposed. A child dying because she has no food does not make sense. She shatters the view from the kitchen window. She shatters your son’s first day at school. Eventually I stopped collecting famine stories. I shut the gate. But I never turned the lock.326

326 Sharman Apt Russell, Hunger: An Unnatural History, 13

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Conclusion

The late Fall of 1968 and all of 1969 were much like the rest of the military

conflict; a gradual back and forth with the overall result that the Nigerians were slowly

carving away pieces of Biafran territory and crawling towards what seemed like an

inevitable victory. Despite this, a few instances of increased outside assistance allowed

the embattled Biafra to reclaim important ground and continue onward. Importantly,

France gave just enough aid to ensure that Biafra could survive while simultaneously

ensuring that it could not win.

Still, Biafra heaved. Finally, in January 1970, “the end of the war came like a

flash of tropical lightning, momentarily illuminating a half-remembered landscape, and

reimposing itself on the consciousness of a world which had already pigeonhold the

conflict, along with Vietnam and the Middle East, as ‘insoluble.’…After two and a half

years of anguished but heroic existence, the Republic of Biafra, ‘Land of the Rusing

Sun’, was dead.”327

And at what a cost. Estimates of the death toll range from 500000328 and over 2

million329, all in pursuit of “unity.” For Nigeria, the costs of the war would extend far into

the future. In his seminal work on contemporary Nigeria This House Has Fallen, Karl

Maier told the story of a group of forgotten foot soldiers, “some…paralyzed, others…

missing a limb or two,” who beg for money by the side of the road. After the war,

Gowon’s attempt to reintegrate the Ibos was framed by the call of “no victors, no

vanquished.” Yet the reality had been much harder for veterans. Soldiers with wounds

were placed in a “War Disabled Veterans Camp.” Some were able to leave or have their

327 Brother’s War, 395328 The low end cited in The Brother’s War329 Found in personal narratives like “Surviving in Biafra.”

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families join them but others were not so lucky. Sitting by the road, one of the former

soldier pondered the fate of his country: “Look at Nigeria now, everything broken.

Nigeria is like us, crippled.”330 Maier agreed:

All [the veterans] were haunting reminders of the human cost of civil war and unwitting prophets of a potentially frightful future should Nigeria’s latest experiment with constitutional rule go badly wrong.331

***

Throughout the months of the war I’ve analyzed, Biafra’s propaganda and foreign

discourse reflected a changing understanding of world opinion and domestic position.

Old rhetoric tended not to be discarded but dynamically reframed. The evolution of

genocide demonstrates this particularly well.

The driving argument behind Biafran secession was that only the sovereignty of

the Eastern Region could guarantee the safety of their people. Nigeria had given up her

right to territorial integrity when her government either turned a blind eye to or was

complicit in the massacres of Ibos and other Easterners in the North in 1966. At the

beginning of the conflict, this argument was situated in a larger set of discourses. In

particular, early Biafran pamphlets argued not just the negative argument that Nigeria

was not fit to rule but the positive argument that Biafra was particularly suited for

nationhood.

As the starvation crisis arose in Spring 1968 and exploded in the Summer, the

language of genocide took on a new prescience. It represented the Biafrans attempt – and

their need – to control the politics of explaining the famine. While humanitarian response

alleviated their suffering, the problem of starvation for them was fundamentally political.

330 Karl Maier, This House Has Fallen, 271331 Ibid., 270

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Changes in Biafran self-representation also demonstrated a reciprocal relationship

with external discourse. The statements of African recognition, with their increased

emphasis on the plight of Biafran citizens, wrought an accordant shift in Biafran focus.

Similarly, the explosion of starvation into American popular media discourse engendered

an immediate shift in Biafra’s discussion of the famine.

In America, the media representation of the conflict changed dramatically when

the starvation reached endemic levels. For the first time, the crisis became a prescient

“issue” that demanded public response. The quantity and variety of coverage during

Summer 1968 was dramatically increased from a year earlier when the conflict began.

The initial coverage, as exemplified by the New York Times, reflected an attempt

on the part of journalists and editors to situate the conflict in the context of then

contemporary American concerns and foreign engagements. Articles and editorials from

Summer 1967 tended to focus on oil, the fear of balkanization, and connected Biafra to

Katanga and other “far away” conflicts.

The famine completely changed the terms of discussion. The spectacle of

starvation images created a moral urgency to the conflict that had not existed before. As

the months of Summer progressed, news coverage dealt broadly with a number of

recurring themes, the most important being portraits of the starvation behind Biafra lines

and the frustrated political hang-ups keeping aid from the suffering.

Indeed, Americans in Summer 1968 overwhelmingly viewed Biafra as a

humanitarian crisis. As discussed in Section Four, images of starvation required the

viewer to imagine him or herself as part of the suffering to understand it, creating closer

cognitive relationships between Americans and Biafrans. Missionaries and journalists

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became bridges between the two societies; for all their sensationalism and partisanship,

the critique of that period’s journalism needs to attempt to understand the emotional and

psychological forces faced by embedded correspondents.

Importantly, American coverage during the Summer of 1968 also focused on

citizen response. Organizations like the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and

individuals like the 9 year old New Jersey girl who flew to see churchmen in Rome and

London helped Americans understand their potentials to engage with the conflict.

The answers, then, to my driving questions, “how do Americans come to feel

connected to far way crises,” and “how did Biafra pitch itself to America and how

successful was it,” are integrally linked.

It is clear that Biafra existed in the American imagination largely because it was

starving. This image also largely determined the American response. Images of

starvation, coupled with explanatory articles and background information, presented

American citizens with a horror that seemed an abomination of the natural order of

things. Regardless of political stance, all could agree that no one – especially not children

– should be made to suffer the fate of starvation.

The fact of hunger provided an inroad for Americans to imagine themselves as

emotionally connected to the Biafrans because its physiological symptoms required

people to draw upon their own subjective experience to understand the images and words

they were shown. I believe that international crises driven by these physiologically

resonant forces have a much greater ability to engage Americans from far away than do

similarly terrible disasters presented in terms of politics. One needs look no further than

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the powerful humanitarian response to Sudanese famines vs. the dithering political

interest in Sudanese wars to understand this reality.

By and large, Americans during the Biafra war rebelled against the connection

between the humanitarian disaster and politics. Throughout the 1968 Summer, articles

lamented the terrible intransigence of both Biafran and Nigerian leadership in the face of

abject suffering. Indeed, for Americans, the politics of the conflict were the enemy. A

moral dichotomy – the privilege of being thousands of miles away from the conflict –

broke apart politics and relief in a way that no amount of Biafran propaganda could

reconnect.

That this division occurred is clear. Whether or not it was the “right” position for

American media and citizens to take is less clear. While the process of learning that went

into this thesis has allowed me to better articulate the answers to some of my specific and

theoretical questions, I am somewhat stymied when it comes to the realm of

“recommendations.”

While the stark division between aid and politics may not have reflected the

reality of the situation, it may still have been a reasonable position for Americans to take.

Neither leadership in the Nigeria conflict seemed, in retrospect, worthy of much support.

Importantly, if allowed to exist, the entity known as Biafra, a construction just as

“Nigeria” had been constructed, might have been a microcosm for the very same

problems that had led to the disintegration of the Nigerian republic.

Moreover, the argument that aid prolonged the war may have some merit.

Occasional foreign recognition and increased media attention and international support

seem to have played a role in Biafra’s unwillingness to surrender. Despite this, the

145

majority of the blame for the duration of the war should be apportioned on the

leaderships of Nigeria and Biafra, who fought a useless war for two and half years while

the dreams of their nation shriveled and starved with a million or more of its citizens.

Still, it is fascinating to understand better the forces which connect America to

African crises. Currently, this knowledge allows one to understand, for example, why

Darfur has received the attention that it has. Americans engaged with the Darfur genocide

today tend to participate in a community of guilt that laments our inaction in Rwanda.

Visceral imagery of women gang-raped while gathering firewood has a corresponding if

not necessarily causal relationship with the increased presence of Darfur in national

media and citizen action in the last few months. This is fascinating because rape is a

suffering that many of us, like hunger, have the ability (and the need) to personalize in

order to understand it in the context of someone else. The old specter of the child starving

that has lurked in the man-made deserts of Africa has come back again, and made regular

appearances at the April 30 Rally for Darfur in Washington, D.C.332

Whether Darfur will succumb to the Janjaweed militias in Sudan before

succumbing to rising oil prices in American attention remains to be seen. My hope in

writing this thesis is that in some small way I have added to the discussion of the forces

which help make it so that this succumbing need not always be the case. We must not

forget that behind this story of propaganda and press were the lives of millions, destroyed

both through their own agency and by forces beyond their control. We must never forget

the horror and abject stupidity of this war, indeed, of most wars.

In the end, I believe Americans have an obligation to understand our relationship

to places in conflict. The stakes of Biafra were lower for us than the Nigerians, just as

332 Attended by the author.

146

they are lower for us than for the Darfuris. Still, there are realities, emotions, needs and

desires we share with these people, as the response to starvation so powerfully

demonstrated. The question of to intervene or not to intervene will likely never be clear,

nor should it be made solely on the basis of imagined connections. Yet as the globe

becomes more interconnected, we will increasingly find ourselves forced into contact

with that world. We ignore it at our peril.

147

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Dissertations

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“Bleak Prospect,” West Africa, December 7, 1968.

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“Play Will Aid Children of Biafra.” The New York Times, Mar 11, 1969, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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“Belgium Moving to Shut Off All Arms to Lagos Regime.” The New York Times, Jul 16, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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“Performance at The Scene Raising Funds for Biafra.” The New York Times, Aug 28, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

162

Anaza, John A. “Support for Biafra.” The New York Times, Aug 29, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Death in Biafra.” The New York Times, Sep 8, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Display Ad.” The New York Times, Sep 9, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Plea to Biafra.” The New York Times, Sep 11, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Reston, James. “The Campaign: The Politics of Violence.” The New York Times, Sep 11, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Latham, Michael C. “For Food Airlift to Biafra.” The New York Times, Sep 11, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Zambian Chief Refuses O.A.U. Vice Presidency.” The New York Times, Sep 14, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“O’Dwyer Backs Biafra Aid.” The New York Times, Sep 15, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“How the O.A.U. Can Help.” The New York Times, Sep 17, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Middleton, Drew. “A New Cold War Feared By Thant.” The New York Times, Sep 20, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Himmelstrand, Ulf. “Biafra as Political Entity.” The New York Times, Sep 22, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Robbins, Dale Bennett. “Myth Destroyed.” The New York Times, Sep 22, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Friendly, Alfred. “Gowon Pledges Restraint.” The New York Times, Sep 10, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Friendly, Alfred. “The Fire Is Here.” The New York Times, Sep 1, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Udo, Udo O. “Biafrans’ Fears.” The New York Times, Jul 25, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Moltsg, O.S. EDW. “For U.S. Airlift to Biafra.” The New York Times, Aug 2, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

163

Gold, Morris Abrambertram H., Edward E. Swanstrom, Marvin Bordelo. “Relief for Biafra.” The New York Times, Aug 13, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Samuels, Michael A. “To Resettle the Ibos.” The New York Times, Sep 24, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Brewer, Sam Pope. “Biafran Official Here Urges Large-Scale Airlift to End Famine in His Land.” The New York Times, Jul 14, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Kenworthy, E.W. “M’Carthy Bids U.S. Ask Biafra Relief.” The New York Times, Aug 3, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Relief Formula Forecast.” The New York Times, Aug 4, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Emerson, Gloria. “Story of Secessionist Biafra: Tribal Hatreds, Civil War and Starvation; Odbur…” The New York Times, Jan 12, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Varga, Charles C. “Right to Health Care.” The New York Times, Jul 11, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Wofford, Harris. “U.S. Aid to Congo.” The New York Times, Jul 10, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Toby, Jacob Allen. “Congo Intervention.” The New York Times, July 13, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Baker, Russell. “Observer: Enough, Enugu! Enough!” The New York Times, Jun 15, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Echewa, Obinkaram. “Biafra’s Resistance.” The New York Times, Jun 19, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Garrison, Lloyd. “The Ibos Go It Alone.” The New York Times, Jun 11, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Explosives Found In Lagos Oil Dump.” The New York Times, Jun 11, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Urbane Secessionist Chukuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu.” The New York Times, May 31, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Garrison, Lloyd. “Civilians Accuse Nigerian Troops.” The New York Times, Jul 21, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

164

Fellows, Lawrence. “Nigerian Armies Near Showdown.” The New York Times, Jun 18, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Nigeria.” The New York Times, Jun 4, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Garrison, Lloyd. “Eastern Region Quits Nigeria; Lagos Vows to Fight Secession.” The New York Times, May 31, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Garrison, Lloyd. “Nigeria on Brink of Breaking Up.” The New York Times, May 29, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Nigeria’s Cliffhanger.” The New York Times, May 29, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Garrison, Lloyd. “Nigerian Region Hopes for an Attack.” The New York Times, Jun 12, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Congo.” The New York Times, Jul 9, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Eastern Nigeria Votes Secession.” The New York Times, May 28, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Lagos Moving to Seal Off East; Issues Warning to Foreign Ships.” The New York Times, Jun 1, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Garrison, Lloyd. “Secessionist Chief Of Eastern Nigeria Expects Civil War.” The New York Times, Jun 2, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Garrison, Lloyd. “Nigeria Cancels American Airlift.” The New York Times, Jun 3, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Garrison, Lloyd. “Broader Backing Sought By Lagos.” The New York Times, Jun 4, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Garrison, Lloyd. “Americans Begin to Leave Nigeria.” The New York Times, Jun 5, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“11 Civilians Join Nigerian Regime.” The New York Times, Jun 13, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“War Charge Denied.” The New York Times, Jun 13, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Tiger Claims Loyalty To Biafra, Not Nigeria.” The New York Times, Jun 16, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

165

Smith, William. “Mid-East Oil Still Flows Despite Uncertain Future.” The New York Times, Jun 18, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Nigeria: Time for Sanctions.” The New York Times, Jun 18, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Lagos Unperturbed by Threat of War.” The New York Times, Jun 19, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Garrison, Lloyd. “Eastern Nigeria’s Last Link to Outside World Is Cut.” The New York Times, Jun 21, 1967, Pro Quest Historical Newspapers

Garrison, Lloyd. “Nigeria.” The New York Times, Jun 25, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Nigeria’s Split Creates Oil Dilemma.” The New York Times, Jun 30, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Secessionist Warns Lagos On Invasion.” The New York Times, Jul 1, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Nigeria Threatens East’s Oil Exports.” The New York Times, Jul 7, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Friendly, Alfred. “500 Secessionists Reported Captured By Nigeria in East.” The New York Times, Jul 9, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Friendly, Alfred. “Nigeria Calls Morale High; Rebels Say Invasion Is Repelled.” The New York Times, Jul 11, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Friendly, Alfred. “Nigeria Fighting Still Is Confused.” The New York Times, Jul 13, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Nigerian Reports Gains In the Past.” The New York Times, Jul 24, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Friendly, Alfred. “Lagos Orders Oil Controls.” The New York Times, Jul 15, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Africa: Arms Are the Arbiter.” The New York Times, Jul 16, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Friendly, Alfred. “Nigeria Reports Capture of Town.” The New York Times, Jul 16, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

166

“British Evacuation Ordered.” The New York Times, Jul 17, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Friendly, Alfred. “Nigerian Secessionists Concede Retreat at Nsukka.” The New York Times, Jul 17, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Nigeria Approves Evacuation of Foreigners in East.” The New York Times, Jul 18, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Garrison, Lloyd. “Muddy Mountain Route Pierces Nigeria Blockade.” The New York Times, Jul 19, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Nigeria Says Federal Planes Strafe Breakaway Region’s Capital.” The New York Times, Jul 19, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“580 Foreigners Evacuated From Rebel Area to Lagos.” The New York Times, Jul 22, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Nigeria’s Forces Are Seen In Insukka.” The New York Times, Jul 23, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Lagos Says Rebels Incur Heavy Losses.” The New York Times, Jul 24, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Both Sides Report Advances In Nigeria.” The New York Times, Jul 26, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Friendly, Alfred. “Red Cross Misses Biafran Aid Goal.” The New York Times, Sep 6, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Foreign Doctors in Biafra Despair Over Shortages.” The New York Times, Oct 7, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“No Biafra Genocide Found By Canadian.” The New York Times, Oct 23, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Garrison, Lloyd. “Yam Crop, Crucial to Biafrans, Periled by a Shortage of Seed.” The New York Times, Feb 24, 1969, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

“Food Is Short in Owerri.” The New York Times, May 4, 1969, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Apple, R.W. “Churchman Says Biafrans Face New Wave of Starvation Deaths.” The New York Times, Jun 29, 1969, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

167

Paces, Eric. “Rainy Season Impedes Nigerian Forces and Raises the Hopes of Biafrans.” The New York Times, Aug 25, 1969, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Paces, Eric. “Biafra Fights On, but It Shows Some Signs of Demoralization.” The New York Times, Sep 13, 1969, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Forsyth, Frederick. “Gutted Hamlets, Rotting Corpses—This is Genocide.” The Sunday Times, May 12, 1968

Sankay Reddy, “An Independent Press Working Against Famine: The Nigerian Experience,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 26, no. 2 (June, 1988): 337-45, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-278X%28198806%2926%3A2%3C337%3AAIPWAF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7

Adepitan Bamisaiye, “The Nigerian Civil War in the International Press,” Transition, no. 44 (1974): 30-32+34-35, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0042-1191%281974%290%3A44%3C30%3ATNCWIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y

Art Hansen and David Aronson, “The Politics of Mercy,” Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 29, no. 3 (1995): 498-505, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0008-3968%281995%2929%3A3%3C498%3ATPOM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S

Seymour M. Hersh, “The United States President who Liked to call Blacks ‘Jigaboos’,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 23 (Spring 1999): 138-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1077-3711%28199921%290%3A23%3C138%3ATUSPWL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9

Kirsten Hastrup, “Hunger and the Hardness of Facts,” Man, vol. 28, no. 4 (December, 1993): 727-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1496%28199312%292%3A28%3A4%3C727%3AHATHOF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D

Robert Dirks, “Social Responses During Severe Food Shortages and Famine,” Current Anthropology, vol. 21, no. 1 (February 1980): 21-44, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0011-3204%28198002%2921%3A1%3C21%3ASRDSFS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E

Roy M. Melbourne. “The American Response to the Nigerian Conflict.” Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 3, no. 2 (1973): 33-42, http://links.org/sici?sici=0047-1607%28197322%293%3A2%3C33%3ATARTTN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4

Paul Richards. “Famine (and war) in Africa.” Anthropology Today, vol. 8, no. 6 (December 1992): 3-5. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0268-540X%28199212%298%3A6%3C3%3AF%28WIAW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R

Kennedy Lindsay, “Biafra and Her Minorities.” Asawit, vol. 1, no. 3 (April 1968)

168