When civil war erupted in July 1967, Nigeria’s federal troops crossed into the breakaway region of Biafra with a clear objective. Colonel Ojukwu, Biafra’s leader, would later articulate his people’s singular goal with stark clarity: survival. They fought not for conquest or ideology, but simply to avoid annihilation.
Yet survival became nearly impossible when hunger was weaponized.
With backing from Britain, Nigeria sealed Biafra’s borders completely. Every entry point closed. Every supply route severed. The message was brutal and unambiguous: surrender or starve.
The latter came to pass.
By the second year of conflict, photographs began emerging that would haunt a generation. International efforts to suppress these images failed, and the world bore witness to suffering on an almost incomprehensible scale. Emaciated children, their stomachs grotesquely swollen from kwashiorkor—a condition caused by severe protein malnutrition—stared into cameras with hollow eyes. Their skeletal frames told stories their voices were too weak to speak.
This became the face of modern famine: deliberate, calculated, preventable.
Women nursed infants they could no longer feed, their own bodies too depleted to produce milk. Men lacked the strength to bury their dead with dignity, resorting to shallow graves behind homes. Families consumed anything remotely edible—reptiles, vegetation, scraps that would have been unthinkable in peacetime. A single meal per day became fortune. Many went days with nothing.
The death toll: three million souls.
Consider that magnitude. Three million individual lives, each with hopes and families and futures, extinguished. In modern terms, imagine erasing every resident of a major metropolitan area—Los Angeles, or Berlin, or Madrid—entirely. Picture one death every half-minute, continuously, for two and a half years.
Children comprised seven out of every ten casualties.
The international community mobilized what help it could. Organizations like Caritas and the Red Cross orchestrated dangerous nighttime flights, threading through hostile airspace to deliver provisions. Individual nations contributed what they could spare. But humanitarian aid proved woefully inadequate against a systematic starvation campaign. The blockade’s efficiency overwhelmed relief efforts.
Beyond hunger, violence rained from above. Marketplaces crowded with civilians became bombing targets. Medical facilities, clearly marked with international symbols of protection, were struck nonetheless. Schools filled with students were not spared. The calculus was deliberate: make existence so unbearable that resistance becomes impossible.
Yet resistance persisted until the bitter end.
