Ten chapters
The history first, in five parts: the road to war, the famine, my own city in the war, what came after, and the movement that grew out of the silence. Then the man in the cage, every date in one list, my own reasons, the argument about the word terrorist, and what one person can do without a weapon.
The short version
In 1966 tens of thousands of Igbo people were killed in pogroms in northern Nigeria and more than a million fled east. In May 1967 the Eastern Region declared itself the Republic of Biafra. Nigeria blockaded it. By the surrender in January 1970, somewhere between one and three million people had died, the great majority of them civilians and most of those children, from starvation. Nigeria declared no victor and no vanquished, paid every Biafran bank account holder twenty pounds regardless of what they had held, and asked the east to forget.
The east did not forget. In 1999 a new movement called MASSOB began agitating peacefully for a new Biafra. In 2012 the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, was founded around a radio station broadcasting from London and its director, Nnamdi Kanu. In 2017 Nigeria had IPOB declared a terrorist organisation by a court. In 2021 Kanu was seized in Kenya and flown to Nigeria. In November 2025 a court in Abuja convicted him of terrorism and sentenced him to life in prison, a verdict his lawyers and millions of Biafrans reject. Meanwhile young people in the south-east are shot for carrying a flag, and an armed insurgency in the north is offered amnesty and cash.
Nigerians we are no more. Biafrans we must be.
The line that closes Biafra Rising
Where I stand, in one paragraph
I believe the people of the south-east of Nigeria have the right to decide their own future, in a referendum, peacefully, as Scotland was allowed to and as international law recognises for all peoples. I believe the killing of unarmed protesters, the detention of activists without conviction and the rendition of a man from a foreign country are crimes that no terrorism charge against him can cancel. I condemn every killing done in Biafra's name and I say so loudly. And I believe that a country which cannot hear the word Biafra without reaching for a gun has already answered the question of whether it is one nation.
The book
My mother and I wrote Biafra Rising: A Story of Resistance, Identity and the Unbreakable Spirit so that our own family would have the history in one place. It has eighteen chapters, a timeline from 1967 to 2025, the legal arguments, voices from detention and a chapter on how to help. It is on Amazon.