Before the war
Nigeria became independent from Britain in 1960 as a federation of three, later four, regions drawn around its largest peoples: Hausa and Fulani in the north, Yoruba in the west, Igbo in the east. In January 1966 a group of mostly Igbo army officers overthrew the government and killed the Prime Minister and the premiers of the north and west. In July a counter-coup by northern officers killed the Igbo head of state. From September 1966, pogroms across northern cities killed Igbo civilians in their tens of thousands; estimates run from eight thousand to thirty thousand dead. More than a million people fled to the Eastern Region.
In January 1967 the military governors met at Aburi in Ghana and agreed a loose confederation. The federal government did not honour the agreement. On 30 May 1967 the military governor of the east, Lieutenant-Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, declared the Republic of Biafra.
Coups and pogroms
Two coups, then the killing of Igbo civilians across the north. The east fills with refugees.
Biafra declared
The Eastern Region becomes the Republic of Biafra under Ojukwu, with its flag of red, black and green and a rising sun.
War
Federal troops cross into Biafra. The war lasts thirty months.
Asaba
Federal soldiers kill hundreds of Igbo men and boys in Asaba after ordering the town to assemble. Estimates run from several hundred to over a thousand.
The blockade and the famine
Biafra is cut off by land, sea and air. Kwashiorkor, the swollen-belly starvation of children, becomes the image of the war around the world.
Surrender
Ojukwu leaves for Ivory Coast; Philip Effiong surrenders. Between one and three million people are dead, most of them from hunger.
No victor, no vanquished
Gowon's phrase, and the policy of twenty pounds for every Biafran bank account regardless of balance, and of eastern property in cities like Port Harcourt declared abandoned.
MASSOB
Ralph Uwazuruike founds the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra, a non-violent group. Members are jailed.
IPOB and Radio Biafra
Nnamdi Kanu, broadcasting from London, founds the Indigenous People of Biafra.
Kanu arrested, freed, hunted
Arrested in Lagos in October 2015, granted bail in April 2017. In September 2017 the army raids his home in Abia State; a court proscribes IPOB as a terrorist organisation the same month. Kanu disappears.
Rendition
Kanu is seized in Kenya and flown to Nigeria without extradition. A United Nations working group later calls his detention arbitrary.
Sit-at-home and the killings
Monday sit-at-home orders in the south-east, violence by enforcers, unknown gunmen and security forces. Thousands dead. IPOB disowns the enforcers and a rival faction abroad.
Conviction
A federal high court in Abuja convicts Kanu on terrorism charges and sentences him to life imprisonment. His lawyers appeal; Biafrans protest.
The famine
It was not a side effect. The blockade was policy. A federal minister said at the time that starvation was a legitimate weapon of war. Relief flights from Church and Red Cross groups into the airstrip at Uli were the only supply line, flown at night under fire. The photographs of Biafran children with swollen bellies and stick arms changed how the world saw famine and founded the modern humanitarian movement. They did not stop the war.
They thought they killed Biafra in 1970. They were wrong.
Biafra Rising
What came after
Reconciliation, Rehabilitation, Reconstruction, the three Rs, was the official programme. In the east, it was twenty pounds for a lifetime's savings, Igbo-owned houses in Port Harcourt reassigned as abandoned, an indigenisation decree passed while the east had no capital to buy with, and a silence. The war was not taught in schools. It still is not, properly. I learned it from my mother.
Now
The south-east is one of the most heavily militarised regions in Nigeria. Its young men are stopped at checkpoints, searched for flags. Its Mondays are lost to sit-at-home. Its most famous son is in a prison in Abuja for life. And a boy in Obinze can still tell you the colours of a flag he has never been allowed to fly.