How a country was sealed
Biafra at its declaration had a coastline, ports, an airport at Enugu and a share of the oil. Within a year it had none of them. Bonny fell in July 1967, Calabar in October, Enugu in October, Onitsha in March 1968, and on 19 May 1968 the federal Third Marine Commando Division took Port Harcourt. From that day Biafra was an enclave of perhaps ten thousand square kilometres, cut off by land, by sea and, except for one road that had been widened into a runway, by air. Twelve million people had fled into it. The harvest could not feed them. The federal government made sure nothing else could either.
Obafemi Awolowo, the federal commissioner for finance, said what the policy was: all is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war; he did not see why the federal side should feed its enemies fat so that they could fight harder. I quote him because Nigerians are still told the famine was Ojukwu's fault for not surrendering, and because a man who says a thing plainly deserves to be remembered plainly.
Kwashiorkor
The word is Ghanaian; the world learned it from Biafra. It is what happens to a child who gets calories, cassava and yam, but no protein. The belly swells with fluid. The hair goes red and thin. The skin cracks. The child stops crying because crying costs energy. By the end of 1968 the relief agencies were estimating that between six and ten thousand people were dying every day inside the enclave, most of them children, and that the total would pass a million before the end. It did. Estimates of the dead run from one to three million; almost all of them were civilians, and most of those had not seen a soldier.
Uli, and the planes at night
The only supply line was a stretch of road at Uli, near Ihiala, code-named Annabelle, on which transport aircraft landed at night with their lights off between Nigerian bombing runs. Church groups flew from the Portuguese island of São Tomé under the name Joint Church Aid, which the pilots called Jesus Christ Airlines. The International Committee of the Red Cross flew from Fernando Po until June 1969, when a Nigerian fighter shot down a Swedish Red Cross DC-7 and the federal government banned the Red Cross from night flights. The churches kept flying until the last week. Between them they moved tens of thousands of tonnes of milk powder, stockfish, salt and medicine, in what was then the largest civilian airlift in history after Berlin, and it was never close to enough.
On 30 May 1969, the second anniversary of the declaration, a twenty-year-old American student named Bruce Mayrock set himself on fire outside the United Nations in New York with a sign that asked the world to stop the genocide. He died the next day. Biafra was the first famine that arrived in living rooms by television, the first with a photograph on the cover of Life magazine, the first to produce the images that every famine appeal has used since. It did not end the war. But the French doctors who worked in the enclave came home and, in 1971, founded Médecins Sans Frontières, and everything that is now called humanitarian intervention traces back to those airstrips.
Awolowo said starvation was a weapon of war. He was right about that. He was wrong about who it was aimed at.
What my family remembers
My mother was a small child in 1968. She remembers the stockfish, cut so thin you could see through it. She remembers a cousin's baby with the belly and the red hair and the silence. She remembers her mother going into the bush at dawn for anything green and coming back with leaves the family had never eaten before and ate. She remembers the noise of the relief planes at night and the whole village lying in the dark, hoping the sound was Annabelle and not a MiG.
She told me all of this before I could read, at bedtime, in the voice you use for fairy tales. When we wrote Biafra Rising together I made her tell it again, with the numbers, and it went into the first chapter. This page is the version I can give away for free.
Why it is not history
Because the country that did it has never said it did it. There has been no inquiry, no apology, no memorial, no line in the school books. Because the men who defended starvation as policy have streets and universities named after them. And because a people who were starved for asking to govern themselves are still, fifty-five years later, being told that the request itself is the crime.