The Nigerian Civil War: Background information when reading Speak No Evil

The Nigerian Civil War

This article relates to Speak No Evil

In Speak No Evil, Uzodinma Iweala's protagonist, Niru, says that his father "reminds us constantly that if he could walk ten miles to get sardines and tinned tomatoes for his family during the war, dodging low-flying Nigerian fighter plans that made a sport of strafing hungry refugees, then there is nothing he or we can't do." The war to which Niru's father refers, the reason why he emigrated from Nigeria to the United States, was the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 to 1970, also known as the Biafran War.

The conflict was precipitated when the state of Biafra, dominated by the Igbo but including other ethnic groups, declared its intention to secede. Tensions between the Igbo people and the Nigerian government had been increasing ever since the Britain decolonization of the country in the early 1960s resulted in massacres of the largely Christian Igbo population by Muslim groups, violence to which the military-led government turned a blind eye. Within five weeks of the declaration of the Republic of Biafra, formal war between Nigeria and Biafra broke out, and despite some defensive victories, the Biafran forces were eventually overtaken by the better-funded Nigerian military.

Cut off from their main source of revenue (the oil fields that had once supplied the region's wealth) and without the funds to import food, the Biafran people began to suffer from widespread malnutrition - ultimately more than one million people died. Images of starving children and refugees dominated Western news stories in the late 1960s - and the suffering also led to the eventual relocation of many people like Niru's parents to countries like the UK and the US. As of 2013, Nigeria was still the African country with the highest population of immigrants In the United States.

For more on the Biafran War see Beyond the Books for What It Means When a Man Falss From the Sky and Half of a Yellow Sun,

Map of the secessionist state of the Republic of Biafra

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This "beyond the book article" relates to Speak No Evil. It originally ran in March 2018 and has been updated for the March 2019 paperback edition. Go to magazine.