How Biafra Came to Be *

Genocide, Starvation, and the American Imagination of the Nigerian Civil War

Nathaniel Whittemore
Northwestern University - Class of 2006 Department of History Submitted May 4, 2006

Acknowledgements Id like to thank a number of people for making this work possible. Firstly, without the guidance and support of Professor Brodie Fischer, this thesis would simply not have happened. Her patience and assistance were invaluable in developing my ideas and keeping me sane. For the grounding in post-colonial African history and theory, I would have been lost without Professor Will Reno. His passion for and commitment working with students is a testament to good education. Thanks also to David Easterbrook for long hours spent introducing me to the wonders of the Herskovitz library. In general, the History Department has given me an incredible home, and I cannot thank its faculty Henry Binford, Mark Bradley, Carl Petry and all the rest enough. Id also like to thank Monica Russel y Rordriguez and Jeff Rice for being my oldest guardians and friends at this university. The four years Ive spent at Northwestern would not have been nearly so wonderful without their intellectual and emotional support. This thesis provides me a particularly good opportunity to thank Professor Rice, for weve shared a growing passion and interest in global conflict and humanitarian crisis over the last few years. Finally, to my friends and family, this thesis has demonstrated both your incredible support and your total unwillingness to let me loose out on relationships by falling to far into whatever endeavor Ive found to consume myself. Family, thanks for always calling to find out how its going. 1916 Maple, thanks for being the (in)sanity in the boredom. 2003-2005 Chapin, thanks for providing constant inspiration. 2006 IYVS & NUDAC - thanks for giving me context. MLE: thanks for the long hours, sweet relief, and many citations.

One Page Summary From May 1967-January 1970, Nigeria was gripped by a civil war that killed between one and two million individuals. The primary cause of death was a famine resulting from a Nigerian economic blockade of the secessionist Eastern Region known as Biafra. The starvation was exacerbated by political wrangling over the terms of aid distribution. Images of hunger spread across the world, causing a particular media sensation and public outcry in America. This thesis focuses on the creation of the American image of Biafra during Spring 1967 and Spring and Summer 1968. It is guided by a theoretical question: What makes Americans feel connected to conflicts in far away places especially when those places are not within the national interest? It seeks to understand the relationship between Biafran propaganda and American media representation in creating a popular imagination of Biafra held by United States citizens. More specifically, it seeks to understand the use of an evolving discourse of genocide, in attempting to create this imagination. The thesis argues that the response of both American citizens and press was determined largely by the starvation and the development of humanitarian crisis. Indeed, rather than creating Biafra, the discourse of genocide was used starting in mid 1968 in an attempt to control the terms of discussion surrounding the famine. In the end, Biafran propaganda had a much greater effect on its domestic population than on foreign opinion. The world press was primarily concerned with the suffering of Biafrans, rather than the Biafran propagandas interpretation of that suffering.

Key words Nigeria Genocide Humanitarianism Propaganda Famine

Table of Contents 1. Cover Page 2. Acknowledgments 3. One Page Summary 4. Table of Contents 5. Introduction 6. Section One: Beginnings and Background 7. Section Two: Recognition and Rhetorical Change 8. Section Three: Starvation Sympathy 9. Section Four: Holocaust and Hunger 10. Conclusion 11. Bibliography

Introduction This thesis starts in Cairo of all places. It starts on the dusty courtyard of St. Andrews Refugee Ministry and in the American University library, whose ugly concrete architecture makes Northwestern students feel right at home. It starts during my Study Abroad, fall 2004, when I taught English to Sudanese Refugees. I would later joke that I had come to Egypt looking for the Middle East, and left having found Africa. I began tutoring at St. Andrews on a whim. My interest in Cairo was the Middle East, or so I thought, but I had noticed before leaving that Sudan was mighty close to Egypt on a map. And Hey, hadnt there been something going on in Sudan? Something some were calling genocide? I was a student of the 1990s. I had read about Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda and Kosovo. I had read about all those places that made me wonder just where I had been to not remember them from my childhood. Many of those situations shared that word Genocide and so to hear of another one a new Genocide and to be so close to it seemed a fascination worth exploring. To get to St. Andrews, you walk down from Esaaf square, through the chaos and bustle of fresh juice stands, shouting street venders, and the proud cacophony of one thousand honking taxis. The metro spills its millions out onto the street and everywhere there is the bustle of life lived in the open. Just before 26 July Street, though, you slip through a unremarkable black gate. The only indications that this is your destination are the small hanging sign and the little steeple that protrudes out from behind the few date trees in the courtyard. No matter how unassuming it may seem, to enter that gate is to cross the border into another world entirely.

There is a palpable calm inside those walls that comes as close to any natural feeling of community as anything Ive experienced. The vast majority of students are Sudanese. Most of them have come from the chaos of the 21 year old civil war in the South. When you walk from that gate in past the chapel and to the main office, though, you can hardly imagine their history and the tragic history of their home. All you can think of is the smiling giggles of Sawsan and Faiza as they stealing cursory glances at the various groups of boys and men, themselves mingling and talking. Your mind is filled not with the tragedies of their past but of the hoop dreams of basketball players like Isaac and Akook. You can spend quiet hours sitting on the steps of the chapel, basking in small serenity from the coughing, hawking, honking congestion of outside. That place is, in the most real sense of the world, sanctuary. But it is not the whole story. It is a wonderful place, but it is a little chapter of hope in a novel more often filled with terrible cruelty and misfortune. Indeed, even this tiny refuge of utopia, crushing reality often invades. I was frustrated to begin to see that even in the small safety of St. Andrews, there is often a cool distance maintained between Southern Sudanese Christians and Northern Muslims. As I began to make friends, I began to hear stories; I vicariously experienced remembrances of joy and a few of pain. I started to see the incredible dedication to dreams of the future exist side by side with the horror of overwhelming hopelessness. My walls slowly came down. My emotional distance from tragedy, the great psychological privilege of my American birth, grew smaller. Faces and names replaced the faceless and nameless victims of crisis I had read about in newspapers.

I tried to understand, to gain some insight into the monumental brutishness of the world. I began to read David Rieff and Romeo Dallaire. I tried to dig deeper and further back. I read accounts, first hand and second hand, journalistic and scholarly, of places like Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan. These were places that before fit into my framework as that troubled African country but were completely depersonalized, no matter how much unspecific sympathy I had. It was not that I didnt care, but simply that there had been nothing human about numbers of the dead, and nothing remarkable about yet another tragedy of the moment. This is, itself, a great paradox in people; our ability to empathize with and sacrifice for our fellow travelers to the grave is matched only by our knack at distancing ourselves from the moral commitments that recognition of a common humanity demands. I came to the Biafran war in the beginning because of its place in so many of the works I was reading about the modern state of humanitarianism. Biafra, they said, was where it all started. It was the first war that required a relief effort that the first generation of aid organizations couldnt provide. It was the war where famous humanitarians like Bernard Kouchner and Frederick Cuny cut their teeth. For Kouchner, it was the impetus to start Medicins San Frontieres today the best privately funded NGO in the world. Biafra, I knew, had been a largely but not totally ethnic separatist movement that wanted to be a political entity unto itself distinct from the united Nigeria that Britain had left largely in the hands of their former native leaders at independence in 1960. The road had been a rocky one from the start but by 1967, the Biafrans Easterners decided that they could no longer remain a part of the Nigerian political entity. Their challenge, as I would find out, would be to either beat the Nigerians on the battle field (a

daunting task, given British military support for its former colony) or to convince the world to intervene on their behalf. Authors like David Rieff (A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis) used Biafra as a starting point, but without really explaining the details. I was left with the vague notion that Biafra was remarkable for its propaganda; that it had sold the world on a genocide that never really happened. Rieff used it to begin his discussion of the modern era of humanitarian crises, in which aid organizations become partisans of their benefactors with marketing that manipulates emotions and confuses political relationships. But was this the case? *** This thesis is about how Biafra came to exist in the American imagination. The story is complicated. It is a story of overt forces: the Biafran propaganda, the sensationalist American depictions of famine. It is also the story of forces more subtle: collective memories and self-imaginations. At its best, it weaves the subtle and overt together in a way which better explains why Americans engaged with the Nigeria-Biafra war to the extent they did. The theoretical question which drove the work is as devastatingly complex in its answer as it is simple in its stating: what makes Americans feel connected to far away conflicts particularly in the absence of a significant national interest? I wondered if by studying the evolution of American concern for the plight of Biafrans in the late 1960s, I might discover something that would help me better understand the process of raising awareness of African issues that has gone on ever since and continues to this day.

I was also driven by both a general and a specific historical question. At the most basic level, I wanted to ask: How did Biafra sell itself to Americans, and how successful was the pitch? More specifically, I wanted to know how and why the Biafran rhetoric of genocide evolved over time, and how successfully it was leveraged. Generally speaking, I wanted to explore for myself what this lauded and lamented Biafran propaganda machine really said, and more importantly, to ask if the correlation between Biafran propaganda and American perception of the conflict was as strong as it seemed? Specifically, I wanted to see how the early use of genocide one of the most notable aspects of Biafran discourse had evolved and what sort of traction it had with American audiences. I chose to focus on news media to gauge United States citizen response to the crisis for a number of reasons. Looking back at the media allows one to examine evolutions of discourse over time. In a pluralistic and free environment, changes in news tend to reflect updates in both information and understanding. I knew from preliminary research that American discourse on Biafra was not monolithic, and focusing on news media allowed me to attempt to reconstruct the dynamic evolution of that understanding. I chose to focus on the New York Times because of its leading role in influencing informed discourse. As noted by many scholars, even at its height, active discussion of Biafra was limited to a relatively well-informed section of the public. Studies of Americans and foreign policy during the 1960s suggested that to talk about making an issue politically salient or generating widespread concern[and] mobilizing public opinion, was to talk about reaching the attentive public (informed and interested in foreign policy problems, and which constituted the audience for the foreign policy

discussions among the elites) and especially the policy and opinion elite at the top.1 My interest was to read what they were reading, in hopes of understanding how their perceptions of the conflict might have been shaped, and how those perceptions were or werent correlated to Biafran information. My focus on media had a theoretical underpinning as well. Stated one way, American news media is a crossroads where Americans and the world meet to share understanding. For the majority of citizens, news media forms the bridge between themselves and far-away conflicts. Examining the representation of the Biafra conflict in US news media seemed essential to understanding how American imaginations of the conflict developed. The Biafrans understood this point as well. The US-owned, Genevabased marketing firm, Markpress, which handled the majority of Biafras international publicity after 1968, targeted journalists in a myriad of ways to attempt to influence the conflict discourse on foreign shores.2 Throughout this thesis, I will argue that Biafran propaganda did not shape the discourse about Biafra in America to nearly the degree assumed by many modern scholars. This is certainly not for lack of trying; throughout the war, Biafran discourse evolved, internalizing lessons and regularly updating its own rhetoric. The reality, however, is that the relationship between Biafran foreign strategy and American representation of the conflict was much more subtle. Importantly, just as American perception of Biafra was not static, neither was the Biafran identity shaping its representations. In many ways, whatever distinct Biafran consciousness did exist was a product of the war, and for this reason, the reception of

1 2

Wiseberg, 545 Laurie Wiseberg, The International Politics of Relief, 575

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Biafran propaganda sent out into the world reflected and affected the domestic identity of that people at home. I spend much of my thesis exploring evolving Biafran selfimagination because I believe that, fundamentally, it cannot be detached from international representation and response. While researching, a number of key themes emerged in both Biafran propaganda and American media. First, there was the general discourse of genocide. Throughout the conflict, the extent to which and the language by which Biafra presented itself as the embattled victim of genocide evolved. If at the beginning, the concept was subdued and buried in the discussion of massacres and argument of secession for survival, by the time starvation hit, it was the word and rhetoric used to centralize all other discourses. As this thesis will show, this had largely to do with the development of the famine and humanitarian crisis, and the need for Biafra to control the political discussion of that crisis. Along with genocide came a strategic use of Holocaust allusion. Parallels to the modern and ancient plight of the Jews form the second theme I explore. The beginning of the conflict witnessed the regular appearance in both Biafran and American sources - of comparisons between the Ibo tribe that formed the core of the Biafran rebellion and Israelites. By the peak of the starvation crisis in Summer 1968, both the Biafrans and their humanitarian and political supporters in the United States were making frequent allusions to the Holocaust. In particular, the number 6 million became a portent for how many Biafrans might die if the problem of starvation was allowed to persist. I explore these from both a rhetorical and theoretical framework.

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Thirdly, I found it necessary to analyze the phenomenon of human bridges between Biafra and America. I noticed (in no small part because people like William Bernhardt of Markpress also noticed) that as the starvation took told, Americans and Europeans missionaries, humanitarians, and journalists made regular appearances both in Biafran propaganda and American news stories. I explore why it might have been important for Americans to have people like themselves as reference points to connect with the far away conflict. In particular, I spend some time thinking about the journalists themselves what forces were they subject to and how did their experience as people reporting the war color their bias? Finally, and most importantly, I deal with the phenomenon of starvation sympathy. The single biggest factor in engaging American attention during the war was the public discussion of starvation and its attendant imagery. As I dug back through the news, I was startled to see the change in quantity and type of coverage given to the conflict after the famine reached crisis levels in early Summer 1968. This realization brought up a new host of questions. What was it about starvation that engaged Americans so strongly? Who controlled the explanation of the famine? How did Biafran rhetoric change to assimilate the fact of starvation and did this influence American discourse or response to the mass hunger? Like the perceptions of the conflict more generally, the American perception of the famine had less to do with Biafran propaganda than has been previously suggested. The rhetoric of genocide certainly influenced some Americans during the starvation citizens and leaders alike. Despite this, there was much more to American imaginations

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than the Markpress strategy of equating the miserable images streaming into American homes with a Final Solution to the Biafra problem being cooked up in Lagos. As with all aspects of the conflict, the representation of the famine took the shape it did based on a combination of factors and people. The testimony of sympathetic journalists, missionaries, doctors, and others raised the moral indignation of average citizens. The political implications of that indignation were less clear. Indeed, the intransigence of both the Nigerian and Biafran leadership in compromising on a strategy for distribution of relief aid made Americans even more hesitant to take sides, and become politically invested beyond demanding that relief be delivered promptly and affectively to those in dire need. What seems clear now is that starvation had a particular power to involve American collective self-imagination, and that this imagination to a far greater degree than Biafran propaganda - dominated the mostly humanitarian response. The sections of this thesis reflect the complication of the story and the importance of attempting to understand the relationship between American media, Biafran propaganda, and American citizen response in nuanced terms. Section One provides the reader with some essential background for understanding the conflict. Although this thesis is primarily focused on understanding representations and imaginations, these cannot be wholly divorced from the military context of the war. The section includes an analysis of early Biafran self-representation as well as an examination of American discussion about the conflict in the wars early months. In some ways, it provides the necessary barometer of American interest in and

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discourse on the conflict before the starvation began. Importantly, it also demonstrates the relative submergence of genocide in early Biafran rhetoric. Section Two focuses on April through June 1968, a period of real and rhetorical transitions in the conflict. It was during this period that the humanitarian crisis began to become acute, and for the first time the suffering of the Biafran citizens resulted in positive diplomatic gain for the Biafran leadership. The section examines the language used by four African nations in their recognition of Biafra and situates it in an ongoing evolution of the discourse of genocide and suffering. The section concludes with an examination of the Biafran use of genocide immediately before starvation really hit the American headlines. Section Three returns the sphere of discussion back to America. At its most basic, it is the story of how the famine came to dominate American imagination of the Biafra conflict. It focuses on the representation of the famine in the New York Times during the Summer 1968, and tries to offer some suggestions about why Americans responded to the particular representations offered in that media. Importantly, it takes time to think critically about the journalists embedded in Biafra and why they wrote the way they did. Towards the end of the section, I explore how Biafra tried to influence the representations of the famine by connecting starvation and genocide, and ask how successful the strategy was. Section Four moves beyond the historical narrative to explore two of the main components of the Biafran rhetoric of genocide in terms of potentials to engage American citizens. I first look at the allusions to modern and biblical Israelis and attempt to situate the reader in the 1960s context into which Holocaust comparisons would have come.

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Secondly, I look at the power of hunger to engage and connect people across borders. This exploration is routed in anthropological, psychological and humanitarian theory and offers interesting conclusions about the language of suffering. Broadly, I argue that the Holocaust comparisons had a limited ability to engage Americans while hunger had a power to engage that was much greater than verbal communication. Ive used a variety of sources to complete this work. The Melville Herskovitz Library provided me an invaluable bounty of Biafran press releases, pamphlets, and more. These primary sources helped me specify the contextualized understanding of the Biafran propaganda campaign I received from secondary sources like John de St. Jorres The Brothers War. On the American side, my primary sources were the New York Times articles published throughout the war. Although I have only included analysis on Spring 1967 and Spring and Summer 1968, my research included reading articles throughout the war, in order to better understand those documents I did focus on. Although I havent presented the entire chronology of the war, I believe the three sections Ive focused on, Summer 1967 and Spring and Summer 1968 are essential in understanding how Biafra achieved its particular place in American consciousness. Summer 1967 provides a control for understanding Biafran rhetorical strategy and American media representation of the conflict in the absence of humanitarian disaster. Spring 1968 was a transition; the starvation was getting worse, the Biafran foreign diplomatic gains were getting better, and the rhetoric was changing accordingly. Summer 1968 saw the onslaught of starvation imagery in American media that corresponded with the most devastating period of famine during the war.

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In the end, I hope that this thesis might help reframe the discourse of crosscultural imaginations and help us think critically about how we engage with and understand those far-away conflicts which continue to plague and shape our world to this very day.

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SECTION ONE: Background and Beginnings From May 1967 until June 1968, the world watched the implosion of Nigeria, a country in which many had placed their hopes for a unified and successful post-Colonial Black Africa. The first half of the war was characterized by an early military back-andforth that by Fall 1967 had calcified into a frustrating siege and stalemate that would last more than two years. From May 1967 through September 1968, the war went from avoidable to inevitable to near Biafran triumph and finally to languishing. The Federal Military Government, bolstered by British and Russian armaments, was in the better long term military position, and after September 67, was never under threat of losing the war again. The period from October 67 to June 1968 ushered in the long siege of Biafra and in many ways, the most important battles were fought in the international diplomatic realm. This section of the thesis explores the early American perception of the NigeriaBiafra war. Specifically, it focuses on early Biafran self-representation and its influence, or lack thereof, on American news coverage, exemplified by the New York Times. The purpose of this section is to provide an initial reading of the context into which Biafran propaganda was received. Where the Times reporting reflected the reality of the situation, I have referenced it like any other source. Where it departed, however, I have made particular note in order to better understand the early perceptions of the conflict.

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On May 28th, 1967, Biafra became front page news. The Regional Assembly of the Eastern Region of Nigeria3 was presented by regional leader Lt. Col. Emeka Ojukwu with three choices; they could submit to domination from Northern Nigeria by accepting Nigerian leader Colonel Gowons terms for a confederation of states, they could continue the present stalemate and drift, or alternately ensure the survival of [their] people by asserting [their] autonomy.4 The Consultative Assembly correctly read Ojukwus tone, characterized by the sulphurous regional sentiment in which anyone who opposed secession was likely to be branded as a saboteur.5 The next day, they passed a unanimous resolution giving Ojukwu a mandate to declare the sovereign Republic of Biafra. The next few days, called a cliffhanger by the New York Times6, must have seemed more like inevitability come to pass in Nigeria. Even before the actual declaration of secession, the leader of the Federal Military Government of Nigeria, Yakubu Gowon had declared a state of emergency and assumed full powers. In the declaration he stated that We must rise to the challengewhat is at stake is the very survival of Nigeria as one political and economic unit.7 And so the terms were laid. On the one side was the Gowons call for One Nigeria and on the other was Ojukwus Sovereignty for Survival. Even as early as May 1967, these two refrains largely defined the political terms of the conflict. Over the course of the war, they became increasingly calcified, their entrenchment and mutual exclusivity

The region that would later become known as Biafra St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 121. 5 Ibid., 121. 6 Eastern Nigeria Votes Secession, The New York Times, May 28, 1967 7 Ibid.
4

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ensured by uncompromisingly hawkish leadership and internal propaganda campaigns to match. Between the Eastern Regional Consultative Assemblys secession mandate on the 27th and Ojukwus declaration of independence three days later, a flurry of press coverage introduced Americans to the conflict and its players like the actors in a Shakespearean drama. Some of the coverage used language just as dated. Lloyd Garrison, a writer who would provide much of the New York Times coverage of the crisis, suggested that the country had for months been on the verge of disintegration as a result of bitter tribal and religious hatred.8 While not without an element of truth, there was much more to the conflict. Nigerias ethnic composition included three major tribal groups the Western Yorubas, Northern Hausa-Fulanis, and the Eastern Ibos. Each region had numerous minority groups including the Ijaw and Efik in Eastern Nigeria, Kanuri and Tiv in the North, and Nupe and Kamberawa in the West. At the time of the outbreak of war, the population of the minority groups together approximately equaled that of the Yoruba, Ibo, and HausaFulani combined.9 The North was the sphere of the Muslims, most of who had been converted hundreds of years earlier. The South tended to be Christian, particularly in the East, which had the highest proportion of Catholics of any region in Africa. When the conflict started, Nigeria had between 47-55million people, the majority concentrated in the North (approximately 25 million) and East (roughly 13 million).10 The balance of power in the country had been historically determined by a number of factors. In 1914 the British had amalgamated the North and the South, not for
8 9

Nigeria on Brink of Breaking Up, The New York Times, May 29, 1967. St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 15. 10 Ibid., 15.

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the sake of unifying the people but rather to achieve a coordinated and economicallyefficient administration.11 To this end, the British-style of indirect rule was utilized to keep the Northern emirs and sultans in positions of political power throughout the country. The Eastern region was, if second in population first in natural wealth.12 It was characterized by rich crops like palm oil, and throughout the period of colonial administration, an Ibo Diaspora had led entrepreneurial Ibos to positions of economic prominence throughout the country. Throughout the 60 year period of British rule before independence, policy emanating from Whitehall had the effect sometimes intentionally of exacerbating regional tension and providing incentives for loose tribal affiliations to harden into competing ethnic factions. When independence was finally granted in 1960, the reactions of the Nigerian people tended to be varied. Ironically, the only group that had a vested interest in Nigerian unification was the Eastern Region that would later secede.13 This point would later be leveraged in Biafran propaganda that argued that the economic dispersion of the Ibo (along with a set of essential Ibo traits) had produced in Biafrans a certain unique Nigerian cosmopolitanism. And as Biafran public relations would later point out ad infinitum, it was in fact, the Northern Region that had first tried to secede in 1966 only to be persuaded otherwise by extreme last minute pressure from British and American diplomats. Early New York Times articles tended to locate the origins of the conflict in the overthrow of the first Nigerian constitutional government in January 1966. According to
11

Nwachuku, Levi Akalazu. U.S./Nigeria: An Analysis of U.S. Involvement in the Nigeria/Biafra War, 1967-1970, 42. 12 Thompson, Joseph E. American Policy and African Famine: The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1966-1970, 3 13 Nwachuku, Levi Akalazu. U.S./Nigeria: An Analysis of U.S. Involvement in the Nigeria/Biafra War, 1967-1970, 49.

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popular perception, the coup had been led by Gen. Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Ibo. About two hundred days later, in July, a countercoup left a couple hundred Ibo officers dead and a group of largely Northern army officers took power. One of those officers was Yakuba Jack Gowon, a soft spoken man who would rise to full power during the Biafran conflict. The 32-year old leader of the Federal Military Government, a member of a minority Middle Belt tribe, was in some ways an unlikely choice for his powerful position. He was, according to a New York Times profile that appeared in late July, 1967, a soldiers soldier, the kind of staff officer who was the first at his desk in the morning [and] the last to show up for a pre-dinner drink at the officers mess. In fact, it was for precisely these qualities that his fellow officers organizing the second coup had turned to him he hadnt made any enemies and could be trusted.14 This picture was in sharp contrast with his Biafran counterpart the chainsmoking scholar Odumegwu Ojukwu. He had attended Oxford compared to Gowons Sandhurst military training. Ojukwu had been the least popular of the four regional governors under Ironsi, but all that changed after the counter-coup in July. It changed even more in September 1966 after the massacre of thousands of Ibos in the North that produced an exodus of millions back to the Eastern Region. In the East, he became, according to one commentator, a sort of folk hero,15 due to his defiance of Gowon in the aftermath of the counter-coup. The personalities of each man and their beliefs about the other would affect their hesitance to discuss realistic options for compromise during the war.
14 15

Nigeria: Two Men Who Are Preparing to Reap a Whirlwind, The New York Times, June 25, 1967 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 81.

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It is important to briefly examine the late 1966 pogrom of Easterners by Northern Nigerians. The event would be singularly important for the state of hypertension and fear it produced in Ibos. As the war progressed, it would be held up as the ,best piece of evidence for the Biafran governments claim that the Eastern peoples faced a program of genocide if they survived the war.16 The event started on September 19th, when a group of Northern soldiers began killing Ibos in Tiv country in the Middle Belt area of the country. News of the killings triggered reprisal violence in the East, which was, in turn, broadcast on Northern radio. On September 29th, soldiers in Kano responded with a mass execution of Ibo refugees. Mobs soon formed in most major Northern towns, killing and looting particularly in the sabon gari or strangers quarters where the Ibos lived. John de St. Jorre, a journalist who spent time on both sides of the front lines and whose 1972 The Brothers War remains perhaps the most referenced source on the conflict suggested that, like earlier riots in May of the same year, the killings were organized though the form of planning is obscure. In many cases it was simply an awareness that the governmentdid not disapprove of or would make no effort to stop people who took the law into their own hands.17 Unlike earlier riots, he suggested that the Fall pogrom had significant involvement by the Army and that the killing was far more indiscriminate; it was carried out by all Northerners rather than simply Northern Muslims - and targeted all Southerners, rather than just Ibos.
For much of September and October the Northern Government lay supine as the pogrom burnt itself out. By that time thousands were dead or maimed and the entire Ibo
16

Interestingly, however, it was referred to as a massacre rather than genocide for more than a year in Biafran propaganda before being connected to the broader claim of genocide. This will be discussed in depth later. 17 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 84.

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population of the North, about a million, had abandoned everything it possessed and was trekking back to the East.18

The mythology of the massacres, if one of the hoariest [myths] of the Civil War,19 would go on to be perhaps the most important single historical factor in the Biafran peoples deep belief that their security could never be assured in a federal Nigeria. Indeed, its visceral impact on the population was leveraged by Biafran leadership throughout their propaganda campaign, although the context in which it was used evolved along with the general tone and strategy of the public rhetoric. Where legitimate fear ended and manipulated fear began is hard to determine. Whatever the case, the massacres played deeply on the collective imaginations of the Ibo people and helped produce a sort of fatalism that led them to throw their whole lot for survival behind Ojukwu. Even before the long-term consequences sunk in, the immediate aftermath of the killings was disastrous: more than any other single factor, [they] sent [Nigeria] down the slope of disintegration and war.20 Despite the appalling21 numbers killed, outside observers urged Ojukwu and the East to show restraint in the period between the Consultative Assemblys secession mandate and the declaration a few days later. No one needs to tell Colonel Ojukwu what a serious perhaps even tragic move it would be to break Nigeria into pieces, wrote the New York Times. That particular article was fascinating in its combination of wishful thinking, demonstration of American interest in the region, and genuine sensitivity and thoughtfulness rather than simple partisanship to the fears and frustrations of the
18

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 85. 19 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 87. 20 Ibid., 87. 21 Nigerias Cliffhanger, The New York Times, May 29, 1967.

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Eastern Region. While underestimating the history of the conflict by remembering that only three years ago Nigeria could rightly be called a haven of stability, the editors of the Times asserted their belief that the Ibos of the East have the best of reasons to hate and fear the northern Moslems. The editorial also foreshadowed the oil question, which, given the simultaneity of the Six-Day War, was at the forefront of American thinking. The exceptionally rich oil fields, most of which were in the Eastern region, were being developed by American, British and French capital. For this reason, secession would have an unhappy resemblance to the effort of the rich copper province of Katanga in the Congo to be independent.22 This specter of Katanga would hang over Biafra, in particular in the minds of African nations.23 Still, there was little to be done. In response to the Consultative Assemblys mandate, Gowon replaced the four regions with a twelve state structure designed to give minority groups a greater investment in the Nigerian federation by allocating them a modicum of political autonomy and authority. The declaration effectively land-locked the Ibos and was, as de Jorre wrote the straw that broke the Camels back for the East.24 On May 30th, the Biafran flag - red, black, and green horizontal bars behind a symbolic rising sun - fluttered out over the State House in Enugu for the first time. The new national anthem announced the dawn of the Republic of Biafra on Radio around the country. A few short weeks later, the first shots rang out heralding the start of the civil war, a conflict fought for reasons real and imagined. It would drag the country through thirty months of war, taking with it the lives of millions of soldiers and civilians and the hope of one of the most promising countries in Africa.
22 23

Ibid. See more on the discussion of Balkanization fears later 24 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 122.

24

*** The six weeks between the declaration of independence and the start of fighting were possessed of a sort of anxious calm. On both sides of the line, armies trained, recruited, and dug-in. The Federal economic blockade that had been implemented upon Eastern secession quietly dug its teeth in, and some hopeful observers pleaded with Gowon to give the sanctions time to work before completing the self-fulfilling prophecy of war that had loomed for months. John de St. Jorre noticed that the environment in Nigeria had a dreamlike qualitythe threat of war hung menacingly in the sodden air, but no one seemed to know quite when and in what shape it would come. The only constant was its inevitability.25 On the other side, he remarked that a siege psychology was already a reality
Ever since the second coup and the subsequent massacres a year before, the Easterners, especially the Ibos, had been drawing in their horns and looking fearfully across the Niger. The mood of heady nationalism with which they had greeted the declaration of Biafras independence a fortnight ago had passed. In its place was a more somber appreciation of their present diplomatic and physical isolation and a gnawing unease induced by the war which they too, knew had come.26

The war would vindicate de St. Jorres analysis. Indeed, what Nigeria and much of the Western world - seemed constantly to underestimate was just how powerfully the Easterns own beleaguered imagination of itself as a people with its back to the wall of extinction that drawing in [of the] horns would affect their determination to struggle, like the chosen people of Canaan, for survival and ascendance. The overwhelming character of the moment - as demonstrated by American reporting and the flurry of propaganda and public relations emanating from Lagos and Enugu was that of everyone waiting to see what anyone else was going to do next. No government wanted to make the first move lining up next to the belligerents especially
25 26

Ibid., 126. Ibid., 130.

25

if there was still a chance that the story might have a peaceful ending - or at least one that maintained a comfortable (and some would argue, delusional) status quo of united Nigeria Ojukwu joked about it, saying with a chuckle that the Western Powers were hanging back waiting for the African powers and the Africans were hanging back for the West. Still, as de St. Jorre noted, this point was probably worrying the Biafran government more than any other at the time.27 Nigeria sought to localize the conflict as much as possible; it wanted the external perception to remain that the secession was an internal issue to be dealt with by the legitimate sovereign government of Nigeria. The Biafrans sought exactly the opposite; the more they were able to draw diplomatic, financial, and military support from the outside, the more likely it was that they could achieve spoken and unspoken ends of the conflict. Their strategy was one of globalization; while the mechanism would change, this overarching framework would guide their foreign relations to the bitter end. The strategy was reflected both in the development of universalizing discourse and in the dispatch of emissaries around the world to raise support for the Biafran cause. *** The interim period de Jorre called the phoney war28 - after secession but before fighting - provides a unique moment to attempt to understand early American media discourse on the war and to try to see what the Biafrans were up against trying to buck the status quo and how initially successful they were in shaping the American view of the struggle. In the absence of battles and sound-bytes, the conflict was explored not simply
27

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 132. 28 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972). 132

26

as an African problem but in its global context. Early reporting in papers like the New York Times provides a wealth of material that helps explain how informed citizens were relating to the news of the conflict, attempting to understand it and place it next to other concerns and American foreign policy. At the time of secession, the Times had two foreign correspondents stationed in Nigeria. Alfred Friendly, Jr. was stationed mostly in Lagos while Lloyd Garrison wrote from the East.29 Garrisons personal story would be come emblematic of the pattern of relationships formed between sympathetic journalists and the Biafrans. During the first few months of the civil war, the Times coverage presented the conflict in terms resonant with domestic American self-awareness. The reporting placed emphasis on the potential impact on Nigerian oil, and more generally focused on the issue of regional and continental stability. Both motifs were linked to contemporary world events notably the Six Days War and US adventuring in Congo and Vietnam. To a much greater extent than would later be the case, early American media discourse on Nigeria focused on the question of oil. Much of the refining and shipping took place in or at least went through areas controlled by Biafra. At the beginning of the conflict, oil was the most explicit connection between America and Nigeria. Whats more, Nigerian oil gained a new prescience in the wake of the Arab-Israeli Six Day war that closed down the Suez Canal for time and threatened to affect shipping of Middle Eastern oil. From the very first story following the Biafran declaration of independence, almost every New York Times article about the Nigerian crisis made some reference to the
29

Adepitan Bamisaiye, The Nigerian Civil War in the International Press, Transition, no. 44 (1974): 3032+34-35, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0042 1191%281974%290%3A44%3C30%3ATNCWIT %3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y

27

foreign oil interest in the Eastern part of that country. In many of these references, the issue was one of personnel. As opposed to the British, whose colonial legacy in the country had left a large group of expatriates, the majority of American nationals in Nigeria were oilmen and their families. As war began to look inevitable, the US recalled all dependents women and children. On June 2, some two to three hundred citizens were evacuated from the Mid-Western regions to Lagos for flights back to America.30 A few days later, the article Americans Begin to Leave Nigeria, reported 101 women and children had been airlifted from the east, part of a larger exodus of more than 700 dependences coordinated by Mobil.31 The oil men, on the other hand anxiously await[ed] the decision of their home offices on which way the money will go.32 The complication with the oil situation was that both Lagos and Enugu were pressuring the foreign companies to report their taxes to them. This problem loomed over the conflict and coverage from the moment of secession. Reporting on May 28, the day after the Eastern Assembly empowered Ojukwu to leave the Nigerian federation, the Times wrote that the American, British, and French petroleum companies have major stakes in thearea[and are] expected to come under heavy pressure to pay revenues to the Eastern Regions treasury.33 This prediction came to fruition. By mid-1967, Shell/BP had about 150 million British pounds invested in the eastern region and 100 million in the Federal controlled areas. Most of the Nigerian investment was in the Mid-West, which further complicated the problem because most of that oil was refined at Port Harcourt and shipped through the Trans-Niger pipeline both in the East. When the conflict erupted in
30 31

Lloyd Garrison. Nigeria Cancels American Airlift, The New York Times, June 3, 1967. Lloyd Garrison. Americans Begin to Leave Nigeria, The New York Times, June 5, 1967. 32 Ibid. 33 Eastern Nigeria Votes Secession, The New York Times, May 28, 1967.

28

June, the oil companies were focused on protecting their investment by keeping the oil flowing and tried to offend neither side.34 The Federal Military Government and Biafra each had certain types of leverage over the foreign companies in the oil war. The Federal Military Government could lock all the oil in the East by fully implementing the economic blockade which had thus far left Port Harcourt open to petroleum shipments. At the same time, Biafra could simply shut down the refinery and stop the flow. This issue came to a head on July 6 when the FMG threatened to stop the oil totally as a retaliatory measure if the producers met a demand to pay royalties to the East.35 The stakes of the conflict were more than simply financial. Who the oil companies chose to pay had ramifications for the legitimacy of the belligerents involved. It would be a coup for the Biafrans if Shell/BP gave even its grudging boiler stamp approval to the Republic by redirecting monies that used to go to Lagos to Enugu. In the long run, the question of Oil was of limited importance. A few months after fighting began, Biafras size had been significantly reduced and the re-captured land, in particular the newly formed Rivers State, had many of those vital oil resources. Despite this, the question of oil reflected a number of larger forces at work. First there was the question of neutrality. In the first few months of the conflict indeed, throughout the duration of the war foreign governments went out of their way to suggest their own conditioned neutrality. The oil issue demonstrated just how difficult and sometimes impossible real political neutrality would be to maintain. The oil
34

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 139. 35 Nigeria Threatens Easts Oil Exports, The New York Times, July 7, 1967. In fact, the threat was warranted as de Jorre describes in Chapter Five of Brothers War. Shell/BP had decided to pay a token payment of 250000 British pounds to the Biafrans to keep the oil flowing.

29

companies could not claim total neutrality, for whatever act they made, even an act of omission, had some political connotation. If they continue to pay royalties to Lagos, it was a political statement in favor of the status quo which amounted to support of Federal Nigerian unity. On the other hand, redirecting that payment to Enugu was a de facto recognition of the Biafran Republic. This was further complicated by the role that Britain played in these negotiations.
The British government came into the picture because, rightly or wrongly, both sides saw it as the power behind Shell/BP and, indeed, with its forty-nine per cent shareholding in British Petroleum, the government could hardly not be involved.36

The New York Times recognized just how complicated the situation was in a dual profile of Gowon and Ojukwu that appeared on June 25.
Today, to protect its oil interests, the West has two agonizing choices: to back General Gowon and risk a bloodbath in the East, or to recognize, diplomatically or tacitly, Biafras right to exist and allow the oil companies to now divert their revenues into the Biafran treasury.37

This confusion and complication of neutrality ominously forshadowed the trouble neutral countries would have distributing aid when the humanitarian crisis of mass famine began a few months later. If starving babies seemed the very antithesis of political, the myriad issues involved in alleviating that misery could not be divorced from political wrangling. In particular, on whose terms and through what mechanisms aid could be delivered would be a sticking point of the crisis, with both Nigerian and Biafran leaderships remaining intransigent that food supplies be distributed through their preferred means. The question of oil also raised important questions of national interest. As governments and citizens looked in on the Nigerian crisis, they were forced to ask themselves what level of involvement was proportionate to their national interest
36

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 139. 37 Garrison Lloyd. Nigeria, The New York Times, Jun 25, 1967.

30

however they chose to define it. While the Americans were certainly concerned about their few hundred citizens working for American companies in the conflicted region, their investment in the area was no where near that of the British, who had been involved in Nigerian affairs for more than seven decades. For this reason, at the beginning, America was quite comfortable following the British lead and more or less keeping its hands clean of the whole affair. As I will later argue, however, the beginning of the famine and the associated terrible images that stormed into American households starting in mid-1968 fundamentally changed the average Americans understanding of their relationship with the crisis. The fact of hunger and starvation in particular allowed them to personalize the otherwise inaccessible suffering, and in the process, opening the potential for understanding the conflict in personal terms. Cynicism and complication aside, by the time Biafra collapsed, many Americans had taken humanitarian relief of its civilian population as part and parcel of their national interest. Still, at the beginning of the conflict, the overwhelming issue for the American government and, to the extent that governments determine citizen sentiments towards unknown far-away places38, the American people, was that of stability. Even the oil issue came down fundamentally to stability; viewed in domestic terms, the question was who and what can we support to ensure a stable situation in which the barrel price of crude remains more or less the same? Many early conflict commentaries displayed a longing for a Nigeria which, according to Biafrans (and most likely other Nigerians as well) might never have existed

38

I happen to think that the power of governments to shape citizen opinion of foreign places is wildly underestimated although whether this underestimation is a bad thing, Im less sure.

31

except perhaps in Britains self-congratulatory imagination of the decolonization process. That was the Nigeria that only three years agocould rightly be called, as a [New York] Times correspondent then wrote, a haven of stability in an area of increasing political turbulence.39 That was the Nigeria that until her regional rivalries became overpoweringwas acclaimed in the West as Africas most promising democracy.40 That loss of Nigeria as a shining example of African democracy was particularly bitter to British and American policymakers who desperately sought stable democratic counter weights to Soviet-backed African revolutionary governments. Africans in places like South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Portuguese colonies still labored under racist colonial or minority white governments. The Western powers stood on much shakier ideological legs than did the Soviets on a continent bursting for freedom after centuries of exploitation and subjugation. Some scholars have also suggested that American liberals lamented the break up because it played into hands of racists just looking for examples of African failure to attend to their own affairs.41 In an extended featured that appeared on June 11, the New York Times Garrison wrote:
For Washington and London, Nigerias crisis means an end to the self-delusion that this former British colony, whose 55 million people make it Africas most populous nation, would develop into a showcase of what parliamentary government, Western aid and creative private enterprise in Africa could do.42

Early news coverage often tried to place the conflict in context of other foreign problems. One comparison that would hover over the Biafrans like a fog was that of Katanga. Katanga was the copper-rich southeast province of Congo that had seceded
39 40

Nigerias Cliffhanger, The New York Times, May 29, 1967. Lloyd Garrison. Eastern Region Quits Nigeria; Lagos Vows to Fight Secession, The New York Times, May 31, 1967. 41 Adepitan Bamisaiye, The Nigerian Civil War in the International Press, Transition, no. 44 (1974): 3032+34-35, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0042 1191%281974%290%3A44%3C30%3ATNCWIT %3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y 42 Lloyd Garrison. The Ibos Go It Alone, The New York Times, June 11, 1967.

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soon after independence in 1960, setting off a three year war involving a long and bloody suppression of the rebellion by the United Nations. The first editorial by the New York Times staff in the wake of the Eastern Consultative Assemblys secession mandate made the comparison explicitly.43 The comparison did not try to draw similarities between the specifics of the two secessions, but rather placed them both in the context of the widely-held fear of balkanization. An extremely pervasive logic one particular strong on the African continent itself held that secessions like Katanga and Biafra could set a dangerous precedent for fragmenting fragile new nations. Different groups had different reasons to look negatively towards this fragmentation. For the Cold War West, secessions demonstrated the fault-lines of both its colonial experiment and its ability to transition from colonial to autonomous leadership. Moreover, it provided an in-road for the USSR to gain new spheres of influence. For Africans, the specter of fragmentation threatened their fragile experiment with autonomy. More cynically, ethnic separatism was an ominous potent for African autocrats with potentially troublesome minorities.
For leaders of many other African countries, presiding over nations composed equally fractious tribal elements, the fear has arisen that if the secession virus spreads it could become a disease from which few governments could claim immunity.44

In the case of Biafra, Ojukwu and his leadership had to contend with the fear that the Biafran separation would lead to the total fragmentation of what was left of Nigeria, as well as being exported to fragile nations around the continent. The mood in the American press during the phoney war was pessimistic to say the least. The Easts secession has all but buried hopes that Nigerias three remaining regionscan hold

43

Nigerias Cliffhanger, The New York Times, May 29, 1967. Lloyd Garrison. The Ibos Go It Alone, The New York Times, June 11, 1967.

44

33

together,45 wrote the New York Times Garrison on May 31. That paper made the connection again a couple days later, quoting an Ojukwu who frustratedly stated that Congolese secessionist leader Tshombe was a puppet backed by foreign interests and therefore the comparison to Biafra was inapt. Over the first two months of the crisis, connections between Biafra and Katanga found their way not only into the Times writers vocabulary but the papers layout. In a number of articles, Biafra and Katanga were paired as complimentary or comparative situations. On July 9, the story Congo: Once Again, Turmoil, transitioned in the last column with the line if the fighting was diminishing in the Congo, however, Africa was being wracked with violence elsewhere last week. In Nigeria The same tie was made a week later in an article about Nigeria called Africa: Arms Are the Arbiter. While the body is all about Nigeria, the last paragraph of that story begins, in the Congo, meanwhile, the insurgency The Federal Military Government also experimented with the Katanga comparison. On July 19th, the Times reported that America and the former colonial powers had been assailed on radio for not really regard[ing] Africa as free from their perpetual suzerainty.46 It accused Britain, America and their fellow travelers [of] encourage[ing], the secession in Biafra, connecting this policy to American military assistance for the Congolese government in its campaign against a break-away region. This reframing of the Kantaga comparison reflected Nigerias desire to localize the conflict and keep the West out of it.

45 46

Urbane Secessionist Chukuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, The New York Times, May 31, 1967. Western Powers Assailed, The New York Times, Jul 19th.

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One of the strategies of Biafran propaganda was try to claim intellectual and diplomatic high ground by confronting arguments against its existence head on. The Enugu printer distributed a series of these arguments in pamphlet form. Number five was The Nigeria/Biafra Conflict: Fallacy of the Balkanization Theory.47 The document was produced in response to the argument often raised against the independence of Biafra that the success of this revolution will lead to the break-up of most of the countries of Africa.48 The fallacy of this logic, Biafra argued, was three-part. First, the argument assumed that all countries shared with Nigeria a history of political conflict and tribal animosity. Second, it assumed that there had been as much breach of faith between governments and citizens as had, according to the Biafrans, happened in Nigeria. Third, the balkanization argument suggested that political break-up happens because of precedent, not necessity. Predictably, Biafra rejected all three arguments. One could not assume instability simply because of arbitrary European boundaries. Additionally, bad faith towards the governor-governed contract was not, in the way necessary to lead a group to secession, a habit of most other African nations. Finally, what was important to consider about whether or not a country would secede was not whether it had the example of other successful rebellions, but rather to what extent the marriage of political association remained mutually beneficial and safe-guarding.
47

It is sometimes hard to tell when exactly various pamphlets were published. There is no date found on the Balkanization Theory document. That said, it is most likely from after May 1968, and almost certainly post-1967. The final line is a quote from a western expert, a strategy implemented by Markpress when they took over public relations strategy in January 1968. Moreover, its use of the word genocide suggests that it might be from the rhetorical interim period from April-June 1968 when genocide became a lynchpin term. For more, see the end of this section. 48 The Republic of Biafra, The Nigeria/Biafra Conflict: Fallacy of the Balkanization Theory, 1967, 1.

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Whatever the rhetoric, the Wests instinct was to listen to the African voice on the question of balkanization. The Organization of African Union had come into existence three years earlier, after all, with precisely the purpose of preserving African unity and colonial borders. The Times reflected this positioning in a June 4th article Broader Backing Sought by Lagos, which referenced the strong support of Nigerian unity that had come from respected Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and the Government of Gambia. Balkanization had another side as well. For average Americans, balkanization both real and imagined added to the sneaking suspicion that the whole world was out of control; too out of control, in fact, to spend much time worrying about. No one likes a problem political or otherwise thats impossible to solve, and as Vietnam burned and Africa raged with post-colonial upheaval, the incentives for dropping out of the conversation of new foreign action must have seemed high. This attitude was reflected in early editorials relating to Biafra. During the first two months following independence, mail at the New York Times focused on the Nigeria conflict was sparse, and suggested, in tone and participation, that the primary concerned audience at the beginning was very different than it would be few months later after the famine began. Whereas later, citizens from all walks of life would write to deplore the humanitarian crises, the early letters came mainly from what seems like a focused group of internationally-minded citizens. Those that did write tended to lump Biafra in with other places America shouldnt get involved. The tension of foreign involvement was not just written. A political cartoon appearing in the July 16 Times Letters to the Editor page pictured a woman running from

36

a burning city with a sign over it that says Racial problems at home, towards a fireman with a US hat in the foreground, hosing off a burning building labeled Vietnam, the Congo, and other Far Away Places.49 One of the strongest expressions of the frustration and simple annoyance that Americans felt towards the third world was the editorial Observer: Enough, Enugu, Enough, which appeared in the June 15, 1967 New York Times.50 The editorial was a narrative story about Carl Spillhouse. Carl was a well-meaning civil servant in the Bureau of Stamp and Glue Standards, who wanted to fulfill his duty of informed citizenship by learning about Latin America. Moreover, he wanted to be able to talk to his Chilean neighbor. He began learning, but suddenly had to switch his attention to Vietnam, zone of the USs new adventure. Just as he gave up ever trying to figure out the Mekong Delta, he was shocked to discover that a country named Dahomey existed. Africa confused him. He wasnt able to keep Ghana straight from Gabon or Guyana. Over a month, he went through the alphabet, clearing the Ms Malagasy, Malaysia, Malawi, and Mali and the Ts Tanzania, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago. Rwanda was troubling because no one wanted to talk to him about Rwanda, save his Chilean neighbor, who wanted to know why Americans cared more about Rwanda than Costa Rica? And just when he had the demographics of Lesotho down, the Middle East crisis happened. But Biafra was too much. Its emergenceoccurring while his back was turned, defeated him. The conclusion of the column was that the trouble with the world today [is that] it is impossible to keep up with the arrival of new nations. Take three weeks off

49 50

Fire!, The New York Times, July 16, 1967 Observer: Enough, Enugu, Enough!, The New York Times, June 15, 1967

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from Africa and Asia to see a Middle East crisis through, and while your back is turned up springs a Biafra.51 If cynical, the editorial must also have held indeed still holds a certain resonance. In 1967, the American experience as an active world leader was still only a couple decades old. As recently as 1943, leading publisher Henry Luce could write a piece like The American Century, in which he berated American citizens and government for allowing the world to fall into the scourge of war by not asserting its natural leadership. At the time, during the height of WWII, this made sense, but Americas subsequent experiments in foreign involvement had given some clout and legitimacy to resurgent isolationism. Failed Cold War experiments in Cuba and the contemporary Vietnam morass played mightily on the minds of citizens loathe to become embroiled in more foreign troubles. Two of the three Letters to the Editor published in June and July 1967 that referenced Biafra did so only as a passing example for why the US shouldnt be involved in more of these adventures abroad. Frustrated by LBJs shipment of Paratroopers to Mobutus Congo, Edward Tiryakian asked If Nigerias Federal Government invites our troops to go into Biafra, if the Sudan asks us for military assistance to put down dissidence in their southern province, if the Portuguese ask us for help in Angola, are we going to add new commitments which can only perpetuate the image of American imperialism?52 Indeed, this liberal non-interventionism was the mirror of the domino theory which had in part led to the mess in Vietnam. If we began intervening in the affairs of

51 52

Ibid. Letters to the Editor of the Times, The New York Times, July 16, 1967

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other countries outside of our realm of interest, its just going to set a precedent for us to do the same later. This was echoed in another letter that appeared a week later. Why intervene in the Congoand not in Nigeria or the Middle East or Cyprus or Hungary?53 This type of intervention would promote a false image of American imperialism. The Congo interventionseems to indicate that the Administrationis assuming the role of the dominant world power, with the right and responsibility to intervene overtly in the affairs of small nations.54 Ever since the days of Teddy Roosevelt in the Philippines and Spanish-America, Americans had flirted with the idea that their peculiar place as the only big power without a colonial past in fact with an anti-colonial past, gave them the potential to be a beneficent power throughout the world. The July 23 letter rejected this idea, suggesting that a durable world order, which we profess to desire, cannot be built on the unilateral actions of one country, taken without consideration for or consultation with other nations.55 This issue would arise again later in the Biafra conflict, when Presidential candidate Nixon tried to make the distinction between acting as the worlds moral conscious and as its policemen. The letter writer was one Jacob Allen Toby, who taught in Nigeria from 1962 to 1964. The third letter to the editor published between June and August was also from an expert source. T. Obinkaram Echew, Assistant Secretary (Publicity) for the Biafra Students Association in the Americas wrote a vitriolic column in response to a Times editorial that implored Gowon to continue his blockade, giving it time to work before
53 54

Letters to the Editor, The New York Times , July 23, 1967 Ibid. 55 Ibid.

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resorting to military action. To maintain the blockade would be utterly appalling in the useless suffering, it would cause.
In your fond hope that the sanctions will bring the people of Biafra to their knees, you have complete misjudged their psychological makeup. The more they suffer, the more they will be prepared to suffer in order to uphold their inalienable right to survival.Gowons cause will prolong the present stalemate and consequently the suffering of millions of people in Biafra.56

To a tragic extent, the commentator would be exactly right. In retrospect, the siege did not weaken the resolve of the Biafran people, but rather played directly into their fears of slaughter at the hands of their former Nigerian fellows. Rather than breaking them apart, the Federal blockade of Nigeria had the disastrous and unintended consequence of drawing the Ibos together by killing them slowly with starvation. Indeed, one of the great ironies of the Nigeria-Biafra war is that the actions of each side, designed to break apart the unity of the other, had the opposite effect making the foundation of both Ibo nationalism and Nigerian unity much stronger than they ever were before the war began. The Ibo siege psychology was not necessarily, however, inevitable. Rather, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy created by hawkish Biafran leadership and propaganda that played upon legitimate Ibo fears routed most strongly in the fall 1966 massacres. Inevitable or not, Ibo and Biafran psychology was a central feature of the early conflict discourse both from the Biafran public relations machine and in the Western Media. When the starvation struck in mid 1968, perceptions of Biafran psychology and identity would come to bear in discourses of aid and politics. It is therefore worth trying to understand the rhetorical relationship between Biafran self-understanding, created or otherwise, and the early representation in American media. Two themes common to early

56

Letters to the Editor, The New York Times, July 4, 1967

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Biafran discourse were a focus on the 1966 massacres as the cause of trouble and a comparison of the Biafrans to the Israelis. Most early New York Times articles and editorials started the chronology of the crisis with the 1966 massacres. On May 29th, Lloyd Garrison wrote that the crisis has been growing since September, when thousands of Easterners were massacred in the North and more than a million refugees left the North for the Eastern Region.57 On the same day, the editorial staff claimed that this gave the Ibos of the Eastthe best of reasons to hate and fear the northern Moslems.58 According to the Times, the massacres set off a wave of negotiations about the future of the political make-up, culminating eventually with Collonel Ojukwus independence speech, a 3am affair that began with a lengthy summary of the Easts grievances, with special emphasis on the massacre last September.59 Interestingly, as June and July progressed, the description of the massacres began to include estimates of the dead. On June 18th, The Times Lawrence Fellows wrote that maybe 10000maybe 30000 had been killed. A few weeks later, an article on the Congo mentioned that about 20000 Ibos in the north were killed there last October. The epidemiology of the 30000 number is vague. While it would become the commonly referenced estimate of the dead during most of the war, it is unclear where it came from and who was first to use it. John de St. Jorre traced the evolution of the numbers game, calling the number citation of the massacres one of the hoariest of the civil wars myths.60 According to St. Jorre, Ojukwu escalated the number four times. In
57 58

Lloyd Garrison. Nigeria on Brink of Breaking Up, The New York Times, May 29, 1967. Nigerias Cliffhanger, The New York Times, May 29, 1967. 59 Lloyd Garrison. Eastern Region Quits Nigeria; Lagos Vows to Fight Secession, The New York Times, May 31, 1967. 60 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 86.

41

the forward to an early booklet entitled Pogrom, he wrote of more than 7000 dead. At the Aburi conference in January 1967, it had become 10000. By the start of the war, the figure most often used by Biafran propaganda and most often accepted unthinkingly by outsiders, was 30000. By the June 1969 Ahiara Declaration, the number jumped again to 50000.61 More than any other single piece of evidence, the massacres were proof to the Biafrans that the Nigerians wanted them dead. As the Ojukwu government more fully articulated genocide and continuously connected sovereignty and safety, the massacres provided the rhetorical lynchpin. Every wartime atrocity became part of that master plan that began decades ago and came to a head in 1966. It is important to examine how Biafra was representing itself at this early juncture in the conflict. An important Biafran public relations strategy was to introduce its cause to the world through a set of documents released by the government printers at Enugu. These documents provided the narrative background for the Biafran struggle. They were the stories and histories of the Biafran people their independent streak, their selfreliance, their ethnic intermingling and their sense of self. Most of all they were they were designed to demonstrate the nation-ness of the Biafran people. The documents sought to frame international discourse by situating the norms the Biafrans were up against in a specific context. One of the earliest of these documents - and one of the largest in its scope is Introducing Biafra, published by the Government of the Republic of Biafra in 1967 and soon thereafter distributed by organizations like the Britain-Biafra Association. The document contained everything from history to religion to economic potentiality of the
61

Ibid., 86.

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Biafran people. The thrust of the document as a whole, like the set of documents of which it was a larger part, was to demonstrate just how particularly suited to nation hood the new Republic of Biafra was. If the language of genocide was not brought to bear as it would be later, the document discussed the principle that would shape that rhetoric, namely that only Biafran sovereignty could safeguard the health of its people. One notion that the Biafrans needed to dispel was that they were somehow the troublemakers of the situation, upsetting an otherwise stable Nigeria with their political greed. Stability was a major consideration for peripheral government actors, and as the secessionist group, the Biafrans had to demonstrate that, in effect, they had had no choice. At the same time, they had to do this in a way which did not diminish their own standing by demonstrating a lack of agency. In the Introducing Biafra document, they speak to this dual need by arguing that the Biafran people were in fact the people who had tried most strenuously to preserve the Nigerian republic. They had made desperate efforts to save the Federation of Nigeria from disintegration. More than any other people in the former Federation, Biafrans contributed their human and material resources to the cause of national unity.62 This was due on the one hand to Biafran progress and dynamism as compared to the tardiness and conservatism of their neighbors who were generally unable to achieve the same standards of efficiency and prosperity.63 Moreover, they argued that as early as the 1914 British unification of Northern and Southern Nigeria, an economic and industrial Biafran diaspora had placed Easterners in positions of leadership around the country. For this reason, they were the only regional or ethnic group with a clear vested interest in national unity.
62
63

Government of the Republic of Biafra, Introducing Biafra, 1967. Ibid.

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The substantive pieces of the document, sections titled The People, Political and Social Systems and Economic Resources, all contained an implicit two part argument; that Biafra was ideally suited for nationhood, and that indeed, that nation could and should be a dynamic partner in West Africa for interested Western powers. The document worked hard to reclaim the language of tribe, suggesting that in fact, national consciousness was a more accurate descriptor of Eastern sentiment. Almost four pages of the total eighteen are spent analyzing the processes of acculturation and inter-dependence which had created an ethnically homogenous Biafra.64 As it says, these bonds were woven from the earliest times when the territory was people,65 and had been produced by periodic movement of the population, the development of the economic nexus, the growth of the oversea trade in slaves, and the division of labour.66 Together, these factors fostered the tradition of mutual reliance and support, now characteristic of Biafrans.67 Politically, the Biafrans were ultra-democratic, highly individualistic and disliked or suspected any form of external government and authority.68 Relationships among Biafrans were moderated by matrilineal connections and the attitude toward warfare was mild and inflected by an interest in third party moderation.69 It was in the realm of economics that the strongest support for Biafran partnership seemed to spring. As the document stated, Biafrans had long been famed for their industry, initiative, self-reliance andalmost insatiable thirst for learning.70 This
64 65

Ibid. Ibid., 6. 66 Ibid., 7. 67 Ibid., 8. 68 Ibid., 10. 69 Ibid., 7. 70 Ibid., 12.

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initiative was not simply individualistic, but had allowed her communities to develop an incredible number of social service projects like bridges, roads, postal agencies, hospitals, etc. Even with this, the human resources of Biafra were not her only economic asset. The small territory had a wealth of natural resources as well; palm oil from trees, timber, minerals, and now recently discovered reserves of oil. The document is not shy about asserting Biafran potential: few countries in Africa, it says, possess economic resources, human and material, comparable to Biafra.71 The conclusion brought the entire story together. Biafrans have all the attributes of a nation. They are capable of defending the integrity of their country and playing an effective role in the counsels of Africa and the world. Above all they possess an abundance of energy and an indomitable will to succeed.72 Perhaps even more importantly, the conclusion articulated the stakes of the war. Biafra was a sovereign country which Biafrans see as their only salvation if they are to survive as a people.73 According to the document, the conflict started with the massacres of Biafrans (or more accurately, Ibos) at Jos in 1945 and Kano in 195374. Whats more, the 1966 pogrom resulted in an irreversible movement of population75 that had made it impossible for Biafrans to feel safe under the current Nigerian regime. The language was strong. In Nigeria, the Biafrans were molested, taunted, hounded, murdered, and finally driven away. Indeed, whatever the other causes, the last page of the introduction makes clear that when all other considerations are leveled, it is the calculated and systematic

71 72

Ibid., 17. Ibid., 19. 73 Ibid., 19. 74 Ibid., 1. 75 Ibid., 2.

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persecution of Biafransthat has driven us to seeksalvation in independence. This was, they said, the struggle for our survival.76 Still, what remains most notable about this indictment was the temperance of the language in relation to the rhetoric that would come to dominate Biafran dispatches just a few months later. This struggle for survival was only mentioned in the introduction and conclusion of the document. Moreover, the statistics which become favorites of the Biafran Minister of Information namely that the 1966 pogroms killed 30,000 were no where to be found. The rawness of the language was not yet fully developed molested, taunted, hounded, and murdered sounds tame compared with how they would soon come to describe their plight. *** All throughout the early Times coverage, the Biafrans were presented much as they tended to portray themselves an independent, entrepreneurial group capable of living with their backs to the wall. Indeed, they were portrayed as a group who others sometimes didnt like because of their success and industry. They were regularly compared to both the modern Israelis and biblical Israelites. Reporting the declaration of independence, the Times wrote that the Ibo tribesman is Eastern Nigerias most important and controversial resource.
Outside his region, the Ibo may be hated or mildly resented or publicly respected, but he is seldom loved. Like the Biblical Israelites, with whom the Ibos share some cultural parallels, the Easts predominant tribe is individualistic, clannish, enterprising, and with an unbending will that some describe as arrogance. Others equate it with the character of modern-day Israelis, a people the Ibos admire.77

Writing a few days later from inside Biafran territory, the same author framed the discussion in terms of the foreign perception of Ibos. Vindicating the message of the
76 77

Ibid., 3. Lloyd Garrison. Eastern Region Quits Nigeria; Lagos Vows to Fight Secession, The New York Times, May 31, 1967.

46

Biafra Student Association, he wrote that In the view of almost all outside observers in Biafra, the more the sanctions bitethe most there will develop a back-to-the-wall state of mind; like a beleagured Israel, Biafra will fight back. It will have nothing to lose. For the Ibo it will be survival or death.78 It wasnt just the outsiders making this comparison. A profile of the urbane secessionist Chukuemeka Ojukwu ended with a quote in which the Biafran leader comments on the Leon Uris novel Exodus about the founding of Israel.
There are parallels here, he said, reflecting the widespread identification with Israel among the Ibos. The Israelis are hard-working, enterprising people. So are we. Theyve suffered from pogroms. So have we. In many ways, we share the same promise, and the same problems.79

A June 11 feature went so far as to find suggest deeper anthropological and linguistic connection, shrouded in a dose of fascinating mystery. No one knew where the Ibos had come from, yet their society had become a source of endless fascination for anthropologists who suspect[ed] they may have migrated from the Nile Valley centuries ago.80 Cited as evidence were similarities in Hebrew and Ibo speech patterns, similar practices of capital punishment, land tenure, child birth, circumcision, stealing, and the fact that the faces on their masks and carvings [were] not Negroid, but Eastern. In 1967, the connection to Israel was loaded with potential meaning. The late 1960s witnessed a subtle but profound shift in the American imagination of Israel. Epic movies of the 1950s such as the Ten Commandments reintroduced the idea of Biblical Canaan, a set of metaphors that found room for analogy in the American imagination of itself as a place imbued with a particular destiny. More concretely, the surprising military

78 79

Nigeria: Hell-Bent for Dissolution, The New York Times, June 4, 1967 Urbane Secessionist Chukuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, The New York Times, May 31, 1967. Lloyd Garrison. The Ibos Go It Alone, The New York Times, June 11, 1967.

80

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resilience of Israel to foreign aggression had started to change Americas admiration for and interest in cooperating with the island nation. Perhaps most relevant to the Biafran discussion, the Holocaust was for the first time working its way into the public conscious as an event separable from and indeed, more terrible than, the general tragedy of World War II. When the discourse of genocide came to fruition in 1968, the Holocaust would be a favorite reference point. Even the number 6 million was used when estimating potential deaths from the famine. So there was the Ibo; a tenacioustribesmen, enterprising and independent, if sometimes clannish. This impression would largely follow the Biafrans throughout the war. Indeed, it had a demonstrable resonance with many of the journalists who found themselves shunned by Nigerians looking to localize the conflict and welcomed with open arms by the Biafrans who needed desperately to sell their cause to anyone whod listen. When the starvation hit, and still the Ibos fought, many Biafran supporters took it as proof of all those earlier mythologies that had helped sell them on the Biafran cause. By July, fighting had commenced. It would last for 30 months. The Federal Military Government boasted that they would quickly finish the rebels. Others werent so sure. The Times wrote The betting of most outside observers here is that sanctions will not be enough, that even if the industrial side of the Eastern Regions economy buckles, the tenacious Ibo tribsmencould hold out for months on home-grown food.81 Unfortunately for the Biafrans, the conflict would last longer much longer than that.

81

Nigerian Region Hopes for Attack, The New York Times, June 12, 1967

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SECTION TWO: Rhetorical Transitions By Spring 1968, the conflict had settled into a frustrating stalemate. Although early military successes saw Biafra advance outside its own borders, its failed attempt on Lagos in August 1967 and subsequent retreat back to the Eastern region represented the last time that the Ojukwu and his government would think of winning the war in military terms. Instead, the emphasis turned even more than it had been to winning the war of words. The Biafrans recognized that their best chance for success would be foreign mediated negotiations that recognized Biafra as an equal partner in the discussions. The weapons in the arsenal were no longer small arms and homemade land-mines, but instead the pamphlets, press releases, and personal ambassadors it sent all over the world to speak its cause. 1968 brought with it two new factors vital to Biafras propaganda war. On the one hand, American-owned, Geneva-based Markpress accepted a contract to coordinate all Biafran press and marketing. The myriad strategies employed by William Bernhardt and his committed staff would be lauded or decried for launching the Biafran cause into the main stream. Even more importantly, however, was the development of famine conditions. As early as December 1967, churches had begun to appeal for food aid and warned of impeding starvation.82 In April, the Red Cross warned of full blown famine. The development of mass hunger corresponded with Markpress organized journalist trips

82

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972)., 200

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to the front lines, and it would not be long before images of starving Biafrans burst into living rooms across Europe and America. Even before the mass media attention of late summer 1968, foreign onlookers were starting to change their relationship with the Biafrans due in large part to the suffering of civilians. Four African nations Tanzania, Gabon, Cote DIvoire and Zambia recognized the Republic of Biafra. Each of the recognitions was based in no small part upon the emerging humanitarian crisis. Importantly, there was an attending shift in rhetoric, and the language of genocide began to achieve a more central role. The period between March and June 1968 demonstrated just how responsive to international discourse was the propaganda machine. *** Late in 1967, the Biafran mission in Paris contacted William Bernhardt asking him to handle the marketing account for the secessionist republic. He was to replace the New York P.R. firm Ruder and Finn, first hired by Ojukwus Eastern Region government in February 1967.83 He agreed, on the condition that he could re-write, edit and generally adapt material from Biafra before it went out to the press.84 His first releases went out in February 1968. Markpress had a distinct strategy for engaging world attention and generating news coverage favorable to the Biafran cause. Step 1 involved a steady build up of background information and stories that were sent with regularity to hundreds of newspapers and governments. Step 2 was to contact foreign editors and their staff directly
83

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 307. 84 Ibid., 306.

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to certify the veracity of Markpress releases and encourage reliance upon them. Step 3 involved facilitating Western journalists to come to Biafra and check the facts themselves. Step 4 was rolling out the red carpet for them upon arrival.85 A final important part of the Markpress strategy was cross-fertilization, which meant referring enquirers to articles written by journalists rather than directly to Biafran government handouts.86 The first few months were difficult for Markpress, but by April, the deterioration of civilian livelihood in Biafra and territories recaptured by Nigeria particularly the emerging starvation started to fundamentally alter the worlds outlook on Biafra. *** The early months of 1968 brought Biafras biggest international diplomatic success to date, official recognition by four African states. This sign of acknowledgment from Tanzania, Gabon, Ivory Coast and Zambia had significance beyond the act itself; it could have had implications for the official status of Biafra within the Organization for African Unity. The OAU was a newly created organization designed to provide a common voice for African states and usher the continent into a new era of post-colonial peace and stability. The Biafran experiment was a significant challenge to the organization, in that it was the first post-colonial African conflict in which Africans were demanding independence from other Africans. The OAUs perception of Biafra was vital not only to inter-continental politics, but to the way foreign governments treated Biafra as well. One of the favorite languages of American policymakers arguing against direct US involvement in the conflict was that it was an African problem, presumably to be
85 86

Wiseberg, The International Politics of Relief, 575 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 306.

51

solved by Africans. This was the Johnson Administrations official line. For this reason, the Biafrans needed the OAU to come out strongly in support of Biafran independence before they could hope to engage neutral international actors like the US. Of the recognitions, Tanzania held a particular importance. President Julius Nyerere was an important leader on the continent having been one of the founders of the OAU in 1963. He was an avowed Pan-Africanist who would later provide shelter and support for a number of African liberation movements including South Africas PanAfrican Congress and African National Congress as well as movements in Mozambique to throw out the Portuguese and the white leaders in then Rhodesia. His support led credence to the Biafran claim that it was enacting its right to self-determination and rule by a state that could guarantee the safety of its citizens. On April 13, 1968, the Minister of State (Foreign Affairs), Mr. C. Y. Mgonja issued a statement on behalf of the Government of Tanzania that laid out the Tanzanian understanding of the case for Biafra. The central points were that a. The Biafrans had a justified fear of violence from Nigerians and the Nigerian government; b. This fear entitled them to form a government that would allow them to live free of fear; c. The desire for African unity was a desire for greater well beingand greater security for Africans, and that if the unity of Nigeria could not provide this, it was in the interest of African unity to work with the Biafrans to ensure their security. The statement appealed to precedent as a way to demonstrate that Biafra was not alone in having responded to the need for real self-determination in recent African and world political history. Interestingly, the document does not follow the Biafran lead in attempting to suppress the language of tribe. Notably, the document dramatically

52

utilizes the language of genocide, going so far as to compare the events transpiring in the Eastern part of Nigeria to the Holocaust a quarter century earlier. The basic case for Biafras secession, the document stated, is that people from the Eastern Region can no longer feel safe in other parts of the federation.87 The fears, according to the Tanzanians, were genuine and deep-seated. While the Nigerians and their supporters had tended to say that these fears were dramatically over-stated or based in propaganda rather than reality, the Tanzanian statement made the argument that this did not matter.
Fears such as now exist among the Ibo peoples do not disappear because someone says they are unjustified, or says that the rest of Nigeria does not want to exterminate the Ibos.88

Taking this line of thinking even further, the document argued that the fears of the Easterners overwhelm whatever political rights and wrongs there were regarding the series of coups and counter-coups that led to the current configuration of the Nigerian government. These factors were irrelevant to the fear which Ibo people feel.89 A particularly pressing political consideration was the terms by which the FMG and Republic of Nigeria would enter mediated negotiations. The FMG demanded (and had the support of her backers in demanding) that the Biafrans renounce their secession before they talked cease-fire. This, the Tanzanians thought, was madness. A demand that [the Ibos] should renounce secession before talks are begun is equivalent to a demand that they should announce their willingness to be exterminatedfor human beings do not voluntarily walk towards what they believe to be certain death.90

87

Minister of State, Tanzania Gabon Ivory Coast & Zambia on Their Recognition of Biafra, April 1968,

1.
88 89

Ibid., 1. Ibid., 1. 90 Ibid., 2.

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The Tanzanians argued that Nigeria had largely failed its duty to safeguard life and liberty for its inhabitants91, and as such, had lost its right to territorial integrity in the Eastern Region.
They claim now to be defending the integrity of the country in which they failed to guarantee the most elementary safety of the twelve million peoples of Eastern Nigeria Surely when a whole people is rejected by the majority of the state in which they live, the must have the right to life under a different kind of arrangement which does not secure their existence.92

Importantly, the Tanzanians tried to make these considerations normative by situating the specific Biafran context in the larger geopolitical and theoretical realm. They discussed the contract between governing and governed in general terms, saying that states are made to serve people[and that] it is on these grounds that people surrender their right and power of self-defence to the government. They pointed out that African states have much to fear from disintegration, yet still make the case that the Biafrans have a right to secede, thus heightening the legitimacy of their argument. Indeed, rather than shirking from the FMGs claim that the secession of Biafra would increase the likelihood of balkanization and disintegration in Africa, the Tanzanian statement of recognition attempted to reframe the discussion of African unity in the context faced by the Biafrans security. The basis of our need for unity, and the reason for our desire for it, it says, is the greater well being, and the greater security, of the people of AfricaThe general consent of all the people involved is the only basis on which unity in Africa can be maintained or extended.93 It is important to note the limits of Tanzanian recognition. In truth, it was inspired not by politics but by humanitarianism. As de Jorre wrote, Neyere did not break from the African crowd to recognize Biafra in order to help [them] win, but primarily to give
91 92

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. 93 Ibid., 4.

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more power to their elbows and drive the Nigerians to the negotiating table to ensure they survived[he] made a clear distinction between Biafran security and Biafran sovereignty.94 Despite this, the feature of the recognition most relevant to the evolving Biafran public discourse was the language of genocide it employed. In the first paragraph it said that 30000 had been killed in the 1966 pogroms. Throughout the war, this number was a key Biafran symbol of Nigerias brutality. Most remarkably, the rhetorical crescendo of the document indeed its strongest appeal to the rest of the world rested in an allusion to the worlds response to the Holocaust. Out of sympathy and an understanding of its own failure to act, Tanzania suggested, the world created the Jewish national homeland of Israel. Whats more, it utter[ed] many ill-informed criticisms of the Jews of Europe for going to their deaths without any concerted struggle.95 The Biafrans, the Tanzanians suggest, have now suffered the same kind of rejection within their state that the Jews of Germany experience.96 Fortunately, they already had a homeland and were willing to defend it. As Biafran rhetoric evolved over the course of the next few months, the reference to the plight of European Jewry was one that would become increasingly important. *** In mid-May, 1968, Gabon and Zambia recognized the Republic of Biafra, as well. Their arguments tended to be similar to those of the Tanzanians. While their statements of recognition did not contain nearly the same exposition of political and moral theory, they tended to stick to the central points of the earlier recognition; the need for African
94

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 194. 95 Ibid., 5. 96 Ibid., 5.

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unity was great but not at the price of countless civilian lives. Importantly, conservative Gabon and Radical Zambia represented opposite sides of the African political spectrum. The common language of their recognitions suggested the degree to which humanitarian concern was infiltrating the international discussion of the Biafra-Nigeria war. Both statements began with an appeal to unity. The Zambian government was most concerned about peace, stability and unity among the people of that area.97 Likewise, the Government of Gabon reaffirm[ed] its faith in African unity.98 Despite this, both governments saw the futility of trying to achieve unity through conquest and war. Gabon was convinced that this African unity can only be realized in peace,99 while the Zambians claimed that it would be morally wrong to force anybody into Unity founded on blood and bloodshedfor unity to be meaningful and beneficial it must be based on the consent of all parties concerned, offering securityto all.100 Both statements rooted their recognitions in the acute suffering of the Biafran peoples and the horror of the war being perpetrated against them. The Zambians largely adopted the Tanzanian tone. The war had wrought indiscriminate massacre of the innocent civilian population.101 It was, all in all, a horrifying war.102 Gabon dramatically upped the rhetorical ante. Like the Tanzanians, they rooted the right of the Biafrans to secede in the massacres they had faced outside of their homeland and the need to safeguard their right to existence. The Government of Gabon
97

Government of the Republic of Biafra, Office of the Special Representative, Statement on the Recognition of the Republic of Biafra by the Government of the Republic of Zambia, May 1968. 98 Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative, The Recognition of Biafra by Gabon, May 1968, 1. 99 Ibid., 1. 100 Government of the Republic of Biafra, Office of the Special Representative, Zambia Recognizes Biafra, May 1968. 101 Government of the Republic of Biafra, Office of the Special Representative, Zambia Recognizes Biafra, May 1968. 102 Ibid.

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went on, however, to indict the FMG, saying that Lagos reactedby perpetrating a real genocide with the aim of wiping out the State of Biafra and the Ibo people.103 Importantly, they metaphorically extended the victimization Ibos faced during the 1966 pogroms to the entire Biafran people, refusing to maintain a guilty indifference in the face of the pogrom organized against fourteen million Africans.104 The obvious conclusion for the Government of Gabon was that, in this circumstance, the Biafran drama [had] ceased to be an internal Nigerian problem and should force all African countries to take a stand. Indeed, the Government and the People of Gabon could not without hypocrisy take refuge behind the principle of the so-called non-interference in the internal affairs of another country.105 The other African country to recognize Biafra was Cote DIvoire. If Nyerere and Tanzanias recognition was important to the credibility of the Biafran cause with PanAfricanists and African liberation movements, the strong support of Biafra coming from Ivory Coast president Feliz Houphouet-Boigny had the potential to elevate the standing of Biafra with the French. Even after independence, Houphouet-Boigny remained extremely close to the former French colonial power. Scholars still debate whether it was the French who influenced Cote DIvoires recognition or the other way around. Whatever the case, Houphouet-Boignys statement of recognition was made at the Ivory Coast Embassy in Paris. Houphouet-Boignys statement charted much of the same rhetorical territory as the official Tanzanian statement of recognition. In fact, he brought up just how irregular agreement between himself and Nyerere was to demonstrate just how irregular and
103

Government of the Republic of Biafra, Office of the Special Representative, The Recognition of Biafra by Gabon, May 1968, 2. 104 Ibid., 2. 105 Ibid., 2.

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prescient was the situation facing Africa and, indeed, the world, in Biafra. Nyerere and myself, he said, who have different political and economic opinions are in agreement in recognizing the necessity of withdrawing this conflict from a legal framework which would restrict us.106 Interestingly, his statement made a rhetorical comparison to Vietnam, although never stating to what ends this comparison was being made. He claimed that the Vietnamese war cannotcompare in horror with the war in Biafra. Indeed, early in his speech he asked do people know that there have been in Biafra in ten months more deaths than in three years in Vietnam?107 Whether this appeal is aimed at the American or French government or citizens is unclear. It may have simply been a device to demonstrate how little the great powers seemed to value African lives.
Insofar as we Africans form a part of the world, we could not but be astonished at how little we are valued; at the indifference with which people treat everything that concerns us.108

To an even greater extent than Tanzania or Gabon, Houphouet-Boigny used the language of genocide. Like the Tanzanians, he asserted that 30,000 people were killed in the Northern pogroms.109 He went further, though, suggesting that the atrocious war had already cost more than 200,000 human lives[and] one will have to, one day, multiply by three, the number of these deaths.110 He used the word genocide three times, once referencing his own unwillingness to let his government be witness to it, and twice admonishing the rest of Africa to take up a voice against it.111 It is likely that the

106

Government of the Republic of Biafra, Office of the Special Representative, Biafra: A Human Problem, A Human Tragedy, May 1968, 3. 107 Ibid., 1. 108 Ibid., 5. 109 Ibid., 2. 110 Ibid., 1. 111 Ibid., 3-5.

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close relationship between Cote DIvoire and the Gabon influenced their shared language of genocide. The most remarkable and most revealing part of the speech was his language of the human ness of the conflict. The title is revealing; Biafra: A Human Problem, a Human Tragedy.112 Throughout the speech, he admonished the listener to expand his or her framework to the realm of essential humanity. In this it mirrored appeals being made around the world by the humanitarian relief organizations advocating for Biafra. Although he was speaking as the president of a neighboring republic, his response was colored by the very same media sources affecting popular perception of the conflict in the West. This is revealed directly when he located the particular urgency with which he called the Paris press conference. It was not that he had received new information from diplomatic sources, but rather that he had been moved by television!
In front of the French T.V. screen, in the course of the programme Cing colonnes a la une of May 3, the poignant film projected on this forgotten war carried my indignation to the state of paroxysm.113

Even more remarkable than this was that his speech indicated that he, like the majority of foreigners who became engaged in Biafran advocacy, was captivated less by the political idea of genocide and massacre than by the mechanism through which it was being executed: hunger. Although it was issued days before the Zambian recognition and within weeks of the Tanzanian and Gabon statements, the most revealing rhetorical difference of the speech was Houphouet-Boignys language of hunger and human concern. So many people, he said, in particular infants and the oldare dying of hunger.114 Biafra had
112 113

Ibid., 1. Ibid., 1. 114 Ibid., 1.

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known for more than ten months neither fish nor meat.115 Although they were sometimes facing desperate situations, in Vietnam, in the North as well as in the South, people eat at least when they are hungry.116 Indeed, more people die in Biafra from hunger than in Vietnam.117 The discourse of hunger was accompanied by an appeal to humanity. His continued general admonitions for his listeners to understand their own humanity and how it is threatened by the plight in Biafra became specific when he appealed to the French.
The French who, looking at their small television screen, have lived in a moment like the revolting drama going on in Biafra; the French who have known the horrors of war; the French who have a cult of human liberty and who are fundamentally attached to peace; could they remain for long insensitive to the sorrow which hangs on a people of admirable courage and who is fighting under the most difficult and the most inhuman conditions for its independence?118

It is fascinating and important that the greater rhetorical reliance and emotional centrality of hunger was accompanied by a stronger appeal to humanitarian rather than political ideals. This was precisely the sentiment that would eventually engage American audiences; and precisely the type of sentiment that allowed them to break apart humanitarian and political concern in a way which left the Biafrans inevitably defeated. *** If the African recognitions represented an evolving international perception of the Nigerian conflict, Biafran documents from that Spring 1968 likewise demonstrated an evolving self-perception. Perhaps in response to that changing international environment, Biafran pamphlets and public presentations from March through June centralize genocide in a new way.
115 116

Ibid., 1. Ibid., 1. 117 Ibid., 5. 118 Ibid., 4.

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The logic of the evolving Biafran argument was that the Nigerian government was perpetrating a war of genocide, that political sovereignty represented the only counterweight the Biafrans had to the threat of full extermination, and that the genocide could only be stopped by a conditionless cease-fire and mediated negotiations. For that reason it was an international moral imperative that neutral governments supported this cease-fire and that pro-Nigerian governments reconsider their position to support the cease-fire. In March, the Biafran Ministry of Information released a document entitled Biafra Deserves Open World Support, which outlined in clear terms the many reasons political and humanitarian that Biafra deserved support. While it used the word genocide something that happened rarely if ever in 1967 general information documents the term was still buried in a larger argument. The document was connected to the past in its attempt to demonstrate the illegitimacy of the Federal Military Government in Lagos. On page two of the Open World Support document, the Ministry declared the Lagos government illegal and unworthy.119 These two ideas, illegality and unworthiness, brought together the two fundamental arguments the Biafrans have against the Nigerian government. According to the Biafrans, The FMG was illegal in part because the conglomeration of territories formerly known as Nigeria was never a nation. Indeed, those territories were simply brought together to foster British imperial interests.120 Moreover, the pack of criminal Army Officers running the FMG were an illegal government because they had usurped power bymurdering the Supreme Commander
119

The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, Biafra Deserves Open World Support, March 1968, 2. 120 Ibid., 1.

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and over 200 Biafran Army Officers and men in a 1966 coup. And if the Nigerian government was illegal, so too was British and Russian support for the government in its campaign against Biafra. The government was unworthy because it had failed in its fundamental duty as a government, to ensure the security of its citizens. In fact, Nigeria, under Gowon, did not only fail to protect the lives and property of Biafrans, she even planned and executed the massacre and maiming of thousands.121 The document also found roots in an earlier rhetoric in its lauding of the Biafran people, leadership, and resources. Biafra deserved support because Lt-Col. Ojukwu [was] the only remaining legitimate Head of Government in Nigeria and Biafra since the inception of the Military Regime in January 1966.122 The section entitled Biafran Maturity and Statesmenship Vindicated extended this tone. When independence was declared, the government was confronted by problems of such magnitude and complexity as might have overwhelmed any government anywhere.123 Despite this, Biafra had maintained peace and stability. She had successfully ordered the political and constitutional life of her citizens,; she had upheld the rule of law and peacefully organizedsocial...andeconomic life.124 Above all, she had fulfilled her raison detre: she has provided safety and security for her citizens and has, with much success, stemmed a war of aggression.125 Echoing the Introducing Biafra document, the Open World Support paper went on to say that Biafra is rich in human and material resources, dedicating an entire
121 122

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 2. 123 Ibid., 2. 124 Ibid., 4. 125 Ibid., 5.

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section of the document with the same name.126 As previously mentioned, Biafrans had long been famed for their industry, initiative, self-reliance, and an almost insatiable thirst for learning.127 Statistics were provided to demonstrate the veracity of such claims. Additionally, Biafra was blessed with enormous material resources. Leaving the invite open to future partnerships, some of these resources were only recently being realized and exploited.128 The report listed the various crops, mineral deposits, and other resources, concluding that Biafra is a young nation with great potentialities for commercial and industrial investment.129 If the argument was legalistic, the language of genocide still found a new prescience in Open World Support. Page three of the document referenced the forced expropriation of Biafran property, for example, as a Nigerian violation of its responsibilities as a signatory of the Convention on Genocide.130 More generally, genocide tended to function rhetorically as the ultimate demonstration of Nigerias failure to protect its citizenry, rather than a heinous crime against humanity. Still, unlike previous documents, genocide became the crescendo of the language of violence. Page one called for a halt to the murderous activities of Nigeria and her collaborators,131 while on page two the Ministry of Information detailed the massacre and maiming of thousands of Biafrans.132 The Nigerian campaign was a total war of genocide.133
126 127

Ibid., 5. Ibid., 5. 128 Ibid., 6. 129 Ibid., 7. 130 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, Biafra Deserves Open World Support, March 1968, 3. 131 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, Biafra Deserves Open World Support, March 1968, 1. 132 Ibid., 2. 133 Ibid., 3.

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Perhaps most notably, the documents final page used the word three times. The language of the inhumanity of genocide comes to the fore as Biafra restates her case for open support. The war of genocide against [Biafra] is senseless and in human.134 Open support from nations around the world will enormously strengthen the position of Biafra in her dedicated fight against the gravest crime in international law, the most heinous crime against humanity genocide.135 *** The months of Summer 1968 were the most action-filled of the entire war.136 The Federal Military Governments military victory seemed to hover constantly. Three major towns - Aba, Owerri, and Okigwi - fell. The wet season brought with it attendant consequences for those civilians trapped inside the diminishing Biafran borders. The African recognitions had brought a renewal of hope to Biafra that did not necessarily equate to the reality of daily life. Indeed, the success of Biafra in the realm of international opinion continued to ascend as the success of Biafra in keeping her people save from starvation, malnutrition and war continued to diminish. Just as Biafra expected a new diplomatic landslide to follow from the African recognitions137, the Nigerians continued to believe that their inevitable victory was closer than it was. It was with these heady expectations that delegations from each government met in Kampala for late May peace talks. The opening statement by the Biafran delegation demonstrated just how far the Biafrans had moved in using the genocide claim to connect their sovereignty to their
134 135

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 8. 136 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 207. 137 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 200.

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security. This discourse and all its components would come to full fruition a few weeks later with the release of The Case for Biafra (First Independence Anniversary Edition) by the Ministry of Information on June 12th. These two documents represented the apex of pre-famine Biafran genocide rhetoric and displayed a number of relevant themes including connection to the Holocaust, reliance on the voices of unimpeachable witnesses, food poising, civiliantargeted air raids, and the fallacy of the presented logic of African unity. Interestingly, they also contained problems and contradictions; how to appeal to the West and accuse it of neo-colonialism at the same time, and how to maximize diplomatic gain from the claim of genocide while minimizing the notion that genocide reflected an inability on the part of the Biafrans to keep their population safe. African unity was a problem that plagued the Biafrans throughout the war. The fear of secession and domino instability ran rampant in the corridors of African parliaments and in the minds of their Western allies. Throughout the war, Biafra argued that African unity could not be compelled by force, and that they had the right to leave Nigeria because the Federal Government had failed in its fundamental responsibility to maintain the safety of her Ibo and Eastern citizens. In The Case for Biafra, this idea was further articulated in terms of broken social contracts and genocide. Nigeria, it said, was teaching Africans to hate fellow Africans; a negation of our basic belief in African brotherhood, yes, universal brotherhood.138 After discussing the horror of the 1966 massacres, the document asked any wonder then that Biafrans are thoroughly convinced that only separate political existence can guarantee their basic needs of

138

The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 3.

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survival and security of life and property?139 Indeed, most of all, it rejected the idea that Nigeria was a contractual community in which Biafrans had agreed to participate: To break away from tyranny, oppression and genocide is a very different thing from breaking away from the ideal of a contractual African community.140 References to the Holocaust were, explicitly and implicitly, part of the new genocide rhetoric. In their opening statements at Kampala, the Biafran diplomats likened the Ibos to the Jews of Europe a quarter century earlier, saying that to force Biafrans back into the Federation would be like forcing Jews who had fled to Israel back to Nazi Germany.141 Quoting journalist Colin Legum from October 1966, the Case for Biafra remembered the Northern pogrom; the total casualties are unknown. The number of injured who have arrived in the East runs in the thousands. After a fortnight, the scene in the Eastern Region continues to be reminiscent of the ingathering of exiles into Israel after the end of the last war. The parallel is not fanciful.142 Bringing in Russian atrocity simultaneously, it went on to lay the problem of witness in referential and terrible terms:
We know what the Nazis did to Jews at Auschwitz. In mass cruelty, the expulsion of the Germans ordered by the Russians fall not very far short of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. The atrocities committed by the Nigerians surpass these.143

Simultaneously, the presentations contained a linguistic undercurrent that either consciously or subconsciously referenced the plight of the Jews. Importantly, by late May and June, the 1966 fall massacres had become known as pogroms. Additionally, the phrase final solution was used for the first time; The main point which was quite clear was that the final solution of the Biafran problem involved genocide.144 Finally, the
139 140

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 15. 141 Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative. Nigeria-Biafra Peace Talks Opening Statement by the Biafran Delegation, June 1968. 7
142 143

The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 7. Ibid., 8. 144 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 8.

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descriptions of the pogroms tended to reference the sabon gari (strangers quarters), separated areas where Ibos living in the North congregated together away from others. Although different, the sabon gari must have sounded all too reminiscent to the European ghettos especially to the American Jews who would become major advocates for Biafran relief. Precisely why the Biafrans chose so strongly to reference the plight of the Jews remains an interesting question with many possible answers. On the one hand, it seemed that the Ibos had a particular fondness for the parallels they drew between themselves and the biblical and modern Israelis. The Eastern Region had been one of the quickest, easiest converts to Christianity during the colonial period. Biafras imagination of itself as connected to the Israelis might have had as much to do with Biblical as modern knowledge. At the same time, Western observers were quick to adopt the parallels as well. Biafrans were sometimes disliked for their clannishness and cunning, but no one could deny their success in the Nigerian financial and economic realm. And now that the massacres had happened, the parallel seemed all the more relevant. However much stock foreign reporters actually put in the allusion, they certainly utilized it frequently in their writing.145 It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Biafrans, always shrewd readers of international opinion, saw this and took it as evidence for the efficacy in the comparison. The place of the Holocaust in American life will be explored in the final section of this thesis. The Holocaust imagery was not the only evolving discourse. The onus of suffering often came down upon children. While this seems totally mundane the
145

See Section 1 for more

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obvious choice of those wishing to demonstrate the horror of a war it is worth spending a minute for why this is the case. As humanitarian critics have noted, the protection of children in situations of African famine is less important than protecting those of childbearing age. In terms of societal stability, the loss of a small child is much less devastating than the loss of reproductive adults. Yet in the West, children remain our icons of African misery. There is something so fundamentally counter to our sense of the natural order things for children to die before their parents. We rebel against the destruction of their innocence. Indeed, their innocence is symbolic of our own wish to remain free from the tyranny of our capacity for choice; as adults, we can and are fully expected to sort between right and wrongs, ambiguous though they may be, to decide how to act in and upon our world. By focusing on the plight of children we evade the commitment to a political stance that brings with it the very real possibility that we will be wrong, complicit in misery, and as such, guilty. The Case for Biafra brought children to the front of its story. The worst calamity of all, it suggested, is the strong feeling of hatred which the sight of a living Nigerian will evoke in the minds of Biafran children, not to mention the permanent state of fear in the minds of such children who for years to come will run in terror whenever they hear the sound of an airplane engine.146 Even more, it utilized the voices of foreign observers to talk about the unnatural order of this war. During the 1966 massacres, pregnant women were cut open and the unborn children killed.147 Children were roasted alive, young girls torn in two.

146 147

The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 2. Ibid., 7.

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Strategically, the Biafrans employed their international press with ever increasing frequency. Rather than forcing new foreign audiences to take their word for anything, Biafran speeches of this period regularly referenced newspapers and magazines from Europe and America, sometimes republishing large swaths of material just to hammer the point home. As mentioned about, this strategy was one of the central tenants of Markpress, the American-operated, Geneva-based marketing firm that ran the foreign propaganda effort for the Biafrans after January 1968. Particularly effective were the quotes from journalists who had become believers, so to speak. Appealing to Western skepticism and latent mistrust of African belligerents, the journalistic converts were propaganda gold. In the midst of the vitriolic indictment of Britain and Nigeria found in The Case for Biafra, the document asks Why should Gowon concentrate on killing innocent African civilians if his objective was not genocide?
Genocide, writes Frederick Foresythe in the London Sunday Times, is an ugly word, and even uglier reality, by my judgment that it really could be the extermination if an entire race does not go unsupportedwhatever the original motivation of the Federal Army, hatred of the Ibos seems to be the prime stimulus. The Nigerian soldiers loot, rape, kill and torture. When asked why, the shrug and say Kill Ibo. Have they a feeling for one Nigeria? Yes one Nigeria, without Ibo.148

In the same article, published in London in May 1968, Forsyth had written At the start, on my first visit to Biafra, I believed it had the most dangerous potential but that Biafran claims that they faced genocide were wildly exaggerated. Ten months later I am convinced that the very thing they claimed at that time has indeed become a reality."149 A number of rhetorical touchstones that would soon achieve a greater prescience were also present. With some regularity, the Case for Biafra began to identify air raids as evidence for the genocidal intent of the Nigerians. By 1968, then, the propaganda machine seemed to have forgotten that the Biafrans were, in fact, the initiators of the air
148

The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 29. Frederick Forsyth. Gutted Hamlets, Rotting CorpsesThis is Genocide, The Sunday Times, May 12, 1968.
149

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war, bombing Lagos albeit in amateur fashion in late 1967.150 At the same time, the documents continued to suggest that Nigeria was poising food coming into Biafran held territory. This had been a Biafran claim since February, according to a New York Times article from July 14.151 The first page of Case for Biafra references claimed that the tragedy of this war is that the vast majority of the dead and wounded are civilians: innocent men, women and children killed by Nigerias army by shelling, bombing, brutal massacres and poisoning of food.152 The Case for Biafra articulated the horror of the air raids in incredible detail again relying on the testimony of foreigners. The London Sunday Times reported in February that there had been air attacks deliberately aimed at Biafran civilians.153 The same reporter, writing a few months later wrote in brutal detail about the children roasted alive, young girls torn in two by shrapnel, pregnant women eviscerated, and old men blown to fragments, all caused by high-flying Russian Illyushin Jets operated by Federal Nigeria.154 A few pages later, a full account was given of the air-raid targets. According to the Biafrans, 46 out of 112 were aimed at civilian residential areas.155 More than ever before, The Case for Biafra document mythologized the genocide by putting it in narrative form. The Asaba massacres of late 1967 became, along with the 1966 pogroms, food poisoning, and air raids, part of the Biafran belief that the Nigerians were out to kill them all. According to a foreign source, Asaba saw 700 Ibo males lined up and shot.
150

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 115 151 _________ New York Times, July 14th 152 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 1. 153 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 22. 154 Ibid., 22. 155 Ibid., 24.

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The Case for Biafra also included the story of Andrew Odinma Mordi, a boy who had escaped and could confirm that the vandals intention was the total extermination of all males above the age of five years.156 Both his father and brother were killed. For a few months, there was a period of normalcy, then in April the massacres re-started. All the boys were rounded up from school and arrested. Andrew escaped again to the bush and crossed safely to the Biafran side.157 The Asaba massacres played viciously on Biafran fears the news of them was spread not only by fellow Ibos but by missionaries who had witnessed the atrocity. Remembering his childhood during the war Alfred Uzokwe wrote that he came home one day to his mother crying uncontrollably.
My mothers father and several other relatives had been summarily shot by federal troops in Asaba. The news hit me like a thunderboltJust a little while beforemy mother had said that her first priority after the war would be to go to Asaba and reunite with her father and others. Now her hopes would never be realized. I was exceedingly embittered by this latest atrocityAs a young Christian boy, I wondered why God would let such calamity befall uswhen the federal troops entered Asaba, they conducted a holocaust of unimaginable proportion; they killed as many people as they could find, regardless of their ages. With that, the Nigerian war broke all the rules of conventional warfare. It started with the senseless killings of the defenseless Easterners in 1966 and was followed by the Asaba massacre. It was compounded by the starvation of many innocent people.158

While its easy to look back cynically, understanding that in fact the Asaba massacres tended to be the exception rather than the rule of Federal Military conduct, that air raids were a regular aspect of war, that it seems unlikely that Nigeria waged a large scale campaign to poison the food coming into Biafra, the psychological terror that these imaginations exerted over day to day Biafran life cannot be discounted. It is extraordinarily difficult to try to discern which parts of Biafran official rhetoric were forged, falsified or intentionally exaggerated, and which parts were simply reflections of
156 157

Ibid., 25. Ibid., 26. 158 Alfred Ukokwe, Surviving in Biafra: The Story of the Nigerian Civil War (Writers Advantage, 2003), 69-73.

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a deeply-held if not factually accurate collective memory and imagination. Whatever the case, the Biafrans were quite right when they said that every act of provocation brought the wounded people of Biafra more closely together.159 A sort of fatalism and resolve gripped the Biafrans and played into the hands of hardliner leadership who wanted no compromise on the idea of Biafran sovereignty even if it meant more dead by starvation or any other means. John de St. Jorre, the most level-headed, intelligent and thorough contemporary analyst of the war wrestled deeply with this reality in September 1968. Despite that it was besieged, bludgeoned, starving, de St. Jorre found the atmosphere charged If you gave us the choice of 1000 rifles or milk for 50000 staving children, a Biafran official told me in Aba, wed take the guns. A callous, inhuman, brutal statement it would appear, but the preference was widely held and seen to make sense.160 The Biafrans, he said, more or less believed that they were fighting for their lives all sides, businessmen and refugees alike, presented the same grim and hopeless equation. The lowest common denominator personal fear, personal survival was constantly present.161 Despite his best attempts, de St. Jorre couldnt dig beneath this belief. The isolation, the suffering, the propaganda, the countless personal horror stories real and imagined the strong colours of war that admit no pastel shades or half-tones made survival the central pivot of life and death.162 The Biafrans talked about this survival constantly; some, he believed, had already taken up a death wish. Simply comprehension

159 160

The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 14. St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 220. 161 Ibid., 222. 162 Ibid., 222.

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was difficulty. De St. Jorre found himself fighting to not let the Biafran sensibilities overwhelm him.
To grasp the mood in Biafra one had to stick severely to the human issues and try to ignore much of the political wrangling and incessant propaganda. The bitterness, disillusion and almost pathological hatred and mistrust of the Nigerians generated by the 1966 massacres and refueled by fourteen months of warfare and traumatic isolation were rather terrifying. (I found myselfbeginning to think of the Nigerians as a race of pariahs, blood-thirsty vandals to a man.)163

The utterances of genocide were not without their problems and contradictions, however. Both The Case for Biafra and the opening statements at the Kampala peace talks simultaneously appealed to the Wests sense of itself in particular playing up the element of religious confrontation embedded in the conflict and then tore the big powers down for neocolonialism and imperialism. To make a full emotional impact, Biafrans had to convince the West that Nigeria was an oppressive, genocidal regime, while not coming of as a victim unable to defend itself. In both of these presentations, the fact that the Northern Nigerians were Islamic as compared to the Christian East received new emphasis, often in the form of italicized or underlined statements. Quoting the London Daily Express from late 1966, the Kampala delegation recounted that another Englishmen who fled the town told of two Catholic priests running for it, the mob after them. I dont know if they escaped: I didnt wait to see..a lot of massacred Ibos are buried in mass graves outside the Moslem walls.164 Later in the same article, I talked with a saffron-robed Hausa, who told me: We killed about 250 here. Perhaps Allah willed it. (Underline theirs). They also quoted the Time magazine story about the Northern massacres, underlining key Islam-focused words.
163

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 222. 164 Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative. Nigeria-Biafra Peace Talks Opening Statement by the Biafran Delegation, June 1968.

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Screaming the blood curses of a Moslem holy war, the Hausa troops turned the airport into a shambles, bayoneting Ibo workers in the bar, gunning them down.The soldiers did not have to do all the killing. They were soon joined by thousands of Hausa civilians who rampaged through the city, armed withhome-made weapons[and] crying Heathen! and Allah!165

In addition to repeating those same articles and quotes, The Case for Biafra moved the discussion of genocidal intent all the way to the top levels. Indicting Gowon for staying silent on the massacres, the Case said that [Gowons] one utterance was that Allah in his infinite mercy had made it possible for another Northerner to guide the affairs of the nation. Precisely why the Biafrans adopted this rhetoric after having spent many months of the conflict downplaying the tribal and religious underpinnings is hard to discern. One possible explanation was that it was calculated to bolster the voices of the priests and missionaries who had, in their humanitarian capacity, become vocal supporters of the Biafran right to survive. Regardless, if this rhetoric was designed to appeal to Western sensibility; it was largely countered by the discussion of British neo-imperialism the Biafrans claims was driving the war. Almost as soon as The Case for Biafra began, it accused Britain of attempting to destroy Africas manpower and resources, which should be used for economic development.166 The blockade of Biafra which was wreaking such horrible hunger upon the civilian population was a result of British collusion.167 Indeed, quite the opposite of fracturing the O.A.U. as it was accused of, Biafra asserted that the Gowon clique in Lagos has failed to understand what is meant by independence in the African context and has allowed itself to be used by neo-colonialist Britain and Russia to achieve their selfish

165

Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative. Nigeria-Biafra Peace Talks Opening Statement by the Biafran Delegation, June 1968. 5 166 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 2. 167 Ibid., 14.

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economic objectives in the exploitation in Africa.168 Indeed, even the United Nations aroused the Biafran ire; The world body pushed around by the United States of America, Britain and Russia accomplices in this crime of genocide, told us it was not its business.169 Still stinging from the oil fiasco at the beginning of the war, Shell-BP a British dominated Company symbolized for the Biafrans the economic exploitation on view in the beleaguered would-be nation. How these two discourses one vitriolic against the Western involvement that had come before and one that would have seemed to appeal to then-contemporary Western Manichaeism could have been part of the same strategy is somewhat unclear. Whatever the case, the rhetoric of genocide had a more subtle and potentially dangerous flipside: victimization. Throughout the conflict, Biafra worked to ensure that it was perceived as a place that even when subjected to terrible forces indeed, forces which compelled the intervention of the humane external world remained powerfully determined and able to control its own destiny. For Biafrans and indeed, for most of the world, this may have seemed simply like a matter of pride. The New York Times editorial staff would later lament this intransigence as people starved to death. At the same time, there may have been more to it than that. In his The Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick explored the relationship of victimhood and collective responses to genocide. Most notably, he recognized that the current sanctification of victims in American culture indeed, the competition for enshrining grievances - was not at all the same in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
There has been a change in the attitude toward victimhood from a status all but universally shunned and despised to one often eagerly embraced. On the individual level,
168 169

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 30.

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the cultural icon of the strong, silent hero is replaced by the vulnerable and verbose antihero. Stoicism is replaced as a prime value by sensitivity.170

The America to which the Biafra narrative was presented, however, was much closer to the older model. Whether the strategy was designed to do so or not, it would have been important for the Biafrans, in order to secure American public approval, to demonstrate their self-reliance. Evidence that Biafra recognized this reality can be found in many of the documents examined. Indeed, the notion that only a Biafran government could safeguard Biafran security was the fundamental tenant upon which Biafran arguments for secession were placed. With the advent of wide-scale starvation however, this have-your-cakeand-eat-it-to genocide discourse would be put to severe strain. By the time The Case for Biafra was released, starvation had become a very real problem. Of course, blame for it was placed on the Nigerians (and sometimes, by proxy, the British) and their campaign of genocide. The importation of food to Biafra was banned, it suggested, in a Gowon-inspired effort to starve to death the two million Biafrans who had fled to Biafra.171 They quoted foreign supporters, citing one Letter to the Editor of the Observer that read the malnutrition of the children in Biafra to which you refer, will inevitably increase so long as Britain observes the blockade to Biafra.172 Interestingly, Biafra attempts to deal with the starvation-based threat to its legitimate right to govern (it says it exists to safeguard the right of its people to exist; if they starve, its mandate is forfeit) by placing the worst of the famine in Nigerian controlled territory. It took the International Committee of the Red Cross to rescue from starvation a group of Biafran sympathizers, abandoned by Nigerians to die in the forest of
170 171

Ibid., 8. The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 8. 172 The Republic of Biafra, The Ministry of Information, The Case for Biafra, June 1968, 34.

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the Republic of Benin.173 Stated more plainly on the first page, a large number of lawabiding and helpless Biafrans have died of starvation behind the Nigerian lines. The time was quickly running out that starvation could figure so mundanely into the overall Biafran discourse. Indeed, as July came, the world took notice of a very different Biafra a starving Biafra and the war would never be the same again.

173

Ibid., 26.

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Section Three: Starvation Sympathy Where once there had been a Nigerian war, the rapid onslaught of famine in mid1968 created a humanitarian crisis in Biafra. As starvation loomed, relief organizations, American citizen support groups, and the Biafran propaganda machine changed their language accordingly. In myriad ways, hunger redefined the stakes and terms of the war; the political battle became focused on how to allow for proper relief, the question of genocide was a question of the intentionality of the famine, the competition for international attention was focused on governing the politics of explanation about the famine. For many Americans looking back today, the pictures of starving children are their only recollection of that far away war. Even from the beginning, Biafra was at risk for developing famine conditions. Despite ardent claims of self-sufficiency, citizens in the Eastern Region relied heavily on protein from other regions and other countries174. The rain-forest vegetation and high population density limited cattle production, and approximately 80% of the protein consumed by the region (which was still, relatively speaking, far less than in other parts of Nigeria), was imported.175 These imports tended to be financed by exporting Eastern products like palm oil or purchased and sent home by the Diasporic Eastern wage earners scattered around the country. The war would have cataclysmic effects on all of these food networks. Upon its declaration of independence, Biafra was one of the most densely populated areas in all of Africa.176 This density was exacerbated by the influx of Ibo

174 175

Government of the Republic of Biafra, Introducing Biafra, 1967. Laurie Wiseberg, The International Politics of Relief: A Case Study of the Relief Operations Mounted During the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970 (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1973), 77. 176 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 237.

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refugees estimated at between 1 and 2 million who had fled from other parts of the country after the fall 1966 massacres in the North. Although extensive kin networks were initially successful in assimilating the refugees, subsistence farming became even more taxed. The prodigious Ibo return was problematic in more than its additional strain on the system of agriculture. The Federal Military Government blockade of Biafra, launched upon the declaration of independence, made it much more difficult for the Easterners to sell their goods outside of their region and to acquire food especially protein from abroad. Because the Ibos living outside of the east had been such an important link in the chain of food acquisition, their return made the effects of the blockade more dramatic. As the war wore on, the Nigerian forces slowly hacked away pieces of Biafran territory. Starting at just under 30,000 square miles, by March/April 1968, Biafra was closer to 9000 sq miles.177 Despite this, there was not a proportionate decrease in population. Acting on deep fears of the Nigerian army produced by a combination of experience and collective self-terrorization, Biafrans particularly Ibos would flee deeper into the hinterland or simply into the bush. Those who fled inward added further stress to the limited pool of nutrient resources and those who hid in the forests were often unable to acquire enough food through foraging or agriculture. The Biafran famine was more than lack of resources. Following a pattern identified by such famine theorists as Amartya Sen, it was also lack of entitlement to resources. It was a conscious strategy of the FMG to deny Biafrans access to food and

177

Garrison, Lloyd. The Point of No Return For the Biafrans. The New York Times, Sep 8, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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access to the resources to acquire food. This political and military strategy would come to loggerheads with the international relief effort. One of the most effective maneuvers undertaken by the FMG was to change the Nigerian currency in 1968. The Biafran government was taken completely by surprise, and the accelerated period of transition a mere 19 days after the announcement initiated a flurry of activity as Biafran emissaries around the world tried to dump their hoards of Nigerian currency. Although it managed to put out its own currency relatively quickly, some have estimated that the Biafran government lost the equivalent of about 30 million British pounds as a result of the operation.178 But the move had a more significant long-term effect on the conflict. The switch in Nigerian currency meant that the value of Biafran money was connected only to Biafran supply and demand. In other words, there was no external stabilizing influence on the value of the Biafran dollar relative to incredibly scare food essentials. As a result, the price of food soared to exorbitant levels. The New York Times reported regularly in 1968 about the dramatic increase in prices of every day goods.179 In addition to increasing the difficulty of buying food in Biafra, one of the Biafran survival strategies - the afia attack, or trading behind enemy lines suffered as a result of the change of currency.180 In addition to the risk of being discovered by enemy soldiers, the women who crossed the lines had difficulty acquiring enough of the Nigerian currency to make the trip worth the risk.

178

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 187. 179 Garrison, Lloyd. The Point of No Return For the Biafrans. The New York Times, Sep 8, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers 180 Alfred Ukokwe, Surviving in Biafra: The Story of the Nigerian Civil War (Writers Advantage, 2003), 58.

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Inequitable distribution of what food existed threatened to tear apart the fragile Biafran self-identity. In a memoir of the war, Alfred Uzokwe recalled his childhood frustrations with food relief. He wrote
I always felt bad at the sight of refugees at the St. Marys School compound, struggling to get food from the distribution center in an adjacent building. I abhorred the fact that people who were already hungry and had lost strength had to fight to get relief food. It became survival of the fittest; those who were strong enough to shove others out of the way got more rations and those who had become exceedingly weak because of hunger could not get enough food.181

Indeed, as the famine set in, the suffering it caused was latched onto by the Biafran leadership as a rhetorical touchstone to raise international ire against the Nigerians, and perhaps equally as importantly to further bind Biafrans in the fear of extermination. The new rhetoric was genocide by starvation. Just like the rhetoric of genocide, the famine itself did not develop overnight. Its incubation period was approximately ten months from the June 1967 beginning of the economic blockade to April 1968 when relief organizations started issuing their most dire warnings.182 Still, determining precisely when the famine became a crisis is hard to do. In a dissertation about the humanitarian aspect of the conflict, Laurie Wiseberg wrote that the situation reached critical dimensions, in April/May 1968. On April 10, the Nigerian Red Cross launched an international appeal warning that as many as 3.6 million women and children were facing malnutrition and starvation.183 De St. Jorre located the problem even earlier, suggesting that by the end of 1967, the situation had reached crisis proportions, with the Churches in Biafra making their first public appeal for relief.184

181

Ibid., 59-60. Laurie Wiseberg, The International Politics of Relief: A Case Study of the Relief Operations Mounted During the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970 (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1973), 78. 183 Ibid., 78. 184 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 237.
182

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And then there were the Biafrans themselves. Reading memoirs and contemporary accounts, the most forward thinking Easterners recognized the danger early on. Ukokwe wrote that as the famine became more acute and he witnessed friends and classmates succumbing to malnutrition or starvation, he realized how hard his parents had tried to save his family by mandating and rationing certain types of food and proteins since the beginning of the conflict.185 Whenever the hunger may have officially begun, by July there could be no doubt that the famine was a full blown crisis. The April fall of Abakaliki, the main food producing area in Biafra, and even more importantly the fall of Port Harcourt in mid-May virtually doomed Biafra to starvation. As Wiseberg wrote, as long as Port Harcourt remained in Biafran hands, the federal blockade was only partially effective, for access to the coast facilitated limited access to supplies and continuance of the local fishing industry. But with it captured, the FMG gained control of the Biafran rivers and coastal region which supported that enterpriseby the end of May, Biafra was landlocked and cut off from access to protein food.186 On July 11, President Johnson made a plea for a cessation of hostilities and consideration of the humanitarian problems of the war. His comments were designed to precede the next days release of the Life cover story that would blast Biafra into the American mainstream. Regardless of Americas intense desire to keep Biafran hunger a humanitarian problem, for both of the belligerents, it was an intensely political issue. Was starvation a legitimate weapon of war? de St. Jorre asked.

185

Alfred Ukokwe, Surviving in Biafra: The Story of the Nigerian Civil War (Writers Advantage, 2003), 61-62. 186 Laurie Wiseberg, The International Politics of Relief: A Case Study of the Relief Operations Mounted During the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970 (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1973), 76.

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The hardliners in Nigeria and Biafra thought that it was, the former regarding it as a valid means of reducing the enemys capacity to resist, a method as old as war itself, and the latter seeing it as a way of internationalizing the conflict through appealing to the humanitarian instincts of the outside world.187

Whether the strategy was legitimate or not, it was what it was. The change in Biafran rhetoric that accompanied the onslaught of starvation was designed precisely to politicize the famine. The reason for this was simple. If the crisis was humanitarian, it could be resolved by humanitarian means namely, food relief. If the Biafrans could some how convince the world that the Nigerians were intentionally starving the hapless but worthy Biafrans as part of a demonstrable strategy of genocide, the response would have to be political. By this time, the main Biafran objective was to throw up insurmountable diplomatic roadblocks against Nigerian victory in order to wrestle de facto recognitions of sovereignty by getting to the negotiation table as a full partner in a conditionless ceasefire. By Summer 1968, the Biafran leadership was posturing like the starvation had forever been part of their plan: Our aim all along has been to delay the enemy until the world conscience can effectively be aroused against genocide.188 This section of the thesis looks at the upheaval in discourse during the Summer months of 1968. In part, it examines how Biafrans changed their rhetoric to calibrate their message to the starvation. Even more though, it looks at the press coverage focused on the New York Times given to the Biafra conflict from July-September 1968 in hopes of better understanding how American citizens were reconciling with and attempting to resolve the crisis across the seas. ***
187

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 237. 188 Odumegwu Ojukwu, Biafra: Random Thoughts (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 242.

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For many Americans, the Biafra crisis began on July 13, 1968. Although the conflict had been underway for more than a year, its resonance in America was still largely limited to ultra-informed citizens with a pre-existing interest in Africa. All that changed with the publication of Life magazines July cover story on the Biafran famine. All of a sudden, Biafra or more specifically the Biafran famine became headline news. Americans introduced to the conflict in terms of starving children were left to sort through the noisome politics to try to figure out what could and should be done. American coverage during those summer months focused largely on the humanitarian crisis enveloping Nigeria. A primary emphasis was the scale and horror of the famine. On-the-ground correspondents became not only journalists but editorialists, human links between the suffering Biafrans and American readers. The media grappled with framing the conflict in terms that its audience could understand; the war tended to be to a much greater degree than coverage from more than a year before reduced to tribalism and reciprocal violence. The real editorialists tended to focus on the intransigence of the leadership to accept compromise. More than British involvement or American noninvolvement, the war lingered because of the totally unwillingness of each leadership to compromise political goals for humanitarian ones. They assumed that this compromise was desired by the civilians involved, particularly the Biafrans, but it may not have been so clear cut. The focus on and concern with starvation was so pervasive that the politics of the war began to be simply part and parcel of the politics of starvation and relief. In article after article, the debate about mercy-corridors vs. cease-fires and massive airlifts was repeated. Editorials and political statements demonstrated an incredible desire on the part

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of Americans government and citizen alike to imagine politics and humanitarian causes as separable. The news was not just concerned with the conflict itself but the whole realm of stakeholders. Coverage about mercenaries and the French got their fair share of column space. Even more importantly, articles about the American response gave people a sense of what their fellow citizens were doing. A series of poignant advertisements by concerned citizens groups tried to arouse public opinion in favor of the suffering Biafrans. What is clear is that the starvation brought with it an entirely different sense of the conflict and an entirely different level of focus in the American media. Although the Biafrans updated their rhetoric particularly that of genocide accordingly, the perception of the conflict in America was mostly humanitarian and was created, in fact, by journalists, citizen activists, and humanitarians; ironically, it was created mostly by Americans themselves. *** There have never been more disturbing pictures in the news media than those starving Biafran children. Day after day, month after month, they have stared at us with sad, bulging, lusterless eyes that seem to ask so pathetically, Why dont you help us? -Howard A Rusk, M.D. New York Times, Sept 22, 1968

The centerpiece of reporting about Biafra was calculating and capturing the misery of starvation. Articles that dealt explicitly with the conditions of starvation in the

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country can be organized into three themes. Some emphasis was put on the scale of the disaster how many people were dying per week, and how many were estimated to die in the long run. At the same time, a few articles by guest columnist doctors gave Americans a better sense of the physiological effects of starvation and malnutrition. The most profound articles, however, were those that dealt with the depravation of famine and its profound effect on Biafran society. Perhaps a bit surprisingly, the number of articles focused primarily on evolving estimates of the famine toll was low. Around the time of the Life article, the International Red Cross estimated that about 3000 Biafrans a week were succumbing to starvation.189 The British and Federal Military Government put the number closer to 200. These numbers became the standards for American articles during Summer 1968. Despite this, some suggested higher estimates up to 6000 a day.190 In August, the starvation was accelerating, and what seemed terrifying was the numbers at risk who hadnt starved yet. According to an August 4 story, Oxfam estimated that during the next week, 400000 children would pass the point of no return after which starvation and malnutrition became inevitable.191 The New York Times editorial staff suggested that estimates of the total number facing starvation in the ensuing months ranged from one to ten million.192 The Swiss Red Cross Representative in Biafra said Dont ask me about August. Ive stopped playing the numbers game.193 By the end of September, the number had rocketed to 8000 to 10000 and getting worse.194

189 190

Nigeria: Little Time Left to Avery Disaster, The New York Times, July 14, 1968 Lloyd Garrison, The Point of No Return For the Biafrans, The New York Times, Sep 8, 1968. 191 Biafra: and then the Children Die, The New York Times, Aug 4 192 The Shame of Biafra, The New York Times, July 16, 1968. 193 Lloyd Garrison, Editorial Article 2No Title, The New York Times, August 11, 1968. 194 Deaths In Biafra Put At 8,000 A Day, The New York Times, September 28, 1968.

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These numbers are revealing for more than their approximation of the famine situation. It seems, given the limited way they factored into other articles, that their efficacy in keeping peoples attention was limited. Numbers of the dead are and always have been depersonalized its the context that matters. The higher the number, the more difficult for people to personalize and conceptualize the horror. Stalin recognized this when he said To kill one person is murder; to kill a million is a mere statistic. Moreover, the focus on death tolls as the quantifier of the misery belies the very different understanding of famine held by the West vs. Africans. Alex de Waal wrote extensively about this in his book Famine that Kills. It didnt take a famine theorist and 15 more years experience to articulate some elements of this.
Starvation[does] not evoke quite the same emotions here as [it] does in richer, happier places. Around the continent there are people living on the margin of starvation from the time they are born until they dieAfricans love their children as much as any others do, but death is commonplace, and if someone in the family has to go without eating, the smallest children represent the smallest investment in food and clothes already paid.195

And what of the mechanism of that death? The New York Times occasionally featured reports by hunger specialists to explain more precisely what those disturbing pictures represented. On August 5, an article by Jane Brody distinguished marasmus the skin-and-bones look generally associated with starvation and kwashiorkor a nutritional deficiency disease, stemming from lack of protein. Kwashiorkor was deceptive, for its victims often swell up with water, giving them a round, almost healthy look.196 Unfortunately for victims, sufferers of malnutrition were extremely susceptible to infection. Even minor ailments could and often did lead to death. Even those children

195

Lawrence Fellows, Anger in Africa Over Wests Help to Biafra Rises, The New York Times, September 30, 1968. 196 Jane E. Brody, Malnutrition Can Permanently Impair Those Who Survive It, The New York Times, August 5, 1968.

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who survived face the reality that severe malnutrition in the young may permanently stunt physical and mental growth.197 About six weeks later, Howard M. Rusk, MD, wrote a much more indignant and vibrant narrative describing the symptoms of starvation. First the stomach shrinks and bloats with cramps. During this period starving children cryand eat anything to stop hunger pains. Rags, straw, clay, chalk and even poisonous weeds, berries and twigs have been reportedly ingested.198 Before long though, the cries turn to whimpers, and nausea follows. Thankfully, Nature becomes kinder to the starving at this juncture, kinder than the politicians arguing about boundaries and power.199 Lethargy sinks in and the sufferer begins to sleep more. Lloyd Garrison, the New York Times correspondent in Biafra at the time of secession, wrote about the horror of seeing children caught in this stage:
Their hair has turned reddish yellowtheir bellies are the size of water melons, their arms and legs like matchsticks. You can offer them milk, sugar lumps, chocolate, anything. But no response. They stare back at you with glassy, saucer-like eyes. Death is inevitable. They are too dehydrated, too listless to eat.200

Returning to Rusks narrative, the abdomen distends with fluid and the organs start to break down. The starving person becomes unable to fight other diseases. Even if nutrition is restored at this point, the damage can be permanent; What a price for innocent people to pay for power politics.201 The piece ends with a ringing indictment of those politicians who belabor points while people suffer, and proactively suggests that future negotiations take place in an atmosphere of hunger.202 ***
197 198

Ibid. Howard A. Rusk, Starvation in Biafra, The New York Times, September 22, 1968. 199 Ibid. 200 Biafra: And then the Children Die, The New York Times, Aug 4, 1968 201 Howard A. Rusk, Starvation in Biafra, The New York Times, September 22, 1968. 202 Ibid.

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The Biafrans were incredibly fast to respond to the new representations of starvation in American media. The Office of the Special Representative of the Republic in New York called a press conference within days of Johnsons public statements and the Life cover story to try to take control over the discussion of the famine. Within the week, starvation had become the mechanism of the genocide that Biafra had been accusing the Nigerians of for months. The connection was incredibly important; the Biafrans needed desperately to be able to control the explanation of the starvation, and by extension, its response. Concerned Americans calling for aid to starving children needed to understand the political causality of the famine if the Biafrans were to achieve their aims. The press conference that followed LBJs July 11th statements made these issues plain. Its rhetorical cornerstones were found in the accusation of genocide and in the call for an immediate cease-fire. Additionally, it gave the Biafran perspective on negotiating with the Nigerians about aid distribution. This discussion would be dominant in editorials, articles and letters to the editor of the New York Times throughout the Summer 1968. The speech began on a note of thanks. Dr, Nyonye Otue, Special Representative, was deeply appreciative of the concern of the American president and people, as well as the relief drives being undertaken by various international organizations. Importantly, however, relief assistance [did] not alleviate [their] fear of genocide, and [came] at a time when a number of people would have died before the relief [took] effect.203

203

Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative. Text of a Press Conference by Dr. Nwonye Otue Special Representative, Republic of Biafra, July 1968.

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He reminded the audience that Biafra came into being as a secession for survival. The Nigerian government could not protect the safety of the people of the Eastern Region, and as such had forfeited its right to govern. Indeed, the execution of the war had vindicated the Biafran belief that the 1966 massacres were part of a long term campaign of genocide. Quoting the Spectator, London from May 31, Otue stated:
It is a war of extermination: a vast volume of evidence from unimpeachable witnesses the International Red Cross, the churches, individual missionaries, doctors and teachers proves conclusively that blood-crazed Federal forces are systematically massacring the civilian population, Ibo and non-Ibo alike.204

Over and over, Otue reminded the press the stakes of the conflict: We are faced with genocide and we are determined to fight to the end to survive.205 Biafra could not agree to any relief program that would compel her to make a choice between unconditional surrender and mass massacre that will follow it and death by starvation.206 The politics of aid relief were extremely problematic. For the Biafrans, they were shadowed by the genocide Nigeria was carrying out. Much to the chagrin of outside observers, the Biafrans had rejected food channeled through the Nigerian government. The Nigerians, for their part, had rejected any plans for airlifts demanding that aid be brought in through mercy corridors, land bridges from Nigerian occupied territory to Biafra. Throughout the Summer of 1968, New York Times readers and writers indeed, citizens from around the world - expressed frustration and disbelief that the two leaderships could be so callous in the face of human suffering; the doctor Howard Rusk was the rule, rather than the exception, in his indignation. Especially after the failed Addis Ababa peace talks in early August, the intransigence of the Nigerian and Biafran
204
205

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 2. 206 Ibid., 3.

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rulers in the face of the generosity of world humanitarian sentiment had commentators apoplectic. On August 16th, the New York Times editorial staff wrote a column called The Heartless Leaders, which suggested that tragically, the people who seem least concerned about the fate of millions of starving Biafrans are their own would-be leaders on both sides of Nigerias savage civil war.the world may well wonder whether either set of rival leaders is fit to rule over this unfortunate people.207 A week and a half later it was more of the same; yet another hope for an immediate massive international relief operation for the starving victims of Nigerias civil war has been dashed by intransigence on both sides.208 On August 18th, an article titled In Nigerias Civil War, Humanitarianism Comes In a Poor Second, summed up the positions of the belligerents. The Nigerian government wouldnt accept airlift proposals on principle; any suggestion that any portion of Nigeria should be internationalized and handed over to a foreign agency was unacceptable.209 The Biafrans object[ed] to the land corridor citing fear as well as political principle.210 For the Biafrans, the rejection of Nigerian proposals for aid was linked to the strategy of genocide. During the press conference following President Johnsons statement, Otue described the various reasons why no Nigerian proposals could be accepted.

207 208

The Heartless Leaders, The New York Times, August 16, 1968. False Hope in Nigeria, The New York Times, August 27, 1968. 209 Alvin Shuster, In Nigerias Civil War, Humanitarianism Comes In a Poor Second, The New York Times, August 18, 1968. 210 Ibid.

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Having stated publicly that starvation was a legitimate instrument of warfare, the Nigerian Government could not be trusted. Even if this were not the case, Lagos did not have the power to control its field commanders who would be charged with implementing any agreements regarding food aid. Logistically, the months it would take to repair and build those land corridors would cost the starvation related deaths of millions more. Indeed, the land corridors might very well be a strategic tool for the implementation of genocide; they would effectively remove all obstacles to the rapid enemy advance into Biafra to complete the genocide. Even more maliciously, food accepted from the Nigerians would likely be poisoned. Otue claimed that impartial observers had confirmed poisoning, and importantly recognized that no responsible leadership wouldeven attempt to persuade [its people] to touch the food.211 *** On the domestic front, the most powerful American articles to appear during the Summer of 1968 were those that dealt with the on-scene horror of the starvation. Journalists like the New York Times Lloyd Garrison became regular bridges between the comfort of America and the suffering of Biafra. Their words put the horrors of starvation in poetic, rather than clinical terms; terms which tore at the consciences of well-fed Americans. In letters to the editor, readers testified to the power of their words. On Aug 1, a man from Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania wrote
Ive seen nothing more compelling since I began reading newspapers (48 years) than Lloyd Garrisons news story on the dying Biafra babies. I pray that President Johnson will send aid. We have the pilots, the planes, and the parachutes to put food where it is needed most.212

211

Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative. Text of a Press Conference by Dr. Nwonye Otue Special Representative, Republic of Biafra, July 1968.
212

Alphonso H. Caser, Biafras Children, The New York Times, August 7, 1968.

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These moving portraits of misery tended to share certain characteristics. For one, they tended to focus on the plight of children. Articles had titles like Despair Shrouds Biafran Hospital as Children Die, and Biafra: And Then the Children Die.213 They included descriptions of the horror, such as the Garrison quote about listless children past the point of no return above. Indeed, these mores repeated themselves so frequently that the first question that popped into my head while reading the letter from Mount Carmel was Which story on the dying Biafra babies? Why so much time was spent on children related largely to audience. Throughout the conflict, Americans demonstrated a desire to remain detached from the politics of the conflict. Children, the ultimate symbol of innocence, provided an outlet for American emotional anguish at the Biafran misery without threatening their coveted political neutrality. By mythologizing children as the symbol of the war, sincerely concerned Americans mapped the political neutrality legitimated by childhood innocence onto a conflict totally inseparable from its politics. Whats more, its important to remember that journalists experienced the same human frustrations and sensibilities about the natural order of things. Most of them shared an upbringing more like their readers than the subjects of their articles. Most of them likely rallied against that denial of innocence and their frustration inevitably found its way into their reporting. Indeed, since their mandate as journalists was some modicum of objectivity, children would have again provided safe ground a place where their neutrality as reporters could nestle comfortably with their indignation as humans. The gut wrenching stories from Summer 1968 shared other characteristics, as well. They tended, like Biafran propaganda, to rely on the testimony of unimpeachable
213

New York Times, August 1968

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witnesses. White missionaries and humanitarians became the moral barometer for the stories; in some stories, the focus on their anguish overwhelms that of the Biafrans. On July 30, the story In Biafra, Death by Famine Strikes Everywhere, included quotes from Reverends and Humanitarians alike. They used to come here every night for a little soup milk or bean, said Rev. Ken Doheny of the 7000 children who gathered nightly at the Okpala Mission, Now we have nothing left. This is a childrens war. Theyre all doomed, the lot of them.214 Later in the same article, Dr. Herman Middlekoop of the World Council of Churches was asked about the death toll: This week I just cant give a figure. Its accelerating every hour. Its a desperate situation. Thats all I can say.215 Perhaps the most pointed example was the story Despair Shrouds Biafran Hospital as Children Die. Published on Aug 1, it told the unfortunate story of three Maris Brothers Scottish, Irish and American who work[ed] round the clock against death [and were]on the verge ofspiritual breakdown.216 Brother Aloysius, a tall, wiry man, was on the verge of tears for the duration of the narrative. How can the world allow one country to starve out another? he asks. Echoing Biafran sensibilities, he continued Whether you die by the bullet or from hunger, its still the same thing. Genocide.217 He went on to rant about the various European and American government positions towards the war; about the blinding frustration of the relief impasse. He broke down almost entirely when he was informed by one of his brothers that another child had died. Im sorry, but Im afraid what you see is a very embittered, disillusioned old man.218
214 215

In Biafra, Death by Famine Strikes Everywhere, The New York Times, July 30, 1968. Ibid. 216 Lloyd Garrison, Despair Shrouds Biafran Hospital as Children Die, The New York Times, August 1, 1968. 217 Ibid. 218 Ibid.

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In effect, the missionaries and humanitarians became the tragic heroes of the story, fighting against a world made by cynical men in Ivory Towers across the globe. In the same way, the journalists became the bards, spreading the epic and tragic tales across the land. Like those heroes of the minstrel days, the missionaries and humanitarians were not without their faults indeed, they were human enough that those hearing their songs could imagine themselves a part of the story. It wasnt simply the fact that they could become disillusioned and embittered; even their habits were not so far from the everyday. Brother Aloysius told his story while taking a cigarette break. Americans needed these bridges to far away places. The regular inclusion of white voices in news articles can not simply be written off as racism or colonial paternalism although this certainly was certainly the case for some. The fact of the matter is that it is hard to connect to people from far away places going through misery that you likely never have and never will experience. The authority of the missionary and humanitarian voice was that their anguish was the anguish of the reader; it was not hunger but the frustration of trying to relieve that hunger. When trying to explain this idea to friends, I often reference my relationship with narratives about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. There are dozens of readily available books on the crisis many of which crush readers with their visceral descriptions of brutality. We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch has become the American college standard for this type of representation. Despite this, the Rwanda narrative that struck me most was Romeo Dallaires Shake Hands With The Devil. Daillare was the UN Force Commander and spent excruciating months trying anything and everything he could do, with his limited

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means and limited mandate, to prevent the slaughter from reaching even more terrible levels. Still, his book is one of the most sanguine. Descriptions of the horror are few and far between. The prose is plodding; basically it is a day-to-day description of his frustration. So why is it that it resonated so strongly? My ability to connect to certain types of pain is limited. I cannot draw upon personal experience to understand the pain of those who have seen their families and friends eviscerated in front of them and stuffed down toilets; the pain of those forced to hide in mortal terror yet accept murder as their inevitable fate. But this is not Daillaires story his is a story of being a bystander to misery, witnessing the terrible things that people can do to one another and feeling powerless to stop it. This is a frustration that I do know and that I can feel. Indeed, it is the frustration Ive felt over and over again writing this thesis. The American collective imagination has often thrived on archetypal narratives. More than informing us about ourselves, they reaffirm our hope for what we are, or what we might be. Whether its the Gilded Ages Ragged Dick reminding us that hard work brings almost limitless rewards, or the Tin Pan Alley Hollywood Cowboys of the Depression and Dustbowl, reminding us of our deep independence in a time when we needed to escape the frustration of living on the government dole, these narratives help us identify ourselves as Americans. Some of our most enduring mythologies are support of the underdog and the idea of beneficent power. Again and again, they have come out in the realm of foreign intervention. There were our adventures in the Phillipines first helping kick out the Spanish colonialists, but then taking up residence ourselves. More recently there were the

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Iraqs, which, as far as most of the decent American public supporters were concerned, came down to helping the Kurds and Shiites kick some of the Baathist butt that had been beating them down so long. In Biafra, those mythologies were evident again. Letters to the editor bemoaned the fact that a nation with such means should allow people to suffer for want of the food we had so readily available. Some went further, suggesting that if the powers involved refused to put their people above the politics, America should simply go over them and deliver relief anyway. The relief workers and missionaries served as the perfect bearers of these mythologies. They had the authenticity of seeing the suffering up close. They had the credibility of being beyond the realm of personal ends; why would they go to a place like Biafra if they were self-interested? Most of all, they were like us the vaguely concerned but comfortable at home Americans - but not too like us. Their follies, emotions, language, skin color, background all of these things helped Americans imagine themselves as like them. But the power (and problem) of collective imagination is that self-mythologies allow you to participate in identity through belief rather than action. In Biafra, to participate in the collective indignation of America, all we had to do was read our stories and lament. To a large degree, Americans could achieve the moral credibility of righteous anger without sacrifice or even participation in the problem or solution. And because so much of our indignation dwelled in the realm of mythology, it was easier for us to detach and detangle the pieces selecting those that were simple humanitarian frustration over those that werent navigating a complex political reality.

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*** If the story had a heady lead of cannibalism, endangered gorillas, or little girls being raped with machetes, then it might survive its journey across the Atlantic. Everything else was like punting in a hailstorm. Stories left the desk and crashed straight into a watery grave, where a half-century of dispatches of bothersome African despair boils at the bottom. - Bryan Mealer Congos daily Blood: Ruminations from a Failed State Harpers April 2006

Missionaries werent the only bridges to European and American communities. For journalists, the war was a unique test to objectivity. John St. de Jorre suggested that civil wars are the hardest conflicts to cover, not in small part because neutrality in a civil war cannot be maintained for long. Sooner or later one has to take sides.219 In ways that would be repeated in later wars, the international press core did more than report the stories of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict; it became a part of them for better or for worse. Subject to wildly disparate conditions for reporting between Biafra and Nigeria, witness to the horrendous affects of starvation, and engaged by both the propaganda and spirit of the Biafrans, reporters of all stripes often found themselves consciously or subconsciously acting as Biafran emissaries; indeed, the pro-Biafra American response to the conflict can be at least partially attributed to the influence of respected journalistic voices. Part of the reason that reporters found themselves pro-Biafra partisans was that there were smart people working tirelessly to engender this mindset. The Biafrans and their marketing consultants knew precisely how important good international coverage was. William Bernhardt and his Markpress firm, the Geneva-based marketing group that
219

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 135.

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handled the Biafra portfolio, believed that their relationship with the press needed to include a few essential components. Good communications was a must, and the press was never at a loss for materials; Markpress ensured that reporters always had access to background briefings220. Perhaps even more important, Markpress coordinated regular trips to Biafra for journalists that included incredible access to the front lines, officials, and any communications infrastructure they might need to transmit their stories. This red carpet treatment was not mirrored on the other side of the war. Skeptical that foreign journalists were simply interfering interlopers, and generally disinclined towards involving outside world in a conflict they viewed as an internal problem, the Nigerians could be exceedingly hostile to journalists. Whats more, their Ministry of Information tended to be in upheaval, and was never able to be as responsive to reporter inquiries as its Biafran counterpart. As if this werent enough, the Nigerian government had a nasty habit of kicking out those good reporters who were embedded, such as Walter Schwartz of the Guardian and the New York Times221 Lloyd Garrison, both of whom became well-known for their work in the Biafran territories. From the viewpoint of the belligerents, the difference in treatment of reporters reflected the different aims of the conflict. By dictating the terms by which the conflict was viewed, the Biafrans thought they could bring outside pressure to bear on the Nigerians. Given how long they were able to hold out despite British and Russian arms shipments to Nigeria, it seems reasonable to speculate that if world governments had been more responsive to the perceptions of the conflict that dominated their citizens, the

220

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 306. 221 Ibid., 354.

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conflict might have had a very different ending. It was with this in mind that the Biafrans worked fervently even months before the war began to push its view of the conflict. For the Nigerians on the other hand, any international involvement whatsoever, except to support the status quo of the regime in Lagos, undermined its sovereignty in a very fundamental way. The civil nature of the conflict meant that the question of authority and sovereignty played out in arenas like who was to be paid for oil contracts involving the Eastern Region and how was aid to be delivered was extraordinarily relevant to the conduct of the war. To try to engage the world press on their side would have brought the world to the conflict in a way that inevitably would undermine the FMGs claim that the conflict was a domestic dispute. As one writer put it, to launch a massive public relations effort abroad would invite the very internationalization of the conflict that the Federal government was concerned, above all other considerations, to prevent.222 There was more to the posture of the international press than the intentions of the belligerents, however. From a cynical standpoint, the conflict was a rattling good yarn,223 a vicious, savage conflict from the Dark Continent that excited the humanitarian emotions and long-standing prejudices of the Western readership. Dramatic reporting often claimed that the conflict harkened back to the vicious wars of the 19th century, indeed that the conflict was the sort of horrible that the white mind just couldnt wrap its head around. It is difficult to find an article that didnt call the conflict a tribal war. To some extent, this reflected an editorship ignorant or not pandering to its audiences biases and creating self-fulfilling prophecies about their inability to
222

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 353. 223 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 354.

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comprehend complexity. Then, as now, many editors were looking for strongly personalized crocodile-infested river and cannibal copy. More than simply failing to representthe people involved in a fully human way, the accounts of the journalists in the action rather than the action itself became primary fodder. One journalist had a full, 3000 word story of his journey to Biafra published before he even arrived.224 Additionally, reporters tended to gloss over all but the most basic complexities of the conflict relying on the standard old myth that there were forces at work in Africa that the white mind simply rebelled against understanding.225 There was the additional difficulty of remaining unbiased with horror all around. Looking back, it is clear that many of the journalists embedded in Biafra became partisan because their own minds refused to comprehend the terrible starvation they saw. Whats more, the indefatigable underdog spirit of the Biafrans seems to have resonated strongly with reporters it was easy to like people who didnt give up in the face of trouble. Even the best reporters found themselves fighting the pressure to adopt the mindset and belief of the Biafrans. John De St. Jorre perhaps the most relentless foreign correspondent in his pursuit of true, objective understanding of the war said he felt schizophrenic moving between the lines, and often felt himself beginning to think of the Nigerians as conniving vandals bent on killing any and all Ibos they met, despite his personal knowledge that this was generally not the case.226 Whatever the connection, the embedded journalists of Biafra pumped an image of Biafra back to Europe and America that was virtually assured to engage citizen passion
224

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 354. 225 Frederick Forsyth, Gutted Hamlets, Rotting CorpsesThis is Genocide, The Sunday Times, May 12, 1968. 226 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 222.

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and pity. The relief response was conditioned by the images Americans saw and the words they read. Taken on its own terms, the Biafra cause was an entirely worthy one it was only in its all-important context that it became more complicated. Indeed, even 40 years later, I find myself lapsing into Biafran partisanship as I read through the documents of their misery and determination. As an American socially conditioned to value grit, resolve, steadfastness, individual agency, and at the same time conditioned to sympathize with others plight and misery, it is simply hard not to connect with the Biafrans based on what they wrote about themselves and what was written about them. From the war, a number of journalistic archetypes emerged; there were the sensationalists like independent Frederick Forsyth and the intelligent-biased like the New York Times Lloyd Garrison. If at least a part of the intention of writing this thesis is to better understand and inform the discussion of representations of genocide and African war today, it is worth thinking critically about these individuals, situated now almost forty years away. On May 12, 1968, the Sunday Times (London) ran the headline: Gutted hamlets, rotting corpses this is genocide. The storys author, Frederick Forsyth, had been working for BBC at the beginning of the war but was reassigned after the Nigerian government complained about his reporting. From February through May 1968, he was based in Port Harcourt and reported from the bush with Biafran troops.227 Towards the end of the war, he would write a strongly partisan book called The Biafra Story. In a vitriolic condemnation of foreign reporting during the war, Adepitan Bamisaiye wrote

227

Frederick Forsyth, Gutted Hamlets, Rotting CorpsesThis is Genocide, The Sunday Times, May 12, 1968.

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that Forsyth, widely quoted in foreign press articles, became one of the instant experts on African problems.228 His frustration was understandable Forsyths writing fell somewhere between sensationalism and racism. The article mentioned above was littered with machinegunned menfolk, women raped to the accompaniment of the all-too-ritualistic mutilations, and children spitted on machete knifes. By the end, he predicted the biggest bloodbath the Commonwealth has ever seen.229 The lead quote, printed above the headline in large font, was: There are forces let loose in Biafra that white men cannot understand.230 Bamisaiye suggests that Forsyths book articles can hardly disguise his contempt for the black man.231 Describing the Nigerian army, Forsyth wrote After the Hause come the Gwodo-Gwodo, giant black mercenaries from Chad; recruited through the good offices of the Northern EmirsThese Chads are of very animaline intelligence and will shoot anyoneBehind the Gwodo-Gwodo, one can hear British voices screaming, Come on you black bastards MOVE.232 After the war, Forsyth would go on to have a moderately successful career as a pulp novelist. Bamisaiye also had little love for the New York Times Lloyd Garrison, who he suggested was the first reporter to see the potential for journalistic success in the
228

Adepitan Bamisaiye, The Nigerian Civil War in the International Press, Transition, no. 44 (1974): 3032+34-35, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0042 1191%281974%290%3A44%3C30%3ATNCWIT %3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y 229 Frederick Forsyth, Gutted Hamlets, Rotting CorpsesThis is Genocide, The Sunday Times, May 12, 1968.
230

Ibid. Adepitan Bamisaiye, The Nigerian Civil War in the International Press, Transition, no. 44 (1974): 3032+34-35, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0042 1191%281974%290%3A44%3C30%3ATNCWIT %3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y 232 Frederick Forsyth, Gutted Hamlets, Rotting CorpsesThis is Genocide, The Sunday Times, May 12, 1968.
231

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underdog status of Biafra and to exploit it shamelessly for his own advantage.233 While there might be an element of cynical truth in his argument, to read Garrisons writing now is to find a reporter whose bias seems to be a condition of his circumstances rather than a conscious strategy. Garrison was kicked out of Nigeria almost as soon as the conflict began and thus his only context was the Biafran context; how could he have failed to be swayed, faced as he was with the misery all around him? John de St. Jorre believed that the problem of many journalists was that they didnt explore the Nigerian side for Garrison, he was physically unable to. If his writing was sensational, particularly with the onslaught of famine, there might have been forces at work above and beyond his simple identification with the Biafran cause. Anthropologists have examined the phenomenon of collective suffering and the problems of sharing that suffering with others. As will be explored in the final section of this work, the suffering of others particularly the suffering of pain and hunger is in some ways beyond cognitive understandingit is lost tospeech.234 If hunger, violence, and evil are all brutal facts of social life, then their brutality is nonlingusiticand there is not way of transferring non-lingustic brutality to facts.235 Importantly, there is a discrepancy between the richness of the lived field experience and the paucity of the language used to characterize it.236 Given this, it is reasonable to wonder to what extent the sensationalism of reporting in the Biafran conflict and
233

Adepitan Bamisaiye, The Nigerian Civil War in the International Press, Transition, no. 44 (1974): 3032+34-35, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0042 1191%281974%290%3A44%3C30%3ATNCWIT %3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y
234

Kirsten Hastrup, Hunger and the Hardness of Facts, Man, vol. 28, no. 4 (December, 1993): 727-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1496%28199312%292%3A28%3A4%3C727%3AHATHOF %3E2.0.CO%3B2-D 235 Ibid., 735. 236 Ibid., 735.

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perhaps any other has to do with the reporters inability to properly verbalize their own experience of trauma. Reporters were not the only group involved in creating the American imagination of the Biafra-Nigeria conflict. Citizen response groups in America sprung up and began inserting their various messages into the public space. On the one hand, they worked to engage Americans with visceral imagery. On the other, some sought to determine how those images were received. Stated another way, these groups in particular the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive were attempting to be the community governing the politics of explanation.237 The American Committee was started by three former Peace Corps participants and a British student. One of the important things about the American Committee was that it was one of the few organizations interested in dealing not only with the humanitarian crisis, but the politics of the situation. It believed, as demonstrated by its actions and publications, that the starvation of Biafra was tantamount to genocide, and accordingly demanded a political response. Throughout the Summer of 1968, the American Committee was a leader in awareness raising events. Importantly, they designed and printed a powerful set of advertisements in the New York Times and other papers. The timing of these ads coincided with the July 12 Life cover story and they generally increased attention being paid to the conflict by news editors around the country. The ads, they explained came about after the Committee was contacted by some people with money who asked us to run a newspaper ad and didnt want to sign it.238 When the ads ran, the Committee got
237

Ibid., 734. Roy M. Melbourne. The American Response to the Nigerian Conflict. Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 3, no. 2 (1973): 33-42, http://links.org/sici?sici=0047238

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an unbelievable response.239 Throughout the summer, they blanketed the country with information and organized pro-Biafran rallies in twenty-three cities. In the process, they spent thousands of dollars a week raised from private contributors.240 Some of the earliest ads run by the American Committee depicted a set of young boys withered from marasmus, with the powerful and confusing caption: If you feel sorry for these starving children of Biafra, youre a victim of misguided humanitarian rubbish.241 The caption was a reference to a statement made earlier by one of the Federal Military Governments most infamous and brutal Army Colonels, Benjamin the Scorpion Adekunle. The bottom of the ad presented the case for Biafra in brief and compelling terms. A central focus of the Committee was the protest the use of starvation as a military weapon.242 Using techniques reflective of the news coverage, it told the story of the Holy Rosary Mission Hospital where Sister Mary Helen, an Irish nun, held a pain-racked baby, now dead from starving. Importantly, it labeled the situation in Biafra genocide, and referenced the Holocaust. Six million will die in six months, it claims; Has mankind become so immune to death that we can accept without protest these facts of life?...That once again the world may be silent witness to the extinction of an entire population.243 The American Committee was not the only group to place ads in the paper. In early August, the American Jewish Emergency Effort for Biafran Relief, a coalition of the major Jewish religious, communal, relief and philanthropic bodies, ran an add with

1607%28197322%293%3A2%3C33%3ATARTTN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4 239 Ibid. 240 Ibid. 241 Display Ad 83No Title, The New York Times, Jul 27, 1968. 242 Ibid. 243 Ibid.

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the headline Have you ever seen millions of children starving to death? Now you have.244 The ad might seem, to modern eyes, conspicuously absent of Holocaust references. After all, the Jewish organizations involved in the Darfur issue today and there are many place the Holocaust at the center of their engagement. Survivor Elie Wiesel states regularly that Jews are involved because when they were in the camps, no one came for them.245 At the time of Biafra, however, Jews were only just starting to discuss the Holocaust in its own terms. Adolf Eichmanns trial in Jerusalem in 1961 had cleared the ground, but the main American representations of the Holocaust were not conspicuously Jewish. In fact, the different sense in the 1960s of the value of victim status provided incentives for Jews not to engage in much public Holocaust discourse.246 In mid-August, the Nigerian government countered with a series of ads called A Ghastly Game, which decried the manipulation of suffering for political ends.247 The accusation was certainly relevant and found many supporting voices in news editors from around the country. The ads referenced various editorials from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Washington Post and others and may have helped keep Americans focused on the humanitarian aspect of the crisis, rather than its political causation. Still, if it gave Nigeria a hand in governing the politics of explanation, it had little of the visceral power of the images of starvation which dominated ads throughout the summer. In addition to general awareness and fundraising ads, a variety of organizations, led by the American Committee, used the New York Times to publicize events. On August 8th, the Committee urged citizens to skip their lunch and come to the United

244 245

Display Ad 21No Title, The New York Times, August 8, 1968. Speech heard by author at National Rally for Darfur, April 30, 2006 246 For more, see the final section of this paper. 247 Display Ad 47No Title. The New York Times, August 13, 1968,

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Nations to form a lifeline for Biafra.248 Its powerful imagery connected the American experience and the Biafran experience. The picture in the center of the screen was a shot of a white doctor holding an emaciated child. The key line of the appeal is This is August 8th. It may be the most memorable August 8th of your life. For the children of Biafra it will be the last.249 Other advertisements over the next few months, funded by the American Committee and other citizen organizations, advertised concerts, dances, political radio programs and more. One of the most important aspects of the New York Times coverage of the conflict was the amount of space given to telling the stories of regular Americans engaged with the conflict. Throughout the summer, citizen actions from the mundane to the unique found their way to readers. On August 19th, three children from Biafra stood as symbolsas 1000 people held a prayer service before the United Nations.250 During the same week, a 9 year old girl from New Jersey flew first to see the Archbishop of Canterbury and then to see the Pope in order to appeal on behalf of the Biafrans. A few weeks earlier, the Times had printed a sort of inventory of groups trying to aid Biafra. The Committee for Nigeria/Biafra Relief was a group of doctors, nurses and former Peace Corps volunteers willing to distribute food and medicine on either side of the lines. The Jewish Emergency Effort for Biafra Relief was a coalition of twenty-one major Jewish groups. Catholic Relief Services and other Christian groups had been sending relief supplies to nearby islands, waiting for a break in the political impasse to distribute aid, for months. The American Committee, it rightly recognized, was more focused on the politics of the situation than relief.
248
249

Display Ad 39No Title. The New York Times, August 8, 1968. Ibid. 250 Will Lissner, 1,000 Pray Before U.N. for Biafran Children, The New York Times, August 19, 1968.

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*** Here it is important to think deeply about the fundamental difference in thinking that separated Americans reading about the starvation and Biafrans experiencing it. As the starvation took hold, the rhetoric of genocide had a dual purpose and a dual efficacy. On the one hand, it represented the Biafrans attempt to demand a political response from the world rather than just a humanitarian one. It was also, however, the driving force behind the besieged mindset of Biafran citizens. Although it received less attention than international propaganda, some have argued that domestic propaganda had the greater influence in shaping the course of the war.251 Throughout the war, propaganda on the Biafran side was use to bolster support for its leadership. Perhaps even more importantly, it was used to create and reinforce a distinct Biafran identity rooted in collective persecution. Ever since the massacres of 1966, Biafran propaganda had played incessantly on the fears aroused by [those] terrible events.252 It had played a key role in preparing the region for secession and throughout the conflict, was the boogeyman to the Biafran suffering. John de St. Jorre wrote that the beauty of the genocide concept for the propagandist was that it left no loophole:
It ensured that the masses, which firmly believed it, would support the leaderships decision to fight on to the very last even beyond the point where all reasonable hope of victory had faded because they were convinced that there was no alternative.253

While this is certainly true, the power of the myth of genocide in Biafra should not only be understood in these uni-directional terms. The Biafrans who gravitated to the rhetoric of genocide assimilated it as part of their personal and collective narratives and

251

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 345. 252 Ibid. 253 St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 346.

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spit it back out. They took what evidence they could find from the cartoons, radio programs or pamphlets or simply hearsay and passed it along. Throughout the Summer, Times articles told the stories of normal Biafrans who had resigned themselves to fight or death. Even in the face of terrible starvation, there could be no surrender. As Garrison wrote in early August, to even suggest surrender is takenas a slur, however unintentional.254 Rather than talk of acquiescence then, Biafrans raised money for their suffering compatriots. They would join together in a public setting and reenact their own terrible history, often with heavy and morbid emphasis on the bloodiest incidents.255 Indeed, the Biafransactually seemed to enjoy perpetuating the memory of their suffering.256 The reality is that the collectivization of the trauma of war in the public life was not simply about fear and propaganda but indeed about finding meaning in misery. The acknowledgement and embrace of toil was a coping strategy for a wounded population. In this way, the mythology of genocide was cyclically created and reinforced; the propaganda was effective within Biafran territory not simply because it played on Ibo fears but because it helped provide justifying explanations that created identity, albeit beleaguered, out of misery. *** Despite this, Americans were not Biafrans and the rhetoric of genocide had a very different intent abroad. From the post-Life press conference onward, the international rhetoric of genocide was used to influence the understanding of starvation. Perhaps the

254 255

Lloyd Garrison., Give In? Biafrans in a Bar Say Nevah, The New York Times, August 2, 1968. St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 347. 256 Ibid., 346.

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strongest single statement aimed at American audiences was released three days after Otues initial press conference. The document, An Appeal: Dont Let Your Righteous Indignation Rise Too Late, utilized all the same techniques as previous Biafran propaganda in particular focusing on the testimony of foreign journalists and other unimpeachable witnesses, but there was a unique force to the claim of genocide by starvation. The Nigerians had cleverly invented the [land] corridor problem and the political surroundings to conceal their real intentionscompleting their plans for another major assultwhile about 3000 Biafrans die a day from starvation and malnutrition THIS IS GENOCIDE.257
The politics of mercy-cooridor is fashioned to compel Biafra to make a choice between death by starvation or surrender to our enemies with mass murder that will follow. Which alternative you choose is GENOCIDE.258

Importantly, that document and other speeches, press conferences and pamphlets issued throughout the summer connected the plight of Biafrans to the Holocaust more strongly than ever before. The final warning of the appeal to righteous American indignation read:
A little over a quarter of a century ago the world was silent and 6 million people died. When it comes to GENOCIDE remaining silent means youve taken sides. Do not leave it to the historians to write about what should have been done. SPEAK OUT NOW!259

Two days leader, Ojukwu called an international press conference where he used the same language. In 1945 he claimed, a group of leaders appalled by the wanton destruction of human life which the world had just witnessedbound themselves to intervene and stop acts of genocide wherever they might occur in the world.260
257

Government of the Republic of Biafra. Office of the Special Representative. Dont Let Your Righteous Indignation Rise Too Late, July 1968 258 Ibid., 5. 259 Ibid., 7. 260 The Republic of Biafra. Address by His Excellency, Lieutenant-Colonel C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Biafra Armed Forces, to an International Press Conference, Thursday, 18th July, 1968, 1968.

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Throughout the speech, he equated the blockade and forced starvation with genocide. He called the poising of food another example of Nigerias genocidal intent. A few months later, after some of the rhetoric had sunk in, the Biafrans released a document that countered some of the arguments that Nigeria and her supporters had used to defend against the charge of genocide. Again, the main Biafran allusion was the Holocaust. With regard to the charge that it was impossible to kill all Biafrans, the document stated Nazi Germany did not succeed in killing all the Jews and yet genocide was the charge against German leaders at the Nuremberg trials.261 In response to the claim that Ibos living in Lagos indicated that the Nigerian leadership couldnt possibly want to kill them all, the Biafrans wrote Many German Jews were working happily and some collaborated with the Nazis during the extermination of the 6000000 Jews in nazi Gas Chambers and concentration camps in Germany during World War II.262 The relationship of America and the Holocaust and the potential efficacy of the Holocaust allusions is explored in the final section. In the end then, how successful were the Biafrans in affecting the discourse of starvation? Were they able to fundamentally change the American outlook on the war? Unfortunately for the Biafrans, the American response to the Biafra conflict was created more by the American press than by Biafran propaganda itself. Their suffering, much more than their interpretation of it, was driving the journalism. The Biafran propaganda strategy recognized that pressmen were the gatekeepers to public opinion. What they wrote about the conflict would and did largely determine how average citizens understood it. In this way, certain parts of the Biafran strategy were
261
262

The Republic of Biafra. Nigerias Weak Response to the Charge of Genocide. Oct 1968. Ibid.

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more effective than others. The Markpress-arranged visits for reporters and foreign emissaries brought individuals into contact with the deprivation of the beleaguered Biafrans, and no matter what the politics of representation, any honest accounting of their misery would have been sure to affect indignation on the part of citizens. It cannot be forgotten, however, that the Biafrans needed not only to show the suffering but to be the community who controlled the explanation. This was the rationale behind the briefings, press releases, and pamphlets that tried so desperately to demonstrate that starvation was just another name for genocide. They were not without some successes. Certain American action groups like the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive adopted the logic of the Biafrans entirely. Throughout the war, they worked to introduce Americans to Biafra in political as well as humanitarian terms. As it became a more political issue, certain members of the house and senate, including liberal Senators like Russell and Kennedy and conservative congressmen like Lukens, put pressure on the US Government to recognize and assist Biafra.263 Perhaps most importantly, on September 9th, the campaigning Republican candidate Nixon implored LBJ to give all the time and attention and imagination and energy he [could] muster, to the issue of Biafra, saying that the time is past for the wringing of hands about what is going on
While America is not the worlds policeman, let us at least act as the worlds conscious in the matter of life and death of millions264

During his campaign, Nixon called the situation in Nigeria genocide and stated strongly that, This [was] not the time to stand on ceremony or to go through channels
263

Roy M. Melbourne. The American Response to the Nigerian Conflict. Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 3, no. 2 (1973): 33-42, http://links.org/sici?sici=00471607%28197322%293%3A2%3C33%3ATARTTN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4 264 Ibid., 37.

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or to observe diplomatic niceties.265 These inflammatory statements brought a swift response, however, from his fellow Republicans and the other institutions of government that were either invested in a united Nigeria or simply unwilling to be invested in Biafra. As President, Nixon engaged the issue more deeply than had his predecessor, appointing a Special Coordinator on relief, but at the same time, realized that those diplomatic niceties were more difficult than he had given them credit for. Since humanitarian relief was in danger of interpretation by the parties as a form of intervention, American relief would draw a sharp distinction between carrying out our moral obligations to respond to humanitarian needs and involving ourselves in the political affairs of others.266 The reality was that written Biafran self-imagination in the form of propaganda press releases and background briefings did little to influence American journalists, and as such, did little to influence the American public perception of Biafra. As mentioned before, Markpress strategy for international public relations included building up steadily and consistently background stories on Biafra, and encourage[ing] the press to rely on Biafran releases.267 Writing in 1973, however, PhD Candidate Laurie Wiseberg stated that relief personnel, newspaper correspondents, and the government officials I had occasion to discuss this with were in general agreement on one point: namely, that no one who was at all sophisticated about politics put much credence on the releases issued by Markpressthey were, quite simply, Biafran propaganda releases.268 Even when Americans were assertive of the need for US political involvement, it tended not to be follow the logic of Biafran rhetoric, but rather was an interpretation of
265 266

Ibid., 37. Ibid.,41. 267 Laurie Wiseberg, The International Politics of Relief: A Case Study of the Relief Operations Mounted During the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970 (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1973), 575. 268 Ibid., 576.

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the intersection between moral abomination and American power. Those Americans that did want a stronger US role in ending the conflict tended to be those Americans who understood the role of US power as doing good by mitigating horror in the world. For these people, it was not necessarily an acceptance of the Biafran connection of genocide and starvation so much as the extent of the horror of the starvation itself that compelled political action. Michael C. Latham reflected the mood of much of the American public that did support intervention. The United States and United Nations, he said, should issue an ultimatum to both governments, saying that they planned to organize a massive airlift of food to those in need. Indeed, if there were attacks, US planes should return fire. He suggested that inevitably, there would be some criticism of the intervention, but that the moral imperative of the situation was too strong to worry long about that: We cannot delay; we must act with vigor and compassion now.269 Fundamentally, then, the American response to the war was determined by humanitarian considerations; viewed as more or less separable from politics. Even when Americans were willing to talk about the politics of the situation, the discussion tended to be routed in the question of whether the scale of starvation was so terrible that Americas beneficent power should be brought to bear in forcing the gate for relief open. *** This coverage of American responses to the conflict is important for understanding the way that citizens of the United States engage with far away places. On one level, the individuals appearing in the articles demonstrators outside the UN or the little girl flying to meet religious leaders functioned as bridges between America and
269

Michael C. Latham, For Food Airlift to Biafra, The New York Times, September 11, 1968.

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the rest of the world; if you couldnt connect to starving children, you might connect to those that cared about them. Perhaps even more, the citizen action groups provided an outlet for the raw emotion inspired by images of starvation. Americans who were shocked into noticing the plight of Biafrans had opportunities to then connect to one another and form communities of the concerned. These groups were organized by every different faith, profession, and political affiliation. The individual narratives of concerned individuals became the basis for connection among the many; if the allusion of the Ibos to the Biblical Israelites connected to you, an evangelical group might be your home. If it was the memory of the Holocaust on the other hand, perhaps a Jewish support organization would work better. Although it is a bit beyond the scope of this paper, I believe that the role of community formation in engaging Americans in international issues is the most vital and perhaps least studied part of the answer to the question of why Americans come to care about far away places. As mentioned above, the terrible images of Biafra could be channeled into a response customized to personal belief systems and affiliations. For many of the participants in these groups, it is likely that participation in the group was at least as important to their involvement as their compassion for Biafra. This phenomenon was not limited to Biafra. Indeed, today extraordinarily similar processes are on display in Darfur activism. Support communities have been formed around faiths, professions, identities, and political beliefs, and much of the swell in activism over the last few months can be attributed, I believe, not to better access to information about Darfur, but rather to more outlets for people to connect with others whove received similar information, wish to do something about it, and perhaps most of all, are like them.

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Section Four While the first three sections of this thesis narrated the evolution of Biafran propaganda and self-representation on the one hand and American imagination of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict on the other, this section is devoted to a theoretical exploration of two fundamental components of the rhetoric and engagement of the Biafra war. The first part looks critically at the place of the Holocaust in American life during the 1960s. What evidence is there that can help us determine how the rhetorical allusions to the persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany might have been received by American audiences? Although this rhetoric evolved over the course of the war, it seems to never have taken hold in American collective imagination. Starvation, on the other hand, drove the American response to the conflict. As we explored in the last section, the images of hunger more than any other single factor engaged citizens of the United States. Section Four examines the anthropology of hunger and asks what gives physiological suffering a power to connect people across borders above and beyond political concepts like genocide.

Holocaust, Jews, and Israel Throughout the war indeed, even before the first shots were fired the Biafrans tied their experience as the successful outcasts of Nigeria to the mythologies of both the Biblical and modern Israelis. In this comparison, they drew upon archetypes of independence, outcast status, intellectual and financial success, and finally - with the onslaught of war and starvation - struggle and survival. Along with starvation came an increased identification with the Holocaust.

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The precise epidemiology of these parallel is hard to discern. They might have derived from biblical identification. Ibos in particular had been quick to adopt Christianity. They may have first read about the Israelites of old in those verses and mapped those stories onto their own experience. The status of Ibos around Nigeria before the war might have also contributed to the parallel. The collective imagination seemed to hold that they were both loathed and grudgingly respected, but never loved. At the same time, there may have been an element of reciprocity between assertion and imagination; as more foreign press took the Biafran cue in making the comparison, more Biafrans (or perhaps just Ibos) might have taken the comparison to heart. Whatever the case, it was not without certain demonstrable efficacy abroad. Interestingly, the Israeli public seemed to have taken the message to heart. According to journalists like de St. Jorre, they were solidly behind Biafra.270 This connection helps demonstrate the powerful influence of self-imagination on public opinion. If Israelis accepted the parallel offered by Biafra, they would in effect take Ibos as Israelis once removed. The difference between thinking of foreign peoples as allies and thinking of them as fundamentally within the bounds of how you define yourself is incredibly important in the depth and type of support that follows. Later, I will argue that this was precisely the psychosocial process introduced by hunger that shifted American public opinion towards Biafra. However much this was the case in Israel is hard to determine. Regardless, this favorable public opinion translated to pressure exerted on the Knesset to break diplomatic relations with Nigeria.271

270

St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 219 271 Ibid., 219

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It is important to note that the Israeli public did not discover Biafra on its own. As early as August 1966, Biafran emissaries had been hard at work trying to develop favorable feelings and more importantly, arms sales from the small Mediterranean nation. Despite the citizen support for Biafra, pressure on the Israeli government never resulted in much more than small quantities of mostly captured arms.272 These were given under heavy camouflage, thus mitigating the important diplomatic value of those transactions.273 But what of America? How did they receive the parallel to the Jews and the Holocaust? Perhaps as interestingly, how would we have expected them to receive it? It is hard to answer these questions looking back from our time, in which the emotional, moral, social, and political resonance of the Holocaust has been cultured by decades of American appropriations, interpretations and mythologies. It is used for propaganda and moral pedagogy. It is widely taken, to greater or lesser extent, as a guiding moral compass. It figures into conversations of abortion, foreign policy, and free speech. The Holocaust in American life is a wildly dynamic set of lessons couched by an ostensibly historical event. Indeed, in some ways, the Holocaust in American life has become a fundamentally ahistorical event, in which extrapolations of meaning have become significantly more relevant to collective imagination and identity than firm historical detail and ambiguity. But was this the case in the late 1960s? In the aftermath of World War II, the Holocaust tended to be assimilated along with other brutality as part of general Nazi horror. In the 1940s and 1950s, it did not have the distinct individual identity it would later acquire. Part of this had to do with the
272 273

From Israels recent Six Day War St. John de Jorre, The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972), 220.

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healing process. In the wake of the war, American national attention was focused on recovery and progress. International rehabilitation plans began to restore the institutions of Europe and America invested heavily in its vanquished foes, Germany and Japan. By the same token, Jews in America tended to be more focused on successful American assimilation. After the debut of Schindlers List, the critically-acclaimed 1993 film about the Holocaust, journalists asked Steven Spielberg why the many Jewish American producers and directors before him hadnt ever made a holocaust movie. He replied that immigrant Jewish producers were having an identity struggle just wanting to become Americans.274 Scholar Hilene Flanzbaum wrote, To make movies about the Holocaust would mean to draw attention to their ethnicity in a way that would impede assimilation.275 The discussion of the Holocaust that did occur focused on universalizing evil. In the early 1960s, the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials argued that a principle established at those proceedings was that genocide was a crime against the entire international community, not a private matter for the aggrieved party.276 Indeed, whereas today much debate is spent on the uniqueness of the Holocaust commentators took offense, for example, to the equating of the Bosnia-Serbia war with the Holocaust, saying that the comparison was like calling a traffic cop a Nazi for ticketing your car in the 1950s, the dominant representations of the Holocaust worked in precisely the opposite fashion, sublimating the aggrieved party to the greater moral importance of the event.

274 275

Hilene Flanzbaum ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust, 12 Ibid., 12 276 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 129

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This shift is demonstrated by the changing objectives of the Anne Frank Foundation. Since the 1980s, the goals of the Foundation have been to educate on World War II, particularly the Holocaust, and to make known the current prejudice and discrimination affecting Jews today.277 This was a marked shift from the previous mission statement, formed in the 1950s, to use the name of Anne Frank as a symbol for hope and to further intergroup understanding in an atmosphere of freedom and hope.278 The 1960s witnessed a few dramatic changes in Holocaust discourse. In 1961, Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, in Argentina and transported him to Israel to stand trial. The trial and the outpouring of conversation surrounding it significantly increased the public openness of American conversations about the Holocaust. Importantly, scholars have noted that the trial was the first time that the Holocaust was presented as a horror all its own, a distinct rather than simply representative piece of Nazi evil.279 In some ways, the commentaries and cultural artifacts created around the trial were as important to our perception of the Holocaust as the trial itself. Western coverage tended to focus on the problems of totalitarianism. The theme emphasized more than any other in newspaper editorials was that ofa warning against the constant threat of totalitarianism that is, Communism. Insofar as editorials noted the responsibility of the Western powers for the Holocaust, it was most often for the Allies having failed to resist Hitler earlier.280 This is extremely important in understanding the American response to the Biafran propaganda in particular as we try to understand whether appeals roughly

277 278

Hilene Flanzbaum ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust, 2 Ibid, 2 279 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 133 280 Ibid, 134

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equivalent to the never again we hear to day with regard to Rwandas and Darfurs had even close to the same invocative resonance. Perhaps even more important to understanding the American response to the Biafran war was the critical and public response to Hannah Arendts articles about the trial that first appeared in the New Yorker. Arendts work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, made several unpopular challenges not only to beliefs but to the instincts that prefigure beliefs. She observed that Eichmann was abundantly normal a personally ambitious, mindless bureaucrat whose evil came not from deep wickedness or anti-Semitism but the most banal motivesnot rooted anywhere.281 Although her opinions later came to be accepted supported in large part by a set of experiments by Yales Stanly Milgram about the average persons psychological capacity for great evil - her reports set off a firestorm initially. Norman Podhoretz wrote that no banality of a man could have done so hugely evil a job so well. Indeed, he wasvocalizing a widespread feeling when he wrote that the traditional version pure evil versus pure good was preferable to her story: complex, unsentimental, riddled with paradox and ambiguity.282 Literary critics were not the only people to take issue with Arendts challenging assertions. During the third season of The Twilight Zone, series creator Rod Serling wrote Deaths Head Revisited, which aired in November 1961.283
Like most episodes Deaths Head Revisited uses supernatural situations and eventsto explore social and ethical issues of general relevance to American audiences (in this case, issues raised by the Eichmann trial) in otherworldly morality plays.284

281 282

Ibid, 135 Ibid, 136 283 Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust, 36 284 Ibid, 36

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The plot of the episode follows the return of a former SS captain to his old haunt of Dachau concentration camp. When he gets there however, he is confronted by the returned spirits of the inmates he tortured and killed. They put Lutze, the former SS man, to trial and condemn him to insanity. Lutze runs for it, but cant escape. Hes led from one part of the camp to another, having the suffering described at each site. At the end, the lead prisoner stands over a Lutze wracked by seizures on the ground, concluding, Captain Lutze,this is not revenge, this is justice. But this is only the beginningYour final judgment will come from God.285 The episode concludes with a message from Serling
All the Dachaus must remain standingbecause they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all their reason, their logic, their knowledge but word of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this,then we become the gravediggers.286

The episode, aired just a few weeks after the televised Eichmann spectacle, fed into the American expectations that had been shattered by the banality of the real trial, so astutely characterized by Arendt. The imaginary trial of a histrionically depraved sadist who clearly delights in the torment of his victims287 quite in contrast with that of an all-too-efficient bureaucrat288 delivered clean, direct justice which appealed not to Americans rationalism and scientific reason, but Judeo-Christian principle[s] of free will.289 The Twilight Zone episode was only one of many cultural artifacts from the 1960s to move the Holocaust from the realm of history to the realm of myth. Throughout the decade, the Holocaust made appearances in crime dramas, law enforcement programs,

285 286

Ibid, 37 Ibid, 38 287 Ibid, 38 288 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 135 289 Ibid, 136

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and science fiction. It began to take on symbols certain visual imagery like the Swastika and rhetorical touchstones like Final Solution, worked their way into the archetype of evil.290 As exemplified by the guest appearance of the Holocaust on The Twilight Zone and later, Star Trek, the science fiction genre used the its cinematic detachment from reality to focus on the lessons, rather than stories, of the Nazi genocide. During the 1960s, the Holocaust began to appeal to Americas mythology of itself and its desire to see things in morally unambiguous and sometimes Manichean terms. The Holocaust coincided with Americas ascendancy to world power. WWII had been the final death of old Europe, and left in its wake was an America which could guide and shape the creation of the new Europe, new Japan, indeed the new world. The lessons of the Holocaust and confrontation of evil embodied by the American fight against Nazi Germany (and by extension, totalitarian Communist USSR) helped root American understanding of itself in unambiguous moral territory. When the Biafran starvation began to demand American government attention, the campaigning President Nixon asked America to be the worlds moral conscience.291 Of course, this moral authority derived by proxy rather than from painful confrontation with our own often atrocious past was cheap, easy, and totally manipulatable by cynical politicians. One needs to look no further than the Carter Administrations public outrage and regular Nazi references when describing Cambodias genocidal dictator Pol Pot, and simultaneous military support (filtered through China and Thailand, of course) to his regime to understand what I mean.292 The beauty and the
290

Hilene Flanzbaum ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust. 35 Roy M. Melbourne. The American Response to the Nigerian Conflict. Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 3, no. 2 (1973): 33-42, http://links.org/sici?sici=00471607%28197322%293%3A2%3C33%3ATARTTN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4
291
292

Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 248

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tragedy of that American moralism derived from the Holocaust is that it requires nothing of us save for the recognition of the evil of others. In some ways, Biafra was the first group to test the waters of Americas universalistic understanding of the Holocaust.293 It is important to remember however, that the Biafran relationship with the Holocaust was not the clear never again we hear today. The parallel that the Biafrans were trying to draw was not simply to the defeated Jews of Europe. Indeed, in one document they recognize that world opinion had (wrongly) condemned the Jews for not struggling against their own fate and tried to distance themselves from this perception. Rather, it seems that they genuinely understood themselves as linked to the Israelis both by characteristic independence, selfsufficiency, outcast status and by struggle and toil. Biafran self-imagination and propaganda did not reference the Holocaust in order to tie themselves to the Jews in victimhood. Quite the opposite, they admired their struggle for survival and the right to self-determination they had wrestled and won. What is fascinating is that the specter of the Holocaust that infected American discourse about the war tended not to reflect Biafran propaganda, but the understanding of the conflict from Western third parties such as missionaries, aid workers, and citizen support groups. Relief organizations and support groups sometimes used the suggestive number 6 million to estimate the numbers threatened with death by starvation.294 Indeed, for some the strategy was explicit. Peter Novick wrote that one of Biafras American supporters wrote of their efforts to conjure up an image of the Nazi regime and Jewish

293 294

Ibid., 247 Ibid., 247

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victims.295 Ironically, the image of victimhood was one the Biafrans worked tirelessly throughout the war to avoid. Missionaries particularly the Catholics who were some of the strongest supporters of the largely Catholic Ibos made the Holocaust connection more explicitly:
To our eternal shamewe sat by while millions of Jewish people and others were put to death before our very eyes. We did practically nothing then. Have we learned nothing from those days?296

Still, if the Holocaust rhetoric was important to the Biafrans and their supporters, it followed, rather than generated, the incredible American and Western response created by the dissemination of information and images of starvation. What was it about hunger that was so engaging?

Hunger Explanation Why is it that hunger and starvation seem to have exhibited such a powerful ability to connect Americans to Biafra, particularly when the language of massacre, atrocity, and other forms of misery had been present since the beginning of the war without the same response? Surely these massacres were just as terrible if not more so than the famine; they showed intention and rational decision making on the part of the perpetrators. I believe that the power that hunger can exert over individual and collective mythologies is wholly different than the power derived from language of atrocity or genocide. Indeed, the horror of genocide is so deviant from the normal experience of external observers that it is only knowable linguistically. Hunger is precisely the opposite; its communication is veritably non-verbal. The common experience of hunger
295 296

Ibid., 248 Ibid., 247-248

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shared by every single person to have ever existed facilitates imaginations of connections across borders that can become real through positive action. Unfortunately, these imaginations tend to be socialized in a way that leads to problematic clashes between desires to alleviate pain and potentials to do so. Victor Turner defined states as relatively fixed or stable condition[s].297 This might include anything from social conditions to the physical, mental or emotional condition in which a person or group may be found at a particular time.298 This was in contrast to a process, which is transitiona becomingeven a transformation here an apt analogy would be water in process of being heated to boiling point. Importantly, a transition has different cultural properties from those of a state.299 The different cultural properties he identified had to do with fixidity and accessibility of understanding. Basically, while states are knowable, the liminal (or inbetween) process is structurallyif not physically, invisible.300 While Turner dealt specifically with life transition rituals and rites of passage, his sense of the knowability of ambiguous processes versus rigid states is important for thinking about the relationship between hunger and politics, or in the case of the Nigeria-Biafra war, starvation and genocide. Hunger is a state of being. We identify hunger in our own lives as the feeling we get when we need or want to eat more food. Yet, as with any state, it has a process that brings it into being. On one level, the process is the metabolic cycle which utilizes the nutrients from food, pushing out the waste, and alerting the negative feedback systems in our body when it is time for more food. The macroscopic extrapolation of this
297 298

Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols, 93 Ibid. 299 Ibid., 94 300 Ibid., 95

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comparison is the state of having food resources available to resolve the state of hunger versus its correspondent process - the system of entitlements that facilitate resource allocation. Both of these examples help to demonstrate the relative invisibility of processes against the knowability of states. It is much harder to conceptualize metabolic and hormone feedback cycles than the simple fact of being hungry. When we unload our Wonderbread into the pantry, we almost never consider the process of growth, refining, shipping, distribution that made that bread available, or the host of economic structures employment, for example - that provided us the financial entitlements to acquire it. The concept of states and processes potentially has ramifications for our understanding of politics, as well. To some extent, the relationship between citizens and governments revolves around state and process. In exchange for certain costs personal financial obligation or surrendered autonomy citizens align themselves with a government whose primary task, over the long run, is to improve or at least secure their general state of being. Governments engender these improved states of being more health, more resources through political processes. Its much easier to conceptualize the end result - for example better health care coverage - than it is to understand the debates, exchanges, incentive systems, financial considerations etc that enabled that state of being to arise. But what does this have to do with starvation in Biafra? When people see images of starving children on TV, they see a flawed state of being. When people read about the perpetration of genocide, they read about a political process. When they see a flawed state of being, they respond in a way that fixes that flaw, not the flaw in the process that

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brought that state into being. If we see people hungry, we give them food. It takes a cognitive leap to say fix the politics to ensure they have entitlements to access available food. But perhaps this is not enough of an explanation. If we take it that states of being are more visible than processes, it still does not explain the incredible change in American engagement that happened when Biafrans started starving. So what was it? Hunger is an individual experience. Each day, we rise to an anxious body that has metabolized its immediate energy stores and waits for more. We replenish, and then a few hours later, the pangs return. Sometimes we consciously disavow the signals we fast for cleansing, aesthetics, or politics. Sometimes, depending on what part of the world we happen to have been born in and to whom, we dont have a choice about when we do and dont eat. Hunger is one of those areas of culture about which no-one has information that can be called up and expressed in discursive statements.301 In its universality, hunger tends to defy the logocentrism of the West; the inherent limitations of language manifest themselves in descriptions of the experience of hunger. The word is descriptive only insofar as it references a state which subjectively everyone has some claim over and understanding of. The connection between subjective states and overt manifestation is to be found in ones own experience.302 Sitting at lunch in April with a friend who happens to be one of the directors of a multi-million member, online, progressive political mailing list and action network, I was
301

Kirsten Hastrup, Hunger and the Hardness of Facts, Man, vol. 28, no. 4 (December, 1993): 727-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1496%28199312%292%3A28%3A4%3C727%3AHATHOF %3E2.0.CO%3B2-D , 731-732 302 Vendler 1984: 201.

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reminded of how much personal imaginations of hunger can determine above and beyond cognitive affiliations responses to even political questions. During the Terri Schaivo case, the organization in question had been one of the leaders in promoting the public argument that her husband should be allowed to decide to end Terris life. It was consistent with the general progressive response to the question. As a leader of this organization, my friend needed to take a strong stance. Yet he told me how hard it was for him indeed, how much he had to wrestle with his emotional self to promote that believe. What got to him? It wasnt any of the political or legal arguments, but rather the imagery that dominated the media: the slow starvation that Schaivos comatose body would endure after the feeding tube was removed. Even though Terri couldnt feel anything, my friend had an extraordinarily difficult time moving past his visceral feeling of the un-naturalness of starvation. The connection between subjective states and personal experience is important when placed in the context of the question: How do we connect to the plight of people far away? Unlike genocide, which is descriptive of the fact of a government attempting to destroy a segment of its population, starvation, by necessity requires us to reference our own subjective experience as humans who experience hunger to understand. The process of understanding the hunger of others is a process of imagination; with such invisible facts as suffering in particular, there is no way of understanding people except through ones own experience and power of imagination.303 Put another way, in attempting to understand the suffering of others we are required to reference our own
303

Kirsten Hastrup, Hunger and the Hardness of Facts, Man, vol. 28, no. 4 (December, 1993): 727-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1496%28199312%292%3A28%3A4%3C727%3AHATHOF %3E2.0.CO%3B2-D,732

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subjective experience; to imagine ourselves as part of the consequences of their plight in order to contextualize and respond to that suffering.
Suffering, then, is embodied and is in some ways beyond cognitive understanding. As such it is lost to both gaze and speech. Yet implicitly we recognize it, even when we have not felt exactly the same way or been exposed to similar disasters. Certain experiences are not literally shared at all, but we are, nevertheless, able to imagine their implications.304

There is a uniqueness to responding to suffering mediated through the context of our physical bodies. As we imagine ourselves as part of that suffering, extrapolating our own referential experiences, we build upon collective mythologies by projecting the order of our lives onto the order of the universe. As Victor Turner wrote,
This use of an aspect of human physiology as a model for social, cosmic, and religious ideas and processes is a variant of a widely distributed initiation theme: that the human body is a microcosm of the universewhatever the mode of representation, the body is regarded as a sort of symbolic template for the communication of gnosis, mystical knowledge about the nature of things and how they came to be what they are.305

Turners theories came out of his experience with the Ndembu tribe of Zambia, in which colors were symbolic of bodily functions and the order of the world.306 The colors the whiteness of semen and milk, the redness of menstrual blood and blood shed by a weapon, the blackness of bodily decay underlie or even constitute what Ndembu conceive to be reality.307 Another example is the Hindu myth of Purusha, the cosmic man whos body was divided at the beginning of time to give rise to the universe his mind the moon, his eyes the sun, his breathe the wind. Even outside of their power to unify the collective mythological experience of societies, our physical bodies are central to how we individually understand the order of the universe. I grew up extremely overweight, even though my family was one of few in my circle of friends which hardly ever indulged in pizza, snacks or anything fried. I was

304 305

Ibid., 733 Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols, 107 306 Ibid., 107 307 Ibid., 107

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internally confident and assertive of my ideas but lived in terror of social interaction which might draw attention to just how heavy I was. Growing up then, my body was the ultimate symbol of worlds injustice. It was my first lesson in the limits of my own agency. When I got to college, however, I dedicated myself wholly to fitness and losing weight. Through simple healthy eating and an intense exercise program, I lost more than 140 pounds by the time I left for the summer. My body had ceased to be Injustice and was instead the reinforcing narrative of the power of Hard Work and Determination. A final note: When you loose weight that quickly, your skin cannot shrink at the same rate and youre left with unsightly extra skin. Many people have it removed; Ive left mine, again, as a reminding symbol of my own history. In this way, my body has been and in many ways remains the starting point for my sensibilities about Injustice, Determination, and the need for empathy. In her book Hunger: An Unnatural History, Sharman Apt Russell shares an anecdote even more relevant to the story of Biafra. At thirty years of age, the pregnant Russell had turned into something of a hunger artist, collecting news clippings about starvation and famine, labeling folders Somalia and Ethiopia. The pregnancy had opened a deep, emotional gate inside her that individualized the starvation of the entire world and projected it upon her child, and collectivized her experience of mothering to all who suffered.
I couldnt understand why children were dying because they had no food. I gave birth to my daughter and fed her my body. Later, I had a son and he, too, drank from me. I was feeding the world. This was not aggrandizement so much as myth. At the center of our life, we are eve or Prometheus or Odysseus. At the center of my life, I fed the world, and yet children were dying.308

308

Sharman Apt Russell, Hunger: An Unnatural History, 13

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Yet, for the power of these individual narratives, the reality remains that hunger is also a collective experience. Although pain, and in particular hunger, is not knowable apart from subjective experience,309 our imagination of others suffering is culturally mediated. This reality is particularly acute in studies of the American response to famine, guided as it has been for centuries by the Malthusian notion that famine is directly correlated to a lack of food resources. The general response pattern to famine, and indeed, suffering more generally, in the last half-century tended to understand mass hunger in terms socialized to the American experience with hunger. As such it has been viewed as a more or less accidental if catastrophic shortage of food.310 The reception of famine is directly correspondent to how the problem is conceived. If the problem is simply a lack of calories, then a humanitarian response of more calories fixes rather than simply salves the problem. In the 1980s, the decade that witnessed the terrible and visible famines in Ethiopia and Sudan, thinkers like Amartya Sen and Alex de Waal started to deconstruct the notions of famine that had been acculturated to the American experience. Until then, the anthropology of suffering had been left largely unexamined, according to Kirsten Hastrup. Pain had been dealt with mainly as an individual, if universal, human experience.311 Moreover, it tended not to be studied because of the theoretical legacy of anthropology, which favors studies of whole, well-functioning, and largely closed systems.312

309

Kirsten Hastrup, Hunger and the Hardness of Facts, Man, vol. 28, no. 4 (December, 1993): 727-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1496%28199312%292%3A28%3A4%3C727%3AHATHOF %3E2.0.CO%3B2-D, 733 310 Ibid., 728 311 Ibid., 728 312 Ibid., 728

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In this perspective, refugees are just people temporarily out of place, and hunger-stricken populations are people who have had tough luck with nature for some time.313

De Waal and Sen broke down these notions, in the process demonstrating the extent to which our reception and imagination of famine (and corresponding responses) are dictated by our socialized readings of the conditions. Perhaps the most important contribution from Sen, one which has slowly started to permeate at least the educated cultural conscious, is that famine tends to be more about lack of entitlements than lack of resources. As he stated, starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.314 Indeed, hunger, he recognized, related to the operation of the political and social arrangements that can, directly or indirectly, influence peoples ability to acquire food and to achieve health and nourishment.315 Studying famine in Sudan, Alex de Waal took to task our notions of the results of famine, not simply their causes. Firstly, there is the problem of what Famine is, precisely. With Malthus conception of famine as too little food for too many people, came a perception that the end result of famine is mass starvation unto death. The lived social experience of famine tends to be more nuanced and complicated, and often doesnt require mass death for an event to be called famine.316 De Waal also found important evidence that not only were infectious diseases the primary cause of famine mortality, but that the diseases paid little attention to food consumption levels after their onset, and as a result argued that measles immunization, malaria control and clean water supplies are at least as important as emergency food relief.317
313 314

Ibid., 728 Sen, 1981: 1 315 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, 162 316 De Waal, Famine that Kills, x 317 De Waal, Famine that Kills, xi

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All of this matters integrally to the driving question of why starvation had such a powerful pull on Americans during the Biafra crisis indeed, why it has always exerted such a powerful ability to engage Western audiences, especially in comparison to political language like that of atrocity or genocide. Moreover, it matters in understanding how and why we responded the way we did. Explaining why American imagination of the Holocaust is important to understand, Peter Novick wrote It is our perceptions of reality, not the reality itself, that shape our responses.318 So it is, and so it was, with starvation in Biafra. The last section of Hastrups article discusses the hardness of facts; that is, the extent to which we under stand facts as fixed or true outside of our subjective experience of them. She argues that relative hardness is not located in the facts themselves, but in the community that agrees upon it, that is, the community governing the politics of explanation.319 The reality of the American reception of the Biafran starvation was that it reflected a particularly American or at least rich, Western understanding of famine. At first, Americans were introduced to incredibly powerful images of starving children. Just as the pictures where a nonverbal transfer or information, so too was the experiential process by which Americans would have understood the agony of those pictured. To understand the images, Americans were forced to imagine themselves as part of the agony of those pictured at least for a time. The recurrence of the imagery, beamed in as it was every night on television and appearing regularly in newspapers kept the gates open.
318

Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 148 Kirsten Hastrup, Hunger and the Hardness of Facts, Man, vol. 28, no. 4 (December, 1993): 727-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0025-1496%28199312%292%3A28%3A4%3C727%3AHATHOF %3E2.0.CO%3B2-D , 734
319

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One of the cultural forces mediating our reception of the images was our ability to distinguish between starvation and politics. The refrain for the majority of American politicians and citizens, with a few notable exceptions, was humanitarian aid over political wrangling; it was people before politics. This had much to do with the variance in visibility of states and processes. Of course, the famine in Biafra was in its causation, its ramifications, and the circumstances of its alleviation totally inseparable from politics. This was precisely why it was so vital for the Biafran propaganda machine to quickly assimilate the starvation into its use of genocide. Put one way, Biafra was trying to govern the politics of explanation. If accepted by the American public, the accusation of genocide would prescribe a political intentionality upon the famine, mandating a response that was both humanitarian and political. The example vindicates central tenets of both de Waal and Sen. The famine was caused by a set of circumstances more expansive than a simple lack of food, and moreover, was understood very differently by those looking in and those suffering. There was also the issue of children. Although Ive explored the reasons that children provided such a unique symbol for American interest in the conflict, it is worth thinking deeply if briefly about how the actual process of starvation might have contributed to the mythologizing of the starving Biafran child. As described earlier, children are a symbol of innocence. In some ways focusing on children is an easy way not to take sides. In her seminal Compassion Fatigue, journalist and critic Susan Moeller wrote that children, not yet linked to biases and

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prejudices, create an imperative moral statement[which]bring[s] moral clarity to the complex story of famine.320 Echoing de Waal, however, Russell argued that the icon of children in famine is a Western bias,321 certainly not reflective of the social hierarchy that takes place in famine stricken areas which puts children lower than those with reproductive capacity. But the reasons why we focus on children are important to Russel:
In famine, a focus on women and children highlights biology: here is a mother who cannot feed her child, a breakdown in the natural order of life. This focus obscures who and what is to blame for the famine, politically and economically, and can lead to the belief that a biological response, more food, will solve the problem.322

This abrogation of the natural order seems to hold an incredibly compelling power for outside observers of others suffering. Russel states it beautifully: When an adult is hungry, it happens in the present tense. When a child starves, there is another dimension. It also happens in the future. For a child is potential, in the act of becoming.323 Of the two types of famine, marasmus, which comes from total caloric deficit, and kwashiorkor, which is a product of malnutrition, kwashiorkor is the more deadly and the more irreparable. The skin and hair of victims turns a reddish yellow. Bacteria and the gas collect in the small bowel, making the stomach puffy and distended. Sufferers become listless, unwilling to exert themselves, or to play. When they do react to stimulus, it is with rage and frustration. Sometimes they will cry uncontrollably for hours upon end. There is a quality of hopelessness and despair, to those that suffer kwashiorkor, which means literally disease of the displaced child.324

320 321

Susan Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, 122 Sharman Apt Russell, Hunger: An Unnatural History, 179 322 Ibid., 179 323 Ibid., 180 324 Ibid., 175

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Whatever the reasons for it, starving children have become the universal symbol of the suffering of the modern world. With all the problems of response identified and predicted by Sen and de Waal responses that focus solely on food delivery for example there is another problem that begins even before the response. This is the very real possibility that people will simply begin to shut down; the very real possibility that when subjected to the constant emotional headrush of famine imagery, even good people will turn inward, choosing all-too-reasonably to focus on problems closer to home, problems that seem manageable. Sen has argued that understanding famines in terms of lack of entitlement rather than lack of food can greatly alleviate donors sense of famine intractability and their own lack of power to influence the situation. He laments the tacit pessimism that often dominates international reactions to these miseries in the world today. This perceived lack of freedom to remedy hunger can itself lead to fatalism and the absence of serious attempts to remedy the miseries that we see.325 At the same time, he asserts strongly that better understanding the actual causation of famine helps us generate policies which better relieve the problems. Susan Moeller identified this problem as well, but gave it a different name. Compassion Fatigue, is the idea that Americans have only so much compassion and, in Moellers calculation, is the idea cynically used by news editors to ignore foreign coverage if the event in question is not more horrible than previous similar events, focus on issues closer to home in formulaic ways, and generally create a self-fulfilling prophecy of American apathy towards international crises.

325

Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, 160

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In a continuation of the same anecdote from above, Sharman Apt Russell wrote of the gradual end of her hunger artist period. The phase, she said, lasted for a few years. Sitting in restaurants with her children, she would see new pictures of a hungry child. She looked out at the children playing on restaurants playground, she looked at her son. She wanted the child in the newspaper to be hers, to be able to bring her up, provide for her. The gate to grief opened yet again.
This grief, whose was it? This was not my baby. I did not burst our crying. I did not frighten my son in the middle of the fast-food restaurant. Instead, I assembled his cardboard prize and turned to another page of the newspaper. I felt tired, but only deep down, so far down it was hardly noticeable. Most of us know this exhaustion. We are afraid that the pain of other people will subtract the joy from our life, that our joy will be impossible next to their pain. A child dying of hunger cannot be juxtaposed. A child dying because she has no food does not make sense. She shatters the view from the kitchen window. She shatters your sons first day at school. Eventually I stopped collecting famine stories. I shut the gate. But I never turned the lock.326

326

Sharman Apt Russell, Hunger: An Unnatural History, 13

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Conclusion The late Fall of 1968 and all of 1969 were much like the rest of the military conflict; a gradual back and forth with the overall result that the Nigerians were slowly carving away pieces of Biafran territory and crawling towards what seemed like an inevitable victory. Despite this, a few instances of increased outside assistance allowed the embattled Biafra to reclaim important ground and continue onward. Importantly, France gave just enough aid to ensure that Biafra could survive while simultaneously ensuring that it could not win. Still, Biafra heaved. Finally, in January 1970, the end of the war came like a flash of tropical lightning, momentarily illuminating a half-remembered landscape, and reimposing itself on the consciousness of a world which had already pigeonhold the conflict, along with Vietnam and the Middle East, as insoluble.After two and a half years of anguished but heroic existence, the Republic of Biafra, Land of the Rusing Sun, was dead.327 And at what a cost. Estimates of the death toll range from 500000328 and over 2 million329, all in pursuit of unity. For Nigeria, the costs of the war would extend far into the future. In his seminal work on contemporary Nigeria This House Has Fallen, Karl Maier told the story of a group of forgotten foot soldiers, someparalyzed, others missing a limb or two, who beg for money by the side of the road. After the war, Gowons attempt to reintegrate the Ibos was framed by the call of no victors, no vanquished. Yet the reality had been much harder for veterans. Soldiers with wounds were placed in a War Disabled Veterans Camp. Some were able to leave or have their
327 328

Brothers War, 395 The low end cited in The Brothers War 329 Found in personal narratives like Surviving in Biafra.

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families join them but others were not so lucky. Sitting by the road, one of the former soldier pondered the fate of his country: Look at Nigeria now, everything broken. Nigeria is like us, crippled.330 Maier agreed:
All [the veterans] were haunting reminders of the human cost of civil war and unwitting prophets of a potentially frightful future should Nigerias latest experiment with constitutional rule go badly wrong.331

*** Throughout the months of the war Ive analyzed, Biafras propaganda and foreign discourse reflected a changing understanding of world opinion and domestic position. Old rhetoric tended not to be discarded but dynamically reframed. The evolution of genocide demonstrates this particularly well. The driving argument behind Biafran secession was that only the sovereignty of the Eastern Region could guarantee the safety of their people. Nigeria had given up her right to territorial integrity when her government either turned a blind eye to or was complicit in the massacres of Ibos and other Easterners in the North in 1966. At the beginning of the conflict, this argument was situated in a larger set of discourses. In particular, early Biafran pamphlets argued not just the negative argument that Nigeria was not fit to rule but the positive argument that Biafra was particularly suited for nationhood. As the starvation crisis arose in Spring 1968 and exploded in the Summer, the language of genocide took on a new prescience. It represented the Biafrans attempt and their need to control the politics of explaining the famine. While humanitarian response alleviated their suffering, the problem of starvation for them was fundamentally political.

330 331

Karl Maier, This House Has Fallen, 271 Ibid., 270

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Changes in Biafran self-representation also demonstrated a reciprocal relationship with external discourse. The statements of African recognition, with their increased emphasis on the plight of Biafran citizens, wrought an accordant shift in Biafran focus. Similarly, the explosion of starvation into American popular media discourse engendered an immediate shift in Biafras discussion of the famine. In America, the media representation of the conflict changed dramatically when the starvation reached endemic levels. For the first time, the crisis became a prescient issue that demanded public response. The quantity and variety of coverage during Summer 1968 was dramatically increased from a year earlier when the conflict began. The initial coverage, as exemplified by the New York Times, reflected an attempt on the part of journalists and editors to situate the conflict in the context of then contemporary American concerns and foreign engagements. Articles and editorials from Summer 1967 tended to focus on oil, the fear of balkanization, and connected Biafra to Katanga and other far away conflicts. The famine completely changed the terms of discussion. The spectacle of starvation images created a moral urgency to the conflict that had not existed before. As the months of Summer progressed, news coverage dealt broadly with a number of recurring themes, the most important being portraits of the starvation behind Biafra lines and the frustrated political hang-ups keeping aid from the suffering. Indeed, Americans in Summer 1968 overwhelmingly viewed Biafra as a humanitarian crisis. As discussed in Section Four, images of starvation required the viewer to imagine him or herself as part of the suffering to understand it, creating closer cognitive relationships between Americans and Biafrans. Missionaries and journalists

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became bridges between the two societies; for all their sensationalism and partisanship, the critique of that periods journalism needs to attempt to understand the emotional and psychological forces faced by embedded correspondents. Importantly, American coverage during the Summer of 1968 also focused on citizen response. Organizations like the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and individuals like the 9 year old New Jersey girl who flew to see churchmen in Rome and London helped Americans understand their potentials to engage with the conflict. The answers, then, to my driving questions, how do Americans come to feel connected to far way crises, and how did Biafra pitch itself to America and how successful was it, are integrally linked. It is clear that Biafra existed in the American imagination largely because it was starving. This image also largely determined the American response. Images of starvation, coupled with explanatory articles and background information, presented American citizens with a horror that seemed an abomination of the natural order of things. Regardless of political stance, all could agree that no one especially not children should be made to suffer the fate of starvation. The fact of hunger provided an inroad for Americans to imagine themselves as emotionally connected to the Biafrans because its physiological symptoms required people to draw upon their own subjective experience to understand the images and words they were shown. I believe that international crises driven by these physiologically resonant forces have a much greater ability to engage Americans from far away than do similarly terrible disasters presented in terms of politics. One needs look no further than

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the powerful humanitarian response to Sudanese famines vs. the dithering political interest in Sudanese wars to understand this reality. By and large, Americans during the Biafra war rebelled against the connection between the humanitarian disaster and politics. Throughout the 1968 Summer, articles lamented the terrible intransigence of both Biafran and Nigerian leadership in the face of abject suffering. Indeed, for Americans, the politics of the conflict were the enemy. A moral dichotomy the privilege of being thousands of miles away from the conflict broke apart politics and relief in a way that no amount of Biafran propaganda could reconnect. That this division occurred is clear. Whether or not it was the right position for American media and citizens to take is less clear. While the process of learning that went into this thesis has allowed me to better articulate the answers to some of my specific and theoretical questions, I am somewhat stymied when it comes to the realm of recommendations. While the stark division between aid and politics may not have reflected the reality of the situation, it may still have been a reasonable position for Americans to take. Neither leadership in the Nigeria conflict seemed, in retrospect, worthy of much support. Importantly, if allowed to exist, the entity known as Biafra, a construction just as Nigeria had been constructed, might have been a microcosm for the very same problems that had led to the disintegration of the Nigerian republic. Moreover, the argument that aid prolonged the war may have some merit. Occasional foreign recognition and increased media attention and international support seem to have played a role in Biafras unwillingness to surrender. Despite this, the

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majority of the blame for the duration of the war should be apportioned on the leaderships of Nigeria and Biafra, who fought a useless war for two and half years while the dreams of their nation shriveled and starved with a million or more of its citizens. Still, it is fascinating to understand better the forces which connect America to African crises. Currently, this knowledge allows one to understand, for example, why Darfur has received the attention that it has. Americans engaged with the Darfur genocide today tend to participate in a community of guilt that laments our inaction in Rwanda. Visceral imagery of women gang-raped while gathering firewood has a corresponding if not necessarily causal relationship with the increased presence of Darfur in national media and citizen action in the last few months. This is fascinating because rape is a suffering that many of us, like hunger, have the ability (and the need) to personalize in order to understand it in the context of someone else. The old specter of the child starving that has lurked in the man-made deserts of Africa has come back again, and made regular appearances at the April 30 Rally for Darfur in Washington, D.C.332 Whether Darfur will succumb to the Janjaweed militias in Sudan before succumbing to rising oil prices in American attention remains to be seen. My hope in writing this thesis is that in some small way I have added to the discussion of the forces which help make it so that this succumbing need not always be the case. We must not forget that behind this story of propaganda and press were the lives of millions, destroyed both through their own agency and by forces beyond their control. We must never forget the horror and abject stupidity of this war, indeed, of most wars. In the end, I believe Americans have an obligation to understand our relationship to places in conflict. The stakes of Biafra were lower for us than the Nigerians, just as
332

Attended by the author.

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they are lower for us than for the Darfuris. Still, there are realities, emotions, needs and desires we share with these people, as the response to starvation so powerfully demonstrated. The question of to intervene or not to intervene will likely never be clear, nor should it be made solely on the basis of imagined connections. Yet as the globe becomes more interconnected, we will increasingly find ourselves forced into contact with that world. We ignore it at our peril.

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Bradley, Mark. Imagining Vietna, & America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Chomsky, Noam. The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo. Common Courage Press, 1999. Clark, Jeffery. Somalia, in Lori Fisler Damrosch, ed., Enforcing Restraint: collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993,. De Waal, Alex. Famine Crimes: Politics & the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa. Indiana University Press, 1998. Devine, Carol et. al, Human Rights: The Essential Reference. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1999. Flanzbaum, Hilene. The Americanization of the Holocaust. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Flint, Julie and Alex de Waal. Darfur: A Short History of a Long War. New York: Zed Books, 2005. Forsyth, Frederick. The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend. Pen and Sword, 2002. Fox, Renee C. Medical Humanitarianism and Human Rights: reflections on Doctors Without Borders and Doctors of the World, in Jonathan Mann et al., eds., Health and Human Rights: a Reader . New York: Routledge, 1999. Gourevitch, Philip. We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Picador USA, 1998. Grundy, Kenneth W. Guerrilla Struggle in Africa: An Analysis and Preview. New York: Grossman, 1971. Hanbury, H.G. Biafra: A Challenge to the Conscience of Britain. London: Britain-Biafra Association, 1968. Hatch, John C., Nigeria: The Seeds of Disaster. Chicago: H. Regnery Company, 1970. Hatzfield, Jean. Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak. New York: Farrar, Straus and Girouz, 2005. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Ignatieff, Michael. Empire Lite. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2003.

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Ignatieff, Michael. Television and Humanitarian Aid, in Jonathan Moore, ed., Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention. Landham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Ignatieff, Michael, The Warriors Honor: Ethnic War and Modern Conscience, London: Vintage, 1999. de Jorre, St. John. The Brothers War: Biafra and Nigeria. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1972. de Waal, Alex. Famine that Kills. Oxford: University Press, 2005. Lieven, Anatol. America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Logevall, Fredrik. Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. MacFarland, Neil. Politics and Humanitarian Action, Occasional Paper No. 41. Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, 2000. Maier, Karl. The House has Fallen: Midnight in Nigeria. New York: Public Affairs, 2000. Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Mann, Michael. Incoherent Empire. London: Verso, 2003. May, Ernest R., ed. American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 1993. McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culutre, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000, Berkeley: the University of California Press, 2001. Melvern, Linda. Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide. London: Verso, 2004. Moeller, Susan. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. Routledge, 1999. Moorehead, Caroline. Dunants Dream: War, Switzerland, and the History of the Red Cross. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc., 1998. Nickerson, Betty, ed. Chi: Letters from Biafra. Toronto: New Process, 1970. Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. New York: Mariner Books, 1999.

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Nwankwo, Arthur and Ifejike, Samuel. Biafra: The Making of a Nation. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1970. Nwachuku, Levi Akalazu. U.S./Nigeria: An Analysis of U.S. Involvement in the Nigeria/Biafra War, 1967-1970. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1973. Ojukwu, Odumegwu. Biafra: Random Thoughts. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. Ojukwu, Odumegwu. Biafra: Selected Speeches and Random Thoughts. New York; Harper & Row, 1969. Okpaku, Joseph, ed. Nigeria: Dilemma of nationhood; An African Analysis of the Biafran Conflict. Wesport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Co., 1971. Power, Samantha. A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Prunier, Gerard. Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2005. Rieff, David. A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. Rieff, David. At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Rieff, David. Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Russel, Sharman Apt. Hunger: An Unnatural History. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Scroggins, Deborah. Emmas War: Love, Betrayal, and Death in the Sudan. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. Sherman, John. War Stories: A Memoir of Nigeria and Biafra. Mese Verde Press, 2002. Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor Books, 1999. Sogge, David, ed. Compassion and Calculation: The Business of Private Foreign Aid. London and Chicago: Pluto Press, for the Transnational Institute, 1996 Stebbins, Richard D. The US in World Affairs. New York: The 1967 Council on Foreign Relations, 1968.

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Terry, Fiona. Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 72, New York: Warner Books, 1973. Thompson, Hunter S. The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. Thompson, Hunter S. Hells Angels. New York: Random House, 1966. Thompson, Joseph E. American Policy and African Famine: The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1966-1970. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. Ukokwe, Alfred. Surviving in Biafra: The Story of the Nigerian Civil War. Writers Advantage, 2003. Van Boven, Theo. Some Reflections on the Principle of Neutrality, in Christophe Swinarski, ed., Studies and Essays on International Humanitarian Law and Red Cross Principles. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1984. Vaux, Tony. The Selfish Altruist: Relief Work in Famine and War. London: Earthscan, 2001. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Essential Wallerstein. New York: the New Press, 2000. Waugh, Auberon, and Suzanne Cronje. Biafra: Britains Shame. London: Michall Joseph, 1969. Zartman, William I. International Relations in the New African Nations. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prenctice-Hall, Inc. 1966 Dissertations Nwachuku, Levi Akalazu. U.S./Nigera: An Analysis of U.S. Involvement in the Nigeria/Biafra War, 1967-1970. Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1973. Wiseberg, Laurie, Sheila. The International Politics of Relief: A Case Study of the Relief Operations Mounted During the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970). Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1973.

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Newspaper and Scholarly Journal Articles Biafra is Starving Its Own People, The Washington Post, July 11, 1969. Bleak Prospect, West Africa, December 7, 1968. Anglin, Douglas. G., Nigeria: Political Non-Alignment and Economic-Alignment. The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 2 (July 1964): 247-263. Anspitz, Lee. Biafra and the Bureaucrats. Forum, vol. 5, no. 2 (February 1969). Arden, John, Apathy, Atrocity, Ignorance and Biafra, Peace News, September 27, 1968, 7. Bourjarily, Vance. An Epitaph for Biafra, New York Times Magazine, January 25, 1970. Cousins, Norman. ABC, Saturday Review, February 1, 1969. Cousins, Norman. Last Flight Out of Biafra, Saturday Review, January 24, 1970. Cousins, Norman. What to do About Biafra, Saturday Review, December 21, 1968. Davis, Morris. The Structuring of International Communications About the NigeriaBiafra War. Peace Research Society Papers, vol. XVIII, The London Conference, 1971. Diamond, Stanley. Biafra: The Biafran Possibility. New York Review of Books (February 1968). Diamond, Stanley. Who Killed Biafra. New York Review of Books, vol. XIV, no. 4 (February 1970). Elizabeth Drew, The Reports, The Atlantic, June, 1970, 6. Dudley, Billy J. Nigerias Civil War: The Tragedy of the Ibo People, The Round Table, no. 229, January 1968, 28-34. Goodell, Charles. Biafra and the American Conscience. Saturday Review, April 12, 1969. Lapteu, V., Lessons of the Nigerian Tragedy, International Affairs, no. 4, April, 1969, 52-58. Leff, Nathaniel H. Bengal, Biafra and the Bigness Bias, Foreign Policy, no. 3, Summer 1971.

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Lukens, Donald. The Right to Live, The Readers Digest, May 1969, 77-78. McLaughlin, John. Nigeria-Biafra: A Matter of Accommodation, America, February 8, 1968. Miles, Him. Biafra: Eye-Witness Report, The Catholic Review, August 2, 1968, 1-2. Oudes, Bruce. The US and the Nigerian War, West Africa, September 8, 1972. Post, K.W. Is There a Case for Biafra. International Affairs, vol. XLIV (January 1968): 26-39. Rivkin, Arnold. Lost Goals in Africa. Foreign Affairs, vol. 44, no. 1 (October 1965): 111-126. Samuels, Michael A., ed., The Nigeria/Biafra Conflict: Report of One-day Conference . (Washington, DC 1969): 58-59. Satterlee, John F. Biafras Vale of Tears. The Elephant Roar, vol. 4, no. 2 (1966): 193212. Spaniolo, Thomas. Future of Biafra Remains in Grave Danger, Western Herald, January 31, 1969. How the State Department Watched Biafra Starve, Forum, vol. VI, no. 3 (March 1970): 9. Charlemagne: Bernard Kouchner, Controversial Proconsul for Kosovo, The Economist (US), July 19, 1999. Healing the World, Runners World, December 1993, 36. Tim Allen and David Styan, The Right to Interfere? Bernard Kouchner and the New Humanitarianism. Journal of International Development (August 2000): 825-42. Hugo Slim, Military Intervention to Protect Human Rights: The Humanitarian Agency Perspective. International Council on Human Rights Policy, 2001. Rusk, Howard A. Starvation in Biafra. The New York Times, Sep 22, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad 39No Title. The New York Times, Aug 8, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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Display Ad 83No Title. The New York Times, Jul 27, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad 29No Title. The New York Times, Jul 29, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad 48No Title. The New York Times, Aug 23, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad.(2). The New York Times, Aug 11, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad 65No Title. The New York Times, Aug 17, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad 43No Title. The New York Times, Aug 24, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad 111No Title. The New York Times, Aug 25, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad. The New York Times, Sep 24, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad 21No Title. The New York Times, Aug 8, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad 44No Title. The New York Times, Aug 12, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad 47No Title. The New York Times, Aug 13, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad 52No Title. The New York Times, Aug 15, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad 57No Title. The New York Times, Sep 3, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad 22No Title. The New York Times, Sep 3, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad.(3). The New York Times, Oct 1, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Roberts, Steven V. Many U.S. Groups Offer Biafra Aid. The New York Times, Aug 8, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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Play Will Aid Children of Biafra. The New York Times, Mar 11, 1969, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Jersey Girl, 9, in Rome, Seeks Papal Aid for Biafra. The New York Times, Aug 18, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers U.S. Girl, 9, Is Balked On Biafran Aid Mission. The New York Times, Aug 17, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Lissner, Will. 1,000 Pray Before U.N. for Biafran Children. The New York Times, Aug 19, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers In Biafra, Death by Famine Strikes Everywhere. The New York Times, Jul 30, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. The Point of No Return For the Biafrans. The New York Times, Sep 8, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers The Children Are Dying. The New York Times, Aug 5, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Caser, Alphonso H. Biafras Children. The New York Times, Aug 7, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Brody, Jane E. Malnutrition Can Permanently Impair Those Who Survive It. The New York Times, Aug 5, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Despair Shrouds Biafran Hospital as Children Die. The New York Times, Aug 1, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Biafra. The New York Times, Aug 4, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Deaths In Biafra Put At 8,000 A Day. The New York Times, Sep 28, 1968. ProQuest Historical Newspapers Pantaleoni, Helenka. To Aid Biafra. The New York Times, Jul 18, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Fellows, Lawrence. Anger in Africa Over Wests Help to Biafra Rises. The New York Times, Sep 30, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Biafran Chief Asks Red China For Help. The New York Times, Sep 30, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad. The New York Times, Oct 1, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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Belgium Moving to Shut Off All Arms to Lagos Regime. The New York Times, Jul 16, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Welless, Benjamin. Hazards in U.S. Relief to Biafrans Viewed as Insurmountable. The New York Times, Aug 16, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers People Before Politics. The New York Times, Aug 13, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers To Save the Ibos. The New York Times, Aug 9, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers An African Tragedy. The New York Times, Aug 7, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers To Succor Biafra. The New York Times, Aug 6, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Welless, Benjamin. Rusk Urges Both Sides in Nigerian War to Show Restraint. The New York Times, Jul 31, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers The Shame of Biafra. The New York Times, Jul 16, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Editorial Article 2No Title. The New York Times, Aug 11, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Lewis, Anthony. Nigeria. The New York Times, Jul 14, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Friendly, Alfred. Biafra Presence At Parley Urged. The New York Times, Jul 17, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Biafra Receives Less Food. The New York Times, Jul 22, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Friendly, Alfred. Nigeria. The New York Times, Jul 28, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Adebonojo, Samuel A. Aid to Biafra Criticized. The New York Times, Jul 29, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Give In? Biafrans in a Bar Say Nevah. The New York Times, Aug 2, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers French Aid Seen. The New York Times, Aug 5, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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Message From Johnson. The New York Times, Aug 6, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Biafran Towns Keep Up a Normal Faade. The New York Times, Aug 7, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Thomas, Ann Sherrod. Whos for Biafra? The New York Times, Aug 9, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Hess, John L. France Wont Act Alone For Biafra. The New York Times, Aug 10, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Doty, Robert C. Pope Asserts Lives Of Biafran People Must Be Put First. The New York Times, Aug 13, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers De Gaulle Meddles Again. The New York Times, Aug 14, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. France Seen as Key To Fate of Biafra; Is Paying for Arms. The New York Times, Aug 16, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Reston, James. The Election: The Worst of Times? The New York Times, Aug 16, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers The Heartless Leaders. The New York Times, Aug 16, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers DeGaulle the Key. The New York Times, Aug 18, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Shuster, Alvin. In Nigerias Civil War, Humanitarianism Comes In a Poor Second. The New York Times, Aug 18, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad 101No Title. The New York Times, Aug 19, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Biafran Territory Shrinking. The New York Times, Aug 22, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers False Hope in Nigeria. The New York Times, Aug 27, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Performance at The Scene Raising Funds for Biafra. The New York Times, Aug 28, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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Anaza, John A. Support for Biafra. The New York Times, Aug 29, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Death in Biafra. The New York Times, Sep 8, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Display Ad. The New York Times, Sep 9, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Plea to Biafra. The New York Times, Sep 11, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Reston, James. The Campaign: The Politics of Violence. The New York Times, Sep 11, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Latham, Michael C. For Food Airlift to Biafra. The New York Times, Sep 11, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Zambian Chief Refuses O.A.U. Vice Presidency. The New York Times, Sep 14, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers ODwyer Backs Biafra Aid. The New York Times, Sep 15, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers How the O.A.U. Can Help. The New York Times, Sep 17, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Middleton, Drew. A New Cold War Feared By Thant. The New York Times, Sep 20, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Himmelstrand, Ulf. Biafra as Political Entity. The New York Times, Sep 22, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Robbins, Dale Bennett. Myth Destroyed. The New York Times, Sep 22, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Friendly, Alfred. Gowon Pledges Restraint. The New York Times, Sep 10, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Friendly, Alfred. The Fire Is Here. The New York Times, Sep 1, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Udo, Udo O. Biafrans Fears. The New York Times, Jul 25, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Moltsg, O.S. EDW. For U.S. Airlift to Biafra. The New York Times, Aug 2, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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Gold, Morris Abrambertram H., Edward E. Swanstrom, Marvin Bordelo. Relief for Biafra. The New York Times, Aug 13, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Samuels, Michael A. To Resettle the Ibos. The New York Times, Sep 24, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Brewer, Sam Pope. Biafran Official Here Urges Large-Scale Airlift to End Famine in His Land. The New York Times, Jul 14, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Kenworthy, E.W. MCarthy Bids U.S. Ask Biafra Relief. The New York Times, Aug 3, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Relief Formula Forecast. The New York Times, Aug 4, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Emerson, Gloria. Story of Secessionist Biafra: Tribal Hatreds, Civil War and Starvation; Odbur The New York Times, Jan 12, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Varga, Charles C. Right to Health Care. The New York Times, Jul 11, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Wofford, Harris. U.S. Aid to Congo. The New York Times, Jul 10, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Toby, Jacob Allen. Congo Intervention. The New York Times, July 13, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Baker, Russell. Observer: Enough, Enugu! Enough! The New York Times, Jun 15, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Echewa, Obinkaram. Biafras Resistance. The New York Times, Jun 19, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. The Ibos Go It Alone. The New York Times, Jun 11, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Explosives Found In Lagos Oil Dump. The New York Times, Jun 11, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Urbane Secessionist Chukuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. The New York Times, May 31, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Civilians Accuse Nigerian Troops. The New York Times, Jul 21, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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Fellows, Lawrence. Nigerian Armies Near Showdown. The New York Times, Jun 18, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Nigeria. The New York Times, Jun 4, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Eastern Region Quits Nigeria; Lagos Vows to Fight Secession. The New York Times, May 31, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Nigeria on Brink of Breaking Up. The New York Times, May 29, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Nigerias Cliffhanger. The New York Times, May 29, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Nigerian Region Hopes for an Attack. The New York Times, Jun 12, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Congo. The New York Times, Jul 9, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Eastern Nigeria Votes Secession. The New York Times, May 28, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Lagos Moving to Seal Off East; Issues Warning to Foreign Ships. The New York Times, Jun 1, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Secessionist Chief Of Eastern Nigeria Expects Civil War. The New York Times, Jun 2, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Nigeria Cancels American Airlift. The New York Times, Jun 3, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Broader Backing Sought By Lagos. The New York Times, Jun 4, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Americans Begin to Leave Nigeria. The New York Times, Jun 5, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers 11 Civilians Join Nigerian Regime. The New York Times, Jun 13, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers War Charge Denied. The New York Times, Jun 13, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Tiger Claims Loyalty To Biafra, Not Nigeria. The New York Times, Jun 16, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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Smith, William. Mid-East Oil Still Flows Despite Uncertain Future. The New York Times, Jun 18, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Nigeria: Time for Sanctions. The New York Times, Jun 18, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Lagos Unperturbed by Threat of War. The New York Times, Jun 19, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Eastern Nigerias Last Link to Outside World Is Cut. The New York Times, Jun 21, 1967, Pro Quest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Nigeria. The New York Times, Jun 25, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Nigerias Split Creates Oil Dilemma. The New York Times, Jun 30, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Secessionist Warns Lagos On Invasion. The New York Times, Jul 1, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Nigeria Threatens Easts Oil Exports. The New York Times, Jul 7, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Friendly, Alfred. 500 Secessionists Reported Captured By Nigeria in East. The New York Times, Jul 9, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Friendly, Alfred. Nigeria Calls Morale High; Rebels Say Invasion Is Repelled. The New York Times, Jul 11, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Friendly, Alfred. Nigeria Fighting Still Is Confused. The New York Times, Jul 13, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Nigerian Reports Gains In the Past. The New York Times, Jul 24, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Friendly, Alfred. Lagos Orders Oil Controls. The New York Times, Jul 15, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Africa: Arms Are the Arbiter. The New York Times, Jul 16, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Friendly, Alfred. Nigeria Reports Capture of Town. The New York Times, Jul 16, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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British Evacuation Ordered. The New York Times, Jul 17, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Friendly, Alfred. Nigerian Secessionists Concede Retreat at Nsukka. The New York Times, Jul 17, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Nigeria Approves Evacuation of Foreigners in East. The New York Times, Jul 18, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Muddy Mountain Route Pierces Nigeria Blockade. The New York Times, Jul 19, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Nigeria Says Federal Planes Strafe Breakaway Regions Capital. The New York Times, Jul 19, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers 580 Foreigners Evacuated From Rebel Area to Lagos. The New York Times, Jul 22, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Nigerias Forces Are Seen In Insukka. The New York Times, Jul 23, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Lagos Says Rebels Incur Heavy Losses. The New York Times, Jul 24, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Both Sides Report Advances In Nigeria. The New York Times, Jul 26, 1967, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Friendly, Alfred. Red Cross Misses Biafran Aid Goal. The New York Times, Sep 6, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Foreign Doctors in Biafra Despair Over Shortages. The New York Times, Oct 7, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers No Biafra Genocide Found By Canadian. The New York Times, Oct 23, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Garrison, Lloyd. Yam Crop, Crucial to Biafrans, Periled by a Shortage of Seed. The New York Times, Feb 24, 1969, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Food Is Short in Owerri. The New York Times, May 4, 1969, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Apple, R.W. Churchman Says Biafrans Face New Wave of Starvation Deaths. The New York Times, Jun 29, 1969, ProQuest Historical Newspapers

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Paces, Eric. Rainy Season Impedes Nigerian Forces and Raises the Hopes of Biafrans. The New York Times, Aug 25, 1969, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Paces, Eric. Biafra Fights On, but It Shows Some Signs of Demoralization. The New York Times, Sep 13, 1969, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Forsyth, Frederick. Gutted Hamlets, Rotting CorpsesThis is Genocide. The Sunday Times, May 12, 1968 Sankay Reddy, An Independent Press Working Against Famine: The Nigerian Experience, The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 26, no. 2 (June, 1988): 337-45, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-278X %28198806%2926%3A2%3C337%3AAIPWAF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7 Adepitan Bamisaiye, The Nigerian Civil War in the International Press, Transition, no. 44 (1974): 30-32+34-35, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00421191%281974%290%3A44%3C30%3ATNCWIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y Art Hansen and David Aronson, The Politics of Mercy, Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 29, no. 3 (1995): 498-505, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00083968%281995%2929%3A3%3C498%3ATPOM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S Seymour M. Hersh, The United States President who Liked to call Blacks Jigaboos, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 23 (Spring 1999): 138-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=10773711%28199921%290%3A23%3C138%3ATUSPWL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9 Kirsten Hastrup, Hunger and the Hardness of Facts, Man, vol. 28, no. 4 (December, 1993): 727-39, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00251496%28199312%292%3A28%3A4%3C727%3AHATHOF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D Robert Dirks, Social Responses During Severe Food Shortages and Famine, Current Anthropology, vol. 21, no. 1 (February 1980): 21-44, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00113204%28198002%2921%3A1%3C21%3ASRDSFS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E Roy M. Melbourne. The American Response to the Nigerian Conflict. Issue: A Journal of Opinion, vol. 3, no. 2 (1973): 33-42, http://links.org/sici?sici=00471607%28197322%293%3A2%3C33%3ATARTTN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4 Paul Richards. Famine (and war) in Africa. Anthropology Today, vol. 8, no. 6 (December 1992): 3-5. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0268-540X %28199212%298%3A6%3C3%3AF%28WIAW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R Kennedy Lindsay, Biafra and Her Minorities. Asawit, vol. 1, no. 3 (April 1968)

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