The Biafra Story – Frederick Forsyth, 1969 [Revised 2001] ★½

Who Mourns for Biafra?

They call them crimes against humanity, but do they count if not everyone admits they are crimes?

This was the problem facing a young British journalist who had what seemed to be a huge story in his hands, one where millions of helpless civilians were killed. But to many of his colleagues, and his own government, the deaths were unfortunate byproducts of settled policy.

Who mourns for Biafra? This becomes a question without an answer, and a cry which permeates each page of this angry, difficult book.

From 1967 to 1970, the newly independent nation of Nigeria, on Africa’s west-central coast, found itself embroiled in a civil war targeting the Ibo [sometimes spelled “Igbo”] tribe who dominated a wedge of southeastern coastal territory that became known as Biafra. Frederick Forsyth, initially working for the BBC, was there to cover the struggle, and makes no bones about taking sides:

I have seen the hinterland of desolated villages, wrecked farms, sacked and looted buildings, burnt habitations and by the wayside the executed bodies of peasants foolish enough or slow enough to be caught in the open by the Federal Army…In war there are bound to be innocent victims, occasional excesses, here and there a wanton brutality conducted by soldiers of a low level. But seldom has such a remarkable pattern of bestiality been established over such a wide territory by such diverse army units.

Nigerian troops en route to capturing Asaba, a strategic town along the Niger River bordering Biafra, in 1967. Asaba's bloody fall made Biafra's collapse seem closer than it proved to be. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Civil_War.

Forsyth would go on to achieve much greater fame in the following decades as a writer of espionage thrillers, but Biafra would remain a cause close to his heart. You can read how much he aches for its fate in every page. Which is much of the problem.

Rather than tell the story of Biafra in a clear, factual way, with the same dispassion that made him a compelling fictional yarnspinner, Forsyth here reveals considerable anguish and deep anger at both the suffering he witnessed and the culpability of his own British countrymen, particularly those in power.

If this is your first book on Biafra (admittedly, it is mine), you will be at a loss about many important details, like what caused the Hausas of the north, them being Nigeria’s ruling tribe in Forsyth’s telling, to take such a hostile tack to their Ibo neighbors that they would seek first to root out and kill any Ibos amongst them, then march south to battle and subjugate the rest.

All the time, Forsyth says, the Ibos just wanted to live in peace. He frequently quotes Biafran leader Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu to this end: “It is better that we move slightly apart and survive. It is much worse that we move close and perish in the collision.”

Ojukwu inspects his troops. Something unmentioned in Forsyth's book is Ojukwu's reputation for executing his own officers when they failed him. https://medium.com/@itsacontinentpod/nigerian-civil-war-thought-you-knew-everything-c421ca95574d.

Ojukwu was opposed by Nigeria’s rulers, namely its head of state Yakubu Gowon and the Hausa-run military who backed him and, in Forsyth’s telling, called all the shots. Also weighing in was a British government which preferred to deal with one nation when it came to brokering economic deals with their onetime colony.

The result was a protracted war and famine which would leave two million Biafrans dead and as many as twice that number displaced:

There is reason to believe that, like the British Government, British business, having backed one horse on the assurance that it would win with ease, has now gone so far that it must continue backing that horse to win no matter what the price; that it is committed to a policy which it might privately like to reverse, but cannot see how to do so.

Forsyth implies the conflict’s origin lay in jealousy. The industrious Ibos adapted readily to outside influences, which gave them a leg up chasing prosperity. This in turn angered the Hausas, especially as Nigeria’s growing oil industry, a key source of modernization, grew up around southeastern cities like Onitsha and Port Harcourt.

Forsyth quotes an American consul: “It’s no good ducking under or hedging round the single immutable political reality of this country, which is: in any race for the material benefits of life, starting from the same point and on the basis of equal opportunity, the Easterner are going to win by a mile. This is intolerable to the North.”

Biafra (in light maize) was poorly situated to resist the Nigerian army, surrounded as it was by three sides with few natural barriers protecting them. Yet it retained its sovereignty for nearly three years. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Civil_War. 

The Biafra Story’s problem is only partially its partiality. The main flaw is a surprising dullness in the way Forsyth relates his facts. An air of turgid formality clings to his prose, presented as a very choppy white paper based on second-hand suppositions. Forsyth edited his copy while fleeing Biafra in one of its last available planes, and it feels rushed.

Forsyth’s admiration for Colonel Ojukwu is I think the book’s most serious failing. Not that Ojukwu was in any way a bad guy; he comes across as very noble. But given the total collapse of Biafra, you expect more shade cast on his leadership than Forsyth is inclined to give.

In Forsyth’s telling, Ojukwu was a reluctant ruler, promoted only after the murder of Nigerian leader General Ironsi, to whom Ojukwu was loyal. The son of a wealthy businessman, Ojukwu eschewed graft and allowed his people to guide his national policy.

If Forsyth allows for any miscalculation by Ojukwu, it was in underestimating the enmity of the North until it was too late. At first, the North wanted succession, both from Biafra in the east as well as the most populated part of the country in the southwest, dominated by the Yoruba tribe and including Lagos, Nigeria’s main city. But then, according to Forsyth, Gowon was persuaded by the emirs of the North, as well as Great Britain, to take up a different tack: conquest.

As Biafra's death toll mounted, so did protests in the West. In 1969, John Lennon returned his MBE award partly in protest of British policy to Biafra. All the while, Forsyth notes, Nigeria tightened the noose. Image from https://medium.com/@ifeoma.chukwuogo/no-victors-245b4572d871.

In their march to overtake Biafra, the Nigerians were aided by British supplies, including armored cars. As they overran Biafran settlements, Nigerian soldiers frequently slaughtered the Ibo and other minority-tribe civilians who landed in their net.

Forsyth notes a brutal absurdity to the violence: On 29 September 1966 Colonel Gowon made a radio broadcast apparently intended to bring the violence to an end. In it he said: “It appears that it is going beyond reason, and is now at a point of recklessness and irresponsibility,” giving the impression to his listeners that up to a certain point the killing of Easterners might be regarded as a reasonable practice.

Violence against civilians formed but one part of the offensive. More lethal still was the famine caused by Nigeria’s blockade of Biafra, from where most fatalities would come.

That this was a deliberate policy, and not the byproduct of a bloody war, was never in question. Even as Europeans and Americans awoke to the death toll, and agitated for humanitarian aid, Gowon was openly hostile to allowing relief expeditions.

Forsyth quotes Nigerian Army Chief of Staff Hassan Katsina: “Personally I would not feed somebody I am fighting.”

Biafran children plead for food in 1969. Fifty years later, Forsyth called British policy supporting Nigeria in the war "the one truly disgusting policy practised by our officialdom during the lifetime of anyone over 50." Image from https://africannewstoday.com/magazine/buried-for-50-years-britains-shameful-role-in-the-biafran-war-by-frederick-forsyth/.

There were even reports of Nigerians poisoning food brought to hungry Biafran children. Forsyth quotes a priest saying he couldn’t give a starving child a cup of milk he knew had come from the North.

Such personal details are thinly scattered in The Biafra Story, which spends more time detailing army maneuvers and diplomatic overtures of momentary importance. Sometimes this is grimly amusing, as when Forsyth relates a clueless British aristocrat blithely informing his Biafran counterparts he thought them just a few tribesmen “living somewhere in the bush.” But much of the time it slows the narrative to a crawl.

As a writer, Forsyth can’t seem to get out of his own way, even when he has something vital to relate. Trying to explain the cruelty of Nigerian policy, he goes on a tangent about various types of genocide as defined by world law, to demonstrate how the Nigerian version is little different than that practiced by Nazi Germany.

It’s not a wild take; the pro rata death tolls were shockingly comparable. Still, in the Nigerian-Biafran War, the killing of civilians was part of a larger war effort, not its object. Forsyth begs to differ here: But even the most sober and disinterested foreigners inside Biafra have long since lost any doubts about their chances of survival as a distinct ethnic group under Nigerian military occupation.

In an afterword, Forsyth admits this may have been too negative a view. The post-war wholesale slaughter of Ibos he feared never came to pass, though the Ibos remain an oppressed minority in Nigeria to this day.

Forsyth spends considerable time detailing supply runs at Uli Airfield. It was a hazardous, delicate night operation that could only employ landing lights at the moment before the plane was about to land. Image from https://chindits.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/landing-at-uli.jpg

Forsyth is at his shrillest and least convincing when railing against the British government and press. It seems after a while that he is more agitated about Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the BBC than any Nigerian. As much as he inveighs against their policies at length, he doesn’t examine their rationale any more than he does the Nigerian policy against Biafra. The result is a big hole at the center of his book.

Admittedly, as a fan of Forsyth’s thrillers, I was reading The Biafra Story for reasons other than elevating my conscience. For me, it was disappointing on that score, too. He does give some details about mercenaries who served as a commando arm of the Biafran military, who seems to have influenced his later thriller The Dogs Of War, but it is more a listing of their diverse nationalities than an explanation of what role, if any, they played in the conflict. It’s all pretty flat.

While ostensibly a war book, The Biafra Story is more about war crimes, both of commission and omission, which makes it a hard-enough read without navigating its loose and angry narrative.