This volume is the first, comprehensive and balanced historical account of the momentous Nigeria-Biafra war. It offers a multi-perspectival treatment of the conflict that explores issues such as local experiences of victims, the massive relief campaigns by humanitarian NGOs and international organizations like the Red Cross, the actions of foreign powers with interests in the conflict, and the significance of the international public sphere, in which the propaganda and public relations war about the question of genocide was waged.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. The Nigeria-Biafra war: postcolonial conflict and the question of genocide
Lasse Heerten and A. Dirk Moses
Section I - Genocide and the Biafran bid for self-determination
2. Irreconcilable narratives: Biafra, Nigeria and arguments about genocide, 1966–1970
Douglas Anthony
3. Marketing genocide: Biafran propaganda strategies during the Nigerian civil war, 1967–1970
Roy Doron
4. The case against Victor Banjo: legal process and the governance of Biafra
Samuel Fury Childs Daly
5. The Biafran secession and the limits of self-determination
Brad Simpson
Section II - A global event
6. The UK and ‘genocide’ in Biafra
Karen E. Smith
7. France and the Nigerian civil war, 1967–1970
Christopher Griffin
8. Israel, Nigeria, and the Biafra civil war 1967–1970
Zach Levey
9. Strange bedfellows: an unlikely alliance between the Soviet Union and Nigeria during the Biafran War
Maxim Matusevich
10. West German sympathy for Biafra, 1967–1970: actors, perceptions and motives
Florian Hannig
11. Dealing with ‘genocide’: the ICRC and the UN during the Nigeria-Biafra war, 1967–1970
Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps
12. Humanitarian encounters: Biafra, NGOs and imaginings of the Third World in Britain and Ireland, 1967–1970
Kevin O’Sullivan
13. ‘And starvation is the grim reaper’: the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and the genocide question during the Nigerian civil war, 1968–1970
Brian McNeil
14. ‘Black America cares’: the response of African Americans to civil war and ‘genocide’ in Nigeria, 1967–1970
James Farquharson
Section III - Trauma and memory
15. Women and the Biafra-Nigeria war
Gloria Chuku
16. ‘Biafra of the mind’: MASSOB and the mobilization of history
Ike Okonta
17. Memory as social burden: collective remembrance of the Biafran War and imaginations of socio-political marginalization in contemporary Nigeria
Edlyne Anugwom
18. The Asaba massacre and the Nigerian civil war: reclaiming hidden history
S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser Ottanelli
19. Imagined nations and imaginary Nigeria: Chinua Achebe’s quest for a country
Mpalive-Hangson Msiska
About the Author :
A. Dirk Moses is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney. He is the author and editor of many publications on history, memory and genocide, including Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (2014, edited with Bart Luttikhuis) and the Journal of Genocide Research (senior editor).
Lasse Heerten is head of the project ‘Imperial Gateway: Hamburg, the German Empire, and the Making of a Global Port’ at the Freie Universität Berlin. Prior to this, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Human Rights at the University of California at Berkeley. His first book, a global history of the humanitarian crisis in Biafra, will be published by Cambridge University Press.
