The Nigeria-Biafra War lasted from 6 July 1966 to 15 January 1970, during which time the post-colonial Nigerian state fought to bring the South-Eastern region, which had seceded as the State or Republic of Biafra, back into the newly independent but ideologically divided nation.
This volume discusses the trends and methodologies in the civil war writings, both fictional and non-fictional, and is the first to analyse in detail the intellectual and historical circumstances that helped to shape these often contentious texts.
The recent high-profile fictional account by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Half of a Yellow Sun was preceded by works by Ken Saro-Wiwa, Elechi Amadi, Kole Omotoso, Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Chukwuemeka Ike and Chris Abani, all of which strongly convey the horrific human cost of the war on individuals and their communities. The non-fictional accounts, including Chinua Achebe’s last work There Was a Country, are biographies, personal accounts and essays on the causes and course of the war, its humanitarian crises and the collaboration of foreign nations.
The contributors examine writers’ and protagonists’ use of contemporary published texts as a means of continued resistance and justification of the war, the problems of objectivity encountered in memoirs, and how authors’ backgrounds and sources determine the kinds of biases that influenced their interpretations, including the gendered divisions in Nigeria-Biafra War scholarship and sources. By initiating a dialogue on the civil war literature, this volume engages a much-needed discourse on the problems confronting a culturally diverse post-war Nigeria.
Chapter 1: Scholarly Trends, Issues, and Themes: Introduction
Toyin Falola and Ogechukwu Ezekwem
Part One: On the History of the Nigeria-Biafra War
Chapter 2: Background to the Nigerian Civil War
G. N. Uzoigwe
Chapter 3: Connecting Theory and Reality? The Nigeria-Biafra War Literature
Ogechi Anyanwu
Chapter 4: Articulating Biafra Propaganda: The Ahiara Declaration
Ralph Njoku
Chapter 5: The Ahiara Declaration: Polemics and Politics
Austin Okwu
Part Two: Critical Debates on the Nigerian Crisis
Chapter 6: Beyond the Blame-Game: Theorizing the Nigeria-Biafra War
Bukola A. Oyeniyi
Chapter 7: The Newspaper as Warmonger? National Crisis, the Newspaper Press and the Road to War
Wale Adebanwi
Chapter 8 Literary Separatism: Ethnic Balkanization in Nigeria-Biafra War Literature
Akachi Odoemena
Chapter 9: Local Writers and Commitments to Ethnic Sentiments.
Olukunle Ojeleye
Part Three: The War in Fiction, Memoir, and Imagination
Chapter 10: Memoirs and the Question of Objectivity: Revisiting Alexander Madiebo’s The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War and Robert Collis’s Nigeria in Conflict
Chukwuma Opata
Chapter 11: Challenges of Nationhood in Pre-Biafra Texts
Cyril Obi
Chapter 12: First, There Was a Country; Then There Wasn’t: Reflections on Achebe’s Last Book
Biodun Jeyifo
Chapter 13: The Social Complexities of the Nigeria-Biafra War in Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun
Meredith Coffey
Chapter 14: Biafra in the Irish Imagination
Fiona Bateman
Chapter 15: Magical Realism or Science Fiction: The Nigerian Civil War and Ali Mazrui’s The Trial of Christopher Okigbo
Adetayo Alabi
Chapter 16: Biafra, an Impractical Mission? Revisiting S. O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun and N. C. Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice.
Ode Ogede
Chapter 17: Neo-Colonialism, Biafra, and the Causes of War as Imagined in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra
Françoise Ugochukwu
Chapter 18: No, This Is Not Redemption: The Legacy of The Biafra War in Chris Abani’s Graceland
Hugh Hodges
Part Four: Locating Gender in Nigeria-Biafra War Literature
Chapter 19: Gender and the Construction of Nigeria-Biafra War Scholarship
Egodi Uchendu
Chapter 20: What Is the Country? Reimagining National Space in Women’s Writing on the Biafran War
Jane Bryce
Chapter 21: Female Participation in War and the Implication of Nationalism: The Postcolonial Disconnection in Destination Biafra
Ofure Aito
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