Abstract
I thank these readers for their attentive, critical readings of my book, and to Michaeline Crichlow for generously organizing this forum. I will respond to them in turn, but before I do, I would like to share candidly what I’ve observed as the book has meandered out into the world.
What is it about the Nigerian Civil War that captures the imagination? In the short time since A History of the Republic of Biafra was published, several important new accounts of the conflict have been published (Chuku and Aham Okoro, 2020; Heerten, 2021; Korieh, 2021; O’Sullivan, 2021). Some look at neglected dimensions of the war, like the role of women, or try to nudge its boulder-like position in Nigerian historiography in one direction or another. Many take a wide angle, painting portraits of the international system reflected in an African mirror. Outside the Nigerian academy, this is what Biafra has looked like most often – an object lesson for humanitarianism, the Cold War, or the study of genocide. There is nothing wrong with this approach. There is more than one way to interpret a war, and I don’t deny Biafra's importance in the global history of the 1960s. But we should be clear about whose story is being told here. The history of humanitarianism is not the same as the history of the places where humanitarians worked. The title of one recent article, “Biafras of the Mind,” is telling: these are accounts of images, representations, and perceptions of the war, less the war itself. Few give much space to the people who fought, except as abstractions. I have come to see this as a feature of humanitarian history. Some historians of international aid treat Africa as a backdrop, others a prop. A few wave around African wars like standards to draw the world's attention. Of course, humanitarians themselves often instrumentalize suffering. They have an interest in publicizing their causes, whether to raise awareness or funds. But why would historians do this, long after the war has been won or lost, the bodies buried, and the cases closed?
It is because violence makes for good storytelling. I speak from experience. As any reader of military history knows, well-told violence makes for gripping books, but it can become a narrative crutch. It is an easy tool of explanation – an anecdote about depravity is hard to argue with, and everyone can intuitively understand how it might provoke a feeling, or explain an event. More than once I found myself scanning a file for gore because I knew I could turn it into an argument. This is a sure way to distort the past; it’s one thing to come across violence in the archives, but it's quite another to go looking for it. There are limits to using acts of violence to explain why people act, or to understand how they feel. Sometimes I allowed violence to hijack my sense of what was important. A few times I let it explain things, rather than approaching it as something to be explained. Eventually I learned to ration what I wrote about violence, training away from overusing that narrative muscle. I came to think of it like smoking: lighting up now and then won’t kill you, but it’s easy to become dependent.
In her response, Vivian Chenxue Lu focuses on the memory of the war, and Biafra’s long, complicated afterlife in Nigeria. Biafran secessionism has come back into Nigerian politics with a vengeance, and no one can really be sure of what part it will play in Nigeria’s future. I feel a certain anxiety about my role in this. Does preserving Biafra’s memory also keep its bitterness alive? The act of explaining political rancor does not make it less likely in the future. Describing the patterns in violence does not tame or soften it, and certainly does not prevent it. I think often of an idea that Margaret Mead formulated towards the end of her career (in her somewhat confused late style). She called for a “post-figurative” approach to the study of human society, which did not look to the past at all, but instead focused on what was possible in the future. Looking back at history, she saw only a “succession of repetitive traps” – “analogue[s] of nature red in tooth in claw,” templates for violence, and promises of destruction (Mead, 1970: xxiii-xxiv). It was only by unshackling ourselves from history, she suggested, that humans could achieve their full potential. This is heretical for a historian to say, but I think Mead may have been right. In describing historical violence, and reveling in its drama, we run the risk of making it seem natural. I may be overestimating historians’ ability to shape the minds of their readers. But like Mead, I sometimes wonder if it would be better to forget some contentious parts of the past. This was certainly what the military dictatorships that ruled Nigeria after the war believed. Silence meant peace as far as the army was concerned, even if that silence was more sepulchral than serene. Biafra is not my story to forget (nor was it mine to tell), but I don't entirely fault them for taking this approach. In telling about wars, it is hard to avoid keeping old grievances alive, or giving ammunition to one side or the other. War stories can naturalize conflict, and I have come to believe that even the ones about resilience, triumph, or honor are fundamentally venemous. Muddling in anything else – heroes, moralists, even the humanitarians who tried to limit the damage – only dilutes the toxin. I would not be the first historian to be poisoned by my own sources, but I feel some regret for passing the dram on to others.
If people outside Nigeria know anything about Biafra, they know about the hunger. At the nadir of the war, a Nigerian blockade created famine conditions around the front. Foreign journalists, aid organizations, and the Biafran government itself documented this famine assiduously. Images of starving people, especially children, became part of its propaganda. Newspapers and magazines all over the world printed the devastating photos stringers sent them – priests holding skeletal toddlers, young adults reduced to the stature of children by malnourishment, naked women trying to breastfeed infants as their own bodies failed. These pictures were burned into the world’s consciousness. Perspective was the first casualty of this propaganda; famine is not just an African phenomenon, but Biafra became its emblem. Africans are still trying to convince the rest of the world that those images depict a moment of crisis – an exceptional circumstance, not what life was usually like. What is a historian to do with these photographs? We can’t ignore them. They show us an important side of the conflict, and the fact that they were framed for maximum emotional effect doesn’t mean they were staged or posed. The famine was very real. Survivors may find them painful, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they want them to be hidden away. Biafran partisans themselves circulate these images, and many who survived the front see them as sacred reminders of what happened there. To them, they are evidence that Nigeria’s conduct was genocidal, and poignant depictions of what the Igbo people endured. For all those reasons, photographs of the famine demand my attention. But I cannot look at them anymore, and I decided early on that I wouldn’t make others look at them either.
These images followed me around for years. I gritted my teeth in archives, knowing that a headless corpse or a dying infant might lurk in every folder. I still open books about Biafra gingerly, knowing that they’re probably there. I once attended a conference where, to my horror, the presenters delivered their remarks while a larger-than-life image of a starving child was projected behind us on a scrim. None of these images appear in A History of the Republic of Biafra. I admit that something of the war’s sharpness is lost in not showing them. But I also believe that the horror of this episode can be communicated without showing its victims in their last moments of life. Moreover, certain aspects of the war can only be understood without them. They suck the air out of the room, making the politics that underpinned the conflict seem irrelevant. They make anything else going on other than death fade into the background – and indeed, quite a lot happened in Biafra. There are ethical reasons for leaving them out too. These images often have the opposite effect to what they intend. Their purpose was to humanize events that were distant to readers in Oslo or Omaha; to put the viewer in the shoes of the victims, or at least to see in them some flicker of her own humanity. But hunger distorts the people we’re looking at so much that some of them are hard to recognize as human. They end up being figures of terror, not sympathy. The effect is dehumanizing, especially when no context is given – no sense of who these people were, or who they might have become. Of course, there is also the matter of the subjects’ privacy and dignity. Each photo was the worst moment of someone’s life, caught on film for millions of people to see. It is fair to ask how they would have felt about that. Since their names are almost never recorded, and most of them probably perished, we can’t know.
I have mixed feelings about all this. I am not interested in censoring the past because it is too nasty or brutal, nor in policing who should air the dirty laundry of the Nigerian Civil War and who should not. I have tried to honor the people who populate my book, but I am not sure that historians should necessarily honor those we write about. It is not the historian’s job to show our subjects an image of themselves they would want to see, or even necessarily one they would recognize. But at the same time, I trust my reaction – a shudder of shame and anger – whenever I open a book and find these photos. Why are they here? What point is being made? Is a victim of a protein deficiency being used to illustrate something, or is the historian using his image as grist for the interpretive mill? Does this matter? A History of the Republic of Biafra is illustrated with historical photographs, but only ones that depict the living. One, by the Kenyan photographer Priya Ramrakha, shows a squad of young women in the middle of a training drill. Another is a group portrait of a village just after the war ended. Some people look darkly into the camera, others laugh. Young men are conspicuously absent because most of them died at the front. These pictures are no less tragic than the images of famine, I think, but they are human in a way that pictures of the dead and dying are not.
None of this is to say that the international part of the story is irrelevant, nor that those who watched the war from afar got everything wrong about it. British and American spies sent home vivid descriptions of what they saw, as did Irish priests and French diplomats. They could see some things that the belligerents could not. I used these records, but I used them with reticence, because the history of Biafra has been told from outsiders’ accounts many times – so many times, in fact, that it can seem like there is no other way of knowing about Biafra. Accounts by foreign observers, most of them heavily dosed with rumor, have been taken at face value more often than not. This is part of a broader pattern in African history, and there are real problems with studying African societies from the testimony of people who were just passing through. Several of my book’s reviews have interpreted it as a rejection of international history, and one called me a “maverick” for “defying the global and international perspectives that are de rigueur in history departments” (Crowcroft, 2020). I do not endorse that reading – I have no axe to grind with international historians, and in some respects I consider myself one of them. But I do believe it is important to acknowledge the limits of what outsiders could see. British intelligence reports are rife with Chinese mercenaries, Yugoslav saboteurs, and other figments of the imagination (some have worked their way into otherwise respectable histories). Humanitarian records are full of exaggerations and half-truths. Diplomats and charity workers struggled to see through the fog of war, and most didn’t know the landscape well to begin with. Biafran judges, lawyers, and litigants – who did know the terrain – could see things a little more clearly. I admit that the legal archive has a dangerous allure. Just because someone swears to tell the truth doesn't mean they actually do. Judges do not announce their biases, and it can be hard to see the structures and formulas that give legal records their meaning. But given how speculative and misinformed the other sources for Biafra’s history are, legal records are indispensable. Without them, what happened in Nigeria in the late 1960s looks like a chaotic storm with no rhyme or reason.
Halimat Titilola Somotan raises an important point about how the survival tactics I describe are connected to the deeper past. Isn’t it possible, she asks, that the “reflex to obscure” that I identify in Biafra might be found before the war too? Yes, absolutely; the danger and precarity found in Biafra existed in Nigeria long before the war, and long outlasted it. The obscuring reflex was especially useful during colonial rule, when Nigerians lived under a government that was even more violent, illegitimate, and out to get them than Biafra was. It would not be wrong to think that colonial-era deceit, forgery, and fraud done behind the backs of colonial officials was related to the forms of mendacity I found in Biafra. But what made crime in Biafra different is the fact that it played out while bombs whistled overhead. The fighting raised the stakes of every interaction, and made matters of truth or falsehood matters of life and death.
The broadest aim of this book is to describe how a peculiar kind of time works; what makes it feel slow or fast, how people move through it, how the horizon they can (or can’t) see shapes the decisions they make. Unlike many of my colleagues in African studies, the variety of time I’m trying to understand is not postcolonial time. Rather, it is wartime. What does this episode tell us about the experience of armed conflict generally? You could find an analogue for the story I tell in many wars, and this is what makes it portable beyond the context of Nigeria: all wars open up a space for deception, even if what that looks like may vary from one battlefield to another. Social relations, decision-making, and the moral calculations that people make in the day-to-day work differently in wartime than they do in peacetime. People make different choices when they know that every day might be their last, and when their measurements of risk are warped by the imperative to survive (or to win). War makes lying easier and more necessary. This may sound like common-sense pablum, but it is seldom acknowledged in histories of warfare, even critical ones. Mendacity is a product of war in general, and my goal was to make this unapologetically universal point from African history, rather than from the more familiar redoubts of war studies – the World Wars, the US Civil War, and a handful of other conflicts.
In the end, my book is a social history of law, even though it unfolds in the domain of military history. In describing battles and armies, we often lose sight of the soldiers who make them up. Individual people can melt away in the legal archive too. It is easy to be sucked into law’s abstractions, and forget that the numbered witnesses and depersonalized characters in a trial (“the defendant,” “the appellant”) were people with flesh and blood. Occasionally, when paging through a file, I would find an exhibit that someone had forgotten to remove – a piece of cloth with a bloodstain on it, or a picture of a crime scene. These memento mori were always disconcerting, but they were also important reminders of the social history behind legal records. Legal decisions can start lives or end them, and each dusty casefile is the shadow of a tragedy, a triumph, or a wound.