HISTORY, MEMORY & THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF THE NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR
By Al J. Venter & Stephen Dinsdale
Biafra Genocide: Nigeria: Bloodletting and Mass Starvation, 1967-1970 (linked for purchase) describes the Biafran War as the most expansive tribal conflagration the continent has experienced and one of the greatest tragedies in Africa due to pervasive death and famine.
By Samuel E. Umweni
888 Days in Biafra (linked for purchase) chronicles the abduction and survival of Samuel Umweni, the officer in charge of Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in Benin. He was held in captivity and detention without trial by Biafran rebel troops throughout the inception and duration of the Nigerian Civil War.
Biafra Writes Back: National Allegory and Double Consciousness in Postcolonial Nigerian Fiction (2020) considers the dangers of applying such a totalizing vision of postcolonial literary history, through an analysis of two imaginative accounts of the Biafran war.
Chaplow, Beth. “Biafra Writes Back: National Allegory and Double Consciousness in Postcolonial Nigerian Fiction.” Research in Africa Literatures, vol. 51, no. 2 (2020), 167-182.
‘And Starvation is the Grim Reaper’: the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and the Genocide Question During the Nigerian Civil War, 1968-70 (2014) argues that the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive offered a redefinition of genocide that wedded conceptions of Biafran identity to the Biafran state. McNeil explains that this redefinition of genocide failed to unit Americans towards supporting Biafran secession and could have led to more confusion about genocide during the conflict.
McNeil, Brian. “‘And Starvation is the Grim Reaper’: the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and the Genocide Question during the Nigerian Civil War, 1968-70.” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 16, no. 2-3 (2014), 317-336.