Whenever you buy a book from our online store, we may make a small commission which supports our work. Visit our online store here.
Fifty-seven years ago, on 30 May 1967, Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu declared the independence of the Republic of Biafra. In addition to ongoing tensions, Ojukwu’s declaration sparked a crisis that led to a three-year civil war between Nigeria and Biafra. I first learnt about the Nigerian Civil War (which lasted from 6 July 1967 until 15 January 1970) from books I picked up while in senior secondary school. The Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War, had profound impacts on the country’s history. Understanding the events and aftermath of the war is crucial to comprehending Nigeria’s contemporary issues and its journey towards nation-building and national unity.
In our latest book recommendation, we have compiled a list of seven books that will give you an essential introduction to the Nigerian Civil War. These books are a great starting point for those unfamiliar with the causes, experiences, and aftermath of the war. Our recommendations provide diverse perspectives, from personal memoirs and historical analyses to fiction inspired by real events, offering a well-rounded introduction to the Nigerian Civil War.
Read our recommendations below.
THERE WAS A COUNTRY
AUTHOR: CHINUA ACHEBE
GENRE: NON-FICTION
The defining experience of Chinua Achebe’s life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War. The conflict was infamous for its savage impact on the Biafran people, Chinua Achebe’s people, many of whom were starved to death after the Nigerian government blockaded their borders. By then, Chinua Achebe was already a world-renowned novelist, with a young family to protect. He took the Biafran side in the conflict and served his government as a cultural ambassador, from which vantage he absorbed the war’s full horror. Immediately after, Achebe took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for more than forty years he has maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Now, decades in the making, comes a towering reckoning with one of modern Africa’s most fateful events.
Achebe masterfully relates his experience, both as he lived it and how he has come to understand it. He begins his story with Nigeria’s birth pangs and the story of his own upbringing as a man and as a writer so that we might come to understand the country’s promise, which turned to horror when the hot winds of hatred began to stir. To read There Was a Country is to be powerfully reminded that artists have a particular obligation, especially during a time of war. All writers, Achebe argues, should be committed writers—they should speak for their history, their beliefs, and their people.
HALF OF A YELLOW SUN
Author: CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
Genre: FICTION
Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a pivotal moment in Nigerian history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed. With empathy and grace of a masterful storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor’s beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.
Cassava Republic Press is proud to announce the launch of their inaugural $20,000 Global Black Women’s Non-Fiction Manuscript Prize dedicated to exceptional works by Black women. Deadline: 30th June 2024. Learn more here.
SUNSET IN BIAFRA: A CIVIL WAR DIARY
AUTHOR: ELECHI AMADI
GENRE: NON-FICTION
In Elechi Amadi’s only work of nonfiction, Sunset in Biafra, he recounts his experiences as a soldier and civilian during the Biafran conflict. The book provides a personal account of the civil war, highlighting Amadi’s experiences as an Ikwerre man in the Igbo-dominated eastern region during the Nigerian Civil War. Amadi opens the reader to his personal struggles in prison and his experiences throughout the war.
WOMEN AND THE NIGERIA-BIAFRA WAR: REFRAMING GENDER AND CONFLICT IN AFRICA
EDITORS: GLORIA CHUKU AND SUSSIE U. AHAM-OKORO
GENRE: NON-FICTION
This first comprehensive study of the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-1970) through the lens of gender explores the gallant ways women carried out old and new responsibilities in wartime and the immediate postwar years. This book presents women as embodiments of vulnerability and agency, who demonstrated remarkable resilience and initiative, waging war on all fronts in the face of precarious conditions and scarcities, and maximizing opportunities occasioned by hostilities.
In this book, women’s experiences are highlighted through critical analyses of oral interviews, memoirs, life histories, fashion and material culture, international legal conventions, music, as well as governmental and non-governmental sources. Co-edited by Gloria Chuku and Sussie Aham-Okoro, the book fills the gap in the war scholarship that has minimized women’s complex experiences fifty years after the hostilities ended. It highlights the cost of the conflict on Nigerian women, their participation in the hostilities, and their contributions to the survival of families, communities and the country. The chapters present counter-narratives to fictional and nonfictional accounts of the war, especially those written by men, which often peripheralize or stereotypically represent women as passive spectators or helpless victims of the conflict; and also highlight and exaggerate women’s moral laxity and sensationalize their marital infidelities.
DESTINATION BIAFRA
AUTHOR: BUCHI EMECHETA
GENRE: FICTION
Destination Biafra is Buchi Emecheta’s fictional account of the Biafran War. According to Ijedike Jeboma in a review for The Republic, ‘Emecheta’s central hypothesis is one of British interference and manipulation, and as such, one of the novel’s primary characters is Alan Grey, a British military colonial officer turned post-colonial political string-puller. Destination Biafra discusses the actions, motivations, and opinions of the West far more than typical Biafran War novels.’
I AM STILL WITH YOU
AUTHOR: EMMANUEL IDUMA
GENRE: NON-FICTION
After spending many years in New York, Emmanuel Iduma recounts his journey back to Nigeria, where he was raised. He travelled home to learn the fate of his uncle Emmanuel, his namesake, who disappeared in the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s. Iduma made numerous stops throughout the former Biafra territory in search of the truth, reuniting with family members to elicit their memories, snooping through university libraries to covertly photocopy materials, and stopping by abandoned monuments. He came to the conclusion that if he could comprehend his father’s grief at losing a sibling in the war, he might be able to learn how to grieve his own deceased father.
OIL, POLITICS AND VIOLENCE: NIGERIA’S MILITARY COUP CULTURE (1966-1976)
AUTHOR: MAX SIOLLUN
GENRE: NON-FICTION
Military rule and oil wealth led to severe changes in Nigeria that nearly tore the country apart on several occasions. Forty years after the end of the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, Max Siollun answers key questions such as: Who were the key personalities and events that caused the Nigeria/Biafra civil war? What is the root of the Niger Delta oil conflict and the ‘curse of oil’? How has Nigeria managed to endure successive military coups, civil war, and ethnic violence while still remaining united?
Siollun’s book addresses major events and controversies in Nigeria from independence until the 1976 assassination of its then Head of State, General Murtala Muhammed. These include the traumatic January and July coups of 1966, the unprecedented magnanimity of the federal leader General Gowon after Nigeria’s civil war, Gowon’s post-war stewardship, and an hour-by-hour reconstruction of the events leading up to the 1976 Dimka coup in which Gowon’s successor, General Murtala Muhammed, was killed.