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Biafra
The breakaway republic of Nigeria's southeast, 1967 to 1970
Biafra existed for less than three years, yet the images of its famine reached television screens worldwide and reshaped how the world responds to humanitarian crises. Declared on May 30, 1967, by the military governor of Nigeria's Eastern Region, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Republic of Biafra was recognized by five states, Tanzania, Gabon, Côte d'Ivoire, Zambia, and Haiti. Nigeria's federal government fought to keep the country whole, and Biafra surrendered in January 1970. French doctors who had worked in the war zone helped found Médecins Sans Frontières in 1971. The name endures in Igbo memory and in a separatist movement that Nigeria's government has proscribed.
Biafra took in Nigeria's former Eastern Region, about 77,300 square kilometers between the lower Niger River and the Cameroon border, facing the Bight of Biafra, from which it took its name. In the south lay the mangrove creeks and oil fields of the eastern Niger Delta around Port Harcourt, inland a belt of rainforest and oil-palm country, and in the north the coal-bearing Udi Plateau above Enugu, edging into savanna. Of roughly 13.5 million people, most were Igbo, alongside Ibibio, Efik, Ijaw, Ogoni, and other communities, some of whose leaders opposed secession. Federal advances shrank the territory steadily. Today the area forms the Nigerian states of Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, Imo, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, and Rivers.
Two military coups in 1966 were followed by killings of Igbo civilians in northern Nigeria, with commonly cited estimates of about 30,000 dead, and more than a million people fled east. Talks at Aburi, Ghana, in January 1967 failed over how much autonomy the regions would hold, and days after Lagos divided the country into 12 states, the east seceded. Fighting began in July 1967. A federal blockade and shrinking Biafran territory produced famine, and churches and relief agencies flew food in by night. Estimates of total deaths, most of them civilians who died of starvation and disease, range widely, from about 500,000 to more than 2 million, and Britannica gives a span of 500,000 to 3 million. Biafra surrendered on January 15, 1970.