Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Biafran War'

Since the end of the Nigcria-Biafra war in 1970, political and social theorists, journalists, and scholars have discussed the significance of the war and the major players. Yet one perspective is often omitted, and that is the experiences of women and the roles they played during the war. This thesis begins to unearth some of those hidden narratives through the use of in-depth interviews with seven Biafran women who lived during and survived the Nigeria-Biafra war. Their stories about the importance of their ethnic and religious identities, their roles and experiences during the war, their encounters with death and refugees, and their discussions of a generational shift are important parts of some of the unearthed narratives.

This thesis examines three novels written by authors of Nigerian Igbo descent: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Chris Abani's GraceLand (2004) and Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation (2005). Focusing upon the strategies through which each novel engages with the legacy of the Nigerian-Biafran War (1967-1970) as a means of reconstituting individual and collective identifications, this study seeks to redefine canonical notions surrounding identity-formation and identification in postcolonial studies, as well as provide a textually-driven examination of the contemporary Nigerian literary landscape which balances a discursive approach to the text with historical and material contextualization. The introduction to this study provides an overview of nation and identification in postcolonial studies, the Nigerian national context and the current field of literary criticism on contemporary Nigerian literature. Chapter 1 focuses on racial identification, deploying Fanon' s schema of racial alienation and its subsequent legacy in postcolonial studies. Chapter 2 examines the intersection of gendered identifications in the postcolonial context of Adichie's, Abani's and Iweala's texts. Chapter 3 moves from the micro- to macro-levels of the text, examining the use of language-as-rhetoric in each core text, focusing particularly on the tropes of literacy, writing and the book. Chapter 4 then considers the means through which mythopoetics are redeployed in these texts through narrative blending, double consciousness and the often-contentious concepts of magical realism and hybridity. The study concludes with a coda which considers the intersection of aesthetics and ethics in representations of African conflict.

This study examines the Biafran secession of 1967-1970 and how the secessionist government constructed a Biafran identity in its campaign to gain international support for Biafra’s permanent separation from Nigeria. The introductory chapter outlines the role of identity in Nigeria’s twentieth-century political history and discusses the scholarly literature addressing questions of national and ethnic identity and on the Biafran secession. The thesis then provides a historical framework for discussing the evolution of Nigerian political identities and the failures of Nigerian leaders to build a Nigerian nationalism among the region’s numerous identifiable groups in the colonial and early independence eras. Subsequent chapters analyse the Biafran government’s attempts to elide the inherent instability of identity and overcome the dynamic process of identity formation in Nigeria by constructing and promoting a fixed Biafran identity based on cultural characteristics and historical experiences that allegedly distinguished and united the diverse peoples of the secessionist region.

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O romance Half of a Yellow Sun, de Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, apresenta uma narrativa em que a experiência dos cronotopos auxilia na compreensão do contexto da Guerra de Biafra (1967-1970). O enredo, estruturado em quatro partes interdependentes, possibilita, pelo menos, dois eixos de observação crítica: a) a percepção da formação das identidades dos sujeitos pós-modernos/pós-coloniais nesse cenário africano e b) a fragmentação da noção de espaço-tempo desses indivíduos. As figuras ficcionais do romance são sujeitos posicionados numa época e local de mudanças, confrontando o deslocamento das antigas tradições culturais africanas e a presença cada vez maior de valores estrangeiros, ocidentais. Portanto, o objetivo do nosso trabalho é o de analisar a construção dos cronotopos a partir de uma perspectiva com base nas personagens Ugwu, Olanna e Richard, bem como em seus respectivos núcleos de participação. Em um ambiente pós-colonial de produção, a obra possibilita ao leitor a oportunidade de conhecer literariamente a estória de um dos maiores traumas do continente africano presenciado por nigerianos e biafrenses e de sentir o sopro do vento da globalização pelas páginas do texto.
Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel authored by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, features a narrative in which the experience of chronotopoi assists in understanding the context of the Biafran War (1967-1970). The plot, divided into four interdependent parts, enables at least two axes of critical observation: a) the perception of the formation of postmodern/post-colonial subjects in an African scenery and b) the fragmentation of the concept of space-time in those individual’s experience. Fictional figures in the novel are positioned in an epoch and place of change and transition, confronting the displacement of ancient African cultural traditions and the increasing presence of foreign, Western values. Therefore, the aim of our work is to analyze the construction of chronotopoi from a perspective based on characters such as Ugwu, Olanna, and Richard, as well as their respective nuclei of participation. In a post-colonial context of production, this novel allows the reader the opportunity to know the literary story of one of the major traumas in the African context witnessed by Nigerians and Biafrans and to feel the breath of the wind of globalization through the pages of the text.

This study examines the effect of propaganda in the Biafran war. Nigeria, the show case of British colonial rule and Empire, and transfer to independence, was at the point of disintegration in 1967. A section of the country, the Eastern region had dared to do the unthinkable at that time, to secede. The British and Nigerian governments were determined that it would not happen. The break away region, which called itself Biafra was blockaded by land, air and sea, and starved of weapons and the means of livelihood. The only means available to it was propaganda. In the opinion of many commentators, Biafra employed propaganda admirably and effectively, sustaining the war for three years, against all odds. An investigation into the background of Biafra's successful propaganda thrust became a very compelling urge for me. But to arrive at that point, an examination is made of propaganda cultures that bear a family resemblance to that of Biafra. Because of the complete dearth of materials by media practioners, or the protagonists, or actors on the Biafran media/propaganda scene, it has been necessary to travel to and from Nigeria several times to interview the key participants. The issuance of questionnaires was unsuccessful as no one had or found time to fill them in. Data and Statistics were non existent in any cohesive form. There is still even now a reticence by the principal actors to discuss the issues involving the war. To discuss a familial pattern, or any other form of family migration which might support the argument of the success of Biafra's propaganda, three models have been examined, ie; Hitler's/Goebbels' German propaganda, (as a watershed in modern war propaganda), Mao Tse Tung's Chinese propaganda, and Ojukwu's Biafran propaganda. However, other examples like the English, American, Russian, and French civil wars and revolutions, etc; are employed in the arguments and discussions. The thesis examines psychological warfare, the origins of propaganda, modern methods and concepts, the Biafran domestic and external factors; and suggests that the exploitative propaganda tools in most civil conflicts are religion, and/or tribal/ethnic/nationalistic tendencies. The difference is that in Biafra there was a first - hunger and starvation became a massively useful propaganda weapon.

During the civil war between Nigeria and the separatist south-eastern state of Biafra, a famine developed that became a global media event in the summer of 1968. Graphic images of starving children captured the public imagination and became a hallmark of the media coverage of famines and humanitarian crises to come. Biafra committees sprang up all over the world and began to support Biafra’s bid for independence and to protest the inactivity of foreign states in the face of what they believed to be a genocide. Expatriate Biafrans and Nigerians in Europe or North America lobbied governments to support their respective side and set up organisations for that very purpose. While the churches and other humanitarian agencies launched fund-raising campaigns to finance the greatest relief effort since the Second World War, most foreign governments hesitated to get involved. The humanitarian effort during the Nigeria-Biafra War became the catalyst of the development of the modern humanitarian industry as well as the breakthrough of the interventionist humanitarianism associated with the borderless movement. A growing number of studies on the global history of the Nigeria-Biafra War have begun to reconstruct the roles of various countries during the war, trace changes in the landscape of humanitarian organisations, and explore the discursive forms of engagement with Biafran suffering. This thesis adds to the existing body of knowledge by studying the transnational dimension of the war and highlighting the intersection of various agents, including the media, governmental institutions, and advocates. The overall argument is that a particular constellation of institutions and converging developments – namely the backdrop of 1960s activism, the media interest in publicising Biafran suffering, and the reluctance of governments to actively intervene to bring about peace – resulted in the rise of the modern humanitarian industry. Simultaneously, the visceral albeit simplifying narrative of human suffering turned the Biafran famine into an almost global cause célèbre and strengthened paternalistic views of the Third World as a space for continued foreign intervention.

Recently new novels about the Biafra war have appeared, proving the ongoing impact of the Nigerian civil war on writers’ interest, and the importance of memory in our life. For all these reasons, I decided to write the present thesis on how memory function in a literary work. The objective is to analyse the literary representation of the Biafra war, with a special focus on individual and collective memory production through two fictional novels: Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Under the Udala Trees, by Chinelo Okparanta. In analysing the literary representations of Biafra in the light of memory studies, I have identified two levels of memory: literary characters’ memory and writers’ memory. Focusing on the level of the memory of the characters, I explored what the characters remember about the Biafra war both when the war is over and when it is still in progress, and what strategies they use to remember or to forget painful memories of the war.  What emerged through this first level of analysis is how Adichie and Okparanta have offered narratives focused not only on accounts of the war, but also on feelings and emotions. Moreover, the strategies of remembering and of forgetting represent tools of survival, and they are not in a relationship of exclusion. Focusing on the level of writers’ memory, I explored the perspectives used by Adichie and Okparanta to narrate and remember the Biafra war: a perspective from below, focused on ordinary people and on their daily lives; a female perspective which represents a novelty in a literary landscape dominated by male writers; the danger of a single story and its risk to create hegemonic narratives; the fictional perspective as a way to enrich a historical event with suggestive details fruit of writers’ imagination; the Afropolitan perspective and the greater openness of mind of the new generation of African writers.

The Nigeria-Biafra war (1967-70) was a critical event for the country and on an international level: furthermore, it forged forever the memory and narrative of Igbo people, authors, politicians and activists and minority groups. I chose this topic because I have always been interested in how political issues have been represented and argued in literature, how the authors and intellectuals have narrated the struggle and the fracture of such a complex nation as Nigeria and how much powerful collective memory can be for the personal and cultural story of a population. What can make the difference in remembering is even how a story and a particular memory is narrated through time. The aim of this thesis is therefore to explore the meaning of the political use of memory of the war through the testimonies of two contemporary fictional novels by Nigerian writers.

Lors de l’été 1968, des images d’enfants décharnés, souffrant de maladies dues à la malnutrition affluent dans les médias occidentaux. Elles proviennent de la région sud orientale de la Fédération du Nigeria, qui a déclaré son indépendance une année auparavant sous le nom de République du Biafra, où se déroule une guerre civile qui oppose les troupes fédérales aux indépendantistes biafrais. L’émotion suscitée en Occident par les représentations du conflit et de la famine qui l’accompagne engendre la mobilisation de diverses organisations humanitaires, qui mettent sur pied des opérations de secours internationales destinées aux populations civiles. Encore peu étudiées par l’historiographie, la crise du Biafra et les réponses qui y sont apportées par les acteurs occidentaux sont l’objet de cette thèse. La recherche examine tout d’abord comment une guerre civile africaine prend la dimension d’une crise humanitaire internationale. Pour ce faire, elle analyse tant la situation sur place que les acteurs de son internationalisation et ses représentations. Ensuite, afin d’appréhender les opérations de secours dans leur complexité la thèse étudie le processus d’élaboration et le déploiement des réponses occidentales à la crise, ainsi que leur réception au Nigeria dans un contexte post-colonial. Enfin, la thèse questionne les principaux éléments qui ont fait du Biafra un moment charnière de l’histoire de l’humanitaire et met en lumière les reconfigurations des discours et des pratiques de l’aide humanitaire qui s’opèrent à la fin des années 1960
In the summer of 1968, pictures of emaciated children, suffering from diseases due to malnutrition, poured in western medias. They came from the eastern region of the Federation of Nigeria, which had proclaimed its independence one year before and taken the name of the Republic of Biafra. War and famine that were taking place in the region generated widespread concern in the West, where humanitarian organizations decided to set up international relief operations to help alleviate the suffering of the civilian population. Still understudied by the historiography, the crisis in Biafra and the mobilization of western organizations are the subjects of this PhD. Firstly, the dissertation examines how an African civil war became an international humanitarian crisis. To this purpose, it analyses the situation in the ground, the actors of its internationalization and how it was represented. Secondly, in order to grasp the complexity of humanitarian aid, the dissertation studies the elaboration and the deployment of the relied operations, as well as their reception in Nigeria in a post-colonial context. Finally, the thesis questions why Biafra is usually considered as a turning point in the history of humanitarianism. By so doing, it sheds light on the reconfigurations of the discourses and practices of humanitarian aid that took place in the late 1960’s

La guerre civile du Nigéria est l'un des rares conflits en Afrique à avoir fécondé une littérature si abondante.Romanciers, poètes, dramaturges et essayistes décrivent cette guerre dans leurs écrits selon la sensibilité qui leur est propre. Parmi eux se trouvent Cyprian Ekwensi et Ken Saro-Wiwa dont le rapport à cette guerre est mise en évidence dans l'écriture de ce phénomène. Chacun d'eux utilise des procédés qui rendent bien compte du désordre et du chaos engendrés par ce drame

Kein anderes Thema hat die nigerianische Literatur so dominiert wie der nigerianische Bürgerkrieg, in dessen Verarbeitung sich verstärkt auch Autorinnen einmischen. Die Dissertation evaluiert 34 Texte von 16 nigerianischen Autorinnen - 12 Romane und 22 Kurzgeschichten - und analysiert sie als Gesamtkorpus, in dem die Texte miteinander und mit der Männerliteratur einen Dialog um den Bürgerkrieg führen. Die Autorinnen wenden bei ihrem "war talk" literarische Strategien wie "re-reading" und "re-writing" an, das Neu-Lesen, Fort- und Umschreiben der Texte und Diskurse des "Zentrums", durch die nicht nur die Blindstellen eines von Männern dominierten literarischen Diskurses sichtbar werden, sondern durch die auch der Prozess des Aushandelns der Geschlechterverhältnisse sowie des Krieges selbst erfolgt, seiner Ursachen, Auslöser und Folgen. Die Autorinnen stellen den Krieg als "sexuelle Unordnung" dar, als Geschlechterkrieg. Die Untersuchung zeigt, dass bei der Verortung der Perspektive der Autorinnen neben Geschlecht, ethnischer Zugehörigkeit auch andere Faktoren, wie Alter, Race, Grad der Distanz oder Nähe etc. berücksichtigt werden müssen, um vorschnelle Festschreibungen zu vermeiden. Hierbei spielen die Paratexte eine wichtige Rolle, in denen die Autorinnen sich persönlich zum Krieg äußern. Die Arbeit bewegt sich an den Schnittstellen mehrerer Disziplinen: Literatur, Historiographie und Geschlechterstudien. In der Einleitung werden die theoretischen Prämissen im Kontext von Krieg, Geschlecht und literarischer Repäsentation behandelt. Das 1. Kapitel ist dem historischen Kontext des Bürgerkrieges, einschließlich der Rolle der Frauen darin gewidmet. Im 2. Kapitel geht es um die Darstellung des Krieges, des Selbst- und Feindbildes sowie der Zukunft. Das dritte Kapitel handelt von der Beziehung zwischen Bürger- und Geschlechterkrieg, vermittelt durch das Medium literarischer Text. Die Zusammenfassung der Ergebnisse und der Ausblick auf zukünftige Forschung erfolgt im Schlussteil. Der Anhang enthält ein vorläufiges Verzeichnis der gesamten Frauenliteratur über den nigerianischen Bürgerkrieg.
No other topic has dominated the Nigerian literature as much as the Nigerian Civil War and female authors increasingly interfere in its literary representation. The thesis evaluates 34 literary texts by 16 female Nigerian authors - 12 novels and 22 short stories - and analyses them as distinctive corpus whose individual texts are in a state of dialogue both with each other and with texts from male authors. The female authors use, in their "war talk", literary strategies like "re-reading" and "re-writing" of texts from the "Centre". On the one hand, these strategies enable them to make the blind spots of a male dominated literary discourse apparent/visible on the other hand, they facilitate the negotiation of gender relations and of the war itself, its causes, trigger points and consequences. The female authors represent war as "sexual disorder", as gender war. The study shows that in order to be able to locate an author''s perspective (and to avoid rash conclusions) it is essential to consider the different factors determining it - besides ethnicity and gender, also age, race, the grade of emotional involvement or distance etc. It is in this regard, where the paratexts play an important part, as in these authors express their personal views and comments on the war. The thesis is located at the interfaces of several disciplines: literary, historical and gender studies. The introduction deals with the theoretical backgrounds in the context of war, literary representation and gender. The first chapter is dedicated to the historical context of the Nigerian Civil War including the role of women. The second chapter looks at the paratexts, different representations of the war''s causes, the self-image, the enemy''s image and the future. The third chapter finally deals with the question how the relationship between Civil War and gender war is negotiated/conveyed through the medium of the literary texts. In the conclusion the results are summarized and prospects for future research are discussed. The appendix contains a preliminary bibliography of all literary texts on the Nigerian Civil War written by female authors.

This project looks at the ways the Biafran Government maintained their war machine in spite of the hopeless situation that emerged in the summer of 1968. Ojukwu’s government looked certain to topple at the beginning of the summer of 1968, yet Biafra held on and did not capitulate until nearly two years later, on 15 January 1970. The Ojukwu regime found itself in a serious predicament; how to maintain support for a war that was increasingly costly to the Igbo people, both in military terms and in the menacing face of the starvation of the civilian population. Further, the Biafran government had to not only mobilize a global public opinion campaign against the “genocidal” campaign waged against them, but also convince the world that the only option for Igbo survival was an independent Biafra. Thus it is not enough to look at the international aspects of the war, or to consider the war on a strictly domestic level. By looking at both the internal and external factors that shaped the Biafran propaganda machine and the Biafran war effort and how these efforts influenced international support and galvanized internal resolve to continue fighting, we can see how the Biafran war effort was able to last for twenty months after the fall of Port Harcourt. Recent scholarly and political work, uncovered documents, and the new plethora of memoirs on the Civil War provide us with a veritable treasure trove of data and analysis with which to study the issue of Igbo nationalism and a unique opportunity to create a new vision of secessionist conflict in Africa. This work will thus provide a step in moving away from the long accepted “Tribalism” paradigm that has so long pervaded not only the study of post-colonial Civil Wars in Africa, but more importantly, the discourse in looking at ethnicity, violence and national identity across the continent. Further, by analyzing the ways that the Biafran propaganda machine operated on a nationalist level, we can see the effects of Biafran secession on the broader Igbo national consciousness and the Igbo national movement, as well as on subsequent political movements in Nigeria.
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This dissertation brings together the history of law in postcolonial Nigeria with the history of the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), analyzing how wartime violence shaped crime and the ethics surrounding it. Using legal records from the Republic of Biafra’s courts, I examine how the secessionist state was governed, and how armed robbery and other criminal activities became means of survival there in the context of the fighting. These cases reveal how Biafrans and their government negotiated what kinds of survival tactics, many of them “criminal,” were permissible or ethical in the context of the war and the humanitarian crisis attending it. Biafra’s courts also became a space where individuals could assert themselves as moral actors in the face of political ataxia and enormous humanitarian strain. The war shaped Nigeria’s postcolonial experience profoundly. As in many conflicts, acts of violence and deception became ordinary – in some cases honorable – when surviving and winning the war trumped all other considerations. When the fighting ended in January 1970, the practices that Biafrans had used to endure the war did not end with it. In the years that followed, fraud and armed violence would become major features of life in reunified Nigeria. Biafra had declared independence in the name of preserving law and order, but the result of the war was to create conditions in which forms of illegality that would later become endemic – forgery, armed robbery, and the body of fraudulent activities known as “419” – could take root. For this reason, the Biafra War is an important episode in both the history of Nigeria after independence, and for the larger study of the dialectics of law and disorder in contemporary Africa.

Though the Nigerian-Biafran War has been the subject of numerous literary and other artistic representations in the four decades since its conclusion, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2006 novel Half of a Yellow Sun has recently received tremendous international attention for its treatment of the 1967-1970 conflict. Contrary to the assertions of many critics, the novel’s complex representation of the war functions as much more than a setting for a series of family dramas at the foreground. Providing a counterargument to such readings, which emphasize the personal over the political in Half of a Yellow Sun, this paper will propose and trace a political allegory legible within the characters’ personal relationships and historical circumstances. Specifically, I will argue that the relationship between two protagonists, the twins Olanna and Kainene, aligns with the relationship between (Northern) Nigeria and the Eastern Nigeria, known as Biafra between 1967 and 1970, during its attempt to secede. In the way that Kainene grows emotionally distant from Olanna, eventually stops speaking to her, and suddenly disappears, so Eastern Nigeria increasingly clashed with Northern Nigeria during the early 1960s, seceded as the Republic of Biafra in 1967, and eventually “disappeared” at the end of the war in 1970, as it was absorbed back into Nigeria. Rather than indicating a sense of finality, however, Adichie’s text refuses closure in ways that ultimately suggest an alternative both to the notion that the novel has an apolitical, purely tragic ending, and to dominant narratives about the Biafran secession’s “inevitable” failure. This reading thus intervenes in critical conversations about Half of a Yellow Sun, the Biafran state, and secession and self-determination throughout Africa. If Kainene’s disappearance does not only testify to the tragedies of war, and if her character allegorically corresponds to Biafra, then what political possibilities might her disappearance allow? Does Biafra—and in turn, the possibility of secession—remain at large too? Far from the prevalent scholarly and political rhetoric that relegates Biafra to a narrow three-year time frame, Adichie’s novel conceives of a Biafran existence beyond the pages of some finalized history.
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This dissertation explores questions of African literature and international law through the lens of the Nigeria-Biafra war (1967-1970). A defining trauma of modern Nigerian history, the war produced a rich and sustained vein of writing that stretches from the late 1960s through the present day, encompassing canonical Nigerian novels as well as a number of British and diasporic texts. Drawing on both literary and legal theory, I argue that this body of work mobilizes particular literary features—including narrative, analogy, allegory, and genre—to articulate both familiar and innovative logics of sovereignty. The structure of the project is primarily conceptual and loosely chronological. The first half explores narratives of development in relation to international law’s standard of civilization, focusing on British colonial writing (Chapter 1) and postwar allegorical novels (Chapter 2). The second half attends to how narrative fiction formally registers mid-20th century developments in international law, focusing on writers' use of analogy as a mode of theorizing genocide (Chapter 3) and the role of genre fiction in imagining economic sovereignty (Chapter 4). Throughout, I show how novelists pick up and transform literary tropes first articulated in wartime journalism, propaganda, and activist pamphlets.