Biafra as Third Space: Reading the Politics of Belonging in Nigeria-Biafra Civil War Literature (2025)

the biafran war: the politics of remembering, mis(remembering) and forgetting

2018

The Biafran War was a genocidal war that occurred between 1967 and 1970 as a result of political, economic and ethnic tensions that arose in Nigeria as well as the divide and rule strategy employed by the British which engendered this conflict.Using the ontological position and critical realist stance that memories of wars such as the Biafran war are under constant internal influence (personal memories) and external influence ( arts, literature,media) I argue that the memory of war and the (mis)remembering and forgetting of war is inherently political.Through qualitative research methods such as content analysis of research articles , I argue that there is a gap in research literature such as the absence of women’s experiences in the Biafran war which contributes to the (mis)remembering and forgetting of histories.To conceptualise the history of the genocidal war, I highlight how memories of war are also social and personal. By using visual research methods to explore the politics of trauma in art and photography, I am able to better interpret these personal and social experiences of the Biafran war . Through close analysis of interview responses, oral narratives about the Biafran war and thematic readings of literature, I can further examine the effects such gaps in research literature have on the fabric of postcolonial Nigeria. Such findings demonstrate the impact of silence in shaping the post-colonial landscape of Nigeria as well as the epistemic violence that arises as a result of this mis(remembering) and forgetting .

Displacement and Identity Crisis in the Nigeria-Biafra War: A Postcolonial Reading of Ike's Sunset at Dawn

This paper focuses on the issue of displacement and identity crisis reflected in Chukwuemeka Ike's seminal novel Sunset at Dawn (1976). It is a historical novel dealing with the Nigerian civil war also known as the Biafran war that raged during 1967 to 1970. The simple plot of the novel mostly follows the war effort from beginning to the end. Ike succeeds unmistakably in drawing attention to the sustained antagonisms between different ethnicities in Nigeria, and the role of British and other extraneous political factors in perpetuating them. The panorama of human suffering and millions of casualties have been imaginatively recreated by the author. In this novel all major characters experience dislocation, loss of belongingness, their self image and very identity faces crisis. This diasporic situation provides an opportunity for a postcolonial analysis of the issue of displacement in the context of Nigerian civil war. This study aims at revealing the factors that widened the gap between various ethnicities in decolonised Nigeria. To find out the effects of displacement and violence in the war is the major concern of this endeavour. The present paper follows an analytical method. Conclusions drawn are based on the analysis of primary and secondary texts.

War and the subaltern: Voice as power in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra

Tydskrif vir Letterkunde

In Africa, as in most other parts of the world, whenever there is war (or massive violence of any other hue), the common people are used as cannon fodder to protect the powerful upper class formulators of the letters of the war. Women and children are easily the most vulnerable. They are raped, tortured, murdered, starved, widowed, and exposed to all sorts of insecurity and depredation. In the end they are marginally characterized in upper class, male-centered war discourse. In this research, we locate the voice of the subaltern in Buchi Emecheta’s civil war novel, Destination Biafra (1982). We utilize Subaltern Studies in a qualitative approach to offer the needed agency to female subalterns as well as a few other marginalized groups. We map the trajectory of these voices and show that the subaltern woman and the other margins denounce colonial complicity in the androcentric war, and would rather the society eschewed violence as conflict resolution strategy. With this study we fill...

Creating the Past, and Still Counting the Losses: Evaluating Narrative of the Nigerian Civil War in Buchi Emecheta’s DESTINATION BIAFRA

Epiphany, 2012

The Legacy of Biafra: An Investigation into trauma as National Identity Fragmentation

The Legacy of Biafra: An Investigation into trauma as National Identity Fragmentation, 2018

Since the achievement of independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria as a post-colonial state has had numerous issues with maintaining a united national identity, which is demonstrated by the rise in sectarian and regional ethno-religious violence across the country. This thesis has argued that the fragmentation in Nigeria’s national identity can be understood as a traumatic legacy of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict or civil war, which is reproduced through varying discourses on genocide and violence and the loss of an imagined community in Biafra. Through the use of semi-structured interviews and secondary qualitative data from published sources, the thesis has found that a discourse on genocide exposes latent trauma of unreconciled violence which serves to divide the nation. It has also found that, the ideas around Biafra are being reborn through generational trauma around an unrealised dream in Biafra and intersecting structural political issues, again further fragmenting the nation. The thesis has consequently concluded that Nigeria as a nation is experiencing fragmentations in its national identity, due to the persistent trauma from an ever-present legacy of the civil war. Therefore, to tackle such a legacy, the Nigerian state must facilitate processes of truth-seeking and reconciliation, in conjunction with targeted development policies.

Creating the past,and still counting the losses: Evaluating narratives of the Nigerian Civil War in Buchi Emecheta's 'Destination Biafra'

Niyi Akingbe, 2013

Gender and the politics of war historiography in Buchi Emecheta's 'Destination Biafra'

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2021

Buchi Emecheta's novel about the Nigerian Civil War, Destination Biafra (1982), challenges war historiography in ways that scholarship designating it a "female perspective" on the conflict can sometimes overlook. This article focuses on how Emecheta deploys a dual narrative approach that weaves an omniscient narrator with diverse Nigerian women's points of view in order to position their lived experiences and subjective knowledges as collectively amounting to the definitive history of the Civil War. This draws the reader's attention to the gendered effects of the civil war as the lens whereby which all facets of the war can be understood-even and especially its macro causes in neocolonialism and petrocapitalism. By writing women who know the economic imperatives behind the conflict; exercise agency under dangerous circumstances; and employ methods of survival that safeguard others, Emecheta reveals the gendered politics of war historiography, and tests these politics by collapsing distinctions between what is habitually conceived of as the war front (and therefore to be narrated by active combatants), and everywhere else (to be narrated by witnesses, refugees, or survivors). Destination can therefore be understood as an attempt to intervene directly in historiographical method, as it rejects the designation of women's war experiences as mere addenda and questions gendered expectations of where to look for and find historical truths.

Trauma theory and Nigerian civil war literature: speaking “something that was never in words” in Chris Abani’s Song for Night

The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2013

The application of trauma theory to postcolonial literature has provoked anxiety from critics concerned about its capacity to impose Eurocentric interpretations. This article evaluates the use of trauma as a paradigm for interpreting Nigerian civil war literature, examining the concept in relation to Chris Abani’s 2007 child-soldier narrative Song for Night. This novel’s formal qualities – temporal disjunction, repetition and communicative ambivalence – signify an intertextual engagement with trauma theory, reflecting the concept’s emergence as a generic framework mediating representations of history in various contexts. Far from effacing historicized detail as some claim, Abani’s engagement with trauma generates an allegory of the war’s significance in post-conflict Nigeria. Song for Night expresses the desire for a border-crossing perspective that would reconcile former antagonisms, while pointing to the obstacles that preclude this. Above all, the fractured subjectivity of the traumatized victim-perpetrator protagonist emerges as an emblem of the conflict’s refusal to be relegated to the completed past.

Neo-Colonialism, Biafra, and the Causes of War as Imagined in Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra

in Toyin Falola & Ogechukwu Ezekwem, eds. Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War, London, James Currey pp.361-379 , 2016

Emecheta is mostly known for her novels reflecting on the domestic sphere, on women’s lives, and issues of marriage and children. Regrettably, Destination Biafra, her novel on the war, seems to have been largely ignored. Described in the author’s foreword as “a historical fiction” which “simply had to be written,” the work follows the long journey of Emecheta’s dream character Debbie from Lagos to the heart of Biafra, a journey that both reveals the various sides of the war and deeply transforms Debbie’s character and viewpoint. This chapter will consider the novel’s presentation of the war through its using thinly veiled historical characters and events as a background, the novelist’s reflection on the causes of the conflict, and her presentation of the role neocolonialism and ethnic realities played in the conflict to show its unique contribution to the Biafran war literature.

Writing the Nigeria–Biafra War

Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 2017