Since Nigeria’s civil war ended decades ago, many groups have continued to advocate for the secession of a Biafran Republic. Today, IPOB is the loudest voice. That title, however, used to belong to another group – MASSOB – which implemented a similar playbook. We go back in time to reconstruct the rise and fall of this organisation.
Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s first democratically elected president in 16 years, had three big worries in 1999: how to keep the military from grabbing power for the umpteenth time, how to rescue the country from the dire depths of debt, and how to keep the ‘Giant of Africa’ from breaking apart.
One man occupied centre stage as far as the third problem went. Four months after Obasanjo was sworn into office, Ralph Uwazuruike started a group called the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB). As the name suggests, he aimed to carve an independent nation out of Nigeria — particularly the southeastern region — known as the Republic of Biafra.
The vision was not new. Nigeria had gone to war over the Biafran question between 1967 and 1970 when Uwazuruike was just entering adolescence. That civil war was responsible for between half a million and three million deaths — so, possibly one out of every 20 Nigerians at the time lost their lives. One of the victims was Apollonia, Uwazuruike’s younger sister, who is said to have died in his arms.
Nigeria is a country of many nations. Like other African countries, its borders were drawn by European imperial powers in the 19th century, driven mainly by economic and diplomatic interests. In 1914, the British authorities joined the protectorates of Northern and Southern Nigeria — again for economic reasons. As a result, present-day Nigeria comprises well over 250 ethnic groups speaking an even greater number of languages, which have been forced into a political marriage. Of these ethnicities, the Hausa and Fulani dominate the northern region, the Yoruba dominate the South West, and the Igbo dominate the South East. This is why statesman Obafemi Awolowo famously described Nigeria in 1947 as “a mere geographical expression [because] there are no ‘Nigerians’ in the same sense as there are ‘English’ or ‘Welsh’ or ‘French’ [people]”.
After the country gained independence in October 1960, the ethnic fractures widened, forming a hole that nearly swallowed it. A military coup in January 1966 set off a vicious chain of events. Some of the coup leaders were Igbo soldiers, and many of the prominent casualties coincidentally came from other regions, including Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and Premiers Ahmadu Bello and Samuel Ladoke Akintola. Though the coup failed, it paved the way for Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo man from Abia state, to become the military head of state. For these reasons, many perceived the coup to be ethnically motivated. Riots broke out in the North, leading to what came to be known as the anti-Igbo pogrom. Tens of thousands of people were massacred; many more became displaced. Six months after the first military takeover, northern officers staged a countercoup and installed Yakubu Gowon as the head of state. His attempts to broker peace between the various regions, however, failed. Finally, on May 30, 1967, Odumegwu Ojukwu, who was military governor of the Eastern Region, declared the secession of the area — calling it the Republic of Biafra. The civil war commenced weeks later.
When Ojukwu made the declaration, he sat in front of a flag much different from Nigeria’s. Its colours – red, black, and green — lined up horizontally. The flag was a simplified version of the Eastern region’s original coat of arms. At the centre stood a yellow semi-circle surrounded by wavy spikes. It represented a partial glimpse of the Sun on the occasion of its rising and was placed on a long bar of the same colour.
Biafran soldiers fought to have that flag and their sovereignty recognised, but it came at a huge cost. Tens of thousands of people died on the battlefield. Many more died of starvation, no thanks to the Nigerian government imposing a blockade and deliberately cutting food supplies after capturing the coastal city of Port Harcourt. Being one of the first televised wars in history, pictures of severely malnourished, bony children spread to and horrified people across the world.
“We were eating so many funny things. People suffer[ed]. All these lizard[s], all those things are meat then. And rats. People were eating rats,” recalled Theresa Nsionu, one of the survivors interviewed in 2017 by Biafran War Memories, a digital archiving initiative founded by journalist Chika Oduah. According to a word cloud at the bottom of the website, kwashiorkor, malnutrition, salt, and starvation were some of the most recurring highlights in the interviews.
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