60 Years After Biafra: The War the World Tried to Forget

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:05]They called it the most beautiful country in Africa, a land of enormous oil wealth, ancient kingdoms, and hundreds of people speaking hundreds of tongues.

[00:00:21]A nation that in 1960 stepped into independence with more promise than perhaps any other on the continent.

[00:00:31]But underneath that promise, a fire was already burning.

[00:00:37]At independence in 1960, Nigeria was a federation of regions, the north, the west, and the east.

[00:00:48]Each home to distinct peoples, cultures, and ambitions.

[00:00:54]The Hausa-Fulani dominated the north, the Yoruba the west, and most parts of the eastern region the Igbo, one of the most educated, entrepreneurial, and politically assertive peoples on earth.

[00:01:11]For a few brief years, it seemed like it might work.

[00:01:16]Then came the 9th of January 15, 1966.

[00:01:22]A group of young military officers led by Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, an Igbo officer from present-day Obanam in Delta State, staged Nigeria's first military coup.

[00:01:37]Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa was killed.

[00:01:41]Senior politicians and military officers, many of them from the north, were also assassinated. The coup's stated goal was to end corruption and restore order.

[00:01:55]Well, it's the rather something like the longest day.

[00:02:00]We started this off on the night of 13th of January uh when a night exercise was planned by the military college, which I command.

[00:02:11]Uh we took out troops to the ground and taught them how to ignite the tanks.

[00:02:16]We didn't tell them what we were planning for, but uh at the end of the exercise, we picked them out and showed them various places where they were to stand.

[00:02:25]And remaining in the vehicle.

[00:02:28]Next day, we went out again for the same type of exercise.

[00:02:32]And at the end, we issued them with ammunition this time, live ammunition.

[00:02:37]And told them that they were going back to the same place as they went yesterday, but this time they were to get certain people. They were willing, were they?

[00:02:45]>> Oh, of course they did. Oh, they were also opposing us. Did you find him himself attending the site?

[00:02:50]Well, no. We didn't see him until the time we actually shot him.

[00:02:55]He ran out of his house when we fired the first few shots of anti-tank gun into the building. The whole roof was blown off on the place of special light.

[00:03:04]Then we went to the rear of the house and started searching from room to room until we found him amongst the women and children, hiding himself.

[00:03:11]So, we took took away the women and children and took him.

[00:03:16]And what are your relations with General Ironsi in Lagos?

[00:03:20]Well, very good. He's my boss. I I have always been under him.

[00:03:27]I feel uh I feel I'm under him.

[00:03:30]They didn't feel there were problems with you?

[00:03:32]Uh misunderstandings arose, but uh this this was due to the publication in the press and by announcement over the radio. At one time, they started calling us in Kaduna rebel.

[00:03:43]What I can say is the revolution was all a planned affair all over the country and many other people Its effects to tear open wounds that would never fully heal.

[00:03:56]The not erupted in May 1966, pogroms swept through Kaduna, Kano, and Jos.

[00:04:06]Thousands of Easterners, most of them Igbo, were slaughtered in the streets.

[00:04:12]Men, women, and children. Their crime being from the wrong part of the country at the wrong moment in history. Most of them who were slaughtered were not even Igbo, but were perceived to be Igbo.

[00:04:29]But, quite a lot of these were killed during the July program. And I myself, I'm not an Igbo man, but I was I was to be killed also, and I just managed to escape. And a few of the officers escaped, but very many were killed.

[00:04:46]Um those that were killed came from um what was then Eastern Nigeria. For instance, uh Major Okonkwo is not an Igbo man, but he was killed. Major He was killed in Kaduna. Major Ekanem was killed in Lagos, and he is not an Igbo man. And um uh uh several others like that. Um I'm trying to say that uh the people the officers killed came not just from one tribe, but from uh the Eastern Nigeria as it then was.

[00:05:20]Yes.

[00:05:21]And it's really the the the there you are.

[00:05:25]It was uh it was lucky for those of us that escaped. Most of them were the smaller tribes around the Eastern region.

[00:05:34]By the end of 1966, a river of refugees was pouring back into Igboland. They carried with them no luggage, only stories of horror.

[00:05:48]Desperate to hold the country together, military leaders convened peace summits.

[00:05:55]The most famous was the Aburi Accord of January 1967, held in Ghana, a last-ditch attempt to find a constitutional arrangement that could satisfy the East and other parts of the country.

[00:06:13]For a brief moment, it seemed like hope.

[00:06:16]Talks collapsed on May 27th, 1967.

[00:06:22]A constitutional assembly in the Eastern Region gave Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Chukwuemeka Ojukwu the mandate.

[00:06:32]Three days later, he stood before the nation and declared the independent Republic of Biafra.

[00:06:40]The federal government under General Yakubu Gowon refused to accept the secession.

[00:06:48]Do you think that it would be necessary to use military force to bring down Colonel Ojukwu's regime?

[00:06:57]Yes, it is necessary.

[00:07:01]I think I have made this point before that if the integrity corporate existence of this country is threatened, I will use force to maintain it.

[00:07:16]And I'm afraid the time has come.

[00:07:22]Colonel Ojukwu is putting heavy pressure on the oil companies for payment to him of the royalties.

[00:07:28]Are the federal government doing the same?

[00:07:31]No, I don't think if I'm doing the same thing.

[00:07:36]In fact, the oil companies are my witness.

[00:07:40]I've tried my best not to get them involved or to be brought into our internal problems.

[00:07:46]And I shall do my best to keep them out of it.

[00:07:50]What action will you take if the oil royalties aren't paid to Colonel Ojukwu's regime?

[00:07:57]I think this question is hypothetical.

[00:08:00]It doesn't arise at the moment.

[00:08:03]I will do my best to keep the oil company out of this uh you know problem, our internal problems.

[00:08:10]And uh I hope I shall be able to keep my word to keep them out of uh you know this uh you know problem.

[00:08:17]If force is used, Colonel Major General Gowon, will this not increase bitterness between the various races in Nigeria?

[00:08:28]It might to start off with.

[00:08:31]But I don't think that this is a thing that will last forever.

[00:08:36]I'm sure the present generation and the generation to come will be better friends than the ones in the past. You think you can limit force once you use it?

[00:08:51]Indeed.

[00:08:53]In fact, what I have done I've told in fact my my troops that they are not fighting a total war against an outside enemy.

[00:09:04]They are only taking police action to crush a rebellion.

[00:09:11]Therefore, the force that will be used will be just the force necessary to get the job done.

[00:09:19]At a summit in Benin, a plan had been proposed to create 12 new states from the four existing regions, a move that would have broken up the oil-rich East and stripped Biafra of its economic lifeblood.

[00:09:37]Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu rejected it affirmatively.

[00:09:43]And so, the war began.

[00:09:48]>> [music] >> On one side stood the Nigerian Federal Military armed, funded, and backed [music] by Britain and the Soviet Union with air superiority, naval blockades, and international recognition. On the other side stood Biafra surrounded, blockaded, outgunned, and yet they did not simply collapse.

[00:10:25]What emerged from the forests of Biafra was one of the most remarkable feats of wartime improvisation in modern world history. The Research and Production Directorate, known as RAP, recruited the brightest minds Biafra had. Engineers, chemists, physicists, students barely out of the university.

[00:10:53]They built armored vehicles from caterpillar tractors. They refined crude petroleum by hand to keep the army moving.

[00:11:04]And they developed what would become Nigeria's most feared weapon, the Ogbunigwe, a cone-shaped, sometimes cylindrical cluster bomb designed to scatter lethal shrapnels across a wide radius. Named in Igbo for something that kills a multitudes, it was entirely locally manufactured and it changed the battlefield. They also built an airstrip at Uli in present-day Anambra State, carved from the bush, hidden under tree cover, used to receive relief flights that kept millions of Onyeabo from starving.

[00:11:49]And when Nigerian Air Force jets came to bomb it, the Biafrans dug aircraft bunkers, underground shelters where planes could taxi to safety. Horror of this war was on the battlefield.

[00:12:06]In October 1967, federal troops entered the town of Asaba in present-day Delta State. The people of Asaba, who were not Biafran soldiers, who had not fired a single shot, came out to greet the troops.

[00:12:24]They came out dancing, waving palm fronds, singing, dressed in the famous akwete.

[00:12:32]They thought the war had passed them.

[00:12:35]Federal soldiers, enraged by guerrilla attacks in the region, rounded up the men and boys of Asaba and shot them, murdering nearly a thousand people in cold blood.

[00:12:50]An entire generation of men from a single town erased in an afternoon. The Asaba massacre remains one of the darkest chapters of the war.

[00:13:02]For decades, it was barely spoken of. To this day, it has never been formally investigated by the Nigerian government.

[00:13:12]The survivors carried the memories alone.

[00:13:16]As should be expected, uh the Biafrans then embarked on asymmetric warfare. So, you know, guerrilla warfare, you know, you hit and run. So, they come in the night, they will hit Nigerian uh soldiers, you killed some of them and disappear. After that anger and fury that they killed them, they were looking for any man, any man that is in sight was targeted. And many many also men, able-bodied men, were killed.

[00:13:42]I remember the day on two occasions I I go to school. I went to school to teach and got I stopped in the school and got stopped in the school for for quite some time, you know, because it wasn't safe to leave the school and go back.

[00:13:54]This massacre did not stop in Asaba. It continued to the town of Ishagu in Aniocha South Local Government Area of Delta State, where the king, his chiefs, and every moving object in the community was leveled to the ground. By 1968, the federal blockade had strangled Biafra.

[00:14:19]No food in, no medicine in, no fuel in.

[00:14:24]And what followed became the defining image of the war.

[00:14:29]Not soldiers, not bombs, but children.

[00:14:33]Children with distended bellies and hollow eyes, dying not from bullets, but from hunger.

[00:14:42]The condition had a name, kwashiorkor.

[00:14:47]Severe malnutrition caused not by drought, not by poverty, but by a deliberate siege. The images shocked the world. It was one of the first wars broadcast in real time into Western living rooms. Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, was founded partly in response to what its founders witnessed during the Biafran genocide. You know what is the position of the doctors usually? They just take They must take care and shut up. And this is the Hippocratic uh uh point of view. And we refuse that. But with the International Red Cross, it was not possible to speak and to let the people know what was going on in Biafra. So, we decided to be witness. And it was not possible for us just to go there, take care of the people, and then the people, specially the babies, are coming back to their villages and dying in their villages or coming back to the hospital.

[00:15:49]So, we tried to let the people know that was going what was going on in Biafra. I mean, starvation, war, and so on. And that was our idea.

[00:16:00]Just don't We don't care about permission. If there is a medical need, okay, we go. But it was just our idea.

[00:16:07]It was difficult to organize. But we start in our mind to build Doctors Without Borders because we sung that there was a specific way from a medical point of view to build such an organization.

[00:16:20]And to let the people know the reality of the civil war and the reality of suffering. And that's our purpose.

[00:16:28]It's not possible to shut up now. You know, just take care of the people another time and coming back to your your country with good conscience. It is not possible because the world is on is one now. Over the course of the war, an estimated over 3 million people died.

[00:16:47]The vast majority were not soldiers.

[00:16:50]They were civilians.

[00:16:52]They were women.

[00:16:54]They were children. They were Igbo.

[00:16:57]On January 15, 1970, exactly 4 years after the coup that started it all, Biafra surrendered. The so-called rising sun of Biafra is set forever.

[00:17:12]It will be a great disservice for anyone to continue to use the word Biafra to refer to any part of the East Central State of Nigeria.

[00:17:26]The tragic chapter of violence is just ended.

[00:17:29]We are at the dawn of national reconciliation.

[00:17:34]Once again, we have an opportunity to build a new nation.

[00:17:42]You will have heard that my government may seek the assistance of friendly foreign governments and bodies, especially in the provision of equipment to supplement our national effort.

[00:17:56]There are, however, a number of foreign governments and organizations whose so-called assistance will not be welcome.

[00:18:06]These are the governments and organizations which sustained the rebellion.

[00:18:13]They are thus guilty of the blood of thousands who perished because of the prolongation of the futile rebel rebel resistance.

[00:18:24]They did not act out of love for humanity.

[00:18:29]Their purpose was to disintegrate Nigeria and Africa and impose their will on us.

[00:18:36]The Republic of Biafra hereby ceases to exist.

[00:18:43]General Gowon made a declaration that would be repeated for decades. No victor, no vanquished. He announced a policy built on three Rs: rehabilitation, reconstruction, reconciliation.

[00:19:01]For many survivors, it sounded like justice. For many others, it sounded like erasure.

[00:19:08]Today, the relics of that short-lived nation remain. Armored vehicles built from tractors, homemade rockets, the Obunigwe itself. Today, the 3 Rs none was implemented. Nowhere in Igboland was reconstructed.

[00:19:29]No one was rehabilitated. And of course, no part of Igboland was any reconciliatory meeting held. The airstrip at Uli is mostly swallowed now by houses and bush. Calls have been made for it to be designated >> [music] >> a national monument. They are yet those calls, of course, remain yet to be answered. Nearly 60 years have passed since the first shots of the Biafra war were fired.

[00:20:04]An entire generation has been born and grown old knowing this war only through whispers, through grandparents who flinch at certain questions, through museums no one speaks enough about. The debates about what this war truly was, a civil conflict, a genocide, a war of self-determination are not settled. They are alive. The debate continues. They are urgent. They are for millions of Igbo people a deeply personal debate.

[00:20:43]What is not debated is the scale of the suffering or the number of people that died. What is not debated is that it happened. It happened. And what must never be forgotten by Nigeria, by Africa, by the world is that when a people are pushed to the edge, when starvation becomes a military strategy, when massacre becomes policy, history and posterity does not forgive such evil.

[00:21:17]>> The civil war never ended.

[00:21:21]At the end of that war, my father Oh, no, it never ended. It's still going on.

[00:21:25]I had no family house.

[00:21:27]My poor mother went back to claim the property she was living into a coma by people whom she had helped all her life and sent to school because she's an Igbo woman and now Port Harcourt belonged to another group of people.

[00:21:41]They forgot the sacrifices that the Igbos made. It's still going on. No apology has ever been made about that.

[00:21:49]Unfortunately, after the change of government with the program that from we have, which was going to allow them to be able to be equal in all respect, uh the the unfortunately, uh yes, those that came probably did not have the belief and >> [laughter] >> the philosophy that the, you know, we we have, that my government have in order to ensure the fairness to every part of Nigeria. The unity we saw it from fighting to remain united. We didn't do much in trying to get people to indoctrinate them through political interactions and the rest of them.

[00:22:45]So, the moment you reintroduce politics, the first thing that came to our minds were what political parties and political system used to be before the civil war.

[00:22:58]Uh you saw that as a starting point. And once you see that, you could hardly change it.

[00:23:24]>> [music] >> Some of the combatants and commentators believe that not much has been done in the [music] reconciliation and reintegration process. All we are saying is that those issues that made our fathers go for war should be addressed.

[00:23:52]When there is true reconciliation, all these remnants of ventilation of anger and people venting their anger from these old towns.

[00:24:02]Materials were given to enable people uh build back their shacks.

[00:24:10]But quite interestingly, in places like Lagos, even the people who had properties and gone away, rents were collected, kept intact. When they came back, they were given by the way, Uncle and others.

[00:24:30]It's only in Port Harcourt, unfortunately, that they did these abandoned properties and took over people's properties.

[00:24:39]And you know, the Ibos had developed much of Port Harcourt.

[00:24:45]That was very, very unfortunate.

[00:24:48]And they must praise the Ibo man for his courage and resilience. In no time at all, despite the and all that, they were back in many They were back in many of these cities.

[00:25:06]The only way to establish that there is no victor, no vanquish is simple.

[00:25:13]A South Easterner that will do what the president of Nigeria People from Biafra, people from the southern region of Nigeria have been calling for a round table discussion so that we can negotiate to Nigeria. We can discuss about our future as a people.

[00:25:28]Like I said earlier, we believe in Nigeria. Here in In every part of Nigeria, you will see Biafrans, Igbo people like they are believing that we are one. The challenges we have in this country, apart from the cost of election and what have you, stems from the fact that people stay too long in power, and people do everything to remain in power.

[00:25:50]Let us do [music] one term.

[00:25:52]Within that one term, he can go to South South South East South West, North Central, this that that, and we start all over again.

[00:26:01]Six times six, 36 years. In 36 years, he's gone round all the geopolitical zones, and we start again.

[00:26:10]By the time we do that, by the time we do that, some other people would have gotten sense of belonging.

[00:26:20]They would have gotten sense [music] of belonging.

[00:26:23]Igbos would have been given the opportunity to test power, and then let them now decide whether they want to misuse power, and forget about it forever, amongst other things.

[00:26:40]But give them that opportunity.

[00:26:42]Thank you for watching this very beautiful documentary of the Nigeria genocidal war against an Igbo between 1967 and 1970, as we approach the 60th anniversary of this war, I urge you to take time to reflect and pray for the souls of every single person that died on the account of Biafra. Till today, Nigeria has failed to rehabilitate. They have failed to reconcile and they have failed to reconstruct Igbo land. We are still building. We are still coming back. But we will never forget. Thank you for watching this very beautiful video. In case you're not yet a subscriber to the channel, kindly hit the subscribe button. I will see you in my subsequent videos. My name still remains Prince Onyedinim Godswill Chukwuemeka Fortune.

[00:27:35]Thank you. Bye-bye.

[00:27:44]>> [music]