Biafra Revisited

Biafra Revisited
Author: Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
Publisher:
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2006
Genre: Civil rights
ISBN:

This text demonstrates that the Biafran War, 1967-1970, was the second phase of the Igbo genocide, following the initial massacre of 100,000 Igbo across the principal towns and cities of northern Nigeria. It shows how the slaughter was sanctioned and organised by the State, with its leading institutions - the military, police, religious, media and academia - implicated therein.

The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism

The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism
Author: Lasse Heerten
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2017-09-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108509134

In the summer of 1968, audiences around the globe were shocked when newspapers and television stations confronted them with photographs of starving children in the secessionist Republic of Biafra. This global concern fundamentally changed how the Nigerian Civil War was perceived: an African civil war that had been fought for one year without fostering any substantial interest from international publics became 'Biafra' - the epitome of humanitarian crisis. Based on archival research from North America, Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, this book is the first comprehensive study of the global history of the conflict. A major addition to the flourishing history of human rights and humanitarianism, it argues that the global moment 'Biafra' is closely linked to the ascendance of human rights, humanitarianism, and Holocaust memory in a postcolonial world. The conflict was a key episode for the re-structuring of the relations between the West and the Third World.

There Was a Country

There Was a Country
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2012-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101595981

From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart—a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil war For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There Was a Country is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.

The New Violent Cartography

The New Violent Cartography
Author: Samson Okoth Opondo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0415782848

This edited volume seeks to propose and examine different, though related, critical responses to modern cultures of war among other cultural practices of statecraft. Taken together, these essays present a space of creative engagement with the political and draw on a broad range of cultural contexts and genres of expressions to provoke the thinking that exceeds the conventional stories and practices of international relations. In contrast to a macropolitical focus on state policy and inter-state hostilities, the contributors to this volume treat the micropolitics of violence and dissensus that occur below [besides and against] the level and gaze that comprehends official map-making, policy-making and implementation practices. At a minimum, the counter-narratives presented in these essays disturb the functions, identities, and positions assigned by the nation-state, thereby multiplying relations between bodies, the worlds where they live, and the ways in which they are ‘equipped’ for fitting in them. Contributions deploy feature films, literature, photography, architecture to think the political in ways that offer glimpses of realities that are fugitive within existing perspectives. Bringing together a wide range of theorists from a host of geographical, cultural and theoretical contexts, this work explores the different ways in which an aesthetic treatment of world politics can contribute to an ethics of encounter predicated on minimal violence in encounters with people with different practices of identity. This work provides a significant contribution to the field of international theory, encouraging us to rethink politics and ethics in the world today.

Governance in Nigeria post-1999: Revisiting the democratic ‘new dawn’ of the Fourth Republic

Governance in Nigeria post-1999: Revisiting the democratic ‘new dawn’ of the Fourth Republic
Author: Edited by Romola Adeola & Ademola Oluborode Jegede
Publisher: Pretoria University Law Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2020-03-06
Genre: Law
ISBN: 192053881X

At the start of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic on 29 May 1999, there was great optimism as to the emergence of a new democratic future representing a significant break from the political undulations of the past. Two decades and four presidential epochs later, there is a prevalent question as to how well Nigeria has fared in governance and human rights post-1999. This book revisits the democratic ‘new dawn’ of the Fourth Republic discussing pertinent matters integral to Nigeria’s democratic future post-2019.

Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War

Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War
Author: Toyin Falola
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 1847011446

21 Female Participation in War and the Implication of Nationalism: The Postcolonial Disconnection in Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra -- Select Bibliography -- Index

Notes on Grief

Notes on Grief
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 44
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0593320816

From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father: “With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief … captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires serenity, when you’d rather just scream. Grief is impolite ... Adichie’s words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided” (The Washington Post). Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page—and never without touches of rich, honest humor—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book—a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.

Between Ethics and Politics: Lessons from Biafra

Between Ethics and Politics: Lessons from Biafra
Author: Tobe Nnamani
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 623
Release: 2016-06-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1524611824

Although many years have elapsed since the demise of Biafra, it still remains an intractable unfinished business that seriously threatens the corporate existence of Nigeria. Most of the literature on Biafra tended to dwell more on the historical and political analysis of the war and how the factors that engendered it could be tackled. It appears however, that no ethical analysis of the issues involved in the Biafran war has been carried out in any significant academic endeavour, hence the reason and need for a critical analytical survey of the ethical and political implications of the role of the world community in the unprecedented events that took place in Biafra. The purpose of this book is, first, to understand the twist and turns of the events and issues involved in the Biafran crisis and the role the international community played in the war. Second is to articulate the complex nature of humanitarian intervention and to stress the relevance of ethics, its interpenetration, and tandem relationship with international relations on a broader level, and in particular, humanitarian intervention as a foreign policy action. The main claim of our argument is that ethics is part and parcel of international relations. Divorcing ethics from international relations leads to amorality that threatens the world order. In other words, it is argued that ethical considerations should guide international affairs and the undertaking of humanitarian intervention. Behind this basic thesis, the book defends the idea of a global ethic. Global ethic means an ethic which acknowledges respect for human life and the interconnectedness and interdependence of all human beings. It is an ethic which transcends the circumscribed confines of national boundaries and economic and geopolitical interests and opens them up to the larger urgent need, well-being, peaceful coexistence, and sustainability of the larger world community. Tobe Nnamani