Odumegwu Ojukwu

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu declared the independence of Biafra in 1967 and led it through a civil war that killed perhaps a million people, most of them by starvation. He was the son of one of the richest men in Nigeria, educated at King's College Lagos, Epsom College and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he took a degree in modern history. He joined the army rather than the family business. After the coup and counter-coup of 1966 and the massacres of Igbo civilians in the north that followed, he was military governor of the Eastern Region and the spokesman for a population that no longer believed the federation would protect it. Negotiations at Aburi in Ghana produced an agreement on a looser confederation which each side afterwards read differently. He declared the Republic of Biafra on 30 May 1967. The war lasted thirty months. A federal blockade produced famine on a scale that put images of starving children into western living rooms for the first time and changed how humanitarian appeals are made; Médecins Sans Frontières grew directly out of it. Biafra surrendered in January 1970 and Ojukwu fled to Ivory Coast, returning under pardon in 1982. He entered party politics, ran unsuccessfully for president in 2003, and remained a figure of enormous standing among the Igbo until his death in 2011. He was among the officers who refused to join the January 1966 coup, which is part of why he was trusted with the Eastern command afterwards. He married Bianca Onoh, a former Miss Africa, who later served as Nigeria's ambassador to Spain. He was given a state burial in 2011 with full military honours by the government he had fought.

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