Republic of Biafra

A secessionist state that lasted thirty months and whose name became a byword for famine. The eastern region of Nigeria declared independence in May 1967, after pogroms in the north killed tens of thousands of Igbo and drove perhaps a million survivors east, and after the collapse of negotiations over a looser federation. Nigeria blockaded it. Biafra lost its ports within a year and was reduced to an enclave supplied by night flights into a widened road at Uli, one of the largest airlifts since Berlin, run by churches and the Red Cross. Starvation became the principal weapon and the principal image: the photographs of children with kwashiorkor were the first famine transmitted to Western living rooms as it happened, and the experience led directly to the founding of Medecins Sans Frontieres by French doctors who concluded that neutrality had made them complicit. Between half a million and two million people died, most of them of hunger. Britain and the Soviet Union armed Nigeria; France, Portugal and a handful of African states supported Biafra without recognising it, and only five ever did. It surrendered in January 1970. Nigeria's government declared no victor and no vanquished, and the war's questions about who the federation is for have never been settled. The war also changed the practice of humanitarianism and the practice of publicity. Biafra hired a Geneva public relations firm, one of the first governments to run a modern media campaign from inside a blockade, and the images it circulated made the case for intervention faster than any government could answer it. The argument that followed - whether relief prolongs a war by feeding the side that is losing - has been fought over in every siege since. Nigeria's post-war reconstruction was funded by oil from the same eastern fields the secession had been partly about, and the federation was later divided into far more and far smaller states so that no region could try again.

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