The events of the Nigerian civil war and world reactions are woven together into a simultaneous and situational sequence based on eyewitness accounts from journalists, relief workers, mercenaries, arms dealers, pilots, and others.
In 1966, several waves of rioting in northern Nigeria culminated in the brutal massacre of thousands of easterners by their northern Nigerian counterparts. Sensing that their safety could no longer be guaranteed, the easterners fled to the eastern region and established an independent nation called Biafra. Refusing to accept her sovereignty, Nigeria waged a thirty-month war against Biafra, targeting air assaults at civilian locations, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of children, women, and the elderly. Nigeria used land and sea blockade to prevent relief food from reaching hungry masses in Biafra and thousands of children died from a form of malnutrition called kwashiorkor. At the end of it all in 1970, two million people had perished.
As the Sky Darkened: The Untold Story of Biafra the Homeland gives a vivid narrative of the war that took place in Nigeria in the second part of the twentieth century. It recounts the events that preceded the war and culminated in the widespread massacres that targeted the Igbo tribe of Southeastern Nigeria and the Igbo west of the Great River Niger. The novel provides a lucid account of effort at the extermination of these people, which supports the allegation of attempted genocide of Igbos. It started in the north of the country and spread all over the country; this made the Igbo declare their own nation, their homeland, Biafra. That declaration provoked an all-out war against that young state, and the novel incorporates the wholesale destruction of life carried out by the Nigerian Army. The conflict dragged out for three long years, during which time unimaginable bombing, shelling, murder, rape, and abduction of women and girls were carried out by the invading army. Hunger was used as a weapon of war, and children, the elderly, and many more lost their lives from hunger and starvation. Lamentably, the novel recounts that the new nation, poorly equipped and ill prepared for such a protracted war, lost the war at the end of three years. It sadly concludes that after the three long years of suffering and untold anguish. With a loss of about two million Igbo civilians, they were forced back in Nigeria. After the war, life of the Igbos continued to be hard. They still felt disliked, unwanted, and unhappy for nothing they had done wrong.
The possibility of war with the Federal Government of Nigeria increased after Col. Ojukwu declared the "Republic of Biafra" on May 30 1967. He was aware of the possible ramifications of secession. He had personally pointed them out to tourists visiting Eastern Nigeria and to the international press conference that he called on March 13. So why did he secede, then? mostly because there aren't any other options.
Nigerian civil war known as Nigeria-Biafra War and its untold History was a civil war in Nigeria from 6 July 1967 to 15 January 1970.During the two and half years of the war, there were about 1000,000 overall military casualties, while between 500,000 and 3 million Biafran civilians died of starvation.
From HOSPITALITY to HOSTILITY -Untold Story of Biafran War: WHY THE IGBO MASSACRE OF 1966-67? Propaganda typically gives only one side of its story. Therefore, Biafrans begin their story with the massacres of 1966-67, when easterners, particularly Igbos, living in the North were subjected to indiscriminate and brutal slaughter. As a result, they believed that their security lay only in the sovereign state of Biafra. By May 1967, most easterners preferred secession to any other form of association with Nigeria. They declared secession and a bloody civil war began. As in all forms of propaganda, you need to hear the other side of the story to find the truth. Before the massacre, the Hausa/Fulani oligarchy and Igbo hegemony in the East were allies and coalition partners in the government that ushered Independence for Nigeria. In addition, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Col. Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Major Patrick Nzeogwu, and many Igbo foremost leaders were born in Northern Nigeria. The North was hospitable enough to be a second home to the Igbos. So, what happened that HOSPITALITY drastically changed to HOSTILITY? The answer is fully researched and supplied in this book.
The Republic of Biafra lasted for less than three years, but the war over its secession would contort Nigeria for decades to come. Samuel Fury Childs Daly examines the history of the Nigerian Civil War and its aftermath from an uncommon vantage point – the courtroom. Wartime Biafra was glutted with firearms, wracked by famine, and administered by a government that buckled under the weight of the conflict. In these dangerous conditions, many people survived by engaging in fraud, extortion, and armed violence. When the fighting ended in 1970, these survival tactics endured, even though Biafra itself disappeared from the map. Based on research using an original archive of legal records and oral histories, Daly catalogues how people navigated conditions of extreme hardship on the war front, and shows how the conditions of the Nigerian Civil War paved the way for the country's long experience of crime that was to follow.