50 Years On, Biafra’s Pain Is Still Fresh

JOHANNESBURG—On Jan. 15, 1970, Nigeria’s civil war with the breakaway nation of Biafra officially came to an end. The war came after coups and countercoups around the central government, followed by a pogrom in which an estimated 30,000 Igbo people were massacred in the north, causing over a million people to flee into the east. The failed Aburi Accord—a conference convened to address rising tensions between the central government and the Eastern Region in 1967—was the final straw.

Nigeria’s reintegration of the breakaway state was surprisingly successful, despite the horrors of the war. About 2-3 million people—mostly women and children in Biafra itself—died in nearly three years of conflict. But 50 years later, Biafran independence is once again a powerful cause.