Having accomplished a plethora of historical firsts, observations from the Nigeria-Biafra conflict can act as important references to better understand the evolving dynamics of warfare.
2020 signalled the turn of a new decade and the 50th anniversary of the end of the Nigeria-Biafra War. While the conflict remains a fringe topic in war discourse, it reflects a wider trend of erasure concerning African narratives in academia. More than just a lack of representation, erasure seeks to render narratives invisible, while dictating what can be regarded as ‘legitimate’ modes of knowledge production. Borrowing from Foucault, prominent postcolonial thinker, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, articulates this erasure, as the production of ‘subjugated knowledge,’ ‘ a whole set of … naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity’.
I observed this phenomenon during my undergraduate studies in International Relations, where I faced a startling absence of African conflicts from mainstream international relations dialogues. Particularly symbolic of this exclusion was the frequent bypassing of the Nigeria-Biafra War. Having accomplished a plethora of historical firsts, observations from the Nigeria-Biafra conflict can act as important references to better understand the evolving dynamics of warfare. First, let’s consider the revolutionary role of media and technology during the Nigeria-Biafra War. In an unprecedented way, media brought into our homes the horrors of warfare and its consequences, creating, as a result, ‘the world’s first televised war’. We also observed key transformations of the roles of state and non-state actors, as the three-year conflict produced unforeseen public relations and NGO activity. It is not common knowledge that today’s Médecins Sans Frontières would never have come into being without the conflict exposing issues with aid and ‘political neutrality’. Perhaps of greatest consideration, would be the conflict’s contribution to shaping discussions on international human rights, especially norms surrounding genocide and mass killings.
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