From pre-independence ethnic dog whistling, to pogroms, a civil war and the systemic socio-political ostracization that has since followed, the Igbo are the most discriminated ethnic group in Nigeria and ethnic bigotry against Igbo people has been on full display in the 2023 election.
The flood of writing attending the fiftieth anniversary of the Nigerian Civil War has found a place for Biafra in many histories, ranging from the birth of political humanitarianism to the articulation of Nigerian masculinity. One topic that is conspicuously absent from studies of the war is its connection to religion. There is good reason for this: religion explains less about the Nigerian Civil War and its aftermath than it might seem looking back from the present.
The fact that religious difference has become such an important fault line in Nigerian politics today might lead one to believe that this was always the case. In fact, religious difference was only a minor factor in the story of Biafra. To be sure, religion figured in Biafra’s national ideology, and in how foreign observers made sense of what was going on there. Some on the front lines understood the stakes of the conflict in religious terms too, and Biafran propaganda intended for the outside world argued that the war was a battle between Biafran Christians and Nigerian Muslims—a gross simplification, but one that was effective in mobilizing sentiment nonetheless. But Biafra was not a war about religion. The war’s root causes were political, ideological, and moral—disagreements which may have overlapped with religious difference, but were not determined by it.
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