Eventually Federal Nigeria found an effective way to quell the rebellious Igbos, by inducing famine conditions inside Biafra. The Nigerian Army began sea and land blockade of Biafra, cutting off food supplies.
Tag: Nigeria
The War in Biafra
Little remembered now, but once the name Biafra as much synonymous with horrors, famine, and war as the names Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Rwanda or Darfur. In 1967, the Igbo people in Biafra, the oil-rich south east part of Nigeria, declared their independence, initiating a three-year conflict.
Biafra by Don McCullin, 1968
Don McCullin introduced the world to the sight of children with stick-thin limbs and grotesquely distended stomachs from Biafra — images which are to become all too tragically familiar in subsequent decades as famines happened in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Uganda, and the Sudan.