A post on Berkley Jones Ike’s Facebook wall was one of three stories that birthed the idea of My Biafran Story project. It was in June 2016, the 49th anniversary of the start of the Nigeria-Biafra war...
The story of Biafra will not be complete without the accounts of United States Peace Corps Volunteers in Nigeria.The Peace Corps Program was created in 1962 by the United States government to provide ...
Mr. Xavier Munoz Tennet is a Geographer from Barcelona, who first came to Sao Tome and Principe in 1986. He is one of the initiators of Friends of Sao Tome and Principe, an association which was start...
(THIS ACCOUNT WAS SENT IN VIA E-MAIL AND IS PUBLISHED HERE IN ITS ORIGINAL FORM)I was a Peace Corps Volunteer from December, 1966, till October, 1969. I lived and worked as an Agricultural and Rural D...
(THIS ACCOUNT WAS SENT IN VIA E-MAIL AND IS PUBLISHED HERE IN ITS ORIGINAL FORM.)Dear Vivian,After so many years what I have written about my time in Nigeria during the Biafran war seems very slight b...
(THIS ACCOUNT WAS SENT IN VIA E-MAIL AND IS PUBLISHED HERE IN ITS ORIGINAL FORM) Hello again, Vivian, Just wanted to send a few notes about my own Biafran War encounters in 1967 while serving outside ...
RETURNING TO NIGERIAOne evening we heard the teachers wailing and crying, “Why did God abandon us?” One of the children sneaked to their quarters to find out what was going on. They had a television a...
SAINT-ANDRE - OUR PLACE OF REFUGE Once we arrived, the first thing they did was to process our registration and match it with file information from Biafra. They gave us new Gabonese numbers different ...
LEAVING BIAFRA In 1968, just before Enugwu-Ukwu fell to the Nigerian troops, my family took refuge in my maternal grandparents’ home at Egbengwu, Nimo, a neighbouring town. When we got there, my grand...
Save the Children Fund, better known as Save the Children, was established in the United Kingdom in 1919. The aim was to improve the lives of children through better education, health care, and econom...
When our ship landed in Lagos most of the foreigners decided they weren’t getting off the ship. This was January 1966. The coup had already taken place. Dad decided we were going in. He had been given...
The wounded soldiers were coming back to the village and telling us what was happening at the war front. They were showing us how to dodge bullets. They were carving guns with wood and giving us, teac...
I was there, anya m wee fu zi kwa ife n’ine gaa nu because my husband was an Air Force man - Staff Sergeant Samuel Chukwu. M’ g’a si n’anyi n’abo so wee nu ya bu ogu. Because oge dii j’ano n’ihu aya g...
I was working at Textile Mills Aba when they came and conscripted us. They just took us to Aba Sports Stadium, near Ngwa Road. The whole stadium was filled with people.We had group pictures. The one I...
The place and importance of the Biafran Airlift in the history of Sao Tome and, by extension, Portugal, cannot be over written.For almost three years that the war lasted, this small island located in ...
Fifty One years ago, the Nigeria-Biafra war grabbed the world’s attention with its sad, haunting images in newspapers, magazines and television sets. Forty Eight years after it ended, the stories of t...
SHOWDOWN AT LIDO by Frank Onyezili The famed Garden City, Port Harcourt, Nigeria, was reverberating with news of the arrival of the new kids on the block. The Fractions a pop music group comprising T...
People used to call my father Mallam because he lived in Jos most of his life. During the pogrom it was his Hausa friends who protected him. He was half-dressed when they bundled him out of his house ...
Then it started. Bombs and more bombs. At a time, as early as 4 o’clock my mother would wake us up to have our bath and our breakfast, then she would pack our food and send us into the drainage. She h...
The thing about Afia Attack is that hunger led people to take all sorts of risks. I joined the battle to prevent Awka from falling into the hands of the Nigerian Soldiers. My unit joined the battle in...
Ojukwu never knew this until 1976 when we met in Washington DC at the reception the late Nchewi Imoke gave him. After I told him how I saved his life, he said he would like to meet Reginald whenever h...
Before the fall of Port Harcourt in 1968, there was a long-distance shelling from the high seas. The shell was falling so rapidly on Port Harcourt and became a threat to life. Prior to this time my yo...
Relief planes are usually welcome into conflict zones, but during the Nigeria-Biafra war the planes of the Joint Church Aid were considered illegal. They were shot at and bombed by the Nigerian Air Fo...
David Koren was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Amaogwugwu, Umuahia, between 1964 and 1966. When the Nigeria-Biafra war broke out in 1967, he accepted a call to work on the Biafran Airlift from Sao Tome. H...
THE WORLD IS DEEP - PART TWOBarry and Larry often worked as a team, and Leo and I as a team. On a night that Barry and Larry were flying, Leo and I were drinking with the ARCO mechanics. There was A...
In October 2017, a random internet search about the Biafran Airlift led me to an article with the unusual title 'The World is Deep – Uwa Di Egwu.' It was written by David L. Koren, a former Peace Corp...
The BIAFRAN AIRLIFT was the first and most massive civilian relief program in modern history. It flew 5,314 missions, lifting more than 60,000 tons of relief material and consequently saving an estima...
Members of my family were saying, “Come back. Come back,” so I asked them, “What am I going to be doing in Biafra? Fighting?” After a lot of pressure, I decided to go back but I knew I had to earn mon...
My book finally arrives, courtesy of the International Committee of the Red Cross.On October 4, during their ‘Ask An Archivist Day’ Facebook event, I had asked the ICRC about the Biafran children airl...
In the beginning.In March 2017 I had seen a post on Facebook announcing a conference called ‘Biafra’s Children, A Gathering of Survivors.’ I sent a message to the convener telling him about the projec...
The document below was published by documenta14’s Press Center.----------The Parliament of Bodies: ‘Biafra’s Children: A Survivors’ Gathering.’JUNE 30; 5.00-10.00 pm; Parko Eleftherias, Athens Municip...
(Ben Onwuka was a former Biafran soldier who was wounded in battle. He talks about other wounded soldiers who were evacuated to Holland by the International Committee of the Red Cross for medical atte...
aOn the 17th of January, 2017, Professor Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo agreed to meet with me and tell me her Biafran story. On the 23rd of the same month, I traveled to Abakiliki in Ebonyi State to intervi...
The Nigerian civil war is often looked at through a binary lens: The East versus the rest of Nigeria and good versus evil, depending on who is telling the story. There is hardly ever a dispassionate c...
I was working with the Sports Commission in Lagos when the problem started. I had to leave Lagos and go to my brother’s house at Ibadan. I was there when they killed Aguiyi Ironsi at Fajuyi’s house. O...
The experience of the war was terrible. I doubt if there’s any emotional clinic one can go to wipe away those effects. No. I think we’ll live with it for the rest of our lives. We can’t escape it. As ...
I was one of the brightest kids in the village but my father was a peasant farmer, so I didn’t have the privilege of going to secondary school. I shuttled from one relation to the other – Aba to Lagos...
To get my wedding cake was a miracle. My sister-in-law, the one that saw me and told my husband about me. she met somebody who made my wedding cake. There were things in the market, not that you can'...
I was a teenager at the time so the war was a threshold into my twenties. That is the most impressionable time in the life of a child and the trauma hits you. You realize it’s not Indians and Cowboys....
When the war started, I was a school girl at Archdeacon Crowther Memorial Girls’ School, near Port Harcourt, so I was already knowledgeable about life. There was so much deprivation, and life became c...
(My Biafran Eyes was published by Guernica on August 12, 2007)My first glimpse into the horror and beauty that lurk uneasily in the human heart came in the late 1960s courtesy of the Biafran War. Biaf...
(In this account, the contributor talks about her mother, late Mrs. Esther Chizube Mgbojikwe.)-------------She trained as a midwife in the United Kingdom and when she came back to Nigeria, she worked ...
I was in primary two at St. Mary’s primary school, Umuopara, Nguru, Mbaise when the war started. Fighter jets were flying over our school and when it became unbearable, we had to go into the bush to c...
As a kid, I had a privileged life. We had a fleet of cars in our garage – Cortina, Beetle and others. My mother drove me to school every day and by the age of four I was already answering phone calls....
I was working with the International Committee of the Red Cross when I met members of the Figures Band taking refuge inmy village. They had escaped from Port Harcourt after it fell to the Nigerian sol...
(My Father’s Fence was published in Medium on December 24, 2016.)It has often been said that when an Igbo man’s wife makes a request of him, he will move mountains to achieve it. Thus it was that when...
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