The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory By C ...

a continued intention to exterminate the Igbo people. The war was indeed a Nigerian variant of what the Nazis called the final solution to the Jewish problem.³²

Scholars and other commentators have extensively documented the Nigeria-Biafra War and the large-scale killing of Igbo through starvation and directly by federal soldiers during the war. Yet some of the literature on the Biafran war has been very cautious in applying the term genocide to these events. G. N. Uzoigwe’s essay in this volume shows that the demonization of the Igbo and the emergence of ethnically driven debates about Igbo citizenship and belonging in the North and the West contributed to a series of historical events that culminated in civil war in 1967. The chapter is a tapestry of the significant contribution to understanding the intersection of British colonial rule and ethnic tension among Nigerians during the colonial and postcolonial periods. The British political arrangement in Nigeria increased ethnic rivalry and tension, often resulting in systematic killings of Igbo in peacetime. Uzoigwe’s essay outlines four successive genocidal incidents on May 29, July 29, September 29, and October 29, 1966. He paints a picture of appalling human suffering and degradation based on eyewitness accounts and official reports. His claim of northerners’ genocidal intention against the Igbo is supported by the accounts of both western journalists and the eastern Nigerian government; these witnesses were convinced that the Igbo faced genocide in the North between May and October 1966, as the word is defined in legalistic terms. Mass exterminations of Igbo in the midwestern region’s towns remain the most visible evidence of what Emma Okocha called the “first black on black genocide” in Africa.³³ These executions took place in the towns of Asaba and Benin. In Asaba, federal troops ordered the killing of every male, including young boys.³⁴ Witnesses reported that all the males of Biafran origin were told to gather in the marketplace to welcome the advancing federal troops but were summarily gunned down by the troops wielding machine guns.³⁵ It is estimated that seven hundred people were killed on that day of “ceremonial welcome.”³⁶ One one native of Asaba who survived the massacre recalled: