Volume 12, Number 10 · May 22, 1969
Biafra Revisited
By Conor Cruise O'Brien
On Easter Sunday I paid my second visit to Biafra. The first visit had been eighteen months before, in the third month of the Nigerian war, September 1967.[1] Then we had come in overland, by Land Rover from Mamfe in Cameroun, to Calabar: we—then as now I traveled with Stanley Diamond, Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York—had interviewed the Biafran leader Colonel Ojukwu in Enugu, and had visited Port Harcourt and Onitsha, where we crossed the Niger Bridge into the section of the Mid-West region then held by Biafran forces. Enugu fell within a few days of our visit; shortly afterward the land route of access was cut. Biafran forces evacuated the Mid-West and destroyed the Niger Bridge. Later Onitsha fell, after a stubborn defense. In the South Port Harcourt and Calabar were lost. What is left of Biafra, territorially, is now accessible only by air.
Feature, 7638 words
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