To the Editors:
Stanley Diamond’s article, “Who Killed Biafra?” (NYR, February 26) sets out to rescue us from the propaganda of governments seeking to justify their roles in the conflict. His discussion of the considerations which moved other nations to support one side or the other is plausible and informative, but sheds little light on the course of events in Nigeria and Biafra themselves. I have no reason to question Diamond’s conclusion that Biafra was not “a puppet of reactionary forces,” or the fact that the unequal supply of foreign arms and assistance to the belligerents was crucial to the outcome of the war. (Nor is it startling to learn that foreign powers supported one side or the other only insofar as they felt it would be in their own interests to do so; it hardly seems necessary to demonstrate that nations’ policies toward one another are not predicated on altruism.) I do think, however, that to represent the Nigerian war as merely the product of external manipulation, past and present, is highly misleading.
Diamond does devote quite a bit of space to developments in Nigeria itself, but his discussion of them contains serious omissions. One of the fundamental problems which has plagued the peoples of Nigeria for a long time is that of developing a political structure which is responsive to the needs of an ethnically diverse population, without being subservient to the interests of any one cultural or linguistic group. By and large, Diamond dodges this issue, both in his treatment of Biafra since 1967, and in his historical analysis of the Ibos’ role in developing Nigerian nationalism.
…Apart from a brief reference to “culturally related peoples,” [Diamond] ignores the non-Ibo residents of Eastern Nigeria. In making this omission, Diamond passes up an excellent opportunity to clarify a complex and often obscure situation—namely, the position and involvement of non-Ibo peoples in Biafra, and how their role developed during the war—and contents himself instead with adding to the cloud of emotional prose which surrounded the whole conflict from its inception. “The Biafrans were struggling to protect a nation in which the culture of the primitive past made itself felt and yet had become part of the modern experience,” etc. (p. 26)
Diamond makes frequent use of the word “primitive” in his depiction of the history of Ibo relations with the British and the rest of Nigeria.
…the primitive democracies which criss-crossed the primarily Ibo-speaking East resisted [British] domination. [p. 19]
In spite of the slave and palm oil trades, the local communities in the forests of Eastern Nigeria were able to maintain a substantially primitive character. [p. 19]
It should be clear, then, that the Ibos were evolving directly from a “primitive” society to a modern nationality without passing through any significant archaic phase, and thereby conceived the modern Nigerian nation as one that should be both universal and egalitarian. [p. 21]
One sensed, under the social surface [of Biafra] the primitive pulse of Ibo adaptability. [p. 22]
In other words, Diamond seems to conceive of the modern Ibo as a sort of national Minerva springing full-blown from the head of her aboriginal parent; the fact that her passage was unsullied by contact with various forms of “archaic,” hierarchical social organization insures the purity of her present political wisdom.
Shades of the Noble Savage? I’m afraid so. Diamond does not do the Ibo the familiar disservice of expecting them to evolve in our own political image; he goes one step further and traces their “emergence” in terms of the romantic images of Western political utopianism. This makes for inspiring reading, but sheds little light on the realities of Nigerian or Biafran life. For example, Diamond dwells on the Ibos’ “attempts at self-validation and self-improvement” which led them rapidly to acquire Western education and to settle “as technicians, professionals, traders, and civil servants among a people [sic] of different culture and inferior formal education….” (p. 20) He also emphasizes their role as “the primary architects of Nigerian freedom…[whose] conception was that of an independent, democratic, economically sovereign, unitary state.” (p. 20) But he never bothers to develop one obvious implication of these arguments—namely, that had the Ibo succeeded in creating a unitary Nigerian state, they would have controlled it, ipso facto. Were the “routinely corrupt and nepotic Northern hierarchy” the only people in Nigeria who objected to this prospect? The events of 1966 suggest not, just as the ready acceptance by many non-Ibo-speaking people in the Southeast and Rivers States of an early return to Nigerian control suggests that they had mixed feelings concerning their prospects in a predominantly Ibo Biafra.
Diamond criticizes those who would argue that Biafra’s secession simply pointed the way to debilitating “Balkanization” of the African continent, and assures us that the Biafrans were “nation-builders” and “pan-Africanists,” not “Balkanizers.” But it is not clear from Diamond’s discussion in what way Ibo nationalism differs from the familiar notion of self-determination, or how Ibo self-determination was to be reconciled with the self-determining impulses of other peoples, either in Biafra or in a unitary Nigeria. He fails to show why, in a Biafran or Nigerian or African context, self-determination should not be expected to lead to Balkanization, just as he does not explain how “nationalism” is the same thing as “pan-Africanism.” Thus, Diamond’s essay is unconvincing, both as an analysis of the internal problems of Nigeria and Biafra, and as a prescription for African political development.
Sara S. Berry
Bloomington, Indiana
To the Editors:
…History is not made in a day. The issues which appear at a given moment to be matters of life and death are seen in perspective to be ones which time itself heals. Had the Biafrans remained quiet they would undoubtedly have suffered some forms of oppression but certainly nothing like the total tragedy which occurred. They could have recovered their strength and, if they are the kind of people Mr. Diamond claims they are [NYR, February 26], would through “self-improvement” have increased their influence again within a few years. Perhaps on a second try they could have achieved their objectives by diplomacy instead of force….
George A. Elbert
New York City
To the Editors:
…I share Mr. Diamond’s admiration of the Ibos as a people. Their energy and talents, however, do not lead me to ignore the needs and rights of the 40 percent minority in Eastern Nigeria who did not want to be part of Biafra. The Efiks, Ijaws, Ibibios, Annangs, Kalabaris, Ogojas and others had been taken advantage of by their Ibo neighbors for decades. These minority tribes had asked repeatedly for independence from the Ibos since the 1950s.
The minority people within the East preferred to be free of Ibo domination by having states of their own as promised by the Federal government. But the Biafran leadership denied them the same right it claimed for itself vis-à-vis the rest of Nigeria, the right of self-determination and protection from victimization….
[Diamond] first exalts the Ibo people, with some justification, and then exalts Biafra, without considering that the two were not identical. True, there were minority persons within the Biafran leadership, but these were mostly “co-opted” (bought off) persons regarded as quislings by their own people.
Within the East, prior to secession and afterwards, there was no free expression of opinion by the minority groups, and Biafra was created without any democratic consultation of the minorities. Hand-picked “representatives” voted for secession or were locked up in Enugu. After the Biafran army had taken hundreds of hostages to its shrinking enclave it dared to call for a plebiscite in the victimized areas.
Reports of Biafran terror and intimidation to ensure “support” from non-Ibo areas never reached the American public because of the press’s quick identification of the Ibos/Biafrans as the “underdog.” I have missionary reports of burnings of villages (as many as 400 homes at a time), mass graves (sixty men, women and children buried alive at Ndiya), and massacre of non-Ibo civilians by Biafran forces. But these things made the Biafrans look more like Nazis than Jews and conflicted with our preconceptions about the situation. They were therefore given no publicity.
For Ibo secession (planned already in mid-July, 1966) to succeed, it needed to annex the territory of neighboring tribes and in particular to have the oil resources and facilities of Port Harcourt in Ijaw territory. I find in my estimation of the Ibos as a people no justification for the Lebensraum philosophy of the Biafra leadership or of the Anschluss of neighboring territory and people.
An indication of the antipathy felt by “fellow Biafrans” toward Ibo overlordship before and especially during secession was the terrible killing of Ibos in non-Ibo areas once the Biafran army was forced to retreat. Ironically, it was the Federal army which protected Ibo civilians from reprisals of their non-Ibo neighbors once the army had gained control of the areas. But this was never reported.
Non-Ibos objected to secession because they feared being “second class citizens” in an Ibo-majority Biafra. Mr. Diamond’s article mutely confirms this objection. Ijaws, Efiks, Ibibios and other non-Ibos are as invisible in his reporting of Biafra as American blacks were in most reporting of the US until only recently….
Norman Thomas Uphoff
Department of Political Science
University of California
Berkeley
Stanley Diamond replies:
My critics take me to task for not doing what I did not propose to do. My intent was to locate the Biafran tragedy within the broadest possible historical and international context; in this light, the points they make (which I am well aware of and which I have dealt with elsewhere) are minor, misleading, and seriously misconceived.
Sara Berry’s insouciance about the role of the Great Powers in the Nigerian civil war betrays a lack of subtlety. It is no longer a question of good old-fashioned nineteenth-century conflicting interests but of a single converging interest. Miss Berry does not seem to realize that the peoples of Nigeria and Biafra were subject to exquisitely detailed imperial power politics, with tragic implications for the whole of the third world. The victimization of Biafra, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “totalizes” this assault, and represents the ultimate phase of colonial manipulation.
Moreover, as commentators of such divergent views as Richard Sklar and Auberon Waugh have pointed out, it is unlikely that the war would have been declared or, if declared, that it would have followed its tragic course, had the interests of the Big Powers not been decisive. In so critical an area as Nigeria, which attained formal independence as recently as 1960, imperial and internal dynamics can hardly be divorced from each other.
Miss Berry seems equally cynical about my analysis of the social character of the Ibo-speaking people, although it is not entirely clear whether she puts into question my analysis or their character. In support of my argument, I quoted four experienced scholars but could have quoted forty, both Nigerian and foreign. How else can one understand the differential behavior of groups of people except by engaging in cultural and historical analysis? And that means linking the past to the present in both continuity and discontinuity. I fail to see that the social character of the Ibo—the result of continuities in their underlying social system, developing ecological factors, and modern cultural influences—reflects “romantic images of western political utopianism.”
