Nigerian Civil War

[gentle music] Have you ever noticed that every family has that story, you know, the one that everybody knows happened or we're all just acting like it did, no one talks about it?

For a lot of Nigerian families, that's the Nigerian Civil War.

And today's guests are asking, what happens when we finally start having those conversations? We sat down with filmmakers Mejie and Leke Alabi-Isama to talk about their new documentary, Surviving Biafra, and wow, this conversation stayed with us.

What makes it even more special is that this story is personal for them.

Leke's dad, who also is Mejie's granddad, is Godwin Alabi-Isama, a veteran of the Nigerian Civil War, whose story is featured in this documentary.

So for them, this isn't just about telling Nigerian history, it's about preserving their own family history as well.

We get into everything from uncovering never-before-seen archive footage to the responsibility of telling very hard and difficult stories.

And once again, we have found a way to go across countries with this one.

But then they started to talk about history.

You know, a lot of them started to talk about the civil war, the Nigerian civil war that went on in, you know, 1967 to 1970, the Biafran War, you know, And then they started to talk about partition of land in Nigeria.

And one of them made a wrong fact about the civil war.

Somebody said something about the civil war that wasn't wrong.

And even the way we talk about and teach history in Nigeria, we, you know, I say very bluntly in the piece that I don't think that we are fully reconciled with the reality of both pre-colonial Nigeria and post-colonial Nigeria, including Nigeria.

The Biafra War.

What do all of these things mean to us? So it is absolutely fair to say if we haven't even recognized the struggles on our soil, somebody who is definitely of Nigerian descent, but whose struggle and whose life and whose story is taken elsewhere.

And of course, she was part of the resistance movement, For Palestine.

Whether it was apartheid or it was struggles in other West African countries, we were present.

And when Obasanjo was an officer the first time, he had a general attitude and he knew that you cannot have a free Africa if all of Africa is not free.

And I think that... post-Biafra War Nigeria, which we never really dealt with what that meant for us as a country, I believe, I think that has absolutely affected our ability to really have material solidarity with the rest of the continent and then, of course, Palestine, which used to be an issue that was at the forefront of Nigerian publics.

Certainly during my own parents' time, when they were in the university and also when they were teachers at the University of Nagorno, that was an issue that was really important to them.

It is a part that she says people do not like to talk about.

The Biafran War.

The Biafran War was a time in Nigeria's history when the eastern part of the country tried to become an independent country.

This happened before Adichie was born.

Adichie had to do a lot of research to write the book.

And also, I should say, congratulations.

My understanding is your book is coming out in two weeks on the Nigerian Civil War.

Yes.

The day Biafra died.

There was the local public, the traditional society, where there was morality, there were rules, there was a legitimate order, but that order was never projected onto the national state.

My favorite, this is in Chinua Achebe's great book about the collapse of the first republic in Nigeria, He sort of says right on the last page of the book where he's describing the collapse of the state and the military coup that kind of leads ultimately to the Biafra War.

In the affairs of the nation, there was no owner.

The laws of the village became powerless.

He was a military kid.

His father was conscripted into the Nigerian Armed Forces during the Biafran War.

We grew up in the barracks, idolized the discipline, and he desperately wanted to join the regular army.

But the army actually rejected him during recruitment because he didn't meet their height restrictions.

And there's an organization, Indigenous People of Biafra, which would like to recreate, uh, the formal state of Biafra.

The grievances of the people there, there are a lot of leftover grievances from the Biafran War.

There is a massive disaffection with the government.

Um, the people in the region feel like, very much like they're second-class citizens.

He could have learned a thing or two from Nigeria.

Uh, the end of the Biafra War, the, the grievances of Biafra were still there.

Uh, and somehow the remaking of the Nigerian state from military rule, uh, to civilian rule, uh, these leaders tried to, to be as, as inclusive as possible.

Somehow, somehow in Liberia, I think we didn't get it right, and Taylor was still very frozen in, in his, his, his idea of, of, of the NPFL.