Hunger as a weapon of war: Biafra, social media and the politics of famine remembrance

Abstract

This article explores the role of social media in the memorialisation of the Biafra famine. It argues that given the absence of Biafra famine narratives in the official post-Civil War memory spaces in Nigeria, social media has emerged as a site where silence and hegemonic discourses around the Biafra famine are disrupted, contested and unmoored. Thus, the study contributes to the contemporary debates on digital media and memorialisation of mass atrocities.

Keywords:

• Nigeria–Biafra war
• famine
• remembrance
• memorialisation
• justice
• social media

Introduction

Following a spate of attacks in the south-east of Nigeria, which was blamed on pro-Biafra separatists, on 1 June 2021, the President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, tweeted:

Many of those misbehaving today are too young to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred during the Nigerian Civil War. Those of us in the fields for 30 months who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand.

The tweet revived memories of the atrocities of the Nigerian Civil War and was interpreted across many quarters as a threat against the people from the Igbo ethnic group of the former secessionist state of Biafra with whom the Nigerian government fought a three-year civil war between 1966 and 1970. However, not evident from the president’s tweet is the fact that most of the millions of lives lost during the war occurred due to famine. Shortly thereafter, Twitter flagged and removed the president’s tweets for violating its terms regarding violence.¹ In retaliation, the Nigerian government banned Twitter on 5 June 2021.² This short synopsis reveals not only how contentious the memory of the Nigeria–Biafra war still is in the present but also how social media is implicated and inserting itself as a site where the politics of remembrance is enacted. Nevertheless, as Chiluwa argues, despite its significance, the role of social media and online networks as a platform for Biafra’s social mobilisation and resistance has not been adequately explored by scholars (Chiluwa 2012, 222).

In societies affected by mass atrocities, unresolved wounds from the past can hinder peacebuilding in the present and also jeopardise the future of a nation. As a result, the state has often used sites like memorials, museums and textbooks to construct a collective narrative of the past and advance its hegemonic agenda of nation-building in a selective political process that acknowledges the memories of loss and violent experiences of some actors while silencing those of certain marginal others (King 2010). In the case of post-civil war Nigeria, a deliberate policy of suppressing the memory of Biafra was pursued, and the few memorial spaces like the national war museum and Armed Forces Remembrance Day have been created and maintained by the state for projecting its military victory, leaving the experience of many others, mostly the Igbos from the Biafran side, unacknowledged and suppressed (Simola 2000; Onuoha 2018; Mehmed 2016). Recent scholarship, however, suggests that information and communication technologies are now becoming critical memory sites, used not only to remember specific events but also as platforms that enable ordinary people to contest official silences and versions of the past, and to inject plural voices from the narratives of the past in the present (Zhao and Liu 2015; Gustafsson 2019). Thus, this paper aims to unpack the role of social media in the remembrance of the Biafran famine. It poses the following question: how is the Biafra famine remembered on social media?

I argue that social media provides a critical site to investigate how memories of famine as mass atrocities are represented and narrated by agentive actors, especially in contexts where authoritarian memory regimes hold sway. The memory of the Biafra famine was written out of Nigeria’s post-civil war memorialisation landscape, which the government has appropriated to construct a grand narrative of national unity and to celebrate national heroes who fought on the side of the state while silencing the atrocious experiences of the Igbos during the war (Onuoha 2016). Hence, new media has been re-appropriated by ordinary people and marginalised voices to remember the Biafra famine as a mass atrocity. It challenges official versions of the Biafran famine as an inevitable consequence of war and the absence of Biafra famine accounts in the official memory sites. Social media users have also leveraged these technologies to honour the unreckoned experiences of victims, narrate their agential stories of survival, and call out national and international perpetrators of the famine.

The paper contributes to the literature on digital media and memorialisation of mass atrocities (Zucker and Simon 2020), and the burgeoning critical debates on the connections between memory, commemoration and peacebuilding in post-conflict societies (Björkdahl et al. 2017; Selimovic 2013), while also advancing the limited scholarship on the memorialisation of the Biafran famine. This article is one of the first to address the remembrance of the Biafra famine within the context of social media. In particular, it sheds light on how technology is enabling memory work by ordinary people, enabling their agency by resisting the official memory narratives, and bringing to the fore often unknown, unacknowledged experiences and stories of the war, especially in climes like Nigeria that are prone to not only media censorship but also tight official regulation of the memory of the civil war.

The article is structured as follows: it begins by presenting a background to the Biafra famine within the context of the Nigerian Civil War. This is followed by a theoretical discussion of the role of social media in contemporary remembrance practices. It then goes on to explore the memory policies of post-war Nigeria, the politics embedded in it, and the conspicuous elision of the Biafran famine in this discourse. Finally, the article shifts to Twitter as a place of memory to explore the key memory narratives of the Biafra famine on social media.

Background to the Nigerian–Biafran civil war

After its independence in 1960, the events of the January 1966 military coup, the revenge coup six months later, and the subsequent pogroms against the Igbos in the northern and western regions hastened Nigeria’s descent into civil war. On 15 January 1966, a group of military officers claiming to be on a mission to rid the country of corrupt and nepotistic politicians led a coup during which prominent political figures of Nigeria’s first republic were killed. Among them were the Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa; the Minister of Finance, Festus Okoti-Eboh; the Premier of the northern region, Ahmadu Bello; and the Premier of the western region, Samuel Akintola. The coup was crushed by a senior military officer, Aguiyi Ironsi, an Igbo, who later took the reins of power. Ironsi’s unitary system enactment, and delay in prosecuting the coup plotters who were arrested, fuelled sentiments of Igbo attempts to dominate the country (Anyaduba and Maiangwa 2020, 283). Furthermore, in July 1966, a group of officers from the northern extraction staged a revenge coup and killed Ironsi as well as many Igbo officers, while Yakubu Gowon, a northerner, took over the reins of power (Maiangwa 2016, 45–47). What followed during the same period was a series of pogroms in cities across Nigeria, particularly in the north in which thousands of Igbo civilians were massacred, with the Nigerian government failing to halt the killings (Korieh 2013, 728–729; Ukaogo 2012). This forced the few Igbos who escaped to flee to the Igbo homeland in the eastern region. The pogroms and subsequent political disagreements exacerbated the loss of confidence by the Igbos in the commitment of Nigeria to guarantee their safety. On 30 May 1967, Ojukwu, with the support of political leaders from the east, declared the independence of the Republic of Biafra from Nigeria (Heerten and Moses 2014, 173). The federal military government, led by Gowon, then embarked on what it called a police action to keep the nation united, which would culminate in the brutal three-year civil war.

Backed by diplomatic support and weapons from Britain, who wanted to help Nigeria retain control over the valuable oil fields in the Biafra-controlled areas, the Nigerian government’s response to the Biafran challenge was to impose a brutal blockade that stifled the flow of food, water and medication. Hence, as the war raged, by the spring of 1968, vulnerable children and older people in the Biafra territories began to manifest disease caused by malnutrition and protein deficiency. Some images of starving children appeared in media outlets across the Western world. But the British and Nigerian governments dismissed this as Biafra propaganda (Waters 2004, 701). However, regarding the Biafra famine as a propaganda narrative, Forsyth argues that for those on the ground who witnessed thousands of children die miserably in Biafra, the issue of propaganda could not come up, given what they saw and witnessed:

There is not one priest, doctor, relief worker or administrator from the dozen European countries who worked in Biafra throughout the last half of 1968 and watched several hundred thousand children die miserably, who could be found to suggest the issue needed any ‘playing up’. The facts were there, the pressmen’s cameras popped and the starvation of the children of Biafra became a world scandal. (Forsyth 2015)

In order to justify its blockade, the Nigerian government expressed concerns about food aid delivery being used as a cover for arms shipment to the Biafrans. Nevertheless, the alternative proposals put forward by the Nigerian government, in concert with the British High Commission, were found to confer the greatest strategic and military advantage to the Nigerian military. For instance, there were concerns that the air relief delivery could be used to import arms; however, offers for relief to be delivered only in broad daylight and even for the Red Cross to supervise the loading were rejected by the Nigerian government. The land route insisted upon by the Nigerian government also had challenges. Food aid would have to crisscross hundreds of miles, bogged down by the Nigerian military traffic, which would have meant that it was not cost effective and would not deliver food to those in need at the speed and in the quantities needed to save lives. Moreover, widespread apprehensions among the suffering Biafran population about potential poisoning of relief food delivered through Nigerian hands meant that such a proposal was not well received from the Biafran standpoint. This was exacerbated by a build-up of Nigerian military equipment around the Biafra enclave which was a primordial threat for the Igbos (Forsyth 2015). Alfred Mudge emphasises that these existential concerns among the Biafran people arose because prior reports of the Igbos people being massacred were treated lightly by the Nigerian government (Mudge 1969, 231).

Moreover, the official narratives of famine as propaganda are undermined by explicit procurements from the Nigerian side, stating that starvation was in fact a military policy that was strategically and rigorously pursued. For instance, Obafemi Awolowo, the Vice Chairman of Nigeria’s Federal Executive Council and Commissioner of Finance, was quoted as justifying starvation: ‘All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see why we should feed our enemies fat, only to fight us harder’ (Bateman 2012, 53).

Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle, a Nigerian Army commander in charge of implementing the government policies on the battlefield, had this to say: ‘I want to see no Red Cross, no Caritas, no World Council of Churches, no Pope, no missionary and no UN delegation. I want to prevent even one Ibo having even one thing to eat before their capitulation’ (Mudge 1969, 228).

This indicates that the Biafra famine was due to a deliberate policy of starvation as a weapon of war adopted by the government of Nigeria to squeeze the Biafrans into capitulation. As Bateman notes, when the war ended in January 1970, over three million Igbos had been killed, with the majority of the casualties being children who died as a result of famine caused by the deliberate military policy of the federal government to block food and medical supplies from entering into the Biafra enclave (Bateman 2012, 53; Lodge 2018, 1).

Nigeria’s post-civil war memory politics

After the war, the federal government began implementing policies aimed at entrenching ‘a culture of amnesia’ (Anyaduba and Maiangwa 2020, 287) with respect to the memory of Biafra. These policies included changing Igbo place names in parts of the eastern region and further fission of the country into smaller states that landlocked the Igbo communities; and renaming the Bight of Biafra, the southern part of Nigeria’s Atlantic coast, to the Bight of Bonny – despite the significance of the Bight of Biafra for the region’s Atlantic, colonial and slave trade history. Consequently, a meta-narrative of national unity and identity – that of a country which emerged from the war stronger, more united, and touted as the hope of the Black race – was promoted by the government following the war – something that all players in the country were expected to key into (Onuoha 2016, 2018). Other major avenues through which the state appropriated the Biafra memory representation were history books, the national museum, and the Armed Forces Remembrance Day. All of these were deployed as platforms to project the official memory versions of the war, which depicted a grand narrative of a nation united despite the war, and to honour national heroes who fought on the government’s side. Government-approved history textbooks for secondary schools in the 1990s rarely referred to the war; however, when they did, the emphasis was placed on the positive aspects of it, including the creation of new states, expansion of military might, and assertion of nationhood. No references were made to the many victims of the war, the ethnic contentions that led to it, the pogrom against the Igbos, or the massacre of ethnic minorities during the war (Onuoha 2018; Ejiogu 2013; Odoemene 2012). In addition, the national war museum in Umuahia, which was designated as the only official museum for the Civil War, has only military-related relics and artefacts like weapons and pictures of key actors in its exhibition. With exhibitions heavy on military hardware, the motto of the museum, namely ‘they did not die in vain’ (Onuora 2015, 206), signifies that it recognises only those who died on the federal side and points to the appropriation of the Civil War memorialisation by the military to project itself as the guarantor of national unity. Also, in perhaps an anticipatory move to displace and hijack 15 January 1970, the day the Biafra war officially ended, from being appropriated for the commemoration of Biafra, it was instead chosen by the government for the annual Armed Forces Remembrance Day and celebration of the unknown soldiers. The soldiers honoured were limited to those who fought for the country in the two World Wars, the civil war, and other peacekeeping operations in which the country had embarked. Thus, these monuments and commemorations excluded those who fought and died on the Biafran side, who were instead seen as traitors and rebels. All these represent the ongoing efforts by the government to project its hegemonic memory regime while suppressing the narratives of the Igbos (Onuoha 2018; Simola 2000).

These narratives of national unity being promoted by the state’s memorialisation efforts obfuscate the lived experiences and ongoing social, economic and political marginalisation of the Igbos after the Civil War. What is perhaps most glaring from the official Biafra war memorialisation landscape is that the famine that took place in Biafra during the war is not recognised, despite accounting for the majority of deaths and casualties. About three million Igbos perished, most dying from ‘starvation and disease brought on by the encirclement of the Biafran enclave, a situation exacerbated by political disputes that hindered efforts to bring food and medical supplies to the besieged population’ (US State Department cited in Korieh 2013, 734). Therein lies the memory politics of Biafra: an instrumental deployment of the war’s memories to represent the victimhood and eulogise the victories of one side. This is in addition to the perpetuation of an idea that reconciliation has been achieved, while at the same time silencing the voices of those who were on the Biafran side and constricting the public space for them to express their trauma and recount their own experiences. Therefore, it is imperative to explore how those on the Biafran side who have been written out of the official civil war memory-making project in Nigeria are making their voices heard by using social media for the remembrance of the Biafra famine.

Collective memory and social media remembrance

Memorialisation projects like monuments, museums and commemoration practices are increasingly becoming part of remembrance practices for coming to terms with past atrocities in post-conflict societies (Selimovic 2013). Usually, these remembrances take place in what Nora describes as ‘lieux de memoire where memory crystallizes and secretes itself’ (Nora 1989, 7). These are tangible and intangible sites, such as museums, monuments, commemorations, rituals and murals, which, as a result of their investment with symbolism and the will to remember, have come to represent embodiments of the past in the present. Traditionally, the state had always sought to control sites of memory and practices of remembrance because of the potential of narratives and representations of the past at those sites to shape and reshape the political, economic and cultural power relations in the present and future. These sites have also been claimed by the state and political elites to maintain their hegemonic interest through the construction of collective memory – a remembrance framework which, according to Maurice Halbwachs, involves a selective reconstruction of the past, in a process that is not innocent but strategically curated for power interests in the present and in accordance with dominant thoughts of society. Hence, the ‘past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the present’ (Halbwachs 1992, 40).

Furthermore, commemorations, museums and monuments are also considered significant mechanisms of transitional justice as they play important roles in healing, reconciling and providing pathways to symbolic reparations and acknowledgement, which are necessary for healing and a kind of closure (Light and Young 2015). Thus, zooming in on memorialisation processes unveils the dynamics of the ongoing injustice in the ways the past is remembered, including who is accorded victim status and is thus considered worthy of remembrance (Robinson 2017). The issue, then, is that versions of the past that are remembered or forgotten at these sites have implications for justice for victims. It also indicates how ongoing violence is obscured by power holders who seize sites of remembrance to construct sanitised narratives of nation-building and homogeneous identities. However, the proliferation and increasing sophistication of new technologies are perhaps among the most potent disruptors of the statist memorialisation terrain, as they open avenues for the unmooring of state-centric remembrance practices from the grass roots (Zucker and Simon 2020).

Social media platforms have emerged as significantly meaningful arenas where different narratives of the past, as espoused by various actors, can be unpacked. Hence, actors with a variety of agendas in shaping how the past is remembered in the present appropriate social media sites to project their own versions of the past, and narratives are an especially important medium through which this is enacted. Narratives are stories that people tell as they attempt to make meaning of their world, experiences and identity. Narratives generate meaning through a certain rendering of events that seeks to weave a morally coherent relationship between the past, present and future. In relation to memory work, the concern is on how memorial sites can then be created to convey hegemonic accounts of the past to the exclusion of others (Björkdahl et al. 2017). The concept of an actor is linked with the fact that remembrance and memory practices do not just happen on their own; rather, they require active enactment by human actors who embark on certain actions to recall the past. Here, attention has been focused on the role of the so-called memory entrepreneurs, a term that refers to actors who mobilise resources and action to remember the past (Conway 2010). These actors exist at different scales and includes global memory entrepreneurs, local elites, communities and victims who use these sites to illuminate their own experiences (Selimovic 2013, 341).

Methodology

Increasing growth in Nigeria’s information and communications infrastructure in recent years has made social media sites more accessible to Nigerians. Even though Facebook is the most popular social media site in Nigeria – with an estimated 4 million users in 2011, most of its data are private. Twitter was chosen as the preferred social media site for this study mainly due to its rich, open and publicly available metadata which can be accessed directly in the form of raw tweet streams (Fink et al. 2012, 165–166). The number of Twitter users in Nigeria was estimated to be around three million by 2021 (The Cable 2022). However, social media use in Nigeria is less popular among the older and less educated adults (Bartlett et al. 2015). In this space, the Nigerian diaspora’s social media activism is quite significant, and this cluster of migrant actors is out of reach for the online and offline silencing machinery of the Nigerian government (Dambo et al. 2022).

The methodology adopted aligns with digital ethnography. One way of approaching digital ethnography is to view the internet as a cyberspace where culture is constructed and reconstructed. Research strategies have ranged from actively participating to lurking and, in other instances, observing computer-mediated communication in this space. However, the approach to digital ethnography adopted here is one that acknowledges the content of digital platforms as a cultural artefact and ethnographic material in and of themselves. Hence, digital media posts are products of culture, experiences, relations, practices and meaning given to them by the users, who are at the same time embedded in their local contexts (Hine 2000). In order to avoid interjecting my opinions into the debates, I did not participate in the discussions. Hence, mainly users’ own discourses and the appearance of online elements are analysed to reveal the meaning, values and actions that they seek to articulate (Bernal 2013, 247). Pseudonyms have been employed to anonymise users. The timeline of the selected tweets was between 2019 and 2021. Most of the social media posts regarding the Biafra famine were, however, concentrated particularly on the days of 15 January and 30 May of the period, which corresponds with Nigeria’s Armed Forces Remembrance Day and Biafra Remembrance Day, respectively. While 15 January is commemorated annually by the government to honour the men of the armed forces who fought for the nation, the Biafra Remembrance Day is not officially recognised; nonetheless, it has been carved out by the Igbos as a day to remember the fallen of Biafra.

Data collection entailed searching Twitter using terms relevant to the study, inter alia, BiafraRemembranceDay, Biafra famine, Biafra starvation, Biafra Hunger, Biafra remembrance, Biafra famine memory, Ozoemena (meaning ‘it should not happen again’). Subsequently, the returned results were sorted to isolate relevant tweets, which were then captured in a document for subsequent analysis (La Rosa 2013). The analysis was guided by a framework that recognises social media platforms as ‘sites of memory’ (Nora 1989, 7), where agentive actors articulate narratives in the form of their posts and online engagements as a form of expression and meaning making regarding social phenomenon, which in this case is the remembrance of the Biafra famine. As Mannergren Selimovic averred, ‘what is remembered and what is forgotten’ (2015, 336) is at the core of memory politics in conflicted settings. Therefore, my approach was to analyse the cultural artefacts deposited at these sites in the form of tweets to understand how the famine is remembered and who is included or excluded in these narratives. Consequently, as outlined by Zhao and Liu (2015), the tweets were closely read to discover themes relevant to the research question, categorise them, and draw out key phrases and expressions that shed light on how the Biafra famine is remembered. The themes were then used to structure the analysis. With regard to how the Biafra famine is remembered, the emergent themes included the existence of competing narratives of the famine as natural and other narratives of the famine as a deliberate weapon of extermination against the Igbos. There was also an interpretation of the ongoing socio-economic neglect of the south-east as re-enacting memories of the food blockade imposed on Biafra and recounting agentive stories of survival by those in the crosshairs of the famine. Furthermore, with respect to who is remembered or not, the theme of hero victims emerged, which highlights the memories of the Igbo victims of the famine, whose voices have been missing from the official memory landscape.

While there may be concerns about the authenticity of digital actors on social media, it is vital to emphasise that the focus here is on digital spaces as sites where people share, experience and organise social phenomena on their own terms. As such, it is important to combine the analysis of online discourse with a nuanced understanding of the contexts in which these discourses unfold (Hine 2000). Hence, the focus of this article is on exploring discourses on the Biafra famine, and how it is experienced and remembered in digital spaces, rather than trying to verify the authenticity of the actors who promote the discourses.

Memory narratives of the Biafran famine on Twitter

Hunger as a weapon of war

The representation of starvation as a crime and a weapon of war was one of the major narratives through which the Biafra famine is remembered on Twitter. Those who hold this position do so through the rejection of the famine label; instead, they call it a deliberate crime, with some going so far as to name it genocide and calling out the perpetrators. For example, on 30 May 2020, one user tweeted: ‘Gowon blockaded Biafra and caused d death and starvation of more than 2million children in #Biafra. Britain on the other hand was supporting the genocide in other to secure their oyel³ interest. #WeRemember #ozoemena #BiafraRemembranceDay’. (@Arthur)

The tweet above was a direct repudiation of the famine as an inevitable consequence of the war narrative promoted by the government. This can be gleaned by the way the user described the famine as a genocide, and at the same time calling out the role played by the local and international actors, the then head of state Yakubu Gowon and Britain – driven by their oil interests – in perpetuating the mass starvation. Included in the post were pictures of malnourished Biafra children, with their skeletal frames showing, and hands outstretched as if begging for food. There were also three other photos showing similar emaciated children. It did not take long for contestations to emerge over this post, as one user kicked back and blamed the Biafran leader, Ojukwu, for causing the starvation: ‘Wrong info, it was ojukwu who actually refused aids by land especially, cos he felt the nigerian troops could take advantage. It back fired’ (@Blossom).

Some users have chosen to re-appropriate the Armed Forces Remembrance Day (15 January) chosen nationally and co-opt it as a platform to remember the Biafra famine. For instance, the following thread elicited a vigorous debate on Twitter about hunger as a weapon of war narrative around the Armed Forces Remembrance Day in January 2021:

On the 51st Anniversary of the end of the Biafra war. Nigeria has done well in terms of achieving national reconciliation but still we need a conversation about the use of starvation as a weapon of war. I’m 56 and a child of the war. (@Alfred)

The above tweet got more than a thousand likes, eliciting wide engagement. The user above makes a point that there has been reconciliation and that starvation was used as a weapon of war. The tweet was posted with three images. The first was the same picture posted earlier of grossly malnourished Biafra children whose skeletal frames were showing. Their hands were stretched out as though begging for food. The second was again a group of starving children. Finally, the third was that of a malnourished mother standing with two emaciated children. She was carrying the first who was sucking on her breast, and the second was on the ground looking on with a bewildered gaze. Such projections of maternal suffering and vulnerable children to represent the public face of a nation’s tragic experience, as Jacobs argues, can create empathic bonds with the victimised groups (Jacobs 2017, 431).

@Alfred said he was 56 years old, which means that he was a child at the start of the Civil War and thus, a child survivor of the war. But then it did not take long for @Alfred’s claim on post-Civil War reconciliation and discussion of the famine to attract debates from different quarters. This user expressed disappointment with his reconciliation claims:

Dr did you say Nigeria has done well in national reconciliation? I don’t agree with that at all. Please, don’t allow the few self achievement of a few people from the South East misguide your assessment. Name the national policies and projects that shows this reconciliation. (@chibuzo)

Is hoarding palliatives same as using starvation as a weapon of war in ‘public elites vs the masses’? (@ikenna)

Twitter user @ikenna’s tweet on the hoarding of palliatives as part of the strategy to use starvation as a weapon of war makes a reference to how the memories of the Biafran starvation were revived by contemporary issues during the COVID-19 lockdown when palliatives in the form of food items meant for distribution to the masses were hidden away. The food items were discovered hidden in government warehouses, evoking outrage and looting of those warehouses across the country by mobs.

Other users weighed in on the debate, which soon took on an ethnic dimension. For example, the user below utilised the quote by Awolowo that starvation is one of the weapons of war to justify the starvation policy and put the blame on both sides:

‘Everything is fair in love and war’. We could point at starvation as a war crime but should also include rape and killing of the armless too. Both parties were guilty (@George).

Although I did not support the war. But I believe if Biafra has that as tools against the Nigeria side it will be used. Mud fight don’t have rules. And wars are mud fight (@Gbolahan).

The position of government representatives regarding the famine has mostly been that of silence. This is consistent with the politics of silence regarding Biafra memory practices that are incongruous with official accounts of the war. However, there were users who regurgitated the narratives about the famine, which mirrored the position stake by the Nigerian government during the war, including justifying starvation and blaming the Biafran leadership, as indicated below:

Biafra was transporting arms and ammunitions in planes bringing aids. Most food coming in was used to feed the troops and civilians starved. Nobody saw an undernourished Biafran soldier. Blockade led to a quick and humane end to the war. (@Adedamola)

The above assertions were countered by the users below, who argued that those who were justifying the starvation policy were doing so only because of their ethnic interests:

A Yoruba man will always support this. So your justification [of] what Awolowo and Gowon did is your assumption that Igbos would have done the same? (@Ikechukwu)

U only bring this up to defend the genocide against igbos. If there was an actual genocide Perpetuated by Biafrans, it would be discussed independently of the genocide against Igbos. But you never see any of that. (@Victory)

Further, another key conversation on the famine was initiated by a user who, on 20 April 2019, tweeted:

I’m old enough to remember the footage from Biafra during the famine in the ‘70s. And those viewers who wrote in to complain that images of starving children spoiled their evening meal… #ClimateCatastrophe @BBCNews @itvnews @DailyMailUK (@Humphrey)

The above tweet soon got the attention of other users on Twitter, who immediately challenged his use of the ‘famine’ label:

Did I hear you say FAMINE?!

No dear sir, It was a cruel and deliberate FOOD BLOCKADE by Awolowo and his crew of criminals. 3.5 million died (@Ifeoma).

It was no famine. Awolowo with help of UK imposed food blockade on Biafra starving millions including children and pregnant women to death. #BiafraGenocide Killing of Biafrans by Nigeria govt on going now #StopBiafraKillings #FreeBiafra (@Eze)

Some important facts can be gleaned from the above responses to the Biafran famine: the nature of the famine as natural or human induced and the apportioning of perpetrators. There is a vehement rejection of the ‘famine’ label by many Igbos. This stems from the general local understanding of famine as periods of food shortage stemming from natural causes, mostly drought. Hence, these people were contesting any narrative that attempted to represent the starvation as a natural event. Even though these social media users understand famine only as natural misfortune, it would not be wrong to still describe these events that they are talking about as famine. This is based on the conception of famine adopted here as ‘a crisis of mass hunger that causes many people to die over a specific period of time’ (De Waal 2018, 17). The Biafra famine was indeed a monumental crisis of mass starvation in which millions of people died; thus, calling it a famine does not take away the fact that it was not natural, as some might profess to believe, but was carefully orchestrated as part of a grand strategy of advancing the military objectives of the Nigerian government.

Moreover, the use of the term ‘genocide’ by the respondents, in describing the starvation, shows that they believe the starvation was deliberately and strategically deployed as part of the blockade on Biafra. Those actors who have been at the forefront of portraying the famine as a crime are mostly Igbos. To stress that it was a human-induced catastrophe, they have used terms like ‘deliberate’ and ‘blockade’ and have also used it to identify those they hold responsible. The blockade cut off protein imports into Biafra, which had hitherto depended on meat and fish imports. The consequent Kwashiorkor, the main ailment that malnourished Biafran children suffered, was caused by a protein deficiency.

Three main actors feature prominently as perpetrators of the famine: Awolowo, Gowon and Britain. Gowon, a northerner, was the head of state; and Awolowo, a Yoruba, was the Commissioner of Finance and Vice-Chairman of the Federal Executive Council. His quote that ‘all is fair in war’ was used by some actors, as described above, to justify the blockade and ensuing starvation. Britain’s interest in oil and arms sales with the Nigerian side during the war means that they will always feature whenever memorialisation of the Civil War and the various policies used, such as starvation, are discussed.

Structural marginalisation today and remembrance of the food blockade

Another important way in which the Biafra famine is remembered on social media is by linking the ongoing structural marginalisation of the south-east as a form of social, economic and political blockade that parallels and brings back memories of the food blockade imposed on Biafra during the war. These narratives point to how the contemporary marginalisation of the Igbo that dominated the south-east in the social, economic, political and development scheme of affairs in the country evokes memories of the Biafra food blockade, as many Igbos interpret this marginalisation on social media as a continuation of the policy of starvation via a food blockade. For example:

Since after the said war which the Biafra was overpowered using food blockades and starvation as the main tool. Since then till today, the Eastern Nigeria have been under marginalization by both UK and nigeria, no constructions by the government, not allowed to rule nigeria… (@Abebi)

The social media users have highlighted that currently, the blockade takes the form of an ethno-political marginalisation; for example, a user who was responding to calls for discussion on the starvation policy was shocked at the suggestion that Nigeria has achieved genuine post-war reconciliation:

I was just as surprised; with ethnopolitical marginaliation of Easterners in the federal space, the sorry state of infrastructure in the East, the government-approved repression of Igbo groups with valid agitations for reparations, the stifling of conversations on the genocide. (@Bayo)

Overall, the narratives of the Biafran famine from the aforementioned excerpts serve a ‘moral function’ and a ‘temporal function’ (Selimovic 2015). The narratives, insofar as they are portraying the perceptions of the narrators, have a moral contest at their core, as though actors on either side of the famine as natural and famine as crime divide are trying to justify or vilify the experiences and roles of the other. There is also a temporal relation inherent in the narratives of the Igbos who considered the famine a crime. This temporality concerns how that violence of the past against the Igbos is still ‘ongoing’. They draw on contemporary structural suppression and violent crackdown on protesters in the south-eastern states as further signs that the past violence is still ongoing in the present. In that regard, they have inserted hashtags such as #StopBiafraKillings, and the post by @Chukwudi that says ‘What you saw was (is still ongoing)’, which demonstrates the ongoing perception among the Igbos that the marginalisation of the Igbo-dominated states and the operation of security forces in the south-east region are a continuation of the killings that resulted through starvation during the Civil War. Thus, they are using the remembrance of the famine on social media to, at the same time, draw attention to and protest against contemporary politics, including the continued militarisation of the Igbo-dominated south-east states and the killing of those protesting for the cause of Biafra: ‘What you saw was (is still ongoing) the Edomite British Govt GENOCIDE by Air, Land and sea blockade of Hebrew Biafra so as to steal oil and gas. 3.5 million People killed and still counting’ (@Chukwudi).

The reference to Hebrew Biafra by the above user seeks to draw parallels between Biafra and the persecution of Israel (Hebrew). Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that unexpected outcomes are emerging from these frictional encounters. As Tsing argued, encounters across differences, despite their messiness, have traces of ‘creative qualities of interconnection’ (Tsing 2004). For example, the excerpt below emphasises the potential changes that can result from creating an open space for people to share their post-war experiences and memories:

You see how civil and interactive most of the comments here are, this goes to show how powerful we can be when this country is restructured. When we hide from the truth, that wound will never heal. Let’s talk about our past, then find a path to a lasting solution. (@Amanda)

Thus, by leveraging spaces on social media to vent about memories of the famine and talk about experiences and traumas that communities still carry, an opening for reconciliation is being carved out, which, if taken up constructively, can be a path to making peace with the past.

Hero victims

An important way in which social media is being used is for honouring the memories of the victims. Besides defining the famine as a deliberate policy of extermination, and identifying perpetrators, some users are using social media to honour victims of the famine whose stories have been written out of the national memorialisation landscape. This is necessary, given that the national monuments and commemorations organised by the government honour only the national heroes who fought on the side of the Nigerian government. In particular, Twitter users have employed the term ‘BiafraHeroes’ to represent them on 30 May, as a rejection of both the government’s ‘NationalHeroes’ celebration and its 15 January date. Take the posts by the users below on 30 May 2021 as an illustration:

2 million Biafran civilians perished from famine during the Nigerian naval blockade. Nigeria realized that defeat was looming for them and they resorted to blocking the food supplies to Biafra which was a war crime. No one has been prosecuted till today. #BiafraHeroesDay2021 (@Zoella)

As my PERSONAL #SitAtHome reaches its 15^th hour, may the souls of my heroes: Emeka Ekwenugo, Peter Ejimakor, Ekpechukwu, Steven, Iroanya and all who died fighting for #Biafra REST IN PEACE. Ditto for my childhood playmates who succumbed to starvation. (@Akon)

In addition, the use of the label ‘Heroes’ for those on the Biafran side who died from starvation is a significant expression and ascription of agency to the deceased, and a rejection of the victim label that is normally assigned to them. Another user tweeted on 31 May 2021: ‘Only in an animal kingdom will 3 million people die through direct war and a deliberate policy of starvation and not a day is set aside to memorialize them’ (@Kelechi).

His post was retweeted more than 4000 times with about 10,000 likes. These are some of the replies:

In Honor of our fallen heroes, we will keep the candle light Candle burning.

OZOEMENA #BiafraHeroesDay2021 (@Dean).

The Nigerian state has deliberately sought to wipe out all memory of the war and incidents that led to it. The Igbo simply ask that a day must be set aside to remember those that fell, on both sides. (@Ceaser)

Again, from these replies, it can be seen that the refusal of the Nigerian government to set aside a day to commemorate the Igbos who died in the war still constitutes a sore point in the memory of the Igbos. Another point that emerges is that most of the images posted to remember the Biafra famine on Twitter take the form of what Chouliaraki calls ‘vulnerability as bare life’ (cited in Kotilainen 2016). These are representations of famine that portray suffering bodies, usually Africans, in most cases malnourished children, who are depicted in masses, sometimes naked, with passive expressions, appearing weak, in a state of extreme suffering, and in need of help from the spectators. They bear a strong resemblance to Western representations of the colonies in photographs taken in the late nineteenth century, which were prevalent, for example, in the iconography of Biafra and the Ethiopian famine of the 1960s and 1980s (Kotilainen 2016). This seems to suggest that there is a need to visually perform and depict sufferings related to famine in shocking and extraordinary forms for their accounts to be deemed worthy of attention. Hence, in the next section, I point to often taken-for-granted agentive representations of the Biafran famine in which those remembering are projecting not their passivity but the ingenious tactics they resorted to in order to survive.

Expression of agency

Some users remember the famine through expressions of the agency and the strategies the affected used for survival:

My mum told me about @BiafraHouse she survived because my grandmother was held captive by the army and she started cooking for the army in the camp from their she will get little food and give my mum and she siblings. #BiafraRemembranceDay #BiafraHeroesDay2021 (@ChuChu).

Damn my parents really survived a fucking genocide.

Over 3 million igbo ppl died between 1966 and 1970, almost ¾ of which were children and both my parents were kids during the war. My dad’s family deadass ate roasted plantain skins during the famine caused by the blockade to avoid starving to death.

It’s a lil crazy when you think about it. My mum’s family were luckier, they went to stay with yoruba friends for a few years and had access to farmland they could cultivate themselves. (@DIANA)

The above tweets show the lengths to which those who experienced hunger went to survive, including eating roasted plantain skins to stay alive. The gendered dimensions of starvation and memory are also captured in the story of @ChuChu whose grandmother was held ‘captive by the army’ to be a cook for them, and how that meant she could sneak a little food out for her children. But in all of these atrocious experiences of the Igbos, there is also the story of well-meaning and humane people from the other ethnic groups, like the Yoruba friends of @DIANA’s mum, who gave them a place to stay as well as farmlands. Stories of these people are not preserved and retold in memorial sites, but they are now being kept alive on social media by those who were witnesses to their good deeds and humanity. In addition to these narrations of survival stories, the above tweets, such as that of @DIANA who agonised that ‘Damn my parents really survived a genocide’, are indicative of the transmission of traumatic experiences to a subsequent generation, who are now using social media to relive the experiences of their parents. This process, Volkan argues, is rife in situations where the predecessor generations have been unable to mourn. Younger generations may be able to reverse the humiliation or seek justice for the harms their relatives suffered from another group. Thus, in this way, they can transmit the shared trauma in the form of a ‘deposited image’, which the subsequent generation has to deal with, failing which they too pass on the mental representation of the traumatic event to the succeeding generation (Volkan 2001, 87–88). Nigeria’s constriction of the space for an alternative memorialisation of the Biafran suffering has prompted the younger generation to leverage social media sites as platforms to air the traumatic experiences of their parents during the Biafran famine.

An important observation from the comments of those representing the memory of the Biafra famine as a mass atrocity is that the main actors driving these remembrance practices are oftentimes child survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the famine. This can be gathered from posts such as that of @ChuChu, who said ‘My mum told me about @BiafraHouse she survived because my grandmother was held captive’. This implies that these memories are mostly being represented by a subsequent generation who may not have witnessed these atrocities themselves, but are telling the stories their parents and grandparents did not get the chance to tell. The new media has empowered their offspring to broadcast their stories. These young people are, in essence, carriers or conveyors of the collective memory of the sufferings and trauma of a generation that has hitherto let their experiences remain underground and shared their stories in hushed tunes in the private sphere. @ChuChu above was thus bearing witness to the trauma of three generations: hers, her mother’s, and her grandmother’s. @ChuChu’s trauma, thus, constitutes a ‘post-memory’ which refers to the strong connection of the second generation of those who witnessed traumatic experiences with the collective trauma of their progenitors. These are experiences that preceded their birth but are so engrained in their transmission that they constitute a memory in their own right (Hirsch 2008, 106–107). Hence, social media is now functioning as a space through which these transgenerational memories of the Biafra famine are being narrated and reconstructed.

Conclusion

This article has unpacked the role of social media in the remembrance of the Biafra famine and the actors at the forefront of this digital memorialisation efforts. It argued that given the absence of any Biafra famine memory narratives in the official post-civil war memory landscape of Nigeria, social media has emerged as a site where silence around the Biafra famine and indeed other contested issues about the civil war are disrupted, and what happened is remembered and disputed. Users have leveraged Twitter as a platform to resist the silencing of the Biafra narratives on the famine and the discourses of the famine as a natural and inevitable consequence of war as perpetuated by the Nigerian government. They have done so by bringing to the fore the human actions and inactions that legitimised the food blockade on Biafra, which led to millions of Igbos starving to death. They also used the platform to identify the perpetrators, both local and external, while at the same time honouring and memorialising the agency of victims and survivors of the famine who have not been given a space to be remembered by the Nigerian government. The actors are of a post-memory generation who did not experience the Biafra war or were still children when the war broke out. However, they have come to personalise the traumatic experiences of their progenitors as their own and now use social media to push for remembrance of and accountability for the Biafra famine atrocities.

The findings from this study have a number of critical implications. The absence of the Biafra famine in Nigeria’s official civil war memory landscape reveals that compared to other atrocities, famine violence is rarely recognised in memorialisation efforts in societies affected by conflicts. In addition, as social media is used for remembrance and grieving of losses during the famine, the narratives projected by people on these sites are also a form of ‘political protests’ (Bernal 2013, 252) against the failings of the state. The people on these platforms are not only protesting the silence of the state regarding the Biafra famine but also contesting the dominant narratives of the famine from the past, pointing to the actors whose experiences are acknowledged and those who are excluded.

Furthermore, the rise of digital memorial platforms is unmooring the exclusive capacity of those in authority to shape how the past is remembered. It is returning power and voice to marginalised communities who have been excluded from the national remembrance discourses. It gives them a sense of invincibility, as it were, especially in repressive environments and settings where offline participation in alternative memorial practices can elicit violent suppression from the state. This also brings to the fore another challenge faced by digital technologies in conflict-affected settings. Specifically, they can also be targets of anti-resistance structures, as could be seen by the banning of Twitter by the Nigerian government in 2021. Furthermore, while digital technologies can empower marginalised actors, they can also be used to reinforce local power imbalances and hegemonic agendas (Tellidis and Kappler 2016, 77). This means that digital technologies should not be romanticised as the definitive antidote to repressive memorialisation regimes, but as sites that are under constant construction and reconstruction by social and political forces. Ultimately, these narratives of loss, grieving and exclusion reveal that memory of the Biafra famine is still contested and raises significant issues that need to be addressed for durable peace and reconciliation to be attained in Nigeria.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor Camilla Orjuela and Professor Swati Parashar for their comments on earlier drafts, and to the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Obinna Chukwunenye Nweke

Obinna Chukwunenye Nweke holds a PhD from the University of Otago. His research focuses on memory politics and critical approaches to peacebuilding.

Notes

1 The post violated Twitter’s policy on ‘abusive behaviour’ (see Maclean 2021).

2 The government rescinded the ban seven months later, claiming that Twitter had accepted its demands (Maclean 2022).

3 This refers to oil in vernacular. Some of the language used in the tweets is grammatically incorrect, but they have been reproduced faithfully here to preserve the voice of the actors.