Crisis and conflict In Nigeria:
Date
1971
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
London: Oxford University Press, Amen House, E.c.4
Abstract
War and peace: July 1967-January 1970; Documents: July 1967-January 1970; Epilogue; An outline calendar of events.
Description
With the outbreak of hostilities on 6 July, the verifiability of the statements included in the documentation of these four years of crisis assumes added complexity. The commonplace that when war comes the first casualty is truth is here compounded by the flood of partisan literature whose quality is by no means commensurate with its quantity, by the total absence of official casualty figures, by the general reluctance to allow war correspondents to fulfil their conventional role, and by the sometimes Bond-like cloaked and covert moves from foreign diplomats, international organizations, oil companies, public relations agencies, roving emissaries, mercenaries, arms-dealers, and blockade busters as well as by the controversial humanitarian and Church bodies that figured so prominently in one headlined context or another over these thirty months. All conjure up J. P. Clark’s imagery in his ‘Casualties 1966/68’.
The detailed ebb and flow of the military campaign is barely touched on in this essentially politically focused narrative. Those who are looking for a carefully chronicled record of the fighting will not find it here. The materials on which the text is based and from which the documentation has been drawn are necessarily but a fraction of those collected in several years’ active researching, and this in turn is but a proportion of that consulted. Much of its origin is identified in the textual footnotes and in the bibliographical notice included in this volume. There are three points on sources that need to be made in addition to the guidelines set out in the Preface to Volume I. Firstly, whereas the grave absence of Nigerian newspapers in British universities and research libraries for the period from January 1966 to July 1967 may endow citations from that primary source with an enhanced value in this country, their growing availability in the U.K. from August 1967 onwards has allowed Volume II to devote greater attention to the well-preserved, readily accessible, and often indexed files of the leading British newspapers and journals. In the event, the handling of the civil war by Fleet Street was to result in something like a subordinate war in its own right; but this is not a premise to develop here. Secondly, while many of Ojukwu’s speeches have subsequently been published in book form, they are reproduced here as they were publicized at the time. Thirdly, by and large, Biafran propaganda documentation in Nigerian libraries and archival repositories has not yet reached the scale of holdings in Europe and America, so that cross-references to such sources in this volume are additionally justified. Because of the internationalizing scale of the civil war and of the escalating level of propaganda, above all in its forum of publicized peace talks and the disputatious context of humanitarian intervention, the amount of documentation available to the researcher working in the period covered by Volume II is considerably greater than that to hand for the period of Volume I. The selection of materials for inclusion has thus been a far harder task. The narrative, too, spread over a much longer time span, has perforce been a matter of closer compression. Once more, political speeches broadcast over the radio have retained a high degree of documentary importance, especially where they have not subsequently appeared in print (e.g., the Mid-West in August and September 1967). And once again, for a day-by-day diary of events, there are few better sources than the pages of Africa Research Bulletin and West Africa.