AD_34_1_2009_1_Introduction.pdf

(34 KB) Pobierz
Africa Development,
Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, 2009, pp. 1–7
© Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2009
(ISSN 0850-3907)
Legacies of Biafra: Violence, Identity and
Citizenship in Nigeria
Introduction
Ike Okonta*
Kate Meagher**
Nearly forty years after the event, the Nigerian Civil War still conjures up
powerful political images, within as well as outside Africa. Internationally,
the ‘Biafran War’, as it was called, recalls accounts of ethnic conflict,
starving children, and humanitarian intervention. Within Africa, it resonates
with the devastating consequences of failed nationalism, but also with a
tenacious demand for genuine citizenship and self-determination. In many
ways, these images have remained as divergent as they are relevant to
contemporary understandings of Africa. As a growing number of African
countries have succumbed to civil war and foreign intervention, it is a good
time to reflect on what was learned from the Biafran conflict, and what
was left unaddressed to trouble the fortunes of future generations.
The following collection of articles represents an interrogation of the
contemporary legacies of the Biafran experience. They explore how the
fault lines of the Nigerian Civil War have continued to shape political
trajectories in Nigeria and in Africa more broadly. In many ways, the Biafran
War was not just a Nigerian civil conflict; it was a resounding challenge to
the dreams of African nationhood, sending out tremors that echoed not just
across Africa, but around the world. The unsatisfactory resolution of issues
of identity, citizenship, and democracy that arose from that conflict continues
to reverberate in contemporary struggles in Nigeria and beyond.
* Junior Research Fellow in Politics, Department of Politics and International Relations,
St Peter’s College, University of Oxford. E-mail: ike.okonta@politics.ox.ac.uk.
**Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics and Political
Science. E-mail: k.meagher@lse.ac.uk.
kK**
Introduction.pmd
1
29/09/2009, 16:49
2
Africa Development,
Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, 2009
Reassessing the Legacies of Biafra
Within Nigeria, the Civil War and the dream of Biafran nationalism continues
to haunt contemporary processes of state-building. While Biafra lost the
Civil War, the conflict reshaped the political and economic character of Ni-
geria, intensifying the salience of ethnicity in the political process, with pro-
found implications for emerging institutions of resource control, citizenship,
and the prospect of democracy. The new institutional arrangements that
emerged in response to the war tended to mask the problems of Nigerian
statecraft rather than solve them. The fallout from the war continues to
influence the development of Nigerian institutions of governance and re-
source control, while failing to address smouldering grievances among the
Igbo and the southern minorities of the Niger Delta. Over the years, an
authoritarian and often negligent state has been met by ongoing challenges to
its legitimacy. At the same time, patterns of migration, trade, and civil or-
ganization have generated countervailing forces at the popular level, giving
rise to a resilient social fabric that has, so far, managed to weather violent
challenges to Nigerian statehood. But, amid the intense economic pressures
and mounting identity-based political mobilization since the 1990s, cracks
are beginning to show…
At the regional and international levels, the Biafran War catalyzed new
forms of international intervention motivated by humanitarian crisis as well
as by colonial politics and oil interests. The response of the global community
was shaped by international rivalries and political agendas as much as by
humanitarian concern – the latter often driven more by voters, churches,
and corporate interests than by states. Global famine relief efforts for Africa
and Médecins sans Frontières were both enduring products of the Biafran
conflict. Similar issues of humanitarian crisis, oil, and geopolitics are resurgent
in contemporary crises in the Niger Delta, and in the wider regional crisis in
Darfur. In short, Biafra, the Civil War, and their aftermath speak to the
continuing problems of statehood in Africa: the precarious balance between
ethnic identities and national polities, the extractive and authoritarian political
culture on the continent, and the concerned but often disruptive humanitarian
intrusions into sovereignty and political process.
Reflecting on Biafra and its consequences is not only of scholarly interest;
it is also a timely contribution to current events. The botched 2007 Nigerian
election has raised serious questions about the problems of democracy, not
only in Nigeria, but in Africa more widely. Mounting violence in the Niger
Delta continues to alarm and frustrate the international community, drawing
attention to ongoing problems of identity, oil, and separatist militias in south-
eastern Nigeria. As we near the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Biafran
Introduction.pmd
2
29/09/2009, 16:49
Okonta and Meagher: Legacies of Biafra: Violence, Identity and citizenship in Nigeria
3
War, and the fiftieth anniversary of Nigerian independence, it seems appropriate
to consider the legacies of this iconic conflict for political developments in
contemporary Africa.
The first two articles, by Ukoha Ukiwo and Kate Meagher, challenge the
perception that civil conflict in Africa is a product of ethnic diversity and
weak states. In the period since the Biafran War, they explore how state
violence rather than popular divisions has contributed to eroding national
cohesion from above, while, paradoxically, ethnic diversity and informal
institutions have contributed to knitting it together from below. A second pair
of articles, by Kathryn Nwajiaku and Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos,
investigates how Biafra has shaped contemporary challenges to the state,
from sub-national minorities in the Niger Delta to international assertions of
the ‘responsibility to protect’. Together, these four articles highlight three
broad themes: the role of violence in nation-building; the reimagining of Biafra
in ethnic struggles since the 1990s; and the implications of the Biafran conflict
for notions of citizenship in contemporary Africa.
This collection of articles takes up the challenge of assessing the Biafran
legacy, with a view to addressing silences and grappling with the underlying
challenges. More by happenstance than by design, the contributions presented
here are dominated by Igbo perspectives on the war, sometimes self-
consciously so. The workshop that originally gave rise to these papers involved
academics from across Nigeria and beyond, but intervening commitments
determined the final selection of articles. That said, these papers are very
much the product of critical discussions and comments that took place in
that forum, and explore the implications of the war in ways that resonate
with perceptions of other Nigerians as well as non-Nigerians.
Violence, Identity, and Citizenship
A strong theme running through most of these articles involves a challenge
to the notion that ethnic identity is a key source of violence in African soci-
eties. Explanations of the rising tide of civil war and violence in Africa have
routinely focused on ‘ancient tribal hatreds’ (Kaplan 1994) or the inherent
fragility of multi-ethnic African states (Young 2004). Ukiwo disputes this
type of explanation by tracing how primary ethnic allegiances are a product
of violent forms of statecraft, rather than the other way around. He shows,
along with most of the other contributions, that the Igbo were the ethnic
group with the highest commitment to federalism in Nigeria before the Civil
War, detailing how state violence, through acts of omission as much as
commission, has embedded ethnic and religious divisions across Nigerian
society, with a particularly negative effect on the sense of national belonging
among the Igbo.
Introduction.pmd
3
29/09/2009, 16:49
4
Africa Development,
Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, 2009
Starting from the opposite side of the question, contributions by Meagher
and Nwajiaku focus on the integrative role of popular identities amid the
divisive pressures of state violence. References are made to marriage and
trade across battle lines during the Civil War, and to the important role of
identity in knitting Nigerian society together through migration, economic
interdependence, and political mobilization. Nwajiaku highlights how the
pressures of minority status and the Civil War galvanized numerous groups
in the Niger Delta into an overaching Ijaw identity. Meagher emphasizes the
role of Igbo identity and economic informalization in creating inter-ethnic
frameworks of cohesion within Nigerian society, contrary to the conventional
assumption that identity and informalization erode national cohesion from
below. However, both contributions support Ukiwo’s contention that state
involvement or complicity in mounting violence in the Niger Delta and in
Shari’a-related riots, are beginning to destroy the integrative dimensions of
identity, making Nigerian society increasingly vulnerable to the identity-based
fractures that precipitated the Civil War. Similar patterns of popular cohesion
and political violence are evident in a number of other African societies – in
Rwanda, Somalia, Sierra Leone – to the extent that international organizations
are now turning to indigenous institutions rather than political nationalism as
mechanisms of conflict resolution (ECA 2007; Jutting et al. 2007).
Turning to the second theme, these articles trace the changing meanings
of Biafra within Nigerian society and beyond. Born of a commitment to
federalism, rather than from a desire for separatism, Biafra did not begin as
a bid for identity politics, but as a call for a more just and inclusive nationalism.
This icon of disillusioned nationalism has given Biafra a resonance that has
not only inspired the formation of contemporary organizations of frustrated
Igbo youth, such as MASSOB, but has developed cross-ethnic appeal as a
rallying symbol for Ijaw nationalist struggles in the Niger Delta. Nwajiaku’s
article shows that this is the more surprising since the Ijaw identified with
the Federal side in the original Civil War, but are now actively reimagining
themselves as champions of the Biafran cause.
The contribution by Pérouse de Montclos considers the ways in which
Biafra has been reimagined in the international community. As Africa becomes
the centre of humanitarian efforts, Biafra continues to symbolize the legitimacy
of these endeavours – the protection of persecuted peoples from starvation
and genocide – despite the fact that contemporary African conflicts are
considerably more complex than these simple Biafran narratives can
accommodate. In contemporary situations where the perpetrators of genocide
may be among the refugees, and supplies may be assisting violent militias
rather than defending armies, the Biafran imaginary is mobilized to gloss
Introduction.pmd
4
29/09/2009, 16:49
Okonta and Meagher: Legacies of Biafra: Violence, Identity and citizenship in Nigeria
5
over the contradictions and depoliticize the intervention, much as it was in
the time of the original Biafran conflict, when the tangle of international
economic, political, and religious interests was cloaked in a benevolent
‘responsibility to protect’.
Both Ukiwo and Nwajiaku also highlight the generational issues embedded
in the contemporary reimagining of Biafra. While Biafra was very much a
product of elite politics in the 1960s, it has been reappropriated since the
1990s as a symbol of subaltern politics. Ukiwo points out that popular
organizations espousing the revival of Biafra were not championed by Igbo
elites, or even by Ojukwu himself. Instead, Biafra has been appropriated by
Igbo diaspora groups in the US and disaffected Igbo and Delta youth,
disillusioned with the corruption and cliental pacts of their elites, and impatient
with the failures of military rule, democracy and neo-liberal reforms to deliver
inclusive forms of citizenship. By appropriating the trappings of statehood
from the original Biafra – the flag, the currency, even an embassy – these
relatively marginalized groups have acquired a symbolic power and prominence
above their political weight, enhancing the visibility as well as the threat of
their message of democratic disappointment.
The final theme touches on the issues of citizenship. The legacies of
Biafra speak of the failure of the Nigerian state to address popular demands
for a more just and equitable form of citizenship. As these articles show, it is
a failure that has reverberated in the form of ethnic discord and civil conflict,
not only in Nigeria, but in societies across Africa. In the globalized
circumstances of contemporary African struggles, however, demands for
greater citizenship rights are as likely to bypass as to discipline the state.
International involvement, through humanitarian organizations and human
rights NGOs, has changed the equation through which demands for citizenship
influence governance and state-building. As Pérouse de Montclos points out,
rebel movements that mobilize international sympathy and assistance are
increasingly able to punch above their weight. In some cases, this may prolong
conflict and increase, rather than ease, the suffering of excluded populations.
Worse still, as hinted at in the contributions of Ukiwo and Pérouse de
Montclos, excessive international intervention, even with the best of intentions,
poses a threat to sovereignty, weakening the institutions and political
confidence necessary to the emergence of genuine citizenship.
Moreover, as the original Biafran conflict revealed, diasporas play an
important role in shaping notions of citizenship. Biafra was a creation of the
Igbo diaspora in other regions of Nigeria, and the Igbo diaspora in the US
and UK have played a key role in the contemporary revival of the Biafran
cause. In an era in which remittances outstrip foreign aid by nearly two to
Introduction.pmd
5
29/09/2009, 16:49

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin