It has been nearly 50 years since Biafra’s bitter independence struggle, the inspiration for Frederick Forsyth’s bestselling The Dogs of War. Now a south London DJ currently imprisoned in Nigeria has taken up the battle, and Biafrans are once again fighting – and dying – for the dream of their own country
Tucked between the bus garage and the Christ Miracle Gospel Ministries church, Sandlings Close is one of the more non-descript parts of Peckham. There are no gritty high-rise flats, no bearded hipsters running pop-up restaurants. Instead, there are rows of modest, semi-detached council houses, most now privately owned.
It’s the sort of place that SE15’s best-known fictional resident, Derek Trotter, might have retired to had Trotters Independent Traders ever turned a profit. Behind the door of one of these homes, however, lies an organisation that dreams far bigger than just New York, Paris and Peckham.
Welcome to the unlikely headquarters of Radio Biafra, broadcasting every night to an army of Nigerian listeners – not just in Little Lagos, as Peckham is sometimes dubbed, but in 100 countries around the world. It looks like a pirate-radio station, but its agenda goes far beyond music and chat. In the words of Nnamdi Kanu, its director and former DJ in chief, ‘We want a free and independent Biafra. Or death.’
A free and independent where? Mention Biafra today, and most Britons would probably struggle to find its place on a map, never mind its place in one of Britain’s bloodiest colonial epilogues.
In fact, finding Biafra on a map is impossible these days. It existed for just two and a half years, from 1967 to 1970, when, less than a decade after Nigeria gained independence from Britain, the mainly Christian Igbo people formed a breakaway state in the south-east.
Angered by the massacre of tens of thousands of Igbos in the Muslim-dominated north, Biafra formed its own army, produced its own currency, and declared independence. The Igbos, who often describe themselves as the ‘Jews of Africa’, wanted their own Israel. They got something closer to holocaust.
Britain, which had drawn Nigeria’s borders arbitrarily, had little patience with locals trying to reshape colonial frontiers. London backed Nigeria’s army in strangling Biafra at birth, supplying weapons and turning a blind eye to a military blockade that resulted in the starvation of about a million people.
Long before Live Aid, it brought the world images of African famine, with emaciated children dying in front of the cameras. Mercenaries and weapons smugglers also ran amok, inspiring a young reporter on the ground called Frederick Forsyth to write his bestselling novel The Dogs of War. For the next few decades, the dream was all but abandoned, with many Igbos leaving Nigeria altogether.
Igbo's around the world unite
Today, Igbo people live everywhere from Canada and Dubai to China. The original Radio Biafra, a true pirate outfit, which broadcast propaganda from a jeep-mounted studio to avoid Nigerian warplanes, fell silent. But eight years ago Kanu restarted it from London, and as the 50th anniversary of the conflict looms, it is once more campaigning for secession. As Kanu once put it, ‘No amount of intimidation, arrest, torture, deprivation will stop Biafra from coming.’
This time, the campaign is also enjoying its very own ‘Brexit boost’. For if Britain doesn’t want to be part of the European superstate, supporters ask, why should Igbos remain part of a disastrous behemoth like Nigeria, with its 250 different ethnicities, 500 tongues and 170 million people?
After all, five decades on from the war, the Nigerian state has become a byword for inept, corrupt government, with the world’s 10th biggest oil reserves, yet 60 per cent of people living on less than $1 a day.
‘Brexit asked why Britain should remain in a system that does not fit it,’ says Emma Nmezu, a Radio Biafra DJ and supporter of Kanu’s movement Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).?
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