Book Review: "The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend" by Frederick Forsyth

For the people of my generation, Biafra is indelible associated with war in Nigeria and the mass starvation of children. Mothers admonishing their kids to eat all their veggies and not to be picky because there were kids in Biafra starving to death was a common reproach.

I remember our school doing a canned food and clothes drive to send via Catholic charities and Caritas to Biafra and being told a very G version of what was happening there. But as all things in this world, that event eventually phased out of our attention when the issue was “solved” and we continued our lives.

I had recently discovered that Frederick Forsyth was in Biafra as a journalist during the war and had written a book about it. This book is not quite a historian’s review of what happened but a witness account of the politics that drove the war and the immediate consequences of it.

Great Britain’s love affair with all things Muslim back in the day is hard to understand, at least to me. This Islamophilic sentiment is the only thing that explain why the Brits backed the uneducated and economically poor Nigerian North which was heavily Islamic against the educated and economic developed Anglophile East Nigeria that split into Biafra.

I read somewhere else that Frederick Forsyth acknowledges his experiences in Nigeria made him try to write fiction. Perhaps as a way to exorcize what he saw in Biafra would be my guess.

Older folks may want to read the book as to refresh those old memories and the younger ones may want to read it so they know the tragic consequences of social engineering mixed a government with a sense of infallibility.