The spirit of the Founding Fathers is not always so easy to find in America itself. The American left, in particular, has not only lost it, but has actively turned against it. In one little-noted area of West Africa, however, that spirit is alive and well.
In the southeastern portion of present-day Nigeria, Biafra still exists. While the world’s attention has been focused elsewhere, Biafra’s drive for independence is once again gathering steam. Nigeria has always been a hybrid, artificial state, created when the British arbitrarily stitched together the Muslim North and the Christian South. Muslims did what Muslims tend to do in such situations: they began waging jihad.
The prime minister of Nigeria in the early 1960s, Mallam Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, told the British just before they granted independence to Nigeria that this would happen: “We do not want, Sir, our Southern neighbors to interfere in our development,” he said. “I should like to make it clear to you that if the British quitted Nigeria now at this stage, the Northern people would continue their interrupted conquest to the sea.” That is, they would conquer and subjugate the Christian areas of the new nation.
That is exactly what they set out to do. In Sept. 1966, Islamic jihadis in Nigeria massacred 30,000 Igbos, the Christians who comprised the nation’s third-largest ethnic group and constituted the people of Biafra. It was not the first such massacre; in fact, it was the last straw. The Christians of Biafra determined to secure their people from further such jihad attacks, and declared their independence on May 30, 1967.
The Muslims of the north of Nigeria, however, were not any more disposed to let the breakaway republic go than the British were in 1776. The war lasted until 1970. When it was over, Biafra was crushed, and three million Biafrans were dead, mostly from ethnic cleansing and the starvation that resulted from a Nigerian blockade.
Nigeria didn’t go it alone. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was eager to aid in the jihad against Biafra. He sent planes to bomb Igbo villages, killing ten thousands of people who had no defense. Algeria and Sudan both felt the call of Islamic solidarity as well, and likewise helped the Nigerians crush Biafra.
Meanwhile, the West’s behavior in this struggle for independence was, to put it charitably, less than honorable. The U.S. did nothing at all. To its everlasting shame, Britain worked energetically to destroy the new state, helping the Nigerian military enforce the blockade of Biafra.
Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, the president of Biafra, explained what was at stake in a June 1969 speech, “The Ahiara Declaration: The Principles of the Biafran Revolution.” Ojukwu explained that “the Biafran struggle is, on another plane, a resistance to the Arab-Muslim expansionism which has menaced and ravaged the African continent for twelve centuries. As early as the first quarter of the seventh century, the Arabs, a people from the Near-East, evolved Islam not just as a religion, but as a cover for their insatiable territorial ambitions.”
Ojukwu noted that “our Biafran ancestors remained immune from the Islamic contagion. From the middle years of the last century Christianity was established in our land. In this way we came to be a predominantly Christian people. We came to stand out as a non-Muslim island in a raging Islamic sea.”
It was this that made it imperative that Biafra had to be crushed. “It is now evident,” Ojukwu said, “why the fanatic Arab-Muslim states like Algeria, Egypt and the Sudan have come out openly and massively to support and aid Nigeria in her present war of genocide against us. These states see militant Arabism as a powerful instrument for attaining power in the world. Biafra is one of the few African states untainted by Islam. Therefore, to militant Arabism, Biafra is a stumbling block to their plan for controlling the whole continent.”
And it still is.
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The jihad genocide of Christians in Nigeria is one of the great unreported stories of our age. Just as the New York Times, to its everlasting shame, downplayed the severity and significance of the Communist-induced Ukrainian famine in the 1930s, so today, the Times and its establishment media comrades for the most part just haven’t gotten around to noticing that Islamic jihadis are murdering Christians on a more or less daily basis in Nigeria, and working hard to establish a caliphate in Africa’s most populous country. Yet the people of Biafra are once again determined to maintain their way of life and resist the advancing jihad.
The United States of Biafra declared Biafran independence once again on November 29, 2024. The Biafrans are once again putting their lives on the line to defend their land from the relentlessly advancing jihad. Will the world ignore them once again? Will Britain once again actively aid the bloody oppressors?
Whatever happens, the Biafrans are showing us yet again that the desire for freedom cannot be extinguished from the human heart. And because that is true, the tyrant’s victory can never be total.
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