In an interview on Nigeria

Your next one is Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Chimamanda Adichie broke the ice in writing about the Biafran war. There was a kind of whispering on the subject in public life but no one ever talked about it that much and I’d been wanting for a long time to read something about that conflict, because it underpins some of what is happening in modern-day Nigeria, in particular the way people in the east relate to the rest of the country. It also played into this much bigger idea of regionalism and the tensions between different parts. Here’s someone who was not alive when the Biafran war took place – maybe it had to be someone like that to draw out the effect and impact of that conflict. Biafra is one of those conflicts that was massive at the time but is pretty much forgotten today in the West.

She evokes well this notion of a nation that flared and died and the passion that went into that and why this was something which had this very deep appeal for a part of the nation which, depending on your point of view, was either marginalised or saw itself as special. Unless you travel in the east, you don’t realise how resonant that still is today. Biafra will be mentioned by the guy in the roadside Coke stall and the chap you chat to outside the church. The unanswered question, because the nation collapsed so quickly, is how homelands created in response to genuine suffering – in this case the pogroms against the Igbo people – can become over time states which are quite hostile to outsiders. The flip side of being a safe haven, a sanctuary, if you’re not from that group, is that it can seem a very hostile and forbidding place. You have people in the Niger Delta who are very glad Biafra didn’t come to pass because they would have been the minority group in this new state and their argument is: ‘From what we could see, the oppressed Igbos were going to turn into the next oppressors.’ The idea is only hinted at in Half of a Yellow Sun, but as a species we sometimes struggle to grasp the obvious point that oppressed people can become oppressors. Liberia is a classic example.

What do you think of the commonly voiced argument that Biafra offers a miraculous example of reconciliation after an incredibly vicious conflict? That this is perhaps something people don’t celebrate enough, the fact that Africa, along with all its violence and trauma, offers very unusual examples of reconciliation. Biafra collapsed and then just went back to being part of Nigeria again. In Eritrea, the rebels went into the mountains and spent 30 years fighting Ethiopian rule.

I haven’t studied this closely but I think a mix of nobility and realpolitik probably brought this about. The journalist Kaye Whiteman, who was around at the time, told me: ‘There was a chemistry arising from the evolution of the war that somehow seemed to diminish the lust for revenge.’ I think that had an international dimension in that, rightly or wrongly, the Biafrans succeeded in creating a sense that they were the victims, involved in an honourable attempt to create a safe homeland, up against an evil dictatorship that would stop at nothing. I suspect the sensible people in the Nigerian government realised they would become world-wide pariahs if they went on a pogrom against Biafra. On the Biafran side, they were losing the war and if they continued to resist, they would have been destroyed. I think there was a certain element of pragmatism under duress. There is something called MASSOB, The Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra, and its members get arrested from time to time, but you’re right, there’s nothing like the EPLF.

Maybe the oil helped?

Maybe. The oil was just being tapped, things were on the up and everyone thought, ‘Rather than destroy this through fighting, maybe we can all get a piece of the pie.’