Lost history · 1 June 1969
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In the middle of a blockade and a famine, Biafra's leaders sat down and wrote a plan for the country they hoped to build. Ojukwu read it out in a small Mbaise town.
By the middle of 1969, Biafra was in a terrible state. The Eastern Region had broken away from Nigeria in 1967, after killings of Easterners living in other parts of the country in 1966 and 1967. A war followed, and Nigeria's blockade shut off food and supplies. Biafra's territory kept shrinking. By the end of the war in January 1970, more than two million people had died.
In the middle of all that, on 1 June 1969, Biafra's head of state, General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, stood up in Ahiara and gave a speech. Ahiara is a town in Mbaise, in what is now Imo State. The speech was called "The Ahiara Declaration: The Principles of the Biafran Revolution". Most people just call it the Ahiara Declaration. It set out the kind of society Biafra said it was fighting for, one built on human dignity, social justice and leaders who answer to the people.
It's an odd thing to think about. A country fighting for its life, with children starving and its land cut down to a pocket, takes time to write out in detail what kind of nation it means to be. But that's what happened. You could read it as desperation. You could also read it as a people refusing to be defined only by the war.
The words weren't Ojukwu's alone. The document was written by Biafra's National Guidance Committee, a group set up to work out the ideas behind the new state. One of its members was Chinua Achebe, already famous for Things Fall Apart. According to Achebe's biographer, the committee drafted several documents, and this was one of them.
The declaration was modelled on the Arusha Declaration of 1967, the statement in which Tanzania's president Julius Nyerere set out his vision of African socialism and self-reliance. Biafra's version took ideas from traditional Igbo ways of running communities and mixed them with the politics of the 1960s, including the idea of being "non-aligned", not belonging to either side in the Cold War.
It didn't spare anyone. It attacked corruption in Nigeria, but it also attacked corruption in Biafra itself, which is unusual for a wartime speech. It called on Biafrans to be patriotic and to keep going, and it told them their suffering had moral worth.
Then it turned outward, and this is the part people remember. Ojukwu went after Britain hard. Britain was supplying arms to Nigeria, and the speech accused what it called the Anglo-Saxon branch of the white race of having sinned against the world again and again.
The sharpest point was about the blockade. The speech said that even in the two world wars, when white countries blockaded each other, some allowance was made for food and basics for women, children and civilians. Biafra, it said, was the only recent case where a whole people had been treated like this. Then it asked the obvious question: was the difference that these were black women, black children and black civilians?
The historian Alexis Heraclides saw the declaration as the moment Biafra moved into a more radical political phase.
The declaration painted the war as more than a fight to break away. It called it the latest round in the black man's long struggle to be treated as fully human. It named what it saw as the enemies: racism, Arab-Muslim expansion and white economic imperialism, with the Soviet Union playing a smaller part. Soviet arms, like British ones, were going to Nigeria.
It also insisted it wasn't simply resisting. The aim, it said, was to build a healthy, progressive state that black people everywhere could be proud of. "Nigerianism", in the speech's view, had been a system of opportunism and exploitation, and those evils were what had broken the federation apart in the first place.
The speech also made a bitter argument about self-determination. The world's powers had declared it a right that couldn't be taken away. But when Biafrans tried to use it, the speech said, they learned it applied only to white people.
You don't have to agree with every line to see why it still gets read. It was written by people who knew they might lose, setting out ideals for a country that might never exist. Seven months later, it didn't. Biafra surrendered in January 1970 and was taken back into Nigeria. Ojukwu went into exile, and he came home under a pardon in 1983. That same year, 1969, Biafra had also adopted a constitution that observers at the time counted among the most progressive in Africa. Like the declaration, it borrowed from the way Igbo communities had long governed themselves, and from the new political ideas of the decade.
The Ahiara Declaration was never put into practice. What survives is the document, and the fact that it was read out in an ordinary Mbaise town, by people who were still planning a future while the war closed in around them.
