Lost history · 1968–1970
No matching image yet, so this page uses a plain title card instead of a photo.
During the civil war, a widened stretch of road at Uli took old propeller planes full of food every night, with no lights, no radar and fighter planes waiting above.
In 1968 Biafra, the breakaway Eastern Region, was cut off. Nigeria's land and sea blockade had become almost total by June of that year, and food was running out. Reports came out of children starving in huge numbers, and by 1969 some reports put the toll at more than a thousand children dying every day. The pictures of children with swollen bellies from kwashiorkor went round the world on television, maybe the first time a famine had been watched live in living rooms like that.
There was one way in that still worked, and it was through the air, after dark. The planes came down at a place called Uli, in what is now Anambra State. It had a code name, Airstrip Annabelle. It wasn't really an airport at all. It was a stretch of road that had been widened so planes could land on it. There were no instruments and no navigation equipment. For a while it was the only working landing ground Biafra had.
Even so, at the height of the airlift it was said to be the second-busiest airport in Africa, behind only Johannesburg. Planes flew in from the island of São Tomé, from Fernando Po (now Bioko), from Cotonou in what was then Dahomey, and from Libreville in Gabon. Each plane might make as many as four round trips in a single night.
Most of this wasn't run by governments. The United Nations stayed out of it, and so did most countries, which saw the war as Nigeria's internal affair. The airlift was mainly the work of churches, Catholic and Protestant, together with charities. Their joint operation was called Joint Church Aid. Pilots joked that the initials JCA stood for "Jesus Christ Airlines".
The flights came at night because Nigerian aircraft controlled the sky by day. So the relief planes flew without lights. They came in low over the treetops, and the runway lights at Uli were switched on only for a few seconds, just long enough to land, because even that brief glow could guide an attacking plane to the strip.
There was no radar. Pilots kept apart from each other by talking on the radio, cockpit to cockpit, while circling in the dark. Sometimes an enemy plane was nearby and they had to wait up there until the all-clear. The planes hunting them were flown by mercenaries, who taunted the relief pilots over the radio and used call signs like "Genocide". Messages from the ground were in code. "No landing lights" meant the airstrip was being bombed.
Once a plane was down, the crew often had to jump out and take cover in trenches beside the runway. Three aircraft were destroyed on the ground at Uli. The planes themselves were mostly worn-out propeller airliners, DC-6s and DC-7s and old Constellations, going cheap because the airlines were switching to jets. Many had their registration numbers removed, because Nigeria and most of the world called these flights illegal.
Unloading got much faster as the months went on. It went from over two hours a plane to about twenty minutes, often with an attack coming or expected. Most of the people doing it were volunteers who had never done anything like it before. The pilots were almost the only trained hands in the whole operation.
At its peak in 1969, the airlift was bringing in about 250 tonnes of food a night. Somewhere between one and a half and two million people depended on relief food, and most of it came through Uli. Even then it was nowhere near enough. One estimate from late 1968 said it covered less than a tenth of what the starving population needed. One food remembered from that time is salted, dried stockfish, a protein the children badly lacked.
Some pilots also agreed to carry dangerous loads like cooking fuel, which could burn, and salt, which eats into an aircraft's metal. On the way out, some planes carried children, orphans or sick children going for treatment. On São Tomé, children with kwashiorkor were nursed back to health.
Joint Church Aid flew over 5,300 missions and lifted about 60,000 tons of aid. The whole effort is reckoned to be the biggest civilian airlift ever, and the biggest non-military airlift of any kind after Berlin in 1948 and 1949. It lasted half as long again as Berlin did. It's estimated to have saved more than a million lives.
The cost was real. At least 29 relief pilots and crew were killed, in crashes or by Nigerian forces. One of them was August Martin, the first Black American to fly for a commercial airline and a former Tuskegee Airman, who died when his plane crashed during the airlift. In June 1969 Nigerian forces shot down a Red Cross DC-7, killing three relief workers.
Nigeria had accused the flights of carrying weapons, but nobody has ever proved it. What's beyond argument is the picture of that dark road at Uli, with old planes dropping out of the night onto it, again and again, for months.
