Circle of Willis
Well-known member
The Biafran War is something of a meme on account of how jumbled up its warring sides' backers were, and less humorously it was also the site of a major famine. In one corner you had Nigeria, which had just gone through two coups within six months and violent pogroms targeted at the Igbo ethnic group, considered to have been among the main beneficiaries of the first coup, resulting in 8-30,000 deaths and the flight of another million Igbos to the southeast; and on the other you had the secessionist Biafran Republic located in said southeast, dominated by the Igbos and containing much of Nigeria's oil resources.
Historically the war ended in a Nigerian victory, although there are still some Biafran nationalists even to this day. Ethnic and religious tensions in Nigeria itself from before the war, of which the Igbos & Biafran nationalism are only one part, don't seem to have abated - the Igbo are mostly Christians with a political tradition of local democracy, in opposition to the Muslim northern Nigerians from the territories of the Sokoto Caliphate & other emirates, and the latter's countercoup in 1966 was the immediate trigger for the Biafran declaration of independence alongside the aforementioned massacres of Igbo in the north - and if anything, it's intensified in the last 20 years or so. But, what if Biafra had managed to win its independence? Could such an outcome at minimum presage the breakdown of Nigeria into additional smaller ethnostates (a Yorubaland or Sokoto, for example) or even encourage the breakdown of the post-colonial borders across Africa?
Historically the war ended in a Nigerian victory, although there are still some Biafran nationalists even to this day. Ethnic and religious tensions in Nigeria itself from before the war, of which the Igbos & Biafran nationalism are only one part, don't seem to have abated - the Igbo are mostly Christians with a political tradition of local democracy, in opposition to the Muslim northern Nigerians from the territories of the Sokoto Caliphate & other emirates, and the latter's countercoup in 1966 was the immediate trigger for the Biafran declaration of independence alongside the aforementioned massacres of Igbo in the north - and if anything, it's intensified in the last 20 years or so. But, what if Biafra had managed to win its independence? Could such an outcome at minimum presage the breakdown of Nigeria into additional smaller ethnostates (a Yorubaland or Sokoto, for example) or even encourage the breakdown of the post-colonial borders across Africa?