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Reviewed by:
  • Women and Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War
  • Felix K. Ekechi
Egodi uchendu. Women and Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2007. xviii + 307 pp. Photographs. Maps. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $24.95. Paper.

The year 2007 marked the thirty-seventh anniversary of the end of the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–70), a war viewed by many as “the most notorious conflict... witnessed in Africa” before the atrocities in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda (10). It is estimated that more than one million Igbo of Eastern Nigeria lost their lives at the hands of Nigerian soldiers and their foreign supporters, who perpetrated the “heinous crime of genocide” (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Biafra Revisited [African Renaissance, 2006], 1).

Most accounts of the Nigeria-Biafra War concentrate on the sociopolitical and religious divide between the Igbo and the Hausa-Fulani of Northern Nigeria. In addition, the historiography has generally privileged male writers, who seem to have relegated women mostly to the background. The [End Page 182] significance of the book under review, therefore, lies in a shift of paradigm. The author, a woman from Anioma, focuses on the activities of women and their experiences during the war, thus illuminating an interesting, but hitherto neglected, aspect of the social history and demonstrating that women mattered too in the Nigeria-Biafra War

The book begins with a historical background of prewar Anioma society, with emphasis on its culture and political systems. Regrettably, there is no historical account of the political and social evolution of the term Anioma itself, which, as Don Ohadike explains in Anioma: A Social History of the Western Igbo People (Ohio University Press, 1994) came into vogue in the 1970s: “Like many groups in Nigeria [after independence in 1960], the Western Igbo people began to seek a new identity. The name they chose for themselves was ndi Anioma, which literally means ‘those who live on the good and prosperous land,’ a term that they coined in the 1970s when they began to agitate for their own separate state within... Nigeria” (xv–xvi).

In the subsequent seven chapters, which are based on extensive field-work, interviews, and written sources, Uchendu recounts the story of the war from the women’s point of view; ironically, she demonstrates, it heralded a period of both “insecurity” and “opportunity” for them. Like almost everyone else, women lived daily in a state of panic and fear, an experience articulated by an Anioma female teacher interviewed by the author: “Almost every night somebody would raise an alarm that Biafran/Nigerian soldiers had come. We would all run away.... The same alarm was sometimes raised during school sessions. We lived daily in panic. We were uncertain of staying alive the next moment” (155). At the same time, women developed many strategies for survival, including commercial and sexual liaisons with the enemy. Prostitution thus became a profitable occupation for both married and unmarried women, offering many of them access to goods and services not commonly available (156). Sadly, in their “desire to live through the crisis,” some also unwittingly subjected their daughters to soldiers’ sexual abuses as these girls hawked products (150).

On the whole, this book is an important contribution to the social history of the Nigeria-Biafra War—a war conventionally presented in the absence of women’s roles and voices. Readers, therefore, owe Uchendu a debt of gratitude for venturing into this interesting social history and filling a void in the historiography. A final observation: While Uchendu comments variously on the atrocities committed against the Igbo, she fails to discuss the chilling events that took place at Asaba, in Anioma. One might therefore profitably consult Emma Okocha’s Blood on the Niger: The First Black Genocide (Triatlantic Books, 2006). [End Page 183]

Felix K. Ekechi
Kent State University
Kent, Ohio
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