The Biafran war of 1967–1970 was the most violent phase in a complex series of convulsions that shook Nigeria in the wake of de colonization. Facilitated by British arms supplies from the Wilson Labour government, the conflict centred on the suppression of the break-away Republic of Biafra by the Federal Military Government of Nigeria. That “Nigeria” was, from the outset, a pragmatic and ambivalent construction is hardly a matter of debate. As is well known, the current geopolitical divisions of West Africa were negotiated between Western European powers in the 1890s, and the emergence of “Nigeria” itself as a national idea can be traced to the London Times in 1897, when it is first proposed by the girlfriend of Frederick (later Lord) Lugard, Flora Shaw (Times 6). In a letter sketching out the Royal Niger Company’s West African territories, Shaw’s text conjures an exotic scene, populated by characters ranging from “pagan natives of low type who... had not risen above the cannibal stage” to “the pure bred Hausa [who] is perfectly black, but is, of course, of a far higher type than the ordinary negro”(6), unabashedly recapitulating the terms of mid-nineteenth century racial theory. Her text is replete with cultural, demographic and ethno graphic misconceptions and inaccuracies which it would be too time-consuming to unravel here. What it does usefully provide, however, is a sense of the imagined entity that the term “Nigeria” is called forth to name at the close of the nineteenth century. It emerges from Flora Shaw’s pen in 1897 as a name for a loose, half-formed colonial construct which, for the sake of better understanding in London, now needs to be described by “some general name”(6). In this way “Nigeria” wins out over “Goldesia” as the common label for “the agglomeration of pagan and Mahomedan states which have been brought by the exertions of the Royal Niger Company”(6).