On 30 May 1967, three days after General Yakubu Gowon's decree splitting the Eastern Region into three states, Lt-Col Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu announced the secession of the Republic of Biafra from the balcony of the Eastern House of Assembly at Enugu, on the mandate of the Eastern Consultative Assembly. The Federal Military Government declared a 'police action' on 6 July 1967. It became a thirty-month total war.
The initial Biafran offensive of August 1967 — the 'Mid-West Invasion' under Brigadier Victor Banjo — reached Ore in the Western Region, 130 miles from Lagos, before federal forces under Colonel Murtala Muhammed pushed it back. The fall of Enugu (October 1967), Calabar (October 1967) and Port Harcourt (May 1968) shrank Biafra to the Igbo heartland between the Niger and the Cross. From mid-1968 the federal naval and air blockade of the remaining ports — implemented with Soviet, British and Egyptian assistance — produced the most concentrated famine in 20th-century African history. ICRC and Caritas relief flights through São Tomé and Fernando Pó kept perhaps 1.5 million children alive; the Federal position, articulated by Chief Anthony Enahoro at the OAU, was that 'starvation is a legitimate weapon of war'.
The war ended on 12 January 1970 when General Philip Effiong, Ojukwu having flown into exile at Abidjan on 11 January, signed the surrender at Dodan Barracks, Lagos. Gowon's celebrated 'No Victor, No Vanquished' speech proclaimed the 3Rs — Reconciliation, Rehabilitation, Reconstruction. In practice, the £20 'Biafran pound exchange' confiscated the savings of every Igbo household; the 1972 Indigenisation Decree was applied to exclude many Igbo from buying back nationalised commercial assets; the federal officer corps was purged of returning Biafran officers; and the abandoned-property law in Rivers and Cross River States stripped Igbo families of their pre-war real estate, never returned.
The minimum credible death toll is one million; the maximum, three million. There has been no truth commission, no reparation, no apology, no memorial day, no museum. Successive federal governments have repeatedly refused to open the war archives. The unresolved memory of Biafra is the unbroken thread running through MASSOB (Ralph Uwazuruike, 1999), IPOB (Nnamdi Kanu, 2012), the Eastern Security Network (2020), and the Unknown Gunmen attacks (2021–). Until the Federal Republic squares with its own dead, the wound cannot close.