When Is a Nation?

Abstract

The implicit irony, the issues fomenting African states’ objections to the Biafran declaration of independence in the 1960s, revolved around two warring polarities: dictation on the one hand, and volition on the other – ironic because these were the very terms that had brought these African nations into arbitrary being as their own entities. Yet the disapproval of African nations, a majority of whom comprised the Organisation of African Unity, was characterised by a stunning pietism unmediated by lessons from world history – such as the tenacity of the human sense of identity. The liberation narrative sustained throughout Africa has not only been one of peoples attaining the status of modern states; it has been a story of ongoing struggle on behalf of others worldwide, in the broader, collective liberation undertaking. This essay pursues the most pertinent and instructive lessons for African leadership’s majority rejection of the breakaway Biafra from the nation-space known as Nigeria in 1967.