In the summer of 1968, audiences around the globe were shocked when newspapers and television stations confronted them with photographs of starving children in the secessionist Republic of Biafra. ...This global concern fundamentally changed how the Nigerian Civil War was perceived: an African civil war that had been fought for one year without fostering any substantial interest from international publics became 'Biafra' - the epitome of humanitarian crisis. Based on archival research from North America, Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, this book is the first comprehensive study of the global history of the conflict. A major addition to the flourishing history of human rights and humanitarianism, it argues that the global moment 'Biafra' is closely linked to the ascendance of human rights, humanitarianism, and Holocaust memory in a postcolonial world. The conflict was a key episode for the re-structuring of the relations between the West and the Third World.
This book focuses on the humanitarian crisis in Biafra from 1967 to 1970 and the historic response of church groups from different parts of the world. This is the first scholarly work to establish ...the Joint Church Aid as the foundation of modern day international humanitarian aid.
Almost half a century has passed since the Nigerian Civil War ended. But memories die hard, because a million or more people perished in that internecine struggle, the majority women and children, ...who were starved to death. Biafra's war was modern Africa's first extended conflict. It lasted almost three years and was based largely on ethnic, by inference, tribal grounds. It involved, on the one side, a largely Christian or animist south-eastern quadrant of Nigeria which called itself Biafra, pitted militarily against the country's more populous and preponderant Islamic north.These divisions- almost always brutal - persist. Not a week goes by without reports coming in of Christian communities or individuals persecuted by Islamic zealots. It was also a conflict that saw significant Cold War involvement: the Soviets (and Britain) siding and supplying Federal Nigeria with weapons, aircraft and expertise and several Western states - Portugal, South Africa and France especially - providing clandestine help to the rebel state. For that reason alone, this book is an important contribution towards understanding Nigeria's ethnic divisions, which are no better today than they were then. Biafra was the first of a series of religious wars that threaten to engulf much of Africa. Similar conflicts have recently taken place in the Ivory Coast, Kenya, Southern Sudan, the Central African Republic, Senegal (Cassamance), both Congo Republics and elsewhere. As the war progressed, Biafra also attracted mercenary involvement, many of whom arriving from the Congo which had already seen much turmoil. Western pilots were hired by Lagos and they flew the first Soviet MiG-17 jet fighters to have played an active role in a'Western' war. Al Venter spent time covering this struggle. He left the rebel enclave in December 1969, only weeks before it ended and claims the distinction of being the only foreign correspondent to have been rocketed by both sides: first by Biafra's tiny Swedish-built Minicon fighter planes while he was on a ship lying at anchor in Warri harbour and thereafter, by MiG jets flown by mercenaries.Among his colleagues inside the beleaguered territory were the celebrated Italian photographer Romano Cagnoni as well as Frederick Forsyth who originally reported for the BBC and then resigned because of the partisan, pro-Nigerian stance taken by Whitehall. He briefly shared quarters with French photographer Giles Caron who was later killed in Cambodia.Prior to that Venter had been working for John Holt in Lagos. It is interesting that his office at the time was at Ikeja International Airport (Murtala Muhammed today) where the second Nigerian army mutiny was plotted and from where it was launched. From this perspective he had a proverbial'ringside seat' of the tribal divisions that followed as hostilities escalated. Venter took numerous photos while on this West African assignment, both in Nigeria while he was based there and later in Biafra itself. Others come from various sources, including some from the same mercenary pilots who originally targeted him from the air.
During the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), France chose to support Biafra, but only on a limited scale, providing mercenaries and obsolete weaponry to Ojukwu's regime. General Charles de Gaulle's ...assistance to Ojukwu was conditioned by the French military drawdown after 1961, the increased power of French secret services on the continent, and the interventions in Katanga (1960-1963), Gabon (1964) and Chad (1968-1972). France supported Biafra primarily to protect its former colonies from Nigeria, stop Soviet subversion and acquire an economic foothold in the oil-rich Niger Delta. De Gaulle chose a limited strategy for two reasons. If Biafra won the war, France would be Biafra's greatest ally. If Nigeria won the war, France could extricate itself from the situation relatively easily and re-establish relations with the Nigerian government, which is what ultimately occurred.
     In this stunning debut novel, a child dissects the darkness at the heart of her British diplomatic family. Living in Nigeria on the brink of civil war, Anna—also known ...as Jake—becomes blood brothers with Dave, the Korean American daughter of a C.I.A. operative. They do push-ups, collect pornography, and plot lives of unmarried freedom while around them a country disintegrates. Luscious, terrifying, and raw, Nigeria itself becomes a lesson in endurance, suffering, love.       Stories are layered upon stories: Anna's grandmother tells stories about life as a white woman on the Gold Coast; the clairvoyant and closeted "Aunt" Elsie gives Anna a story of transformation to hold onto in the coming tumult of adolescence. Yet Where Bones Dance also spirals down to the stories that are not told—sexual abuse, the myth of benign colonialism, the chaos of postcolonial Africa. Sensual and fantastical by turns, this moving, funny, immensely readable book delivers an understanding of the interplay of sexuality, gender, race, and war that is sophisticated beyond the years of its intrepid narrator.   Winner, Georges Bugnet Award for Novel, Alberta Literary Awards, Writers Guild of Alberta Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians and the Public Library Association
This essay is a quasi-biographical depiction of Frederic Rzewski's years in Rome, c.1967-1970 and highlights through a rich tapestry of anecdotal reflection, places, people, friends, collective ...projects, associations, improvisation, and fellow-composers. The essay further relates how stimulations had abounded in Rzewski's life and those associated with the improvisational group Musica Elettronica Viva, at this time with performative materials, icons, political and literary texts all thrown together within new musical languages. Through the time of Rzewski's life the essay reveals how all this had emerged as a response to new emancipatory freedom, artistic and political, that was part of the activism surrounding this time, the late 1960s and during the course of countless tours, associations, and concerts throughout Europe.
This article contributes to a better understanding of the syntax-phonology interface. It offers a prosodic trigger for extraposition which accounts for the following asymmetry: While extraposition of ...subject, adjunct and attributive clauses is optional in German, object clauses must appear in the right periphery of the clause. It is argued that the constituents following an object clause in its preverbal base-position cannot be a parsed into phonological phrases. Such a configuration causes a defective prosodic clause structure. This deficiency is resolved by extraposition, which derives a structure where the formerly unparsed constituents now incorporate into the preceding prosodic constituent. Extraposition is thus considered a last resort strategy.
Not Just Churches McAlister, Melani
Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations,
08/2022
Book Chapter
Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum claimed to be hopeful, but his argument was pointed. In an essay written for Religion News Service in August 1968, he discussed the way that American Jews were responding to the ...suffering of civilians in the Biafra war. Tanenbaum was at the time the head of Interreligious Affairs at the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and he had been involved for some years in interreligious dialogue with American Christians. He pointed out that Jews had been moved by the news of suffering in Nigeria-Biafra and that they had chosen to contribute money especially as Jews, yet they donated
