Guided by burning flares, a transport plane dipped down out of the night over Biafra last week and landed with a shipment of condensed food for the secessionist state’s starving population. When soldiers guarding the airstrip saw its cargo, they burst unashamedly into tears. On a country road a few miles away, relief workers held out bits of food to a group of hungry children. They ran, not knowing what to do with it. “We are going to have to teach a generation of children how to eat again,” said a Canadian nurse. In the border town of Ikot Ekpene, the emaciated bodies of a brother and sister lay side by side in a rough cradle. Their eyes had been pecked out by vultures still circling overhead, waiting to attack a line of wasted bodies in a ditch outside of town. EMERGENT Africa has known more than its share of strife and bloodshed, from the Mau Mau terror in Kenya to the carnage of Congolese secession. But in scope of suffering, in depth of bitterness, in the seeming hopelessness of any solution short of wholesale slaughter, there is no parallel to the tragedy that has been gathering force the past 14 months in Nigeria—once Africa’s brightest hope for successful nationhood. One of the opposing forces, wielding a full array of modern weapons from Britain, Russia and much of Europe, is the federal government of Nigeria. It is determined to crush a rebellion that it feels will destroy its republic. On the other side, armed chiefly with determination, stands the secessionist state of Biafra, the home of Nigeria’s Ibo tribe. The Ibos are convinced that they are fighting not only for independence but for their survival as a people. The Biafrans are losing. Outnumbered and outgunned, they have been inexorably driven into a landlocked cir cle of rain forest entirely surrounded by federal forces. Their single remaining lifeline to the outside world is a widened stretch of blacktop road that serves as a nighttime landing strip for supply planes—when the planes can run the gauntlet of federal radar-controlled antiaircraft fire. But they are not only losing the war: slowly but surely, eight million Biafrans are starving to death. Gradually, the image of Biafra’s human agony has unsettled the conscience of the world. That image is of Ibo infants and children with anguished, vacant eyes, distended bellies, shriveled chests and matchstick limbs crippled from edema. The world has protested in the form of silent marches of New Yorkers outside the United Nations building, impassioned debates in Britain’s Parliament and West Germany’s Bundestag, shillings and sixpences collected by Tanzanian schoolchildren and in the appeal of a “deeply distressed” Pope Paul VI. Despite the world’s horror, the efforts of the Organization of African Unity, the personal intervention of Emperor Haile Selassie and four separate confrontations across the bargaining table, the fighting and the starvation go on. Physical Ruin. The symbol of Biafran resistance is Lieut. Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, a brooding hulk of a man who leads his people’s military effort and speaks for their pain. With an Oxford education, a rare gift for rhetoric and a deep sense of the tragedy encompassing the war, he is endowed with the best that the white man has given Africa and beset by the worst of Africa’s many ills. Ojukwu is also probably as
