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Biafra War Death Toll: The Forecast That Became a Count (Cold Files 013)
On 17 November 1968, a United States senator put a number on Biafra.
Part of the Cold Files series.
A release from Edward Kennedy's office said loss of life from starvation was running at more than 10,000 persons per day, over 1,000,000 lives in recent months, and that without emergency measures the figure would climb to 25,000 a day within a month, and "some 2,000,000 deaths by the end of the year." The statement survives because a law review preserved it: George Alfred Mudge set it down in "Starvation as a Means of Warfare" in The International Lawyer in 1970.
Kennedy had not been to Biafra. The million was a claim about the past. The two million was a projection to a date five weeks away, built from a daily rate supplied by relief workers counting what they could see inside feeding stations. The war had fourteen months left to run. The number arrived first, and it stuck.
The forecast that became a count
The daily rates in circulation in late 1968 do not agree with each other, and none of them was ever meant to be run flat across the war.
Lord Ritchie-Calder told the House of Lords on 12 December 1968 that a million people had already died, that half a million more would probably die over that Christmas, and that experts put the total as high as two million by the end of the year. In the same speech he gave the death rate as between 12,000 and 20,000 a day, and also as a "stabilised" figure of 6,000 a day, warning in the same sentence that "stabilised" does not mean "constant." Auberon Waugh, writing in The Spectator on 27 December 1968, reported relief workers' estimates rising from 3,000 a day in July to 10,000 a day inside unoccupied Biafra plus 4,000 a day in federally held territory.
Run the lowest of them flat across the eighteen months of famine and 6,000 a day produces 3.3 million dead on its own. Ritchie-Calder's upper figure produces nearly eleven million, triple the enclave's surviving population. Nobody intended that sum, and that is exactly the point. These were peak rates observed at feeding stations and offered as relief planning instruments by people trying to make an indifferent world move. They could not be added up. They were added up anyway.
Nobody could have counted
Nigeria's census of 1962 was abandoned. The 1963 recount gave the Northern Region 29.8 million people and restored its parliamentary majority, on returns that Gerardo Serra and Morten Jerven describe in the Journal of African History as failing statistical tests across 57.4 per cent of districts in the West, 46.7 per cent in the Mid-West and 43.4 per cent in the North, with the National Population Commission later admitting that overenumeration "was rampant throughout the country." The 1973 census was then cancelled outright. The next one Nigeria accepted was held in 1991.
So there is no usable pre-war baseline for the Eastern Region and no usable post-war one either.
The nearest thing to a measurement anyone took is a document almost nobody quotes. A United States relief survey mission went into the enclave between 17 and 28 October 1969 and reported to Under Secretary Elliot Richardson that December. It found severe malnutrition throughout the population, with oedema in 52 per cent of people over 45 and 42 per cent of children under four. It put Biafra's population at approximately 3.2 million, "considerably lower than the figures commonly quoted." And on the question everyone was arguing about, it wrote one sentence: "It is impossible to determine how many people have died in Biafra as a result of the war."
Fifty-six years later, that remains the most careful thing anyone has said about it. The range now in general use, 500,000 to three million, appears in Encyclopaedia Britannica without a method attached. The narrower academic range, one to three million, appears in the introduction Lasse Heerten and A. Dirk Moses wrote for the Journal of Genocide Research special issue in 2014, which is the article that convened the scholarly field, and it appears there with no attribution and no methodology either.
Starvation is a legitimate weapon of war
The mechanism was simple. Nigeria embargoed shipping to and from the secessionist East in June 1967, weeks after Ojukwu's declaration of 30 May, exempting oil tankers until Shell-BP paid Biafra royalties at the end of that month. The blockade closed roughly 200 miles of coastline and with it the seaports, the airfields, foreign currency, incoming mail and telecommunications. Biafra had been a food importer. Heerten and Moses record that it worsened sharply after Port Harcourt fell in May 1968.
Everything after that is an argument about intent, and the most famous sentence in this war is the one you should trust least. It is usually given as Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Nigeria's Federal Commissioner for Finance: "All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don't see why we should feed our enemies fat in order for them to fight us harder." It reached mass circulation through Chinua Achebe's There Was a Country in 2012. Achebe's cited source is Dan Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations, published in 1987, seventeen years after the shooting stopped. No contemporaneous speech text, transcript or newspaper report of the day has been produced in which Awolowo says those words, and his political associates have disputed the attribution for years.
A blunter version is documented, and it belongs to a different man. Mudge's article opens with two epigraphs. The first is Chief Anthony Enahoro, Federal Commissioner for Information and Labour: "starvation is a legitimate weapon of war." The second is Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle of the 3rd Marine Commando Division: "I want to see no Red Cross, no Caritas, no World Council of Churches, no Pope, no missionary and no U.N. delegation. I want to prevent even one Ibo having even one thing to eat before their capitulation." Both are footnoted to Lloyd Garrison in the New York Times Magazine of 8 September 1968, page 102.
The policy never needed the famous quotation. Two named federal ministers stated it out loud in 1968, in a source with a date and a page number.
Annabelle
What fed the enclave was an airstrip called Annabelle: a widened stretch of the Owerri to Ihiala road, about 6,000 feet of usable length, repaired by hand every day and flown only at night.
Joint Church Aid, known to its own crews as Jesus Christ Airlines, flew 5,314 missions over two years and delivered 60,000 tons. Twenty five aircrew were killed. The International Committee of the Red Cross coordinated the distribution of more than 100,000 tonnes of food across the war, running its own nightly bridge out of Fernando Po alongside the church agencies flying from Sao Tome.
It ended on the night of 5 June 1969. A Douglas DC-7B, registration SE-ERP, flying on ICRC charter from Transair Sweden, was shot down over Eket by a Nigerian Air Force MiG-17. All four crew died. The Nigerian Air Force said afterwards that the aircraft had been suspected of gunrunning. The first American situation report said two of the crew had parachuted and were being held. It was wrong.
Nigeria then declared the ICRC's commissioner general, Dr August Lindt, persona non grata and took over relief in federal territory. The committee's coordinating role went with him. The church airlift carried the enclave's last seven months.
The corridors Biafra would not take
Here is the part the sympathetic version leaves out, on the record in three independent places. The Central Intelligence Agency reported on 29 January 1969 that the Biafrans refused to open their one operating airstrip to daylight flights, and assessed that night operations were serving as cover for separate arms flights. The National Security Council's Interdepartmental Group for Africa recorded twelve days later that Biafra had "opposed (or countered with proposals unacceptable to the FMG) every land corridor proposed by the FMG," on the grounds that a corridor would be militarily exploited and the food might be poisoned. Lord Shackleton told the Lords on 12 December 1968 that Ojukwu "has not so far felt able to accept" the federal land corridor offer and had made no positive response on daylight flights.
The October 1969 survey put it harder than any of them. The Biafran leadership, it wrote, having "paradoxically written off the population as the price for 'Biafran security', they appear to harden their position on relief proposals proportionately as the health conditions deteriorate."
The charge circulated in Britain too: if genocide was in question, "it must be laid at the door of Colonel Ojukwu himself." Auberon Waugh printed that line in order to demolish it, and his answer is the strongest one Biafra has. Suffering is to be blamed on those who inflict it rather than those who endure it. The poisoning fear was not paranoid when Adekunle's sentence was on the record. A land corridor through federal lines would have handed Lagos control of the enclave's food and therefore of its surrender date. And Lagos refused a scheme of its own: in August 1968, Mudge records, Nigeria rejected an ICRC proposal for daytime flights into a neutralised airfield under ICRC control, which Biafra had accepted days earlier. Both sides preferred leverage to relief. Only one of them was besieged.
No evidence of genocide, from men who were not allowed to look
Biafra's case to the world was genocide, and the world sent an Observer Team to Nigeria to test it: Britain, Canada, Poland, Sweden, the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity, in the field from 15 September 1968 to 28 February 1970.
Canada's Department of National Defence states the finding plainly. The observers reported evidence of "unprovoked and inexcusable killings" and found "no evidence that the Nigerian forces had been or were engaged in genocide." Poland's presence proves nothing about impartiality, since the Soviet Union was arming Lagos. But a whitewash does not usually include the phrase "unprovoked and inexcusable."
Then read the limitation. Heerten and Moses record that the team was forbidden entry to Biafran territory, which is where the famine and the aerial bombing were. Suzanne Cronje's critique adds that its members were serving officers rather than investigators, and that they moved entirely on Nigerian military transport. The team looked hard at the half of the war it was allowed to see.
The genocide scholarship has mostly declined the label on the intent test while conceding the deaths. Robert Melson excluded the case because federal policy, in his reading, "did not include extermination of the Ibos." Leo Kuper called the 1966 pogroms genocidal massacre rather than genocide. Chima Korieh's edited volume argues the other way. Heerten and Moses note that the exclusion of Biafra from genocide studies has been "virtually as complete as it has been unnoticed."
What was left
Ojukwu left for Cote d'Ivoire in the second week of January 1970. Sources give 8, 9 and 11 January, which is itself a small monument to how this war was recorded.
Philip Effiong broadcast the disengagement on 12 January and signed the instrument of surrender at Dodan Barracks in Lagos on 15 January: "the Republic of Biafra hereby ceases to exist." Gowon's broadcast the same day guaranteed the security of life and property of all citizens and called the outcome a victory for national unity. The phrase everyone quotes from that moment, "no victor, no vanquished," does not appear in the transcript of the broadcast. It is the slogan of the reconciliation period, not a sentence from a speech.
The feared massacre did not happen. USAID's William Haven North called that fear "exaggerated and not borne out, in fact," in the same oral history in which he says it has been estimated that a million people lost their lives from the earliest Northern riots onward. The other thing that did not happen was a count. No Nigerian government has published one.
What is left is a range spanning two and a half million people, anchored to a projection a senator made about a year that had not finished, in a country whose census was cancelled in 1973 and not replaced until 1991.
The one survey sent in to look wrote the only honest sentence available. It is impossible to determine how many people have died.
Sources consulted
Mudge, "Starvation as a Means of Warfare," The International Lawyer 4:2 (1970)
Garrison, "The 'Point of No Return' for the Biafrans," New York Times Magazine, 8 Sept 1968
FRUS 1969 to 1976, Vol. E-5 Part 1, Docs. 27, 35, 71 and 145
Heerten and Moses, "The Nigeria-Biafra war," Journal of Genocide Research 16:2-3 (2014)
Serra and Jerven, "Contested Numbers," Journal of African History (2021)
Hansard, HL Deb, 12 December 1968
Government of Canada, Dept of National Defence, "Observer Team Nigeria"
Waugh, "Britain and Biafra," The Spectator, 27 December 1968
Desgrandchamps, "Organising the unpredictable," Int. Review of the Red Cross 94:888 (2012)
ADST oral history, William Haven North (1993)
Achebe, There Was a Country (2012); Gould, The Struggle for Modern Nigeria (2012)
More Cold Files: Sri Lanka, 2009, and the Zaire refugee camps, 1996.
Next in Cold Files: Okinawa, 1945. Over a hundred thousand civilian dead on a single island, the compulsory group suicides, and a textbook fight that never really ended.
Cold Files runs twice a week alongside the morning brief. For both, join us on Telegram at t.me/TheLeaflet.
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