Women and the Nigeria-Biafra War : Reframing Gender and Conflict in Africa

This comprehensive study of the Nigeria-Biafra War through the lens of gender captures women’s complex experiences and the valiant ways they carried out old and new responsibilities in wartime and postwar Nigeria. It fills a gap in war scholarship fifty years after the conflict by presenting women as embodiments of vulnerability and agency.

This first comprehensive study of the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-1970) through the lens of gender explores the valiant and gallant ways women carried out old and new responsibilities in wartime and immediate postwar Nigeria. The book presents women as embodiments of vulnerability and agency, who demonstrated remarkable resilience and initiative, waging war on all fronts in the face of precarious conditions and scarcities, and maximizing opportunities occasioned by the hostilities. Women’s experiences are highlighted through critical analyses of oral interviews, memoirs, life histories, fashion and material culture, international legal conventions, music, as well as governmental and non-governmental sources. The book fills the gap in the war scholarship that has minimized women’s complex experiences fifty years after the hostilities ended. It highlights the cost of the conflict on Nigerian women, their participation in the hostilities, and their contributions to the survival of families, communities and the country. The chapters present counter-narratives to fictional and nonfictional accounts of the war, especially those written by men, which often peripheralize or stereotypically represent women as passive spectators or helpless victims of the conflict; and also highlight and exaggerate women’s moral laxity and sensationalize their marital infidelities.