Customer Reviews

Brutality of Nations

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We tend to remember Vietnam as the defining event of the late 60's and early 70's, but Biafra was and is ultimately more heartbreaking to contemplate, because it is nearly forgotten, even though millions died. Jacobs tells a story of valor and treachery, of relief pilots and aid workers who risked death everyday so that they could bring medicine and food into the oil-rich Biafran separatist enclave, which was completely surrounded by a huge and vengeful, British-backed Nigerian military machine bent on the Biafrans' extinction.

The book is detailed but doesn't plod, and we follow along as an ethnic pogrom festers into a civil war, and ultimately a holocaust. Along the way, all the vaunted fail-safes of our modern world, from the U.N., to the Red Cross, to the liberal governments of the U.S. and the U.K., actually aid and abet the Nigerians, and exacerbate the Biafrans' plight and prolong their agony. The U.S.S.R., long falsely seen as an anti-imperialist engine for African liberation, cynically plays its hand as cruelly as anyone else, providing military and technical assistance to the Federal Government of Nigeria whenever the West loses their stomach for it.

When millions are dead, and so many are culpable, one feels it's unfair to assign blame to any single party, but blame must be assigned. Everyone's responsible, all the way back to the imperialists who so ineptly drew the borders of what were to emerge as completely unworkable national entities. Perhaps "state failure" in Africa will ultimately be the force which credibly redraws the boundaries, but in Nigeria's case, that will only happen when the oil runs out. And Lord how high the cost will be.

Mr. Jacobs captures the lies and deceit that Nation states engage in when resource control is the objective. In this case..oil. The sad part is that the material costs in human lives is unforgivable.

This book is not history OR journalism. It is more the ramblings of a fanatic. Jacobs skips time, place, themes, without any connection or point of reference. He jumps right into the famine without examining the political or economic conditions that caused it. There is no attempt to make this a book about Biafra--the whole work is a polemic denouncing the UK and the US and the ICRC. Truly a wretched work.

It reads more like the mumblings of a drug addled sociology professor than a work worthy of publication.