The Biafran War

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Life offers many memories, some are good and many are bad, but we learn from all of them and hold onto them. The movie “Half of the Yellow Sun,” which is based on a book of the same title by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, amazingly offers a story of Nigeria and the struggle the Igbo people went through during the Civil War of 1967 and 1970. This was a very horrific moment for many people at that time. The main actors in the film are two twin sisters whose parents were very rich back then before the war began. Once the war came, things went from good to terrible in many different ways. In this film, the relationship between the twin sisters reveals a deep understanding of what was happening in their country. Throughout the film, it is easy to see …show more content…

The following statement from a book reviews that I was reading by Holzgrefe et al. On” The Struggle for Modern Nigeria: The Biafran War 1967–1970 “by Michael Gould, really lays out what the conflict was in this bloody war”. The war had its origins in ethnic rivalry within the Nigerian army. After Abubakar Tafawa Balewa’s government was overthrown in January 1966, in a coup led by junior-ranked Igbo officers, Major-General Johnson AguiyiIronsi was nominated Head of State by those government ministers who had survived the coup. Given that Aguiyi-Ironsi was an Igbo and that those killed in the coup were senior politicians from the Western and Northern provinces (including Tafawa Balewa and the Northern premier Ahmadu Bello), the coup quickly became characterized as an Igbo conspiracy to control Nigeria.” It is clear here as we see children of the same land betraying one another because of certain greediness, misunderstanding, and personal interest as is the relationship between the two sisters who fight over things which could have been stopped if they only thought things through. The author of the review continues the statement further, saying: “Though Aguiyi-Ironsi was quickly overthrown in a counter-coup masterminded by northern Muslim officers, which placed General Yakubu Gowon as the new head of the Federal Military Government (FMG), ethnic tensions spiralled. Consequently, anti-Igbo pogroms in the north followed, with 30,000 Igbos being killed and over one million fleeing the north to the eastern part of the country. Such widespread ethnic violence alongside the reversal of Aguiyi-Ironsi’s own coup led many Igbos to conclude that a united Nigeria could not guarantee their safety or their equal role in the country and that secession was a viable option.”Prior to the colonialist, it can be said that though conflict existed between the many tribes

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