Under the weak light of a dusk sky, the train platform in Makurdi trembled with the weight of human desperation. Children clung to the hems of their mothers’ wrappers, their bare feet streaked with red earth. Soldiers stood guard nearby, silent and still, rifles slung over their shoulders. A train engine moaned in the distance, slow and deliberate, as if unsure whether to come any closer. It carried more refugees fleeing the eastern region, another fragment in a country that no longer trusted its center. Nigeria, only seven years old as an independent nation, was unraveling by the hour.
The war began in July 1967, but its roots had dug deep long before then. British colonialism had drawn lines on the map of West Africa that paid no mind to culture, language, or trust. When Nigeria gained independence in 1960, it inherited a federal structure layered with rivalry. The north held political power, the west guarded trade, and the east, home to the Igbo people, surged ahead in education and civil service. In a country stitched together by artificial borders, progress became a liability. In January 1966, a group of young Igbo military officers staged a coup, killing key political leaders from the north and west. Although the coup was not supported by all Igbos, and some of its victims were Igbo themselves, it was widely perceived as an ethnic conspiracy.
A counter-coup followed in July. Northern officers retook power, and with them came reprisals. In towns across the north, Igbos were hunted, beaten, and killed in their homes, businesses, and schools. Reports of massacres reached into the thousands. In the eastern region, which was predominantly Igbo, horror turned to fear and fear turned to flight. Over a million people fled back to the east. Nigeria’s fragile unity snapped beneath the pressure. In May 1967, the military governor of the Eastern Region, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, declared the independence of the Republic of Biafra.
The Nigerian government, led by General Yakubu Gowon, responded with force. The federal military campaign was swift in its opening months, pushing into Biafran territory with British-supplied weapons and logistical support. Oil, discovered in the Niger Delta, added urgency to the federal cause. The stakes were not only national unity but economic control. For Biafra, the fight was framed as survival.
The war dragged into the heart of the countryside. Biafra, encircled by federal troops, had limited access to international support. Portugal, France, and a few African nations offered recognition or aid, but no major power intervened militarily. Most of the world remained aligned with the Nigerian government. Britain continued to supply arms. The Soviet Union sent equipment. Egypt, under Nasser, contributed air support.
Inside Biafra, the war took on a different shape. Airstrikes hit markets and clinics. Roads became impassable. Railways crumbled. With the blockade in place, food supplies withered. The Biafran leadership launched a vigorous propaganda campaign, showing the world images of starving children with distended bellies and vacant eyes. The world watched, but it did not act. Relief agencies scrambled to send aid, but the Nigerian government, fearing it would prolong the war, obstructed many efforts.
The most haunting images of the war came not from the battlefield, but from the hunger. Children lay motionless in crowded hospitals, too weak to cry. Mothers wailed beside them, their own bodies shrinking. Relief flights landed at night, dodging federal air patrols, bringing powdered milk and medicine into Uli airstrip, Biafra’s fragile lifeline. Yet it was never enough.
Doctors who had volunteered in the Biafran zone formed an organization after the war ended, which would become known as Médecins Sans Frontières. Their frustration with the limitations of humanitarian neutrality began here. For them, Biafra was the moment when silence became complicity.
Fighting continued through 1968 and 1969. Federal troops, equipped with armored vehicles and supported by naval and aerial bombardments, advanced steadily. Biafran resistance, made up of conscripted boys, retired civil servants, and foreign mercenaries, could not match them in firepower. Yet the war did not end quickly. It smoldered through cities, villages, and forests. Civilians bore the cost. Towns changed hands. Schools became barracks. Churches became morgues.
By the final year of the war, Biafra was a skeletal state. It printed its own currency, passed its own laws, and broadcast messages of hope, even as its territory shrank to a fraction of its original size. Starvation became a weapon, as much as bullets or bombs. Between one and two million people died, most of them civilians. The exact number is still debated. What is not debated is the scale of the suffering.
On January 12, 1970, Biafra surrendered. The announcement came not from Ojukwu, who had fled into exile, but from his second-in-command, Philip Effiong. In Lagos, Gowon promised there would be no victor and no vanquished. He spoke of reconciliation and reintegration. But in the east, homes remained in ruin. Families buried their dead in silence. The cost of the war was measured not just in graves but in trust, which would take generations to rebuild.
No tribunals were held. No war crimes were prosecuted. Nigeria moved forward without looking back. The policy of “no victor, no vanquished” was meant to heal, but it also meant forgetting. Reconstruction focused on infrastructure, not justice. Many Biafrans who had lost their jobs during the war were not reinstated. Their properties, sometimes taken over by others, were not returned. Compensation was minimal. The federal government offered twenty pounds to each Biafran, regardless of how much they had owned before the war. It was both a gesture and a warning.
In the decades that followed, the legacy of the war lingered. It lived in silence, in bitterness, in the memories of parents who lost children, and children who never met their parents. It lived in literature, in songs, and in whispered conversations. To speak openly of Biafra was, for many years, to risk arrest. The name itself became a caution.
Today, there are those who still wave the Biafran flag. Some demand a new referendum. Others invoke the name only to remember. The pain has not vanished. It has transformed. For many Nigerians, the war remains the most violent reminder of how fragile unity can be when it is not anchored in justice.
The story of Biafra is not only about war. It is about what happens when a country fractures and refuses to listen to the warnings. It is about how fear, if not addressed, becomes rage, and how that rage, if ignored, becomes fire. Nigeria survived the war, but it was changed. The east was never the same. Neither was the rest of the country.
In the old railway towns, rusted tracks still run through weeds. The platforms are empty now. The children who once fled with their parents have grown old. Some stayed. Some left. They remember the sounds. The hunger. The silence. And above all, they remember the train that never came back.
