The new landlessness and the lessons of Biafra

Forty-five years after the self-proclaimed independence of the Republic of Biafra, Odumegwu Ojukwu, the spokesman and architect of the Land of the Rising Sun, died in a London hospital. Ojukwu’s legacy, like Biafra itself, remains cloaked in controversy.

For some, Biafra is a stymied self-determination movement, an example of the constrained freedom of Africa’s unwieldy colonial borders. For others, Biafra warns of the potential balkanization of multiethnic states. And then there are the images; pictures of malnourished children and mass graves that testify to a starker reality of devastating violence. Although Biafra has not been forgotten, its lessons have not been adequately learned.

This is the standard narrative: a few Igbo military men orchestrate a state takeover and execute many of Nigeria’s leading politicians including the President and the Northern Premier. In response, a cadre of Northern soldiers stage a counter-coup, and anti-Igbo pogroms begin throughout Nigeria. The problem with this narrative is that by reducing the Biafra conflagration to an atavistic conflict between warring ‘tribes’, it obscures the political significance of the rupture between the Nigerian state and the Igbo community.

In 1968, Chinua Achebe described the formation of Biafra as the expression of the Nigerian government’s rejection of the Igbo community. The unpunished anti-Igbo massacres in the north and west spurred what Achebe described as a ‘retreat home’. In the same vein, Ojukwu asserted, at Biafran independence, that the Igbo could no longer be protected in their lives and property by any government based outside Eastern Nigeria. Biafra was rooted in the volatile belief that the only way to protect a community’s lives and interests is to seize or create a state government.

Oil-rich southeastern land was central to the Igbo leaders’ belief that Biafra could stand on its own. This land was also at the heart of Nigeria’s fierce determination to quell the secession and the British government’s decision to back Lagos’ bloody solution of knitting the country together by force. Exclusive control of this territory was the road ‘home’ for Igbo leaders who believed their national government unable or unwilling to contain the aspirations of their community.

Almost half a century later in a revised scramble for Africa, state leaders auction African land to the highest bidder. In a continent still confronting widespread food insecurity, this trend is economically troubling. In light of Biafra’s lesson that state conduct may propel ethnic, religious, or other sub-national identities to the forefront, it is also politically disturbing.

By selling, leasing, and loaning huge swaths of lands to multinational companies and foreign governments, these leaders, brick by brick, lay the foundation for political instability in their countries. After all, the thousands of hectares acquired by Qatar, United Arab Emirates, agribusiness, and biofuel companies are not vacant. Recent studies show that land reform deals take a disproportionate toll on indigenous communities without providing commensurate benefits.

Although African state leaders view these land reform deals as an alternative to the dependency of the international aid economy and ostensibly plan to use the funds gained for national development, ten years of research show that the livelihood and rights of rural communities are jeopardized by this new land rush. As fertile lands pass out of the hands of African peasants, herders, and fisherfolk, indigenous communities are demanding a vision of development that incorporates rather than ignores their existence and potential. These African government alliances with international finance at the expense of local rights, communicate a steady rejection of indigenous people throughout the continent. At what point will these local communities, like the Biafrans of the mid-20th century, decide that they can no longer be protected in their lives and property by their federal government and seek their own ‘home’?

Among a plethora of overlapping identities, the nation-state does not everywhere and always compel allegiance, particularly when a supposedly-representative government rides roughshod over one’s rights and way of life. When African leaders play fast and loose with non-renewable natural resources, often at the behest of foreign interests, they drive a wedge between local communities and state government.

Recently, a group of self-described ‘peasants, pastoralists and indigenous peoples’ from throughout the world met in Nyeleni, Mali to organize against the new land rush. The Global Alliance against Land-Grabbing was launched on 19 November 2011 in the shadow of Mali’s recent commitment to lease 800,000 hectares of land to business investors. In their final resolution, the Alliance frankly challenged Mali’s right to make decisions concerning indigenous land. After all, local communities had occupied land for generations; how could a Mali state which had ‘only existed since the 1960s’, claim sovereignty? Clearly, these nation-states of recent vintage and troubled tenure ignore the political fallout of land grabs at their own peril. The new landlessness is driving local people to take refuge in their identities as indigenous people and challenging the legitimacy of state governments. However, this does not necessarily constitute a move toward balkanization.

In Mali, beleaguered local agriculturalists did not ‘retreat home’. Instead, they are claiming a place within a supra-national international community of indigenous activists in order to urge their governments to fulfill human rights obligations. In calling for closer connections between indigenous farmers and pension fund members, international press, academics, international finance institutions, and other human rights activists, the Nyeleni declaration outlines shared problems and calls for common solutions. This time around, as indigenous peoples look around, above, and beyond the nation-state for justice, they are seeking a sovereignty rooted in global networks of solidarity rather than secession.

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* Abena Ampofoa Asare is a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus and a doctoral candidate at New York University's History Department. Her dissertation focuses on transitional justice and human rights in Ghana.

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