Weaponising hunger: Frederick Forsyth's account of a starved region the world ignored

Time of India

22-06-2025

The late Frederick Forsyth was best known for his thriller novels. But his most remarkable work might have been his first book, The Biafra Story (1969), reporting about the region that tried to break away from Nigeria, but was brutally subdued through weaponisation of famine.Biafra's famine stands out because it wasn't just man made, but also involved deliberate malnutrition of infants. Forsyth explains how the Eastern Region of Nigeria, which tried to become Biafra, 'was more or less self-supporting in food, being able to provide all of its carbohydrates and fruit, but importing quantities of meat from the cattle-breeding north of Nigeria, and bringing in by sea dried stockfish from Scandinavia, and salt'.Biafra's relative fertility and proximity to oilfields encouraged its leaders' hopes of independence. The actual cause was the marginalisation of Nigeria's Igbo minority by northern Nigerian communities. This again was due to the British colonial habit of patching together a country with little thought of those living in it, and then leaving with little care for the consequences. Unlike with India, the British sought to retain influence in Nigeria because of oil. Forsyth blames Biafra's tragedy on the military and diplomatic support from the UK to Nigeria's leaders 'to cover up that the UK's assessment of the Nigerian situation was an enormous judgmental screw-up'.The region's main crop was cassava, which was processed to make an easy-to-cook starch called gari . Cassava tubers had been introduced to West Africa from Brazil, possibly by returned slaves who knew how to process it to remove toxins. In Longthroat Memories , Yemisi Aribisala's collection of essays on Nigerian food, she quotes a friend of her grandfather to show how much the Biafrans came to depend on gari in the depths of the conflict: 'You dared not make a fire. You would never be that foolish… You made cold-water gari with water from the stream or rainwater, or you made something close to the gari in peacetime by using hot urine.' For a bowl, he recommended taking the helmet from a dead soldier 'with great reverence, if there was a head to talk of, and it became your pot and plate and bowl'.For all the horrors of surviving this way, adults could do it — but children could not. Gari was carbohydrates and children need protein for growth, but the Nigerian government cut off access to meat and dried fish. Forsyth describes how children started developing what would become the key image of the Biafran famine, and others to follow in Africa: 'A reddening of the hair, paling of the skin, swelling of the joints and bloating of the flesh as it distends with water.'This was kwashiorkor , a deficiency disease that occurs when children are given carbohydrates, but not enough protein. Cicely Williams, the Jamaican paediatrician who first described the disease, used a word from Ghana which translates grimly as 'the disease of the deposed child' — meaning what happens when a child is denied breast-feeding because another child has been born. The starchy weaning food given to the first child usually lacks the nutrients of milk, leading to kwashiorkor . Images of Biafran children with kwashiorkor broke through the blackout on news imposed by Nigerian leaders and supported by their British advisors.This led to a remarkable airlift to supply Biafra with protein, mostly fortified milk powder. It was organised by church groups, but implemented by mercenary pilots, who flew from the island of São Tomé, then part of Portugal.Forsyth writes with nuance about the mercenaries, who were there for the money, yet bringing relief. It inspired The Dogs of War , his novel about a mercenary-led coup in Africa. Biafra made the world aware of famine as a weapon of war — and yet, as Gaza shows, we have not learned how to stop it.