The war (1967–1970), also called the Biafran War, in which the Igbo-led Eastern Region tried to break away from Nigeria as the Republic of Biafra and was defeated, largely through a blockade that produced a mass famine. Carried into homes worldwide by television and relief campaigns, it became the first modern famine spectacle and a landmark in the history of humanitarian action, while posing the hardest question of the postcolonial state: whether borders drawn by Europe could hold a nation together.
Biafra became one of the first modern famine spectacles of the television age. In the late 1960s, in a breakaway country called Biafra, children were dying of hunger by the thousand. Families in Europe and America watched it on film, in a place most had never heard of. The images did something new. They turned a distant African war into a personal emergency in living rooms an ocean away. Money poured in. Planes flew in by night. A generation of young doctors went to help, and some came home determined to build a new kind of relief that would not wait for permission. The war that did this was also one of the cruelest tests the young states of Africa would face: a question, settled by hunger as much as by guns, of whether a nation made from very different peoples could hold.