Dr Maureen Eke1
1Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, United States
Biography:
Professor of Comparative and World Literatures in the English Department, Central Michigan University. She teaches courses in African Literature, African American literature, Post-colonial Literature/theory, Film and adaptation, and Women's Writing. Her publications include an edited collection of essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (2015); Emerging Perspectives on Tess Osonye Onwueme (2023) and a groundbreaking and the first comprehensive collection of essays on Nigerian playwright Tess Osonye Onwueme. Other publications are several co-edited books, including Literature, the Visual Arts and Globalization in Africa and Its Diaspora; Emerging Perspectives on Nawal El Saadawi; Gender and Sexuality in African Literature and Film.
Abstract:
Between 1967 and 1970, the Federal government of Nigeria engaged in a war against Indigenous Igbos in Biafra. Igbos had fled to their homeland (1966) from the pogroms against them in several regions of Nigeria and declared a sovereign country named Biafra (1967). Nigeria’s official estimates indicate that about 3,000,000 women, children, and men were killed in the struggle that Biafrans describe as a war of freedom.
While several books have examined the Biafra-Nigeria (often referred to as the Nigerian Civil) war, Nigerians have yet to resolve the residual tensions of the war, and there have not been any efforts at transitional justice or true reconciliation.
More than fifty years after the war, Indigenous Igbo/Biafrans continue to experience violence from the Nigerian state security apparatus, Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa, and the Fulani herdsmen. The 1966 pogroms, the war, and current massacres of Igbo/Biafrans are violations of the human and indigenous rights of Biafrans, a genocide.
In this part of my ongoing research, I examine the experiences (past and current) of Indigenous Igbo/Biafrans through the lenses of UN documents on genocide and human rights. My research includes an examination of some of the speeches and journals of Gen. Ojukwu (then leader of Biafra) as provided in his published journals as literary and historical documents that reveal his attempts to explain the terror unleashed against his people as a human rights violation, carefully constructing a narrative representing the trauma and accompanying violence as an emerging genocide.