TY - JOUR
AU - Daly, Samuel Fury Childs
AB - In The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering, Lasse Heerten offers a rigorously researched, comprehensive analysis of a war that was critical not only to Nigeria’s national history but also to the ascendance of a form of humanitarianism that remade the practice of war in the second half of the 20th century. In the story of Biafra, Heerten also finds the origin of a mode of representing violence in Africa that still endures. The book is a detailed autopsy of a humanitarian response and, for this reason, it will be of interest not only to historians but also to policymakers in government and international organizations. It is both a valuable account of Biafra’s history in the international sphere, and an important contribution to many thematic areas—especially the history of human rights. The central conceit of the book is the spectacle, which has two meanings for Heerten. ‘It is not only that non-Western conflicts are turned into spectacles of suffering,’ he writes, ‘the spectacles of suffering are also the lenses through which the West observes the postcolonial world’ (p. 341). This ‘spectacle’ was a co-production between Biafra’s diplomats and propagandists, sympathetic churches, international organizations, and some conflicted foreign governments. These actors had a range of objectives, only one of which was securing Biafra’s independence. Heerten shows how this process unfolded over the course of the conflict (1967–1970). Chapters one and two provide the deep background to the war and narrate its beginning. Chapters three and four relate how the outside came to know about Biafra, initially through churches, and how Europeans and others began to ‘discover’ the war as a humanitarian crisis. Chapter five analyzes Biafra as a ‘visual experience,’ considering how humanitarians built a structure of empathy on images of starvation. Chapter six describes the use of metaphor in humanitarian practice, tracking how the memory of the Holocaust shaped Biafra’s message and what responses that message garnered, while chapter seven situates it in the larger story of Third World nonalignment. Chapter eight interprets how arguments about genocide were mobilized by Biafra and its allies. Chapters nine and ten narrate the end of the war, the wrapping up of the humanitarian project, and the long shadow that the war casts over humanitarian activity generally. The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism takes a familiar tack in global history; it studies an object not only to discern something about the object itself but also about its itinerary through global politics. What distinguishes Heerten’s use of this heuristic is what he uses as the ‘trace.’ Rather than one of the better-known ‘global’ events of this period (of which there are many—1968 and 1969 were busy years in world history) Heerten uses as his object the Biafra War, thereby demonstrating that an event in African history can be far-reaching in the same way that one from Europe or North America can. Talk of Biafra dovetailed with local politics of race and religion in the USA, for example, and it resonated differently in Britain, where Nigeria’s status as a former colony was the lens through which politicians and the public understood the war, than in Germany, where the Holocaust was the most salient point of comparison. On this note, one of the book’s most important contributions is its description of Biafra’s role in consolidating the memory of Europe’s Holocaust. What results is an ambitious and detailed picture of international (especially European) politics in the late 1960s-1970s as refracted through an episode in African history. In large part, this book is about how politicians and humanitarians instrumentalize emotional responses to images. It traces how photographs of suffering—starving children, the war dead—circulate in the world of international politics, and in so doing it enters a larger debate about how to represent acts of violence. Heerten is acutely aware of the ethical weight attached to these images, but his historical argument compels him to place them before the reader in the interest of explaining how they functioned. ‘The iconography of suffering established during the Biafran famine created a new visual genre that characterizes representations of humanitarian campaigns since; up to this day, the African child iconically encapsulates the pain of the Third World for the Western observer,’ he writes. (p. 335). They have lost none of their emotional potency in the last 50 years. Those interested in how images of violence can be instrumentalized, from the iconography of the concentration camp to American lynching, will find this book extremely thought provoking. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Biafran War and postcolonial humanitarianism: Spectacles of suffering
JF - African Affairs
DO - 10.1093/afraf/adab004
DA - 2021-03-31
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-biafran-war-and-postcolonial-humanitarianism-spectacles-of-3Gso0Id6bS
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -