Images of war
Producer Sami Kent tells us how the conflict in Biafra affected the British public’s ideas about Africa
“It’s hard to imagine today, but world opinion really did hold Africa to be the coming continent”
Archive on Four: Britain and Biafra RADIO Radio 4 Scheduled for Saturday 28 April
In the 1960s, many Britons were optimistic about the future of the nation’s former colonies in Africa. “It’s hard to imagine today, but world opinion really did hold Africa to be the coming continent,” says Sami Kent, producer of an Archive on Four documentary presented by Afua Hirsch about events 50 years ago in Nigeria.
So what changed? How did subSaharan Africa in particular come to be associated with conflict and famine? According to Kent, the turning point was the war that broke out when Biafra attempted to break free of Nigeria in 1967. This “ruptured early optimism” about the end of empire.
“Biafra brought to western audiences pictures of black children with distended bellies and interviews with exasperated aid workers on the ground,” says Kent. “It’s banal coverage now, but at the time it was unprecedented.”
We need to see Biafra, says Kent, as “analogous to the Vietnam War”, in that images of the conflict were prominent both on television and in the tabloids.
Yet the power of these images created distortions. Despite Britain helping to arm the Nigerian government because the country was strategically important for its oil, Biafra came to be seen primarily as a humanitarian tragedy. It was even the subject of the Blue Peter Christmas Appeal in 1968. Considering that, at the very least, 500,000 people died in a war that ended with the secessionists’ defeat in 1970, that’s perhaps understandable. However, this style of reporting, based on what Kent calls the “trope of the wide-eyed African child”, is problematical in that it’s “depoliticised, humanitarian, and deeply visceral”. It also suggests that Europeans can somehow be the saviours of starving children. (This idea runs through TV coverage of the famine in Ethiopia, and Live Aid).
“If on the one hand [this coverage] did at least engage British audiences with a war in west Africa, it was also pretty limited,” says Kent. “As a Nigerian journalist who survived the war as a child told me, when he first saw how the British media reported it, he ‘was so profoundly disgusted’. It had, he felt, been turned into a story not of his suffering and solidarity with others, but about him waiting for western help.”