THE DAY
BIAFRA
DIED

BY MILTON ALLIMADI

Garrison, who had been expelled by Nigeria's Federal Military Government (FMG), had managed to make his way into Biafra, the breakaway region that had declared its independence under Gen. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. From there, he continued filing stories for The New York Times. I remember reading a memorandum from the paper's editors to the State Department expressing alarm that the FMG had made it clear Garrison's life would be in danger if federal troops captured him.

The episode struck me as a fascinating glimpse into the realities of foreign correspondence in an African war zone—an aspect of journalism that readers rarely see documented in such detail through the internal records of a major news organization. Although decades passed, I always intended to revisit that story, dig deeper into the archives, and, if possible, locate Garrison's own correspondence describing what had happened and how the episode was ultimately resolved.

When I first conducted research in The New York Times archives, I was a graduate student at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism from 1991 to 1992. My findings formed the foundation of my master's research project, "Darkest Times in Africa," which examined the newspaper's coverage of Africa from the 1850s through the 1990s and the racial assumptions that underpinned much of both its reporting and commentary. At the time, the archives were housed in a separate building. Today, they are located in the main branch of the New York Public Library in Midtown Manhattan.

Over the past three years, I have returned to the archives periodically, examining the papers of various New York Times correspondents who reported from Africa over several decades. Beginning in the fall of 2025, I focused once again on Garrison's files and made an unexpected discovery.

From my earlier research, I already knew that Garrison had been sympathetic to Biafra. What I did not know was the extent of that commitment.

For the first time, I read letters exchanged between Garrison and his editors revealing that he had befriended the Swedish aviator and adventurer Count Gustaf von Rosen, who later helped Biafra establish its embryonic air force, which launched military attacks against Nigeria. Garrison knew about the proposed Biafran air force and its planned operations well before the attacks took place. He would later report on those same operations from Biafra for The New York Times.

I decided to use these archival materials to write what I envisioned as a relatively slim volume focusing on this previously unreported episode of the Biafran War: that The New York Times knew about the planned military attacks against Nigeria more than a month before they occurred—and, presumably, well before the Nigerian military government led by Gen. Yakubu Gowon.

I believed such a book would interest journalists, Nigerians, students of African history, and anyone curious about the role that two Europeans played in this remarkable chapter of Nigeria's history.

I also wanted to know whether the Nixon administration, which was in office during much of the Biafran War, had been aware that The New York Times possessed advance knowledge of the planned attacks. That question led me into the historical archives of the US State Department, a resource I had explored in previous years, although never for a specific book project.

What I discovered surprised me.

As I worked through State Department and White House memoranda, it became clear that President Richard Nixon had played a far more active role in the Biafran War than I had ever imagined. Initially, he sought to pressure both Gen. Gowon and Gen. Ojukwu to permit a significant increase in relief shipments for starving Biafrans. Later, he wanted to abandon the official US policy of neutrality and tilt decisively toward Biafra—perhaps even extend recognition.

At that point, I realized the book could no longer be simply about Lloyd Garrison's partisan role in the war. It had become a larger story—one that combined Garrison's extraordinary relationship with Biafra, Nixon's evolving policy toward the conflict, and, ultimately, how Gen. Ojukwu appears to have made a fateful decision that contributed to the death of Biafra.

As my research expanded, I also came to appreciate another important distinction. The Biafran War differed fundamentally from another major African conflict involving secession: the Congo Crisis of the early 1960s.

The Congo conflict had a pronounced ideological dimension. On one side stood Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the nationalist and Pan-African leader who had been mentored by Kwame Nkrumah, one of the foremost advocates of a United States of Africa. On the other stood Moise Tshombe, who was widely regarded across Africa as a Western puppet and an agent of neocolonialism.

Lumumba enjoyed the sympathy of African nationalists, Pan-Africanists, the socialist countries, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern bloc. Tshombe, by contrast, was backed by the Western capitalist powers—primarily the United States and Belgium, the former colonial power—as well as powerful financial and mining interests.

The Nigerian Civil War lacked that same ideological divide. Ironically, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union—Cold War adversaries—found themselves supporting the same side, backing the Federal Military Government against Biafra.

Yet my research uncovered another revealing irony. Both Gen. Gowon, who led the Nigerian military government, and Gen. Ojukwu, who led Biafra, were viewed by American officials as members of the new African bourgeois elite. At the same time, even though France supplied Biafra with hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of weapons during the war, French officials viewed Ojukwu with wary eyes. According to documents in the archives of the US State Department, they believed that even if Biafra had survived as an independent state, Ojukwu would eventually have been overthrown by Biafran leftist intellectuals.

That is how this book came to be.

The Biafran War also claimed the life of an American who is frequently overlooked in historical accounts: August Harvey Martin. A former Tuskegee Airman, Martin made history in 1955 when Seaboard World Airlines hired him as the first African American commercial airline captain. Driven by humanitarian concern, he volunteered to fly hazardous nighttime relief missions delivering food to blockaded Biafra. On June 30, 1968, while attempting to land a Lockheed L-1049G Super Constellation at the Uli airstrip during a severe tropical rainstorm, his aircraft crashed. The tragedy also took the lives of his wife, Gladys Frank Riddle Martin, and two Red Cross representatives.

I wanted to thank all friends and family members who read the manuscript and provided feedback. Special thank you to Merron Lemma who has sharp eyes and whose editing was exceptional.

Milton Allimadi, New York City.
September 1, 2026