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Wiktionary
biafra

n. A short-lived secessionist state in southern Nigeria in the late 1960s.

Wikipedia
Biafra

Biafra, officially the Republic of Biafra, was a secessionist state in eastern Nigeria that existed from the 30th of May, 1967, to January 1970. It took its name from the Bight of Biafra, the Atlantic bay to its south. The inhabitants were mostly the Igbo people who led the secession due to economic, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions among the various peoples of Nigeria. Other ethnic groups that constituted the republic were the Efik, Ibibio, Annang, Ejagham, Eket, Ibeno and the Ijaw among others.

The secession of the Biafran region was the primary cause of the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War. The state was formally recognised by Gabon, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, and Zambia. Other nations which did not give official recognition, but provided support and assistance to Biafra included Israel, France, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Rhodesia, South Africa and the Vatican City. Biafra also received aid from non-state actors, including Joint Church Aid, Holy Ghost Fathers of Ireland, Caritas International, MarkPress and U.S. Catholic Relief Services.

After two-and-a-half years of war, during which over three million Biafran civilians died from starvation occasioned by the total blockade of the region by the Nigerian government, Biafran forces under the motto of "No-victor, No-vanquished" surrendered to the Nigerian Federal Military Government (FMG), and Biafra was reintegrated into Nigeria.

Usage examples of "biafra".

Stop at the bend where part of the Atlantic Ocean curves inward and becomes the Bight of Biafra.

The death of the nation of Biafra was a matter of days now, not weeks, and he and his wife were some of the last to go.

The Ibos were not on an island, and Biafra was destroyed by Nigerian numbers and British and Russian weapons and a blockade that no nation on earth made any effort to relieve, not on a scale that could save anyone.

She remembered standing between her parents and the Howarths (who, though they had adopted her, had never let her call them Mother and Father lest she forget her real heritage in Biafra), hearing her father say, “Please.

My father was an illiterate savage who spoke better English than her and had French and German, too, and wrote beautiful poems in Igbo and even though to survive in the days when Biafra was struggling for survival he worked as a house servant to an American correspondent, he was never illiterate!

Taking me back to the burned-out jungle in Biafra where fear grew thicker than the vines.

Forsyth is currently at work on a third novel, The Dogs of War, which he has set among mercenaries in Africa and in which he has included details of gun-running from Europe he uncovered while researching his nonfiction book, The Biafra Story, and while serving as the BBC's television correspondent in Biafra during the Nigerian civil war.

Anyway, he wrote me saying he was going to join the mercenaries in Biafra.