Arua Oko Omaka’s The Biafran Humanitarian Crisis, 1967–1970 is an important addition to the growing literatures on both the Nigeria-Biafra War and international humanitarianism. The book begins with a thorough description of the war’s historical context, including an argumentative account of Nigeria’s national history up until Biafra’s secession. It then moves on to a series of thematic chapters on the politics of international humanitarianism in the 1960s, the creation of the consortium of Christian relief agencies known as Joint Church Aid (JCA) in 1968, and the provision of aid to Biafra up to the time of its defeat in 1970. Several important dimensions of the international response are addressed here more fully than in most secondary works, including the logistics of the humanitarian airlift, the theological underpinnings of the intervention, and the internal tensions among Catholic and Protestant agencies “on the ground.” Rather than evaluating the impact of JCA’s work, Omaka’s objective is to understand “the factors that influenced the intervention of the humanitarian organizations and how such intervention shaped the interpretation of the war debate” (5).

The book’s greatest value lies its distilled description of the crisis which elicited the response of organizations such as Joint Church Aid. As a history of that response it is tentative; JCA occupies less space in the narrative than the title suggests it might, and some of the unresolved questions about it and other agencies, including their role in bringing arms and other military materials into the country, are not Omaka’s main focus. But as a description of the crisis itself, it is exhaustive and effective. Detailed descriptions of the management of food distribution, the improvisation of anesthetics, and the conjuring of camps to accommodate millions of displaced people all feature here, often in greater detail than can be found elsewhere. The book is rich with archival materials, but there is little engagement with secondary literature—both on the war and on the larger story of human rights and humanitarianism.

One of the central arguments of The Biafran Humanitarian Crisis concerns the question of aid dependency. Omaka believes that Biafra offers a lesson to humanitarian organizations on how to avoid making the places that they serve reliant on the assistance that they provide. Several important points are made in reaching this conclusion, including a description of JCA’s encouragement of sustainable agricultural practices and a deep historical argument about the “heritage” of food deficiency in eastern Nigeria, which Omaka convincingly argues shaped both the form that hunger took in Biafra and its ability to recover from famine after the war ended. But what, if anything, the history of JCA in Biafra tells us about aid dependency is unclear, especially given the short duration of the war and the circumstances in which it ended. Whether the former Biafran territories might have become “dependent” on aid in the long term was made moot by Nigeria’s stance towards foreign aid organizations after Biafra’s surrender. “Let them keep their bloody money,” Omaka quotes Nigeria’s head of state Yakubu Gowon as saying when Caritas and the World Council of Churches offered their services to him after the war. “Nigeria will do this itself” (112). The salient historical question here is not how JCA and other organizations prevented dependency, but rather how Nigeria conducted relief and rehabilitation within its reconstituted borders once peace had been achieved.

A major debate in the study of humanitarianism and warfare revolves around whether or not aid—even to civilians—prolongs conflict by propping up a belligerent state that would otherwise be defeated quickly. Omaka weighs JCA’s work against this argument, tallies lives saved and lost, and concludes that humanitarian aid had no such effect in Biafra. Even so, he allows that this is a speculative question which cannot be fully answered using the sources available to him. The argument is a moral one; even if humanitarian aid to Biafra did prolong the war, he admonishes, the military assistance provided to Nigeria by its allies and other supportive nations did so to a greater extent. After all, planes and armaments sold or given to Nigeria enabled the fighting in a much more direct manner than the food aid that kept Biafran civilians alive. This is an important riposte to the historiography of humanitarianism, which can be myopic in its focus on the internal philosophies of humanitarian organizations at the expense of a broader view of their place on the battlefield.

Arua Oko Omaka’s book deserves a wide readership not only in African studies but in the fields of human rights and humanitarianism as well. It will appeal to the growing number of historians working through the legacies of the Nigeria-Biafra War and the history of international intervention in the 1960s and 70s, but it also speaks to current practitioners of humanitarianism. To that audience, Omaka offers a detailed case study of how good causes are made, mobilized, and instrumentalized.