A Grammy-winning director’s new documentary delves into the untold story of his Nigerian grandfather’s involvement in the Biafran War, forcing a reckoning with Britain’s colonial legacy. On the surface, it is a personal family history. But scratch that surface and it is a mirror held up to the enduring fractures of postcolonial identity.
The director, known for his musical accolades, has turned his lens to a conflict that remains a raw wound in Nigeria’s collective memory. The Biafran War (1967-1970) was a brutal secessionist struggle that claimed millions of lives, starved by blockade and shattered by ethnic violence. His grandfather was a foot soldier caught between loyalty to a nascent nation and the shadow of British influence that had drawn the borders in the first place.
What is striking is how this story resonates beyond one family. At a film screening in London, I spoke to audience members who were visibly shaken. A young British-Nigerian woman told me: 'I know nothing of Biafra. My parents never spoke of it. This feels like a key to a door I didn't know was locked.' This is the human cost of historical amnesia. When families suppress trauma, the silence echoes through generations.
Britain’s role in Nigeria is a tangle of economic exploitation and arbitrary statecraft. The BBC’s own archives reveal how Whitehall officials favoured a united Nigeria to protect oil interests, arming the federal government while blockading Biafra. The war was not an African tragedy; it was a colonial aftershock. Yet the British national curriculum glosses over this, leaving diaspora children to piece together fragments from grandparents’ whispers or, now, a documentary.
The director’s work is part of a wider cultural shift. From podcasts to novels, a new generation is sifting through the rubble of empire. They are not seeking apologies but understanding. They want to know how a grandfather could fight for a cause that ended in starvation, or how a grandmother survived. This is not academic; it is personal archaeology.
At a time when ‘decolonising’ has become a buzzword, this film grounds the term in a single lived experience. It shows how the personal is inevitably political. And it challenges Britain to look at its own history not as a series of noble exploits but as a web of decisions that still shape lives in Lagos, Enugu and the streets of Peckham.
The director has said he made this film for his children. But he has also made it for us. It is a reminder that history is never past. It is buried in the soil of our identities, waiting to be unearthed.
