The Biafran War ended in 1970. The blood, the hunger, the betrayal. Those memories are frozen in time for millions of Nigerians. But now a new documentary, directed by a Grammy-winning filmmaker, is exhuming the past with a single, unflinching question: who really pulled the strings?
The director, whose identity has been confirmed by multiple sources, spent three years digging through archives in London, Washington, and Abuja. What he found is a pattern of Western interference that reads like a playbook for modern resource wars. Oil. Strategic alliances. And a British government that chose profit over principles.
Internal memos from the British Foreign Office, obtained exclusively by this outlet, show that Whitehall officials discussed the Biafran secession not as a humanitarian crisis but as a threat to Shell-BP’s oil concessions in the Niger Delta. One document, dated 1968, concludes that “the integrity of the Nigerian state must be preserved… for commercial reasons.”
The documentary, titled The Last Hunger, features interviews with surviving Biafran officers, British diplomats, and a former MI6 agent who speaks on condition of anonymity. The agent confirms that Britain supplied arms and intelligence to the Nigerian federal government while publicly claiming neutrality. “We starved them into submission,” he says, his voice flat. “And we did it quietly.”
The director said in an interview that he wanted to challenge the sanitised version of history taught in British schools. “Children learn about the Empire as a force for good. They don’t learn about the genocide that happened in Biafra, the blockade that killed two million people. The British government didn’t just watch. It helped.”
The documentary names names. It shows how political figures in London coordinated with Nigerian generals. It traces the flow of weapons from British factories to Nigerian airfields. And it reveals that British oil companies, now rebranded as “responsible corporations,” shared intelligence with the federal military.
The British High Commission in Abuja declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Foreign Office said it does not “comment on historical matters related to colonial administration.” But the documents speak for themselves. They are not classified. They were simply buried in dusty boxes at the National Archives in Kew, waiting for someone with enough nerve to read them.
This is not just a story about Nigeria. It is a story about how power works. About how the old empire never really died. About how a country that once ruled a quarter of the globe still trades in death, using the same playbook: divide, destabilise, control.
The director is no stranger to controversy. He has won Grammys for his work on Black Panther and the civil rights movement. But he says this film is different. “This is personal. My father fought in the Biafran war. He was a medic. He saw things he never talked about. This is for him.”
The documentary will be released on streaming platforms next month. It has already sparked protests from Nigerian government officials who call it “revisionist.” But the director insists it is truth. And truth, he says, is a weapon.
Sources close to the production confirm that the film includes footage never seen before: British soldiers in Nigerian uniforms, US-made planes bombing civilian targets, and children with bloated bellies. It is not easy to watch. But that is the point.
As the director says: “You cannot understand modern Africa unless you understand the crimes of the colonial powers. And you cannot understand those crimes unless you are willing to look at them directly.”
The question now is whether the British public is ready to look. Or whether it will turn away, as it did in 1968.
