A Grammy-winning director has, with the blessing of UK taxpayers, decided to explore his Nigerian grandfather’s role in the Biafran war. How terribly convenient. The Biafran conflict, a squalid little tribal spat that claimed perhaps a million lives, is now the subject of a film. Not a documentary, mind you, but a ‘personal exploration’. Because what the world truly needs is another artiste unpacking their ancestral trauma while we pay for the therapy.
Let us not mince words. The Biafran war was a product of the post-colonial chaos that followed the British Empire’s hasty retreat. The Empire, in its wisdom, had cobbled together Nigeria from disparate peoples, leaving behind a powder keg. When the powder ignited, the world shrugged. The British government, ever the pragmatist, backed the federal side. The Americans played their usual role of indecisive giant. And the Biafrans starved, their children’s bellies distended in photographs that briefly stirred the conscience of the West before we turned the page to more pressing matters like the latest Beatles album.
Now, a half-century later, a celebrity grandson arrives to ‘explore’ this messy history. The UK-backed film—supported by the British Film Institute or some such quango—promises to ‘reassess’ the conflict. Reassess? The Biafran war has been reassessed to death. It was a tragedy, a war crime, a failure of diplomacy, etc. We know this. What we don’t know is why a talented director wastes his time on this navel-gazing when there are actual wars happening today: Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan. But no, the past is safer. The past can be framed, scored, and sold to Netflix.
The director’s grandfather apparently played a role. Which side? The film doesn’t say, but it will no doubt be complicated, nuanced, and deeply personal. I can already see the reviews: “A searing indictment of colonial legacy” or “A moving tribute to family memory.” The director, a man of wealth and acclaim, will parse his guilt over his grandfather’s complicity or victimhood. And we will applaud his courage.
This is the intellectual decadence I have warned about. We have become a civilisation obsessed with introspection over action, with symbol over substance. The Victorians, for all their faults, understood empire and its costs without constant hand-wringing. They built things; they fought wars; they moved on. Today, we film our nightmares and call it progress.
The Biafran war deserves a serious historian, not a filmmaker seeking catharsis. But that would require confronting uncomfortable truths: that tribalism remains alive, that post-colonial states are often failures, that the West’s interference—or non-interference—was never purely altruistic. Instead, we get a film. A film that will win awards, dominate festival circuit chatter, and change nothing.
I am told the director hopes to ‘humanise’ the conflict. Humanise? The Biafran war was already humanised by the photos of children with flies on their lips. The problem was never a lack of humanity; it was a lack of will. The British, the Americans, the Soviets—all had the power to stop the famine. They chose not to. That is the story. That is the sin. And no amount of clever editing will absolve us.
But I digress. The film will be a triumph. The director will cry in interviews. The UK will pat itself on the back for funding ‘difficult conversations’. And the Biafran dead will remain dead, their ghosts unappeased.
I must conclude. This is the pattern of our age: turn tragedy into content, complexity into persona. The director is not a historian; he is a tourist in his own past. And we are the saps who buy the ticket.
