Biafra: The War the Children Paid ForNigeria · 1967–1970“This story I tell standing, not sitting. Some stories are too heavy for a comfortable voice.”Two coups, a wave of massacres of Igbo people in the north, a million refugees streaming east — and in May 1967 the Eastern Region declared itself the Republic of Biafra. The federation answered with war, and with the oldest siege weapon there is: the blockade.The lesson the elders kept: Famine in modern war is rarely weather — it is policy. And the humanitarian conscience of the modern world was partly born watching Biafra starve.