Destination Biafra was published by Allison & Busby in 1982. It is Emecheta’s most ambitious novel in scope — a sweeping narrative of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), from the coups and counter-coups that fractured Nigeria along ethnic lines through the secession of Biafra, the siege, the famine, and the eventual surrender. Debbie Ogedemgbe, a young, Oxford-educated Igbo woman who has joined the Nigerian army, is sent on a mission to persuade the Biafran leader Abosi (a thinly fictionalized Ojukwu) to negotiate a ceasefire.
Debbie’s journey through the war zone forms the novel’s narrative spine. She witnesses atrocities committed by both sides — the massacres of Igbos in the north, the retaliatory killings, the systematic starvation of Biafra’s civilian population by the Nigerian federal government. Emecheta does not take sides in the conventional sense — she is Igbo and her sympathies are with the Biafran cause, but she is too honest to pretend that the Biafran leadership was blameless or that the conflict was a simple matter of good versus evil.
The novel is sometimes faulted for its scope — Emecheta attempts to encompass the entire war in a single narrative, and the result can feel rushed — but its ambition is undeniable. It is one of the few novels to address the Nigerian Civil War from a woman’s perspective, and Debbie’s experience as a woman in a war zone — the sexual violence, the exploitation, the erasure of women’s agency — adds a dimension that the predominantly male literature of the conflict lacks.
Collecting Destination Biafra
First edition (Allison & Busby, London, 1982): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good/very good: $40–$100