Abstract
Buchi Emecheta’s novel about the Nigerian Civil War, Destination Biafra (1982), challenges war historiography in ways that scholarship designating it a “female perspective” on the conflict can sometimes overlook. This article focuses on how Emecheta deploys a dual narrative approach that weaves an omniscient narrator with diverse Nigerian women’s points of view in order to position their lived experiences and subjective knowledges as collectively amounting to the definitive history of the Civil War. This draws the reader’s attention to the gendered effects of the civil war as the lens whereby which all facets of the war can be understood - even and especially its macro causes in neocolonialism and petrocapitalism. By writing women who know the economic imperatives behind the conflict; exercise agency under dangerous circumstances; and employ methods of survival that safeguard others, Emecheta reveals the gendered politics of war historiography, and tests these politics by collapsing distinctions between what is habitually conceived of as the war front (and therefore to be narrated by active combatants), and everywhere else (to be narrated by witnesses, refugees, or survivors). Destination can therefore be understood as an attempt to intervene directly in historiographical method, as it rejects the designation of women’s war experiences as mere addenda and questions gendered expectations of where to look for and find historical truths.
Highlights
Buchi Emecheta’s novel about the Nigerian Civil War, Destination Biafra (1982), challenges war historiography in ways that scholarship designating it a “female perspective” on the conflict can sometimes overlook
Majority of African women, her real achievement — as I see it — is to make her immediate environment as happy as is possible under the circumstances” (Emecheta, 1988: 179). In this speech delivered at the Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, the Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta admires what she describes as African women’s skills in managing difficult material conditions to the benefit of the individual and the collective
She argues work deemed successful by Western feminism is easy in comparison to the complexity of surviving the diverse structures seeking to socially, politically, and economically delimit the lives of African women
Summary
Buchi Emecheta’s novel about the Nigerian Civil War, Destination Biafra (1982), challenges war historiography in ways that scholarship designating it a “female perspective” on the conflict can sometimes overlook. She argues work deemed successful by Western feminism is easy in comparison to the complexity of surviving the diverse structures seeking to socially, politically, and economically delimit the lives of African women.1 This power, she further suggests, is passed on, practised, and known (“nothing new”), and it results in material changes to “the circumstances” (Emecheta, 1988: 179).
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