2025 Journal Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu

Memory As Counter-War Tool

by Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu, 2025 Journalism Fellow

Once, in a small village in northeastern Nigeria, I sat with a man whose teenage son had been killed by Boko Haram terrorists a few years before. As I listened to him recount the incident, how his son had died in what is now known as the Buni Yadi massacre, how he had sent the boy to boarding school hale and hearty only to receive not his remains but news of what they looked like in the end—charred, unrecognisable—his grief was unspeakable. Yet I would later try to articulate it in a report for HumAngle Media, where I work. Towards the end of the interview, in an attempt to get him to make a call for action, I asked what justice would look like for him, what he would like the Nigerian government to do to assuage his pain.

“They should just apologise and acknowledge the harm that was done,” he said to me. He did not want financial reparation or even access to psychosocial services. Just an acknowledgement that they had failed in their duty to protect his son and that his son had died needlessly.

As I walked through Auschwitz in July 2025 during the FASPE programme, gazing upon the results of painful efforts to remember, preserve, and acknowledge that harm was done, as I looked at the seemingly endless mounds of shoes and human hair, I remembered what that man said to me years ago: they should simply acknowledge the harm that has been done.

He was neither the first nor the last to respond to that question—which I almost always pose at the end of every interview—in that way. But somehow, it was his memory that came bubbling to the top of my mind that day. Even now, I see his pained face as he spoke to me.

His plea was basic. It speaks to what is essential to humans everywhere: the need to be seen, acknowledged, and heard. But it may also have been born out of what little action the Nigerian government has undertaken in that regard. How far he had allowed himself to hope was heavily influenced by what he thought possible or attainable. For citizens of countries that take remembrance seriously, a plea from families of victims would likely look different.

Violent extremists in Borno State founded Boko Haram in 2009. Ever since, they have, worked towards toppling Nigerian democracy to establish what they believe to be an Islamic state. They have pursued this goal through mass killings, abductions, and atrocities so violent the human mind struggles to imagine them. Between then and now, over 350,000 people have been killed directly and indirectly, 25,000 others have gone missing, and over 2 million have been displaced.

The Boko Haram insurgency is not Nigeria’s first faceoff with war, however.

In 1967, less than a decade after gaining independence, the country became embroiled in a war when people from the southeastern region tried to break away as the independent country of Biafra. These events came on the heels of intense political instability resulting from, among other things, two coup attempts. Both had resulted in the deaths of key political players. These sequences of military interference may have intensified the government’s violent reaction to Biafra’s attempted secession.

The war raged for years, only ending in 1970 after nearly one million people had been killed through starvation and violence.

It did not start off as an ethnic war, but since those in the southeast were mainly Igbo-speaking and those in the north mainly Hausa-speaking, it quickly became one. Pictures of starving children reduced to skeletons began to surface, and the international community tried to intervene. Some countries, such as the UK, sided with Nigeria. Others, like France, sided with Biafra. Finally, in 1969, Biafra surrendered, and its leader, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, fled, seeking asylum in the Ivory Coast. To this day, ethnic tensions exist between the region and others, especially the northern region, where I am from. The government, however, insists on a slogan of “no victor, no vanquished.”

There are still agitations for Biafra; separatist groups have sprung up in the southeast to further the cause and have turned violent, leading Nigeria to declare one of them– the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB)—a terrorist group. In addition to the separatist agitation, however, there is ethnic and religious tension that, from time to time, flares into little pockets of violence not just in the southeast but also in other parts of the country: mob violence, ethnic profiling, jungle justice. All the telltales of a nation that has not yet healed.

All these instances point to the fact that the Nigeria–Biafra war was a significant and defining moment in Nigeria’s history, so much so that the effects are still visible and ongoing to this day. Yet, the state has actively suppressed this history, even attempting to erase it. History, as a subject, was removed from secondary school curricula, for example. A HumAngle investigation¹ also found that the Nigerian government deliberately blocked access to websites that sought to document Biafran history. I was only able to access them when I travelled out of the country. On these websites, I saw firsthand accounts from now very old men and women about how they survived the war, the things they witnessed, the starvation, and their conscription into conflict, even when they had no military or combat experience to speak of. Others spoke about the friends and family they had lost. One Roselyn Ukerele recounted,² through the Biafra War Memories platform, how “people threw away their children” as they fled for survival.

In 2014, the planned release of a movie depicting the war faced resistance from the Nigerian government. It was an adaptation of the novel Half of a Yellow Sun by celebrated Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie. She wrote in her New Yorker article³ that year that the government said the movie might “incite violence.” Adichie, whose grandfathers had died in the war, said she found this reasoning absurd. The movie’s release was delayed but not stopped.

The refusal to reckon with a history of violence, in other words, continues to surface and manifest in different ways in Nigeria.

At Auschwitz, I came face to face with the magnitude of what that decision has done to the Nigerian psyche.

In one room, there was the seemingly endless book that documented every known name of all the nearly six million victims of the Holocaust. In another part, the rooms and “furniture” stood exactly as they had been during the war. The gas chambers remained. The fellowship experience also brought me so close to the way the Nazis’ minds worked: studying Himmler’s speech, learning about the Topf brothers.

It was not easy to look upon those memories, to learn about those men and women, all that evidence of what had been done all those years ago, to reckon with the human capacity for evil and injustice. No, it was not easy, but it was necessary. In those efforts, literature, and sites, I found the deliberate refusal to look away, to hold up the pieces and say to the world: look, this happened. And we must never forget, because we cannot let it happen again.

This approach does not restore—no approach does, even where reparations are paid— but it repairs. It validates the victims’ experiences, acknowledges and brings to the fore the humanity of the aggressors. It is a potent counter-war strategy that reminds us, over and over, that society must never slip back into that kind of darkness again.

In fighting war, Nigeria has tried heavy militarisation, often leading to the accidental bombing of civilian populations. It has tried amnesty by establishing a “safe corridor” programme for combatants to lay down their arms and surrender to the state (this has also had issues of forced admission of wrongdoing by civilians who are arbitrarily held for years without proof and trial. They “confess” because it speeds up their release).

What it has not tried, what it has rejected vehemently, is to remember publicly and collectively. It did not do so after the Nigeria-Biafra war. But it has a chance to do so now as the Boko Haram insurgency rages on.

I have travelled through rural parts of conflict-affected regions in Nigeria, including Bama, Nguro Soye, Buni Yadi, Jumbam, Dapchi, Birnin Yauri, and others. And there is no shortage of relics left behind by the violence on the road. I have come across discarded remnants of the early, more violent days of the insurgency: collapsed buildings, charred vehicles, burnt homes, and much else.

I came back from FASPE with many questions for myself and my career but also some for my country: what could become possible if these items were preserved in a museum or a memorial site, as evidence of what happened, if we were not afraid to look upon them and come to terms with the fact that they did, in fact, happen? That they are, in fact, happening?

Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu was a 2025 FASPE Journalism Fellow. She is currently the managing editor at HumAngle Media, a conflict reporting media organisation based in Nigeria.

Memory As Counter-War Tool

by Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu, 2025 Journalism Fellow

Notes