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From Socialist Worker, No. 103, 4 January 1969, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
AS SYMPATHETIC human beings we might give to charity, although we know such actions cannot even scratch the surface of the problem.
As socialists we art concerned with the battle to eliminate the root causes of poverty, war and oppression.
It is appropriate that the millionaire press was plastered with heartbreaking pictures of starving Biafran children when a Nigerian victory was thought to be imminent, but that they lost interest when the Biafrans struggled to their feet to keep on fighting.
As socialists, however, we are mainly concerned with supporting men when they fight, if we think their cause is right. We can leave the useless pity for the defeated to our private hearts.
But should we support Biafra’s right to break away from Nigeria?
The phrase ‘right of national self-determination’ will not give us an answer until we have decided exactly what it means, and why we should support it.
Socialists do not believe in mystical things which men cannot voluntarily change. We don’t believe that ‘nations’ exist irrespective of what men think, but only because men make them and believe in them.
And we certainly do not believe in the sacredness of territorial integrity and national boundaries.
On the contrary, nations and nation states only took clear shape and asserted themselves with the development of capitalism and we are trying to encourage working-class internationalism and to fight to make a free international society.
Yet just as class rule does exist and can only be opposed by strengthening (not denying) class feeling and class war, so national oppression does exist and can only be overcome by struggles for national independence.
If workers did not feel class conscious you would not have a classless society, only one in which the class; rule of the capitalists was even harsher. If the Vietnamese were not fighting the Americans you would not have a less nationalistic world, merely one in which the aggressive nationalism of American imperialism was less challenged.
‘The recognition of the RIGHT of ALL nations to self-determination implies the recognition of the maximum of DEMOCRACY and the minimum of nationalism ... Unless we in our agitation advance and carry out the slogan of the right to secession we shall play into the hands not only of the bourgeoisie but also of the feudal landlords and of the absolutism of the oppressing nation’ (Lenin, 1914).
The quotation from Lenin is very much in its place here, Today we think of national liberation as a struggle against imperialism.
Clearly we must support the Vietnamese NLF against the world power which is the greatest enemy both of the third world and of the world working class.
The Biafran situation does not fit in neatly here. True, Britain created the Nigerian Federation, and deliberately weighted it so the feudal north would counterbalance the more modern classes of the West and particularly the East (Biafra), a situation with parallels in the Adeni Federation.
True, Britain has sustained! the Nigerian attack with arms and supplies. But the rival imperialisms of Portugal and France have been backing Biafra.
Most socialists have found the situation confusing and have abstained from taking sides or even from discussing it.
But Lenin argued support for the right of self-determination in a situation which can easily be compared to Biafra.
He was asserting particularly the right of secession of Poland from Russia – of a more advanced and westernised ruling class from the political domination of a more backward autocracy – which, said Lenin, was itself ‘economically entirely dependent on the power of the imperialist finance capital of the ‘rich’ bourgeois countries.’
A bourgeois Poland, independent of Russian political rule, had a chance of developing its industry and its working class.
A Biafra independent of Nigerian rule would have much less chance of achieving this.
More than 50 years have passed and the capitalists of backward countries are almost entirely paralysed by the power of imperialism and the world market and by the distance that must be travelled to achieve a modern technology.
Yet while it is clear that the Nigerian Federation could not have achieved the breakthrough (and even clearer that a Nigeria reunited by force could not do so), it is arguable that an independent Biafra, inhabited by some of the most westernised people in Africa (with near 100 per cent literacy for example) and with valuable natural resources, might just possibly succeed.
Lenin’s argument about Poland did not however depend on the greater presumed efficiency and ‘progressiveness’ of an independent bourgeois Poland. Our argument about Biafra is also not dependent on this remote possibility.
We, like Lenin, are concerned first with the development of a strong working-class movement with an international consciousness. The working class of a nation which rules and oppresses another is corrupted by this, unless it campaigns for the right of the oppressed nation to self-determination.
Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot’ said Lenin.
And Marx thought that ‘it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connection with Ireland ... English reaction had its roots ... in the subjugation of Ireland’.
On the other hand, the working class of the subject nation finds itself doubly repressed. It also finds its vision of the class enemy at home and the class brothers abroad blurred by the need to fight for independence.
There can, of course, be unity without oppression and to support the right to divorce does not mean one may not argue against it in a particular case.
Before the massacres of Ibos by other tribes, they were the section of the country most committed first to independence from Britain and then to a united Nigeria.
Now, however, it is clear that a reunited Nigeria will only be glued together by naked force and oppression, which would block the development of a working-class movement on either side.
Perhaps we are still begging the whole question. It is sometimes argued that we have here not a national but a reactionary tribal movement of a kind which could splinter Africa.
But the seven million Ibos are among the most westernised and detribalised people in Africa, comprising many traders, entrepreneurs and industrial workers.
Their old tribal structure was not centralised and they are not now fighting under the banners of chiefs and elders but of a modern army and administration.
Are they then a puppet of a rival imperialism, as was Tshombe in Katanga? There can be no doubt of their dependence on arms from France and Portugal.
On August 19, a photocopy of a document supposedly signed by Ojukwu (the Biafran leader) was shown to the press in Lagos. It ceded to a French bank all rights to exploit Biafran underground resources (coal and minerals, not oil or gas) in return for 80 million francs in cash.
Yet aid alone does not make a puppet. It is clear that the Ibo population solidly supports secession, and that the move was not foreign inspired. The dependence of Biafra on support it receives does not nearly balance the dependence of Nigeria on its foreign backers.
Without outside support to either side, Biafra would have won long ago.
Is Biafra a nation?
A nation may often be created in struggle. There can be no doubt that the Nigerian Federation before the civil war was not a nation and that if the Federation were reimposed by force, the chances of it becoming one would be nil.
The seven million Ibos have found a unity in struggle which is making a nation of them.
It is uncertain whether this statement can be extended to the five mllion members of minority tribes living within the Biafran area. We must recognise also the justice of the aspirations of these minorities.
For the moment Biafra’s struggle against Nigeria must be characterised as a defensive action. There is no working class in either Nigeria or Biafra capable of preparing the way to a solution to the problem by siding in solidarity with one or the other.
No one can demand of the Ibos that they let themselves be exterminated by Adekunle’s troops. A peace not recognising the independence of Biafra could only paper over the national conflicts which would break out again in the long run.
The Ojukwu regime bears evident features of neocolonialism – and French imperialism is no better than English imperialism.
But it is only in an independent Biafra that the the ruling class can eliminate all the contradictions of the tribal quarrels.
It is only along this path that the Nigerian and Biafran workers can recover from their destructive defeat and take up the struggle for real national and social liberation – for the overthrow of the national bourgeoisie and the feudal aristocracy, for the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasants and certain sectors of the middle class and for the unification of all the Sudanese states on a socialist basis.
Such success will only be achieved in conjunction with revolution in the advanced countries.
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