The first warning did not arrive with gunfire or sirens. It arrived quietly, in kitchens across the Eastern Region, when cooking pots were lifted from fires and something essential was missing. Soup tasted flat. Fish no longer appeared. Children ate and remained hungry moments later. Before many families ever saw soldiers or heard shelling nearby, they understood that the war had entered their homes through food.
This loss of taste was not trivial. It marked the beginning of a systemic collapse brought on by the federal blockade imposed during the Nigerian Civil War. By late 1967, the Eastern Region had been cut off from food systems it had relied on for decades. Salt and protein, once ordinary and dependable, disappeared with alarming speed. Roughly 80 percent of protein supplies previously imported or sourced from other regions were severed. What followed was not an instant famine but a prolonged breakdown of nutrition that unfolded slowly, relentlessly, and at the level of the household.
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How meals began to fail
Food scarcity revealed itself first in portions, then in substance. Plates grew lighter. Ingredients vanished. A thin, watery preparation known as “win-the-war” soup became a daily reality in many homes. It often contained no meat at all. In some cases, its only flavour came from boiling and re boiling already used salt cod. The soup filled stomachs briefly but provided little nourishment. Eating ceased to be sustaining and became an exercise in endurance.
As supplies vanished, families turned outward for survival. Forests, rivers, and fields were stripped of what they could offer. Common crabs, small rodents, and wild leaves entered daily diets. Cocoyam leaves, once peripheral, became central as a substitute source of protein. Cassava and yams were harvested before maturity, driven by fear of looting and the urgency of hunger. Each premature harvest reduced future yields, tightening scarcity as the war dragged on.
Farming under siege
Agriculture itself was reshaped by necessity. A “Land Army” was created to encourage the cultivation of every available plot of land. Cassava and yams became survival crops rather than market produce. Farming was no longer seasonal or economic. It became an emergency response to blockade. Fields were planted not for abundance or profit, but for continuity, enough to survive the next week rather than the next year.
Salt remained the most elusive necessity. Its absence went far beyond taste. Food preservation became nearly impossible. Iodine intake collapsed. Diets grew more monotonous and less nutritious. Salt was treated as a luxury item, handled carefully, diluted when possible, and often entirely absent. Its disappearance symbolised a deeper loss of control over the most basic requirements of life.
Bodies reveal the cost
By 1968, deprivation could no longer be concealed. Bodies began to record what statistics could not yet capture. Kwashiorkor, a form of protein energy malnutrition, spread widely across the enclave. Children were the most visibly affected. Swollen bellies, thinning limbs, skin lesions, and hair discolouration became common sights. Starvation deaths rose sharply, reaching peak levels in late 1968. Hunger was no longer private. It was collective, visible, and unmistakable.
The human body adapted in desperate and often fatal ways. With insufficient protein, muscle tissue broke down. Strength drained away. Many became too weak to tend farms or walk long distances. Immune systems collapsed, turning common illnesses such as diarrhoea and measles into deadly threats. Survival increasingly depended not on labour or resilience, but on chance.
Women and the burden of survival
As formal supply systems collapsed, informal ones emerged. Women developed a dangerous form of cross border trade known as “afia attack,” slipping across battle lines into Nigerian controlled areas in search of food and salt. These journeys were risky, and the available material does not document their full scope or individual experiences. Their existence alone, however, reveals how survival responsibilities shifted onto civilians, particularly women, as official channels failed.
Scarcity also forced communities to revive older practices. With imported salt unavailable, indigenous salt mining and processing re emerged, especially in areas such as present day Ebonyi. Women again played a central role in this revival, producing salt locally to meet urgent needs. The scale and effectiveness of this production are not quantified in the available material, but its return illustrates how communities reached backward into older knowledge systems to survive present conditions.
A deliberate humanitarian disaster
The blockade was not accidental. It was a deliberate strategy. Combined with sustained military conflict, it produced a humanitarian catastrophe. Estimates attribute between 500,000 and 2 million civilian deaths, predominantly from starvation and related diseases, to the conditions created during the siege. While the exact figure remains contested, the scale of loss is undisputed.
When the war ended in 1970, its damage did not end with the fighting. Bodies had been permanently altered. Diets had been rewritten under pressure. Trust in stability, of food, of systems, of everyday life, had been profoundly shaken. Children who survived carried the physical consequences of early malnutrition. Adults carried the memory of watching food fail.
What hunger changed forever
The disappearance of salt and protein did more than alter what people ate. It redefined survival itself. Ordinary life, meals, farming, trade, was reorganised around absence. Long after the guns fell silent, the experience remained embedded in how communities understood hunger, resilience, and the reach of state power into the most intimate spaces of life.
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Author’s Note
This article traces how the federal blockade during the Nigerian Civil War transformed everyday life in the Eastern Region by collapsing access to salt and protein. It documents how ordinary households adapted through altered diets, emergency farming, informal trade, and revived indigenous practices, while highlighting the biological toll of widespread malnutrition and the long lasting social consequences of enforced hunger.
References
John de St. Jorre, The Nigerian Civil War
Alexander Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War
Elizabeth Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War
