The Nigerian Civil War announced itself quietly in many communities across the Eastern Region. It arrived not first with gunfire, but with absence. Men disappeared from compounds and farms, drawn away by conscription, displacement, or death. Fields lay untended. Markets thinned. In towns and villages, women woke to households that had to function without the people who once anchored them.
Long before many women encountered soldiers or front lines, the war had already entered their lives. Food became scarce. Travel grew dangerous. Survival became uncertain. In this widening gap between loss and necessity, women stepped into responsibilities the war itself made unavoidable.
READ MORE: Ancient & Pre-Colonial Nigeria
Blockade, Hunger, and the Collapse of Ordinary Life
Following Biafra’s declaration of independence, the Federal Military Government imposed a comprehensive land, sea, and air blockade. Food, medicine, fuel, and relief supplies dwindled rapidly. Starvation spread, particularly among children. Hospitals overflowed with the malnourished and wounded. International relief efforts, though present, could not meet the scale of the crisis.
For women, the war was no longer distant or abstract. It entered kitchens where meals could not be prepared, markets where goods vanished, farms where harvests failed, and clinics overwhelmed by hunger-related disease. Daily life became a series of urgent decisions shaped by scarcity.
Holding Communities Together Under Siege
Women initially carried the burden of survival in ways that followed existing social expectations. They cooked what little could be found, nursed the sick and wounded, and cared for children suffering from severe malnutrition, including kwashiorkor. As formal supply systems collapsed, women organised informal food networks, processing cassava, drying vegetables, and redistributing scarce resources within communities.
Many sold personal possessions, jewellery, wrappers, furniture, or household tools to obtain food. These acts were not marginal to the war effort. They sustained families and communities under deliberate deprivation and prolonged siege.
Crossing Lines When Survival Required Movement
As the conflict intensified and shortages deepened, survival demanded more than endurance. Women began undertaking dangerous journeys across contested territory to obtain food and supplies. Disguised as traders or market women, they crossed checkpoints and front lines where men faced arrest or forced recruitment.
These journeys were perilous. Some women returned with food that sustained entire households. Others were detained, injured, or killed. The risks were understood, yet participation increased as hunger left few alternatives.
Movement also brought knowledge. Women observed troop movements, checkpoints, and changes in territorial control. Information gathered during trading or supply missions circulated informally within communities and, in some cases, reached local defence structures. While rarely documented in official records, such intelligence formed part of Biafra’s broader survival strategies.
Women in Civil Defence and Paramilitary Roles
As manpower shortages grew, women appeared in roles previously closed to them. Historical and academic studies confirm women’s involvement in civil defence units, local militias, logistics, communications, and support operations linked to Biafran forces. Some received basic military training and handled weapons, particularly in defensive or support contexts.
Their participation was driven less by ideology than necessity. As casualties mounted, women filled gaps left behind. Hunger and exhaustion often forced movement between roles, from defence to nursing, from logistics to caregiving. The war blurred distinctions between civilian and combatant, care and conflict.
Community Leadership and Local Resistance
Beyond military structures, women emerged as central figures in community organisation and resistance. As Nigerian forces advanced, formal authority often collapsed. Women organised protests, coordinated evacuations, protected food supplies, and negotiated survival at the local level.
In riverine and rural communities, women mobilised collective action to resist occupation, safeguard farmland, and maintain social cohesion. These forms of leadership expanded women’s political agency during the war, particularly where male leadership was absent or disrupted.
Hunger as a Weapon and Women as Its Primary Targets
The blockade and control of agricultural zones intensified famine conditions. International observers described Biafra as one of the gravest humanitarian crises since the Second World War. Women bore the heaviest consequences. Food scarcity undermined their traditional roles as providers and caregivers, forcing constant adaptation.
They improvised food systems, substituted crops, crossed dangerous terrain, and sustained families under conditions designed to exhaust both body and spirit. Survival became an act of resistance.
Social Change Under Pressure
Wartime necessity reshaped social boundaries. Distinctions between male and female roles blurred. Women acquired skills, authority, and responsibilities largely inaccessible before the war. Their labour sustained not only households but the basic functioning of the secessionist state under siege.
These changes, however, were born of emergency rather than policy. They existed because collapse left no alternative.
Silence After the War
When the war ended in 1970, the transformations women experienced found little place in the peace that followed. Women who had organised supply networks, supported defence efforts, and sustained communities returned to civilian life. Their contributions were rarely formalised, recognised, or integrated into postwar governance.
The skills, networks, and authority forged under siege receded from public view, preserved mainly in oral testimony, academic research, and fragmented archives.
Remembering What Survival Required
The history of Biafran women complicates familiar narratives of the Nigerian Civil War. They were not passive witnesses to a male conflict. They were organisers, caregivers, couriers, defenders, and survivors, shaped by hunger, loss, and necessity.
The war altered life in the Eastern Region in lasting ways. Roles expanded. Authority shifted. Boundaries bent under pressure. When the fighting stopped, much of this history faded from official memory. Yet it endures as evidence of how ordinary women redefined participation, resistance, and survival when silence was no longer possible.
EXPLORE: Nigerian Civil War
Author’s Note
This article examines the central role women played during the Nigerian Civil War, particularly in Biafra, where blockade and famine forced women into survival, logistics, civil defence, and community leadership roles. It highlights how women sustained households and local resistance under siege, how wartime necessity reshaped social boundaries, and how these contributions were largely forgotten after the war, despite their lasting impact on communities in the Eastern Region.
References
- Elizabeth Isichei, A History of the Igbo People
- Gloria Chuku, Igbo Women and Economic Transformation in Southeastern Nigeria
- Suzanne Cronje, The World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of the Biafran War
