Biafran Childhoods, Youth Mobilization, and Child Soldiering in the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-70.

The starving Biafran child was the iconic victim of the Nigerian civil war and resultant famine. Children and youth however were not just victims of the war--they actively contributed to Biafra's defense and their people's survival, and their participation was more significant than commonly acknowledged in existing scholarship or public memory. This article argues that there was a widespread mobilization of children and youth as part of Biafra's total war effort, from household labor, hunting, and humanitarian relief to underage military service. Biafra recruited children and youth into paramilitary and military forces, in increasing numbers and decreasing chronological ages as the war progressed. They were recruited into specialist reconnaissance units for guerrilla warfare, exploiting child and teenage liminality. This article contextualizes child soldiering within wider patterns of child and youth mobilization and militarization, highlighting the varying paths towards, and alternatives to, military service that shaped both the level of and forms of underage military recruitment and use within Biafra. With a marginalization of children's experiences in archival records, this article uses memoirs, interviews, and life writings from former Biafran children, alongside war reporting and photography to analyze the roles that children and youth fulfilled and their wartime experiences. Individuals acted across multiple roles, from frontline to reconnaissance to auxiliary work, often moving between such roles as their capacities for, and attitudes towards, violence and personal risk changed. While some fought through coercion or necessity, others felt genuine political motivation, willingly risking their lives and freedoms for Biafra's survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]