UC Riverside

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

The Holocaust of Biafra: Anti-Semitism and Genocide in Sub-Saharan Africaby Remy Chukwukaodinaka Ilona

Doctor of Philosophy in Religious StudiesUniversity of California, Riverside, 2024 Dr. Michael S. Alexander

The Igbo genocide carried out between 1966 and 1970 by Nigeria was a culmination of many years of persecution of the Igbo people (the Jews of Nigeria). From the early period of Nigeria, other Nigerians had been hostile to the Igbos. This led to the stirring of an Igbo nationalism to champion their national security. This increased the resentments of the elites of the other Nigerian groups towards the Igbos whose culture and Jewish identity made them different. Attacks, and accusations that the Igbos were satanic, money-loving, Jews, and worse increased. In response the besieged people’s national consciousness started becoming political. Instructively, at roughly the same period that Igbo nationalism became more political, the political Zionism of Theodore Herzl was engendered by anti-Semitic attacks in Europe. The Igbos wanted to restore the national/cultural rights colonialism had taken away from them which they considered their natural rights. These included regaining freedom to express their nationhood in their homeland, which many of them had been forced away from, and to be free of British colonialism. The Jewish nationalists known as Zionists pursued the right to return to Zion (the land of Israel), where they would once again be masters of their own destiny. With World War II came the Holocaust, which some of its outcomes included spread of the culture of Nazi anti-Semitism. Hatred of the Jews did not die with the collapse of the Third Reich. Neither was the culture of the Holocaust contained only in Europe. During the bloodletting in Europe, the late Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Al Haj Mohammed Amin al Husseini, shared this culture spiced with slurs about Jews as enemies of Islam to people in the Arab and Muslim worlds. This dissertation argues that powerful Nigerians who had worked with Al Husseini, and shared his anti-Semitic views, used them to incite Nigerians against Jews. Between 1966 and 1970, the incited Nigerians fell on the Igbos and murdered large numbers of them. Nigeria’s tactics were so brutal that many observers, including the late famous Elie Wiesel, wrote in his book, A Jew Today, that Biafra echoed Auschwitz.