Gender and the politics of war historiography in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra

Buchi Emecheta’s novel about the Nigerian Civil War, Destination Biafra (1982), challenges war historiography in ways that scholarship designating it a “female perspective” on conflict can sometimes overlook. This article focuses how Emecheta deploys dual narrative approach weaves an omniscient narrator with diverse women’s points of view order to position their lived experiences and subjective knowledges as collectively amounting definitive history War. draws reader’s attention gendered effects civil lens whereby which all facets be understood - even especially its macro causes neocolonialism petrocapitalism. By writing women who know economic imperatives behind conflict; exercise agency under dangerous circumstances; employ methods survival safeguard others, reveals politics historiography, tests these by collapsing distinctions between what is habitually conceived front (and therefore narrated active combatants), everywhere else (to witnesses, refugees, or survivors). attempt intervene directly historiographical method, rejects designation mere addenda questions expectations where look for find historical truths.