It is around 40 years now since the civil war in Nigeria ended, yet its ugly scars on the Nigerian mind and soul remain visible and glaring. The defective healing process of the wounds on the Nigerian psyche from the war has resulted in an extensive gulf between the people of the defunct Biafra and Nigeria, the two parties in the war that lasted from 1967 to 1970 and the implications of the war are manifested in diverse ways and degrees in the contemporary Nigerian body politic. Biafra comprised mainly the people of the Eastern part of Nigeria, who, led by Lt. Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, attempted to secede from the federation of Nigeria on account of several grievances prominent among which was acute marginalization. According to Atofarati (2003),

The apparent bitterness and discontent of the people of Biafra about the way they were treated, and the total waste that the Nigeria–Biafra war portended, come alive in the fiction on the war. Nigerian fiction on the war, written mostly by scholars and intellectuals from Eastern Nigeria, specifically the Igbo, who directly suffered and still bear the pains of the war, reveals that the war was avoidable.