Browsing by Subject "Biafra"

This dissertation excavates historical fragments, moments, and broader patterns of humanitarian connection between West Germany and the wider world, and specifically to Nigeria-Biafra and Ethiopia, from the 1960s to the 1980s. It brings them together under the sign of global humanitarianism, but it does not tally them to an uplifting account or cautionary tale about humanitarianism’s rise and fall. Engaging history transnationally, beyond the Cold War, and outside the bounds of former empires, each chapter works micro-historically outward from specific places and conjunctures in order, first, to analyze the logics and effects of humanitarian aid, activism, and intervention in concrete circumstances; second, to assert West Germany’s changing placement in the postcolonial world; and third, to show how humanitarian concerns were tied to and impacted some of the key political issues of European and African history in the later twentieth century, including nationalisms and civil wars, student activisms, refugee migrations, child malnutrition, capitalist-socialist economic development, novel media forms, Holocaust memories, and new African diasporas. To define and explain the interrelation of the humanitarian and the political, this dissertation uses the concept of “moral politics.” By examining archival, visual, and oral-historical sources that shed light on West German, Nigerian-Biafran, and Ethiopian pasts from oblique angles, this dissertation pushes the study of twentieth-century global history beyond masternarratives of the Cold War and colonial imperialism. It also highlights people, ideas, and processes that defined an era when the faint futures of our present and the distant echoes of an earlier age were in dynamic tension.