La Guerre des rapaces

In July 1968, Agence France-Presse sent me to Nigeria. The Biafran war had been raging for a year and all of Europe was discovering, in horror, the images of starving children. I joined the federal troops at the front, in the Port Harcourt region. My dispatches, datelined Nsokpo, Port Harcourt or Aba, were picked up by Le Monde, by The Times in London, and as far away as Brazil.

I spent two months there. I entered the headquarters of Colonel Benjamin Adekunle, the man both his soldiers and his enemies called the "Black Scorpion". I saw the war as it really was, far from the official communiqués: violence on both sides, cold calculation, and behind it all the oil and the great powers whose manoeuvres kept it going.

A book against the tide

That reporting became a book, written with Jean Wolf and published by Albin Michel in 1969, while the conflict was still under way. We went back through Nigeria's history, described the front line and exposed the foreign interests at play. They are the "vultures" of the title: those circling above a bleeding country.

French public opinion at the time was overwhelmingly behind the Biafran cause. Our book refused to simplify, and presented itself as the first objective work on the subject. The following year it was reviewed in the British journal International Affairs, alongside Frederick Forsyth's book.

Where to read it today

The original edition has long been out of print. The book was reissued digitally in 2019 under the French national programme for unavailable twentieth-century books, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France offers the full text on Gallica.