Biafran community gathered in Cork to celebrate St Patrick's Day

Ireland’s Biafran community gathered in Cork city on Friday to showcase their culture at the annual St Patrick’s Day parade, coming from as far away as Dublin to enjoy the festivities.

With only about 50 members in the whole of Ireland, the community is small but proud of its rich heritage and identity.

The Indigenous People of Biafra in Ireland (IPOB), under the leadership of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, celebrates the yearly St Patrick's day parade in Cork, demanding the immediate release of Mr Kanu and a referendum for Biafran autonomy or independence. Mr Kanu is the British-based leader of IPOB, and advocates for the secession of Biafra from Nigeria.

Cork IPOB secretary, Mazi Lawrence Ogboani, said he expected 50 people or more to join their section of the parade. There are about ten Biafrans in Cork, and they meet in the Kingsley Hotel near Cork County Hall every first Sunday of the month. Before Covid, they met at Blackrock GAA club.

Mr Ogboani said the Biafrans and Irish share a common history of struggling against colonialism, and an attitude of hospitality towards outsiders. “We have a very strong tie with Ireland,” he said.

During the Nigerian Biafran war of 1967 to 1970 in which over three million people died, many of them children dying from starvation, an Irish journalist publicised the atrocities when other news agencies did not.

At the height of the crisis in the summer of 1968, it was estimated that 6,000 children were dying every week. During the war, Irish people donated money every week to help the starving children of Biafra.

The killings of civilians remains strong in the folk memory of Biafrans, said Mr Ogboani. “We have many pictures. The Biafran Genocide Exhibition has recently visited Canada. The attachment the Biafran people have to Ireland is because the Irish people were very much concerned with helping the Biafran people at that time.” 

Concern Worldwide was founded by John and Kay O’Loughlin-Kennedy in 1968, in response to the famine in the breakaway province of Biafra in Nigeria.

“Ireland formed Concern. They were flying food and medicine at night to land in Uli airport,” said Mr Ogboani, who has lived in Cork since 2003 when he came from Germany to study in UCC.

The Biafran community enjoyed their traditional cuisine on St Patrick’s Day. “The culture of Irish people is open to foreigners in exactly the same way our people receive foreigners,” said Ogboani, and both cultures value close family life. Mr Ogboani backed calls for an independent Biafran state.