This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Historians divide over how far the Nigerian Civil War was a religious conflict. The historians Toyin Falola and Matthew Heaton treat it as fundamentally a crisis of Nigerian federalism and ethnic political competition following the 1966 coups, driven by regional rivalry over political power and, once eastern oil revenue became central, resource control, reading the Eastern Region's largely Christian identity as a demographic fact rather than the war's cause.
The novelist Chinua Achebe, by contrast, argues that the 1966 pogroms against Igbo civilians, most of them Christian, in the Muslim-majority north constituted a campaign of ethnic and religious persecution that made Biafra's secession an act of communal self-preservation, holding that federal authorities tolerated or abetted the violence and that the war's conduct, especially the blockade-driven starvation, continued that same intent by other means; allegations that the federal government's conduct of the blockade amounted to a deliberate policy of starvation remain contested in Nigerian politics today. The 1966 pogroms are recorded here as an attested historical trigger, without adopting either camp's account of how far religious identity, as against ethnic and political rivalry, explains them.