When the Biafran Independence War – also known as the Nigerian Civil War – broke out in July 1967, ‘exactly one month after the [third] Arab-Israeli War’, as the omniscient narrator of S.O. Mezu's Behind the Rising Sun is quick to point out, the Biafrans’ dream was to replicate the feat of ‘the famous six-day war that saw Israel triple the size of her territory’. The narrator adds in the same passage:

Long after the physical combat ended, following the defeat of the gorgeous dream of Biafra, the Nigerian Civil War continues to fascinate students and scholars of African history and literature. This is primarily because the world is so used to haunting images of the brutal impact on the victims of the war, the thousands who were maimed, massacred, or starved to death. But, owing to the surge of misinformation and controversy surrounding the subject, which continues to reverberate to this day, the Biafran War has remained, understandably, one of the most equivocal events in post-Independence Nigerian history, and the conversation around this contentious topic is not likely to abate anytime soon.3 In order to be liberated from the baggage of obfuscation and to properly understand the conditions that caused the demise of Biafra and cut so deep a gulf in the lives of the people that their wounds are yet to fully heal, it is pertinent to identify and closely examine some good starting points: S.O. Mezu's Behind the Rising Sun (1971) and I.N.C. Aniebo's The Anonymity of Sacrifice (1974), the earliest substantial narrative explorations by participant-observer, native Biafran authors of those chaotic events that sabotaged the war efforts from both within and outside of the ill-fated enclave.

Mezu's Behind the Rising Sun is a tour de force in historical fiction; it crafts, in a startlingly witty and innuendo-laden style, an eye-opening account that goes to the heart of why Biafra fell.