What role did law play in articulating sovereignty and citizenship in postcolonial Africa? Using legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra, this article analyzes the relationship between law and national identity in an extreme context—that of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970). Ideas about order, discipline, and legal process were at the heart of Biafra's sense of itself as a nation, and they served as the rhetorical justification for its secession from Nigeria. But they were not only rhetoric. In the turmoil of the ensuing civil war, Biafra's courts became the center of its national culture, and law became its most important administrative implement. In court, Biafrans argued over what behaviors were permissible in wartime, and judges used law to draw the boundaries of the new country's national identity. That law played this role in Biafra shows something broader about African politics: law, bureaucracy, and paperwork meant more to state-making than declensionist views of postcolonial Africa usually allow. Biafra failed as a political project, but it has important implications for the study of law in postcolonial Africa, and for the nation-state form in general.

法律在阐明后殖民非洲的主权和公民身份方面发挥了什么作用？本文使用分离主义共和国比夫拉共和国的法律记录，在极端的背景下（尼日利亚内战（1967-1970年））分析了法律与民族认同之间的关系。关于秩序，纪律和法律程序的思想是比亚夫拉作为一个民族的自我意识的核心，它们成为其脱离尼日利亚的修辞理由。但是它们不仅是夸夸其谈。在随后的内战的动荡中，比亚夫拉的法院成为其民族文化的中心，法律成为其最重要的行政手段。法庭上，比亚夫兰斯（Biafrans）就战时允许的哪些行为进行了辩论，法官们利用法律划定了新国家的民族身份的界限。法律在比亚夫拉（Biafra）中扮演了这个角色，这表明非洲政治具有更广泛的意义：法律，官僚主义和文书工作对国家制定的意义要比对后殖民非洲通常采用的偏爱派观点更为重要。Biafra作为一个政治项目失败了，但是它对后殖民非洲的法律研究以及整个民族国家形式都具有重要的意义。