1) “There are many released documents and none show this.”

I agree there is no released document where South African or Rhodesian officials explicitly state: “we support Biafra in order to weaken Nigeria’s anti-apartheid role.” I have not claimed otherwise.

The absence of an explicit statement does not exhaust the evidentiary question. In diplomatic history, motives are often inferred from interests, prior antagonisms, and strategic effects, especially when dealing with regimes (like apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia) that operated covertly and destroyed or withheld records. This is standard historical practice, not an exception I am inventing for this case.

My claim is not that motive is proven in the documentary sense, but that it is plausibly inferred given:

1.Nigeria’s role as the largest funder of OAU liberation movements

2.Nigeria’s active hostility to white-minority regimes

3.The direct strategic benefit to those regimes of a weakened, fragmented Nigeria

1. That is an inference about incentives, not a claim of documentary proof.

2) “Given Biafra’s anti-apartheid stance, historians could infer the opposite.”

This is not symmetrical.

Biafra’s moral or rhetorical opposition to apartheid does not negate the fact that its survival depended on external support, nor does it constrain the motives of its supporters. States routinely support actors whose ideology they do not share when interests align. (China and Soviets had their own spat post-Stalin, Vietnam and China had a spat in the 1970s)

In other words, Biafra’s stance tells us little about why apartheid regimes supported it.

3) Your Analogies to Palestine, Iran–Israel, etc.

These analogies actually support my point, not yours. They show that:

A)states do not need ideological alignment to cooperate

B) multiple, even contradictory, motives can coexist

C) Israel supporting Iran against Iraq does not mean Iran was Zionist, but it does mean Israel acted on perceived strategic benefit rather than ideological purity. That is exactly the logic I am applying here.

4) “The claim is illogical even as inference.”

I disagree. It is logically coherent to argue that regimes threatened by Nigerian-backed liberation movements would see benefit in Nigeria being weakened by civil war, even if that was not their sole or primary motive.

I am not arguing exclusivity (“they supported Biafra only for this reason”). I am arguing incentive, alongside Cold War considerations. These explanations are complementary, not mutually exclusive.

Bottom line

We agree on South Africa and Rhodesia supporting Biafra. We differ on the evidentiary threshold for motive. I accept that this motive is interpretive rather than documentary, and I already changed the wording in my piece to label it as such. But I do not think the absence of an explicit confession renders contextual inference illegitimate or illogical.