Post-independence nation-states can create, or choose to perpetuate, certain narratives of history at the exclusion of others in order to justify their existence. Indian and Pakistani state-sanctioned historiographies of the 1947 Partition of the Subcontinent consistently treat it as inseparable from their own national births. Sometimes, it is framed as a necessary tragedy: a price that had to be paid for independence, which can also conveniently allow India to treat its Muslims ‘as a diseased limb that had to be sacrificed for the health of the national body-politic’ (Chatterji 1991, 168). Sometimes, it is remembered as the painful but historic birth-pangs of a nation, as was mobilised in Pakistan for a top-down Islamisation. This instrumentalisation exists, too, in Nigerian state-sanctioned approaches to the historiography of the 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War. Raisa Simola notes that ‘the rather sparse official commemoration of the war has been left mainly to the military, which uses the opportunity to assure itself of its role as guarantor of national unity’ (2000, 98).