Lloyd Garrison (1931-2014) was a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times who covered conflicts in Africa during the 1960s, including a secessionist war in Nigeria that resulted in more than a million deaths.
Garrison joined The Times in 1961 after writing for NBC News and Newsweek. He covered the civil rights movement and the United Nations before being assigned to Lagos, Nigeria, to focus on West Africa. He reported on the warfare that for most of the decade engulfed nations like Congo, which was newly liberated, and Angola, which was struggling for independence.
For a New York Times Magazine profile of Antonio Muandazi, an Angolan rebel officer, he traveled more than 60 miles on foot in four days with rebel forces in the wilderness.
In 1967, the Nigerian government ejected him from Lagos for his articles about Nigeria’s civil war with Biafra, a secessionist state made up mostly of Ibo tribesmen in the South. He was dispatching a story by telephone when he was “arrested, literally, in the middle of a sentence,” according to an article in Times Talk, an internal newsletter.
Undeterred, Mr. Garrison continued to sneak into Nigeria to report on widespread starvation and death in Biafra. He left The Times in 1969 to write a book about his experiences in Africa but never published it. He later taught African history, wrote for Time magazine and helped create Choices, a United Nations magazine.
He founded Norfolk Now, a hometown newspaper and retired in 2008 but remained involved with the paper.
Garrison graduated from Milton Academy in 1950 and received a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard in 1954. After college he briefly served in the Army making promotional documentary films at Fort Knox, Kentucky.
