Comfort Ero knew that her appointment as the president and chief executive of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank working to prevent wars, would be arduous. But taking up the role in December, two months before Russia invaded Ukraine, is not exactly what she envisaged.

“It is a reminder of what it means to be president of Crisis Group as well,” Ero said, talking about her experiences as the first Black woman to lead the organization since its inception in 1995.

Yet Ero, who was born in England to Nigerian parents, is familiar with the great difficulties associated with war. She grew up with parents and an extended family who bore the cost of the 1967 Biafran war in Nigeria. Her parents, she said, could not return to Nigeria after they finished university in Britain because it was no longer safe to do so.

“I read the letters exchanged between my mother and her father,” Ero said in a Zoom call with PassBlue in March, from London. “And my father and his father-in-law, my grandfather, . . . it was a message of ‘This is not a good time to come home, people are suffering, . . . the moment for you to return will come. But this is not the right time, because of the pain and suffering that people are going through.’”

When relative calm returned to Nigeria after the war, and Ero’s grandparents considered the country safe again, she and her older brother were sent to live in Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos, when Ero was two years old.

“My parents wanted me to know, experience, understand Nigeria as a child and to have those cultural and disciplinary mannerisms instilled in me at an early age,” she said. “So myself and my older brother, we were both sort of raised in our formative years in Nigeria.”

Ero returned to Britain just in time for her primary education. She would later earn a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, University of London. Before joining the International Crisis Group in 2011 as the Africa program director, she worked at the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Liberia as a political affairs officer and policy adviser to the special representative of the secretary-general.

In this interview for PassBlue’s Women as Changemakers column, Ero discussed her childhood, the continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine and the expectations of her new role. The interview has been edited and condensed for brevity.

Continue Reading