Word: nigeria
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...they solemnly invoked the ancient power of Ibo Kwennu, the rallying cry of Ibo brotherhood. From family heads and village elders, there went out millions of messages to virtually every Ibo still living outside the East, each with a single, peremptory instruction: Come home. And from every corner of Nigeria, loaded down with what possessions they could salvage, the Ibo brethren came. They piled into mammy wagons, crowded into railroad coaches, mounted bicycles or simply walked, carrying their belongings on their heads. Within a few months, the great majority of non-Eastern Ibos had returned. With the living came...
...everyone in the caravans of refugees was dressed in the bright shirts and shapeless dresses of the poorer Africans. Ibos had been the mandarins of the government, the army, the professions. They had run many of Nigeria's hospitals, done much of its engineering, presided over vast commercial empires ?and their sudden, simultaneous uprooting deprived the rest of Nigeria of its elite. What is more, like the message of jungle drums that is understood only by the initiated, the imperative summons mysteriously reached those Ibos comfortably ensconced abroad?medical specialists in London, university professors in the U.S., students...
...training, was the federal Nigerian governor of the Eastern Region and thus held the key to all its resources. True to his profound belief in Nigerian unity, Ojukwu first argued against outright secession and urged Easterners to settle for a radical loosening of ties with the rest of Nigeria. The ruthless slaughter by the North, he pleaded, was "the final act of sacrifice that Easterners would be called upon to make in the interest of Nigerian unity...
...gain a new foothold in Africa by backing the likely winner) were soon providing Nigerian military commanders with every kind of weapon they wanted. Automatic rifles and endless rounds of ammunition, heavy artillery, mortars, rockets, grenade launchers, antiaircraft guns, Czechoslovak Delfin jets, Russian MIGs and Ilyushin 11-28 bombers?Nigeria ordered and got them all. The result was an unhappy precedent for Africa: the Nigerian conflict became the first African bush war fought with modern weapons...
...tribes. Trained at Britain's Sandhurst military school, Gowon once shared barrack quarters with Ojukwu, but has neither his intellect nor his strong interest in politics?a fact that probably does not displease his Northern sponsors. He is an affable, unassuming leader who has shown considerable skill in keeping Nigeria united during a civil war that he himself once predicted would be nothing more than "a short, surgical police action...