Word: biafrans
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...across Africa, a phenomenon that filled his writings with bursts of hope and despair. He eloquently expressed the ideals of black nationalism and spoke out harshly whenever they seemed in danger of being compromised or betrayed. In 1967 he was arrested by the Nigerian government, charged with assisting the Biafran rebels in their struggle for a separate state and held for 22 months. Soyinka later recounted this ordeal in the scathing prison memoir The Man Died...
Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, a general in the Nigerian army, is a man who always seems to be at the center of the action. In 1975 he and his fellow officers ousted General Yakubu Gowon, who had taken power soon after the outbreak of the bloody four-year Biafran war. The following year, an unarmed Babangida confronted rebellious army officers in Lagos during an attempted coup and persuaded them to surrender. It was he too who masterminded the army coup that, on the last day of 1983, toppled Shehu Shagari, the civilian President whose winking acceptance of endemic corruption had helped...
...tend to think of them as Malthusian disasters," Eberstadt says, but he adds that "all you have to do is look at Soviet collectivization or the Biafran disaster or Uganda." You cannot divorce the two, he maintains, and his recent experiences in Thailand and Cambodia reinforce his belief...
Rhoodie is now hinting that he has a lot more to talk about. Among the rumored topics: bribery involving U.S. and other foreign officials and disclosure of Pretoria's role in backing the Biafran rebels during the Nigerian civil war. Two weeks ago, Rhoodie had a rendezvous in Paris with General Hendrik van den Bergh, 64, former head of South Africa's notorious Bureau of State Security (BOSS), and an industrialist named Josias van Zyl, 31, who offered Rhoodie a sales job in one of his companies. What the two men wanted in return was Rhoodie...
Sontag is uneasy about the entire role of "concerned" photography. Holocaust victims, matchstick Biafran children, burnt Vietnamese-seen as products in the camera's neutral eye, she argues, these images of suffering become analgesic; they first stimulate the moral sense, then dull it by overload. There is a truth to that, but not the whole truth. No matter what one may say against the continual voyeurism of photography, the likelihood is that it played as great a role in finishing the Viet Nam War as the printed word did. (One main reason why civilians in England could tolerate...