Word: biafras
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...bitter war in Biafra (see THE WORLD) is a symbol of the continent's divided soul, and the most discouraging example so far of a profound impasse that is crippling many of Black Africa's 30 newly independent states. It is an impasse between tribe and nation, which is also a clash between tradition and change, fact and aspiration...
Guided by burning flares, a transport plane dipped down out of the night over Biafra last week and landed with a shipment of condensed food for the secessionist state's starving population. When soldiers guarding the airstrip saw its cargo, they burst unashamedly into tears. On a country road a few miles away, relief workers held out bits of food to a group of hungry children. They ran, not knowing what to do with it. "We are going to have to teach a generation of children how to eat again," said a Canadian nurse. In the border town of Ikot...
...opposing forces, wielding a full array of modern weapons from Britain, Russia and much of Europe, is the federal government of Nigeria. It is determined to crush a rebellion that it feels will destroy its republic. On the other side, armed chiefly with determination, stands the secessionist state of Biafra, the home of Nigeria's Ibo tribe. The Ibos are convinced that they are fighting not only for independence but for their survival as a people...
...stretch of blacktop road that serves as a nighttime landing strip for supply planes?when the planes can run the gauntlet of federal radar-controlled antiaircraft fire. But they are not only losing the war: slowly but surely, eight million Biafrans are starving to death. Gradually, the image of Biafra's human agony has unsettled the conscience of the world. That image is of Ibo infants and children with anguished, vacant eyes, distended bellies, shriveled chests and matchstick limbs crippled from edema. The world has protested in the form of silent marches of New Yorkers outside the United Nations building...
...irrelevant to many Ibos. Even should massive food supplies suddenly arrive, thousands of undernourished Biafrans would die with the first bellyful of protein food that they took. It would simply prove too much for their debilitated systems to handle. Already, famine must have caused brain damage in many of Biafra's children; if it goes on much longer, it could blight the minds of an entire Ibo generation...