Word: hausa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...British carved out their colonial empire in West Africa, they paid little attention to anything but economic and administrative expediency. Nigeria is an uneasy marriage of over two hundred tribal groupings, many with linked histories and cultural similarities, others with very different roots and ways of living. The Hausa-Fulani with about 29 million tribesmen dominate the North. Islam is their faith, and they trace their origins to the North and East of Africa...
...three powerful groups--Hausa, Yoruba, and Ibo--have formed the major parties. Governments rose to power when two parties aligned against the other, and fell when the coalition dissolved and allegiances shifted...
After independence, though, a Yoruba-Ibo alliance coalesced into a single party opposing the Hausa. The numerical superiority of the North was one spur for the coalition, and, in fact, despite the coalition, the Hausa won a massive victory in the '64 elections...
...stereotypes are, of course, just images, but the images are not entirely exaggerated. For both cultural and historical reasons, the North is the least developed section of the country. The bulk of the Nigerian army before the crisis was Hausa; for the uneducated the army is a road to advancement...
Thus, the Yoruba and Ibo came together not so much because they feared the numerical preponderance of the Hausa, for it would have been more politically expedient for either group to make peace with the Hausa against the other, but because they feared the political dominance of an uneducated majority. They could see the resources of the East and West financing the development of the North, and they envisioned hordes of inefficient Hausa bureaucrats...