Word: hausa
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Groaning Lorries. The bedraggled caravans are filled with Hausa tribesmen in flowing white robes, bare-breasted Yoruba women from Nigeria, Malian water carriers, Upper Voltan gold miners, Ivorean timber merchants and beggars of all nationalities. The luckier ones started out in trucks or wood-frame "mammy wagons" whose fares have jumped more than 400% since the exodus got under way. For many, travel by whatever means stopped at the border. Groaning lorries carrying homeward-bound Nigerians and Dahomians are stalled in columns miles long because they have not received permission to cross tiny Togo. An unknown number of people have...
...British mediated the feuds; after independence they were unchecked. The Hausa government elected in 1964 amidst cries of foul play was topped by an Ibo-led coup in January, '66. The new government which had seized power to "clean up the country" did so with a vengeance, and the deaths of former Hausa leaders sparked riots and unrest in the North...
Then came the July coup, when Hausa officers struck back and installed a Tiv tribesman, Yakubu Gowon, as head of the military government. Some say that Gowon came to power because he was regarded as a man with an even temper and no strong personal ambition. Others said that in the tribal politics of Nigeria, Gowon held an ace, for his tribe dominates the artillery corps...
...massacres, he offered concessions, but whatever he did was interpreted by Governor Ojukwu as one more sign of duplicity and hatred. On the one hand, it seemed, Gowon offered friendship, while on the other, the people he governed murdered Ibos. Gow- on was caught. Only punishing the Hausa mobs involved in the riots would have placated Ojukwu, but to punish Hausas when the bulk of the army was Hausa would have been political suicide...
Gowon also has to deal with Hausa-Yoruba feuds that even the war emergency has not laid to rest. Observers, some with government jobs and official contacts, have said that when the Ibos seceded, the Yorubas would have gone with them, but Yorubaland was quickly occupied by the Nigerian army...