Word: hausa
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...political confusion after independence in 1960, political parties became firmly associated with regional and tribal groupings. In July, 1966, a group of army officers, dominated by members of the Hausa tribe, overthrew a federal government led by Ibo officers. Thus, when in September between thirty and forty thousand Ibos were killed in massive anti-Ibo riots in Hausa territory, the association between the massacres and government policy seemed obvious to leaders among the Ibo. Odumegwu Ojukwu, then the Governor of East Central State, which is Ibo, issued a call for all his tribesmen to return to the safety of their...
...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...
...even bounty could not overcome the ethnic facts that have split Nigeria?as distinctly as the steady current of the K-shaped river system that forms its skeleton?into three separate regions. To the north, living on flat grassland that backs up to Sahara sands, dwell the Hausa and Fulani, haughty, devout Moslem peoples governed locally by feudal emirs. The Western Region is the home of the Yoruba, a tribe known for its profusion of gods (more than 400) and its joie de vivre. To the east, where they are now trapped, the ambitious and clever Ibo people thrived. Brought...
...followed by ragtag "sweepers" from Northern Nigeria. They nailed Ibo tribesmen to the walls of their wooden huts, then sprayed them with automatic-rifle fire or set torches to their clothes. "Mop-up" soldiers raped women, sometimes lined up whole villages to be shot. The Ibos concluded that the Hausa tribesmen fully intended to use the war to systematically exterminate them. This fear, more than anything else, has hardened the Biafran determination to fight on to the end. "We shall all return to our villages and homes, if necessary behind enemy lines, and torment and harass them at every turn...
...real sense, Nigeria's tribal antagonisms are the product of modernization's pressures. The Ibo's skills--and their ambition and industriousness--embittered the backward Hausas, particularly after Ibos captured most of the skilled jobs in the Northern Region. Hausa envy, inflamed by Ibo arrogance, goes a long way toward explaining the tribal explosion...