Word: ibos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...world's shortest-lived country was the tiny state of Biafra - or so it seemed. Six months ago, the Eastern Region of Nigeria, the home of 8,500-000 Ibo tribesmen, proclaimed itself a sovereign nation and plunged Nigeria into civil war. No country ever recognized Biafra, and the Nigerian federal navy soon choked its economy with a blockade. By October, federal troops sent to quell the rebellion had captured almost a third of Biafra's territory, including the capital of Enugu, and sent the secessionist government fleeing into the region's rain forests. The surprising fact...
...miles up a channel from Bonny Island, which is occupied by swarms of federal troops. Port Harcourt has the only major airport left to Ojukwu, who depends upon air shipments for arms and other vital supplies. Its loss would leave Ojukwu's men tightly sealed in their Ibo heartland. To prevent a federal force from coming up the channel, the Biafrans have sunk a barge, cars, trucks and even a bus in it. But last week the federal army was preparing to navigate a vast network of secondary channels and creeks to reach Port Harcourt...
...Ibo Hunts." The Biafrans are adamantly against surrender because they fear that they will be massacred. The killing of many thousands of Ibo in Northern Nigeria last year led to the civil war, and the Northern-dominated army has given Biafrans little cause to believe that they can escape the same fate. Major General Yakubu Gowon, the head of the federal government, has tried to keep his men in line, but without much success. Ragtag recruits who "mop up" after Gowon's armies have joined local tribesmen brandishing machetes and cutlasses in "Ibo hunts." In the Midwest, they rounded...
...Ibo, Achebe writes of Ibo civilization as something not simply to be supplanted and forgotten. The story centers on a religious chief, virtually a god to his tribe, whose most potent magic is achieved through a sacred python. Though he distrusts Christianity, he allows an earnest, not more than ordinarily obtuse district officer to send one of his sons to a mission school. To the chief's horror, the Christianized boy zealously imprisons the sacred python in a box. "An abomination has happened," cries one tribesman. "Today I shall kill the boy with my own hands," says the chief...
...Ibos were terrified that further resistance might trigger a huge massacre of the kind that cost them many thousands of deaths in Northern Nigeria last year. As for General Ojukwu, he had to decide whether to surrender and throw himself on Gowon's mercy, stay in Enugu and fight to the death, or flee to the Ibo heartland south of Enugu, where he could carry on a guerrilla war. Whatever choice he makes, Biafra seemed doomed...