Word: ibos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Teen-age girls and Teddy boys in tight pants, neatly dressed middle-class merchants and shoeless old men in tattered togas last week formed civil defense groups in besieged Biafra, the secessionist Nigerian state that is under attack from federal forces. Largely Ibo tribesmen, they joined together to resist an invading army that was made up mainly of the rival Hausa tribe, whose members last year slaughtered thousands of Ibos in Northern Nigeria. The Biafran volunteers searched automobiles at roadblocks, practiced grenade throwing and ambushing. At a Port Harcourt automotive assembly plant, Biafran engineers rolled out their first homemade tanks...
...Enugu and the provincial centers of Nsukka and Ogoja. Large numbers of federal troops, which the government said were "moving cross-country on their flat feet," reportedly overran an Eastern military camp and captured 500 recruits. Determined Biafrans, whose army of about 7,000 is largely composed of Ibo tribesmen, claimed to have thrown Gowon's men back into their own territory at one border point. Colonel Ojukwu called on the Biafrans to kill ten federal soldiers for every one of their Ibo tribesmen slaughtered last year in riots in the predominantly Moslem North. It was the massacres...
Fearing the outbreak of renewed violence, hundreds of Ibos last week shuttered their shops in Lagos and crowded into Iddo Motor Park, eating palm-oil chop out of metal bowls and awaiting transportation to take them to the East. Thousands of Ibos fled in cars, mammy wagons and buses over the Niger River Bridge into the East, until Gowon ordered this last remaining road link with the East closed. Then they fled across the river in canoes. All along the swampy and grassy border areas, Ibo soldiers dug into foxholes. In the Eastern towns, however, the mood was ebullient...
...Enthusiasm. An Oxford graduate and the son of a millionaire Ibo financier, Lieut. Colonel Ojukwu is more than a match for Gowon, who grew up in the more provincial Middle Belt region and learned most of his lessons in the army. For months, Ojukwu has been gradually removing the last traces of federal influence in the East. Gowon made concessions, but he insisted on the principle of a strong central government. Then last week Gowon forced Ojukwu over the brink by announcing a plan to divide Nigeria's regions into twelve states, three of them to be carved...
...week in Africa's most populous nation. For months Nigeria has teetered on the edge of civil war, its fate hinging on relations between two young, untested leaders. Colonel Ojukwu, 33, governor of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, afraid of a repeat of recent massacres of his fellow Ibo tribesmen, is demanding more legal autonomy from the central military government headed by Colonel Gowon, 32. Ojukwu vows to seize more autonomy whether Gowon approves or not-and last week he took a step in that direction that could produce another bloodbath for Nigeria's 57 million people...