Word: ibos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Nigeria's present crisis is rooted in tribal tensions which have been maturing for decades. The most violent antagonism is between the progressive Ibos, who dominate Nigeria's Eastern Region, and the less-educated Hausas, a Moslem people from the vast and largely arid Northern Region. After World War II, the Ibos, whose Eastern home is badly overpopulated, migrated north in droves to take advantage of the opportunities offered by their underdeveloped and underpopulated neighbor. The Ibos soon dominated major northern industries and captured crucial transportation and communications jobs. The Hausas, frustrated by their inability to complete with the "foreigners...
...federation. Gowon also extended his ban on all civilian political activity, refused to withdraw Northern army units from the suspicious East and West, and made his only obeisance to Eastern feelings by promising a federal "rehabilitation program" to aid the 40,000 merchants and bureaucrats of the Eastern Ibo tribe who were driven out of the North by last fall's terrorism. Pleaded Gowon in a nationwide radio broadcast: "Help us in saving this country from falling apart. If we fail, the whole of Africa and the black race will not forgive...
Last month Ibo passengers on West African Airways' London-to-Lagos jet were hauled off the plane and machine-gunned in the northern Nigerian way station of Kano. Pan American's New York-to-Nairobi Flight 150 lived up to the tradition. Last week a simple refueling halt enroute grew into an international incident...
...killing. They were soon joined by thousands of Hausa civilians, who rampaged through the city armed with stones, cutlasses, machetes, and homemade weapons of metal and broken glass. Crying "Heathen!" and "Allah!", the mobs and troops invaded the sabon gari (strangers' quarter), ransacking, looting and burning Ibo homes and stores and murdering their owners...
...Push Has Started." The Kano massacre was a critical blow to the at tempts of the Nigerian government to hold the country together. In the Ibo East, Military Governor Odumegwu Ojukwu ordered all members of outside tribes to leave the region immediately, announcing curtly that "I have lost confidence in my ability to continue restraining the violently injured feelings of the people of this region." Ojukwu also repeated his past threats to lead the East out of the Nigerian Federation entirely. "I have said before that the East would not secede unless she is forced out," he told the Ibos...