Word: ibos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Sweepers. As the war progressed, the chants turned into terrible reality. In captured village after village, frontline troops were 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...
...faces I see in those refugee camps," he said. Some of the hunger?"about 30%"?he admits is the Biafrans' own fault. "There is more we could do ourselves." One thing he has done is go to his home town and eat snails in a public demonstration. The Ibos scorn snails as food "only for the lowest." Ojukwu told TIME Correspondent James Wilde: "What you are seeing now is the end of a long, long journey. It began in the far north of Nigeria and moved steadily southwards as we were driven out of place after place. Now this...
Ojukwu's early schooling took place among the Yorubas of Lagos, Nigeria's bustling seaport capital. At twelve, he was shipped off to the best British education that an Ibo millionaire could buy, first at Epsom public school in Surrey and then at Oxford's Lincoln College. "When I first went to England as a boy," he recalls, "I was swamped by that sea of white faces. I didn't even recognize people who had been my teachers, once they were immersed among their own kind." On the debating team at Epsom, he developed a keen gift for words...
Wartime Democracy. His dedication to Ibo nationhood dates from the same day as his now luxuriant beard, which he let grow during the 1966 fall massacres "as a sign of mourning." He sleeps from dawn to midmorning, lives and works in his tightly guarded Umuahia villa. He evacuated his wife Njide-ka and two small children after a bomb was dropped near his home. Slouched at his desk, pacing the grounds impatiently in darkness, chain-smoking State Express filter cigarettes, he is a lonely figure in his besieged land. Ojukwu often is pictured in Nigerian propaganda as a power...
Airlift as Symbol. Ojukwu's fear of mass poisoning is not so ridiculous as it seems to the Western mind: the traditional way of doing in an enemy in Africa is to poison him, and Ibo lore abounds with such tales...