Word: ibos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...land of physical ruin. Crowded into hardwood forests and mangrove swamps that cannot possibly support them, Biafrans are starving to death, by a conservative estimate, at the rate of 1,000 a day. Most of the 4,500,000 refugees from all corners of Nigeria who returned to the Ibo heartland live in makeshift camps, totally dependent on scanty government and missionary rations. The price of staple foods has risen fantastically (cost of a dozen eggs: $4), and salaried work is almost nonexistent. Biafra's chance of survival shrinks with each day; yet its resolution seems unwavering. Ojukwu himself...
...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 forcibly together under colonial rule, the three regions developed the hatreds and jealousies of totally different cultures. Most hated of all?and most envied by other Nigerians?were the Ibos, quite possibly Africa's most capable people and, by force of energy and intellect, the dominant tribe...
...descended on the sabon garris (strangers' quarters), the home in almost every Northern city of job-hunting Ibo settlers, slaughtering as they went. The Northerners used everything from shotguns to poison arrows in their slaughter of the Ibos, and they roamed the length and breadth of cities to take them...
Jungle Drumbeat. During a two-week orgy of systematic murder that fall, when tens of thousands of their people were killed and hundreds of thousands maimed, the Ibo tribal elders of the East lost all hope of reconciliation within the Nigerian union. Fearing for the very survival of their tribe, they solemnly invoked the ancient power of Ibo Kwennu, the rallying cry of Ibo brotherhood. From family heads and village elders, there went out millions of messages to virtually every Ibo still living outside the East, each with a single, peremptory instruction: Come home. And from every corner of Nigeria...
...almost a tenfold increase on their 8,000 regulars. Inevitably, the volunteers included unemployed youths and street-corner thugs who planned to serve most of their hitch looting towns and shaking down civilians. They also included a share of vengeful Northern tribalists eager to settle old scores with the Ibo tribe. The songs they chanted marching off to war dealt not with Nigerian unity but with finishing off the Ibos...