Word: ibos
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...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...
...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...