Word: ibos
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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...
...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...
With full military honors, Major General Aguiyi Ironsi was buried last week -for the third time. Though it had never been confirmed by the government, everyone in Nigeria knew that Ironsi, an Ibo tribesman and an Easterner, was shot to death six months ago by Northern army officers who toppled him in a coup. Ironsi's executioners first buried him in a shallow roadside grave, and then in a cemetery in the Western city of Ibadan. The decision to exhume Ironsi's remains and fly them East for burial in his home town of Imuahia Ibeku...
Ironsi's reinterment was only one of the delicate matters that have lately been agreed on by his successor, Lieut. Colonel Yakubu Gowon, and Eastern Military Governor Odumegwu Ojukwu, an Ibo and the second most powerful man in Nigeria. At a retreat near Accra in Ghana-it was their first meeting since Gowon's July 29 coup-the Nigerian chiefs earlier this month agreed to start mending the broken fabric of national unity with a week of mourning. For two days, the whole nation flew its flags half-mast for Ironsi. For the next three-in the North...
Safely Home. When Governor Ojukwu returned to his capital of Enugu, he climbed into a car and rode triumphantly through the streets-principally to show the skeptical Ibos that he had not been murdered. "This is the first realistic step taken in solving our problems," he commented, urging his tribesmen to accept the loss of Ironsi as "one more sacrifice for the good of Nigeria." The exultant tone was justified for Ojukwu brought home some significant concessions from Gowon. Gowon agreed to split the nation's army into four parts, each recruited in its own area and under...