Word: ibos
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Crowds still line the roads to Enugu and Orlu, Umuahia and Aba, major centers of Nigeria's Ibo tribe. But now the crowds are made up mostly of traders and their customers, not fleeing refugees. In Nnewi, the Cool Precious Restaurant for Good Diet is back in business. The breweries are working again, and cold beer goes swiftly at $1 a bottle. The Ibo commercial instinct is reasserting itself everywhere-from the $20-a-night Bristol Hotel in Lagos, where Ibo businessmen throng to re-establish their contacts, to the smallest villages, where young boys sell cigarettes...
...Yoruba spoke with mingled admiration and apprehension. Three years ago the Ibos established the breakaway nation of Biafra and precipitated Black Africa's worst civil war. When the war ended last January, close to 2,000,000 of them were dead or missing, Biafran Leader Odumegwu Ojukwu was headed for exile in the Ivory Coast, and the Ibo homeland was a shambles. But with the armistice six months old this week, the Ibos appear well on the way to reviving. "They have not been conquered," said the Yoruba. "They have merely cleared the decks to build anew...
Vacuum Cleaners. After Biafra fell, there were fears that many of the surviving 4,000,000 Ibos there would be slaughtered or starved. But there were no sweeping reprisals, and certainly no genocide. When the federal 3rd Marine Commando Division followed the armistice with an outburst of rape and pillage, Major General Yakubu Gowon, leader of Nigeria's government, swiftly replaced the unit. Though Major General Philip Effiong, who surrendered to Gowon, is still in custody, along with a score of other ranking Biafran officials, all other prisoners of war have been sent home. The East Central State, where...
...seemly to use the faintest hint of force to get food to the people of Biafra [Feb. 2]. No, that would be in terfering in the internal affairs of another nation. Let the Nigerians and ex-Biafran generals whoop it up at their wedding parties. Let the Ibo babies rest their heads in pools of diarrhea and cry the remainder of their lives out. It's just good politics...
...worked in Eastern Nigeria and Biafra for nine years, and I was struck by your quote from a diplomat in Lagos: "An Ibo would be out of his mind to show up in Hausa towns like Kano, Kaduna or Sokoto. They don't want him there." In this statement the real reason for the secession in 1967 is touched: the fact that the Easterners were not wanted and not safe in their own country...