Word: nigerians
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...support from the rest of the world. Britain naturally supported its Commonwealth partner. The rest of Europe and even Soviet Russia (seeing a chance to gain a new foothold in Africa by backing the likely winner) were soon providing Nigerian military commanders with every kind of weapon they wanted. Automatic rifles and endless rounds of ammunition, heavy artillery, mortars, rockets, grenade launchers, antiaircraft guns, Czechoslovak Delfin jets, Russian MIGs and Ilyushin 11-28 bombers?Nigeria ordered and got them all. The result was an unhappy precedent for Africa: the Nigerian conflict became the first African bush war fought with modern...
Furious Bursts. Ojukwu's antagonist is a dapper, 33-year-old son of a Methodist missionary. Yakubu Gowon, the commander of the federal forces, had no ambitions beyond serving as a competent staff officer of the Nigerian army until two years ago, when leaders of the Northern countercoup settled on him as head of state. Gowon was, at that point, the North's way of appeasing the South: besides practicing Christianity, he belonged to one of the smallest Northern tribes. Trained at Britain's Sandhurst military school, Gowon once shared barrack quarters with Ojukwu, but has neither his intellect...
...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...
...return to Lagos was scarcely less carefree, judging by the swath he cut through capital society while an administrator in the government. Then, in anticipation of the role of the military in post-independence Africa, Ojukwu joined the Nigerian army as an officer trainee. He felt little attachment to the army as such, but realized that it was "the only truly federal organization in Nigeria that appeared likely to remain intact." Until the very end, Ojukwu tried to use his influence to bridge the gap between Nigeria's cultures...
...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-mad Hitler. In fact, he runs Biafra as a wartime democracy, frequently seeking the advice of his consultative assembly of Ibo elders. Biafra also has a functioning judiciary, a ministerial executive government