Word: nigerias
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Model of Sobriety. Sundered, stricken Nigeria is a far different place from the fast-developing territory that in 1960 won final independence from Britain and thus became Africa's most populous country. No other on the continent had a more promising future or a more exciting present. Occupying the wide basin of the mighty Niger River, Nigeria's 56 million people had built a sturdy economy and installed an active parliamentary government. Because British colonial law had largely prevented white men from owning land, the enterprise of black traders and businessmen flourished, based on exports of palm oil and cocoa...
...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 of newly independent Nigeria...
Prideful Advertisements. It had not always been so. When the British arrived in Nigeria, the Ibos were among the most primitive people they encountered, scratching out their lives on yam patches and occasionally supplementing their low-protein diet with human flesh. But within their backward tribal culture lay unique seeds for Western-style self-improvement. Unlike many other tribes, they had no autocratic village chiefs. Instead, they were ruled by open councils of what sociologists call high achievers?successful yam farmers...
...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, loaded down with what possessions they could salvage, the Ibo brethren came. They piled into mammy wagons, crowded into railroad coaches, mounted bicycles or simply walked, carrying their belongings on their heads. Within a few months, the great majority of non-Eastern Ibos had returned. With the living came...
...everyone in the caravans of refugees was dressed in the bright shirts and shapeless dresses of the poorer Africans. Ibos had been the mandarins of the government, the army, the professions. They had run many of Nigeria's hospitals, done much of its engineering, presided over vast commercial empires ?and their sudden, simultaneous uprooting deprived the rest of Nigeria of its elite. What is more, like the message of jungle drums that is understood only by the initiated, the imperative summons mysteriously reached those Ibos comfortably ensconced abroad?medical specialists in London, university professors in the U.S., students...