Word: sardauna
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...passions, declaring an end to the old federated government, tightening the powers of the central administration. All the while, he was gaining enemies and losing friends. The Moslem North resented its sudden loss of power - not to mention the assassination of Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and the Sardauna of Sokoto, the two most powerful Northern leaders. In the South, the young Ibo officers who had led the military coup accused Ironsi of appeasement when he refused to allow drastic retaliation after an abortive Northern uprising in June...
...murmured one resident Englishman: "Sandhurst training certainly leaves its mark"). In the dusty northern capital of Kaduna, Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, 29, had been holding night maneuvers for six straight weeks, once even led his troops through a mock invasion of the sprawling white palace of Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna (Emir) of Sokoto, religious leader of 12.5 million Nigerian Moslems, boss of the nation's ruling political party, and the real power behind the Balewa government. So accustomed had the city become to the sound of night gunfire during the maneuvers that not even the police bothered to investigate...
Handcuffs & Dash. A similar scene was occurring at the same time in Ibadan, capital of the Western Region, where the Sardauna's political ally, Regional Premier Chief Samuel Akintola, was shot and his house burned down...
Fortnight ago, Akintola and the Sardauna of Sokoto met secretly in Ibadan, decided to call in the army to crush the growing rebellion. As far as the junior officers were concerned, that was the last straw. They launched their long-planned coup. "Our enemies," said Nzeogwu, "are the political profiteers, the men that seek bribes, those that seek to keep the country divided permanently so they can remain in office as Ministers, tribalists and nepotists, those that have corrupted our society and put the political calendar back...
...remained to be seen. For while the joy was obviously genuine in the south, it was just as obviously mixed in the north. Any new constitutional convention is almost bound to slice up the north into several regions to cut it down to size. And the assassination of the Sardauna of Sokoto raised a possibility that southerners have long feared: a Moslem holy war of reprisal. Besides, it was far from clear that the power struggle within the army itself had been fully resolved...