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Today, Ojukwu's Biafra is a land of physical ruin. Crowded into hardwood forests and mangrove swamps that cannot possibly support them, Biafrans are starving to death, by a conservative estimate, at the rate of 1,000 a day. Most of the 4,500,000 refugees from all corners of Nigeria who returned to the Ibo heartland live in makeshift camps, totally dependent on scanty government and missionary rations. The price of staple foods has risen fantastically (cost of a dozen eggs: $4), and salaried work is almost nonexistent. Biafra's chance of survival shrinks with each day; yet its resolution seems unwavering. Ojukwu himself has guessed that his fate, if he should ever surrender to the federals on behalf of Biafra, would be hanging—at the hands of his own defiant people.
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. Four years before independence, drillers discovered deep pools of oil in the Niger Delta—a strike that within ten years made Nigeria the world's 13th largest oil producer. Nature itself, it seemed, was favoring self-rule.
But even bounty could not overcome the ethnic facts that have split Nigeria—as distinctly as the steady current of the K-shaped river system that forms its skeleton—into three separate regions. To the north, living on flat grassland that backs up to Sahara sands, dwell the Hausa and Fulani, haughty, devout Moslem peoples governed locally by feudal emirs. The Western Region is the home of the Yoruba, a tribe known for its profusion of gods (more than 400) and its joie de vivre. To the east, where they are now trapped, the ambitious and clever Ibo people thrived. Brought forcibly 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,