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The Ibos welcomed missionaries, largely because they brought schools and books. Before their secession from Nigeria, the Ibos of the Eastern Region were spending 40% of their public funds on education. Villagers often pooled their savings to send the most promising boy of college age off to study in Britain, expecting him, in return, to devote his career to the village's welfare. Those who stayed at home eagerly absorbed the mechanics of industry and government from British colonials, who came to rely on willing Ibo hands to do their work. Crowded into their own territory, they became Nigeria's most cosmopolitan people, whose traders and technicians spread throughout the country, building factories, hospitals and their inevitable cooperative self-improvement associations. One of the most successful was Ojukwu's father, Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu, who built up a vast fortune in transport, real estate and securities.
After the British left, the Ibos, in effect, inherited the controls of modern Nigeria, from civil service posts in the government to engine-driver jobs on the railways. That alone created bitter rivalries with the vastly more numerous Northerners (29 million). Besides, the Ibos are a proud, sometimes arrogant people, and their frequent bursts of self-praise did little to make them popular. Former Nigerian President Nnamdi Azikiwe, himself an Ibo, is fond of saying, "The god of Africa has created the Ibo nation to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of the ages." Ibo executives—whether they ran ministries of the federal government or small businesses in northern Kano-had a typically tribal way of surrounding themselves with Ibo associates. The result was clannishness that did not sit well with the rest of the country, especially the powerful North, which spoke bitterly of the "Ibo ring." They won for themselves the nickname "Jews of Africa," and they were, in a sense, a chosen people, although the choice was the result of a cultural accident. They valued what most African tribes disparaged: high personal achievement. It soon proved a curse as well as a blessing in post-colonial Nigeria.
Moslem Mobs. For a time, in the hopeful days of early independence, however, a shaky truce among the three major tribes prevailed under the North-East coalition government of Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the shrewd and prudent Prime Minister from the North. It came to an end on a night of bloody violence in January 1966, at the hands of five young Ibo army officers who had begun to chafe under increasing Northern domination, and were tired of the rampant corruption in Sir Abu-bakar's government. In a swift, well-planned coup, they killed the Prime Minister and murdered or kidnaped several other leading Northerners. In a bloody countercoup six months later, Northerners regained control of the government in Lagos and installed Yakubu Gowon as the nation's new supreme commander. The coup triggered a pogrom against millions of non-Eastern Ibos.
Northern soldiers, often at the behest of vengeful non-Ibo civilian officials, routed Ibo soldiers from their barracks and murdered them by the dozens with bayonets. Joined by screaming Hausa Moslem mobs, they