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Jungle Drumbeat. During a two-week orgy of systematic murder that fall, when tens of thousands of their people were killed and hundreds of thousands maimed, the Ibo tribal elders of the East lost all hope of reconciliation within the Nigerian union. Fearing for the very survival of their tribe, 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 the dead as well. Some parents arrived with the heads of their murdered children in baskets.
Not 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 in Europe. With few exceptions, they too abandoned everything and came home.
Modern Bush War. From the beginning, there was no question among Ibos as to who must lead them. Ojukwu, besides his gifts of intellect and training, was the federal Nigerian governor of the Eastern Region and thus held the key to all its resources. True to his profound belief in Nigerian unity, Ojukwu first argued against outright secession and urged Easterners to settle for a radical loosening of ties with the rest of Nigeria. The ruthless slaughter by the North, he pleaded, was "the final act of sacrifice that Easterners would be called upon to make in the interest of Nigerian unity."
At one point, Ojukwu and Gowon appeared to be headed for a compromise that would have allowed the Ibos a mea sure of autonomy and self-protection while still keeping them in the federation. But Gowon was unwilling to let the East maintain a separate army, finally brought the crisis to a head by decreeing a plan for twelve Nigerian states that would have cut the Ibos off from their oil and their coastline. Meanwhile, Ojukwu expelled Northerners from his region and built up his army. In the early hours of May 30, 1967, at a champagne reception in the regional capital of Enugu, he announced the creation of a new republic. Its name: Biafra, after the Bight of Biafra, off the Atlantic coastline to the south.
At the outset, Ojukwu received little sympathy