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In contrast to the rest of Nigeria, the war-damaged East Central state is healing at an extraordinary pace. Thanks largely to postwar medical attention and food supplies, a majority of Biafra's starving children have miraculously survived; the state has 1,100,000 children in school—more than it had before the war. New buildings are sprouting amid the wreckage, and the great market at Aba is booming again.
The Aba textile mill was bombed five times during the war, and its machinery was looted, vandalized and scattered; yet its technicians managed to put it back into operation in five months. Nigerian army engineers estimated that it would take a year to rebuild the badly damaged waterworks at Nsukka; Ibo engineers did it in three weeks. The state abounds with similar tales. As the American manager of the Aba mill, a North Carolinian named W.A. Way, puts it: "Ain't no power on earth gonna hold these people back."
Last on the List. The recovery was made possible by Gowon's insistence that the Ibos, the most energetic and aggressive of Nigeria's 15 major tribes, should not be persecuted in defeat. Some 65 rebel officers have been allowed to rejoin the federal army. The state government is entirely in the hands of Ibos; the state administrator, Ukpabi Asika, was a federal loyalist during the war, but several of his commissioners and fully 99% of his civil servants fought on the Biafran side. Like many other influential Ibos who were closely involved with the Biafran regime, Novelists Chinua Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi live in freedom in the East Central state today; both have returned to their writing.
It is also true, however, that the Ibos have been subjected to some discrimination. Shortly after the war ended, Major General Adeyinka Adebayo, the army's second-ranking officer, vowed that the Ibos, having lost the war, would not be permitted to win the peace. Many Nigerians, both in and out of the federal government, seem determined to defend those words. Most Ibos who held civil service jobs outside the East Central state before the war have been unable to win them back, even when no other qualified Nigerians are available to fill them. The East Central state is occupied by two federal army divisions, and it receives far less than its share of federal development funds. "The word is out," says one foreign-aid official, "that the East Central state is last on the list for everything, even books."
With its size and burgeoning economy, the Nigerian giant may yet succeed in strengthening and stabilizing all of Black Africa. Its progress will be seriously impeded, however, by its failure to achieve what Poet Pol Ndu described as the pooling of brothers with brother.