The Unconquerable Ibos

Crowds still line the roads to Enugu and Orlu, Umuahia and Aba, major centers of Nigeria's Ibo tribe. But now the crowds are made up mostly of traders and their customers, not fleeing refugees. In Nnewi, the Cool Precious Restaurant for Good Diet is back in business. The breweries are working again, and cold beer goes swiftly at $1 a bottle. The Ibo commercial instinct is reasserting itself everywhere--from the $20-a-night Bristol Hotel in Lagos, where Ibo businessmen throng to re-establish their contacts, to the smallest villages, where young boys sell cigarettes for a few cents' profit. "They have learned a lot from the war," a Yoruba from Nigeria's Western Region told TIME Correspondent James Wilde last week. "They will never try armed force again, but will use their brains instead. This is far more dangerous."

The Yoruba spoke with mingled admiration and apprehension. Three years ago the Ibos established the breakaway nation of Biafra and precipitated Black Africa's worst civil war. When the war ended last January, close to 2,000,000 of them were dead or missing, Biafran Leader Odumegwu Ojukwu was headed for exile in the Ivory Coast, and the Ibo homeland was a shambles. But with the armistice six months old this week, the Ibos appear well on the way to reviving. "They have not been conquered," said the Yoruba. "They have merely cleared the decks to build anew."

Vacuum Cleaners. After Biafra fell, there were fears that many of the surviving 4,000,000 Ibos there would be slaughtered or starved. But there were no sweeping reprisals, and certainly no genocide. When the federal 3rd Marine Commando Division followed the armistice with an outburst of rape and pillage, Major General Yakubu Gowon, leader of Nigeria's government, swiftly replaced the unit. Though Major General Philip Effiong, who surrendered to Gowon, is still in custody, along with a score of other ranking Biafran officials, all other prisoners of war have been sent home. The East Central State, where the Ibos are concentrated, is administered by an Ibo, Anthony Ukpabi Asika, 33, who studied at U.C.L.A., taught at the University of Ibadan, and sided with the federal government in Lagos during the rebellion. But seven of Asika's ten ministers were officials of the secessionist Biafran government.

Despite the swift pace of revival, misery has by no means been banished from the East Central State. Hospitals are short-staffed and overcrowded. Some roads ripped up to slow Nigerian armored cars have not been repaired. Ex-soldiers, known as "vacuum cleaners" because they are so thorough, roam the region stealing from villagers. In Enugu, a businessman explained why he could never reach Lagos by telephone: "Thieves steal the copper telephone lines, melt them down and sell the ingots in Lagos, where they are made into telephone lines."

Starvation is still a major concern, and 200 children are dying each week of malnutrition or the protein deficiency called kwashiorkor that killed thousands during the war. After the armistice, the Nigerian Red Cross and the Federal Commission for Reconstruction quarreled over which should supervise Ibo relief operations; one result was a breakdown in aid. Most of the 300 British and U.S. vehicles rushed in to carry food have either been "diverted" or have stopped running for lack of spare parts. Thousands of tons of relief food rotted on Lagos' docks; eventually stocks of Dutch powdered milk intended for starving children were used to fill road potholes in Port Harcourt.

Barter Economy. Getting supplies into Ibo territory is difficult, because General Gowon firmly refuses to open the airstrip at Uli, a symbol of Biafra's resistance. The present alternative, now that Asika's government is taking over relief work from the Nigerian Red Cross, is a creeping system of old cars and trucks, some still carrying bright red Biafran license plates.

The Ibos are as short of cash as they are of food, and a barter trade has developed in which dried salted stockfish frequently takes the place of money. The East Central State government, which cannot run on stockfish, has a budget of approximately $80 million this year, but expects to collect only $14 million in local taxes. One result is that thousands of civil servants will not be paid.

Surviving the Slight. Jobs are still scarce. The once ubiquitous Ibo shopkeeper and market mammy are unwelcome in much of the rest of Nigeria. Before the war, there were 8,000 Ibo civil servants in Lagos; barely 1,000 will get their jobs back. Port Harcourt, center of a thriving oil industry that has already nearly doubled wartime production to 1,100,000 barrels a day, was once 90% Ibo; it is now 100% Rivers tribesmen. But the Ibos seem able to survive the slight. "We are very much like the Jews," said a former Biafran civil servant. "You know what happened to them during World War II. Now they are a force to be reckoned with."

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