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Dream of free Biafra revives in southeast Nigeria

Jul 12, 2006 10:22 am By Robert Spencer

Free Biafra! Anti-dhimmitude in southeast “Nigeria,” from Reuters:

ONITSHA, Nigeria (Reuters) – Down a dark, narrow alley in the heart of West Africa’s biggest market, sheltered in his tiny wooden stall, a trader draws out a wad of crisp bank notes printed with the words “One Biafran Pound.”

Manchikah can’t buy anything with the currency because it was only accepted from 1967 to 1970 in a chunk of southeastern Nigeria that tried and failed to secede under the name of Biafra. He risks arrest for keeping a stash of it.

Yet for him, the worthless money represents the hope of a better future for the Ibo, Nigeria’s third-largest ethnic group whose home region is the southeast.

“We are keeping it because we are going to have our freedom, and we will use it,” he says.

“We want Biafra. We need Biafra. We are suffering in this Nigeria!” he adds, raising his voice as he warms to his subject.

Dozens of others gather around, shouting their agreement, and within minutes they burst into song in the Ibo language.

These young men, like many Ibo, are angry because they feel that their people have been marginalized by successive Nigerian governments ever since the Biafran forces surrendered to the Nigerian army in 1970 after a war that killed a million Ibo.

They are bitter at the fact that no Ibo has ruled Nigeria since 1966 and they accuse the two bigger tribes, the Hausa in the north and the Yoruba in the southwest, of monopolizing power and the riches of Nigeria’s multibillion-dollar oil industry….

“For 40 years no one heard about Biafra but now it’s gradually coming up again. One day it will reach the high heaven and God will grant us our freedom,” said Joseph Akani, who was paralyzed from the waist down by a Nigerian bullet in 1968.

“We have suffered enough. Unless Biafra comes we have nowhere to lay our heads.”

The subjugation of Biafra also contained a jihad element — as one Biafran puts it, “We do not believe that God will allow Islam to swallow up Christians. We have no plans to succumb to Islam. That’s why we have Biafra; that’s why we must actualize Biafra.” Free Biafra!

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