Nigeria's Civil War - Africans are dying in Nigeria these days because powerful white men, in an almost playful mood, sat down to draw a few straight lines on a vague map more than half century ago. That is the root cause of the Nigerian civil war. The federal military government of Nigeria is trying to crush the secession of the old eastern region, which calls itself Biafra now, to preserve the territorial integrity of the nation. But what does the territorial integrity of Nigeria mean? At the turn of the century, the British, French and Germans decided to avoid any warring by sharing their colonial spoils in an amicable way. They did it by carving up a map. "In those days we just took a blue pencil and a rule and we put it down at old Calabar and drew that line up to Yola," said a British negotiator who helped set the boundary between eastern Nigeria and the old German Cameroon at that time. While dividing northern Nigeria from French Niger, according to another British official, the British and French "have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were..."

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