Odumegwu Ojukwu, once the leader of Biafra, died during the last few days of November. He received respectable obituaries in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both Robert D. McFadden and T. Rees Shapiro got all the facts right and understood the causes and the horrors of the Nigerian Civil War well. But, befitting a man who was only a minor figure in African history, the notices were relatively small, and there was no room to portray his audacity, his operatic flair, his demeaning wit, and his contempt for the many less gifted than he. I interviewed Colonel Ojukwu for the first time in June 1967 a day or two after he had seceded from Nigeria and proclaimed the independent republic of Biafra...

More than 40 years ago, I sat in the Western Nigeria House of Assembly in Ibadan and marveled at how well the British colonial government had implanted its democratic parliamentary system into this new African country. An African page in blue knee breeches and red stockings walked into the chamber carrying a mace. “The Speak-uh,” he cried. The Speaker, a tall African in white wig and black robes, entered, strode across the chamber and sat in his enormous chair. The page carefully put the mace on its stand on the table below the Speaker and saluted him...

Ten years ago, I left New York on a dark, snow-lashed night and stepped down the next day into the morning glare of Dakar, in Senegal. It was an exciting, expectant time for the newly independent countries of Africa. Since that moment in Dakar, I have spent most of the last decade in Africa. Those ten years did not transform a gullible fool into a mean and narrow cynic, but I feel more critical, more doubtful, more skeptical, more pessimistic than I did in 1962. I still feel sympathetic and understanding. But I have learned that sympathy and understanding are not enough. Africa needs to be looked at with cold hardness as well. There have been more disappointments than accomplishments in Africa in the ten years. Two events — the Nigerian civil war and the assassination of Tom Mboya — struck like body blows at the sympathies of an outsider. The war was probably the greatest scourge in black Africa since the slave trade, and it was largely self-made. Murder cut down the man who seemed most to represent all that was modern in new Africa, and it was probably done for the glory of tribal chauvinism. On top of this, the decade has produced a host of other unpleasant events...

On July 7, 1967, when the Nigerian civil war began, the censors of the federal military government stamped out all use of the phrase “civil war” in news dispatches going overseas. The Nigerians insisted their invasion of Biafra was a “police action.” Major General Yakubu Gowon, the federal military commander, told diplomats the job would be done in six weeks. His army would march into Biafra, string up Colonel C. Odumegwu Ojukwu “and his rebel gang,” and end secession. “Our orders are to get Ojukwu,” a government spokesman said at a news conference the day after the war began. “If we get him today, that’s it.” Now, more than two years later, the Nigerian government has neither captured Ojukwu nor ended secession. More than one million people, mostly Biafrans of the Ibo tribe, have died in the horror. There is no talk of police action now. The Nigerians have dropped pretense. They look on the Ibos of Biafra as a hated enemy people whose secession must be destroyed militarily even if it means destroying them. The specter of millions of starving children fails to dissuade the Nigerians. “All is fair in war,” Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the vice chairman of Nigeria’s federal executive council, told newsmen recently, “and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see why we should feed our enemies fat, only to fight us harder...”

Images play as important a roIe as guns in the Nigerian civil war. The Biafran secessionists, among Africa’s most sophisticated peoples, have known from the beginning that their chances for success depended as much on evoking world sympathy as on holding back the federal army. Now, after twenty months of war, it is clear that the Biafrans have been far more adept at propaganda than soldiering. If they survive in some sovereign form, they will owe it to their skill with images. Part of the Biafran success in public relations stems from the federal Nigerian Government’s failure at it. At the beginning, the Nigerians made absolutely no intelligent effort to get their point of view across. In fact, the government’s publicists often hurt the Nigerian case as much as they helped it. Many officials of the Ministry of Information were new at their job. Before the troubles, the top information officers had been Ibos, but they fled to their tribal home in eastern Nigeria soon after thousands of Ibos were massacred in northern Nigeria in September, 1966. When the eastern region seceded and called itself Biafra in May, 1967, these civil servants remained there. Besides lacking experience, the new Nigerian information officers also had the disadvantage of working for a military government...

Little can be done to save the lives of those bloat-bellied children of Biafra until the civil war in Nigeria is over. That is the heart of the matter; all else is peripheral. The pitiable pictures in the London press, the stricken conscience of the British people, the rush of volunteers to feed and nurse Biafran babies, the American powdered milk piling high on the docks of Lagos, the mad scrambling of relief workers to crack Nigerian inefficiency and push the supplies somewhere, somehow — all mean little as long as the war goes on. Some idealists believe that the world’s indignation, outcry and shamed anger over the thousands dying in Biafra will force the two sides to end their war, in the name of decency and humanity, but that is doubtful. “No group can stop a war because people are dying,” said Alison Ayida, an influential Nigerian civil servant, in a meeting with foreign newsmen in Lagos recently. “It’s never been done in a war before, and it won’t be done in Nigeria — unless you stop the cause of the war. That’s what war is all about.” The federal government feels that it is about to crush the rebellion in Biafra, and it is in no mood to be cheated of this victory by pictures of starving children...

Two simple posters explain the civil war in Nigeria. The first, a thin strip, was glued to the walls and windows of most public buildings in Enugu, the capital of Eastern Nigeria, a few weeks before the region seceded on May 30 to become the Republic of Biafra. The poster shows four men. Three look alike, obviously Ibos, the dominant tribe of the east. The fourth man is a Hausa from Northern Nigeria. “This Is Your Region,” the poster says, “Report Any Strange Face to the Police.” The second poster, a little larger and more colorful, was slapped all over Lagos, the federal capital of Nigeria, a few weeks before federal troops invaded Biafra on July 6, the beginning of the civil war. This poster shows a monstrous drawing of the severed head of Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu, the ruler of Biafra, lying under the heavy combat boot of a Nigerian soldier. “Crush Rebellion,” the poster says...

Makes Fools of Federal Military Ruler, Other Opponents in Nigerian Crisis - Lt. Col. C. Odumegwu Ojukwu is a roughly bearded young man with soft eyes and gentle tones and an unconcealed contempt for the men who oppose him in the present Nigerian crisis. There is a feeling in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, that all these Nigerian troubles with the secessionist state of Biafra would go away if only its leader, Ojukwu, would also go away. The feeling Is false. But it is worth recording because it reveals one of the problems In the crisis - the federal rulers know in their bones that Ojukwu has contempt for them...

[OPINION] The angry young men of Nigeria seem tired and subdued these days and not so young anymore. Five years ago, when I visited Lagos, they rushed from nightclub to nightclub, dancing the highlife and drinking and complaining, shouting abuse at politicians, accusing them of corruption, greed, nepotism, ignorance, inefficiency, sloth, lethargy. Their anger had excitement. One young man would pace back and forth and flap his arms in anguish over the sickness in his government. Their frustration was dramatic. "I am an angry young man," one told me, slamming his fist into his palm, "but I do not know what to do." When their frustration mounted, they would grow quiet and bitter, and talk vaguely about plots. Some day, they whispered, the army would put an end to all this...

One night in steaming, gamboling Lagos, a young Nigerian poet leaned forward and whispered, "Nigeria is made up of a caste of corruption on the top and a caste of grumblers on the bottom." A friend joined in. "The grumblers are angry." "No," the poet disagreed. "They are not angry yet. They still have too much." These words caught the mood of a generation in Africa...

FOREIGN AID PATTERN - Will the developing nations have to adjust their sights and hopes to meet the new look in American foreign aid? Officials at the Agency for International Development (AID) have declined to divulge just how the new guidelines for foreign aid will affect specific nations. But non-government experts surveyed by the Associated Press have applied the principles laid down by Gen. Lucius Clay's special study committee and by President Kennedy in his foreign aid message to congress on Tuesday, and generally have come up with these conclusions...

Keepers Of Nationalism - The poverty of tribal, rural hinterlands may be Africa's most despairing problem, but it is in the atmosphere of cities that African leaders tackle the issue. African cities, bustling and impatient, are far away from tribal Africa with its huge and potentially supreme masses. Only 12% of the population between the Sahara Desert and South Africa live in cities. But urban Africa Is vital Africa. The cities are the keepers of nationalism. Their moods create the changes that make headlines and make the new Africa. To understand new Africa, an observer must catch the mood of its cities. Let us catch the mood of three and see three different African ways of adjusting to the modern world...

Niyi Ishola, a 28-year-old government secretary in Nigeria, admires America very much. One of his great heroes, in fact, is the late John Foster Dulles. But Ishola has a complaint. "Soviet cosmonauts Gherman Titov and Yuri Gagarin give a much better impression than your astronaut John Glenn," he says. "Both Russians wear uniforms in their photographs, and the people respect uniforms. Uniforms show discipline. In his pictures," Ishola continues sadly, "Glenn wears a bowtie." John Glenn's bowtie has not stalled America's drive to win friends and respect In Africa. But this tale of a young Nigerian's concern with astronautical polka dots reflects the difficulty of trying to analyze the impact of U.S. policies on Africa. Africans live in a world remote from the world of Americans. Africans worry about farm plots and factory sites, not Castro and Khrushchev, about building a nation, not building an image. American assumptions about what impresses Africans, or what disturbs them, often lack a true base. The difficult problem of American race relations can illustrate this a bit. Many U.S. policymakers assume that the names Little Rock, New Orleans, Oxford do not endear the United Slates to Africa. The assumption, of course, is true. The treatment of Negroes in the United Slates does bother Africans...