By Emmanuel Gandu
The Horrific Massacre of Igbos in Kano, even before the hostilities and atrocities of the war started:
The massacre began at the airport near the 5th Battalion’s home city of Kano. A Lagos-bound jet had just arrived from London, and as the Kano passengers were escorted into the customs shed, a wild-eyed soldier stormed in, brandishing a rifle and demanding ‘Ina Nyamiri?’- Hausa for ‘Where are the damned Igbos?’ There were Igbos among the customs officials, and they dropped their chalk and fled, only to be shot down in the main terminal by other soldiers.
Screaming the blood curses of a Muslim holy war, the Hausa troops turned the airport into a shambles, bayoneting Igbo workers in the bar, gunning them down in the corridors, and hauling Igbo passengers off the plane to be lined up and shot. From the airport, the troops fanned out through downtown Kano, hunting down Igbos in bars, hotels, and on the streets. One contingent drove their Land Rovers to the railroad station, where more than 100 Igbos were waiting for a train, and cut them down with automatic weapons fire.
The soldiers did not have to do all the killing. They were soon joined by thousands of Hausa civilians, who rampaged through the city armed with stones, cutlasses, machetes, and homemade weapons of metal and broken glass. Crying ‘Heathen!’ and ‘Allah!’, the mobs and troops invaded the Sabon Gari (strangers’ quarter), ransacking, looting, and burning Igbo homes and stores and murdering their owners.
All night long and into the morning, the massacre went on. Then, tired but fulfilled, the Hausas drifted back to their homes and barracks to get some breakfast and sleep. Municipal garbage trucks were sent out to collect the dead and dump them into mass graves outside the city. The death toll will never be known, but it was at least 5,000.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in a war that claimed the lives of 3 million Nigerians, including millions of children who died of kwashiorkor. 60 years after the civil war, have the drumbeats of ethnic and religious war stopped sounding in Nigeria?
Watch out on WhatsApp and Facebook for details of an ugly past they don’t want us to talk about.
Peace 🙏
Emmanuel Gandu (20/5/2026)
