Excerpts

Introduction An Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora Between 1909 and his death in 1963, W. E. B. Du Bois, the Harvard-trained historian, sociologist, journalist, and political activist, dreamed of editing an "Encyclopædia Africana." He envisioned a comprehensive compendium of "scientific" knowledge about the history, cultures, and social institutions of people of African descent: of Africans in the Old World, African Americans in the New World, and persons of African descent who had risen to prominence in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Du Bois sought to publish nothing less than the equivalent of a black Encyclopaedia Britannica , believing that such a broad assemblage of biography, interpretive essays, facts, and figures would do for the much denigrated black world of the twentieth century what Britannica and Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie had done for the European world of the eighteenth century. These publications, which consolidated the scholarly knowledge accumulated by academics and intellectuals in the Age of Reason, served both as a tangible sign of the enlightened skepticism that characterized that era of scholarship, and as a basis upon which further scholarship could be constructed. These encyclopedias became monuments to "scientific" inquiry, bulwarks against superstition, myth, and what their authors viewed as the false solace of religious faith. An encyclopedia of the African diaspora in Du Bois's view would achieve these things for persons of African descent.     But a black encyclopedia would have an additional function. Its publication would, at least symbolically, unite the fragmented world of the African diaspora, a diaspora created by the European slave trade and the turn-of-the-century "scramble for Africa." Moreover, for Du Bois, marshalling the tools of "scientific knowledge," as he would put it in his landmark essay, "The Need for an Encyclopedia of the Negro" (1945), could also serve as a weapon in the war against racism: "There is need for young pupils and for mature students of a statement of the present condition of our knowledge concerning the darker races and especially concerning Negroes, which would make available our present scientific knowledge and set aside the vast accumulation of tradition and prejudice which makes such knowledge difficult now for the layman to obtain: A Vade mecum for American schools, editors, libraries, for Europeans inquiring into the race status here, for South Americans, and Africans."     The publication of such an encyclopedia, Du Bois continued, would establish "a base for further advance and further study" of "questions affecting the Negro race." An encyclopedia of the Negro, he reasoned, would establish both social policy and "social thought and discussion ... upon a basis of accepted scientific conclusion."     Du Bois first announced his desire to edit an "Encyclopædia Africana" in a letter to Edward Wilmot Blyden, the Pan-Africanist intellectual, in Sierra Leone in 1909: "I am venturing to address you on the subject of a Negro Encyclopædia. In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation of the American Negro, I am proposing to bring out an Encyclopædia Africana covering the chief points in the history and condition of the Negro race." Du Bois sent a similar letter to dozens of other scholars, white and black, including William James, Hugo Munsterberg, George Santayana, Albert Bushnell Hart (his professors at Harvard), President Charles William Eliot of Harvard, Sir Harry Johnston, Sir Flinders Petrie, Giuseppe Sergi, Franz Boas, J. E. Casely-Hayford, John Hope, Kelly Miller, Benjamin Brawley, Anna Jones, Richard Greener, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and several others, all of whom -- with the sole exception of President Eliot -- agreed to serve on his editorial board. Du Bois sought to create a board of "One Hundred Negro Americans, African and West Indian Scholars," as he put it in a letter, and a second board of white advisors. Du Bois, in other words, sought the collaboration of the very best scholars of what we would call today African Studies and African American Studies, as well as prominent American and European intellectuals such as James and Boas.     Nevertheless, as he put it to Blyden, "the real work I want done by Negroes." Du Bois, admitting that this plan was "still in embryo," created official stationery that projected a publication date of the first volume in 1913 -- "the Jubilee of Emancipation in America and the Tercentenary of the Landing of the Negro." The remaining four volumes would be published between 1913 and 1919.     Despite the nearly unanimous enthusiasm that greeted Du Bois's call for participation, he could not secure the necessary funding to mount the massive effort necessary to edit an encyclopedia of the black world. But he never abandoned the idea. At the height of the Great Depression, the idea would surface once again.     Anson Phelps Stokes, head of the Phelps-Stokes Association, a foundation dedicated to ameliorating race relations in America, called a meeting of 20 scholars and public figures at Howard University on November 7, 1931, to edit an "Encyclopedia of the Negro," a Pan-African encyclopedia similar to Du Bois's 1909 project. Incredibly, neither Du Bois nor Alain Locke, a Harvard trained Ph.D. in philosophy and the dean of the Harlem Renaissance, nor Carter G. Woodson (like Du Bois, a Harvard Ph.D. in history and the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History) was invited to attend. Du Bois protested, angrily, to Phelps Stokes. A second meeting was convened on January 9, 1932, at which Du Bois was unanimously elected editor-in-chief. Between 1932 and 1946, Du Bois would serve as "Editor-in-Chief" of the second incarnation of his project, now named "The Encyclopædia of the Negro," and housed at 200 West 135th Street in New York City.     Du Bois planned a four-volume encyclopedia, each volume comprising 500,000 words. Just as he had done in 1909, he secured the cooperation of an impressive array of scholars, including Charles Beard, Franz Boas, John R. Connors, Edith Abbott, Felix Frankfurter, Otto Klineburg, Carl Van Doren, H. L. Mencken, Roscoe Pound, Robert E. Park, Sidney Hook, Harold Laski, Broadus Mitchell, "and scores of others," as Du Bois put it in a letter to the historian Charles Wesley. Du Bois's "Encyclopædia of the Negro" would require a budget of $225,000. It would be written by a staff of between "25 and 100 persons" hired to be "research aides," to be located in editorial offices to be established in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and New Orleans. They would prepare bibliographies, collect books and manuscripts, and gather and write "special data" and shorter entries. Black and white scholars, primarily located in Europe, America, and Africa, would write longer interpretive entries.     Du Bois tells us that his project was interrupted by the Depression for three years. But by 1935, he was actively engaged in its planning full-time, time made available by his forced resignation from his position as editor of the Crisis magazine, the official organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which Du Bois had held since its first publication in 1910. Du Bois had written an editorial advocating the development of independent Negro social and economic institutions, since the goal posts of the Civil Rights Movement appeared to be receding. The NAACP's board of directors was outraged and demanded his resignation. Du Bois obliged. Du Bois sought funding virtually everywhere, including the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers' Project, to no avail, despite the fact that Phelps Stokes had pledged, on a matching basis, half of the needed funds. He continued to write to hundreds of scholars, soliciting their cooperation. E. Franklin Frazier, the great black sociologist, declined Du Bois's overture, citing in a letter dated November 7, 1936, the presence of too many "politicians," "statesmen," "big Negroes," and "whites of good will" on Du Bois's editorial board. Throw out the table of contents, fire the board of editors, replace them with scholars, Frazier wrote, and he would consider joining the project.     A few months before this exchange, Du Bois was viciously attacked by Carter G. Woodson in the black newspaper the Baltimore Afro-American . On May 30, 1936, a page-one headline blared the news that Woodson "Calls Du Bois a Traitor if He Accepts Post," with a subtitle adding for good measure: "He Told Ofays, We'd Write Own History." Woodson charged that Du Bois had stolen the idea of The Encyclopedia of the Negro from him and that his project was doomed to failure because Du Bois was financed by, and his editorial board included, white people. Du Bois was embarrassed and sought to defend himself in letters to potential contributors and board members. Between his enemies at the NAACP and his intellectual rivals such as Woodson and Frazier, Du Bois faced an enormous amount of opposition to his encyclopedia project. In this swirl of controversy, in the midst of the Depression, funding appeared increasingly elusive.     Du Bois's assistant editor, Rayford Logan, like Du Bois, Woodson, and Charles Wesley a Harvard-trained Ph.D. in history, told a poignant story about the failure of this project to receive funding. By 1937, Du Bois had secured a pledge of $125,000 from the Phelps-Stokes Fund to proceed with his project -- half of the funds needed to complete it. He applied to the Carnegie Corporation for the remaining half of his budget, with the strong endorsement of Phelps Stokes and the president of the General Education Board, a group of four or five private foundations that included the Rockefeller Foundation. So convinced was Du Bois that his project would finally be funded, that he invited Logan to wait with him for the telephone call that he had been promised immediately following the Carnegie board meeting. A bottle of vintage champagne sat chilling on Du Bois's desk in a silver bucket, two cut crystal champagne flutes resting nearby.     The phone never rang. Persuaded that Du Bois was far too "radical" to serve as a model of disinterested scholarship, and lobbied by Du Bois's intellectual enemies, such as the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, the Carnegie Corporation rejected the project.     Nevertheless, Du Bois stubbornly persisted, even publishing two putative "entries" from the Encyclopædia in Phylon magazine in 1940, one on Robert Russa Moton, the principal of Tuskegee Institute between 1915 and 1935, the other on Alexander Pushkin. He even was able to publish two editions in 1945 and 1946 of a Preparatory Volume with Reference Lists and Reports of the Encyclopædia of the Negro . But the project itself never could secure adequate backing.     David Levering Lewis, Du Bois's biographer, tells us what happened to Du Bois's promised funding. The executive committee of the General Education Board rejected the proposal early in May 1937. "In his conference a few days later with Carnegie Corporation president Frederick Keppel, GEB's Jackson Davis paradoxically pleaded for favorable Carnegie consideration of the project. `Dr. Du Bois is the most influential Negro in the United States,' Davis reminded Keppel. `This project would keep him busy for the rest of his life.' Predictably, Carnegie declined. Within a remarkably short time, the study of the Negro (generously underwritten by the Carnegie Corporation) found a quite different direction under a Swedish scholar then unknown in the field of race relations, one whose understanding of American race problems was to be distinctly more psychological and less economic than was Du Bois's.... When the president of the Phelps Stokes Fund wrote Du Bois in 1944 at the time of the publication of An American Dilemma: [The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy] that `there has been no one who has been quite so often quoted by [Gunnar] Myrdal than yourself,' Du Bois must have savored the irony."     Adding insult to injury, in 1948 the General Education Board, along with the Dodd Mead publishing company, approached Frederick Patterson, the president of Tuskegee Institute, to edit a new incarnation of the project, to be entitled The Negro: An Encyclopedia . Then in 1950, the historian Charles Wesley wrote to Du Bois, informing him that in the wake of Carter Woodson's death, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History had decided to resurrect The Encyclopedia Africana project, reminding him of Woodson's claims to have conceived of it in 1921. Du Bois wished him well, but cautioned him in a postscript that "there is no such thing as a cheap encyclopedia." Everyone, it seemed, wanted to claim title to the encyclopedia, but no one wanted Du Bois to serve as its editor. For black scholars, Africana had become the Grail. Its publication, as Du Bois put it "would mark an epoch."     Long after Du Bois had abandoned all hope of realizing his great ambition, an offer of assistance would come quite unexpectedly from Africa. On September 26, 1960, Du Bois announced that Kwame Nkrumah, the president of the newly independent Republic of Ghana, had invited him to repatriate to Ghana, where he would serve as the editor-in-chief of The Encyclopædia Africana . Du Bois accepted, moving in 1961. On December 15, 1962, in his last public speech before his death on the eve of the March on Washington in August 1963, Du Bois addressed a conference assembled expressly to launch -- at last -- his great project.     He wanted to edit "an Encyclopædia Africana based in Africa and compiled by Africans," he announced, an encyclopedia that is "long overdue," referring no doubt to his previously frustrated attempts. "Yet," he continued with a certain grim satisfaction, "it is logical that such a work had to wait for independent Africans to carry it out [because] the encyclopedia is concerned with Africa as a whole." Citing his own introductory essay in the Preparatory Volume of 1945, Du Bois justified this project by railing against "present thought and action" that "are all too often guided by old and discarded theories of race and heredity, by misleading emphasis and silence of former histories." After all of these centuries of slavery and colonialism, on the eve of the independence of the Continent, "it is African scholars themselves who will create the ultimate Encyclopædia Africana ." Eight months later Du Bois would be dead, and with him died his 54-year-old dream of shepherding a great black encyclopedia into print. Nevertheless, the Secretariat of the Encyclopædia Africana , based in Accra, Ghana, which Du Bois founded, eventually published three volumes of biographical dictionaries, in the late seventies and early eighties, and has recently announced plans to publish an encyclopedia about the African continent in 2009, which is welcome news. We first became enamored of this project as students at the University of Cambridge. One of us, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was a student of Wole Soyinka, the great playwright who in 1986 became the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The other, Kwame Anthony Appiah, was an undergraduate studying philosophy. Though we came from very different backgrounds -- in rural West Virginia and in urban Asante, in Ghana -- we both already had, like Soyinka, a sense of the worlds of Africa and her diaspora as profoundly interconnected, even if, as we learned ourselves, there were risks of misunderstanding that arose from our different origins and experiences. The three of us represented three different places in the black world, and we vowed in 1973 to edit a Pan-African encyclopedia of the African diaspora, inspired by Du Bois's original objective formulated in 1909. Du Bois's later conception of the project was, we felt, too narrow in its scope, and too parochial in its stated desire to exclude the scholarly work of those who had not had the good fortune, by accident of birth, to have been born on the African continent. (Du Bois himself, had this rule been literally applied, would have been excluded from his own project!) Instead, we sought to edit a project that would produce a genuine compendium of "Africana."     Our own attempts to secure the necessary support were in vain too until four years ago when, first, Quincy Jones and Martin Payson, and then Sonny Mehta and Alberto Vitale at Random House, agreed to fund the preparation of a prototype of a CD-ROM encyclopedia of the African diaspora, to be edited by us, with Soyinka serving as the chair of an international and multiethnic board of editors. Two years later we secured the support for a 2-million-word encyclopedia from Frank Pearl, the CEO of a new publisher called Perseus Books, and from the Microsoft Corporation. Modifying the editorial structure that Du Bois planned to use to complete The Encyclopædia of the Negro , we deployed a staff of some three dozen writers and editors, and we solicited about 400 scholars to write longer, interpretive articles.     Du Bois's own idea, although he did not admit this, probably arose at least in part out of the publication of the Encyclopædia Judaica in 1907, as well as black encyclopedia antecedents such as James T Holly, who published The Afro-American Encyclopedia in 1895, Alexander W. Wayman's Cyclopedia of African Methodism (1882), Charles O. Boothe's The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama (1895), and Revels Adams's Cyclopedia of African Methodism in Mississippi (1902). Other unpublished projects patterned after Du Bois's 1909 proposal included Daniel Murray's monumental "Historical and Biographical Encyclopædia of the Colored Race Throughout the World," which was to have been published in 1912 in six volumes and, later, Edward Garrett's self-written "A Negro Encyclopedia," consisting of 4000 entries, and completed on the eve of World War II. Both encyclopedias exist in manuscript form, but tragically were never published. All told, more than two dozen black encyclopedias have been published in the past century with limited distribution, but none has explored in a single compass both the African continent and the triumphs and the tragedies of Africa's people and their descendants around the globe.     That continent is where human prehistory begins. It was in Africa, as biologists now believe, that our species evolved, and so, in a literal sense, every modern human being is of African descent. Indeed, it was probably only about 100,000 years ago that the first members of our species left Africa, across the Suez Peninsula, and set out on an adventure that would lead to the peopling of the whole earth.     It is important to emphasize that Africa has never been separate from the rest of the human world. There have been long periods and many cultures that knew nothing of life in Africa. For much of African history, even in Africa, most Africans were unaware of other peoples in their own continent, unaware, in fact, that they shared a continent at all (just as most people in Europe, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas would have been astonished to learn that they were Europeans, Asians, Australasians, or Americans!). But the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Peninsula were always bridges more than obstacles to travel; the Mediterranean was already a system of trade long before the founding of Rome; the Sahara Desert, which so many people imagine as an impenetrable barrier, has a network of trade routes older than the Roman Empire. Starting some 2000 or so years ago, in the area of modern day Cameroon, Bantu-speaking migrants fanned out south and east into tropical Africa, taking with them the knowledge of iron smelting and new forms of agriculture. And so, when Greek and Arab travelers explored the East Coast of Africa in the first millennium C.E., or European explorers began to travel down the West African coast toward the equator in the fifteenth century, they were making direct contact with cultures with which their ancestors had very often been in remote and indirect contact all along.     The first European scholars to write about Africa in the modern period, which begins with the European Age of Discovery, knew very little of Africa's history. They did not know that their ancestors, thousands of generations ago, had also lived in Africa. If they had read Herodotus, they might have noticed his brief discussion of the civilizations of the upper Nile, and so they might have realized that Egypt was in touch with other African societies. However, it would probably not have occurred to them that, since those societies were also in touch with still others, Egypt was in touch with Central Africa as well. So they thought of much of Africa as being outside the human historical narrative they already knew.     These first scholars were also obviously struck by the physical differences between Africans and themselves -- especially of skin color and hair -- and by the differences between the customs back home and the ones the European explorers found on the Guinea coast. And so they thought of Africans as different in kind from themselves, wondering, sometimes, whether they were really also descendants of Adam and Eve.     Attitudes like these already distorted Western understandings of Africa from the fifteenth century on. Worse yet, as the transatlantic slave trade developed, so did an increasingly negative set of ideas about African peoples and their capacities. It became normal to think of black Africans as inferior to Europeans, and many Europeans found in that inferiority a rationalization for the enslavement of Africans. As a result, much of the writing about Africans and about people of African descent in the New World was frankly derogatory. Because modern Africans were educated in European colonies, they too inherited a distorted and dismissive attitude toward Africa's past and African capacities, and one of the first tasks of modern African intellectuals has been to try to frame a sense of the world and our place in it that is freed from these sad legacies.     There have been many skirmishes in the battle to find a just representation of Africa and her peoples. But in the course of this century -- and more especially in the last 30 or 40 years -- a more objective knowledge of Africa has gradually emerged, both in Africa and elsewhere. Anthropologists began to describe the rich religious, artistic, and social life of African peoples. African historians have learned to interpret oral histories, passed down in Africa's many traditions, crosschecking them against archæological and documentary evidence to produce a rich picture of the African past. Economists and political scientists, literary critics and philosophers, scholars of almost every discipline in the social sciences and the humanities have contributed to this new knowledge. And it has been the work of scholars on every continent, Africans prominent among them. Work in African American Studies has led to new understandings of the culture of slaves and of the role of people of African descent in shaping the New World's language, religion, agriculture, architecture, music, and art. As a result, it is now possible to comb through a great library of material on African history and on the peoples of Africa and her diaspora, and to offer, in a single volume, a compendium of facts and interpretations.     An encyclopedia cannot include everything that is known about its subject matter, even everything that is important. So we have had to make choices. (And, alas, some of the most interesting questions are as yet unanswered.) But we have sought to provide a broad range of information and so to represent the full range of Africa and her diaspora. About two-fifths of the text of the encyclopedia has to do exclusively, or almost so, with the African continent: the history of each of the modern nations of Africa and what happened within their territories before those nations developed; the names of ethnic groups, including some that were formerly empires and nations, and their histories; biographies of eminent African men and women; major cities and geographical features: rivers, mountains, lakes, deserts; forms of culture: art, literature, music, religion; and some of Africa's diverse plant and animal life. Another third deals mostly with Latin America and the Caribbean, focusing on the influence of African cultures and people of African descent in shaping those portions of the New World. Slightly less than a third of the material deals with North America in the same way. And the rest is material of cross-cultural significance or has to do with the African presence in Europe, Asia, or the rest of the world.     Our main focus has been on history -- political and social -- and on literature and the arts, including music, to which African and African American contributions have been especially notable in modern times. Our aim has been to give a sense of the wide diversity of peoples, cultures, and traditions that we know about in Africa in historical times, a feel for the environment in which that history was lived, and a broad outline of the contributions of people of African descent, especially in the Americas, but, more generally, around the world.     It is natural, faced with a compendium of this sort, to go looking first for what we know already and to be especially pleased with ourselves if we find something missing! But in setting out to make an encyclopedia in a single volume, we had to make choices all the time about what to include, and we did so in the light of our own best judgments, in consultation with many scholars from around the world. It has been one of the great satisfactions of compiling a work with so many colleagues with so many different specialized areas of knowledge, that we have been able to fill in some of our own many areas of ignorance. That, we believe, is the great pleasure of this new encyclopedia: it not only answers many questions that you knew you wanted to ask, it invites you to ask questions that you had not dreamed of asking. We hope you will find, as we have, that the answers to these unfamiliar questions are as amazing and as varied as Africa, her peoples, and their descendants all around the globe.     We mentioned earlier some of the many encyclopedias of various aspects of African and African American life that have been published in the past. The publication of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience as a one-volume print edition aspires to belong in the grand tradition of encyclopedia editing by scholars interested in the black world on both sides of the Atlantic. It also relies upon the work of thousands of scholars who have sought to gather and to analyze, according to the highest scholarly standards, the lives and the worlds of black people everywhere. We acknowledge our indebtedness to these traditions of scholarly endeavor -- more than a century old -- to which we are heirs, by dedicating our encyclopedia to the monumental contribution of W. E. B. Du Bois. Kwame Anthony Appiah Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chapter One a Africa Aardvark (Afrikaans for "earth pig"), common name for a burrowing, anteating mammal. The aardvark is found throughout much of Africa, from the southern part of Egypt to the Cape of Good Hope. A primarily nocturnal animal, it lives in burrows and feeds on ants and termites, occasionally eating other insects, the fat mouse, and a species of wild ground cucumber. The aardvark is up to 2.3 m (7.5 ft) long, including the fleshy, tapering tail, which it uses to throw earth backward when it burrows, it has an arched back, a tubular snout, and large, upright ears. The aardvark uses its specialized, chisel-shaped claws to break open the hard clay of termite nests; then it uses its sticky tongue to capture the insects in the nest. Unlike the animals known as anteaters, which are toothless, the aardvark has 20 cylindrical, rootless teeth that grow continually throughout its lifetime.     The female gives birth to one or occasionally two offspring, which can dig their own burrows at the age of six months. Although timid, the aardvark will fight when it cannot flee or burrow to safety; it defends itself with its powerful claws or by striking with its tail or shoulders. Scientific classification: the aardvark makes up the order Tubulidentata. It is classified as Orycteropus afer . North America Aaron , Henry Louis (Hank) (b. February 5, 1934, Mobile, Ala.), African American baseball player, broke Babe Ruth's record for career home runs in 1974. The third of eight children, Henry Aaron was raised in Mobile, Alabama, by Estella and Herbert Aaron. His first experience with professional baseball came in the Negro Leagues, as he moved up through the ranks with the Pritchett Athletics, the Mobile Black Bears, and the Indianapolis Clowns. In 1952 Aaron received his first opportunity to play in the newly integrated major leagues as a shortstop with the Milwaukee Braves' farm team. Moving from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to Jacksonville, Florida, Aaron made it to the major leagues in 1954, playing for the Milwaukee Braves (now the Atlanta Braves).     Aaron is considered by some the best baseball player in history. Over his 23-year Major League baseball career, Aaron compiled more batting records than any other player in baseball history. He holds the record for runs batted in with 2297, and was a Gold Glove Winner in 1958, 1959, and 1960. Aaron's most acclaimed accomplishment came on April 8, 1974. At the age of 40, he hit a 385-foot home run against the Los Angeles Dodgers, thus surpassing Babe Ruth's record of 714 career home runs. He ended his career with 755 home runs.     After retiring, Aaron returned to the Atlanta Braves as a vice president for player development. In 1989 he was promoted to senior vice president. Aaron currently serves as corporate vice president of community relations for Turner Broadcasting Systems, Inc. (TBS) and is a member of the Sterling Committee of Morehouse College. He is also the founder of the Hank Aaron Rookie League program. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982. Alonford James Robinson, Jr. See Also Baseball in the United States. Africa Abacha , Sani (b. September 20, 1943, Kano, Nigeria; d. June 8, 1998, Abuja, Nigeria), military dictator of Nigeria. Sani Abacha attended primary and secondary school in his home state of Kano and then joined the army in 1962. As a soldier he attended the Nigerian Military Training College in Kaduna (1962-1963), and then went to England for further military schooling.     Abacha achieved steady promotions as a soldier and by the mid-1980s had entered Nigeria's military elite. In 1983 he was among those who overthrew Shehu Shagari, leader of the Second Republic, in a coup that led to the military rule of Muhammadu Buhari. In 1985 Abacha participated in a second coup, which replaced Buhari with General Ibrahim Babangida. As head of state, Babangida announced that free elections would be held in the early 1990s. In 1993, however, after Babangida nullified the results of these belated free elections, Abacha staged a third coup and ousted his former ally.     Once in power, Abacha dissolved all of Nigeria's democratic institutions, from local governments to the national assembly and the constitution. He replaced state governors with military officers and banned the country's two political parties. Abacha also began imprisoning and executing most of his opposition. Among the long list of people imprisoned under Abacha were Olusegun Obasanjo, a former Nigerian head of state; Moshood K. O. Abiola, the presumed winner of the 1993 elections; numerous human rights lobbyists; and several journalists. Obasanjo's vice president, Shehu Musa Yar'Adua, died in prison in 1997, and environmental activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa was jailed, then executed in 1995. Abiola died in prison in July 1998, shortly after Abacha's death.     Abacha even imprisoned his own second-in-command, Oladipo Diya, in December 1997. His regime was characterized by a concern with security that verged on paranoia. In addition to maintaining a large personal guard, Abacha employed plainclothes policemen to flush out dissenters. Although his image was plastered everywhere, Abacha himself rarely appeared in public.     Abacha scheduled elections for August 1998, but months beforehand all five legal parties nominated him as their "consensus candidate." As the election approached, Abacha used the military and police to break up pro-democracy demonstrations. In June 1998 Abacha died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Eric Bennett See Also Babangida, Ibrahim Gbadamosi; Kano, Nigeria; Saro-Wiwa, Kenule Beeson; Abiola, Moshood Kashimawo Olawale. Latin America and the Caribbean Abakuás , all-male secret societies created by African slaves living in CUBA during the mid-nineteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, thousands of African slaves were involuntarily brought from the Calabar region of southwestern NIGERIA to Cuba in order to labor on the sugar plantations. In Cuba, these enslaved people reconstructed aspects of their language (Ibo) and religious rituals in Abakuás , all-male organizations with closely guarded religious, musical, and dance traditions. The prototype for Cuba's Abakuás can be found in Calabar's leopard societies, groups of highly respected, accomplished men who adopted the leopard as a symbol of masculinity. Today as in the past, Abakuás are found predominantly in the city of Havana and the province of Matanzas and are united by a common African mythology and ritual system.     Abakuás preserve African traditions through performative ceremonies, a complex system of signs, and narratives in the Ibo language. Customarily led by four leaders and eight subordinate officers, members of the Abakuás seek to protect themselves from misfortune and harm through a spiritual alliance. Abakuás also constitute a financial support system in which members, who are required to pay monthly dues, can borrow money in times of need.     The Abakuá ceremonies of worship combine music, song, dance, and costume. The traditional instrumentation features a lead conga-like drum and several smaller drums held under the arm. Two bells attached by a curved metal rivet and a type of friction drum may also be included. Members clap their hands and sing in a chorus-response format. Some Abakuá members don a checked outfit, fringed with hay-like raffia and topped with a conical hood, and dance in veneration of ancestral spirits known as iremés or ñáñigos . These ceremonies reenact aspects of the mythology surrounding the group's origins in Africa and often involve spirit possession and animal sacrifice. Although most of the ceremonies take place in a clandestine, sacred setting known as a fambá , others, such as funerals, take the form of a public procession.     Abakuás' exclusion of women is explained by the myths that provide the basis for their rituals. The two individuals central to Abakuá mythology are Tanze, the ancient king of Ejagham (part of the Calabar region in southwest Nigeria) and the founding father of leopard societies; and Sikán, a powerful princess of Efut, a region to the south of Ejagham. Members of Abakuás believe that when Tanze died his soul became a fish that was later captured by Sikán. By coming into possession of Tanze's soul, Sikán came into possession of the secrets of his leopard society, some of which she revealed to the world. This episode, which ends in the death of Sikán, accounts for the general mistrust of women among members of Abakuás.     The story of Tanze and Sikán also informs the Abakuás' symbolic language, known as anaforuana . The central symbol of the Abakuás is a geometric form divided into quartered areas, each of which contains a small circle. The small circles are interpreted individually as the eyes of Tanze and Sikán, and the whole form is interpreted as the fusion of their powers, since by capturing his soul Sikán essentially became the bride of Tanze. It is a symbol of spiritual communication and enlightenment. The theme of four eyes is a reoccurring motif among some 500 sacred symbols used by members of Abakuás to communicate with one another and with the divine.     Since their inception in the early to mid-eighteenth century, Abakuás have frequently been misunderstood and repressed by the dominant segment of Cuban society. While some refer to Abakuá members as ñáñigos, after the spirits they worship, others have labeled them diablitos , or little devils. Their reputation among light-skinned Cubans as bloodthirsty and cannibalistic is implied in sayings such as "Pórtense bien porque si no se los lleva el ñáñigo" (Behave yourself or else the ñáñigo will get you).     Although Abakuás initially only admitted blacks, over time some mulatto and white Cubans have gained entrance into the secret societies, giving way to religious syncretism. Some parallels in the practices of Abakuás and Catholics include a set of commandments (Abakuás tend to have seven rather than ten) and an altar complete with candles, holy water, and incense. Abakuás, however, continue to be predominantly black and centered on maintaining spiritual connections with an African past. Aaron Myers See Also Matanzas, Cuba; Catholic Church in Latin America and the Caribbean. Europe Abbott , Diane (b. September 27, 1953, London, Great Britain), the first black woman to be elected a member of Parliament (MP) in Great Britain. Diane Abbott, a working-class Cambridge University graduate, made history on June 11, 1987, by becoming the first black female member of the British Parliament. Her outspoken criticism of racism and her commitment to progressive politics have made her a controversial figure in Great Britain's Labour Party.     Diane Abbott was born in 1953 in the working-class London neighborhood of Paddington. Her mother (a nurse) and father (a welder) had moved there in 1951 from Jamaica. Later they moved to lower-middle-class Harrow, where Abbott was the only black student at the Harrow County School for Girls. Graduating among the top in her class, she applied and was accepted into Newnham College at Cambridge University, despite a high school teacher's comment that attendance there would give her ambitions that were above her social status.     She began work after graduation at the home office, a government department responsible for a broad range of domestic policies. Eighteen months later she left to become the first black staff member at the National Council for Civil Liberties. She left claiming she disliked the "hypocrisy of making a living out of race." Abbott then tried her hand at television reporting. Later, she became a public relations officer for the Greater London Council, the city's metropolitan government.     Abbott joined the Labour Party at age 18 and has been active in politics ever since. Her political career began in 1982. She won a Westminster city council seat, and learned to maneuver in what has been described as the "bare-knuckled, gibe-and-jeer politics of England's elected neighborhood councils." This experience prepared her for parliamentary battles.     After a failed election bid in 1985, Abbott won a Parliament seat in the district of Hackney North. In winning, Abbott joined the 4 percent of members of Parliament (MPs) who are women. In the 1987 election just two other blacks, Bernie Grant and Paul Boateng, won seats.     In her first speech to Parliament, Abbott denounced the racism of Great Britain's immigration policies. In 1988, to the dismay of the Labour leadership who sought unity within the party, Abbott attempted to create a black caucus similar to that in the United States Congress. However, Abbott was the only black MP to show up at the caucus's first meeting. Despite this and other setbacks, she continues to voice often contentious views.     In Parliament she has not only had to defend her views on racism in Great Britain; she has needed to justify her status as a single mother with a career. Many conservatives blame single mothers for the breakdown of family and the subsequent rise in poverty and crime. Abbott married Ghanaian David Thompson in 1991 and had a child, James, but divorced soon after. She believes that her experience as a single mother has helped to prepare her for parliamentary battles. She stated, "First I can manage with very little sleep. Second, I am very flexible.... And third ... I can put up with a lot of childish babble."     During the 1990s, the centrist policies of Prime Minister Tony Blair's New Labour alienated left-wing MPs such as Abbott. Before the 1997 election, Blair reprimanded Abbott for her public criticism of Labour Party campaign contribution and election practices. After winning the election, the Labour government dismissed Abbott from Parliament's Treasury Committee because she disagreed with Blair's fiscally conservative policies. Reassigned to the Foreign Affairs Committee, Abbott has criticized the lack of democracy in Hong Kong since it was handed over to China in 1997, and has opposed British military action in Iraq in 1998. Abbott remains a blunt critic of policies she considers unethical or racist, and continues to advocate social policies to help poor immigrant and minority populations. Leyla Keough See Also Great Britain; Congressional Black Caucus. North America Abbott , Robert Sengstacke (b. November 28, 1868, Frederica, Ga.; d. February 22, 1940, Chicago, Ill.), African American founder, editor, and publisher of the Chicago Defender . Robert S. Abbott was the son of Thomas and Flora (Butler) Abbott, both former slaves. From 1892 to 1896 he attended Hampton Institute, where he learned the printing trade. Abbott moved to Chicago to attend Kent College of Law, graduating in 1898. He practiced law for a few years but changed careers to become a journalist.     Abbott founded the Chicago Defender , a weekly newspaper, on May 6, 1905. He started the paper with $25, and at first operated it out of his kitchen. Under his direction, the Defender became the most widely circulated African American newspaper of its time and a leading voice in the fight against racism. Abbott cultivated a controversial, aggressive style, reporting on such issues as violence against blacks and police brutality. The Defender raised eyebrows with its antilynching slogan, "If you must die, take at least one with you"; its opposition to a segregated Colored Officers Training Camp in Fort Des Moines, Iowa, in 1917; and its condemnation of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Through the Defender , Abbott also played a major role in the Great Migration of many African Americans from the South to Chicago.     In addition to his journalistic leadership, Abbot also actively participated in several civic and art organizations in Chicago. He served as a member of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which published the study The Negro in Chicago (1922). Abbott developed tuberculosis in 1932 and died in Chicago of Bright's disease. The Defender continued under the control of Abbott's nephew, John H. Sengstacke, who began publishing it as a daily in 1956. Robert Fay See Also Antilynching Movement; Chicago Defender ; Garvey, Marcus Mosiah; Great Migration, The; Universal Negro Improvement Association. Abd al-Kadir . Please see Abd al-Qadir Abdallah ibn Yacin . Please see `Abd Allah ibn Yasin Africa `Abd Allah ibn Yasin [also known as Abdullah b. Yasin al-Gazuli and Abdallah ibn Rasin] (b.?, Morocco; d. 1059?), an Islamic scholar and one of the founders of the Almoravid movement. The Almoravid movement of Abd Allah ibn Yasin conquered parts of northwestern Africa and later Spain during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and converted the defeated populations to Malekite (Maliki) Sunni Islam. Little is known of `Abd Allah ibn Yasin's life prior to 1035 B.C.E., when as a student he was visited by a Sanhadja Berber chieftain and invited to return home with him to teach his people the true faith of Islam.     A devout Muslim, `Abd Allah ibn Yasin was scandalized by the Sanhadja Berbers' lax and immoral practices. He had them convert to Malekite Sunni Islam, imposing a strict interpretation of Koranic law. Eventually he even restructured the Berbers' troops to conduct jihads (holy wars) in accordance with the Koran. By 1041, however, the Berber chieftains resented the religious scholar's rule, and sent him away. `Abd Allah ibn Yasin and a group of followers spent a year at a coastal ribat (religious retreat), then returned and launched a series of attacks on Berber communities, marking the beginning of the Almoravid movement.     Under `Abd Allah ibn Yasin, the Almoravid movement conquered the Gadala, Lemtuna, and Messufa Berber clans in the southern part of present-day Morocco, and brought Islam to the ancient kingdom of Ghana. It also took over several important Saharan market towns, such as Aoudaghost and Sijilmasa. In 1059 `Abd Allah ibn Yasin was killed in battle against Gadala Berbers. He was succeeded by Abu Bakr ibn Omar and his cousin Yousuf ibn Tasfin, who led the movement throughout Morocco and into northern Spain. Elizabeth Heath See Also Ghana, Early Kingdom of; Sahara Desert; Almoravids; Islamic Fundamentalism: An Interpretation. Africa Abd al-Qadir (b. May 26, 1807; d. 1883), Algerian religious and military leader credited with unifying Algerian territory into a state through his campaign against French colonization. Considered a hero of anticolonial resistance by many contemporary Algerians, Abd al-Qadir created an Arah-Berber alliance to oppose French expansion in the 1830s and 1840s. He also organized an Islamic state that, at one point, controlled the western two-thirds of Algeria's inhabited land.     Abd al-Qadir's ability to unite Arabs and Berbers owed in part to the legacy of his father, the head of the Hashim tribe in Mascara and leader of the Qadirayya regional political body, which opposed the Turkish sultanate. In 1826 Abd al-Qadir and his father made a pilgrimage, or hajj , to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam. Upon his return in 1828, Abd al-Qadir's own reputation as an Islamic religious and cultural leader grew, and Arabs and Berbers alike looked to him to lead the resistance against the French after their 1830 invasion of Algiers.     As the French expanded westward, in 1832 Abd al-Qadir led attacks on French-occupied Oran, taking the city within six months. He signed a treaty with France in 1834 that permitted French occupation of western coastal cities, but resumed fighting after a new French military leader attempted to organize tribal resistance against him. Through military and diplomatic triumphs over both the French and rival local groups, Abd al-Qadir expanded and consolidated his rule over the territory in the surrounding Oran. As emir, he governed a hierarchical, theocratic state integrating tribal traditions and promoted commerce and education. In 1837 France signed the Treaty of Tafna with Abd al-Qadir, acknowledging his sovereign authority over an area encompassing two-thirds of Algeria.     The French abandoned the policy of "limited occupation" when General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud came to power. Using "scorched earth" tactics, the French systematically destroyed the Algerian means of livelihood, including villages, crops, livestock, and forests, and reportedly trapped surrendering Muslims in caves and burned them. In 1843 the emir was forced into exile in Morocco, but when former allies there turned on him, he returned to Algeria to lead resistance efforts. His last retreat to Morocco in July 1846 ended in complete loss of Moroccan support, and in 1847 he returned to Algeria and surrendered to French authorities. The French broke promises of safe conduct and imprisoned him for four years in France, until Emperor Napoleon III Africa released him to permanent exile.     In 1852 Abd al-Qadir went to Damascus, in present-day Syria, where he wrote about politics and studied science. During the anti-Christian riots of 1860 in Damascus and Lebanon, he gathered several hundred followers to rescue more than 12,000 Christians from their attackers. Napoleon III awarded him the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor.     In Algeria, Abd al-Qadir's legacy remained an inspiration through the War of Independence (1954-1962). In 1968 the newly independent nation erected a monument to Abd al-Qadir in the place where a French monument to General Bugeaud had stood, and took up his green and white standard as its flag. Marian Aguiar See Also Algeria; Algiers, Algeria; Berber North America Abdul-Jabbar , Kareem (b. April 16, 1947, Harlem, N.Y.), African American BASKETBALL player, widely considered to be one of the greatest National Basketball Association (NBA) players in history. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the highest scorer in NBA history, was born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. in Harlem, New York. Raised in a middle-class household and educated at Catholic schools in Manhattan, he was introduced to basketball at age nine and played competitively throughout elementary and high school. He was 6 ft, 8 in (2.05 m) tall by the time he was 14 and became a star center for Power Memorial Academy, leading the high school to two city championships. He continued his dominant play at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where the team won three National Collegiate Athletic Association championships and lost only two games during his college career. An outspoken political activist who was influenced by the Black Power movement, he changed his name from Alcindor to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1971 after converting to Islam. A popular NBA star from 1969 to 1989, he thwarted opponents with his "skyhook" shot and became professional basketball's most imposing offensive threat. In his 20-year professional career, Abdul-Jabbar played on 18 All Star teams and claimed six championships, six most valuable player awards, and numerous other NBA records.     In 1996 Abdul-Jabbar authored Black Profiles in Courage: A Legacy of African-American Achievement. Robert Fay See Also Harlem, New York. Africa Abé (also known as the Abbe or Abbey), ethnic group of Côte d'Ivoire. The Abé, numbering around 180,000, live in the Agboville region of Côte d'Ivoire. They speak a Niger-Congo language. Linguistically and culturally, they belong to the Akan group. See Also Côte d'Ivoire; Languages, African: An Overview. Africa Abeokuta , Nigeria, the capital of Ogun State, in southwestern Nigeria. The Egba leader Sodeke founded Abeokuta around 1830 as a settlement for a group of refugees from the collapse of the Oyo Kingdom. Abeokuta translates as "under the rocks," or "refuge among rocks," and refers to the city's location on the craggy east bank of the Ogun River. The early city comprised four Egba subgroups, the Ake, Gbagura, Oke-Ona, and Owu, each in a separate ward. (The Egba are themselves a subgroup of the YORUBA.) In the 1840s missionaries and freed Egba slaves introduced Christianity and secular European influences to Abeokuta. The subsequent arrival of Sierra Leone Creoles further diversified the town.     In the mid-nineteenth century, the people of Abeokuta warred with the neighboring kingdom of Dahomey (in present-day Benin) and then with Ibadan. Abeokuta maintained an alliance with Great Britain during this war and the later Yoruba civil wars (1877-1893). Consequently, when Great Britain asserted its control over the region in 1893, it granted Abeokuta and the surrounding Egba region a degree of autonomy. Abeokutans protested their city's incorporation into British Nigeria in 1914.     Today Abeokuta serves as a market town for the surrounding agricultural region, which produces staple crops, fresh produce, cotton, and palm products. It lies on the main rail line from Lagos to Ibadan and the interior, and highways link it to surrounding cities, including Ketou in Benin. Abeokutans are known for their traditional adire , cotton cloth dyed with locally grown indigo. Small-scale local industries include fruit canning, brewing, saw milling, and the manufacture of plastic and aluminum products. In 1984 the University of Lagos established an Abeokuta campus, which focuses on science, technology, and agriculture. The city's population is approximately 400,000. Eric Bennett See Also Dahomey, Early Kingdom of; Ibadan, Nigeria; Lagos, Nigeria; Oyo, Early Kingdom of. North America Abernathy , Ralph David (b. March 11, 1926, Linden, Ala.; d. April 17, 1990, Atlanta, Ga.), American minister and civil rights leader who organized nonviolent resistance to segregation and succeeded Martin Luther King Jr. as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Ralph Abernathy was born on March 11, 1926, in Linden, Alabama, to William and Louivery Abernathy. He earned a B.S. from Alabama State College and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1948. In 1951 he received an M.A. in sociology and became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He and Martin Luther King Jr. led the successful boycott of the Montgomery bus system in 1955, protesting segregated public transportation.     In 1957 Abernathy helped King found the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) to coordinate nonviolent resistance to segregation. After King's assassination in 1968, Abernathy served as SCLC president until he resigned in 1977. Robert Fay See Also King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Montgomery Bus Boycott; Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Africa Abidjan , Côte d'Ivoire, the former capital and largest city of the Côte d'Ivoire. The administrative, cultural, and economic center of the Côte d'Ivoire, Abidjan surrounds the Ebrié Lagoon on the Atlantic Ocean's Gulf of Guinea. It is believed that people founded settlements on the site in the early sixteenth century. Later in that century three Ebrié fishing villages existed in the area -- Locodjo, Anoumabo, and Cocody. The area was briefly explored by Portuguese traders in the seventeenth century, after which it was largely ignored by Europeans until French colonization. In 1903 the French chose the area as the endpoint for a railway connecting Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) to the coast, and a small town soon developed around the train station; but without a viable port, it grew slowly at first.     In 1934, shortly after the completion of the rail link to the Upper Volta city of Bobo-Dioulasso, the French moved the colonial capital from nearby Bingerville to Abidjan and began building a series of bridges between the mainland and the lagoon islands. The completion of the Vridi Canal in 1950, followed by the construction of a port on the barrier island of Petit Bassam, made Abidjan the colony's center of industry and shipping. The opening of the port also dramatically increased the city's wealth and population, and Abidjan has since become the most populous city in the Côte d'Ivoire. Today, it has an estimated population of more than 2 million, a fact that helped prompt the government of Félix Houphouet-Boigny to move the capital to Houphouët-Boigny's hometown, Yamoussoukro, in 1983.     A series of islands centered on a Manhattan-like business center called the Plateau, Abidjan is considered one of the most cosmopolitan (and expensive) African cities, sometimes referred to as "the Petit Paris of Africa." Its glass-walled skyscrapers house the headquarters of numerous international firms and agencies, and shopping centers and French restaurants cater to a sizable population of European expatriates. Most of the city's African residents -- many of whom are migrants from Burkina Faso, Mali, and other West African countries -- live in neighborhoods such as Treichville and Adjamé, both centered on huge outdoor markets.     Abidjan is home to the country's largest port as well as to factories that process the country's main exports -- COCOA, coffee, and palm oil. Although these industries have contributed to the city's prosperity, its population is still sharply divided economically, and many of the neighborhoods beyond the Plateau are extremely poor, crowded, and inadequately serviced. In recent years the government has attempted to counteract urban poverty by training the unemployed as farmers and then giving them land in the country's interior. Although some of these "back to the land" programs have had a measure of success, overpopulation and underemployment remain significant problems in Abidjan. Elizabeth Heath See Also Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso; Colonial Rule; New York, New York; Yamoussoukro, Côte d'Ivoire. Africa Abiola , Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (b. August 24, 1937, Abeokuta, Nigeria; d. July 7, 1998, Abuja, Nigeria), Nigerian businessman, presidential candidate, and political prisoner. On June 12, 1993, the popular businessman Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola won a long-awaited presidential election in Nigeria, only to have the country's military leader, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, annul the election results. When Abiola declared himself the country's legitimate leader a year later, Babangida's successor, Gen. Sani Abacha, jailed him for treason. As a political prisoner, Abiola became the rallying symbol for Nigerians' democratic aspirations.     Abiola was born into a poor, polygamous household of Yoruba-speaking Muslims. None of his parents' first 22 children had survived past infancy, so Abiola, the 23rd, was given the middle name Kashimawo, meaning "Let's see if he will survive." Growing up in the ancient Yoruba town of Abeokuta, he first attended the Islamic Nawar Ud-Deen School, then transferred to the Christian-run African Central School. As an indigent student at the Baptist Boys' High School, Abiola sold firewood to pay for his books. He was so poor that he did not eat his first egg until he was 19 years old. He organized a traveling orchestra that performed at public events, often for food. A slight stammerer, Abiola had questionable musical talent but tremendous determination.     After leaving high school, Abiola worked briefly as a bank clerk and a civil servant, then won a scholarship to Glasgow University to study accounting. A bright student, he graduated with several awards in 1965. Returning to Nigeria, he worked as an accountant for the Lagos University Teaching Hospital. He then became divisional controller for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer Products. In 1968 he joined International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), a corporation that was owed a considerable debt by the Nigerian army. After securing the recovery of the debt, Abiola was named the company's chairman in Nigeria and its vice president for Africa and the Middle East.     In 1974 Abiola launched his own company, Radio Communications of Nigeria. Abiola started accumulating wealth rapidly. At his death, Abiola's business interests spanned 60 countries and included firms engaged in banking, shipping, oil prospecting, agriculture, publishing, air transportation, and entertainment. His Nigerian companies alone employed close to 20,000 workers.     Abiola's philanthropy was famous throughout Nigeria. He supported education, sports, and numerous social and political causes. He called for reparations from the West to compensate African peoples for the TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE. He married at least five wives and fathered, by some accounts, more than 50 children.     Abiola's public life was full of paradoxes. As a businessman, he received large contracts from his military friends, yet he became an outspoken opponent of the military dictatorship. Abiola's political career was cut short by two such friends: Babangida, who annulled Abiola's presidential victory, and Abacha, who threw him in jail.     Abiola was the first presidential candidate from the southern part of the country who won a majority of votes even in the predominantly Hausa north. Hopes for his release from prison soared after Sani Abacha died suddenly in June 1998 and his successor, Gen. Abdulsalam Abubakar, announced the release of many other political prisoners. However, Abiola, who had suffered from heart problems for several years, fell ill on July 7, 1998, while meeting with United States diplomats to discuss the terms of his release. He died several hours later, apparently of a heart attack. Abiola's death in detention sparked anger and violence in parts of Nigeria. Okey Ndibe See Also Abeokuta, Nigeria; Babangida, Ibrahim Gbadamosi; Education in Africa; Lagos, Nigeria; Abacha, Sani; Islam and Tradition: An Interpretation. Copyright © 1999 Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. All rights reserved.