More than three decades after the breakaway "Republic of Biafra" suffered a bloody defeat at the hands of federal forces, rebellious shoppers are once again spending Biafran pounds and shillings in the markets of south-eastern Nigeria.
In the latest sign of the centrifugal forces threatening to tear Africa's largest oil exporter apart, ethnic Igbo rebel leaders have reintroduced the bills, which are identical to those minted during Biafra's doomed three-year struggle for independence.
They now circulate widely in the east's bustling street markets and have partially displaced the Nigerian naira, the national currency and a hated symbol of central rule.
Violence, disease and starvation killed more than a million Nigerians during the country's 1967-1970 civil war. Most of the dead were Igbos from the territory claimed as Biafra by rebel forces, and many from the region still cling to dreams of full independence.
Separatist leaders say that they will not now take up arms against the Nigerian state, but that they instead plan to edge their homeland into freedom through a 25-step programme of gradual autonomy. One of the first such steps was the reintroduction of the pound, which has proved popular.
"I cannot accept Nigerian naira because I am a Biafran. Besides, the naira is as worthless as toilet paper. This is Biafran land and I have to abide by the laws of this new republic," declared 22-year-old Ogbonnaya Udeh, who trades in textiles in Owerri market.
"I have renounced my Nigerian citizenship. I am a Biafran in everything; mind, body and soul," said Cyprian Onyejekwe, an Igbo who said he became a trader after losing a place in law school to a rival from another ethnic group who had lower test scores.
"I will have nothing to do with Nigeria again. The naira has become a taboo to an Igbo man. It is a sacrilege to touch it here because anything Nigerian is evil," the 30-year-old added.
Over the weekend in Owerri and Onitsha, the most downstream bridging point on the mighty River Niger and home to west Africa's busiest market, pounds and shillings were changing hands between Igbo shoppers and traders and being sold by money changers at a rate one pound to 270 naira.
At a boisterous Onitsha street rally organised by a banned separatist group, the Movement for the Actualisation of a Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), protesters brandished fistfuls of the notes alongside the rising-sun banner of the defunct republic.
"The naira ceased to be legal tender in Igboland in 1999 when MASSOB began the current struggle," the group's leader Ralph Uwazuruike told AFP at his fortified compound in the farming village of Okwe in the forests of Imo State in the south-east of Nigeria.
Uwazuruike said the pound notes now circulating in Onitsha and across the cities of Igboland had been taken from stocks preserved after Biafra's defeat in 1970.
Of the many dangers facing Africa over the next ten years "the most important would be the outright collapse of Nigeria" it noted, adding that "if Nigeria were to become a failed state, it could drag down a large part of the west African region."
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