In the political and cultural evolution of West Africa the year 1966 was critical. At the end of 1965 the former colonial territories, both Anglophone and Francophone, seemed to be well advanced along the road of sovereignty and national progress. All of the former British possessions were now officially independent, and, although in 1958, all but one of the French territories had temporarily elected to stay within a loose economic community, the only absolute stranglehold which Europe retained in the area was in the still-enslaved Portuguese possessions of Guinea and Cape Verde, where wars of liberation still raged. By Christmas of that year, however, the horizon had assumed a louring aspect. In January 1966 a posse of army officers, led in the first instance by Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna, took over control in Nigeria, while in the following month President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana was removed from power by a similar coup while absent on a state visit to China. In Lagos the dominating figure in the new military government soon emerged as Major-General J. T. U. Aguiyi-Ironsi who, when he announced plans to centralize the Federation by substituting ‘provinces’ for the existing semi-autonomous states, was himself ousted in a counter-coup on 29 July.