For a continent increasingly inclined to criticize itself for its own failings there was much, in the late 1960s and early 1970s about which to feel concern. The succession of coups which afflicted West African states in 1966 was far from the last. In Dahomey (Benin), there had been no fewer than five such insurrections by 1972. Meanwhile in Ghana a renewed attempt at democratic government in 1969 soon drove itself into the ground in a mire of corruption and usurped authority. Early in 1972 another military cabal took over in Accra. The National Redemption Council under Colonel I. K. Acheampong was loud in its promises of a clean sweep of compromising interests, claims over which the population at large were already growing not a little cynical. Though the Nigerian Civil War ended with the absorption of Biafra in 1970, the aftermath of bitterness and mistrust took many years to subside. No sooner was the Nigerian war at an end than unsavoury rumblings were heard from the desert state of Chad, which itself was soon embroiled in a civil conflict even costlier and more bloody. In Nigeria the promised return to civilian government was continually postponed, but after its arrival on 1 October 1979 almost as transient as in Ghana.