CORRESPONDENTS who have been covering West Africa describe the chaotic conditions there with the acronym WAWA, meaning "West Africa Wins Again." To the newsmen scrambling to cover the sudden collapse of the breakaway state of Biafra, last week was WAWA and then some. At the moment of victory for Nigeria, the nearest TIME Correspondent was James Wilde, 1,000 miles away in Kinshasa, the Congo. He could just as well have been on the moon. Defeated by bureaucracy and the vagaries of travel in Africa, Wilde was forced to assess the situation on the basis of long experience in the war and previous interviews with Biafran Leader Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu.

Nevertheless, TIME was well represented at the week's biggest story. East African Correspondent John Blashill was in Addis Ababa when the word came; it took him 30 hours to cover over 6,000 miles to Lagos, through Athens, Geneva and London. In from Paris flew Roland Flamini, and he and Blashill pieced together a thorough report on the final breakup and surrender. Planes were grounded, and correspondents who attempted the 36-hour drive to Enugu, the original secessionist capital, were turned back by Nigerian army roadblocks. In Lagos, government officials refused to see newsmen at all. Nevertheless, Blashill managed an exclusive 45-minute interview with a top Nigerian official. "He kept saying he really had to go," recalls Blashill. "But he kept on talking. I found out later that he was supposed to be with General Gowon at the peace talks in which the Biafrans formally surrendered."

Half the job was getting the news out. "The public telex office was jammed day and night," reported Flamini. "The overloaded wires became more erratic with frequent breakdowns and wrong numbers. One correspondent waited hours, only to discover that he had transmitted his entire story to a Scandinavian machine-tool factory with a call sign similar to that of his paper." Eventually TIME'S team got their report over the wires to New York. Their files, along with Jim Wilde's in Nairobi, provided the material for this week's cover story written by Spencer Davidson, edited by Ronald Kriss and researched by Marion Knox.

The Cover: Photographic design by Fred Burrell, who utilized a dramatically lit wood-and-polychrome Ibo mask. The figures in the foreground symbolize Biafran refugees.

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