It all started with a series of provocative cartoons in a Danish newspaper, but few in Nigeria are worried about that now.
The fury unleashed in protests against the European press has taken on a deadly logic of its own, and no-one knows how many will be dead before it ends.
At the weekend, Muslim northerners took out their anger at the cartoons’ perceived insult to their prophet by slaughtering their Christian neighbours.
Now, vengeful Christian southerners have launched their own pogrom and the streets of Onitsha are filling up with Muslim dead.
”I heard that two lorries brought dead Igbos down from the north. They were enraged, and attacked my people,” said 22-year-old gold trader Ramatu Tanko.
On Thursday, more trucks will head north filled with Hausa dead, as Africa’s most populous country looks once again into the abyss of ethnic war.
Tanko and hundreds of her fellow northerners — Hausa from Nigeria and Niger — have fled the southern Nigerian city of Onitsha after two days of bloodshed.
Nigeria as a whole is not in flames. Most of its 130-million citizens are still talking, trading and working together in cosmopolitan cities.
This is not 1967, and the tribes are not yet ready for another civil war.
But drive the 200m across the Niger River Bridge from Asaba to its twin city Onitsha and the fragility of the status quo becomes shockingly clear.
Asaba is the plush administrative centre of oil-rich Delta State, Onitsha a lawless urban jungle and home to West Africa’s largest market.
On Wednesday, reporters crossing the murky brown river to investigate reports of a wholesale massacre were brought to an immediate halt.
Igbo youths wielding machetes and metal bars faced off against nervous, angry soldiers. Between and among them, the fly-blown bodies of the Hausa dead.
Gun shots rang out, and soldiers surged forward to rescue a police jeep that risked being lost to the angry crowd.
An officer collected bloodied Islamic prayer beads from the roadside.
No accurate account of these riots will be written.
No official body has the capacity to collect true casualty figures, and no-one really wants to know.
All that can be said is that the police, who traditionally downplay civilian death tolls, say 15 Christians were killed in Maiduguri on Saturday.
Add to those the 19 Muslims lying mangled on Wednesday at the Onitsha bridge, and the 15 dead that shell-shocked drivers reported lining the city’s streets.
Take into account the five said to be dead in Delta State, then prepare for more deaths and more incredible casualty rates as the bad news trickles out.
And, even if no-one has been able to count the bodies, Onitsha’s Muslim minority has begun to count the cost of being caught up in the fury.
Male Isa, a 55-year-old goat trader, looked stunned as he joined fellow refugees for prayers under a mango tree in an Asaba police compound.
On his head, a deep wound. Inflicted by a rioter’s cutlass, friends said.
”We were in the market, selling goats and beans, when they came. They just started killing us, killing us in the market,” said 43-year-old Mallam Hassan.
Onitsha’s market is huge, a polyglot global crossroads where Nigerians of all ethnic groups trade with West Africans, Lebanese, Chinese and others.
The traditions of exchange are the only real law, and the main enforcers of order are the savagely violent vigilantes hired by the traders.
But there is no such thing as common ground in Nigeria. On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, the Muslims were reminded that they work on Igbo land.
Abdusalami Dan-Buzer came to Onitsha from the Sahara Desert ten years ago, although he still speaks the French of his native Niger.
He has a Nigerian wife and children born here. But now he has nothing else. His home and business have been torched, and he has no bus fare home.
”I’ve nothing, not one franc. I can’t go back to Niger,” he said.
But the violence was not totally senseless. Even hate can be mathematical.
”My brother was attacked, so he spoke to them in Igbo. They said: ‘Since you learned Igbo, we will not kill you’. They slashed his head,” said Tanko.
Hate has not yet gripped the refugees. They are still caught up in shock and hopelessness, and their needs overwhelm their police hosts.
But when the bodies and the stories get back to the north, anger will come. – Sapa-AFP