 He was educated at Government Secondary School, Afikpo, and later attended college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he studied philosophy and mathematics, earning a bachelor of science degree in 1967, the year of the outbreak of civil war in Nigeria, which lasted two and a half years.At the time living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Chinweizu founded and edited the "Biafra Review" (1969–70).He enrolled for a Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo, under the supervision of political scientist Claude E. Welch Jr. Chinweizu apparently had a disagreement with his dissertation committee and walked away with his manuscript, which he got published as "The West and the Rest of Us