Thursday 20 December 2012

The Nigerian state, Igbo genocide and the Africom


Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “The Nigerian state, Igbo genocide and the Africom”, Tensões Mundiais/World Tensions, Vol 17, No 13, December 2012, pp 155-168.

In “The Nigerian state, Igbo genocide and Africom” (see link below), Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe critically examines the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, and its consequences on contemporary Africa. The results have been catastrophic. Ekwe-Ekwe demonstrates the glaring inability of the state in Africa to fulfil its basic role to the peoples and concludes that the way out for Africa is for constituent peoples to construct democratic and extensively decentralised new states that guarantee and safeguard human rights and freedom for the people and individual.

Tuesday 18 December 2012

Who is my friend with my history?


Last night friends, colleagues and families converged on the picturesque market town of Henley-on-Thames, west of London, to celebrate Chinua Achebe’s incomparable and irrepressible There was a Country. A spontaneous rendering by all gathered of a popular Igbo chorus on a variation on the theme of “Happy Survival”, appropriately the Igbo post-genocide survival anthem, launched the party.

There was a Country is an indefatigable reminder to an oft-complacent world of the gruesome and devastating Igbo genocide of 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 and the incredible survival of Igbo people. 3.1 million Igbo or a quarter of this nation’s population were murdered by the Nigeria state and its domestic and foreign allies during these 44 months of the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. It is precisely this dual-track mission of There was a Country that has been most troubling to those fanged assailants of Achebe’s memoirs. Any reminder of the Igbo genocide and, particularly, the Igbo survival therefrom, riles the sensibilities of assailants whose life’s quest is to continue to dart around the crumbling edifice of a doubtful sage, more demonstrably a genocidist “theorist” who insensately advocated and co-supervised the murder of 3.1 million children, women and men. This marks the beginning of Africa’s current age of pestilence. What a burden of a legacy for anyone to wish to prop up; truly, a dreadfully punishing ordeal.

It is instantly recognisable by everyone that the Igbo survival from the genocide is a monumental repudiation of this legacy whatsoever guises it appears to be recycled. This is pointedly what the assailants of There was a Country are struggling to come to terms with.

Igbo will never forget. Happy Survival! Land of the Rising Sun. 

Sunday 4 November 2012

A reminder on the pressing question on the Igbo genocide


We mustn’t forget to note that the stretch of phases-I, II and III of the Igbo genocide encapsulates the timeframe 29 May 1966-12 January 1970. The conduct of each and every operative – civilian, military – involved in organising/abetting/prosecuting this crime against humanity is consequently evaluated across this entire stretch. When one adds phase-IV, beginning 13 January 1970 to the present, the composite parameter, and therefore the overall picture, appropriately becomes fully encompassing. The pressing question of this age of pestilence is thus posed as follows: What is the role of operative A or operative B or operative C, for instance, in the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966 to the Present Day?

Sunday 21 October 2012

Commanding the Igbo genocide…


The Nigerian state murdered 3.1 million Igbo children, women and men, a quarter of this nation’s population, during the genocide of 29 May 1966-12 January 1970. This genocide is still ongoing (phase-IV). Yakubu Gowon headed the junta that executed the genocide and Obafemi Awolowo, a lawyer, was his deputy and genocidist “theorist” for the campaign and head of the all-powerful finance ministry. The ghoulish anthem of the genocide, broadcast uninterruptedly in Hausa on Kaduna state-run radio (short wave band) and television throughout its 44 months’ duration has the following blatantly-expressed gruesome lyrics for this crime’s tactical and strategic goals: 

Mu je mu kashe nyamiri
Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su
Mu chi mata su da yan mata su
Mu kwashe kaya su
(English translation: Let’s go kill the damned Igbo/Kill off their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property)

Those responsible for the death of 3.1 million Igbo people must face trial for this crime against humanity. Thankfully, there is no statute of limitations in the prosecution of genocide in international law. If the Nigerian genocidists had been tried after 12 January 1970, Africa would probably have been spared the additional 12 million who have been murdered in subsequent genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, Nuba Mountains, South Kordofan (all three in the Sudan) and Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in other wars in Africa. 

Finally, a genocide-state, such as Nigeria, has indeed no future as its raison d’être is nothing else but murder and murder and murder...

Tuesday 16 October 2012

Wole Soyinka on the Igbo genocide


 “... Of course I used my weapon, which was writing, to express my disapproval of the [Biafran] ... war into which we were about to enter. These were people who’d been abused, who’d undergone genocide, and who felt completely rejected by the rest of the community, and therefore decided to break away and form a nation of its own” –   Wole Soyinka (emphasis added), interviewed by Peter Godwin, Hay literary festival, Xalapa, Mexico, 12 October 2012.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9600954/Wole-Soyinka-If-religion-was-taken-away-Id-be-happy.html

Monday 15 October 2012

A snap reflection on these times!


The Nigerian state murdered 3.1 million Igbo, a quarter of this nation’s population, during the genocide of 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970. This genocide is still ongoing (phase-III). Since the September 2012 publication of Chinua Achebe’s There was a Country, the world has witnessed the staggering depravity that underscores the ways and means a stretch of Nigerian intellectuals (especially journalists and writers – even a “poet”! –, etc., etc.) in Nigeria and abroad continues to “defend” the genocide. Everyone must know that there is no statute of limitations in the prosecution of the crime of genocide in international law.

Thursday 11 October 2012

Two pertinent questions on genocide


1. How does Raphael Lemkin who, in 1943, formulated the word “genocide”, define this crime?
Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.
2. What is the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 9 December 1948?

For details, please click on following link from Office of  the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/genocide.htm (accessed 11 October 2012).

In Africa, since this UN convention, the following peoples have been subjected to the crime of genocide:

1. Igbo, 1966-1970; still continuing – see particularly article II (a), (b) and (c) in link above

2. Tutsi, 1994

3. Darfur, west of the Sudan, since 2004

4. Abyei, south of the Sudan, ongoing

5. Nuba, south of the Sudan, ongoing

6. Multiple nations/nationalities, Zaĩre/Democratic Republic of the Congo (especially east region), variously, since the late 1990s

Since the presumed conclusion of the Igbo genocide, during which 3.1 million Igbo were murdered, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in the subsequent genocides (see above) and in other wars in Liberia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Conakry, Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique, Algeria, Libya, Kenya, Central African Republic, Angola, Zimbabwe, Burundi and Mali, Ethiopia, Congo Republic, Somalia, South Sudan and Chad.


Monday 8 October 2012

Lest we forget – Salient features of the Igbo genocide


The major preoccupation of an aggressor/conqueror state is to seek to effectuate a process of memory erasure over its overrun nation and land. This is the opportunity for the conqueror to begin to construct a bogus narrative of possession and control of the targeted society that arrogates it to the fictive role of primary agent of the course of history.

The enduring success of Chinua Achebe’s Things fall Apart
is that the classic not only anticipates this conqueror’s predilection but it subverts the triumphalism of the latter’s Pyrrhic victory. Despite the District Commissioner’s bombastically-captioned anthropological treatise at the end of the novel, heralding the latest European “possession and control” of another region of Africa, this time Igboland, the future direction of history here neither lies with the administrator nor his evolving occupation regime – nor indeed with his conquering capital back home in Europe! 
To locate the source for change and transformation in Igboland, subsequently, we need to examine, carefully, the import and circumstance of historian Obierika’s address to the administrator on the life and times of his friend and people’s hero, Okonkwo, who had recently committed suicide. We are reminded that as he speaks, two full sentences into a third, Obierika’s voice “trembled and choked his words”, trailing off into gasps and silences of deep contemplation. It is precisely within the context of these kaleidoscopic frames of Obierika’s recalls and introspection that we discern the sowing of the Igbo nation’s regenerative seeds of resistance and quest for the restoration of lost sovereignty. It is therefore not surprising that Okonkwo’s grandchildren would spearhead the freeing of Nigeria, to which Igboland had since been arbitrarily incorporated by the conquest, from the British occupation – beginning in the 1930s, just 30 years after the so-called formal inauguration of the conquest.

(George Russell Sextet, “Ezzthetic” [Russell, piano; Don Ellis, trumpet; Dave Baker, trombone; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; Steve Swallow, bass; Joe Hunt, drums; recorded: Riverside Records, New York, 8 May 1961])
Abolish the sun now!

For the aggressor state with a clear genocidal goal, memory erasure of the crime scene at the targeted nation is even more frantically pursued. On the morrow of the conclusion of its execution of the third phase of the Igbo genocide in January 1970, Nigeria wheeled out pretentious cartographers to embark on erasing the illustrious name Biafra from all maps and records that it could lay its hand on! During its meetings, the genocidist junta in power banned the words “sun”, “sunlight”, “sunshine”, “sundown”, “sunflower”, “sunrise” or any other word-derivatives from the great sun star that unmistakably reference the inveterate Land of the Rising Sun. This task and symbolism of sun-banning and sun-bashing were of course bizarre if not daft as the junta itself was to discover much sooner than later – and from a most unlikely source indeed… 

At the time, a British military advisor to the junta, who was out dining with a senior member of the council in Lagos, unwittingly compared Igbo national consciousness and tenacity with that of the Poles. The advisor, who had studied modern history at university and was a great admirer of the exceptional endurance of Polish people in history, stated that the Igbo had demonstrated similar courage in the latter’s defence of Biafra and that the “rebirth of Biafra is a distinct possibility in my lifetime” – this was unlike the 123 (one hundred and twenty-three) years it took the Polish state to re-appear in history after its disappearance from the world map! The advisor was then in his early 30s and the obvious implications of his Igbo-Polish analysis were not lost on his host. The junta member co-diner was understandably most outraged by the advisor’s crass insensitivity on the subject which he readily shared with his junta colleagues. Predictably, the immediate consequence of the hapless advisor’s impudence was an early recall home to Britain. 

There were other bouts of farcical treats on display in Nigeria during the period aimed at erasing the memory of the Igbo genocide. Junta and other state publications and those of their sympathisers would print the name Biafra, a proper noun, with a lower case “b” or box the name in quotes or even invert the “b” to read “p”, such was the intensity of the schizophrenia that wracked the minds of the members of the council over the all important subject of the historic imprint of Igbo resistance and survival. 

3.1 million Igbo or a quarter of this nation’s population were murdered in the genocide between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970. This is the foundational and most gruesome genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa.
Despite the catastrophic stretch of slaughter in 44 months, it was business-as-usual, or so it appeared, for the genocidists on the morrow of the conclusion of phase-III of the murder on 12 January 1970. Lest we forget, the new phase was pursued with utmost vengeance, with the added highly prized fiscal and capital assets sequestrated by the genocidists – namely, the pillaging of the multibillion(US)dollar-Igbo economy at home and those located in Nigeria, particularly in the Lagos/greater Lagos industrial-commercial region. Many operatives who worked as advisors, at varying layers of the genocidist command and control infrastructure, went to, or returned to universities and colleges as professors and researchers, some became university administrators, bureaucrats, media editors and executives, company chief executives and directors, ministers of state, ministers of religion, businesspeople; many of the commanders and commandants became generals and admirals and marshals, and state legislators, administrators and the like; some even sought the highest office of state – head of regime (Obafemi Awolowo, variously, without success; Olusegun Obasanjo, three times successful; Muhammadu Buhari, once successful; Ibrahim Babangida, once successful; Sanni Abacha, once successful; Abdulsalami Abubakar, once successful).

The Awolowoists and Awolowoids (supporters of Obafemi Awolowo – junta deputy chair, genocidist “theorist” and head of finance ministry) on the junta even toyed with the idea of abolishing money altogether in the economy of the soon occupied-land of the resourceful and enterprising Igbo. They reasoned that this would deliver the “final solution” that had eluded them during the “encirclement, siege, pounding and withering away”-strategy of the previous 44 months… They ended up with the “compromise” pittance of £20.00 sterling (twenty pounds sterling only) per the surviving male-head of the Igbo family – a derisory sum, which, they reckoned, stood no chance of averting the catastrophe of social implosion they envisaged would occur in Igboland subsequently. We mustn’t fail to note that the £20.00-handout excluded the hundreds of thousands of Igbo families whose male-heads had been murdered during the genocide… Dreadfully, the accent placed by Nigeria on this fourth phase of the genocide, starting from 13 January 1970, was the economic strangulation of the 9 million Igbo survivors…

Survival

Igbo survival from the genocide is arguably the most extraordinary feature for celebration in an otherwise depressing and devastating age of pestilence in Africa of the past 46 years. Few people believed that the Igbo would survive their ordeal, especially from September 1968 when 8-10,000 Igbo, mostly children and older people, died each day as the overall brutish conditions imposed by the genocidist siege deteriorated calamitously. 

The Igbo are probably the only people in the world who were convinced that they would survive. And when they did, the aftermath was electrifying. In spontaneous celebration, the Igbo prefaced their exchange of greetings with each other, for quite a while, with the exaltation, “Happy Survival”
Igbo survival, at the end, does represent the stunning triumph of the human spirit over the savage forces unleashed by Nigeria and its allies that had tried determinably, for four years, to destroy it.

Forty-two years on, first and second generations removed from their parents and grandparents, respectively, who freed British-occupied Nigeria in 1960 and survived the follow-up genocide, Okonkwo’s progeny are once again tasked and poised to restore Igbo lost sovereignty and track of progress and transformation. Everyone knows of their firm resolve and ability to achieve this goal. The Igbo can feel it; they indeed feel it; the rest of the world feels it. Surely, the successful outcome of this endeavour is one of the most eagerly awaited news developments in contemporary Africa.


*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s 2192-word essay on Chinua Achebe’s all-important memoir, Another Country, London: Allen Lane, 2012, is published in Literary Encyclopedia, 4 October 2012,






Monday 24 September 2012

Nigeria 1 October 2012 – Celebrating? What?


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Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe




Saturday 15 September 2012

A stretch of choices or another form of contestation in northcentral Africa*


Despite the increasingly grave level in the rise of tension between the Sudan and the South Sudan over a mutually acceptable borderline demarcation between the two states, it should be stressed that it is not inevitable that another war is the way forward to settle this dispute. The South Sudan has signed the November 2011 “border roadmap”, drawn through African Union mediation, but the Sudan still refuses to endorse this document, arguing that “to do this (sic) could prejudice final settlement negotiations on the subject”.

But the Sudan must now know that it cannot destroy the independence and sovereign rights of the South Sudan despite several decades of war and the resultant catastrophic death tally of 2.5 million people, mostly South Sudanese. The eventual, most painful success of the South Sudan resistance, since 1955, has been an historic boon to African determination to halt the agelong expansionism of the Arabo-imperium in this pivotal strategic region of the continent. Furthermore, with its 98 per cent “yes” vote in last year’s referendum to free itself from the Sudan, the South Sudan has decisively shaken the foundation of that seemingly ossified architecture of the “Berlin state” in post-(European)conquest Africa of which the Sudan, pointedly and ironically, is the “first to be run” by “African” management. Few now doubt that, thanks to the landmark decision in this referendum, the “Berlin state” in Africa is, at long last, in free fall. Current frenetic developments on this score in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa underline the deep yearnings of the peoples to now begin to construct and transform their own states and societies, themselves, based on the precepts of their respective aspirations and worldviews. We are invariably on the eve of a dazzling age of African social transmutation. As I have argued severally,[1] the “Berlin state” in Africa is the bane of African existence and progress. This state is at once genocidal and immanently anti-African. Since the cataclysmic 1966-1970 Igbo genocide, it has murdered 12 million additional Africans in further genocide in Rwanda, Darfur (west of the Sudan – continuing), Nuba Mountains (south of the Sudan – continuing), South Kordofan (south of the Sudan – continuing) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (ongoing), and in other wars across the continent.

The Sudan has been at varying shades of devastating war and crippling immiseration since 1955. It is from this background of staggering brutalisation that the Republic of the South Sudan emerged! Surely, the peoples of the Sudan and the South Sudan deserve life’s immense choices for freedom, peace, and productive possibilities. Or don’t they?

For the regime in Khartoum, particularly, there are indeed other arenas of contestation with its southern neighbour, which it had probably never thought of, instead of planning for yet more campaigns of certain death and deprivation. The Juba administration, for its own part, must no longer allow itself to be boxed in a quagmire of indefinite conflict with the Sudan that only further impoverishes its people. Instead, both states can embark on the following track of competition which will mark a charging break from the past. The timeframe for this contest is five years – 2012-2017. It will be monitored by a team of African-centred scholars which starts work right away and the results will be published in October 2017.

The rule for the contest, with the content and scope many would probably adjudge as too modest,[2] is simple and straightforward: which of these two states – the South Sudan or the Sudan will achieve the following set of goals by 15 September 2017:

1. 100 quality primary and secondary schools with excellent world-standard curriculum content, equipment, staff and study environment

2. One university of worldwide standard, attracting staff and students from across the region and world

3. 1000 apprenticeship opportunities to study at excellent technical schools, producing a skilled workforce of electricians, builders, plumbers and mechanics

4. Pave 1000 kilometres of well-constructed road linking towns and cities

5. Engage 1000 new farmers in agricultural work, providing technical and financial support 

6. 100 quality primary health care centres with excellent facilities, equipment and medicine 

7. Fifty per cent of the population have access to clean pipe-borne water

8. Fifty per cent of population have access to power 24 hours a day, seven days a week

9. Fifty per cent of young people, 18-25, have access to small-scale loans to start business ventures

10. Fifty per cent of women have access to small-scale loans to start business ventures

Now, Both – Get Set! Ready: Go!

*I wish to thank Dr Okwuonicha Nzegwu for her contribution to this commentary

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe










[1]See, for instance, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2011).
[2]It is well to reflect that if every African “leadership” which has been in power since the so-called restoration of independence on 1 January 1956 (in the Sudan!) has envisioned and achieved this track of objectives enumerated here during just five years in office, African post-conquest recovery and transformation, presently, would be second to none.  

Tuesday 28 August 2012

“Sub-Sahara Africa” is racist*

It appears increasingly fashionable for a number of broadcasters, websites, news agencies, newspapers and magazines, the United Nations/allied agencies and some governments, writers and academics to use the term “sub-Sahara Africa” to refer to all of Africa (54 countries) except the 5 predominantly Arab states of north Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt) and the Sudan, a northcentral African country. Even though its territory is mostly located south of the Sahara Desert, the Sudan is excluded from the “sub-Sahara Africa” tagging by those who promote the use of the epithet because the regime in power in Khartoum describes the country as “Arab” despite its majority African population. 

Which science?

As we now demonstrate, the concept “sub-Sahara Africa” is absurd, misleading, if not a meaningless classificatory schema. Its use defies the science of the fundamentals of geography but prioritises hackneyed, stereotypical, racist labelling. It is not obvious, on the face of it, which of the four possible meanings of the prefix, “sub”, its users attach to the “sub-Sahara Africa” labelling. Is it “under” the Sahara Desert or “part of”/“partly” the Sahara Desert? Or, presumably, “partially”/“nearly” the Sahara Desert or even the very unlikely (hopefully!) application of “in the style of, but inferior to” the Sahara Desert, especially considering that there is an Arab people sandwiched between Morocco and Mauritania (northwest Africa) called Saharan? 

The example of South Africa is appropriate here. Crucially, this is a reference underlined in the relevant literature of the era especially those emanating from the West, the United Nations (principally UNDP, FAO, WHO, UNCTAD), the World Bank and IMF, the so-called NGOs/“aid” groups, and some in academia who all are variously responsible for initiating and sustaining the operationalisation of this “sub-Sahara Africa” dogma. The point is that prior to the formal restoration of African majority government in 1994, South Africa was never designated “sub-Sahara Africa” by anyone in this portrait, unlike the rest of the 13 African-led states in southern Africa, which were also often referred to at the time as the “frontline states”. South Africa then was either termed “white South Africa” or the “South Africa sub-continent” (as in the “India sub-continent” usage, for instance), meaning “almost”/“partially” a continent – quite clearly a usage of “admiration” or “compliment” employed by its subscribers to essentially project and valorise the perceived geostrategic potentials or capabilities of the erstwhile European minority occupation regime-led country. 

But soon after the triumph of the African freedom movement there, South Africa became “sub-Sahara Africa” in the quickly adjusted schema of this representation! What happened suddenly to South Africa’s geography to be so differently classified?! Is it African liberation/rule that renders an African state “sub-Sahara”?[1] Does this post-1994 West-inflected South Africa-changed classification make “sub-Sahara Africa” any more intelligible? Interestingly, just as in the South Africa “sub-continent” example, the application of the “almost”/“partially” or indeed “part of”/“partly” meaning of prefix “sub-” to “Sahara Africa” focuses unambiguously on the following countries of Africa: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, each of which has 25-75 per cent of its territory (especially to the south) covered by the Sahara Desert. It also focuses on Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and the Sudan, which variously have 25-75 per cent of their territories (to the north) covered by the same desert. In effect, these ten states would make up sub-Sahara Africa. 

Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, the five Arab north Africa countries, do not, correctly, describe themselves as Africans even though they unquestionably habituate African geography, the African continent, since the Arab conquest and occupation of this north one-third of African territory in the 7th century CE. The West governments, press and the transnational bodies we referred to earlier (which are led predominantly by West personnel and interests) have consistently “conceded” to this Arab cultural insistence on racial identity. Presumably, this accounts for the West’s non-designation of its “sub-Sahara Africa” dogma to these countries as well as the Sudan, whose successive Arab-minority regimes since January 1956 have claimed, but incorrectly, that the Sudan “belongs” to the Arab World. On this subject, the West does no doubt know that what it has been engaged in, all along, is blatant sophistry and not science. This, however, conveniently suits its current propaganda packaging on Africa, which we shall be elaborating on shortly. 

It would appear that we still don’t seem to be any closer at establishing, conclusively, what its users mean by “sub-Sahara Africa”. Could it, perhaps, just be a benign reference to all the countries “under” the Sahara, whatever their distances from this desert, to interrogate our final, fourth probability? Presently, there are 54 so-called sovereign states in Africa. If the 5 north Africa Arab states are said to be located “above” the Sahara, then 49 are positioned “under”. The latter would therefore include all the 5 countries mentioned above whose north frontiers incorporate the southern stretches of the desert (namely, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and the Sudan), countries in central Africa (the Congos, Rwanda, Burundi, etc., etc), for instance, despite being 2000-2500 miles away, and even the southern African states situated 3000-3500 miles away! In fact, all these 49 countries, except the Sudan (alas, not included for the plausible reason already cited!), which is clearly “under” the Sahara and situated within the same latitudes as Mali, Niger and Chad (i.e., between 10 and 20 degrees north of the equator), are all categorised by the “sub-Sahara Africa” users as “sub-Sahara Africa”. 

“Sub-”s of the world?

To replicate this obvious farce of a classification elsewhere in the world, the following random exercise is not such an indistinct scenario for universal, everyday, referencing: 

1. Australia hence becomes “sub-Great Sandy Australia” after the hot deserts that cover much of west and central Australia 

2. East Russia, east of the Urals, becomes “sub-Siberia Asia” 

3. China, Japan and Indonesia are reclassified “sub-Gobi Asia” 

4. Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam become “sub-Himalaya Asia” 

5. All of Europe is “sub-Arctic Europe” 

6. Most of England, central and southern counties, is renamed “sub-Pennines Europe” 

7. East/southeast France, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia are “sub-Alps Europe” 

8. The Americas become “sub-Arctic Americas” 

9. All of South America south of the Amazon is proclaimed “sub-Amazon South America”; Chile could be “sub-Atacama South America” 

10. Most of New Zealand’s South Island is renamed “sub-Southern Alps New Zealand” 

11. Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama become “sub-Rocky North America” 

12. The entire Caribbean becomes “sub-Appalachian Americas”

African-centred scholarship

So, rather than some benign construct, “sub-Sahara Africa” is, in the end, an outlandish nomenclatural code that its users employ to depict an African-led “sovereign” state – anywhere in Africa, as distinct from an Arab-led one. It is the users’ non-inclusion of the Sudan in this grouping (despite its majority African population and geographical location) but its inclusion of South Africa only after the latter’s 1994 liberation that gives the game away! More seriously to the point, “sub-Sahara Africa” is employed to create the stunning effect of a supposedly shrinking African geographical landmass in the popular imagination, coupled with the continent’s supposedly attendant geostrategic global “irrelevance”. 

“Sub-Sahara Africa” is undoubtedly a racist geopolitical signature in which its users aim repeatedly to present the imagery of the desolation, aridity, and hopelessness of a desert environment. This is despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of 1 billion Africans do not live anywhere close to the Sahara, nor are their lives so affected by the implied impact of the very loaded meaning that this dogma intends to convey. Except this steadily pervasive use of “sub-Sahara Africa” is robustly challenged by rigorous African-centred scholarship and publicity work, its proponents will succeed, eventually, in substituting the name of the continent “Africa” with “sub Sahara Africa” and the name of its peoples, “Africans”, with “sub-Sahara Africans” or, worse still, “sub-Saharans” in the realm of public memory and reckoning.

*This essay is a slightly updated version of a paper entitled “What is ‘sub-Sahara Africa’”?, read at the IDeoGRAMS Conference: Contemporary Media, University of Leicester, 14 September 2007.

 Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe


[1]Roger Tangri, Politics in Sub-Sahara Africa (London and Portsmouth, N. H.:  James Currey, 1985), p. ix, passim.

Monday 20 August 2012

Outrage


The Thursday 16 August 2012 South African police massacre of 34 striking miners at the Lonmin-owned platinum mines at Marikana, northwest of Johannesburg, is outrageous, beastly and tragically ironic. An observer would be forgiven if they thought that the gruesome footage emanating from the scenes of this slaughter was ripped off from the catalogue of the incessant and long-stretched police/military-organised murdering of Africans during the epoch of the European-minority occupation of South Africa: Weenen, Rand, Sharpeville, Boipatong, Lellefontein, Bisho, Shell House, Sizzlers, Soweto…

No state has the right to turn its guns on people – its own or indeed others whatever the circumstances. Not least the state in Africa given its atrocious legacy since the Igbo genocide, 1966-1970, when it has murdered 15 million Africans in all genocides and other wars across the continent.

Notably, President Zuma reflects on the “sanctity of human life and the right to life” in his official statement on the Marikana murders, a conviction his police officers responsible for the outrage don’t appear to share. Africans and the rest of the world expect the Zuma administration to respond urgently to the multifold ramifications of this carnage which include the following:

1. All persons and institutions responsible for the murder of these miners must account for their actions and punished accordingly

2. All victims (the dead, the wounded and those variously victimised by the mine owners and others, and all their families) must have full reparations on their ordeal paid for by the state and Lonmin

3. The working conditions and pay in Lonmin’s Marikana mines must be comparable to the high standards tenable elsewhere in the world

4. Never again does the South Africa police/military shoot the people


Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Thursday 16 August 2012

Hedge-notes for the denialists?


Less than 24 hours after the spectacular crash of that obligatory haematophagous monster at the London 30th Olympiad, with the ignominious tally of bronze medals=zero, silver medals=zero, gold medals=zero, two revanchist commentators, Y and Z, each representing two of the tripartite genocidist bloc that executed the Igbo genocide, beginning 46 years ago, had an unlikely reunion. Both must have felt so weighed down with grief by their country’s abysmal performance. Just one item dominated their grisly exchange: Which of their contributing constituencies murdered more of the total 3.1 million Igbo during the 44 months of extirpation? “We did!” thundered Z, “C’mon listen to me, little one! We started this slaughter. Yes, we, who own this place, launched it. Check the history! We slaughtered more Igbo than you ever could and did – beginning from our backyard, across our backyard, starting mid-morning on the 29th of that May, fourteen straight months before you stomached the courage to join us. Indeed, not before we warned your [genocidist] ‘theorist’ to open the uninterrupted slaughter-corridor to Biafra. Or – ”

“No! No! No! My dear frien’,” the incredulous Y got so riled up: “It was my people that deployed the real-slaughtering generals, the real-slaughtering generals across swathes of Biafra, especially its south, slaughtering and slaughtering and slaughtering the Igbo and devastating and devastating and devastating their prized land. It was our real-slaughtering generals, my dear frien’, who accomplished this task. OK? Please check the history. It is there! Will you? Maybe you reneged on our collective understanding to allow our great theorist to be president after the slaughter because you didn’t really appreciate the role of our real-slaughtering generals in the slaughter of the Igbo.” 

In April 2009, Nigeria was not invited to attend the London G-20 summit. Head of regime Umaru Yar’Adua mournfully noted his disappointment: “Today is a sad day for Nigeria as a country. This is because we are not invited to a meeting of the 20 world leaders. We have the population, we have the resources and we have the potential”. Predictably, Yar’Adua referred to those hackneyed, bogus indices (“population”, “resources”, “potential”) that every school child knows obfuscate the immanent fragility, infamy and hopelessness that chart the quagmire that is Nigeria. 

It is impossible to overstate that the Igbo genocide put paid to any Nigeria pretensions to transform itself to a serious state of global contention. Nigeria, which the Igbo had strategically led to liberate from 60 years of British occupation, collapsed, irremediably, on 29 May 1966. This is the date that interlocutor Z rightly referenced as the beginning of the genocide during the macabre reminiscences with Y. On this day, students, teachers, civil servants, community leaders, varying security personnel, clergy, alimajiri and the like in north Nigeria planned and descended on Igbo children, women and men domiciled in the region: murdering, raping, maiming, looting, destroying… The first phase of the genocide, the most gruesome and devastating in Africa not seen since the 1900s, was now underway. Starting on 6 July 1967, the Nigerians expanded their murdering zones of operation to liquidate the Igbo by attacking the entire stretch of Igboland – from Issele-Ukwu, Agbo, Anioma, Ugwuta and Onicha in the west to Ehuugbo, Aba and Umuahia to the east; from Nsukka and Eha Amuufu in the north to Igwe Ocha/Port Harcourt, Umu Ubani/Bonny and Igwe Nga/Opobo to the south. 

On the morrow of this pulverising season of slaughtering, the only tangible capability that the murderers have acquired is one to commit even more murders – nothing else … definitely, not the more challenging capacity to develop and transform its human potential and economy and, in turn, attract and merit the accolades and recognitions from peers elsewhere.

With such an unenviable legacy, it would indeed have been quite bizarre for anyone to expect this Malebolge to win anything “respectable” in the just concluded London games. Understandably, the world is eagerly looking forward to welcoming the elegant and focussed men and women athletes from these southwestcentral contours of Africa flying the indomitable flag of the Land of the Rising Sun in future Olympiads – with Rio, a tantalising marker?


Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe








Sunday 5 August 2012

Join this movement of the age – Ban all arms to Africa

(excerpts from Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature [pp. 183-194] which you may find helpful as you decide to join the movement)

… It should therefore be stressed that whilst the dichotomy often placed between “legal arms” and “illegal arms” by some observers (in the African militarisation, genocide and war debate) has some analytical credit, its outcome on the ground, particularly in enabling us evaluate the comparative impact that the two categories ultimately pose on African social co-existence and security, always comes as a shock! Contrary to the initial value judgement that most people would make between the “legality” of a particular commodity (in this case, arms) and its “illegality”, it is definitely no comfort at all when it is shown at the end of the exercise that the overwhelming majority of the 15 million murdered in Africa’s genocide and wars in the past 45 years were in fact slaughtered with the use of “legal” armaments, operated seemingly legally by the armed forces of the state and their allies. The examples of the Nigerian state in 1966-1970, the Rwandan central government in the 1990s, and the current Arab regime in Khartoum are acutely illustrative of this cataclysmic sequence. In effect, whether “legal” or “illegal”, armaments in Africa, controlled overwhelmingly by the African state and its allies, are used to murder targeted African nations and populations domiciled within these states; the African states, since the Igbo genocide, have deployed armaments in their armouries to murder their peoples most brutally, massively and extensively. These states, starting from Nigeria, have murdered a ghastly total of 15 million Africans in a generation. They are still murdering without let up… They have devastated communities. They have disfigured and traumatised peoples’ lives and aspirations. In the hands of the typical African state, since the Igbo genocide, these armaments, even though classified “conventional”, are indeed weapons of mass destruction. Nothing else, but weapons of mass destruction… In Africa, the pistol, the rifle, the grenade, the rocket, the bazooka, the landmine, the helicopter gunship, the naval gunship, the fighter aircraft, the bomber, the tank – each and every one of these items, imported by and large from abroad, is a killer used primarily by the state to murder targeted peoples within its border. The African state should and must be stopped from murdering peoples within its frontiers. The rest of the world, especially from where weapons to these African states originate, day in and day out, can no longer remain bystanders as this orgy of death is brazenly played out in Africa. Since the Igbo genocide, the African state has been destroying African lives; they are presently destroying African lives; they will continue to destroy African lives until stopped. The African state must surely be stopped from its pursuit of this pulverising mission of death…

… On this score, the ethos that governs the African journey of recovery is the commitment of all Africans and the demand that they need to make to the rest of the world to place a mandatory embargo on all arms sales and transfers to all of Africa, as well as a complete demilitarisation of the continent. Africa needs justice and peace for, and with itself, to enable it embark on the much-vaunted era of reconstruction…

 … On this, Africa’s challenge to the rest of the world couldn’t be clearer: those who live outside Africa but “care so much for Africa” should now scale down their multitudinous “aid-ventures for Africa” and turn their incredible talents to lobbying their respective states and other institutions in their countries and elsewhere to ban arms sales/transfers to Africa. This new focus for the world’s leading charities, away from the band-aid syndrome, will surely be more exciting, even less taxing, but definitely more rewarding for the ultimate outcome for Africa and the rest of the world alike. Africa seeks no resources from anyone, not even for one US dollar, to accomplish its current transformative mission to dismantle the genocide state. It is simply asking the world to completely seal off its vast armouries to deny access to the deadly claws of the African genocide state. For once, no one is asking anyone to raise money for Africa! Given the devastating impact of arms, arming, armies, genocide and other armed conflicts on Africa’s tragic history and the present, Africa, today, projects an unwavering signpost for the world’s attention that proclaims: Africa Is An Arms-Free Zone. A demilitarised continent. No More Arms Sales Or Transfers To Africa…

(Why not get a copy of Readings from Reading today, read through the argument and join the movement to ban all arms to Africa. There is no centralising arm of this movement. You are the centre! Form yours today by sharing with family and friends and colleagues everywhere – at discussion/entertainment venues, work, places of worship and spiritual fellowship, union meetings [trades, schools/colleges, family/village/town/district/regional, etc., etc.], next surgery with your electoral ward/precinct/local government representative, member of parliament/congressperson/senator… You can begin and join this movement wherever you are in the world. To ban arms to Africa is at once supporting African wellbeing and that of the rest of humanity. Now is the time!)


Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe




Wednesday 25 July 2012

Solemn lessons from Ghana


It is about 24 hours since the announcement of the sudden death of President John Atta Mills of Ghana. The news was received across Ghana with shock and grief – as of a family member. The state’s constitutional wheel of response to such an emergency moved in sync with all the sensitivity and subtlety in observance. Vice-president John Dramani Mahama, a writer and historian, has since been sworn in by the chief justice as new president in a dignified ceremony. All the while, no tanks have moved from some base to another nor has anyone seen an armoured personnel carrier gatecrashing through some barricade. No sermons have been preached by anyone from anywhere for anyone to murder anybody. No news has been broadcast by any radio or television station or newspaper or on the internet or any other media asking anyone to murder someone or any people or peoples. On the contrary, Ghana gets on with life in a mood reflective of poise, dignity and compassion.


Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Tuesday 17 July 2012

Biafra Revisited


Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Biafra Revisited (Dakar & Reading: African Renaissance, 2006), ISBN 9780955205002,paperback,188pp.,  £19.50/US$33.95/CDN$34.69/EUR28,19/¥ 2,950


 


















Forty years after the onset of the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe returns to the subject on which he published two seminal books in 1990. In Biafra Revisited, Ekwe-Ekwe demonstrates that the Biafra War (1967-1970) is the second phase of the Igbo genocide after the initial massacre of 100,000 Igbo people across the principal towns and cities and villages across north Nigeria and elsewhere in the country between May and September 1966. The slaughter was organised and carefully coordinated by the Nigeria state and its leading institutions – the military, police, religious, academic, media, business. In Biafra, 3 million Igbo or a quarter of this nation’s population were annihilated within 30 months. This is a holocaust of unprecedented proportions in recent African history. The study shows that the British government of the day fully supported this devastating stretch of genocide militarily, politically and diplomatically. On this, Ekwe-Ekwe insists: “It is evident that this genocide, the worst in 20th century Africa, would probably not have occurred without the active support that the perpetrators received directly from the British government … As a result, Britain, crucially, has played a key role in the emergence of the ongoing age of pestilence ravaging Africa” (emphasis in the original). The author contends that Nigeria is a failed state that does not serve the interests of the constituent peoples, a failure which, pointedly, occurred in 1945 under the “very watch of the British occupation regime” when the Igbo immigrant population in Jos (north Nigeria) were subjected to a harrowing pogrom organised by Hausa-Fulani (north) regional leaders, the much coveted British political allies opposed to the restoration of African independence. The British did not prosecute any of those responsible for the Jos massacre. This pogrom and another carried out once again against the Igbo, this time in Kano (north Nigeria) in 1953, became “dress rehearsals” for the 1966-1970 genocide.

Nigeria has now run the course of its bloody trail in this history. The greatest challenge currently facing the Igbo and other oppressed nations in Nigeria, Ekwe-Ekwe concludes this major study, is to negotiate the formal and orderly dissolution of this state and embark on the creation of democratic and extensively decentralised new states that guarantee and safeguard lives, human rights, equality and freedom for all peoples and individuals.

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