Monday 2 June 2014

Enduring shadows cast across Africa by the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-present day

(Three shadows project insistently across the African landscape, indelible reminder to the peoples of the world of the 3.1 million Igbo children, women and men, one-quarter this nation’s population, which dual-genocidist states Nigeria and Britain murdered during the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 – the foundational genocide of post-{European}conquest Africa [illustration from paintings on the rock by San people, southern Africa, 1500-3000 years ago])
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

TO UNDERSTAND the politics of the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-present day, is to have an invaluable insight into the salient features and constitutive indices of politics across Africa in the past 50 years. 

Africans elsewhere, including those on the continent and in the diaspora, particularly in the Americas and Europe, remained largely silent on the gruesome events in Nigeria but did not foresee the grave consequences of such indifference as subsequent genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, Nuba Mountains, South Kordofan (latter three in the Sudan) and Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in other wars and conflicts in every geographical region of Africa during the epoch have demonstrated catastrophically, resulting in the additional murder of 12 million Africans:  Liberia, Mali, Libya, Egypt, Côte d’Ivoire, Algeria, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, southern Guinea, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo (5 million murdered here since mid-1990s), Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Central African Republic, Nigeria – where the dual-genocidists have continued their campaign of the Igbo genocide most unrelentingly, most ruthlessly, as they have now have the Boko Haram terrorist organisation as additional asset in that ghastly assemblage of annihilative forces of theirs now 48 years old. The haunting killing fields have indeed stretched, almost inexorably, from Igboland, Biafra, to the rest of Africa

Igbo freedom

The Igbo will be free, their independence fully restored. There is no question about it. Neither Britain nor Nigeria can prevent this outcome, despite these 48 years of pulverising assault on Igbo people. Nigeria, for all intents and purposes, collapsed into inconsequence, irretrievably so, when it embarked on the Igbo genocide during that mid-morning of Sunday 29 May 1966. As for Britain, a British prime minister will, much sooner than most are prepared to contemplate presently, inevitably admit to an eagerly awaiting world audience that Britain has been living a lie as some “civilised” country since 29 May 1966. This is the same time frame of the past 48 years it has spent carrying out the gruesome genocide to destroy Igbo people, one of Africa’s most talented and enterprising peoples, which is its formulated pathway to control the lives and fortunes of African peoples indefinitely. 

GENOCIDE is a crime against humanity and both Britain and Nigeria surely know the consequences of their execution of the Igbo genocide.
(John Coltrane Sextet, “Out of this world” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Donald Garrett, clarinet, bass; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jonesdrums; recorded: live at Penthouse Jazz Club, Seattle, US, 30 September 1965])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of Readings from Reading: Essays on African History, Genocide, Literature (2011)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe







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