Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
BRITAIN and FULANI alliance, this genocidist transcontinental dual-headed power configuration that has executed the Igbo genocide with such abiding ruthlessness and monstrosity these past 53 years, has ensured that Igbo people’s history of the past century challenges, quite dramatically, a range of key assumptions in “post-colonial” discourses that centres on race, history and geography.
In 1945, about 50 years after the beginning of the British conquest and occupation of Igboland, Biafra, the Fulani islamist jihadists in occupied north Nigeria, whose home is the Futa Djallon highlands of northwest Africa, 1500 miles away, embarked on the invasion of Igbo territorial spaces emplaced in the overarching architecture of the British occupation (in Jos, northcentral Nigeria) with the latter’s tactical if not strategic connivance. In effect, this attack, in which the Fulani unleashed a pogrom on the Igbo as the mode of invasion, formally inaugurated the dual-headed genocidist cabal that would oversee the perpetration of yet another season of pogrom on the Igbo in 1953 (Kano, north Nigeria), and then launched the horrendously full-blown, extended and expansive Igbo genocide, beginning on 29 May 1966. During phases I-III of the genocide in the 44 subsequent months, the duo genocidists murdered 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of the Igbo population. Tens of thousands of additional Igbo have been murdered in phase IV of the genocide, 13 January 1970-present day. The latter tally includes the 3000 Igbo murdered since November 2015 by the Muhammadu Buhari regime, installed in power in March 2015 by ex-US President Barack Hussein Obama, the first African-descent president of the United States in 233 years of the founding of this republic, and ex-British Prime Minister David Cameron.
What disparity?
IT IS precisely because of the very genocidist terror that undergirds the Anglo-Fulani alliance, in the wake of the 1945 Fulani invasion of Igbo homes and other interests in Jos, that the Igbo resistance to this catastrophe does not categorise any of these two invaders as either “primary” or “secondary” despite the sequence of the timeframe of the invasions, despite the nature of the contributing resources that each of the co-operative executioners of this crime against humanity deploys, and despite the predictable array of data readily deployed to project the presumed disparity of the comparative “statuses” of the two complementary genocidist states in world affairs.
For the Igbo, the grave existential challenges from both the British and Fulani, in these past 74 years, have occurred almost invariably in more fluid or composite frames...
IT IS precisely because of the very genocidist terror that undergirds the Anglo-Fulani alliance, in the wake of the 1945 Fulani invasion of Igbo homes and other interests in Jos, that the Igbo resistance to this catastrophe does not categorise any of these two invaders as either “primary” or “secondary” despite the sequence of the timeframe of the invasions, despite the nature of the contributing resources that each of the co-operative executioners of this crime against humanity deploys, and despite the predictable array of data readily deployed to project the presumed disparity of the comparative “statuses” of the two complementary genocidist states in world affairs.
For the Igbo, the grave existential challenges from both the British and Fulani, in these past 74 years, have occurred almost invariably in more fluid or composite frames...
(John Coltrane Quintet, “Stardust” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Wilbur Harden, fluegelhorn; Red Garland, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Jimmy Cobbs, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, US, 11 July 1958])
*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018)
Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
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