81st birthday of Albert Ayler

(Born 13 July 1936, Cleveland, Ohio, US)

ICONIC tenor saxophonist and composer whose July 1964 album, Spiritual Unity (Ayler, tenor saxophone; Gary Peacock, bass; Sunny Murray, percussion) and subsequent landmark recordings celebrate the concept of rhythmic freedom that captures the saliency of the ongoing age of freedom drive in the United States and elsewhere in the world

(Albert Ayler Trio, Spiritual Unity [“Ghosts: First variation”, “The wizard”, “Spirits”, “Ghosts: Second variation” {personnel: Ayler, tenor saxophone; Gary Peacock, bass; Sunny Murray, drums; recorded: Variety Arts Recording Studio, New York, US, 10 July 1964}])

(Albert Ayler & Don Cherry, Vibrations  [“Ghosts: short version”, “Children”, “Holy Spirit”, “Ghosts: extended version”, “Vibrations”, “Mothers” {personnel: Ayler, tenor saxophone, alto saxophone; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet, Gary Peacock, bass; Sunny Murray, drums; recorded: Copenhagen, Denmark, 14 September 1964}])

 Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Olusegun Obasanjo

Straight from the horse’s mouth itself: “[Nigeria] is jinxed and cursed; we should all go to hell”! 

This declaration is from none other but Olusegun Obasanjo – speaking in Ibadan, west Nigeria, in August 2013. In the speech, not surprisingly (saharareporters.com, 13 August 2013), Obasanjo, who had been head of regime for 11 years, totally absolves himself of being a key agency in facilitating the status of his “jinxed and cursed”-Nigeria as can be shown clearly in the following (“‘Cargo cult mentality’, Nigeria and the illusions of NEPAD”,
http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2011/03/cargo-cult-mentality-nigeria-and.html).

(Obusonjo’s unmistakeable verdict: “[Nigeria] is jinxed and cursed...”)

Age of pestilence
“[J]inxed and cursed”-Nigeria has the unenviable accolade of having carried out the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa against Igbo people, thus inaugurating the current age of pestilence in Africa that includes the ravaging terrorist campaigns which affect all regions of the continent with Nigeria’s Boko Haram emerging as the world’s deadliest (Institute of Economics & Policy, “Global Terrorism Index 2015”, New York: IEP, November 2015). 

During the course of 44 months, beginning from 29 May 1966, Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo, or one-quarter of this nation’s population. And Olusegun Obasanjo is one of the most notorious Nigerian military commanders of this genocidal campaign. At its apogee, 1968/1969, the Obasanjo-led brigade, operating in the outstretched south Biafra, had converted this panhandle into a veritable killing field in which it slaughtered “… everything that moves … we shoot at everything, even at things that don’t move”, as its previous commander, the equally notorious Benjamin Adekunle, had  so grimly proffered. 

The skies of Biafra were neither spared from this “shoot-at-everything” monstrosity. In June 1969 Obasanjo ordered his air force to shoot down a 3-person crew international Red Cross aircraft bringing urgent relief to the encircled, blockaded and bombarded Igbo and he later boasted fiendishly of this crime in his memoirs, aptly entitled My Command (Ibadan & London, 1980: 78-79). 

(DC-7 aircraft similar to the ICRC relief-carrying plane shot down over south Biafra by genocidist Nigeria military on the orders of Obusonjo)

Not since the German genocide against the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples in contemporary Namibia in the early 1900s had Africa witnessed such brazen act of savagery on expansive display. As I have argued, severally, Nigeria collapsed as a state with few prospects on that Sunday 29 May 1966 it launched the Igbo genocide (See, for instance, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “29 May 1966”,

http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/where-is-life-we-have-lost-inliving.html).

DNA signature

Obasanjo’s imprimatur is writ large on this catastrophe. Given that it is, after all, not just unbridled opportunism that the London Financial Times not too long ago dubbed this same Obasanjo “godfather of modern Nigeria” (Financial Times, London, 14 April 2012), the hardly disguised FT’s sardonic characterisation in the pointed reference to the kakistocracy that most know is Nigeria notwithstanding, the génocidaire’s Nigeria-is-“jinxed-and-cursed” acknowledgement, albeit belated, is testimony that the offspring indeed carries the unmistakeably doomed DNA signature of its paternity.

(The New York Contemporary Five plays Bill Dixon’s composition, “Trio” – [personnel: Archie Shepp, tenor saxophone; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet;  Tchicai, alto saxophone; Don Moore, bass; JC Moses, drums [recorded: live, Jazzhus Montmarte, Copenhagen, Denmark, 15 November 1963][note particularly Tchicai’s ethereal solo - first - at this session])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe 

Olusegun Obasanjo: From the horse’s mouth itself!

Straight from the horse’s mouth: “[Nigeria] is jinxed and cursed; we should all go to hell”! 

This declaration is from none other but Matthew Olusegun Okikiola Aremu Obasanjo – speaking in Ibadan, west Nigeria, in August 2013. In the speech, not surprisingly (saharareporters.com, 13 August 2013), Obasanjo, who had been head of regime for 11 years, totally absolves himself of being a key agency in facilitating the status of his “jinxed and cursed”-Nigeria as can be shown clearly in the following (“‘Cargo cult mentality’, Nigeria and the illusions of NEPAD”,
http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2011/03/cargo-cult-mentality-nigeria-and.html).

(Olusegun Obasanjo:  “[Nigeria] is jinxed and cursed...”)

Age of pestilence
“[J]inxed and cursed”-Nigeria has the unenviable accolade of having carried out the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa against Igbo people, thus inaugurating the current age of pestilence in Africa. During the course of 44 months, beginning from 29 May 1966, Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo, or one-quarter of this nation’s population. And Olusegun Obasanjo is one of the most notorious Nigerian military commanders of this genocidal campaign. At its apogee, 1968/1969, the Obasanjo-led brigade, operating in the outstretched south Biafra, had converted this panhandle into a veritable killing field in which it slaughtered “… everything that moves … we shoot at everything, even at things that don’t move”, as its previous commander, the equally notorious Benjamin Adekunle, had  so grimly proffered. 

The skies of Biafra were neither spared from this “shoot-at-everything” monstrosity. In June 1969 Obasanjo ordered his air force to shoot down a 3-person crew international Red Cross aircraft bringing urgent relief to the encircled, blockaded and bombarded Igbo and he later boasted fiendishly of this crime in his memoirs, aptly entitled My Command (Ibadan & London, 1980: 78-79). 

(DC-7 aircraft similar to the ICRC relief-carrying plane shot down over south Biafra by genocidist Nigeria military on the orders of Olusegun Obasanjo)

Not since the German genocide against the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples in contemporary Namibia in the early 1900s had Africa witnessed such brazen act of savagery on expansive display. As I have argued, severally, Nigeria collapsed as a state with few prospects on that Sunday 29 May 1966 it launched the Igbo genocide (See, for instance, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “29 May 1966”,

http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/where-is-life-we-have-lost-inliving.html).

DNA signature

Obasanjo’s imprimatur is writ large on this catastrophe. Given that it is, after all, not just unbridled opportunism that the London Financial Times not too long ago dubbed this same Obasanjo “godfather of modern Nigeria” (Financial Times, London, 14 April 2012), the hardly disguised FT’s sardonic characterisation in the pointed reference to the kakistocracy that most know is Nigeria notwithstanding, the genocidist’s Nigeria-is-“jinxed-and-cursed” acknowledgement, albeit belated, is testimony that the offspring indeed carries the unmistakeably doomed DNA signature of its paternity.

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Path to African freedom and transformation: 2015-2065*****

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

In 2065, fifty years away, the Igbo people and the rest of the world will be making final preparations to commemorate a century of the Igbo genocide. This will take place on 29 May 2066.

Barbarism, Pestilence

It should be recalled that on that dreadful mid-morning of Sunday 29 May 1966 and through the course of 44 subsequent months of indescribable barbarity and carnage not seen in Africa since the German-perpetration of the genocide against the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of Namibia in the early 1900s, the composite institutions of the Nigeria state, civilian and military, embarked on the murder of Igbo people. 3.1 million Igbo or one-quarter of this nation’s population were murdered during the genocide.

The Igbo genocide is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. It inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. Singularly and quite dramatically, the genocide shattered the capacity of this post-conquest state to capitalise on the vast invaluable resources of multinationality and multiculturality emplaced at such a critical phase to engineer a determined reconstructionary and redevelopment programme of the country after the devastation of 60 years of the British occupation. 

Constitutive indices

To understand the politics of the Igbo genocide and the politics of the “post”-Igbo genocide is to have an invaluable insight into the salient features and constitutive indices of politics across Africa in the past 50 years. Africans elsewhere 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 period, have demonstrated catastrophically: Liberia, Mali, Libya, Egypt, Côte d’Ivoire, Algeria, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, southern Guinea, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Central African Republic, Nigeria (Boko Haram insurgency in north, northcentral regions). The haunting killing fields have indeed stretched, almost inexorably, from Igboland to the rest of Africa… 

Just as the Nigerian operatives of mass murder appeared to have got away without censure from the rest of Africa, other genocidal and brutal African regimes soon followed in Nigeria’s footpath, murdering a horrifically additional tally of 12 million people in their countries considered “undesirables” or “opponents” since the Igbo genocide in January 1970. These 12 million murdered in the latter bloodbaths would probably have been saved if Africans and the rest of the world had intervened, robustly, to stop the initial genocide against the Igbo people. Surely, the world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide.

Bane of existence

Forty-nine years and 15 million murders on, Africans now realise, finally, that there cannot be any meaningful advancement in their fortunes without abandoning this post-(European)conquest state, this “Berlin-state”, essentially a genocide-state. This state is the bane of African existence and progress. Yet, thankfully, just as in Berlin, in November 1884-February 1885, when conquering Europeans drafted their gruesome charter for the occupation of Africa, states are not a gift from the gods but relationships painstakingly formulated and constructed by a discernible group of human beings that inhabit an ascertainable geo-historical territorial expanse on earth to pursue worldviews and interests envisioned and articulated by these same human beings. The state, any state, therefore, is transient; in contrast, human beings, people(s), endure.

Aimé Césaire, the poet and philosopher,  once told interviewer Annick Thebia Melson (“The liberating power of words: An interview with Poet Aimé Césaire”, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Vol. 2, No 4, June 2008, pp. 2-7) during one of those illuminating discourses of his on history: “History is always dangerous, the world of history is a risky world; but it is up to us at any given moment to establish and readjust the hierarchy of dangers” (2008: 7). It is indeed in the very course to disrupt and “readjust” this hierarchy in this age of pestilence in the”‘cursed” (to quote historian Basil Davidson) “Berlin-state” in favour of Africa and African peoples that the constituent African nation or people (Igbo, Darfuri, Gĩkũyũ, Wolof, Ibibio, Bakongo, Jola, Mongo, Akan, Luba, Ndebele, Mende, Luo, Herero, Serer, Bamileke, etc., etc) – so long maligned, so long impoverished, so long brutalised, so long humiliated and dehistoricised with often unprintable epithets (t****, n****, n*****, n******, p********, b******, w**, sub-*******, sub-*****, e*****, c***, c******, m*****, d******, h*******, f******-b******, b****, m***, b********, c*******, b*********…), so long massacred, is recognised, at last, as the principal actor and agency of its being and geography.

So, for all African peoples or nations, the unambiguous message on the unfurled banner for their freedom march in this next one-half of a century couldn’t be more confident and focused: “We are because we are free; We are free because we are”. Abandon the “Berlin-state” now: Nigeria, Niger, Chad, the Sudan, etc., etc., each and every one of this configuration, is a fraud. Create your own state today, now. Now is the time! The constituent African nation, this people, can and should create its own state if it so desires. Freedom. 

It is its inalienable right (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/rights-for-scots-rights-for-igbo.html, accessed 10 September 2015). It does not therefore have to explain to anyone else why it has embarked on this track of freedom. It can now decide what precepts, what aspirations, what trajectory, what goals, it has set its new state to embark upon. As Césaire deftly puts it in the interview referred to, the challenges of the times become the “quest to reconquer something, our name (sic), our country … ourselves” (2008: 2).

(Sonny Rollins Quintet, “Decision” [personnel: Rollins, tenor saxophone, Donald Byrd, trumpet; Wynton Kelly, piano; Gene Ramey, bass; Max Roach, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, US, 16 December 1956])

Let freedom ring!
Thus, the pressing point to reiterate here is that the immediate emergency that threatens the very survival of African peoples is the enthralling “Berlin-state” edifice entombed in African existence to serve the strategic interests of its European World creator in perpetuity coupled with the pathetic bunch that masquerades here and there as African leaderships but whose mission is to oversee the pervasive manifestation that signposts contemporary Africa.

African women and men will sooner, now, rather than later, abandon this fractured, fracturing, conflictive, alienating and terror contraption. Africans must now focus on real transformation – the revitalisation and consolidation of the institutions of Africa’s constituent nations and polities, or what Okwuonicha Nzegwu has described, succinctly, as the “indigenous spaces of real Africa” (Nzegwu, Love, Motherhood and the African Heritage, 2001: 41). In these institutions and spaces of African civilisation lie the organic framework to ensure transparency, probity, accountability, investment in people, humanised wealth creation, respect for human rights and civil liberties, and a true commitment to radically transform African existence.

The future for the constituent nations and peoples of Africa couldn’t be more reassuring on the morrow of that which, since 1 January 1956, has been classified as the post-(European)conquest “Berlin-state” or genocide-state of Africa. All successor states, organically constituted, really have their work cut out. Their mission is not to begin to construct states that are merely post-genocide or post post-conquest/post post-“colonial” states (cancelling out, in some mechanical venture, that which was “Berlin-state” Africa here and there!) but a realisation, a reclamation of that which makes us all human and part of humanity. 

The new states have an opportunity to begin to build a new civilisation where human life, fundamentally, is sacrosanct. This is an inclusive state where women and men live as co-operators and co-creators in fundamentally transforming their society. This is a state that accepts and accords full rights to all minority groups. This is a state where people enjoy the rights to differ and to dream dreams and dream different sets of dreams as they choose. This is a state dedicated to furthering and nurturing the resilience of its people and to enabling them pursue their highest creative endeavours. This state continuously strives to remove all limitations in the paths of its people and committed to making life better and better and better. This is a state that primes its people to flourish. 

Finally, the long drawn out nightmare of nearly 200 years, since November 1884- February 1885, is over and truly Africans do stand poised on the eve of a new beginning.

(Ornette Coleman Quartet, “Tomorrow is the question” [personnel: Coleman, alto saxophone; Don Cherry, trumpet; Percy Heath, bass; Shelly Manne, drums; recorded: Contemporary’s Studio, Los Angeles, US, 9/10 March 1959])

*****(slightly edited version of paper originally published in Pambazuka News: Pan African Voices for Freedom and Justice, Issue 680, 29 May 2014, as part of collection of essays focusing on “Africa in 50 years’ time – inventing a new Africa”)

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Age of freedom or post-“Berlin-state” Africa*****

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

IN 2064, fifty years away, Igbo people and the rest of the world will be making final preparations to commemorate a century of the Igbo genocide. This will take place on 29 May 2066. It should be recalled that on that dreadful mid-morning of Sunday 29 May 1966 and through the course of 44 subsequent months of indescribable barbarity and carnage not seen in Africa since the German-perpetration of the genocide against the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of Namibia in the early 1900s, the composite institutions of the Nigeria state, civilian and military, embarked on the murder of Igbo people. 3.1 million Igbo or one-quarter of this nation’s population were murdered during the genocide.

The Igbo genocide is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. It inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. Singularly and quite dramatically, the genocide shattered the capacity of this post-conquest state to capitalise on the vast invaluable resources of multinationality and multiculturality emplaced at such a critical phase to engineer a determined reconstructionary and redevelopment programme of the country after the devastation of 75 years of the British occupation. 

TO UNDERSTAND the politics of the Igbo genocide and the politics of the “post”-Igbo genocide is to have an invaluable insight into the salient features and constitutive indices of politics across Africa in the past 50 years. Africans elsewhere 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 period have demonstrated catastrophically: Liberia, Mali, Libya, Egypt, Côte d’Ivoire, Algeria, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, southern Guinea, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Central African Republic, Nigeria (Boko Haram insurgency in north, northcentral regions). The haunting killing fields have indeed stretched, almost inexorably, from Igboland to the rest of Africa… 

Just as the Nigerian operatives of mass murder appeared to have got away without censure from the rest of Africa, other genocidal and brutal African regimes soon followed in Nigeria’s footpath, murdering a horrifically additional tally of 12 million people in their countries considered “undesirables” or “opponents” since the Igbo genocide in January 1970. These 12 million murdered in the latter bloodbaths would probably have been saved if Africans and the rest of the world had intervened, robustly, to stop the initial genocide against the Igbo people. Surely, the world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide.

Bane of existence
FORTY-EIGHT years and 15 million murders on, Africans now realise, finally, that there cannot be any meaningful advancement in their fortunes without abandoning this post-(European)conquest state, this “Berlin-state”, essentially a genocide-state. This state is the bane of African existence and progress. Yet, thankfully, just as in Berlin, in 1884-1885, when conquering Europeans drafted their gruesome charter for the occupation of Africa, states are not a gift from the gods but relationships painstakingly formulated and constructed by a discernible group of human beings that inhabit an ascertainable geo-historical territorial expanse on earth to pursue worldviews and interests envisioned and articulated by these same human beings. The state, any state, therefore, is transient; in contrast, human beings, people(s) endure.

Aimé Césaire, the poet and philosopher,  once told interviewer Annick Thebia Melson (“The liberating power of words: An interview with Poet Aimé Césaire”, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Vol. 2, No 4, June 2008, pp. 2-7) during one of those illuminating discourses of his on history: “History is always dangerous, the world of history is a risky world; but it is up to us at any given moment to establish and readjust the hierarchy of dangers” (2008: 7). It is indeed in the very course to disrupt and “readjust” this hierarchy in this age of pestilence in the”‘cursed” (to quote historian Basil Davidson) “Berlin-state” in favour of Africa and African peoples that the constituent Africa nation or people (Igbo, Darfuri, Gikuyu, Wolof, Ibibio, Bakongo, Jola, Mongo, Akan, Luba, Ndebele, Mende, Luo, Herero, Serer, Bamileke, etc., etc) – so long maligned, so long impoverished, so long brutalised, so long humiliated and dehistoricised with often unprintable epithets (t****, n****, n*****, n******, p********, b******, w**, sub-*******, sub-*****, e*****, c***, c******, m*****, d******, h*******, f******-b******, b****, m***, b********, c*******, b*********…), so long massacred, is recognised, at last, as the principal actor and agency of its being and geography.

So, for all African peoples or nations, the unambiguous message on the unfurled banner for their freedom march in this next one-half of a century couldn’t be more confident and focused: “We are because we are free; We are free because we are”. Abandon the “Berlin-state” now. Create your own state today, now. Now is the time! This nation, this people, can and should create its own state if it so desires. Freedom. 

IT IS its inalienable right (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/rights-for-scots-rights-for-igbo.html, accessed 25 July 2015). It does not therefore have to explain to anyone else why it has embarked on this track of freedom. It can now decide what precepts, what aspirations, what trajectory, what goals, it has set its new state to embark upon. As Césaire deftly puts it in the interview referred to, the challenges of the times become the “quest to reconquer something, our name (sic), our country … ourselves” (2008: 2). 

Let freedom ring!
THUS, the pressing point to reiterate here is that the immediate emergency that threatens the very survival of African peoples is the “Berlin-state” encased in African existence coupled with the pathetic bunch that masquerades here and there as African leaderships but whose mission is to oversee this enthralling edifice. African women and men will sooner, now, rather than later, abandon this fractured, fracturing, conflictive, alienating and terror contraption. Africans must now focus on real transformation – the revitalisation and consolidation of the institutions of Africa’s constituent nations and polities. In these institutions and spaces of African civilisation lie the organic framework to ensure transparency, probity, accountability, investment in people, humanised wealth creation, respect for human rights and civil liberties, and a true commitment to radically transform African existence.

The future for the constituent nations and peoples of Africa couldn’t be more reassuring on the morrow of that which, since 1 January 1956, has been classified as the post-(European)conquest “Berlin-state” or genocide-state of Africa. All successor states, organically constituted, really have their work cut out. Their mission is not to begin to construct states that are merely post-genocide or post post-conquest/post post-“colonial” states (cancelling out, in some mechanical venture, that which was “Berlin-state” Africa here and there!) but a realisation, a reclamation of that which makes us all human and part of humanity. 

The new states have an opportunity to begin to build a new civilisation where human life, fundamentally, is sacrosanct. This is an inclusive state where women and men live as co-operators and co-creators in fundamentally transforming their society. This is a state that accepts and accords full rights to all minority groups. This is a state where people enjoy the rights to differ and to dream dreams and dream different sets of dreams as they choose. This is a state dedicated to furthering and nurturing the resilience of its people and to enabling them pursue their highest creative endeavours. This state continuously strives to remove all limitations in the paths of its people and committed to making life better and better and better. This is a state that primes its people to flourish. 

FINALLY, the long drawn out nightmare of nearly 200 years, since November 1884- February 1885, is over and truly Africans do stand poised on the eve of a new beginning.

(Ornette Coleman Quartet, “Change of the century” [personnel: Coleman, alto saxophone; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet; Charlie Haden, bass; Billy Higgins, drums; recorded: Radio Recorders, Hollywood, California, US, 8 October 1959])

 *****(originally published in Pambazuka News: Pan African Voices for Freedom and Justice, Issue 680, 29 May 2014 as part of collection of essays focusing on “Africa in 50 years’ time – inventing a new Africa”)

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Age of freedom or post-“Berlin-state” Africa?

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/91922

(Thelonious Monk Quintet, “Brilliant corners” – personnel: Monk, piano; Ernie Henry, alto saxophone; Sonny Rollins, tenor saxophone; Oscar Pettiford, bass; Max Roach, drums; recorded: Riverside studio, New York, US, 15 October 1956)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe