REMINDER: Britain’s central role in the execution of the ongoing Igbo genocide ... As the British Labour party faces a meltdown over the antisemitism/racism crisis of its leader Jeremy Corbyn, we must stress that this affliction in the party started half a century ago – 53 years ago to be exact when the then Labour leader and prime minister, Harold Wilson, personally directed the prosecution of the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)occupation Africa, with Britain’s client-state Nigeria

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

“Diminution-of- African life”

AT THE apogee of phase-III of the Igbo genocide, summer 1968-autumn 1969, 23 years after the horrendous Jewish genocide in east and central Europe carried out by Germany, Harold Wilson informed Clyde Ferguson (United States state department special coordinator for relief to Biafra), on record, that he, Harold Wilson, “would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” the Nigerian génocidaires to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide (Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, 1977: 122). 

Wilson pursued his genocide drive against the Igbo, steeped in that overarching ideological rubric of the expressed “diminution-of-African life” that constitutes the engaging, subjugating template of 400 years of pan-European enslavement of the African humanity in the Americas and elsewhere, beginning in the 15th century, and Europe’s consequent occupation of the African homeland itself. 

 (Harold Wilson, Labour Party leader and prime minister that carried out the Igbo genocide with its Nigeria client state ... “would accept half a million dead Biafrans...”)   

WILSON’s Igbo death-decree tally of 500, 000 represented 4.2 per cent of the Igbo population at the time. The prime minister’s on the ground African executioners led by Fulani islamist/jihadists and their loyal pan-African constituent nations’ allies, particularly Yoruba, Edo, Urhobo, Jarawa, Nupe, Hausa, Kanuri and Tiv,  fulsomely obliged their “massa” Wilson, murdering 3.1 million Igbo by 12 January 1970 – 2.6 million more Igbo than the Labour leader’s slaughtering target or 25 per cent of the Igbo population. 

Wilson would later acknowledge the extent of the British role in the sheer savagery of the Igbo genocide. In his memoirs, he notes that the Nigeria genocidist military, equipped zealously by Britain, expended more small arms ammunition in its campaign to achieve its annhilative mission in Biafra than the amount used by the British armed forces “during the whole” of the Second World War (Harold Wilson, Labour Government, 1964-1970: A Personal Record, 1971: 630, added emphasis). Robert Scott, military advisor in the British diplomatic mission in Nigeria then, couldn’t agree more with Wilson on the subject. Scott stated that as Nigerian genocidist military forces unleashed their attacks on Biafran cities, towns and villages, they are the “best defoliant agent known” (Daily Telegraph, London, 11 January 1970). Chillingly dreadful...

THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY that led Britain into executing the Igbo genocide, this crime against humanity, is a social democratic/socialist/trade unionist party, democratically elected by the British population in October 1964 in one of the leading West World countries – it is “left wing”, “egalitarian”, “inclusivist”, “party of workingclass/people”, “progressive”, “liberal”, “humanist”, “internationalist” (usually supported tactically, in major political developments, throughout the era, by the Communist Party of Great Britain), not the Conservative party nor “right wing” nor “conservative” nor “party of the oppressor” nor “party of the privileged” nor “party of the rich” nor “party of bankers and landowners” nor “nationalist” nor “nativist” nor “white man’s party”, nor  “xenophobic” nor “far right” nor “fascist”... (cf. the cacophony of the current epoch’s sloganising inanities that pass for studious political discourses especially in Britain and the United States).

Intelligible

SEEN AGAINST this background of Prime Minister and British Labour party leader Harold Wilson’s execution of the Igbo genocide with Britain’s client state of Nigeria, beginning 53 years ago, the dossier of evidence so dramatically and uninterruptedly published in the past three years by influential leaders of this party, leading Jewish leaders, and others elsewhere in Britain that  the current British Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic and racist becomes hugely intelligible.

(Jeremy Corbyn, present British Labour party leader... charge of antisemitism and racism by influential members of his party...)

(John Coltrane & Don Cherry, “Focus on sanity” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cherry, pocket trumpet; Percy Heath, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums; recorded: Atlantic Studios, New York, US, 28 June/8 July 1960])

Reference

Coltrane, John and Don Cherry. “Focus on sanity”. The Avant-Garde. New York: Atlantic Studios, 28 June/8 July 1960.

Morris, Roger. Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. London & New York, 1977.

Wilson, Harold. Labour Government, 1964-1970: A Personal Record. London: Penguin Books, 1971.

Sunday Telegraph. London, 11 January 1970.

[*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s recently published books on the Igbo genocide and Biafra are The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018)]

 Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

  

Reflections on African freedom, recovery, transformation

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, ed., Decolonisation Pathways: Postcoloniality, Globalisation, and African Development (Kampala: Centre for African Studies, Uganda Martyrs University Book Series, No. 12, 2018), pp. 322

IT IS always a delight to read a study that emphasises its engagement with the unfettered restoration-of-independence of African peoples. In Decolonisation Pathways, editor Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, along with his other contributors, is adamant about the goal of this project: to “ … understand the dynamics behind Africa’s colonial history and postcolonial performances/identities in the wake of globalisation … Africa can move forward on a self-decolonisation path and development” (Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, ed., Decolonisation Pathways, 2018: 14). That evocative insight from South Africa’s Steve Biko, “The most potent weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”, posted prominently under the book’s title on the back cover, alerts the reader of how discerning the writers of the text deem the subject of their enterprise.

Despite the certainty of the subject and focus as the title cover demonstrates, most of the contributors are caught up in a level of unclarity, right from the outset of their endeavour, that challenges who, indeed, is the subject of their study. Most fundamentally, the study presented is disquieting in its use of “sub-Sahara Africa”, “sub-Sahara region of Africa”, “sub-Saharan African”, “sub-Saharan Africans”, “sub-Saharan African students”, “sub-Saharan migrations”, “sub-Saharan migrants”,  “sub-Saharan immigrants”, “sub-Saharan countries”, “sub-Saharans”… – definitely not a book on Africa, Africans, African peoples, as the text’s front cover page title projects distinctly.

Epithet of racism

IT cannot be overstated that “sub-Sahara Africa” is gratuitously racist. “Sub-Sahara Africa” defies the science of the fundamentals of geography but prioritises hackneyed, stereotypical, racist labelling. The West’s creators of the “sub-Sahara Africa” epithet have literally deployed an outlandish nomenclatural code to depict an African people’s-led “sovereign” state. This is why, for instance, they never designated South Africa “sub-Sahara Africa” until an African leadership took power there in 1994. These wealth-studded entrepôts of the continent of Africa, namely the African-peoples’-led states that the West and its local allies still control and plunder so ruthlessly, have been boxed with the label “sub-Sahara Africa” on it in contrast to the Arab-led ones (https://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/2016/06/blog-post_25.html).

“Sub-Sahara Africa” creators ensure that the use of their epithet has the effect of a purportedly shrinking African geographical landmass in the popular imagination, particularly within the consciousness of African peoples (cf. Steve Biko’s injunction quoted above), coupled with the continent’s supposedly attendant geostrategic global “irrelevance”. The racism at play in the minds of “sub-Sahara Africa” creators is alarmingly depraved: there are 1 billion Africans who dwell on a continent whose landmass is 30,301,596 sq km which is more than the combined landmasses of Western Europe, the United States, China, India and Argentina that total 29,843,826 sq km. For Decolonisation Pathways, surely, “sub-Sahara Africa” constitutes such a key obstacle that the study must dismantle pointedly, not buy into (!), to guarantee a less stressful passage for its envisaged African peoples’ march to freedom.

IN his chapter contribution on education in contemporary Africa, “Whose education is it? The exclusion of African values from higher education”, Johnnie Muwanga-Zake notes: “[I]n … Africa, education was imported for enhancing political, social and economic independence and development through human and physical structural development” (Ssentongo, ed, 2018: 90). Really? Who “imported” this education? Isn’t this the same EuroConqueror education programme across the continent that exists, introduced and entrenched by the European invasion, strategically, to rationalise its Africa conquest and aftermath which Muwanga-Zake describes as “Eurocentric” (93)? If indeed the reason of this “imported” education is to “enhanc[e]” the expansive goals in Africa that Muwanga-Zake himself maps out, then it is not convincing that the author would in the same breath be advocating some transformative education objective in this same Africa imbued with what he describes as “African values” (92-108). Undoubtedly, these two “streams of consciousness” are intrinsically antithetical.

Work is today’s!

Decolonisation Pathways implicitly acknowledges that the European World “abandoned” a toxic waste in Africa in the aftermath of its devastating conquest and occupation of the continent that goes by the name “state”, the “Berlin-state” in Africa, and Africans, themselves, must get rid of it to survive. It is a dreadful proposition to conceptualise any progress of African peoples in this “state” – the likes of Nigeria, Niger, Chad, the Sudan, Guinea M, Guinea N, Guinea Q … or whatever their ghastly signatures denote. These are contrived contraptions of murder and murdering of African peoples by Africans who lead the “Berlin-states” and the pillaging of critical African resources by the same Africans who lead the “Berlin-states” for transfers to the West and increasingly China.

Every African people, not these notorious leaderships who police the “Berlin-states” on the West’s behalf, is in the position to construct an organic state form that is responsive to their own nation’s worldviews and progress. This is the challenge that Africa faces presently. The quest and its solution are internal – right there in the geography of every constituent African people or nation emplaced in Africa.

AS A RESULT, few researchers elsewhere in the world have the limitless latitude possessed by contemporary African students and scholars to embark on this scholarship of restitution and transformation of a battered history. This enterprise requires scientific rigour and a critical analysis of concepts and ideas.  It also requires focus, tenacity and resilience. This generation of African peoples’ students and scholars cannot afford to pass over the burden of endeavour to their children and children’s children’s generations. This will be unpardonable. The work is today’s. Now’s the time.

(John Coltrane & Don Cherry, “Focus on sanity” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cherry, pocket trumpet; Percy Heath, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums; recorded: Atlantic Studios, New York, US, 28 June/8 July 1960])

******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

Two tales in a week in August that underscore the sheer hate and envy that drive the Fulani-led Nigeria state genocide against Igbo people

(Save-a-Soul Quintet of Biafran school girls from Regina Pacis Secondary School Onicha, southwest Biafra... wins global technovation contest, San Jose, United States, Thursday 9 August 2018)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

ON FRIDAY 10 August 2018, news comes through of the overnight stunning success of the great Save-a-Soul Quintet of Biafran school girls from Regina Pacis Secondary School,  Onicha, southwest Biafra, winning the 2018 global technovation contest held in San Jose, United States. Fifty million Biafrans at home and in the diaspora are catapaulted into a weekend of celebration as the Regina Pacis whiz kids Promise Nnalue, Vivian Okoye, Adaeze Onuigbo, Jessica Osita, and Nwabuaku Ossai became latest icons in the 52 years of the Biafra freedom movement.

Across the wall, in genocidist lair Nigeria, the news from San Jose is crushingly depressing … The state, as usual, is thrown into a frenzy as it decides what to do… how to react to yet another uplifting news feature on/about Biafra and Biafrans. As in the past, genocidist planners would come up with a response, usually more savage than before, in a day or two, a few days, but surely within a week…

ON FRIDAY 17 August in Owere, east Biafra, 50 miles away from Onicha, 2000 Igbo women embark on a peaceful freedom march. As the marchers approach the Owere city centre, a genocidist police detachment opens fire on them. Details of casualties and possible fatalities suffered by the women are still unknown but the génocidaires detained scores of survivors of the shooting for four days before they were released due to a follow up unrelenting campaign by the Biafran population.

(Biafran women on freedom march, Owere, east Biafra, Friday 17 August 2018)

(Biafran women freedom marchers, Owere, east Biafra, Friday 17 August 2018)

(Scores of Biafran women marchers in Owere, east Biafra: detained by Nigerian génocidaires)

Crux, collapse, legacy

AT the crux of this unparalled savagery by genocidist Nigeria, this malebogle, this poorest country on earth presently (according to the World Bank, https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/1031088319654842369), is the engaging, crippling consequence of its genocide against Igbo people which has gone on since its launch date on 29 May 1966. Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo during phases I-III of the genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, and tens of thousands of additional Igbo subsequently, phase-IV, 13 January 1970-present day…

Precisely, Nigeria has indeed collapsed as a state with few prospects for the future. Despite 52 years of genocide it has waged on the Igbo, including its 44 devastating months of comprehensive siege of Biafra by air, land and sea, 29 May 1966-

12 January 197o, Igbo people have demonstrated a greater creative drive towards constructing an advanced civilisation in Biafra than what Nigeria has all but wishes it could achieve in the past five decades.

THIS is the haunting legacy that Nigeria presents to Theresa May, prime minister of its Igbo genocide co-genocidist and suzerain state Britain, who arrives there tomorrow, Wednesday 29 August, for a fleeting visit.

(John Coltrane & Don Cherry, “Focus on sanity” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cherry, pocket trumpet; Percy Heath, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums; recorded: Atlantic Studios, New York, US, 28 June/8 July 1960])

 Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Condemnation of British expulsion of African peoples-from-the-Caribbean

(Amber Rudd ... British home secretary whose department/ministry is responsible for the African peoples’ deportation)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

MANY African commentators in the diaspora and at home have joined other critics elsewhere in the world to condemn the current British government’s outrageous expulsion of some of its citizens of African descent to the Caribbean. The criticisms are rightly commendable.

Yet silence…

IT IS  however most noticeable that a number of these commentators have been conspicuously silent when African peoples in African-run states are deported similarly or subjected to even worse treatment by their hosts as the following examples highlight:

1. In Lagos, west Nigeria, the regional regime has over the years deported scores of Igbo people to Biafra. In 2015, the king or oba of Lagos issued a royal edict to murder Igbo people if they did not vote for the king’s own preferred candidate for a senior political regional office.

2. In South Africa, thousands of African émigrés from southern, east and west Africa have been expelled in recent years by the state. Hundreds of these immigrants have been murdered in the country during the period and their homes and businesses destroyed by organised groups often linked to state officials.

3. Since the March 2015 imposition of Muhammadu Buhari, the genocidist islamist jihadist, as head of regime in Nigeria by ex-US President Obama and ex-British Prime Minister Cameron, the Buhari regime’s military and its adjunct Fulani militia, one of the world’s five deadliest terrorist organisations, have murdered 3000 Igbo people across Biafra in what has been one of the bloodiest track of phase IV of the ongoing Igbo genocide. These murders have continued unabated.

Moral rectitude
AFRICAN peoples’ lives matter. This must surely be the case wheresoever African peoples live: Biafra, Sénégal, Tanzania, Botswana, United States of America, South Africa, Barbados, Kenya, India, Côte d’Ivoire, Guyana, Canada, Britain, Surinam, St Lucia, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Brazil, France, Ghana, Finland, Uganda…

Few now doubt that African commentators and others in that prominent professional grouping stand to forfeit any moral rectitude if they restrict their quest to uphold African lives’ interests usually in geographical spaces marked outside Africa but exercise a predictable stone-walled silence when these same interests are assaulted, quite often more viciously, inside Africa.

(John Coltrane & Don Cherry, “Focus on sanity” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cherry, pocket trumpet; Percy Heath, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums; recorded: Atlantic Studios, New York, US, 28 June/8 July 1960])

 Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

75th birthday of Stanley Macebuh

(Born 28 December 1942, Aba, Biafra)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

SPARK of enduring Biafran creative energy! Celebrated cultural and literary critic and executive editor of The Guardian, Lagos, Nigeria, beginning February 1983, when he embarks on the  radical transformation of the focus and scope and qualitative threshold of journalism practice not seen in Africa’s southwestcentral region in 50 years – since the edifying standard set for post-(European)conquest Africa journalism by Nnamdi Azikiwe, political scientist, academic, poet, journalist, multiform entrepreneur, leader in Igbo vanguard role in the drive for restoration of independence for African peoples in this region (mid-1930s-October 1960) from the British conquest and occupation ... 

BIAFRA FREEDOM MOVEMENT is on its way back to continue its work viciously disrupted by the genocide: to teach basic lessons on competence, to overcome challenges, to exercise transformative initiatives, to affirm life, African life, as sacrosanct particularly given 51 years of Hausa-Fulani/islamist-controlled genocidst Nigeria’s programmed savagery to destroy the lives of 50 million Igbo people…

(John Coltrane & Don Cherry, “Focus on sanity” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cherry, pocket trumpet; Percy Heath, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums; recorded: Atlantic Studios, New York, US, 28 June/8 July 1960])

 Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

“Indivisibility”? “Indissolubility”? “Indestructibility”? Read: Genocide

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

The right to self-determination is for every people. It is inalienable and is guaranteed by the United Nations. No people is exempt from exercising this right. This is why the slogan that proclaims such gibberish as “indivisibility”/“indissolubility”/“indestructibility” of a state, any state, is not really worth the paper it is written on except of course it is an embedded code by a slaughtering horde for the plot of the next genocide or the reinforcement of an ongoing genocide – as indeed the world has witnessed most tragically across several regions in Africa since Nigeria’s launch of the Igbo genocide on 29 May 1966. A grisly total of 15.1 million Africans have been murdered by a number of these states and their allies in the genocides of the Igbo (29 May 1966-12 January 1970), Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo (variously since 2003) and Darfur/Nuba Mountains/South Kordofan (all in the Sudan – since 2003), and in other wars in west, north, northcentral, east and southern Africa during the epoch.

Support for British conquest and occupation of Nigeria indefinitely

FOR THE RECORD, it mustn’t be forgotten that the Hausa-Fulani/islamist-led leadership in Nigeria which ritually trumpets the “ind”-threesome slogan (above) to preface its next planned massacre of the Igbo in occupied Biafra or in Nigeria supported continuing British occupation of the conquest-state called Nigeria during the course of 30 momentous years (1930s-October 1960) by opposing the Igbo-led restoration-of-independence movement for the freeing of the constituent African nations and peoples from the British occupation. Britain duly “rewarded” the islamist leadership perpetual control of Nigeria as a prop to transfer the latter’s retrograde view of this conquest-state to some  “post”-conquest variation on the theme which, in itself, guarantees British suzerainty over Nigeria indefinitely. This is a cardinal feature that constitutes the tragedy called Nigeria today.

As everyone probably knows, the states that Europe created in Africa, in the aftermath of its November 1884-February 1885 Berlin conqueror-conference on the latter, cannot provide the fundamental needs of Africans.  This “Berlin-state”, with its bumbling ahistorical name (Nigeria, Niger, Guinea, the Sudan, Chad, whatever!), cannot lead Africans to the reconstructive changes they deeply yearn for after the tragic history of centuries of catastrophic occupation. Such change was and never is the mission of this state but an instrument to expropriate and despoil Africa by the conquest. Essentially, the “Berlin-state” still serves the interests of its creators and those of the ruthless cabal of African-overseers which polices the dire straits of existence that is the lot of Africans currently.

Not-gift

AS IN BERLIN, the state is not a gift from the gods. On the contrary, the state is a relationship painstakingly formulated and constructed by groups of human beings on our planet earth to pursue aspirations and interests envisioned by these same human beings within a shared historical and geographical articulation. The African humanity is presently gripped in a grave crisis for survival. Surely, it is aware of this emergency and it is now time that it abandoned the contrived “Berlin-state” in order to survive. This state is a bane of African existence. African nations, namely the Igbo, Ijo, Acholi, Wolof, Yao, Ibibio, Asante, Tonga, Baganda, Mende, Bakongo, Gĩkũyũ, Bambara, Luba, Luo, etc., etc, remain the basis for the regeneration of Africa’s development. These nations are the sites of the continent’s intellectual and other cultural creativity.

Peoples endure; states are indeed transient

States, in the end, are transient as the following attests... Whatever happened to Czarist Russia, Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottoman empire, the British empire, French Indo-China, Portuguese empire, Spanish empire and, more latterly, the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Treaty states, Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia? Each and everyone of these no longer exists. Gone! Each of them collapsed, somewhere, along their march in history… 

What happened to the constituent peoples in these states that no longer exist? These constituent peoples exist in innumerable new states with names beginning with and from “A” to “Z”. Why did the Polish state disappear from the world map for 123 years (yes, one hundred and twenty-three years!) until its reappearance in 1918? Answer: Gobbled up by predator states, chiefly Czarist Russia. What happened to the Polish people during this century and twenty-three years of varying conquest and occupation? The Poles survived, bidding their time for the restoration of their independence. What would happen to the United Kingdom if the Scots vote “Yes” in another referendum for independence? The United Kingdom would cease to exist as the world has known it as a “union” incorporating Scotland since 1707 if a simple majority of the 5 million Scottish people decides on such an outcome. In the event, if a similar process didn’t occur sooner elsewhere in Europe, an independent Scotland would be the 25th new state to emerge in Europe since 1991. The last one, in 2008, is Kosovo, with a population of 1.8 million which is less than that of the Fegge district of Onicha, the great market town on the Oshimili River of southwest Biafra. 

IN HISTORY, therefore, states have actually been transient formations. It is to human beings that survival belongs, provided no genocidist hotchpotch plans to wipe out a targeted group of them as Nigeria is geared, presently, in its long-stretched campaign against Igbo people…

(John Coltrane & Don Cherry,“Focus on sanity” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cherry, pocket trumpet; Percy Heath, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums; recorded: Atlantic Studios, New York, US, 28 June/8 July 1960])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe