Nelson Mandela, catastrophic murders of Igbo people in South Africa, restoration-of-independence of Biafra

(Born 18 July 1918, Mvezo, South Africa)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

ON THURSDAY 18 July 2019, South Africa, the African World and the rest of the globe will celebrate the 101st birthday of Nelson Mandela – lawyer, leader of the African restoration-of-independence movement that freed South Africa after 342 years of the pan-European conquest, occupation, and subjugation.

The commemoration of Mandela’s 101st birthday ironically occurs at a very depressing epoch for African peoples-centred students and scholars studying and researching South Africa. The latter have, in recent years, usually incredulously as one can imagine, given the inestimable support and goodwill rendered to the South African freedom movement from practically every region of the African World including Igbo people from Biafra, as hundreds of African émigrés in South Africa from Biafra, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and elsewhere from Africa are murdered in premeditated campaigns clearly organised by groupings in the country with tacit and at times active support from personages within the South Africa state ... Additionally, in this campaign, African émigrés’ residents and businesses have been destroyed and thousands of survivors sent into horrid South Africa refugee camps or forced to return to their various countries. 

ALL along, as this murder campaign rages, the South Africa state categorises this crime so quaintly and outrageously with the essentially sanitising euphemism, “xenophobic attacks” – an outrage of a designation readily picked up, re-packaged, and re-broadcast uncritically with relish across the world by the usual expressly anti-African lives’ broadcasters and commentators and other news organsations. This planned murdering campaign against African émigrés in South Africa, executed by organised South African death-squads, must be called by its name: murder; there must be no obfuscation in presenting this crime for what it is.

Catastrophe

Since February 2016, over 120 Igbo immigrants in South Africa, who had themselves fled the ongoing Igbo genocide in occupied Biafra by Fulani-led islamist/jihadist genocidist Nigeria, have been viciously murdered as part of this savage campaign against African émigrés across the country. Biafra will never forget this unleashed catastrophe on its people. On the contrary, the consequences of this trail of executions of Biafrans in South Africa will dictate the character of the future relationship between the restored-independent Biafra and South Africa. Surely, no one murders Igbo people and gets away with the crime.

ONCE AGAIN, assailed in a country whose state is often primed to make outlandish sanctimonious declarations on foreign policy, especially on the Middle East, but demonstrates such gross irresponsibility to protect the lives of African peoples from elsewhere domiciled within its borders, the Igbo, in South Africa, must now think seriously of relocating to other countries for their safety and well-being.

(Sonny Rollins Quartet, “Dance of the reed pipes” [personnel: Rollins, tenor saxophone; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Billy Higgins, drums; recorded: live, Village Gate, New York, US, 27-30 July 1962])

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

105th birthday of Mbonu Ojike

(Born 5 May 1914, Arundizuogu, Biafra)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

CELEBRATED AFRICAN peoples-centred transformative intellectual, graduate of University of Chicago, arguably the profoundest political economic thinker in the provisional restoration-of-independence government of (British occupied) east region Nigeria, home of the historic Igbo village republican democratic states that had flourished for over a millennium; minister of economic development and planning and architect of the 1947-1966 transformation of this pre-Igbo genocide political economy to Africa’s most dynamic with immense possibilities.

The Ojike Plan had envisaged a 20-year timeframe, beginning in 1954, during which the east region would be transformed into an advanced multifaceted industrial and agricultural economy. Such was the impressive pace of this programme that, by 1964, ten years later, the overall economic performance of the east had not only outstripped the rest of Nigeria but was in fact Africa’s fastest growing economy. The east had the best schools and the first “post-conquest” university system (University of Nsukka) in the country, the best humanpower development in the country across a range of fields including, crucially, engineering, science, medicine, the arts, the middle-range technical cadre, and sports. 

The region also had the most integrated infrastructural development in Nigeria and its manufacturing, distributive and extractive enterprises centred in the Enuugwu-Nkalagu-Emene conurbation to the north, Onicha (commercial capital and home to the future Oshimili stock exchange and index) to the west and Igwe Ocha-Aba-Calabar to the south were clearly the hubs of the making of this African industrial revolution of recent history. 

BUT for the Igbo genocide, launched by Britain, under Harold Wilson’s prime ministership and its Fulani islamist/jihadist north region-led Nigeria client state on 29 May 1966 and continuing as these lines are written, 53 years on, the longest genocide of contemporary history, with the murder of 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of the Igbo population during phases I-III of this crime (29 May 1966-12 January 1970), the east was on course to construct the “Taiwan” or the “China” or the “South Korea” or the “India” in Africa – 20 years before these post 1939-1945 war much-vaunted “economic transformational miracles” of the era emerged...

Mbonu Ojike City of Innovation and Enterprise

THE MAIN thrust of this plan is still valid and should be retrieved from the archives, reworked, and adapted by the ongoing Biafra freedom movement to 21st century priorities and the advantage of new technologies. This phase would appropriately be Ojike Plan II and the Mbonu Ojike City of Innovation and Enterprise, built on the morrow of the restoration of Biafra independence, will offer Biafrans with multiform creative interests and goals, especially start-up entrprenuereship, an enabling environment dedicated solely to work through their ideas and transform this great Land of the Rising Sun.

(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 Jones, drums; recorded: live at Penthouse Jazz Club, Seattle, US, 30 September 1965])

******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

Mmuo Biafra, Igbo genocide, Britain, Brexit and retributive justice

(THERESA MAY: “restore ... our self determination”) 

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

SUCCESSIVE British governments since 29 May 1966, beginning with the one led by Harold “[W]ould-accept-half-a-million-dead-Biafrans-if-that-was-what-it-[T]ook” Wilson, have, in strategic alliance with the coterie of African constituent nations in Nigeria (particularly Fulani, Yoruba, Kanuri, Urhobo, Bachama, Tiv, Hausa, Nupe, Edo) waged the Igbo genocide most unrelentingly, most gruesomely…

Comeuppance?

The current British government is tellingly incapable to negotiate a simple exit from the European Union (organisation Britain joined voluntarily, not forced into, in 1973) as demanded by the majority “yes”-voters of the country’s June 2016 referendum. For Britain, the humiliating narrative that characterises these Brexit talks in Brussels is palpable. Despite Prime Minister Theresa May’s ringing pledge that Brexit is the British decision to “restore ... our self-determination” (“Prime Minister’s letter to Donald Tusk on the triggering of article 50”, gov.uk, 29 March 2017, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prime-ministers-letter-to-donald-tusk-triggering-article-50/prime-ministers-letter-to-donald-tusk-triggering-article-50,
accessed 29 March 2017), the EU is offering Britain “exit terms” from the league that are structurally not dissimilar from that infamous Lancaster House fake-independence/fraudulent freedom template that Britain foisted on African restoration-of-independence movements in its occupied states across the continent – from the Sudan/Ghana (mid-1950s) to Zimbabwe (late 1979/early 1980). 

It is precisely this unlikely equivalence of two seemingly unrelated tracks of history that has prompted Boris Johnson, ex-British foreign secretary, ex-mayor of London, journalist, and essayist who has often relished in his writings demonising peoples (particularly Africans) conquered over the last 350 years by Britain, to now proclaim, so ironically, that the current “Brexit deal” from the EU reduces Britain to a “vassalage, satrapy, colony” (Andrew Woodcock, “Boris Johnson: Theresa May’s Brexit plan makes UK a ‘colony’”, The Scotsman, Edinburgh, 26 July 2018, https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/boris-johnson-theresa-may-s-brexit-plan-makes-uk-a-colony-1-4774271, accessed 28 July 2018)!

HAS the comeuppance that has vividly struck a number of the countries besides, obviously, Nigeria (e.g. Soviet Union, Egypt, Algeria, the Sudan, Cameroon, German Democratic Republic, Guinea-Conakry, Syria) and several lead génocidaires (e.g. Obafemi Awolowo, Harold Wilson, Hafez al-Assad, Muhammadu Buhari, Barack Hussein Obama, Hosni Mubarak, Muhammadu Shuwa, Ahmadou Ahidjo, Ibrahim Taiwo, David Cameron, Olusegun Obasanjo, Murtala Muhammed) who have been involved in the murder of Igbo people these past 52 years finally hit Britain?

Biafran freedom and justice

If ever there was any doubt, the evidence, so far, demonstrates the contrary – namely, that no one, no agency, murders 3.1 million and additional tens of thousands of Igbo children, women and men (including the 3000 murdered so far since November 2015 by fiendish génocidaire Muhammadu Buhari who was imposed in office by ex-US President Barack Hussein Obama, the first African descent president in 233 years of the founding of the United States republic) in this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa and walks away free...  Apart from the now 50 million Igbo survivors, the 3.1 million and the additional tens of thousands are individually and collectively involved in the current historic Biafran resilient quest for freedom and justice...  

AND Biafra will get this freedom and justice. Undoubtedly.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Consequences” – 4th movement in First Meditations {for Quartet} [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 2 November 1965])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why Donald Trump is great for Africa (2018) and author of Readings from Reading: Essays in African Politics, Genocide, Literature (2011) 

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Prince Charles, the heir apparent to the British throne, is presently on a week’s visit to west Africa. The following essay, “Britain, history, Africa”, first published in December 2006 and is a contributing chapter in Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (2011), discusses the salient features that map out Africa-British relations of the past 400 years.

(Prince Charles: heir apparent to the British throne)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe 

Britain, history, Africa

IN A December 2006 article for the New Nation (the London-based weekly newspaper that appeals to a wide African people’s readership), former British Prime Minister Tony Blair writes that he feels “deep sorrow” for Britain’s central role in the European World’s enslavement of African peoples. This declaration is surely not good enough as Britain is the leading beneficiary of this holocaust. Blair should have apologised unreservedly to Africans across the world for Britain’s role in a holocaust that remains humanity’s most gruesome, most expansive, and most enduring (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, African Literature in Defence of History: An essay on Chinua Achebe, 2001: especially ch. 1). Blair should have announced a comprehensive package of reparations paid to surviving Africans in Africa, Europe, the Americas and elsewhere in the world for this crime.

(Theresa May:... British Prime Minister)

IT must be emphasised that within 300 years of achieving the strategic control of Africa’s human and material resources, namely at the apogee of the African enslavement, Europe lays the foundation for the West’s political and economic hegemony of the world as we know it presently. This is a fact – “though largely erased and ignored in Western thought”, as Michel Beaud, the influential French economist, is keen to remind the European World. (Michel Beaud, A History of Capitalism: 1500-1980, 1983: 44.) Britain, the first truly effective Western global power, uses the gargantuan wealth it acquires during the course of its late 17th century/early 18th century pre-eminent role in the enslavement and mass exportation of millions of Africans to the Americas to consolidate its conquest of the Americas (especially the north/the Caribbean basin), embark on its conquest of India and other regions of Asia, embark on the subsequent pan-European (Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium, Spain, Germany and Italy) conquest and occupation of a (subsequently) weakened Africa, and lastly, but surely not least in importance, finance its 19th century industrial revolution which is the turning point in the development of Western capitalism.

Backwater

Britain’s success on this score cannot be over-stressed. This was a country which, prior to the mid-17th century, was still a “cultural and scientific backwater”, to quote the graphic description made by Christopher Hill, the eminent British historian who is an authority on this period of British history. (Christopher Hill, “Lies about crimes”, The Guardian, London, 29 May 1989.)

By the beginning of the 18th century, Britain had established virtual world monopoly in the seizure and transportation of millions of Africans from their homelands to the Americas after displacing the Iberian states of Portugal and Spain. It used the enormous resources that accrued to it as a result to finance its burgeoning scientific and technological enterprises. Soon, as Hill further notes, Britain became the “centre of world science”. (Hill, “Lies about crimes”, The Guardian, London, 29 May 1989.) And to underline the sheer size of the wealth Britain was accumulating during the period, Charles Davenant, a late 17th century economist who studied the comparative worth of an enslaved African in the Caribbean and a worker in England, concludes: “[The labour of this enslaved African] is worth six times as much as the labour of an Englishman at home”. (Christopher Hill, “Lies about crimes”, The Guardian, London, 29 May 1989.)

(Olaudah Equiano: Distinguished Igbo-British intellectual of the 1780s-1790s England ... leading exponent of African freedom) 

WHILST studying the work of African labour force in the Guyanese sugar industry in the 1870s, it does not come as a shock to Joseph Beaumont, the British chief justice of Guyana, that it takes two to three days of work by the “best English laborer” (in England) of the day to complete a day’s work done by a typically enslaved African plantation worker. (Alan Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 1972: 112.) “We have [in England] no excavating work so heavy as trench digging in Demerara [Guyana]”, Beaumont recalls, “and if the reader were to see a stalwart n[****] ... sweltering under the blazing sun throughout the day ... standing up to his knees and often to his hips in water, not only lifting (or more properly wrenching) 4000 to 5000 spits of dense clay ... throwing these twelve or sixteen feet clear on each side – not with a pleasant hammer throwing swing, but delivered straight from the loins at the end of a seven foot shovel ... I venture to think he would not only wonder at but admire ... the ‘lazy n[*****]’” (emphasis in the original). (Sidney Mintz, “Descrying the Peasantry”, 1982: 210)

During the 300 years of Britain’s ascendancy as the world’s principal enslaver-power in Africa and the Americas, leading members of its state establishment (especially in royalty, clergy, parliament, industry, academia, science and the arts) personally and collectively profited enormously from this unprecedented holocaust in human history. Cities such as London, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow became extremely rich, showcasing the spectacular transformation that each had undergone from being key destinations of prime investment of profits accruing to the British treasury from the enslavement of the African humanity. Thereafter, Britain became the epicentre of the intellectual activity of an ever-expanding collective of European World genocidist scholars, scientists and writers who offered the “requisite” cultural/scientific/literary rationalisation for the African holocaust. Influential members of this collective would include Spencer, Petty, Darwin, Lyell, Prichard, Reade, Locke, White, Knox, Marx, Hume, Lee, Farrar, Coupland, Egerton, Trevor-Roper, Conrad, Kipling, Carey, Haggard, Burroughs, Buchan, Mitford, Monsarrat, Ballantyne, Huxley and Blixen. (Ekwe-Ekwe, African Literature in Defence of History, passim.)

These practitioners, in a sentence, turned Britain into the creator, cardinal codifier, and pivotal publicist of pan-European racism as an ideology – to effectuate that strategic goal of erasure that Michel Beaud so cogently refers to.

The stupendous fortune Britain earned from this holocaust and the accompanying gullies of socio-economic devastation it unleashed across Africa and African survivors in Africa itself, the Americas and elsewhere in the world, ensured that a triumphant Prime Minister Salisbury confidently insisted, in a speech in London in 1898, that “One can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying ... [T]he living nations will fraudulently encroach on the territory of the dying.” (Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes”, 1997: 140) Less than 50 years after these remarks, the dire consequences of pogroms and holocausts would be felt much closer home to the heart of Europe rather than just the targeted lands further afield in Africa and elsewhere. On this, Sven Lindqvist has observed solemnly:

I am fairly sure the nine-year-old Hitler was not at Albert Hall when Lord Salisbury was speaking. He had no need to. He knew it already. The air he and all other Western people in his childhood breathed was soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process, which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races. It was a conviction which already cost millions of human lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application. (Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes”, 1997: 141)

AS should be expected, the effects on Africans and their homeland of this earlier holocaust, have been grave indeed: the active human power of millions of future African generations were uprooted and shipped off to the Americas by European enslavers to work the cotton, sugar and tobacco plantations, excavate the gold and silver mines, and build new towns and cities in territories being conquered by expansionist European conqueror forces. In the process, as Cheikh Anta Diop has shown, Africa lost about 150 million of its peoples as enslaved, including those who died during the overland journey, crisscrossing west Africa and elsewhere, to conveyor-ships and the voyage to the Americas. (Cheikh Anta Diop, Precolonial Africa, 1987: 142.)

Soon, Britain and the rest of the European powers (France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Spain), who eventually occupied Africa, turned the continent into a reservoir of cheap labour for intensive and extensive agricultural and mineralogical exploitation. The African farmer was converted overnight into a “cash crop farmer”, a term that at face value has a dubious meaning as it is aimed to describe a farmer who cultivates assorted crops such as cotton, cocoa, palm produce, groundnut, cloves and sisal solely for export to European markets. The farmer who cultivates other crops, but for the home market, which he or she still sells for cash, is not a “cash crop farmer”! Instead, goes the conquest-economics jargon, the latter farmer is involved in “subsistent farming”. Considering that the overwhelming majority of Africans were, and are still farmers, these millions of people were, as a result of the European conquest and occupation, being culturally alienated at the crucial site of their economic activity with obvious far-reaching implications, which are still at the core of Africa’s current tragedy. If the African labour was not bound for agricultural activity, “cash crop”, or not, he or she was instead deployed by the occupation-state to the European mining corporations dotted all over the continent to extract various types of minerals including diamonds, gold, tin, bauxite, coal, copper, iron ore and petroleum products – again for export to the European World. All forms of taxes were imposed to expedite this European take-over of Africa, and the strategic spheres of the continent’s independent pre-conquest cultural, industrial and other forms of technological creativity therein were curtailed or suppressed.

IN EFFECT, African land and property relations were abolished by the occupation to make way for the seizure of land for both plantation agriculture and mining enterprises already referred to, or for the construction of new communication infrastructure, or for the direct population settlement by European immigrants as exemplified in east Africa (Kenya), southern Africa (Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Angola, Namibia), west Africa (São Tomé and Principé, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde) and north Africa (Algeria). Again, Britain was the leading conqueror-state beneficiary during this phase of the direct occupation of Africa, having particularly seized lands with major population centres and vast and multiple natural resource emplacements: South Africa, Namibia (proxy control, post-1918 – after the defeat of Germany in World War I), Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania (post-1918, after the defeat of Germany in World War I), the Sudan, Nigeria, south Cameroons (post-1918, after the defeat of Germany in World War I), Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia. In each of these conquered lands as well as others, now arbitrarily carved out from hitherto existing African states, the European regime imposed its monetary system on society and also ensured that the terms for the exchange of goods and services, fundamental for the logical development of any socio-economic activity or relation, was inextricably tailored to the needs and expectations of the home market back home (in Europe). No doubt, the economies that emerged subsequently in Africa, particularly on the eve of the so-called re-establishment of the peoples’ independence from the mid-1950s, were structurally bereft of local needs and priorities. Instead, these were mineralogical and agricultural redoubts to service a European home market, and, at the same time, conduits for European emigration.

In summary, three distinct consequences on the African humanity can be discerned from the British-led (i.e. post-mid 17th century) enslavement of Africans or the African holocaust. First, the seizure and exportation of 150 million Africans from Africa to the Americas and elsewhere. Second, the destruction/near destruction of local populations and the dispatch of survivors/others into labour reserves/“townships” to make way for direct European occupation (particularly east/southern Africa) as from the 19th century, and, finally, the overall control of subjugated populations and the conversion of human and material resources to serve pan-European interests (rest of Africa), which has continued virtually uninterrupted to this day.

Kakistocracy and genocide

THE CONCERTED African drive, beginning soon after the Second World War, to free the continent of European control has yet to achieve its strategic objective: unfettered restoration-of-independence. Britain and France and Belgium and Portugal and Spain just won’t let go of Africa; for these countries, the phenomenal bounties of the African conquest are yet to be fully expropriated, despite the holocaust, despite the hundreds of years of occupation, and, more importantly, despite the insistence of the post-1945 African liberating mission. Starting from 1956 in Sudan, Britain (once again!) embarked on the construction of a constellation of kakistocratic states across the continent to precisely neutralise the emergence of this new, free Africa. Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia and others, as well as the Belgian and French derivatives of these monstrous constructs (Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo Republic, Chad, Central African Republic, Cameroon, etc., etc.) soon followed suit. In Nigeria, in 1966, Britain perfected, even further, the catastrophic tentacles of kakistocracy in Africa. (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Biafra Revisited, 2006)

In concert with the Nigeria state (religious, military, police, academic, bureaucracy, media) and the leaderships of key constituent nations in the country, Britain inaugurated the quintessential genocidal state in Africa: Nigeria. Britain and its Fulani islamist/jihadist-led Nigerian allies murdered 3.1 million Igbo people during the course of 1966-1970 in the most horrendous genocide of Africans not seen on the continent since the mid-19th century. At the apogee of the genocide, Harold Wilson, the British prime minister who oversaw the perpetration of this crime from his office and home at 10 Downing Street London was completely unperturbed to inform 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) And to ensure that the the génocidaires achieved whatever annihilative threshold on the destruction of Igbo people they had set for this mission in Biafra, Wilson duly reinforced and saturated the Nigeria armoury with assorted British military resources. Wilson was gravely effusive on the range and impact of Nigerian use of British arms in the genocide as he recalled in his memoirs: Nigerian military expended more small arms ammunition in its campaign in Biafra than the amount used by the British armed forces “during the whole” of the 1939-1945 war. (Harold Wilson, Labour Government, 1964-1970: A Personal Record, 1971: 630; added emphasis) Wilson’s government’s diplomatic mission military advisor in genocidist Nigeria at the time, Robert Scott, acknowledged his employer’s empirical evidence, albeit linguistically (at the height of the genocide, mid 1968- January 1970), that as the Nigerian genocidists unleashed their campaigns across Biafran cities, towns and villages, they were the “best defoliant agent known” (Sunday Telegraph, London, 11 January 1970).  Whilst Wilson’s own preferred and projected death-wish tally for the Igbo was 500,000, which represented 4.2 per cent of the Igbo population at the time, his co-Nigerian genocidists on the ground instead murdered 3.1 million Igbo people – 2.6 million more or 25 per cent of the total Igbo population; definitely, the Nigerians had handsomely obliged their “massa” Harold Wilson’s extermination edict...

(Harold Wilson: ... “would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took..)

IT IS therefore extraordinary that in his study, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (2006), Geoffrey Robertson, a British human rights lawyer, a queen’s counsel, does not discuss the Igbo genocide anywhere in his 759-page text nor Britain’s instrumental role in perpetrating this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. Robertson’s is clearly the case of a scholar who wishes to deny the most catastrophic of genocides.

Indeed, the mass murder of the Igbo, centrally organised by Britain, sets the grotesque precedence that would chart and characterise the defining features of African politics during the subsequent 30 years: Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo Republic, Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan. A total of 12 million Africans have been murdered in these countries since the Igbo genocide.

As Britain (and France and Belgium particularly) would surely attest, the kakistocratic state of Africa, especially its genocidal variety in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Sudan for instance, pays handsomely. An examination of any index of statistical data on Anglo-Nigeria relations, or indeed Anglo-Sudan interactions, won’t shock for the very obvious.

As the Africans in a Nigeria or a Sudan languish in perpetuity in these perditions of “homeland” of British creation, the British continue to enjoy unprecedented levels of profits from these “countries”, day in, day out, receive net capital inflows from these territories, including those looted by thieving “leaderships” and officials, and appropriate critical resources from there at will ... Britain, and the rest of the European World, couldn’t ask for a more enabling environment to expropriate and expropriate the vast riches of Africa indefinitely.

FOR Africans, the next move in the much-sought-after liberation couldn’t be clearer: (1) dismantle the extant genocide state or quickly abandon their membership therein and (2) create new state forms of civilisation that expressly serve their own interests and aspirations – not those of others, including, especially, the notorious overlords of persons, groups and the “ascribed” African constituent nations or nationalities on the ground who carry out the day-to-day policing of this retrograde, hierarchical architecture of doom on behalf of Britain.

(Nnamdi Kanu: ... leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra ... Biafrans are poised to free themselves from genocidist & kakistocratic Nigeria ... Igbo freedom will inaugurate the age of freedom for African peoples with inestimable transformative possibilities...)

References

Adamson, Alan. Sugar without Slaves. New Haven: Yale University, 1972.

Beaud, Michel. A History of Capitalism: 1500-1980. New York: Monthly Review, 1983

Diop, Cheikh Anta. Precolonial Africa. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1987.

Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert. Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature. Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2011.

Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert. Biafra Revisited. Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2006.

Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert. African Literature in Defence of History: An essay on Chinua Achebe. Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2001.

Hill, Christopher. “Lies about crimes”. The Guardian, London, 29 May 1989.)

John Coltrane Quartet. A Love Supreme. Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 9 December 1964.

Lindqvist, Sven. “Exterminate All the Brutes”. London: Granta Books, 1997.

Mintz, Sidney. “Descrying the Peasantry”. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), VI, 2, Fall 1982, pp. 209-225.

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

Robertson, Geoffrey, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice. London: Penguin Books, 2006.

Sunday Telegraph. London, 11 January 1970.

Wilson, Harold. Labour Government, 1964-1970: A Personal Record. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971. 

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Resolution” {part-II of A Love Supreme suite} [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones,  drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 9 December 1964])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of the recently published Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2018) (https://www.amazon.co.uk/DonaldTrump-great-Africa-Herbert-Ekwe-Ekwe/dp/0955205026/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541694262&sr=8-1&keywords=herbert+ekwe-ekwe)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Igbo genocide and this gripping irony of our times

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

IF THE executioner Fulani islamist/jihadist-led genocidist regime on the ground in Nigeria that has carried out the Igbo genocide with such fiendishness these past 52 years were of European descent (bekee, oyibo, tubaab... ) and not African, there would have been a thundering outrage and expansive campaign against this perpetrator with hollering of “racist”, “fascist”, “exclusivist”, “supremacist”, “occupationist”, “b***** c******* o********”, “imperialist”… mounted across the rest of the world, particularly from the African World – continental Africans, Africans in Europe, Africans in the Americas, Africans in Asia, Africans in Australasia. 

Thus, as far as African critical opinion is concerned, despite its wide geographical spread, Africa’s state-organised mass murderers who slaughter an African people in Africa, it would appear from this devastating history of five decades, can literally get away with murder.

YET the Igbo genocide by the Fulani & co and other Africa-based state/estate’s horrendous crimes against African peoples and nations are distinct empirical determinants of those haunting lines sketched in historian Chancellor Williams’s commanding insight of Africa’s devastating history as shown here:

Now the shadows lengthened. The Europeans had also been busily building up and training strong African armies. Africans trained to hate, kill and conquer Africans. Blood of Africans was to sprinkle and further darken the pages of their history … Indeed, Africa was conquered for the Europeans by the Africans [themselves], and thereafter kept under [conquest] control by African police and African soldiers. Very little European blood was ever spilled. (Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization: The Great Issue of a Race between 4500BC and 2000AD [Chicago: Third World, 1995], p. 218.)

(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 Jones, drums; recorded: live at Penthouse Jazz Club, Seattle, US, 30 September 1965])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe 

Igbo genocide: reflecting on a gripping irony of our times

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

IF THE executioner Hausa-Fulani/islamist-led genocidist regime on the ground in Nigeria that has carried out the Igbo genocide with such fiendishness these past five decades were European and not African, there would have been a thundering outrage and expansive campaign against the perpetrator (“racist”, “fascist”, “exclusivist”, “supremacist”, “occupationist”, “imperialist”…) mounted across the rest of the world, particularly from the African World. Yet the Igbo genocide and other Africa state/estate-horrendous crimes against African peoples and nations are distinct empirical determinants of those haunting lines sketched in historian Chancellor Williams’s commanding insight of Africa’s devastating history as shown here:

Now the shadows lengthened. The Europeans had also been busily building up and training strong African armies. Africans trained to hate, kill and conquer Africans. Blood of Africans was to sprinkle and further darken the pages of their history … Indeed, Africa was conquered for the Europeans by the Africans [themselves], and thereafter kept under [conquest] control by African police and African soldiers. Very little European blood was ever spilled. (Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization: The Great Issue of a Race between 4500BC and 2000AD [Chicago: Third World, new edition, 1995: p. 218])

(George Russell Sextet, “Nardis” {composer: Miles Davis} [personnel: Russell, piano; Don Ellis, trumpet; Dave Baker, trombone; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Steve Swallow, bass; Joe Hunt, drums; recorded: Riverside Records, New York, 8 May 1961])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

110th birthday of Akanu Ibiam

(Born 29 November 1906, Unwana, Biafra)

Affable physician, erudite theologian, principled statesperson, works for 30 years in the Church of Scotland/Presbyterian Church rural medical programme in central and east regions of Biafra and who, in 1967, returns to Queen Elizabeth II of England the three insignias of knighthood (OBE, KBE, KCMG) conferred on him by both her and her father, King George VI,  in protest against the central role being played by Britain in the perpetration of the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, when it and its client state Nigeria murder 3.1 million Igbo people, 25 per cent of this nation’s population, between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970

(John Coltrane, “Dear Lord” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano;  Jimmy Garrison, bass; Roy Haynes, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 26 May 1965]) 

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe