(Harold Wilson: “would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took... [Britain’s on the ground co-genocidist state Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide]” )
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
AT THE APOGEE of phase-III of Igbo genocide, mid 1968- autumn 1969, Harold Wilson, British prime minister and chief architect of this genocide, phases I-III, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, is totally unperturbed as he informs Clyde Ferguson, the United States state department special coordinator for relief for Biafra – in response to the very British-coordinated premeditated genocide of Igbo people who had been comprehensively besieged, starved and bombarded by land and sea and air for 38 catastrophic months by the Anglo-Nigerian genocidists – that he, Harold Wilson, “would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” its client and co-genocidist state Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide (Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, London and New York: Quartet Books, 1977, p. 122.).
Indices of Wilsonian annihilative power
JUST who is Harold Wilson who is so contumelious to go on record to call for and execute the genocide of Igbo people of Biafra, 3150 miles away in southwestcentral Africa, 23 years after the end of the perpetration of the horrendous Jewish genocide by Germany in Europe in which the latter murdered 6 million Jews, and 20 years after the declaration of the seminal 1948 UN convention on the crime of genocide (see
JUST who is Harold Wilson who is so contumelious to go on record to call for and execute the genocide of Igbo people of Biafra, 3150 miles away in southwestcentral Africa, 23 years after the end of the perpetration of the horrendous Jewish genocide by Germany in Europe in which the latter murdered 6 million Jews, and 20 years after the declaration of the seminal 1948 UN convention on the crime of genocide (see
1. Harold Wilson is not some dictator, some leader of a loony party, a fascist party, or anything of that political brand
2. Harold Wilson is an elected politician, a politician in an advanced western representative democracy
3. Harold Wilson is leader of the British Labour party, one of Europe’s leading social democratic parties (also incorporates democratic socialists, other strands of socialists, communists, trade unionists)
4. Harold Wilson is prime minister of Britain
5. Harold Wilson is therefore not the prime minister of some “peripheral”/seemingly inconsequential country
6. Harold Wilson is prime minister of a “centre” state and power that was part of the victorious alliance that defeated a fascist global amalgam in a global war that ended in 1945 – barely 23 years earlier
7. Harold Wilson is prime minister of a “centre” state and power (sixth to occupy this exalted position since the end of the 1939-945 war) that was one of the key countries that worked on the panel that drafted the historic 1948 UN “Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide”
8. Harold Wilson’s administration joins successive British governments in the past that have sought to “punish” the Igbo for the latter’s vanguard role during 1930s-October 1960 in the African peoples’ freedom project to liberate Nigeria, one of Britain’s “prized African occupied states” from 60 years of the British conquest; previous British governments had connived at the premeditated devastating pogroms of Igbo people organised and executed by the Fulani jihadist/islamist leadership (on the ground African strategic ally of the British occupation who Wilson would soon work with to unleash the Igbo genocide) in the north Nigeria towns of Jos (1945) and Kano (1953)
9. Harold Wilson pursues 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
10. Harold Wilson oversees the mass slaughter of the Igbo from his 10 Downing Street London official residence
11. Harold Wilson embarks on the savagery of this campaign by constructing an alliance of willing and ruthless pan-African constituent nations in Nigeria itself including, particularly, Yoruba, Urhobo and Edo of its west regions, Hausa, Kanuri, Jawara, Nupe, Bachama, Tiv, and Jukun of the north provinces, all loyal to and led by the Fulani, the visceral anti-African jihadists/islamists from Futa Djallon, 1000 miles away in northwestcentral Africa, who were stridently opposed to the Igbo-driven restoration of-African peoples-independence mission from the British occupation, and who had already demonstrated their expertise in Igbo mass slaughtering in the pogroms of 1945 and 1953 cited earlier
12. Harold Wilson’s decree death target of a half “a million dead Biafrans” represents 4.2 per cent of the Igbo population at this time
13. Harold Wilson realises 6-9 months after his “a half a million dead Biafrans”-death decree declaration, 12 January 1970, that his co-Nigerian genocidists on the ground have instead murdered 3.1 million Igbo people – 2.6 million more or 25 per cent of the total Igbo population; definitely, the Nigerians have handsomely obliged their “massa” Harold Wilson’s death decree of Igbo people...
14. Harold Wilson is not the least surprised of this outcome, thanks to British weapons his government supplied its co-Nigerian genocidists to accomplish their exterminating project – as Wilson recalls most effusively in his memoirs, published in 1971, the Nigerian military expended more small arms ammunition in its campaign to achieve its annihilative goal 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, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, p. 630, added emphasis)
15. Harold Wilson’s government’s diplomatic mission military advisor in genocidist Nigeria at the time, Robert Scott, acknowledges that at the height of the genocide, summer 1968-12 January 1970, their allied rampaging genocidists had turned swathes of Biafran territory into waste lands by the uncontrollable use of those British weapons that Wilson supplied so generously to them (Wilson: 630); Scott is graphically emphatic as he declares that as the genocidists unleashed their campaigns across Biafran cities, towns and villages, they are the “best defoliant agent known” (Sunday Telegraph, London, 11 January 1970)
Igbo resilient spirit
What has evidently underpinned the tenets of Harold Wilson’s very brazen role as this advocate of mass-slaughtering-of-Igbo people in the world of mid/late 1960s is his sheer confidence of a stunning “victory” in his stated goal: Harold Wilson believes fervently that given all the power at his disposal, and these are indeed immense, as we have shown, he would destroy Igbo people… There is, however, one feature in this outstretched power resource, a critical one for that matter, which Wilson is not in control of. Harold Wilson has no access to the resilient spirit of Igbo people, that forte that ensures Igbo survival of the genocide.
BY SURVIVING the genocide, the Igbo have not only repudiated the gruesome Wilsonian logic of Igbo mass slaughter most assuredly, but they are poised today, 53 years later, as the Biafra freedom movement has grown inexorably, to resume the interrupted construction of their beloved state of Biafra – the Land of the Rising Sun.
(Alice Coltrane Quartet, “Lord, help me to be” [personnel: Coltrane, piano; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Rashied Ali, drums; recorded: Coltrane home studio, Dix Hills, New York, US, 6 June 1968])
Works cited
Alice Coltrane Quartet, “Lord, help me to be”. Dix Hills, New York: Coltrane home studio, 6 June 1968
Morris, Roger. Uncertain Greatness: Henry
Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. London and New York: Quartet Books,
1977.
UN. “Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide”.
https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%2078/volume-78-i-1021-english.pdf, 9 December 1948, accessed 12 October 2017.
Wilson, Harold. Labour Government, 1964-1970: A Personal Record. London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.
*****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)
