Vanguard on the move

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

BEGINNING in the early 1930s to October 1960, the Igbo nation played the vanguard role in the campaign for restoration-of-independence to terminate 100 years of the British conquest and occupation of the multiplicity of states and peoples of southwestcentral Africa region which the conqueror contemptuously tagged “Nigeria” – the “n*****” area/land.

Britain responded with the genocide of the Igbo and employed its Fulani/islamist clients on the ground, inveterately anti-African who hitherto opposed the restoration-of-independence drive, to enforce this mass murder. The genocidists slaughtered 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of the Igbo population during the course of 44 months, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970. Tens of thousands additional Igbo have been murdered subsequently. 

THE Igbo have not only survived the genocide but are now in the vanguard to construct Biafra, an African peoples-centred state, that at once effectuates African control of its destiny not seen for centuries and the collapse of the Anglo/European World anti-African “Berlin-states” or constellation of EuroConqueror league states dotted across Africa such as the “Nigerias”.

(John Coltrane, Ascension {edition II} [personnel – solo sequence –: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, Dewey Johnson, trumpet, Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Archie Shepp, tenor saxophone; Marion Brown, alto saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano;  Art Davis, bass; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, NJ, US, 28 June 1965]) 

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 Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

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(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 – here which captures the historic saliency of the restoration-of-independence movement of the Biafran and Catalan peoples])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe 

Vanguard on the move

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

BEGINNING in the early 1930s to October 1960, the Igbo nation played the vanguard role in the campaign for restoration-of-independence to terminate 100 years of the British conquest and occupation of the multiplicity of states and peoples of southwestcentral Africa region which the conqueror contemptuously tagged “Nigeria”. Britain responded with the genocide of the Igbo and employed its Hausa-Fulani/islamist clients on the ground, inveterately anti-African who hitherto opposed the restoration-of-independence drive, to enforce this mass murder. The genocidists slaughtered 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of the Igbo population during the course of 44 months, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970. Tens of thousands additional Igbo have been murdered subsequently. 

THE Igbo have not only survived the genocide but are now in the vanguard to construct Biafra, an African peoples-centred state, that at once effectuates African control of its destiny not seen for centuries and the collapse of the Anglo/European World anti-African “Berlin-states” dotted across Africa such as the “Nigerias”.

(John Coltrane, Ascension [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Dewey Johnson, trumpet; John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Marion Brown, alto saxophone; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; Archie Shepp, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano;  Art Davis, bass; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, NJ, US, 28 June 1965]) 

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Ornette Coleman, freedom, Biafra

(Born 9 March 1930, Fort Worth, Texas, US)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

TODAY IS the 87th birthday of Ornette Coleman. Alto saxophonist, trumpeter, violinist, composer, one of the very top inventive jazz artists of all time – a leading exponent of the avant-garde/free jazz movement, beginning late 1950s/early 1960s, when his varying working quartets (personnel: Coleman, alto saxophone [tenor saxophone on Ornette on Tenor only], Don Cherry, cornet/trumpet/pocket trumpet; Charlie Haden/Scott LaFaro/Red Mitchell/Percy Heath/Jimmy Garrison/Don Payne, bass; Billy Higgins/Ed Blackwell/Shelly Manne, drums) and quintet (Something Else!!!! only, with Walter Norris on piano) record seven classic albums (Something Else!!!! [1958], Tomorrow is the Question [1959], The Shape of Jazz to Come [1959], Change of the Century [1959], This is our Music [1960], Ornette! [1961], Ornette on Tenor [1961]), and an eighth, this time recorded by an octet (Coleman, alto saxophone; Cherry, pocket trumpet; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Haden, bass; LaFaro, bass; Blackwell, drums; Higgins, drums), pertinently titled Free Jazz (1960).

Biafra

In this revolutionary epoch in which stretches of peoples and nations across the globe but especially in the African World have risen against centuries of pan-European conquest, occupation and subjugation, Coleman’s music has consistently offered an infectiously gripping optimism for freedom.  As the world keenly watches the march of the strikingly innovative freedom movement of the people of Biafra in southwestcentral Africa from bludgeoning genocide perpetrated against them presently by Britain and Nigeria, two compositions from the Coleman repertoire couldn’t be more appropriate to capture the immense transformational possibilities that success in Biafra will have for constituent peoples in the region and elsewhere in Africa: “Turnaround” (February 1959) and “Change of the century” (October 1959).

(Ornette Coleman Quartet, “Turnaround” [personnel: Coleman, alto saxophone; Don Cherry, trumpet; Red Mitchell, bass; Shelly Manne, drums; recorded: Contemporary’s Studio, Los Angeles, US, 23 February 1959])

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

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74th birthday of Stanley Macebuh

(Born 28 December 1942, Aba, Biafra)

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

(Miles Davis Quintet plays Wayne Shorter’s composition, “Footprints” [personnel: Davis, trumpet; Shorter, tenor saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York, US, 24/25 October 1966])

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Britain votes to leave the European Union in a historic referendum conducted on Thursday 23 June 2016: 52% of the electorate vote to leave as against 48% remain (Prime Minister David Cameron to resign consequently); Biafrans, 3,134 miles away in southwestcentral Africa, currently look forward to organising their own referendum on restoration-of-independence from genocidist Nigeria – a state concocted by, ironically, Britain a century ago to serve British strategic and economic interests in perpetuity

(Britain: population 65 million)

(Biafra: population 50 million)

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The sardauna of Sokoto, Nigeria, Britain and the restoration of Igbo independence

Igbo tenacity, drive and relentless optimism to pursue and overcome life’s challenges are acutely an affront to both the sardauna of Sokoto (northwest Nigeria) and British occupation sensibilities in Nigeria. This is particularly evident during the 1930s-1960s epoch when Igbo people spearhead the termination of the British occupation of these lands and peoples of southwestcentral Africa.

This sardauna interview (video below) must have been recorded in the late 1950s/early 1960s – definitely after both the 1945 and 1953 north Nigeria-organised pogroms against Igbo immigrant populations in Jos and Kano respectively. Hundreds of Igbo were murdered during the pogroms and tens of thousands of pounds sterling worth of their property were looted/destroyed at the time. Each pogrom was carried out because of the Igbo vanguard role in the restoration-of-independence movement to free Nigeria from the British conquest and occupation, begun in the 1930s. North Nigeria’s sociopolitical leaderships, effectively British regional clients, were opposed to the restoration of African freedom. No other leadership across the entire Southern World (Africa, Asia, the Caribbean/South America) has such an unenviable record during this unprecedented epoch of transglobal freedom charge. North Nigeria leaderships, indeed, were disposed to the continuing British occupation of Nigeria. It is therefore not in the least surprising that, in year 2015, fifty-five years after the essentially bogus sovereignty that Nigeria exercises, this state’s current head of regime, a genocidist and putschist operative, is imposed on the peoples, thanks to a raft of machinations in which Britain plays a critical role.

Enslaved spaces and 20th/21st centuries replicas

As a result, the occupation regime did not apprehend or prosecute anyone for either the 1945 or 1953 pogroms and the outrages became the “dress rehearsals” for the 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 Igbo genocide when the Nigeria state (as a whole, involving other constituent nations including the Yoruba, the Edo and Urhobo of the west region) with full Britain involvement, and others, murdered 3.1 million Igbo or one-quarter of this nation’s population. Britain, nor in fact any of the other pan-European conquerors of Africa (France, Portugal, Belgium, Spain, Germany), did not create a Nigeria, or whatever names these “Berlin states” in Africa are called, as precursor for African emancipation. On the contrary, the Nigerias of Africa are more of replicas of the enslaved plantations of the Americas (in the previous epoch of nearly 400 years) to perpetuate European World control and exploitation of Africa and Africans in perpetuity.

The enslaved Igbo encountered this with unrelenting courage and defiance in the enslaved estates in the Americas (north, south and the Caribbean), as history shows, and wouldn’t have it either at home! The sardauna interview should be part of History/Politics 101 course on Africa because it does tell one, in a nutshell, the “fate” of the Igbo in Nigeria that north Nigeria, with firm support of Britain, had, carefully, contrived right back in the 1950s. Except the Igbo people have signed up for a concerted suicide, they surely cannot see their destiny emplaced in this space of certain death and immiseration.

This has been the cardinal lesson of the Igbo genocide. Thankfully, some Igbo who were still not sure of the long term implications of the continuing Nigerian occupation of their homeland (since 12 January 1970) have had a baptism of enlightenment since the video of the sardauna interview went viral! Suddenly, historical records become opportunities for rare streams of conscientisation...

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe