Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo – Poet, polymath, human rights activist

Today, Monday 16 August 2010, is the 80th birthday of the great Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo. Okigbo is Africa’s most celebrated and most influential poet. He occupied the poetry chair of the continent’s post- (European)conquest literary academy in the 1960s with Chinua Achebe the head of the novel institute and Wole Soyinka, head of drama.

Okigbo’s scholarship and influences are extensive and varied: Igbo history, mythology, art and philosophy, ancient world religious and spiritual heritage encompassing Kemet (“ancient Egypt”), Nri, Babylon, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Greece and Roman as well as the poetry of Ovid, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Yeats, Mallarmé, Eliot, Pound, Hopkins. Right from the outset, Okigbo’s perspicacious intellectual contribution in mapping out the tenets of Africa’s renaissance scholarship is his focus on both redeeming the European occupation’s assault on the spiritual embodiment of the African existence, in the wake of the conquest, and confronting a ruthless genocide state-in-the-making in Nigeria at the first half of the 1960s. Okigbo’s worldview does not tolerate any excuses for either the perpetration or perpetuation of any forms of tyranny and subjugation of peoples. Since then, Okigbo’s poetry has had a profound impact on the work of several poets of his generation as well as on the ever-expanding stretch of the “post”-Igbo genocide generation of poets and writers in other genres.

Crucial site

Fifty years on, the state in contemporary Africa is essentially a genocide-state – exemplified most catastrophically by Nigeria, the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Okigbo’s incisive scholarship (see, especially, Christopher Okigbo, Heavensgate, Silences, Limits, Distances, “Laments of the Masks”, “Laments of the Deer”, “Four Canzones” and Path of Thunder), to the poet’s eternal credit, anticipates the nature and characterisation of the multifocal crises of this development and rigorously interrogates their tragic consequences. For Okigbo, given the operationalising backdrop of the European conquest and occupation, the spiritual is a crucial site of the African resistance and campaign for the restoration of sovereignty. This is because the eventual goal of the occupation’s assault is aimed at burrowing a cataclastic fault-line in the soul of the people to pre-empt or complicate their determined process of recovery on the morrow of the triumph of freedom. Evidently, Okigbo responds to this emergency, in his scholarship, by weaving a multilayered and panoramic landscape of often-complex fabric of overarching architecture of ideas that meditates on the variegated spiritual universe of the people.

Genocide

In the 1960-1966 Nigeria historical context particularly, Okigbo’s scholarship of resistance pitches its tent squarely on behalf of those who would confront blatantly-rigged election results and imposed parties and leaderships, rigged census returns, arbitrary arrests and detentions, rabid and rampant authoritarianism and, most tragically of all, the Nigeria state-organised genocide against the Igbo people. The poet himself was killed defending his beloved motherland. 3.1 million Igbo people were murdered during the 44 months of the genocide – 29 May 1966-12 January 1970. In the gripping lines of his last poem cycle, Path of Thunder, written before the outbreak of the genocide, but published posthumously, Okigbo breathtakingly presages the contours of the cataclysmic consequences of Africa’s foundational genocide of the 20th century and his own likely death during the slaughter:

AND THE HORN may now paw the air howling goodbye …

For the Eagles are now in sight:
Shadows in the horizon –

THE ROBBERS are here in black sudden steps of showers, of
caterpillar –
THE EAGLES have come again,
The eagles rain down on us –

POLITICIANS are back in giant hidden steps of howitzers, of
detonators –
THE EAGLES descend on us,
Bayonets and cannons –

THE ROBBERS descend on us to strip us of our laughter, of our
thunder –

THE EAGLES have chosen their game …
…

POLITICIANS are here in this iron dance of mortars, of
generators –
THE EAGLES are suddenly there,
New stars of iron dawn;

So let the horn paw the air howling goodbye …

O mother mother Earth, unbind me; let this be
my last testament; let this be
The ram’s hidden wish to the sword the sword’s
secret prayer to the scabbard –
…

BEYOND the iron path careering along the same beaten track –

THE GLIMPSE of a dream lies smouldering in a cave,
together with the mortally wounded birds.
Earth, unbind me; let me be the prodigal; let this be
the ram’s ultimate prayer to the tether …

AN OLD STAR departs, leaves us here on the shore
Gazing heavenward for a new star approaching;
The new star appears, foreshadows its going
Before a going and coming that goes on forever…

Many a season

Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo would be appalled by the devastation of Igboland, 40 years after the end of the second phase of the genocide. He wouldn’t rest on his laurels, though, in response to challenge and overcome what is undoubtedly a clear, conscious, fiendishly-scripted and targetedly-driven juggernaut to destroy one of the world’s very talented peoples. Okigbo, who believes in the power of words, would head for his keyboard … and more…

History testifies that the quest for human freedom is not often an engagement pursued over just one season. For many, and the Igbo appear to be incorporated in this group, it is rather much more painfully drawn out; it could entail a cast of over several, long seasons. This trajectory, therefore, inevitably, encapsulates its vivid vicissitudes of pain … grief … opportunities … turmoil … setbacks … triumphs … turmoil … grief …  opportunities … breakthroughs …  What is at stake here is for a more focused, more steadfast, and a more enduring understanding of the huge tasks ahead. Surely this is music in the ears of the resourceful and resilient Igbo people.

The Igbo can and will rebuild their battered towns and villages and economy, which was one of Africa’s fastest growing power houses on the eve of the genocide. Unquestionably, the Igbo will restore their sovereignty. As the Okigboan œuvre demonstrates, human freedom eventually prevails most luminously. Okaa Omee.

British arms to Africa

The new British Conservative-Liberal Democratic government, the first coalition administration in the country since the end of the Second World War, is grappling with significantly cutting the record national budget deficit of £160 billion during the life of the current parliament. The deficit represents about 11 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. Massive cuts are therefore expected across the entire spectrum of government departments’ expenditure with only healthcare and overseas “aid” funding provisions preserved. But even on health services, positions of health managers and other administrators as well as hitherto powerful supervisory boards are being abolished.

So, not even spending on crucial departments as education nor indeed defence (despite the war in Afghanistan and the other country’s security commitments elsewhere in the world) is spared, such is the gravity of this crisis of the British budget deficit. This financial year’s (2010-2011) defence ministry’s core budget is £37 billion and the impending cuts mean that officials here are already looking for sources beyond the treasury (finance ministry) to offset any cash shortfalls. One source recently suggested by Peter Luff, minister for defence equipment, is to boost the export of British weapons. For Africa, a continent where Britain is currently the leading global arms exporter, Luff’s comments to the media on the future drive of his department on the subject is ominous indeed: “There’s a sense that in the past we were rather embarrassed about exporting defence products. There is no such embarrassment in this government.”

There is nothing in Luff’s statement which implies that the previous British Labour governments of 14 years (Prime Minister Brown’s and Blair’s) were anywhere “embarrassed” or ethically challenged on British arms sales/ transfers to Africa. On the contrary, it was indeed during the Labour party tenure that Britain acquired that unenviable status as “leading arms exporter to Africa”. As from 2004, Britain’s annual income from selling arms to Africa crossed the £1 billion threshold. Besides being a major arms supplier to such genocide-states as Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Sudan, Britain also sold arms during this period to 10 out of 13 conflict-stricken countries on the continent. These included states in east/central Africa then involved in the so-called Great Lakes’s War where London in fact sold arms to both sides of the principal protagonists (DRC, Rwanda, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Uganda), which led Charles Onyango-Obbo, the respected Ugandan journalist, to reflect, at the time, that “Britain is supporting both sides [in the war] – it just robs them of any moral authority and a lot of people rightly do despise the British government on this affair.”

Britain should ban all arms sales to Africa immediately and comprehensively. This act should be a priority implemented by the new Cameron government. Africa must not be the arena where Britain wants to seek urgent financial resources, through arms sales, to ease its budgetary difficulties at home or achieve other goals. As I have argued severally in the past decade, British and other exported arms to Africa are used principally by the local recipient regime to murder its own people(s), often targeted constituent nation(s), as inter-state conflicts/wars have been more of the exception. 15million Africans across the continent have been murdered since May 1966 with the use of these weapons in genocidal campaigns and other intra-state conflagrations. We mustn’t fail to recall that the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide which claimed the lives of 3.1 million Igbo people (a quarter of the nation’s population), the foundational genocide of post-European conquest Africa, was carried out by the Nigeria state with the active involvement of the British government of the day – Labour’s Premier Wilson’s. British support for the campaign included steadfast supply of arms and other logistic and diplomatic backing to the genocidist regime in Lagos throughout the gory and devastating duration of the 42 months of slaughter.

In his major speech in Bangalore (India) last week on one of the prominent threads of the existential threat of our age, Prime Minister Cameron may have opened up a laudable, new vista in international relations discourses that requires statespersons to approach pressing global issues more openly, more honestly, more frankly. Arms to Africa is another prominent thread in this threat. Given Britain’s much embedded role in the thread, Africa and the rest of the world do expect the reforming Cameron to administer the Bangalore treatment to this problem at his earliest opportunity.

Congolese diamonds for Belgian Queen Paola – What’s really the fuss?

It isn’t quite clear what the seeming controversy is all about in Belgium and elsewhere in Europe over Queen Paola’s receipt of a gift of Congolese diamonds during a recently concluded visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Paola had accompanied her husband, King Albert II, to represent Belgium at the Kinshasa commemorative festivities to mark the 50th anniversary of the country’s so-called restoration of independence. The DRC’s head of regime Joseph Kabila gave Paola the priceless diamond set of necklace, bracelet and earrings, an impressively rich package indeed which led La Dernière Heure, the influential Belgian daily newspaper, to note, most pointedly: “a gift of choice and certainly with a high price”.

Some commentators in Belgium, the Netherlands and France are apparently surprised, with a few even “shocked” to learn of the Belgian royal family’s “acceptance of such (sic) expensive presents” from a country a Reuters’s and Agence France-Presse’s dispatches on the gift describe, respectively, as “impoverished” and “one of the poorest in the world”.

Really!? It is inconceivable that either Paola or Albert would have thought or would think that the central African country they visited a month ago is anywhere “impoverished” nor is it “one of the poorest [countries] in the world”. The Democratic Republic of Congo is overwhelmingly richer than Belgium and no one is better placed than the Belgian royal family, itself, to confirm this fact of comparative international economics. The family cannot but be aware that King Leopold II, their 19th century “illustrious” ancestor (some would differ by using the adjective “notorious” or even “bloody” to describe Leopold instead) wrestled that Congo basin of central Africa from Africa for the Belgian royalty and state. This was after an indescribably brutal campaign on the African population by Leopold’s private army and forces of the Belgian state during which 10-15 million Africans were murdered. In effect, Leopold’s army ravaged the Congo in search of diamond, rubber, ivory and the like, accumulating gargantuan wealth for the king (by the time Leopold dies in 1909, he had reaped a personal fortune of US$1.1 billion dollars [in early 21st century adjusted value terms] from the Congo genocide, making him one of the richest monarchs of his age) and transforming the nascent Belgian state into a modern European state.

To his credit, Leopold II made no secrets at all of the instrumentalist impact that the riches of the Congo would have on his poor Belgium. He had insisted all along: “I d[idn’t] want to miss the chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake”.

This African cake remains as scrumptious as ever for Belgium! Thirty-one years after Leopold’s death, Nazi Germany invaded Belgium, forcing the then Belgian royal family and government to flee to London on exile. Thanks to the inexhaustible wealth of the Congo bakery, the entire financing of the Belgian war effort including the expenses of the exiled royals and government, which totalled the grand sum of £40 million, was paid off comfortably. Thus, Belgium neither borrowed any money to pay for the war nor was its gold reserves used.

The historic effort made 15 years later by the irrepressible Patrice Lumumba, the young Congolese postal clerk and itinerant salesperson, to recover this bakery of his people for his people was violently suppressed by Belgian special forces and some of their foreign allies operating in concert with those Congolese hostile to the restoration of African independence. Lumumba was murdered and a Joseph Mobutu (or Mobutu Sese Seko) was ultimately installed instead to oversee the preservation of the bakery to its agelong exclusivist access, but with some modification in response to the exigencies of the epoch: Belgian royalty and government, the emerging “francophonie” constellation of states under French hegemony, Mobutu and his African cohorts. Yet, the Congo, Africa and the rest of the world will never forget Lumumba’s moving speech, addressed to his people and the Belgians, after being sworn in as prime minister on that 30th day of June 1960, part of which reads as follows:

… We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being; for it was a noble and just struggle and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force…

The “magnificent African cake”, so graphically expressed by Leopold II (he should know!), is indeed the metaphor at the crux of the Congo story, the Sudan story, the Nigeria story, the Burundi story, the-rest-of-the-Africa story...

It should now be clear that there is no such thing as “poor Africa”. The latter is an inexcusable obfuscation of language – and reality. Besides, it is an unpardonable slur on the humanity of African bakers who year in, year out, bake the cake that they are shut out from eating. Just as the Congo, Africans have been shut into anti-African caricatures of the state where they live, principally, to create incredible levels of wealth – not for themselves and their children and grandchildren and theirs, but for the continuing expropriation by extracontinental interests and their local African allies.

There is no future of African progress in the existing “Berlin states” of Africa. The inexorable logic of these states’ existence is to alienate Africans from their being and wealth. Africans have no other choice but break out of these states and create new states of organic sensibility where they are certain to not only bake their own nation’s cake but participate fully in the meal as well.

Yet, another breaking news from The Hague!

When a person desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize [their] dream.
– Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (London: Thorsons, 1995)

The International Court of Justice in The Hague has declared, in a landmark ruling, that Kosovo’s February 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia did not violate international law. On the contrary, ICJ President Hisashi Owada notes, in his address on the majority verdict (10 jurists to 4), that international law contained “no applicable prohibition” of Kosovo's declaration of independence. The ICJ therefore rejected Serbia’s claims, which it had earlier brought to the court for consideration, that its “territorial integrity was violated” by the Kosova independence proclamation.

These are extraordinary times indeed… It mustn’t be forgotten that it has been under the seemingly protective umbrella of this “[state’s] territorial integrity was violated”-dubious legal mantra that many a regime across the world, particularly in Africa, have since the 1960s waged genocidal and other military campaigns against constituent nations and peoples within the population who seek their own independence and state. The most notorious of this occurrence is of course the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide. 3.1 million Igbo people were murdered during the timeframe of 42 months. For the Harold Wilson British government, which was centrally involved in the planning and the execution of the genocide and which often prided itself at the time as a more credible spokesperson of the campaign than envoys of the genocidist junta in Lagos, this mantra was the linchpin of its publicity and lobbying efforts across varying sociopolitical forums and circles during those 42 catastrophic months to “rationalise” its sordid role.

Forty years on, both the ICJ and the International Criminal Court, also in The Hague, have made it impossible for anyone, anywhere, to invoke some statute of international law as a “rationalisation” to embark on the murder of any people or peoples within its frontiers on the bogus basis of operating for or on behalf of this existing state’s territorial status. No heads of regime or indeed any other regime operatives enjoy immunity, as a result of their office, for murdering people or peoples in their population and there is no statute of limitations for the crime of genocide or/and war crimes. Forty four years after the beginning of the Igbo genocide, today’s ICJ ruling is a giant step forward in bringing the goals of the restoration of the sovereignty of Biafra very much closer. As the saying goes, the ball is now clearly in the Igbo court.

Nigeria perpetuates violence and insecurity in Igboland

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

In these very turbulent times, the recent high profile summit of leading Igbo human rights scholars (including respected literary critic Ben Obumselu) and activists (including influential lawyer Olisa Agbakoba) at the Ofuobi African Centre, Enuugwu, may well be the turning point on the ground in Igboland to decisively chart the final phase of the course to the restoration of Igbo sovereignty.

Away from the usual heart-rending equivocations and staggering untruths that emanate from occupation-appointed officials and acolytes and by uncritical commentators (some of who are, amazingly, Igbo!) on the source of the current violence and insecurity in Igboland, the summit’s communiqué lays the case squarely on the Nigeria state – its “siege and occupation” of Igboland, as the text appositely states. It elaborates, most profoundly:

[Igboland] has become militarized with a vast deployment of expeditionary and predatory police and army personnel who are from outside the region. For instance, there are 61 Police check-points between Abakal[e]k[e] … to Nsukka … (a distance of about 130km). In [contrast] between Obolo-Afo [Igboland] and Lokoja [Nigeria] (a distance of nearly 400 km) no checkpoints exist. This state of siege is exemplified by the current [situation] of … [Igbo] cities [including] Aba, [Enuugwu, Abakaleke, Onicha, Owere] and Nnewi – hitherto the fastest growing and thriving industrial cum commercial cities in the African continent now being turned into refuse dumps and ghettos. Businesses that would have provided jobs to engage our youths have been strangulated by incompetent and criminal leadership.

The summiteers conclude with a 10-point resolution and demand made on the occupation state, two of which are particularly pertinent:

1. Immediate demilitarisation of Igboland by dismantling all checkpoints and security barricades that it has set up across the country

2. Immediate rescinding of the deployment of Nigeria military forces to Igboland on the spurious mission of fighting kidnapping, instead reorienting policing from expeditionary operations to intelligence-based operations in cooperation with communities

What is clearly evident is that the accent, presently, on Nigeria’s unrelenting genocide on the Igbo, since the 1966-1970 foundational stretch when it murdered 3.1 million of the people, focuses on demolishing the crucial socioeconomic architecture of their collective being. Pointedly, this preoccupation constitutes one of the five acts of genocide explicitly defined in article 2 of the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: “deliberately inflicting upon the group conditions of life designed to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (the Sudan’s head of regime Omar al-Bashir’s recent indictment for genocide, by the International Criminal Court, was effected partly because of his regime’s perpetration of this particular act of genocide in Darfur – see previous blog posting).

If one refers, for example, to the innumerable public statements on the Igbo genocide made over the years by Olusegun Obasanjo, a fiendish operative of this heinous crime and ex-head of regime in Nigeria, Nigeria has since been deeply troubled by its failure to accomplish its dreadful objective of annihilating the Igbo population 44 years ago. It therefore considers its current project of destroying the socioeconomic heritage and viability of the Igbo nation a sufficiently lethal tactical plank to accomplish its much vaunted, gruesome mission. Since 1970, the primary ambition of a typical Nigerian police officer graduating from police colleges in Nigeria is to be deployed to Igboland; he/she readily bribes their commandants to receive the coveted Igboland posting where they make an incredible fortune in just a few years of their placements at the myriad checkpoints, detaining/kidnapping/extorting money or a range of choice consumer products from road users. Even Igbo school children going to and from school, are not exempt from this officially-sponsored, openly-organised brigandage. Igbo homes and businesses (particularly shops and markets), as can be expected, are also regular targets of this institutionalised thieving spree. We mustn’t forget that, just over seven years to the day (10 July 2003), it was a Raphael Ige, a Nigerian assistant inspector general of police, who spectacularly carried out the kidnapping of then governor Chris Ngige of the Anambra region, northwest Igboland. Ige was a key executioner in the Ngige abduction plot, which was planned and authorised by the Obasanjo regime to divert Anambra public funds to Obasanjo-recruited hirelings opposed to the ongoing reconstruction of Igboland.

Abduction, detention and extortion constitute the 3-headed monster that the Nigerian occupation employs to savage the Igbo economy – most ruthlessly and most remorselessly. In essence, and perhaps most perversely cast, the Igbo nation subsidises its very own occupation – an indirect taxation thereof, amounting to millions and millions of US dollars of savings annually for the near-bankrupt Nigeria treasury. Given the paltry state of its finances, Nigeria cannot afford its continuing occupation of Igboland without its simultaneous ravaging of the legendary wealth of Igboland. The Igbo therefore carry the burden of this occupation with all its tragic ramifications. There are no comparable occupations elsewhere in the contemporary world with the same viciousness and severity.

What happens next in Igboland? When will the Nigeria military and police forces depart – as duly demanded by the Igbo human rights practitioners? How do the Igbo shut down this occupation? The Igbo demands are for immediate implementation. Nigeria must comply with these demands. The Igbo should now ensure that Nigeria evacuates its occupying military and police forces from their country forthwith. The Igbo are not Nigerian. The Igbo are from Biafra. The Igbo are Biafran. Whilst the Igbo worked extraordinarily hard by playing the vanguard role in the liberation of Nigeria from the British conquest (beginning from the 1930s), the Igbo ceased to be Nigerian on 29 May 1966. This was the day Nigeria launched the Igbo genocide. The Igbo renouncement of their Nigerian citizenship is the irrevocable Igbo indictment on a state that embarked on the destruction of 3.1 million Igbo people, one-quarter of the nation’s population at the time. The only future a genocide-state has is its dismantling – nothing else.

The Igbo should now stop paying the millions and millions of US dollars worth of expropriation tax that sustains the occupation and their subjugation. One must never, ever, be a participant in their incarceration, their deindividuation. A general, indefinite strike across the Igbo country should be called forthwith, demanding the unconditional dismantling of Nigeria’s barriers of extortion and expropriation, and the evacuation of its military/police bases from their land. An extensive and continuing-evolving organisation is required as this march of freedom develops. All strata of the 50 million Igbo population, at home and abroad, must be mobilised – particularly women organisations, farmers, youth/students’ bodies, the redoubtable umuada and umunna circuits, market/allied trade guilds, custodians and overseers of Igbo traditional religious places of worship, the clergy and the rest of the intellectuals. The Igbo clergy, for instance, has its work cut out. The role of the church in national freedom movements has been invaluable as the world has seen in places like Poland, the United States (the African American church, for example), several countries in Latin America and, of course, back home in Biafra as occurred 44 years ago – surely in the next sermon in the churches and cathedrals of the land, the congregation will be interested to learn of the legacies of the venerables Akanu Ibiam, Godfery Okoye, Benjamin Nwankiti… The Igbo expect their intellectuals, many of who are part of the world’s best and brightest, to play a critical role in responding to this existential threat to their nation. Already, there exists a rich legacy of the outstandingly selfless role played by Igbo intellectuals to Igboland at the onset of the genocide to build upon.

Finally, the rest of the world must know of the historic Enuugwu human rights community declaration and the measures being taken by the Igbo to free their homeland. The text of the communiqué should be distributed worldwide, particularly to institutions and agencies working on genocide, human rights, peace and freedom. The use of all the creative avenues of new technology is paramount. Igbo website networks will indeed be very busy in the coming days and weeks. The millions of Igbo émigrés, especially those in Europe and North America, should begin, right away, to lobby their elected representatives(members of parliament/deputies/congresspeople/senators) on these breathtaking developments and also seek support and solidarity from civil and human rights bodies in their community, region or country of domicile.

Students should take up this campaign in their unions, clubs and societies on resumption after the summer vacation. The office of Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, The Hague, should be contacted at once with the astonishingly vast documentation that the current and previous phases of the Igbo genocide attest to. Last year’s British Broadcasting Corporation’s investigation of the Nigeria police murdering-escapades in Enuugwu as well as that of Amnesty International’s wider canvass of investigation on the same police barbarities in other parts of occupied Igboland and Nigeria (see links below) are indispensible additions to the existing dossier on the genocide:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8400799.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8401119.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7986039.stm

http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AFR44/038/2009/en/f09b1c15-77b4-40aa-a608-b3b01bde0fc5/afr440382009en.pdf

Update on the al-Bashir indictment!

Appropriately, the The Hague-based International Criminal Court has issued a second arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the head of the Sudanese regime, charging him of committing genocide in Darfur (west of the country). His regime has, in total, murdered 300,000 Darfuri since 2003 and forced 2.5 million survivors into refugee camps in neighbouring Chad. The text of the current indictment is succinct and unambiguous: al-Bashir is accused of “genocide by killing, genocide by causing serious bodily or mental harm and genocide by deliberately inflicting on each target group conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction”. Earlier on, in March 2009, the ICC had issued its first arrest warrant for al-Bashir to stand trial for “war crimes and crimes against humanity” in Darfur, making him the first head of state in office to be so indicted.

For 44 years, since Nigeria inaugurated the genocide-state in Africa, murdering 3.1 million Igbo people, Africans have eagerly looked forward to these laudable developments from The Hague: the issuance of arrest warrants, by the ICC, to apprehend the head of an African regime to stand trial for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Surely, the time for reckoning has drawn much closer, than ever before, for the principal, foundational architects of this continental age of slaughter who are still alive and who are responsible for the murder of 3.1 million during 1966-1970.

Let freedom ring!

The recent meeting in Nairobi between visiting US Vice-President Joe Biden and Salva Kiir Mayardit, president of the south Sudan semi-autonomous region, is surely one of the most important political developments of the first half of 2010 in Africa. The meeting focused on the ongoing preparations in the south Sudan to organise the historic January 2011 restoration-of-independence referendum for the people. Most observers are in no doubt that the region will register a decisive “yes” vote to free itself from decades of Arab/muslim occupation and subjugation. This outcome will signal the much expected beginning of the formal unravelling of the “Berlin-states” that have wreaked havoc in Africa since 1885.

The US’s very proactive support to the referendum process is highly commendable. Biden promised Kirr that the US would provide technical assistance to guarantee a successful outcome of the exercise. Additionally, and perhaps, more crucially, Biden called on the rest of the world to robustly support the referendum planning to “ensur[e] that all necessary measures are in place for a peaceful outcome that is internationally recognized.” Washington’s is indeed an unprecedented position to take on such a pivotal subject in Africa and its impact will have far reaching ramifications across the continent. African scholars, human rights, peace, freedom and other activists strenuously involved in the construction of post-“Berlin-states” in Africa couldn’t have had their work cut out more readily. They should now be booking their flights to south Sudan to monitor and be participants in history in the making… The south Sudan referendum will set the precedent that will chart the trajectory of the restoration of independence for all occupied and oppressed peoples in Africa subsequently.

The devastation wrought on the African humanity by the “Berlin-states” can never be exaggerated. These are states of conquest that European conqueror countries (Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Spain) imposed on Africa and currently maintained by a shard of disreputable African regimes to exploit and despoil the continent’s human and material resources. Everyone knows that these states cannot serve African interests. The African “overseeing” of the contraptions (beginning, pointedly, in the Sudan in January 1956), which should have been totally dismantled on the eve of the presumed “departure” of their creators back to Europe in the 1950s/60s, couldn’t be more illustrative of the destructiveness of these states’ ontological mission. The overseers pushed the states into even deeper depths of genocidal and kakistocratic notoriety in the past 54 years as the grim examples of particularly Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sudan itself depressingly underscore. 15 million Africans have been murdered by African-led regimes in these states and elsewhere in Africa since the Igbo genocide of 1966-1970.

In 1990, I published The Biafra War, Nigeria and the Aftermath, one of my early books on the Igbo genocide. Such was my optimism of the possibilities of Africans to dismantle the “Berlin-states” in the future, despite the apparent bleakness of the times, that I noted the following in the concluding pages of the study. The unfolding, breathtaking events in the south Sudan are so reassuring that I am only too willing to share these thoughts of 20 years ago once again:

“Either in peace or war, the existence of the European post-colonial state is inimical to the interests of African peoples. It is a state that cannot provide the fundamental needs of Africans … The African humanity is presently gripped in a grave crisis for survival. It is now time that it abandoned the contrived post-colonial state in order to survive … African nations, [namely] Igbo, Wolof, Yoruba, Asante, Baganda, Bakongo, Bambara, etc., etc … remain the basis for the regeneration of Africa’s development … [and] the sites of the continent’s intellectual and other cultural creativity … What is being stressed here is that African peoples, themselves, must decide on the … issue of sovereignty … even if the outcome were to lead to 1000 states … For the future survival of the African humanity, let no more Africans have to die for the defence of, or for upholding the territorial frontier of any post-colonial state. No precious life should be wasted for its preservation.”