Rethinking Africa is a forward looking blog dedicated to the exchange of innovative thinking on issues affecting the advancement of African peoples wherever they are. We provide rigorous and insightful analyses on the issues affecting Africans and their vision of the world.
Pianist, pianists’
pianist whose “encyclopaedic knowledge” (to quote the recurring
phrase from many a critic) of the jazz piano repertoire ensures he ranges effortlessly
in his solo take from the stride traditions of the 1920s-1930s (James Johnson,
Willie “The Lion” Smith, Fats Waller) to the late 1940s/early 1950s
revolutionary breakthroughs of Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols and the later
flights of Cecil Taylor but still sounding Jaki Byard, academic, indelible
footprints on the Charles Mingus jazz workshop – particularly the classic
sextet: Mingus, bass; Johnny Coles, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass
clarinet, flute; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Byard, piano; Dannie
Richmond, drums Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
The “Igbo Question”, as I understand it, is
intrinsically linked to the Igbo strategic goal, presently, which is to end the
occupation of their homeland by genocidist Nigeria – imposed since 13 January
1970. This is phase-IV of the genocide, launched by Nigeria on 29 May 1966. 3.1 million
Igbo people or one-quarter of this nation were murdered by Nigeria and its allies including, especially, Britain, which
supported the genocide right from conceptualisation to execution – politically,
diplomatically, militarily. These were 44 months of uninterrupted, unimaginable carnage and barbarity perpetrated on a people. No single nation or people in Africa
has suffered this gruesome and devastating extent of state(s)-premeditated and
organised genocide in history.
(George
Russell Sextet, “Thoughts” – personnel: Russell, piano; Don Ellis, trumpet;
Dave Baker, trombone; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Steve Swallow, bass; Joe
Hunt, drums [recorded Riverside Record, New York, 28 May 1961])
Given the critical links between the salient features of the
politics of the occupation and the overarching architecture of the genocidal
campaign, everyone knows that the Igbo termination of the occupation is at once
the beginning of their freedom march from Nigeria
and the implementation of an expansive socioeconomic programme of reconstruction
unprecedented in this region of Africa. If this is the case, one does not need an Igbo
“presidency” in Abuja
to achieve this as some Igbo commentators as well as a few others have, at
times, contended. Indeed no Igbo “presidency”, not even one reinforced
with an all-Igbo
personnel in the key cabinet military/police/“security”-positions can halt this
genocide. This campaign has now acquired an inexorable logic to its being. What
the emergence of Boko Haram and its other subalterns have demonstrated in Nigeria is that
the prosecuting agency of the genocide has become very much decentred, very
much motivated, very much engagingly virulent. The typical Boko Haram suicide-operating
cell is a handful-strength, in single digits, and none in the group knows any of
the others until they meet at the designated, targeted site of operation – in which
they, invariably, are not expected to survive! If any survives, they of course
become a member of new cell of hitherto unknown members and the cycle goes
on...
Inalienable Prior to Boko Haram, still
on the Igbo “presidency”, we mustn’t forget that Nigeria was under the leadership of
an Igbo general when the genocide began on 29 May 1966. Thus, Igbo “presidency”,
however attractive the proposition, offers no route to the Igbo halting the genocide.
None whatsoever. The route remains Igbo freedom from Nigeria. This is an inalienable
Igbo right with or without the genocide as I have argued severally. If the
Scots, for instance, one-tenth of the Igbo population and without a genocide
antecedent would wish to leave a union
they have largely been exponential beneficiaries for 300 years (“Rights for
Scots, Rights for the Igbo”, http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/rights-for-scots-rights-for-igbo.html), the Igbo, surely, don’t require any agonisingly turgid
historical and sociological treatise to wish to leave Nigeria.
Contrary to the amazingly ahistorical discourses on the nature
of the state and its survivability in some circles, particularly in Africa, the
state is very much a transient relationship in human history: Kemet, Roman “empire”, Ghana “empire”, Mali “empire”, Czarist
“empire”, Austro-Hungarian “empire”, Ottoman “empire”, British “empire”, Malaya
Federation, West & East Pakistan, Soviet Union,
Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia,
the Sudan...
Twenty-three (23) new states have, for example, emerged in Europe
since the end of the 1980s. Even though a population of about 350 million,
one-third of Africa’s population, Europeans
presently have more states per capita than Africans! And as history shows, the catastrophe is not the collapse of the
state; the catastrophe is the attempt to
destroy or destroy constituent peoples within the state. Here lies the Igbo Question. Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
(Born 11
June 1920, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago)
Perspicacious
pianist, singer, actress and human rights activist whose incomparable
affirmation of her African American identity in Hollywood of the 1940s-1950s remains a towering
legacy Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
Bishop of
The Potter’s House, a 30,000-member church in Dallas, US, one of the leading
contemporary inspirational preachers with global appeal as sermons are broadcast
live on television and the internet, prolific author, film producer Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
Moscow
currently celebrates a week of activity of poetry recital and reading competition
to commemorate the 215th birthday of Pushkin, arguably Russia’s most famous
poet and father of modern Russian literature, whose matrilineal great-grandfather,
Abram Gannibal, is an enslaved African who works himself through to become an engineer,
regional governor and general in the czarist army and rises to the Russian
aristocracy, and whose great-granddaughter Nadedja marries Prince George of
Battenburg of the British royal family, uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen ElizabethII Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
Celebrated
poet, child prodigy who publishes her first poem at 13, first African American
winner of the Pulitzer Prize (1950), Illinois state poet laureate (1968), academic Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is specialist on the state and on genocide & wars in Africa in the post-1966 epoch – beginning with the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-present day, the foundational and most gruesome genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population were murdered by Nigeria and its allies, principally Britain. Africa and the rest of the world largely stood by and watched as the perpetrators enacted this horror most ruthlessly. The world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide. This genocide inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. During the period, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/DRCongo (variously, since the late 1990s) and Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004) and in other wars in Africa. African peoples have, presently, no other choice but exit/dismantle the extant genocide-state (the bane of their existence & progress) & construct own nation-centred states that serve their interests. He is author of several books & papers on the subject and his new book is entitled The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019).
