Thankfully, for the interest of posterity, the Igbo genocide, perpetrated by the Nigeria state, is one of the most documented crimes against humanity. Leading university and public libraries across Europe (particularly in Britain, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Denmark and Sweden) and North America have invaluable repositories of books, state papers (including, crucially, hitherto classified material now declassified as part of mandatory timeframe provisions and freedom-to-information legislations), church papers, human rights/anti-genocide/anti-war groups’ campaign papers, reports, photographs and interviews, Red Cross/other third sector papers, reports and photographs, newspaper/newsmagazine/radio/ television/video archives and sole individual depositories, some of which are classified as “anonymous contributors”.
These data variously include extensive coverage of news and analyses of varying features of the genocide between May 1966 and January 1970 as well as still photographs and reels and reels of film footage of the devastating impact of the genocidist’s “starvation weapon” attack on Igbo children and older people, the genocidist air force’s carpet bombings of Igbo population centres (especially refugee establishments, churches, shrines, schools, hospitals, markets, homes, farmlands and playgrounds) and the haunting photographs and associated material that capture the sheer savagery of the slaughter of 100,000 Igbo in north Nigeria towns and villages and elsewhere in parts of west Nigeria (especially Lagos and suburbs, Ibadan, Abeokuta, Oyo, Benin) during the first phase of the genocide in May to October 1966. A stream of these archival references has flowed steadily onto the youtube website as well as other internet outlets and much more material on the genocide will be available online in the months and years ahead. On the whole, these documentations are a treasure trove for the conscientious scholar and researcher on the genocide. For the would-be prosecutor of the perpetrators of this crime, they couldn’t have wished anything more for that crucial resource base to embark on their historic enterprise. A total of 3.1 million Igbo, or a quarter of the nation’s population at the time, were murdered in the genocide, the worst in Africa since the 19th century. On the morrow of 44 months of unrelenting slaughtering, Nigeria, the perpetrator, emerges as the undisputed obligatory haematophagous monster in this southwestcentral region of Africa. Its death-march on the Igbo and Igboland was soon relayed, tragically, across the continent – Uganda, the Congos, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Darfur … resulting in the murder of additional 12 million Africans in the subsequent 40 years.
Quite auspiciously, the record of those who ordered/executed the Igbo genocide makes no pretences, offers no excuses, whatsoever, about the goal of their dreadful mission – such was the maniacal insouciance and rabid Igbophobia that propelled the project. The principal language used in the prosecution of the genocide was Hausa. Appropriately, the words of the ghoulish anthem of the genocide, published and broadcast on Kaduna radio and television throughout the duration of the crime, are in Hausa: Mu je mu kashe nyamiri/Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su/Mu chi mata su da yan mata su/Mu kwashe kaya su (English translation: “Let’s go kill the damned Igbo/Kill off their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property”).
The Hausa word for war is yaki. Whilst Hausa speakers would employ this word to refer to the involvement/combat services of their grandfathers, fathers, uncles, sons, brothers, other relatives and friends in “Boma” (reference to World War II Burma [contemporary Myanmar] military campaigns/others in southeast Asia, fighting for the British against the Japanese) or even in the post-1960s Africa-based “peace-keeping” military engagements in the Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, east Africa, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Sudan, they rarely use yaki to describe the 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 mass murders of Igbo people. In Hausaspeak, the latter is either referred to as lokochi mu kashe nyamiri (English past tense: “when we murdered the damned Igbo”) or lokochi muna kashe nyamiri (English past continuous tense: “when we were murdering the damned Igbo”). Pointedly, this “lokochi” (when, time) conflates the timeframes that encapsulate the two phases of the genocide (29 May 1966-29 October 1967 and 6 July 1967-12 January 1970), a reminder, if one is required, for those who bizarrely, if not mischievously, wish to break this organic link.
Elsewhere, genocidist documentation on this crime is equally malevolent and brazenly vulgar. A study of the genocide-time/“post”-genocide era interviews, comments, broadcasts and writings on the campaign by key genocidist commanders, commandants and “theorists” and propagandists such as Benjamin Adekunle, Yakubu Danjuma, Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo, Hassan Katsina, Ibrahim Haruna, Oluwole Rotimi, Obafemi Awolowo, Anthony Enaharo and Allison Ayida underscores the trend. A brief review of Obasanjo’s contribution (published in his memoirs, My Command) that focuses on his May 1969 direct orders to his air force to destroy an international Red Cross aircraft, carrying relief supplies to the encircled and blockaded Igbo, is crucially appropriate.
Obasanjo had “challenged”, to quote his words, Captain Gbadomosi King (genocidist air force pilot), who he had known since 1966, to “produce results” in stopping further international relief flight deliveries to the Igbo. Within a week of his infamous challenge, 5 June 1969, Obasanjo recalls nostalgically, Gbadomosi King “redeemed his promise”. Gbadomosi King had shot down a clearly marked, in coming relief-bearing International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) DC-7 plane near Eket, south Biafra, with the loss of its 3-person crew.
Obasanjo’s perverse satisfaction over the aftermath of this horrendous crime is fiendish, chillingly revolting. He writes: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando Division [the notorious unit Obasanjo, who later becomes Nigeria’s head of regime for 11 years, commanded] was profound. It raised morale of all service personnel, especially of the Air Force detachment concerned and the troops they supported in [my] 3 Marine Commando Division”.
Yet despite the huffing and puffing, the raving commanding brute is essentially a coward who lacks the courage to face up to a world totally outraged by his gruesome crime. Instead, Obasanjo, the quintessential Caliban, cringes into a stupor and beacons to his Prospero, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson (as he, Obansanjo, indeed unashamedly acknowledges in his My Command) to “sort out” the raging international outcry generated by the destruction of the ICRC plane...
Thursday, 26 May 2011
Thursday, 19 May 2011
29 May 1966
For the Igbo, prior to 29 May 1966, three important holidays were high up on their annual calendar: the Igbo National Day, the iri ji, or the New Yam Festival, and 1 October. The latter was the day of celebration for the restoration of independence for peoples in Nigeria after 60 years of the British conquest and occupation. Or, so were the thoughts predicated on this date’s designation.
The Igbo were one of the very few constituent nations in what was Nigeria, again prior to 29 May 1966, who understood, fully, the immense liberatory possibilities ushered in by 1 October and the interlocking challenges of the vast reconstructionary work required for state and societal transformation in the aftermath of foreign occupation. The Igbo had the most robust economy in the country in their east regional homeland, supplied the country with its leading writers, artists and scholars, supplied the country’s top universities with vice-chancellors (or presidents) and leading professors and scientists, supplied the country with its first indigenous university (the prestigious university at Nsukka), supplied the country with its leading and most spirited pan-Africanists, supplied the country with its top diplomats, supplied the country’s leading high schools with head teachers and administrators, supplied the country with its top bureaucrats, supplied the country with its leading businesspeople, supplied the country with an educated, top-rated professional officers-corps for its military and police forces, supplied the country with its leading sportspersons, essentially and effectively worked the country’s rail, postal, telegraphic, power, shipping and aviation services to quality standards not seen since in Nigeria … And they were surely aware of the vicissitudes engendered by this historic age precisely because the Igbo nation played the vanguard role in the freeing of Nigeria from Britain, beginning from the mid-1930s. The commentator, Sabella Ogbobode Abidde, couldn’t have been more emphatic in summarising the thrust of the Igbo mission during the period:
The Igbo’s break with Nigeria occurred catastrophically on 29 May 1966. On this day, leaders of the Hausa-Fulani north region (feudal overlords, muslim clergy, military, police, businesspeople, academics, civic servants, other public officials and patrons), who were long opposed to the liberation of Nigeria (there were no comparable clusters of political, cultural, ideational, religious, national or racial groupings anywhere else in the Southern World, during the era, which had a similar, unenviable disposition of hostility to emancipation from the European occupation of their lands as the Hausa-Fulani leadership), launched waves of premeditated genocidal attacks on Igbo migrant populations resident in the north. These attacks were later expanded to Igboland itself, Biafra, during the second phase which began on 6 July 1967, boosted particularly by the robust participation in the slaughter by the Yoruba, Urhobo, and Edo nations of west Nigeria as well as others elsewhere in the country.
The Yoruba support for the genocide as from 6 July 1967, for instance, bears all the hallmark of a squelching cadence of opportunism. The Yoruba appeared to have lost, quite spectacularly, the 1930s-1960s Igbo-Yoruba competitive “preparatory drive” to develop the high-level humanpower and ancillary resources required to run the prospective post-conquest state after the British departure. They therefore viewed the outbreak of the mid-1966 Igbo mass killings in the north region and elsewhere as welcome season to “avenge” their “loss” during the great sociocultural rivalry of those previous three decades, clutching onto any bomb or missile available from July 1967 on their onward death-march east to lob, remorselessly, into besieged Igboland, into an Igbo home, Igbo school, Igbo shrine, Igbo church, Igbo hospital, Igbo office, Igbo market, Igbo farmland, Igbo factory/industrial enterprise, Igbo children’s playground, Igbo town hall, Igbo refugee centre …
Benjamin Adekunle, one of the most fiendish of the genocidist commanders of the time had no qualms, whatsoever, in boasting about the goal of this horrendous mission when he told an August 1968 press conference, attended by journalists including those from the international media: “We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces march into the centre of I[g]bo territory, we shoot at everything, even at things that do not move”. It is astonishing how genocidist cravings and dispositions build on gory precedents so markedly as the following two examples attest. First, in 1891, Karl Peters, the head of the German occupation regime in east Africa, gave the following haunting description of some of the gruesome massacres his forces had recently carried out in the region: “I shall show the Vagogo what the Germans are! Plunder the villages, throw fire into the houses, and smash everything that will not burn ... At about three, I marched further south toward the other villages ... [T]orches were thrown into the houses, and axes worked to destroy all that the fire did not achieve. So by half past four, twelve villages had been burned down ... My gun had become so hot from so much firing I could hardly hold it”. Second, in October 1904, Lother von Trotha, the general officer commanding the German military forces engaged in the genocide of the Herero people and others in Namibia issued the following proclamation, which he unambiguously captioned an “Extermination Order”: “The Herero people will have to leave the country. Otherwise I shall force them to do so by means of guns ... [E]very Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any more women and children. I shall drive them back to their people - otherwise I shall order shots to be fired at them. These are my orders to the Herero people”. The outcome of von Trotha’s campaign was cataclysmic. No sectors of the Herero population, nor indeed those of the other nations in the region such as the Nama and the Berg Damara escaped the resultant genocide as the following statistics from Germany’s own 1911 census figures for the area show. In that year, there were 15,130 Herero, compared with a population figure of 80,000 in 1904, indicating that at least 80 per cent were destroyed in the holocaust. For the Nama, their population in 1911 was 9,781 people compared with 20,000 in 1904, recording a 51 per cent German annihilation score. There were no detailed, broken down, figures for the Berg Damara, but the Germans reckoned that about 30 per cent of them were murdered in the genocide.
To return to the post-Peters/von Trotha-genocide epoch of the mid-20th century Africa, notably between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970, Adekunle and his extended trail of genocidist hordes, starting from the sabon gari-killing fields’ launch pads that were Igbo homes and churches and offices and businesses in north Nigeria to the “centre of I[g]bo territory”, 400 miles to the south, did murder 3.1 million Igbo people – a haunting tally which indeed includes those slaughtered during the Adekunleist “everything that moves”-targeting, duly promised in the infamous press briefing. As for the outcome of the “things that do not move”-assault category, the genocidists were hardly off target. Their gratuitous destruction of the famed Igbo economic infrastructure, one of the most advanced in Africa of the era, is indescribably barbaric. This was followed, subsequently (post-January 1970), by the genocidists’ implementation of the most dehumanising raft of socioeconomic package of deprivation in occupied Igboland, not seen anywhere else in Africa. The brigandage includes the following:
1. Seizure of the multimillion Igbo capital asset in Igwe Ocha/Port Harcourt and elsewhere
2. Comprehensive sequestration of Igbo liquid asset in Nigeria (as of January 1970), bar the £20.00 (twenty pounds) doled out to the male surviving head of an Igbo family
3. Exponential expropriation of the rich Igbo oil resources from the Abia, Delta, Imo and Rivers administrative regions
4. Blanket policy of non-development of Igboland
5. Aggressive degradation of socioeconomic life of Igboland (As if another empirical reminder is yet required to underscore this obviously grave situation at stake, the following news item from the Lagos Vanguard [16 November 2009] is typically illustrative: “Journalists in … Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, [Enuugwu] and Imo [central Igboland administrative regions] have threatened to embark on hunger strike to protest the bad conditions of federal roads [there]. They regretted that the failed roads [have] claimed many lives and property worth billions of naira”.)
6. Ignoring ever-expanding soil erosion/landslides and other pressing ecological emergencies particularly in northwest Igboland
7. Continuing reinforcement of the overall state of siege of Igboland …
These latter measures, which inaugurated phase-III of the Igbo genocide, constitute 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”.
We mustn’t fail to add, finally, that these measures were drafted and implemented largely by Yoruba economists and lawyers led by Obafemi Awolowo which included, ironically, Sam Aluko who, along with all members of his family, enjoyed the generosity of a political asylum in Igboland when his life was in serious danger during the vicious intra-Yoruba political violence of the early 1960s.
The Harold Wilson-led British government of the day underwrote this devastating stretch of genocide militarily, politically and diplomatically – from its early conceptualisation, liaising continuously with the Gowon-Mohammed-Danjuma genocidist cells of the Nigeria military at varying stages between January and May 1966, to the savage, spiralling aerial, naval and ground onslaughts on encircled Igbo population centres (the “shooting everything”-raging inferno) especially between March 1968 and January 1970. London’s strategic goal in supporting the genocide was to “punish” the Igbo for “daring” to spearhead the termination of the British occupation of Nigeria. This foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa and the worst in 20th century Africa would probably not have occurred without British active involvement. It is inconceivable that a contemporary British government would continue to delay any much longer in offering its unreserved apology to the Igbo for Britain’s role in the execution of this genocide and pay reparations to the survivors.
29 May 1966 is undoubtedly the most tragic day in the annals of Igbo history. It was a day that the Igbo were subjected to an overwhelming violence and unremitting brutality by supposedly fellow countrymen and women. Ironically, the atrocity was clinically organised, supervised and implemented by the very state that the Igbo had played such a crucial role to liberate from foreign conquest and occupation. This state, now violently taken over by murderous anti-African sociopolitical forces, had pointedly violated its most sacred tenet of responsibility to its Igbo citizens – provision of security. Instead of providing security to these citizens, the Nigeria state murdered 3.1 million of them. The ghoulish anthem for the genocide, broadcast uninterruptedly in Hausa on Kaduna radio and television throughout its duration, was unambiguously clear on the principal objective of this crime against humanity:
Yet this 29th day of May 1966 is also the Igbo Day of Affirmation. The Igbo people resolved on this day, the day that marked the beginning of the genocide, to survive the catastrophe. This was the day the Igbo ceased to be Nigerians forever – right there on the grounds of those death camps in the sabon gari residential districts and offices and rail stations and coach stations and airports and churches and schools and markets and hospitals across north Nigeria. They created the state of Biafra in its place and tasked it to provide security to the Igbo and prevent Nigeria, a genocide state, from accomplishing its dreadful mission. The heuristic symbolism defined hitherto by 1 October shattered in the wake of this historic Igbo declaration. For the Igbo, the renouncement of Nigerian citizenship was the permanent Igbo indictment of a state that had risen thunderously to murder its people.
The Igbo could not have survived the genocide if they still remained Nigerian. They rightly chose the former course of their fate and not the latter which they cast adrift. Consequently, Nigeria collapsed as a state with any serious prospects for the future. Despite the 4 murderous years of siege, the Igbo demonstrated a far greater creative drive towards constructing an advanced civilisation in Biafra than what Nigeria has all but wished it could achieve in the past 40 years. Nigeria gburu ochu; Nigeria mere alu. Surely, Nigeria couldn’t recover from committing this heinous crime – this crime against humanity, this Malebolge.
29 May is therefore a beacon of the resilient spirit of human overcoming of the most desperate, unimaginably brutish forces. It is the new Igbo National Holiday. It is a day of meditation and remembrance in every Igbo household anywhere in the world for the 3.1 million murdered, gratitude and thanksgiving for those who survived, and the collective Igbo rededication to achieve the urgent goal of the restoration of Igbo sovereignty.
The Igbo were one of the very few constituent nations in what was Nigeria, again prior to 29 May 1966, who understood, fully, the immense liberatory possibilities ushered in by 1 October and the interlocking challenges of the vast reconstructionary work required for state and societal transformation in the aftermath of foreign occupation. The Igbo had the most robust economy in the country in their east regional homeland, supplied the country with its leading writers, artists and scholars, supplied the country’s top universities with vice-chancellors (or presidents) and leading professors and scientists, supplied the country with its first indigenous university (the prestigious university at Nsukka), supplied the country with its leading and most spirited pan-Africanists, supplied the country with its top diplomats, supplied the country’s leading high schools with head teachers and administrators, supplied the country with its top bureaucrats, supplied the country with its leading businesspeople, supplied the country with an educated, top-rated professional officers-corps for its military and police forces, supplied the country with its leading sportspersons, essentially and effectively worked the country’s rail, postal, telegraphic, power, shipping and aviation services to quality standards not seen since in Nigeria … And they were surely aware of the vicissitudes engendered by this historic age precisely because the Igbo nation played the vanguard role in the freeing of Nigeria from Britain, beginning from the mid-1930s. The commentator, Sabella Ogbobode Abidde, couldn’t have been more emphatic in summarising the thrust of the Igbo mission during the period:
The Igbo nation ha[s] attributes most other Nigerian nationalities can only dream of and are what most other nations [are] not. The Igbo made Nigeria better. Any wonder then that the Igbo can do without Nigeria; but Nigeria and her myriad nationalities cannot do without the Igbo? Take the Igbo out of the Nigeria equation … and Nigeria will be gasping for air.
The Igbo’s break with Nigeria occurred catastrophically on 29 May 1966. On this day, leaders of the Hausa-Fulani north region (feudal overlords, muslim clergy, military, police, businesspeople, academics, civic servants, other public officials and patrons), who were long opposed to the liberation of Nigeria (there were no comparable clusters of political, cultural, ideational, religious, national or racial groupings anywhere else in the Southern World, during the era, which had a similar, unenviable disposition of hostility to emancipation from the European occupation of their lands as the Hausa-Fulani leadership), launched waves of premeditated genocidal attacks on Igbo migrant populations resident in the north. These attacks were later expanded to Igboland itself, Biafra, during the second phase which began on 6 July 1967, boosted particularly by the robust participation in the slaughter by the Yoruba, Urhobo, and Edo nations of west Nigeria as well as others elsewhere in the country.
The Yoruba support for the genocide as from 6 July 1967, for instance, bears all the hallmark of a squelching cadence of opportunism. The Yoruba appeared to have lost, quite spectacularly, the 1930s-1960s Igbo-Yoruba competitive “preparatory drive” to develop the high-level humanpower and ancillary resources required to run the prospective post-conquest state after the British departure. They therefore viewed the outbreak of the mid-1966 Igbo mass killings in the north region and elsewhere as welcome season to “avenge” their “loss” during the great sociocultural rivalry of those previous three decades, clutching onto any bomb or missile available from July 1967 on their onward death-march east to lob, remorselessly, into besieged Igboland, into an Igbo home, Igbo school, Igbo shrine, Igbo church, Igbo hospital, Igbo office, Igbo market, Igbo farmland, Igbo factory/industrial enterprise, Igbo children’s playground, Igbo town hall, Igbo refugee centre …
Benjamin Adekunle, one of the most fiendish of the genocidist commanders of the time had no qualms, whatsoever, in boasting about the goal of this horrendous mission when he told an August 1968 press conference, attended by journalists including those from the international media: “We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces march into the centre of I[g]bo territory, we shoot at everything, even at things that do not move”. It is astonishing how genocidist cravings and dispositions build on gory precedents so markedly as the following two examples attest. First, in 1891, Karl Peters, the head of the German occupation regime in east Africa, gave the following haunting description of some of the gruesome massacres his forces had recently carried out in the region: “I shall show the Vagogo what the Germans are! Plunder the villages, throw fire into the houses, and smash everything that will not burn ... At about three, I marched further south toward the other villages ... [T]orches were thrown into the houses, and axes worked to destroy all that the fire did not achieve. So by half past four, twelve villages had been burned down ... My gun had become so hot from so much firing I could hardly hold it”. Second, in October 1904, Lother von Trotha, the general officer commanding the German military forces engaged in the genocide of the Herero people and others in Namibia issued the following proclamation, which he unambiguously captioned an “Extermination Order”: “The Herero people will have to leave the country. Otherwise I shall force them to do so by means of guns ... [E]very Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any more women and children. I shall drive them back to their people - otherwise I shall order shots to be fired at them. These are my orders to the Herero people”. The outcome of von Trotha’s campaign was cataclysmic. No sectors of the Herero population, nor indeed those of the other nations in the region such as the Nama and the Berg Damara escaped the resultant genocide as the following statistics from Germany’s own 1911 census figures for the area show. In that year, there were 15,130 Herero, compared with a population figure of 80,000 in 1904, indicating that at least 80 per cent were destroyed in the holocaust. For the Nama, their population in 1911 was 9,781 people compared with 20,000 in 1904, recording a 51 per cent German annihilation score. There were no detailed, broken down, figures for the Berg Damara, but the Germans reckoned that about 30 per cent of them were murdered in the genocide.
To return to the post-Peters/von Trotha-genocide epoch of the mid-20th century Africa, notably between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970, Adekunle and his extended trail of genocidist hordes, starting from the sabon gari-killing fields’ launch pads that were Igbo homes and churches and offices and businesses in north Nigeria to the “centre of I[g]bo territory”, 400 miles to the south, did murder 3.1 million Igbo people – a haunting tally which indeed includes those slaughtered during the Adekunleist “everything that moves”-targeting, duly promised in the infamous press briefing. As for the outcome of the “things that do not move”-assault category, the genocidists were hardly off target. Their gratuitous destruction of the famed Igbo economic infrastructure, one of the most advanced in Africa of the era, is indescribably barbaric. This was followed, subsequently (post-January 1970), by the genocidists’ implementation of the most dehumanising raft of socioeconomic package of deprivation in occupied Igboland, not seen anywhere else in Africa. The brigandage includes the following:
1. Seizure of the multimillion Igbo capital asset in Igwe Ocha/Port Harcourt and elsewhere
2. Comprehensive sequestration of Igbo liquid asset in Nigeria (as of January 1970), bar the £20.00 (twenty pounds) doled out to the male surviving head of an Igbo family
3. Exponential expropriation of the rich Igbo oil resources from the Abia, Delta, Imo and Rivers administrative regions
4. Blanket policy of non-development of Igboland
5. Aggressive degradation of socioeconomic life of Igboland (As if another empirical reminder is yet required to underscore this obviously grave situation at stake, the following news item from the Lagos Vanguard [16 November 2009] is typically illustrative: “Journalists in … Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, [Enuugwu] and Imo [central Igboland administrative regions] have threatened to embark on hunger strike to protest the bad conditions of federal roads [there]. They regretted that the failed roads [have] claimed many lives and property worth billions of naira”.)
6. Ignoring ever-expanding soil erosion/landslides and other pressing ecological emergencies particularly in northwest Igboland
7. Continuing reinforcement of the overall state of siege of Igboland …
These latter measures, which inaugurated phase-III of the Igbo genocide, constitute 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”.
We mustn’t fail to add, finally, that these measures were drafted and implemented largely by Yoruba economists and lawyers led by Obafemi Awolowo which included, ironically, Sam Aluko who, along with all members of his family, enjoyed the generosity of a political asylum in Igboland when his life was in serious danger during the vicious intra-Yoruba political violence of the early 1960s.
The Harold Wilson-led British government of the day underwrote this devastating stretch of genocide militarily, politically and diplomatically – from its early conceptualisation, liaising continuously with the Gowon-Mohammed-Danjuma genocidist cells of the Nigeria military at varying stages between January and May 1966, to the savage, spiralling aerial, naval and ground onslaughts on encircled Igbo population centres (the “shooting everything”-raging inferno) especially between March 1968 and January 1970. London’s strategic goal in supporting the genocide was to “punish” the Igbo for “daring” to spearhead the termination of the British occupation of Nigeria. This foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa and the worst in 20th century Africa would probably not have occurred without British active involvement. It is inconceivable that a contemporary British government would continue to delay any much longer in offering its unreserved apology to the Igbo for Britain’s role in the execution of this genocide and pay reparations to the survivors.
29 May 1966 is undoubtedly the most tragic day in the annals of Igbo history. It was a day that the Igbo were subjected to an overwhelming violence and unremitting brutality by supposedly fellow countrymen and women. Ironically, the atrocity was clinically organised, supervised and implemented by the very state that the Igbo had played such a crucial role to liberate from foreign conquest and occupation. This state, now violently taken over by murderous anti-African sociopolitical forces, had pointedly violated its most sacred tenet of responsibility to its Igbo citizens – provision of security. Instead of providing security to these citizens, the Nigeria state murdered 3.1 million of them. The ghoulish anthem for the genocide, broadcast uninterruptedly in Hausa on Kaduna radio and television throughout its duration, was unambiguously clear on the principal objective of this crime against humanity:
Mu je mu kashe nyamiri
Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su
Mu chi mata su da yan mata su
Mu kwashe kaya su
(English translation: Let’s go kill the damned Igbo/Kill off their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property)
Yet this 29th day of May 1966 is also the Igbo Day of Affirmation. The Igbo people resolved on this day, the day that marked the beginning of the genocide, to survive the catastrophe. This was the day the Igbo ceased to be Nigerians forever – right there on the grounds of those death camps in the sabon gari residential districts and offices and rail stations and coach stations and airports and churches and schools and markets and hospitals across north Nigeria. They created the state of Biafra in its place and tasked it to provide security to the Igbo and prevent Nigeria, a genocide state, from accomplishing its dreadful mission. The heuristic symbolism defined hitherto by 1 October shattered in the wake of this historic Igbo declaration. For the Igbo, the renouncement of Nigerian citizenship was the permanent Igbo indictment of a state that had risen thunderously to murder its people.
The Igbo could not have survived the genocide if they still remained Nigerian. They rightly chose the former course of their fate and not the latter which they cast adrift. Consequently, Nigeria collapsed as a state with any serious prospects for the future. Despite the 4 murderous years of siege, the Igbo demonstrated a far greater creative drive towards constructing an advanced civilisation in Biafra than what Nigeria has all but wished it could achieve in the past 40 years. Nigeria gburu ochu; Nigeria mere alu. Surely, Nigeria couldn’t recover from committing this heinous crime – this crime against humanity, this Malebolge.
29 May is therefore a beacon of the resilient spirit of human overcoming of the most desperate, unimaginably brutish forces. It is the new Igbo National Holiday. It is a day of meditation and remembrance in every Igbo household anywhere in the world for the 3.1 million murdered, gratitude and thanksgiving for those who survived, and the collective Igbo rededication to achieve the urgent goal of the restoration of Igbo sovereignty.
Sunday, 8 May 2011
Now is the time!
I recently finished some piece of work after quite a while and I found the following Coltrane Quartet performance of “Vigil”, aka “Modal Excursion” (live in Comblain-La-Tour, Belgium, 1 August 1965), such an inspirational company during the period. Bassist Garrison appears to have just walked onto the bandstand, steadying and steadying that instrument of his that he plays with deftness and assiduousness as Coltrane, on tenor, begins the timely conversation with Jones on drums. Coltrane soars and soars in this continuously creative polytonal torrent of sound that is unmistakeably his signature. His commentary on the crucial challenges of his day is profoundly honest, insistent, multilayered and optimistic, a mood shared equally by the exhilarating inventiveness of Jones’s drumming. Note the resultant sweating and sheer exhaustion of the duo even before Coltrane’s brief break! As Tyner, on piano, joins the conversation, he takes 20-30 seconds of dizzying phrasing to restate the cardinal theme of the excursion and then essays his own contribution along a serene plateau of disarming contemplation, punctuated by Garrison’s impeccable percussive engagement and Jones’s continuing testament. Coltrane finally returns for the quartet to studiously sum up the goal for the vigil by declaring firmly and unreservedly: “Now is the time!” Today, we are most honoured and privileged to have inherited the priceless legacy of these selfless geniuses.
John Coltrane - Untitled (Vigil)
John Coltrane - Untitled (Vigil)
Thursday, 5 May 2011
France must now leave Côte d’Ivoire
“Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century”
- French President François Mitterand, March 1998
“A little country, with a small amount of strength, we can move a planet because [of our] … relations with 15 or 20 African countries”
- Jacques Godfrain, former head, French foreign ministry, March 1998
For whoever wished to know, it was evident, right from the outset, that the French mission in Côte d’Ivoire since November 2010 had little to do with the locally disputed presidential elections. If France’s ambitions were to help resolve a fractious presidential poll, it indeed was confronted with a pressing opportunity during the period within its own European homeland – in Belarus, just a thousand miles away. Perhaps, for a “nobler” transcontinental effect, if it felt so compelled, it could have sought to resolve that mother of all presidential disputes that has dragged on for 21 years in Myanmar between Aung San Suu Kyi and the country’s aging military junta.
No, France had no and has no such lofty aspirations. In Côte d’Ivoire, to employ that late 20th century/early 21st century awful euphemism for the flagrant invasion and occupation of a country and the overthrow of its government by an aggressor state, the French objective here has been nothing but “regime change”. It achieved this so ferociously and viciously recently by unleashing a raging cascade of violence in Abidjan that was at once aimed at re-creating, on the African scene, the bestial kidnapping of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1960 (centrally organised, we mustn’t fail to recall, by France’s Belgian francophonie cousin) and the 1973 attack and virtual destruction of Salvador Allende’s presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, by Pinochet’s putschist military. Hundreds of Ivoriens and others were murdered during this brigandage with one report placing the final casualty tally at 2300. On the morrow of its Abidjan rampage on 6 April 2011, the brute seized President Gbagbo, along with his wife and family and aides, dismissed him from office and turned him over to his very implacable electoral foes for incarceration or worse. Finally, the brute imposed Alassane Ouattara, its francophonie acolyte and barely competent ex-IMF official, on the peoples of Côte d’Ivoire as la président du république!
Origins
But why Côte d’Ivoire, a sovereign African country 3000 miles away from France? Why indeed Africa? France has long been wracked by chronic anxieties about its “status” and “prestige” in the world since its military was dealt a humiliating defeat during a 12-year old uprising by enslaved African military forces led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in French-occupied San Domingo (Haiti) – the “greatest individual market” of the 18th century European enslavement of the African humanity, which accounted for two-thirds of French foreign trade at the time. The Africans of San Domingo, “The Black Jacobins”, as CLR James, the illustrious African Caribbean scholar would describe them in such searing irony and sardonicism in his 1938-published classic of the same title on the subject, “defeated in turn the local whites and the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of some 60,000 men, and a French expedition of similar size under [Napoleon] Bonaparte’s brother-in-law”. Following the latter’s victory in 1803, the Africans proclaimed and established their republic of Haiti on 1 January 1804.
France has yet to recover from the catastrophic damage to its psyche, elicited by its losses in San Domingo. The transformation of enslaved Africans, as James notes perceptively in his study, “trembling in hundreds before a single white man … into a people able to organise themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day … is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement”. Consequently, in its relationship with Africans, wherever this occurs on earth, France feels that it is still fighting Toussaint L’Ouverture and his formidable forces all over again and again… Furthermore, San Domingo is gravely etched indelibly in French consciousness as the precursor to the catalogue of crushing French military defeats in the subsequent 150 years of its history, aptly illustrated by the following: the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, the 1914-1918 World War I, the 1939-1945 World War II and the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu resulting in the débâcle of its elite French Far East Expeditionary Corps’s occupation garrison in Vietnam, inflicted by the resolute Viet Minh commanded by General Giáp. It would require another commentary to sketch, more fully, how the French angst over San Domingo must be working through the mindset of the current occupant of the Élysée Palace whose regime thrives in its serial fantasy as the neo-Napoleonic imperium of these early decades of the 21st century.
Irony
Interestingly, to mention the Second World War French experience is to invoke a fascinating, albeit uncanny irony which French history shares currently with that of the peoples of Côte d’Ivoire in the wake of Paris’s unprovoked and unpardonable aggression. Despite the iron-fist texture of the German blitzkrieg that overran France in July 1940 resulting in French surrender and the establishment of the Vichy regime to oversee the Nazi occupation for four debilitating years, majority of French people had to work very had to believe, correctly, that the success of this invasion was essentially a Pyrrhic victory; eventual termination of the occupation and consequently the restoration of French sovereignty was therefore possible and had to be assiduously pursued with those French men and women who identified uncompromisingly with the free French.
Thankfully, the Ivoriens haven’t had long to wait to draw their own conclusions on the character and intent of the overwhelming brutish terror visited on them in April 2011 by the military from that same country that was so virulently subjected to a similar experience, almost 71 years to the day. Despite the savagery of its violence, despite its subterfuge, despite its obfuscations and despite its hackneyed rationalisations for these dreadful deeds, France must know that the African peoples of Côte d’Ivoire and Africans elsewhere in the world regard the presumed successes of its 6 April 2011 bombardment of Abidjan as, at best, a Pyrrhic victory. Just as France ultimately found out in its own experience in 1945, a free Côte d’Ivoire, free of France, will surely occur. Additionally, its reincarnated, entrenched overseer-Marshal Pétain, now dubbed with an altered second name that begins with “O”, pointedly the next alphabet up from “P”, will end up agonising how to precisely answer the overriding question of an enraged epoch: “Why have I allowed myself to be so fouled-up by the course of history where I exist and operate miserably, pathetically and disgustingly as the mere pawn of an active agency?”
Post-"Berlin-states" or Successor states
In the meantime, a group of Southern World countries headed by South Africa and including Botswana, Cape Verde, India, Jamaica and Bolivia should visit Côte d’Ivoire and support the process of organising a referendum to determine the competing sovereignties in the country, occasioned by the murderous collapse of the Ivorien state. Côte d’Ivoire, as so presently constituted, can no longer provide security to all its incorporated African nations or peoples. Instead, it murders them most horribly.
Tragically, Côte d’Ivoire has now joined that dreadful league of states of Africa inaugurated in May 1966 by Nigeria, the obligatory haematophagous monster in the region, whose raison d’être is to murder Africans most routinely and ritualistically. Enough! Every African life in Côte d’Ivoire is worth much more than the state of Côte d’Ivoire in addition to all of Africa’s states of death. The peoples, including the hundreds of thousands who have been displaced by the emergency to neighbouring countries in west Africa and elsewhere must determine freely and democratically which post-Côte d’Ivoire successor states they wish to belong.
- French President François Mitterand, March 1998
“A little country, with a small amount of strength, we can move a planet because [of our] … relations with 15 or 20 African countries”
- Jacques Godfrain, former head, French foreign ministry, March 1998
For whoever wished to know, it was evident, right from the outset, that the French mission in Côte d’Ivoire since November 2010 had little to do with the locally disputed presidential elections. If France’s ambitions were to help resolve a fractious presidential poll, it indeed was confronted with a pressing opportunity during the period within its own European homeland – in Belarus, just a thousand miles away. Perhaps, for a “nobler” transcontinental effect, if it felt so compelled, it could have sought to resolve that mother of all presidential disputes that has dragged on for 21 years in Myanmar between Aung San Suu Kyi and the country’s aging military junta.
No, France had no and has no such lofty aspirations. In Côte d’Ivoire, to employ that late 20th century/early 21st century awful euphemism for the flagrant invasion and occupation of a country and the overthrow of its government by an aggressor state, the French objective here has been nothing but “regime change”. It achieved this so ferociously and viciously recently by unleashing a raging cascade of violence in Abidjan that was at once aimed at re-creating, on the African scene, the bestial kidnapping of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1960 (centrally organised, we mustn’t fail to recall, by France’s Belgian francophonie cousin) and the 1973 attack and virtual destruction of Salvador Allende’s presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, by Pinochet’s putschist military. Hundreds of Ivoriens and others were murdered during this brigandage with one report placing the final casualty tally at 2300. On the morrow of its Abidjan rampage on 6 April 2011, the brute seized President Gbagbo, along with his wife and family and aides, dismissed him from office and turned him over to his very implacable electoral foes for incarceration or worse. Finally, the brute imposed Alassane Ouattara, its francophonie acolyte and barely competent ex-IMF official, on the peoples of Côte d’Ivoire as la président du république!
Origins
But why Côte d’Ivoire, a sovereign African country 3000 miles away from France? Why indeed Africa? France has long been wracked by chronic anxieties about its “status” and “prestige” in the world since its military was dealt a humiliating defeat during a 12-year old uprising by enslaved African military forces led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in French-occupied San Domingo (Haiti) – the “greatest individual market” of the 18th century European enslavement of the African humanity, which accounted for two-thirds of French foreign trade at the time. The Africans of San Domingo, “The Black Jacobins”, as CLR James, the illustrious African Caribbean scholar would describe them in such searing irony and sardonicism in his 1938-published classic of the same title on the subject, “defeated in turn the local whites and the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of some 60,000 men, and a French expedition of similar size under [Napoleon] Bonaparte’s brother-in-law”. Following the latter’s victory in 1803, the Africans proclaimed and established their republic of Haiti on 1 January 1804.
France has yet to recover from the catastrophic damage to its psyche, elicited by its losses in San Domingo. The transformation of enslaved Africans, as James notes perceptively in his study, “trembling in hundreds before a single white man … into a people able to organise themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day … is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement”. Consequently, in its relationship with Africans, wherever this occurs on earth, France feels that it is still fighting Toussaint L’Ouverture and his formidable forces all over again and again… Furthermore, San Domingo is gravely etched indelibly in French consciousness as the precursor to the catalogue of crushing French military defeats in the subsequent 150 years of its history, aptly illustrated by the following: the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, the 1914-1918 World War I, the 1939-1945 World War II and the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu resulting in the débâcle of its elite French Far East Expeditionary Corps’s occupation garrison in Vietnam, inflicted by the resolute Viet Minh commanded by General Giáp. It would require another commentary to sketch, more fully, how the French angst over San Domingo must be working through the mindset of the current occupant of the Élysée Palace whose regime thrives in its serial fantasy as the neo-Napoleonic imperium of these early decades of the 21st century.
Irony
Interestingly, to mention the Second World War French experience is to invoke a fascinating, albeit uncanny irony which French history shares currently with that of the peoples of Côte d’Ivoire in the wake of Paris’s unprovoked and unpardonable aggression. Despite the iron-fist texture of the German blitzkrieg that overran France in July 1940 resulting in French surrender and the establishment of the Vichy regime to oversee the Nazi occupation for four debilitating years, majority of French people had to work very had to believe, correctly, that the success of this invasion was essentially a Pyrrhic victory; eventual termination of the occupation and consequently the restoration of French sovereignty was therefore possible and had to be assiduously pursued with those French men and women who identified uncompromisingly with the free French.
Thankfully, the Ivoriens haven’t had long to wait to draw their own conclusions on the character and intent of the overwhelming brutish terror visited on them in April 2011 by the military from that same country that was so virulently subjected to a similar experience, almost 71 years to the day. Despite the savagery of its violence, despite its subterfuge, despite its obfuscations and despite its hackneyed rationalisations for these dreadful deeds, France must know that the African peoples of Côte d’Ivoire and Africans elsewhere in the world regard the presumed successes of its 6 April 2011 bombardment of Abidjan as, at best, a Pyrrhic victory. Just as France ultimately found out in its own experience in 1945, a free Côte d’Ivoire, free of France, will surely occur. Additionally, its reincarnated, entrenched overseer-Marshal Pétain, now dubbed with an altered second name that begins with “O”, pointedly the next alphabet up from “P”, will end up agonising how to precisely answer the overriding question of an enraged epoch: “Why have I allowed myself to be so fouled-up by the course of history where I exist and operate miserably, pathetically and disgustingly as the mere pawn of an active agency?”
Post-"Berlin-states" or Successor states
In the meantime, a group of Southern World countries headed by South Africa and including Botswana, Cape Verde, India, Jamaica and Bolivia should visit Côte d’Ivoire and support the process of organising a referendum to determine the competing sovereignties in the country, occasioned by the murderous collapse of the Ivorien state. Côte d’Ivoire, as so presently constituted, can no longer provide security to all its incorporated African nations or peoples. Instead, it murders them most horribly.
Tragically, Côte d’Ivoire has now joined that dreadful league of states of Africa inaugurated in May 1966 by Nigeria, the obligatory haematophagous monster in the region, whose raison d’être is to murder Africans most routinely and ritualistically. Enough! Every African life in Côte d’Ivoire is worth much more than the state of Côte d’Ivoire in addition to all of Africa’s states of death. The peoples, including the hundreds of thousands who have been displaced by the emergency to neighbouring countries in west Africa and elsewhere must determine freely and democratically which post-Côte d’Ivoire successor states they wish to belong.
Friday, 22 April 2011
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
“Cargo cult mentality”, Nigeria, and the illusions of NEPAD
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
The great Chinua Achebe once described as the “cargo cult mentality” the illusion, or rather the delusion of many leaders of so-called developing countries who feel that without sustained hard work, internally, their states could somehow achieve the status of socio-political transformation that they had envisaged in many a “development programme”.
This mentality manifests in the form of a perpetual gaze across the seas, across the horizon, hoping/awaiting a “fairy ship [to] dock in their harbour laden with every goody they have always dreamed of possessing”. This gaze, as can be imagined, is frustratingly a chore that triggers bewildering ranges of emotion: … When, for instance, is this ship arriving? Where is it coming from? What will it contain that will transform our existence? More loans? More aid packages? A privatisation scheme? Oh! Is that the mast of the mysterious ship coming over the horizon – at last? Oh yeah! The ship is already here… Good news: the goodies are here, fellow countrymen (and women, presumably!). We are now developed, We are a world power… No, not yet… We need the arrival of 3, 4, or 5 more of these ships to achieve this target. Oh dear! How long will this now take? The time span for all these arrivals will be in the order of 10 years… No, twice as long; sorry, to be more precise, 21 years… Therefore, my administration needs another term, maybe two, perhaps three, to oversee these arrivals, the offloading of the goodies, and the sustainable implementation of this multisectoral development programme!(Father of African Literature)
Spurious developmentalism
To focus more specifically on the Africa example, perhaps less humourously, the “cargo cult mentality” is pointedly a perverse case right from the outset. African regimes in the late 1950s/1960s (baseline decades for the “restoration of African independence” after centuries of the European conquest and occupation) uncritically keyed into the Fraudulent Developmentalism music of the age which was trumpeted noisily and widely by the Western World – led strategically by none other than Britain and France, the core conqueror states of Africa. Thanks to the nauseating naivety of these leaderships, Britain, France and other European World states and institutions that had committed heinous crimes of conquest and occupation in Africa for 500 years, were overnight “entrusted” with a role, the central role for that matter, to embark upon Africa’s seeming project of societal reconstruction in the wake of the holocaust.
South Korea, for instance, has demonstrated that if the country’s leaderships in the late 1940s/1950s (after the country’s liberation from Japanese conquest and occupation) had “allowed” Japan to play a similar role in their reconstruction project as the Africa example just cited, their society would not have been “endowed” with the scientific know-how in the very short 50 years time lag to co-stage the recent World Cup Football competition with Japan and with such comparable dazzling technological finesse as the latter.
In Nigeria, in 1979, nearly a decade after it had murdered 3.1 million Igbo people in the most devastating genocide in Africa since the Herero genocide of the early 1900s, few in the country were prepared for the extraordinary pronouncement of optimism on the country’s future from the regime in power. There was no semblance of any reconstructionary programme on the ground to support this claim. Olusegun Obasanjo, then head of the country’s military junta, had, in effect, gazed across the hallucinatory horizon of expectation embedded in the “cargo cult mentality” and made the following prediction with all the certitude at his disposal: “Nigeria will become one of the ten leading nations in the world by the end of the century”.
(Olusegun Obasanjo ... genocidist commander: “Nigeria will become one of the ten leading nations in the world by the end of the [20th]century”)Anything but a world power...
Of course in 1999, 20 years later, Nigeria was anything but a world power. This outcome is not because the country lacked a resourceful population nor because it is deprived of an “enabling” natural resource infrastructure to accomplish such a task. On the contrary, many countries in history with a fraction of Nigeria’s staggering human and natural resource capacity as at 1979, not to mention 1999, have achieved major societal development in very limited timeframes. Presently, Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan are three examples that illustrate, acutely, this point. On material resources, for instance, Nigeria, the world’s sixth largest petroleum oil producer, had by 1999 earned the sum of US$300 billion from this product after 40 years of exploitation and exports. Unfortunately, this revenue had by and large been squandered by the country’s regimes of the epoch through their legendary, institutionalised corruption and profligacy. They literally lurched ravenously into the public purse in frenzy. Between 1972 (when Yakubu Gowon was in power) and 1999 (end of the tenure of the Abdulsalami Abubakar junta/beginning of the current Obasanjo regime), one fifth of this sum, or US$60 billion, was looted personally by these furacious leaderships and transferred to Western banks and other financial institutions. Elsewhere in the economy, this was the infamous epoch of dubious contractual deals and dealing that yielded enormously-inflated financial returns for thieving public functionaries: the importation of everything from cement, sand, nails and rice to air (?), champagne and lace, and the staging of innumerable feasts and festivals usually dreamt up in a whiff! At some point in 1983, at the apogee of this scramble of an economy, Nigeria’s entire external currency reserves were reduced precariously to about US$2billion. Inevitably, this scramble has churned out the directory of the nouveau riche of millionaires and even billionaires whose names and gory legacy make up the haunting epitaph of a failed state. It is in this context that Edwin Madunagu’s description of this shenanigan as the “political economy of state robbery” could not have been more evocative.
It does not require emphasising that with the judicious use of the gargantuan sum of US$300 billion (which few comparable “independent” African countries have earned since the beginning of the European conquest and occupation of the continent in the 15th century), not only Nigeria but also the entire African World would have been radically transformed beyond recognition. No one would dare equate “disaster, degradation, desperation” with contemporary African existence as it is often the norm in many a standard discourse. On this very “squandering of [the peoples’] riches”, ignoring, for once the other striking features of the kleptomania and maledictive incompetence of successive Nigerian regimes of the era, all those who describe themselves or have been so described as Nigeria’s heads of regime particularly in recent decades must be eternally ashamed of themselves. They, as well as those intellectuals who surrounded them as aides and advisors, do constitute the most vivid tragedy of Africa’s recent history. They have frittered away the treasured trove of several generations of peoples. Furthermore, they were and remain a monumental disappointment and disgrace to millions of Africans elsewhere in the world.
Internal logic
In effect, Nigeria’s regimes appear to have ignored the salient feature of the development ethos, any development ethos, that the engine of such an enterprise is anchored internally – right there at the very locale of the projected activity. Or do they? Alas, the “perpetual gaze across the seas” for socio-economic salvation serves these regimes. It absolves them of any responsibilities to their long-suffering peoples or so they imagine.
In the last three years of the 4-year term of his regime, Olusegun Obasanjo has been out of Nigeria at least 80 times on official trips. He has visited virtually every key country in Europe, Asia, North America, South America/the Caribbean and, of course, Africa during the period. As for his European and North American and Asian destinations, he has been to Britain, France, Italy, Germany, the United States and Japan more than twice. The average time duration for a trip is three days and the average number of aides and other officials is 30 except in the North American and European destinations when this figure is often doubled and at times tripled and on some occasions even more.
With 80 overseas trips during 1999-2002, Obasanjo makes a foreign trip approximately every fortnight. He and other regime spokespersons have repeatedly indicated that these junkets are important for Nigeria to attract “foreign investment” and help seek some relief or cancellation of Nigeria’s foreign “debt” of about US$30 billion. Each of these visits costs Nigeria at least US$200,000 on the average and this sum shoots up with the larger entourage that embarks on the North America/Europe/Japan ventures. In total, Nigeria has spent minimally the sum of US$16 million on these trips without any concrete returns especially on the subject of investment or relief on Nigeria’s so-called debt to the West. Indeed on the latter, Obasanjo stated openly during the March 2002 conference on development in Mexico that Nigeria had failed to secure “a single cent of debt relief… In the past three years, Nigeria has had to spend five billion dollars in servicing its foreign debts, even though the same debts had been repaid two times over”.
According to Jerry Gana, the regime’s information minister, Nigeria’s annual “debt service of about [US]$1.5 billion is nine times our budget for health, and three times our budget for education”. But it is Nigeria’s failure to attract meaningful foreign investment (a miserly US$2.25 billion per year on the average in the next four years, according to projected estimates by the London Economist Intelligence Unit) during the period and the direct link of this failure to Obasanjo’s junkets which is most heart-rending. In an interview recently with the London Financial Times, Obasanjo could not but admit: “In three years I went round the world and did not get anything… I went round the countries in Europe, twice over, I went to Japan, to America, to Canada and got good words… but no action at all”.
Yet if Obasanjo continues his current rate of travel overseas in the remaining 12 months of his regime, he will make a further 30 trips with the whooping cost of US$6 million to Nigeria’s forlorn economy. These visits should now be cancelled and the savings invested in the collapsing primary schools of the country to enable millions of Nigerian children have a better future than is presently the case. Those who advise Obasanjo should for once show responsibility. So, by May 2003, the Obasanjo regime would have spent US$22 million of scarce resources on four years of travel in pursuit of an illusory but calamitous enterprise of “gazing across the seas” for Western “goodies” to salvage an economy that his own regime (twice: 1976-1979, 1999-expected May 2003) as well as others have virtually destroyed in the past 40 years. The gross insensitivity of the lifestyle that encapsulates these junkets at a time when the overwhelming majority of Nigerians have been reduced to dire straits of existence is particularly obscene.
Current key social statistics on Nigeria are disastrous. Seventy per cent of the population of 120 million live below the poverty line of about US$1 a day and the country is one of the 20 poorest countries in the world. Forty eight million of the people or “about 40 per cent wallow[…] in abject poverty” – to quote the very words of Obasanjo himself in July 2000. Even though the monthly minimum wage is a paltry US$75, many public and private enterprises have routinely not paid their workers their salaries. Millions are therefore owed several months of unpaid wages and several sectors of the economy are more often than not strike-bound. Two months ago, a group of Nigerian professionals known as “concerned professionals” questioned the regime’s claims to have spent US$100 million on “poverty alleviation” and US$500 million on the improvement of electricity supplies in the past fiscal year. On the former, the organisation rightly observes that no “dent in the poverty profile across the land” has occurred despite the huge sums the regime supposedly spent nor has there been a change in the notorious national electricity power supply. Very worryingly, the professionals conclude, 70 per cent of the regime’s budget allocation goes to recurrent expenditure and the implication of this for the rest of the economy is predictably troubling: “the cost of running government therefore crowds out the rest of the economy even before the budget is implemented”.
Equally concerned, the country’s senate’s public accounts committee has since published a critical report on regime spending. It criticises the large size of the recurrent expenditure and the regime’s concomitant “under-funding of capital provisions”. It also finds serious discrepancies in the accounting of sequestrated funds from the overseas bank accounts of Sani Abacha’s (an ex-head of regime) which had been returned to the Nigeria treasury. The report was so compelling that moves were made in the senate to begin impeachment proceedings on Obasanjo last month. These moves soon floundered due to sustained pressure on key senators by Obasanjo. In the cesspool that is politics in Nigeria, the media has been awash with news of massive bribing of senators by the regime to halt the impeachment.
Never expect progress and development...
It is evident that following the failure of Obasanjo’s frantic and expensive overseas tours in the last three years to secure both the ever illusory “dividend” of international investment and “debt” relief for Nigeria, the regime head has now broadened the parameters of the observation post from where to continue his existential “gaze across the seas” – for the goodies to supposedly transform Nigeria! In other words, Obasanjo has continentalised the quest for the illusion and the name given to it couldn’t even mask its plasticity: NEPAD or New Partnership for Africa’s Development. Just as Nigerians know, unmistakably, that NEPA (Nigeria Electricity Power Authority), an acronym which in fact shares the same root origins as NEPAD, really means Never Expect Power Always rather than any worthy energy generating organisation, we will now show that NEPAD does instead mean Never Expect Progress And Development.
Obasanjo and other African “leaders” have promoted NEPAD as a “neo-Marshall Plan” reconstruction programme for Africa. It envisages the “eradication” of poverty, sustained economic growth, and development. “Good governance” is promised with qualitatively transformed “leaderships”’ accountability and transparency towards both the population (with regards the respect of their human rights) and the management of natural resources, especially the critical revenues derived thereof. But, crucially, the fulcrum of NEPAD’s own sustainability hinges on Africa’s declared partnership with the leadership of the West World.
This “partnership”, a term we should stress emanates from the African side of the bargain, operates or is actuated in the format of a quid pro quo: African “leaders” embark on providing “good governance” and the like to their people and the West would, in return, “invest” in Africa. The amount of investment the leaders claim they require is US$64 billion per annum. This will take the form of substantial “debt” relief package for the continent where most countries spend about 70 per cent of total annual export revenues in “debt”-servicing obligations currently. Africa is also asking the West to cut vast agricultural subsidies that the latter pays its farmers. These limit “fair competition” to the detriment of African farmers who in the past 10 years have lost virtually all subsidies, thanks to the eagerness of their states to implement IMF-World Bank directives of “structural adjustment programmes”. Finally, African “leaders” want the West to cut the high duties that African manufacturing exports are subjected to in the former’s markets. If there is any of the unrelentingly statistical surveys churned out on contemporary Africa by studies after studies, the latest from the World Bank captures the severity of the Africa situation and its projected “hopelessness”. According to the bank, about half of Africa’s population of nearly a billion presently live on the “equivalent of [US]$1 a day or less”. More seriously, the bank forecasts that the number of people within this poverty bracket will increase by about 60 million in the next 15 years. For its African proponents, NEPAD assumes that the West World is particularly concerned by the ever-worsening condition of African socio-economic life.
For the West, on the contrary, Nigeria, just like the rest of Africa, “works” – in the sense that the humanity of this country (and continent) has not ceased to create wealth for the West in spite of the obvious deterioration of local social existence. The European World, it must never be forgotten, created and sustains the tragedy that is present-day Africa. The principal beneficiary of this tragedy both in material and philosophical terms remains the West. Africa has yet to recover from the West’s half a millennium-long brazen conquest and occupation of Africa. The West’s perpetration of the African holocaust during the period (the most dehumanising and extensive in history) and its seizure and transfer to its homeland of Africa’s immense wealth, ensured that it catapulted to an unassailable global power where it has since remained. Despite the so-called restoration of African independence, the West’s exploitation of Africa has worsened, thanks to its implanted “Berlin-state” murderous contraption in the continent and the lobotomised creatures that parade as African leaderships.
In the past 20 years, Africa has consistently been a net-exporter of capital to the West, a trend that has been accentuated by the debilitating consequences of Africa’s servicing of its so-called debt to the West. In 1981, Africa recorded a net capital export of US$5.3 billion to the West. In 1985, this transfer jumped to US$21.5 billion and three years later it was US$36 billion or US$100 million per day. In 2000, Africa’s net capital transfer to the coffers of the West stood at US$150 billion. (We should stress that these figures refer to 48 African countries including Nigeria and do not include the national accounting of the five Arab states of North Africa – Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.)
It has taken 10 generations of West governments to accomplish their control and exploitation of Africa, and no future government there would voluntarily abandon such a lucrative harvest of conquest. The West will always wish to exploit Africa. It does not have any other choice, except, of course, it is stopped. For a typical Western government therefore, including the present one whose majority of members were ironically born on the eve of the African “restoration of independence” 50 years ago, the West’s continuing control of African resources does not cease to be an ontological preoccupation. In emphasising that NEPAD is a “partnership” between Africa and the West, the African regimes have essentially tried to re-enact the Fraudulent Developmentalism of the 1950s/1960s. But everyone knows, including the West particularly, that the African version is a desperate one indeed. If Fraudulent Developmentalism I is a tragedy, Fraudulent Developmentalism II, its sequel, is more of a hallucination than a farce in the sense of that marxian negation!
None of the West leaders who met Obasanjo and the other African “leaders” during the June 2002 G-8 summitry in Kananaskis, Canada, really thinks or feels that the latter are their partners in the sense of the mutual pursuit of a commonly agreed cause and outcome by two or more parties. West leaders, who strive and age overnight in office as the continuing responsibility and accountability to their electorate and population take their toll, are understandably contemptuous of African “leaderships” who always appear rejuvenated, as if they have walked out of cosmetic surgery every Friday lunch time! West leaders therefore lecture these imposed heads-of-regimes-of-Africa anywhere and anytime: “Respect the Human Rights of your people”; “Stop murdering your people – you have slaughtered 15 million from Biafra to Darfur since you took over power from us in 1960”; “You are corrupt, very corrupt! You steal your peoples’ money – Stop it! You must be transparent and Accountable!”; “Institute a bill of rights, Respect the rule of law”; “Run free and fair elections! Don’t turn your presidency into a life-long estate as we really don’t want you to deal with our own next generation of leaders, our sons and daughters”…
There is of course nothing in these apparent pro-African sentiments by Western leaders to suggest that the latter really look forward to the day when they will deal with a democratic Africa where its leaderships are accountable to their home publics. If that were to occur, the West would cease to exercise the stranglehold it currently has on the continent. No responsive leadership will play the overseer role which these African regimes engage in.
What the West has obviously done (as expressed above) is to appropriate the popular language of disgust against African “leaders” across Africa. Even the innocence of African children has not been spared the disastrous blunders and disgrace that African “leaderships” have now come to represent to the eagle-eyed scrutiny of a global audience. Two months ago, during the UN children’s summit in New York, Joseph Tamale, a 12 year old Ugandan delegate stunned the audience when he made the following declaration on African “leaderships”: “When you get the money, you embezzle it, you eat it”. The proceedings and outcome of the Kananaskis conference sum up this contempt. The African “leaders” emerged from the proceedings with nothing concrete to show from their hosts except promises of a modest increase in the overall Western “aid budget” to Africa which had been in fact mooted earlier on in the year during the Mexico conference on development.
The visiting African heads of regime in Kananaskis had been noticeably unimpressed by the total sum of US$6 billion involved which wouldn’t even be available till 2006! The West once again tabled this dubious package at Kananaskis but this time round none of these African “leaders” dared show their disenchantment. It was left to Phil Twyford, a director of OXFAM (the British non-governmental organisation), to bellow with anger: “We’re extremely disappointed… They’re offering peanuts to Africa – and recycled peanuts at that”. There was no mention at all in the summit communiqué on the vexed subjects of investment, “debt” cancellation or the opening up of Western markets to African exports. On the latter, both the United States and Canada had announced substantial increases in subsidies to their own farmers on the eve of the summit, dashing any hopes of any concerted accommodation to the African “leaders”’ so-called demands for access to these important Western markets. For Messrs Obasanjo & Co, the humiliation at Kananaskis means a return to the observation post – and the resumption of the gaze until the next ripples of movement across the waves… Never Expect Progress And Development, after all, has been what NEPAD has been all the while since its inception…
“Berlin-states” can't do it; African constituent nations are bases for transformation
In 1987, I held a wide-ranging weekend interview in London with Abdulrahman Mohammed Babu, the eminent Zanzibari public intellectual. On Africa-European World relations, I had asked Babu what he thought was the essence of the West’s thinking on Africa at the height of the IMF/World Bank-driven devastating “structural adjustment programme” on the continent. His reply is deftly panoramic:
Quite simply, the West sees Africa as the rural sector of Europe… to guarantee Africa’s historic role as the supplier of cheap labour and raw materials to Europe… This remains the West’s view of Africa. Definitely the West is hostile to Africa’s development. We continue to fool ourselves if we think the contrary is the case. The West will never develop Africa. Our under-development is dialectically linked to their development. Europe is aware of this historical relationship and cannot do otherwise.
Despite NEPAD, or precisely because of the very assumptions on which NEPAD is frantically pursued presently by the failed crop of the imposed heads-of-regime-of-Africa, nothing in the past 15 years since Babu’s observations gives cause to suggest that that definitive trajectory of the West’s mission in Africa is about to change course. The more pressing point to note, however, is that the immediate emergency that threatens the very survival of African peoples is the “Berlin-state” encased in African existence coupled with the pathetic bunch that masquerades here and there as African leaderships but whose mission is to oversee this enthralling edifice. African women and men will sooner, rather than later, abandon this fractured, fracturing, conflictive, alienating and terror contraption. Africans must now focus on real transformation – the revitalisation and consolidation of the institutions of Africa’s constituent nations and polities, or what Okwuonicha Nzegwu has described, succinctly, as the “indigenous spaces of real Africa”. In these institutions and spaces of African civilisation lie the organic framework to ensure transparency, probity, accountability, investment in people, humanised wealth creation, respect for human rights and civil liberties, and a true commitment to radically transform African existence.
*****(This essay is a slightly amended version of a study first published, usafricaonline.com, July 2002)
Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
History and that Gaddafi diversionary trail
(This essay, first published in africaresource.com [26 August 2007], is reissued here in the light of current developments in Libya and the Arab World)
It did not require some extraordinary insight to predict the utter failure of the July 2007 Accra summit of Africa’s heads of regime – not so much the broad indifference shown to the vaunted theatrics of the so-called continental union government performance by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi but the assembly’s deafening silence over the ongoing Sudan Arab regime-driven genocide against the African people of Darfur. This failure is indefensible. Just as the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide (post-European occupied Africa’s foundational genocide which the Arab/islamic World, in concert with Britain, the former Soviet Union and the Nigeria state executed, resulting in the murder of 3.1 million Igbo) and the subsequent genocide in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other conflicts and wars on the continent, African regime heads have yet again failed to confront and halt another mass slaughter of an African people. Just as in all the pre-Darfur continental genocide and other armed conflicts of the past 41 years in which 15 million Africans were murdered, the world appears, yet again, to watch at the sideline as another nation of Africans is being systematically destroyed by an Africa-based regime run by a ruthless minority Arab/islamist hegemonic grouping. A total of 200,000 Darfuri have so far been murdered.
Despite Gaddafi’s pre-summit boisterous campaigns across Africa to publicise his “union government” ambition, the Arab nationalist, who has turned his country into some religio-dynastic fiefdom since he seized power in 1969 after a coup d’état, has obviously scant democratic credentials to present to the current frenetic African discourses. These are geared to the reworking and transformation of Africa’s debilitating sociopolitical spaces of dictatorship, militarism, and genocide. Africa’s strategic goals in these early decades of the new millennium, it should be stressed, are to dismantle its extant genocide-states and create extensively decentralised new state forms of organic coherence that not only halt the slaughtering of four decades but also embark on the construction of African-centred polities of advanced civilisations.
Furthermore, Gaddafi must have known, all along, that the overwhelming majority of Africans are vehemently opposed to be dragged and boxed into another conqueror/genocide-state, à la the existing ones – Nigeria, the Sudan, the Congos, Central Africa Republic, Chad, whatever! This is whether or not the envisaged contraption is more territorially expansive than the status quo or if it is subsumed under some creeping Arab/islamist imperium, which is essentially what Gaddafi’s “union government” quest ominously prefigures. Gaddafi had indeed in 2001 appealed to Arabs, including those domiciled outside Africa, to support and join this contraption as the “only [living] space we have” for the future, a point already taken up so aggressively by the Sudan which has been settling thousands of Arabs on Darfuri lands, “cleansed” of their African owners as the genocide intensifies. It is precisely because of the overriding importance of the “Darfur factor” in present pan-Arab political calculations on Africa that Gaddafi was generally unperturbed by his “union government” failure in Accra. Indeed, Gaddafi returned home from Accra very satisfied that he had ensured that Africa did not discuss the raging Darfur genocide. Gaddafi had in effect converted the well-known pan-Arab long-term goal to seize the whole of Africa to a more “immediate” task, a smokescreen that dominated the conference proceedings and kept Darfur off the agenda! Yet Gaddafi’s diversionary trail on Darfur must be exposed for what it really is: the Darfur genocide, in 2007, tragically illustrates the grim realities of African-Arab “relations” of nearly 2000 years which Gaddafi and other Arab expansionists and some of their African religio-political allies cannot ignore.
Serial aggression and expansionism were the interlocking dual tracks that codified Arab’s policy to the African World right from the outset. In the 7th century of the last millennium, a rampaging Arab/islamist army invaded Africa from across Arabia in the northeast and seized the great African civilisation of Kemet (“ancient Egypt”). It later expanded this conquest westwards to cover the 3000 miles of territory to the continent’s northwest Atlantic coast – the so-called Maghrib. Africa lost one-third of its territory that the Arabs still occupy to the present day. Essentially this occupation has continued, thanks to the tapering off of the African resistance in Kemet and elsewhere in north Africa and the dispersal of millions of survivors to the neighbouring regions of central, eastern and western Africa. Soon, the Arab/islamists converted their north African occupation and their later cultural hegemony in Sahelian west Africa into a profitable conurbation for the enslavement and export of Africans as well as non-human resources such as gold (particularly) to the Arab World, Asia and southern Europe. At the height of the occupation, the Arab/islamists exported two million enslaved Africans per annum to the Arab World and extensively depleted the gold reserves in the Sudan, Mali, Songhai, Kanem-Bornu and elsewhere which were transferred to enrich the bourses and palaces of the Arab World. Considering the magnitude of this export of African resources at the time, it is not without significance that the Arabs, themselves, have a saying, “Against the camel’s mange use a tar, and against poverty make a trip to the Sudan”. The role of the Arab World itself in the re-export of enslaved Africans in its territory to southern Europe (in addition to the Near-East and southwest Asia) during the period – a practice which dramatically doubled and, in some cases, tripled the “value” of the enslaved Africans – was such that in Naples, for example, 83 per cent of those enslaved there by the 15th century were African. And, contrary to “conventional” wisdom, enslaved Africans worked Arab/islamist sugar plantations in Morocco as early as the 9th century CE, almost 600 years before the Americas!
Morocco itself would later on in 1593 attack, pillage, and seize prominent towns of Songhai, leading ultimately in its wake to the collapse of the Songhai state, ironically the most islamised of the Sahelian west African states. Parallel to these events in west Africa, Arab/islamist expansionism in east Africa, subsequent to the initial 7th century invasion of the north, soon spread along the Somali, Kenyan and Mozambican coastline and their occupation of the offshore island of Zanzibar, which they later transformed into a strategic colony for enslaved Africans.
From the above-mentioned coastal bridgeheads of east Africa, the Arab/islamists began to exert enormous influence into the affairs of the existing independent states of the African hinterland – in the east, central and southern Africa. In the latter two regions, as were the cases in north and western Africa, they pursued a scorched earth policy of brigandage, murders and the enslavement and export of millions of African peoples to the Arab World and elsewhere – a practice that actively went on well into the 16th century when it, in turn, was enveloped by the burgeoning European eventual attack and take-over of Africa. Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, the Zulu historian, recalls, most chillingly, the aftermath of the Arab enslavement of southern Africa: “no less than a hundred [nations] were wiped out completely [during the period] in Tanganyika, Kenya, the Congo basin and [Zambia]”. The Arab aggression was couched in the language of racist bigotry and attendant Africophobism that hauntingly anticipates Europe’s own rationalising efforts a few centuries later: “You K[*****] are not people. It is the will of Allah and the Prophet that we catch you and sell you, for you are not people … you have no souls. Allah gave you to us for servants”. Finally, in eastcentral Africa in the early 1550s, the Arab/islamists dealt a further blow to Africa’s independence. They overran the three “successor states” of Nubia, essentially the surviving bastions of Africa’s ancient Nile valley civilisations of Kemet, thus extending their territorial stranglehold on the Nile further south to the river’s strategic middle stretches.
In the end, Africans escaped the blanket “Australasianisation” of their destiny by the Arab conquest, 800 years before the Europeans achieved this murderous goal elsewhere in the world. This was because Africans were continuously re-grouping and re-defining the future trajectory of their defence, existence, and development by utilising the flexibility occasioned by the sheer size of their (continental) homeland. In addition, they were successful in interweaving the arterial cultural fibre that bound their peoples in order to cope with the inevitable social stresses in regions that had become destinations for the migratory shifts of population, leaving any territories lost or severely threatened by the Arab/islamist emergency. Even then, the partial success of the Arab “Australasianisation” of Africa, albeit in the north of the continent, was a sufficiently timely warning to Africans that they required both eternal vigilance and a totally different mode of resistance to foreign aggression in future if they were to avoid the possibility of complete expulsion from their homeland or a distinct marginalisation therein.
Arab/islamist aggression on Africa paved the way to Europe’s later attack, underlining the very double jeopardy-character of the African holocaust. It is evident that a key lesson that Africans learnt from the former was crucial in enabling them to organise the permanent but flexible resistance that eventually led to the partial termination of the European occupation when it arose. This lesson is still pertinent as Africans reject any form of “unionisation” with the Arab World and respond robustly to the Darfur outrage and other mass murders programmed for the future. For the Arabs, genocide remains their historically trodden route to seek to complete their “Australasianisation” of Africa. The more recognisable or operationalising concept of this process of course goes by the following name – Arabisation/islamisation of Africa.
It did not require some extraordinary insight to predict the utter failure of the July 2007 Accra summit of Africa’s heads of regime – not so much the broad indifference shown to the vaunted theatrics of the so-called continental union government performance by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi but the assembly’s deafening silence over the ongoing Sudan Arab regime-driven genocide against the African people of Darfur. This failure is indefensible. Just as the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide (post-European occupied Africa’s foundational genocide which the Arab/islamic World, in concert with Britain, the former Soviet Union and the Nigeria state executed, resulting in the murder of 3.1 million Igbo) and the subsequent genocide in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other conflicts and wars on the continent, African regime heads have yet again failed to confront and halt another mass slaughter of an African people. Just as in all the pre-Darfur continental genocide and other armed conflicts of the past 41 years in which 15 million Africans were murdered, the world appears, yet again, to watch at the sideline as another nation of Africans is being systematically destroyed by an Africa-based regime run by a ruthless minority Arab/islamist hegemonic grouping. A total of 200,000 Darfuri have so far been murdered.
Despite Gaddafi’s pre-summit boisterous campaigns across Africa to publicise his “union government” ambition, the Arab nationalist, who has turned his country into some religio-dynastic fiefdom since he seized power in 1969 after a coup d’état, has obviously scant democratic credentials to present to the current frenetic African discourses. These are geared to the reworking and transformation of Africa’s debilitating sociopolitical spaces of dictatorship, militarism, and genocide. Africa’s strategic goals in these early decades of the new millennium, it should be stressed, are to dismantle its extant genocide-states and create extensively decentralised new state forms of organic coherence that not only halt the slaughtering of four decades but also embark on the construction of African-centred polities of advanced civilisations.
Furthermore, Gaddafi must have known, all along, that the overwhelming majority of Africans are vehemently opposed to be dragged and boxed into another conqueror/genocide-state, à la the existing ones – Nigeria, the Sudan, the Congos, Central Africa Republic, Chad, whatever! This is whether or not the envisaged contraption is more territorially expansive than the status quo or if it is subsumed under some creeping Arab/islamist imperium, which is essentially what Gaddafi’s “union government” quest ominously prefigures. Gaddafi had indeed in 2001 appealed to Arabs, including those domiciled outside Africa, to support and join this contraption as the “only [living] space we have” for the future, a point already taken up so aggressively by the Sudan which has been settling thousands of Arabs on Darfuri lands, “cleansed” of their African owners as the genocide intensifies. It is precisely because of the overriding importance of the “Darfur factor” in present pan-Arab political calculations on Africa that Gaddafi was generally unperturbed by his “union government” failure in Accra. Indeed, Gaddafi returned home from Accra very satisfied that he had ensured that Africa did not discuss the raging Darfur genocide. Gaddafi had in effect converted the well-known pan-Arab long-term goal to seize the whole of Africa to a more “immediate” task, a smokescreen that dominated the conference proceedings and kept Darfur off the agenda! Yet Gaddafi’s diversionary trail on Darfur must be exposed for what it really is: the Darfur genocide, in 2007, tragically illustrates the grim realities of African-Arab “relations” of nearly 2000 years which Gaddafi and other Arab expansionists and some of their African religio-political allies cannot ignore.
Serial aggression and expansionism were the interlocking dual tracks that codified Arab’s policy to the African World right from the outset. In the 7th century of the last millennium, a rampaging Arab/islamist army invaded Africa from across Arabia in the northeast and seized the great African civilisation of Kemet (“ancient Egypt”). It later expanded this conquest westwards to cover the 3000 miles of territory to the continent’s northwest Atlantic coast – the so-called Maghrib. Africa lost one-third of its territory that the Arabs still occupy to the present day. Essentially this occupation has continued, thanks to the tapering off of the African resistance in Kemet and elsewhere in north Africa and the dispersal of millions of survivors to the neighbouring regions of central, eastern and western Africa. Soon, the Arab/islamists converted their north African occupation and their later cultural hegemony in Sahelian west Africa into a profitable conurbation for the enslavement and export of Africans as well as non-human resources such as gold (particularly) to the Arab World, Asia and southern Europe. At the height of the occupation, the Arab/islamists exported two million enslaved Africans per annum to the Arab World and extensively depleted the gold reserves in the Sudan, Mali, Songhai, Kanem-Bornu and elsewhere which were transferred to enrich the bourses and palaces of the Arab World. Considering the magnitude of this export of African resources at the time, it is not without significance that the Arabs, themselves, have a saying, “Against the camel’s mange use a tar, and against poverty make a trip to the Sudan”. The role of the Arab World itself in the re-export of enslaved Africans in its territory to southern Europe (in addition to the Near-East and southwest Asia) during the period – a practice which dramatically doubled and, in some cases, tripled the “value” of the enslaved Africans – was such that in Naples, for example, 83 per cent of those enslaved there by the 15th century were African. And, contrary to “conventional” wisdom, enslaved Africans worked Arab/islamist sugar plantations in Morocco as early as the 9th century CE, almost 600 years before the Americas!
Morocco itself would later on in 1593 attack, pillage, and seize prominent towns of Songhai, leading ultimately in its wake to the collapse of the Songhai state, ironically the most islamised of the Sahelian west African states. Parallel to these events in west Africa, Arab/islamist expansionism in east Africa, subsequent to the initial 7th century invasion of the north, soon spread along the Somali, Kenyan and Mozambican coastline and their occupation of the offshore island of Zanzibar, which they later transformed into a strategic colony for enslaved Africans.
From the above-mentioned coastal bridgeheads of east Africa, the Arab/islamists began to exert enormous influence into the affairs of the existing independent states of the African hinterland – in the east, central and southern Africa. In the latter two regions, as were the cases in north and western Africa, they pursued a scorched earth policy of brigandage, murders and the enslavement and export of millions of African peoples to the Arab World and elsewhere – a practice that actively went on well into the 16th century when it, in turn, was enveloped by the burgeoning European eventual attack and take-over of Africa. Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, the Zulu historian, recalls, most chillingly, the aftermath of the Arab enslavement of southern Africa: “no less than a hundred [nations] were wiped out completely [during the period] in Tanganyika, Kenya, the Congo basin and [Zambia]”. The Arab aggression was couched in the language of racist bigotry and attendant Africophobism that hauntingly anticipates Europe’s own rationalising efforts a few centuries later: “You K[*****] are not people. It is the will of Allah and the Prophet that we catch you and sell you, for you are not people … you have no souls. Allah gave you to us for servants”. Finally, in eastcentral Africa in the early 1550s, the Arab/islamists dealt a further blow to Africa’s independence. They overran the three “successor states” of Nubia, essentially the surviving bastions of Africa’s ancient Nile valley civilisations of Kemet, thus extending their territorial stranglehold on the Nile further south to the river’s strategic middle stretches.
In the end, Africans escaped the blanket “Australasianisation” of their destiny by the Arab conquest, 800 years before the Europeans achieved this murderous goal elsewhere in the world. This was because Africans were continuously re-grouping and re-defining the future trajectory of their defence, existence, and development by utilising the flexibility occasioned by the sheer size of their (continental) homeland. In addition, they were successful in interweaving the arterial cultural fibre that bound their peoples in order to cope with the inevitable social stresses in regions that had become destinations for the migratory shifts of population, leaving any territories lost or severely threatened by the Arab/islamist emergency. Even then, the partial success of the Arab “Australasianisation” of Africa, albeit in the north of the continent, was a sufficiently timely warning to Africans that they required both eternal vigilance and a totally different mode of resistance to foreign aggression in future if they were to avoid the possibility of complete expulsion from their homeland or a distinct marginalisation therein.
Arab/islamist aggression on Africa paved the way to Europe’s later attack, underlining the very double jeopardy-character of the African holocaust. It is evident that a key lesson that Africans learnt from the former was crucial in enabling them to organise the permanent but flexible resistance that eventually led to the partial termination of the European occupation when it arose. This lesson is still pertinent as Africans reject any form of “unionisation” with the Arab World and respond robustly to the Darfur outrage and other mass murders programmed for the future. For the Arabs, genocide remains their historically trodden route to seek to complete their “Australasianisation” of Africa. The more recognisable or operationalising concept of this process of course goes by the following name – Arabisation/islamisation of Africa.
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