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Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (Dakar & Reading: African Renaissance, 2011), ISBN 9780955205019, paperback, 236pp., £19.95/US$29.95/CDN$30.68/EUR23,99/￥2,580
The essays here in Readings from Reading underscore Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s continuing optimism about the possibilities of Africans constructing post-“Berlin-states” as the launch pad to transform the topography of the African renaissance. Readings from Reading is a timely publication, coming on the eve of the historic January 2011 referendum in south Sudan in which the people of the region will choose to vote to restore their national independence or get stuck hopelessly in the Sudan, the first of the “Berlin-states” that Africans tragically “inherited” in January 1956. Ekwe-Ekwe insists that the contemporary Africa state, imposed on Africans by a band of European conqueror-states and currently run by what the author describes as a “shard of disreputable African regimes to exploit and despoil the continent’s human and material resources”, cannot serve African interests. The legacy, as this study demonstrates, has indeed been catastrophic: “The [African] overseers pushed the states into even deeper depths of genocidal and kakistocratic notoriety in the past 54 years as the grim examples of particularly Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Sudan ... depressingly underscore. 15 million Africans have been murdered by African-led regimes in these states and elsewhere in Africa since the Igbo genocide of 1966-1970”. Ekwe-Ekwe argues that there is no future for African
progress, especially in ensuring that the peoples, themselves, exercise an
unfettered self-governing ability to develop their lives, reconstruct centuries
of a battered heritage and transform their societies, except Africans dismantle
the “Berlin-state” on the continent. This state remains a
conqueror’s/conquest principality as its original creators have indeed sought and reinforced unrelentingly and cannot, therefore, respect not to talk of safeguard the human rights of African peoples.
On the contrary, the future for Africans predicates on an extensive
sociopolitical decentralisation process where constituent nations, however
“small”, exercise their inalienable right to control and develop their human and
natural resources and decide, freely, on the nature of the relationship that
they wish to establish with their neighbours and those elsewhere in the world.
Readings from Reading is an engaging, incisive, wide-ranging and multidisciplinary discourse, salient features that have come to define Ekwe-Ekwe’s groundbreaking scholarship of the past three decades. The author covers an assemblage of diverse topics and themes which include the Igbo genocide, the Jos massacres in central Nigeria, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s failed attempt to blow up an incoming aircraft over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, African presence in Britain, Robert Mugabe, Muammar Gaddafi, Obafemi Awolowo, Omar al-Bashir, Yoweri Museveni, Charles Taylor, Olusegun Obasanjo, Ali Mazrui, Andrew Young, the G8 and Africa, Africa “debt”, African émigrés’ remittances to Africa, “sub-Sahara Africa”, reparations to Africans, African representation on the UN Security Council, African choices for the Nobel Peace Prize, Africa and the International Criminal Court, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, the Sudan and the Congo, arms to Africa, arms-ban on Africa. Finally, on the subject of the restoration-of-independence, the key connecting thread that links all the visitations, Ekwe-Ekwe critically examines the contributions made variously on this cord by an impressive line up of some of the very best and brightest of African intellectuals: Achebe, Adichie, Césaire, Damas, Coltrane, Diop, Equiano, Ngũgĩ, Okigbo, Senghor.
When last in March 2010 I
reviewed the Washington-based Fund for Peace’s annual research
publication, “The Failed States Index”
(http://rethinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/jos-foregrounding-failed-state.html),
the fund concluded that
11 out of the “worst 20 states” in the world (in 2009)
were located in Africa. I had shown that Nigeria, one of the eleven, had indeed
been a failed state since 1945. For the outcome of the FfP’s current, 2011
research, published recently, the highlights for Africa are as follows: 14 out
of the “worst 20 states”; 20 out of the “worst 30 states”; 28 (just above
one-half of all the continent’s so-called sovereign states) of the “worst 53
states”. It is not inconceivable, at this rate, that by the time students
finishing high school this year graduate from colleges and universities and
begin to apply for research positions at the fund, “53 out of the worst 53
states” in the world could be in Africa.
African countries,
unsurprisingly, fare most poorly at each and across the ten crucial variables
at the centre of the fund’s research, but particularly in the following, with
the inescapable crushing consequences on the lives and well-being of the
peoples:
1. legitimacy of the state
2. rise of fractionalised elite
3. chronic and sustained human
rights violation
4. uneven economic development
5. poorly, sharp and severe
economic decline
6. massive movement of refugees
or internally displaced persons
Yet, according to trade figures
and associated data readily obtainable, these principalities of seeming
dysfunction have performed their utmost, year in, year out, in that key variable
for which their creators established them in the first place – curiously, in no
way part of the FfP research: redoubts for export services of designated
mineralogical/agricultural products to the European World/overseas. There are
no indications, whatsoever, that any of these countries has found it difficult
to fulfil its principal obligations on this accord – not the genocidal and
kakistocratic Nigeria, no. 14 on the failed index, not the Democratic Republic
of the Congo (no. 4), not the Sudan (no. 3), not even Chad, the no. 2 worst
state. This is the context that that seemingly contradictory aphorism, “Africa
works”, becomes hugely intelligible. In effect, the raison d’être of the
“state” in Africa is not really to serve its people(s); it is, on the contrary,
to respond, unfailingly, to the objective needs of its creators overseas.
It
would therefore be surprising if the Fund for Peace did not soon have to
investigate this “missing link” component in its annual study.
It should be obvious in this discussion that our goal is definitely not to contribute to the “politically correct” rhetoric bandied about incessantly which calls for some “decrease” in African population because we do not believe that Africa, in the first instance, is overpopulated. We must now examine this issue. The population argument is usually advanced on a number of fronts. First, there is a “theory” that the given landmass which presently defines Africa and its various so-called nation-states cannot sustain the existing populations, but, more critically, the “projected populations” in years to come. We shall examine the degree to which this “theory” is able to stand up to serious scientific scrutiny first by comparing Africa’s landmass vis-à-vis its population and those of some of the countries of the world.
Africa’s population is currently 1 billion (all the statistics here on countries’ population, landmass and the like are derived from The World Bank, World Development Report 2011 and United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2011) covering an incredibe vast landmass (11,668,599 sq miles). Ethiopia’s landmass is 471,775 sq miles, five times the size of Britain’s at 94, 226 sq miles. Yet Britain’s population of 62 million is three-quarters that of Ethiopia’s 83 million. As for Somalia, it is 2.6 times the size of Britain but has a population of only 9 million. Sudan and South Sudan provide an even more fascinating comparison. Whilst both countries are 10 times the size of Britain, they support a population of 45 million – about 70 per cent the size of Britain. In fact the Sudans have a landmass equal to that of India which is populated by 1.22 billion people – i.e., more than the population of all of Africa! Britain is one-tenth the size of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) which has a landmass of 905,562 sq miles, similar to the Sudans and India. In other words, the DRC is about ten times the size of Britain but with a population of 71 million, nine million more than the population of the latter. Even though the DRC landmass is about twice that of all of Britain, France and Germany (492661 sq miles), it has just about one-third of these three western European total population of 208 million. Inevitably, the thundering question posed by the hollering
across the vast research field of this most exciting inquiry must now be answered: Where, Where are these “overpopulated” Africans? Where can we find them? Please, please, where are they?
Second, let us examine similarly sized countries. France has a landmass of 211,206 sq miles close to Somalia’s. However, France’s population of 65 million is about seven times the population of Somalia. Similarly, Botswana is slightly larger than France at 254,968 sq miles but with a population of 2 million, a minuscule proportion of France’s. Uganda’s landmass at 91,135 sq miles is about the size of Britain’s 94,226 sq miles. Yet with a population of only 33 million, Uganda is about half that of Britain’s. Similarly, Ghana’s landmass of 92,099 sq miles makes it approximately equal to the size of Britain. Ghana is however populated by only 25 million people, far less than one-half Britain’s population.
Southern World to Southern World comparisons can also prove useful in exposing the fallacy of either Africa’s “large population” or “potential explosive population”. Iran’s size of 636,292 sq miles is about the same as Sudan and South Sudan combined. Yet its population, unlike the Sudans’ 45 million, is at least one and one-half times as large at 75 million. Pakistan’s landmass of 310,402 sq miles is just about Namibia’s 333,702 but Pakistan’s population is 174 million while Namibia’s is 2 million! Even though Bangladesh’s 55,598 sq mile-landmass makes it roughly one-eighth the size of Angola (481,350 sq miles) as well as that of South Africa’s (471, 442 sq miles), Bangladeshi population at 159 million outstrips Angola’s 13 million and South Africa’s 50 million. If we were to return to our earlier comparisons, Angola and South Africa are about 4-5 times the size of Britain but with one-fifth and four-fifths respectively of the latter’s population.
Finally, we should turn to the question of resource, its availability or lack of it, and therefore its ability or inability to support the African population – another component of Africa’s “over-population” fallacy. Well over 50 per cent of Uganda’s arable land, some of the richest in Africa, remains uncultivated. Were Uganda to expand its current food production significantly, not only would it be completely self-sufficient, but it would be able to feed all the countries contiguous to its territory without difficulty. It must be stressed here that Uganda does not need any GM food technology to acquire this capability. Indeed no African country requires any shred of GM technology to acquire food sufficiency and security. None, whatsoever.
Statistics of transformation
The overall statistics of the African situation is even more revealing as with regards to the continent’s long-term possibilities. Just about a quarter of the potential arable land of Africa is being cultivated presently (FAO and IIED, “What effect will biofuels have on forest land and poor people’s access to it?”, 2008). Even here, an increasingly high proportion of the cultivated area is assigned to so-called cash-crops (cocoa, coffee, tea, groundnut, sisal, floral cultivation, etc.) for exports at a time when there has been a virtual collapse, across the board, of the price of these crops in international commodity markets. In the past 30 years, the average real price of these African products abroad has been about 20 per cent less than their worth during the 1960s-70s period which was soon after the “restoration of independence”. As for the remaining 75 per cent of Africa’s uncultivated land, this represents 60 per cent of the entire world’s potential (John Endres, “Ready, set, sow”, The Journal of Good Governance Africa, Issue 6, November 2012, p. 1). The world is aware of the array of strategic minerals such as coltan (columbite tantalite)**, cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, industrial diamonds, iron ore, manganese, phosphates, titanium, uranium, and of course petroleum oil found in virtually all regions across the continent.
Despite the ravages of history of foreign conquest and occupation and the virulence of locally-brewed tyranny of genocidal regimes and fellow-travellers, Africa remains one of the world’s most wealthy and potentially one of the world’s wealthiest continents. What is not always or simultaneously associated with the wealth profiles of Africa is that it has vast acreage of rich farmlands with capacity to optimally support the food needs of generations of African peoples indefinitely. In addition, the famous fish industry in Sénégal, Angola, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana for instance, Botswana’s rich cattle farms, west Africa’s yam and plantain belts extending from southern Cameroon to southern Sénégal, the continent’s rich rice production fields, etc., etc., all highlight the potential Africa has for fully providing for all its food needs. Again, without a shred of GM technology needed or emplaced. Thus, what the current African socioeconomic situation shows is extraordinarily reassuring, provided the acreage devoted to cultivation is expanded and expressly targeted to address Africa’s own internal consumption needs. Land use directed at agriculture for food output, as opposed to the calamitous waste of “cash-crop” production for export and/or the more recently observed “land-grab” – parcelling away of land to foreign governments and organisations – occurring across the continent (on this, see, particularly, the excellent work of Emeka Akaezuwa’s“StopAfrica Land Grab” movement – http://www.stopafricalandgrab.com/author/emeka-akaezuwa/).
It is an inexplicable and inexcusable tragedy that any African child, woman, or man could go without food in the light of the staggering endowment of resources in Africa. Africa constitutes a spacious, rich and arable landmass that can support its population, which is still one of the world’s least densely populated and distributed, into the indefinite future. There is only one condition, though, for the realisation of this goal – Africa must utilise these immense resources for the benefit of its own peoples within newly negotiated, radically decentralised sociopolitical dispensations which must abandon the current murderous “nation-states” or “Berlin-states” as they should be more appropriately categorised (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature, African Renaissance, 2011). We now no longer require any reminders that the primary existence of these states is to destroy or disable as many enterprisingly resourceful and resource-based constituent peoples, nations and publics within the polity that are placed in their genocidal march and sights.
It is abundantly clear that the factors which have contributed to determining the very poor quality of life of Africa’s population presently have to do with the nonuse, partial use, or the gross misuse of the continent’s resources year in, year out. This is thanks to an asphyxiating “Berlin-state” whose strategic resources are used largely to support the Western World and others and an overseer-grouping of local forces which exists solely to police the dire straits of existence that is the lot of the average African. As a result, the broad sectors of African peoples are yet to lead, centrally, the entire process of societal reconstruction and transformationby themselves. Surely, an urgently restructured,culturally supportive political framework that enhances the quality of life of Africans is really the pressing subject of focus for Africa.
*Discussion paper presented at a youth weekend-school, Stratford, London, Saturday 16 June 2012.
**Refined coltan is critical in the manufacture of an array of small electronic equipment including, particularly, laptop computers and mobile phones; 80 per cent of the world’s reserves of this mineral is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo which is being currently subjected to a genocidal conflict where 5 million people have been murdered since the 1990s.
“Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean
the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass
killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a
coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential
foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the
groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of
the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings,
religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of
the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the
individuals belonging to such groups”.
– Raphael Lemkin who formulated the word “genocide”, 1943
Andrew Hill’s composition,
“Dedication”, appositely sets the tone for the essay below remembering 46 years
to the day of the beginning of the Igbo genocide which would subsequently transform the course of Igbo history and that of the rest of
Africa most tragically. Here, the Andrew Hill Sextet plays “Dedication” from
its Point of Departure album – personnel: Hill, piano; Kenny Dorham, trumpet;
Eric Dolphy, bass Clarinet; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone; Richard Davis,
bass; Tony Williams, drums, recorded: Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, New
York, 21 March 1964.
“[Hope] is
an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart … Hope is definitely
not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will
turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how
it turns out” – Válclav Havel, playwright, poet, former president,
Czechoslovakia, former president, Czech Republic, “Válclav Havel on hope and power”, http://entersection.com/posts/761-vaclav-havel-on-hope-and-power
(accessed 18 May 2012)
“Good men and women are even better when they challenge safe
zones of human thinking” – Ubaldo Rafiki to Herb Hirsch, communication, iagslistserv@googlegroups.com, 26 May 2012
Today, Tuesday 29 May 2012,
marks the 46th anniversary of the start of the Igbo genocide. Beginning at
mid-morning on 29 May 1966 to 12 January 1970, the composite aggregation of the
Nigeria state – military officers, the police, Hausa-Fulani emirs, muslim
clerics and intellectuals, students, civil servants, alimajiri,
journalists, politicians, other public figures – planned and carried out the
Igbo genocide. This is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest
Africa. It is also Africa’s most expansive and devastating genocide of the 20th
century and the inaugurator of contemporary Africa’s age of pestilence. A total
of 3.1 million Igbo people, a quarter of this nation’s population at the time,
were murdered during those harrowing 44 months.
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.
Igbo or Nigeria?
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 the British 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 its vice-chancellors (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 its 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 vanguardist 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.[1]
Genocide is the name
The Igbo’s break with Nigeria occurred catastrophically on
29 May 1966. On this day, starting from mid-morning, leaders of the
Hausa-Fulani north region (feudal overlords, muslim clergy, alimajiri,
military, police, businesspeople, academics, students, civil 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 epoch, 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, 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 unto any bomb or missile available to lob remorselessly in 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 a 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.”[2]
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. Olusegun Obasanjo, a fellow Yoruba commander
who later took over the notorious Adekunle-led brigade and who would be a
cantankerous human rights violator and very corrupt and inept post-genocide
Nigeria head of regime for 11 years, expanded even further the barbarism of his
predecessor particularly in his murder of hundreds of thousands of Igbo
villagers and the expansive destruction of scores of Igbo villages in the
Aba-Umuahia-Owere-Igwe Ocha/Port Harcourt panhandle. On 5 June 1969, Obasanjo
ordered Gbadomosi King, another Yoruba national, a pilot in the genocidist air
force, to shoot down an International Committee of the Red Cross DC-7
relief-bearing aircraft to the encircled and bombarded Igbo over the skies of Eket, south Biafra. As instructed,
Gbadomosi King duly destroyed the aircraft with the loss of its 3-person.
Amazingly, Obasanjo gives a blow-by-blow account of this outrage in his
memoirs, aptly entitled My Command,[3]
and expresses a perverse satisfaction
over the aftermath of the crime as he gloatingly recalls: “The effect of [this]
singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando
[officially-designated name of the Obasanjo genocidist unit] 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”.[4]
Additionally, Obasanjo unreservedly admits, in his records, that his
prosecuting genocidist regime (on the ground) had to rely on its key British
government ally (see more below) to “sort out” the raging international outcry
generated by the destruction of the ICRC plane.[5] It is this same Olusegun Obasanjo that the
London Financial Times recently proclaimed the “godfather of modern
Nigeria”[6]
without, of course, the irony intended. If the Financial Times is
correct, then Olusegun Obasanjo’s must be one of the most troubling terms of
paternity that the world must have to deal with and those who call themselves
Nigerians do have the scariest scourge of inheritance to live with. As the Financial
Times is so enamoured of Olusegun Obasanjo, it is now incumbent on this
publication to perhaps upgrade its client to some “global status” by naming two
other countries from each of the following regions of the world to where
Olusegun Obasanjo should also be installed “godfather”: Africa, Asia,
Australasia, Central America/the Caribbean, Europe, North America, South
America…
Nigeria’s
genocidal campaign against the Igbo people 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 of terror includes the following 10
distinct features
1. Seizure and looting of the multibillion-(US)dollar
capital assets across Biafra including particularly those at Igwe Ocha
conurbations and elsewhere and in Nigeria
2. Comprehensive sequestration of
Igbo liquid assets in Biafra and Nigeria (as of January 1970), bar the £20.00
(twenty pounds sterling) doled out only 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
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 …[7]
8. Nineteen cases of premeditated
pogroms against the Igbo, particularly in north Nigeria, between 1980 and 2012:
1980
... 1982 ... 1985 ... 1991 ... 1993 ... 1994 ... 1999 ... 2000 ... 2001 ...
2002 ... 2004 ... 2005 ... 2006 ... 2007 ... 2008 ... 2009 ... 2010 ... 2011
... 2012
9. Ninety per cent of the
54,000 people murdered in Nigeria by the state/quasi-state operatives and
agents since 1999 are Igbo people, according to the December 2011 research by
the International Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule Of Law – an
Onicha-based human rights organisation
10. At least eighty per cent
of people murdered by the Boko Haram islamist insurgent group’s attacks across
swathes of lands in north/northcentral Nigeria since Christmas Day 2011 to date
are Igbo
These latter measures, especially
numbers 1-7 which inaugurated phase-III of the Igbo genocide on 13 January
1970, 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”.[8]
We mustn’t fail to add, finally, that these measures were drafted and
implemented largely by Yoruba economists and lawyers led by Obafemi Awolowo and
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. Prime Minister Wilson was adamant that he “would accept”
the death of “a half a million” Igbo “if that was what it took”[9]
the Nigeria genocidists to accomplish their ghastly mission. This Wilson’s
declaration on the Igbo genocide was in fact more gruesome than those made by
some of the most vociferous Nigerian genocidist commanders and propagandists
operating on the ground during the slaughtering. Such was the grotesquely expressed
diminution of African life made by a supposedly leading politician of the world
of the 1960s and head of government of one of the countries that actually
drafted and a signatory of the 1948 United Nations’ “Convention on the
Prevention of the Crime of Genocide” – barely 20 years after the deplorable
perpetration of the Jewish genocide. As the final tally of the murder of the Igbo
demonstrates, Harold Wilson probably had the perverse satisfaction that his
Nigerian allies did perform far in excess of his grim target …
Ozoemena
Alas, Harold Wilson had apparently set the tone and
benchmark of “dispensability” against which African life would be “valued” in
Africa itself (particularly by the continent’s genocidist troopers, “theorists”
– for example, the infamous Awolowoists and neo-Awolowoists – and allied
officials) and across the world in the wake of the Igbo genocide. Forty-two
years on, 12 million more Africans would be slaughtered in the ever-expanding genocidal killing fields of the continent: Rwanda (1994),
Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo (variously, since the late 1990s),
Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004), Abyei – south of the Sudan –
(ongoing), Nuba – south of the Sudan – (ongoing), and in other killings in
Liberia, Ethiopia, Congo Republic, Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Equatorial
Guinea, Guinea-Conakry, Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, South Sudan,
Burundi, Mali.
Not to the European World, though, does the Wilson
malevolent logic apply. On the contrary. For the European World, following the
Jewish genocide of the 1930s-1940s, the purposeful resolve struck for the
future course of societal direction and progress, rightly so, is ozoemena –
“never again”. Never again, European World leaders affirmed, would any peoples
of European descent anywhere and at anytime on earth be murdered so malefically
and callously for any reason(s) whatsoever. In 1992, I published a satirical
commentary entitled “Is Bosnia-Herzegovina in Africa?”[10]
in which I meditated on the ongoing robust intervention by the leaders of the
European World of the age (Bush, Major, Mitterrand, Kohl) to halt the gestating
multipronged genocide in the then Yugoslavia. For days, I was overwhelmed by
this laudable intervention to uphold a key fundamental right of human beings –
the right to life. The irony of this move was of course not lost on anyone.
Since May 1966 some political leaderships of the same European World have, in
complicity with their African clients in the field, waged or abetted campaigns
of genocide against African peoples. Pertinently, the unfolding genocide in the
Balkans that had elicited this intervention was very similar to what the Igbo
and some other Africans had been subjected to during the course of the previous
30 years. I couldn’t stop imagining what effect a similar intervention would
have had on Biafra, the Congos, Liberia and elsewhere in Africa … If the
peoples in Bosnia-Herzegovina were indeed Africans, I wondered, would there
have been this high-powered intervention to stop genocide? Could Harold Wilson
have waged a genocidal campaign against a European World people, for instance,
during the course of 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, similar to his campaign
against the Igbo? If not, why not?
In the spirit of ozoemena, the Europeans successfully
blocked the simmering genocide in the Balkans. Again, in the spirit of
ozoemena, the Europeans worked assiduously to break up the immanently fractured
states in the region (Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia) which they knew
could not guarantee the rights and aspirations of constituent nations and
peoples – a recipe for the perpetration of genocide. Since then, in the spirit
of ozoemena, 22 new sovereign states, including Kosovo (population: 1.8 million), have emerged in Europe.
This is a figure that is four states less than one-half of the total number of
so-called sovereign states in Africa, the latter’s much larger territorial size
and population notwithstanding. On this score, is it not ironical that in the
same week in February 2008 that US President George Bush ecstatically
recognised Kosova rights to exercise their sovereign rights to declare
themselves independent from Serbia, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was
busy pressurising Africans in Kenya to forego their own sovereign rights –
demonstrated, in this case, by electing a government of their choice in
December 2007. So, as far as the European World is concerned, in the spirit of
ozoemena, a European nation or people is deemed superior to the state. A
people does not even have to feel “threatened” in the existing state where it
is found to lose this status as the Scots in Britain currently demonstrate.[11]
This position is indeed correct for all nations and peoples, not just
Europeans. African nations and peoples are also superior to the state. The
nation, the people, is enduring; the state is transient.
Peoples vs the state
That the state is inferior to its
peoples, irrespective of race, continent, region, religion/belief system, is
irrefutable. As a result, and graciously for that matter, Prime Minister John
Major of Britain, back in 1992, did not utter some obscenity during the period,
à la his predecessor 25 years before, of willing to “accept” the death of “one
half million” Serb or Albanian or Croat to keep Yugoslavia “intact”; neither
did Major dabble into some nonsense of the “inviolability” or “indivisibility”
of the Yugoslav state, an artificial assemblage concocted at the same time in 1918
as the equally inchoate Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union. Pointedly, these two
oft-repeated vulgarities, just quoted, were a favourite of Harold Wilson’s on
Nigeria in the 1960s as well as by Nigerian genocidists whose state, cobbled
together by Britain in 1914, also shares the same non-organic kinship as
the central/east European examples. It is now evident that this foundational
genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa and the worst in 20th century Africa
would probably not have occurred without British active involvement. As a
result, Britain, crucially, has played a key role in the emergence of
the ongoing age of pestilence ravaging Africa. The continuing presentation of
the British policy to Africa since the May 1966 outbreak of the Igbo genocide
in both academia and media, particularly in the Western World, as that of some
benign foreign state proffering “aid”/“development” programme(s) is at best
evasive but at worst staggeringly denialist and thus fraudulent. It should also
be recalled that in the two Igbo pogroms organised and perpetrated by
Hausa-Fulani leaderships in Jos (1945) and Kano (1953), both during years of
the British occupation and, with hindsight, “dress rehearsals” for the
1966-1970 genocide, the occupation did not prosecute those responsible for
these crimes. It is indeed inconceivable that a contemporary British government
would continue to delay any much longer the historic task of offering its
unreserved public apology to the Igbo, one of humanity’s most hardworking and
peaceful peoples, for Britain’s central role in the execution of this genocide
and pay reparations to the survivors.
This 29th day of May
Undoubtedly, 29 May 1966 is the most tragic day in the
annals of Igbo history. It is the day that the Igbo were subjected to an
overwhelming violence and unremitting brutality by supposedly fellow countrymen
and women. The atrocity was clinically organised, supervised and implemented by
the very state that the Igbo had played such a crucial role to liberate from
the British 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 anthem for the genocide, broadcast uninterruptedly in
Hausa on Kaduna radio and television throughout its duration, creating a
continental precedent whose local equivalents Hutu and a string of Sudanese
genocidist broadcasters would viciously reproduce during their own devastating
crimes against humanity in southcentral and northcentral Africa 28 years and 37
years later, respectively, is unambiguously clear on the principal objective of
this crime of genocide:
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 when
only few in the world thought that they would accomplish such an improbable
feat. 29th day of May 1966 is the day the Igbo people 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 is the permanent Igbo indictment of a
state that had risen thunderously to murder one of its constituent peoples.
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 few prospects for the future as illustrated most
cogently and graphically today – 46 years to the day. Despite the four
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 four decades of indescribable
hopelessness. Surely, Nigeria couldn’t recover from committing this heinous
crime, this crime against humanity.
This 29th day of May is therefore
a beacon of the resilient spirit of human overcoming of the most desperate,
unimaginably brutish forces – local and external. 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.
[1]Sabella Ogbobode Abidde, “The
Nigerian Presidency and the Igbo Nation”,
[9]Roger Morris, Uncertain
Greatness: Henry Kissinger & American Foreign Policy (London and new York:
Quartet Books, 1977), p. 122. See
also Michael Leapman, “While Biafrans starved, the FO moaned with hacks”, The Independent on Sunday (London), 3 January 1999.
[10]Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “Is Bosnia
Herzegovina in Africa? Reflections on the regionalism of wars and conflicts
since World War II”, African Peoples Review, Vol 1, No. 1, June 1992, p.
15.
This month marks the 46th anniversary of the start of the Igbo genocide. Beginning on 29 May 1966 to 12 January 1970, the composite aggregation of the Nigeria state – military officers, the police, Hausa-Fulani emirs, muslim clerics and intellectuals, students, civil servants, alimajiri, journalists, politicians, other public figures – planned and carried out the Igbo genocide. This is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. It is also Africa’s most expansive and devastating genocide of the 20th century. A total of 3.1 million Igbo people, a quarter of this nation’s population at the time, were murdered during those harrowing 44 months. Most Igbo were slaughtered in their homes, offices, businesses, schools, colleges, hospitals, markets, churches, shrines, farmlands, factories/industrial enterprises, children’s playground, town halls, refugee centres, cars, lorries, and at bus stations, railway stations, airports and on buses, trains and planes and on foot, or starved to death – the openly propagated regime-“weapon” to achieve its heinous goal more speedily. In the end, the Igbo genocide was enforced, devastatingly, by Nigeria’s simultaneously pursued land, aerial and naval blockade and bombardment of Igboland, Africa’s highest population density region outside the Nile Delta. The genocidists also destroyed, sequestrated or looted the multibillion-dollar Igbo economy, one of the most advanced and enterprising conurbations in Africa of the era. Africa and the rest of the world largely stood by and watched as the perpetrators enacted this horror most relentlessly and ruthlessly. Africa and the world could have stopped this genocide; Africa and the world should have stopped this genocide. This genocide inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. During the period, i.e., since January 1970, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo (variously, since the late 1990s) and Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004) and in other killings in Liberia, Ethiopia, Congo Republic, Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, south Sudan, Burundi, Mali.
In memory of the murdered 3.1 million Igbo, this blog will re-issue this notice each day throughout May until 29th of the month, the day commemorating the launch of the genocide, when an essay captioned “Igbo people 29 May 1966 – Genocide, survival, remembrance” will be published.
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is specialist on the state and on genocide & wars in Africa in the post-1966 epoch – beginning with the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-present day, the foundational and most gruesome genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population were murdered by Nigeria and its allies, principally Britain. Africa and the rest of the world largely stood by and watched as the perpetrators enacted this horror most ruthlessly. The world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide. This genocide inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. During the period, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/DRCongo (variously, since the late 1990s) and Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004) and in other wars in Africa. African peoples have, presently, no other choice but exit/dismantle the extant genocide-state (the bane of their existence & progress) & construct own nation-centred states that serve their interests. He is author of several books & papers on the subject and his new book is entitled The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019).
