Rethinking Africa is a forward looking blog dedicated to the exchange of innovative thinking on issues affecting the advancement of African peoples wherever they are. We provide rigorous and insightful analyses on the issues affecting Africans and their vision of the world.
Selected works: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God, A Man of the People, Beware Soul Brother, Girls at War and other Stories, Morning Yet on Creation Day, The Trouble with Nigeria, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”, Anthills of the Savannah, Hopes and Impediments, “Our Mission”, Collected Poems, “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration”, Home and Exile, There was a Country
(Herbie Nichols Trio, “The prophetic” {Vol I} [personnel: Nichols, piano; Al McKibbon, bass; Art Blakey, drums; recorded: Rudy Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, US, 6 May 1955])
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe TODAY MARKS the 133rd anniversary of the beginning of the infamous 15 November 1884 – 26 February 1885 European leaders’ Berlin conference on Africa. The gathering was chaired by German Chancellor von Bismarckto formalise the pan-European seizure, planned occupation, and irrepressible exploitation of the gargantuan riches of the African World which Leopold II, the génocidaire king of the Belgians, described predatorily as “this magnificent African cake”. It was indeed to “secure for ourselves [Belgians] a slice of this magnificent African cake”, Leopold II’s own haunting words, that this monarch and his private forces and those of the Belgian state and others elsewhere in Europe carried out a devastatingly reprehensible 30-year trail (1878-1908) of genocide against Africans in the Congo basin in which they annihilated 13 million constituent peoples. The following countries attended the Berlin meeting: Belgium, Holland, Britain,France, Portugal,Ottoman “empire”, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria-Hungary, Denmark,CzaristRussia, Sweden-Norway,UnitedStates. THE catastrophic aftermath of this Berlin-assembly, essentially its state’s genocidist architecture (genocide in the Congo basin by Belgian Leopold II, Herero genocide, Nama genocide, Berg Damara genocide, Igbo genocide, Rwanda genocide, Darfur genocide, genocide elsewhere in the Sudan, genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ...) is the bane of contemporary Africa which the peoples, themselves, not anyone else, must dispense with to survive.
(2. infamous gathering in session: to formalise the pan-European seizure, planned occupation, and irrepressible exploitation of the gargantuan riches of the African World – “this magnificent African cake”)
(George Russell Sextet here plays “Nardis”, a composition by Miles Davis[personnel: Russell, piano;Don Ellis, trumpet;Dave Baker, trombone;Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet;Steve Swallow, bass;Joe Hunt, drums; recorded: Riverside Records, New York, US, 8 May 1961])
BRILLIANT political scientist, academic, author, university administrator, pianist, corporate boards’ member, influential statesperson: US presidential advisor on national security (2001-2005), US secretary of state, 2005-2009 Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
INFLUENTIAL pianist with distinctly recognisable swing and stretch of feeling and author of Raise Up Off Me (1974), his critically-acclaimed memoirs
(Hampton Hawes Quartet, “For real!” [personnel: Hawes, piano; Harold Land, tenor saxophone; Scott La Faro, bass; Frank Butler, drums; recorded: Contemporary Records, Los Angeles, 17 March 1958])
1.Thursday 16 November 2017: Chinua Achebe’s birthday –
commemorating the 87th birthday of one of Biafra’s preeminent intellectuals and
Father of African Literature
(Father of African Literature)
2.Saturday 18 November 2017: Ofe nsala day – the Biafra
freedom movement’s organised day of mass boycott of Hausa-Fulani/islamist-led genocidist
Nigeria’s occupation regime-“election” in Biafra’s Anambra southwest region.
It should be noted that this lead grouping of the occupation which is arranging
the Anambra election chimera has no tradition of democratic discourse or
engagement whatsoever in its
brutish history of terror, conquests, occupations, expropriations, decadence,
genocide… At the end of such an exercise in the past, it usually appoints the
individual/“party” that it reckons will enable it to police its occupation of
Biafra more ruthlessly.
(Nnamdi Kanu: ... leader of Indigenous People of Biafra and freedom broadcaster, Radio Biafra)
THIS IS precisely why the Biafra freedom movement insists on a
referendum, nothing else including the occupation’s bogus elections, to democratically secure the next crucial phase
of the restoration-of-independence process. It has therefore called
on the Anambra population to instead stay firmly home with loved ones
throughout this day and enjoy a delicious dinner and don’t partake in the
desperate occupation’s strategy to prolong its murderous stay***** which is now
clearly unsustainable.
(Wynton Kelly Quintet, “Wrinkles” [personnel: Kelly, piano; Lee Morgan, trumpet; Shorter, tenor saxophone; Paul Chambers, bass; Philly Joe Jones, drums; recorded: Fine Sound Studios, New York, US, 12 August 1959])
*****INDEED in these past two years of the Muhammadu
Buhari regime, beginning in November 2015, the Nigeria genocidist military and
its Fulani militia adjunct have murdered over 2000 Biafrans in scorched-earth
campaigns across the country – marking it one of the bloodiest stretches during
the course of phase IV (launched on 13 January 1970, following phases I-III, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, when Nigeria and co-genocidist Britain murdered 3.1 million Biafrans or 25 per cent of the Igbo population) of the Igbo genocide in
which tens of thousands of Biafrans have been murdered. Since 14 September 2017,
the genocidists have murdered hundreds of Biafrans including the attack on the
family home of Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, when
scores of Kanu’s relatives and friends were murdered. Scores
of others are still unaccounted for. The whereabouts of Kanu himself and
parents are still unknown since these bombardments. None of the regimes in the
administrative regions of Biafra, essentially quisling-of-the-occupation, has
condemned any of these spates of 24 months of slaughtering of their own people.
(Born 9 November 1731, Baltimore county, Maryland, US)
INFLUENTIAL African-centred mathematician, astronomer, inventor, author, surveyor, farmer, freedom exponent, who documents his astronomical discoveries in his widely-circulated almanacs as well as correspondences with Thomas Jefferson (principal drafter of US constitution and future president) and others where he unambiguously asserts unfettered African freedom
(Miles Davis Quintet plays Wayne Shorter’s composition, “Footprints” [personnel: Davis, trumpet; Shorter, tenor saxophone;Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: 30th Street Columbia Studio, New York, US, 24-25 October 1966])
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).
