17 days: South Sudan – and Africa’s date with history

Aimé Césaire once told an interviewer during one of those illuminating discourses of his on history: “History is always dangerous, the world of history is a risky world; but it is up to us at any given moment to establish and readjust the hierarchy of dangers”. It is indeed in the very course to disrupt – and “readjust” this hierarchy of an age in favour of the African people of south Sudan that this nation heads for an historic referendum just 17 days away, poised to vote for the restoration of their independence from Arab/muslim rule and hegemony.

There is an added verve of audaciousness in the south Sudan choice of or agreement to a January date, the 9th (2011), to make their decision. On another January date, this time the 1st, in 1956, the supposedly departing British occupation regime imposed the minority Arab/muslim population on the south in a bogus independence contraption aimed at perpetuating its vast economic and strategic interests in northcentral Africa. The south’s response was to launch a stretch of resistance which has transformed that monstrosity to a case of referendum and breath of freedom. This time around, south Sudan has indeed wrestled down January and tamed its clime of adversity!

Ten years after 1956, 29 May 1966, the Igbo nation of southwestcentral Africa, some 1800 miles away from the Sudan, spectacularly disrupted the presumed teleological insistence of the burgeoning genocide state in Nigeria, the first in Africa in 60 years. The Igbo had played the vanguard role in the liberation of Nigeria from the British conquest and occupation. As Nigeria embarked on its genocidal campaign to destroy the Igbo, which resulted in the murder of 3.1 million of the people or a quarter of the population within 44 months, the Igbo responded by declaring their independence, the state of Biafra, from yet another outlandish British contraption. Nigeria, to all intents and purposes, collapsed in the wake of the Igbo genocide. We mustn’t forget to recall that the final edifice of the Nigeria contrivance, namely the British positioning of the minority Hausa-Fulani muslim/north region on the apex of its “hierarchy of dangers”, was instructively fitted by the same occupation governor James Robertson who had, on 1 January 1956, officiated the Sudan farce that is on the eve of unravelling. Contrariously, Biafra is the first African people’s-centred state created on African soil since the 1885 formal loss of all-African sovereignty.

The bridging of 29 May 1966 and 9 January 2011, the two most important dates on the African calendar since 1885, will henceforth chart and transform the continent’s political landscape in this evolving epoch of the post-Berlin state of Africa. After 9 January 2011, the bridge becomes a panhandle unto which the new successor states will embark on the construction of an unprecedented polycentric connectivity of relations on the African scene.

Fifty-five years after 1956, the wheel has undoubtedly turned full circle in Africa. Africans are back to the beginnings but this time clearly on their own terms. The constituent African nation – so long maligned, so long impoverished, so long brutalised, so long humiliated, so long massacred, is recognised, at last, as the principal actor and agency of its being. This nation can now decide what precepts, what aspirations, what trajectory, what goals, it has set its new state to embark upon…* Whoever says that history isn’t so incorrigibly fascinating?! As Césaire deftly puts it in the interview already referred to, the challenges of the times become the “quest to reconquer something, our name (sic), our country … ourselves”.

So, which new states will emerge after south Sudan? The overwhelming majority of 50 million Igbo surely wish that theirs is next, following the link with south Sudan. But the Igbo know, particularly from their own experience, that history does not cohere to some logic of sequencing. Given its volatility, a people consciously and actively constructs, humanises and maintains its own passage of history. Igbo base organisations – human rights, civil rights, peace, workers, women, youth, students, enterprise and intellectuals must now begin the process of planning and carrying out a referendum of all Igbo people in occupied Igboland and abroad (Nigeria and elsewhere in the world) to decide freely on the restoration of Biafra. Reports from east/central Africa already indicate that four new states could emerge from the Congo Democratic Republic and two new states from one or two of the Berlin-states of northeast Africa. In the west region, observers, no doubt, will keep developments in the following countries in their sights: Cameroon, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria … Surely, as from the morrow of 9 January 2011, Africa is back!

*To underscore an important feature of this fast moving development in Africa, even if some might wish to categorise this particular example as “retrogressive”, Omar al-Bashir, the head of the Sudanese regime, made the following broadcast on Khartoum radio and television on 19 December 2010: “If south Sudan secedes, we’ll change the constitution. There will be no question of cultural or ethnic diversity. Sharia will be the only source of the constitution, and Arabic the only official language”. The people of the south would probably have responded, presumably quietly, in the confines of their homes: “This is your right, Mr al-Bashir! We have gone!”