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.
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