The state is transient; peoples endure

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

WHATEVER HAPPENED to Sweden-Norway, Czarist Russia, Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottoman empire, the British empire, British India, French Indo-China, Portuguese empire, Spanish empire and, more latterly, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Malaysian Federation, West Indian Federation,  Central African Federation, British Cameroons, United Arab Republic, Senegambia Confederation, the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Treaty states, Czechoslavakia, Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia, etc., etc? Each and everyone of these no longer exists. Gone! Each of them collapsed, somewhere, along their march in history… 

What happened to the constituent peoples in these states that no longer exist? The constituent peoples exist in innumerable new states with names beginning with and from “A” to “Z”. 

Kosovo vs Fegge, Onicha

WHY did the Polish state disappear from the world map for 123 years (yes, one hundred and twenty-three years!) until its reappearance in 1918? Answer: Gobbled up by predator states, chiefly Czarist Russia. What happened to the Polish people during this century and twenty-three years of varying conquest and occupation? The Poles survived, bidding their time for the restoration of their independence. What could happen to the United Kingdom as from September 2014? The United Kingdom could cease to exist as the world has known it as a “union” incorporating Scotland since 1707, if a simple majority of the 5 million Scottish people votes “yes” in a restoration-of-independence referendum to be held in the country then.  If the Scots leave the UK later on in the year, their state will be the 25th new state that would emerge in Europe since 1991. The last one, in 2008, is Kosovo, with a population of 1.8 million which is less than that of the Fegge district of Onicha, the great market town on the Oshimili River of southwest Biafra. In history, therefore, states have actually been transient formations. It is to human beings that survival belongs, provided no genocidist amalgam plans to wipe out a targeted group of them…

(John Coltrane Quartet, “The promise” [personnel: Coltrane, soprano saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live radio broadcast, Liederhalle, Stuttgart, Germany, 4 November 1963])

Inalienable, 1001 states

The right to self-determination is for every people. It is inalienable and is guaranteed by the United Nations. No people is exempt from exercising this right. This is why the slogan that proclaims such gibberish as “indivisibility”/“indissolubility”/“indestructibility” of a state, any state, is not really worth the paper it is written on except of course it is an embedded code by a slaughtering-horde for the plot of the next pogrom or the reinforcement of the terror of an ongoing genocide. As everyone knows, the states that Europe created in Africa, in the aftermath of its 1884-1885 Berlin conqueror-conference, cannot provide the fundamental needs of Africans.  This “Berlin-state”, with its bumbling ahistorical name (Nigeria, Niger, Guinea, the Sudan, Chad, whatever!), cannot lead Africans to the reconstructive changes they deeply yearn for after the tragic history of centuries of occupation. Such change was and never is the mission of this state but instruments to expropriate and despoil Africa by the conquest. Essentially, the “Berlin-state” still serves the interests of its creators and those of the ruthless cabal of African-overseers which polices the dire straits of existence that is the lot of Africans currently.

AS IN BERLIN, the state is not a gift from the gods. On the contrary, the state is a relationship painstakingly formulated and constructed by groups of human beings on our planet earth to pursue aspirations and interests envisioned by these same human beings within a shared historical and geographical articulation. The African humanity is presently gripped in a grave crisis for survival. It is now time that it abandoned the contrived “Berlin-state” in order to survive. This state is a bane of African existence. African nations, namely the Igbo, Ijo, Wolof, Ibibio, Asante, Baganda, Bakongo, Gĩkũyũ, Bambara, Luo, etc., etc, remain the basis for the regeneration of Africa’s development. These nations are the sites of the continent’s intellectual and other cultural creativity. 

What is being stressed here is that African peoples, themselves, must each decide on the issue of sovereignty in the post-“Berlin-state” epoch even if the outcome were to lead to the creation of 1001 states in Africa– or more. 

IN THIS epoch of freedom, any African peoples who, for instance, wishes to chart a future based on the precepts of their forebears in the 12th century Contemporary Era (CE) or even way back to say, 8th century Before Contemporary Era (BCE), has the right to pursue this goal. Equally any African peoples who believes that their aspirations lie in working through challenges of the 21st century CE and projecting targets of creativity and transformations subsequently, must exercise this right.  

To achieve the goal(s) of any of the stipulated paths does not require anyone embarking on murdering someone else or having themselves murdered.  For the future survival of the African humanity, let no more die for the path to the civilisation, howsoever this civilisation a people chooses is construed. It surely can be attained and sustained without committing a crime, particularly genocide – a crime against humanity.  

THE FLOURISHING age of organically articulated African-own states to really transform depressing African fortunes in the contemporary world has already begun.

(Lee Morgan Quintet, “Gary’s notebook” [personnel: Morgan, trumpet; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone; Barry Harris, piano; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Billy Higgins, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 21 December 1963])

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