Igbo survivor-victor

No people who survives genocide is a “loser”: Kongo, Mongo, Luba, Boulangui, Mangbetu-Azande, Berg Damara, Nama, Herero, Armenians, Jews, Igbo, Tutsi, Darfuri... Someone or a people that survives genocide is at once a survivor and victor, hence that stunning incantation of the triumph of life itself on the morrow of overcoming the slaughter: “Happy Survival”!
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/on-christopher-okigbo-africas-leading.html, accessed 2 September 2015)

Foundation

In the case of the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa in which Nigeria murders 3.1 million Igbo (one-quarter of this nation’s population), the agency that has consistently acknowledged this fact of the survivor-victor, throughout this dreadful epoch, is, pointedly, if not ironically, none other than Nigeria – the key perpetrator of this crime itself. Whatever else explains why Nigeria segues almost effortlessly to a new phase of its campaign, as early as 13 January 1970, to coincide with that Igbo celebratory life-invocation-of- “Happy Survival” that they proclaimed to the whole world:

(a) new vistas of charging murder trails since (i.e., 13 January 1970-10 September 2015), targeting and slaughtering tens of thousands of Igbo domiciled particularly in the geographies of north Nigeria but also elsewhere in the country with the murder-machine now morphed into Boko Haram and the Buhari regime, arguably the most terror-retrograde fraction of the Nigeria genocidist power-bloc   

(b) enhanced disarticulation/degradation/dismantling of Igboland economy and programmed “marginalisation” of the well-known contending assets of Igbo intellectual/politico-economic-cultural establishment – a crucial plank of the overarching goal of the Nigeria occupation which the Buhari regime has expanded with relish since May 2015

(c) unrelentingly fiendish valorisation of the genocide by genocidist “theorists”/ commanders/commandants/heads-of-regime/regime enthusiasts-propagandists including that notorious 6 April 2015 royal edict by Rilwan Akiolu, the king or oba of Lagos (west Nigeria) and fulsome supporter of the Buhari regime, calling publicly for the mass murder of Igbo people
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/c.html, accessed 6 September 2015). 

(d) not one official of the Buhari regime, either in the regions or the centre in Abuja, has denounced this Akiolu-death decree

(e) not therefore fortuitous that, since the Akiolu-death decree, regime troopers have murdered scores of Igbo in Igboland itself – at the Ariara International Market, Aba (eastcentral region), on 31 July 2015, and at the Oshimili River bridgehead of the Oshimili delta, Onicha (northwest region), on 31 August 2015

(f) essentially, this Nigeria genocidist regime is a haematophagous terror monster stalking the landscape of Igboland
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/in-wake-of-murder-of-three-possibly.html, accesssed 5 September 2015).

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Living space” [personnel: Coltrane, soprano saxophone, McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, NJ, US, 16 June 1965])

Biafra

Yet despite the desperation and savagery of genocidist Nigeria, particularly heightened currently, the Igbo refuse to go under. Igbo will never go under, thanks to the resilience of the survivor-victor. In dazzling contrast, the world presently watches, unmistakeably, as Nigeria trots along to an ignominious collapse, having run the course of its bloody trail in history, begun on Sunday 29 May 1966.

Consequently, for the Igbo, they have their work cut out as they embark on constructing a new civilisation in Biafra in the aftermath of Nigeria. This is the news the world awaits most eagerly. In Biafra, the Igbo don’t only have to negate, in its entirety, that which was Nigeria but subvert the very ideational crucible which inaugurated this pulverising nightmare unleashed by the epoch of the British conquest of the peoples and occupation of the states of this southwestcentral region of Africa in 1885 – 130 years ago.

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe