Igbo genocide: reflecting on a gripping irony of our times

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

IF THE executioner Hausa-Fulani/islamist-led genocidist regime on the ground in Nigeria that has carried out the Igbo genocide with such fiendishness these past five decades were European and not African, there would have been a thundering outrage and expansive campaign against the perpetrator (“racist”, “fascist”, “exclusivist”, “supremacist”, “occupationist”, “imperialist”…) mounted across the rest of the world, particularly from the African World. Yet the Igbo genocide and other Africa state/estate-horrendous crimes against African peoples and nations are distinct empirical determinants of those haunting lines sketched in historian Chancellor Williams’s commanding insight of Africa’s devastating history as shown here:

Now the shadows lengthened. The Europeans had also been busily building up and training strong African armies. Africans trained to hate, kill and conquer Africans. Blood of Africans was to sprinkle and further darken the pages of their history … Indeed, Africa was conquered for the Europeans by the Africans [themselves], and thereafter kept under [conquest] control by African police and African soldiers. Very little European blood was ever spilled. (Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization: The Great Issue of a Race between 4500BC and 2000AD [Chicago: Third World, new edition, 1995: p. 218])

(George Russell Sextet, “Nardis” {composer: 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, 8 May 1961])

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