Unconscionable silence from Africa as Hausa-Fulani/islamist-occupied genocidist Nigeria murders Igbo people of Biafra most beastly

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

THE PAST 20 MONTHS, namely since May 2015, have indeed been a catastrophic track in phase-IV***** of the ongoing Igbo genocide by Nigeria. 

Under the jihadist génocidaire Muhammadu Buhari regime, the Nigerian military and its adjunct Fulani militia have slaughtered 3000 Igbo people across Biafra, especially in cities and towns Onicha, Oka, Igweocha, Enuugwu, Aba, Owere, Asaba, Umuahia and Ubulu-Ukwu. On 14 September 2017, the genocidists stormed the Afaraukwu-Ibeku (eastcentral Biafra) family home of Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra. Kanu hasn’t been seen subsequently nor have his parents who were home with their son during the bombardment. Scores of Kanu’s relative and friends were murdered during the raid and scores of others are still unaccounted for. 

CONTEMPORANEOUSLY, on the key subject of the universal right of a people to freedom, to self-determination, on focus here, the Nigerian assault on Kanu’s home and its harrowing aftermath would be equivalent to a British military attack on the family homes of restoration-of-independence Scottish leaders Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond or a Spanish military assault on the home of Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan restoration-of-independence leader.

Unpardonable

Not one state contiguous to Nigeria nor any of the other 14 states in this southwestcentral region of Africa has condemned this Nigerian sheer savagery unleashed on Biafra nor indeed has there been any condemnation from the rest of the 40 states of Africa. Not one. Silence.

But what remains egregiously pronounced in this African response is the silence of most of the 25 million diaspora African population (who have emigrated from Africa since the mid-1980s to Europe, the Americas/Caribbean, Oceania and elsewhere), particularly intellectuals who would readily express an opinion of outrage from the often more liberal democratic heritage of their new-found domicility. The latter’s position is unquestionably unpardonable.

FOR PEOPLES who denounce anti-African racism in all its forms across the globe (rightly so), day in, day out, Africans, wherever they are, must now know that they stand to forfeit any moral rectitude if they continue this morbid silence over the gruesome, unrelentingly driven Hausa-Fulani/islamist-led genocidist Nigeria campaign to annihilate the Igbo, one of Africa’s most talented and enterprising peoples.

_______________________________________________

(*****Igbo genocide is the most devastating and expansive genocide in Africa since Belgian King Leopold II/Belgian state-organised genocide against African peoples in the central regions of the Congo River basin, 1878-1908, murdering 13 million Africans. During phases I-III of the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, Nigeria and co-genocidist and [its] suzerain state Britain murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or 25 per cent of the Igbo population. Tens of thousands of additional Igbo people have been murdered by the dual genocidists in the course of phase-IV of the slaughtering which was launched on 13 January 1970 and continues to this day.)

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Lonnie’s lament” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood, Cliff, NJ, US, 27 April 1964])

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Biafra’s Ezinne Uko wins US$100,000 first prize at the Econet GoGettaz’s all-Africa entrepreneurship contest just concluded in Nairobi, Kenya – neither genocidist Nigeria nor indeed any other state can stop the march of Biafra freedom or the versatile creativity of its people

(Ezinne Uko: ... okee nwanyi mmadu)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

ACCORDING to reports on this brilliant win (Business Insider, Friday 26 January 2018), Ezinne Uko’s success is on building an app which provides “easy inventory for sales, business performance analysis as well as customer and business solutions”. Co-1st position winner Peter Wachira of Kenya’s  own app focuses on a “ceramic water filter that helps in the fight against water-borne disease in Kenya”.

 (Thelonious Monk Quintet, “Brilliant corners” – personnel: Monk, piano; Ernie Henry, alto saxophone; Sonny Rollins, tenor saxophone; Oscar Pettiford, bass; Max Roach, drums; recorded: Riverside studio, New York, US, 15 October 1956)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

89th birthday of Benny Golson

(Born 25 January 1929, Philadelphia, US)

AWARD-WINNING tenor saxophonist and bandleader and versatile composer including jazz standards “I remember Clifford”, “Blues march”, “Whisper not”, “Stablemates”, “Are you real?” and “Along came Betty” and scores for films on television (including Mission: Impossible, Ironside, M*A*S*H)

(Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, “Whisper not” [personnel: Blakey, drums; Lee Morgan, trumpet; Golson, tenor saxophone; Bobby Timmons, piano; Jymie Merritt, bass; recorded: live, L’Olympia, Paris, France, 22 November 1958 & 17 December 1958]) 

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

93rd birthday of JJ Johnson

(Born 22 January 1924, Indianapolis, US)

ARGUABLY the most influential trombonist of the bebop revolution of the 1940s/50s, composer, including scores for films, and arranger

(JJ Johnson Sextet, “Shutterbug” [personnel: Johnson, trombone; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Cedar Walton, piano; Arthur Harper, bass; Albert Heath, drums; recorded: Columbia Records, New York, US, 1 & 3 August 1960])

 Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

144th birthday of Arthur Schomburg

(Born 24 January 1874, Santurce, Puerto Rico)

Historian, writer, activist archivist on sources and resources on African history in the Americas and Europe, 1900-1938, and seminal contributor to the Harlem Renaissance, beginning in 1919, with New York public library’s Schomburg Center for research in African American culture named in his honour

(Schomburg Center, New York)

(Andrew Hill Sextet, “Spectrum” [personnel: Hill, piano; Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet, flute; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone;  Richard Davis, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 21 March 1964])

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Britain and the Igbo genocide – this annihilative mission, 29 May 1966-24 January 2018

(Harold Wilson: “would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took...”)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

BRITISH SUPPORT FOR the perpetration of the Igbo genocide, this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, 29 May 1966-Present Day, is driven principally by one factor: to “punish” Igbo people for playing the vanguard role in the mid 1930s-October 1960 movement to terminate 100 years of Britain’s conquest and occupation of the constellation of states and peoples of this southwestcentral region of Africa that it calls Nigeria. At the apogee of the genocide, 1968/1969, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is adamant: “[I] would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took”  Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide (Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, London & New York: Quartet Books, 1977, p. 122).

HAROLD WILSON probably had the perverted satisfaction of having his Nigerian co-genocidist league of slaughters on the ground in SWC Africa, 3140 miles away from Britain, perform far in excess of their “massa”’s  grim target by murdering 3.1 million Igbo instead – an outcome coldly recounted indeed in Wilson’s own memoirs where he notes that the Nigerian génocidaires, duly led by Hausa-Fulani/islamists trenchantly opposed to the mid 1930s-1960 African peoples’ restoration-of-independence goal and therefore equipped zealously by Britain, expended more small arms ammunition in its campaign to achieve its annihilative mission in Biafra than the amount used by the British armed forces  “during the whole” of  the Second World War (Harold Wilson, Labour Government, 1964-1970: A Personal Record, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, p. 630, emphasis added).

(New York Art Quartet plays “Mohawk”, a composition by Charlie Parker [personnel:  John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965]) 

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

What other source of information on the intrinsic character of genocidist Nigeria does the league of sceptics still desire? Even the British conqueror regime is honest enough, right from the outset, about the entrenched differences in the key sociological and historical markers of the constituent peoples in the Nigeria contraption that it knows exists soley for its optimum resource expropriation indefinitely (see Hugh Clifford below). Or perhaps the sceptics are awaiting a special broadcast from the leadership of the current British government to the peoples in Nigeria to reiterate Hugh Clifford’s crucial observations made almost 100 years ago to the day.

(Hugh Clifford)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

IN DECEMBER 1920, Hugh Clifford, the British conquest and occupation governor in Nigeria, makes the following contribution to a “Legislative Council Debate, Lagos”:

[Nigeria is a] collection of Independent … States, separated from one another by great distances, by differences of history and traditions and by … racial … political, social and religious barrier.[1]

TODAY, Tuesday 23 January 2018, 98 years on, would Hugh Clifford conceivably make these same assertions? If so, why? If not, why not?

(George Russell Sextet plays Miles Davis’s  composition, “Nardis” [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])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

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[1]Quoted in George CE Enyoazu, “Sovereign National Conference – Will the people have their say at last?”, African Democrat, 30 October 2013.

103rd birthday of Arthur Lewis

(Born 23 January 2015, Castries, St Lucia)

ERUDITE AND WIDELY PUBLISHED economist, academic, economic advisor to Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah government (1957-1959), awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1979, university administrator, Caribbean regional bank president; Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, SALISES, Cave Hill, Barbados named in his honour

(Arthur Lewis Building, University of Manchester {houses School of Social Sciences and School of Environment, Education and Development}, named after Professor Lewis who taught economics at Manchester from 1947 to 1957)

(John Coltrane Sextet, “Blue train” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Lee Morgan, trumpet; Curtis Fuller, trombone;  Kenny Drew, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Philly Joe Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, US, 15 September 1957])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Noted move from Yorubaland, west Nigeria, on genocidist Nigeria’s “Fulani cattle colony” annexation & islamisation project

(Olu Falae: ... Yoruba people will not concede one inch of its territory as a colony...) 

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

OLU FALAE, a leading Yoruba public figure and one time regime secretary, is unmistakably candid in a press conference in Akure, west Nigeria (Vanguard, Lagos, 22 January 2018):  “[T]here shall not be cattle colonies in any part of Yorubaland. It’s a fraud ... A colony is a political entity which someone said [they] want ... to create in the territory of another; that is a provocation; that is terrible for anybody to contemplate ... [A]s a leader of the [Yoruba], the Yoruba people will not concede one inch of its territory as a colony to another person.”

(The New York Contemporary Five plays Don Cherry’s composition, “Consequences” [personnel: Archie Shepp, tenor saxophone; Cherry, pocket trumpet; John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Don Moore, bass; JC Moses, drums; recorded: live, Jazzhus Montmarte, Copenhagen, Denmark, 15 November 1963])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

#3000IgboPeople have been #murdered by #genocidistNigeria since #MuhammaduBuhari became #headofregime in May2015. #No “#Fulani #cattle #colony” anywhere in #Biafra. “Colony” is #regimespeak for #annexation & #islamisation. #FreeBiafra

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Mission of Biafra freedom movement restated

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

IGBO SURVIVAL from the catastrophe of the genocide by the Hausa-Fulani/islamist jihadist-controlled Nigeria and its suzerain state Britain is one of the preeminently celebratory outcomes of recent history. The Igbo are primed to deploy their phenomenal resilience from this history as they embark on the expansive reconstructionary endeavour to transform their Biafra homeland into a haven of creativity, humanism and progress, in the wake of the genocide. 

Despite the genocide and occupation, Biafra controls one of Africa’s best-developed multidisciplinary humanpower conglomeration of assets which will be invaluable in the mission ahead. Additionally, Biafra will be tapping into an epoch of immense possibilities in Africa – an Africa that, since 1981, contrary to the sophistry of the indolent, propagandist media and certain sectors of academia, has been a net-exporter of capital to the West World and elsewhere, gargantuan resources that should never leave Africa but retained therein solely for the peoples who have created this wealth, and an Africa whose millions of émigirés in the West World and elsewhere are now net-exporters of capital back to Africa through the latter’s remittances year in, year out (see Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “Rethinking the state in Africa ... Whose state is it?”, 

http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/rethinking-state-in-africa-whose-state.html).

 

Biafra flowers of rebirth

BIAFRANS have an opportunity to begin to build a new civilisation where human life, African life, fundamentally, is sacrosanct. This salient feature cannot be overstressed. Nigeria has been, for the Igbo, a haematophagous quagmire throughout its history beginning in 1945 with the Igbo pogrom in Jos (northcentral region) by the same Hausa-Fulani/islamist jihadists, duly overseen by the British occupation. A “next time” Igbo pogrom was executed in Kano (north region), in 1953, by the same jihadists and again overseen by the British occupation – “dress rehearsals” for the Igbo genocide which the dual-genocidists would embark upon on 29 May 1966, slaughtering 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of the Igbo population in the subsequent 44 months of sheer savagery.

Those writing the scores of the Biafra freedom symphony are aware of this quest to celebrate the sanctity of African life. The Biafran freedom mission is therefore not to begin to construct a state that is merely post-genocide or post post-conquest/post post-“colonial” state of Africa; in other words, cancelling out here and there, in some mechanical venture, that which was Nigeria, “Berlin-state” Africa’s most notorious. Instead, Biafra is a realisation, a profound reclamation of that which makes us all human and part of humanity. Biafra is a beacon of the tenacity of the spirit of human overcoming of the most desperate, unimaginable brutish forces. 

Biafran reconstruction at once signals to the rest of the constituent peoples and nations enveloped in the European-created “Berlin-states” of death, immiseration, desolation and hopelessness that freedom and transformation, right there in Africa, are achievable goals – that African peoples can build, reconstruct, embark on all possibilities of working for themselves and appropriating the fruits of their labour from their land and on their own terms... 

THE WORLD must now know that Biafra flowers innumerable Biafras of rebirth not seen in Africa for 500 years – since the Europe World launched what irrepressible historian Walter Rodney has categorised, aptly, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Song of praise” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 17 May 1965])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

94th birthday of Jewel Plummer Cobb

(Born 17 January 1924, Chicago, US)

Renowned biologist specialising in cancer research, academic, and president (vice-chancellor/rector) of California State University, Fullerton, 1981-1990

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

259th birthday of Paul Cuffee

(Born 17 January 1759, Cuttyhunk Is, Mass, US)

Asante-descent leading African freedom proponent during African enslavement in the United States, sailor, successful and expansive businessperson, owner of a shipping conglomerate, founder of schools and promoter of educational opportunities for African Americans as well as others, actively involved in the early 19th century’s African American and African British return-to-Sierra Leone projects 

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

87th birthday of James Earl Jones

(Born 17 January 1931, Arkabutla, Miss, US)

Actor extraordinaire, “one of the greatest actors in [US] history” in a career spanning over 60 years

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Chim chim cheree” [personnel: Coltrane, soprano saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 17 May 1965])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

87th birthday of James Earl Jones

(Born 17 January 1931, Arkabutla, Miss, US)

Actor extraordinaire, “one of the greatest actors in [US] history” in a career spanning over 60 years

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Chim chim cheree” [personnel: Coltrane, soprano saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 17 May 1965])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Igbo genocide pointer – “left wing”, “right wing” and the histrionics of labelling in these times

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

NIGERIA IS Africa’s most notorious genocidist state. Britain created Nigeria in the early 1900s after its conquest and occupation of  the constellation of states of nations and peoples in the southwestcentral region of Africa. A hundred and twenty years on, genocidist Nigeria remains a British client-state, run on its behalf  by the Hausa-Fulani/islamist jihadist north region confederates. Indeed, Nigeria exists principally to serve Britain and this local overseer conglomerate and continues to offer Britain outlandishly excellent returns, as any conceivable socioeconomic/geostrategic index demonstrates, year in, year out. Not surprisingly, the British chief representative in Nigeria spent quite some time in 2017 in a rigorous defence of Britain’s Nigeria (https://www.pambazuka.org/democracy-governance/igbo-are-gone-gone-free, accessed 14 January 2018).

Beginning on Sunday 29 May 1966, Britain, led by the Labour party government under leader and prime minister Harold Wilson, and its Nigeria launched phase-I of the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post(European)conquest Africa. Forty-four months later, by the end of phase-III of the genocide, Britain and Nigeria had murdered 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population. Phase-IV of the genocide has continued subsequently, without let up, with the murder of tens of thousands additional Igbo by the dual-genocidists. For Britain, this genocide is to “punish” Igbo people for the Igbo vanguard role played in the African peoples’ campaign to terminate the British occupation of these states of Africa during the course of the mid-1930s to October 1960 
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-conquerors-concord-in.html).

What label?

THE BRITISH LABOUR party that led Britain into executing the Igbo genocide, this crime against humanity, is a social democratic/socialist/trade unionist party, democratically elected by the British population in October 1964 in one of the leading West World countries – it is “left wing”, “egalitarian”, “inclusivist”, “party of working class/people”, “progressive”, “liberal”, “humanist”, “internationalist”, not the Conservative Party nor “right wing” nor “conservative” nor “party of the oppressor” nor “party of the privileged” nor “party of the rich” nor “party of bankers and landowners” nor “nationalist” nor “nativist” nor  “xenophobic” nor “far right” nor “fascist”...

(John Coltrane & Don Cherry, “Focus on sanity” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cherry, pocket trumpet; Percy Heath, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums; recorded: Atlantic Studios, New York, US, 28 June/8 July 1960])

 Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

89th birthday of Martin Luther King

(Born 15 January 1929, Atlanta, US)

One of the most outstanding leaders of the freedom movement in history

(Sonny Rollins Trio, “The freedom suite” [personnel: Rollins, tenor saxophone; Oscar Pettiford, bass; Max Roach, drums; recorded: Riverside Records, New York, US, 7 March 1958])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

48th anniversary of Nigeria’s launch of phase-IV of the Igbo genocide

(resplendent Biafra flag: ... on the ascent...)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

WHAT IS NIGERIA? This is Africa’s most notorious genocidist state, currently occupied by Hausa-Fulani/islamist jihadists whose Fulani affiliate hegemons came from their home in the Futa Djallon highlands of northwest Africa, 1500 miles away.

Nigeria was created by Britain in the early 1900s after the latter’s conquest and occupation of  the constellation of states of nations and peoples in the southwestcentral region of Africa including the republican Igbo states to the east, stretching to the Atlantic coast, the west monarchical Edo and Yoruba state configurations and the expansionary militarist Arabo-islamist Hausa-Fulani feudal principalities to the north. A hundred years on, genocidist Nigeria remains a British client-state, run on its behalf  by its Hausa-Fulani confederates. It exists principally to serve Britain and this local overseer conglomerate and continues to offer Britain outlandishly excellent returns, using any conceivable socioeconomic/geostrategic variable, year in, year out.

Igbo genocide: Age of pestilence

Nigeria inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence – starting from that dreadful mid-morning of Sunday 29 May 1966 when it embarked on the studiously-organised mass murder of its Igbo population domiciled in north Nigeria and later elsewhere in the country and subsequently expanded to Biafra. Britain, under the premiership of Harold Wilson, coordinated the genocide to “punish” the Igbo for this nation’s vanguard role in leading the campaign to terminate the British occupation during the course of the 1930s-1960. 

IN THIS foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, Anglo-Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or 25 per cent of the Igbo population in 44 months, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970. Africa had not witnessed the unspeakable barbarity and range of such slaughtering of a people for 60 years; definitely, not since the German-organised genocide against the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of southwest Africa between 1904-1907
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/blog-post_23.html).

BESIDES Britain, Nigeria was supported in the execution of the Igbo genocide by a range of (now) collapsed states and failed/failing states which provided it with critical military, financial, political and diplomatic resources: principally the Soviet Union, German Democratic Republic, Egypt, Syria, the Sudan, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Chad, Niger, Guinea-Conakry. Since 12 January 1970, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocides and other wars in Africa carried out by similarly ruthless African regimes (especially in Rwanda, the Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo) and their foreign allies, including France.

Phase-IV ... and legacy of US’s first African-descent president

ON 13 January 1970, 48 years ago to the day, evidently not content with the appalling magnitude and consequences of its death campaign, Nigeria launched phase-IV of the genocide which now focused on degrading/dismantling the surviving frames of the (pre-genocide robust) Biafran economy, pulverised during phases-I-III of the previous 44 months, a programme intertwined gruesomely by spates and stretches of pogroms in which thousands of additional Igbo have been murdered. These murders have continued, unabated, to this day, as catalogued in the following link, especially from sub-title phase-IV: 
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/phase-i-sunday-29-may-1966-30-march.html)

Since imposing jihadist-genocidist trooper Muhammadu Buhari as Nigeria’s head of regime in March 2015 in a collaborative deal with David Cameron, former British prime minister, ex-US President Barack Hussein Obama actively supported this phase of the Igbo genocide (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-this-piece-is.html) particularly in his last two years in office. Being the first African-descent president in the US of 233 years of history and given the scourging dehumnisation of the African humanity in the US during the stretch of this period, Obama’s support of this raging genocide against an African people in this continent of his fathers is an incalculable tragedy, a legacy of catastrophic proportions. Since Buhari was installed in power, 3000 Igbo have been murdered by his genocidist military and his two other adjunct forces, Boko Haram and Fulani militia – two of the world’s five deadliest terrorist organisations. Neither Obama’s White House nor his state department nor his embassy in Nigeria ever condemned any of these murders. It had been left to the audacious outreach of the London-based Amnesty International to shatter the deafening silence emanating from the Obama presidency on this ongoing genocide (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/11/peaceful-pro-biafra-activists-killed-in-chilling-crackdown/, accessed 23 November 2016). 

Breakthrough

THE IGBO will overcome this genocide, despite the horrendous assault and its evidently hydra-headed drive. They possess the resilience to survive and triumph over this ordeal. They surely will. This Igbo resistance to the genocide is arguably the most defining struggle underway in Africa currently. The breakthrough of the Biafra freedom movement, very much on the cards, is of immense epochal consequence for Biafrans and the future direction of Africa. One cannot exaggerate the import of this development.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Untitled original 90314” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, NJ, US, 16 June 1965])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

87th birthday of Flora Nwapa

(Born 13 January 1931, Ugwuta, Biafra)

Okee nwanyi mmadu, first African (continental) woman published novelist – Efuru, 1966, and, soon after, Idu, which she begins to work on at the onset of the Igbo genocide (mid-1966) and later publishes in 1970; her landmark works as well as those of sociologist Kamene Okonjo’s open up the expanse of possibilities in Igbo Women/African World Studies within which the scholarship, artistry and writings of subsequent generations of intellectuals, working worldwide, have flourished immensely

(Jackie McLean Quintet, “Action” [personnel: McLean, alto saxophone; Charles Tolliver, trumpet; Bobby Hutcherson, vibraphone; Cecil McBee, bass; Billy Higgins, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 16 September 1964])

 Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

128th birthday of Mordecai Wyatt Johnson

(Born 12 January 1890, Paris, Tennessee, US)

Economist and theologian, first African American president (vice-chancellor/rector) of Howard University (1926-1960) during which the university attracted a range of luminaries to teaching positions including the philosopher Alain Locke, poet Sterling Brown, surgeon Charles Drew, political scientist Ralph Bunche and chemist Percy Lavon Julian

(John Coltrane Sextet, “Blue train” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Lee Morgan, trumpet; Curtis Fuller, trombone;  Kenny Drew, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Philly Joe Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, US, 15 September 1957])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

On that “Handshake-across-the-Niger” summit in Enuugwu, Biafra, Thursday 11 January 2018

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

UNDOUBTEDLY, the underlying problem of this Enuugwu conference (Vanguard, “Handshake across the Niger”, Lagos, 9 January 2018) is that Igbo-Yoruba relation is predicated, essentially, on these two nations in this state that calls itself Nigeria. But Nigeria is a genocide state that has focused on the slaughter of Igbo people, one of Africa’s leading entrepreneurial and academically endowed nations, as an enduring programme of state policy in the past 52 years – since 29 May 1966, in which the Yoruba have been a key participatory perpetrator among other constituent nations of Nigeria.

3.1 million Igbo, 25 per cent of the Igbo population then, were murdered in phases I-III of the genocide (29 May 1966-12 January 1970) and tens of thousands more Igbo have been murdered during the course of phase-IV of the genocide which began on 13 January 1970. The genocide goes on as these lines are written… History shows that a genocide state is abandoned, dismantled. There can be no other solution to this outcome. For the Igbo, Biafra brings this tragedy to a screeching halt.

“Successor” state(s)

Those who commit genocide on a people, as Germans have demonstrated since 1945, particularly their intellectuals (See, for instance, A Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past [Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2007]), must carry out a thorough introspective interrogation subsequently as the beginning of a journey to achieve some form of absolution for having committed this horrific crime against humanity.

AS IT should now be obvious, this crucial process cannot occur within the space of the genocide state but in “successor” state(s). Consequently, Igbo-Yoruba relations would have acquired the possibility of  a conducive platform for a more dispassionate discourse.

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

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe