Rethinking Africa is a forward looking blog dedicated to the exchange of innovative thinking on issues affecting the advancement of African peoples wherever they are. We provide rigorous and insightful analyses on the issues affecting Africans and their vision of the world.
INGENIOUS alto (and tenor)saxophonist, composer, bandleader, one of the most outstandingly ethereal soloists in the repertoire
(The New York Contemporary Five plays Bill Dixon’s composition, “Trio” – [personnel: Archie Shepp, tenor saxophone; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet; Tchicai, alto saxophone; Don Moore, bass; JC Moses, drums [recorded: live, Jazzhus Montmarte, Copenhagen, Denmark, 15 November 1963][note particularly Tchicai’s ethereal solo - first - at this session])
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe NOVELIST, university registrar, academic, Africa west region principal pre-university qualifying examination board (WAEC) administrator, one of the leading intellectuals in defence of the people during the Igbo genocide, phases I-III, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, carried out by Britain and its Nigeria client state led by Hausa-Fulani/islamist jihadists during which 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of Igbo population are murdered in this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa; Anglo-Nigeria launches phase-IV of the genocide on 13 January 1970 and this has continued unabated with tens of thousands of additional Igbo murdered; Igbo genocide is the longest, most gruesome, and most ruthless genocide in contemporary history
(The New York Contemporary Five, “Trio” [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])
(Born 29 April 1899, Washington, DC, United States)
Pianist and bandleader and one of the preeminent composers of the 20th century
(1. Two masters at work: Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, “Take the Coltrane”) [personnel: Ellington, piano; Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Stdudios, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 26 September 1962)])
(2. Three masters at work: Duke Ellington Trio, “Fleurette Africaine” {“African flower”} [personnel: Ellington, piano; Charles Mingus, bass; Max Roach, drums; recorded: Sound Makers Studios, (New York, US, 17 September 1962)])
(3.Three masters at work: Duke Ellington Trio, “Warm valley” [personnel: Ellington, piano; Mingus, bass; Roach, drums; recording and other details as in“2” above])
(4.Three masters at work: Duke Ellington Trio, “Money jungle” [personnel: Ellington, piano; Mingus, bass; Roach, drums; recording and other details as in “2” above])
THE BIAFRA freedom movement
surely dictates the terms of the freedom of the people of Biafra from Nigeria
despite the savagery of the feudal Hausa-Fulani/islamist-led genocidist Nigeria
occupation and the overseeing ruthlessness on the ground by that league of
quislings-of-occupation alternatively known as heads of regime of the
administrative regions. The movement insists on a referendum: nothing else, including bogus
regime-elections, to democratically secure the next crucial phase
of the restoration-of-independence process. “Election” exercises in occupied Biafra have in the past been distinctively
fraudulent and immensely contradictory as the Fulani lead-occupiers with no tradition
of democratic discourse or engagement whatsoever in its own culture or brutish history of
terror, conquests, occupations, expropriations, decadence and genocide, not to mention genocidist Nigeria itself
which has had no credible election throughout its history, would bizarrely
posit to organise elections in (occupied) Igboland that has enjoyed an advanced
republican democratic tradition for over 1000 years. Thus, for the Igbo in occupied Biafra or in the diaspora in Nigeria, the way forward couldn’t be clearer: boycott all “elections” organised by genocidist Nigeria.
BESIDES, “election” time in Nigeria
is time-of-death. It is also time-of-destruction, time-of-desolation,
time-of-waste, time-to-waste... Vile genocidist operative Olusegun Obasanjo captures the characterisation of this season most
vividly, if not horridly, in a February 2007 proclamation at Abeokuta, west
Nigeria: “it’s do or die” (all-africa.com, 11 February 2007), a haunting
disposition echoed readily by co-genocidist Muhammadu Buhari who paints a
characteristically morbid portrait of“dog-and-the-baboon-would-all-be-soaked-in-blood” (The Vanguard, Lagos,
15 May 2012) to attest to the extent of violence he would unleash during this
appointed time-of-death.
Biafrans do freedom...
Biafran people don’t do “it’s do or die” nor
“soaked-in-blood”. Tufia kwa! Either of these is predictably genocidist Nigerian
stuff – as Biafrans have known, most devastatingly, in the past 52 years, with
3.1 million of their people murdered, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, and tens of
thousands others additionally murdered since, 13 January 1970-present day, by
this most gruesome band of murderers in African history since 1908.
BIAFRANS, on the contrary, do freedom. Freedom is inalienable. One does not ask for it; one takes it! The 50 million Igbo know they
have to take their freedom as they head to the referendum to proclaim this
liberatory choice. This is the choice the rest of the world awaits eagerly.
(John Coltrane Quartet, “Acknowledgement” {part-I of A Love Supreme suite} [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 9 December 1964])
PRODIGIOUSLY INFLUENTIAL tenor saxophonist, one of the leading lights of the instrument in the jazz repertoire underscored so classically with his TheState of the Tenor: Live at the Village Vanguard, Vols I & II (1985)
(Joe Henderson Trio, “Beatrice” {composer: Sam Rivers} [personnel: Henderson, tenor saxophone; Ron Crter, bass; Al Foster, drums; recorded: live, Village Vanguard, New York, US, 14-16 November 1985])
VERY DISTINGUISHED tenor saxophonist, composer, bandleader
(Thelonious Monk Quartet, “In walked Bud” [personnel: Monk, piano; Griffin, tenor saxophone; Ahmed Abdul-Malik, bass; Roy Haynes, drums; recorded: live, Five Spot Café, New York, US, 7 August 1958])
(Born 22 April 1922, Nogales, Arizona, US: outstanding bassist, composer and bandleader whose music encapsulates all the critical junctures of jazz history and his Jazz Workshop a landmark conservatoire of an age)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe IN SEPTEMBER 1996, I published an essay on the work of Charles Mingus in the African Peoples Review(Vol. V, No. 3, September-December 1996, p. 22) entitled “Wednesday night prayer meeting” under the signature of Nnamdi Nzegwu. The essay is reissued here (below), in the original, in commemoration of the iconic bassist/composer’s 96th birthday:
*****IT is no mean achievement that Charles Mingus’s music encapsulates all the critical junctures of jazz. His work with the pioneering geniuses of Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton and Art Tatum in New York of the early 1950s gives Mingus the compositional and arranging insights that would soon be the bassist’s forté.
Few jazz scholars would now disagree that the success of that much discussed May 1953 concert at Toronto’s Massey Hall featuring the Parker Quintet (Parker, alto; Dizzy Gillespie, trumpet; Bud Powell, piano; Mingus, bass; Max Roach, drums) is not just a Parkerian triumph but equally that of the iconoclastic bassist from Los Angeles.
BEGINNING with Mingus, the bass ceases to be merely an “accompanying” time-keeping, harmonic instrument in jazz. It still has to contend with “time-keeping”, but it has entered into the interplay as a polyphonic participant. The work of subsequent bassists particularly Paul Chambers, Ron Carter, Jimmy Garrison, Scott La Faro, Gary Peacock, Eddie Khan, Charles Haden and Dave Holland attest to this Mingusian redesignation
In 1954, Mingus launched his Jazz Workshop experimentation which was to emphasise more of “group” or “collective” improvisation in jazz, away from what was then increasingly becoming the tedious and formularised “theme-solo-theme” structures of the bebop revolution that had been launched in the 1940s by the Parker-Gillespie-Thelonious Monk troika. As a critic once observed, it was not that Mingus was “avoiding Bebop, he straddled it”. He still had to absorb the great jazz heritage to move the music forward to wrestle with the new possibilities.
Creativity and rehearsals and creativity
It is therefore the case of Mingus trying to return jazz to the “group feeling” of those years of its early development in the closing decades of the 1800s. The soloist still has a great deal of space in Mingus’s thinking but their musical concepts has to develop in anticipation and in response to the polyphony of collective interaction; there are now multisided and multiple centres of creativity soon after that infectious bass intro! The act of creativity is no longer dependent on some space and time limitation. The workshops could not distinguish between rehearsals, for instance, and real performances! Creativity during rehearsals becomes rehearsals of creativity occurring at bandstands with or without an audience (for the latter, listen to the ethereal 1962 album Mingus Presents Mingus, featuring multiinstrumentalist Eric Dolphy). The music is always in a state of flux: evolving, developing, maturing, breaking up, only to form the nucleus of another centre of activity, itself interacting with other centres of the medley.
WITH THE CLASSIC Pithecanthropus Erectus album (1956), Mingus gives notice to this sense of continuous creativity – after all, this composition is his portrait of the formulaic development of a cataclysmic human form and the (predictable?) resultant chaos that this produces in the world by the end of the 20th century. Using distinct but unusual forms of squeals, grunts, duets and harmony, the composition exacts a coherent understanding of this tragic travelogue that a 1996 earth inhabitant would perhaps be familiar with (exhaustion/appropriation/destruction of the world’s limited resources, rupture of the ozone layer) than their counterpart 40 years before. The impassioned crystalline-striking lyricism of altoist Jackie McLean, the Rollinsesque rebuttals of tenorist J R Monterose and the plodding, haunting echoes of pianist Mal Waldron strokes keep the narrative of the age on course and there is relief, at the final movement, when the pulverising destroyer falls, is destroyed.
In Blues and Roots album that follows suit, Mingus pays homage to the sacred music of his roots. The rhythmic tension at play by soloists McLean, Booker Ervin (tenor), John Handy (alto) and Jimmy Knepper (trombone) over such compositions as “Tensions”, “Moanin’”, “Cryin’ Blues” and “E’s Flat Ah’s Flat Too” always calls for new insights, ever more challenging interpretations on replays. “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” is predictably such a joy and by the time this composition is confronted yet again by a new Mingus personnel line up live in Antibes, Juan-Les-Pins (France) in 1960, detailing Mingus (bass and piano), Ted Curson (trumpet), Dolphy (alto), Ervin (tenor) and Dannie Richmond (drums), it has become the launching pad for intuitive flights and virtuosity.
Commentary
Mingus’s vivid commentaries on contemporary American life and worldwide developments are prolific. These samples range from ballads (“Sue’s Changes”, “1 X-Love”, “Bemoanable Lady”, “Celia”) to the very humorous (“Eat that Chicken”, “Hog Callin Blues”, “Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am”, “Old’ Blues for Walt’s Torin”, “My Jelly Roll Soul”), sentimental/sensuous (“Portrait of Jackie”, “Love Chant”, “Orange was the Color of her Dress, then Blue Silk”, “Peggy’s Blue Skylight”) to outright, politically serious (“Pithecanthropus Erectus”, “Ecclusiastics”, “Passions of a Man”, “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting”,“Letter to Duke”, “MDM – Monk, Duke, Mingus”, “Oh Lord Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me”, “Meditations on Integration”, “All the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother”, “Fables of Faubus”, “Haitian Fight Song”, “Weird Nightmare”, “So Long Eric”) and dirge – “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”, Mingus’s salute to tenorist Lester Young, and of course Epitaph, his 127-minute long composition which was performed posthumously by a 30-piece orchestra at the New York’s Lincoln Center in 1989.
NEARLY A DECADE before critics would use the term “free jazz” to describe the music of revolutionaries such as Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, etc., etc., the Mingus workshops were already redefining and laying the foundation of new points of departure for jazz. Names of workshops’ alumni read like the priority core zone of the restless and most adventurous innovators of the jazz directory of the era: drummers Willie Jones and Dannie Richmond; trumpeters Clarence Shaw, Richard Williams, Ted Curson and Johnny Coles; altoists Jackie McLean, Charlie Mariano, John Handy, Eric Dolphy (also flute and bass clarinet virtuoso), Charles McPherson; tenorists Teo Marcero, J R Monterose, Roland Kirk, Booker Ervin and Clifford Jordan; trombonist Jimmy Knepper; pianists Mal Waldron, Jaki Byard, Horace Parlan, Roland Hanna.
(Charles Mingus at Antibes,“Wednesday night prayer meeting” [personnel: Mingus, bass, piano; Ted Curson, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; Booker Ervin, tenor saxophone; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: live, Jazz à Juan festival,
Juan-les-Pins, Antibes, France, 13 July 1960])
VIRTUOSIC bassist, composer, member of Miles Davis First Great Quintet/Sextet (1955-1963) and subject of salutary, standard compositions by varying artistic colleagues: tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, “Mr P.C.”; tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, “Paul’s Pal”; pianist Tommy Flanagan, “Big Paul”; pianist Red Garland, “Mr P. C. Blues”; drummer Max Roach, “Five for Paul”
(John Coltrane Quartet featuring Paul Chambers, “Walkin’” and “The theme” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, Wynton Kelly, piano; Chambers, bass; Jimmy Cobb, drums; recorded: live, German television, Düsseldorf, Germany, 28 March 1960])
IN AN ADDRESS to a business forum in London on Wednesday 18 April 2018, organised as part of the ongoing Commonwealth heads of state/government conference in the British capital, genocidist Nigeria’s head of regime Muhammadu Buhari says the following about young people in his “country”:
Nigerian
youths just want to sit down and do nothing, banking on the notion that Nigeria
is an oil rich nation… More than 60 per cent of the country is under 30, a lot
of them haven’t been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria is an oil
producing country, therefore, they sit and do nothing, and get housing, health care, education for free.
(Multiinstrumentalist Eric Dolphy here plays “God bless the child” [composed by Billie Holiday & Arthur Herzog, Jr] [personnel: Dolphy, bass clarinet; recorded: live, University of Illinoi, Champaign, Illinoi, 10 March 1963])
(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])
(Amber Rudd ... British home secretary whose department/ministry is responsible for the African peoples’ deportation)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
MANY African
commentators in the diaspora and at home have joined other critics elsewhere in
the world to condemn the current British government’s outrageous expulsion of
some of its citizens of African descent to the Caribbean. The criticisms are rightly
commendable.
Yet silence…
IT IS however most noticeable that a number of these commentators have been
conspicuously silent when African peoples in African-run states are deported similarly
or subjected to even worse treatment by their hosts as the following examples highlight:
1. In Lagos,
west Nigeria, the regional regime has over the years deported scores of Igbo
people to Biafra. In 2015, the king or oba
of Lagos issued a royal edict to murder Igbo people if they did not vote for
the king’s own preferred candidate for a senior political regional office.
2. In South
Africa, thousands of African émigrés from southern, east and west Africa have
been expelled in recent years by the state. Hundreds of these immigrants have
been murdered in the country during the period and their homes and businesses destroyed
by organised groups often linked to state officials.
3. Since the March
2015 imposition of Muhammadu Buhari, the genocidist islamist jihadist, as head
of regime in Nigeria by ex-US President Obama and ex-British Prime Minister
Cameron, the Buhari regime’s military and its adjunct Fulani militia, one of
the world’s five deadliest terrorist organisations, have murdered 3000 Igbo people
across Biafra in what has been one of the bloodiest track of phase IV of the ongoing
Igbo genocide. These murders have continued unabated. Moral rectitude AFRICAN peoples’
lives matter. This must surely be the case wheresoever African peoples live: Biafra,
Sénégal, Tanzania, Botswana, United States
of America, South Africa, Barbados, Kenya, India, Côte d’Ivoire, Guyana, Canada, Britain, Surinam, St
Lucia, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Brazil, France, Ghana, Finland, Uganda… Few now doubt that African commentators and others in that prominent professional
grouping stand to forfeit any moral rectitude if they restrict their quest to
uphold African lives’ interests usually in geographical spaces marked outside
Africa but exercise a predictable stone-walled silence when these same
interests are assaulted, quite often more viciously, inside Africa.
(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])
BRITAIN and
FULANI alliance, this genocidist transcontinental dual-headed power configuration that
has executed the Igbo genocide with such abiding ruthlessness and monstrosity
these past 52 years, has ensured that Igbo people’s history of the past century
challenges, quite dramatically, a range of key assumptions in “post-colonial”
discourses that centres on race and geography.
In 1945, about
50 years after the beginning of the British conquest and occupation of Igboland,
the Fulani in occupied north Nigeria, whose home is the Futa Djallon highlands of
northwest Africa, 1500 miles away, embarked on the invasion of Igbo
territorial spaces emplaced in the overarching architecture of the British
occupation (in Jos, northcentral Nigeria) with the latter’s tactical if not
strategic connivance. In effect, this attack, in which the Fulani unleashed a
pogrom on the Igbo as the mode of
invasion, formally inaugurated the dual-headed genocidist cabal that would
oversee the perpetration of yet another season of pogrom on the Igbo in 1953
(Kano, north Nigeria), and then launched the horrendously full-blown, extended and
expansive Igbo genocide, beginning on 29 May 1966. During phases I-III of the genocide in the 44 subsequent months, the duo genocidists murdered 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of the Igbo population. Tens of thousands additional Igbo have been murdered in phase IV of the genocide, 13 January 1970-present day.
IT IS precisely because of the very genocidist terror that undergirds the Anglo-Fulani
alliance in the wake of the 1945 Fulani invasion of Igbo homes and other
interests in Jos that the Igbo resistance to this catastrophe does not
categorise any of these invaders as either “primary” or “secondary”, despite the
sequence of the timeframe of the invasions and despite the nature of the
contributing resources that each of the co-operative executioners of this crime against
humanity deploys. For the Igbo, the grave existential challenges from both the British and Fulani in these
past 73 years have occurred almost invariably in more fluid or composite frames.
(John Coltrane Quintet, “Stardust”[personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Wilbur Harden, fluegelhorn; Red Garland, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Jimmy Cobbs, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, US, 11 July 1958])
FIRST mathematics doctorate in Biafra/southwestcentral Africa, rigorous academic and public intellectual, aptly described by Biafran theoretical physicist Alexander Obiefoka Animalu as the “foremost African mathematical genius of the 20th century”
(John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio, “Traneing in”[personnel: Garland, piano; Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Paul Chambers, bass; Art Taylor, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, US, 23 August 1957])
IT HAPPENED on the afternoon of 14 September last year, 2017.
I
had come back to visit my family home in Biafra a few weeks earlier from
Germany, where I now live. I call it Biafra because Biafra is my country,
not Nigeria.
My
mother and father, my older brother Nnamdi Kanu and I were in the house, along
with friends. It was my son’s thirteenth birthday. I had just been on the phone
congratulating him when the first gas canisters were thrown over the fence
followed by gunfire. It was 4pm. The house was surrounded by Nigerian soldiers.
I found it
hard to breathe. Everyone was panicking. I was witnessing a full on military
attack on my parents’ home. I saw a soldier jump over the high fence that
surrounds our house and open our main gate. He started shooting at the young
men inside. That was when I realised if I didn’t escape now I would die.
There
were soldiers and guns everywhere. How I got out only heaven knows. I remember
I had to jump two walls. There was sporadic firing from the soldiers and one of
the people who tried to follow me, a good family friend, was killed. My
youngest brother, Emmanuel, had left a few minutes before and was only a few
metres away. Since that afternoon, I’ve heard nothing from my mother and father
and my brother Nnamdi.
THE ONLY explanation for my family being targeted by the Nigerian government is that we
believe in an independent Biafra. People may remember the Biafran War fifty
years ago. For a few years, between 1967 and 1970 we were a free state. I was
born during the war in December 1969. My family had to leave our home in
Umuahia to escape the invasion by the Nigerian army then. My mother was
pregnant with me and it was no longer safe. There was fighting just behind our
house.
Biafran
people were shot and bombed and starved to death; millions of them. Our
experience was genocide. My parents lost most of their relatives.
SO I GREW up in an occupied country, an unhappy country. We were forced to be part
of a state manufactured by colonial rule: Nigeria. I remember my father,
like everyone else, was given the equivalent of £20 in recompense, to start
again.
But despite
everything, we had a very happy childhood and a loving family life. My older
brother Nnamdi and I did everything together. We were about the same height, so
we even shared clothes and shoes. He took care of me as a younger brother and
guided me. My father traded in farm produce. Now he is a traditional ruler.
People look up to him. They trust him.
When
I was younger I knew I couldn’t stay in Biafra. Since the mid-’70s our culture,
our history, our people had been all but erased. My brother and I needed to do
something to help people to remember and we couldn’t do it there.
I moved to
Germany sixteen years ago and raised a family. He moved to London and began the
online Radio Biafra, broadcasting in English and Igbo, the language of
Biafra, stories about our country, music, commentary and news. The
Nigerian government has wanted to shut this down since it first broadcast in
2010.
NNAMDI also started our organisation, Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, IPOB, seeking
peaceful ways to bring about self-determination and independence for Biafra
through democracy. We are a young organisation. Many of our members are too
young to remember the war, but we are passionate that we will see an
independent Biafra and a free Biafran people in our lifetimes.
Many Biafrans have
been killed or detained before, during and after the 14th September 2017.
There have been peaceful protests to commemorate the war where the security
services have just opened fire on us.
AS FAR AS we are concerned, the government of Mohammadu Buhari is
determined to stifle the independence movement. This week, President Buhari will
meet the Queen at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. The Queen needs
to know that, if my experience is anything to go by, Buhari’s government
will resort to the most serious human rights violations in order to gag the
people of Biafra. *****Kingsley Kanu who lives in Germany is younger brother of Nnamdi Kanu, leader of Indigenous People of Biafra
ANYONE WHO presumes that there are no global and strategic dimensions to Muhammadu
Buhari’s re-advent to the control of state power in the Nigeria project and his
on-going determined pursuit of deadly parochial-Islamization policies viz-a-viz
the disruption of the peace, well-being and existence of the distinct peoples
that inhabit the enlarged Niger basin—especially the Igbo and their neighbors
in the lower southeast portion—should take a pause and reflect better.
The
role that dedicated Igbo scholars, public intellectuals, their allies, and
sympathizers everywhere must play by bringing their skills and knowledge to
bear on the contextualization of the issues and facts involved in Muhammadu
Buhari’s state polices, their adverse aims and implications this time and
beyond for the peace, well-being and existence of the Igbo and the other
threatened distinct inhabitants of the Niger basin cannot be downplayed.
When
Adolf Hitler and his militaristic Nazi regime were routed in 1945 by the efforts
of the heroic men and women—fellow Africans included—from every corner of the
globe, who volunteered for military and military support service in the World
War II, several of Hitler’s frontline and backroom operatives in the Nazi
establishment who played actionable roles in the mass genocidal extermination of
countless Jews and people of other despised races in the gas chambers,
concentration camps, etc. that they set up and operated in known parts of
Europe’s heartland, fled Germany and resettled in Argentina, other parts of
Latin America, and even the Middle East.
IT IS noteworthy here for full disclosure that my own dear father, who died in
2011 at the age of 97 was one of those brave African men who stepped forward to
be counted for military service in that Great War as soldiers in occupier
Britain’s Royal West African Frontier Force, (RWAFF).My father who enlisted in 1940 at the
enlistment depot in Enuugwu, was assigned to the Royal Signals Corps alongside
24 other young enlistees all of who were from the distinct nationalities in the
Niger basin’s lower southeast portion.Their assignment to the Royal Signal Corps instead of the Regimental
Signal Corps was on account of their superior Western educational
qualification—all of them possessed the standard six certificates, which was
coveted at the time.Research revealed
that the need to recruit personnel with the requisite Western educational
qualification was in fact, the compelling rationale that trumped the
established stipulation made by Her Majesty’s military policy makers at
Whitehall to deviate from the established stipulations that guided the
recruitment of colonial military manpower in the colonies to favor men from the
so-called “martial tribes” alone in the upper Niger basin,
For
those Nazi operatives who fled to Argentina, their choice of refuge was aided
and abetted by their Argentine benefactors, some of whom are in or connected
with their country’s military establishment, who also received and provided
them with cover and sundry support upon arrival in Argentina.In the post WWII years after the founding of
the State of Israel in 1948, and it quickly evolved into a no-nonsense
veritable protector of universal Jewish rights with regard to the vow that
“never again” would the Jewish people fall victim to such violation of their
human rights as was the case in the hands of the Nazis, only a few of those
Nazi operatives have been located by the Israeli state, which in some cases, used
extraordinary means to bring them to Israel where they faced justice for their
crimes against humanity.The rest have
quietly lived out their lives and died natural deaths undetected, without being
made to account for the atrocities they inflicted on Jews and their other
victims.
Don’t
forget that Africans—Ovaherero and Nama peoples of South West Africa, in today’s
Namibia, were the initial victims of the Nazi genocidists.The torture techniques that the Nazis
subsequently applied wholesale against their victims during the Jewish Holocaust
were developed and perfected on the Ovaherero and the Nama by German colonial
administrators who operated in South West Africa in the early 1900s.An estimated 100,000 Ovaherero and Nama lost
their lives during the time.Noteworthy
is that in 2004, Germany accepted that those killings amount to genocide, but still
refuses to pay specific compensation to descendants of the victims.Descendants of the Ovaherero and Nama who
lost their lives in that genocide recently filed a law suit in New York in
which they demand compensation from the German government.That suit is on-going in New York.
IT WAS not by happenstance therefore, that the military establishment in Argentina
after its overthrow of President Isabel Peron’s government and usurpation of
state power in 1976 embarked on a systematic and horrific human rights
violations against all sections of society in Argentina throughout the duration
of the reign of terror called the Dirty War on civil society that it imposed in
the 1976 through 1983 after it lost the Falklands war and was ousted from power.Society in Argentina is yet to recover from
that horrific Dirty War in which 30,000 opponents of military rule were
systematically “disappeared”.Most of
those who were responsible have not been held accountable.
Although
the military establishment in Argentina is no longer in control of de facto state power since 1983, there
is no doubt that its strands and elements that were responsible for and
participated in those horrific gross human rights violations are still well and
kicking.They were the same strands and
elements that received, gave cover to, and protected fleeing Nazi genocidists
from Germany when they arrived Argentina after 1945.
THE HISTORY of land ownership and plantation agriculture in Argentina and the rest
of Latin America is the story of racial expropriation and exploitation
especially of indigenous peoples.Much
of the large scale commercial ranching in Argentina and other Latin American
countries are in the hands property-owning families that support and or are
involved in right-wing politics in society.The military establishments in Latin America have direct links and
affiliation to those property-owning families who rely on their relationship to
the former to guarantee their economic and political privileges in
society.Also, during the period when
the military was in control of state power in Argentina, many of their
individual elements appropriated stupendous tracts of acreage of land that they
deployed for huge commercial ranching ventures that they still own and operate
all over Argentina.
The alarm, the worry…
DO YOU now see one of the worrisome and alarming linkage-implications of Muhammadu
Buhari’s policy that would send soldiers from a military, whose officer corps
and other ranks are overwhelmingly Hausa-Fulani men to Argentina to learn
ranching skills? In stark terms, the
policy will enable Muhammadu Buhari’s genocidist military to acquire up-to-date
skills to aid and abet the Islamization agenda in the Niger basin.
Military
forts in the name of cattle ranches scattered across the land will provide
outposts around which government supported Fulani settlements will
flourish.Also, as was the case in parts
of the world where settler colonialism prevailed, soldiers from such military
forts will be used to project pacification violence against indigenous
resistance to forced permanent Fulani settlements in the nooks and crannies of
the rural communities where they are located.
IGBO scholars, intellectuals and their friends everywhere must not be shy to
proclaim to the world that the Igbo and their neighbors in the lower southeast
Niger basin do not pose or constitute threat of any sort to peace in the regional
or global contexts.The non-militaristic
cultures and the inherent democratic social authority patterns that these
inhabitants of the lower southeast evolved and still rely on to direct
authority in their respective society are testimonies to that truthful
assertion.
For
civilized humanity to sit by and watch while Muhammadu Buhari and his
militaristic Hausa-Fulani kinsmen and women deploy militaristic policies that
engulf the peace-loving peoples of the lower southeast right in their
respective homeland using different ploys amounts to real and serious threats
to regional and world peace.
EVEN THOUGH nothing again has been heard about this policy since it was first
flouted in sections of the Press in Nigeria sometime last year, the big worry
is whether it indicates that the Hausa-Fulani ruling establishment under
Muhammadu Buhari has made contacts with elements of Hitler’s Nazi war criminals
and their Argentine benefactors.The
implications of that for the distinct peoples, especially the Igbo, that
inhabit the lower Niger basin is serious as they continue to face down Fulani
Islamization onslaught. *****Professor EC Ejiogu is author of The Roots of Political Instability in Nigeria: Political Evolution and Development in the NigerBasin, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011and guest editor, “Special Issue on Chinua Achebe: The Igbo, Pogrom, Biafra War and Genocide in Nigeria”, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol 48, 6, December 2013 (contributors: EC Ejiogu, VY Mudimbe, Biodun Jeyifo, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Carol Ijeoma Njoku, Chima J Korieh, Douglas B Chambers, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o) Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is specialist on the state and on genocide & wars in Africa in the post-1966 epoch – beginning with the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-present day, the foundational and most gruesome genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population were murdered by Nigeria and its allies, principally Britain. Africa and the rest of the world largely stood by and watched as the perpetrators enacted this horror most ruthlessly. The world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide. This genocide inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. During the period, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/DRCongo (variously, since the late 1990s) and Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004) and in other wars in Africa. African peoples have, presently, no other choice but exit/dismantle the extant genocide-state (the bane of their existence & progress) & construct own nation-centred states that serve their interests. He is author of several books & papers on the subject and his new book is entitled The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019).
