Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
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])
Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
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