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.
(JamesBaldwin and Chinua Achebe: … African Atlantic discourses, University of Florida, Gainesville, 9 April 1980…)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
THURSDAY 2 August 2018 is the 94th
birthday of James Baldwin – novelist,
essayist, commentator, dramatist, arguably African America’s leading writer and
intellectual during its age of freedom affirmation, 1950s-1990s. As
part of this week’s commemoration of the birthday, re-thinkingafrica here
reissues that Baldwin’s historic conversation with Chinua Achebe, Father of African Literature (University of
Florida, Gainesville, 9 April 1980), originally published by brainpickings. ...Reflections on history, art, politics, brainpickings, 22 September 2014,
Marcus Roberts Septet, “Nebuchadnezzar” (personnel: Roberts, piano; Wycliffe Gordon, trombone; Wessell Anderson, alto saxophone; Herbert Harris, tenor saxophone; Chris Thomas, bass; Maurice Carnes, drums; Herlin Riley, percussion; recorded: Mastersound Studios, Astoria, New York, US, 9-10 August 1989/10 December 1989 and The Saenger Theatre, New Orleans, US, 15 December 1989)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe ONE of the preeminent luminaries of French letters, prolific across genres – novels, drama, travel books, history, journalism – with classics which include The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Twenty Years Later, The Last Cavalier, Georges
(Miles Davis Quintet featuring Sonny Stitt, “Autumn leaves” [personnel: Davis, trumpet; Stitt, tenor saxophone; Wynton Kelly, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Jimmy Cobb, drums; recorded: live, L’Olympia, Paris, France, 11 October 1960])
THE MAIN thrust of ex-US President
Barack Hussein Obama’s 16th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg, South Africa, earlier on in the week is its focus on “democracy”
in the world and ways and means to sustain it. Three excerpts from the lecture
are illustrative (Barack Obama, “The Nelson Mandela Lecture”, The New Yorker, New York, 18 July 2018): 1. “And, yes,
democracy
can be messy, and it can be slow, and it can be frustrating … For all its
imperfections, real democracy best upholds the idea that government exists to
serve the individual, and not the other way around. And it is the only form of
government that has the possibility of making that idea real.”
2. “So,
for those of us who are interested in strengthening democracy, it’s time for us
to stop paying all of our attention to the world’s capitals and the centers of
power, and to start focussing more on the grassroots, because that’s where
democratic legitimacy comes from. Not from the top down, not from abstract theories,
not just from experts, but from the bottom up. Knowing the lives of those who
are struggling.” 3. “We
have to stop pretending that countries that just hold an election where sometimes
the winner somehow magically gets ninety per cent of the vote, because all the
opposition is locked up or can’t get on TV, is a democracy. Democracy depends
on strong institutions, and it’s about minority rights and checks and balances,and freedom of speech and freedom of expression and a free press, and the right
to protest and petition thegovernment, and an independent judiciary, and everybody having to follow the law.” OBAMA alerts his audience on those individuals and social forces which he feels pose
or constitute sources of obstacles to the growth or strengthening of “democracy”
across the world. These include (a) the “autocrat”, (b) “strongman politics”, (c)
“right-wing billionaires” and (d) “populist movements”. AS I
read this speech, that profound rumination on history a decade ago by Aimé Césaire (poet and philosopher) weighed heavily on my
thoughts. Césaire had told interviewer Annick Thebia Melson in 2008 that “[h]istory
is always dangerous, the world of history is a risky world; but it is up to us
at any given moment to establish and readjust the hierarchy of dangers” (“The
liberating power of words: An interview with Poet Aimé Césaire”, The
Journal of Pan-African Studies, Vol. 2, No 4, June 2008, p. 7). It is
indeed in the very course to construct and “readjust” this “hierarchy of
dangers” by focussing solely on Africa here that I will respond to Obama’s
lecture.
(Aimé Césaire: “[h]istory is always dangerous...”)
ARGUABLY the most expressively
covered and discussed news item in the United States presently is on special
counsel Robert Mueller and
team’s work investigating alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US elections.
An investigation of this calibre is deemed vital by the Americans because any such
purported interference in this election, particularly from a foreign power,
would undoubtedly have had negative impact and consequences on the course of
democracy in the United States, very much in the overarching context sketched
above by Obama. Yet no such investigations are underway
to probe those hardly disguised meddling-in-elections/“elections”/referendum by
none other than the ex-President
Barack Obama US government itself
in the following seven countries between 2009 and 2016: Honduras, Macedonia, Britain, Egypt, Kenya, Israel, Nigeria.
Abhorrent legacy of support for Igbo genocide
and imposition and invasions of states in Africa or quintessential disarticulation
of grounds for democracy APART from Nigeria
where Obama, first African-descent elected president after 233 years of the
founding of the US republic, imposed Muhammadu Buhari, an
islamist/jihadist and one of the vilest Nigerian genocidist operatives
during these 52 years of the ongoing Igbo genocide, as head of Nigeria regime
in March 2015 (this imposition was carried out with then British prime minister
David Cameron whose country is a co-genocidist state in this crime), his
administration’s robust interferences in elections in the other six states in
the group, including the June 2016 British referendum on Brexit, were
spectacularly a failure.
BESIDES the Buhari-imposition
catastrophe during which the Buhari-led Nigeria military and its Boko Haram and
Fulani militia adjunct forces have murdered 3000 Igbo people in Biafra, Barack Obama
intervened elsewhere in African politics: 1. supported the 2010
French military invasion of Côte d’Ivoire , ordered by
President Nicolas Sarkozy (one of the most openly racist French political
leaders in the contemporary era who made his views on Africans explicit, on
record, in his notorious “The tragedy of Africa is that the African has
not fully entered into history”-speech at Dakar’s Cheikh Anta Diop
University in July 2007 [see “The unofficial English translation of Sarkozy’s
speech”, africaResource, 13 October
2007]), in which 2300 Africans were
ruthlessly murdered and the Laurent Gbagbo regime in Abidjan
overthrown and replaced by a personage more acceptable to French strategic and
economic interests in the country
2.was part of the 2011
US-Britain-France (Obama & Cameron & Sarkozy) tripartite military
invasion of Libya during which head of regime Muammar Gaddafi was murdered as well as
some members of his family in addition to some influential officials of his
regime, hundreds of other Libyans also murdered during the operations, and
several Libyan cities and infrastructure destroyed 3. supported French
military invasion of Central African Republic, ordered by President
François Hollande (2013) 4. supported French
military invasion of Mali, ordered by François
Hollande (2013)
QUESTION: Which of the four sources of
obstacles to “democracy” raised in Obama’s Johannesburg lecture and quoted
above (a, b, c, d) explains or identifies Barack Hussein Obama’s own vast range of operation in disrupting the cause and course of
democracy in Africa whilst in office as the 44th president of the United States?
Just one? A couple? More than a couple? None?
(Sonny Rollins Quartet, “Dance of the reed pipes” [personnel: Rollins, tenor saxophone; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Billy Higgins, drums; recorded: live, Village Gate, New York, US, 27-30 July 1962])
(Born 20 July 1925, Fort-de-France, Martinique, Caribbean)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe PSYCHIATRIST, student of poet, playwright and essayist Aimé Césaire, philosopher and one of the preeminent revolutionary theorists of the 20th century whose landmark publications are: The Wreathed of the Earth (1963), A Dying Colonialism (1965), Black Skin, White Masks (1967), Toward the African Revolution (1969)
(Eric Dolphy Quintet, “Hat and beard” [personnel: Dolphy, bass clarinet; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Bobby Hutcherson, vibraphone; Richard Davis, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 25 February 1964])
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe On Wednesday 18 July 2018, South
Africa, the African World and the rest of the globe celebrate the 100th
birthday of Nelson Mandela – lawyer, leader of the African
restoration-of-independence movement that freed South
Africa after 342 years of the European
World conquest, occupation, and subjugation.
THE commemoration of Mandela’s birth centenary
ironically occurs at a very depressing epoch for African peoples-centred students
and scholars studying and researching South Africa. The latter have, in recent
years, usually incredulously as one can imagine, given the inestimable support
and goodwill rendered to the South African freedom movement from practically
every region of the African World including Igbo people from Biafra, as
hundreds of African émigrésinSouth Africa
from Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and elsewhere from Africa are murdered in
premeditated campaigns clearly organised by groupings in the country with tacit
and at times active support from personages within the South Africa state
... Additionally, in this campaign, African émigrés’ residents and
businesses have been destroyed and thousands of survivors sent into
horrid South Africa refugee camps or forced to return to their
various countries.
Catastrophe Since February 2016, over 100 Igbo
immigrantsin South Africa, who had themselves fled the ongoing Igbo genocide in
occupied Biafra by Fulani-led islamist/jihadist genocidist Nigeria, have been so viciously murdered as part
of this savage campaign against African émigrés across the country. Biafra will
never forget this raging catastrophe.
ONCE AGAIN, assailed in a country
whose state is often primed to make outlandish sanctimonious declarations on
foreign policy but demonstrates such gross irresponsibility to protect the
lives of African peoples from elsewhere domiciled within its borders, the Igbo
in South Africa must now think seriously of relocating to other countries for
their safety and well-being.
(Sonny Rollins Quartet, “Dance of the reed pipes” [personnel: Rollins, tenor saxophone; Don
Cherry, pocket trumpet; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Billy Higgins, drums; recorded: live,
Village Gate, New York, US, 27-30 July 1962])
TODAY marks 10months or 300 days since the 14 September 2017 genocidist Nigeria military, led by Fulani islamist/ jihadists under Muhammadu Buhari, stormed the home of Nnamdi Kanu’s parents at Afaraukwu-Ibeku, eastcentral Biafra. Consequently, the whereabouts of Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (constituted integrally in the Biafra freedom movement), and his parents, remain unknown. Scores of the Kanus’ relatives and friends were murdered during the assault and scores of others are still unaccounted for. Three thousand Igbo people have been murdered across Biafra since Buhari, who, in March 2015, was imposed on Nigeria as head of regime by ex-United States President Barack Hussein Obama (first African-descent president of the US republic in 233 years of existence) and ex-British Prime MinisterDavid Cameron, embarked on this bloodiest track of phase-IV of the Igbo genocide (13 January 1970-present day) in November 2015. After eight years in the White House and 19 months since he left office, Obama now presents a dreadful presidential legacy, not lost particularly on African World reckoning, of zealously supporting the Igbo genocide, foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, executed on the ground by Nigeria, an islamist-led state, and its suzerain state Britain. (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/2017/05/on-30-march-2016-i-published-essay.html) GENOCIDIST Nigeria has murdered more Africans in Biafra, southwestcentral Africa, since 1945 than the total number of Africans murdered in Africa since 1900 by all of Europe’s conqueror-powers in Africa: Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain – including the number of Africans the Germans murdered in the genocide of the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of southwest Africa (1904-1907). Nigeria now rates a not-too-distant second to Belgian King Leopold II’s notorious position as lead génocidaireof African peoples since the 19th century in the Leopold II/Belgian state’s genocide against Africans in the central regions of the Congo River basin (1878-1908). Nigeria surely knows that it will account for the safety of Nnamdi Kanu and his parents and take full responsibility for the consequences of that savage raid on a family home.
(Joe Henderson Trio plays Thelonious Monk’s composition, “Friday the 13th” [personnel: Henderson, tenor saxophone; Ron Carter, bass; Al Foster, drums; recorded: live, Village Vanguard, New York, US, 14-16 November 1985])
TWO “voices” in the southwestcentral region of Africa with such contrasting worldviews are in contestation presently: 1. For the first “voice”, it is to threaten and threaten to murder, and indeed murder and murder and murder under the overarching flaming banner of the herd as they and their parents and grandparents have done during the course of the Igbo genocide these past 52 years (29 May 1966-12 July 2018) and the Igbo pogroms in Kano (1953) and Jos (1945) and the dreadful legacy of foreparents’ trail of murders and subjugations of indigenous African populations across the entire north stretches of the region since they left their Futa Djallon homeland in Guinea-Conakry just over 200 years ago to the day. 2. For the other “voice”, in the south of the geography, Land of the Rising Sun, it is engaged, uncompromisingly, in an assured quest for freedom that views life, African life, as sacrosanct and is eager to employ its incredible talent of creativity to transform the lives of its people, an outcome with epochal consequences for the region and the rest of the African World.
(Jackie McLean Quintet, “Love and hate” [personnel: McLean, alto saxophone; Grachan Moncur III, trombone; Bobby Hutcherson, vipraphone; Larry Ridley, bass; Roy Haynes, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 20 September 1963])
THE Biafra freedom movement continues to challenge and override the cardinal tenets that define comparable liberatory trajectories of contemporary history. It has remained fiercely peaceful and resilient despite the scorched-earth savagery of the Fulani islamist/jihadist-led Nigeria genocidist military and its Boko Haram and Fulani militia adjuncts – the genocidists have murdered 3000 Igbo since October 2015 with scant condemnation from the rest of the worldincluding co-genocidist perpetrator Britain. Usually, a liberation movement “returns home” on the morrow of victory! No, not the Biafra freedom movement which is already emplaced throughout Biafra, as the world observes, setting up structures and processes of restoration-of-independence before formal restoration... SCHOLARS and students of freedom are gasping to catch up with learning what new breaks or departures this movement is teaching the rest of the world on how to deal with gruesome anti-human regimes especially the genocidist caste à la Nigérianawhich now teetering on imploding, overwhelmed by the cadence of that very familiar freedom orchestration scored by the resilient Biafrans.
(John Coltrane Sextet, “Out of this world” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Donald Garrett, clarinet, bass; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live at Penthouse Jazz Club, Seattle, US, 30 September 1965])
(Born 6 July 1937, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe ARGUABLY Botswana’s leading writer whose critically acclaimed publications include the novels When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), Maru (1971) and A Question of Power (1973) and the historical study, Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981)
(Alice Coltrane Quintet, “Isis and Osiris” {1&2} [personnel: Coltrane, harp;Pharoah Sanders, soprano saxophone, percussion;Charlie Haden, bass;Vishnu Wood, oud;Rashied Ali, drums;recorded: live, The Village Gate, New York, US, 4 July 1970])
ON 6 JULY 1967, Nigeriaexpands the territorial range of its execution of the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, which it launched 14 months earlier, 29 May 1966, in different parts of Nigeria but especially in the north region, murdering 100,000 Igbo people (phases I and II). Now, it embarks on a land, air and sea-borne invasion of Biafra, the Igbo homeland, with the British government, under the leadership of Harold Wilson, playing the central role in the campaign (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-conquerors-concord-in.html). Indeed without British support, pointedly if not ironically 52 years before Brexit, the Igbo genocide, this crime against humanity, would probably not have occurred. This phase-III of the genocide stretches for 30 months during which 3 million Igbo are murdered. Harold Wilson coordinates the campaign from his offices and home at 10 Downing Street London, 3150 miles away from Biafra, facilitated on the ground in client-state Nigeria by Francis Cumming-Bruce, the British chief representative and proconsul. Cumming-Bruce liases expansively with key Nigerian genocidists in charge of the crime, right from the outset in May 1966, as well as the coterie of Hausa-Fulani/islamist north region emirs, politicians and other leading public figures who Britain had arbitrarily handed over supreme overseeing political authority in October 1960 to “manage” Nigeria on London’s behalf ad infinitum as part of a bogus independence settlement. These north region political forces had rigorously opposed the restoration of African independence which the Igbo had led for 30 years, beginning in the 1930s (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-conquerors-concord-in.html). For the British, the Igbo genocide is “punishment” for the Igbo for daring to spearhead the campaign to terminate the control of its Nigeria “rich-prized land”. At the apogee of the Igbo slaughtering in 1968, Wilson, himself, insists that he “would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” the Nigerian génocidairesto destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide (Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, London and New York: Quartet Books, 1977: 122). In his memoirs published in 1971, Wilson reveals that the Nigerian military, equipped zealously by Britain, expended more small arms ammunition in its campaign to achieve its annihilative goal 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: 630, added emphasis). Britain’s Lagos (Nigeria) diplomatic mission military advisor Robert Scott’s acknowledgement (at the height of the genocide, mid 1968- January 1970) that as the Nigerian genocidists unleashed their campaigns across Igbo cities, towns and villages, they were the “best defoliant agent known” (Sunday Telegraph, London, 11 January 1970) is equally gravely harrowing.
TO COMPLEMENT this stupendous British military investment in the mass murder of Igbo people, the BBC world service, that state broadcaster funded by the British foreign office, assumes the chief publicity role to “rationalise” the genocide to the world’s public. The BBC effectively becomes the external broadcasting corporation of the on-the-ground Nigerian prosecuting genocidists, displacing the rambling and ramshackle Voice of Nigeria, spewing out hate, racist and fraudulent features and analyses to discredit the Biafra freedom movement decades before the world’s attention is drawn to the realisation that fake news programming and broadcasts are an embodiment in the practices of quite a few news organisations (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/bbc-nationalists-or-secessionists.html). Definitive goal
Right from the outset as its invasion of Biafra is launched, genocidist Nigeria establishes on the ground and employs rape and abduction of Igbo girls and women and the public execution of Igbo boys and men as pivotal instruments in waging the campaign. Its ghoulish anthem of the genocide, broadcast uninterruptedly on state-owned Kaduna radio (shortwave transmission) and television and with editorial comments on the theme, regularly published in both state-ownedNew Nigerian(daily) newspaper and (Hausa) weeklyGaskiya Ta fi Kwaboduring the period, has these lyrics in Hausa:
Mu je mu kashe nyamiri Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su Mu chi mata su da yan mata su Mu kwashe kaya su (English translation: Let’s go murder the damned Igbo/Murder their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property)
This genocidist intent, particularly its empirically earmarked specifics, is unequivocally explicit and its overarching method sets the precedent of the savagery and barbarity that are the hallmarks of the genocide and subsequent genocides in Africa as Rwanda (1994), Darfur/Nuba Mountains/Blue Nile/South Kordofan (the Sudan, variously since 2004), and Democratic Republic of the Congo (since the late 1990s) attest.
AT THE HEIGHT of the Igbo genocide, beginning from the second-half of 1968 when thousands of Igbo children and older citizens die daily from starvation, one of the genocidist’s publicly-stated “weapons” in the prosecution of the crime as articulated by chief “theorist” Obafemi Awolowo himself, British Prime Minister Wilson as already stated, informs Clyde Ferguson (United States state department special coordinator for relief to Biafra) that he, Harold Wilson, “would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” the Nigerian génocidairesto destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide. Nigeria in fact ends up murdering 3 million Igbo – 2 and one-half million more than Wilson’s grim 500,000 Igbo-death wish.
(Harold Wilson:“would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took...”)
Furthermore, it is indeed a telling irony, given British support for Nigeria and the génocidaires’ strategy of rape and abduction of Igbo womanhood in Biafra, that it is in London, in June 2014, forty-seven years later, that the first international conference on “rape and sexual violence” in war, with emphasis on Africa (and particular focus on the Democratic Republic of the Congo), is hosted by none other than the British government in which foreign secretary of state William Hague describes rape as “‘one of the great mass crimes’ of modern times” (BBC News, 10 June 2014).
(William Hague ... 47 years later: rape is “‘one of the great mass crimes’ of modern times”)
IN BIAFRA, beginning 6 July 1967, every Igbo town or village overrun by the Nigerian génocidaires becomes a gruesome milestone in an inexorable march of rape, death, and destruction: Obollo Afo ... Obollo Eke ... Enuugwu-Ezike ... Opi ... Ukehe … Nkalagu ... Owgwu ... Abakaleke … Eha Amuufu ... Nsukka ... Enuugwu ... Agbaani ... Asaba ... Ogwashi-Ukwu ... Isele-Ukwu ... Onicha-Ugbo …Agbo …Umunede ... Onicha ... Nkpo …Oka ... Aba ... Udi ... Ehuugbo ... Ehuugbo Road ... Okigwe ... Umuahia ... Owere ...Abagana ... Igwe Ocha ... Ahaoda ... Obiigbo ... Azumini ... Umu Ubani/Bonny ... Igwe Nga/Opobo ... Ugwuta ... Amasiri ... Akaeze ... Uzuakoli ... Clearly invokingNazi-style “search through population-round off-isolate-and-destroy”-tactics in overrun non-Igbo towns and cities such as Calabar, Oron, Ikot Ekpene, Uyo, Ogoja, Obubara, Obudu, Nkarasi and Eket, the genocidists meticulously profile Igbo nationals. Thousands of such profiled Igbo are shot at sight or marched off and later executed at city limits, forest firing-range sites, river banks, or at specifically dedicated genocidist-occupied barrack venues…
Incubation & manifestation
AS CONTEMPORARY Nigeria demonstrates, most graphically, as these lines are written, grounded genocidist advocates/“theorists”/operatives especially Obafemi Awolowo, Tony Enaharo, Hassan Katsina, Alison Ayida, Olusegun Obasanjo, Gbadomosi King, Umaru Dikko, Maitama Sule, Benjamin Adekunle, Muhammadu Buhari, Yakubu Gowon, Murtala Muhammed, Yakubu Danjuma, Ibrahim Haruna and Ibrahim Taiwo are perhaps just coming to terms with the realisation that their thoughts and deeds have incubated within their very own and become hauntingly cyclical across generations – DNA signature. This is precisely why survivors from these purveyors of state-directed mass slaughter, such as the Igbo, for example, must keep well away from the latter’s tent. Boko Haram and Fulani militia insurgents now ravaging swathes of territory across the north, northeast and northcentral and elsewhere in Nigeria are remarching along the paths first trodden by their parents/grandparents/greatgrandparents/Nigériãna-génocidaires, beginning 29 May 1966, 52 years ago to the day.
As for Nigeria’s genocide-prosecuting ally Britain, again 52 years to the day, it has, alas, caught up with Biafra, via Brexit, to engage, critically, with exercising its own right to self-determination – in this instance, to determine whether or not it wishes to be part of the supranational state called the European Union after 44 years of membership. Unlike the Biafrans, who, 52 years ago, exercised this same right but in staggeringly existential circumstances, Britain hasn’t sought Brexit from the European Union because it has been threatened or subjected to the crime of genocide by the latter nor indeed by any individual member state of the union such as Germany, Italy or France. On the contrary. Similarly, the 5 million constituent Scottish people in Britain do not, 52 years after Biafra, currently seek to exercise their right to self-determination from Britain because they have been threatened or subjected to the crime of genocide by Britain. Not at all. JUST as the Biafrans, 52 years ago, the underlying awareness by the British, as a whole, collectively, or the Scots, separately, is that this right to self-determination is inalienable and its exercise by any people across the world is not dependent on prevailing circumstance(s). Biafra flag on the ascent SO, despite the the unflinching 52 years of British support for the prosecution of the Igbo genocide, despite the sheer savagery of the Nigeria genocidist regime’s military murder of 3.1 million Igbo people or 25 per cent of the Igbo population during phases I-III of the genocide (29 May 1966-12 January 1970) and tens of thousands of additional Igbo during phase-IV (since 13 January 1970 and continuing) including the military/Boko Haram/Fulani militia murders of 3000 Igbo people carried out across Biafra since October 2015 under the Muhammadu Buhari regime, despite the unconscionable support of the Igbo genocide by Barack Hussein Obama, the first African American president in 233 years of the US republic (https://www.pambazuka.org/human-security/obama-must-tell-world-why-he-supported-igbo-genocide), the Igbo have emerged even more focused, steadfast, resilient. They have converted their strategic mission of Biafra independence restoration to a tactical tool which they employ almost effortlessly here and there with exponential impact locally and internationally. This is extraordinary. The Biafra Sun is on the ascent. Any referendum conducted in Biafra presently on the restoration-of-independence for this population of 50 million will result in a high 90 per cent score. Biafrans now dictate the terms of this long drawn-out journey. Biafrans are redefining the tenor of the march for freedom in Africa. They are reshaping African history in this great epoch of our time.
AND the freedom movement has done it, in these past 20 months, it must be stressed, without firing a single shot – either in defence or offence.
DISTINGUISHED electrical engineer, academic and air force pilot, okee nwoke mmadu – electrical engineer: plays key role in expanded electrification programme in Igwe Ocha in Biafra’s Oshimili Delta and elsewhere in Biafra, and Nigeria, in the early 1950s on return from the United States where he had studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; academic:particularly meritorious career at both Kumasi College of Technology School of Engineering (now Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology), Ghana (1955-1958) and RAF Halton School of Technical Training, England, where he isflying instructor(1959-1964);air force pilot: Royal Air Force (commissioned flying officer, July 1959; becomes flight lieutenant, 1962), pioneer air force pilot major and commander, Nigeria air force, September 1964
(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])
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).
