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.
(John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy, “Spiritual” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone; Dolphy, bass clarinet; McCoy Tyner, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live, The Village Vanguard, New York, US, 3 November 1961])
*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of Biafra Revisited (2006) and author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why Donald Trump is great for Africa (2018)
(Nnamdi Kanu: leader, Indigenous People of Biafra)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe TODAY, Friday 19 October
2018, 401 days after that Fulani-led genocidist Nigeria military savage attack on a loving family residence, Nnamdi
Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, appears in Jerusalem, Israel, 2,500 miles away from Biafra, solemnly offering
prayers at the city’s historic western wall (see video below). The world is now awaiting news
of Kanu’s parents, Eze Israel Okwu Kanu and Ugoeze Nnenne Kanu, who were also at home during the 14 September 2017 invasion... Scores of the Kanus’ relatives and friends were murdered during the assault and scores of others are still unaccounted for.
(1. Nnamdi Kanu: western wall, Jerusalem, Friday 19 October 2018)
(2. Nnamdi Kanu: praying, western wall, Jerusalem, Friday 19 October 2018)
(John Coltrane Sextet, “Out of this world” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, soprano 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])
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe and Lakeson Okwuonicha, Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (Dakar & Reading: African Renaissance, 2018), ISBN 0955205026/ISBN 9780955205026, paperback, 158pp., £12.92/US$16.99/CDN$21.97/EUR 15,73/￥2,058
WHAT did US President Donald Trump mean in January 2018 when he referred to the states in Africa as a “s*******”? In Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa the authors, in this compact study, examine six decades of “independence” in Africa and arrive at a conclusion not dissimilar to President Trump’s.
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe and Lakeson Okwuonicha expose 62 years of fake developmentalism during which the African humanity has generated an expansive capital resource heritage that should sustain its very existence and transformation but instead exports vast amounts of these resources year in, year out, to a voracious, insatiable EuroConqueror league state system. This state system is complicit with “marionette” leaderships in Africa both of whom are committed to ensuring an Africa defined by incapacitated and incompetent states or “countries” perpetually at war with their peoples.
THE authors conclude by welcoming a characteristically ebullient Trump intervention that speaks directly to the outcome of 6 decades of this system of subjugation. Ekwe-Ekwe and Okwuonicha insist on a free Africa based on each constituent people’s right to exercise their own self-determination to realise their own transformatory vision of life, liberty, peace and promise.
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is a specialist on the state and genocide and wars in Africa
Lakeson Okwuonicha is an African peoples-centred scholar who lives in Biafra Publication date: 16 October 2018 Key subjects book covers: international politics since end of 1939-1945 war, Donald Trump, Chinua Achebe, US-Africa relations, Britain, France and China relations with Africa, Igbo genocide, Biafra, Harold Wilson, Barack Obama, aid and development, Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, future of Africa
TODAY marks 13months or 396 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 an abominable 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 (Igbo pogrom in Jos, northcentral Nigeria) 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, murdering 13 million of them (Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem,Histoire générale du Congo: De l'héritage ancien à la République Démocratique. Paris: Duculot, 1998, p. 344).
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. The Biafra freedom movement has insisted indefatigably that a referendum for the 50 million Biafrans is the democratic path to Biafran freedom. Biafrans are indeed poised for a referendum. This remains the path today than ever before to end the Igbo genocide.
(John Coltrane Quartet, “The Promise” [personnel: Coltrane, soprano saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live, Birdland, New York, US, 8 October 1963)
THE IGBO were one of the very few constituent nations in British Nigeria, southwestcentral Africa, prior to the 29 May 1966 Anglo-Nigeria launch date of the Igbo genocide, who understood, fully, the immense liberatory possibilities ushered in by 1 October 1960 (presumed day for the restoration-of-independence for the subjugated African peoples) and the interlocking challenges of the vast reconstructionary work required for state and societal transformation in the aftermath of the British occupation.
Enterprise
The Igbo had the most robust economy in the country in their east regional homeland, supplied the country with its leading writers, artists and scholars, supplied the country’s top universities with its vice-chancellors (presidents/rectors) and leading professors and scientists, supplied the country with its first indigenous university (the prestigious university at Nsukka), supplied the country with its top diplomats, supplied the country’s leading high schools with its head teachers and administrators, supplied the country with its top bureaucrats, supplied the country with its leading businesspeople, supplied the country with an educated, top-rated professional officers-corps for its military and police forces, supplied the country with its leading sportspersons, essentially and effectively worked the country’s rail, postal, telegraphic, power, shipping, and aviation services to quality standards not seen since in Nigeria…
And they were surely aware of the vicissitudes engendered by this historic age precisely because the Igbo nation played the vanguardist role in the freeing of Nigeria from Britain, beginning from the mid-1930s...
Suzerain’s response
BRITAIN responded to this Igbo fervent resourcefulness by plotting the genocide against the Igbo along with its on the ground north region Hausa-Fulani/islamists who were vociferously opposed to African freedom. Indeed, the Hausa-Fulani/islamists wanted the British occupation indefinitely – which, in fact, is the case, 57 years after!
(Charles Mingus Sextet, “Passions of a man” [personnel: Mingus, piano, vocals; Jimmy Knepper, trombone; Rahssan Roland Kirk, flute, siren, tenor saxophone, manzello, strich; Booker Ervin, tenor saxophone; Doug Watkins, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: Atlantic Studios, New York, US, 6 November 1961])
(Harold Wilson: ... “would accept half a million dead Biafrans...”)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
“Diminution-of-African life”
AT the apogee of phase-III of this genocide, summer 1968-autumn 1969, 23 years after the horrendous Jewish genocide in east and central Europe carried out by Germany, Harold Wilson informed Clyde Ferguson (United States state department special coordinator for relief to Biafra), on record, 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 (Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, 1977: 122). Wilson pursued his genocide drive against the Igbo, steeped in that overarching ideological rubric of the expressed “diminution-of-African life” that constitutes the engaging, subjugating template of 400 years of pan-European enslavement of the African humanity in the Americas and elsewhere, beginning in the 15th century, and Europe’s consequent occupation of the African homeland itself.
Wilson’s Igbo death-wish tally of 500, 000 represented 4.2 per cent of the Igbo population at the time. The prime minister’s on the ground African executioners led by Fulani islamist/jihadists, fulsomely obliged their “massa” Wilson, murdering 3.1 million Igbo by 12 January 1970 – 2.6 million more Igbo than the Labour leader’s slaughtering target or 25 per cent of the Igbo population. Wilson would later acknowledge the extent of the British role in the sheer savagery of the Igbo genocide. In his memoirs, he noted that the Nigeria genocidist military, equipped zealously by Britain, expended more small arms ammunition in its campaign to achieve its annhilative 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, 1971: 630, added emphasis). Colonel Robert Scott, military advisor in the British diplomatic mission in Nigeria then couldn’t agree more with Wilson on the subject. Scott stated that as Nigerian genocidist military forces unleashed their attacks on Biafran cities, towns and villages, they are the “best defoliant agent known” (Daily Telegraph, London, 11 January 1970). Chillingly dreadful...
Intelligible
SEEN AGAINST this background of Harold Wilson’s repugnant involvement in the Igbo genocide, the very trenchant charge of antisemitism and racism that current Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn has had from some of his colleagues and other prominent persons in Britain, becomes hugely intelligible:
(Margaret Hodge, British Labour party member of parliament: “Jeremy Corbyn is f****** racist and antisemite”, The Independent, London, 18 July 2018)
(Chuka Umunna, British Labour party member of parliament: “The Labour party [under Jeremy Corbyn] is institutionally racist ... very painful”, Daily Mail, London, 9 September 2018)
(Jonathan Sacks, former British chief rabbi: “[Jeremy Corbyn] is anti-semite [who has] given support to racists, terrorists and dealers of hate”, New Statesman, London, 28 August 2018)
(Trevor Philips, former head of British equality commission: “[Jeremy Corbyn] is anti-semite and racist”, Daily Mail, 13 September 2018)
(Jeremy Corbyn, British Labour party leader...)
(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])
BEGINNING in the early 1930s to October 1960, the Igbo nation played the vanguard role in the campaign for restoration-of-independence to terminate 100 years of the British conquest and occupation of the multiplicity of states and peoples of southwestcentral Africa region which the conqueror contemptuously tagged “Nigeria” – the “n*****” area/land. Britain responded with the genocide of the Igbo and employed its Fulani/islamist clients on the ground, inveterately anti-African who hitherto opposed the restoration-of-independence drive, to enforce this mass murder. The genocidists slaughtered 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of the Igbo population during the course of 44 months, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970. Tens of thousands additional Igbo have been murdered subsequently. THE Igbo have not only survived the genocide but are now in the vanguard to construct Biafra, an African peoples-centred state, that at once effectuates African control of its destiny not seen for centuries and the collapse of the Anglo/European World anti-African “Berlin-states” or constellation of EuroConqueror league states dotted across Africa such as the “Nigerias”.
(John Coltrane, Ascension {edition II} [personnel– solo sequence –: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, Dewey Johnson, trumpet, Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Archie Shepp, tenor saxophone; Marion Brown, alto saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Art Davis, bass; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, NJ, US, 28 June 1965])
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).
