Saturday, 26 January 2019

Defining registers of Biafra affirmation


Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

BIAFRANS have an historic opportunity to embark on the construction of a new civilisation where human life, African life, fundamentally, is sacrosanct. This salient feature cannot be overstressed.

For Igbo people, Nigeria has for long been a haematophagous quagmire in their history, beginning in the 1945 Igbo pogrom in Jos (northcentral region) carried out by the Fulani islamist/jihadists, duly overseen by the British conqueror-occupying regime. A “next time” Igbo pogrom was executed in Kano (north region), in 1953, by the same Fulani islamist/jihadists and again overseen by the British occupation – “dress rehearsals” for the Igbo genocide which the dual-genocidists and the expanded league of pan-African perpetrators (particularly, Yoruba, Kanuri, Edo, Tiv, Gwari, Nupe, Jukun) 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, phases I-III of the genocide. Phase-IV of the genocide has continued since, with the murder of additional tens of thousands Igbo people.

Mission

THE Biafra 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 notoriously anti-human.

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. 

THE restoration-of-independence of Biafra 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...
(John Coltrane Quartet, “Attaining” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass;  Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Impulse!, New York, US,  26 August 1965])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is author of the recently published The longest genocide  since 29 May 1966 (2019)  
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/2019/01/blog-post_25.html)
Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
                                                                                                                                 

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