Nelson Mandela, catastrophic murders of Igbo people in South Africa, restoration-of-independence of Biafra

(Born 18 July 1918, Mvezo, South Africa)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

ON THURSDAY 18 July 2019, South Africa, the African World and the rest of the globe will celebrate the 101st birthday of Nelson Mandela – lawyer, leader of the African restoration-of-independence movement that freed South Africa after 342 years of the pan-European conquest, occupation, and subjugation.

The commemoration of Mandela’s 101st birthday 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 émigrés in South Africa from Biafra, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe 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. 

ALL along, as this murder campaign rages, the South Africa state categorises this crime so quaintly and outrageously with the essentially sanitising euphemism, “xenophobic attacks” – an outrage of a designation readily picked up, re-packaged, and re-broadcast uncritically with relish across the world by the usual expressly anti-African lives’ broadcasters and commentators and other news organsations. This planned murdering campaign against African émigrés in South Africa, executed by organised South African death-squads, must be called by its name: murder; there must be no obfuscation in presenting this crime for what it is.

Catastrophe

Since February 2016, over 120 Igbo immigrants in South Africa, who had themselves fled the ongoing Igbo genocide in occupied Biafra by Fulani-led islamist/jihadist genocidist Nigeria, have been viciously murdered as part of this savage campaign against African émigrés across the country. Biafra will never forget this unleashed catastrophe on its people. On the contrary, the consequences of this trail of executions of Biafrans in South Africa will dictate the character of the future relationship between the restored-independent Biafra and South Africa. Surely, no one murders Igbo people and gets away with the crime.

ONCE AGAIN, assailed in a country whose state is often primed to make outlandish sanctimonious declarations on foreign policy, especially on the Middle East, 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])

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018) 

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe