In this week that Biafra commemorates the 52nd anniversary of the genocidist invasion of its country by Nigeria and Britain or these dual-genocidist states’ launch of phase-III of the Igbo genocide, a reminder of Igbo people’s vanguard mission in contemporary history

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

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/jihadist client-operatives on the ground, inveterately anti-African throughout their history and who consequently opposed the restoration-of-independence drive, to enforce this mass murder, this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. For Britain, this genocide to destroy Igbo people, one of Africa’s most talented and enterprising peoples, is its envisaged path, in the post 1939-1945 war epoch, to control the lives and fortunes of African peoples indefinitely. 

The Anglo-Nigeria dual 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, phases I-III of the genocide. Tens of thousands additional Igbo have been murdered subsequently, phase-IV (beginning 13 January 1970), including the 3000 murdered by the fiendishly rabid Muhammadu Buhari regime since November 2015. Buhari had been installed in power in March 2015 by ex-US President Barack Hussein Obama, the first African-descent president in 233 years of the founding of the United States republic, and David Cameron, ex-British prime minister. Obama’s unconscionable support of the Igbo genocide is his ignoble presidential legacy.

THE Igbo have not only survived the genocide but are now in the vanguard to restore Biafra independence, the 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 or the Nigéríanãs-of-inconsequence.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Dusk-Dawn” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewoods Cliff, NJ, US, 16 June 1965])

******Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s recently published books on the Igbo genocide are The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

On that “Handshake-across-the-Niger” summit in Enuugwu, Biafra, Thursday 11 January 2018

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

UNDOUBTEDLY, the underlying problem of this Enuugwu conference (Vanguard, “Handshake across the Niger”, Lagos, 9 January 2018) is that Igbo-Yoruba relation is predicated, essentially, on these two nations in this state that calls itself Nigeria. But Nigeria is a genocide state that has focused on the slaughter of Igbo people, one of Africa’s leading entrepreneurial and academically endowed nations, as an enduring programme of state policy in the past 52 years – since 29 May 1966, in which the Yoruba have been a key participatory perpetrator among other constituent nations of Nigeria.

3.1 million Igbo, 25 per cent of the Igbo population then, were murdered in phases I-III of the genocide (29 May 1966-12 January 1970) and tens of thousands more Igbo have been murdered during the course of phase-IV of the genocide which began on 13 January 1970. The genocide goes on as these lines are written… History shows that a genocide state is abandoned, dismantled. There can be no other solution to this outcome. For the Igbo, Biafra brings this tragedy to a screeching halt.

“Successor” state(s)

Those who commit genocide on a people, as Germans have demonstrated since 1945, particularly their intellectuals (See, for instance, A Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past [Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2007]), must carry out a thorough introspective interrogation subsequently as the beginning of a journey to achieve some form of absolution for having committed this horrific crime against humanity.

AS IT should now be obvious, this crucial process cannot occur within the space of the genocide state but in “successor” state(s). Consequently, Igbo-Yoruba relations would have acquired the possibility of  a conducive platform for a more dispassionate discourse.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Dusk-Dawn” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, NJ, US, 16 June 1965])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

47th anniversary of Nigeria’s launch of phase-IV of the Igbo genocide

(resplendent Biafra flag: ... on the ascent...)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

WHAT IS NIGERIA? This is Africa’s most notorious genocidist state. It was created by Britain in the early 1900s after its conquest and occupation of  the constellation of states of nations and peoples in the southwestcentral region of Africa including the republican Igbo states to the east, the west monarchical Edo and Yoruba state configurations and the expansionary militarist Arabo-islamist Hausa-Fulani feudal principalities to the north. A hundred years on, genocidist Nigeria remains a British client-state, run on its behalf  by its Hausa-Fulani confederates. It exists principally to serve Britain and this local overseer conglomerate and continues to offer Britain outlandishly excellent returns, using any conceivable socioeconomic/geostrategic variable, year in, year out.

Igbo genocide: Age of pestilence

Nigeria inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence – starting from that dreadful mid-morning of Sunday 29 May 1966 when it embarked on the studiously-organised mass murder of its Igbo population domiciled in north Nigeria and later elsewhere in the country and subsequently expanded to Biafra. Britain, under the premiership of Harold Wilson, coordinated the genocide to “punish” the Igbo for this nation’s vanguard role in leading the campaign to terminate the British occupation during the course of the 1930s-1960. 

In this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, Anglo-Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or 25 per cent of the Igbo population in 44 months, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970. Africa had not witnessed the unspeakable barbarity and range of such slaughtering of a people for 60 years; definitely, not since the German-organised genocide against the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of southwest Africa between 1904-1907 (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/blog-post_23.html).

Besides Britain, Nigeria was supported in the execution of the Igbo genocide by a range of (now) collapsed states and failed/failing states which provided it with critical military, financial, political and diplomatic resources:  principally the Soviet Union, German Democratic Republic, Egypt, Syria, the Sudan, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Chad, Niger, Guinea-Conakry. Since 12 January 1970, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocides and other wars in Africa carried out by similarly ruthless African regimes (especially in Rwanda, the Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo) and their foreign allies, including France.

Phase-IV

On 13 January 1970, 47 years ago to the day, evidently not content with the appalling magnitude and consequences of its death campaign, Nigeria launched phase-IV of the genocide which now focused on degrading/dismantling the surviving frames of the (pre-genocide robust) Biafran economy, pulverised during phases-I-III of the previous 44 months, a programme intertwined gruesomely by spates and stretches of pogroms in which thousands of additional Igbo have been murdered. These murders have continued, unabated, to this day, as catalogued in the following link, especially from sub-title phase-IV: 
http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/phase-i-sunday-29-may-1966-30-march.html

Since imposing genocidist trooper Muhammadu Buhari as Nigeria’s head of regime in March 2015 in a collaborative deal with David Cameron, former British prime minister, the outgoing US President Barack Obama has actively supported this phase of the Igbo genocide (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-this-piece-is.html). Being the first African-descent president in the US of 233 years of history and given the scourging dehumnisation of the African humanity in the US during the stretch of this period, Obama’s support of this raging genocide against an African people in this continent of his fathers is an incalculable tragedy, a legacy of catastrophic proportions. Since Buhari was installed in power, 2000 Igbo have been murdered by his genocidist military and his two other adjunct forces, Boko Haram and Fulani militia – two of the world’s five deadliest terrorist organisations. Neither Obama’s White House nor his state department nor his embassy in Nigeria has ever condemned any of these murders. It has been left to the audacious outreach of the London-based Amnesty International to shatter the deafening silence emanating from the Obama presidency on this ongoing genocide (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/11/peaceful-pro-biafra-activists-killed-in-chilling-crackdown/, accessed 23 November 2016).

Breakthrough

The Igbo will overcome this genocide, despite the horrendous assault and its evidently hydra-headed drive. They possess the resilience to survive and triumph over this ordeal. They surely will. This Igbo resistance to the genocide is arguably the most defining struggle underway in Africa currently. The breakthrough of the Biafra freedom movement, very much on the cards, is of immense epochal consequence for Biafrans and the future direction of Africa. One cannot exaggerate the import of this development.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Dusk-Dawn” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, NJ, US, 16 June 1965])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

46th anniversary of Nigeria’s launch of phase-IV of the Igbo genocide

What is Nigeria? This state in southwestcentral Africa inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence – starting from that dreadful mid-morning of Sunday 29 May 1966 when it embarked on the studiously-organised mass murder of its Igbo population domiciled in north Nigeria and later elsewhere in the country and subsequently expanded to Biafra.

In this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or one-quarter of this nation’s population during the course of 44 months, ending 12 January 1970. Africa had not witnessed the unspeakable barbarity and range of such slaughtering of a people for 60 years; definitely, not since the German-organised genocide against the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of Namibia in the early 1900s.

Nigeria was supported in the execution of the Igbo genocide by a range of foreign powers which provided it with the critical military, financial, political and diplomatic resources:  principally Britain, the Soviet Union, Egypt, Syria, the Sudan, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Chad, Niger, Guinea-Conakry. Since this genocide, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocides and other wars in Africa carried out by similarly ruthless African regimes and their foreign allies.

Phase-IV

On 13 January 1970, evidently not content with the appalling magnitude and consequences of its death campaign, Nigeria launched phase-IV of the genocide which now focused on degrading/dismantling the surviving frames of the (pre-genocide robust) Biafran economy, pulverised during phases-I-III of the previous 44 months, a programme intertwined gruesomely by spates and stretches of pogroms that have continued, unabated, to this day as catalogued in the following link, especially from sub-title phase-IV: 
http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/phase-i-sunday-29-may-1966-30-march.html

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Dusk-Dawn” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, NJ, US, 16 June 1965])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Baga & Paris – two massacres, contrasting responses and consequences

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

AS THE WORLD witnessed last week, rarely have there been two dreadful massacres carried out almost simultaneously in two separate continents by two organisations surely operating autonomously but belonging to the same overarching religiopolitical agency. 

Boko Haram, the islamist jihadist group based in north Nigeria, massacred 2000 people in Baga (The Guardian, London, 10 January 2015) during the course of two days. In Paris, France, over a 2-day stretch, during the same week, a French–based cell affiliated to some islamist caliphate brigade in the Mid East massacred 17 people including cartoonists of the satirical journal, Charlie Hebdo, and staff and shoppers at a Jewish supermarket. Boko Haram is ideologically allied to the global islamist causes and projects of the Mid East amalgam including al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula and the Islamic State (controls vast swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria), as well as the Taleban in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in west/northwest Africa and al-Shabaab in Somalia. Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau never tires to extend solidarity messages to these fellow organisations in his regular video releases that update the strategic objectives and expectations of the ongoing transnational insurgency.

THE responses of Nigeria and France to these tragedies couldn’t be so trenchantly different though. Right from the outset, the French state robustly came out in defence of its population. It mobilised the entire range of its security forces to hunt down the murderous cell, stepped up security for its citizens whilst continually reassuring them, attended to the dead, the dying and the wounded, and organised a solidarity march in honour of the 17 and their families and for the reaffirmation of the crucial tenets and ethos that underpin the existence of the French republic. 3.5 million French people turned out in Paris on Sunday 11th January for this historic gathering. The heads of state or government of most countries of the European World and beyond attended the march in support of France. The global media covered this story of a week comprehensively.

Morbid silence

In Nigeria, in contrast, the country’s regime-leadership and its expanded establishment exercised a morbid silence over the outrage in Baga – not a word on Baga from the current head-of-regime nor from any of the seven ex-heads of regime. None of the eight was moved to act in defence of Baga from its ruthless assailants, not even in the wake of that haunting, graphic account of the tragedy of his town rendered soon after by Baga district head survivor Baba Abba Hassan: “…most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove in … firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents”. 

Silence, punishing silence, utter silence… Such was the staggering indifference displayed by the Nigeria state to this massacre, within its frontier, that an observer would be forgiven if they thought that the slaughter that occurred in Baga never happened or that Baga were somewhere else on the planet or, perhaps, that Baga didn’t really exist… In effect, this state no longer pretends that it exists to serve its peoples (for an expansive discourse on this feature, see Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature, 2011). If anyone is still unsure of this crucial characteristic, a reminder of the final segment of Nigeria’s response to these massacres of a week might be of help: despite the silence on Baga, the state’s head of regime found the time and purpose to send a message of condolence to the French head of state on the murder in Paris; equally silent on Baga, another senior regime official found the time and purpose to tweet a message of condolence to the people of France on the murder in Paris. It shouldn’t be found surprising to add that no one marched in Nigeria on behalf of the 2000 murdered in Baga nor for their families nor indeed for any exhortative values of a doubtful state. As for the world’s media, the lenses of their camera, during the week, were of course focussed 2600 miles away from Baga – Paris.

IT IS to this focus of the world media and some of its wider consequences that led Simon Allison of the Daily Maverick to observe: “It may be the 21st century, but African lives are still deemed less newsworthy – and, by implication, less valuable – than western lives” (Simon Allison, “I am Charlie, but I am Baga too”, Daily Maverick, Johannesburg, 12 January 2015). Allison is undoubtedly alluding to the catastrophic diminution of the African humanity by the pan-European World during 400 years of the latter’s enslavement of African peoples and its conquest and occupation of Africa. But as we now show, this perceived “less valuable” status of African life in the contemporary epoch has not just been a teleological transposition from a somewhat distant past. On the contrary, it is a thoroughly, consciously mapped-out package and practice designed and formally launched much more recently, in the mid-1960s, by a not-too-unfamiliar global power central in this visceral African subjugated history/international politics.

Diarchy

Finally, let us return to Nigeria’s deafening silence on Baga. Given Nigeria’s past and recurring history, does one realistically expect this state to defend Baga from Boko Haram, comment or mourn the murder of the 2000 from Baga – almost 49 years to the day after it embarked on the murder of 3.1 million of its Igbo population in a studiously-organised genocide that is still ongoing? Each of the seven of Nigeria’s ex-heads of regime, referred to earlier, is a structural participant in this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. They all constitute a génocidaire septet. This genocide at once shapes the architecture of the present Nigeria establishment as the world knows it. Therefore, no one from any spheres or levers of this state assemblage could have had anything intelligible or/and credible to say on Baga. Part of the reason of Nigeria’s silence on Baga is that given the country’s Igbo genocide antecedent, few would have believed any word declared on this massacre by any officials of its state.

Britain, the ex-conqueror/occupying state in Nigeria supported the Igbo genocide from conceptualisation to execution. In supporting the genocide, Britain sought to “punish” the Igbo for being in the vanguard, since the 1930s, to terminate the British occupation of Nigeria – one of the very prized lands of the British conquest of Africa. During the course of the 1968/1969 gruesomely devastating apogee of the genocide, Harold Wilson, the British prime minister, informed C. Clyde Ferguson, the US state department special coordinator for relief to Biafra, that he, Harold Wilson, “would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide (Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, 1977: 122). For the record, Wilson’s “a half a million dead Biafrans”-sentence represented 4.2 per cent of the Igbo population then; by the time that that phase of the genocide came to an end, 6-9 months after Wilson’s wish-declaration, 25 per cent of this nation’s population or 3.1 million Igbo people had been murdered by the genocidists.

Undoubtedly, the Nigerians, led by Fulani islamist jihadists and their Yoruba, Urhobo, Hausa, Edo, Jukun, Tiv, Kanuri, Nupe, Jawara and Gwari principal pan-African allies, had handsomely obliged  their “massa” Harold Wilson’s wish. Those punching words of historian Chancellor Williams’s were at once vindicated, most dramatically: “… The Europeans had also been busily building up and training strong African armies.  Africans trained to hate, kill and conquer Africans…” (Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization, 1987: 218). 

IN THE CONSTRUCTION of the template of international relations that would embody the post-1939-1945 war era, the British-Nigerian genocidist diarchy had elevated the “dispensability of African life in national and international politics” to the highest calibrated level possible.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Dusk-Dawn” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewoods Cliff, NJ, US, 16 June 1965])

References
Allison, Simon. “I am Charlie, but I am Baga too”.  Daily Maverick, Johannesburg, 12 January 2015.

Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert. Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature. Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2011.

John Coltrane Quartet. “Dusk-Dawn”. Van Gelder Studio, Englewood, Cliff, NJ, US, 16 June 1965.

Morris, Roger. Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. London & New York: Quartet Books, 1977.

Williams, Chancellor. The Destruction of Black Civilization. Chicago: Third World, 1987.

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe