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.
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe MULTIINTRUMENTALIST geniuswhose compositions, recordings and evocative soloing with any of his chosen instruments (alto saxophone, bass clarinet, flute, bassoon, oboe...) in his multicombo-led settings and across a range of collaborative ensembles (especially those headed by drummers Chico Hamilton and Max Roach, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, pianists George Russell and Andrew Hill, alto and tenor saxophonist Oliver Nelson,tenor and soprano saxophonist John Coltrane, and bassist Charles Mingus) have a distinctly recognisable Dolphyian signature that has impacted the jazz repertoire most profoundly
(Eric Dolphy Quartet, “Softly as in a morning sunrise” [personnel: Dolphy, bass clarinet; Herbie Hancock, piano; Eddie Khan, bass; JC Moses, drums; recorded: live, University of Illinoi, Champaign, Illinoi, 10 March 1963])
(John Coltrane Quintet, “Brasilia” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live, at The Village Vanguard, New York, US, 1 November 1961])
(Charles Mingus Sextet – with Eric Dolphy, Cornell University 1964, “Meditations” [personnel: Mingus, bass; Johnny Coles, trumpet; Dolphy, flute, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: live, Cornell University, 18 March 1964])
******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)
(Biafran women on freedom march, Owere, east Biafra, Friday 17 August 2018)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe THE Indigenous People of
Biafra has declared a general strike across Biafra on Friday 14 September 2018.
All Biafrans living at home and in the diaspora in Nigeria and
elsewhere in the world have been asked to stay home with their families and
mourn the death of over 3000 Igbo people murdered by the Fulani-led islamist/jihadist Nigeria genocidist
occupation military in Biafra and its adjuncts Fulani militia* and Boko Haram** terrorists since Muhammadu Buhari, one of the vilest members of the génocidaires
high command that has waged the Igbo genocide in the past 52 years, was imposed
on Nigeria as head of regime in March 2015. All public services in Biafra including schools, markets,
banks/other finance houses, state offices, etc., etc., will be shut down
throughout the day. There will be no movement of vehicles, private or
commercial.
Legacy THIS LAST three years’
stretch of Igbo murders has been particularly horrid, the bloodiest in phase-IV
of the genocide since the Nigerians launched it on 13 Jaunary 1970. Tens of
thousands of Igbo have been murdered during the period. In phases I-III of
the genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, the genocidists murdered 3.1 million
Igbo or 25 per cent of the Igbo population at the time. The Igbo genocide is
the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa.
The Buhari head-of-regime imposition
was carried out by Barack Obama, former US president and first person
of African descent to be elected to the position of president of the United
States 233 years after the founding of the republic, and
David Cameron, ex-British prime minister, whose country is a co-genocidist
state in this crime of the Igbo genocide.
OBAMA’s support of the Igbo genocide constitutes the abominable
legacy of his presidency. ---------------------------0000---------------------0000------------------- * & **Fulani militia and Boko Haram are both part of the world’s five deadliest terrorist groups currently, according to the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-17/global-terrorism-index-increase/6947200, accessed 17 November 2015.
(Charles Mingus Sextet – with Eric Dolphy, Cornell University 1964, “Meditations” [personnel: Mingus, bass; Johnny Coles, trumpet; Dolphy, flute, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: live, Cornell University, 18 March 1964])
“[Hope] is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart … Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out” (Válclav Havel, playwright, poet, former president, Czechoslovakia, former president, Czech Republic, “Válclav Havel on hope and power”, http://entersection.com/posts/761-vaclav-havel-on-hope-and-power , accessed 20 April 2017)
TODAY, Tuesday 29 May 2018, marks the 52nd anniversary of the start of the Igbo genocide. Beginning at mid-morning on Sunday 29 May 1966 to 12 January 1970, Britain, Nigeria’s suzerain state, then under the premiership of Harold Wilson, and the composite aggregation of its Nigeria client state-on-the-ground, 3000 miles away in southwestcentral Africa – military officers, the police, Hausa-Fulani emirs, muslim clerics and intellectuals, students, civil servants, alimajiri, journalists, politicians, other public figures – planned and carried out the Igbo genocide. This is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. It is also Africa’s most expansive and devastating genocide of the 20th century and the inaugurator of contemporary Africa’s age of pestilence. A total of 3.1 million Igbo people, a quarter of this nation’s population at the time, were murdered during those harrowing 44 months. FOR THE IGBO, prior to 29 May 1966, three important holidays were high up on their annual calendar: the Igbo National Day, the iri ji, or the New Yam Festival, and 1 October. The latter was the day of celebration for the restoration of independence for peoples in Nigeria after 60 years of the British conquest and occupation. Or, so were the thoughts predicated on this date’s designation...
Igbo or Nigeria?
The Igbo were one of the very few constituent nations in what was Nigeria, again prior to 29 May 1966, who understood, fully, the immense liberatory possibilities ushered in by 1 October and the interlocking challenges of the vast reconstructionary work required for state and societal transformation in the aftermath of the British occupation. 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) and leading professors and scientists, supplied the country with its first indigenous university (the prestigious university at Nsukka), supplied the country with its leading and most spirited pan-Africanists, 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. The commentator, Sabella Ogbobode Abidde, couldn’t have been more emphatic in summarising the thrust of the Igbo mission during the period:
The Igbo nation ha[s] attributes most other Nigerian nationalities can only dream of and are what most other nations [are] not. The Igbo made Nigeria better. Any wonder then that the Igbo can do without Nigeria; but Nigeria and her myriad nationalities cannot do without the Igbo? Take the Igbo out of the Nigeria equation … and Nigeria will be gasping for air.[1]
Genocide is the name
The Igbo’s break with Nigeria occurred catastrophically on Sunday 29 May 1966. On this day, starting from mid-morning, leaders of the Hausa-Fulani north region (feudal overlords, muslim clergy, alimajiri, military, police, businesspeople, academics, students, civil servants, other public officials and patrons), who were long opposed to the liberation of Nigeria (there were no comparable clusters of political, cultural, ideational, religious, national or racial groupings anywhere else in the Southern World, during the epoch, which had a similar, unenviable disposition of hostility to emancipation from the European occupation of their lands as the Hausa-Fulani leadership), launched waves of premeditated genocidal attacks on Igbo migrant populations resident in the north. These attacks were later expanded to Igboland itself, Biafra, during phase-III of the genocide which began on 6 July 1967, boosted particularly by the robust participation in the slaughter by the Yoruba, Urhobo, and Edo nations of west Nigeria as well as others elsewhere in the country.
THE YORUBA SUPPORT for the genocide, for instance, bears all the hallmark of a squelching cadence of opportunism. The Yoruba appeared to have lost, quite spectacularly, the 1930s-1960s Igbo-Yoruba competitive “preparatory drive” to develop the high-level humanpower and ancillary resources required to run the prospective post-conquest state after the British departure. The Yoruba therefore viewed the outbreak of the mid-1966 Igbo mass killings in the north region and elsewhere as welcome season to “avenge” their “loss” during the great sociocultural rivalry of those previous three decades, clutching unto any bomb or missile available to lob remorselessly in besieged Igboland, Biafra, into an Igbo home, Igbo school, Igbo shrine, Igbo church, Igbo hospital, Igbo office, Igbo market, Igbo farmland, Igbo factory/industrial enterprise, Igbo children’s playground, Igbo town hall, Igbo refugee centre …
Benjamin Adekunle, one of the most fiendish of the genocidist commanders of the time had no qualms, whatsoever, in boasting about the goal of this horrendous mission when he told a 1968 press conference, attended by journalists including those from the international media: “We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces march into the centre of I[g]bo territory, we shoot at everything, even at things that do not move.”[2]
Between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970, Adekunle and his extended trail of genocidist hordes, starting from the sabon gari-killing fields’ launch pads that were Igbo homes and churches and offices and businesses in north Nigeria to the “centre of I[g]bo territory”, 400 miles to the south, did murder 3.1 million Igbo people – a haunting tally which indeed includes those slaughtered during the Adekunleist “everything that moves”-targeting, duly promised in the infamous press briefing. As for the outcome of the “things that do not move”-assault category, the genocidists were hardly off target. Their gratuitous destruction of the famed Igbo economic infrastructure, one of the most advanced in Africa of the era, is indescribably barbaric.
(Benjamin Adekunle: ... beastly monstrous)
OLUSEGUN OBASANJO, a fellow Yoruba commander who later took over the notorious Adekunle-led brigade and who would be a cantankerous human rights violator and very corrupt and inept post-genocide Nigeria head of regime for 11 years, expanded even further the barbarism of his predecessor particularly in his murder of hundreds of thousands of Igbo villagers and the expansive destruction of scores of Igbo villages in the Aba-Umuahia-Owere-Igwe Ocha panhandle of south Biafra. On 5 June 1969, Obasanjo ordered Gbadomosi King, another Yoruba national, a pilot in the genocidist air force, to shoot down an International Committee of the Red Cross DC-7 relief-bearing aircraft to the encircled and bombarded Igbo over the skies of Eket (south Biafra). As instructed, Gbadomosi King duly destroyed the aircraft with the loss of its 3-person. Amazingly, Obasanjo gives a blow-by-blow account of this outrage in his memoirs, aptly entitled My Command,[3] and expresses a perverse satisfaction over the aftermath of the crime as he gloatingly recalls: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando [officially-designated name of the Obasanjo genocidist unit] was profound. It raised morale of all service personnel, especially of the Air Force detachment concerned, and the troops they supported in [my] 3 Marine Commando Division”.[4] Additionally, Obasanjo unreservedly admits, in his records, that his prosecuting genocidist regime (on the ground) had to rely on its key British government prosecuting-ally (see more below) to “sort out” the raging international outcry generated by the destruction of the ICRC plane.[5]
It is this same Olusegun Obasanjo that the London Financial Times in 2012 proclaimed the “godfather of modern Nigeria”[6] without, of course, the irony intended. If the Financial Times is correct, then Olusegun Obasanjo’s must be one of the most troubling terms of paternity that the world must have to deal with and those who call themselves Nigerians do have the scariest scourge of inheritance to live with. As the Financial Times is so enamoured of Olusegun Obasanjo, it is now incumbent on this publication to perhaps upgrade its client to some “global status” by naming two other countries from each of the following regions of the world to where Olusegun Obasanjo should also be installed “godfather”: Africa, Asia, Australasia, Central America/the Caribbean, Europe, North America, South America…
(O Obusonjo: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando Division was profound. It raised morale of all service personnel...”)
NIGERIA’s genocidal campaign against the Igbo people was followed, subsequently, post-January 1970, by the genocidists’ implementation of the most dehumanising raft of socioeconomic package of deprivation in occupied Igboland, not seen anywhere else in Africa. The brigandage of terror includes the following 10 distinct features
1. Seizure and looting of the multibillion-(US)dollar capital assets across Biafra including particularly those at Igwe Ocha conurbations and elsewhere and in Nigeria
2. Comprehensive sequestration of Igbo liquid assets in Biafra and Nigeria (as of January 1970), bar the £20.00 (twenty pounds sterling) doled out only to the male surviving head of an Igbo family
3. Exponential expropriation of the rich Biafra oil resources from the Abia, Delta, Imo and Rivers administrative regions
4. Blanket policy of non-development of Biafra
5. Aggressive degradation of socioeconomic life of Biafra
6. Ignoring ever-expanding soil erosion/landslides and other pressing ecological emergencies particularly in northwest Biafra
7. Continuing reinforcement of the overall state of siege of Biafra …[7]
8. 25cases of premeditated pogroms against the Igbo, particularly in north Nigeria, between 1980 and 2018: 1980 ... 1982 ... 1985 ... 1991 ... 1993 ... 1994 ... 1999 ... 2000 ... 2001 ... 2002 ... 2004 ... 2005 ... 2006 ... 2007 ... 2008 ... 2009 ... 2010 ... 2011 ... 2012 ... 2013 ... 2014 ... 2015 ... 2016 ... 2017 ... 2018
9. 90 per cent of the 54,000 people murdered in Nigeria by the state/quasi-state operatives and agents between 1999 and 2012 are Igbo people, according to the December 2011 research by the International Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule Of Law – an Onicha-based human rights organisation
10. At least 80 per cent of people murdered by the Boko Haram islamist insurgent group’s attacks across swathes of lands in north/northcentral Nigeria in the first three years of its savage insurgency, i.e., 2009-2012, are Igbo 11. 3000 Igbo people have been murdered across Biafra since Muhammadu
Buhari, who was imposed in power by ex-US President Barack
Hussein Obama and ex-British Prime Minister David Cameron in March
2015, embarked on the bloodiest track of phase-IV of the Igbo genocide (13 January
1970-present day) in November 2015.
THESE LATTER measures, especially numbers 1-7 which inaugurated phase-IV of the Igbo genocide on 13 January 1970, constitute one of the five acts of genocide explicitly defined in article 2 of the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: “deliberately inflicting upon the group conditions of life designed to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.[8] We mustn’t fail to add, finally, that these measures were drafted and implemented largely by Yoruba economists and lawyers led by Obafemi Awolowo and included, ironically, Sam Aluko who, along with all members of his family, enjoyed the generosity of a political asylum in Igboland when his life was in serious danger during the vicious intra-Yoruba political violence of the early 1960s.
The Harold Wilson-led British government of the day oversaw and underwrote this devastating stretch of genocide militarily, politically and diplomatically – from its early conceptualisation, liaising continuously with the Gowon-Mohammed-Danjuma genocidist cells of the Nigeria military at varying stages between January and May 1966, to the savage, spiralling aerial, naval and ground onslaughts on encircled Igbo population centres (the “shooting everything”-raging inferno) especially between March 1968 and January 1970. Harold Wilson chiefly coordinated the genocide from the comfort of his No. 10 Downing Street, London, offices and residence. London’s strategic goal in supporting the genocide was to “punish” the Igbo for “daring” to spearhead the termination of the British occupation of Nigeria. Harold Wilson was adamant that he “would accept” the death of “a half a million” Igbo “if that was what it took”[9] the Nigeria genocidists to accomplish their ghastly mission. This Wilson-declaration on the Igbo genocide, this Wilsonian logic of mass slaughtering of the Igbo, was in fact more gruesome than those made by some of the most vociferous Nigerian genocidist commanders and propagandists operating on the ground during the genocide, including the Adekunle-Obasanjo duo already referred to. Pointedly, the Wilsonian logic became the litmus test to calibrate the annhilative threshold on the Igbo genocide.
SUCH was the grotesquely expressed diminution of African life made by a supposedly leading politician of the world of the 1960s and head of the British government that was one of the countries that actually drafted and a signatory of the 1948 United Nations’ “Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide” – barely 20 years after the deplorable perpetration of the Jewish genocide. As the final tally of 3.1 million Igbo murdered demonstrates, 2.6 million more than Wilson’s “would accept” the death of “a half a million” Igbo “if that was what it took”, Harold Wilson probably had the perverse satisfaction that his on-the-ground Nigeria genocidists did perform far in excess of his set, grim annhilative threshold …
(Harold Wilson: ... inaugurates the Wilsonian logic of mass slaughter of Igbo people, the annhilative threshold of the Igbo genocide, as he, Harold Wilson, insists that he “would accept a half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took...”)
Ozoemena
Alas, Harold Wilson had apparently set the tone and benchmark of “dispensability” against which African life would be “valued” in Africa itself (particularly by the continent’s genocidist troopers, “theorists” – for example, the infamous Awolowoists and neo-Awolowoists – and allied officials) and across the world in the wake of the Igbo genocide. Fifty-one years on, 12 million more Africans would be slaughtered in the ever-expanding genocidal killing fields of the continent: Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo (variously, since the late 1990s), Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004), Abyei – south of the Sudan – (ongoing), Nuba – south of the Sudan – (ongoing), and in other killings in Liberia, Ethiopia, Congo Republic, Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Conakry, Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, South Sudan, Burundi, Mali.
NOT TO THE European World, though, does the Wilsonian malevolent logic apply. On the contrary. For the European World, following the Jewish genocide of the 1930s-1940s, the purposeful resolve struck for the future course of societal direction and progress, rightly so, is ozoemena – “never again”. Never again, European World leaders affirmed, would any peoples of European descent anywhere and at anytime on earth be murdered so malefically and callously for any reason(s) whatsoever. In 1992, I published a satirical commentary entitled “Is Bosnia-Herzegovina in Africa?”[10] in which I meditated on the ongoing robust intervention by the leaders of the European World of the age (Bush, Major, Mitterrand, Kohl) to halt the gestating multipronged genocide in the then Yugoslavia. For days, I was overwhelmed by this laudable intervention to uphold a key fundamental right of human beings – the right to life. The irony of this move was of course not lost on anyone. Since May 1966 some political leaderships of the same European World have, in complicity with their African clients in the field, waged or abetted campaigns of genocide against African peoples. Pertinently, the unfolding genocide in the Balkans that had elicited this intervention was very similar to what the Igbo and some other Africans had been subjected to during the course of the previous 30 years. I couldn’t stop imagining what effect a similar intervention would have had on Biafra, the Congos, Liberia and elsewhere in Africa … If the peoples in Bosnia-Herzegovina were indeed Africans, I wondered, would there have been this high-powered intervention to stop genocide? Could Harold Wilson have waged a genocidal campaign against a European World people, for instance, during the course of 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, similar to his campaign against the Igbo? If not, why not?
In the spirit of ozoemena, the Europeans successfully blocked the simmering genocide in the Balkans. Again, in the spirit of ozoemena, the Europeans worked assiduously to break up the immanently fractured states in the region (Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia) which they knew could not guarantee the rights and aspirations of constituent nations and peoples – a recipe for the perpetration of genocide.
Since then, in the spirit of ozoemena, 22 new sovereign states, including Kosovo (population: 1.8 million), have emerged in Europe. This is a figure that is four states less than one-half of the total number of so-called sovereign states in Africa, the latter’s much larger territorial size and population notwithstanding. On this score, is it not ironical that in the same week in February 2008 that US President George Bush ecstatically recognised Kosova rights to exercise their sovereign rights to declare themselves independent from Serbia, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was busy pressurising Africans in Kenya to forego their own sovereign rights – demonstrated, in this case, by electing a government of their choice in December 2007. So, as far as the European World is concerned, in the spirit of ozoemena, a European nation or people is deemed superior to the state. A people does not even have to feel “threatened” in the existing state where it is found to lose this status as the Scots in Britain currently demonstrate.[11] This position is indeed correct for all nations and peoples, not just Europeans. African nations and peoples are also superior to the state. The nation, the people, is enduring; the state is transient.
Peoples vs the state
THAT THE STATE IS INFERIOR to its peoples, irrespective of race, continent, region, religion/belief system, is irrefutable. As a result, and graciously for that matter, Prime Minister John Major of Britain, back in 1992, did not utter some obscenity during the period, à la his predecessor 25 years before, of willing to “accept” the death of “one half million” Serb or Albanian or Croat to keep Yugoslavia “intact”; neither did Major dabble into some nonsense of the “inviolability” or “indivisibility” of the Yugoslav state, an artificial assemblage concocted at the same time in 1918 as the equally inchoate Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union. Noticeably, these two oft-repeated vulgarities, just quoted, were a favourite of Harold Wilson’s on Nigeria in the 1960s as well as by Nigerian genocidists whose state, cobbled together by Britain in 1914, also shares the same non-organic kinship as the central/east European examples. It is now evident that this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa and the worst in 20th century Africa would probably not have occurred without British active involvement. As a result, Britain, crucially, has played a key role in the emergence of the ongoing age of pestilence ravaging Africa. The continuing presentation of the British policy to Africa since the May 1966 outbreak of the Igbo genocide in both academia and media, particularly in the Western World, as that of some benign foreign state proffering “aid”/“development” programme(s) is at best evasive but at worst staggeringly denialist and thus fraudulent. It should also be recalled that in the two Igbo pogroms organised and perpetrated by Hausa-Fulani leaderships in Jos (1945) and Kano (1953), both during years of the British occupation and, with hindsight, “dress rehearsals” for the 1966-1970 genocide, the occupation did not prosecute those responsible for these crimes. It is indeed inconceivable that a contemporary British government would continue to delay any much longer the historic task of offering its unreserved public apology to the Igbo, one of humanity’s most hardworking and peaceful peoples, for Britain’s central role in the execution of this genocide and pay reparations to the survivors and pay for the destruction of Biafra’s
grand pre-genocide economic infrastructure.
This 29th day of May
Undoubtedly, 29 May 1966 is the most tragic day in the annals of Igbo history. It is the day that the Igbo were subjected to an overwhelming violence and unremitting brutality by supposedly fellow countrymen and women with the prompting and support of a European World power called Britain. The atrocity was clinically organised, supervised and implemented by the very state that the Igbo had played such a crucial role to liberate from the British conquest and occupation. This state, now violently taken over by murderous anti-African sociopolitical forces, had pointedly violated its most sacred tenet of responsibility to its Igbo citizens – provision of security. Instead of providing security to these citizens, the Nigeria state murdered 3.1 million of them. The anthem for the genocide, broadcast uninterruptedly in Hausa on Kaduna radio and television throughout its duration, creating a continental precedent whose local equivalents Hutu and a string of Sudanese genocidist broadcasters would viciously reproduce during their own devastating crimes against humanity in southcentral and northcentral Africa 28 years and 37 years later, respectively, is unambiguously clear on the principal objective of this crime of genocide:
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 kill the damned Igbo
Kill off their men and boys
Rape their wives and daughters
Cart off their property
YET THIS 29th day of May 1966 is also the Igbo Day of Affirmation. The Igbo people resolved on this day, the day that marked the beginning of the genocide, to survive the catastrophe when only few in the world thought that they would accomplish such an improbable feat. 29th day of May 1966 is the day the Igbo people ceased to be Nigerians forever – right there on the grounds of those death camps in the sabon gari residential districts and offices and rail stations and coach stations and airports and churches and schools and markets and hospitals across north Nigeria. They created the state of Biafra in its place and tasked it to provide security to the Igbo and prevent Nigeria, a genocide state, from accomplishing its dreadful mission. The heuristic symbolism defined hitherto by 1 October shattered in the wake of this historic Igbo declaration. For the Igbo, the renouncement of Nigerian citizenship is the permanent Igbo indictment of a state that had risen thunderously to murder one of its constituent peoples.
Biafra freedom march
The Igbo could not have survived the genocide if they still remained Nigerian. They rightly chose the former course of their fate and not the latter which they cast adrift. Consequently, Nigeria collapsed as a state with few prospects for the future as illustrated most cogently and graphically today – 52 years to the day. Despite the four murderous years of siege, the Igbo demonstrated a far greater creative drive towards constructing an advanced civilisation in Biafra than what Nigeria has all but wished it could achieve in the past five decades of indescribable hopelessness. Surely, Nigeria couldn’t recover from committing this heinous crime, this crime against humanity. THIS 29th day of May is therefore a beacon of the resilient spirit of
human overcoming of the most desperate, unimaginably brutish forces – both
locally from Africa and externally from the European World. It is indeed the
day that marks the Igbo dramatic repudiation of the vile Wilsonian logic of mass slaughter and the
very course of its Adekunleist, Obasanjoist and other Nigerian génocidaires’ murderous tributaries on the
theme. It is the new Igbo
national holiday. It is a day of meditation and remembrance in every Igbo
household anywhere in the world for the 3.1 million and tens of thousands more
murdered, gratitude and thanksgiving for those who survived, and the collective
Igbo rededication to achieve the urgent goal of the restoration of
Igbo sovereignty.
(Charles Mingus Sextet – with Eric Dolphy, Cornell University 1964, “Meditations” [personnel: Mingus, bass; Johnny Coles, trumpet; Dolphy, flute, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: live, Cornell University, 18 March 1964])
[9]Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger & American Foreign Policy (London and new York: Quartet Books, 1977), p. 122. See also Michael Leapman, “While Biafrans starved, the FO moaned with hacks”, The Independent on Sunday (London), 3 January 1999.
[10]Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “Is Bosnia Herzegovina in Africa? Reflections on the regionalism of wars and conflicts since World War II”, African Peoples Review, Vol 1, No. 1, June 1992, p. 15.
INFLUENTIAL African freedom nationalist, physician, writer, who notes, memorably, “every people should be originators of their own destiny” – the very breathtaking resilient resolve that powers the ongoing Biafra freedom movement in southwestcentral Africa
(Charles Mingus Sextet – with Eric Dolphy, Cornell University 1964, “Meditations” [personnel: Mingus, bass; Johnny Coles, trumpet; Dolphy, flute, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: live, Cornell University, 18 March 1964])
POET, literary critic, academic, university president (vice-chancellor/rector), offers selfless and distinguished service as head of the crucial Biafran resistance government communication directorate during phases I-III of the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, carried out by Nigeria and its suzerain state Britain who murder 3.1 million Igbo people or 25 per cent of this nation’s population; in phase-IV of the genocide, 13 January 1970-present day, the dual genocidists have murdered an additional tally of tens of thousands of Igbo people
(Charles Mingus Sextet – with Eric Dolphy, Cornell University 1964, “Meditations” [personnel: Mingus, bass; Johnny Coles, trumpet; Dolphy, flute, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: live, Cornell University, 18 March 1964])
(Born 19 December 1875, New Canton, Va, United States)
Historian, journalist, versatile educator and inaugurator of the “African World History Month”, now a very important fixture in the annual calendar in several regions of the African World, outside Africa, and who, whilst researching the nature of the education of African Americans in the 1930s, concludes on the following consequences on someone, anyone, being controlled and defined by an agency outside their own centre of being, an observation as salient as ever, 80 years on (Woodson, 2010: 48):
IF YOU can control a [person’s] thinking, you don’t have to worry about [their] action. If you can determine what a [person] thinks you do not have to worry about what [they] will do. If you can make a [person] believe that [they are] inferior, you don’t have to compel [them] to seek an inferior status [for they] will do so without being told and if you can make a [person] believe that [they are] justly an outcast, you don’t have to order [them] to the back door. [They] will go to the back door on [their] own and if there is no back door, the very nature of the [person] will demand that you build one [for them]. (added emphasis)
(Charles Mingus Sextet – with Eric Dolphy, Cornell University 1964, “Meditations” [personnel: Mingus, bass; Johnny Coles, trumpet; Dolphy, flute, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: live, Cornell University, 18 March 1964])
Britain, Mugabe,
Zimbabwe, Africa (originally written in July 2008 and updated as chapter 15 in Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature, 2011: 95-100)
DESPITE THE unprecedented overdrive of its diplomatic pressure on African heads of regime
during the recent African Union assembly in Egypt, Britain failed abysmally to
persuade the summit to condemn Zimbabwe’s June 2008 rigged elections.[1]
For the Gordon Brown administration, this failure was a disappointing
anticlimax in a season of sustained publicity blitz across Britain in which the
state and media found a rare common purpose and a convergence of opinion on the
subject of the demonisation of Robert Mugabe. The typecasting was unmistakeably
swift and assured: Mugabe became the purveyor or indeed inventor of election
rigging in Africa, the grotesque human rights violator, the quintessential,
fiendishly-sutured African dictator. Even provincial newspaper editors and
commentators as well as their radio and television counterparts, usually
concerned with more mundane local issues, became instant experts on Mugabe and
Mugabeism – such was the frenzy of the times! Thanks to this bizarre British
offering of “African history” of the past 50 years, the plaque of shame that
lists the cabal of Africa’s notorious heads of regime and genocidist operatives
of the age appear casually erased for the occasion: Muhammed, Gowon, Danjuma,
al-Bashir, Idi Amin, Mengistu, Bokassa, Awolowo, Buhari, Compaoré, Aminu,
Eyadéma, Haruna, Mobutu, Toure, Enaharo, Abubakar, Akinrinade, Patassé,
Obasanjo, Are, Gbadamosi King, Habré, Adekunle, Ayida, Ali, Babangida, Taiwo …
The irony of the
awkward bind in which Britain currently finds itself in the Zimbabwe saga is
fascinating. Britain is absolutely right that Mugabe rigged those elections.
But everybody knows that. The African “leaders” at the Sharm el Sheikh summit
also know that. More importantly though, they also know that, like Mugabe, each
and everyone of them (total of 53 heads of regime), except, possibly, the
leaderships of Sénégal, Botswana, Ghana and South Africa, is presently head or
beneficiary of a rigged election/no-election regime. Not even Hosni Mubarak,
the host of the gathering, could distinguish between a rigged election and one
designated “free”/“fair”. It is therefore not surprising that, on the eve of
the conference, Mugabe dramatically capitalised on these well-known facts on
bogus elections-that-“elect”-bogus leaders in Africa and dared any of his
fellow summiteers to criticise his own signature of poll rigging!
“Elections” in Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe Hardly anyone of them
took up that challenge. In the end, it was left to Britain, a supposedly
non-member of the AU, to lobby delegates hard in hotel suites, conference hall,
committee rooms and corridors to sign up to its “Mugabe illegitimate
re-election” resolution quest but without success. For African “leaders” and
quite a few other observers, Britain still had to explain the rationale for its
policy to pick-and-choose from Africa’s rigged-election catalogue. Whilst it
recognised and fraternises with the regimes that emerged from the rigged
elections in Nigeria (April 2007) and Kenya (December 2007), it demonises and
wants the rest of the world to ostracise the regime that took power after the
rigged poll in Zimbabwe (June 2008).
Yet no independent
assessments of the three “polls” have shown that the charade in Zimbabwe was
any worse than either the one in Nigeria or in Kenya. This is the case if one
evaluates the comparative data available on the three countries, focusing
particularly on such key indices: (a) competitive environment for all
contestants and their affiliate organisations (b) genuine and free access to
vital campaign resources including the ability to form independent political
parties (c) raise finance (d) access to publicly-owned media outlets for party
broadcasts and advertising (e) access to private media institutions (f)
unhindered campaigns in time and space (g) intimidation (h) pre-“poll” levels
of violence (i) “poll” day/post-“poll” day levels of violence (j) number of
persons murdered (k) number of persons injured (l) homes/other properties
damaged or destroyed (m) displacement of persons, and (n) overall state of
“stability and security” within the country in the aftermath of the “poll”. On
the very crucial subject of fatality in these “polls”, for instance, more
Africans were murdered in Kenya than in Zimbabwe; more Africans were murdered in
Nigeria than in Zimbabwe. Finally, it should be stressed that for the regime in
Nigeria, unlike its counterparts in Kenya and indeed Zimbabwe, its April 2007
“election” was nothing short of a military campaign – aptly, albeit ominously
code-named “operation do-or-die” by regime head Olusegun Obasanjo, a genocidist
general in the Nigeria army during the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide. This was
Obasanjo’s third election rigging in eight years.
Gukurahundi
EXCEPT Britain is perhaps much more
concerned with the destiny of Africans in election-rigging Zimbabwe than
those in the rest of other equally election-rigging African countries which
include Nigeria and Kenya, the June 2008 rigged presidential poll in Zimbabwe
does not, in itself, sufficiently explain the basis of the present British
hostility to Robert Mugabe. One of the myths peddled along the stream of mutual
propaganda by both sides in this crisis is to exaggerate the timeframe of the
“confrontation”. Contrary to current popular perception, Mugabe has generally
had a close and warm relationship with successive British governments during
most of his 28 years of absolutist power. Few African “leaders” of comparable
disposition have had such ties with Britain in recent history.
We mustn’t
forget that the overwhelming majority of victims of Mugabe’s ruthless rule,
right from the outset, have been Africans. In 1982-83, two years after he came
to power following the “restoration” of Zimbabwean independence, Mugabe ordered
the notorious Gukurahundi or the 5th brigade of his military forces to
embark on a devastating, murderous campaign against the Ndebele people in the
south of the country.[2]
A total of 20000 Ndebele were slaughtered during the pogrom.[3]
Mugabe essentially assumed supreme political power across Zimbabwe after these
murders. The Ndebele were the core electoral constituency for the ZAPU
liberation movement, which, in alliance with Mugabe’s ZANU, had won the
pre-“restoration” of independence election organised and supervised by
Britain.
At the time
of the Ndebele massacre, the British still exercised some administrative
“oversight” on Zimbabwean security and land resources, an important feature of
the “restoration” of independence settlement worked out in London in 1979/early
1980. Britain was therefore fully aware of the Ndebele atrocity. The Gukurahundi
campaign was comprehensively and extensively covered across the world’s media
then. In 1984, barely one year after the Gukurahundi outrage, the
prestigious Edinburgh University awarded Mugabe an honorary doctorate degree for
“services to education in Africa”.[4]
Ten years later, the Zimbabwean “leader” made an official visit to London. The
British state used the grand occasion to crown its special relationship with
Mugabe by appointing him the prestigious honorary Knight Grand Cross of the
Order of the Bath (Following the June 2008 revocation of this honour, there was
consternation and disappointment among some in African-centred intellectual
circles in Britain who were unaware that Mugabe had all along, until very recently,
been a proud recipient of British knighthood!).[5]
THIS COSY relationship began souring in the
late 1990s. The Blair government that took office in 1997 reneged on making the
annual British financial payment to the Mugabe regime (that had been paid since
1980 – part of the London pre-“restoration” of independence settlement) to
enable it engage in the perverse venture of “buying back” African lands
expropriated by the British invasion of Zimbabwe during the course of the
previous century. Mugabe responded by implementing a “land recovery programme”,
which should have been part of the strategic goal of the liberation project
back in 1980. The Mugabe “version” being executed 20 years later was clearly
opportunistic, a hardly disguised stratagem for the personal survival of a
dictator! The compelling lesson of the belated Mugabe-British discord couldn’t
be clearer: Mugabe could murder and murder as many Africans in Zimbabwe and
trample on their other human rights as he deemed fit but there was a “red line”
he mustn’t cross – harm Europeans in Zimbabwe. For Britain, Mugabe’s “land
recovery” exercise was just “land robbery” that harmed Europeans in Zimbabwe.
He had crossed that “red line” and must be punished!
First steps
IT IS NOT inconceivable that Britain
decided to focus on the rigged Zimbabwe poll, rather than address all the
others in Africa, as the start to challenging pervasive election-robbery in
Africa. After all, one must start somewhere! Maybe Prime Minister Brown wants
to re-launch a new “ethical foreign policy” that focuses on Africa after the
disastrous collapse of the one initiated by his predecessor (Blair) in the late
1990s/early 2000s. Under the aegis of the former, paradoxically, Britain, in
the August-September 2001 conference on racism in South Africa, vehemently
opposed African peoples’ calls for reparations from Britain for its central
role in the pan-European execution of the African holocaust and the phenomenal
wealth it accrued in the process.[6] In
the same period, Britain emerged as the leading arms exporter to Africa, now
earning at least US$2 billion per annum. At the height of the dreadful wars in
the Africa Great Lakes region in 2000, Britain sold weapons to both sides of
the conflict. Charles Onyango-Obbo, the respected Ugandan journalist, recalls:
Britain is
supporting both sides – it just robs them of any moral authority and a lot of
people rightly do despise the British government in this affair.[7]
IT IS never too late to establish this
moral position, even after 500 long years ... If indeed Brown’s intention on
his Zimbabwe “confrontation” is to embark on a British policy of amends in
Africa, the following steps would be profoundly rewarding:
1. Britain
has to expand its current “illegitimate”-branding of the Mugabe regime to
encompass the two other rigged elections that occurred in Africa since April
2007 – namely, Nigeria and Kenya. Brown will soon be hosting Umaru Yar’Adua, a
key participant and chief beneficiary of the April 2007 rigged election in
Nigeria, in a London summit.[8]
Should Brown be hosting Yar’Adua while ostracising Mugabe? If so, Brown must
clarify his position to an understandably highly sceptical world.
2. Britain would need to stop its present
“convenient” reading of African recent history on the question of election
rigging. Britain inaugurated election rigging in Africa during the closing days
of its formal occupation of the continent. This was its policy of perpetuating
its control of politics and economics in Africa even after “withdrawal”. James
Robertson, the British occupation governor, rigged the 1959 pre-“restoration”
of independence legislative and executive poll in Nigeria to ensure that power
went to pro-British clients in the north region who strenuously opposed the
liberation of the country led by Igbo people. There has been no free or fair
election in Nigeria since then. Three years earlier, Robertson, then occupation
governor in the Sudan, had rigged the poll there in favour of the Arab minority
population who are still entrenched in power till this day
3. Britain was central, along with the Nigeria
state, in planning and executing the Igbo genocide of 1966-1970. A total of 3.1
million Igbo, a quarter of the nation’s population then, were murdered. It was
the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. It was Britain’s
“punishment” of the Igbo for daring to lead the struggle for the freeing of
Nigeria that began in the 1940s. Twice, during that struggle, the British
occupation had casually watched two organised pogroms against the Igbo in north
Nigeria (1945, 1953) which were dress rehearsals for the subsequent genocide.
As I argue in my Biafra Revisited, Britain must apologise to the Igbo
for its involvement in this crime against humanity. It should pay reparations
to the survivors and lastly, but surely not the least, support current efforts
to bring individuals and institutions in Nigeria, Britain and elsewhere
involved in this genocide to justice. A number of prominent Nigerians involved
in the genocide are still alive and must be indicted unfailingly in
international criminal courts: Danjuma, Gowon, Buhari, Babangida, Haruna, Are,
Enaharo, Aminu, Gbadamosi King, Abubakar, Obasanjo, Akinrinade, Adekunle,
Ayida, Ali, Taiwo …
4. A fortnight ago, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, a permanent secretary of the regime in
Abuja, made an astonishing declaration to a meeting of the country’s senate
committee on transport. Baba-Ahmed said that the strategic Onicha bridge,
linking east and west Igboland, is “collapsing”.[9] He
added, quite lackadaisically, that “there wasn’t anything” his regime could do
about this unfolding grave emergency.[10]
Millions of Igbo and others use this bridge annually. Successive Nigerian
regimes have always regarded Britain as their “most reliable” foreign ally.[11]
It is therefore incumbent on the British to advise their Nigerian friends at
Abuja, the occupying power in Igboland since 1970, of their international
responsibilities on this bridge. The current Yar’Adua regime in Abuja and the
previous one should have no doubts whatsoever that they will individually and
collectively be held responsible in the international criminal courts for any
consequences brought about by the collapse of the Onicha bridge on Igbo life,
Igbo property, Igbo income, Igbo opportunities, environmental degradation,
etc., etc.
5. Britain
is the premier arms exporter to Africa. This is what keeps Africa’s genocide
state, the bane of African social existence, very much alive. In turn, this
state organises mass slaughters of peoples and nations, asphyxiates
opportunities for its citizens, fuels the rigging of elections ... Britain
can singularly begin to change this dreadful dynamic by imposing a
comprehensive arms embargo on all countries throughout Africa. Brown is not
required to go to parliament to seek approval for this historic move. The
measure can be taken in the next Tuesday, weekly cabinet meeting: 15 July 2008.
(Charles Mingus Sextet – with Eric Dolphy, Cornell University 1964, “Meditations” [personnel: Mingus, bass; Johnny Coles, trumpet; Dolphy, flute, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: live, Cornell University, 18 March 1964])
Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
[1]“Brown makes Zimbabwe cash
promise”, BBC News, 29 June 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7480117.stm
(accessed 3 July 2010). For the conference communiqué, see “African Union Summit
Resolution on Zimbabwe: Adopted at the 11th Ordinary Session of the African Union
Assembly, 1 July 2008, Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt”,
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).
