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.
(Born 23 September 1926, Hamlet, NC, United States)
ICONOCLASTIC tenor (and soprano) saxophonist and composer who, arguably, has had the most profound impact on the development of jazz in the past 50 years (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe)
(John Coltrane Quartet, “Slow
blues” from Both directions at once – the lost album [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; technical personnel: Ravi Coltrane, compiler, Ken Druker, compiler, Rudy Van Gelder, mixing, Sonny Rollins, liner notes; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 6 March 1963; released 55 years later, 29 June 2018!])
IN December 1966, prior to the historic 4-5 January 1967 African-initiated Aburi (Ghana) summit, Biafra’s General
Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu turned down a British-sponsored “conference
of mediation” that would involve all surviving members of the pre-Igbo genocide Nigeria’s
supreme military council on board a British frigate, off the Bight of
Biafra, in which the British would chair. The Biafran leader could not accept
the presumption of “neutrality” or “even-handedness” inherent in London’s
invitation to host such a summit, considering Britain’s instrumental role
in the Igbo genocide since the weeks and months leading to the outbreak on
Sunday 29 May 1966, especially its work with the Yakubu Gowon-Yakubu
Danjuma-Murtala Muhammed genocidist cells in the Nigeria military, the north
region Fulani islamist/jihadist emirs and, pivotally, staff and students at
the Ahmadu Bello University, the epicentre of the planning and execution
of the genocide.
FURTHERMORE, Ojukwu, the historian, could not have ignored the lessons
of a similar event in the 19th century, 1887. Then, King Jaja of Igwe Nga (Opobo),
the Igbo nationalist monarch opposed to British territorial aggression and
expansionism along the Atlantic coast of Biafra, was kidnapped by the British
navy and exiled to the Caribbean island of St Vincent after accepting, in good
faith, a British offer of “peace talks” on board a British naval vessel berthed off
the Igwe Nga shores – Bight of Biafra.
(John Coltrane Quartet, “Slow blues” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 6 March 1963)
*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of Biafra Revisited (2006) and author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why Donald Trump is great for Africa (2018)
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).
