1st anniversary of Rotimi Amaechi’s revelatory proclamation!

Thursday 2 January 2014 – Rotimi Amaechi, speaking on AIT television, insists: “… Jonathan has developed Abia, and Imo but he refused to develop Rivers. Are we Biafrans?” (http://universalreporters247.blogspot.com.br/2014/01/rivers-group-scolds-amaechi-over-his.html[accessed 2 January 2015]).  

In a swoop, albeit unwittingly, Rotimi Amaechi, head of regime of the Rivers administrative region, alludes to a critical plank of phase-IV of the Igbo genocide by Nigeria, beginning on 13 January 1970, which focuses on the non-development/dismantling of the economy of Igboland – Africa’s most resourceful and enterprising, prio to the genocide. 

Extraordinary! To underscore the historic significance of Amaechi’s declaration, readers are invited to click on the follow-up link and note, particularly, material under subtitle “Phase-IV..” http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2013/10/genocidist-generals-genocidist-theorists.html (accessed 3 January 2015)

Whoever says history isn’t so incorrigibly fascinating?!

(Charles Mingus Sextet, “Conversation” [Mingus, bass; Clarence Shaw, trumpet; Jimmy Kneeper, trombone; Shafi Hadi, alto and tenor saxophones; Bill Evans, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: Bethlehem Records, Cincinnati, US, 16 August 1957])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

What “civil war” isn’t

The oxymoron “civil war” is a strange beast indeed. It neither describes what, by any imagination, is “civil” about it nor does it elucidate on the salient features of the nature or character and range of its being. All that “civil war” connotes is that it is an “internal war” – occurring within a seemingly sovereign state, which, in the Africa case, would be a reference to its “Berlin state(s)”. Its opposite, supposedly, is the “inter-state war”.

Since the beginning of the presumed restoration-of-African independence epoch in the Sudan in January 1956, “inter-state wars” in Africa are in fact an exception – just a handful, not more than five! Even here, the genesis of the Ethiopia-Eritrea War (May 1998-June 2000), one of the five, is located in the “internal” wars of old Ethiopia. If one were therefore to follow this “internal war”/“external war” dichotomy-characterisation of armed conflicts in Africa during this epoch, the overwhelming majority of the 15 million Africans who have lost their lives, since the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, would be designated as having died in “internal wars”.

(Herbie Nichols Trio, “It didn’t happen” [personnel: Nichols, piano; Al McKibbon, bass; Art Blakey, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Havensack, NJ, US, 13 May 1955])

Recognisable

Scholars and others who promote the “civil war” tag particularly in Africa have often done so merely to privilege the extant  “Berlin-state” configuration and its principal or “dominant” protagonist in the conflict (“state”, “government”, “central government”, “federal government”, etc., etc.) over oppositional or insurgent protagonists often cast as “regionalists”, “secessionists”, “rebels” or worse. The trend is to be restricted or trapped in a quaint juridical fidelity of discourse under the overarching, essentially sanitising banner of “civil war” without confronting the much more expansive turbulence of underlying history emplaced. 

If most of the 15 million Africans already referred to died in “internal wars”, then “civil war” proponents’ primary quest to preserve the “Berlin-state” status quo ironically problematises the latter’s existence as this “Berlin-state”, in Africa, is a murder-machine… The salutary lesson from this is obvious:  Rather than try to obfuscate or sanitise a human-made catastrophe, call it by its instantly, recognisable name!

Besides a reference to a territoriality and its constituent peoples in Africa, there is nothing else internal about “internal wars” in Africa. As the Igbo genocide demonstrates, this crime against humanity would probably not have occurred without the central role played by Britain, an external power – right from its conceptualisation to execution (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2013/07/britain-aburi-and-igbo-genocide_14.html).

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Can’t be overstressed: What “civil war” is not

The oxymoron “civil war” is a strange beast indeed. It neither describes what, by any imagination, is “civil” about it nor does it elucidate on the salient features of the nature or character and range of its being. All that “civil war” connotes is that it is an “internal war” – occurring within a seemingly sovereign state, which, in the Africa case, would be a reference to its “Berlin state(s)”. Its opposite, supposedly, is the “inter-state war”.

Since the beginning of the presumed restoration-of-African independence epoch in the Sudan in January 1956, “inter-state wars” in Africa are in fact an exception – just a handful, not more than five! Even here, the genesis of the Ethiopia-Eritrea War (May 1998-June 2000), one of the five, is located in the “internal” wars of old Ethiopia. If one were therefore to follow this “internal war”/“external war” dichotomy-characterisation of armed conflicts in Africa during this epoch, the overwhelming majority of the 15 million Africans who have lost their lives, since the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, would be designated as having died in “internal wars”.

Recognisable

Scholars and others who promote the “civil war” tag particularly in Africa have often done so merely to privilege the extant  “Berlin-state” configuration and its principal or “dominant” protagonist in the conflict (“state”, “government”, “central government”, “federal government”, etc., etc.) over oppositional or insurgent protagonists often cast as “regionalists”, “secessionists”, “rebels” or worse. The trend is to be restricted or trapped in a quaint juridical fidelity of discourse under the overarching, essentially sanitising banner of “civil war” without confronting the much more expansive turbulence of underlying history emplaced. 

If most of the 15 million Africans already referred to died in “internal wars”, then “civil war” proponents’ primary quest to preserve the “Berlin-state” status quo ironically problematises the latter’s existence as this “Berlin-state”, in Africa, is a murder-machine… The salutary lesson from this is obvious:  Rather than try to obfuscate or sanitise a human-made catastrophe, call it by its instantly, recognisable name!

Besides a reference to a territoriality and its constituent peoples in Africa, there is nothing else internal about “internal wars” in Africa. As the Igbo genocide demonstrates, this crime against humanity would probably not have occurred without the central role played by Britain, an external power – right from its conceptualisation to execution (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2013/07/britain-aburi-and-igbo-genocide_14.html).

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

FWD – Once again, Britain: Why the Igbo? Why?

http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2013/07/britain-and-igbo-genocide-now-for_19.html

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Rotimi Amaechi reveals!

Thursday 2 January 2014 – Rotimi Amaechi, speaking on AIT television: “… Jonathan has developed Abia, and Imo but he refused to develop Rivers. Are we Biafrans?” (http://universalreporters247.blogspot.com.br/2014/01/rivers-group-scolds-amaechi-over-his.html).  In a swoop, albeit unwittingly, Rotimi Amaechi, head of regime of the Rivers administrative region, alludes to a critical plank of phase-IV of the Igbo genocide by Nigeria, beginning on 13 January 1970, which focuses on the non-development/dismantling of the economy of Igboland – Africa’s most resourceful and enterprising, prio to the genocide. Extraordinary! To underscore the historic significance of Amaechi’s declaration, readers are invited to click on the follow-up link and note, particularly, material under subtitle “Phase-IV..” http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2013/10/genocidist-generals-genocidist-theorists.html

Whoever says history isn’t so incorrigibly fascinating?!

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

What is “civil war”?

The oxymoron “civil war” is a strange beast indeed. It neither describes what, by any imagination, is “civil” about it nor does it elucidate on the salient features of the nature or character and range of its being. All that “civil war” connotes is that it is an “internal war” – occurring within a seemingly sovereign state, which, in the Africa case, would be a reference to its “Berlin state(s)”. Its opposite, supposedly, is the “inter-state war”.

Since the beginning of the presumed restoration-of-African independence epoch in the Sudan in January 1956, “inter-state wars” in Africa are in fact an exception – just a handful, not more than five! Even here, the genesis of the Ethiopia-Eritrea War (May 1998-June 2000), one of the five, is located in the “internal” wars of old Ethiopia. If one were therefore to follow this “internal war”/“external war” dichotomy-characterisation of armed conflicts in Africa during this epoch, the overwhelming majority of the 15 million Africans who have lost their lives, since the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, would be designated as having died in “internal wars”.

Recognisable

Scholars and others who promote the “civil war” tag particularly in Africa have often done so merely to privilege the extant  “Berlin-state” configuration and its principal or “dominant” protagonist in the conflict (“state”, “government”, “central government”, “federal government”, etc., etc.) over oppositional or insurgent protagonists often cast as “regionalists”, “secessionists”, “rebels” or worse. The trend is to be restricted or trapped in a quaint juridical fidelity of discourse under the overarching, essentially sanitising banner of “civil war” without confronting the much more expansive turbulence of underlying history emplaced. 

If most of the 15 million Africans already referred to died in “internal wars”, then “civil war” proponents’ primary quest to preserve the “Berlin-state” status quo ironically problematises the latter’s existence as this “Berlin-state”, in Africa, is a murder-machine… The salutary lesson from this is obvious:  Rather than try to obfuscate or sanitise a human-made catastrophe, call it by its instantly, recognisable name!

Besides a reference to a territoriality and its constituent peoples in Africa, there is nothing else internal about “internal wars” in Africa. As the Igbo genocide demonstrates, this crime against humanity would probably not have occurred without the central role played by Britain, an external power – right from its conceptualisation to execution (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2013/07/britain-aburi-and-igbo-genocide_14.html).

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Britain and the Igbo genocide – now for the pertinent questions *Updated!

(Uzo Egonu, Exodus, 1970) 

On 6 July 2013, I published an article commemorating the 47th anniversary of the launch of the largely British-orchestrated and managed Nigerian-state military invasion of Igboland, Biafra (“Britain, Aburi and the Igbo genocide”, http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2013/07/britain-aburi-and-igbo-genocide_14.html). The invasion is phase-III of the Igbo genocide in which 3 million Igbo people are murdered between 6 July 1967 and 12 January 1970. Earlier on, in phases-I and II of the genocide, beginning 29 May 1966 to 5 July 1967, 100,000 Igbo were murdered by their fellow compatriots in premeditated attacks on Igbo residences, businesses, places of worship, schools, hospitals, parks, private and public transport, everywhere, in towns and villages across most of north Nigeria and in parts of the country’s Lagos, west and midwest regions. The Igbo genocide is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa and inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. Precisely because the world failed to stop this genocide and punish those responsible for carrying it out, the killing fields of Igboland soon extended almost inexorably across Africa. During the period, since January 1970, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo (variously, since the late 1990s) and in Darfur/Nuba Mountains/South Kordofan (all in the Sudan since 2003) and in other wars and conflicts in  Liberia, Ethiopia, Congo Republic, Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Conakry, Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, Mozambique, Algeria, Libya, Kenya, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Mali.

I should qualify my earlier assertion on the world’s attitude to the Igbo genocide because there was, indeed, a rare but robust African diplomatic initiative to halt the genocide after the end of its first phase in January 1967 – i.e., after 100,000 Igbo had already been murdered during the previous seven months. As I show in “Britain, Aburi and the Igbo genocide”, the remarkable Joseph Ankrah’s government in Ghana offered its good offices to mediate in the catastrophe that engulfed its neighbour and end the slaughtering. Ankrah succeeded in inviting all the eight members of the pre-genocide Nigeria’s governing supreme military council to Ghana for two days of talks which ended extraordinarily with a successful confederal political agreement for Nigeria’s future. All the eight signed the agreement including, spectacularly, Yakubu Gowon, head of the genocidist forces that had spearheaded the campaign since 29 July 1966, and Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, leader of the east region resistance government.

“Punish”

Britain, the hitherto conqueror/occupying state in Nigeria but which still exercised a hegemonic control over the country’s politico-economic and strategic affairs despite seven years of so-called restoration of independence, rejected the outcome of these Ghana talks and immediately embarked on pressuring Gowon and its agelong north region clients to renege on implementing the accords and instead expand the territorial reach of the genocide by attacking Igboland itself. It was not therefore just to preserve its vast interests in Nigeria that Britain found the Ghana discussions and outcome objectionable, but London had since sought to “punish” the Igbo for being in the vanguard, since the 1930s, to terminate the British occupation of Nigeria. In June 1945, the British occupation regime openly accused Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Igbo academic and journalist and leading restoration-of-independence politician, in addition to other Igbo leaders, for organising the 6-week pro-restoration of independence countrywide strike that had virtually paralysed the country’s economic activity. The regime’s inflammatory propaganda on Igbo “responsibility” for the event was an instigator prop to the Hausa-Fulani/north’s organised massacres of hundreds of Igbo immigrant populations in the northcentral city of Jos and the looting and/or destruction of their property worth tens of thousands of pounds. No one was ever prosecuted by the regime for planning or participating in those massacres. Another anti-Igbo pogrom was again staged under the watch of the British occupation in 1953 by Hausa-Fulani/north leaders in Kano, 185 miles further north of Jos. This time, the issue focused on the controversial question of a timetable to end the British occupation which Britain’s north allies were opposed to. Hundreds of Igbo were again murdered in Kano and tens of thousands of pounds worth of their property looted and/or destroyed.  As in Jos, no one was prosecuted by the regime for planning or participating in this pogrom and no such censures would occur during the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide, subsequently, to which these pogroms are dreadful “dress rehearsals”.

 The world has recently followed with admiration the ways and means the British security and justice services have apprehended Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the two Nigerian-Britons accused of the reprehensible murder of fusilier Lee Rigby outside a southeast London military barracks earlier on in the year. Ironically, if these accused had allegedly committed a similar murder in contemporary Nigeria, the duo would have, thanks to the British-supervised precedent in the country going back to the 1945 Igbo pogrom in Jos, “unlikely been arrested”/“not be arrested” but would instead be “prime candidates” awaiting a regime-commissioned amnesty for those who have committed such heinous crimes – the latter process is in fact the case for members of  the Boko Haram islamic insurgent organisation as these lines are written.

“Centre”

Back to the Igbo genocide, it must be stated, clearly, that Harold Wilson, the British prime minister of the day, knew precisely the nature or the character of the campaign that his government was involved in Igboland, Biafra, beginning from 6 July 1967. During the course of the 1968/69 gruesomely catastrophic apogee of the campaign, Wilson 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 [London and New York: Quartet Books, 1977]: 122). For the records, Wilson’s “a half a million dead Biafrans” 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.

Harold Wilson’s “[W]ould accept a half a million dead Biafrans”-wish is not a declaration made by some dictator, some leader of a loony party, a fascist party or anything of that ilk; on the contrary, this is a declaration made by an elected politician, a politician in an advanced western democracy – the leader of the British Labour party, a party that prides itself for having attracted leading thinkers to its ranks in the post-World War II era. “[W]ould accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took”-declaration is made by the prime minister of Britain; not the prime minister of some “peripheral”, inconsequential country but the prime minister of a “centre” state and power that was part of the victorious alliance that defeated a fascist global amalgam in a global war that ended barely 23 years earlier. This is a prime minister of a “centre” state and power, the sixth to occupy this exalted position since the end of the war, that was one of the key countries that worked on the panel that drafted the historic 1948 United Nations “Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide”, in the wake of the 1930s/1940s deplorable perpetration of the Jewish genocide in Europe. 6 million Jews were murdered then by Nazi Germany. It is to ensure that no human beings are ever subjected to what the Jews went through in central Europe and elsewhere that this genocide convention is rated as one of the key international documents of the new age. Britain is a signatory to the convention.

Surely, Harold Wilson’s “[W]ould accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took”-declaration cannot fit into the hallowed pages of the 1948 United Nations “Convention on the prevention of the Crime of Genocide”. Absolutely not! On the contrary, Wilson’s is a mid-1960s declaration to wage a genocide on a people, the Igbo people, 3150 miles away in southwestcentral Africa, just 20 years after the Jewish genocide in Europe. In the end, rather than Wilson’s 500,000 “dead Biafrans”-wish, there were 3.1 million murdered Biafrans... How many others in Wilson’s cabinet identified with this genocidal position and policy on the Igbo? What was the nature of the debates on this subject? Were there voices of opposition within cabinet? Who were these voices and how did they try to alter both position and policy? An official in the foreign office in London at the time does acknowledge, without any ambiguity, the genocidal plank of this administration’s policy especially on the issue of the dispatch of urgent relief to the encircled, blockaded and bombarded Igbo: “[my government’s position was designed to] show conspicuous zeal in relief while in fact letting the little buggers starve out” (Morris: 122. See also Michael Leapman, “While the Biafrans starved, the FO moaned about hacks”, The Independent on Sunday [London], 3 January 1999). How widespread did people in the broader Labour party know of Harold Wilson’s genocidal policy on the Igbo? How much of Wilson’s Igbo genocide drive did the official British Conservative party opposition aware of?

The unrelentingly brazen impunity displayed by Nigeria’s genocidist “theorists” and operators on the ground, during the three phases and 44 months of the genocide, was anchored on the confidence that they had the British government’s back and were pointedly a variation on the theme spun by Wilson and the foreign office official. Benjamin Adekunle, one of the most notorious of Nigeria’s field commanders in southern Igboland, makes the following statement to the media, including foreign representatives, in an August 1968 press conference, almost about the same time as Wilson’s declaration to Ferguson: “I want to prevent even one I[g]bo having even one piece to eat before their capitulation. 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 don’t move” (The Economist [London], 24 August 1968). To fuse Wilson’s declaration to the London foreign office spokesperson’s to Adekunle’s is to produce a lethal genocidal juggernaut  that incorporates the conceptualisation, testing and implementation of like-minded operatives who just see the wholescale murder of Igbo people as the foreseeable outcome, “solution” of their strategic goal(s). Nothing else… When in June 1969, Olusegun Obasanjo, another fiendish genocidist commander, again in the south of Igboland, orders his airforce to shoot down an ICRC relief plane bringing in urgent supplies to the Igbo (note, once again, the symbolism of food and life!), it is to Harold Wilson that Obasanjo beckons for help to “sort out” the outraged international response to this atrocity as the latter, himself, points out in his memoirs, aptly entitled My Command (Ibadan and London: Heinemann, 1980: 165 ).

Revisit

It is now incumbent on the current David Cameron British government to revisit the Harold Wilson administration’s 1966-1970 genocidal campaign against Igbo people and make urgent amends. It should seek to effectuate some measure of closure to Wilson’s sordid programme of genocide against one of humanity’s most industrious and peaceful of peoples. Indeed, Cameron has no greater opportunity, presently, to permanently erase these “scars of Africa” from Britain’s “conscience”, to quote the sentiment severally made by Tony Blair, a former prime minister. Britain should now unreservedly apologise to Igbo people for its cardinal role in the genocide of 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 that cost the lives of 3.1 million Igbo children, women and men. It should follow up this apology by paying reparations to the survivors and support ongoing efforts to bring to trial all those involved in perpetrating the genocide. Thankfully, the crime of genocide has no statute of limitations in international law. No other African peoples have suffered such an extensive and gruesome genocide and incalculable impoverishment in a century as the Igbo.

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Britain and the Igbo genocide – now for the pertinent questions *Updated!

Last Saturday (6 July 2013), I published an article commemorating the 47th anniversary of the launch of the largely British-orchestrated and managed Nigerian-state military invasion of Igboland, Biafra (“Britain, Aburi and the Igbo genocide”, http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2013/07/britain-aburi-and-igbo-genocide_14.html). The invasion is phase-III of the Igbo genocide in which 3 million Igbo people are murdered between 6 July 1967 and 12 January 1970. Earlier on, in phases-I and II of the genocide, beginning 29 May 1966 to 5 July 1967, 100,000 Igbo were murdered by their fellow compatriots in premeditated attacks on Igbo residences, businesses, places of worship, schools, hospitals, parks, private and public transport, everywhere, in towns and villages across most of north Nigeria and in parts of the country’s Lagos, west and midwest regions. The Igbo genocide is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa and inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. Precisely because the world failed to stop this genocide and punish those responsible for carrying it out, the killing fields of Igboland soon extended almost inexorably across Africa. During the period, since January 1970, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo (variously, since the late 1990s) and in Darfur/Nuba Mountains/South Kordofan (all in the Sudan since 2003) and in other wars and conflicts in  Liberia, Ethiopia, Congo Republic, Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Conakry, Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, Mozambique, Algeria, Libya, Kenya, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Mali.

I should qualify my earlier assertion on the world’s attitude to the Igbo genocide because there was, indeed, a rare but robust African diplomatic initiative to halt the genocide after the end of its first phase in January 1967 – i.e., after 100,000 Igbo had already been murdered during the previous seven months. As I show in “Britain, Aburi and the Igbo genocide”, the remarkable Joseph Ankrah’s government in Ghana offered its good offices to mediate in the catastrophe that engulfed its neighbour and end the slaughtering. Ankrah succeeded in inviting all the eight members of the pre-genocide Nigeria’s governing supreme military council to Ghana for two days of talks which ended extraordinarily with a successful confederal political agreement for Nigeria’s future. All the eight signed the agreement including, spectacularly, Yakubu Gowon, head of the genocidist forces that had spearheaded the campaign since 29 July 1966, and Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, leader of the east region resistant government.

“Punish”

Britain, the hitherto conqueror/occupying state in Nigeria but which still exercised a hegemonic control over the country’s politico-economic and strategic affairs despite seven years of so-called restoration of independence, rejected the outcome of these Ghana talks and immediately embarked on pressuring Gowon and its agelong north region clients to renege on implementing the accords and instead expand the territorial reach of the genocide by attacking Igboland itself. It was not therefore just to preserve its vast interests in Nigeria that Britain found the Ghana discussions and outcome objectionable, but London had since sought to “punish” the Igbo for being in the vanguard, since the 1930s, to terminate the British occupation of Nigeria. In June 1945, the British occupation regime openly accused Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Igbo academic and journalist and leading restoration-of-independence politician, in addition to other Igbo leaders, for organising the 6-week pro-restoration of independence countrywide strike that had virtually paralysed the country’s economic activity. The regime’s inflammatory propaganda on Igbo “responsibility” for the event was an instigator prop to the Hausa-Fulani/north’s organised massacres of hundreds of Igbo immigrant populations in the northcentral city of Jos and the looting and/or destruction of their property worth tens of thousands of pounds. No one was ever prosecuted by the regime for planning or participating in those massacres. Another anti-Igbo pogrom was again staged under the watch of the British occupation in 1953 by Hausa-Fulani/north leaders in Kano, 185 miles further north of Jos. This time, the issue focused on the controversial question of a timetable to end the British occupation which Britain’s north allies were opposed to. Hundreds of Igbo were again murdered in Kano and tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of their property looted and/or destroyed.  As in Jos, no one was prosecuted by the regime for planning or participating in this pogrom and no such censures would occur during the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide, subsequently, to which these pogroms are dreadful “dress rehearsals”.

 The world has recently followed with admiration the ways and means the British security and justice services have apprehended Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the two Nigerian-Britons accused of the reprehensible murder of fusilier Lee Rigby outside a southeast London military barracks earlier on in the year. Ironically, if these accused had allegedly committed a similar murder in contemporary Nigeria, the duo would have, thanks to the British-supervised precedent in the country going back to the 1945 Igbo pogrom in Jos, “unlikely been arrested”/“not be arrested” but would instead be “prime candidates” awaiting a regime-commissioned amnesty for those who have committed such heinous crimes – the latter process is in fact the case for members of  the Boko Haram islamic insurgent organisation as these lines are written.

“Centre”

Back to the Igbo genocide, it must be stated, clearly, that Harold Wilson, the British prime minister of the day, knew precisely the nature or the character of the campaign that his government was involved in Igboland, Biafra, beginning from 6 July 1967. During the course of the 1968/69 gruesomely catastrophic apogee of the campaign, Wilson 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 [London and New York: Quartet Books, 1977]: 122). For the records, Wilson’s “a half a million dead Biafrans” 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.

Harold Wilson’s “[W]ould accept a half a million dead Biafrans”-wish is not a declaration made by some dictator, some leader of a loony party, a fascist party or anything of that ilk; on the contrary, this is a declaration made by an elected politician, a politician in an advanced western democracy – the leader of the British Labour party, a party that prides itself for having attracted leading thinkers to its ranks in the post-World War II era. “[W]ould accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took”-declaration is made by the prime minister of Britain; not the prime minister of some “peripheral”, inconsequential country but the prime minister of a “centre” state and power that was part of the victorious alliance that defeated a fascist global amalgam in a global war that ended barely 23 years earlier. This is a prime minister of a “centre” state and power, the sixth to occupy this exalted position since the end of the war, that was one of the key countries that worked on the panel that drafted the historic 1948 United Nations “Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide”, in the wake of the 1930s/1940s deplorable perpetration of the Jewish genocide in Europe. 6 million Jews were murdered then by Nazi Germany. It is to ensure that no human beings are ever subjected to what the Jews went through in central Europe and elsewhere that this genocide convention is rated as one of the key international documents of the new age. Britain is a signatory to the convention.

Surely, Harold Wilson’s “[W]ould accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took”-declaration cannot fit into the hallowed pages of the 1948 United Nations “Convention on the prevention of the Crime of Genocide”. Absolutely not! On the contrary, Wilson’s is a mid-1960s declaration to wage a genocide on a people, the Igbo people, 3150 miles away in southwestcentral Africa, just 20 years after the Jewish genocide in Europe. In the end, rather than Wilson’s 500,000 “dead Biafrans”-wish, there were 3.1 million murdered Biafrans... How many others in Wilson’s cabinet identified with this genocidal position and policy on the Igbo? What was the nature of the debates on this subject? Were there voices of opposition within cabinet? Who were these voices and how did they try to alter both position and policy? An official in the foreign office in London at the time does acknowledge, without any ambiguity, the genocidal plank of this administration’s policy especially on the issue of the dispatch of urgent relief to the encircled, blockaded and bombarded Igbo: “[my government’s position was designed to] show conspicuous zeal in relief while in fact letting the little buggers starve out” (Morris: 122). How widespread did people in the broader Labour party know of Harold Wilson’s genocidal policy on the Igbo? How much of Wilson’s Igbo genocide drive did the official British Conservative party opposition aware of?

The unrelentingly brazen impunity displayed by Nigeria’s genocidist “theorists” and operators on the ground, during the three phases and 44 months of the genocide, was anchored on the confidence that they had the British government’s back and were pointedly a variation on the theme spun by Wilson and the foreign office official. Benjamin Adekunle, one of the most notorious of Nigeria’s field commanders in southern Igboland, makes the following statement to the media, including foreign representatives, in an August 1968 press conference, almost about the same time as Wilson’s declaration to Ferguson: “I want to prevent even one I[g]bo having even one piece to eat before their capitulation. 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 don’t move” (The Economist [London], 24 August 1968). To fuse Wilson’s declaration to the London foreign office spokesperson’s to Adekunle’s is to produce a lethal genocidal juggernaut  that incorporates the conceptualisation, testing and implementation of like-minded operatives who just see the wholescale murder of Igbo people as the foreseeable outcome, “solution” of their strategic goal(s). Nothing else… When in June 1969, Olusegun Obasanjo, another fiendish genocidist commander, again in the south of Igboland, orders his airforce to shoot down an ICRC relief plane bringing in urgent supplies to the Igbo (note, once again, the symbolism of food and life!), it is to Harold Wilson that Obasanjo beckons for help to “sort out” the outraged international response to this atrocity as the latter, himself, points out in his memoirs, aptly entitled My Command (Ibadan and London: Heinemann, 1980: 165 ).

Revisit

It is now incumbent on the current David Cameron British government to revisit the Harold Wilson administration’s 1966-1970 genocidal campaign against Igbo people and make urgent amends. It should seek to effectuate some measure of closure to Wilson’s sordid programme of genocide against one of humanity’s most industrious and peaceful of peoples. Indeed, Cameron has no greater opportunity, presently, to permanently erase these “scars of Africa” from Britain’s “conscience”, to quote the sentiment severally made by Tony Blair, a former prime minister. Britain should now unreservedly apologise to Igbo people for its cardinal role in the genocide of 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 that cost the lives of 3.1 million Igbo children, women and men. It should follow up this apology by paying reparations to the survivors. No other African people have suffered such an extensive and gruesome genocide and incalculable impoverishment in a century.

Britain and the Igbo genocide – now for the pertinent questions

Last Saturday (6 July 2013), I published an article commemorating the 47th anniversary of the launch of the largely British-orchestrated and managed Nigerian-state military invasion of Igboland, Biafra (“Britain, Aburi and the Igbo genocide”, http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2013/07/britain-aburi-and-igbo-genocide_14.html). The invasion is phase-III of the Igbo genocide in which 3 million Igbo people are murdered between 6 July 1967 and 12 January 1970. Earlier on, in phases-I and II of the genocide, beginning 29 May 1966 to 5 July 1967, 100,000 Igbo were murdered by their fellow compatriots in premeditated attacks on Igbo residences, businesses, places of worship, schools, hospitals, parks, private and public transport, everywhere, in towns and villages across most of north Nigeria and in parts of the country’s Lagos, west and midwest regions. The Igbo genocide is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa and inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. Precisely because the world failed to stop this genocide and punish those responsible for carrying it out, the killing fields of Igboland soon extended almost inexorably across Africa. During the period, since January 1970, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo (variously, since the late 1990s) and in Darfur/Nuba Mountains/South Kordofan (all in the Sudan since 2003) and in other wars and conflicts in  Liberia, Ethiopia, Congo Republic, Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Conakry, Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, Mozambique, Algeria, Libya, Kenya, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Mali.

I should qualify my earlier assertion on the world’s attitude to the Igbo genocide because there was, indeed, a rare but robust African diplomatic initiative to halt the genocide after the end of its first phase in January 1967 – i.e., after 100,000 Igbo had already been murdered during the previous seven months. As I show in “Britain, Aburi and the Igbo genocide”, the remarkable Joseph Ankrah’s government in Ghana offered its good offices to mediate in the catastrophe that engulfed its neighbour and end the slaughtering. Ankrah succeeded in inviting all the eight members of the pre-genocide Nigeria’s governing supreme military council to Ghana for two days of talks which ended extraordinarily with a successful confederal political agreement for Nigeria’s future. All the eight signed the agreement including, spectacularly, Yakubu Gowon, head of the genocidist forces that had spearheaded the campaign since 29 July 1966, and Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, leader of the east region resistance government.

“Punish”

Britain, the hitherto conqueror/occupying state in Nigeria but which still exercised a hegemonic control over the country’s politico-economic and strategic affairs despite seven years of so-called restoration of independence, rejected the outcome of these Ghana talks and immediately embarked on pressuring Gowon and its agelong north region clients to renege on implementing the accords and instead expand the territorial reach of the genocide by attacking Igboland itself. It was not therefore just to preserve its vast interests in Nigeria that Britain found the Ghana discussions and outcome objectionable, but London had since sought to “punish” the Igbo for being in the vanguard, since the 1930s, to terminate the British occupation of Nigeria. In June 1945, the British occupation regime openly accused Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Igbo academic and journalist and leading restoration-of-independence politician, in addition to other Igbo leaders, for organising the 6-week pro-restoration of independence countrywide strike that had virtually paralysed the country’s economic activity. The regime’s inflammatory propaganda on Igbo “responsibility” for the event was an instigator prop to the Hausa-Fulani/north’s organised massacres of hundreds of Igbo immigrant populations in the northcentral city of Jos and the looting and/or destruction of their property worth tens of thousands of pounds. No one was ever prosecuted by the regime for planning or participating in those massacres. Another anti-Igbo pogrom was again staged under the watch of the British occupation in 1953 by Hausa-Fulani/north leaders in Kano, 185 miles further north of Jos. This time, the issue focused on the controversial question of a timetable to end the British occupation which Britain’s north allies were opposed to. Hundreds of Igbo were again murdered in Kano and tens of thousands of pounds worth of their property looted and/or destroyed.  As in Jos, no one was prosecuted by the regime for planning or participating in this pogrom and no such censures would occur during the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide, subsequently, to which these pogroms are dreadful “dress rehearsals”.

 The world has recently followed with admiration the ways and means the British security and justice services have apprehended Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the two Nigerian-Britons accused of the reprehensible murder of fusilier Lee Rigby outside a southeast London military barracks earlier on in the year. Ironically, if these accused had allegedly committed a similar murder in contemporary Nigeria, the duo would have, thanks to the British-supervised precedent in the country going back to the 1945 Igbo pogrom in Jos, “unlikely been arrested”/“not be arrested” but would instead be “prime candidates” awaiting a regime-commissioned amnesty for those who have committed such heinous crimes – the latter process is in fact the case for members of  the Boko Haram islamic insurgent organisation as these lines are written.

“Centre”

Back to the Igbo genocide, it must be stated, clearly, that Harold Wilson, the British prime minister of the day, knew precisely the nature or the character of the campaign that his government was involved in Igboland, Biafra, beginning from 6 July 1967. During the course of the 1968/69 gruesomely catastrophic apogee of the campaign, Wilson 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 [London and New York: Quartet Books, 1977]: 122). For the records, Wilson’s “a half a million dead Biafrans” 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.

Harold Wilson’s “[W]ould accept a half a million dead Biafrans”-wish is not a declaration made by some dictator, some leader of a loony party, a fascist party or anything of that ilk; on the contrary, this is a declaration made by an elected politician, a politician in an advanced western democracy – the leader of the British Labour party, a party that prides itself for having attracted leading thinkers to its ranks in the post-World War II era. “[W]ould accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took”-declaration is made by the prime minister of Britain; not the prime minister of some “peripheral”, inconsequential country but the prime minister of a “centre” state and power that was part of the victorious alliance that defeated a fascist global amalgam in a global war that ended barely 23 years earlier. This is a prime minister of a “centre” state and power, the sixth to occupy this exalted position since the end of the war, that was one of the key countries that worked on the panel that drafted the historic 1948 United Nations “Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide”, in the wake of the 1930s/1940s deplorable perpetration of the Jewish genocide in Europe. 6 million Jews were murdered then by Nazi Germany. It is to ensure that no human beings are ever subjected to what the Jews went through in central Europe and elsewhere that this genocide convention is rated as one of the key international documents of the new age. Britain is a signatory to the convention.

Surely, Harold Wilson’s “[W]ould accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took”-declaration cannot fit into the hallowed pages of the 1948 United Nations “Convention on the prevention of the Crime of Genocide”. Absolutely not! On the contrary, Wilson’s is a mid-1960s declaration to wage a genocide on a people, the Igbo people, 3150 miles away in southwestcentral Africa, just 20 years after the Jewish genocide in Europe. In the end, rather than Wilson’s 500,000 “dead Biafrans”-wish, there were 3.1 million murdered Biafrans... How many others in Wilson’s cabinet identified with this genocidal position and policy on the Igbo? What was the nature of the debates on this subject? Were there voices of opposition within cabinet? Who were these voices and how did they try to alter both position and policy? An official in the foreign office in London at the time does acknowledge, without any ambiguity, the genocidal plank of this administration’s policy especially on the issue of the dispatch of urgent relief to the encircled, blockaded and bombarded Igbo: “[my government’s position was designed to] show conspicuous zeal in relief while in fact letting the little buggers starve out” (Morris: 122). How widespread did people in the broader Labour party know of Harold Wilson’s genocidal policy on the Igbo? How much of Wilson’s Igbo genocide drive did the official British Conservative party opposition aware of?

The unrelentingly brazen impunity displayed by Nigeria’s genocidist “theorists” and operators on the ground, during the three phases and 44 months of the genocide, was anchored on the confidence that they had the British government’s back and were pointedly a variation on the theme spun by Wilson and the foreign office official. Benjamin Adekunle, one of the most notorious of Nigeria’s field commanders in southern Igboland, makes the following statement to the media, including foreign representatives, in an August 1968 press conference, almost about the same time as Wilson’s declaration to Ferguson: “I want to prevent even one I[g]bo having even one piece to eat before their capitulation. 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 don’t move” (The Economist [London], 24 August 1968). To fuse Wilson’s declaration to the London foreign office spokesperson’s to Adekunle’s is to produce a lethal genocidal juggernaut  that incorporates the conceptualisation, testing and implementation of like-minded operatives who just see the wholescale murder of Igbo people as the foreseeable outcome, “solution” of their strategic goal(s). Nothing else… When in June 1969, Olusegun Obasanjo, another fiendish genocidist commander, again in the south of Igboland, orders his airforce to shoot down an ICRC relief plane bringing in urgent supplies to the Igbo (note, once again, the symbolism of food and life!), it is to Harold Wilson that Obasanjo beckons for help to “sort out” the outraged international response to this atrocity as the latter, himself, points out in his memoirs, aptly entitled My Command (Ibadan and London: Heinemann, 1980: 165 ).

Revisit

It is now incumbent on the current David Cameron British government to revisit the Harold Wilson administration’s 1966-1970 genocidal campaign against Igbo people and make urgent amends. It should seek to effectuate some measure of closure to Wilson’s sordid programme of genocide against one of humanity’s most industrious and peaceful of peoples. Indeed, Cameron has no greater opportunity, presently, to permanently erase these “scars of Africa” from Britain’s “conscience”, to quote the sentiment severally made by Tony Blair, a former prime minister. Britain should now unreservedly apologise to Igbo people for its cardinal role in the genocide of 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 that cost the lives of 3.1 million Igbo children, women and men.  It should follow up this apology by paying reparations to the survivors and support ongoing efforts to bring to trial all those involved in perpetrating the genocide. Thankfully, the crime of genocide has no statute of limitations in international law. No other African peoples have suffered such an extensive and gruesome genocide and incalculable impoverishment in a century as the Igbo.

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Africa today – reflections on resilience* (updated with an additional key reference)

(John Coltrane Quartet here plays  “Wise one” – personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums [recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 27 April/I June 1964].)


Africa has uninterruptedly been a net-exporter of capital to the Western World since 1981. The thundering sum of US$400 billion is the total figure that Africa has transferred to the West in this manner to date (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature, 2011: 41-42, 176-177). These are legitimate, accountable transfers, largely covering the ever-increasing interest payments for the “debts” the West claims African regimes owe it, beginning from the 1970s. A 2010 study by Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based research organisation, shows that Africa may have also transferred the additional sum of US$854 billion since the 1970s (“this figure might be more than double, at [US]$1.8 trillion”, the study cautions – “Illicit financial flows from Africa: Hidden resource for development”, http://www.gfintegrity.org/content/view/300/75/ [accessed 25 April 2013]) through illegitimate exports by the “leaderships” of corrupt African regimes – with Nigeria topping this league at US$240.7 billion. In effect, the state, in Africa, no longer pretends that it exists to serve its peoples.

Additionally, and this might appear paradoxical,  trade figures and associated data readily obtainable indicate that these African states of seeming dysfunction have performed their utmost, year in, year out, in that key variable for which their European World creators established them in the first place: redoubts for export services of designated mineralogical/agricultural products to the European World/overseas. There are no indications, whatsoever, that any of these countries has found it difficult to fulfil its principal obligations on this accord. This is the context that that seemingly contradictory aphorism, “Africa works”, becomes hugely intelligible. Appositely, the raison d’être of the “state” in Africa is not really to serve its people(s), African peoples; it is, on the contrary, to respond, unfailingly, to the objective needs of its creators overseas.

For instance, thanks to the continuing inordinate leverage that Britain and France, the two foremost conqueror-states of Africa, exercise in these essentially anti-African principalities tagged “the state” in Africa, both European countries have a greater secured access to Africa’s critical resources today than at any time during decades of their formal occupation of the continent. France, right from the post-World War II leadership of Charles de Gaulle to the current François Hollande, has such glaring contempt for the notion of “sovereignty” in the so-called francophonie Africa, ensuring that France has invaded most of these 22 African countries 51 times since 1960 (for an excellent study on French hegemonic control of the finances/economies of these countries, see Gary Busch, “Africans pay for the bullets the French use to kill them”, http://www.afrohistorama.info/article-africans-pay-for-the-bullets-the-french-use-to-kill-them-82337836.html [accessed 15 May 2013]). As for Britain, sheer greed and opportunism appear to be the guiding principle to attaining its unenviable position as the leading arms-exporter to Africa, including Africa’s leading genocide-states (See, for instance, journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo’s candid insight on the subject in a BBC interview, “UK arming African countries”, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/699255.stm [accessed 12 May 2013]). Indeed, France and Britain have never had it so good in Africa. This is the background to which the brazenly racist epithet “sub-Sahara Africa” is operationalised currently (see Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe,“‘Do you still read or hear of “sub-Sahara Africa”?’ … ‘What is it anyway?’ ... ” , http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com.br/2013/06/still-read-or-hear-of-sub-sahara-africa.html [accessed 14 June 2013]).

Those crucial African capital exports referred to earlier, legitimate or/and illegitimate, are funds of gargantuan proportions produced by the same humanity that many a commentator or campaign project would be quick to categorise as “poor” and “needy” for “foreign aid”. In the past 30 years, these funds could and should easily have provided a comprehensive healthcare programme across Africa, the establishment of schools, colleges and skills’ training, the construction of an integrative communication network, the transformation of agriculture to abolish the scourge of malnutrition, hunger and starvation, and, finally, it would have stemmed the emigration of 25 million Africans, including crucial sectors of the continent’s middle classes and intellectuals to the Americas, Europe, Asia and elsewhere in the world since the 1980s.

Yet, despite these grim times of pulverised economies and failed and collapsing states in Africa, we shouldn’t ever forget that those who still ensure that the situation on the ground is not much worse for the peoples than it is, are Africans – individuals, working alone, conscientiously, or working in concert with others or within a larger group to feed, clothe, house, educate and provide healthcare and some leisure to immediate and extended families, communities, neighbourhoods, villages and the like. For example, the surgeon who not only works tirelessly in a city hospital, with very limited resources, but uses his scarce savings to build a health centre and an access road in his village with subsidised treatment and prescription costs; the nurse who travels around her expansive health district, unfailingly, bringing care to the doorsteps of the people who neither can afford nor access it physically; the retired diplomat who has mobilised her community to set up a robust environmental care service that has involved the construction of public parks, regular refuse collection and some recycling, after-school free tuition for children with a planned community newspaper in the pipeline; the coach transport operator who lays out scores of his coaches to ferry survivors of a recently organised pogrom 350 miles away to safety; the civil rights activist and intellectual who rallies members of his internet discussion groups within the course of a month’s intense campaign to successfully apprehend a contractor who was about to abscond with millions of (US) dollars’ worth of public funds meant for a crucial upgrade of an international airport initially built by the community; a stretch of individuals’ programmes of scholarships for students at varying levels of school life, provision of staff salaries in schools and colleges, maintenance of libraries and laboratories in schools and colleges, construction and maintenance of vital infrastructure in villages and counties, etc., etc. These are the authors busily scripting the path of the renaissance Africa.

To cap these phenomenal strides of Africans, the 25 million African émigrés mentioned earlier presently constitute the primary exporters of capital to Africa itself. Africans now dispatch more money to Africa than “Western aid” to the continent, year in, year out. In 2003, according to the World Bank, these African overseas residents sent to Africa the impressive sum of US$200 billion – invested directly in their communities (World Bank, “Migrant Labor Remittances in Africa”, Africa Regional Paper Series, No. 64, Washington, November 2003: 12). This is 40 times the sum of “Western aid” in real terms in the same year – i.e. when the pervasive “overheads” attendant to the latter are accounted for (cf. Fairouz El Tom’s recently concluded informed research, “Do NGOs practise what they preach?”, http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/87395 [accessed 15 May 2013]). In a sentence:  The African humanity currently generates, overwhelmingly, the capital resource that at once sustains its very existence and is intriguingly exported to the Western World. It is precisely the same humanity that those who benefit immeasurably from this conundrum (over several decades and are guaranteed to benefit indefinitely from it, except this is stopped by Africans) have consistently portrayed, quite perversely, as a “charity case”. The notion that Africans are in any way dependent on a European World/Western World or any other overseas’s “handout” is at best a myth or at worst an all-out lie – perpetuated by a circle of academics and in the media who in fact in the not-too-distant-past would have been in the vanguard “justifying”/“rationalising” African enslavement or/and the conquest and occupation of Africa.

Surely, this historic big lie of characterisation can no longer be sustained. Africa is endowed with the human resource and capital resource (in all its calibration and manifestation) to build advanced civilisations provided Africans abandon the prevailing “Berlin-states” of dysfunction that they have been forced into by the latter’s creators as we shall be elaborating soon. Thus, Africa’s pressing problem in the past 57 years of presumed restoration of independence has been how to husband incredible range of abundance of human and non-human resources for the express benefits of the peoples rather than it being fritted away so criminally.

Population, food, future

There has often been a “politically correct” rhetoric bandied about incessantly by some in academia, media and elsewhere who discuss this grave crisis of contemporary Africa in the context of population (as a useful background to this rhetoric, see, particularly, Roland Oliver, “The condition of Africa”, Times Literary Supplement, London, 20 September 1991: 8). Africa, it is concluded in these assertions, requires some “decrease” in its population and/or population-growth as an important measure towards achieving a “solution”. On the contrary, as we now demonstrate, Africa is, indeed, in no way overpopulated. The population argument is usually advanced on a number of fronts. First, there is a “theory” that the given landmass which presently defines Africa and its various so-called 54 nation-states cannot sustain the existing populations, but, more critically, the “projected populations” in years to come. We shall examine the degree to which this “theory” is able to stand up to serious scientific scrutiny first by comparing Africa’s landmass vis-à-vis its population and those of some of the countries of the world.

Africa’s population is currently one billion covering an incredible vast landmass  of 30,221,533 sq km or about four times the landmass of Brazil (all the statistics here on countries’ population, landmass and the like are derived from The World Bank, World Development Report 2012 and United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2012). Ethiopia’s landmass is 1,221,892 sq km, five times the size of Britain’s at 244,044 sq km. Yet Britain’s population of 62 million is three-quarters that of Ethiopia’s 83 million. As for Somalia, it is 2.6 times the size of Britain but has a population of only 9 million. Sudan and South Sudan provide an even more fascinating comparison. Whilst both countries are 10 times the size of Britain, they support a population of 45 million – about 70 per cent the size of Britain. In fact the Sudans have a landmass equal to that of India which is populated by 1.22 billion people – i.e., more than the population of all of Africa! Britain is one-tenth the size of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) which has a landmass of 2,345,395 sq km, similar to the Sudans and India. In other words, the DRC is about ten times the size of Britain but with a population of 71 million, nine million more than the population of the latter. Even though the DRC landmass is about twice that of all of Britain, France and Germany (1,275,986 sq km), it has just about one-third of these three west European countries’ total population of 208 million. Inevitably, the evidence does beg the question as to where this population really is!

Second, let us examine similarly sized countries. France has a landmass of 547,021 sq km close to Somalia’s. However, France’s population of 65 million is about seven times the population of Somalia. Similarly, Botswana is slightly larger than France at 660,364 sq km but with a population of 2 million, a minuscule proportion of France’s. Uganda’s landmass at 236,039 sq km is about the size of Britain’s 244,044 sq km. Yet with a population of only 33 million, Uganda is about half that of Britain’s. Similarly, Ghana’s landmass of 238,535 sq km makes it approximately equal to the size of Britain. Ghana is however populated by only 25 million people, far less than one-half Britain’s population.

Southern World to Southern World comparisons can also prove useful in exposing the fallacy of either Africa’s “large population” or “potential explosive population”.  Iran’s size of 1,647,989 sq km is about two-thirds that of Sudan and South Sudan combined. Yet its population, unlike the Sudans’ 45 million, is at least one and one-half times as large at 75 million. Mexico’s landmass is 1,943,950 sq km. This is approximately the same size as the Sudans but with a population of 115 million, Mexico is two and one-half times the former. Pakistan’s landmass of 803,937 sq km is just about Namibia’s 864,284 sq km but Pakistan’s population is 174 million while Namibia’s is 2 million! Even though Bangladesh’s 143,998 sq km-landmass makes it roughly one-eight the size of Angola (1,246,691 sq km) as well as that of South Africa’s (1,221,029 sq km), Bangladeshi population at 159 million outstrips Angola’s 13 million and South Africa’s 50 million. If we were to return to our earlier comparisons, Angola and South Africa are about 4-5 times the size of Britain but with one-fifth and four-fifths respectively of the latter’s population.

Crucial reminders, genocide, post-Berlin states

Finally, we should turn to the question of resource, its availability or lack of it, and therefore its ability or inability to support the African population – another component of Africa’s “over-population” fallacy. Well over 50 per cent of Uganda’s arable land, some of the richest in Africa, remains uncultivated. Were Uganda to expand its current food production significantly, not only would it be completely self-sufficient, but it would be able to feed all the countries contiguous to its territory without difficulty, and GM free too! The overall statistics of the African situation are even more revealing as with regards to the continent’s long-term possibilities. Just about a quarter of the potential arable land of Africa is being cultivated presently (FAO and IIED, “What effect will biofuels have on forest land and poor people’s access to it?”, 2008). Even here, an increasingly high proportion of the cultivated area is assigned to so-called cash-crops (cocoa, coffee, tea, groundnut, sisal, floral cultivation, etc.) for exports at a time when there has been a virtual collapse, across the board, of the price of these crops in international commodity markets. In the past 30 years, the average real price of these African products abroad has been about 20 per cent less than their worth during the 1960s-70s period which was soon after the “restoration of independence”. As for the remaining 75 per cent of Africa’s uncultivated land, this represents 60 per cent of the entire world’s potential (John Endres, “Ready, set, sow”, The Journal of Good Governance Africa, Issue 6, November 2012: 1). The world is aware of the array of strategic minerals such as coltan,** cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, industrial diamonds, iron ore, manganese, phosphates, titanium, uranium, and of course petroleum oil found in virtually all regions across the continent.

Africa remains one of the world’s most wealthy and potentially one of the world’s wealthiest continents. What is not always associated with the profiles of Africa is its vast acreage of rich farmlands with capacity to optimally support the food needs of generations of African peoples indefinitely. In addition, the famous fish industry in Sénégal, Angola, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana for instance, Botswana’s rich cattle farms, west Africa’s yam and plantain belts extending from southern Cameroon to southern Sénégal, the continent’s rich rice production fields, etc., etc., all highlight the potential Africa has for fully providing for all its food needs. Thus, what the current African socioeconomic situation shows is extraordinarily reassuring, provided the acreage devoted to cultivation is expanded and expressly targeted to address Africa’s own internal consumption needs. Land-use directed at agriculture for food output must become the focus of agricultural policy in the new Africa, as opposed to the calamitous waste of “cash-crop” production for export and/or the more recently observed “land-grab” – parcelling away of land to foreign governments and organisations – occurring across the continent (on this, see the excellent work of Emeka Akaezuwa’s “Stop Africa Land Grab” movement – http://www.stopafricalandgrab.com/author/emeka-akaezuwa/ [accessed 14 May 2013]).

It is an inexplicable and inexcusable tragedy that any African child, woman, or man could go without food in the light of the staggering endowment of resources in Africa. Africa constitutes a spacious, rich and arable landmass that can support its population, which is still one of the world’s least densely populated and distributed, into the indefinite future. There is only one condition, though, for the realisation of this goal – Africa must utilise these immense resources for the benefit of its own peoples within newly negotiated, radically decentralised sociopolitical dispensations which must abandon the current murderous “states” or “Berlin-states” as they should be more appropriately categorised (Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: 27, 41, 44, 69, 200). These principalities that dutifully go by the very fanged names of their creators (Nigeria, Niger, Chad, the Sudan, Central Africa Republic… whatever!) are an agglomeration of inchoate, inorganic and alienating  emplacements that have been an asphyxiating trap for swathes of African constituent nations with evidently distinct histories, cultures and aspirations. 

We now no longer require any reminders that the primary existence of these principalities is to destroy or disable as many enterprisingly resourceful and resource-based constituent peoples, nations and publics within the polity that are placed in their genocide march and sights.  Here, the example of the Igbo people of west Africa cannot be overstressed. This is one of the most peaceful and industrious of peoples subjected to the longest-running genocide of the contemporary epoch by the Nigeria state. The Igbo genocide is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. It inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. During the course of 44 months (29 May 1966-12 January 1970) of indescribable barbarity and carnage not seen in Africa since the German-perpetration of the genocide against the Herero people of Namibia in the early 1900s, the composite institutions of the Nigeria state, civilian and military, murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or one-quarter of this nation’s population. To understand the politics of the Igbo genocide and the politics of the “post”-Igbo genocide is to have an invaluable insight into the salient features and constitutive indices of politics across Africa in the past 50 years. Africans elsewhere remained largely silent on the gruesome events in Nigeria but did not foresee the grave consequences of such indifference as subsequent genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, Nuba Mountains, South Kordofan (all three in the Sudan) and Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in other wars in every geographical region of Africa during the period have demonstrated catastrophically. Just as the Nigerian operatives of mass murder appeared to have got away without censure from the rest of Africa, other genocidal and brutal African regimes soon followed in Nigeria’s footpath, murdering a horrifically additional tally of 12 million people in their countries considered “undesirables” or “opponents”. These 12 million murdered in the latter bloodbaths would probably have been saved if Africans had intervened robustly to stop the initial genocide against the Igbo people.

It is abundantly clear that the factors which have contributed to determining the very poor quality of life of Africa’s population presently have to do with the nonuse, partial use, or the gross misuse of the continent’s resources year in, year out. This is thanks to an asphyxiating “Berlin-state” whose strategic resources are used largely to support the Western World and others and an overseer-grouping of local forces which exists solely to police the dire straits of existence that is the lot of the average African. As a result, the broad sectors of African peoples are yet to lead, centrally, the entire process of societal reconstruction and transformation by themselves. Surely, an urgently restructured, culturally-supportive political framework that enhances the quality of life of Africans is really the pressing subject of focus for Africa.

One immediate move that states across the world, especially Britain, the leading arms exporter to Africa, and the rest of the West, Russia and China and others can make to support the ongoing efforts by peoples across Africa to rid themselves of such frighteningly genocidal and dysfunctional states is to ban all arms sales to Africa. This ban must be total and comprehensive. A total and comprehensive arms ban on Africa will radically advance the current quest on the ground by Africans, across the continent, to construct democratic and extensively decentralised new state forms that guarantee and safeguard human rights, equality and freedom for individuals and peoples. Africans have both the vision and the capacity to create alternative states – for them it is an imperative upon which their survival is based.

Forty-seven years and 15 million murders on, Africans finally realise that there cannot be any meaningful advancement without abandoning the post-conquest state, essentially a genocide-state. This state is the bane of African existence and progress. It is in the longer-term interest of the rest of the world, especially in the West, to support African transformations initiated by the peoples rather than the “helmspersons”/“helmsconstituent nations” ostensibly entrenched in the hierarchical architecture that maps the typical continent’s genocide-state.

*Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is visiting professor in graduate programme of constitutional law at the Universidade de Fortaleza, Brazil, and specialist on the state and genocide and wars in Africa. This is a keynote paper he gave to a one-day conference on Africa on Monday 20 May 2013 at the Universidade Estadual do Ceará, Fortaleza. He wishes to thank Professor Mônica Dias Martins and her team for a very successful conference which featured a very engaging and rewarding stretch of discourses among scholars and students from an array of disciplines well into late evening. Obrigado!

**Refined columbite-tantalite, coltan, is critical in the manufacture of a range of small electronic equipment including, particularly, laptop computers and mobile phones; 80 per cent of the world’s reserves of this mineral is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo which is being currently subjected to a genocidal conflict where 5 million people have been murdered since the 1990s.

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