106th birthday of Aimé Césaire

(Born 26 June 1913, Basse-Pointe, Martinique)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

POET, playwright, essayist, cofounder, with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontram Damas, of the “negritude” movement in Paris in the 1930s-1940s; of Igbo descent,***** one of the preeminent intellectuals of African World affirmation in the wake of 500 years of pan-European enslavement of African peoples, conquest and occupation of Africa; author of classics Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 1939 (English: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1956), 

Discours sur le colonialisme, 1950 (English: Discourse on Colonialism, 1953), Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial, 1960 (study on Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Haitian restoration-of-independence revolutionary), Une Saison au Congo, 1966 (English: A Season in the Congo, 1968 – play on life and times of Patrice Lumumba, 1950s/early 1960s’ leader of the restoration-of-independence movement in the Congo, then occupied by Belgium where the king, Leopold II, and the Belgian state, had committed an expansive genocide against constituent African peoples therein between 1878 and 1908 murdering 13 million Africans) and Une Tempête, 1969 (English: A Tempest, 1986 – a play, African peoples-centred rereading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest); The Tragedy of King Christoph (2015) – a play on Henri Christoph, general in Toussaint’s Haitian restoration-of-independence army who later declares himself king in north Haiti and exercises an oppressive rule on the people; teacher of and major influence on Frantz Fanon, fellow Martinican and celebrated freedom scholar and author of The Wretched of the Earth.

(*****Chukwuma Azuonye, “Igbo Names in the Nominal Roll of Amelié, An Early 19th Century Slave Ship from Martinique: Reconstructions, Interpretations and Inferences”, Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series, Paper 8, 1990, p. 1. {Thanks to Chidi Osuagwu for kindly citing this reference in his communication with me, Wednesday 26 June 2019 [HE-E].})

(John Coltrane Septet, “Dahomey dance” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Art Davis, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: A&R Studios, New York, US, 25 May 1961])

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

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

105th birthday of Mbonu Ojike

(Born 5 May 1914, Arundizuogu, Biafra)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

CELEBRATED AFRICAN peoples-centred transformative intellectual, graduate of University of Chicago, arguably the profoundest political economic thinker in the provisional restoration-of-independence government of (British occupied) east region Nigeria, home of the historic Igbo village republican democratic states that had flourished for over a millennium; minister of economic development and planning and architect of the 1947-1966 transformation of this pre-Igbo genocide political economy to Africa’s most dynamic with immense possibilities.

The Ojike Plan had envisaged a 20-year timeframe, beginning in 1954, during which the east region would be transformed into an advanced multifaceted industrial and agricultural economy. Such was the impressive pace of this programme that, by 1964, ten years later, the overall economic performance of the east had not only outstripped the rest of Nigeria but was in fact Africa’s fastest growing economy. The east had the best schools and the first “post-conquest” university system (University of Nsukka) in the country, the best humanpower development in the country across a range of fields including, crucially, engineering, science, medicine, the arts, the middle-range technical cadre, and sports. 

The region also had the most integrated infrastructural development in Nigeria and its manufacturing, distributive and extractive enterprises centred in the Enuugwu-Nkalagu-Emene conurbation to the north, Onicha (commercial capital and home to the future Oshimili stock exchange and index) to the west and Igwe Ocha-Aba-Calabar to the south were clearly the hubs of the making of this African industrial revolution of recent history. 

BUT for the Igbo genocide, launched by Britain, under Harold Wilson’s prime ministership and its Fulani islamist/jihadist north region-led Nigeria client state on 29 May 1966 and continuing as these lines are written, 53 years on, the longest genocide of contemporary history, with the murder of 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of the Igbo population during phases I-III of this crime (29 May 1966-12 January 1970), the east was on course to construct the “Taiwan” or the “China” or the “South Korea” or the “India” in Africa – 20 years before these post 1939-1945 war much-vaunted “economic transformational miracles” of the era emerged...

Mbonu Ojike City of Innovation and Enterprise

THE MAIN thrust of this plan is still valid and should be retrieved from the archives, reworked, and adapted by the ongoing Biafra freedom movement to 21st century priorities and the advantage of new technologies. This phase would appropriately be Ojike Plan II and the Mbonu Ojike City of Innovation and Enterprise, built on the morrow of the restoration of Biafra independence, will offer Biafrans with multiform creative interests and goals, especially start-up entrprenuereship, an enabling environment dedicated solely to work through their ideas and transform this great Land of the Rising Sun.

(John Coltrane Sextet, “Out of this world” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Donald Garrett, clarinet, bass; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live at Penthouse Jazz Club, Seattle, US, 30 September 1965])

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

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

In a stunningly rare exposition, Italy openly reminds fellow EU member state France that its current wealth and prestige lie in the French continuing occupation and expropriation of “francophonie” Africa

 (Luigi Di Maio: ... stunningly rare exposition on France from Italian ally)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

LUIGI DI MAIO, the Italian deputy prime minister, couldn’t be franker in raising the subject of France’s continuing occupation and expropriation of the peoples and states of so-called francophonie Africa. 

In a speech in central Italy last weekend (John Irish and Gavin Jones, “France summons Italian envoy after Di Maio’s comments on Africa”, Reuters, Paris, 21 January 2019), Di Maio pinpoints one of the key empirical embodiments of contemporary France that is derived directly from its Africa conquest: 

If France didn’t have its African colonies, because that’s what they should be called, it would be the 15th largest world economy. Instead, it is among the first, exactly because of what it is doing in Africa … If we have people who are leaving Africa now it’s because some European countries, and France in particular, have never stopped colonizing Africa … I have stopped being a hypocrite talking about the effects of immigration and it’s time to talk about the causes … The EU should sanction all those countries like France that are impoverishing African countries and are causing those people to leave.

(For an expansive essay that focuses on this French occupation, expropriation and immiseration of Africa, see Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “‘Francophonie Africa’ works!”,

https://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/2015/10/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-since-the1960s-there.html)

(John Coltrane Sextet, “Out of this world” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Donald Garrett, clarinet, bass; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live at Penthouse Jazz Club, Seattle, US, 30 September 1965])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why Donald Trump is great for Africa (2018)

(https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Donald-Trump-great-Africa-ebook/dp/B07KFQHXKV/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1542585950&sr=8-1)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

125th birthday of Chancellor Williams

(Born 22 December 1893, Bennettsville, South Carolina, US)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

DISTINGUISHED historian and sociologist, prolific author including the authoritative tome, The Destruction of Black Civilization: The Great Issue of a Race between 4500BC and 2000AD (1974) – It would appear that Chancellor Williams has the Igbo genocide poignantly in mind particularly as he writes the very distressing lines in his illustrious study (see quote from p. 218 below) of Africans trained by conqueror-European World occupation forces in Africa to murder other Africans so ruthlessly… 

In the past 51 years, beginning on 29 May 1966, Fulani islamist/jihadists in British-contrived Nigeria, fully supported in the campaign by an assemblage of African constituent nations such as the Yoruba, Edo, Kanuri, Hausa, Urhobo, Tiv and Nupe especially, have been trained and feverishly equipped militarily by their bature/oyinbo massa British overlords to slaughter 3.1 million Igbo people in Biafra (29 May 1966-12 January 1970, phases I-III) and tens of thousands more subsequently (13 January 1970-present day [22 December 2018], phase IV) in this foundational, most gruesome, and most devastating genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa… 

THE genocide continues unrelentingly and the immanently hate-driven perpetrators wage this crime against humanity on every conceivable contour of Igbo political, social, economic existence…

Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization: The Great Issue of a Race between 4500BC and 2000AD (Chicago: Third World, new edition, 1995), 345pp, pbk, US$12.43/£12.99:

Now the shadows lengthened. The Europeans had also been busily building up and training strong African armies. Africans trained to hate, kill and conquer Africans. Blood of Africans was to sprinkle and further darken the pages of their history … Indeed, Africa was conquered for the Europeans by the Africans [themselves], and thereafter kept under [conquest] control by African police and African soldiers. Very little European blood was ever spilled. (The Destruction of Black Civilization, p. 218)

(John Coltrane Sextet, “Out of this world” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Donald Garrett, clarinet, bass; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live at Penthouse Jazz Club, Seattle, US, 30 September 1965])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why Donald Trump is great for Africa (2018)

(https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Donald-Trump-great-Africa-ebook/dp/B07KFQHXKV/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1542585950&sr=8-1)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Nnamdi Kanu survived the Thursday 14 September 2017 genocidist Nigeria military assault on his parents’ home in Afraraukwu-Ibeku, east Biafra

(Nnamdi Kanu: leader, Indigenous People of Biafra)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

TODAY, Friday 19 October 2018, 401 days after that Fulani-led genocidist Nigeria military savage attack on a loving family residence, Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra,  appears in Jerusalem, Israel, 2,500 miles away from Biafra, solemnly offering prayers at the city’s historic western wall (see video below). The world is now awaiting news of Kanu’s parents, Eze Israel Okwu Kanu and Ugoeze Nnenne Kanu, who were also at home during the 14 September 2017  invasion... Scores of the Kanus’ relatives and friends were murdered during the assault and scores of others are still unaccounted for. 

(1. Nnamdi Kanu: western wall, Jerusalem, Friday 19 October 2018)

(2. Nnamdi Kanu: praying, western wall, Jerusalem, Friday 19 October 2018)

(John Coltrane Sextet, “Out of this world” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone; Donald Garrett, clarinet, bass; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live at Penthouse Jazz Club, Seattle, US, 30 September 1965])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

As the world watches this genocidist state implode...

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

BRITAIN creates a predatory estate it calls Nigeria, a name concocted cavalierly from one of the derivatives of the racist, dehumanising pan-European-crafted “n*****” epithet with edited part of word “area” added on to emphasise the conquered African peoples’ domicility. 

Igbo people

It then employs an equally predatory and expansionist African-based Fulani islamists/jihadists, originally from Futa Djallon highlands in contemporary Guinea-Conakry, 1500 miles to the northwest, to murder indigenous uncompromisingly republican Igbo people at will in this longest and most devastating genocide of contemporary history – with 3.1 million Igbo murdered, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, and tens of thousands of additional Igbo murdered, 13 January 1970-present day... 

Just three days ago, Friday 17 August 2018, a Nigeria genocidist ocupation police unit in Owere, east Biafra, opened fire at 2000 Igbo women engaged in a peaceful freedom march through the Owere city centre. Details of casualties and possible fatalities suffered by the women are still unknown but the génocidaires have detained scores of survivors of this shooting.

IT should be noted that, in shooting at Igbo women freedom marchers last Friday, the Nigerians have studiously borrowed a leaf  out of the book of their co-genocidist British conqueror state whose own occupation forces had, in November-December 1929, fired on and murdered 55 Igbo women freedom marchers in this same east Biafra region, opposed to the British conquest
(https://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/2017/11/blog-post_23.html). 

Freedom

For the Igbo, the resistance and overcoming from Nigeria are undoubtedly existential. Clearly, the Igbo are the authors of their freedom which, thankfully, 52 years later, is on the cards. 

IGBO FREEDOM from this haematophagous monster, presently in its death throes, is the great African story of the 21st century.

(John Coltrane Sextet, “Out of this world” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone; Donald Garrett, clarinet, bass; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live at Penthouse Jazz Club, Seattle, US, 30 September 1965])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Biafra freedom movement projects!

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

THE Biafra freedom movement continues to challenge and override the cardinal tenets that define comparable liberatory trajectories of contemporary history. It has remained fiercely peaceful and resilient despite the scorched-earth savagery of the Fulani islamist/jihadist-led Nigeria genocidist military and its Boko Haram and Fulani militia adjuncts – the genocidists have murdered 3000 Igbo since October 2015 with scant condemnation from the rest of the world including co-genocidist perpetrator Britain.

Usually, a liberation movement “returns home” on the morrow of victory! No, not the Biafra freedom movement which is already emplaced throughout Biafra, as the world observes, setting up structures and processes of restoration-of-independence before formal restoration... 

SCHOLARS and students of freedom are gasping to catch up with learning what new breaks or departures this movement is teaching the rest of the world on how to deal with gruesome anti-human regimes especially the genocidist caste à la Nigériana which now teetering on imploding, overwhelmed by the cadence of that very familiar freedom orchestration scored by the resilient Biafrans.

(John Coltrane Sextet, “Out of this world” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Donald Garrett, clarinet, bass; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live at Penthouse Jazz Club, Seattle, US, 30 September 1965])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe 

105th birthday of Aimé Césaire

(Born 26 June 1913, Basse-Pointe, Martinique)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

POET, playwright, essayist, cofounder, with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontram Damas, of the “negritude” movement in Paris in the 1930s-1940s; one of the preeminent intellectuals of African World affirmation in the wake of 500 years of pan-European enslavement of African peoples, conquest and occupation of Africa; author of classics Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 1939 (English: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1956), 

Discours sur le colonialisme, 1950 (English: Discourse on Colonialism, 1953), Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial, 1960 (study on Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Haitian restoration-of-independence revolutionary), Une Saison au Congo, 1966 (English: A Season in the Congo, 1968 – play on life and times of Patrice Lumumba, 1950s/early 1960s’ leader of the restoration-of-independence movement in the Congo, then occupied by Belgium where the king, Leopold II, and the Belgian state, had committed an expansive genocide against constituent African peoples therein between 1878 and 1908 murdering 13 million Africans) and Une Tempête, 1969 (English: A Tempest, 1986 – a play, African peoples-centred rereading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest); The Tragedy of King Christoph (2015) – a play on Henri Christoph, general in Toussaint’s Haitian restoration-of-independence army who later declares himself king in north Haiti and exercises an oppressive rule on the people; teacher of and major influence on Frantz Fanon, fellow Martinican and celebrated freedom scholar and author of The Wretched of the Earth.

(John Coltrane Septet, “Dahomey dance” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Art Davis, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: A&R Studios, New York, US, 25 May 1961])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

240 days ... Genocidist Nigeria: Where is Nnamdi Kanu? Where are Nnamdi Kanu’s parents, Eze Israel Okwu Kanu and Ugoeze Nnenne Kanu?

(Nnamdi Kanu and his loving parents)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

TODAY marks eight months or 240 days since the 14 September 2017 genocidist Nigeria military, led by Hausa-Fulani/islamist jihadists under Muhammadu Buhari, stormed the home of Nnamdi Kanu’s parents at Afaraukwu-Ibeku, eastcentral Biafra. Consequently, the whereabouts of Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (constituted integrally in the Biafra freedom movement), and his parents, remain unknown. Scores of the Kanus’ relatives and friends were murdered during the assault and scores of others are still unaccounted for. 

Three thousand Igbo people have been murdered across Biafra since Muhammadu Buhari, who in March 2015 had been imposed on as Nigeria’s head of regime by ex-US President Barack Hussein Obama and ex-British Prime Minister David Cameron in March 2015, embarked on this bloodiest track of phase-IV of the Igbo genocide (13 January 1970-present day) in November 2015.

GENOCIDIST Nigeria, this haematophagous monster, this most beastly and serially kakistocratic and notoriously most vividly anti-African peoples state ever emplaced in Africa, surely knows that it will account for the safety of Nnamdi Kanu and his parents and take full responsibility for the consequences of that savage raid on a family home.

(John Coltrane Sextet, “Spiritual” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone and soprano saxophone; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Garvin Bushell, contrabassoon; McCoy Tyner, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live, at The Village Vanguard, New York, US, 5 November 1961])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

For the genocidist Nigeria regime which spends most of its time murdering Igbo people in Biafra, abducting/detaining their creative entrepreneurs and smashing up their economy, it isn’t really a surprise that it lacks the capability to provide a basic, efficient petrol/gas delivery service to the peoples domiciled in its territory (see pictures below)

(predictable scenes that highlight the gross indolence and incompetence of regimes in genocidist Nigeria, December 2017)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

EVEN AT the apogee of the Igbo genocide in Biafra (phase-III) as the Hausa-Fulani/islamist-led Nigerian gruesome genocidists slaughtered to the hilt (August-December 1969), the Biafrans, under a comprehensive land, aerial and naval siege unprecedented in Africa, refined their petroleum oil ingeniously. There were never such distressing queues in Biafra as evident in the pictures (above) in Nigeria, in December 2017, 48 years later! Biafrans definitely couldn’t have had such queues for petrol during the genocide as they would have constituted a set target for the squadrons of Egyptian pilots which the génocidaires had rented to carpet bomb Biafran population centres, another pivotal feature of the savagery in vogue.

BIAFRA is on its way back to teach basic lessons on competence, overcoming challenges, exercising transformative initiatives…

(John Coltrane Sextet, “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost”, part-I of the five-part suite Meditations [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, percussion, Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone, tambourine, bells; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; Rashied Ali, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 23 November 1965])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Enduring shadows cast across Africa by the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-present day

(Three shadows project insistently across the African landscape, indelible reminder to the peoples of the world of the 3.1 million Igbo children, women and men, one-quarter this nation’s population, which dual-genocidist states Nigeria and Britain murdered during the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 – the foundational genocide of post-{European}conquest Africa [illustration from paintings on the rock by San people, southern Africa, 1500-3000 years ago])

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

TO UNDERSTAND the politics of the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-present day, is to have an invaluable insight into the salient features and constitutive indices of politics across Africa in the past 50 years. 

Africans elsewhere, including those on the continent and in the diaspora, particularly in the Americas and Europe, 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 (latter three in the Sudan) and Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in other wars and conflicts in every geographical region of Africa during the epoch have demonstrated catastrophically, resulting in the additional murder of 12 million Africans:  Liberia, Mali, Libya, Egypt, Côte d’Ivoire, Algeria, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, southern Guinea, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo (5 million murdered here since mid-1990s), Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Central African Republic, Nigeria – where the dual-genocidists have continued their campaign of the Igbo genocide most unrelentingly, most ruthlessly, as they have now have the Boko Haram terrorist organisation as additional asset in that ghastly assemblage of annihilative forces of theirs now 48 years old. The haunting killing fields have indeed stretched, almost inexorably, from Igboland, Biafra, to the rest of Africa…

Igbo freedom

The Igbo will be free, their independence fully restored. There is no question about it. Neither Britain nor Nigeria can prevent this outcome, despite these 48 years of pulverising assault on Igbo people. Nigeria, for all intents and purposes, collapsed into inconsequence, irretrievably so, when it embarked on the Igbo genocide during that mid-morning of Sunday 29 May 1966. As for Britain, a British prime minister will, much sooner than most are prepared to contemplate presently, inevitably admit to an eagerly awaiting world audience that Britain has been living a lie as some “civilised” country since 29 May 1966. This is the same time frame of the past 48 years it has spent carrying out the gruesome genocide to destroy Igbo people, one of Africa’s most talented and enterprising peoples, which is its formulated pathway to control the lives and fortunes of African peoples indefinitely. 

GENOCIDE is a crime against humanity and both Britain and Nigeria surely know the consequences of their execution of the Igbo genocide.

(John Coltrane Sextet, “Out of this world” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Donald Garrett, clarinet, bass; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live at Penthouse Jazz Club, Seattle, US, 30 September 1965])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of Readings from Reading: Essays on African History, Genocide, Literature (2011)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe