Year 51 – Biafra before Brexit

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Uncovering the tracks

ON 6 JULY 1967, Nigeria expands the territorial range of its execution of the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, which it launched 14 months earlier, 29 May 1966, in different parts of Nigeria but especially in the north region, murdering 100,000 Igbo people (phases I&II). Now, it embarks on a land, air  and sea-borne invasion of Biafra, the Igbo homeland, with the British government, under the leadership of Harold Wilson, playing the central role in the campaign (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-conquerors-concord-in.html).  Indeed without British support, pointedly if not ironically 51 years before Brexit, the Igbo genocide, this crime against humanity, would probably not have occurred. 

This phase-III of the genocide stretches for 30 months during which 3 million Igbo are murdered. Harold Wilson coordinates the campaign from his offices and home at 10 Downing Street London, 3150 miles away from Biafra, facilitated on the ground in client-state Nigeria by Francis Cumming-Bruce, the British chief representative and proconsul. Cumming-Bruce liases expansively with key Nigerian genocidists in charge of the crime, right from the outset in May 1966, as well as the coterie of Hausa-Fulani/islamist north region emirs, politicians and other leading public figures who Britain had arbitrarily handed over supreme overseeing political authority in October 1960 to “manage” Nigeria on London’s behalf ad infinitum as part of a bogus independence settlement. 

These north region political forces had rigorously opposed the restoration of African independence which the Igbo had led for 30 years, beginning in the 1930s (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-conquerors-concord-in.html). For the British, the Igbo genocide is “punishment” for the Igbo for daring to spearhead the campaign to terminate the control of its Nigeria “rich-prized land”.  At the apogee of the Igbo slaughtering in 1968, Wilson, himself, insists that he “would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” the Nigerian génocidaires 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). In his memoirs published in 1971, Wilson reveals that the Nigerian military, equipped zealously by Britain, expended more small arms ammunition in its campaign to achieve its annihilative goal in Biafra than the amount used by the British armed forces  “during the whole” of  the Second World War (Harold Wilson, Labour Government, 1964-1970: A Personal Record,

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971: 630, added emphasis). Britain’s Lagos (Nigeria) diplomatic mission military advisor Robert Scott’s acknowledgement (at the height of the genocide, mid 1968- January 1970) that as the Nigerian genocidists unleashed their campaigns across Igbo cities, towns and villages, they were the “best defoliant agent known” (Sunday Telegraph, London, 11 January 1970) is equally gravely harrowing. 

TO COMPLEMENT this stupendous British military investment in the mass murder of Igbo people, the BBC world service, that state broadcaster funded by the British foreign office, assumes the chief publicity role to “rationalise” the genocide to the world’s public. The BBC effectively becomes the external broadcasting corporation of the on-the-ground Nigerian prosecuting genocidists, displacing the rambling and ramshackle Voice of Nigeria, spewing out hate, racist and fraudulent features and analyses to discredit the Biafra freedom movement decades before the world’s attention is drawn to the realisation that fake news programming and broadcasts are an embodiment in the practices of quite a few news organisations (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/bbc-nationalists-or-secessionists.html).

Definitive goal

Right from the outset as its invasion of Biafra is launched, genocidist Nigeria establishes on the ground and employs rape and abduction of Igbo girls and women and the public execution of Igbo boys and men as pivotal instruments in waging the campaign. Its ghoulish anthem of the genocide, broadcast uninterruptedly on state-owned Kaduna radio (shortwave transmission) and television and with editorial comments on the theme, regularly published in both state-owned New Nigerian (daily) newspaper and (Hausa) weekly Gaskiya Ta fi Kwabo during the period, has these lyrics in Hausa:

Mu je mu kashe nyamiri
Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su
Mu chi mata su da yan mata su
Mu kwashe kaya su 
(English translation: Let’s go murder the damned Igbo/Murder their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property)

This genocidist intent, particularly its empirically earmarked specifics, is unequivocally explicit and its overarching method sets the precedent of the savagery and barbarity that are the hallmarks of the genocide and subsequent genocides in Africa as Rwanda (1994), Darfur/Nuba Mountains/Blue Nile/South Kordofan (the Sudan, variously since 2004), and Democratic Republic of the Congo (since the late 1990s) attest.

AT THE HEIGHT of the Igbo genocide, beginning from the second-half of 1968 when thousands of Igbo children and older citizens die daily from starvation, one of the genocidist’s publicly-stated “weapons” in the prosecution of the crime as articulated by chief “theorist” Obafemi Awolowo himself, British Prime Minister Wilson as already stated, informs Clyde Ferguson (United States state department special coordinator for relief to Biafra) that he, Harold Wilson, “would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” the Nigerian génocidaires to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide. Nigeria in fact ends up murdering 3 million Igbo – 2 and one-half million more than Wilson’s grim 500,000 Igbo-death wish. 

(Harold Wilson: “would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took...”)

Furthermore, it is indeed a telling irony, given British support for Nigeria and the génocidaires’ strategy of rape and abduction of Igbo womanhood in Biafra, that it is in London, in June 2014, forty-seven years later, that the first international conference on “rape and sexual violence” in war, with emphasis on Africa (and particular focus on the Democratic Republic of the Congo), is hosted by none other than the British government in which foreign secretary of state William Hague describes rape as “‘one of the great mass crimes’ of modern times” (BBC News, 10 June 2014).

(William Hague ... 47 years later:  rape is “‘one of the great mass crimes’ of modern times”)

IN BIAFRA, beginning 6 July 1967, every Igbo town or village overrun by the Nigerian génocidaires becomes  a gruesome milestone in an inexorable march of rape, death, and destruction: Obollo Afo ... Obollo Eke ... Enuugwu-Ezike ... Opi ... Ukehe … Nkalagu ... Owgwu ... Abakaleke … Eha Amuufu ... Nsukka ... Enuugwu ... Agbaani ... Asaba ... Ogwashi-Ukwu ... Isele-Ukwu ... Onicha-Ugbo …Agbo …Umunede ... Onicha ... Nkpo …Oka ... Aba ... Udi ... Ehuugbo ...  Ehuugbo Road ... Okigwe ... Umuahia ... Owere ...Abagana ... Igwe Ocha ... Ahaoda ... Obiigbo ... Azumini ... Umu Ubani/Bonny ... Igwe Nga/Opobo ... Ugwuta ... Amasiri ... Akaeze ... Uzuakoli ... 

Clearly invoking Nazi-style “search through population-round off-isolate-and-destroy”-tactics in overrun non-Igbo towns and cities such as Calabar, Oron, Ikot Ekpene, Uyo, Ogoja, Obubara, Obudu, Nkarasi and Eket, the genocidists meticulously profile Igbo nationals. Thousands of such profiled Igbo are shot at sight or marched off and later executed at city limits, forest firing-range sites, river banks, or at specifically dedicated genocidist-occupied barrack venues…

Incubation & manifestation

As contemporary Nigeria demonstrates, most graphically, as these lines are written, grounded genocidist advocates/“theorists”/operatives especially Obafemi Awolowo, Tony Enaharo, Hassan Katsina, Alison Ayida, Olusegun Obasanjo, Gbadomosi King, Umaru Dikko, Maitama Sule, Benjamin Adekunle, Muhammadu Buhari, Yakubu Gowon, Murtala Muhammed, Yakubu Danjuma, Ibrahim Haruna and Ibrahim Taiwo are perhaps just coming to terms with the realisation that their thoughts and deeds have incubated within their very own and become hauntingly cyclical across generations – DNA signature. This is precisely why survivors from these purveyors of state-directed mass slaughter, such as the Igbo, for example, must keep well away from the latter’s tent. Boko Haram insurgents now ravaging swathes of territory across the north, northeast and northcentral and elsewhere in Nigeria are remarching along the paths first trodden by their parents/grandparents/greatgrandparents/Nigériãna-génocidaires, beginning 29 May 1966, 51 years ago to the day.

As for Nigeria’s genocide-prosecuting ally Britain, again 51 years to the day, it has, alas, caught up with Biafra, via Brexit, to engage, critically, with exercising its own right to self-determination – in this instance,  to determine whether or not it wishes to be part of the supranational state called the European Union. Unlike the Biafrans, who, 51 years ago, exercised this same right but in staggeringly existential circumstances, Britain hasn’t sought Brexit from the European Union because it has been threatened or subjected to the crime of genocide by the latter nor indeed by any individual member state of the union such as Germany, Italy or France. On the contrary. Similarly, the 5 million constituent Scottish people in Britain do not, 51 years after Biafra, currently seek to exercise their right to self-determination from Britain because they have been threatened or subjected to the crime of genocide by Britain. Not at all. 

Just as the Biafrans, 51 years ago, the underlying awareness by the British, as a whole, collectively, or the Scots, separately, is that this right to self-determination is inalienable and its exercise by any people across the world is not dependent  on prevailing circumstance(s).

Biafra flag on the ascent

So, despite the the unflinching 51 years of British support for the prosecution of the Igbo genocide, despite the sheer savagery of the Nigeria genocidist regime’s military murder of 3.1 million Igbo people or 25 per cent of the Igbo population during phases I-III of the genocide (29 May 1966-12 January 1970) and tens of thousands of additional Igbo during phase-IV (since 13 January 1970 and continuing)  including the military/Boko Haram/Fulani militia murders of 2000 Igbo people carried out across Biafra since October 2015 under the Muhammadu Buhari regime, despite the unconscionable support of the Igbo genocide by Barack Hussein Obama, the first African American president in 233 years of the US republic (https://www.pambazuka.org/human-security/obama-must-tell-world-why-he-supported-igbo-genocide), the Igbo have emerged even more focused, steadfast, resilient. They have converted their strategic mission of Biafra independence restoration to a tactical tool which they employ almost effortlessly here and there with exponential impact locally and internationally. This is extraordinary. The Biafra Sun is on the ascent. Any referendum conducted in Biafra presently on the restoration-of-independence for this population of 50 million will result in a high 90 per cent score. Biafrans now dictate the terms of this long drawn-out journey. Biafrans are redefining the tenor of the march for freedom in Africa. They are reshaping African history in this great epoch of our time.

And the freedom movement has done it, in these past 20 months, it must be stressed, without firing a single shot – either in defence or offence.

(Andrew Hill Sextet, “Dedication” [personnel: Hill, piano; Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone; Richard Davis, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 21 March 1964])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

France: Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron advance to second and final round of presidential poll. There isn’t a more opportune time for African peoples to embark on an Africa “francophonie”-exit

 (Marine Le Pen, front national)

(Emmanuel Macron, en marche!)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe 

(Charles de Gaulle, [Brazzaville, 1944]: “Self-government [restoration-of-African-independence] must be rejected – even in the more distant future”)

(François Mitterand [Paris, 1998]: “Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century”)

(Jacques Chirac: [Paris, 2008] “[W]ithout Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third [world] power”)

(Jacques Godfrain, head of French foreign ministry: [Paris, 1998] “A little country, with a small amount of strength, we can move a planet because [of our] … relations with 15 or 20 African countries”)

For the first time since the 1958 founding of the French 5th republic by Charles de Gaulle, two supposedly outside politicians not from the alternate “right” (spectrum of Gaullist republicans) and “left” (socialists) parties of the country’s political establishment have won the stipulated first round of the French presidential election. Marine Le Pen of the front national and Emmanuel Macron of the en marche! (not totally an “outsider”, having been economy minister in the outgoing, unpopular Hollande government, quitting in August 2016 to form his so-called centrist movement) will now go on to contest for the decisive second round in a fortnight.

Tenor

Despite the tenor of the epigraphs (above) that illustrate, definitively, the role of Africa in France and French life, Africa hardly features as a substantive subject in French elections, not least yesterday’s. Apart from the course and consequences of non-EU immigration in the country and tangentially islamist terrorism which is viewed more as one in a range of manifestations of the aftermath of its history with the Middle East/islamist world, French politicians, irrespective of ideological/political leanings do not find France’s relationship with Africa any contentious. Whatever may be differences in the “vision” of the future of France between Le Pen and Marcon, for instance, in the wake of the tumultuous “anti”-establishment aftermath of yesterday’s poll, both accept the salient formulations encapsulated in each of the epigraphs on Africa and France, beginning with the founder of their 5th republic, a right-wing politician, and including that of the respected socialist Mitterrand. 

Equally, the duo Nicholas Sarkozy (“right”) and François Hollande (“left”) illustrate this trend. Even though Sarkozy belongs to the so-called establishment right, his thinking on Africa (see, for instance, in the link below, his infamous Dakar, Sénégal, address to students, academics, state officials, and specially invited members of the public at the Cheikh Anta Diop University, 2007) is more gratuitously racist and dehumanising than anything Le Pen or indeed Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father, founder of front national, both members of the “non-establishment right”, have said or written on this very subject.

WHAT IS PRECISELY at stake here, for the French state, is that incorporated in the provisions of the 1958 5th republic conceptualisation, following the humiliating defeat and collapse of its “French Indo-China” in 1954, its agelong French-occupied African states and peoples, a total of 22 countries, become effectively la terres richesse – wealthlands, to serve France and the French in perpetuity.

Plaque

This is why the French have such a supercilious antagonism to any conceivable notion of African restoration-of-independence and sovereignty (“Francophonie Africa works!”,
http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-since-the1960s-there.html). This is the background to Gary Busch’s excellent study in which these countries which France still controls, occupies, calls “francophonie”,  “deposit the equivalent of 85% of their annual reserves in [dedicated Paris] accounts as a matter of post-[conquest] agreements and have never been given an accounting on how much the French are holding on their behalf, in what these funds been invested, and what profit or loss there have been” (see link above).

This is why the French military has invaded this African enclave 53 times since 1960 (see link above). Such invasions provide the French the opportunity to directly manipulate local political trends in line with their strategic objectives, install new client regimes, if need be, and expand the parameters of expropriation of critical resources even further as unabashedly vocalised by many a sitting president in Paris wishes. For the French president and policy to “francophonie” Africa, from de Gaulle in 1958 to Hollande in 2017, all members of the French establishment, the operationaling plaque for action in the Elysée palace has been: invade, intimidate, manipulate, install, antagonise, ingratiate, indemnify, expropriate, invade, intimidate...

THIS PLAQUE awaits either Le Pen or Macron, “non-members of the French establishment”, to implement as usual as it has been in the past 59 years, irrespective of which of them wins the 7 May second election presidential poll. Except, of course, African peoples in the 22 states bring this staggering expropriation and indescribable servitude to a screeching halt.

“Francophonie”-exit: freedom

The first move of the Africa “francophonie”-exit from this debilitating conundrum couldn’t be more predictable: do not transfer your hard-earned revenues, the “85 per cent”, not one euro, to that dedicated Paris bank account. This transfer must stop at once, now. One mustn’t ever be a party to their own subjugation. The African publics in Bujumbura, Yamoussoukro, Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou, Ndjamena, Buea, Douala, Brazzaville, Kinshasa, St Louis, Bangui, Lome, Younde, Cotonou, Abidjan, Touba... should at once embark on consultations with their varying state officials to work out the parameters of implementing this great freedom movement and other interlocking features in each and every space of this occupied hemisphere. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” must surely be for all…

(Andrew Hill Sextet, “Refuge” [personnel: Hill, piano; Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone; Richard Davis, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 21 March 1964])

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No German arms to genocidist Nigeria

(Angela Merkel: … German chancellor)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Muhammadu Buhari, head of the genocidist Nigeria regime, embarks on a 3-day “state” visit to Germany today. According to a regime spokesperson, “cooperation on security”, a euphemism for possible German arms exports/transfers to Nigeria, will be one of the subjects of Buhari’s discussion with German officials. Indeed, Markus Elderer of the German foreign ministry had been quoted in the Lagos (Nigeria) Vanguard (7 June 2016) that Nigeria had asked for German weapons for “security challenges” especially in its northcentral/northeast region, epicentre of the islamist Boko Haram insurgency.

Igbo genocide

But as I have argued, variously, Buhari is not really at war with Boko Haram not to mention this organisation’s other ruthless cousin, Fulani militia. On the contrary, Buhari is an integral component of Boko Haram/Fulani militants. Buhari’s war, since his March 2015 imposition as head of Nigeria regime by US President Obama and ex-British Prime Minister Cameron, is to the south of Nigeria – in Biafra, occupied by Nigeria since 13 January 1970.

Buhari has continued the Nigeria state genocide against the Igbo people, fully supported by Britain, which he, himself, as a lieutenant then in the genocidist army has been an active participant right from launch date, 29 May 1966. 3.1 million Igbo people were murdered in the three phases of the genocide prior to 13 January 1970. Hundreds of thousands have been murdered subsequently including those murdered since Buhari’s current position in power, especially beginning October 2015 and has continued unabated.

(Ursula von der Leyen: … German defence minister)

Any German weapons sold/transferred to Nigeria presently, even a bullet, pistol or grenade, are more likely to be deployed to murder Biafrans. This will amount clearly to German complicity in the Igbo genocide, this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. Federal Germany, it must be recalled, in commendation, was one of the first countries which placed a comprehensive arms embargo on Nigeria during the May 1966- January 1970 phases I-III of the genocide unlike its “other half”, the GDR (East Germany), which ignominiously supported the genocide, particularly in its training and reequipping of squadrons of loaned Egyptian air force pilots flying Soviet MiGs who specialised in the carpet bombing of Biafran cities and towns and villages.

What relationship?

Germany started its direct “relationship” with Africa in the early years of the first decade of the last century quite abominably with its organised genocides against the following African peoples in the southwest region of the continent: beginning in 1904 and through to 1907, the German military, operating in the region, murdered 65,000 out of 80,000 Herero people or 80 per cent of the total Herero population wiped out; beginning in 1904 and through to 1907, the German military, operating in the same region, murdered 10,000 Nama people or 50 per cent of the Nama population destroyed. Thirty years later, the German-state would resume this southwest Africa genocidist antecedent 5000 miles away in the heart of Europe, its continental homeland, as it embarked on the gruesome genocide of Jewish people, murdering 6 million of them by 1945.

Given its catastrophic history in the 20th century, it is hopefully inconceivable that Germany would wish to “reengage” with Africa in this second decade of a new century, this time in southwestcentral Africa, by intervening to send weapons to Nigeria to enable the latter intensify its campaign of savagery in the ongoing Igbo genocide, a genocide in which Nigeria and Britain murdered 25 per cent of the Igbo population between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970.

(Andrew Hill Sextet, “Dedication” [personnel: Hill, piano; Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone;  Richard Davis, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 21 March 1964]) 

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Igbo genocide: Asaba, 7 October 1967

Today, Wednesday 7 October 2015, is the 48th anniversary of the mass execution of 700 Igbo male, boys and men, in Asaba (twin Oshimili River port of Biafra) by genocidist Nigeria military brigade commanded by Murtala Muhammed and Ibrahim Haruna and Ibrahim Taiwo. This was during phase-III of the Igbo genocide which Nigeria launched on 6 July 1967. 

Emma Okocha’s Blood on the Niger (TriAtlantic Books, 2006), a compulsory reference in the study of the Igbo genocide, meticulously catalogues the savagery and aftermath of this massacre. Okocha, who lost most of his family during the slaughter, survived the execution as a 4-year-old.

(Emma Okocha: onye amuma ndi Igbo)

Hundreds of other Igbo boys and men were also slaughtered by the Muhammed-Haruna-Taiwo brigade in several other towns and villages in this Anioma region of Biafra, west of the Oshimili, as  Okafor Udoka has shown (Okafor Udoka, “Lest we forget the genocide of Asaba”, Skytrend News, 6 October 2014). Ifeanyi Uriah, now 61, another survivor of the Asaba execution, recalls, in an interview with Udoka, the haunting memory of 7 October 1967:

I cannot tell this story without tears in my eyes … They [genocidist brigade] ordered everyone to come out to the [Asaba] town square … They were honest with us. They told us they were going to kill us. They took us to the mounted machine guns. Then it dawned on us that it was true. I was standing with my older brother at the edge of the crowd. He was holding my hand. He had always taken care of me. We shared the same bed. He was the first to be dragged away by the soldiers. He let go of my hand and pushed me into the crowd. He was shot in the back. I could see the blood gushing from his back. He was the first victim of the massacre. Then all hell let loose. I lost count of time. To this day, I live with the smell of the blood of my brethren that night. Even the heavens wept for the victims of this holocaust. Finally the bullets stopped (Udoka: 2014).

Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or one-quarter of this nation’s population during the three phases of the genocide – 29 May 1966-12 January 1970. This genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. 

The world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide. 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.

(Andrew Hill Sextet, “Dedication” [personnel: Hill, piano; Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone; Richard Davis, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studios, Englewoods Cliff, NJ, US, 21 March 1964])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe