Rethinking Africa is a forward looking blog dedicated to the exchange of innovative thinking on issues affecting the advancement of African peoples wherever they are. We provide rigorous and insightful analyses on the issues affecting Africans and their vision of the world.
Showing posts with label Louis Armstrong. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Louis Armstrong. Show all posts
MASTERLY trumpeter, composer and public intellectual whose 1958 composition, the effervescent “Egwu jazz bu egwu Igbo” (“Jazz is Igbo music”), leads him to research Igbo contribution to the development of jazz whilst studying in Germany and the United States, and receives the highest accolade of his career when none other than Satchmo himself, Louis Armstrong, visiting Lagos, Nigeria, in 1961, and listening to Onyia play at Surulere stadium, inquires in that unmistakeably popsian voice, “Who is that hip cat?
(Zeal Onyia and band play “Money trouble” and “Lumumba” – latter composition is in memory of Patrice Lumumba, leader of the the Congolese restoration-of-independence movement and prime minister, who had been brutally murdered on 17 January 1961 by an amalgam of the forces of the notorious pro-Belgian Congolese putschist Mobutu Sese Seko, a brigade of Belgian special forces and operatives of other West espionage services [recording details of this performance, including, especially, full band personnel, are unknown except that it was sometime in 1961].)
DISTINGUISHED electrical engineer Massachusetts Institute
of Technology-trained scientist and British Royal Air Force pilot, okee nwoke mmadu – plays key role
in expanded electrification programme in Igwe Ocha and elsewhere in Biafra, and
Nigeria, in the early 1950s on return from the United States; academic:particularly meritorious
career at both Kumasi College of Technology School of Engineering (now
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology), Ghana (1955-1958)
and RAF Halton School of Technical Training, England where he isflying instructor(1959-1964);air force pilot: Royal Air Force (commissioned flying
officer, July 1959; becomes flight lieutenant, 1962), pioneer air force pilot
major and commander, Nigeria air force, September 1964
(Louis Armstrong, the incomparable maestro, here sings Bob Thiele and George David Weiss’ composition, “What a wonderful world”)
Masterly trumpeter, composer and public intellectual whose 1958 composition, the effervescent “Egwu jazz bu egwu Igbo” (“Jazz is Igbo music”), leads him to research Igbo contribution to the development of jazz, African American classical music, in Germany and the United States, and receives the highest accolade of his career when none other than Satchmo himself, Louis Armstrong, visiting Lagos, Nigeria, in 1961, and listening to Onyia play at Surulere stadium, inquires in that unmistakeably popsian voice, “Who is that hip cat?”
(Zeal Onyia and band play “Money trouble” and “Lumumba” – latter composition is in memory of Patrice Lumumba, leader of the the Congolese restoration-of-independence movement and prime minister, who had been brutally murdered on 17 January 1961 by an amalgam of the forces of the notorious pro-Belgian Congolese putschist Mobutu Sese Seko, a brigade of Belgian special forces and operatives of other West espionage services [recording details of this performance, including, especially, full band personnel, are unknown except that it was sometime in 1961. Could anyone with more information on this recording please contact me and any updates will be duly acknowledged. Thank you, HE-E])
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is specialist on the state and on genocide & wars in Africa in the post-1966 epoch – beginning with the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-present day, the foundational and most gruesome genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population were murdered by Nigeria and its allies, principally Britain. Africa and the rest of the world largely stood by and watched as the perpetrators enacted this horror most ruthlessly. The world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide. This genocide inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. During the period, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/DRCongo (variously, since the late 1990s) and Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004) and in other wars in Africa. African peoples have, presently, no other choice but exit/dismantle the extant genocide-state (the bane of their existence & progress) & construct own nation-centred states that serve their interests. He is author of several books & papers on the subject and his new book is entitled The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019).
