Mmuo Biafra strikes! As the British Labour party fractures over the antisemitism/racism crisis of its leader Jeremy Corbyn with this morning’s dramatic resignation from the party of seven influential members of parliament (Lucina Berger, Chuka Umunna, Ann Coffey, Mike Gapes, Angela Smith, Chris Leslie, Gavin Shuker), a reminder that this affliction in the party started half a century ago – 53 years ago to be exact, when the then Labour leader and prime minister, Harold Wilson, centrally directed the prosecution of the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)occupation Africa, with Britain’s client-state Nigeria … More resignations are expected from the party as this crisis worsens

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

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

“Diminution-of-African life”

AT the apogee of phase-III of this genocide, summer 1968-autumn 1969, 23 years after the horrendous Jewish genocide in east and central Europe carried out by Germany, Harold Wilson informed Clyde Ferguson (United States state department special coordinator for relief to Biafra), on record, 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 (Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, 1977: 122). Wilson pursued his genocide drive against the Igbo, steeped in that overarching ideological rubric of the expressed “diminution-of-African life” that constitutes the engaging, subjugating template of 400 years of pan-European enslavement of the African humanity in the Americas and elsewhere, beginning in the 15th century, and Europe’s consequent occupation of the African homeland itself (see, for instance, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, African Literature in Defence of History: An essay on Chinua Achebe, 2001: 1-54).

Wilson’s Igbo death-wish tally of 500, 000 represented 4.2 per cent of the Igbo population at the time. The prime minister’s on the ground African executioners led by Fulani islamist/jihadists, fulsomely obliged their “massa” Wilson, murdering 3.1 million Igbo by 12 January 1970 – 2.6 million more Igbo than the Labour leader’s slaughtering target or 25 per cent of the Igbo population. 

WILSON would later acknowledge the extent of the British role in the sheer savagery of the Igbo genocide. In his memoirs, he noted that the Nigeria genocidist military, equipped zealously by Britain, expended more small arms ammunition in its campaign to achieve its annhilative mission 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, 1971: 630, added emphasis). Robert Scott, military advisor in the British diplomatic mission in Nigeria then couldn’t agree more with Wilson on the subject. Scott stated that as Nigerian genocidist military forces unleashed their attacks on Biafran cities, towns and villages, they are the “best defoliant agent known” (Daily Telegraph, London, 11 January 1970). Chillingly dreadful...

(Jeremy Corbyn: current Labour party leader)

Intelligible
SEEN AGAINST this background of Harold Wilson’s repugnant involvement in the Igbo genocide, the very trenchant charge of antisemitism and racism that current Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn has had from some of his colleagues and other prominent persons in Britain, including, especially, those seven members of the party who have just quit, becomes hugely intelligible...

(The seven members of parliament who made their exit from the British Labour party today: [l-r] Chris Leslie, Mike Gapes, Luciana Berger, Ann Coffey, Chuka Umunna*****, Angela Smith, Gavin Shuker) (pic and graphics: Daily Mail, London, Monday 18 February 2019)

SNIPPETS of comments made by two of the seven members of the Labour party during the London press conference today announcing their exit from the party:

Luciana Berger:  “I am embarrassed and ashamed to remain in the party … [the Labour party] is “institutionally anti-Semitic … I cannot remain in the party that I have today come to the sickening conclusion is anti-Semitic … I am leaving behind a culture of bullying, bigotry and intimidation”.

Mike Gapes: “I am sickened that the Labour Party is now a racist, anti-Semitic party”.

*****It is immensely significant to note that Chuka Umunna, one of these now seven ex-Labour party members of the British parliament, is Igbo British, born in England in October 1978, 12 years after the launch of the Igbo genocide

Marcus Roberts Septet, “Nebuchadnezzar” (personnel: Roberts, piano; Wycliffe Gordon, trombone; Wessell Anderson, alto saxophone; Herbert Harris, tenor saxophone; Chris Thomas, bass; Maurice Carnes, drums; Herlin Riley, percussion; recorded: Mastersound Studios, Astoria, New York, US,  9-10 August 1989/10 December 1989 and The Saenger Theatre, New Orleans, US, 15 December 1989)

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is author of the recently published The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019)  (https://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/2019/01/published-longest-genocide-since-29-may.html)

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Mmuo Biafra, Igbo genocide, Britain, Brexit and retributive justice

(THERESA MAY: “restore ... our self determination”) 

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

SUCCESSIVE British governments since 29 May 1966, beginning with the one led by Harold “[W]ould-accept-half-a-million-dead-Biafrans-if-that-was-what-it-[T]ook” Wilson, have, in strategic alliance with the coterie of African constituent nations in Nigeria (particularly Fulani, Yoruba, Kanuri, Urhobo, Bachama, Tiv, Hausa, Nupe, Edo) waged the Igbo genocide most unrelentingly, most gruesomely…

Comeuppance?

The current British government is tellingly incapable to negotiate a simple exit from the European Union (organisation Britain joined voluntarily, not forced into, in 1973) as demanded by the majority “yes”-voters of the country’s June 2016 referendum. For Britain, the humiliating narrative that characterises these Brexit talks in Brussels is palpable. Despite Prime Minister Theresa May’s ringing pledge that Brexit is the British decision to “restore ... our self-determination” (“Prime Minister’s letter to Donald Tusk on the triggering of article 50”, gov.uk, 29 March 2017, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prime-ministers-letter-to-donald-tusk-triggering-article-50/prime-ministers-letter-to-donald-tusk-triggering-article-50,
accessed 29 March 2017), the EU is offering Britain “exit terms” from the league that are structurally not dissimilar from that infamous Lancaster House fake-independence/fraudulent freedom template that Britain foisted on African restoration-of-independence movements in its occupied states across the continent – from the Sudan/Ghana (mid-1950s) to Zimbabwe (late 1979/early 1980). 

It is precisely this unlikely equivalence of two seemingly unrelated tracks of history that has prompted Boris Johnson, ex-British foreign secretary, ex-mayor of London, journalist, and essayist who has often relished in his writings demonising peoples (particularly Africans) conquered over the last 350 years by Britain, to now proclaim, so ironically, that the current “Brexit deal” from the EU reduces Britain to a “vassalage, satrapy, colony” (Andrew Woodcock, “Boris Johnson: Theresa May’s Brexit plan makes UK a ‘colony’”, The Scotsman, Edinburgh, 26 July 2018, https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/boris-johnson-theresa-may-s-brexit-plan-makes-uk-a-colony-1-4774271, accessed 28 July 2018)!

HAS the comeuppance that has vividly struck a number of the countries besides, obviously, Nigeria (e.g. Soviet Union, Egypt, Algeria, the Sudan, Cameroon, German Democratic Republic, Guinea-Conakry, Syria) and several lead génocidaires (e.g. Obafemi Awolowo, Harold Wilson, Hafez al-Assad, Muhammadu Buhari, Barack Hussein Obama, Hosni Mubarak, Muhammadu Shuwa, Ahmadou Ahidjo, Ibrahim Taiwo, David Cameron, Olusegun Obasanjo, Murtala Muhammed) who have been involved in the murder of Igbo people these past 52 years finally hit Britain?

Biafran freedom and justice

If ever there was any doubt, the evidence, so far, demonstrates the contrary – namely, that no one, no agency, murders 3.1 million and additional tens of thousands of Igbo children, women and men (including the 3000 murdered so far since November 2015 by fiendish génocidaire Muhammadu Buhari who was imposed in office by ex-US President Barack Hussein Obama, the first African descent president in 233 years of the founding of the United States republic) in this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa and walks away free...  Apart from the now 50 million Igbo survivors, the 3.1 million and the additional tens of thousands are individually and collectively involved in the current historic Biafran resilient quest for freedom and justice...  

AND Biafra will get this freedom and justice. Undoubtedly.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Consequences” – 4th movement in First Meditations {for Quartet} [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 2 November 1965])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why Donald Trump is great for Africa (2018) and author of Readings from Reading: Essays in African Politics, Genocide, Literature (2011) 

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Mmuo Biafra a biakwa! Genocidist Nigeria abandons its desperate, contemptible drive since 1999 to erase 29 May 1966, day of its launch of the Igbo genocide, from history

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

AS I show in the essay in the following link (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/2015/05/blog-post_7.html), 
genocidist Nigeria, in 1999, declared 29 May of the year its “democracy day” as an additional tool in its murderous arsenal to deny and erase 29 May 1966, day it and co-genocidist state Britain launched the Igbo genocide, from history and public consciousness. Twenty-nine years earlier, 1970, soon after its end of phases I-III of the genocide (12 January 1970), murdering 3.1 million Igbo people, the genocidists had abolished the teaching of history in its schools as the key feature of this denialist project.

Failed mission

Two reasons account for the génocidaires’ abandonment of their 29 May so-called democracy day on 6 June 2018: 

1. The indefatigably resilient tenor of the politics of the Biafra freedom movement with its heightened, pinpointed focus on the dates of 29 May and 30 May (Heroes Day) on the Biafra calendar, particularly in these last three years of the jihadist Muhammadu Buhari-led regime, has so saturated the news cycle every month of May since that it makes nonsense of the denialist theatrics of Nigeria’s 29 May “democracy day”.

2. The génocidaires high command is currently ravaged by a grave crisis not seen in at least 30 years, exacerbated, pointedly, by the devastatingly parallel murder campaigns by the jihadist terrorists Fulani militia and Boko Haram (2 of the 5 deadliest terrorist organisations in the world) in Nigeria’s northcentral, northeast and the eastcentral Benue valley regions. These terrorists are allied more ideologically to the Fulani wing of the genocidist amalgam led by Buhari. Olusegun Obasanjo, a Yoruba, but a very influential member of the high command who crucially supported ex-US President Obama and ex-British Prime Minister Cameron’s imposition of Buhari as head of regime in March 2015, has informed Buhari that he won’t now endorse a “continuation” of the latter’s regime beyond March 2019. It was Obasanjo, as head of regime, who had decreed 29 May as “democracy day” back in 1999. Buhari’s abrogation of 19 years of regime status placed on this date is therefore an embittered response to Obasanjo’s decision not to back his post-2019 leadership ambitions.

IN yet another act in these génocidaires’ bizarre enchantment to the theatre of “democracy day”-declarations, Buhari, just as Obasanjo, has himself decreed 12 June as the latest Nigeria’s “democracy day” – a desperate, cruedly opportunistic  attempt by Buhari to appeal to the wider Yoruba population for support for 2019 as 12 June itself is a day of remembrance in Yoruba history.

(Jaki Byard Trio, “Trendsition zildjian” [personnel: Byard, piano; David Izenzon, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Prestige, New York, US, 31 October 1967])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe