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(Working session of the congress with WEB Du Bois, the versatile intellectual, in the middle of the picture)
The February 1919 Pan-African Congress in Paris, France, convened by WEB Du Bois and Ida Gibbs Hunt,is the first of five high-profile international congresses after World War I (1914-1918) that demands the restoration of African independence in continental Africa/the Caribbean/Americas and enhanced cooperation among African peoples globally after 400 years of the enslavement and conquest and occupation and underdevelopment of African peoples and Africa by the European World
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe AS THE WORLD witnessed last week, rarely
have there been two dreadful massacres carried out almost simultaneously in two
separate continents by two organisations surely operating autonomously but
belonging to the same overarching religiopolitical agency. Boko Haram, the
islamist jihadist group based in north Nigeria,
massacred 2000 people in Baga (The
Guardian, London,
10 January 2015) during the course of two days. In Paris,
France, over a 2-day stretch,
during the same week, a French–based cell affiliated to some islamist caliphate
brigade in the Mid East massacred 17 people
including cartoonists of the satirical journal, Charlie Hebdo, and staff and shoppers at a Jewish supermarket. Boko
Haram is ideologically allied to the global islamist causes and projects of the
Mid East amalgam including al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula and the Islamic
State (controls vast swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria), as well as the
Taleban in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in west/northwest
Africa and al-Shabaab in Somalia. Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau never tires to extend
solidarity messages to these fellow organisations in his regular video releases
that update the strategic objectives and expectations of the ongoing transnational
insurgency.
THE responses of Nigeria and France to these
tragedies couldn’t be so trenchantly different though. Right from the outset,
the French state robustly came out in defence of its population. It mobilised
the entire range of its security forces to hunt down the murderous cell, stepped
up security for its citizens whilst continually reassuring them, attended to
the dead, the dying and the wounded, and organised a solidarity march in honour
of the 17 and their families and for the reaffirmation of the crucial tenets
and ethos that underpin the existence of the French republic. 3.5 million
French people turned out in Paris
on Sunday 11th January for this historic gathering. The heads of state or
government of most countries of the European World and beyond attended the
march in support of France.
The global media covered this story of a week comprehensively.
Morbid silence
In Nigeria, in contrast, the country’s
regime-leadership and its expanded establishment exercised a morbid silence
over the outrage in Baga – not a word on Baga from the current head-of-regime
nor from any of the seven ex-heads of regime. None of the eight was moved to
act in defence of Baga from its ruthless assailants, not even in the wake of that
haunting, graphic account of the tragedy of his town rendered soon after by Baga
district head survivor Baba Abba Hassan: “…most victims are children, women and
elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove in … firing
rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents”. Silence, punishing
silence, utter silence… Such was the staggering indifference displayed by the Nigeria state
to this massacre, within its frontier, that an observer would be forgiven if
they thought that the slaughter that occurred
in Baga never happened or that Baga were somewhere else on the planet or,
perhaps, that Baga didn’t really exist… In effect,
this state no longer pretends that it exists to serve its peoples (for an expansive
discourse on this feature, see Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading:
Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature, 2011). If anyone is still
unsure of this crucial characteristic, a reminder of the final segment of
Nigeria’s response to these massacres of a week might be of help: despite the
silence on Baga, the state’s head of regime found the time and purpose to send
a message of condolence to the French head of state on the murder in Paris;
equally silent on Baga, another senior regime official found the time and
purpose to tweet a message of condolence to the people of France on the murder
in Paris. It shouldn’t be found surprising to add that no one marched in Nigeria on
behalf of the 2000 murdered in Baga nor for their families nor indeed for any exhortative
values of a doubtful state. As for the world’s media, the lenses of their camera,
during the week, were of course focussed 2600 miles away from Baga – Paris.
IT IS to this focus of
the world media and some of its wider consequences that led Simon Allison of
the Daily Maverick to observe: “It
may be the 21st century, but African lives are still deemed less newsworthy –
and, by implication, less valuable – than western lives” (Simon Allison, “I am Charlie, but I am Baga too”, Daily Maverick, Johannesburg, 12 January 2015). Allison is undoubtedly
alluding to the catastrophic diminution of the African humanity by the pan-European
World during 400 years of the latter’s enslavement of African peoples and its conquest
and occupation of Africa. But as we now show,
this perceived “less valuable” status of African life in the contemporary epoch has
not just been a teleological transposition from a somewhat distant past. On the
contrary, it is a thoroughly, consciously mapped-out package and practice
designed and formally launched much more recently, in the mid-1960s, by a
not-too-unfamiliar global power central
in this visceral African subjugated history/international politics.
Diarchy
Finally, let us
return to Nigeria’s
deafening silence on Baga. Given Nigeria’s past and recurring
history, does one realistically expect this state to defend Baga from Boko
Haram, comment or mourn the murder of the 2000 from Baga – almost 49 years to
the day after it embarked on the murder of 3.1 million of its Igbo population
in a studiously-organised genocide that is still ongoing? Each of the seven of Nigeria’s ex-heads of regime, referred to
earlier, is a structural participant in this foundational genocide of
post-(European)conquest Africa. They all constitute
a génocidaire septet. This genocide at once shapes the architecture of the
present Nigeria
establishment as the world knows it. Therefore, no one from any spheres or
levers of this state assemblage could have had anything intelligible or/and
credible to say on Baga. Part of the reason of Nigeria’s silence on Baga is that given
the country’s Igbo genocide antecedent, few would have believed any word declared on
this massacre by any officials of its state.
Britain, the ex-conqueror/occupying
state in Nigeria
supported the Igbo genocide from conceptualisation to execution. In supporting
the genocide, Britain sought
to “punish” the Igbo for being in the vanguard, since the 1930s, to terminate
the British occupation ofNigeria – one of the very prized lands of the British conquest of Africa. During the course of the 1968/1969 gruesomely devastating
apogee of the genocide, Harold Wilson, the British prime minister, 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, 1977: 122). For the
record, Wilson’s “a half a million dead Biafrans”-sentence 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.
Undoubtedly, the Nigerians, led by Fulani islamist jihadists and their Yoruba, Urhobo, Hausa, Edo, Jukun, Tiv, Kanuri, Nupe, Jawara and Gwari principal pan-African allies, had handsomely obliged their “massa” Harold Wilson’s wish. Those punching words
of historian Chancellor Williams’s were at once vindicated, most dramatically: “…
The Europeans had also been busily building up and training
strong African armies. Africans trained
to hate, kill and conquer Africans…” (Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization, 1987: 218). IN THE CONSTRUCTION of the template of international relations that would embody the
post-1939-1945 war era, the British-Nigerian genocidist diarchy had elevated
the “dispensability of African life in national and international politics” to
the highest calibrated level possible.
(John
Coltrane Quartet, “Dusk-Dawn” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy
Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder
Studio, Englewoods Cliff, NJ, US,
16 June 1965])
References Allison, Simon. “I am Charlie, but I am Baga too”.Daily Maverick, Johannesburg, 12 January 2015. Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert. Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature. Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2011. John Coltrane Quartet.“Dusk-Dawn”. Van Gelder Studio, Englewood, Cliff, NJ, US, 16 June 1965. Morris, Roger. Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. London & New York: Quartet Books, 1977. Williams, Chancellor. The Destruction of Black Civilization. Chicago: Third World, 1987.
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).
