132nd anniversary of the start of the pan-European World conference on Africa subjugation in Berlin – 15 November 1884-26 February 1885

(1. infamous gathering in session)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Today marks  the 132nd anniversary of the beginning of the infamous 15 November 1884 – 26 February 1885 European leaders’ Berlin conference on Africa. The gathering was chaired by German Chancellor von Bismarck to formalise the pan-European seizure, planned occupation, and irrepressible exploitation of the gargantuan riches of the African World which Leopold II, the génocidaire king of the Belgians, described predatorily as “this magnificent African cake”. It was indeed to “secure for ourselves [Belgians] a slice of this magnificent African cake”, Leopold II’s own haunting words, that this monarch and his private forces and those of the Belgian state and others elsewhere in Europe carried out a catastrophic 30-year trail (1878-1908) of genocide against Africans in the Congo basin in which they annihilated 13 million constituent peoples.

The following countries attended the Berlin meeting: Belgium, Holland, Britain, France, Portugal, Ottoman “empire”, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria-Hungary, Denmark, Czarist Russia, Sweden-Norway, United States. 

The catastrophic aftermath of this Berlin-assembly, essentially its state’s genocidist architecture (genocide in the Congo basin by Belgian Leopold II, Herero genocide, Nama genocide, Berg Damara genocide, Igbo genocide, Rwanda genocide, Darfur genocide, genocide elsewhere in the Sudan, genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ...) is the bane of contemporary Africa which the peoples, themselves, not anyone else, must dispense with to survive.

(2. infamous gathering in session: to formalise the pan-European seizure, planned occupation, and irrepressible exploitation of the gargantuan riches of the African World – “this magnificent African cake”)

(George Russell Sextet here plays “Nardis”, a composition by Miles Davis [personnel: Russell, piano; Don Ellis, trumpet; Dave Baker, trombone; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Steve Swallow, bass; Joe Hunt, drums; recorded: Riverside Records, New York, US, 8 May 1961])

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Genocidist Nigeria, 29 May 1966-29 May 2016: What is the scoreboard?

(Nigeria state proclivity: genocide)

(Obusonjo: easily decipherable DNA signature...)

Throughout the stretch of these pulverising five decades of slaughtering 3.1 million and more Igbo people in this genocide, this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, the only tangible capability that the murderers have acquired is one to commit even more murders –  nothing else … definitely, not the more challenging capacity to develop and transform their human potential and economy and, in turn, attract and merit the accolades and recognition from peers and others elsewhere in the world. Alas, murders and murdering and murders constitute their easily decipherable DNA signature.

(George Russell Sextet here plays “Nardis”, a Miles Davis’s composition [personnel: Russell, piano; Don Ellis, trumpet; Dave Baker, trombone; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Steve Swallow, bass; Joe Hunt, drums; recorded: Riverside Records, New York, US, 8 May 1961])

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FWD: Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti region administration, west Nigeria, unequivocally condemns continuing murder of Biafrans by Nigeria-occupation genocidist military in Biafra; Fayose warns: “Muhammadu Buhari is turning the people” of Biafra into “endangered species” (Vanguard, Lagos, Wednesday 1 June 2016)

(Ayodele Fayose: ... “Buhari has made up his mind to eliminate as many [Biafrans] as possible”)

*****“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything” (Albert Einstein)

NO CURRENTLY serving public official in genocidist Nigeria has been as forthright in denouncing the present phase of the Igbo genocide, being directed by Muhammadu Buhari, as Ayodele Fayose. In his latest condemnation, Fayose reminds the world that well over 150 Igbo have been murdered by the Nigeria military under the Buhari regime since August 2015 and notably indicts: “It appears that … Buhari has made up his mind to eliminate as many [Biafran] people as possible … To even justify the killing by claiming [as regime spokespersons have been variously quoted] that Igbo youths protest was orchestrated in order to mar the first anniversary of Buhari’s [regime] is to say the least wicked and animalistic” (Vanguard, Lagos, 1 June 2016). Fayose ends his historic statement by appealing to the international community (pointedly a direct reference to David Cameron and Barack Obama administrations which imposed Buhari as head of Nigeria regime in March 2015) to take note of this gruesome murder campaign against Igbo people.

Fountain of ideas

Surely, no one would accuse Ayodele Fayose of overstating this ever deteriorating grave situation in Biafra... 

It is extraordinary, if not shocking, that, in contrast, there is a deafening silence on the ongoing genocide from the heads of the following administrative regimes in six regions of occupied Biafra – Abia, Anambra, Enuugwu, Delta, Ebonyi, Imo and Rivers, the epicentre of this unrelenting slaughtering of a peaceful, defenceless people. Are they not aware of the genocide? Do they dispute Fayose’s courageous, graphic narrative? Would they? What has happened to those who claim to be leaders from a people who gave the world such literary classics as Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, There was a Country, Efuru, Idu, Labyrinths & Path to Thunder and who constructed and lived through advanced republican democracies for over a millennium whose variegated legacy constitutes a fountain of ideas for the contemporary world? Just what are these officials waiting for to tell the world that their people, Igbo people, are being murdered by a ruthless Nigeria-islamist genocidist regime headed by Muhammadu Buhari who, during phase-III of the Igbo genocide (6 July 1966-12 January 1970), was commander of a genocidist brigade in north/northcentral Biafra, slaughtering to the hilt?

(George Russell Sextet here plays “Nardis”, a composition by Miles Davis [personnel: Russell, piano; Don Ellis, trumpet; Dave Baker, trombone; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Steve Swallow, bass; Joe Hunt, drums; recorded: Riverside Records, New York, US, 8 May 1961])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Igbo Question

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

The “Igbo Question” is intrinsically linked to the Igbo strategic goal, presently, which is to end the occupation of their Biafran homeland by genocidist Nigeria – imposed since 13 January 1970. 

This is a structural facet of phase-IV of the genocide, launched by Nigeria on 29 May 1966. 3.1 million Igbo people or one-quarter of this nation were murdered by Nigeria and Britain. Britain supported the genocide right from conceptualisation to execution – politically, diplomatically, militarily. These were 44 months of uninterrupted, unimaginable carnage and barbarity perpetrated on a people. Pointedly, no single nation or people in Africa has suffered this extent of gruesome and devastating state(s)-premeditated and organised genocide in history.

(George Russell Sextet, “Thoughts” [personnel: Russell, piano; Don Ellis, trumpet; Dave Baker, trombone; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Steve Swallow, bass; Joe Hunt, drums; recorded Riverside Record, New York, US, 28 May 1961])

The genocide continues unabated (as several essays and other recent entries in re-thinking.blogspot.co.uk demonstrate) and Britain’s support continues unflinchingly crucial. For Britain, contrary to the often clanking histrionics of prevailing international politics rhetoric, its strategic alliance here, in this African region, has always been with the islamist north region Hausa-Fulani leadership which vociferously opposed the restoration of African independence from the British occupation. It is Britain’s alliance with this leadership situated atop the Nigeria constellation-equation that makes up the Anglo-Nigerian amalgam that executed the Igbo genocide. It is also from groupings with this same leadership that both Boko Haram (currently the world’s most ruthless terrorist organisation, according to the Institute for Economics & Peace, http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/institute-for-economics-peace-global.html) and the Fulani militia (see also the IE&P’s study on this militia) were created and unleashed to murder tens of thousands of Africans and others in these times.   

So, given the critical links between the salient features of the politics of the Nigerian occupation of Biafra and the overarching architecture of the genocidal campaign, it is the case that the Igbo termination of the occupation is at once the beginning of their freedom march from Nigeria and the implementation of an unprecedentedly expansive socioeconomic programme of reconstruction. The route remains Igbo freedom from Nigeria, an inalienable Igbo right with or without the genocide as I have argued severally. If the Scots, for instance, one-tenth of the Igbo population and without a genocide antecedent would wish to leave a union they have largely been exponential beneficiaries for 300 years (“Rights for Scots, Rights for the Igbo”, http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/rights-for-scots-rights-for-igbo.html), the Igbo, surely, don’t require any agonisingly turgid historical and sociological treatise to wish to leave Nigeria.

Rarefication

Contrary to the amazingly ahistorical discourses on the nature of the state and its survivability in some circles, particularly in Africa where the prevailing eurocentric conquest social sciences curriculum essentially rarefies the “state”, the state is very much a transient relationship in human history: Kemet, Roman “empire”, Ghana “empire”, Mali “empire”, Czarist “empire”, Austro-Hungarian “empire”, Ottoman “empire”, Portuguese “empire”, Spanish “empire”, British “empire”, French Indo-China, Malaya Federation, Anglo-Egyptian-Sudan, Central African Federation, United Arab Republic, Mali Federation, Senegambia Confederation, West & East Pakistan, Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, the Sudan... What has indeed been the grounding feature of the state in world history on this accord, thankfully, has rather been “divisibility”, “dissolubility”, “destructibility”, each the antonym of that 3-headed genocidist mantra mouthed off at random by quite a few spokespersons of especially the genocide-state in Africa.

It is therefore not surprising that twenty-three (23) new states have, for example, emerged in Europe since the end of the 1980s. Even though a population of about 350 million, one-third of Africa’s, Europeans presently have more states per capita than peoples of Africa! And as history shows, the catastrophe is not the collapse of the state; the catastrophe is the attempt to destroy constituent peoples within the state as the Anglo-Nigeria amalgam has sought in Biafra since 29 May 1966.  Here lies the Igbo Question.

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe