107th birthday of Eric Williams

(Born 25 September 1911, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

ONE OF THE most outstanding African Caribbean intellectuals of all time, author of Capitalism and Slavery (1944), classic on African enslavement in the Americas by the pan-European World – from his 1938 Oxford University doctoral thesis, and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, 31 August 1962, after centuries of the British/European World conquest, enslaving and occupation

(George Russell Sextet, “Honesty” [personnel: Russell, piano; Don Ellis, trumpet; Dave Baker, trombone; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; Steve Swallow, Joe Hunt, bass; drums; recorded: Riverside Records, New York, US, 8 May 1961])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

106th birthday of Eric Williams

(Born 25 September 1911, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago)

ONE OF THE most outstanding African Caribbean intellectuals of all time, author of Capitalism and Slavery (1944), classic on African enslavement in the Americas by the pan-European World – from his 1938 Oxford University doctoral thesis, and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, 31 August 1962, after centuries of the British/European World conquest, enslaving and occupation

(George Russell Sextet, “Honesty” [personnel: Russell, piano; Don Ellis, trumpet; Dave Baker, trombone; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; Steve Swallow, Joe Hunt, bass; drums; recorded: Riverside Records, New York, US, 8 May 1961])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Archival treat for scholars and students – University of Kansas Kenneth Spencer Research Library houses Onicha market literature collection

(University of Kansas Kenneth Spencer Research Library)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

AS DETAILS below show (see link), this collection was initially made in 1966 by Thomas Buckman, a former Kansas University director of libraries, before the Onicha market (Biafra’s Oshimiri Delta) main repository of this historic literature was destroyed by the Nigerian vandal military during the Igbo genocide. This Kansas archive is the “first full-text digitization of the [Onicha] pamphlets”. “Just as eager readers purchased [Onicha] market literature 40-50 years ago”, the Kansas University Library aptly recalls, “this initiative makes [the] pamphlets accessible once again to a wide-ranging readership on the Internet”. 

Emmanuel Obiechina, the esteemed literary scholar and critic, researched expansively on the Onicha market literature, a focus on his doctoral thesis at Cambridge University later published as the classic, An African Popular Literature, 1973 (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/blog-post_51.html).

*****University of Kansas Kenneth Spencer Research Library’s link to the Onicha market literature collection:(http://exhibits.lib.ku.edu/exhibits/show/onitsha),
accessed 17 November 2016.

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