Would Hugh Clifford repeat these comments on Nigeria today?

In 1920, Hugh Clifford, the British conquest and occupation governor of Nigeria, makes the following contribution to a “Nigeria Council Debate”:[1]

[Nigeria is a] collection of Independent … States, separated from one another by great distances, by differences of history and traditions and by … racial … political, social and religious barriers.

Today, 5 November 2014, 94 years on, would Hugh Clifford conceivably make those same assertions? If so, why? If not, why not?

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[1]Quoted in George C E Enyoazu, “Sovereign National Conference – Will the people have their say at last?”, African Democrat, 30 October 2013.

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Would Hugh Clifford repeat these comments on Nigeria today?

In 1920, Hugh Clifford, the British conquest and occupation governor of Nigeria, makes the following contribution to a “Nigeria Council Debate”:[1]

[Nigeria is a] collection of Independent … States, separated from one another by great distances, by differences of history and traditions and by … racial … political, social and religious barriers.

Today, 31 October 2013, 93 years on, would Hugh Clifford conceivably make those same assertions? If so, why? If not, why not?

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[1]Quoted in George C E Enyoazu, “Sovereign National Conference – Will the people have their say at last?”, African Democrat, [http://africandemocrat.com/content/sovereign-national-conference-%E2%80%93-will-people-have-their-say-last-george-c-e-enyoazu – accessed 31 October 2013])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Reminder – Readings from Reading

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (Dakar & Reading: African Renaissance, 2011), ISBN 9780955205019, paperback, 236pp., £19.95/US$29.95/CDN$30.68/EUR23,99/￥2,580

Do you have a copy of Readings from Reading? Does your library have one? If not, why not order one today – right away (please see order details below). Have a feel and be part of the discussion in this seminal study which has part of the following excerpts in its concluding optimistic insights about the future of Africa (p. 199):

The bridging of 29 May 1966 and 9 January 2011, the two most important dates on the African calendar since 1885, will henceforth chart and transform the continent’s political landscape in this evolving epoch of the post-Berlin state of Africa. After 9 January 2011, the bridge becomes a panhandle unto which the new successor states will embark on the construction of an unprecedented polycentric connectivity of relations on the African scene. 

Fifty-five years after 1956, the wheel has undoubtedly turned full circle in Africa. Africans are back to the beginnings but this time clearly on their own terms. The constituent African nation – so long maligned, so long impoverished, so long brutalised, so long humiliated, so long massacred, is recognised, at last, as the principal actor and agency of its being. This nation can now decide what precepts, what aspirations, what trajectory, what goals, it has set its new state to embark upon…[1] Whoever says that history isn’t so incorrigibly fascinating?! As Aimé Césaire deftly puts it in the interview already referred to, the challenges of the times become the “quest to reconquer something, our name (sic), our country … ourselves”.[2] 

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[1]To underscore an important feature of this fast moving development in Africa, even if some might wish to categorise this particular example as “retrogressive”, Omar al-Bashir, the head of the Sudanese regime, made the following broadcast on Khartoum radio and television on 19 December 2010: “If south Sudan secedes, we’ll change the constitution. There will be no question of cultural or ethnic diversity. Sharia will be the only source of the constitution, and Arabic the only official language”. The people of the south would probably have responded, presumably quietly, in the confines of their homes: “This is your right, Mr al-Bashir! We have gone!”

[2]Melson, “The Liberating Power of Words: An Interview with Poet

Aimé Césaire”.

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Readings from Reading

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (Dakar & Reading: African Renaissance, 2011), ISBN 9780955205019, paperback, 236pp., £19.95/US$29.95/CDN$30.68/EUR23,99/￥2,580

The essays here in Readings from Reading underscore Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s continuing optimism about the possibilities of Africans constructing post-“Berlin-states” as the launch pad to transform the topography of the African renaissance. Readings from Reading is a timely publication, coming on the eve of the historic January 2011 referendum in south Sudan in which the people of the region will choose to vote to restore their national independence or get stuck hopelessly in the Sudan, the first of the “Berlin-states” that Africans tragically “inherited” in January 1956. Ekwe-Ekwe insists that the contemporary Africa state, imposed on Africans by a band of European conqueror-states and currently run by what the author describes as a “shard of disreputable African regimes to exploit and despoil the continent’s human and material resources”, cannot serve African interests. The legacy, as this study demonstrates, has indeed been catastrophic: “The [African] overseers pushed the states into even deeper depths of genocidal and kakistocratic notoriety in the past 54 years as the grim examples of particularly Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Sudan ... depressingly underscore. 15 million Africans have been murdered by African-led regimes in these states and elsewhere in Africa since the Igbo genocide of 1966-1970”. Ekwe-Ekwe argues that there is no future for African progress, especially in ensuring that the peoples, themselves, exercise an unfettered self-governing ability to develop their lives, reconstruct centuries of a battered heritage and transform their societies, except Africans dismantle the “Berlin-state” on the continent. This state remains a conqueror’s/conquest principality as its original creators have indeed sought and reinforced unrelentingly and cannot, therefore, respect not to talk of safeguard the human rights of African peoples. On the contrary, the future for Africans predicates on an extensive sociopolitical decentralisation process where constituent nations, however “small”, exercise their inalienable right to control and develop their human and natural resources and decide, freely, on the nature of the relationship that they wish to establish with their neighbours and those elsewhere in the world.

Readings from Reading is an engaging, incisive, wide-ranging and multidisciplinary discourse, salient features that have come to define Ekwe-Ekwe’s groundbreaking scholarship of the past three decades. The author covers an assemblage of diverse topics and themes which include the Igbo genocide, the Jos massacres in central Nigeria, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s failed attempt to blow up an incoming aircraft over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, African presence in Britain, Robert Mugabe, Muammar Gaddafi, Obafemi Awolowo, Omar al-Bashir, Yoweri Museveni, Charles Taylor, Olusegun Obasanjo, Ali Mazrui, Andrew Young, the G8 and Africa, Africa “debt”, African émigrés’ remittances to Africa, “sub-Sahara Africa”, reparations to Africans, African representation on the UN Security Council, African choices for the Nobel Peace Prize, Africa and the International Criminal Court, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, the Sudan and the Congo, arms to Africa, arms-ban on Africa. Finally, on the subject of the restoration-of-independence, the key connecting thread that links all the visitations, Ekwe-Ekwe critically examines the contributions made variously on this cord by an impressive line up of some of the very best and brightest of African intellectuals: Achebe, Adichie, Césaire, Damas, Coltrane, Diop, Equiano, Ngũgĩ, Okigbo, Senghor.

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orders@africanbookscollective.com

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