Thoughts for the weekend: Who is “person of colour”?

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

WHO is this? Who indeed is “person of colour”? Would they also be termed “coloured person”? If not, why not?

No one should ever toy with their identity, their history – particularly African peoples, especially those domiciled in the pan-European World. Crucially, in this geographical space, as well as in the Arab World, the cardinal constructs of African identity have in the past been expunged in stretches of robust state/quasi-state programmes aimed primarily to deny or distort the saliency of the African presence.

This is why a person who presents themself, for instance, as African British, African American, African Caribbean, Igbo British, Ethiopian American, Congolese French, Biafran German, Jamaican Canadian, etc., etc., actuates a presence unmistakeably that references or resonates with history. In contrast, employing a dehistoricised expression/epithet in referencing someone, however expedient, even fanciful, questions that person’s presence and surely accelerates their slide to quite often tragic alienation.

ALWAYS insist on who you are. This is not the responsibility of somebody else’s.

(McCoy Tyner Quartet, “Contemplation” [personnel: Tyner, piano; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone; Ron Carter, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 21 April 1967])

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Igbo question, Biafra mission

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Unparalleled  

THE “Igbo question” is intrinsically linked to the Igbo strategic goal, presently, which is to end the occupation of their Biafra homeland by genocidist Nigeria – imposed since 13 January 1970, beginning of phase-IV of the genocide. This is the structural facet of the termination of the genocide itself which was launched by Nigeria and its suzerain state Britain on 29 May 1966 (phases I-III). 3.1 million Igbo people or 25 per cent of this nation were murdered by Nigeria and Britain. 

Britain, which sought to “punish” the Igbo for leading the freedom movement to terminate 100 years of the British conquest and occupation of the states and peoples of this southwestcental region of Africa, supported the genocide right from from the outset, from conceptualisation to execution – politically, diplomatically, militarily. As a result, Britain and Nigeria subjected the Igbo to 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 and Britain’s support continues unflinchingly crucial, boosted by that dramatic March 2015 abominable support for the genocide by ex-US President Barack Obama, first African-descent president in 233 years of the founding of the United States republic. 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/jihadist, Arabist, north region Fulani leadership which vociferously opposed the restoration of African independence from the British occupation throughout the 1930s-1960s epoch. The Igbo steadfastly led this liberation mission. 

It is Britain’s alliance with the Fulani leadership, situated atop the prevailing congenital anti-African constellation-equation (which also includes, principally, the following constituent nations: Yoruba, Edo, Tiv Urhobo, Jukun, Bachama, Hausa, Nupe, Kanuri) emplaced in its Nigeria, that makes up the Anglo-Nigerian amalgam that executes 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 Sydney-based 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 Igbo and others in these times.   

Saliency

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.

Reification

CONTRARY to the amazingly ahistorical discourses on the nature of the state and its survivability in some circles, particularly in Africa where the extant eurocentric conquest social sciences and history curriculums essentially reify  the “state”, the state is very much a transient relationship in human history: Kemet, Roman “empire”, Ghana “empire”, Mali “empire”, Sweden-Norway, 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 enduring 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.

Mission

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 and the historically grounded response of the Biafra mission.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Sun ship” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Impulse!, New York, US, 26 August 1965])

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