“Establishing and readjusting the hierarchy of dangers”

(John Coltrane Quartet plays Mongo Santamaría’s composition, “Afro Blue” – personnel: Coltrane, soprano saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums [recorded: live, Half Note, New York, US, 26 March 1965])

Aimé Césaire once told an interviewer (Annick Thebia Melson, in Unesco Courier, 2010) during one of those illuminating discourses of his on history: “History is always dangerous, the world of history is a risky world; but it is up to us at any given moment to establish and readjust the hierarchy of dangers”. It is indeed in the very course to disrupt and “readjust” this hierarchy in this age of the “cursed” Berlin-state in favour of Africa and African peoples that the constituent Africa nation or people (Igbo, Darfuri, Gikuyu, Wolof, Ibibio, Bakongo, Akan, Bamileke, etc., etc) – so long maligned, so long impoverished, so long brutalised, so long humiliated and dehistoricised with often unprintable epithets (t****, n****, n*****, n******, p********, b******, w**, sub-*******, sub-*****, e*****, c***, c******, m*****, d******, h*******, f******-b******, b****, m***, b********, c*******, b*********…), so long massacred, is recognised, at last, as the principal actor and agency of its being and geography.

This nation, this people, can and should create its own state if it so desires. It is its inalienable right. Freedom. It does not therefore have to explain to anyone else why it has embarked on this track of freedom. It can now decide what precepts, what aspirations, what trajectory, what goals, it has set its new state to embark upon… As Césaire deftly puts it in the interview referred to, the challenges of the times become the “quest to reconquer something, our name (sic), our country … ourselves”. 

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79th birthday of Paul Chambers

(Born 22 May 1935, Pittsburgh, US)

Virtuosic bassist, composer, member of Miles Davis First Great Quintet/Sextet (1955-1963) and subject of salutary, standard compositions by varying artistic colleagues: tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, “Mr P.C.”; tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, “Paul’s Pal”; pianist Tommy Flanagan, “Big Paul”; pianist Red Garland, “Mr P. C. Blues”; drummer Max Roach, “Five for Paul”

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92nd birthday of Charles Mingus

(Born 22 April 1922, Nogales, Arizona, US)

Outstanding bassist, composer and bandleader whose music encapsulates all the critical junctures of jazz history and his Jazz Workshop a landmark conservatoire of an age

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“I am because I am free; I am free because I am”

John Coltrane & Don Cherry play Ornette Coleman’s composition, “Focus on sanity” (full personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cherry, cornet; Percy Heath, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums (recorded: Atlantic Records, New York, US, 28 June 1960)

Why and how does a state exist to dominate, exploit, and, in cases such as Nigeria, Rwanda, the Sudan and Democratic Republic of the Congo, for instance, attempt to destroy some of its constituent nations or peoples? As every school child knows, the states that Europe created in Africa, in the aftermath of its leaders’ infamous 1884-1885 Berlin-conquest conference, cannot lead Africans to the reconstructive changes they deeply yearn for after the tragic history of centuries of conquest and occupation.

Such changes were and never are the mission of these states but instruments to expropriate and despoil Africa by the conquest in perpetuity. This is the “curse” of Berlin. But, thankfully, just as in Berlin, states are not a gift from the gods but relationships painstakingly formulated and constructed by groups of human beings on planet Earth to pursue aspirations and interests envisioned and articulated by these same human beings. For the Igbo, Darfuri, and all other peoples presently besieged by the haematophagous genocide state, the message on the unfurled banner for their freedom march couldn’t be more confident and focused: “I am because I am free; I am free because I am”. Create your own state today. Now is the time!

The flourishing age of organically constituted African-own states to radically transform depressing African fortunes in the contemporary world has already begun.

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85th birthday of Mariama Bâ

(Born 17 April 1929, Dakar, Sénégal)

Novelist and influential intellectual, author of the seminal So Long a Letter (1981)

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93rd birthday of Chike Obi

(Born 17 April 1921, Onicha, Igboland)

First mathematics doctorate in Igboland/southwestcentral Africa, rigorous academic, aptly described by theoretical physicist Alexander Obiefoka Animalu as the “foremost African mathematical genius of the 20th century”

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Thoughts on Africa in these times… Contract with the state

(New York Contemporary Five plays “Consequences” – personnel: Archie Shepp, tenor saxophone; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet; John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Don Moore, bass; JC Moses, drums [recorded: live, Jazzhus Montmarte, Copenhagen, 15 November 1963])

The most salient contract a state has with its citizen(s)/constituent people(s) is to safeguard the latter’s security. This role is indeed the state’s raison d’être! If the state or its agent (designated or clandestinely) embarks on the murder of the citizen(s)/people(s) or is unable to protect the citizen(s)/people(s) from being murdered by other agents (domestic or extra-domestic), the state has clearly failed to uphold this cardinal contractual tenet. It is indeed extraordinary to observe that the citizens/peoples haven’t walked away from this relationship, consequently…

What are they waiting for? That the state would, perhaps, dissolve itself? But do they equally contemplate, quite clearly a graver, much more catastrophic possibility, that the state, all along, may also wish to annihilate the people(s)?

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