Rethinking Africa is a forward looking blog dedicated to the exchange of innovative thinking on issues affecting the advancement of African peoples wherever they are. We provide rigorous and insightful analyses on the issues affecting Africans and their vision of the world.
Alto saxophonist genius and composer who plays an instrumental role in inaugurating the bebop revolution in jazz, African American classical music, in the 1940s/early 1950s, channelling its creativity and outcomes crucially to this epoch of African American freedom quest
(Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, “Hot house” [personnel: Parker, alto saxophone; Gillespie, trumpet;
Dick Hyman, piano; Sandy Block, bass; Charlie Smith, drums; recorded: DuMont
television network, New York, US, 24 February 1952])
Distinguished theoretical physicist, expert on solar energy, professor emeritus and prolific multidisciplinary author including a set of biographical studies on leading Igbo intellectuals, one of which is on mathematician Chike Obi aptly subtitled: The foremost African mathematical genius of the 20th century Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
Many would probably adjudge as “too modest” the following 12 tasks* that states in contemporary Africa are called upon to accomplish for their peoples in the next five years starting tomorrow, Friday 28 August 2015. Despite such reservation, the tasks are available here for the challenge. Can any of these states achieve the set goals? Which? Which cannot? Why not? Each of the current 54 so-called sovereign African states has the capacity to accomplish these tasks during the the set timeframe including, particularly, those disarticulated entities where regime cadres of genocidist and putschist sergeants and “generals” and privates and corporals are ritually recycled as immanent crucibles of statecraft. Freedom vs Not-fit-for-purpose If any of the states can’t, then such a state should be deemed dissolved – not fit for purpose. This is now the opportunity for constituent nations or peoples to seize the historic initiative of freedom, since February 1885, and march along focused with a sense of mission to embark on this reconstruction/redevelopment themselves, underscoring that lucid insight since proffered by Walter Rodney – “development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth” . In other words, the engine of societal development is located internally, in the peoples, themselves, not the prevailing and pervasive fraudulent developmentalism beamed to Africa whose mission has the etched signature of some external agency and the latter’s central interests.
Goals for states/new states 1. Cut by 50 per cent prevalence of communicable ailment in the population
2. One hundred quality primary health care centres with excellent facilities, equipment and medicine
3. One hundred quality primary and secondary schools with excellent world-standard curriculum content, equipment, staff and study environment
4. One university of worldwide standard, attracting staff and students from across the region and world
5. One thousand apprenticeship opportunities to study at excellent technical schools, producing skilled workforce of electricians, builders, welders, plumbers, mechanics
6. Fifty per cent of young people, 18-25, have access to small-scale loans to start business ventures
7. Fifty per centof women have access to small-scale loans to start business ventures
8. Pave 1000 kilometres of well-constructed road linking towns and cities and country
9. Engage 1000 new farmers in agricultural work, providing technical and financial support
10. Fifty per centof population have access to clean pipe-borne water supply
11.Fifty per cent of population have access to power 24 hours a day, seven days a week
12. Fifty per cent of homes connected to the internet
(John Coltrane &
Don Cherry, “Focus on sanity” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cherry,
cornet; Percy Heath, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums; recorded: Atlantic Studios, New
York, 28 June/8 July 1960])
*I wish to thank Dr Okwuonicha Nzegwu for her contribution to this commentary
“Pres”/“Prez” of the tenor, influential tenor saxophonist whose unique, more introverted tone has had an immense impact on several successive lead players of the instrument including, especially, Gordon, Getz, Mulligan, Cohn, Sims, Quinichette and Stitt
(Billie holiday
& Her All Stars, featuring Lester Young, play “Fine and mellow” [full personnel: Holiday, vocals;
Roy Eldridge, trumpet; Doc Cheatham, trumpet; Vic Dickenson, trombone; Gerry Mulligan,
baritone saxophone; Lester Young, tenor saxophone; Ben Webster, tenor
saxophone; Coleman Hawkins, tenor saxophone; Danny Baker, guitar; Mal Waldron,
piano; Milt Hinton, bass; Osie Johnson, drums; recorded: CBS, “Sound of Jazz”,
New York, US, 8 December 1957])
Perspicuous harpist, pianist, organist, bandleader and versatile composer which includes the ethereal masterpiece,Ptah, the El Daoud (personnel: Coltrane, piano, harp; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; Ron Carter, bass; Ben Riley, drums [recorded: Impuse! Records, New York, 26 January 1970])
(Born 26 August 1918, White Sulphur Springs, W Virginia, US) Iconic mathematician, physicist, computer scientist and space scientist, with expansive work in the US space programme Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe The “Igbo Question” is intrinsically linked to the Igbo strategic goal, presently, which is to end the occupation of their homeland, Biafra, by genocidist Nigeria – imposed since 13 January 1970. This is phase-IV of the genocide, launched by Nigeria on Sunday 29 May 1966. 3.1 million Igbo people or 25 per cent of this nation’s population were murdered by Nigeria and its allies including, especially, Britain, which 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. No single nation or people in Africa has suffered such a 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])
Architecture Given the critical links between the salient features of the politics of the occupation and the overarching architecture of the genocidal campaign, most agree that the Igbo termination of the occupation is at once the beginning of their freedom march from Nigeria and the implementation of an expansive socioeconomic programme of reconstruction unprecedented in this southwestcenral region of Africa. If this is the case, one does not need an Igbo “presidency” in Abuja to achieve this as some Igbo commentators as well as a few others have, at times, contended, but quite uncritically. Indeed no Igbo “presidency”, not even one reinforced with an all-Igbo personnel in the key cabinet military/police/“security”-positions can halt this genocide. This campaign has now acquired an inexorable logic to its being. What the emergence of Boko Haram and its other subalterns have demonstrated in Nigeria is that the prosecuting agency of the genocide has become very much decentred, very much motivated, very much engagingly virulent. The typical Boko Haram suicide-operating cell is a handful-strength, in single digits, and none in the group knows any of the others until they meet at the designated, targeted site of operation – in which they, invariably, are not expected to survive! If any survives, they, of course, become a member of new cell of hitherto unknown members and the cycle goes on...
Inalienable Prior to Boko Haram, still on the Igbo “presidency”, we mustn’t forget that Nigeria was under the leadership of an Igbo general when the genocide began on 29 May 1966. Thus, Igbo “presidency”, however attractive the proposition, offers no route to the Igbo halting the genocide. None whatsoever. The route remains Igbo freedom from Nigeria. This is 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, accessed 18 July 2015), the Igbo, surely, don’t require any agonisingly turgid historical and sociological treatise to wish to leave Nigeria.
Resolution Contrary to the amazingly ahistorical discourses on the nature of the state and its survivability in some circles, particularly in Africa, 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”, British “empire”, Malaya Federation, West & East Pakistan, Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, the Sudan... 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 population, Europeans presently have more states per capita than Africans! And as history shows, the catastrophe is not the collapse of the state; the catastrophe isto destroy/attempt to destroy constituent peoples within the state as the Igbo, for instance, have faced in a Nigeria since 29 May 1966. Here lies the Igbo Question. Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is specialist on the state and on genocide & wars in Africa in the post-1966 epoch – beginning with the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-present day, the foundational and most gruesome genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population were murdered by Nigeria and its allies, principally Britain. Africa and the rest of the world largely stood by and watched as the perpetrators enacted this horror most ruthlessly. The world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide. This genocide inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. During the period, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/DRCongo (variously, since the late 1990s) and Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004) and in other wars in Africa. African peoples have, presently, no other choice but exit/dismantle the extant genocide-state (the bane of their existence & progress) & construct own nation-centred states that serve their interests. He is author of several books & papers on the subject and his new book is entitled The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019).
