52nd anniversary of bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama, US

(part of the 16th Street Baptist Church Birmingham after the bombing)

In this terrorist attack on 15 September 1963, described by Martin Luther King as “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity”, four girls are murdered and 22 other congregants sustain varying levels of injuries

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Alabama” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live, Jazz Casual Productions {host: Ralph Gleason}, 7 December 1963])

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126th birthday of Claude McKay

(Born 15 September 1889, Nairne Castle, Clarendon, Jamaica)

One of the leading intellectuals of the 1920s-1930s Harlem Renaissance – prolific poet, novelist, autobiographer, essayist, journalist, whose works include “If We Must Die” (1919), Harlem Shadows (1922), Home to Harlem (1928),  Banjo (1929), A Long Way from Home (1937),  Harlem (1940), My Green Hills of Jamaica (1979) and Amiable With Big Teeth (the eagerly awaited new novel from a 1941 McKay manuscript discovered in 2009 [68 years later!] in Columbia University archives)

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Path to African freedom and transformation: 2015-2065*****

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

In 2065, fifty years away, the Igbo people and the rest of the world will be making final preparations to commemorate a century of the Igbo genocide. This will take place on 29 May 2066.

Barbarism, Pestilence

It should be recalled that on that dreadful mid-morning of Sunday 29 May 1966 and through the course of 44 subsequent months of indescribable barbarity and carnage not seen in Africa since the German-perpetration of the genocide against the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of Namibia in the early 1900s, the composite institutions of the Nigeria state, civilian and military, embarked on the murder of Igbo people. 3.1 million Igbo or one-quarter of this nation’s population were murdered during the genocide.

The Igbo genocide is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. It inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. Singularly and quite dramatically, the genocide shattered the capacity of this post-conquest state to capitalise on the vast invaluable resources of multinationality and multiculturality emplaced at such a critical phase to engineer a determined reconstructionary and redevelopment programme of the country after the devastation of 60 years of the British occupation. 

Constitutive indices

To understand the politics of the Igbo genocide and the politics of the “post”-Igbo genocide is to have an invaluable insight into the salient features and constitutive indices of politics across Africa in the past 50 years. Africans elsewhere remained largely silent on the gruesome events in Nigeria but did not foresee the grave consequences of such indifference as subsequent genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, Nuba Mountains, South Kordofan (latter three in the Sudan) and Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in other wars and conflicts in every geographical region of Africa, during the period, have demonstrated catastrophically: Liberia, Mali, Libya, Egypt, Côte d’Ivoire, Algeria, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, southern Guinea, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Central African Republic, Nigeria (Boko Haram insurgency in north, northcentral regions). The haunting killing fields have indeed stretched, almost inexorably, from Igboland to the rest of Africa… 

Just as the Nigerian operatives of mass murder appeared to have got away without censure from the rest of Africa, other genocidal and brutal African regimes soon followed in Nigeria’s footpath, murdering a horrifically additional tally of 12 million people in their countries considered “undesirables” or “opponents” since the Igbo genocide in January 1970. These 12 million murdered in the latter bloodbaths would probably have been saved if Africans and the rest of the world had intervened, robustly, to stop the initial genocide against the Igbo people. Surely, the world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide.

Bane of existence

Forty-nine years and 15 million murders on, Africans now realise, finally, that there cannot be any meaningful advancement in their fortunes without abandoning this post-(European)conquest state, this “Berlin-state”, essentially a genocide-state. This state is the bane of African existence and progress. Yet, thankfully, just as in Berlin, in November 1884-February 1885, when conquering Europeans drafted their gruesome charter for the occupation of Africa, states are not a gift from the gods but relationships painstakingly formulated and constructed by a discernible group of human beings that inhabit an ascertainable geo-historical territorial expanse on earth to pursue worldviews and interests envisioned and articulated by these same human beings. The state, any state, therefore, is transient; in contrast, human beings, people(s), endure.

Aimé Césaire, the poet and philosopher,  once told interviewer Annick Thebia Melson (“The liberating power of words: An interview with Poet Aimé Césaire”, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Vol. 2, No 4, June 2008, pp. 2-7) 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” (2008: 7). It is indeed in the very course to disrupt and “readjust” this hierarchy in this age of pestilence in the”‘cursed” (to quote historian Basil Davidson) “Berlin-state” in favour of Africa and African peoples that the constituent African nation or people (Igbo, Darfuri, Gĩkũyũ, Wolof, Ibibio, Bakongo, Jola, Mongo, Akan, Luba, Ndebele, Mende, Luo, Herero, Serer, 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.

So, for all African peoples or nations, the unambiguous message on the unfurled banner for their freedom march in this next one-half of a century couldn’t be more confident and focused: “We are because we are free; We are free because we are”. Abandon the “Berlin-state” now: Nigeria, Niger, Chad, the Sudan, etc., etc., each and every one of this configuration, is a fraud. Create your own state today, now. Now is the time! The constituent African nation, this people, can and should create its own state if it so desires. Freedom. 

It is its inalienable right (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/rights-for-scots-rights-for-igbo.html, accessed 10 September 2015). 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” (2008: 2).

(Sonny Rollins Quintet, “Decision” [personnel: Rollins, tenor saxophone, Donald Byrd, trumpet; Wynton Kelly, piano; Gene Ramey, bass; Max Roach, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, US, 16 December 1956])

Let freedom ring!
Thus, the pressing point to reiterate here is that the immediate emergency that threatens the very survival of African peoples is the enthralling “Berlin-state” edifice entombed in African existence to serve the strategic interests of its European World creator in perpetuity coupled with the pathetic bunch that masquerades here and there as African leaderships but whose mission is to oversee the pervasive manifestation that signposts contemporary Africa.

African women and men will sooner, now, rather than later, abandon this fractured, fracturing, conflictive, alienating and terror contraption. Africans must now focus on real transformation – the revitalisation and consolidation of the institutions of Africa’s constituent nations and polities, or what Okwuonicha Nzegwu has described, succinctly, as the “indigenous spaces of real Africa” (Nzegwu, Love, Motherhood and the African Heritage, 2001: 41). In these institutions and spaces of African civilisation lie the organic framework to ensure transparency, probity, accountability, investment in people, humanised wealth creation, respect for human rights and civil liberties, and a true commitment to radically transform African existence.

The future for the constituent nations and peoples of Africa couldn’t be more reassuring on the morrow of that which, since 1 January 1956, has been classified as the post-(European)conquest “Berlin-state” or genocide-state of Africa. All successor states, organically constituted, really have their work cut out. Their mission is not to begin to construct states that are merely post-genocide or post post-conquest/post post-“colonial” states (cancelling out, in some mechanical venture, that which was “Berlin-state” Africa here and there!) but a realisation, a reclamation of that which makes us all human and part of humanity. 

The new states have an opportunity to begin to build a new civilisation where human life, fundamentally, is sacrosanct. This is an inclusive state where women and men live as co-operators and co-creators in fundamentally transforming their society. This is a state that accepts and accords full rights to all minority groups. This is a state where people enjoy the rights to differ and to dream dreams and dream different sets of dreams as they choose. This is a state dedicated to furthering and nurturing the resilience of its people and to enabling them pursue their highest creative endeavours. This state continuously strives to remove all limitations in the paths of its people and committed to making life better and better and better. This is a state that primes its people to flourish. 

Finally, the long drawn out nightmare of nearly 200 years, since November 1884- February 1885, is over and truly Africans do stand poised on the eve of a new beginning.

(Ornette Coleman Quartet, “Tomorrow is the question” [personnel: Coleman, alto saxophone; Don Cherry, trumpet; Percy Heath, bass; Shelly Manne, drums; recorded: Contemporary’s Studio, Los Angeles, US, 9/10 March 1959])

*****(slightly edited version of paper originally published in Pambazuka News: Pan African Voices for Freedom and Justice, Issue 680, 29 May 2014, as part of collection of essays focusing on “Africa in 50 years’ time – inventing a new Africa”)

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130th birthday of Alain Locke

(Born 13 September 1885, Philadelphia, US)

Distinguished philosopher and prolific multidisciplinary scholar aptly described by Martin Luther King as one of the preeminent philosophers that “came through the universe”, dean of the 1920s-1930s Harlem Renaissance

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91st birthday of Amilcar Cabral

(Born 12 September 1924, Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau)

Agricultural engineer, outstanding theorist and philosopher of the national liberation resistance (see, particularly, Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea [New York: Monthly Review, 1970] and Cabral, Return to the Source [New York: Monthly Review, 1973]) and founder of  Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e CaboVerde (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) that frees Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in 1974 from 500 years of the Portuguese conquest and occupation

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Igbo survivor-victor

No people who survives genocide is a “loser”: Kongo, Mongo, Luba, Boulangui, Mangbetu-Azande, Berg Damara, Nama, Herero, Armenians, Jews, Igbo, Tutsi, Darfuri... Someone or a people that survives genocide is at once a survivor and victor, hence that stunning incantation of the triumph of life itself on the morrow of overcoming the slaughter: “Happy Survival”!
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/on-christopher-okigbo-africas-leading.html, accessed 2 September 2015)

Foundation

In the case of the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa in which Nigeria murders 3.1 million Igbo (one-quarter of this nation’s population), the agency that has consistently acknowledged this fact of the survivor-victor, throughout this dreadful epoch, is, pointedly, if not ironically, none other than Nigeria – the key perpetrator of this crime itself. Whatever else explains why Nigeria segues almost effortlessly to a new phase of its campaign, as early as 13 January 1970, to coincide with that Igbo celebratory life-invocation-of- “Happy Survival” that they proclaimed to the whole world:

(a) new vistas of charging murder trails since (i.e., 13 January 1970-10 September 2015), targeting and slaughtering tens of thousands of Igbo domiciled particularly in the geographies of north Nigeria but also elsewhere in the country with the murder-machine now morphed into Boko Haram and the Buhari regime, arguably the most terror-retrograde fraction of the Nigeria genocidist power-bloc   

(b) enhanced disarticulation/degradation/dismantling of Igboland economy and programmed “marginalisation” of the well-known contending assets of Igbo intellectual/politico-economic-cultural establishment – a crucial plank of the overarching goal of the Nigeria occupation which the Buhari regime has expanded with relish since May 2015

(c) unrelentingly fiendish valorisation of the genocide by genocidist “theorists”/ commanders/commandants/heads-of-regime/regime enthusiasts-propagandists including that notorious 6 April 2015 royal edict by Rilwan Akiolu, the king or oba of Lagos (west Nigeria) and fulsome supporter of the Buhari regime, calling publicly for the mass murder of Igbo people
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/c.html, accessed 6 September 2015). 

(d) not one official of the Buhari regime, either in the regions or the centre in Abuja, has denounced this Akiolu-death decree

(e) not therefore fortuitous that, since the Akiolu-death decree, regime troopers have murdered scores of Igbo in Igboland itself – at the Ariara International Market, Aba (eastcentral region), on 31 July 2015, and at the Oshimili River bridgehead of the Oshimili delta, Onicha (northwest region), on 31 August 2015

(f) essentially, this Nigeria genocidist regime is a haematophagous terror monster stalking the landscape of Igboland
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/in-wake-of-murder-of-three-possibly.html, accesssed 5 September 2015).

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Living space” [personnel: Coltrane, soprano saxophone, McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, NJ, US, 16 June 1965])

Biafra

Yet despite the desperation and savagery of genocidist Nigeria, particularly heightened currently, the Igbo refuse to go under. Igbo will never go under, thanks to the resilience of the survivor-victor. In dazzling contrast, the world presently watches, unmistakeably, as Nigeria trots along to an ignominious collapse, having run the course of its bloody trail in history, begun on Sunday 29 May 1966.

Consequently, for the Igbo, they have their work cut out as they embark on constructing a new civilisation in Biafra in the aftermath of Nigeria. This is the news the world awaits most eagerly. In Biafra, the Igbo don’t only have to negate, in its entirety, that which was Nigeria but subvert the very ideational crucible which inaugurated this pulverising nightmare unleashed by the epoch of the British conquest of the peoples and occupation of the states of this southwestcentral region of Africa in 1885 – 130 years ago.

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FWD: Joe R Feagin, How Blacks Built America: Labor, culture, freedom and democracy

Joe R Feagin, How Blacks built America (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2015, 252 pp.), £90.00/US$25.24-US$136.47hc; £24.99/US$36.39-39.95pbk; £23.74/US$36.26kindle

Book summary

How Blacks Built America examines the many positive and dramatic contributions made by African Americans to this country over its long history. Almost all public and scholarly discussion of African Americans accenting their distinctive societal position, especially discussion outside black communities, has emphasized either stereotypically negative features or the negative socioeconomic conditions that they have long faced because of systemic racism. In contrast, Feagin reveals that African Americans have long been an extraordinarily important asset for this country. Without their essential contributions, indeed, there probably would not have been a United States. This is an ideal addition to courses race and ethnicity courses.

Author

Joe R Feagin is Ella C McFadden professor of sociology, Texas ARM University, and prolific author whose books include Racist America (2002), Systemic racism (2006), Two faced racism (2007), White party, White government (2012), The white racial frame (Second edition, 2013), Racist America (Third Edition, 2014)

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