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Erudite scholar, diplomat, member of the crucial communication directorate of the Biafran resistance government during the Igbo genocide, carried out by Nigeria and its suzerain state Britain, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, during which 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population are murdered in this foundational genocide of post(European)conquest Africa
(Charles Mingus, the iconoclastic bassist and composer, plays the piano: spontaneous compositions and improvisations... [personnel: Mingus, piano; recorded: Impulse!, New York, 30 July 1963])
(Born 4 January 1901, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago)
Revolutionary marxist theorist and philosopher, author of the classic, The Black Jacobins (1938) on the historic enslaved African uprising in France’s conquered and occupied Saint Domingue, the Caribbean, in the 1790s, in which theAfricans defeat the French and its pan-European naval and land forces’ allies (including, especially, British and Spanish) and proclaim the Republic of Haiti, 1804, a victory whose profound consequences are etched indelibly in the psyche of the French Establishment as it relates to African peoples and the African World subsequently
(Sonny Rollins Quartet, “St Thomas” [personnel: Rollins, tenor saxophone; Tommy Flanagan, piano; Doug Watkins, bass; Max Roach, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, US, 22 June 1956])
Biafrans do not agitate for freedom. They proclaim their freedom. No one agitates for freedom; freedom is proclaimed! Biafrans proclaim the restoration of their independence. This right to freedom is inalienable.
(Sonny Rollins Trio, “The freedom suite” [personnel: Rollins, tenor saxophone; Oscar Pettiford, bass; Max Roach, drums; recorded: Riverside Records, New York, US, 7 March 1958])
ARGUABLY THE most distinguished vibraphonist of the bebop revolutionof the 1940s-1950s and co-founder of the Modern Jazz Quartet (full personnel: Jackson, vibraphone; John Lewis, piano; Percy Heath, bass; Connie Kay, drums), 1952-1992
(Milt Jackson & John Coltrane, “Bags and Trane” [personnel: Jackson, vibraphone; Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Hank Jones, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Connie Kay, drums; recorded: Atlantic Records, New York, 15 January 1959])
IT IS INDEED hilarious how awfully
predictable the islamist genocidist Nigeria regime has become of late.
Throughout most of the summer, it
unleashed its Fulani militia group (often misclassified in the media in Nigeria and elsewhere as “herdsmen”), cousin of its other created terrorist grouping,
Boko Haram (the latter are part of the five deadliest terrorist organisations
in the world currently according to the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-17/global-terrorism-index-increase/6947200, accessed 17 November 2015), to ravage swathes of territory across Biafra,
murdering and maiming hundreds of people and destroying their property worth
millions of US dollars. It was in one of
such campaigns that the militia murdered some seminary students near Nsukka,
northcentral Biafra, and abducted and murdered Akaeze Ofulue III, the highly respected
obi or king of Ubulu-Ukwu, west Biafra. These attacks are part of the
intensification of the current phase-IV of the Igbo genocide.
NEITHER the regime in Nigeria nor of
course the occupying genocidist military on the ground in Biafra ever condemned
these atrocities. As I also stressed during the period, neither former British
Prime Minister David Cameron nor in fact US President Barack Obama (first African-descent
president in 233 years of the US republic) who both installed Muhammadu Buhari
as new head of the Nigeria regime in March 2015 for once condemned these outrages
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/select-terroristoutrages-across-world.html). Besides the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law
and other Biafra-based tireless human rights organisations which have meticulously
reported these murders as well as others carried out directly by the genocidist
military since the Buhari imposition, Amnesty International in London, England,
has also elaborately informed the world of the slaughter in two
widely-publicised studies it published in November 2016 (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/11/peaceful-pro-biafra-activists-killed-in-chilling-crackdown/, accessed 23 November 2016) and earlier on in
June 2016 (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/06/nigeria-killing-of-unarmed-pro-biafra-supporters-by-military-must-be-urgently-investigated/, accessed 10 June 2016). Corner shop vs “cattle ranch” SIX MONTHS later, the regime has just
made the trite announcement that some of its military operatives would be sent
to Argentina to “learn how cattle [are] reared” so that “cattle ranches [are
set up] in almost all [military] divisions … and brigades” (Vanguard, Lagos, 20
December 2016). For a particularly
degenerate genocidist military that has spent 50 years in a desperate campaign to
destroy Igbo people and which has itself been riven internally by coups and
coups and countercoups and variations on coups, this haematophagous monster
surely has no conceivably creative enterprising characteristics in its DNA. The
Nigeria military cannot run the most
rudimentary of a corner-shop; it surely wouldn’t understand what it entails to
run an infinitely more complex organisation as a cattle ranch. Definitely not.
Dreadful legacy
ON the face of it, Nigeria’s “cattle
ranch” initiative is therefore phony but nonetheless a venture, as will be
elaborated shortly, that serves as cover for the concrete, underlying ominous policy
calculation which keys into the overarching strategic architecture of what it
considers the “final stretch” of this phase of its genocidist drive against the
Igbo – currently being played out in this people’s Biafran homeland. Thanks to
the seeming carte blanche to murder
as many Igbo as he thought fit without the possibilities of US/international
criticism or sanctions that regime chief Buhari received right from the outset (in
2015) particularly from Barack Obama, Nigeria has by and large been “shielded”
from consequential international revulsion in response to this crime against
humanity perpetrated on Igbo people. Thus the US government under Obama – the
White House, the state department, the US embassy in Abuja, Nigeria – has
remained morbidly silentthroughout
the October 2015-December 2016 raging slaughter of hundreds of Igbo carried out
by the Buhari dual force-operational genocidist machine deployed in Biafra: the
military, Fulani militia. For Obama, first African-descent US president, it is
indeed a dreadful legacy to support this full blown islamist-led genocide in contemporary
Africa, this continent of his fathers (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-this-piece-is.html).
Shattering the silence
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL’s latest report
on the genocide, already referred to, coming literally on the eve of the end of
Obama’s 2-term presidency, shatters this orchestrated international silence
over the Igbo genocide. The import of Amnesty’s study is a comprehensively graphic
reminder to the world on what the survivors of the stretch of the one-year’s murders
have been reporting all along, what the Biafra human rights organisations have
been publishing during the period, what updated situation report of the
genocide on the ground since its own June 2015’s study, what heinous crimes
have been committed against a peaceful and industrious people by the reprobate
genocidist installed in office by Obama (and ex-British Premier Cameron)
without the appropriate response from
the “international community”. At once, for the first time in 13 months, Amnesty’s
report projected the grim news of this phase of the Igbo genocide onto the
transmitting wires of the world’s leading news agencies and coverage by television
and radio broadcasters and newspapers: Reuters, PA, AFP, AP, CNN, MSN, BBC,
France24, Newsweek, The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, New York
Times, Fox News, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Die Welt, Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Le Figaro, Hindustan Times…
“Cattle ranch” ploy: annexation & islamisation
PREDICTABLY, the genocidist regime
was riled up by the Amnesty International report. Suddenly, its grave atrocities
in Biafra, so zealously but cowardly covered up until then by its masters in
Washington and London was broadcast and rebroadcast worldwide. The regime’s feverish
response was threefold and aimed principally to reinforce its 47 years of
occupation of Biafra. First, it launched a major travel clampdown across Biafra
to disrupt the journey plans of hundreds of thousands of Biafran families travelling
home from Nigeria to celebrate Christmas, one of the most important holidays of
the Biafra calendar for a country that is 98.5% Christian. Second, the regime
declared that Buhari would visit Enuugwu, the Biafran capital, just before
Christmas, in what was seen by the Biafran resistance as a “desperate
provocation” by the genocidist. The regime called off the visit at the last
minute on the uncompromising insistance by the resistance that Biafrans couldn’t “tolerate
such a visit” and would oppose it forthwith. Third, its most strategically
intuned, the regime announced its “cattle ranch” project which is essentially a
ploy to deploy its terrorist Fulani militia with
their cows across the valleys and farmlands of Biafra on a permanent basis
by expelling millions of Biafran farmers and back up this (fresh) invading Fulani
presence with added protection from its already occupying military formations. Here
in Biafra, the Fulani are indeed desperate to adapt a strategy of “cow swamping-and-occupy”
which they had employed in their conquest and islamisation of parts of Yorubaland and multiple nations
and peoples in the Niger and Benue valleys of northwestcentral Africa in the 19th century/early decades of
the 20th century, just before the subsequent conquests and occupations of these
states and peoples by Britain.
Essentially, there are five words to
describe this particularly sinister so-called cattle-ranch genocidist Nigeria
programme: annexation and islamisation of Biafra.
Biafran resistance 2017
IN JULY 2010, a group of leading Igbo human rights scholars (including respected literary critic Ben Obumselu) and activists (including
influential lawyer Olisa Agbakoba) met in the Ofuobi African Centre, Enuugwu, in
a conference and called formally for the termination of the Nigerian occupation
of Biafra (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/in-wake-of-murder-of-three-possibly.html). They had stated a preamble to their 10-point call for this
termination which we need re-stating here:
[Biafra] has become militarized with
a vast deployment of expeditionary and predatory police and army personnel who
are from outside the region. For instance, there are 61 Police check-points
between Abakal[e]k[e] … to Nsukka … (a distance of about 130km). In [contrast]
between Obolo-Afo [Biafra] and Lokoja [Nigeria] (a distance of nearly 400 km)
no checkpoints exist. This state of siege is exemplified by the current
[situation] of … [Biafran] cities [including] Aba, [Enuugwu, Abakaleke, Onicha,
Owere] and Nnewi – hitherto the fastest growing and thriving industrial cum
commercial cities in the African continent now being turned into refuse dumps
and ghettos. Businesses that would have provided jobs to engage our youths have
been strangulated by incompetent and criminal leadership.
I had indicated soon after the Ofuobi
conference that the Igbo should stop paying the millions and millions of US
dollars worth of expropriation tax that sustains the genocidist occupation and
their subjugation and this call must be reiterated once again. One must never,
ever, be a participant in their incarceration, their deindividuation. Nigeria
must unconditionally cease its occupation of Biafra. A general, indefinite
strike across Biafra should be called forthwith, demanding the unconditional
dismantling of Nigeria’s barriers of extortion and expropriation, and the
evacuation of its military/police/customs bases/Fulani cattle herds from their
land. An extensive and continuing-evolving organisation is required as this
march of freedom develops.The
Biafra resistance has its work cut out. It is unstoppable and the “cattle
ranch” ploy is understood clearly for what it is: stark desperation.
Genocidist Nigeria does know that the Igbo are
not Nigerian. The Igbo are from Biafra. The Igbo are Biafran. Whilst the Igbo
worked extraordinarily hard by playing the vanguard
role in the liberation of Nigeria from the British conquest (beginning from
the 1930s), the Igbo ceased to be Nigerian on Sunday 29 May 1966. This is the day
Nigeria launched the Igbo genocide. The Igbo renouncement of their Nigerian
citizenship is the irrevocable Igbo indictment on a state that embarked on the
destruction of 3.1 million Igbo people, 25 per cent of this nation’s population
at the time. The only future a genocide-state has is that those murdered by it
or others apprehensive that it could extend its murderous heritage on them abandon
it – nothing else.
BIAFRANS have since abandoned genocidist Nigeria and
are on their way to restore their sovereigntyin
their Biafran homeland. There can never be a reversal. This will be
one of the most outstanding breakthroughs of the freedom movement of the age.
(Alice Coltrane Quartet, “Lord, help me to be”[personnel: Coltrane, piano; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Ben Riley, drums; recorded: Coltrane home studio, Dix Hills, New York, US, 29 January 1968])
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).
