Queen Elizabeth II of England honours Professor Elizabeth Nneka Anionwu, emeritus professor of nursing and former dean of School of Adult Nursing at the University of West London – made dame commander (DBE) for services to nursing and the Mary Seacole statue appeal in Britain’s 2017 New Year honours list

(Queen Elizabeth II of England formally honours Professor Elizabeth Nneka Anionwu as dame commander [DBE], London, 23 February 2017)

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60th anniversary of restoration-of-independence in contemporary Ghana

6 March 1957: Restoration of independence of the peoples – terminating 90 years of the British conquest, unrelenting expropriation and occupation of contemporary Ghana with the triumph of the freedom movement begun in the 1940s and led by Kwame Nkrumah, political theorist and philosopher

(Jackie McLean Sextet, “Appointment in Ghana” [personnel: McLean, alto saxophone; Blue Mitchell, trumpet; Tina Brooks, tenor saxophone; Kenny Drew, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Art Taylor, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 1 September 1960])

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83rd birthday of Jimmy Garrison

(Born 3 March 1934, Miami, US)

BASSIST of the classic John Coltrane Quartet (full personnel: Coltrane, tenor and soprano saxophones; McCoy Tyner, piano; Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums), 1962-1965, whose recognisable propulsive drive invigorates the group’s distinctive swinging oeuvre

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Impressions” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner, piano; Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: KQED Studios, San Francisco, US, 1 November 1963])

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Biafra at the Rio 2016 Olymipics: A retrospective

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

For those not particularly familiar with the inner workings of that haematophagous monster which calls itself Nigeria, the following news item in African Spotlight (Friday 12 August 2016), carried similarly by several other news organisations, could appear extraordinary if not outlandish.

First, the story’s blazing headline: “Rio 2016: Mikel Obi pays $4,000 to save Nigerian players embarrassment from Brazilian hotel”. 

Second, the first paragraph in the dispatch that duly elaborates on the theme: “In yet another scandal, Team Nigeria captain at the ongoing Olympics, Mikel John Obi, had to pay $4,000 of his personal money, to save the footballers from embarrassment after a hotel in Sao Paulo held the entire team to ransom over the bills incurred by additional officials, it has been revealed. The Nigerian Olympic team almost missed their flight [from São Paulo] to Salvador, reports say” (emphasis added). A player – not even one of the usual retinue of accompanying genocidist Nigerian officials (coach, managers, trainers, hangers-on, etc., etc), pays for his team’s hotel bills incurred at a foreign assignment 3500 miles away from Nigeria! 

Furthermore, this intervening player, with his personal money to pay for the outstanding São Paulo hotel costs, is Biafran...

Genocidist state

What sort of state on this planet would send a sports team to represent it abroad – not just, for instance, to some other state across its frontiers, contiguous to its territory (if such a rationalisation could ever be contemplated) but 3500 miles away, in a competition, the prestigious Olympic games for that matter, and not adequately fund the team’s passage and upkeep and welfare comprehensively? Straight-ahead reply: genocidist Nigeria.

Why? Not too complicated either: genocidist Nigeria, now 51 years in the making after it and its suzerain state and strategic ally Britain had initially murdered 3.1 million Igbo people during phases I-III of the Igbo genocide (29 May 1966-12 January 1970), is currently run by Muhammadu Buhari. This is an islamist jihadist operative who is so riled by the defiant Igbo youth’s doggedly dominant presence and drive stamped on the creative arts and sports and academic disciplines and practices across the Nigeria landscape, despite the genocide and occupation of the Biafran homeland. In what the uninitiated genocidist Nigeria watcher might think is perverse, Buhari would rather adamantly prefer a non-Nigeria participation in the Rio Olympics or a complete loss of a game’s tournament by Nigeria if the “country”’s participating sports team, in this case a football team, as is more often than not, is captained by an Igbo or/and has a substantial personnel of the team, as is also more often than not, populated by Igbo talent.

Depression

MUHAMMADU BUHARI must have literally been thrown into days of agonising depression by this football team heading from São Paulo to Salvador in Brazil whose captain has the following name profile with its uncompromisingly classed Igbo registers: John Michael Nchekwube Obinna – not Ahmed, Saraki, Abacha, Muhammadu, Ahmadu, Maigida, Salisu, Maimuna, Mohammed, Buhari, Sulaiman, Lamido, Sadiq, Abubakar, etc., etc, that would more likely characterise the forename or surname of an operative that sits on a genocidist preparatory committee or participatory cell/squad/brigade in an Abuja, Katsina, Maiduguri, Kano or Sokoto, meticulously planning the next slaughtering outrage in Onicha, Oka, Owere, Igwe Ocha, Enuugwu or somewhere else in occupied Biafra.

Asset

For Muhammadu Buhari, the Nnamdis and Nnekas and Ngozis and Obiagelis and Nkeirus and Ikechukwus and Nkechis and Chidis and Emekas and Chukas of the Igbo nation should be sequestrated in the cities, towns and villages of Biafra awaiting the genocidist slaughter-next-round instead of being positioned, as hundreds of thousands of them are indeed primed currently, in several top colleges and universities and innumerable sites of creative endeavours and sports activities around the world. One of the insistent factors that has fuelled the Igbo genocide in these past 50 years is the Hausa-Fulani islamist leadership’s trenchant aversion to the well-known Igbo hardworking ethic and entrepreneurial drive. Consequently, this dual attribute of ethic and drive has transformed Igbo people to presently control one of Africa’s best-developed multidisciplinary humanpower conglomeration of assets.

Finally, to return to that Mikel Obi’s US$4000.00 personal payment to rescue the Nigeria football team from its São Paulo hotel bill’s entanglement, an obvious question on the minds of many must be the following: Given the existential threat that most know the Igbo face due to the ongoing genocide from Nigeria, was Nchekwube Obinna’s payment motivated by sheer naivety or just crass ignorance?  No, contrary to seemingly predictable impulses, neither is distinctly on the mark. Instead, Obinna was indeed acting out from a script that tragically pervades the entire Africa landscape, in the wake of centuries-old European conquest and occupation of the continent, where the largely non-deconstructed conqueror’s/conquest social sciences & humanities project the prevailing “state”, the “Berlin-state”, as some raefied if not ahistorical construct to which each and every African is “strapped”.

(Biafra’s John Michael Nchekwube Obinna: ... footprints ... indelible registers ...)

Nchekwube Obinnas of Africa are free to choose

IN THE NIGERIA case, as any cursory observer should attest to, the horror of that imagination, characterisation and association must be catastrophically profound. For the Igbo, in the maelstrom of that wretchedness, the history of the past 50 years attests chillingly and overwhelmingly. The Nchekwube Obinnas of Africa must now know that they are not wedded to any such states. On the contrary, states are historical constructs which human beings negotiate, pick and choose from. That is why states have, thankfully, remained transient in human history. The Nchekwube Obinnas of Africa are free to choose any states they wish to belong. It must therefore be a pointedly unthinkable personal tragedy if the Nchekwube Obinnas of Africa who are also survivors of genocide from genocidist Nigeria end up ticking Nigeria as the state of choice… Tufia kwa! 

The Nchekwube Obinnas of Africa must cease to represent genocidist Nigeria in all conceivable competitions: sports, creative and performing arts/other spheres of intellectual labour… Never again should we be treated to the grotesque scene of witnessing some Igbo athlete, some Igbo writer, some Igbo academic, appearing at some world stage carrying or wrapping themselves around a Nigerian flag. Enough! Order a Biafran flag for the occasion or alternatively promote the flag of your generous host –  the United States, Barbados, Vanuatu, Finland, Suriname... Definitely not genocidist Nigeria’s. A genocidist state’s fate is nothing else but to be abandoned, to be voided, to be dismantled. This is Nigeria’s fate as the handwriting on the wall is writ large.

NCHEKWUBE OBINNA should have donated or invested his US$4000.00 in any or some of the many private clinics across Biafra treating hundreds of desperate Biafran survivors from the recent murdering escapades carried out by genocidist Nigeria military/Boko Haram/Fulani militia brigades, beginning October 2015. Ironically, by paying the sum of US$4000.00 to the São Paulo hoteliers, due responsibility of genocidist Nigeria’s, Nchekwube Obinna provided ready savings or credit for this genocidist state and allies to fund the fresh cache of AK-47 rifles, ammunitions, bazookas, tank shells and suicide vests for their next planned murderous outrage in Oka, Onicha, Enuugwu, Igwe Ocha, Aba… 

Not only do Biafrans not obviously bail out genocidist Nigeria from its quagmire but Biafrans cannot be a party to Nigeria’s hardly disguised chart and intent of Biafran annihilation. This is precisely what the philosophers who worked strenuously on the name Nchekwube insist the Igbo and the world must know.

(George Russell Sextet here plays “Nardis”, a composition by Miles Davis [personnel: Russell, piano; Don Ellis, trumpet; Dave Baker, trombone; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Steve Swallow, bass; Joe Hunt, drums; recorded: Riverside Records, New York, US, 8 May 1961])

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94th birthday of Dexter Gordon

(Born 27 February 1923, Los Angeles, US)

Tenor saxophonist and composer, towering jazz ambassador who stars as “Dale Turner”, a composite character of himself, fellow tenor saxophonist Lester Young and pianist Bud Powell in the 1986 movie Round Midnight directed by Bertrand Tavernier

(Dexter Gordon Quartet, “Body and soul” [Gordon, tenor saxophone; George Gruntz, piano; Guy Pederston, bass; Daniel Humair, drums; recorded: live, Jazz Prisma, Brussels, Belgium, 8 January 1964])

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103rd birthday of James Cameron

(Born 25 February 1914, La Crosse, Wisconsin, US)

Indefatigable lynching-survivor in Marion, Indiana (7 August 1930), engineer, educator, founder of Milwaukee’s America’s Black Holocaust Museum dedicated to the history of African Americans from the epoch of enslavement to quest for freedom, author of A Time of Terror (1982)

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Asymmetrical matrix: genocidist Nigeria, force, Igbo survival, collapse of the Soviet Union

 (...the state in history is transient... the peoples endure: USSR/The Soviet Union, 30 December 1922-26 December 1991)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe 

“On a personal note, the phased end of the USSR was a turning point for me. It convinced me that change can be brought about without firing a single shot” (Muhammadu Buhari, barely educated***** vile genocidist Nigeria commander, north/northcentral Biafra during phase-III of the Igbo genocide, 6 July 1966-12 January 1970, addressing a meeting at Chatham House, London, England, 1000-1030 Hours GMT, Thursday 26 February 2015, arranged by his British establishment minders just a month before then British Prime Minister Cameron and ex-US President Obama, expectedly, two well educated persons in their respective publics, imposed the Buhari as Nigeria’s head-of-regime)

VERY MUCH interpellated in this thought process in Muhammadu Buhari’s mind of not-firing a single shot and the fall of the Soviet Union must be his realisation, even if belated, that despite the staggering pulverising force his genocidist military deployed to destroy Igbo people during phases I-III of the genocide of 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, the Igbo survived whilst contemporary Nigeria is a staggeringly, withering wretch.

The Soviet Union supported the genocide by sending in the squadrons of MiGs to Nigeria flown by loaned Egyptian pilots (not Nigerian pilots as the country no longer had such prized personnel since the genocidists murdered outstanding Igbo pilots who made up the then Nigeria air force service during phase-I of the genocide and slaughter-survivors escaped to Biafra to begin the construction of the Biafra air force), specialists in the carpet bombing of Igbo homes, offices, markets, churches, shrines, schools, children’s playgrounds, hospitals, railway stations, trains, cars, car parks, refugee centres… This same Soviet Union, this seemingly redoubtable state, soon, beginning December 1991, collapses “without (sic) a single shot fired” (!) but its constituent peoples survive – a reminder, if ever there was one, that the state, including the one that calls itself Nigeria, is transient; peoples endure 
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/state-is-transient-peoples-endure.html).

 (...the state in history is transient... the peoples endure: post-USSR/The Soviet Union – 15 new sovereign states emerged after the collapse of this colossus of a state, beginning December 1991...)

IT SHOULD now be evident to Buhari (and others) that those reptilian epaulettes for “majors” and “sergeants” and “corporals” and “generals” and “lieutenants” and “colonels” decked by genocidists who streamed to Biafra during those 44 dreadful months to murder 3.1 million Igbo children and women and men are nothing else but signifiers for perpetrating this heinous crime against humanity. 
____________________________________________
*****According to the 1999 genocidist Nigeria “constitution”, an aspiring candidate for the position of the state’s head-of-regime must possess a WASSCE certificate (school certificate/WASC/WAEC/high school/GCE “O” Level/GCSE “O” Level equivalent). Muhammadu Buhari does not have this basic qualification but was imposed regardless as head-of-regime by Cameron and Obama, a decision implemented on the ground in this British client-state by a ruthless overseer oligarchy.*****

(Sam Rivers Trio, “Afflatus” [personnel: Rivers, tenor saxophone; Cecil McBee, bass; Steve Ellington, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood, NJ, US, 17 March 1967])

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