109th birthday of Thurgood Marshall

(Born 2 July 1908, Baltimore, US)

Preeminent human rights lawyer, first Africa American judge appointed to the US high court, October 1967

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84th birthday of Rashied Ali

(Born 1 July 1933, Philadelphia, US)

Illustrious avant-garde drummer and educator who joins the John Coltrane expanded band, beginning in 1965, and plays on the saxophonist’s album Meditations (1965), as well as numerous later recordings including Cosmic Music (1966), Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (1966), Coltrane in Japan (1966), John 
Coltrane: Live at Temple University (1966), Stellar Regions (1967), Interstellar Space (1967), Expression (1967)

(John Coltrane Duo, “Jupiter” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, bells; Rashied Ali, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood, Cliff, NJ, US, 22 February 1967])

 (John Coltrane Duo, “Mars” [personnel and recording details as in above])

(John Coltrane Duo, “Venus” [personnel and recording details as in above])

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Biafra resistance movement pre-empts its return!

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

The Biafra freedom movement continues to challenge and override the cardinal tenets that define comparable liberatory trajectories of contemporary history. It has remained fiercely peaceful and resilient despite the scorched-earth savagery of the Nigeria genocidist military and its Boko Haram and Fulani militia allies – the genocidists have murdered 2000 Igbo since October 2015 with scant condemnation from the rest of the world including co-genocidist ally Britain.

USUALLY, a liberation movement “returns home” on the morrow of victory! No, not the Biafra freedom movement which is already emplaced throughout Biafra, as the world observes, setting up structures and processes of restoration-of-independence before formal restoration...  Scholars and students of liberation are gasping to catch up with learning what new breaks or departures this movement is teaching the rest of the world on how to deal with anti-human regimes especially the genocidist caste à la Nigériana.

(John Coltrane Quartet,  “Equinox” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Steve Davis, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Atlantic Studios, New York, US, 26 October 1960])

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86th birthday of Andrew Hill

(Born 30 June 1931, Chicago, US)

Seminally innovative pianist and composer, including the critically acclaimed Point of Departure, Compulsion!!!!! and Eternal Spirit; academic

(Andrew Hill Sextet, “New monastry” [personnel: Hill, piano; Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone;  Richard Davis, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 21 March 1964])

(Bobby Hutcherson Sextet, “Dialogue” [personnel: Hutcherson, vibraphone; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Sam Rivers, bass clarinet; Andrew Hill, piano; Richard Davis, bass; Joe Chambers, drums; recorded:  Van Gelder Studio, Englewood, Cliffs, NJ, US, 3 April 1965])

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145th birthday of Paul Laurence Dunbar

(Born 27 June 1872, Dayton, Ohio, US)

Prolific poet, novelist, playwright, songwriter (writes lyrics for In Dahomey, the very successful 1903 musical which appears in Broadway and elsewhere), essayist, whose critically acclaimed output foreshadows the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s-1930s

(John Coltrane Septet, “Dahomey dance” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Art Davis, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: A&R Studios, New York, US, 25 May 1961])

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Britain’s Nigeria

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Britain’s Nigeria

ACCORDING to media reports from genocidist Nigeria, a British royal air force detachment is in a north Nigeria airbase to “train” genocidist forces – who would, in turn, head for Biafra, in due course, to continue their slaughter of Igbo people as is now their notoriously demonstrated definitive goal.

Nigeria, supposedly, has been “independent” since October 1960 and, 57 years later, is still being “trained” by the same Britain! What a “state”!

“Nigeria ‘train’ yourself”? Oh no!

When will Nigeria begin to “train” itself? Didn’t Britain leave Nigeria 57 years ago? Of course not! Nigeria is Britain’s, the British lead client-state in this strategic region of southwestcentral Africa – emplaced, as Britain envisages, in perpetuity.

This at the crux of the Igbo genocide which both Britain and Nigeria, led by its anti-African freedom Hausa-Fulani/islamist religiopolitcal forces, have waged since 29 May 1966.

IGBO FREEDOM opens up immeasurable possibilities for liberation of scores of African peoples trapped in this British expropriation estate. Freedom peoples across the world can’t wait for this incoming epoch being inaugurated by Biafra.

(Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, “Free for all” [personnel: Blakey, drums; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Curtis Fuller, trombone; Wayne Shorter, tenor saxophone; Cedar Walton, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 10 February 1964])

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FOR THE RECORD ... Shocking! Even genocidist Nigeria once envisaged permanent membership of the UN security council as the following commentary in dissidentvoice.org (12 May 2005) shows: “Nigeria does not deserve UN security council seat”

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Nigeria does not deserve UN security council seat 

(originally published in dissidentvoice, 12 May 2005, and is republished here unedited as in the original)

IT NOW APPEARS very likely that Nigeria will, after all, hand over Liberian fugitive leader Charles Taylor (currently in exile in Nigeria) to the Freetown-based UN court investigating war crimes in conflicts in and around Sierra Leone. Thanks to the insistence of the US government, the Obasanjo regime is about to send Taylor to the Freetown court despite its long-held position to the contrary. The regime has until recently argued that it was against its “national honour” (whatever that means) to respond positively to the court’s request to extradite Taylor to face trial for overseeing the slaughter of 1.3 million Africans in the west central states of Liberia, Sierra Leone and southern Guinea while he was president of Liberia.

The irony is of course not lost on any keen observer of this development. Whatever may be the US’s strategic interests on this subject (possible Taylor links with al-Qaida, possible Taylor involvement in millions of dollars worth of money laundering, possible Taylor complicity in the January 2005 attempted coup in Conakry to remove the pro-American Guinean president), it has taken the intervention of a non-African power to force a disreputable African leadership to hand over the head of a fellow murderous African leadership to face trial for the murder of 1.3 million Africans – not 1.3 million non-Africans. African democrats are surely unencumbered by this irony. African leaderships have murdered 15 million Africans across the continent in the past 40 years in appalling spates of genocide. Even if the devil itself were to lecture African leaderships to stop murdering their peoples and, in the process, help prevent just one more African being annihilated by their depraved overlords, that would be readily welcome. African populations are under siege by brutal regimes replete across Africa. The peoples require unremitting support for their right to safeguard their lives and progress from wherever in the world. Not less.

If indeed the US administration has threatened to block Nigeria’s current so-called “bid” for a permanent seat on a possibly enlarged UN Security Council, if it continues to keep Taylor away from facing justice, as some press reports indicate, Washington has done very well. But the Americans shouldn’t lift their threat yet, even if Nigeria dispatches Taylor to Freetown. It is breathtakingly obscene for Nigeria to wish to be considered for a permanent seat at the Security Council given the ghastly human rights records of successive Nigerian regimes in the past 40 years including the current one where statecraft at best is run as some medieval baronial fiefdom. The US and the rest of the world should reject this “bid” out of hand. Not to do that would be to send the wrong signal to Africa – by rewarding a band of genocidist operatives who have the blood of Africans on their hands, and who have in tandem pillaged an economy whose resources alone could easily have transformed the entire continent.

Pestilence                 

IT MUSTN’T be forgotten that Nigeria inaugurated the current African “Age of Pestilence” when its leadership in 1966 embarked on the premeditated massacres of its Igbo population during a stretch of five months. One hundred thousand Igbo were killed during what emerged as the first phase of this genocide. The following year, the leadership expanded the territorial reach of this campaign into Igboland itself for the second phase. Three million Igbo, or one-quarter of the nation’s population then, were annihilated within 30 months. Most of Africa stood by and watched, hardly critical or condemnatory of this wanton destruction of human lives and the sacking and plundering of community after community. As the perpetrators appeared to have got off free from any forms of sanctions from Africa (and the rest of the world) for what were clearly crimes against humanity, several leaderships elsewhere in Africa were “convinced” of the lessons that they had drawn from the escapades of their Nigerian counterpart: “We can murder our peoples at will. There will be no sanctions from abroad”. As a result, the killing fields of the age stretched inexorably beyond the Nigerian frontiers: Liberia, Sierra Leone, southern Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, Uganda, Zaïre/Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan.

In the past 40 years, Nigeria has been run by a succession of genocidist generals and other operatives (military and civilian alike) who planned, executed and sustained the Igbo genocide. The current head of state, Olusegun Obasanjo, commanded a notorious division in southern Igboland that committed indescribable atrocities as it overran cities, towns and villages. Neither he (who has been head of state for a total of nine years during the period) nor any of his colleagues (most of whom are still alive) has apologized or shown remorse for their crimes against humanity. On the contrary. In fact Yakubu Gowon, who was head of state and grand overseer of the genocide, only recently told the press in Enugu (political and cultural capital of Igboland) that he had “nothing to apologize” to the Igbo.

BEFORE he shot himself in a Berlin bunker in 1945, few would have expected Adolf Hitler to apologize or show remorse for his organized genocide of six million Jews across Europe during the Second World War. Hardly anyone, though, would wish to contemplate a Hitler traveling to Jerusalem today to address a press conference in which he would insist categorically: “I have nothing to apologize for the six million Jews my forces annihilated between 1939 and 1945. What I did was right”. That would be unimaginable monstrosity. But this was precisely what Gowon did at Enugu a fortnight ago.

Nigeria’s “bid” to join the Security Council could not have provided the world with a better opportunity to deal with the crux of contemporary Africa’s malaise: the non-accountability of African leaderships who employ genocide and mass murder as a twin-track instrument of power. No country in Africa is more appropriate for the world to enforce this accountability than where the disease emerged in the first place on the continent – Nigeria, the quintessentially failed and genocide-state.

NOW is the time for the US and the world to insist that each and every member of the Nigerian leaderships who participated in the murder of three million Africans 40 years ago, and who in effect triggered off the chain of mass killings of 12 million others elsewhere in the continent must be made to account for their action. Besides, if Nigeria is ultimately forced to hand over Taylor to face trial for the murder of 1.3 million Africans in the 1980s-1990s, then his current hosts (Obasanjo, Abubakar, Babangida, Buhari, Gowon, Danjuma and many many others) must also be apprehended for the murder of 3.1 million Africans in the 1960s-1970s.

(New York Art Quartet plays “Mohawk”, a composition by Charlie Parker [personnel:  John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965]) 

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