Barack Obama, the “strongman”, history and these times

(Barack Obama: ... legacy of support for ...)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

THE MAIN thrust of ex-US President Barack  Hussein Obama’s 16th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg, South Africa, earlier on in the week is its focus on “democracy” in the world and ways and means to sustain it. Three excerpts from the lecture are illustrative (Barack Obama, “The Nelson Mandela Lecture”, The New Yorker, New York, 18 July 2018):

1. “And, yes, democracy can be messy, and it can be slow, and it can be frustrating … For all its imperfections, real democracy best upholds the idea that government exists to serve the individual, and not the other way around. And it is the only form of government that has the possibility of making that idea real.”

2. “So, for those of us who are interested in strengthening democracy, it’s time for us to stop paying all of our attention to the world’s capitals and the centers of power, and to start focussing more on the grassroots, because that’s where democratic legitimacy comes from. Not from the top down, not from abstract theories, not just from experts, but from the bottom up. Knowing the lives of those who are struggling.”

3. “We have to stop pretending that countries that just hold an election where sometimes the winner somehow magically gets ninety per cent of the vote, because all the opposition is locked up or can’t get on TV, is a democracy. Democracy depends on strong institutions, and it’s about minority rights and checks and balances,and freedom of speech and freedom of expression and a free press, and the right to protest and petition the government, and an independent judiciary, and everybody having to follow the law.”

OBAMA alerts his audience on those individuals and social forces which he feels pose or constitute sources of obstacles to the growth or strengthening of “democracy” across the world. These include (a) the “autocrat”, (b) “strongman politics”, (c) “right-wing billionaires” and (d) “populist movements”.

AS I read this speech, that profound rumination on history a decade ago by Aimé Césaire (poet and philosopher) weighed heavily on my thoughts. Césaire had told interviewer Annick Thebia Melson in 2008 that “[h]istory 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” (“The liberating power of words: An interview with Poet Aimé Césaire”, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Vol. 2, No 4, June 2008, p. 7). It is indeed in the very course to construct and “readjust” this “hierarchy of dangers” by focussing solely on Africa here that I will respond to Obama’s lecture. 

(Aimé Césaire: “[h]istory is always dangerous...”)

ARGUABLY the most expressively covered and discussed news item in the United States presently is on special counsel Robert Mueller and team’s work investigating alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. An investigation of this calibre is deemed vital by the Americans because any such purported interference in this election, particularly from a foreign power, would undoubtedly have had negative impact and consequences on the course of democracy in the United States, very much in the overarching context sketched above by Obama.

Yet no such investigations are underway to probe those hardly disguised meddling-in-elections/“elections”/referendum by none other than the ex-President Barack Obama US government itself in the following seven countries between 2009 and 2016: Honduras, Macedonia, Britain, Egypt, Kenya, Israel, Nigeria.

Abhorrent legacy of support for Igbo genocide and imposition and invasions of states in Africa or quintessential disarticulation of grounds for democracy

APART from Nigeria where Obama, first African-descent elected president after 233 years of the founding of the US republic, imposed Muhammadu Buhari, an islamist/jihadist and one of the vilest Nigerian genocidist operatives during these 52 years of the ongoing Igbo genocide, as head of Nigeria regime in March 2015 (this imposition was carried out with then British prime minister David Cameron whose country is a co-genocidist state in this crime), his administration’s robust interferences in elections in the other six states in the group, including the June 2016 British referendum on Brexit, were spectacularly a failure.

BESIDES the Buhari-imposition catastrophe during which the Buhari-led Nigeria military and its Boko Haram and Fulani militia adjunct forces have murdered 3000 Igbo people in Biafra, Barack Obama intervened elsewhere in African politics:

1. supported the 2010 French military invasion of Côte d’Ivoire , ordered by President Nicolas Sarkozy (one of the most openly racist French political leaders in the contemporary era who made his views on Africans explicit, on record, in his notorious “The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history”-speech at Dakar’s Cheikh Anta Diop University in July 2007 [see “The unofficial English translation of Sarkozy’s speech”, africaResource, 13 October 2007]), in which 2300 Africans were ruthlessly murdered and the Laurent Gbagbo regime in Abidjan overthrown and replaced by a personage more acceptable to French strategic and economic interests in the country

2. was part of the 2011 US-Britain-France (Obama & Cameron & Sarkozy) tripartite military invasion of Libya during which head of regime Muammar Gaddafi was murdered as well as some members of his family in addition to some influential officials of his regime, hundreds of other Libyans also murdered during the operations, and several Libyan cities and infrastructure destroyed

3. supported French military invasion of Central African Republic, ordered by President François Hollande (2013)

4. supported French military invasion of Mali, ordered by François Hollande (2013)

QUESTION: Which of the four sources of obstacles to “democracy” raised in Obama’s Johannesburg lecture and quoted above (a, b, c, d) explains or identifies Barack Hussein Obama’s own vast range of operation in disrupting the cause and course of democracy in Africa whilst in office as the 44th president of the United States? Just one? A couple? More than a couple? None?

(Sonny Rollins Quartet, “Dance of the reed pipes” [personnel: Rollins, tenor saxophone; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Billy Higgins, drums; recorded: live, Village Gate, New York, US, 27-30 July 1962])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

93rd birthday of Frantz Fanon

(Born 20 July 1925, Fort-de-France, Martinique, Caribbean)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

PSYCHIATRIST, student of poet, playwright and essayist Aimé Césaire, philosopher and one of the preeminent revolutionary theorists of the 20th century whose landmark publications are: The Wreathed of the Earth (1963), A Dying Colonialism (1965),  Black Skin, White Masks (1967), Toward the African Revolution (1969)

(Eric Dolphy Quintet, “Hat and beard” [personnel: Dolphy, bass clarinet; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Bobby Hutcherson, vibraphone; Richard Davis, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 25 February 1964])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Nelson Mandela, catastrophic murders of Igbo people in South Africa, Biafra

(Born 18 July 1918, Mvezo, South Africa)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

On Wednesday 18 July 2018, South Africa, the African World and the rest of the globe celebrate the 100th birthday of Nelson Mandela – lawyer, leader of the African restoration-of-independence movement that freed South Africa after 342 years of the European World conquest, occupation, and subjugation.

THE commemoration of Mandela’s birth centenary ironically occurs at a very depressing epoch for African peoples-centred students and scholars studying and researching South Africa. The latter have, in recent years, usually incredulously as one can imagine, given the inestimable support and goodwill rendered to the South African freedom movement from practically every region of the African World including Igbo people from Biafra, as hundreds of African émigrés in South Africa from Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and elsewhere from Africa are murdered in premeditated campaigns clearly organised by groupings in the country with tacit and at times active support from personages within the South Africa state ... Additionally, in this campaign, African émigrés’ residents and businesses have been destroyed and thousands of survivors sent into horrid South Africa refugee camps or forced to return to their various countries.

Catastrophe

Since February 2016, over 100 Igbo immigrants in South Africa, who had themselves fled the ongoing Igbo genocide in occupied Biafra by Fulani-led islamist/jihadist genocidist Nigeria, have been so viciously murdered as part of this savage campaign against African émigrés across the country. Biafra will never forget this raging catastrophe.

ONCE AGAIN, assailed in a country whose state is often primed to make outlandish sanctimonious declarations on foreign policy but demonstrates such gross irresponsibility to protect the lives of African peoples from elsewhere domiciled within its borders, the Igbo in South Africa must now think seriously of relocating to other countries for their safety and well-being.

(Sonny Rollins Quartet, “Dance of the reed pipes” [personnel: Rollins, tenor saxophone; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Billy Higgins, drums; recorded: live, Village Gate, New York, US, 27-30 July 1962])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Day 300 ... Genocidist Nigeria: Where is Nnamdi Kanu? Where are Nnamdi Kanu’s parents, Eze Israel Okwu Kanu and Ugoeze Nnenne Kanu?

(Nnamdi Kanu and his loving parents)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

TODAY marks 10 months or 300 days since the 14 September 2017 genocidist Nigeria military, led by Fulani islamist/ jihadists under Muhammadu Buhari, stormed the home of Nnamdi Kanu’s parents at Afaraukwu-Ibeku, eastcentral Biafra. Consequently, the whereabouts of Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (constituted integrally in the Biafra freedom movement), and his parents, remain unknown. Scores of the Kanus’ relatives and friends were murdered during the assault and scores of others are still unaccounted for. 

Three thousand Igbo people have been murdered across Biafra since Buhari, who, in March 2015, was imposed on Nigeria as head of regime by ex-United States President Barack Hussein Obama (first African-descent president of the US republic in 233 years of existence) and ex-British Prime Minister David Cameron, embarked on this bloodiest track of phase-IV of the Igbo genocide (13 January 1970-present day) in November 2015. After eight years in the White House and 19 months since he left office, Obama now presents a dreadful presidential legacy, not lost particularly on African World reckoning, of zealously supporting the Igbo genocide, foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, executed on the ground by Nigeria, an islamist-led state, and its suzerain state Britain.
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/2017/05/on-30-march-2016-i-published-essay.html)

GENOCIDIST Nigeria has murdered more Africans in Biafra, southwestcentral Africa, since 1945 than the total number of Africans murdered in Africa since 1900 by all of Europe’s conqueror-powers in Africa: Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain – including the number of Africans the Germans murdered in the genocide of the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of southwest Africa (1904-1907).  Nigeria now rates a not-too-distant second to Belgian King Leopold II’s notorious position as lead génocidaire of African peoples since the 19th century in the Leopold II/Belgian state’s genocide against Africans in the central regions of the Congo River basin (1878-1908). Nigeria surely knows that it will account for the safety of Nnamdi Kanu and his parents and take full responsibility for the consequences of that savage raid on a family home.

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

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Thelonious Monk, “Friday the 13th”

(Thelonious Monk ...:composer, pianist)

(Joe Henderson Trio plays Thelonious Monk’s composition, “Friday the 13th” [personnel: Henderson, tenor saxophone; Ron Carter, bass; Al Foster, drums; recorded: live, Village Vanguard, New York, US, 14-16 November 1985])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Sharply contrasting worldviews in contemporary Africa!

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

TWO “voices” in the southwestcentral region of Africa with such contrasting worldviews are in contestation presently:

1. For the first “voice”, it is to threaten and threaten to murder, and indeed murder and murder and murder under the overarching flaming banner of the herd as they and their parents and grandparents have done during the course of the Igbo genocide these past 52 years (29 May 1966-12 July 2018) and the Igbo pogroms in Kano (1953) and Jos (1945) and the dreadful legacy of foreparents’ trail of murders and subjugations of indigenous African populations across the entire north stretches of the region since they left their Futa Djallon homeland in Guinea-Conakry just over 200 years ago to the day.

2. For the other “voice”, in the south of the geography, Land of the Rising Sun, it is engaged, uncompromisingly, in an assured quest for freedom that views life, African life, as sacrosanct and is eager to employ its incredible talent of creativity to transform the lives of its people, an outcome with epochal consequences for the region and the rest of the African World.

(Jackie McLean Quintet, “Love and hate” [personnel: McLean, alto saxophone; Grachan Moncur III, trombone; Bobby Hutcherson, vipraphone; Larry Ridley, bass; Roy Haynes, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 20 September 1963])

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Biafra freedom movement projects!

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 Fulani islamist/jihadist-led Nigeria genocidist military and its Boko Haram and Fulani militia adjuncts – the genocidists have murdered 3000 Igbo since October 2015 with scant condemnation from the rest of the world including co-genocidist perpetrator 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 freedom 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 gruesome anti-human regimes especially the genocidist caste à la Nigériana which now teetering on imploding, overwhelmed by the cadence of that very familiar freedom orchestration scored by the resilient Biafrans.

(John Coltrane Sextet, “Out of this world” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Donald Garrett, clarinet, bass; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: live at Penthouse Jazz Club, Seattle, US, 30 September 1965])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe