Join this movement of the age – Ban all arms to Africa

BY HERBERT EKWE-EKWE

(excerpts from Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature [pp. 183-194] which you may find helpful as you decide to join the movement)

… It should therefore be stressed that whilst the dichotomy often placed between “legal arms” and “illegal arms” by some observers (in the African militarisation, genocide and war debate) has some analytical credit, its outcome on the ground, particularly in enabling us evaluate the comparative impact that the two categories ultimately pose on African social co-existence and security, always comes as a shock! Contrary to the initial value judgement that most people would make between the “legality” of a particular commodity (in this case, arms) and its “illegality”, it is definitely no comfort at all when it is shown at the end of the exercise that the overwhelming majority of the 15 million killed in Africa’s genocide and wars in the past 45 years were in fact slaughtered with the use of “legal” armaments, operated seemingly legally by the armed forces of the state and their allies. The examples of the Nigerian state in 1966-1970, the Rwandan central government in the 1990s, and the current Arab regime in Khartoum are acutely illustrative of this cataclysmic sequence. In effect, whether “legal” or “illegal”, armaments in Africa, controlled overwhelmingly by the African state and its allies, are used to murder targeted African nations and populations domiciled within these states; the African states, since the Igbo genocide, have deployed armaments in their armouries to murder their peoples most brutally, massively and extensively. These states, starting from Nigeria, have murdered a ghastly total of 15 million Africans in a generation. They are still murdering without let up… They have devastated communities. They have disfigured and traumatised peoples’ lives and aspirations. In the hands of the typical African state, since the Igbo genocide, these armaments, even though classified “conventional”, are indeed weapons of mass destruction. Nothing else, but weapons of mass destruction… In Africa, the pistol, the rifle, the grenade, the rocket, the bazooka, the landmine, the helicopter gunship, the naval gunship, the fighter aircraft, the bomber, the tank – each and every one of these items, imported by and large from abroad, is a killer used primarily by the state to murder targeted peoples within its border. The African state should and must be stopped from murdering peoples within its frontiers. The rest of the world, especially from where weapons to these African states originate, day in and day out, can no longer remain bystanders as this orgy of death is brazenly played out in Africa. Since the Igbo genocide, the African state has been destroying African lives; they are presently destroying African lives; they will continue to destroy African lives until stopped. The African state must surely be stopped from its pursuit of this pulverising mission of death…

… On this score, the ethos that governs the African journey of recovery is the commitment of all Africans and the demand that they need to make to the rest of the world to place a mandatory embargo on all arms sales and transfers to all of Africa, as well as a complete demilitarisation of the continent. Africa needs justice and peace for, and with itself, to enable it embark on the much-vaunted era of reconstruction…

… On this, Africa’s challenge to the rest of the world couldn’t be clearer: those who live outside Africa but “care so much for Africa” should now scale down their multitudinous “aid-ventures for Africa” and turn their incredible talents to lobbying their respective states and other institutions in their countries and elsewhere to ban arms sales/transfers to Africa. This new focus for the world’s leading charities, away from the band-aid syndrome, will surely be more exciting, even less taxing, but definitely more rewarding for the ultimate outcome for Africa and the rest of the world alike. Africa seeks no resources from anyone, not even for one US dollar, to accomplish its current transformative mission to dismantle the genocide state. It is simply asking the world to completely seal off its vast armouries to deny access to the deadly claws of the African genocide state. For once, no one is asking anyone to raise money for Africa! Given the devastating impact of arms, arming, armies, genocide and other armed conflicts on Africa’s tragic history and the present, Africa, today, projects an unwavering signpost for the world’s attention that proclaims: Africa Is An Arms-Free Zone. A demilitarised continent. No More Arms Sales Or Transfers To Africa…

(Why not get a copy of Readings from Reading today, read through the argument and join the movement to ban all arms to Africa. There is no centralising arm of this movement. You are the centre! Form yours today by sharing with family and friends and colleagues everywhere – at discussion/entertainment venues, work, places of worship and spiritual fellowship, union meetings [trades, schools/colleges, family/village/town/district/regional, etc., etc.], next surgery with your electoral ward/precinct/local government representative, member of parliament/congressperson/senator… You can begin and join this movement wherever you are in the world. To ban arms to Africa is at once supporting African wellbeing and that of the rest of humanity. Now is the time!)

This Phase Of Igbo Genocide

By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

The concept “failed-state” carries an understandable melodramatic import! It refers to the inability or failure of a state to fulfil some of its key roles and responsibilities to its people(s) and others domiciled within its territory and consequently to its neighbours and the wider global community of states. State failure materialises at three broad spheres of the lives of the people(s): social, political and economic. The following would feature among the key empirical determinants of this failure:

1. The state’s inability to provide security to its population – crucially, a catastrophic failure as the state’s primary existence is predicated on this provision of security to its citizens. This failure may have arisen because the state no longer exercises control across part/parts or all of its territory. Several factors could account for this including, for instance, calamitous breakdowns in vital internal sociopolitical and economic relations, intra-regime fractionalism and rivalries and the unmanageability of natural disasters. As we shall note shortly, it could also be due to the state’s actively pursued violation of the human rights of the people(s) including, most gravely, a deliberate state policy to embark on the destruction of one or more of its constituent nations/peoples/religious groups, etc., etc.

2. The state’s inability to provide essential social services (communication infrastructure, health care, education, housing and recreation, development of culture) to its people(s) or the state’s deliberate policy to deny or partially offer such services to some of its constituent nations/peoples/religious groups…

There remains a lack of consensus among scholars studying the failed states of contemporary Africa on the terms of the evaluative parameters of this enterprise including the critical constitutive timeframes of assessing and therefore concluding when this or that African state ‘began to fail’ or/and when indeed it “failed”. There is a tendency by many to arbitrarily circumscribe the limit of the focus of interrogation to the so-called African post-conquest epoch (i.e., post-1 January 1956, following the presumed restoration of independence date in the Sudan) with the underlying presumption that the state, as formulated and constituted on the eve of the “restoration of independence”, has a definitive and enduring internal logic to its being. Of course what such a staggeringly ahistorical arbitrariness does to this scholarship is that it attempts to freeze layers and layers of vital record and practice off sustained scrutiny as it wishes to project this era of all-Africa external conquest and occupation as “largely unproblematic”. Undoubtedly, as has been demonstrated all too clearly since January 1956, a post-(European)conquest African Studies corpus built on such a blatantly contrived edifice is hopelessly trapped in a debilitating and eventual terminal crisis.

1945 & 1953

For Nigeria, the country at the focus of this roundtable, it is at once a failed and genocide state. It is to Jos, a city in its northcentral region, that we locate the start of the trajectory to its “failed state” status. The year is not 2000 or 2001 or any other year in this last decade nor indeed in any of the three years of the current decade but 1945, eleven years before 1956 and fifteen years before 1960 – the year of the “termination” of the British occupation of the country. In October 1945, in the wake of a very successful anti-occupation countrywide strike, Hausa-Fulani muslim north regional leaders, those much endeared clients of the occupation-regime who were not only opposed to this strike but also the ultimate goal of Nigeria’s liberation from the British conquest in which Igbo people played a vanguard role, organised and launched a pogrom against Igbo immigrants in Jos and the surrounding tin mining towns and villages on the plateau. Hundreds of Igbo were murdered during the massacre and tens of thousands of pounds sterling worth of their property looted or destroyed. No perpetrators of these murders were ever apprehended or punished by the occupation-regime. As a result, emboldened Hausa-Fulani leaders organised yet another pogrom of Igbo immigrants in the north, this time in Kano, 180 miles further north, in May 1953, which coincided with the heightened debates among Nigerian politicians on the possible date for the formal termination of the occupation and the restoration of independence. Hundreds of Igbo were murdered during this massacre and tens of thousands of pounds sterling worth of their property looted or destroyed. Once again, no perpetrators of these murders were apprehended or punished by the occupation-regime.

1966-2012

On the contrary, as the world would witness 13 years later, these dual pogroms became dreadful dress rehearsals for the most gruesome, most devastating, and most expansive stretch of state-organised mass murders of a people not seen in Africa since the German-organised genocide of the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of contemporary Namibia in the early 1900s. Beginning 29 May 1966 to 12 January 1970, the composite aggregation of the Nigeria state – military officers, the police, Hausa-Fulani emirs, muslim clerics and intellectuals, students, civil servants, journalists, politicians and other public figures – planned and executed the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. This is also Africa’s most destructive genocide of the 20th century. A total of 3.1 million Igbo people, a quarter of this nation’s population at the time, were murdered during those harrowing 44 months. Most Igbo were slaughtered in their homes, offices, businesses, schools, colleges, hospitals, markets, churches, shrines, farmlands, factories/industrial enterprises, children’s playground, town halls, refugee centres, cars, lorries, and at bus stations, railway stations, airports and on buses, trains and planes and on foot, or starved to death – the openly propagated regime-“weapon” to achieve its heinous goal more speedily. In the end, the Igbo genocide was enforced, devastatingly, by Nigeria’s simultaneously pursued land, aerial and naval blockade and bombardment of Igboland, Africa’s highest population density region outside the Nile Delta. The genocidists also sequestrated and pillaged the multibillion-dollar Biafra economy, one of the most advanced and enterprising hubs in Africa of the era.

Most of Africa and the world stood by and watched, hardly critical or condemnatory of this wanton destruction of human lives, raping, sacking and plundering of towns, villages, community after community in Biafra and elsewhere... The consequences for Africa have been catastrophic. In this genocide of the Igbo, Nigeria inaugurated the “age of pestilence” that defines contemporary Africa. Several regimes elsewhere in Africa are “convinced” of the conclusions that they have drawn from this crime by their Nigerian counterpart: “We can murder targeted constituent people(s) at will within the state we control … Haul off their prized property and livelihood … Comprehensively destroy their cities, towns, villages, communities – precisely their agelong, priceless, inheritance ... There will be no sanctions from Africa – and the world”. As a result, the Igbo genocide becomes the clearing site for the haunting killing fields that would crisscross the African geographical landscape in the subsequent 40 years with the murders of additional 12 million Africans, since January 1970, by regimes in further genocide in Rwanda, Darfur and Zaïre/Democratic Republic of Congo and other killings in Liberia, Ethiopia, Congo Republic, Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, south Sudan, Burundi.

One would perhaps be forgiven if they thought that, after such a frenzied indulgence in indescribable depravity in mass slaughtering and a trail of destruction, capped by its occupation of Biafra, Nigeria would tire out of its appetite to continue the murder of Igbo people. No, not really. This obligatory haematophagous creature continues its murder of the Igbo unabated – almost routinely and ritualistically during the course of subsequent years, signposted here by the eerie columns that chart the contours of fresh pogrom outrages: 1980 ... 1982 ... 1985 ... 1991 ... 1993 ... 1994 ... 1999 ... 2000 ... 2001 ... 2002 ... 2004 ... 2005 ... 2006 ... 2007 ... 2008 ... 2009 ... 2010 ... 2011 ... 2012. According to the December 2011 research by the International Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule Of Law, a human rights organisation based in Onicha, 90 per cent of the 54,000 people murdered in Nigeria by the state/quasi-state operatives and agents since 1999 are Igbo people. Since last Christmas Day, the Boko Haram islamist insurgent group spearheads these murders. At least 80 per cent of people murdered by the Boko Haram across swathes of lands in north/northcentral Nigeria since then are Igbo. Hundreds of thousands of Igbo families have abandoned homes and businesses in the affected region and have returned to Igboland. Arguably, the Igbo are the world’s most brutally targeted and most viciously murdered of peoples presently. Not since 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 has Igbo life in Nigeria acquired such a gripping existential emergency…

The Boko Haram now issues its threats to murder quite habitually, at times on a daily basis, and, true to its words, executes its mission most ruthlessly, most remorselessly. After each of its outrages, Boko Haram acknowledges responsibility and does this most dispassionately… The regime in Abuja appears cruelly powerless to protect Igbo people (and others) emplaced within the jurisdiction of the supposedly sovereign state it controls with the well-known consequences in international law that this shocking relegation of responsibility entails. Regime-head Goodluck Jonathan says as much in a recent astonishing radio and television broadcast to his country and the world: “Boko Haram is everywhere in the executive arm of [my] government, in the legislative arm of [my] government and even in the judiciary. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security [services] … Some continue to dip their hands and eat with you and you won’t even know the person who will point a gun at you or plant a bomb behind your house”. Following from Jonathan’s proclamation, it is conceivable that right there closeted in his regime, there are operatives deeply complicit in these ongoing murders. And it doesn’t appear that the regime can halt the
murdering nor the insurgency. On the contrary, Jonathan is essentially saying in his broadcast: “I don’t know how to solve this problem; I can’t solve this problem”. The seriousness of this situation cannot be exaggerated. Presently, Nigeria is a grave danger to itself. Nigeria is a grave danger to its constituent peoples and nations, to its neighbours, to the west Africa region, to Africa and the wider world. Nigeria has indeed now run the course of its bloody trail in history. The ongoing murders have exposed, particularly, the lethal fissures in a hitherto seemingly compact genocidist monolith. This fractionalisation cannot be contained.

REFERENDUM AND SUCCESSOR STATE(S)

Whilst Jonathan’s broadcast is undoubtedly a desperate acknowledgement of helplessness if not hopelessness, it however opens up an historic opportunity to overcome this tragedy. There is undoubtedly a silver lining over this cloud. What is critically at stake here is the right of the peoples domiciled in Nigeria, each and every constituent people, to democratically decide their future. This right to self-determination for every people is inalienable and is guaranteed by the United Nations. No people is exempt from exercising this right. To proceed to the realisation of this goal, two key features are called for forthwith:

1. The requisite institutions of the world must now embark on initiating the process for an internationally organised, supervised, and binding referendum across Nigeria for the peoples, themselves, to decide whether they wish to remain in Nigeria or form new state(s) of their choice.

2. To support Igbo people’s participation in this referendum, Igbo intellectuals should double up their efforts to work for the restoration of Igbo sovereignty, Biafra. The Igbo genocide is one of the most comprehensively documented crimes against humanity. Nonetheless, Igbo intellectuals must contribute, robustly, to continue to inform the entire world of the nature and extent of the genocide, examining, particularly, the variegated contours of the expansive trail of this crime, the parameters and strictures of the monstrosity of denialism of the crime (especially by some clusters of the core perpetrators of the crime in Nigeria and their collaborators abroad including some in academia and media) and the debilitating and oppressive burden of 40 years of occupation.

Let it never be forgotten that, four decades ago, Igbo intellectuals, many very talented and widely accomplished men and women in their varying fields of expertise (writers, academics, artists, students, diplomats, military officers, scientists, physicians, lawyers, engineers), contributed most profoundly to the eventual survival of the Igbo during phases I and II of the genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970, when only few in the world thought that they would accomplish such an improbable feat. We surely have an historic legacy to contend with.

*(Paper presented at “Roundtable on Nigeria’s future: The challenges to security and economic development caused by Boko Haram and the way forward”, held at E. Franklin Frazier Center for Social Work Research, Howard University Law School, Washington, DC, United States, Thursday 12 April 2012. Roundtable moderator: Robin Renee Sanders, former US ambassador to Nigeria and Republic of Congo; other roundtable panellists – Pat Utomi, professor and senior fellow, Lagos Business School, Pan-African University, Lagos, Nigeria; Augustine (Gus) Fahey, senior desk officer for Nigeria, Bureau of African Affairs, US State Department, Washington, DC; Oguchi Nkwocha, physician, Biafra Foundation, Los Angeles; Michael Maduagwu, professor and senior fellow, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, Kuru, Nigeria and Eric Guttschuss, Nigeria researcher, Human Rights Watch, Washington, DC; roundtable coordinator: Chima Korieh, professor of history, Marquette University, Milwaukee; roundtable co-sponsors: Apollos Nwauwa, president of Igbo Studies Association and professor of history, Bowling Green State University, Ohio; Kanayo Odeluga, physician and executive director, Igbo League, Chicago and Mike Mbanaso, professor and director, E. Franklin Frazier Center for Social Work Research, Howard University, Washington, DC.)

Please follow Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe on twitter: @HerbertEkweEkwe

The Africa State, Genocide and the Exigency of AFRICOM

(Paper presented on the panel “US Africa Command and South Atlantic Security”, V ENABED, Fifth national conference of the Brazilian Association of Defence Studies, Seara Praia Hotel, Fortaleza, Brazil, Monday 8 August 2011*)



Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe



The state in Africa demonstrates a glaring inability to fulfill its basic role to provide security, welfare and trans-formative capacities for society’s developmental needs and aspirations. The state is virtually at war with its peoples, having murdered 15 million in Biafra, Rwanda, Darfur, southern Sudan, Uganda, Guinea-Bissau, the Congos, Angola, Côte d’Ivoire and elsewhere on the continent between 1966 and 2011. Since January 1956, fifty-five years after the beginning of the so-called restoration of African independence process in the Sudan, it is the case that the state in Africa is essentially a genocide-state, the bane of African social existence. It is what constitutes the firestorm of the emergency that threatens the very survival of the African. It is not the “debt”, “poverty”, HIV/Aids/other diseases and the myriad of socioeconomics indices often reeled off in many a commentary.



This state, which the European conqueror-regime (Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Spain) created originally in Berlin in the 1880s, cannot lead Africans to the reconstructive change they deeply yearn for after the tragic history of centuries of foreign occupation and plunder. Such a change was and never is the mission of this state but an instrument to murder, expropriate and despoil Africa by the conquest and its aftermath. As this paper demonstrates, the very presumptions, predilections and exigencies that encapsulate the thinking and strategic goals of the planners of the United States Africa Command, AFRICOM, the subject of this panel at the August 2011 conference of the Brazilian Association of Defence Studies, here in Fortaleza, are based precisely on this evaluation of the utterly unviable ethos of the contemporary Africa state and the palpable, widespread feeling of alienation towards it expressed by most constituent African peoples or nations. In other words, AFRICOM wishes to exploit the critically unresolved seismic crisis within the African political landscape created by the history and devastating consequences of conquest.



Tragically, this is equally the background against which an array of foreign powers and international/transnational institutions or organisations have often acted, with impunity, in African socioeconomic and political affairs and development in the past 55 years, despite this epoch of presumed restoration of African independence and sovereignty. The ongoing flagrant Anglo-Franco-US-led NATO unrelenting aerial and naval bombardment of Libya, which has gone on for four months, and the French-led violent military overthrow of the government of Cote d’Ivoire earlier on in the year, during which an estimated number of 2300 Africans were so ruthlessly murdered, underscore this staggering impunity. Africans, themselves, must therefore resolve the contentious issues generated by the extant genocide-state that fuels the conflictual existence of its peoples before achieving urgently needed socioeconomic transformation. This is an imperative, internal political question, whose answer or solution is also imperatively internal – definitely not external, howsoever the “rationalisation” is construed. Thus, Africans’ own strategic goal for change remains the dismantling of the architecture of alienation and subjugation posed to African existence and progress by the “Berlin state” emplaced. There is no more profoundly urgent case to illustrate this grave emergency in Africa than to focus on the very country from where it first originated. This country goes by the name Nigeria and it is to it that we should now turn.



Igbo genocide and its aftermath – The tragedy of Africa’s unlearned lessons:



In 1966, soon after the world commemorated the 21st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and made the customary, solemn declaration of “Never, Never Again”, Nigeria defiled that season of reflection, commiseration and hope. Its military officers, the police, Hausa-Fulani emirs, muslim clerics and intellectuals, civil servants, journalists, politicians and other public figures planned and executed the Igbo genocide – the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. This is also Africa’s most devastating genocide of the 20th century. A total of 3.1 million Igbo people, a quarter of this nation’s population at the time, were murdered between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970.



Most of Africa and the world stood by and watched, hardly critical or condemnatory of this wanton destruction of human lives, raping, sacking and plundering of towns, villages, community after community in Biafra and elsewhere... Most Igbo people were slaughtered in their homes, offices, businesses, schools, colleges, hospitals, markets, churches, shrines, farmlands, factories/industrial enterprises, children’s playground, town halls, refugee centres, cars, lorries, and at bus stations, railway stations, airports and on buses, trains and planes and on foot, or starved to death – the openly propagated regime-“weapon” to achieve its heinous goal more speedily. In the end, the Igbo genocide was enforced, devastatingly, by Nigeria’s simultaneously pursued land, aerial and naval blockade and bombardment of Igboland, Africa’s highest population density region outside the Nile Delta. Earlier on in 1945 and 1953, under the very watch of the British occupation, the Hausa-Fulani political leadership had carried out two premeditated pogroms on Igbo immigrant populations in Jos and Kano, cities in north Nigeria, in opposition to the Igbo vanguard role in the struggle for the restoration of the independence of peoples in Nigeria from the British conquest. Hundreds of Igbo were murdered in each occasion and tens of thousands of pounds sterling worth of their property looted or destroyed. Neither in Kano nor Jos did the occupation regime apprehend or prosecute anyone for these massacres and destruction. Tragically, these pogroms turned out as “dress rehearsals” for the 1966-1970 genocide.



The perpetrators, who subsequently seized and pillaged the rich Nigeria economy appear to have got off free from any forms of sanctions from Africa (and the world) for what are, unquestionably, crimes against humanity. The consequences for Africa have been catastrophic. Several regimes elsewhere in Africa are “convinced” of the conclusions that they have drawn from this crime by their Nigerian counterpart: “We can murder targeted constituent people(s) at will within the state we control … Haul off their prized property and livelihood … Comprehensively destroy their cities, towns, villages, communities – precisely their agelong, priceless, inheritance ... There will be no sanctions from Africa – and the world”. As a result, the Igbo genocide becomes the clearing site for the haunting killing fields that would snake across the African geographical landscape in the subsequent 40 years with the murders of additional 12 million Africans, since January 1970, by regimes in further genocide in Rwanda, Darfur and Zaïre/Democratic Republic of Congo and other killings in Liberia, Ethiopia, Congo Republic, Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, south Sudan, Burundi.



Yaki, it isn’t



The records of those who carried out the Igbo genocide make no pretences, offer no excuses, whatsoever, about the goal of their dreadful mission – such was the maniacal insouciance and rabid Igbophobia that propelled this project. The principal language used in the prosecution of the genocide was Hausa. The words of the ghoulish anthem of the genocide, published and broadcast on Kaduna radio and television throughout the duration of the crime, are in Hausa:



Mu je mu kashe nyamiri



Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su



Mu chi mata su da yan mata su



Mu kwashe kaya su



(English translation: Let’s go kill the damned Igbo/Kill off their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property)



The Hausa word for war is yaki. Whilst Hausa speakers would employ this word to refer to the involvement/combat services of their grandfathers, fathers, uncles, sons, brothers, other relatives/friends in “Boma” (reference to World War II Burma [contemporary Myanmar] military campaigns/others in southeast Asia, fighting for the British against the Japanese) or even in the post-1960s Africa-based “peace-keeping” military engagements in west, east and central Africa, they rarely use yaki to describe the May 1966-January 1970 mass murders of Igbo people. In Hausaspeak, the latter is either referred to as lokochi mu kashe nyamiri (English: “when we murdered the damned Igbo”) or lokochi muna kashe nyamiri (English: “when we were murdering the damned Igbo”). Pointedly, this lokochi (when, time) conflates the timeframes that encapsulate the two phases of the genocide (May 1966-October 1966 and July 1967-January 1970), a reminder, if one is required, for those who bizarrely, if not mischievously, wish to break this organic link.



Elsewhere, genocidist documentation on this crime is equally malevolent and brazenly vulgar. A study of the genocide-time/“post”-genocide era interviews, comments, broadcasts and writings on the campaign by key genocidist commanders, commandants and “theorists” and propagandists including particularly Yakubu Danjuma, Ibrahim Haruna, Yakubu Gowon, Benjamin Adekunle, Olusegun Obasanjo, Oluwole Rotimi, Obafemi Awolowo, Allison Ayida and Anthony Enaharo is at once revealing and profoundly troubling. Adekunle, a notoriously gruesome commander, had no qualms, indeed, in boasting about the goal of this horrendous mission when he told an August 1968 press conference, attended by journalists including those from the international media: “We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces march into the centre of I[g]bo territory, we shoot at everything, even at things that do not move”. True to type, Adekunle duly carried through his threat with clinical precision both on his “everything that moves”-targeting, especially in south Igboland where his forces slaughtered hundreds of thousands, and on the “things that do not move”-assault category. Adekunle’s gratuitous destruction of the famed Igbo economic infrastructure, one of the most advanced in Africa of the era, was indescribably barbaric. A brief review of Olusegun Obasanjo’s own contribution (published in his memoirs, pointedly captioned My Command) that focuses on his May 1969 direct orders to his air force to destroy an international Red Cross aircraft carrying relief supplies to the encircled and blockaded Igbo is crucially appropriate. Obasanjo had “challenged”, to quote his words, Captain Gbadomosi King (genocidist air force pilot), who he had known since 1966, to “produce results” in stopping further international relief flight deliveries to the Igbo. Within a week of his infamous challenge, 5 June 1969, Obasanjo recalls nostalgically, Gbadomosi King “redeemed his promise”. Gbadomosi King had shot down a clearly marked, incoming relief-bearing International Committee of the Red Cross DC-7 plane near Eket, south Biafra, with the loss of its 3-person crew. Obasanjo’s perverse satisfaction over the aftermath of this horrendous crime is fiendish, chillingly revolting. He writes: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando Division [the notorious unit Obasanjo, who later becomes Nigeria’s head of regime for 11 years, commanded] was profound. It raised morale of all service personnel, especially of the Air Force detachment concerned and the troops they supported in [my] 3 Marine Commando Division”. Yet despite the huffing and puffing, the raving commanding brute is essentially a coward who lacks the courage to face up to a world totally outraged by his gruesome crime. Instead, Obasanjo, the quintessential Caliban, cringes into a stupor and beacons to his Prospero, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson (as he, Obansanjo, indeed unashamedly acknowledges in his My Command), to “sort out” the raging international outcry generated by the destruction of the ICRC plane...



What “internal affair”? Whose “internal affair”?



There was an extensive coverage of the Igbo genocide in the international media throughout its duration. The United Nations though never condemned this atrocity unequivocally. U Thant, its secretary-general, consistently maintained that it was a “Nigerian internal affair”. The United Nations could have stopped this genocide; the United Nations should have stopped this genocide instead of protecting the interests of the Nigeria state, the very perpetrator of the crime. In the wake of the Jewish genocide of the 1930s-1940s during which 6 million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany, Africa was, with hindsight, most cruelly unlucky to have been the “testing ground” for the presumed global community’s resolve to fight genocide subsequently, particularly after the 1948 historic United Nations declaration on this crime against humanity. Only a few would have failed to note that U Thant’s reference to “internal” was staggeringly disingenuous as genocide, as was demonstrated devastatingly 20-30 years earlier on in Europe, would of course occur within some territoriality (“internal”) where the perpetrator exercises a permanent or limited or partial or temporary sociopolitical control (cf. Nazi Germany and its programme to destroy its Jewish population within Germany itself; Nazi Germany and its programme to destroy Jewish populations within those countries in Europe under its occupation from 1939 and 1945). Between 1966 and 2006, the world would witness genocide carried out against the Igbo, the Tutsi/some Hutu, and Darfuri in “internal” spaces that go by the names Nigeria, Rwanda, and the Sudan respectively. The contours of the territory where genocide is executed do not therefore make the perpetrators less culpable nor the crime permissible as the United Nations’s crucial 1948 genocide declaration states unambiguously.



The very central role played by Britain in support of the Igbo genocide no doubt reinforced the scandalous failure of the United Nations to protect Igbo people during this catastrophe. Britain, a fully-fledged member of the United Nations – indeed a founding member of the organisation who enjoys a permanent seat on its security council and participated in drafting the anti-genocide declaration – supported the Igbo genocide militarily, politically and diplomatically. It is extraordinary that in his otherwise informative study, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (London: Penguin Books, 2006), Geoffrey Robertson, a British human rights lawyer, a queen’s counsel, does not discuss the Igbo genocide anywhere in his 759-page text nor Britain’s instrumental role in perpetrating this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa.



Britain was deeply riled by the Igbo lead-role in terminating its occupation of Nigeria and had since sought to “punish” them for this. A senior British foreign office official was adamant that his government’s position on international relief supply effort to the encircled and bombarded Igbo was to “show conspicuous zeal in relief while in fact letting the little buggers starve out”. Indeed as the slaughtering of the Igbo progressively worsened, Prime Minister Wilson was unashamedly unfazed when he informed Clyde Ferguson (United States State Department special coordinator for relief to Biafra) that he, Harold Wilson, “would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide. Such was the grotesquely expressed diminution of African life made by a supposedly leading politician of the world of the 1960s – barely 20 years after the deplorable perpetration of the Jewish genocide. As the final tally of its murder of the Igbo demonstrates, Nigeria probably had the perverted satisfaction of having performed far in excess of Harold Wilson’s grim target… Predictably, it was to Wilson that the Nigerians turned to, in 1969, to “sort out” the international revulsion generated by the latter’s destruction of the ICRC aircraft as we have already stated.



Arms ban



Without British active involvement in the perpetration of the Igbo genocide, it was highly unlikely that this crime would have been committed. Nigeria did not have an arms-manufacturing capacity then to embark on this terror without external support. Forty-five years on, Nigeria still does not have such an internal military capability. It still relies heavily on Britain, currently the world’s leading arms exporter to Africa, for its supplies.



One immediate move that Britain, the West, and the rest of the world, including Brazil, particularly, can make to support the ongoing efforts by peoples in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa to rid themselves of the genocide-state is to ban all arms sales to Nigeria and the rest of Africa. This ban must be total and comprehensive. Nigeria and other Africa genocide-states require the political and diplomatic support from abroad and the deadly array of arms ever streaming into their arsenal from Britain and elsewhere to exist and terrorise the people(s) in their territories. This is part of the cardinal and enduring lessons of the Igbo genocide. The legacy has, in fact, been catastrophic and feeds into the overarching strategic permutations of AFRICOM which the latter, in turn, exploits.



A total and comprehensive arms ban on Africa will radically advance the current hectic quest on the ground by peoples across the continent to construct democratic and extensively decentralised new state forms that guarantee and safeguard human rights, equality and freedom for individuals and peoples – alternatives to the extant genocide-state. Africans know very well that there are alternatives to the genocide-state. They have both the vision and the capacity to create these alternatives. For Africans, indeed, the creation of these alternatives is imperative in this age of pestilence. Nothing else.



*I wish to thank Professors Mônica Dias Martins (Universidade Estadual do Ceará, Fortaleza), Sued de Castro Lima (Observatório das Nacionalidades), Manuel Domingos Neto (Univeridade Federal Fluminense) and Gustavo Raposo Pereira Feitosa (Universidade de Fortaleza) for an excellently organised and successful conference and for their immense hospitality during my visit to Fortaleza. Obrigado. Tchau!



Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (African Renaissance, 2011) which is available at amazon.com (US$29.95), Barnes & Noble (US$29.95), amazon.co.uk (£19.95) and elsewhere.

Enough! The Nigeria state occupation of Igboland must now stop

By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

BACKGROUND

Since 13 January 1970, Nigeria has implemented the most dehumanising raft of socioeconomic package of deprivation in occupied Igboland not seen anywhere else in Africa. This further scourge on the Igbo closely followed the Igbo genocide when Nigeria murdered 3.1 m...illion Igbo people between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970. Since then, Nigeria has locked down all of Igboland in a labyrinthical network of checkpoints to control the movement of people, goods and services. Two outcomes, each that inexorably feeds into the other, are sought in this brigandage: (a) Nigeria chokes off any rational and sustained economic activity in the land of the famed, enterprising Igbo and (b) the checkpoint is the site that the occupation military/police/other vicious personnel carryout their extortion of the population. For instance, there are 60 occupation police checkpoints between Abakaleke and Nsukka – a distance of 80 miles. In contrast, no checkpoint exists between Obolo-Afo (Igboland) and Lokoja (Nigeria), a distance of 250 miles.

Given the paltry state of its finances, Nigeria cannot afford its continuing occupation of Igboland without its simultaneous ravaging of the legendary wealth of Igboland. In essence, and perhaps most perversely cast, the Igbo nation subsidises its very own occupation – an indirect taxation thereof, amounting to millions and millions of US dollars of savings annually for the near-bankrupt Nigeria treasury. The Igbo therefore carry the burden of this occupation with all its tragic ramifications. There are no comparable occupations elsewhere in the contemporary world with the same viciousness and severity.

WAY FORWARD

1. A general, indefinite strike across the Igbo country should be called forthwith, demanding the unconditional dismantling of Nigeria’s barriers of extortion and expropriation and the evacuation of its military/police bases from their land.

2. The Igbo should today, now, stop paying the millions and millions of US dollars worth of expropriation tax that sustains the Nigeria occupation and subjugation. One must never, ever, be a participant in their incarceration, their deindividuation.

3. An extensive and continuing-evolving organisation is required on the ground as this march of freedom transforms. All strata of the 50 million Igbo population, at home and abroad, must be mobilised – particularly women organisations, farmers, youth/students’ bodies, the redoubtable umuada and umunna circuits, market/allied trade guilds, custodians and overseers of Igbo traditional spiritual/religious places of worship, the clergy and the rest of the intellectuals.

4. The Igbo clergy, for instance, has its work cut out. The role of the church in national freedom movements has been invaluable as the world has seen in places like Poland, the United States (the African American church, for example), several countries in Latin America and, of course, back home during the genocide as occurred 45 years ago – surely in the next sermon in the churches and cathedrals of Igboland, the congregation will be interested to learn of the legacies of the venerable Akanu Ibiam, Godfery Okoye, Benjamin Nwankiti…

5. The Igbo expect their intellectuals, many of who are part of the world’s best and brightest, to play a critical role in responding to this existential threat to their nation. Already, there exists a rich legacy of the outstandingly selfless role played by Igbo intellectuals to Igboland at the onset of the genocide in May 1966 to build upon.

6. Igboland must be Free. Now. If each and every one of us plays their individual role, however “small” or limited it is deemed, the mountain will surely move and decisively so.

7. Beginning now, no longer cooperate with the occupation; don’t be a party to your own subjugation – make this your personal pledge.

8. Igboland will be free so that we can embark on the construction of an advanced civilisation for the memory of the 3.1 million who were murdered and those who survived to tell the tale.

9. We will free Igboland.

10. Welcome aboard the Igbo freedom train. Forward this exaltation to at least 10 friends and family and ask each of them to send to at least another batch of 10… and 10… and 10…

11. Remain focused and steadfast. We will free Igboland.

New Book by Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (Dakar & Reading: African Renaissance, 2011), ISBN 9780955205019, paperback, 236pp., £19.95/US$29.95


The essays here in Readings from Reading underscore Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s continuing optimism about the possibilities of Africans constructing post-“Berlin-states” as the launch pad to transform the topography of the African renaissance. Readings from Reading is a timely publication, coming on the eve of the historic January 2011 referendum in south Sudan in which the people of the region will choose to vote to restore their national independence or get stuck hopelessly in the Sudan, the first of the “Berlin-states” that Africans tragically “inherited” in January 1956. Ekwe-Ekwe insists that the contemporary Africa state, imposed on Africans by a band of European conqueror-states and currently run by what the author describes as a “shard of disreputable African regimes to exploit and despoil the continent’s human and material resources”, cannot serve African interests. The legacy, as this study demonstrates, has indeed been catastrophic: “The [African] overseers pushed the states into even deeper depths of genocidal and kakistocratic notoriety in the past 54 years as the grim examples of particularly Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Sudan ... depressingly underscore. 15 million Africans have been murdered by African-led regimes in these states and elsewhere in Africa since the Igbo genocide of 1966-1970”.

This is an engaging, incisive, wide-ranging and multidisciplinary discourse, salient features that have come to define Ekwe-Ekwe’s groundbreaking scholarship of the past three decades. The author covers an assemblage of diverse topics and themes which include the Igbo genocide, the Jos massacres in central Nigeria, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s failed attempt to blow up an incoming aircraft over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, African presence in Britain, Robert Mugabe, Muammar Gaddafi, Obafemi Awolowo, Omar al-Bashir, Yoweri Museveni, Charles Taylor, Olusegun Obasanjo, Ali Mazrui, Andrew Young, the G8 and Africa, Africa “debt”, African émigrés’ remittances to Africa, “sub-Sahara Africa”, reparations to Africans, African representation on the UN Security Council, African choices for the Nobel Peace Prize, Africa and the International Criminal Court, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, the Sudan and the Congo, arms to Africa, arms-ban on Africa. Finally, on the subject of the restoration-of-independence, the key connecting thread that links all the visitations, Ekwe-Ekwe critically examines the contributions made variously on this cord by an impressive line up of some of the very best and brightest of African intellectuals: Achebe, Adichie, Césaire, Damas, Coltrane, Diop, Equiano, Ngũgĩ, Okigbo, Senghor.


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The Meaning Of Igbo Resistance And Survival

By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

A major preoccupation of an aggressor/conqueror state is to seek to effectuate a process of memory erasure over its overrun nation and land. This is the opportunity for the conqueror to begin to construct a bogus narrative of possession and control of the targeted society that arrogates it to the fictive role of primary agent of the course of history. The enduring success of Chinua Achebe’s Things fall Apart is that the classic not only anticipates this conqueror’s predilection but it subverts the triumphalism of the latter’s pyrrhic victory. Despite the District Commissioner’s bombastically-titled anthropological treatise at the end of the novel, heralding the latest European “possession and control” of another region of Africa, this time Igboland, the future direction of history here neither lies with the administrator nor his evolving occupation regime – nor indeed with his conquering capital back home in Europe! To locate the source for change and transformation in Igboland, subsequently, we need to examine carefully the import and circumstance of historian Obierika’s address to the administrator on the life and times of his friend and people’s hero, Ogbuefi Okonkwo, who had recently committed suicide. We are reminded that as he speaks, two full sentences into a third, Obierika’s voice “trembled and choked his words”, trailing off into gasps and silences of deep contemplation. It is precisely within the context of these kaleidoscopic frames of Obierika’s recalls and introspection that we discern the sowing of the nation’s regenerative seeds of resistance and quest for the restoration of lost sovereignty. It is therefore not surprising that Okonkwo’s grandchildren would spearhead the freeing of Nigeria, to which Igboland had since been arbitrarily incorporated by the conquest, from the British occupation.

For the aggressor state with a clear genocidal goal, memory erasure of the crime scene at the targeted nation is even more frantically pursued. On the morrow of the conclusion of its execution of the second phase of the Igbo genocide in January 1970, genocidist Nigeria wheeled out pretentious cartographers to embark on erasing the illustrious name, Biafra, from all maps and records that it could lay its hand on! During its meetings, the Gowon genocidist junta in power banned the words “sun”, “sunlight”, “sunshine”, “sundown”, “sunflower”, “sunrise” or any other word-derivatives from the sun that unmistakably reference the inveterate Land of the Rising Sun. This task and symbolism of “sun-banning” and “sun-bashing” were of course bizarre if not daft as the junta itself was to discover much sooner than later – and from a most unlikely source indeed. At the time, a British military advisor to the junta, who was out dinning with a senior member of the council in Lagos, unwittingly compared Igbo national consciousness and tenacity with that of the Pole. The advisor, who had studied modern history at university and was a great admirer of the exceptional endurance of Polish people in history, stated that the Igbo had demonstrated similar courage in the latter’s defence of Biafra and that a “rebirth of Biafra was a distinct possibility in my lifetime” – unlike the 123 years it took the Polish state to re-appear after its disappearance from the world map! The advisor was then in his early 30s and the obvious implications of his Igbo-Polish analysis were not lost on his host. The junta member co-diner was understandably most outraged by the advisor’s crass insensitivity on the subject which he readily shared with his junta colleagues. Predictably, the immediate consequence of the hapless advisor’s impudence was an early recall home to Britain.

There were other bouts of farcical treats on display in Nigeria during the period aimed at erasing the memory of the Igbo genocide. Junta and other state publications and those of their sympathisers would print the name Biafra, a proper noun, with a lower case “b” or box the name in quotes or even invert the “b” to read “p”, such was the intensity of the schizophrenia that wracked the minds of the members of the council over the all important subject of the historic imprint of Igbo resistance and survival. The Awolowoists and Awolowoids on the junta even toyed with the idea of abolishing money altogether in the economy of the resourceful and enterprising Igbo. They reasoned that this would deliver the final solution that had eluded them during the “encirclement, siege, pounding, and withering away” strategy of the previous 44 months… They ended up with the “compromise” pittance of £20.00 per the surviving male-head of the Igbo family – a derisory sum, which, they reckoned, stood no chance of averting the catastrophe of social implosion they envisaged would occur in Igboland subsequently. We mustn’t fail to note that the £20.00 handout excluded the hundreds of thousands of Igbo families whose male-heads had been murdered during the period… Dreadfully, the accent placed by Nigeria on this third phase of the genocide, starting from 12 January 1970, was the economic strangulation of the 9 million Igbo survivors… 3.1 million Igbo had been murdered in the genocide between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970.

Celebration

Igbo survival from the genocide is arguably the most extraordinary feature for celebration in an otherwise depressing and devastating age of pestilence in Africa of the past half of a century. Few people believed that the Igbo would survive their ordeal, especially from September 1968 when 8-10,000 Igbo, mostly children and older people, died each day as the overall brutish conditions imposed by the genocidist siege deteriorated catastrophically… The Igbo were probably the only people in the world who were convinced that they would survive. And when they did, the aftermath was electrifying. In spontaneous celebration, the Igbo prefaced their exchange of greetings with each other for quite a while with the exaltation, “Happy Survival!”: “Happy Survival! Nne”, “Happy Survival! Nna”, “Happy Survival! Nwannem”, “Happy Survival! Nwanna”, “Happy Survival! Nwunyem”, ‘Happy Survival! Oriaku”, “Happy Survival! Dim”, ‘Happy Survival! Kedu?”, “Happy Survival! Ndeewo”, “Happy Survival! Ke Kwanu?”, “Happy Survival! Odogwu”, “Happy Survival! Okee Mmadu”, “Happy Survival! Dianyi”, “Happy Survival! Umu Igbo”, “Happy Survival Ndiigbo”. Igbo survival, at the end, does represent the stunning triumph of the human spirit over the savage forces that had tried determinably for four years to destroy it. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s description of her majestic tome on the subject, Half of a Yellow Sun (this sun, yet again – odi egwu!), as a “love story” couldn’t therefore be more appropriate.

Forty years on, first and second generations removed from their parents and grandparents respectively who freed British-occupied Nigeria in 1960 and survived the follow-up genocide, Ogbuefi Okonkwo’s progeny are once again tasked and poised to restore Igbo lost sovereignty. Everyone knows of their firm resolve and ability to achieve this goal. Surely, the successful outcome of this endeavour is the most eagerly awaited news in Africa of these early years of the new millennium.

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of Biafra Revisited (African Renaissance, 2006)

June 1969: Documenting a crime against humanity

By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe


Thankfully, for the interest of posterity, the Igbo genocide, perpetrated by the Nigeria state, is one of the most documented crimes against humanity. Leading university and public libraries across Europe (particularly in Britain, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden and Denmark) and North America have invaluable repositories of books, state papers (including, crucially, hitherto classified material now declassified as part of mandatory timeframe provisions and freedom-to-information legislations), church papers, human rights/anti-genocide/anti-war groups’ campaign papers, reports, photographs and interviews, Red Cross/other third sector papers, reports and photographs, newspaper/newsmagazine/radio/television/video archives and sole individual depositories, some of which are classified as “anonymous contributors”.

These data variously include extensive coverage of news and analyses of varying features of the genocide between May 1966 and January 1970 as well as still photographs and reels and reels of film footage of the devastating impact of the genocidist’s “starvation” weapon attack on Igbo children and older people, the genocidist air force’s carpet bombings of Igbo population centres (especially refugee establishments, churches, shrines, schools, hospitals, markets, homes, farmlands and playgrounds) and the haunting photographs and associated material that capture the sheer savagery of the slaughter of 100,000 Igbo in north Nigeria towns and villages during the first phase of the genocide in May to October 1966. A stream of these archival references has flowed steadily unto the youtube website as well as other internet outlets and much more material on the genocide will be available online in the months and years ahead. On the whole, these documentations are a treasure-trove for the conscientious scholar and researcher on the genocide. For the would be prosecutor of the perpetrators of this crime, they couldn’t have wished anything more for that crucial resource base to embark on their historic enterprise. A total of 3.1 million Igbo, or a quarter of the nation’s population at the time, were murdered in the genocide, the worst in Africa since the 19th century.

Not-“yaki”

Quite auspiciously, the genocidists’ own record on the genocide makes no pretences whatsoever about the goal of their dreadful mission – such was the maniacal insouciance and rabid Igbophobia that propelled the project. The principal language used in the prosecution of the genocide was Hausa. Appropriately, the words of the ghoulish anthem of the genocide, published and broadcast on Kaduna radio and television throughout the duration of the crime, are in Hausa: Mu je mu kashe nyamiri/Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su/Mu chi mata su da yan mata su/Mu kwashe kaya su (translation: Let’s go kill the damned Igbo/Kill off their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property).

The Hausa word for war is “yaki”. Whilst Hausa speakers would employ this word to refer to the involvement/combat services of their grandfathers, fathers, relatives and friends in “Boma” (reference to World War II Burma [contemporary Myanmar] military campaigns/others in southeast Asia, fighting for the British against the Japanese) or even in the post-1960s Africa-based “peace-keeping” military engagements in Cameroon, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Sudan, they rarely use “yaki” to describe the May 1966-January 1970 mass murders of the Igbo people. In Hausaspeak, the latter is either referred to as lokochi mu kashe nyamiri (past tense: when we murdered the damned Igbo) or lokochi muna kashe nyamiri (past continuous tense: when we were murdering the damned Igbo). Pointedly, this “lokochi” (when, time) conflates the timeframes that encapsulate the two phases of the genocide (May 1966-October 1967 and July 1967-January 1970 – for detailed analysis, see Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Biafra Revisited, 2006), a reminder, if one is required, for those (especially currently in a projected conference on the subject in the United States) who bizarrely, if not mischievously, wish to break this organic link.

Elsewhere, genocidist documentation on this crime is equally malevolent and brazenly vulgar. A study of the genocide-time/“post”-genocide era interviews, comments, broadcasts and writings on the campaign by key genocidist commanders, commandants and other officials such as Adekunle, Danjuma, Gowon, Obasanjo, Katsina, Haruna, Rotimi, Awolowo, Enaharo and Ayida underscores the trend. A brief review of Obasanjo’s contribution (published in his My Command, 1980) that focuses on his May 1969 direct orders to his air force to destroy an international Red Cross aircraft carrying relief supplies to the encircled and blockaded Igbo is hugely illustrative.

Obasanjo had “challenged”, to quote his words, Captain Gbadomosi King (genocidist air force pilot), who he had known since 1966, to “produce results” in stopping further international relief flight deliveries to the Igbo. Within a week of his infamous challenge (5 June 1969), Obasanjo recalls nostalgically, King “redeemed his promise”. King had shot down a clearly marked, in coming relief-bearing International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) DC-7 plane near Eket, south Biafra, with the loss of its 3-person crew.

Obasanjo’s perverse satisfaction over the aftermath of this crime is chillingly revolting. He writes: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando Division [the notorious unit Obasanjo, who subsequently becomes head of regime for 11 years, commanded] was profound. It raised morale of all service personnel, especially of the Air Force detachment concerned and the troops they supported in [my] 3 Marine Commando Division.” Yet, despite the huffing and puffing, the raving commanding brute is essentially a coward who lacks the courage to face up to a world totally outraged by his gruesome crime. Instead, Obasanjo, the quintessential Caliban, cringes into a stupor and beacons to his Prospero, British Premier Harold Wilson, to “sort out” the raging international outcry generated by the destruction of the ICRC plane...

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (forthcoming, 2009)

Nigeria Does Indeed Belong To A "G-"!

By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe


An important development that must not and cannot be ignored… Until last week, 43 years to the day since the beginning of the Igbo genocide perpetrated by Nigeria and its allies, no head of regime in power in Nigeria had ever admitted, albeit unwittingly, the utter worthlessness of Nigeria in the pecking order of the countries of the world. On Nigeria’s non-invitation to the April 2009 G-20 London economic summit, regime head Yar’Adua mournfully noted: “Today is a sad day for Nigeria as a country. This is because we are not invited to a meeting of the 20 world leaders. We have the population, we have the resources and we have the potential.” Predictably, Yar’Adua refers to those hackneyed, bogus indices (“population”, “resources”) that everyone knows obfuscate the immanent fragility, infamy and hopelessness that chart the Nigeria quagmire. In response to Yar’Adua’s pain, Kevin Ani, the lucid analyst, is succinctly upfront: “Even if one extends (sic) this list to G-1000, Nigeria still will not make it.”

It cannot be overstated that the Igbo genocide put paid to any Nigeria pretensions to transform itself to a serious state of global contention. Nigeria, which the Igbo had strategically led to liberate from 60 years of British occupation, collapsed, irremediably, in May 1966. This was when its troops, police, students, teachers, civil servants, community leaders, clergy, alimajiri and the like in north Nigeria planned and descended on Igbo children, women and men domiciled in the region – killing, raping, maiming, looting, destroying … A total of 100000 Igbo were murdered between May and October (1966) in this first phase of the worst genocide in Africa since the previous century. The Nigerians later expanded their murdering zones of operation to liquidate the Igbo by attacking the entire stretch of Igboland (from Issele-Ukwu, Agbo, Anioma, Ugwuta and Onicha in the west to Ehugbo, Aba and Umuahia to the east; from Nsukka and Eha Amufu in the north to Igwe Ocha, Umu Ubani and Igwe Nga to the south) between July 1967-January 1970. A total of 3 million Igbo were murdered during this second phase. Altogether, the Igbo lost one-quarter of their population as a result of the genocide.

On the morrow of this pulverising season of murdering, the only tangible capability that the murderers had acquired was one to commit even more murders – nothing else … definitely, not the more challenging capacity to develop and transform an economy to, in turn, attract and merit the accolades and recognitions from peers elsewhere. The tragedy of the otherwise farcical so-called “rebranding” of the Nigeria state is that this current “quest” is supposedly overseen by an Igbo academic (Dora Akunyili) who presumably is unaware of the history of her people in Nigeria or is probably biding her time to tell her employers the blunt truth of Nigeria’s inexorable cascade into irrelevance.

Yet, contrary to Yar’Adua’s angst over Nigeria’s non-membership of the G-20, Nigeria actually belongs to a “G-” grouping. It is called Group-G and Yar’Adua must know that not only does his country belong to this outfit but it also heads it as its undisputed supremo presently. In this club, the “G” letter stands for the beginning of that dreadful word which Nigeria has at once operationalised and institutionalised as the legacy of its vicious existence and has since exported across contemporary Africa – Genocide.

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (Fortcomung, 2009)

Oluwole Rotimi: Gloating over the Igbo genocide, 1966-1970

By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

The following notes, each dedicated to the memory of the number of Igbo children, women and men murdered by the Nigerian state and its allies in each of the four years of the Igbo genocide, are in response to the recent outrageous gloating over these horrendous murders by Oluwole Rotimi, himself a genocidist commandant during the slaughter:

1.The grim total of 3.1 million Igbo children, women and men were murdered during the genocide. This represents one-quarter of the 12 million Igbo population at the time. The Igbo genocide is the foundational genocide of (European) post-conquest Africa and remains the worst genocide in Africa to date.

2. Contrary to the Harold Wilson’s British government-inflected, Nigerian declaration of “no victor, no vanquished” on 12 January 1970, the Igbo were indeed the victors in this encounter. They survived. The Nigerian genocide state failed to accomplish its monstrous mission to destroy the Igbo. Igbo survival is a phenomenal triumph of human will and tenacity. The Igbo, relying solely on the materiality of the extraordinarily resourceful citizens’ defence forces they assembled from scratch (commanded by the handful of the pre-July 1966 Igbo officer-corps who survived the first phase of the genocide, professors, students, civil servants, businesspeople, farmers, artisans, etc., etc), overcame an aggregation of desperately brutish forces some of whom were otherwise antagonists or rivals in regional or the broader contours of international politics in the post-World War II era: Hausa-Fulani, Britain Yoruba/Oduduwa, Bini, Soviet Union, Tiv, Egypt, Berom, Yergam, Nupe, Ishan, the Sudan, Angas, Urhobo, Itsekiri, Igala, Bachama, Poland, Sura, Algeria, Jarawa (central Nigeria), Jukun, Saudi Arabia, Gwari, Guinea (Conakry), Kanuri, Syria, Idoma, German Democratic Republic, Iraq, Chad/gwodogwodo.

3. Between 1937 and 1959, the Igbo spearheaded the freeing of Nigeria from formal British occupation of the country which eventually ended in 1960. For all intents and purposes, Nigeria collapsed as a state with any serious prospects in the wake of the Igbo genocide that it launched on 29 May 1966. The singular lesson for Africa and the rest of the world from the incalculable tragedy that is called Nigeria is glaringly clear for whoever wishes to observe: one does not murder the potter and expect the pottery making-in-progress to attain a classic investiture. Despite earning the stunning sum of US$650 billion in oil sales in the subsequent 40 years, a significant proportion of this from occupied Igboland in the Delta, Rivers, Imo and Abia administrative regions, Nigeria has cascaded into a degenerative abyss politically, economically, intellectually, socially, morally and spiritually.

4. Forty years ago, Igbo people singularly and cruelly bore the brunt of the savage politics of mass murder, organised and executed meticulously and ruthlessly by the central coordinating operatives of this movement under the racist and chauvinist imprimatur of religious fundamentalism and exclusivity. Twice, during the course of two decades earlier, these operatives had staged murderous campaigns against the same Igbo in the north Nigerian towns of Jos and Kano – in dress rehearsals for the 1966-1970 “final solution”... As the virulence of this politics has since spread globally and indeed defines the dominant concern of international relations in the current epoch, the world no doubt needs to learn quite a lot from the Igbo experience. How have the Igbo “coped” with the visceral politics of hate and death in the past one-half century of a cataclysmic history? Despite the present Nigerian occupation of their homeland, the Igbo possess the critical indices for the far-reaching socioeconomic transformation of this region of Africa. They have an impressive industrial and manufacturing base that requires a radical upgrade and diversification, a disciplined workforce and an indefatigable intellectual, entrepreneurial and managerial class. The Igbo youth, 16-40, makes up part of Africa’s most educated and talented grouping. Despite the occupation, Igbo male and female students out-perform the rest of Nigeria across the entire spectrum of the education system. (On this, see particularly Okechukwu Agbor’s excellent study, “Look who is going to school in Nigeria,”) in [accessed 13 February 2009] a change of the title of Agbor’s essay to, for instance, “Igbo education during the era of occupation”, underscores, even further, the historic relevance of his study.) Strategically emplaced in Igboland is a resourceful engine of creativity that has immense possibilities for the future wellbeing of Africa and the rest of the world. It is therefore incumbent on the world to support the Igbo’s arduous efforts presently to free themselves from the Nigeria occupation. Furthermore, the world must ensure that genocidist operatives such as Oluwole Rotimi and his fellow travellers are stopped from strutting across international frontiers masquerading as “diplomats”, “businesspeople”, “presidents”, “heads of state”, even “peace envoys”.

On the eve of The Hague international court ordering the arrest of Sudanese President al-Bahier for “war crimes and crimes against humanity” in Darfur, it is surely unpardonable that the Rotimis of this planet are basking in the democratic sunny havens of Florida instead of being incarcerated in the Netherlands. We mustn’t forget that al-Bashier studiously learnt his vicious trade from that infamous dossier that documented the mass murders that charted the parameters of a devastating age for Africa – of which al-Bashier has contributed his own vile quota. The dossier was jointly signed by Obafemi Awolowo and Yakubu Gowon and was dated 29 May 1966-12 January 1970.

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (forthcoming, 2009)

The Tragedy of the Igbo Intellectual (2): Igbo Guardian, Ambrose Ehirim & Critics

Let me first thank you for taking the time and making the effort to query the palpable lethargy or disarray which has preoccupied and apparently neutralized the intellectual firepower of contemporary Igbo elite. My reaction to your submission shall be limited, for now, since the essay is still a work in progress. As provocative as what you have written thus far may sound, I still look forward to a conclusion of your current trend of thought.

The much I can say, for now, is that the emphasis on generational divide in the task before our folks, by your repeated mention of the old versus young intellectuals, could engender unnecessary misgivings even though such an outcome may not have been your intent. The Ikemba’s quote contained in your piece is quite clear in the invitation to the young in our midst to muster the gumption to step up to the plate and assume the lead to make up the deficiencies of the older ones. It is, therefore, confusing to try to explain the inability of the young Igbo intellectual elite like you to rise up to the challenge of this era by providing a long list of old intellectuals who may have not met your expectations of them for a variety of reasons.

Since you made a special mention of me, I feel compelled to let you understand that, based on my limited means, I have always endeavored to make my own input into our collective struggle as a people in as many ways as I could and as I speak, I am still in the trenches trying my utmost daily to open up new vistas of hope for the future of our people. I have written sundry articles on Biafra and also have been instrumental in proposing the systematic implementation of the Biafra Memorial Project (BMP) to which the Osondu Foundation has always been committed. The Osondu Newsletter, which later metamorphosed into the online outlet, Osondu website debuted here in the Washington, DC metro in the 1990s. If you get the chance to browse the site, especially the first three volumes of the Osondu Newsletter, you can still appreciate the seriousness of the effort made at the time to portray the injustices meted to our folks in Nigeria as well as the determination to restore our dignity and cultural pride through the pursuit of Igbo Renaissance. May I also refer you to the effort being made through the World Igbo Environmental Foundation (WIEF) to seek a real-time revitalization of the Igbo spirit by restoration of the sanctity and integrity of the Igbo ancestral home base which is currently being overwhelmed by neglect and widespread decay and degradation. To facilitate quicker actualization of WIEF’s mission at ground zero, the four cardinal ideological tenets of the Green Movement has been proposed and elucidated for easy universal application by groups and individuals as they deem suitable to their own circumstances.

I have written no books thus far, but I believe that I have generated and compiled enough material over the years to write more than a few. I also know that there are alternative effective means of harnessing and deploying the power of the written word beyond just publication of books. If you however, know of parties interested in partnering with me in book-publishing, endeavor, I shall definitely like to explore that.

Okenwa Nwosu, MD
Founder, Physicians Omni Health Group
Maryland, USA


…Congratulations on this excellent essay. This is a major intervention that our people will come to recognize as a turning point in probing the seemingly inexplicable inaction of our intellectuals to confront the Igbo genocide and its aftermath. The essay surely ends this very depressing lethargy. The Igbo nation will triumph. Let no one ever doubt this outcome. All we need is to be unwavering and eternally focused.


Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
Leading Scholar, Igbo Genocide 1966-1970


This is a subject I have been thinking quite a lot about lately. I wasn’t born during the war or the events that preceded it and my understanding of these things were largely shaped by the “victors history” fed to me in school. My parents and older relations didn’t speak in too much detail about it; they seemed to want to shield us from the horrors they witnessed.

In the past few years, though, I’ve suddenly found that I really need to develop a more accurate picture of this period in our history. In many ways I’m similar to someone like Ike Ude (whose work I admire) – culturally transcendent, largely apolitical, committed to aesthetics and style – but I feel the need to say something more, more culturally and historically specific. So thanks on the reference to the writers who are expressing insightful views on the subject… I will definitely be looking them up.

One thing, though a subject that I have encountered a lot lately is the effective use of propaganda to solicit sympathy and support for the Igbo cause… Many critics view the use of words like “pogrom” and “genocide” as being slightly overstating the situation…


Uchenna
Performing Arts and Music Analyst
Comb & Razor Blog


In order that the events in Biafra in the 1960s become no more than a fading memory, essays such as this, should remind us of what did happen and what was learned as a result. It is important to draw upon the experience of past conflicts as a means of assessing lessons learned. And having done some research myself, I found Ambrose Ehirim’s analysis to be completely accurate. He has written a very impressive and thoughtful article. While one does not have to agree entirely with each and every statement, my overall impression is very positive. Mr. Ehirim has obviously done a lot of reading, perhaps more than have many of those he rebukes. The issues he raises are troubling, and alas, very real.


Jonathan A. Goetz
Hermosa Beach, California




Ambrose Ehirim’s article “The Tragedy of the Igbo Intellectual” sets out to rescue, seeking to justify the young Igbo intellectual elite for inaction and blaming the old intellectual elite for lack of profound leadership. His discussion of a “notable few” who wrote “extensively and exhaustively” is plausible and informative, but sheds little light on who needs to be writing more on the course of events in Biafra. However, I admire his energy and courage in his work, so far. I have no reason to question Ehirim’s conclusion that the lack of profound leadership is a tragedy or the fact that nothing much should be expected of the young Igbo intellectual. (Nor is it startling to learn that many books have been written on internal strife, wars, genocide and “pogrom” to make a case of crimes committed against humanity; it hardly seems necessary for Ehirim to demonstrate that every Igbo should write a book about the “pogrom” and Biafra.) I do think, however, that Ehirim dodged the issue of including himself as part of the Igbo problem, thus declining to take up the mantle of Igbo leadership with reference to Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu’s quote.


Ardis Hamilton
The Hamilton Group
Real Estate Investors
Los Angeles, California


There were many omissions in Ambrose Ehirim’s article. First, I share Ehirim’s concern for his people. Their energy and talents, however, do not lead me to ignore the needs and rights of the minorities. The Efiks, Ijaws, Ibibios, Annangs, Kalabaris, Ogojas and others have been taken advantage of by their Igbo neighbors for decades. These minority tribes had asked repeatedly for independence from the Igbos since the 1950s.

The minority people within the East preferred to be free of Igbo domination by having states of their own as promised by the Federal government. But the Biafran leadership denied them the same right it claimed for itself vis-à-vis the rest of Nigeria, the right of self determination and protection from victimization.

Within the Eastern region and prior to secession and afterwards, there was no free expression of opinion by the minority groups, and Biafra was created without any democratic consultation of the minorities. Hand-picked representatives voted for secession or were locked up in Enugu. After the Biafran army had taken hundreds of hostages to its shrinking enclave it dared to call for a plebiscite in the victimized areas. Reports of Biafran terror and intimidation to ensure support from non-Igbo areas never reached the American public because of the press’s quick identification of the Biafrans as the underdog. I have reports of burnings of villages, mass graves, and massacre of non-Igbo civilians by Biafran forces. But these things made the Biafrans look more like Nazis than Jews and conflicted with our preconceptions about the situation. They were therefore given no publicity.

For Igbo secession to succeed, it needed to annex the territory of neighboring tribes and in particular to have the oil resources and facilities of Port Harcourt in Ijaw territory.


Gerald F. Obozome
Claremont, California


Everything in my professional life began when I came to Los Angeles from Israel and enrolled at Los Angeles College of Fashion Design where I learned about scholarship, determination and the wisdom of patience. Over the years I made friends through Ambrose and Ambrose has always made me feel a valued, competent, independent woman. All the friends I met through Ambrose, each in their way, gave me their support and helped me to find the freedom I needed to think and do the things I love doing best: acting and fashion design. Ambrose, you are a rare gem and your writing speaks a lot about the person that you are and with this stimulating and important essay, I am moved.


Ruth Uloma Ehirim
Uloma Fashion Designers
Hollywood, California


Ambrose Ehirim Replies:


My thanks to Okenwa Nwosu for his generous response and above all for the links he provided for my access perhaps before the completion of this article in which he “still look forward to a conclusion of” my “current trend of thought.” In addition to being a leading figure in Igbo Diaspora, a regular contributor to Igbo-related forums with great ideas and quite a critic of a retarded World Igbo Congress that has nothing to show for being Igbo umbrella other than keeping records of funny books, Nwosu is also a practicing medical doctor in the state of Maryland. Given his formidable credentials, his response deserves to be taken seriously with his reputation of intelligence and integrity.

One assertion by Nwosu I have no intention of attempting to rebut is that “based on my limited means, I have always endeavored to make my own input into our collective struggle as a people in as many ways as I could and as I speak, I am still in the trenches trying my utmost daily to open up new vistas of hope for the future of our people.”

Indeed, his own serious commitment to the Igbo cause is very important because after browsing the Osondu website and the links to World Igbo Environmental Foundation, it took me aback to Igbo Forum a couple of years ago where he posted images of a decaying and abandoned Onitsha, the hub of African marketplace in the continent. To judge by those images and video shots, apart from what I believe was an intended pleasure trip back home, and if the purpose was making the environment better and safer healthwise, the goal has not been met yet, with the agenda seemingly abandoned, and in that regard, one would be compelled to ask why the drive was stopped midway by someone of Nwosu’s magnitude.

Dr. Nwosu’s response is based entirely upon the premise that the old intellectuals should be wholly blamed for the problems grand and small that have engulfed the Igbo people – home and abroad – pointing fingers at me in particular and I will be coming to that part in a minute. At the same time, to repeat what I wrote in the first part of this essay, I made it patently clear talking about we, and that we, is a collective of Igbo Diaspora which may include the writer with regards to the American social system in which much advantage should have been taken, for onward objectivity by Igbo Diaspora, just like our other immigrant counterparts.

I had implied the need of the intellectuals as a machinery in any organized society which is much expected of the Igbo Diaspora intellectuals to use in effecting change within a sound framework of the Igbo nation, and by doing that, the confusion and chaos that seemed to have drowned us wouldn’t have arrived had the intellectuals not been forced to go with any flow on the basis of their weakness. And I do not see any disability in Nwosu, who has, in my assessment, the ability to subdue and deal with the fools and ruffians that are destroying Igbo land by way of political thuggery.

As it also happened, I did try to get in touch with Dr Chima J. Korieh at the Department of History, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who in partnership with Dr. Ifeanyi Ezeonu at the Department of Sociology, Brock University, St Catherine, Ontario, Canada, regarding the call for papers on the pogrom in which the premier issue is now in print,to be published sometime this year in Mbari – The International Journal of Igbo Studies, and scholars and authors have until March 09, 2009 to submit their papers for review for the special issue which goes in print in April. I understand the quarterly will be gracing libraries of many institutions here in the United States and Canada.

Speaking with Korieh and laying much emphasis on the pogrom and why it is important we should never stop keeping records and embarking on research projects to eke out a complete analysis of this horrible event –the Igbo genocide – he told me he had been attending a lot of meetings and seminars, and the Igbo Studies Association, which I’m already aware of, normally holds seminars on the pogrom the first week of April, hosted at Howard University, Washington, DC.

There are many reasons why Ezeonu and his colleague Korieh at Marquette University are desperately calling for papers on the Biafran genocide. And one of them, as I suggested while we spoke on the phone, is: the intent to preserve materials (testimonies, documentaries on tapes and perhaps currently plans to digitize testimonies and eye witness accounts, and even duplicating the tapes into Motion JPEG files, as well as other formats for computer and television viewing) about the pogrom and catastrophic Civil War to the future generations. These are worthy projects I believe if every Igbo-related organization, foundations or trusts should embark on and for mankind to be alert, the pogrom and the lessons learned would not be in vain. With that practically put into perspective, the pains, the feelings, the emotion of the events and the separation from families; the stories will be told until eternity. And most importantly, the time is now because aging survivors of the pogrom may not be around upon commencement of conduction of interviews even if it has to be done by a generation yet unknown, thus the importance of keeping records.

Just like the story of the Igbo man who survived the pogrom from the hands of hoodlums and Nigerian vandals lying in circumstances which are of an exclusive economic nature. For nearly twenty-something years before the pogrom Igbos gradually managed to capture not only commerce and industry but they also succeeded in acquiring, by means of purchase and lease, a huge amount of landed property in Kano, Jos, Lagos and all the big cities including Port Harcourt where Igbos owned almost every landed property stretching from the Ogbunabali area on the outskirts of Trans Amadi Industrial Layout to Diobu (Mile 1 through Mile 3).

Or the story of Egbebelu Ugobelu who was in combat during the war and almost starved to death because of Awolowo’s initiated economic blockade that denied food and medicine to the shores of Biafra and as a result, women, infants and children were desperately starved to death. Even before the Civil War erupted on failures from the federal Nigeria side to respect the Aburi Accord, huge numbers of Igbo men and women including infants and children had already been murdered or displaced with parents taken away. Yes, Gowon’s-led genocidal campaign against the Igbo nation by not upholding the decisions at Aburi was a moral abomination. Obafemi Awolowo, who had conspired with his colleagues in Action Group to overthrow the government of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and sentenced to ten years in prison by Justice George Sodeinde Sowemimo later to be released by Ojukwu in anticipation of either staying neutral or declaring Oduduwa Republic, all of a sudden, made a 180-degrees turn telling the world that starvation was a war strategy, that their enemies should not be fed fatter in order to fight them harder. But what he seems to have forgotten, or more likely remembered, but would not say, was that Ojukwu could have left him locked up until the war was over, or possibly eliminated him as a “strategy of war.” In a desperate search for food, and according to Ugobelu, a whole lot happened:

“…Before long we were eating rats, lizards, grasshoppers and frogs. Snakes and tortoise were known to be eaten by some towns... The first time I tasted a snake, it was just the juice…We would be searching for food at times and encounter some civilians who braved it and came to search for food also, I mean within a mile to the forward location. Often they came to see if there were some ripe palm fruits to cut down or some fairly ripe bananas and plantains to cut down…When someone discovered a bunch of bananas somewhere, he kept checking and praying that someone else didn’t see it; sometimes he covered it up. The idea was to allow it to be fairly ripe. Nine times out of ten, he lost because maybe ten or more others had indeed seen it and were also waiting and praying….Besides, I was looking for a family member principally for the purpose of knowing his or her address in order to fill out an allotment form so that he or she would be drawing my allotment, and in the event of my death, if it so happened…”

These and hundreds of thousands of testimonies are the kind of stories that need to be told for a broader reach and for generations to come. These are stories that require funding; that research centers have to be built and stories that needs a museum for posterity. These are stories foundations, trusts and organizations need to be collecting data on.

I must honestly thank scholar Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe whose response first popped up in my mail box, and who is unquestionably impeccable recognizing the fact that I am a scholar of his devoted works on Igbo genocide 1966-1970, and as part of awareness that “never again” which sends a message that Igbos are alert and there shouldn’t be any illusions about demolishing the Igbo nation, any further. The Igbo nation must rise to the occasion and it’s just a question of time.


For Uchenna, the African classical music analyst at the Comb & Razor Blog with whom I have quite often exchanged ideas on musicology dating back to the days of Action, Doves, Apostles, even E.T. Mensah and Funkees, and a brief response to the first part of this essay, I salute you, and let me add this to your curious mind about shielding the truth. Like the Holocaust which is taught in many universities, social-cultural institutions, colleges and community colleges; even secondary schools and intermediate schools throughout the United States and Europe, the crippled Igbo intellectual is one of several reasons why the pogrom is not taught in Igbo-related schools and higher institutions because he lacks the courage and political power to initiate that. In most of these institutions in the United States and Europe, the Holocaust is taught with an endowed chair and all sorts of funding inspired and drawn from a wide range of collective Jewish organizations. The Holocaust is taught with fear and trembling, with reverence for the subject and respect for its victims almost everywhere.

But the disturbances and the Igbo genocide of 1966-1970 and why it is not taught in schools in “Nigeria” or elsewhere today is (are) another issue to ponder and clearly a tragedy on the side of the Igbo intellectual.

And the question here is how could this be done? Well, the fact is there will not be much worthwhile teaching and scholarship – and in the long run not much vital memory of the Igbo genocide – unless schools, colleges, universities, endowed chairs, research centers, museums, publishers, and other educational institutions provide encouragement and support for the important work that lies ahead.

And how could this be established? A do-nothing World Igbo Congress, the so-called “Igbo Umbrella” could be used here as an example. Since the WIC was founded about sixteen years ago with the idea of being Igbo umbrella what would one say WIC has achieved all these years save for invite its adversaries to expose its dirty laundry and when a collective, confused bunch of Igbo Diaspora efulefu, a worthless bunch dismisses, their guests will be scratching their heads wondering about how messy such an elite body just could not get things done.

I must also thank my learned friend Jonathan Goetz for his contribution and observations in what is looking more like disappearing from the face of this planet and who for some reason has developed a great deal of interest studying the Igbo genocide. For now, the Igbo hagglers are bent on what is in there for them in terms of loot sharing. But nevertheless, time will tell. In addition to that, I thank Ardis Hamilton, as well, for his unbiased contribution.

For Gerald Obozome, let me set the following record straight before addressing your point of view; and maybe, you do not know what you are talking about, and I can sense you belong to the Port Harcourt mainland stock of Omoku/Ikwerre/Etche; and by confiscating Igbo assets and belongings earned through hard work declaring them abandoned property without reparations despite all the injuries that occurred, that’s OK in your mind and I hope your conscience is very clear – though it is a mystery to me how someone who thinks he is level headed could so misconstrue the straightforward meaning of what I wrote.

But whoever could have imagined that Ken Saro-Wiwa who fought on the Nigerian side in order to coerce and steal Igbo properties would end up being a victim by the people he aligned himself with in plundering and demolishing the Igbo nation? Whoever could have imagined that the same Britain that supplied arms to the Nigerian vandals in its genocidal campaign against the Igbo nation would today be intervening through military support for the federal government in the Niger Delta? Whoever could have imagined that Roland Ekperi, the President of the Ijaw People’s Association, (IPA), and his followers in London will today be waving their placards singing solidarity songs in the quest to free its detainees and liberate Niger Delta? Whoever could have imagined that Shell Petroleum Development Company, Chevron Nigeria Limited, Nigeria Agip Oil Company Limited, Mobil Producing Nigeria Limited, Pan Ocean Oil Corporation and Elf Petroleum Company Limited would be the firms to destroy the lands of Niger Delta polluting its environment and would not give back anything in appreciation for tapping the “oil rich region’s” natural resources? And whoever could have imagined that Igbo would have no hands in such a mess as the Ijaw nation and other ethnic minorities had thought in the past?

As a little kid, growing up in Accra, Ghana, I witnessed when much was discussed about “Nigeria’s” problems huge and tiny through the pre and post Civil War eras. I also read thoroughly an emerging continent going through the pains of colonialism coupled with the scramble that left the entire continent in the hands of its captors by way of its resource control and how it should be put into place in terms of power and delegated ruling elites.

Britain, in particular, succeeded in determining how power should be brokered in every of its enclave it colonized along the West African Coast. They had succeeded because they had been able to come in between a people that had no idea what was about to happen when the rush and quest for sovereignty heated up within the regions it fabricated and joined up even though the people in question had nothing in common from the kind of food they ate, their custom and way of life; and how they conducted business in general.

Britain did not envision a one Nigeria which was their own doing as a result of the settings which brought about a hindsight that a divided Nigeria was not going to be in their own interest. But that hunch somehow provided an avenue of loopholes from around which a Northern Nigeria influence became the ruling elites from an inflated proportion that gave the North the edge, thus coming up with a questionable political party that had no basis winning by a so-called “majority” as suggested by majority rule in any democracy.

However, the problem, henceforth, would surface and a fabricated nation as ordained by the imperialists would never be the same again. During the constitutional conferences and the debates that followed which would lead to independence, the late Chief Awolowo had foreseen the irrelevance of a Nigerian state, sophistically analyzing that there’s no such thing as Nigeria, that it was only a “geographical expression” which suggested a one united Nigeria was just a mirage. Awolowo was right and we are now living witnesses. And had it been at the time of these constitutional conferences and “logical debates” the founders of a fabricated state had societal vision like Awolowo did, perhaps the irrelevance of a one united Nigeria would have arise, and perhaps different nationalities would have emerged as it eventually happened in the Balkans.

But the discovery of oil had persuaded the imperialists not to give up the idea of a fabricated state with the northern ruling elites as its machinery to keep these fabricated states viable and in tact through majority rule which would ultimately lead to a bastardized corrupt administration within few years of the nation’s sovereignty.

I have held numerous debates while exchanging greetings with my comrades and these interesting and intellectual discourses have been most of the time, if not all, situations regarding a troubled nation like a fabricated Nigeria ignoring the classic case of the Balkanization theory.

Nevertheless, the setting up of the Willink Commission to study the agitation of ethnic minorities to carve out autonomy based on resource control and self determination engineered more interesting scenarios. After all said and done, the Mid-West was created to pacify the ethnic minorities which actually was not enough to address the principles of resource control considering the fact that the Ijaw nation was all over including the riverine areas.

Mid-West was a hotbed of every major ethnic group in that fabricated state. There was the Hausa speaking Mid-West, the Igbo speaking Mid-West and a Yoruba speaking Mid-West spreading from Auchi, Asaba and Benin, joined by other ethnic minorities – the Itsekiris, the Isokos, the Esans, the Urhobos, and the rest of which culture was very much varied.

On the other hand, along the Bight of Biafra, there were other ethnic minorities, too, on the deltas of Opobo, Brass, Bonny, Calabar and Oron whose agitation for self determination erupted when a young and energetic lad by the name of Isaac Jasper Adaka Boro began a movement to sort out the problems of a fabricated state and wanted out to determine that a bunch had been amiss when watering down the mess of oil revenue and the abandonment of the creeks where oil flowed in abundance to sustain a fabricated state.

If you Google Boro’s name it takes exactly 0.20 seconds to discover that he worked briefly as a teacher, then joined the police force and was stationed in Port Harcourt. It takes no longer than it is taking you to read this sentence to find out that Boro had gone AWOL for a job as an instructor at the Man O’War Bay Character and Leadership Center in Western Cameroon. You will also find out Boro spent two years at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka studying chemistry. Also, you will find out the Ijaw nation has a date that observes Isaac Boro’s Day as a national holiday. If you have more time to browse Google image on Boro, you will find pictures of Boro including the ones he had on a military fatigue, English suit and his boyish days.

Boro started a movement that was ill-timed, not even necessary, and provocative at a time when the imperialists had set up a tone detrimental to his “oil rich region” when a one Nigeria had been the round table conference requiring effectiveness of dialogue and diplomacy to sort things out without bloodshed and perhaps to a fabricated nation that may somehow break up, one day.

Boro started the Niger-Delta militancy group fighting against an establishment put together by the imperialists. Boro sold out. He made his mistakes and the genesis of the ongoing conflicts in the Niger-Delta areas was his own making and he paid dearly for it. And something that must be borne in mind is that Nd’Igbo had nothing to do with issues of concern to Niger-Delta when Boro and his youngish colleagues fought against a Nigeria set up established by the imperialists regarding resource control and self determination with the flowing Niger-Delta oil being the center of attraction in what would be the mother of all conflicts.

Was oil really the issue in building a profound national state despite the minorities that encompassed the Easter Region when Nd’Igbo who came up with the practical idea there’s no substitute for hard work; building bridges, dwelling comfortably among their other ethnic neighbors and providing goods and services which became a trademark for the Igbo nation knowing for the fact that Igbo people were industrious and prospered wherever they dwelled? Nd’Igbo made Port Harcourt what it is today. They built homes, established series of businesses and ran the city effectively.

But the problem of the ethnic minorities was that either they had been brainwashed to have been insane on the ground that Igbo people would run them over in the event an Igbo-related sovereignty emerges through some kind of dialogue based on regionalization, or they were just ignorant. Though Boro had nothing against Nd’Igbo when he started his movement in the company of his colleagues to liberate Niger-Delta from “bondage” and the inexplicable events that would follow in his quest for self determination for the Ijaw nation, there was no such thing as Biafra being “created without any democratic consultation of the minorities” claimed by Obozome or force-fed him in the nihilist Nigeria of his youth.

And I would assume Obozome likes reading jargon because he had no explanation to where more than 400 Igbo men and women “waiting for evacuation at Kano International Airport” were murdered in the most horrible way by armed Northern nihilists; in Lafenwa, near Abeokuta where hundreds of railway workers, all of Igbo origin, were rounded up and murdered by Northern Nigerian soldiers from the Abeokuta Garrison; in Awka, where civilians were forced to drink urine by the Nigerian vandals; in Okigwe where hundreds of innocent people were lined up and shot execution style; in Afor Umuohiagu near Owerri where more than 300 civilians were killed, most of them women and children; inside the Ikeja barracks on the orders of Lieutenant Nuhu to the mutineers to execute all officers of Eastern Nigeria origin; mass arrests and execution of officers of Eastern Nigeria origin, most of them, if not all, Igbo officers in Apapa, Yaba and Surulere; in Asaba, the “male death march and drowning,” and the list of these atrocities by the Nigerian vandals goes on and on, and on.

Irrespective of what happened, after the pogrom and Civil War, the intellectual community came to appreciate, and admire the courage of the Igbo people – for having a choice and refusing to be enslaved. The same sense of estrangement and rootlessness that is going on now in the Niger-Delta by the Niger-Delta insurgents against a federal government they once sided with during the Biafran conflict shows how deeply troubled a fabricated state has been since its independence. But Biafra did have a choice when they were being persecuted from place to place in a country supposedly to be free and just, and belonging to all of us, which is why in the Ahiara document, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu declared:

“Fellow countrymen and women, You, the people of Eastern Nigeria: Conscious of the supreme authority of Almighty God over all mankind, of your duty to yourselves and posterity; aware that you can no longer be protected in your lives and in your property by any government based outside Eastern Nigeria; believing that you are born free and have certain inalienable rights which can best be preserved by yourselves; unwilling to be unfree partners in any association of a political or economic nature; rejecting the authority of person or persons other than the military government of Eastern Nigeria to make any imposition of whatever kind or nature upon you; determined to dissolve all political and other ties between you and the former federal republic of Nigeria; prepared to enter into such association, treaty or alliance with any sovereign state within the former federal republic of Nigeria and elsewhere on such terms and conditions as best to subserve your common good…”

It should be borne in mind that the Ahiara Declaration was made after a joint session of the “Consultative Assembly and the Advisory Committee of Chiefs and Elders” which adequately was represented from every province in the region and passed a resolution authorizing Ojukwu “to declare at the earliest practicable date Eastern Nigeria, a free, sovereign and independent state by the name and title of Republic of Biafra.” And Igbo people had no problem with resource control and wherever creek oil flowed from to keep a fabricated nation afloat. In that regard, pointing it out clearly on plebiscite, Odumegwu Ojukwu, again:

“At the present moment, the Nigerian army has occupied some non-Igbo areas of Biafra. But this cannot be regarded as a settlement of the ‘minority question.’ This is why we have suggested a plebiscite. Under adequate international supervision, the people of these areas should be given the chance to choose whether they want to belong to Nigeria or to Biafra. Plebiscites have been used… to determine what grouping is most acceptable to the people of disputed areas. If Nigeria believes that she is really defending the true wishes of the minorities, she should accept our proposal for a plebiscite in the disputed areas of Nigeria and Biafra.”

Boro’s call sheet – Samuel Owonam and Nothingham Dick – had put together a plan recruiting men within the creeks to help fight for their cause; the liberation of Niger-Delta from the hands of a fabricated national state called “Nigeria.” Boro and his men created the Niger-Delta Volunteer Force, battle ready and blowing up oil pipelines engaging law enforcement officers in an all out war declaring the Niger-Delta as a sovereign nation. Boro was fighting Nigeria and not the Igbo nation when all the mess he created became an act of war. So Obozome’s exclamations are swollen tabloid rumors and had no basis; it is misinformation and lunatic.

Yakubu Gowon’s-led federal Nigeria’s decision to guarantee the ethnic minorities’ security by the creation of more states within the Eastern region ranks among the more fateful of many fateful steps taken in the fear-filled year of 1967. In retrospect, and with full knowledge of its consequences, was it wise for the “Niger Deltas?” And who is now bearing the consequences in its aftermath? Are the “Niger Deltas” better off today after all these years of formal ceasefire in a war that consumed about 3 million souls? Or could it really have been that, at the moment when Igbos were investing their money building homes and setting up businesses in the Port Harcourt metropolis that the Ijaws, the Ogonis, the Kalabaris and their other delta co-dwellers were just envy for Igbos persistent hard work that paid off which had their minds poisoned with bigotry and hatred? And where did Igbo people go wrong in what had been ignited by Gowon for firing the first shot in a war that shouldn’t have erupted in the first place had the Aburi accord been respected, and would drag on for more than 30 months?

Ruth, I do not have words to express my gratitude but to say thank you very much for the kind words and, I am glad you have maintained your composure all these years.

In light of what has been revealed on “The Tragedy of the Igbo Intellectual” and crimes committed against mankind by the Nigerian vandals in the course of this controversy, I am, needless to say, that a whole lot has been learned which would help the next generation pick up interest with regards to facts and logics about the pogrom and Biafra-Nigeria War.

I thank everyone who has written, but especially Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Okenwa Nwosu, Ardis Hamilton, Uchenna of Comb & Razor Blog, and Gerald Obozome for stretching my thoughts and Jonathan Goetz.

Guardian of Nd’Igbo

At the beginning of this decade, around March 2000, to be precise, a heated debate erupted on Igbo Charter and Australian-based Frances Elekwachi was among many others who championed its cause to be drawn on the board for deliberations and adoptions. I, for one, engaged in some of the debates with my colleagues at Biafra Nigeria World, (BNW) and Biafra Liberation Movement. Also, I had written in detail a platform proposing the best possible way of dealing with the subject matter in question, all reflecting on the status quo – how things use to be and how better off we were back in the day of our forebears. But knowing Igbo Diaspora for who they are, that proposal was killed instantly by a gang that had problems digesting the contents of the project. Thus while every state bears the same obligation to care for all who are in its charge, like a national state, sovereignty means independence not only with respect to national custom, but also with respect to the deeper questions of national constitution and purpose which was the whole idea of Igbo Charter.

Almost ten years has gone by and Igbos still don’t have a charter with its mission statement as guardian of the physical well-being of Igbo people all around the world. That vigorous debate in 2000, had it gone through and been effected and envisioned as a polity that would among other things permit the establishment of an independent Igbo national culture based on the unique perspective of Nd’Igbo; and also assist Igbos in developing a character suitable for a life of self-reliance and independence. By the time Elekwachi brought out his document, he saw clearly what the circumstances of statelessness had brought Nd’Igbo, especially Igbo Diaspora to the brink of collapse. It was in this fashion Igbos lost everything because they did not have the political power even up until today as I pen this piece.

Yet beyond the prospects for creating a charter or constitution for the Igbo nation, the document also would have achieved something important for “Nigeria’s” Igbo identity. By deliberately forging an internal Igbo document, the forum (then at Igbo Forum) would have introduced the idea that Igbo is not merely another democratic fabric on the shores of the West African coast, but a project of Igbo people seeking to chart its own course among the nations. I would assume Igbo Charter died a natural death since no Igbo Diaspora intellectual wants to talk about it ever since or maybe some of these intellectuals have compromised with the new breeds who lost every sense of purpose for they seem to be living a better life than their forebears which probably could have been the root of all the mess as survey after survey shows how the new breeds do not care and just do not get it. It is a tragedy.

To be sure, the newer generation who seem to be talking tough on the grounds of better life and better living environment slamming our forebears as not having the opportunity that they, the newer generation has today, and that if they (our forebears) had lived in today’s world, that they (our forebears) wouldn’t have been able to do “jack,” because of the fierce competitiveness and the bore, nuclear family mold they (newer generation) had to deal with. But all the rhetoric about a better privileged, nuclear family mold has been exposed as a mere rhetorical balderdash, and no way close or parallel to the days of our forebears when a brother gets his brother covered and a sister plays her dual feminine role – mother and nurse, no matter the circumstances; and building of community steadfast.

Nowadays, in the explosive, nuclear family mold as adopted upon exploring the shores of America, brothers can no longer dwell together or eat from the same dish; families and communities becomes impotent and fast disappearing as authorities preside over family matters; women abandon domestic work for 24/7 working days thus elevated to head of household; men lose their jobs, socio-economic status and becomes arm chair quarter backs in their living rooms with a new title of house husband; parents no longer spend quality time with their children for they have been trapped living above their means and caught up with all sorts of bills that can never be consolidated until God knows when; praying together which helped keep family values intact disappears from the family’s timetable and families and communities at a time more pacific becomes jumbled and bellicose.

It was during the days of the Igbo Union back in the day that we had character and values even though our forebears had limited resources and in many instances did not have the kind of education and exposure that we possess today, yet they prevailed in organizing themselves and getting things done. It was during the Igbo Union era that the display of character was measured by the way Igbo men and women were raised and were able to point out failings, not only with regard to this or that person, but also with regard to the entire people. Like character which embodied our forebears, they were able to form associations in which individuals work together over a period of many years, even a lifetime to achieve a common purpose. In Igbo vernacular, like the boy-boy, that is, the apprentice who learns a trade form his nnaukwu, that is, his master (Big Daddy) who in most cases is a relative or a townsfolk, and after some time he is allowed to start up his own business independently which tells a man of character because over the years of apprenticeship his spirit was not bent out of shape by adversity or duress, defeat or victory, and the chain of reaction goes on and on as the pillar of that very branch of trade eventually becomes an institution of its own where townsfolk learn to trade.

And on this note, I put the effective role of the intellectuals into perspective. Without the proper guidance of the intellectual by way of character and examples, the boy-boy probably would leave prematurely on many grounds; for example, say his nnaukwu never treated him well compared to other apprentice from around the block where they trade on the same merchandise. On the other hand, without a proper training by the intellectual, the nnaukwu might have his shop fold up through careless business decisions. This is why it is important to be thorough in every trade which brings about the effectiveness of the intellectual and these instances relies on how we handle ourselves as intellectuals on any given day under any circumstances.

Take for instance, a state governor or commissioner from any Igbo-related state visiting the shores of this land probably on a goodwill message tour to update the Diaspora on the affairs of state from the native land which comes as usual by a group of organizing committees who coordinates between the governor/commissioner and his or her host of dignitaries. Remember the governor’s visit was meant to update Diaspora on the affairs of state and he or she is running the state on transparency and accountability. But the truth of the matter is that when this said governor arrive the United States he or she is not prepared by the organizers to update his kinsfolk on the goings on, rather he or she is whisked away, sometimes hidden with nobody knowing his whereabouts until the behind closed doors meeting with apologetic lobbyists for “high ranking” positions back home, local businessmen and some prestigious integrationists that has nothing to do with the governors visit is over.

And it is at this point that I come to the fore to question the role of the intellectuals who supposedly should be giving form and content to mass liberation movements that changes society. So who should be blamed right here, the governor or the intellectual who organized the august visit?

Nevertheless, the truth is that Igbo homeland desperately need Igbo Diaspora, it is their anchor in reality; just as Igbo Diaspora needs Igbo homeland of which in combination makes them think politically which harnesses a lot of stuff from education to infrastructures. Such work is very difficult, but it must be done if both homeland and Diaspora are to survive. Like the controversial “medical mission” errands which I will be writing about in a different article, those of us here in Diaspora (anywhere within the Western Hemisphere) should think about political and cultural utopianism, for our destinies are fused, because neither of our communities can survive without the development of a sound Igbo political tradition, which will teach us to think realistically about our natural being, our politics, our economics, our culture and our foreign relations.


Notes:

1). The Tragedy of the Igbo Intellectual (Ambrose Ehirim, The Ambrose Ehirim Files)

2). Sam Amadi, Colonial Legacy, Elite Dissension and the making of Genocide: The Story of Biafra

3). Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo and Samuel U. Ifejika, Biafra: The Making of a Nation

4). Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, Biafra: Selected Speeches and Random Thoughts

5). Dan Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations

6). Egbebelu Ugobelu, Biafra War Revisited, A Concise and Accurate Account of Events That Led To the Nigerian Civil War

7). Patrick A. Anwunah, The Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-1970): My Memoirs

8). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

9). Max Siollun (Essay on Isaac Boro) at Max Siollun Website