We grew up in Enugu. We used to regard the place as a unique city. Surrounded by the rolling Udi hills and famous for its coals, the geography of the place and its natural bounty set it out as a special spot with serious economic and tourist potentials. It occupied a special place in our hearts amongst all the cities in Nigeria. As far as we were concerned no city in Nigeria could touch Enugu. Our slogan used to be: "make your money elsewhere, but come to Enugu to enjoy it". We always thought that Enugu was the ultimate place to retire to after one had done his bit in life.
Popularly known as The Coal City, what marks Enugu out is perhaps the people it breeds. The environment conditions the individual, they say; but Enugu was still recovering from the ravages of the Biafra/Nigeria civil war when we were growing up. Most of my childhood friends in those formative years also had what we used to refer to as 'Enugu upbringing'. This meant that you were raised properly. You had inculcated in you some virtues of nobility, including a strong moral character, intellectualism and respect for decency.
However, over the years, as Nigeria's socioeconomic and political climate moved from one 'bad weather' to another, it's not only the citizenry that have been left badly traumatised. The decay in infrastructure from city to city, north to south, west to east, leaves you with terrible psychological hangups. Enugu had more than its fair share of neglect. With the mass exodus of its youths in search of greener pastures elsewhere, this once beautiful city had become a ghost town.
It is against this backdrop that I felt a certain sense of pride when I learnt that Enugu State was awarded the top position in a recent exercise involving all the states in Nigeria, bar Bayelsa. This exercise was a performance rating of all the state governments in the Feral Republic of Nigeria, including the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. It sought to establish the best performing state in the Federation within certain given criteria.
Following the generalised sorry situation in Nigeria in all areas of governance, this result had sounded too good to be true, especially the parameters and indicators that yielded it. In fact, I regarded it with some suspicion. I needed to get the right balance; another perspective to this that would keep it real. For some strange reason, I felt reassured when I read this article by Ejiofor Nwokolo in the Daily Independence - Enugu: The Limits of Propaganda. If you read this article to the end then you must feel my pain too. Doesn't reality have something in common with the truth? The time is nineteen after four, and this odd clock has many faces. Nothing has really changed.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Our right to know
I first read the news of Nigeria's double tragedy last Sunday on the CNN website. As the initial reports could not immediately confirm whether there were any survivors from the crashed flight 210 I turned to the BBC website for more information. I had searched through the local online media and could only find This Day Online scrolling it as Breaking News. At this point the BBC was reporting that about 50% of the passengers had survived the crash. It even mentioned a report of a phone call back home by an ECOWAS official, to confirm that he had been on the flight but had survived the crash. As is usual with the BBC website, it also had provided a forum for those who may be affected by the incident to express themselves.
I read through the many hopes expressed by respondents who had prayed that their loved ones on that fated flight would be alright. By the following morning when the truth of the situation emerged and it became clear that there were no survivors, this page was withdrawn from the website. It was replaced with an article titled: Nigeria - where the truth is hard to find, by Anna Borzello. This article tried to clear the confusion surrounding the conflicting reports, blaming the Nigerian situation for the mix up. The disappointment and frustration that must have followed this development is inestimable, especially for those who may be directly affected by this incident, and who may be without alternative sources of information. It's easy to point fingers elsewhere but the BBC should've provided another forum for readers to express their disappointment or vent their angst.
I was further alarmed when I read that the AIT and Ray Power FM stations were shut down by the Nigerian National Broadcasting Commission, for what they termed "unprofessional coverage" of the scene of the ill-fated flight. Part of their reasons was that the said stations had announced on location, that there were no survivors, before competent authorities had fully assessed the situation; or before the families of the victims had been informed. Haba!
This plane had disappeared from the radar for at least fifteen hours before these announcements were made. Nobody could account for the whereabouts of the aircraft all this while. Two helicopters were scrambled and a frantic search and rescue operation was mounted by the Nigerian authorities. The entire world media was focused on Nigeria and the missing jetliner. Everybody wanted news. AIT happened to be the first to find and reach the crash site; and what the NBC did was to shut the station down for making public its findings. This action underscores the military mentality and ignorance that still rules the Nigerian stage. It is disgusting!
What is wrong with this country, Nigeria? Why must only irrational and ignorant people have access to decision making positions here. Or, is this power-play a deliberate attempt to punish the owners of these stations for getting the birthdate of the tragic first Lady wrong? In fact, Chief Gani Fawehinmi's call for immediate payment of compensations to DAAR Communications Limited is much in order. I also think that the NBC is a useless commission and should be scrapped. The people have a right to know.
I read through the many hopes expressed by respondents who had prayed that their loved ones on that fated flight would be alright. By the following morning when the truth of the situation emerged and it became clear that there were no survivors, this page was withdrawn from the website. It was replaced with an article titled: Nigeria - where the truth is hard to find, by Anna Borzello. This article tried to clear the confusion surrounding the conflicting reports, blaming the Nigerian situation for the mix up. The disappointment and frustration that must have followed this development is inestimable, especially for those who may be directly affected by this incident, and who may be without alternative sources of information. It's easy to point fingers elsewhere but the BBC should've provided another forum for readers to express their disappointment or vent their angst.
I was further alarmed when I read that the AIT and Ray Power FM stations were shut down by the Nigerian National Broadcasting Commission, for what they termed "unprofessional coverage" of the scene of the ill-fated flight. Part of their reasons was that the said stations had announced on location, that there were no survivors, before competent authorities had fully assessed the situation; or before the families of the victims had been informed. Haba!
This plane had disappeared from the radar for at least fifteen hours before these announcements were made. Nobody could account for the whereabouts of the aircraft all this while. Two helicopters were scrambled and a frantic search and rescue operation was mounted by the Nigerian authorities. The entire world media was focused on Nigeria and the missing jetliner. Everybody wanted news. AIT happened to be the first to find and reach the crash site; and what the NBC did was to shut the station down for making public its findings. This action underscores the military mentality and ignorance that still rules the Nigerian stage. It is disgusting!
What is wrong with this country, Nigeria? Why must only irrational and ignorant people have access to decision making positions here. Or, is this power-play a deliberate attempt to punish the owners of these stations for getting the birthdate of the tragic first Lady wrong? In fact, Chief Gani Fawehinmi's call for immediate payment of compensations to DAAR Communications Limited is much in order. I also think that the NBC is a useless commission and should be scrapped. The people have a right to know.
Monday, October 24, 2005
Stella
I was up early this morning expecting a call from Humphrey, a friend and classmate, in transit from Port Harcourt to Dallas, Texas. He'd stopped over last night at London Heathrow for a connecting flight. We hoped to meet before he continued his journey later this aftenoon.
As I waited for Humphrey's call my mind wandered to the events of yesterday. It was an ordinary Sunday until Tina, my wife, called me from Lagos to announce that Stella was dead. Before I could say, "Which Stella?", she had added, "It's on CNN". We know a few Stellas but only one could make CNN by her demise. This one was the most important woman in Nigeria. My reaction was nearly the same as when I got the news of Sani Abacha's death years ago. Deja vu? No! Powerful people didn't just die like that. I was like: "Na lie, you must be joking!", and instinctively I reached for my laptop.
While confirming the news on the CNN website my wife was still going on about people's reactions back home. And that's when I saw the real tragedy. There had also been a plane crash somewhere near Lagos and apparently there were fatalities. With over a hundred people on board the plane there was cause for worry. As I mentioned the plane crash to my wife she had stated matter of factly that everybody was in shock.
The CNN reports had been simple and straight forward. Stella Obasanjo, Nigeria's first Lady, was apparently on a private visit to Spain where she went for cosmetic surgeries and had died of complications there of. She would've been 60 in two weeks time, the report said. I thought: could this be the serenade to a heavy birthday party? Aahhh, vanity; thou art treacherous! Though, CNN did not relate the news about the fated airplane to the death of the first Lady, the double tragedy was enough to trouble the Nigerian leader. I turned to the BBC for more information.
Sure enough the BBC report on Stella's death had the expected twist. Among other things, the BBC had pointed out that Stella was a controversial person. They observed that she once had a journalist arrested for doing an article on her in a local newsprint titled, "Greedy Stella". Interesting. But, the BBC plane crash report appeared to conflict with that from CNN. Quoting a Red Cross source CNN wasn't sure there were any survivors. The BBC, at this stage was reporting a 50% survival figure. This is typical of events in Nigeria. Nobody is ever sure of anything! Anyhow the BBC was definite that the airline in trouble, Bellview, was one patronised mainly by foreigners, top Nigerian officials and the wealthy. Big man, Big trouble. Meanwhile, the local www media were dead asleep on all this, except for This Day Online which had it as Breaking News.
Lying in bed this morning, I'm reflecting on recent events in Nigeria. The vice President, Atiku, is being investigated in America by the FBI. Governor Alam goes to a German hospital for tummy tuck (some big man's disease); he is arrested in Britain on charges of money laundering and put to rest in a London jail. He is fighting for his freedom. Meanwhile, his colleagues in office all develop cold feet about travelling abroad. It was always medical checkup, or some such mundane activity. Suddenly they all become very fit and healthy. No more foreign conferences either. The guilty, afraid? Now, Stella, the country's official first Lady goes for surgery in a Spanish hospital; she does not live to see the result. As my neighbour would say, "E be like say Oyibo don do meeting for us o!" If so, who's turn next?
But then, 'even if Oyibo man do meeting for us', borrowing from my neighbour, will the development make Nigerian leaders wake up to the realities of the day? No way. I suspect that Nigerian politicians would prefer to die in foreign hospitals than receive treatment at home. Isn't their their main job to make sure that nothing works in Nigeria so they can continue their looting? Otherwise, why would they not develop and equip our hospitals? While Nigerian doctors and nurses excelled all over world, they are insulted at home. I think it's time to ban everyone who takes public office from going for medical treatment or consultation abroad, including members of their family. How else would our healthcare delivery system get any attention? Ditto for education, if necessary.
The other day a French airliner was lucky to escape a major disaster at Port Harcourt airport, after running into a herd of cattle. A herd of cattle on an airport runway, for crying out loud! Now, the country is again plunged into mourning. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the grace of God, rest in peace.
As I waited for Humphrey's call my mind wandered to the events of yesterday. It was an ordinary Sunday until Tina, my wife, called me from Lagos to announce that Stella was dead. Before I could say, "Which Stella?", she had added, "It's on CNN". We know a few Stellas but only one could make CNN by her demise. This one was the most important woman in Nigeria. My reaction was nearly the same as when I got the news of Sani Abacha's death years ago. Deja vu? No! Powerful people didn't just die like that. I was like: "Na lie, you must be joking!", and instinctively I reached for my laptop.
While confirming the news on the CNN website my wife was still going on about people's reactions back home. And that's when I saw the real tragedy. There had also been a plane crash somewhere near Lagos and apparently there were fatalities. With over a hundred people on board the plane there was cause for worry. As I mentioned the plane crash to my wife she had stated matter of factly that everybody was in shock.
The CNN reports had been simple and straight forward. Stella Obasanjo, Nigeria's first Lady, was apparently on a private visit to Spain where she went for cosmetic surgeries and had died of complications there of. She would've been 60 in two weeks time, the report said. I thought: could this be the serenade to a heavy birthday party? Aahhh, vanity; thou art treacherous! Though, CNN did not relate the news about the fated airplane to the death of the first Lady, the double tragedy was enough to trouble the Nigerian leader. I turned to the BBC for more information.
Sure enough the BBC report on Stella's death had the expected twist. Among other things, the BBC had pointed out that Stella was a controversial person. They observed that she once had a journalist arrested for doing an article on her in a local newsprint titled, "Greedy Stella". Interesting. But, the BBC plane crash report appeared to conflict with that from CNN. Quoting a Red Cross source CNN wasn't sure there were any survivors. The BBC, at this stage was reporting a 50% survival figure. This is typical of events in Nigeria. Nobody is ever sure of anything! Anyhow the BBC was definite that the airline in trouble, Bellview, was one patronised mainly by foreigners, top Nigerian officials and the wealthy. Big man, Big trouble. Meanwhile, the local www media were dead asleep on all this, except for This Day Online which had it as Breaking News.
Lying in bed this morning, I'm reflecting on recent events in Nigeria. The vice President, Atiku, is being investigated in America by the FBI. Governor Alam goes to a German hospital for tummy tuck (some big man's disease); he is arrested in Britain on charges of money laundering and put to rest in a London jail. He is fighting for his freedom. Meanwhile, his colleagues in office all develop cold feet about travelling abroad. It was always medical checkup, or some such mundane activity. Suddenly they all become very fit and healthy. No more foreign conferences either. The guilty, afraid? Now, Stella, the country's official first Lady goes for surgery in a Spanish hospital; she does not live to see the result. As my neighbour would say, "E be like say Oyibo don do meeting for us o!" If so, who's turn next?
But then, 'even if Oyibo man do meeting for us', borrowing from my neighbour, will the development make Nigerian leaders wake up to the realities of the day? No way. I suspect that Nigerian politicians would prefer to die in foreign hospitals than receive treatment at home. Isn't their their main job to make sure that nothing works in Nigeria so they can continue their looting? Otherwise, why would they not develop and equip our hospitals? While Nigerian doctors and nurses excelled all over world, they are insulted at home. I think it's time to ban everyone who takes public office from going for medical treatment or consultation abroad, including members of their family. How else would our healthcare delivery system get any attention? Ditto for education, if necessary.
The other day a French airliner was lucky to escape a major disaster at Port Harcourt airport, after running into a herd of cattle. A herd of cattle on an airport runway, for crying out loud! Now, the country is again plunged into mourning. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the grace of God, rest in peace.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
I wonder if Tsunami was a girl too
A little while ago it was Katrina. Now it is Rita! Still reeling from the terrible devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina, Americans prepare for hurricane Rita. I began to wonder if there was some bias to the naming of nature's greatest storms. Why would this natural phenomena that practically destroyed a beautiful city like New Orleans be named after a woman? Do people who bear names associated with such natural disasters that take heavy tolls on humankind object to being so named? For answers I took a dive online and googled "hurricane". In micro-seconds I had more information than I could handle. How the world has changed!
I found FEMA's info site for kids on hurricanes - http://www.fema.gov/kids/hurr.htm most interesting. A complete site, and it did my curiosity justice. Among other things, it dealt with the history of hurricanes and the how and why they were given names, including who did the naming. There was a long list of names given to hurricanes from 1996 - 2007. I thought I might find my name on that list. Hey, I did!
I began to relax though when I noticed a good balance between male and female names for hurricanes. But then, because I couldn't go into individual details I couldn't immediately tell who, or which, did the most severe damage. And then again you couldn't associate certain names with a particular gender. So, hurricane Chris or Sam could be male or female. But Katrina is definitely female. Mercy, Rita!
I'll go for Tony Wilson: New Orleans music makes you happy. Take heart people, as you rebuild.
Q. What do hurricanes and women have in common?
A. They're both wet and wild when they come, and they take the house and car when they leave.
I found FEMA's info site for kids on hurricanes - http://www.fema.gov/kids/hurr.htm most interesting. A complete site, and it did my curiosity justice. Among other things, it dealt with the history of hurricanes and the how and why they were given names, including who did the naming. There was a long list of names given to hurricanes from 1996 - 2007. I thought I might find my name on that list. Hey, I did!
I began to relax though when I noticed a good balance between male and female names for hurricanes. But then, because I couldn't go into individual details I couldn't immediately tell who, or which, did the most severe damage. And then again you couldn't associate certain names with a particular gender. So, hurricane Chris or Sam could be male or female. But Katrina is definitely female. Mercy, Rita!
I'll go for Tony Wilson: New Orleans music makes you happy. Take heart people, as you rebuild.
Q. What do hurricanes and women have in common?
A. They're both wet and wild when they come, and they take the house and car when they leave.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
NIGERIA 70 COMPILATION
How times change! Who could have imagined that at some point men actually walked the streets of Nigeria dressed up like this? Would anyone now look at those 'layers' with some nostalgia? I wouldn't bet on it.
Methinks it would be a tricky affair, because the slightest breeze might not just cause a serious embarassment to any regular 'bobo' but much damage is possible to today's very hungry Nigerian.
I go die o!
Nigerians have a great sense of humour too. Yes, a good joke makes my day anyday. And so when I got this one recently from Agari Mojo, Okpoka NdiIgbo, I decided to blog it here.
In the Classroom in Warri:
Teacher: You Boy, spell plantain
Boy: Whish one? The ripe one or the unripe one?
Teacher: What difference does it make? Just spell plantain!
Boy: Teasha, If you fry the ripe one na 'DODO', if you fry the unripe
one na 'SHIPS' if you roast am, na 'BOLI', all of them na plantain,
so whish one you wan make I spell?!
----------------------
Have you heard the latest?
Cameroun is going to attack Nigeria as soon as they've learnt to drive the septic tanks they bought from the French!
Methinks it would be a tricky affair, because the slightest breeze might not just cause a serious embarassment to any regular 'bobo' but much damage is possible to today's very hungry Nigerian.
I go die o!
Nigerians have a great sense of humour too. Yes, a good joke makes my day anyday. And so when I got this one recently from Agari Mojo, Okpoka NdiIgbo, I decided to blog it here.
In the Classroom in Warri:
Teacher: You Boy, spell plantain
Boy: Whish one? The ripe one or the unripe one?
Teacher: What difference does it make? Just spell plantain!
Boy: Teasha, If you fry the ripe one na 'DODO', if you fry the unripe
one na 'SHIPS' if you roast am, na 'BOLI', all of them na plantain,
so whish one you wan make I spell?!
----------------------
Have you heard the latest?
Cameroun is going to attack Nigeria as soon as they've learnt to drive the septic tanks they bought from the French!
Monday, July 18, 2005
London: Scary Encounter on the DLR
The journey from Lewisham Station to Cross Harbour takes less than 10 minutes on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), but yesterday evening, my journey appeared to take a life time.
Lewisham Station, a terminal for DLR trains going from here to either Bank Station or Stratford, is usually not so busy at this hour. I got on the train and made my way towards the front of the first coach. A moment later I was joined by a young man (white) and his girl friend (also white). Two other passengers came in to occupy the train driver's seat and then a girl (black) took up a position on the seat next to that one.
Suddenly a man (black) in his mid 50s staggered into the train. He sat on the seat opposite me and the white couple. I recognised him immediately. On my way to the Station, I had noticed this character disengaging himself from a small group of drunks (whites), as I walked through a small park. They drew my attention because they were quite loud as they bid their 'friend' good bye.
As the man sat down he began to chatter in a loud voice, to no one in particular, about nothing of particular interest. Though he wore no dreadlocks, his accent betrayed his Carribean ethnic origin. Everybody ignored him. The couple on the train driver's seat got up immediately and disappeared towards the rear of the coach. I
thought, "do I move too, or do I stay and put up with this drunk?" I stayed.
Now the drunk began to address the couple sitting by me. I got the impression this guy defered to white people. Forced himself on them rather.
"You look like John Lenon", he said.
Perhaps more out of respect, the other guy replied,
"That's what people say".
This scene had nothing to do with me, so I looked away. Staring into space, I tried to make myself as small as possible so no one would notice me. That was my mistake.
The drunk turned on me. I'm not able to recall exactly what he'd said, but he'd expected me to react. I boned up. I wasn't getting involved in this. To the white boy he said,
"I love John Lenon".
Then he began to rave:
"You see why black people shoot each other?"
"Black people don't support one another!"
"You see, you're a white boy, you show me respect"
"But see this black man, he no show me no respect"
"That is why I carry a gun in my bag!"
"I shoot you, you're dead"
"Bang! Bang!", he shot me.
No, I didn't drop dead. Not yet. It was an air pistol.
But my heart skipped a beat when he reached for his bag. Is this fool going to try and shoot me, or what? This was the worst kind of pest! People who couldn't carry their booze well. The scum of the earth. To be this drunk so early in the evening. To try and turn me into a victim of his sorry world. I didn't trust this guy at all.
But wait, what if the man really had a gun in that bag? Can one just suddenly lose his life like that? For nothing? I braced myself. To take a bullet?
Ha!
An ordinary encounter about to suddenly turn nasty?! As the man continued to rave, weird thoughts ran through my mind. I tried to coil myself so I could go at him head first. Would my bag get in the way? Can I move fast enough? I concentrated on his hands. And his bag. This was serious. I wasn't smiling at all.
"Your face too long", complained the man.
"African boy", "you don't deserve to live!"
He was standing up now.
"Bang! Bang!", he shot me again. Air pistol.
The train began to stop. Deptford Bridge Station. The man began to leave the train. As he left, he continued to abuse and call me names. I never said a word to him. Kept my face blank. The rest of the passengers still showed no interest in this one-man demo.
The man got off the train, looked through the window at me, and drew his air pistol for the finisher.
"Bang! Bang! Bang!", he went.
The train moved on. Phew! That was close.
I struggled to comprehend the intensity of this man's emotion. I wondered what could've been the outcome of this encounter if the man had got a real gun in his bag. I was so sure he could've used it. Or tried to. He was almost foaming at the mouth as he cursed and abused me.
I began to reflect. Some of what the man had said to me went beyond drunkeness. His monologue had betrayed some deep seated ill-feeling against me, and my kind. To be confronted with this scenario less than two weeks after the terror bombs of the London transport system left me aghast. Apparently al-Qaeda isn't the only threat one has to contend with in this society.
Why is the world so full of hate? What makes people think they are the ones who deserve to live while others deserve to die, and at their hands? Do humans really enjoy killing one another? Why? So many questions, so few answers.
But I'll ride the DLR again. Scum and all.
Lewisham Station, a terminal for DLR trains going from here to either Bank Station or Stratford, is usually not so busy at this hour. I got on the train and made my way towards the front of the first coach. A moment later I was joined by a young man (white) and his girl friend (also white). Two other passengers came in to occupy the train driver's seat and then a girl (black) took up a position on the seat next to that one.
Suddenly a man (black) in his mid 50s staggered into the train. He sat on the seat opposite me and the white couple. I recognised him immediately. On my way to the Station, I had noticed this character disengaging himself from a small group of drunks (whites), as I walked through a small park. They drew my attention because they were quite loud as they bid their 'friend' good bye.
As the man sat down he began to chatter in a loud voice, to no one in particular, about nothing of particular interest. Though he wore no dreadlocks, his accent betrayed his Carribean ethnic origin. Everybody ignored him. The couple on the train driver's seat got up immediately and disappeared towards the rear of the coach. I
thought, "do I move too, or do I stay and put up with this drunk?" I stayed.
Now the drunk began to address the couple sitting by me. I got the impression this guy defered to white people. Forced himself on them rather.
"You look like John Lenon", he said.
Perhaps more out of respect, the other guy replied,
"That's what people say".
This scene had nothing to do with me, so I looked away. Staring into space, I tried to make myself as small as possible so no one would notice me. That was my mistake.
The drunk turned on me. I'm not able to recall exactly what he'd said, but he'd expected me to react. I boned up. I wasn't getting involved in this. To the white boy he said,
"I love John Lenon".
Then he began to rave:
"You see why black people shoot each other?"
"Black people don't support one another!"
"You see, you're a white boy, you show me respect"
"But see this black man, he no show me no respect"
"That is why I carry a gun in my bag!"
"I shoot you, you're dead"
"Bang! Bang!", he shot me.
No, I didn't drop dead. Not yet. It was an air pistol.
But my heart skipped a beat when he reached for his bag. Is this fool going to try and shoot me, or what? This was the worst kind of pest! People who couldn't carry their booze well. The scum of the earth. To be this drunk so early in the evening. To try and turn me into a victim of his sorry world. I didn't trust this guy at all.
But wait, what if the man really had a gun in that bag? Can one just suddenly lose his life like that? For nothing? I braced myself. To take a bullet?
Ha!
An ordinary encounter about to suddenly turn nasty?! As the man continued to rave, weird thoughts ran through my mind. I tried to coil myself so I could go at him head first. Would my bag get in the way? Can I move fast enough? I concentrated on his hands. And his bag. This was serious. I wasn't smiling at all.
"Your face too long", complained the man.
"African boy", "you don't deserve to live!"
He was standing up now.
"Bang! Bang!", he shot me again. Air pistol.
The train began to stop. Deptford Bridge Station. The man began to leave the train. As he left, he continued to abuse and call me names. I never said a word to him. Kept my face blank. The rest of the passengers still showed no interest in this one-man demo.
The man got off the train, looked through the window at me, and drew his air pistol for the finisher.
"Bang! Bang! Bang!", he went.
The train moved on. Phew! That was close.
I struggled to comprehend the intensity of this man's emotion. I wondered what could've been the outcome of this encounter if the man had got a real gun in his bag. I was so sure he could've used it. Or tried to. He was almost foaming at the mouth as he cursed and abused me.
I began to reflect. Some of what the man had said to me went beyond drunkeness. His monologue had betrayed some deep seated ill-feeling against me, and my kind. To be confronted with this scenario less than two weeks after the terror bombs of the London transport system left me aghast. Apparently al-Qaeda isn't the only threat one has to contend with in this society.
Why is the world so full of hate? What makes people think they are the ones who deserve to live while others deserve to die, and at their hands? Do humans really enjoy killing one another? Why? So many questions, so few answers.
But I'll ride the DLR again. Scum and all.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
London Terror: The other side
One week after the London terror bombings, I was watching the news of the solidarity rally by Londoners at Trafalgar Square on TV when this text message arrived from Agari Mojo:
Do we run true to type, or do we? The humour in the message wasn't lost on me.
But, seriously, if this many Nigerians were caught up in this tragedy it does reveal something quite ominous. It would suggest that the population of Nigerians who have fled the tyranny at home to settle here and try to make a living, is indeed great. They face a new threat now.
Globalization. No, this has nothing to do with the challenges of international trade or economic neo-colonisation by super-multinational outfits. I am talking about the shifting battlegrounds of mass murder.
These Nigerians had felt safe here. They had fled the suffocating economic environment back home to come here. They had fled police brutality and state sponsored assasinations. They had fled ethnic violence and religious bigotry. They ran away from hunger and disease; only to end up victims of international terror.
What has happened to our world? Not that it has ever known peace. But must we allow things to continue this way? What is wrong with tackling the causes of terrorism instead of its consequences?
Since they announced some financial compensation 4 d bomb victims Naija names on d list has increased. Na wa o!
Do we run true to type, or do we? The humour in the message wasn't lost on me.
But, seriously, if this many Nigerians were caught up in this tragedy it does reveal something quite ominous. It would suggest that the population of Nigerians who have fled the tyranny at home to settle here and try to make a living, is indeed great. They face a new threat now.
Globalization. No, this has nothing to do with the challenges of international trade or economic neo-colonisation by super-multinational outfits. I am talking about the shifting battlegrounds of mass murder.
These Nigerians had felt safe here. They had fled the suffocating economic environment back home to come here. They had fled police brutality and state sponsored assasinations. They had fled ethnic violence and religious bigotry. They ran away from hunger and disease; only to end up victims of international terror.
What has happened to our world? Not that it has ever known peace. But must we allow things to continue this way? What is wrong with tackling the causes of terrorism instead of its consequences?
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Guest Author: Chinweizu on Negrophobia
Black Renaissance Tracts: No.l
Copyright © 1994 by Chinweizu
A Sundoor Publication, P. 0. Box 988, Festac Town, Lagos, Nigeria
_____________________________________
On Negrophobia: Psychoneurotic obstacles to Black autonomy
(or Why I just love Michael Jackson)
by
Chinweizu
Negrophobia, the fear and dislike of blacks, is a great disease. It has killed more blacks in the last five hundred years than all other diseases combined: more than malaria, more than epidemics and plagues of all sorts, In the coming years, it could kill far more than AIDS. It is a psychological disease, a disease of the mind, which harvests dead black bodies every day.
The blacks who died through slavery were killed by negrophobia. The blacks who died all over the globe from white colonial aggression were killed by negrophobia. The blacks who died in our liberation struggles —Bookman, Toussaint and Dessalines with all their soldiers in Haiti; the Mau Mau warriors in Kenya; the liberation fighters in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Sudan and elsewhere — were all killed by negrophobia.
The blacks dying from the structures and policies of neocolonialism are dying from negrophobia. The blacks killed by AIDS, a disease manufactured by whites in the biological warfare labs of the USA and deliberately introduced into central Africa and Haiti to kill off blacks, are dying of negrophobia.
Ah, Negrophobia, I didn't know that hate could kill so many!
Negrophobia is a psychoneurosis, a mental disorder. So too is blancophilia, its twin. If someone hates everything black, including the black butterfly, including the most fertile black soil, isn't he mentally disturbed? If someone loves everything white, including white trash, including white arsenic, isn't he mentally disturbed? Negrophobia and blancophilia form a syndrome, a characteristic set of psychoneurotic passions that occur together.
The negrophobia syndrome is characterised by melanotropism. a magnetic movement away from or toward different intensities of melanin, the skin pigment. Blancophilia induces a reflex movement toward things white, even toward white ugliness. The stimulus object is white skin, any skin that is low in melanin.
Negrophobia, for its part, induces a reflex movement away from things black, even from black beauty. The stimulus object is black skin, any skin blessed with melanin in high dosage.
Negrophobia and blancophilia are, of course, conditioned responses to white power and black powerlessness. In a sad case of stimulus substitution, the responses to superior power have become transferred to white skin, and those to powerlessness have become transferred to black skin. The negrophobia syndrome is a chronic disease with the white race, a disease born of pride of power. It is a disease with which they have infected the whole world, including the black race, giving rise to negro negrophobia, the disease of black self-hate.
Negro negrophobia is a most absurd disease. Can you imagine some black running to escape his blackness? To escape from himself? His obsession with fleeing from himself proves he is unfit to live. His running to embrace his white enemy proves he is a suicide. The entire affair shows he is mad. Some call it alienation, a mental disorder. Yet some black sirens now sing in praise of alienation, beckoning all blacks to acquire the disease.
What are the symptoms of negro negrophobia? Negro negrophobia makes black women bleach, till some proudly sport yellow monkey faces and ebony-black thighs. (or ‘Fanta Orange face and Coca-cola legs’ as some call it). It makes black parents prefer their lighter skinned children to the darker skinned. It makes blacks who marry white or mulatto think they are marrying up and improving the race. It makes a pitch-black Sudanese proclaim himself Arab, on account of just one white Arab ancestor ten generations back; it makes him count as nothing, indeed as a blemish, all his 1023 black ancestors in that generation, and all the millions before and since.
Negro negrophobia makes African-Americans, and now black South Africans too, believe that integrating white neigbourhoods is social advancement. It makes blacks desperate to integrate white schools, white churches, white communities, white ideologies, white movements and white organizations. Some would even gladly die to integrate the Ku Klux Klan.
Negro Negrophobia makes blacks defer to whites. It makes bright black boys, the thinkers of the race, obey the IMF, the World Bank, GATT and the UN, even when they know that the orders from such outfits are aimed to destroy their own people. It makes black intellectuals swallow and spout any silly idea, provided it is put forth by some guru of the white world, like Marx, like Jesus, like Mohammed.
Negro negrophobia makes blacks accept leaders of thought and of action that are chosen for them by whites. It makes blacks revere any third class mind, any tinpot potentate, that whites annoint to confuse and mislead them. But for negro negrophobia, we would automatically reject any leader chosen for us by our historic enemies. But for negro negrophobia, we would thoroughly suspect the loyalty to the black race of any black Rhodes Scholar, of any black Nobel lureate, of any black Faisal laureate, of any black Lenin laureate, of any black knight or peer of England, of any black elect of the French Academy. He would have to work extra hard to convince us that he is not an agent sent to help hasten our ruin.
Believing the blancophile dogma that white is right, that white is quick-witted, that white is beauty and virtue and salvation; believing the negrophobe dogma that black is wrong, that black is dumb, that black is ugliness and sin and damnation, the negrophobic black does not feel comfortable in a blacks-only group. Blacks-only associations give him claustrophobia; he must throw open the doors to let in some white skin to boss or spy on him; only then can he relax; only then can he feel that all is well with his world. Negro negrophobia is, thus, a disease which drives blacks to crave racial integration and to espouse continentalist Pan-Africanism.
In multi-racial societies, it drives the black elites to flee to white suburbs. In the name of racial equality, they decapitate their own black communities, rob the ghetto of black leadership, and abandon it to confusion and predatory gangs, In the name of black freedom they flee from the black world. Similarly, in international relations, pulled by the call of the white, blacks are eager to join a British Commonwealth. They are desperate to join a French Community. They sell their sanity to join a Russian Collective. And an Arab empire? They disown their black inheritance to get into its latrine! They will pay any price, suffer any humiliation, to join any club formed by whites. But a black community, or commonwealth, or league? They will not only not join, they will oppose its being formed at all! The idea of blacks getting together, all by themselves, disorganizes their being. In their blancophilia they are self-made orphans desperately seeking white foster homes. For all their outcry on behalf of the black community, all they want is to disappear into the whiteness of the white world, whether Arab or European. They want to disappear by any means possible or available — physically, mentally, emotionally.
In such ways, negro negrophobia has affected Pan-Africanism, affected Negritude, affected even the great leaders of these Black Redemption Movements. Senghor's Francophilia weakened his Negritude; made him ecstatic to join the "Universal Civilization" by becoming an elect of the French Academy.
Nkrumah's Arabophilia subverted the Garveyism of his Black Star symbol; it truncated his Pan-Negro Pan-Africanism into a continentalist Pan-Africanism which would exclude Garvey from membership of its organizations, and which distorted Pan-Africanism into an Arab and Black African tango.
With Du Bois, when the racial integrationism of his NAACP triumphed, it wrecked the black community in the USA; it bore the bitter fruit of black ghettos whose absentee black leaders squat in white suburbia, squawking as hostages to white power.
Cheikh Anta Diop's Marxism, with its dedication to the primacy of multi-racial class solidarity, made him most unenthusiastic about a sub-Sahara Federation of Black Africa. He would accept it only as a very last resort, only if the Arab invader-settlers doggedly excluded themselves.
Mandela's liberalism, with its dedication to the primacy of multi-racialism, is allset to subvert the cardinal goal of returning to the black aborigines of South Africa all the land stolen from them by the white invader-settlers.
Senghor, Nkrumah, Du Bois, Cheikh Anta Diop and Mandela are proof that not even the best among us are immune from the negrophobia syndrome. Of the great black redeemers of the 20th century, only Garvey escaped the syndrome, principally because he was unequivocal and uncompromising on black solidarity. Significantly, he did not call his movement Pan-Africanism, with all the equivocation on race that is harboured by that term; he called it the United Negro Improvement Association, a name which unequivocally implies a redemption movement of blacks, by blacks, for blacks.
To call yourself a leader of blacks, one leading them to liberation from the white world, and yet run off to integrate white suburbia— isn't that absurd? It can only mean that your Black Consciousness is shallow, or even opportunistic; that hiding under your black mask is a blancophile heart. To call yourself a leader of blacks, one leading them out of the prison cell of white power, and yet insist on bringing whites into every organization for blacks — isn't that folly of the first order? Those blacks who espouse continentalist Pan-Africanism, are they not like those Trojans who carried the Greek wooden horse into their own citadel, and hastened their people's destruction?
If you are such a black leader or intellectual, take a look at Michael Jackson and see the incarnation of your spirit, see your mind made flesh. Michael Jackson has most publicly done what black negrophobiacs secretly dream of doing: act out George Schuyler's great satire Black No More! Michael Jackson is the supreme, public example of negro negrophobia, which is why he is such a valuable negative example, which is why I just love Michael Jackson. Every racially integrating black, every continentalist Pan-Africanist black, is Michael Jackson minus opportunity. They are the social and political counterparts of Wacko Jacko, as the white press dubbed him. The only difference is that he has carried his negro negrophobia to its logical, physical conclusion — turn himself into a fake white man! Because the others cannot afford the cash or courage for the skin and bone surgery, they settle for the next best thing: they disappear into white communities, or integrate into white ideologies and white movements. Presumably, from seeing so many white faces around them at all times, they will lose sight of the fact that they themselves are black.
After being created and entrenched by five centuries of white power, Negro negrophobia has, alas, become a character neurosis. From one generation to another, black parents pass on to their children the neurotic character structures which foster negrophobic attitudes and behaviour. The global mechanisms of white power (religion, media, school, advertising, propaganda) then reinforce the neurosis.
Blacks, alas, cannot take control of the Black World until they are cured of this neurotic syndrome. Until they get rid of this neurotic plague, any white boy or girl or child can seize control of their affairs by flashing a bit of white skin. Proof? All you need do is introduce a white face among negrophobic blacks and they become disorganised, they become disoriented. Just put one ugly blondie among them, and their eyes will stray and their minds will wander from the doughnut before them and focus on the white hole. Some will be obsessed with desire for whitey; some will be obsessed with hate for whitey; either way, they lose touch with basic reality and ignore what they must do to keep control of their lives, their situation, their environment. And at that point, any white waif can take them over.
What then is the cure? That is for our medical and social scientists to investigate. But from the sidelines, let me observe that it may require psychotherapy, both individual and group therapy. It may require cultural therapy, with basic retraining to break the habits of the negrophobic syndrome and inculcate non-negrophobic habits of thought and valuation. It would be the job of homes, schools, media, and social organisations to bring up new generations untainted with Negrophobia and blancophilia. It may require, above all, environmental therapy of a political sort, through the emergence of at least one powerful black nation that would destroy the five-century -old correlation of white skin with power and black skin with powerlessness. That is probably the strategic cure for the syndrome.
My guess is that until the power therapy for this power neurosis is accomplished, all other therapies would be only partially effective. Whatever the case, until the race cures itself of negrophobia, it has no future. Which is why getting rid of Negro negrophobia is perhaps the cardinal task of internal reparation.
Black Renaissance Tracts: No.l
-------------------------------
Please feel free to comment on and fwd this information to any Pan-African persons, or to publish and reproduce to the Pan-African community, provided you credit the author, do not alter descriptive terms, change any words or otherwise mutilate the piece without written agreement.
If posted at a website, please email a copy of the web page to sundoor777@hyperia.com
For print media use, please obtain prior written permission, and then send two (2) copies of the publication wherein used, to Chinweizu, P. O. Box 988, Festac Town, Lagos, Nigeria.
For further information please contact Chinweizu
All rights reserved.
© Chinweizu 2005
Copyright © 1994 by Chinweizu
A Sundoor Publication, P. 0. Box 988, Festac Town, Lagos, Nigeria
_____________________________________
On Negrophobia: Psychoneurotic obstacles to Black autonomy
(or Why I just love Michael Jackson)
by
Chinweizu
Negrophobia, the fear and dislike of blacks, is a great disease. It has killed more blacks in the last five hundred years than all other diseases combined: more than malaria, more than epidemics and plagues of all sorts, In the coming years, it could kill far more than AIDS. It is a psychological disease, a disease of the mind, which harvests dead black bodies every day.
The blacks who died through slavery were killed by negrophobia. The blacks who died all over the globe from white colonial aggression were killed by negrophobia. The blacks who died in our liberation struggles —Bookman, Toussaint and Dessalines with all their soldiers in Haiti; the Mau Mau warriors in Kenya; the liberation fighters in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Sudan and elsewhere — were all killed by negrophobia.
The blacks dying from the structures and policies of neocolonialism are dying from negrophobia. The blacks killed by AIDS, a disease manufactured by whites in the biological warfare labs of the USA and deliberately introduced into central Africa and Haiti to kill off blacks, are dying of negrophobia.
Ah, Negrophobia, I didn't know that hate could kill so many!
Negrophobia is a psychoneurosis, a mental disorder. So too is blancophilia, its twin. If someone hates everything black, including the black butterfly, including the most fertile black soil, isn't he mentally disturbed? If someone loves everything white, including white trash, including white arsenic, isn't he mentally disturbed? Negrophobia and blancophilia form a syndrome, a characteristic set of psychoneurotic passions that occur together.
The negrophobia syndrome is characterised by melanotropism. a magnetic movement away from or toward different intensities of melanin, the skin pigment. Blancophilia induces a reflex movement toward things white, even toward white ugliness. The stimulus object is white skin, any skin that is low in melanin.
Negrophobia, for its part, induces a reflex movement away from things black, even from black beauty. The stimulus object is black skin, any skin blessed with melanin in high dosage.
Negrophobia and blancophilia are, of course, conditioned responses to white power and black powerlessness. In a sad case of stimulus substitution, the responses to superior power have become transferred to white skin, and those to powerlessness have become transferred to black skin. The negrophobia syndrome is a chronic disease with the white race, a disease born of pride of power. It is a disease with which they have infected the whole world, including the black race, giving rise to negro negrophobia, the disease of black self-hate.
Negro negrophobia is a most absurd disease. Can you imagine some black running to escape his blackness? To escape from himself? His obsession with fleeing from himself proves he is unfit to live. His running to embrace his white enemy proves he is a suicide. The entire affair shows he is mad. Some call it alienation, a mental disorder. Yet some black sirens now sing in praise of alienation, beckoning all blacks to acquire the disease.
What are the symptoms of negro negrophobia? Negro negrophobia makes black women bleach, till some proudly sport yellow monkey faces and ebony-black thighs. (or ‘Fanta Orange face and Coca-cola legs’ as some call it). It makes black parents prefer their lighter skinned children to the darker skinned. It makes blacks who marry white or mulatto think they are marrying up and improving the race. It makes a pitch-black Sudanese proclaim himself Arab, on account of just one white Arab ancestor ten generations back; it makes him count as nothing, indeed as a blemish, all his 1023 black ancestors in that generation, and all the millions before and since.
Negro negrophobia makes African-Americans, and now black South Africans too, believe that integrating white neigbourhoods is social advancement. It makes blacks desperate to integrate white schools, white churches, white communities, white ideologies, white movements and white organizations. Some would even gladly die to integrate the Ku Klux Klan.
Negro Negrophobia makes blacks defer to whites. It makes bright black boys, the thinkers of the race, obey the IMF, the World Bank, GATT and the UN, even when they know that the orders from such outfits are aimed to destroy their own people. It makes black intellectuals swallow and spout any silly idea, provided it is put forth by some guru of the white world, like Marx, like Jesus, like Mohammed.
Negro negrophobia makes blacks accept leaders of thought and of action that are chosen for them by whites. It makes blacks revere any third class mind, any tinpot potentate, that whites annoint to confuse and mislead them. But for negro negrophobia, we would automatically reject any leader chosen for us by our historic enemies. But for negro negrophobia, we would thoroughly suspect the loyalty to the black race of any black Rhodes Scholar, of any black Nobel lureate, of any black Faisal laureate, of any black Lenin laureate, of any black knight or peer of England, of any black elect of the French Academy. He would have to work extra hard to convince us that he is not an agent sent to help hasten our ruin.
Believing the blancophile dogma that white is right, that white is quick-witted, that white is beauty and virtue and salvation; believing the negrophobe dogma that black is wrong, that black is dumb, that black is ugliness and sin and damnation, the negrophobic black does not feel comfortable in a blacks-only group. Blacks-only associations give him claustrophobia; he must throw open the doors to let in some white skin to boss or spy on him; only then can he relax; only then can he feel that all is well with his world. Negro negrophobia is, thus, a disease which drives blacks to crave racial integration and to espouse continentalist Pan-Africanism.
In multi-racial societies, it drives the black elites to flee to white suburbs. In the name of racial equality, they decapitate their own black communities, rob the ghetto of black leadership, and abandon it to confusion and predatory gangs, In the name of black freedom they flee from the black world. Similarly, in international relations, pulled by the call of the white, blacks are eager to join a British Commonwealth. They are desperate to join a French Community. They sell their sanity to join a Russian Collective. And an Arab empire? They disown their black inheritance to get into its latrine! They will pay any price, suffer any humiliation, to join any club formed by whites. But a black community, or commonwealth, or league? They will not only not join, they will oppose its being formed at all! The idea of blacks getting together, all by themselves, disorganizes their being. In their blancophilia they are self-made orphans desperately seeking white foster homes. For all their outcry on behalf of the black community, all they want is to disappear into the whiteness of the white world, whether Arab or European. They want to disappear by any means possible or available — physically, mentally, emotionally.
In such ways, negro negrophobia has affected Pan-Africanism, affected Negritude, affected even the great leaders of these Black Redemption Movements. Senghor's Francophilia weakened his Negritude; made him ecstatic to join the "Universal Civilization" by becoming an elect of the French Academy.
Nkrumah's Arabophilia subverted the Garveyism of his Black Star symbol; it truncated his Pan-Negro Pan-Africanism into a continentalist Pan-Africanism which would exclude Garvey from membership of its organizations, and which distorted Pan-Africanism into an Arab and Black African tango.
With Du Bois, when the racial integrationism of his NAACP triumphed, it wrecked the black community in the USA; it bore the bitter fruit of black ghettos whose absentee black leaders squat in white suburbia, squawking as hostages to white power.
Cheikh Anta Diop's Marxism, with its dedication to the primacy of multi-racial class solidarity, made him most unenthusiastic about a sub-Sahara Federation of Black Africa. He would accept it only as a very last resort, only if the Arab invader-settlers doggedly excluded themselves.
Mandela's liberalism, with its dedication to the primacy of multi-racialism, is allset to subvert the cardinal goal of returning to the black aborigines of South Africa all the land stolen from them by the white invader-settlers.
Senghor, Nkrumah, Du Bois, Cheikh Anta Diop and Mandela are proof that not even the best among us are immune from the negrophobia syndrome. Of the great black redeemers of the 20th century, only Garvey escaped the syndrome, principally because he was unequivocal and uncompromising on black solidarity. Significantly, he did not call his movement Pan-Africanism, with all the equivocation on race that is harboured by that term; he called it the United Negro Improvement Association, a name which unequivocally implies a redemption movement of blacks, by blacks, for blacks.
To call yourself a leader of blacks, one leading them to liberation from the white world, and yet run off to integrate white suburbia— isn't that absurd? It can only mean that your Black Consciousness is shallow, or even opportunistic; that hiding under your black mask is a blancophile heart. To call yourself a leader of blacks, one leading them out of the prison cell of white power, and yet insist on bringing whites into every organization for blacks — isn't that folly of the first order? Those blacks who espouse continentalist Pan-Africanism, are they not like those Trojans who carried the Greek wooden horse into their own citadel, and hastened their people's destruction?
If you are such a black leader or intellectual, take a look at Michael Jackson and see the incarnation of your spirit, see your mind made flesh. Michael Jackson has most publicly done what black negrophobiacs secretly dream of doing: act out George Schuyler's great satire Black No More! Michael Jackson is the supreme, public example of negro negrophobia, which is why he is such a valuable negative example, which is why I just love Michael Jackson. Every racially integrating black, every continentalist Pan-Africanist black, is Michael Jackson minus opportunity. They are the social and political counterparts of Wacko Jacko, as the white press dubbed him. The only difference is that he has carried his negro negrophobia to its logical, physical conclusion — turn himself into a fake white man! Because the others cannot afford the cash or courage for the skin and bone surgery, they settle for the next best thing: they disappear into white communities, or integrate into white ideologies and white movements. Presumably, from seeing so many white faces around them at all times, they will lose sight of the fact that they themselves are black.
After being created and entrenched by five centuries of white power, Negro negrophobia has, alas, become a character neurosis. From one generation to another, black parents pass on to their children the neurotic character structures which foster negrophobic attitudes and behaviour. The global mechanisms of white power (religion, media, school, advertising, propaganda) then reinforce the neurosis.
Blacks, alas, cannot take control of the Black World until they are cured of this neurotic syndrome. Until they get rid of this neurotic plague, any white boy or girl or child can seize control of their affairs by flashing a bit of white skin. Proof? All you need do is introduce a white face among negrophobic blacks and they become disorganised, they become disoriented. Just put one ugly blondie among them, and their eyes will stray and their minds will wander from the doughnut before them and focus on the white hole. Some will be obsessed with desire for whitey; some will be obsessed with hate for whitey; either way, they lose touch with basic reality and ignore what they must do to keep control of their lives, their situation, their environment. And at that point, any white waif can take them over.
What then is the cure? That is for our medical and social scientists to investigate. But from the sidelines, let me observe that it may require psychotherapy, both individual and group therapy. It may require cultural therapy, with basic retraining to break the habits of the negrophobic syndrome and inculcate non-negrophobic habits of thought and valuation. It would be the job of homes, schools, media, and social organisations to bring up new generations untainted with Negrophobia and blancophilia. It may require, above all, environmental therapy of a political sort, through the emergence of at least one powerful black nation that would destroy the five-century -old correlation of white skin with power and black skin with powerlessness. That is probably the strategic cure for the syndrome.
My guess is that until the power therapy for this power neurosis is accomplished, all other therapies would be only partially effective. Whatever the case, until the race cures itself of negrophobia, it has no future. Which is why getting rid of Negro negrophobia is perhaps the cardinal task of internal reparation.
Black Renaissance Tracts: No.l
-------------------------------
Please feel free to comment on and fwd this information to any Pan-African persons, or to publish and reproduce to the Pan-African community, provided you credit the author, do not alter descriptive terms, change any words or otherwise mutilate the piece without written agreement.
If posted at a website, please email a copy of the web page to sundoor777@hyperia.com
For print media use, please obtain prior written permission, and then send two (2) copies of the publication wherein used, to Chinweizu, P. O. Box 988, Festac Town, Lagos, Nigeria.
For further information please contact Chinweizu
All rights reserved.
© Chinweizu 2005
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Guest Author: Chinweizu - Nija Titanic
A super-sized slave ship called Nija Titanic, built by Goldie & Lugard Shipyard, was packed full of chained Niggers who had been captured for enslavement on the IMF plantations across the ocean. Admiral Al Capone, alias Tatt [Traitor-at-the-Top] and his crew of Ali-Baba gangsters had a secret deal with the ship owners that the Nija Titanic was, under no circumstances, to offload its cargo of captives or cast overboard the fabulous treasures in its bottom holds. Though hailed as "unsinkable", the Nija Titanic, while in mid-ocean, hit an iceberg and began taking in water through gaping holes below its waterline. But amazingly, for several days nobody on board noticed a thing. The Admiral and his crew were too busy playing kalo-kalo in the casino hall, collecting billion dollar chips to be cashed when they stepped ashore. There was no pilot on board. No lookouts had been posted, the ship’s radar was unmanned, contact with weather stations and position finders had been lost when the ship’s radio communication system fell into disrepair. All the money-addicted crew had been too obsessed with their casino game to do their appointed jobs. So the crew had no way of knowing the doomed condition the ship was in.
When, at last, someone noticed that the ship had stopped moving, the Admiral denied that anything was wrong with the ship, and called a staff meeting of 400 of his most trusted henchmen to discuss, not how to evacuate the stricken ship [it carried no lifeboats] and save the people on board, but how to rearrange the seats in the casino hall, the seats in the banquet hall and the chairs on the deck. When someone was foolish enough to raise the issue of evacuation, the Admiral angrily declared that evacuation was out of the question. The Nija Titanic was unsinkable and all must remain on board; and anyone who raised the issue again would be tried and shot for alarmism and mutiny. And all his crew, amazingly, complied. Meanwhile the stricken ship continued to take in water. And sharks and all manner of sea monsters began to gather and circle the doomed ship, waiting for a lavish feast on the soon-to-be-drowned multitude.
After their staff confab, Admiral Al Capone and his 400 henchmen retired to their fabulous suites, dreaming of the life of abundance they would enjoy for ever after. But suddenly, there was a mighty shaking as an explosion in the fuel tanks rocked the ship, the lowest levels of the ship flooded furiously and the ship began to keel over. Before long the stricken ship upended, and everything that was unbolted to floor or wall came tumbling down. Panic everywhere as the ship broke into several pieces which began to sink to the depths of the ocean. Admiral Al Capone could not believe what was happening, he tried to make frantic phone calls to shore for a helicopter to come and whisk him to safety, but when none came (the long unserviced phone system was dead, and his desperate calls went nowhere) he fell on his knees and bawled out a teraful prayer. But his god was too busy elsewhere to listen or come rescue him. And he and all his comprador crew, and all the hapless captives on board went down with the "usinkable" Nija Titanic.
Chinweizu
Lagos,
March 1, 2005
===================================
Some Questions for Young Nigerians to ponder
Do the passengers on the Nija Titanic wish to go down with the ship, down to the bottom of the sea? Or to the IMF plantation to be enslaved for ever, without possibility of release?
What is the destination preferred by the captives on the doomed ship of the Nigerian State?
When, and in what condition do they want to arrive at their preferred destination?
What predictable dangers await them in the 21st century?
Is the Nigerian state equipped to evade or defeat these dangers?
What is a state? – Is Nigeria not a failed state, waiting to implode?
What should the Nigerian state do or not do to/for its citizens?
What are the key features of the global environment in which the Nigerian state will operate in the 21st century and beyond?
What are the vital interests of the Nigerian population?
What are the global strategic conditions for defending and advancing those interests?
What is national security, as distinct from state security or the security of the state apparatus and its officials?
What is democracy? And how can it be institutionally entrenched?
What kind of democracy, if any, will help the Nigerian population to control the Nigerian state, to survive and permanently end their enslavement, impoverishment and humiliation by others?
What use to the people is a state or a democracy if its character is to disorganize, and destroy society?
What are the challenges of the 21st century and beyond?
What kind of state or political system is most likely to help the Nigerian population to survive the dangers and challenges of their near future?
What are the nature, causes and remedies for the anarchy in Nigeria?
Can the Lugardian state, which was constructed, from the very start, as an armed bureau of internal plunder and repression and to programmed to enslave and exploit the Nigerian population for the benefit of foreign interests; can it be trusted to change its own character out of sheer goodwill? [bearing in mind Frederik Douglas’ statement that “power concedes nothing without a demand”]
Can the Lugardian state apparatus, no matter how reconfigured, solve the problems that need to be solved for the Nigerian population to survive the 21st century? Can a whale ever swim the desert? Or a camel walk the ocean? Or an elephant fly?
If this Lugardian contraption that is programmed to suppress, exploit, massacre and terrorize the Nigerian population [Aba women1929; Enugu coal miners 1949; Lagos, Kalakuta 1977 & 1978; Talata-Mafara farmers (a.k.a Bakalori) 1980; Odi villagers 1999, Zaki-Biam villagers 2001; etc]—if this Lugardian contraption is not dismantled and dumped on Lugard’s grave, can the Nigerian population invent and institute a state that will serve, defend and advance their own interests?
Will rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic prevent it from sinking?
What went wrong with Nigerian Independence, starting from 1945 or even earlier?
By what measures can office holders in Nigeria be obliged to abide by their oaths of office? Here is a Persian example from the 6th century BC:
Otanes' chair
Otanes' father Sisamnes had been put to death by Cambyses [King of Persia]: he was one of the royal judges, and as a punishment for taking a bribe and perverting justice Cambyses had him flayed; all his skin was torn off and cut into strips, and the strips stretched across the seat of the chair which he used to sit on in Court. Cambyses then appointed his son to be judge in his place, and told him not to forget what his chair was made of, when he gave his judgements.”
--Herodotus, The Histories,Bk 5; ch 25
Major massacres of Nigerians
by the army and police of the Nigerian Lugardian State, sine 1920, i.e. after the initial bloody conquest and pacification ended ca. 1918, and its rule had become instituted, assured and presumably “non-violent.”
1929: Women’s anti-tax protest (a.k.a Aba women’s riot) in the Owerri and Calabar provinces of Southern Nigeria was suppressed with 55 women killed.
1949, Nov 18: Shooting of coal miners in Iva Valley, Enugu,
1977: Soldiers burn down Fela’s Kalakuta following his boycott of Festac 77.
1978: the military Govt of Lagos State demolish Fela’s Kalakuta, while he was away at the Berlin Jazz Festival
1980: Farmers in Talata-Mafara, Sokoto State, massacred following protests against Impresit Bakalori, an Italian Company.
1980s: Students at ABU, Zaria, and OAU, Ife killed by police
1999, Nov.: soldiers, deployed to the Niger Delta to protect the oil companies from citizens outraged by the devastation of their environment, sack Odi village, Bayelsa State, killing hundreds.
2001, Oct: Zaki-Biam, Benue State sacked by army, with more than 200 killed
Chinweizu
Lagos
May 15, 2005
-----------------------------------
2005, June 7th: Apo Village, Abuja - the slaughter continues as the Nigerian Police laid waste 5 Igbo traders plus 1 Esan girl returning from a party, and branded them armed robbers.
-----------------------------------
Please feel free to comment on and fwd this information to any Pan-African persons, or to publish and reproduce to the Pan-African community, provided you credit the author, do not alter descriptive terms, change any words or otherwise mutilate the piece without written agreement.
If posted at a website, please email a copy of the web page to sundoor777@hyperia.com
For print media use, please obtain prior written permission, and then send two (2) copies of the publication wherein used, to Chinweizu, P. O. Box 988, Festac Town, Lagos, Nigeria.
For further information please contact Chinweizu
All rights reserved.
© Chinweizu 2005
When, at last, someone noticed that the ship had stopped moving, the Admiral denied that anything was wrong with the ship, and called a staff meeting of 400 of his most trusted henchmen to discuss, not how to evacuate the stricken ship [it carried no lifeboats] and save the people on board, but how to rearrange the seats in the casino hall, the seats in the banquet hall and the chairs on the deck. When someone was foolish enough to raise the issue of evacuation, the Admiral angrily declared that evacuation was out of the question. The Nija Titanic was unsinkable and all must remain on board; and anyone who raised the issue again would be tried and shot for alarmism and mutiny. And all his crew, amazingly, complied. Meanwhile the stricken ship continued to take in water. And sharks and all manner of sea monsters began to gather and circle the doomed ship, waiting for a lavish feast on the soon-to-be-drowned multitude.
After their staff confab, Admiral Al Capone and his 400 henchmen retired to their fabulous suites, dreaming of the life of abundance they would enjoy for ever after. But suddenly, there was a mighty shaking as an explosion in the fuel tanks rocked the ship, the lowest levels of the ship flooded furiously and the ship began to keel over. Before long the stricken ship upended, and everything that was unbolted to floor or wall came tumbling down. Panic everywhere as the ship broke into several pieces which began to sink to the depths of the ocean. Admiral Al Capone could not believe what was happening, he tried to make frantic phone calls to shore for a helicopter to come and whisk him to safety, but when none came (the long unserviced phone system was dead, and his desperate calls went nowhere) he fell on his knees and bawled out a teraful prayer. But his god was too busy elsewhere to listen or come rescue him. And he and all his comprador crew, and all the hapless captives on board went down with the "usinkable" Nija Titanic.
Chinweizu
Lagos,
March 1, 2005
===================================
Some Questions for Young Nigerians to ponder
Do the passengers on the Nija Titanic wish to go down with the ship, down to the bottom of the sea? Or to the IMF plantation to be enslaved for ever, without possibility of release?
What is the destination preferred by the captives on the doomed ship of the Nigerian State?
When, and in what condition do they want to arrive at their preferred destination?
What predictable dangers await them in the 21st century?
Is the Nigerian state equipped to evade or defeat these dangers?
What is a state? – Is Nigeria not a failed state, waiting to implode?
What should the Nigerian state do or not do to/for its citizens?
What are the key features of the global environment in which the Nigerian state will operate in the 21st century and beyond?
What are the vital interests of the Nigerian population?
What are the global strategic conditions for defending and advancing those interests?
What is national security, as distinct from state security or the security of the state apparatus and its officials?
What is democracy? And how can it be institutionally entrenched?
What kind of democracy, if any, will help the Nigerian population to control the Nigerian state, to survive and permanently end their enslavement, impoverishment and humiliation by others?
What use to the people is a state or a democracy if its character is to disorganize, and destroy society?
What are the challenges of the 21st century and beyond?
What kind of state or political system is most likely to help the Nigerian population to survive the dangers and challenges of their near future?
What are the nature, causes and remedies for the anarchy in Nigeria?
Can the Lugardian state, which was constructed, from the very start, as an armed bureau of internal plunder and repression and to programmed to enslave and exploit the Nigerian population for the benefit of foreign interests; can it be trusted to change its own character out of sheer goodwill? [bearing in mind Frederik Douglas’ statement that “power concedes nothing without a demand”]
Can the Lugardian state apparatus, no matter how reconfigured, solve the problems that need to be solved for the Nigerian population to survive the 21st century? Can a whale ever swim the desert? Or a camel walk the ocean? Or an elephant fly?
If this Lugardian contraption that is programmed to suppress, exploit, massacre and terrorize the Nigerian population [Aba women1929; Enugu coal miners 1949; Lagos, Kalakuta 1977 & 1978; Talata-Mafara farmers (a.k.a Bakalori) 1980; Odi villagers 1999, Zaki-Biam villagers 2001; etc]—if this Lugardian contraption is not dismantled and dumped on Lugard’s grave, can the Nigerian population invent and institute a state that will serve, defend and advance their own interests?
Will rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic prevent it from sinking?
What went wrong with Nigerian Independence, starting from 1945 or even earlier?
By what measures can office holders in Nigeria be obliged to abide by their oaths of office? Here is a Persian example from the 6th century BC:
Otanes' chair
Otanes' father Sisamnes had been put to death by Cambyses [King of Persia]: he was one of the royal judges, and as a punishment for taking a bribe and perverting justice Cambyses had him flayed; all his skin was torn off and cut into strips, and the strips stretched across the seat of the chair which he used to sit on in Court. Cambyses then appointed his son to be judge in his place, and told him not to forget what his chair was made of, when he gave his judgements.”
--Herodotus, The Histories,Bk 5; ch 25
Major massacres of Nigerians
by the army and police of the Nigerian Lugardian State, sine 1920, i.e. after the initial bloody conquest and pacification ended ca. 1918, and its rule had become instituted, assured and presumably “non-violent.”
1929: Women’s anti-tax protest (a.k.a Aba women’s riot) in the Owerri and Calabar provinces of Southern Nigeria was suppressed with 55 women killed.
1949, Nov 18: Shooting of coal miners in Iva Valley, Enugu,
1977: Soldiers burn down Fela’s Kalakuta following his boycott of Festac 77.
1978: the military Govt of Lagos State demolish Fela’s Kalakuta, while he was away at the Berlin Jazz Festival
1980: Farmers in Talata-Mafara, Sokoto State, massacred following protests against Impresit Bakalori, an Italian Company.
1980s: Students at ABU, Zaria, and OAU, Ife killed by police
1999, Nov.: soldiers, deployed to the Niger Delta to protect the oil companies from citizens outraged by the devastation of their environment, sack Odi village, Bayelsa State, killing hundreds.
2001, Oct: Zaki-Biam, Benue State sacked by army, with more than 200 killed
Chinweizu
Lagos
May 15, 2005
-----------------------------------
2005, June 7th: Apo Village, Abuja - the slaughter continues as the Nigerian Police laid waste 5 Igbo traders plus 1 Esan girl returning from a party, and branded them armed robbers.
-----------------------------------
Please feel free to comment on and fwd this information to any Pan-African persons, or to publish and reproduce to the Pan-African community, provided you credit the author, do not alter descriptive terms, change any words or otherwise mutilate the piece without written agreement.
If posted at a website, please email a copy of the web page to sundoor777@hyperia.com
For print media use, please obtain prior written permission, and then send two (2) copies of the publication wherein used, to Chinweizu, P. O. Box 988, Festac Town, Lagos, Nigeria.
For further information please contact Chinweizu
All rights reserved.
© Chinweizu 2005
Friday, July 08, 2005
London: To Those Who Mourn
In the book, The Great Reckoning: How the World Will Change in the Depression of the 1990s, James Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg captured the mood of the moment when they analysed 'violence as a catalyst and consequence of change'. They quoted Thomas Schelling in 'Arms and Influence' thus:
World opinion may yet be divided on how to settle the clashes of interest that have been the source of conflict through the ages, but of major concern to everyone should be the shifting battleground. From New York City - Bali - Nairobi - Beslan - Madrid - Istanbul - Baghdad, rules no longer exist to this conflict. The enemy is faceless. The weapon is everything. The target is everyone. The battle field is everywhere.
And so, on Thursday 7 July 2005, Terror came to London! An unsuspecting city had seemingly dropped her guards, and the sprawling transport system was hit by terror bombs. Caught up in the carnage were innocent Londoners going about their normal routines.
The same people who, only the day before, had fought hard and succeeded in a bid to create a better World through the Olympics in the years to come.
The same people who, only a few days before, had come out in droves to support the efforts of the Live 8 to force the hands of the G8 into making the world a better place for everybody, by making poverty history.
The same people who have time and again marched, and marched, through their streets, to tell their leaders that there are other ways to handle issues like Iraq. These same people are slaughtered in the shifting battleground, in a conflict that hath no rules of engagement.
What has happened to our World? WWIII, is this the nature? How did we come to this? Whatever it is going on, the world as we know it, has certainly come to an end.
Not in my Name.
One of the lamentable principles of human productivity is that it is easier to destroy than to create. A house that takes several man-years to build can be destroyed in an hour by any young delinquent who has the price of a box of matches....
The power to hurt - to destroy things that somebody treasures, to inflict pain and grief - is a kind of bargaining power, not easy to use but used often. In the underworld it is the basis for blackmail, extortion, and kidnapping, in the commercial world, for boycotts, strikes, and lockouts ... it underlies the humane as well as the corporal punishments that society uses to deter crime and delinquency ... It is often the basis for discipline, civilian and military: and gods use it to exact obedience.
World opinion may yet be divided on how to settle the clashes of interest that have been the source of conflict through the ages, but of major concern to everyone should be the shifting battleground. From New York City - Bali - Nairobi - Beslan - Madrid - Istanbul - Baghdad, rules no longer exist to this conflict. The enemy is faceless. The weapon is everything. The target is everyone. The battle field is everywhere.
And so, on Thursday 7 July 2005, Terror came to London! An unsuspecting city had seemingly dropped her guards, and the sprawling transport system was hit by terror bombs. Caught up in the carnage were innocent Londoners going about their normal routines.
The same people who, only the day before, had fought hard and succeeded in a bid to create a better World through the Olympics in the years to come.
The same people who, only a few days before, had come out in droves to support the efforts of the Live 8 to force the hands of the G8 into making the world a better place for everybody, by making poverty history.
The same people who have time and again marched, and marched, through their streets, to tell their leaders that there are other ways to handle issues like Iraq. These same people are slaughtered in the shifting battleground, in a conflict that hath no rules of engagement.
What has happened to our World? WWIII, is this the nature? How did we come to this? Whatever it is going on, the world as we know it, has certainly come to an end.
Not in my Name.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
Guest Author: Chinweizu on Ancestral Culture
Ancestral Culture and modern survival: The example of Meiji Japan
by Chinweizu
Culture as society’s immune system
The primary function of the body’s immune system is to identify and protect what is self and destroy what is not-self. What the immune system learned while the foetus was still in the womb was that anything it came into contact with during that time must be regarded as self. A society’s ancestral culture is the social analogue of the body’s immune system. It identifies what is socially self, i.e. whatever displays the ancestral culture, and protects it from the intrusive and alien. When it is functioning properly, the immune system will repel invaders. One of the ways in which an immune system can go wrong is to assault cells that it is supposed to protect. When a culture is functioning properly, it will react to invaders by mobilizing its society for resistance. Likewise, when a culture goes faulty, it may not only (like an AIDS-afflicted immune system) fail to protect against the alien invasion; it can even (as in auto-immune disease) attack its own society.
The notion that culture is the ultimate backbone of a people, the immune system of a society, is alien to the niggerized consciousness of the populations of PanAfrica. Many of their comprador elite now see African culture as nothing more than a source of fossilized arts and museum pieces to be sold to earn foreign exchange! Others view it as a disgraceful, primitive paganism that should be smashed and consigned to the bonfire. That is a most dangerous situation and needs to be urgently ended if the peoples of PanAfrica intend to survive. To help bring home to Africans the true nature and vital function of culture, there is probably no better example than Meiji Japan.
Meiji Japan: ancestral culture in the modernization process
How and why did Japan survive the Pan European attempt to colonize and destroy it and, within 50 years, 1868-1904, convert itself into a world power? How and why did a Japan that was overawed by Commodore Perry and his few gunboats in 1853 turn itself into a power that defeated Imperial Russia in 1904? To see the Meiji spirit and Japanese culture in action, the book to read is Lafcadio Hearn, Writings from Japan, ed by Francis King, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984; especially the essays “The Japanese Family”, “A Conservative”, “Christian Converts” and “A Glimpse of Tendencies”. But the whole book needs to be read to get a feel for Japanese culture and how it came to the rescue of the Japanese people and saved them from the White Peril that overwhelmed the rest of the non-European world.
By way of introduction to the Meiji example, here are some excerpts from Lafcadio Hearn:
1. In many ways a human society may be compared biologically with an individual organism. Foreign elements introduced forcibly into the system of either, and impossible to assimilate, set up irritations and partial disintegration, until eliminated naturally or removed artificially. Japan is strengthening herself through elimination of disturbing elements; and this natural process is symbolized in the resolve to . . . leave nothing under foreign control within the empire. It is also manifested in the dismissal of foreign employees, in the resistance offered by Japanese congregations to the authority of foreign missionaries, and in the resolute boycotting of foreign merchants. (p. 268)
2. On "the queer superstitions of the pre-Meiji era concerning" Occidentals
Although recognized as intelligent and formidable creatures, Occidentals were thought of as more closely allied to animals than to mankind. They had hairy bodies of queer shape; their teeth were different from those of men; their internal organs were also peculiar; and their moral ideas those of goblins. –(p. 296)
3. On Foreigners and foreign help
What is worse for the alien than miscomprehension is the simple fact that he is in the position of an invader. (p. 263)
There is also the definite conviction that foreign help is proof of national feebleness (p. 268)
4. On the family as social unit
Though the individual is now registered, and made directly accountable to the law, while the household has been relieved from its ancient responsibility for the acts of its members, still the family practically remains the social unit, retaining its patriarchal organization and its particular cult. (p. 221)
4. The law of duty
From servant to master – up through all degrees of the household hierarchy – the law of duty was the same: obedience absolute to custom and tradition. The ancestral cult permitted no individual freedom: nobody could live according to his or her pleasure; everyone had to live according to rule. The individual did not even have a legal existence; the family was the unit of society. Even its patriarch existed in law as representative only, responsible both to the living and the dead. (p. 287)
5. Ancestor Worship
A samurai boy . . . was educated to revere the ancient gods and the spirits of his ancestors; he was well schooled in the Chinese ethics; and he was taught something of Buddhist philosophy and faith. But he was likewise taught that hope of heaven and fear of hell were for the ignorant only; and the superior man should be influenced in his conduct by nothing more selfish than love of right for its own sake, and the recognition of duty as a universal law. . . . [Accordingly] the young samurai [grew up] fearless, courteous, self-denying, despising pleasure, and ready at an instant’s notice to give his life for love, loyalty, or honor. (p. 293)
6. National motivation and solidarity
[To] a people of forty millions, uniting all their energies to achieve absolute national independence, . . . the existence of foreign settlements in Japan, under consular jurisdiction, was in itself a constant exasperation to national pride, an indication of national weakness. (p.265)
The average Japanese would prefer to work fifteen hours a day for one of his own countrymen than eight hours a day for a foreigner paying higher wages. (p. 265)
7. The Japanese soul and the English language
. . . the idea of making English the language, or at least one of the languages of the country, and the idea of changing ancestral modes of feeling and thinking . . were wild extravagances. Japan must develop her own soul: she cannot borrow another. A dear friend whose life has been devoted to philology once said to me while commenting upon the deterioration of manners among the students of Japan: ‘Why, the English language itself has been a demoralizing influence!’ There was much depth in that observation. Setting the whole Japanese nation to study English (the language of a people who are being forever preached to about their ‘rights,’ and never about their ‘duties’) was almost an imprudence. The policy . . . helped to sap ethical sentiment. (pp. 271-272)
The above are from Lafcadio Hearn’s observations on the Meiji Japanese of the 1890s, in the decade when they were furiously preparing to burst forth as a world power.
The spirit of Meiji was expressed in slogans, such as: Sonno-joi (Revere the Emperor! Expel the barbarians!); fukoku-kyohei (rich country, strong arms!) and fukko (Return to Antiquity). Such slogans were actually implemented. In keeping with fukko, for example, Shinto (the way of kami), the ancient indigenous religious beliefs and practices of Japan, with it multitude of kami (sacred powers: ancestor spirits and nature spirits), was strengthened and institutionalized as the state religion, State Shinto. Shinto festivals and ceremonies became integrated into the affairs of government. Shinto moral teaching was made compulsory in schools, the doctrine of the divinity of the Emperor was inculcated, and the government took up the administration of the country’s more than 100,000 shinto shrines. Everybody (whether Buddhist, Christian or Shintoist) was required, as a patriotic duty, to make obeisance at Shinto shrines. The effectiveness of this anchoring of modernization on the ancestral religion and culture was demonstrated by the fervent national spirit which enabled Japan to become a world power within 50 years. The cultural source of that effectiveness was recognized by the Americans when they attempted to smash the cultural foundations of Japanese power. In 1945, after Japan’s defeat in WWII, despite their democratic propaganda for religious freedom, the American conquerors decreed the abolition of State Shinto, forbade the government to support Shinto shrines, and suppressed the doctrine of the emperor’s divinity.
Lest we think the Japanese thereafter lost their cultural anchor, here is an observation of the Japanese in the 1990s by Graham Hancock:
For no matter how modern, rational and scientific Japan has become, it is still a land in which powerful and ineffable spiritual forces are perceived to move in secret behind all things, to pervade all things, and to underlie the very fabric of reality. . . .
-- Hancock, Graham Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age, London: Michael Joseph, 2002, pp. 567-568
In other words, despite pulling off two miracles -- industrial modernization in the 19th century, and spectacular economic recovery in the 20th century – the Japanese still remain animists!
How, you may ask, did Japan contain the 'demoralizing influence' of the English language? According to Professor Kinichiro Toba of Waseda University:
My grandfather graduated from the University of Tokyo at the beginning of the 1880s. His notebooks were full of English. My father graduated from the same university in 1920 and half of his notes were filled with English. When I graduated a generation later my notes were all in Japanese. So … it took three generations for us to consume western civilization totally via the means of our own language.
--quoted in Chinua Achebe, “What has Literature Got to do with it?” in Hopes and Impediments, London: Heinemann, 1988, p. 110
Japanese and Africans compared
Thus, throughout their Meiji industrialization project, and while preparing their post WWII re-emergence as an economic power, the Japanese took care not to repudiate their ancestor worship, their animism, their ’pagan’ Shinto religion, and the other core aspects of their ancestral culture. Not for them the foolishness of abandoning Japanese religion and language as a precondition for modernization.
In stark contrast to the Japanese, whenever African societies have been invaded by alien forces in the last millennium, their Islamized, Christianized, or Eurochauvinized members not only repudiated their ancestral culture; they also enthusiastically joined in assaulting their own culture and demonizing their own ancestors for alleged paganism, “unbelief” or primitivism. These “fifth columnists” have zealously destroyed African religions, customs and traditions instead of identifying with and protecting them. In making its members attack itself, such alien-perverted, partially disintegrated, ‘triple-heritage’ pseudo-African societies have manifested the cultural equivalents of auto-immune diseases. African Afrophobia and Negrophobia are symptoms of this class of cultural diseases.
A strengthening, not a weakening, let alone repudiation or liquidation of ancestral Japanese culture was the foundation for the modernization of Japan. Quite unlike Africans who have been brainwashed into thinking that, in order to learn to fly, they must first cut off and throw away their own feet. Of course, having thrown away their ancestral cultural feet, Africans have found it impossible to modernize. They have no feet left to stand upon and sprint for take off!
Lagos, January 2005
Please feel free to comment on and fwd this information to any Pan-African persons, or to publish and reproduce to the Pan-African community, provided you credit the author, do not alter descriptive terms, change any words or otherwise mutilate the piece without written agreement.
If posted at a website, please email a copy of the web page to sundoor777@hyperia.com
For print media use, please obtain prior written permission, and then send two (2) copies of the publication wherein used, to Chinweizu, P. O. Box 988, Festac Town, Lagos, Nigeria.
For further information please contact Chinweizu
All rights reserved.
© Chinweizu 2005
by Chinweizu
Culture as society’s immune system
The primary function of the body’s immune system is to identify and protect what is self and destroy what is not-self. What the immune system learned while the foetus was still in the womb was that anything it came into contact with during that time must be regarded as self. A society’s ancestral culture is the social analogue of the body’s immune system. It identifies what is socially self, i.e. whatever displays the ancestral culture, and protects it from the intrusive and alien. When it is functioning properly, the immune system will repel invaders. One of the ways in which an immune system can go wrong is to assault cells that it is supposed to protect. When a culture is functioning properly, it will react to invaders by mobilizing its society for resistance. Likewise, when a culture goes faulty, it may not only (like an AIDS-afflicted immune system) fail to protect against the alien invasion; it can even (as in auto-immune disease) attack its own society.
The notion that culture is the ultimate backbone of a people, the immune system of a society, is alien to the niggerized consciousness of the populations of PanAfrica. Many of their comprador elite now see African culture as nothing more than a source of fossilized arts and museum pieces to be sold to earn foreign exchange! Others view it as a disgraceful, primitive paganism that should be smashed and consigned to the bonfire. That is a most dangerous situation and needs to be urgently ended if the peoples of PanAfrica intend to survive. To help bring home to Africans the true nature and vital function of culture, there is probably no better example than Meiji Japan.
Meiji Japan: ancestral culture in the modernization process
How and why did Japan survive the Pan European attempt to colonize and destroy it and, within 50 years, 1868-1904, convert itself into a world power? How and why did a Japan that was overawed by Commodore Perry and his few gunboats in 1853 turn itself into a power that defeated Imperial Russia in 1904? To see the Meiji spirit and Japanese culture in action, the book to read is Lafcadio Hearn, Writings from Japan, ed by Francis King, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984; especially the essays “The Japanese Family”, “A Conservative”, “Christian Converts” and “A Glimpse of Tendencies”. But the whole book needs to be read to get a feel for Japanese culture and how it came to the rescue of the Japanese people and saved them from the White Peril that overwhelmed the rest of the non-European world.
By way of introduction to the Meiji example, here are some excerpts from Lafcadio Hearn:
1. In many ways a human society may be compared biologically with an individual organism. Foreign elements introduced forcibly into the system of either, and impossible to assimilate, set up irritations and partial disintegration, until eliminated naturally or removed artificially. Japan is strengthening herself through elimination of disturbing elements; and this natural process is symbolized in the resolve to . . . leave nothing under foreign control within the empire. It is also manifested in the dismissal of foreign employees, in the resistance offered by Japanese congregations to the authority of foreign missionaries, and in the resolute boycotting of foreign merchants. (p. 268)
2. On "the queer superstitions of the pre-Meiji era concerning" Occidentals
Although recognized as intelligent and formidable creatures, Occidentals were thought of as more closely allied to animals than to mankind. They had hairy bodies of queer shape; their teeth were different from those of men; their internal organs were also peculiar; and their moral ideas those of goblins. –(p. 296)
3. On Foreigners and foreign help
What is worse for the alien than miscomprehension is the simple fact that he is in the position of an invader. (p. 263)
There is also the definite conviction that foreign help is proof of national feebleness (p. 268)
4. On the family as social unit
Though the individual is now registered, and made directly accountable to the law, while the household has been relieved from its ancient responsibility for the acts of its members, still the family practically remains the social unit, retaining its patriarchal organization and its particular cult. (p. 221)
4. The law of duty
From servant to master – up through all degrees of the household hierarchy – the law of duty was the same: obedience absolute to custom and tradition. The ancestral cult permitted no individual freedom: nobody could live according to his or her pleasure; everyone had to live according to rule. The individual did not even have a legal existence; the family was the unit of society. Even its patriarch existed in law as representative only, responsible both to the living and the dead. (p. 287)
5. Ancestor Worship
A samurai boy . . . was educated to revere the ancient gods and the spirits of his ancestors; he was well schooled in the Chinese ethics; and he was taught something of Buddhist philosophy and faith. But he was likewise taught that hope of heaven and fear of hell were for the ignorant only; and the superior man should be influenced in his conduct by nothing more selfish than love of right for its own sake, and the recognition of duty as a universal law. . . . [Accordingly] the young samurai [grew up] fearless, courteous, self-denying, despising pleasure, and ready at an instant’s notice to give his life for love, loyalty, or honor. (p. 293)
6. National motivation and solidarity
[To] a people of forty millions, uniting all their energies to achieve absolute national independence, . . . the existence of foreign settlements in Japan, under consular jurisdiction, was in itself a constant exasperation to national pride, an indication of national weakness. (p.265)
The average Japanese would prefer to work fifteen hours a day for one of his own countrymen than eight hours a day for a foreigner paying higher wages. (p. 265)
7. The Japanese soul and the English language
. . . the idea of making English the language, or at least one of the languages of the country, and the idea of changing ancestral modes of feeling and thinking . . were wild extravagances. Japan must develop her own soul: she cannot borrow another. A dear friend whose life has been devoted to philology once said to me while commenting upon the deterioration of manners among the students of Japan: ‘Why, the English language itself has been a demoralizing influence!’ There was much depth in that observation. Setting the whole Japanese nation to study English (the language of a people who are being forever preached to about their ‘rights,’ and never about their ‘duties’) was almost an imprudence. The policy . . . helped to sap ethical sentiment. (pp. 271-272)
The above are from Lafcadio Hearn’s observations on the Meiji Japanese of the 1890s, in the decade when they were furiously preparing to burst forth as a world power.
The spirit of Meiji was expressed in slogans, such as: Sonno-joi (Revere the Emperor! Expel the barbarians!); fukoku-kyohei (rich country, strong arms!) and fukko (Return to Antiquity). Such slogans were actually implemented. In keeping with fukko, for example, Shinto (the way of kami), the ancient indigenous religious beliefs and practices of Japan, with it multitude of kami (sacred powers: ancestor spirits and nature spirits), was strengthened and institutionalized as the state religion, State Shinto. Shinto festivals and ceremonies became integrated into the affairs of government. Shinto moral teaching was made compulsory in schools, the doctrine of the divinity of the Emperor was inculcated, and the government took up the administration of the country’s more than 100,000 shinto shrines. Everybody (whether Buddhist, Christian or Shintoist) was required, as a patriotic duty, to make obeisance at Shinto shrines. The effectiveness of this anchoring of modernization on the ancestral religion and culture was demonstrated by the fervent national spirit which enabled Japan to become a world power within 50 years. The cultural source of that effectiveness was recognized by the Americans when they attempted to smash the cultural foundations of Japanese power. In 1945, after Japan’s defeat in WWII, despite their democratic propaganda for religious freedom, the American conquerors decreed the abolition of State Shinto, forbade the government to support Shinto shrines, and suppressed the doctrine of the emperor’s divinity.
Lest we think the Japanese thereafter lost their cultural anchor, here is an observation of the Japanese in the 1990s by Graham Hancock:
For no matter how modern, rational and scientific Japan has become, it is still a land in which powerful and ineffable spiritual forces are perceived to move in secret behind all things, to pervade all things, and to underlie the very fabric of reality. . . .
-- Hancock, Graham Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age, London: Michael Joseph, 2002, pp. 567-568
In other words, despite pulling off two miracles -- industrial modernization in the 19th century, and spectacular economic recovery in the 20th century – the Japanese still remain animists!
How, you may ask, did Japan contain the 'demoralizing influence' of the English language? According to Professor Kinichiro Toba of Waseda University:
My grandfather graduated from the University of Tokyo at the beginning of the 1880s. His notebooks were full of English. My father graduated from the same university in 1920 and half of his notes were filled with English. When I graduated a generation later my notes were all in Japanese. So … it took three generations for us to consume western civilization totally via the means of our own language.
--quoted in Chinua Achebe, “What has Literature Got to do with it?” in Hopes and Impediments, London: Heinemann, 1988, p. 110
Japanese and Africans compared
Thus, throughout their Meiji industrialization project, and while preparing their post WWII re-emergence as an economic power, the Japanese took care not to repudiate their ancestor worship, their animism, their ’pagan’ Shinto religion, and the other core aspects of their ancestral culture. Not for them the foolishness of abandoning Japanese religion and language as a precondition for modernization.
In stark contrast to the Japanese, whenever African societies have been invaded by alien forces in the last millennium, their Islamized, Christianized, or Eurochauvinized members not only repudiated their ancestral culture; they also enthusiastically joined in assaulting their own culture and demonizing their own ancestors for alleged paganism, “unbelief” or primitivism. These “fifth columnists” have zealously destroyed African religions, customs and traditions instead of identifying with and protecting them. In making its members attack itself, such alien-perverted, partially disintegrated, ‘triple-heritage’ pseudo-African societies have manifested the cultural equivalents of auto-immune diseases. African Afrophobia and Negrophobia are symptoms of this class of cultural diseases.
A strengthening, not a weakening, let alone repudiation or liquidation of ancestral Japanese culture was the foundation for the modernization of Japan. Quite unlike Africans who have been brainwashed into thinking that, in order to learn to fly, they must first cut off and throw away their own feet. Of course, having thrown away their ancestral cultural feet, Africans have found it impossible to modernize. They have no feet left to stand upon and sprint for take off!
Lagos, January 2005
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© Chinweizu 2005
African Fundamentalism by Marcus Garvey
A Racial Hierarchy and Empire for Negroes
Negro’s Faith Must Be Confidence in Self
His Creed: One God. One Aim. One Destiny
The time has come for the Negro to forget and cast behind him his hero worship and adoration of other races, and to start out immediately to create and emulate heroes of his own. We must canonize our own saints, create our own martyrs, and elevate to positions of fame and honor black men and women who have made their distinct contributions to our racial history. Sojourner Truth is worthy of the place of sainthood alongside of Joan of Arc: Crispus Attucks and George William Gordon are entitled to the halo of martyrdom with no less glory than that of the martyrs of any other race. Toussaint L'Ouverture's brilliancy as a soldier and statesman outshone that of a Cromwell, Napoleon and Washington; hence, he is entitled to the highest place as a hero among men. Africa has produced countless numbers of men and women, in war and in peace, whose luster and bravery outshine that of any other people. Then why not see good and perfection in ourselves? We must inspire a literature and promulgate a doctrine of our own without any apologies to the powers that be. The right is ours and God's. Let contrary sentiment and cross opinions go to the winds. Opposition to race independence is the weapon of the enemy to defeat the hopes of an unfortunate people. We are entitled to our own opinions and not obligated to or bound by the opinions of others.
If others laugh at you, return the laughter to them; if they mimic you, return the compliment with equal force. They have no more right to dishonor, disrespect and disregard your feeling and manhood than you have in dealing with them. Honor them when they honor you, disrespect and disregard them when they vilely treat you. Their arrogance is but skin deep and an assumption that has no foundation in morals or in law. They have sprung from the same family tree of obscurity as we have; their history is as rude in its primitiveness as ours; their ancestors ran wild and naked, lived in caves and in branches of trees, like monkeys, as ours; they made human sacrifices, ate the flesh of their own dead and the raw meat of the wild beast for centuries even as they accuse us of doing; their cannibalism was more prolonged than ours; when we were embracing the arts and sciences on the banks of the Nile their ancestors were still drinking human blood and eating out of the skulls of their conquered dead; when our civilization had reached the noonday of progress they were still running naked and sleeping in holes and caves with rats, bats and other insects and animals. After we had already fathomed the mystery of the stars and reduced the heavenly constellations to minute and regular calculus they were still backwoodsmen, living in ignorance and blatant darkness.
The world today is indebted to us for the benefits of civilization. They stole our arts and sciences from Africa. Then why should we be ashamed of ourselves? Their modem improvements are but duplicates of a grander civilization that we reflected thousands of years ago, without the advantage of what is buried and still hidden, to be resurrected and reintroduced by the intelligence of our generation and our posterity. Why should we be discouraged because somebody laughs at us today? Who can tell what tomorrow will bring forth? Did they not laugh at Moses, Christ and Mohammed? Was there not a Carthage, Greece and Rome? We see and have changes every day, so pray, work, be steadfast and be not dismayed.
As the Jew is held together by his religion, the white races by the assumption and the unwritten law of superiority, and the Mongolian by the precious tie of blood, so likewise the Negro must be united in one grand racial hierarchy. Our union must know no clime, boundary or nationality. Like the great Church of Rome, Negroes the world over must practice one faith, that of Confidence in themselves, with One God! One Aim! One Destiny! Let no religious scruples, no political machination divide us, but let us hold together under all climes and in every country, making among ourselves a Racial Empire upon which "the sun shall never set."
Let no voice but your own speak to you from the depths. Let no influence but your own rouse you in time of peace and time of war; hear all, but attend only to that which concerns you. Your allegiance shall be to your God, then to your family, race and country. Remember always that the Jew in his political and economic urge is always first a Jew; the white man is first a white man under all circumstances, and you can do no less than being first and always a Negro, and then all else will take care of itself. Let no one innoculate you with evil doctrines to suit their own conveniences. There is no humanity before that which starts with yourself, "Charity begins at home." First, to thyself be true, and "thou canst not then be false to any man."
God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our measurement. There is no height to which we cannot climb by using the active intelligence of our own minds. Mind creates, and as much as we desire in Nature we can have through the creation of our own minds. Being at present the scientifically weaker race, you shall treat others only as they treat you; but in your homes and everywhere possible you must teach the higher development of science to your children; and be sure to develop a race of scientists par excellence, for in science and religion lies our only hope to withstand the evil designs of modern materialism. Never forget your God. Remember, we live, work and pray for the establishing of a great and binding racial hierarchy, the founding of a racial empire whose only natural, spiritual and political limits shall be God and "Africa, at home and abroad."
New York, the Negro World, June 6, 1925, Front Page Editorial
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Guest Author: Chinweizu on Reparations
Great Lion Chinweizu throws his head back and roars aloud here about reparations and collective Black World afflictions. Heart full of thunder, this most respected Nigerian scholar, poet, satirist, polemicist and ‘bolekaja’ critic offers his diagnosis and plan of recovery.
The Lion--he was born to roar and cannot go against his nature--opens his mighty jaws.
Reparations and the Pan-African War on Genocide
by Chinweizu
Now that the American Nazi masters of White Power have started implementing their Global ‘Final Solution’ to what, in the USA, they used to call ‘The Negro Question’ [i.e. ‘What is to be done with the Negro?’], a new and deadly context has arisen for the Pan-African Reparations Movement.
Situation Report
Who manufactured the actual, but still mysterious, virus that causes AIDS, and why, and how it got into the WHO vaccines is yet another story?
The Challenge
There comes a time when a people must get its act together or perish. For Pan-Africa (the entire Black African World) that time is NOW! If we fail to get our act together, we will have no future left, for we shall, like others before us, be disappeared from Planet Earth by our age-old enemies: the genocide-addicted barbarian masters of Global Europe. We shall be disappeared like the Native Americans of the USA, like the Black Tasmanians, like the Black Aborigines of Australia, like the Tatar Aborigines of Siberia. The challenge before all Africans is, therefore, this:
To wage a relentless War on Genocide and defeat, by any means necessary, this satanic extermination campaign that has been unleashed on us. That is the paramount task, indeed the one and only strategic task facing us in this century.
What is to be done?
As victims of a genocide attack, it is our duty to respond with a War on Genocide.
To that end,
We must rouse the African fighting spirit.
We must mobilize the population of Pan-Africa.
We must reorganize the societies and communities of Pan-Africa to build African Power for Pan-African survival.
But what has reparations got to do with any of that?
Everything!
Indeed, Self-Reparation, the core aspect of reparations, is the key to everything. How so?
The two prime obstacles to African mobilization and organization are
a) the Niggerized populations of Pan-Africa, and
b) the packed galleries of the Traitors-at-the-Top of Pan-Africa’s societies and communities: the Traitors Spiritual, Traitors Temporal, Traitors Intellectual, Traitors Political, Cultural, Economic etc; Traitors who are installed by White Power to disorient and lead us astray, and who hold their own people down for the imperialist enemy to rape, loot, exploit and exterminate.
Remember Marcus Garvey? That great Pan-African prophet who warned us, back in the 1920s, against the genocide we are now undergoing? What kept us from heeding his call to organize the African Power to deter or defeat this long-predicted attack? It was none other than our de-Africanized, Niggerized and zombified minds.
Our first step towards victory must, therefore, be to de-Niggerize and re-Africanize our minds; to get rid, especially, of the Niggerism that is now entrenched in the Homeland.
But, first of all, What is the Nigger?
The Nigger is the African mangled by white power, a peculiar travesty produced by centuries of European imperialism and Arab hegemony. And alas! after more than a century of being completely in the dungeons of White Power, all of us Africans today have become Niggers.
The Nigger is the zombi into which White Power has deformed the African.
The Nigger is a fake African – a person of African race, who has been stripped of African culture, and who is culturally Eurocentric or Arabocentric.
The Nigger is a biological African who has internalized white supremacist superstitions, and become Afrophobic, and even Eurochauvinist or Arabochauvinist too, in many cases.
The Nigger is a person with black skin, white mind and white spirit, an African salt that has lost its savor, brown sugar that has turned sour.
The Nigger is that strange creature – the nominal African who despises his race, denies African culture, demonizes his ancestors, and yet expects, and even demands, that people of the other self-respecting races of humanity should respect him and treat him as an equal member of humanity.
The Nigger is the African zombi possessed by the ideas and ideals of White Supremacy; the Afrocidal African who craves to be white, physically (e.g Wacko Jacko), or culturally (e.g. the assortment of Black Europeans in the Homeland, Afro-Saxons in the Diaspora, and Omar Bashir with his criminal band of Arabizer-Jihadeer slavers and ethnic cleansers in the Sudan).
The Nigger, mesmerized by the Phantom of Individual Freedom/Equality/Rights within the White Power system of the enemy, imagines himself liberated even while everything in Pan-Africa – our laws, our customs, our cities, our schools, our beliefs, our ambitions -- still bears the characteristics stamped on it to serve imperialism.
The Nigger is the African enchanted by and addicted to Global Europe’s anti-ecological [i.e. anti-Maat] Way; that glamorized, capitalist way that is leading to certain destruction for the biosphere and humanity.
Some Niggers, the Super-Niggers, are so addicted to the satanic gods and conman heavens of their white slave-masters that they are, in effect, already enslaved, not only in body and mind, but also in soul; not only for a lifetime here on earth, but also for eternity in the hereafter.
Imagine a black sheep regurgitated after a week in the stomach of a white python and covered in a thick gel of python saliva; imagine that half-digested carcass staggering about and parading itself as a sheep. Some sheep! But such, alas, is the Nigger!
It takes the Nigger to think or say: ‘Thank God for Slavery!’ or ‘Thank God for Colonialism!’, i.e. to count as blessings those two demolitions of African societies by White Power: demolitions accompanied by viper bites which imbedded fangs and poisons into the body-social of Pan-Africa, fangs which are yet to be extracted, and poisons which are yet to be bled and neutralized with antidotes, poisons which are still coursing through our spirits, leaving Pan-Africa too dazed, decrepit and disoriented to get its act together.
Such is the Niggerized African, whether of the homeland or the Diaspora!
And the Nigger mind is the enemy’s recruiting point for traitors among us.
And it is Niggerism that has made Pan-Africa’s Traitors-at-the-Top squander, in frivolous pursuits, the past 50 years of ‘Independence’, and it has kept them chasing after crumbs from the table of White Power, instead of focusing on their strategic duty to build African Power. And these gratuitous failures have brought us, weak and defenseless, into this vaccination slaughter-yard for genocide.
Our first task in our War on Genocide is, therefore, to cure Pan-Africa of Niggerism, with its identity confusions, its strategic blindness, its miseducated and zombified consciousness, its suicidal imbecilities and its infinite tolerance for Traitors-at-the-Top.
Self-Reparation is about effecting this cure. And the operational proof of successful self-reparation is when we build the African Power that brings us victory over this genocide. But the Nigger in us dreads and obstructs this cure.
Remember Rap Brown? Remember his battle cry? "Die, Nigger Die!"
We are yet to fully undergo that wise cure he prescribed. There are still too many Niggers in Pan-Africa, doing havoc among us everywhere. In fact, Niggers are proliferating, particularly in the Homeland. We must speedily kill off the Nigger, for the Nigger must die if the African is to live!
Remember Cabral, who taught us to re-become Africans and to struggle against our own weaknesses?
De-Niggerization, re-Africanization and overcoming our crippling weaknesses are the fundamentals of the self-reparation we must accomplish. Without them, our chances of surviving this 21st century are less than that of a hailstone in a metal-melting furnace.
Killing the Nigger is the foundation for our self-reparation program. And since the Nigger is so hard to kill, we must collectively help one another to kill the Nigger in himself or herself.
So, the basic and urgent task of the African Self-Reparation Movement is clear:
Re-Africanize the Nigger, for that is the only conversion that could save our bodies here on earth, and our souls in the hereafter.
To Africanize ourselves, we must Afrocentrify our minds.
After a century or more of comprehensive miseducation, our first need is to know ourselves and know our enemies.
And for that we must turn to our sages and prophets from down the ages and drink from their fountains of healing wisdom:
We must learn from our anti-imperialist prophets, from Bookman to Biko.
We must learn from our intellectual warriors and pathfinders, from the defenders of the African way: from Garvey, Cheikh Anta Diop, Amilcar Cabral, Martin Delaney, Malcolm X, Blyden, Fanon, Cesaire, Carruthers and others.
We must seek guidance from our sages across the millennia, from Ptahhotep down to p’Bitek, and from the proverbs of our ancestors.
We must take inspiration from exemplary organizers and mobilizers of African Power, from Mena to Menelik, from Senwosre to Shaka, from Seqenenre Tao, Kamose, Ahmose, Piankhy, and Taharka, down to Sundiata, Sonni Ali, Osei Tutu, Dessalines, Nzinga, Yaw Asantewa, Nehanda, Sobukwe and many many more.
We must arm ourselves with the weapon of culture, of African culture; we must furnish our minds with Afrocentric stories, epics, historiographs, parables, riddles, instructions, admonitions; with the sciences and technologies that built the Great Pyramids on the Nile; with the stories of the Good works, Suffering, Death and Resurrection of Ausar/Orsir, the sorrows and saving powers of Ise, the wisdom of Djehuti and the other Akhu/(Enlightened Ones) of the Sep Tepi.
For our African Spirit to resurrect, like Ausar, after these many centuries of menticide, we must erase from Pan-Africa the satanic imprint of White Power and its Afrocidal brand of knowledge.
We must end our tolerance and admiration for those Nigger devils in the Traitors’ galleries who are spotlighted and glorified by enemy propaganda.
We must withdraw our allegiance and followership from the star Nigger misleaders foisted on us by White Power manipulation and praise songs.
We must abandon the acclaimed Niggers who purvey enemy doctrines and, instead, we must soak up wisdom from our own Afrocentric instructors: those who teach in the African Interest.
But while killing off the Nigger in and all around us, and while Afrocentrifying ourselves and our communities, we must not neglect some urgent defensive measures that we need to contain this genocide attack:
1. Do not submit to any mass vaccination program, especially those sponsored by any White Power outfit, like the WHO and other UN agencies.
2. At all times, Practice safe sex and other anti-AIDS measures.
3. Breed as much as you can. Pan Africa has a problem of UNDER-POPULATION, not "overpopulation", and we now need also to breed at a faster rate than the enemy’s genocide machine can mow us down.
4. Give your offspring a thorough Afrocentric upbringing to ensure they become Africans and not Niggers!
5. Create structures that will make and keep us African in mind and spirit.
6. Become African-security-conscious at all times, and create organs for African control of African countries and communities.
7. Insist on Africa for the Africans, and on using Africa’s resources for African Power.
8. Disorganize the imperialist structures that entrap your country, enslave your society and warp your lives.
Remember, at all times, that the battlefront in this War on Genocide is wherever you are. So, take action wherever you are, today and every day:
Kill the Nigger in and around you and Afrocentrify yourself and your fellows!
Slay the Phantom of individual freedom/equality/rights which enemy sirens brandish to delude and cripple us. The only freedom/equality/rights any African can have anywhere on earth is the freedom/equality/rights guaranteed by African Power.
Anything else is a mirage that appears and disappears at the whim of White Power.
Recognize that Afrocentrism, like reparations, is all about building African Power, and recognize that the problem of the 21st century is the problem of African Power: How to build enough of it to guarantee the survival and sovereign autonomy of Pan-Africa.
Remember at all times, that there is no individual exemption, no individual escape route, from this genocide attack. A Colin Powell may claim that he isn’t black or African; but can he fool those new and improved Bio-WMD viruses that are genetically engineered to pick out and kill blacks, and blacks only? [See p.10 for Appendix 2: "Biowar and the Apartheid Legacy" by Salim Muwakkil, In These Times, May 29, 2003]
We are all in this together, and must fight the war collectively or perish separately.
Therefore Organize, don’t agonize!
Indeed, this War on Genocide is a great summons to us to organize, to build coalitions and establish operational unity between the Diaspora and Homeland zones of Pan-Africa. This is the time for zealous missionaries of Afrocentrism to fan out throughout Pan-Africa to win back our people to our collective interest. And, in particular, all you Afrocentrists of the Diaspora: Come over to Africa and help us Afrocentrify this Niggerized wasteland and make it fit to build African Power for Pan-Africa’s survival!
And in taking up the challenge, let us arm our spirits with Bookman’s prayer of 1791:
With Bookman’s spirit lighting up our path
Let us unite and go forward to win this War on Genocide!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please feel free to publish this article, providing the source and the author are properly credited, text is not edited and descriptive terms or phrases are not altered in any way without written permission.
Copyright © by Chinweizu 2004
http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/chin.html
Appendix 1: Smallpox Vaccine ‘triggered Aids virus’ by Pearce Wright, Science Editor, The (London) Times of May 11, 1987, follows on p.6
Appendix 2: “Biowar and the Apartheid Legacy” by Salim Muwakkil, In These Times, May 29, 2003 p.10
The Lion--he was born to roar and cannot go against his nature--opens his mighty jaws.
Reparations and the Pan-African War on Genocide
by Chinweizu
Now that the American Nazi masters of White Power have started implementing their Global ‘Final Solution’ to what, in the USA, they used to call ‘The Negro Question’ [i.e. ‘What is to be done with the Negro?’], a new and deadly context has arisen for the Pan-African Reparations Movement.
Situation Report
Black Africans, whether in the African homeland or in the world-wide Diaspora, have, for three decades already, been under a genocide attack from the barbarian masters of Global Europe; a sneak attack made by using Biological Weapons of Mass Destruction (Bio-WMDs). Those who, for centuries have orchestrated our enslavement, expropriation and super-exploitation, are now (Surprise! Surprise!) orchestrating our extermination.
Our prospects have, without fanfare, gone from worse to the worst: from a further 1000 years of exploitation, humiliation and the most dire poverty, to outright extermination within this century, if we don’t defeat this attack. Unfortunately, most Africans do not know that they are at war; or that Global Europe has been making war, non-stop, on Pan-Africa for the last six centuries; or that, since the 1970s, the Nazi masters of Globalization [their imperialist ‘New World Order’] have been waging a covert war to exterminate us.
Africans know all too well of AIDS, and of the AIDS epidemic that is devastating Pan-African populations; but they, and especially those of the Homeland, either do not know, or are too brainwashed to believe, that the AIDS scourge was deliberately inflicted to exterminate them, via the World Health Organization (WHO) and its mass vaccination campaign to, ostensibly, eradicate smallpox. That was the campaign in which they vaccinated 97 million people in the 7 countries of Central Africa which became the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic: Zaire, Zambia, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Rwanda, Burundi. [See p.6 for Appendix 1: the article by Pearce Wright, “Smallpox vaccine ‘Triggered Aids virus,’” The (London) Times, May 11, 1987, pp.1, 18]
Who manufactured the actual, but still mysterious, virus that causes AIDS, and why, and how it got into the WHO vaccines is yet another story?
The Challenge
There comes a time when a people must get its act together or perish. For Pan-Africa (the entire Black African World) that time is NOW! If we fail to get our act together, we will have no future left, for we shall, like others before us, be disappeared from Planet Earth by our age-old enemies: the genocide-addicted barbarian masters of Global Europe. We shall be disappeared like the Native Americans of the USA, like the Black Tasmanians, like the Black Aborigines of Australia, like the Tatar Aborigines of Siberia. The challenge before all Africans is, therefore, this:
To wage a relentless War on Genocide and defeat, by any means necessary, this satanic extermination campaign that has been unleashed on us. That is the paramount task, indeed the one and only strategic task facing us in this century.
What is to be done?
As victims of a genocide attack, it is our duty to respond with a War on Genocide.
To that end,
We must rouse the African fighting spirit.
We must mobilize the population of Pan-Africa.
We must reorganize the societies and communities of Pan-Africa to build African Power for Pan-African survival.
But what has reparations got to do with any of that?
Everything!
Indeed, Self-Reparation, the core aspect of reparations, is the key to everything. How so?
The two prime obstacles to African mobilization and organization are
a) the Niggerized populations of Pan-Africa, and
b) the packed galleries of the Traitors-at-the-Top of Pan-Africa’s societies and communities: the Traitors Spiritual, Traitors Temporal, Traitors Intellectual, Traitors Political, Cultural, Economic etc; Traitors who are installed by White Power to disorient and lead us astray, and who hold their own people down for the imperialist enemy to rape, loot, exploit and exterminate.
Remember Marcus Garvey? That great Pan-African prophet who warned us, back in the 1920s, against the genocide we are now undergoing? What kept us from heeding his call to organize the African Power to deter or defeat this long-predicted attack? It was none other than our de-Africanized, Niggerized and zombified minds.
Our first step towards victory must, therefore, be to de-Niggerize and re-Africanize our minds; to get rid, especially, of the Niggerism that is now entrenched in the Homeland.
But, first of all, What is the Nigger?
The Nigger is the African mangled by white power, a peculiar travesty produced by centuries of European imperialism and Arab hegemony. And alas! after more than a century of being completely in the dungeons of White Power, all of us Africans today have become Niggers.
The Nigger is the zombi into which White Power has deformed the African.
The Nigger is a fake African – a person of African race, who has been stripped of African culture, and who is culturally Eurocentric or Arabocentric.
The Nigger is a biological African who has internalized white supremacist superstitions, and become Afrophobic, and even Eurochauvinist or Arabochauvinist too, in many cases.
The Nigger is a person with black skin, white mind and white spirit, an African salt that has lost its savor, brown sugar that has turned sour.
The Nigger is that strange creature – the nominal African who despises his race, denies African culture, demonizes his ancestors, and yet expects, and even demands, that people of the other self-respecting races of humanity should respect him and treat him as an equal member of humanity.
The Nigger is the African zombi possessed by the ideas and ideals of White Supremacy; the Afrocidal African who craves to be white, physically (e.g Wacko Jacko), or culturally (e.g. the assortment of Black Europeans in the Homeland, Afro-Saxons in the Diaspora, and Omar Bashir with his criminal band of Arabizer-Jihadeer slavers and ethnic cleansers in the Sudan).
The Nigger, mesmerized by the Phantom of Individual Freedom/Equality/Rights within the White Power system of the enemy, imagines himself liberated even while everything in Pan-Africa – our laws, our customs, our cities, our schools, our beliefs, our ambitions -- still bears the characteristics stamped on it to serve imperialism.
The Nigger is the African enchanted by and addicted to Global Europe’s anti-ecological [i.e. anti-Maat] Way; that glamorized, capitalist way that is leading to certain destruction for the biosphere and humanity.
Some Niggers, the Super-Niggers, are so addicted to the satanic gods and conman heavens of their white slave-masters that they are, in effect, already enslaved, not only in body and mind, but also in soul; not only for a lifetime here on earth, but also for eternity in the hereafter.
Imagine a black sheep regurgitated after a week in the stomach of a white python and covered in a thick gel of python saliva; imagine that half-digested carcass staggering about and parading itself as a sheep. Some sheep! But such, alas, is the Nigger!
It takes the Nigger to think or say: ‘Thank God for Slavery!’ or ‘Thank God for Colonialism!’, i.e. to count as blessings those two demolitions of African societies by White Power: demolitions accompanied by viper bites which imbedded fangs and poisons into the body-social of Pan-Africa, fangs which are yet to be extracted, and poisons which are yet to be bled and neutralized with antidotes, poisons which are still coursing through our spirits, leaving Pan-Africa too dazed, decrepit and disoriented to get its act together.
Such is the Niggerized African, whether of the homeland or the Diaspora!
And the Nigger mind is the enemy’s recruiting point for traitors among us.
And it is Niggerism that has made Pan-Africa’s Traitors-at-the-Top squander, in frivolous pursuits, the past 50 years of ‘Independence’, and it has kept them chasing after crumbs from the table of White Power, instead of focusing on their strategic duty to build African Power. And these gratuitous failures have brought us, weak and defenseless, into this vaccination slaughter-yard for genocide.
Our first task in our War on Genocide is, therefore, to cure Pan-Africa of Niggerism, with its identity confusions, its strategic blindness, its miseducated and zombified consciousness, its suicidal imbecilities and its infinite tolerance for Traitors-at-the-Top.
Self-Reparation is about effecting this cure. And the operational proof of successful self-reparation is when we build the African Power that brings us victory over this genocide. But the Nigger in us dreads and obstructs this cure.
Remember Rap Brown? Remember his battle cry? "Die, Nigger Die!"
We are yet to fully undergo that wise cure he prescribed. There are still too many Niggers in Pan-Africa, doing havoc among us everywhere. In fact, Niggers are proliferating, particularly in the Homeland. We must speedily kill off the Nigger, for the Nigger must die if the African is to live!
Remember Cabral, who taught us to re-become Africans and to struggle against our own weaknesses?
De-Niggerization, re-Africanization and overcoming our crippling weaknesses are the fundamentals of the self-reparation we must accomplish. Without them, our chances of surviving this 21st century are less than that of a hailstone in a metal-melting furnace.
Killing the Nigger is the foundation for our self-reparation program. And since the Nigger is so hard to kill, we must collectively help one another to kill the Nigger in himself or herself.
So, the basic and urgent task of the African Self-Reparation Movement is clear:
Re-Africanize the Nigger, for that is the only conversion that could save our bodies here on earth, and our souls in the hereafter.
To Africanize ourselves, we must Afrocentrify our minds.
After a century or more of comprehensive miseducation, our first need is to know ourselves and know our enemies.
And for that we must turn to our sages and prophets from down the ages and drink from their fountains of healing wisdom:
We must learn from our anti-imperialist prophets, from Bookman to Biko.
We must learn from our intellectual warriors and pathfinders, from the defenders of the African way: from Garvey, Cheikh Anta Diop, Amilcar Cabral, Martin Delaney, Malcolm X, Blyden, Fanon, Cesaire, Carruthers and others.
We must seek guidance from our sages across the millennia, from Ptahhotep down to p’Bitek, and from the proverbs of our ancestors.
We must take inspiration from exemplary organizers and mobilizers of African Power, from Mena to Menelik, from Senwosre to Shaka, from Seqenenre Tao, Kamose, Ahmose, Piankhy, and Taharka, down to Sundiata, Sonni Ali, Osei Tutu, Dessalines, Nzinga, Yaw Asantewa, Nehanda, Sobukwe and many many more.
We must arm ourselves with the weapon of culture, of African culture; we must furnish our minds with Afrocentric stories, epics, historiographs, parables, riddles, instructions, admonitions; with the sciences and technologies that built the Great Pyramids on the Nile; with the stories of the Good works, Suffering, Death and Resurrection of Ausar/Orsir, the sorrows and saving powers of Ise, the wisdom of Djehuti and the other Akhu/(Enlightened Ones) of the Sep Tepi.
For our African Spirit to resurrect, like Ausar, after these many centuries of menticide, we must erase from Pan-Africa the satanic imprint of White Power and its Afrocidal brand of knowledge.
We must end our tolerance and admiration for those Nigger devils in the Traitors’ galleries who are spotlighted and glorified by enemy propaganda.
We must withdraw our allegiance and followership from the star Nigger misleaders foisted on us by White Power manipulation and praise songs.
We must abandon the acclaimed Niggers who purvey enemy doctrines and, instead, we must soak up wisdom from our own Afrocentric instructors: those who teach in the African Interest.
But while killing off the Nigger in and all around us, and while Afrocentrifying ourselves and our communities, we must not neglect some urgent defensive measures that we need to contain this genocide attack:
1. Do not submit to any mass vaccination program, especially those sponsored by any White Power outfit, like the WHO and other UN agencies.
2. At all times, Practice safe sex and other anti-AIDS measures.
3. Breed as much as you can. Pan Africa has a problem of UNDER-POPULATION, not "overpopulation", and we now need also to breed at a faster rate than the enemy’s genocide machine can mow us down.
4. Give your offspring a thorough Afrocentric upbringing to ensure they become Africans and not Niggers!
5. Create structures that will make and keep us African in mind and spirit.
6. Become African-security-conscious at all times, and create organs for African control of African countries and communities.
7. Insist on Africa for the Africans, and on using Africa’s resources for African Power.
8. Disorganize the imperialist structures that entrap your country, enslave your society and warp your lives.
Remember, at all times, that the battlefront in this War on Genocide is wherever you are. So, take action wherever you are, today and every day:
Kill the Nigger in and around you and Afrocentrify yourself and your fellows!
Slay the Phantom of individual freedom/equality/rights which enemy sirens brandish to delude and cripple us. The only freedom/equality/rights any African can have anywhere on earth is the freedom/equality/rights guaranteed by African Power.
Anything else is a mirage that appears and disappears at the whim of White Power.
Recognize that Afrocentrism, like reparations, is all about building African Power, and recognize that the problem of the 21st century is the problem of African Power: How to build enough of it to guarantee the survival and sovereign autonomy of Pan-Africa.
Remember at all times, that there is no individual exemption, no individual escape route, from this genocide attack. A Colin Powell may claim that he isn’t black or African; but can he fool those new and improved Bio-WMD viruses that are genetically engineered to pick out and kill blacks, and blacks only? [See p.10 for Appendix 2: "Biowar and the Apartheid Legacy" by Salim Muwakkil, In These Times, May 29, 2003]
We are all in this together, and must fight the war collectively or perish separately.
Therefore Organize, don’t agonize!
Indeed, this War on Genocide is a great summons to us to organize, to build coalitions and establish operational unity between the Diaspora and Homeland zones of Pan-Africa. This is the time for zealous missionaries of Afrocentrism to fan out throughout Pan-Africa to win back our people to our collective interest. And, in particular, all you Afrocentrists of the Diaspora: Come over to Africa and help us Afrocentrify this Niggerized wasteland and make it fit to build African Power for Pan-Africa’s survival!
And in taking up the challenge, let us arm our spirits with Bookman’s prayer of 1791:
Good God who created the Sun which shines on us from above, who rouses the sea and makes the thunder rumble;
Listen! God though hidden in a cloud watches over us.
The god of the whiteman calls forth crime but our God wills good works.
Our God who is so good commands us to vengeance.
He will direct our arms and help us.
Throw away the likeness of the white man’s god who has so often brought us to tears and listen to liberty which speaks in all our hearts.
--(Bookman, Haitian Vodun priest, Aug. 1791; tr. by Jacob Carruthers )
With Bookman’s spirit lighting up our path
Let us unite and go forward to win this War on Genocide!
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Please feel free to publish this article, providing the source and the author are properly credited, text is not edited and descriptive terms or phrases are not altered in any way without written permission.
Copyright © by Chinweizu 2004
http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/chin.html
Appendix 1: Smallpox Vaccine ‘triggered Aids virus’ by Pearce Wright, Science Editor, The (London) Times of May 11, 1987, follows on p.6
Appendix 2: “Biowar and the Apartheid Legacy” by Salim Muwakkil, In These Times, May 29, 2003 p.10
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
NAFCON, Onne: Orthopaedic Life
Initially, I felt nothing, like one in a trance. Only my mind stirred. The rest of me was either in a bind or did not exist. Then the stiffness; unable to turn my head this way or that. What's going on? Gradually I became aware of my surroundings. I was lying down, somewhere. Faintly, I could hear voices; very distant. Then I drifted off.
Again the voices, this time a little closer. Again I stirred.
Annie!
Did someone just try to call me?
O tete go, I heard someone say. He is awake.
In a minute I began to observe some faces. Joe, my uncle. Ugo, my brother. Amaka too. And others. Where was I then? And how long have I been here? I remembered PAMO Clinic. That was Port Harcourt. Then I remembered the trip in the NAFCON ambulance. Now where were the people that brought me to Enugu? Ugo leaned closer to me. He was like,
Nnaa we've been worried about you. We thought you'd never wake up. You've been here for three days!
'Three days!!'
They had to keep you here because there was no bed available in the Private Ward. But you'll be moving today. A patient got discharged yesterday and they've prepared the bed for you. We are just waiting for the ambulance.
'Private Ward?'
'Room?'
What did all that mean? Then I noticed that my right hand, my injured hand, was wrapped in heavy bandages and was hanging on a metal crossbar that formed part of my bed. A plastic tube led from my left hand to two plastic bags also hanging on the metal bar. Drip. Blood. Transfusion. I felt nothing; my body still did not exist. I also noticed that there were others like me, some were hung by their legs. Patients. Hmmm.
There're people outside waiting to see you, Ugo continued. The nurses are not allowing them inside. The news has travelled fast. We are all in shock!
That statement defined the state of my family at this hour.
It used to be known as Emperor Haile Selasie Medical Hospital...(continues)
Again the voices, this time a little closer. Again I stirred.
Annie!
Did someone just try to call me?
O tete go, I heard someone say. He is awake.
In a minute I began to observe some faces. Joe, my uncle. Ugo, my brother. Amaka too. And others. Where was I then? And how long have I been here? I remembered PAMO Clinic. That was Port Harcourt. Then I remembered the trip in the NAFCON ambulance. Now where were the people that brought me to Enugu? Ugo leaned closer to me. He was like,
Nnaa we've been worried about you. We thought you'd never wake up. You've been here for three days!
'Three days!!'
They had to keep you here because there was no bed available in the Private Ward. But you'll be moving today. A patient got discharged yesterday and they've prepared the bed for you. We are just waiting for the ambulance.
'Private Ward?'
'Room?'
What did all that mean? Then I noticed that my right hand, my injured hand, was wrapped in heavy bandages and was hanging on a metal crossbar that formed part of my bed. A plastic tube led from my left hand to two plastic bags also hanging on the metal bar. Drip. Blood. Transfusion. I felt nothing; my body still did not exist. I also noticed that there were others like me, some were hung by their legs. Patients. Hmmm.
There're people outside waiting to see you, Ugo continued. The nurses are not allowing them inside. The news has travelled fast. We are all in shock!
That statement defined the state of my family at this hour.
It used to be known as Emperor Haile Selasie Medical Hospital...(continues)
Friday, June 24, 2005
Are Nigerians deluded?
I was searching for anything to reassure me that Nigeria would still make it to Germany in 2006. Somehow this country had managed to manouvre herself into a very tight corner, such that qualifying for the next Mundial was beginning to look uncertain. With three consecutive appearances at this world event, Nigerians had begun to take their qualification as a right. But with a dismal performance against Angola in Kano a week ago, Nigeria's chances of qualifying this time around had been thrown to the wind.
Reactions had been fast and furious. The noise had reached a crescendo. A coach had been sacked. It was difficult to contemplate a World Cup without Nigeria! So, I was searching for the latest development when I ran into the following article. Suddenly my appetite died. Qualifying for the World Cup paled into insignificance. There was a serious problem! Here goes...
Reconstruction of Nigeria: Four Delusions on our Strategic Horizon
By Chinweizu
This is the danger point. What will become of the Negro in another five hundred years if he does not organize now to develop and protect himself? The answer is that he will be exterminated . . . No race or people can well survive without an aim or purpose . . . The work that lies before us is not so much to identify ourselves with the scattered purpose and greed of others, but to create for ourselves a central ideal and make our lives conform to it. . . and (to create) for ourselves a political superstate . . . that will make us secure in the . . . world. . . . We are determined to . . . found there (in Africa) a nation of our own, strong enough to lend protection to the members of our race scattered all over the world, and to compel the respect of the nations and races of the earth.
- Marcus Garvey in The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, 1922, 1925 (pp. I 48-49; II 15, 16; I 38, 39)
Africans are capable of achieving their place in the sun, provided that they discard the spirit of individualism which has so far prevented social cohesion. It cannot be doubted that one reason why Africans seem destined to serve other races for ever is because they have no sense of oneness . . . Are Africans not doomed to extermination from the face of the earth because they are self-centred and self-satisfied and selfish? Do Africans not deserve extirpation because they have proved their incapacity to carry on and to disseminate the torch of civilization which their ancestors handed to them in the dim past? . . . Black men and women, when will you cease to drift along the way which leads to the extermination of the black race?
- Nnamdi Azikiwe, Renascent Africa, 1937, (pp.98; 117-118; 207)
Introduction
Ideas rule the world. An idea has brought us all together here today. Let me congratulate my senior and good friend of more than three decades on his success in nursing to fruition his idea of a Centre for Public and Business Policy. I have had the privilege of watching as he nursed it along since he left public office earlier in the decade. I have worried for him and his project like supporters are wont to do. When your friend steps into the boxing ring, you feel the blows he receives. For bearing up under pressure, and bringing his idea to
fruition, I salute him. Chu, well done!
The theme of today's Black Redemption sermon is taken from a sentence from a public lecture given by Chu Okongwu, here in Enugu, back in 1985, on the very same subject as this seminar. Lamenting our economic plight at that time, he said, inter alia, that "it might have occurred to us that we have unhelpful notions about ourselves and our environment." In so mildly putting the matter, Chu was being properly polite, as befits a public servant. As a certified and permanent private citizen, I may put the matter quite bluntly. We suffer from quite a few delusions about ourselves and our environment, and these delusions, by fogging up our strategic horizon, are terrible obstacles to our progress and survival. But before I go into all that, a few preliminaries.
As I said before, ideas rule the world. Not only is one generation ruled by ideas from the preceding generation, but some ideas rule for centuries, and some even for millennia. Consider some of the ideas which still rule humanity today, and see how old they are. First, two ideas from Black Africa.
The idea of resurrection and judgement day is a most ancient doctrine in the religion of Black Egypt. It is probably older than the first pharaoh of Egypt, thus it is older than 4500 BC. After 6500 years, it is still going strong and dominating the Black World, though in its Euro-Christian, Arab-Islamic and Judaic adaptations.
The idea of the reincarnation of departed ancestors is probably even older than that of resurrection and judgement day. It is still part of African religion, and a force in our lives. One day, a very old man was asked why he went about planting an orchard of fruit trees. To the questioner the old man answered and said: "I am doing it so that, when I reincarnate, I will find the trees mature and ready for me to eat." So, your future in your next incarnation may well be the one you sow today. Some more recent ideas which, in this century, have been implanted in Africa are the package consisting of the free market, individualism, liberty, progress, egalitarianism, electocracy, and a secular universe stripped of ancestor spirits and gods, and without the civilizing restraints of resurrection, judgement day and reincarnation. These are joint products of the European Bourgeois Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries AD. They are now being sold to the entire world, and are even being imposed by bullets and bombs on those who don't want them. They are ideas which have been injected into other societies to help destroy them, the most recent and spectacular case being post-Soviet Russia.
The other idea is that of a world government. It was developed a century ago by British Prime Minister William Gladstone for use as an instrument and cover for Anglo-American global imperialism. He sold the idea to their American cousins, and Woodrow Wilson tried, but failed, to implement it by way of the League of Nations. Then, under the sponsorship of Roosevelt and Churchill, it became the hidden agenda of the UN. And now, after the Cold War removed the Soviet obstacle to its implementation, Anglo-American hegemony, via the UN, is now being successfully, but surreptitiously, imposed on the world. Thus an idea invented by Gladstone, that great liberal and heir to a fortune built on Black slavery, is what Clinton, from the old slaving state of Arkansas, is finally imposing upon the entire globe.
Ideas rule the world; and like all rulers, ideas can build or wreck. Ideas can help or hurt, clarify or confuse, enlighten or delude, facilitate or impede. We must pay careful attention to them to ensure that we do not blindfold and hang ourselves with the wrong ones.
Unhelpful notions and delusions
If ideas rule the world, then our first stop on the way to social reconstruction of any kind must be at the workshop of ideas. Note that I did not say "the marketplace of ideas," that place where the lazy mind goes to shop for readymade ideas, ideas prepackaged to serve their maker's vested interests. We must begin by deconstructing and reconstructing our idea of our society and of its place in the world. We must, indeed, begin by reconstructing our idea of social reconstruction. Indeed, reconstructing our idea of reconstructing Nigeria is the first task, and that is what I shall concentrate upon today.
In rationally considering reconstruction, we would need to correctly determine what is to be reconstructed and why; the environment in which the new construct will operate; and the goals of the new construct if it is to serve our group interests. We would, specifically, need to find out the following: What is Nigeria, and why should it be reconstructed? What constraints is the world of tomorrow most likely to try to impose on Nigerians? What kind of reconstruction does the survival of Nigerians prescribe? If we have the wrong ideas on these matters, whatever reconstruction we undertake will most probably miscarry or prove counterproductive. In the matter of reconstructing Nigeria, we need to start by ridding ourselves of four delusions which I have singled out for examination today. By doing so, we should be in a better position to appreciate what kind of social reconstruction our strategic situation calls for. But first, let me reflect a bit on my topic: "Social reconstruction in the stabilization of the Nigerian economy." Now, the idea of social reconstruction for survival might make sense to most people. But social reconstruction for economic stabilization? Many might demur, asking, and quite correctly, which exists for the other, the society or the economy?
Does one reconstruct the social supersystem in order to stabilize its economic subsystem? Should it not be the other way round? Not unless the economic subsystem is judged perfect. But when the economy in question is a neocolonial economy; is dominated by a foreign enclave sector; and is tied to foreign dictates by the chains of debt trap imperialism; and when it keeps most of its members impoverished and harassed through economic anarchism - when that is the case, why would its victims want it stabilized?
Why would they go to the trouble of reconstructing their entire society so as to stabilize their economic misfortune? Washington, London and Paris might like to stabilize Nigeria's neocolonial economy, but certainly not the Nigerian people, not unless we are mad, or unbelievably masochistic, or plain suicidal. The only valid reason why the Nigerian people should be interested in stabilizing this neocolonial, anarchist economy is as a necessary preliminary step to reconstructing it out of existence. Sometimes a body arrives in hospital so battered and ill that the doctors will first have to stabilize it in order to begin a full-scale regimen of radical therapy.
It is only on that premise that one would justify social reconstruction as a factor in stabilizing Nigeria's present economy. So, the question is: stabilization for what? Income growth? Industrialization? Development? First, it should be understood that without industrialization, growth is simply bloat and not development. Secondly, if Nigeria's aim is to catch up with China, Japan, the EU or the USA, then it must be understood that it cannot do so without industrializing itself. Having said that, let me now focus on the first part of the topic, namely, the social reconstruction of Nigeria.
Reconstruction for what? Reconstruction for the survival, security, prosperity, power and prestige of the Nigerian people. I submit that that is the minimum objective which would make worthwhile the enormous risks and rigors of social reconstruction.
But why would we want Nigeria reconstructed? What could be fundamentally wrong with this great nation, this giant of Africa, this hope of the Black World? I submit that if Nigeria is not reconstructed, its people will be exterminated during the 21st century. Why? There are some powerful forces in the world who want Africa without the Africans, and the Africans, Nigerians included, are in no position today to prevent them achieving their aim. And why can Nigerians not prevent their own extermination?
It is because, in global strategic terms, Nigeria is in a state of decrepitude and cannot withstand an attack even by tenth rate powers. And why is that? Because Nigeria is not an industrialized society and, even more important, Nigeria is not a nation. If all of that is not obvious, that is largely because of the unhelpful notions or delusions we hold about ourselves and our environment. Which brings me to the four delusions I mentioned earlier. These are the propositions: That Nigeria is a nation or is engaged in nation-building - it is not, I submit. That Nigeria is developing or industrializing - it is not, I submit. That Nigeria is potentially a great power on earth - it is not, I submit. That the global system is Blacks-friendly, and wants us alive and strong and participating as equal members who exercise economic and political self-determination - it does not, I submit. It is actually hostile to us to the point of wanting to castrate and exterminate us as soon as possible. Let us examine the delusions in these popular and conventional propositions.
The first delusion
Regarding the proposition that Nigeria is a nation or is engaged in nation-building, I submit that, though the official rhetoric so claims, Nigeria is not a nation and never has been, nor have Nigerians been engaged in nation-building. If so, what indeed is Nigeria? Nigeria is what some French ethologists, students of animal social behavior, have called a noyau. And what is that? A noyau is a society of inward antagonism, one held together by mutual internal antagonism, one which could not survive if its members had no fellow members to hate. A nation, on the other hand, is a society held together by antagonism toward external enemies and by their defense of a common territory.
The British created a Nigerian state a century ago. In that time, the ethnic groups they forcibly enclosed inside it have created a Nigerian society of sorts, but have failed to create a Nigerian nation. Nigeria simply is a territory, with a state apparatus for internal plunder, and a fountain of petrodollars which together provide a habitat for a multi-ethnic noyau. With between 300 and 400 ethnic groups, and with thousands of autonomous communities which noisily quarrel over the national petrodollar cake; and whose boundary and leadership disputes often lead to mayhem, it is clear that each group's primary identity is its own, and its solidarity is against its visible neighbors within Nigeria. These basic antagonisms are compounded by regional and religious quarrels. One need only recall such conflicts as those of Modakeke, Zango Kataf, Ogoni, Tiv-Idoma, Ijaw-Itshekiri, etc.
Also add to the list the Maitatsine and other fanatical religious riots and the OIC crisis. Add too the AG-NCNC crisis in the old Western Region, the Awolowo-Akintola crisis, the NPC-NCNC alliance-cum-crisis, the NPN-NPP alliance-cum-crisis, and of course the Nigerian Civil War and the June 12 Crisis. However much it may be deplored, the fact is that for each of the constituent peoples of Nigeria, the nation is the ethnic group or clan, not Nigeria. For some, it is the religious community. Attack these and their instincts for territorial defense and external antagonism will be triggered. The ultimate sign of Nigeria's being a noyau is that Nigerians show no sign of having a common external enemy. Not even foreign sanctions would unite Nigerians against the sanctioners. Were Nigerians a nation they would have patched up their June 12 quarrel at the mention of sanctions and united to face the foreign powers.
As a society of inward antagonism, Nigeria has little chance of surviving an attack by another society. Its very instincts will undermine its defensive efforts. This is because a society of inward antagonism, when confronted by crisis, contains no instinctive mechanisms to command the loyalty of its members.
The second delusion
The second proposition is that, for the past four or five decades, Nigeria has been engaged in economic development, and even in industrialization. What Nigeria has been engaged in, actually, is the development of its consumania, using its petrodollar bonanza to feed its appetite for foreign goods and services of every sort. And that, strictly speaking, is maldevelopment: the development of consumania for industrial products without the concomitant development of industrial productive capacity. If indeed Nigeria has been attempting industrialization or development, its failure is stark. After half a century of alleged effort, Nigeria still has no basic industries. In particular, it has failed to build a steel mill despite 30 years and some $10 billion of effort.
It has failed at managing such basic utilities suppliers as NEPA and NITEL. And it has reduced itself to foreignizing the few secondary and tertiary industries that it has Behind this dismal performance lies the criminal wastage of human and financial resources. First of all, foreign contractors build most projects beyond the level of private houses, thus preventing the accumulation of practical experience within the Nigerian population. Secondly, in a quest for quantity without quality, Nigeria expanded and debased the inadequate education system it inherited from the British. As a result, the land is awash with the illiterate, innumerate, indisciplined and amoral products of our so-called universities. Note that I said amoral, not immoral.
If any condition is socially worse than immorality, it is amorality, the failure to even appreciate the concept of morality. As a result, there are today in Nigeria, a disconcerting number of so-called educated adults who have never heard of the Ten Commandments, or heard of any other moral code, and who cannot distinguish between right and wrong. Among them are the networks of campus gangsters who are wrongly called "cultists" - those armed rapists and murderers who routinely terrorize the places of learning. An extraordinary and recent example of amorality was that quite articulate cannibal who believed that killing and eating his fellow citizens was no different from "eating potatoes".
Likewise, in 40 years as an oil exporter, Nigeria has squandered some $500 billion of petrodollar bonanza. Nevertheless, it still begs for a few million dollars of "foreign aid" and "foreign investment", and it is bluffed and insulted for that. Nigeria could have industrialized itself in that time, and with less than one fifth of that bonanza, and with not a single dollar of foreign investment and foreign aid, but its leadership was not so minded. Its leadership conveniently overlooked the fact that, in addition to numeracy and literacy, industrialization needs a puritan ethos, (what Max Weber called the Protestant Ethic), and it needs, particularly in the leadership strata, the spartan discipline of a miser who is allergic to squandermania, and is addicted to making savings and productive investments.
And so, after 40 years of alleged development effort, Nigeria has little to show. Such a monumental wastage of the key inputs of industrialization, namely human and financial resources, is not development. However, the Nigerian elite believes that it has been working hard at development. But then, a child that rubs its belly with water all morning long will claim that it is taking a bath!
The Third Delusion
The third proposition is that Nigeria, by virtue of its size and population, is the giant of Africa, a potential great power on the global arena, and the hope of the Black World. In the days of the oil boom, there used to be glib talk about a Great Nigeria. And even after the oil boom had bust, Nigeria attempted to organize a so-called concert of the medium powers of the world. All that was petrodollar bombast, a farce to help relieve boredom in some quarters.
In actual fact, Nigeria even lacks the profile of a potential great power. Its resource endowment, when compared with those of China, Russia, the EU and the USA, is thin on strategic minerals and plants. Nigeria is not even as richly endowed as South Africa or the former Zaire. And unlike the British or the Japanese, island peoples with few natural resources, Nigerians lack the national power drive to borrow or buy or steal whatever they need from any nook or cranny of the globe. They lazily wait for technology to be transferred to them! Besides, unlike the situation when Britain and Japan became world powers, the resources abroad which Nigeria would need have already been cornered by much stronger powers.
Besides all of that, Nigeria's land is small, and no strategic strength derives from its location. Geostrategically, it is neither a vast transcontinental heartland like Russia, nor an offshore fortress like Britain is to Europe or North America is to Eurasia. Nigeria sits across no geostrategic sea or land or air route, and so lacks the significance and power of a focal ground. It lacks China's regional isolation behind natural barriers of seas, mountains and deserts. And it lacks such natural defences against invaders as the Russian winter.
To make matters worse, Nigerians of the post-colonial era are neither hungry nor greedy nor humiliated enough to exert themselves to become a world power. They are too much addicted to instant and lavish self-enjoyment with little spirit of sacrifice for tomorrow. The great power motivation is sorely lacking in them. On the whole, Nigerians of this era are too soft, too selfish and too naïve for the great power adventure.
All in all, a handful of strategic minerals and plants, a medium sized and poorly located territory, and a realistically estimated population of some 70 million persons who are chronically unmotivated for the rigors and privations of the national power quest: these are not the stuff of which a world power is made in this age.
In summary, what is Nigeria today? It is a noyau and not a nation. It is an unindustrialized, maldeveloped, enclave dominated, neocolonial, anarchist economy controlled by foreign powers through the strings of debt trap imperialism as manipulated by the IMF-WTO-World Bank trinity. It is a strategic nonentity incapable of defending its territory and interests against even the tenth-rate powers of today. If its efforts against Charles Taylor, Foday Sankoh and Bakassi are anything to go by - and they are all we can go by - that must be the honest situation report on Nigeria's capability.
For lack of heavy industries, Nigeria cannot manufacture its own armaments. So, all it would take is an embargo by its arms suppliers for Nigeria to be defeated in any war. And if it is a war between Nigeria and NATO or its surrogates, you can be sure that an arms embargo against Nigeria would be made effective. Nigeria's economic vulnerability is palpable. An economic embargo which withdrew the foreign oil companies and which stopped the importation of rice, spaghetti, champagne, paper, ink, cornflakes, milk, tableware, lace, air conditioners, generators and spare parts would demoralize the Nigerian elite and bring the Nigerian economy to a halt.
It has often been said, by my good friend Dr George Obiozor, the Director-General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), that Nigeria is not a banana republic; indeed it is not; it is something much worse, it is a noyau republic. And that compounds its strategic weakness by making it politically brittle. In fact, Nigeria is what may be called an alewa republic, a sugarcane candy stick republic, all sweetness and brittleness. Hit anything, even a glass pane, with an alewa stick, and the stick is liable to break into pieces. That is an alewa republic for you. I therefore submit that Nigeria is not a potential great power, and therefore is not the hope of the Black World. Nigeria may be the giant of Africa, but it is not one of the giants, actual or potential, of the world. Therefore, if Nigeria is the Black World's hope, then the Black World has no hope.
The fourth delusion
The fourth proposition concerns the attitude and intentions of the overlords of the global system towards Nigeria and Black Africa. The standard view is that, with the end of colonialism, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the rise of globalism, and with the universal promotion of electocracy and the free market ideology, we are now in a new era without imperialism, without white supremacist
notions, without racism, and particularly without Negrophobia. Racism is now supposedly ended and taboo; and the term imperialist has even dropped out of usage and has been replaced by the obscurantist term "the international community". So, all we need do is cooperate with the new system, submit to our mentors in electocracy and free market ways, and we too shall prosper, and we too shall soon arrive at an economic destination that will look like the USA or the EU or Japan. All of that, I submit, is a monumental delusion.
I assume that every normal person is interested in the welfare of its descendants, starting with its children and grandchildren. I would therefore like to share with you my prognosis of what lies ahead for your descendants within the 21st century. The prognosis is bad. Your descendants will most probably be deliberately kept in the prison of national poverty, like the Haitians have been since 1804; or Africans will be driven out of the minerals-rich parts of Africa, like the Cherokee nation was ethnic cleansed out of its homeland in the USA in 1838; or they will be exterminated altogether, like the Tasmanians were in the early 19th century. The reason is that, like the Haitians, the Cherokees and the Tasmanians before them, Black Africans have now arrived at a position of absolute strategic vulnerability. For the first time since the 15th century, the imperialist powers need your valuable land, but they do not need you to work it for them. They will soon have their anti-malaria vaccine, and their vaccine against melanoma, the skin cancer; both of these vaccines will enable them to settle in all parts of Black Africa and to exploit its resources for themselves. So they will get rid of you, unless you can militarily stop them.
During the last five years, whenever I have pointed out this prospect to Nigerians, their usual reaction has been dismissive. Impossible! How can? This is the 20th century! This is the modern world! We live in a global village! The international community will not permit it! World opinion will not allow it! For those who react like that, I can only direct them to the historical record. Ethnic cleansing and extermination have happened before, again and again and again, and they can happen yet again, and they can happen to you. Why not? Do you have what it would take to stop whoever is powerful enough to attempt them on you? Mind you, if NATO proceeds to exterminate you, CNN will not cover it, the New York Times will not see it as news that is fit to print, just as German radio and newspapers did not cover the extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz!
But, what is more, these options have been considered and are already being implemented against us. In the mid 1970s, during the OPEC oil crisis, some American academics, including Henry Kissinger, floated the idea of a Fourth World of basket case economies into which they would spin off the countries which were not vital to the West. That is no longer a project for the future; it has already been accomplished through the SAP programs which the IMF sponsored, and through the WTO and its Uruguay GATT rules. Most African economies, including Nigeria, are now on their way to join Haiti in the permanent poverty of the Fourth World. To make that clear, let us consider the global economic system and your descendants' prospect of catching up if the present status quo is allowed to remain. Some economists have calculated that, if the 1986 growth rates were maintained indefinitely into the future, "the poor countries would achieve the income level of the rich countries in 127 years' time. They would catch up with the rich countries in half a millennium, 497 years to be precise."
(Penang, Malaysia), Mid-September 1992, p. 14>
In other words, if conditions had remained as favorable to the poor countries as they were back in 1986, it would take till the year 2113 for the incomes of the poor countries to reach where those of the rich countries were in 1986! And not till the year 2483 would the poor countries finally catch up with the rich. And, mark you, that was based on figures before SAP flushed the value of the Naira and other African currencies down the drain; and before the Uruguay GATT came into force and the WTO came into being. Needless to say, under WTO rules, the terms of trade have been moved even more sharply against the poor countries.
Under the World Bank-IMF-WTO system of debt trap imperialism, hoping to catch up in income, let alone in economic power, even in 500 years time, is a hopeless delusion. Furthermore, under their system, any country which has not already industrialized would be prevented from doing so.
Also during the 1970s, other American academics, led by Garret Hardin, put forward the twin ideas of lifeboat ethics and triage; and they advocated that the poor countries be exterminated to save for the rich countries the resources of an allegedly overpopulated Lifeboat Earth. In one of the most provocative presentations of the triage idea, Garret Hardin argued against sending famine relief to "overpopulated" countries, saying:
How can we help a foreign country to escape overpopulation? Clearly the worst thing we can do is send food.... Atomic bombs would be kinder. For a few moments the misery would be acute, but it would soon come to an end for most of the people, leaving a few survivors to suffer thereafter".
-Garrett Hardin, The immorality of being soft-hearted.
Stanford Alumni Almanac, Jan 1969.
In other words, bomb and exterminate the poor, hungry brutes and save their resources for the rich, all in the name of civilization. Later, George Bush, former president of the USA, was reported as saying that they want Africa without the Africans. He was articulating a view held in some high level environmentalist quarters, that Africa should be turned into a big game reserve, as well as
another view held in some high level business quarters that Africa should be turned into an economic resource reservoir for the industrialized world. And, subsequent to all of that, it has emerged that Africa did not become the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic by accident. A strong prima facie case has been established that the AIDS virus is an American biological weapons device, and that the AIDS epidemic in Africa is the result of an AIDS bomb unleashed there when the World Health Organization (WHO) vaccinated 97 million persons in seven central African countries in the late 1970s, in a massive immunization program to eradicate smallpox. Thus, by accident or by design, the proposals to exterminate the peoples of the poor and allegedly overpopulated countries, and to remove the Africans from Africa, are already being implemented through the AIDS epidemic.
The third option, ethnic cleansing, was tried in apartheid South Africa under its Bantustan program. The aboriginal Blacks of South Africa were forcibly expelled from the best 87% of their land and confined to the worst 13%, and those were constituted into allegedly independent Bantustans. These were scattered fragments of poor quality lands, without amenities. Despite resistance and protest and publicity, the ethnic cleansing continued. The decision to abandoned apartheid was made in the mid-1970s, only after Black liberation armies, backed by the Soviet Union, had won control of Angola and Mozambique, thereby bringing apartheid South Africa within striking distance of black liberation armies. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s, the project to dismantle apartheid and install a black government controllable by the West and protective of its interest had gone too far to be reversed. Had the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1970s, the western powers would have felt no need to save their investments by helping to dismantle apartheid. But we must be quite clear on one thing: though the ethnic cleansing option has been abandoned in South Africa, along with apartheid, it can be revived in any part of Africa as need arises. The technique has merely been retired, not destroyed.
Given these facts, we must seriously ask ourselves: Is the international community Blacks-friendly? Those who, in the last six centuries, inflicted the slave catching wars and slavery on us; who conquered, colonized and exploited us; who inflicted genocide on some of us, hunting some of us down like wild beasts for their entertainment (as in Namibia and the former Zaire) - can they be properly seen as our friends? Those who, in the last 50 years, have maneuvered us into permanent poverty, who committed ethnic cleansing into Bantustans on some of us, and extermination on some of us by the AIDS bomb- can they be properly seen as anything but our mortal enemies? So much for our delusion on the humane attitudes and benevolent intentions towards us by the overlords of the global system.
The three prospects for your descendants may be summarized as follows:
The Haiti or Fourth World prospect: that is a continuation of the status quo of malign entrapment in the cage of Debt Trap Imperialism, where they will flounder and famish in the false hope of catching up with the industrialized countries sometime in the late Third Millennium.
The Cherokee or Bantustan prospect: that is where those who inhabit lands with specific resources wanted by the imperialists will be treated to ethnic cleansing and, if lucky, will be confined to some impoverished reservations or human zoos.
The Tasmanian or Triage prospect: that is where they will be selectively and instalmentally exterminated, so that the civilized will not be threatened by the resource demands of the over-breeding poor. Should the AIDS bomb fail to finish the job in central Africa, other bombs are there to be used, and other methods are available, including improved versions of the Auschwitz program of the Nazis.
So, all in all, through the AIDS bomb and the World-Bank-IMF-WTO system, Nigerians, and other Black Africans, are quietly being put through two of these three treatments. The third has already been tried on South Africans and abandoned for the time being. So long as the absolute strategic impotency of Black Africans persists, these and other techniques of destruction can be used against them. It is against this threat that Nigeria's reconstruction must be aimed if it is to be worth the bother.
Nigeria or ECOWAS?
Given the hostile global environment which I have just sketched, in order to survive, Nigerians need to build an industrialized nation that is a military power of the order of China and India, at the very least, and preferably of superpower rank, like Russia, the EU and the USA. Nothing less will do. And they need to do that starting yesterday; they need to accomplish it by mid-21st century at the latest. Otherwise, they can kiss the earth goodbye whenever the imperialists, having secured their malaria and melanoma vaccines, move finally against them.
The task of reconstruction may seem an obvious one: take this unindustrialized, neocolonized noyau called Nigeria, and turn it into a nation and industrialize it. Right? Not quite! A strategist must also take a look at the opposition. What needs to be made into a nation and industrialized must have the potential to beat off a NATO assault of any type, for NATO is the military enforcement arm of the
ultimate enemy. Furthermore, as I already pointed out, Nigeria, for all its boasted endowment, has neither the territorial expanse, nor the resource diversity, nor the human population to place it in the league of China, India, Russia, the EU or the USA. So, what is to be done?
Even in the best of circumstances, nation building is a difficult enterprise. Turning a noyau into a nation will be even more so. But Malaysia has done it in the same period (40years) in which Nigerians have refused to attempt it. But Malaysia did it, not absent-mindedly, not by self-deception, but by a conscious program, intelligently and diligently pursued. Similarly, industrialization is an exacting project, even for an already consolidated nation. Japan did it in one generation, under the Meiji. China did it in one generation, under Mao. And Russia, under Stalin, even did it in ten years! The two together, nation-building and industrialization, make a formidable project. So, is the combined challenge worth the bother? If our people's survival is worthwhile to us, then, we have no choice in the matter: the dual project must be undertaken, and carried out in such a way that the projected industrial nation will meet the geostrategic conditions for its survival. There is no point building a paper house when a forest fire is approaching.
There is no point in building a chicken coop when what you need is an aircraft hangar. If Nigerians want to engage in nation building and industrialization at all, they ought to partake in building and industrializing a nation big enough to survive and thrive in the global conditions of tomorrow. And the nearest potentially adequate politico-economic structure that Nigerians could join in building is ECOWAS. If the reconstruction of Nigeria is to make strategic sense, it must extend to the reconstruction of ECOWAS. Nothing less will do.
How to turn ECOWAS into a state, and its peoples into a nation, and how to industrialize it, and develop its strategic might to the level of China's, at the very least? And how to do so in what little time is still available before NATO invades us in a final campaign to evict Africans from Africa by exterminating us? These are the central problems which the strategic reconstruction of Nigeria must solve. However, that is the theme of Project 2060 which I outlined elsewhere
a few years ago and which, hopefully, will be the subject of a future seminar.
Conclusion
I hope all of you here will lend yourselves to the effort to meet this geostrategic challenge. If you are inclined to do nothing, please remember that, by reincarnation, you could be right back here when the Black Africans are sent down their own Trail of Tears to the Black Auschwitz. For those who want to avoid that bitter experience, Black Redemption and the African Renaisssance demand that we bring to the challenge all our talents and experience and courage and
steadfastness. We either succeed or Black Africans will be caused to vanish from the earth like the Tasmanians.
Please feel free to comment and pass on this information to any Pan-African persons, or to publish and reproduce to the Pan-African community, provided you credit the author, do not alter descriptive terms or change any words without written agreement.
For further information please contact:
Chinweizu: sundoor777@hyperia.com
© Chinweizu 2005
My reflection: This is scary stuff, but it rings so true. Serious food for thought. Some things are difficult to swallow. In recent times, Nigeria has been making one headline after another. There is tension in the air already. Football had been the only thing that tended to bind Nigerians together. If the country does not qualify for Germany 2006, waiting another four years for the next stage could be very frustrating. Given recent events up and down the country, anything is possible in-between.
Reactions had been fast and furious. The noise had reached a crescendo. A coach had been sacked. It was difficult to contemplate a World Cup without Nigeria! So, I was searching for the latest development when I ran into the following article. Suddenly my appetite died. Qualifying for the World Cup paled into insignificance. There was a serious problem! Here goes...
Reconstruction of Nigeria: Four Delusions on our Strategic Horizon
By Chinweizu
This is the danger point. What will become of the Negro in another five hundred years if he does not organize now to develop and protect himself? The answer is that he will be exterminated . . . No race or people can well survive without an aim or purpose . . . The work that lies before us is not so much to identify ourselves with the scattered purpose and greed of others, but to create for ourselves a central ideal and make our lives conform to it. . . and (to create) for ourselves a political superstate . . . that will make us secure in the . . . world. . . . We are determined to . . . found there (in Africa) a nation of our own, strong enough to lend protection to the members of our race scattered all over the world, and to compel the respect of the nations and races of the earth.
- Marcus Garvey in The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, 1922, 1925 (pp. I 48-49; II 15, 16; I 38, 39)
Africans are capable of achieving their place in the sun, provided that they discard the spirit of individualism which has so far prevented social cohesion. It cannot be doubted that one reason why Africans seem destined to serve other races for ever is because they have no sense of oneness . . . Are Africans not doomed to extermination from the face of the earth because they are self-centred and self-satisfied and selfish? Do Africans not deserve extirpation because they have proved their incapacity to carry on and to disseminate the torch of civilization which their ancestors handed to them in the dim past? . . . Black men and women, when will you cease to drift along the way which leads to the extermination of the black race?
- Nnamdi Azikiwe, Renascent Africa, 1937, (pp.98; 117-118; 207)
Introduction
Ideas rule the world. An idea has brought us all together here today. Let me congratulate my senior and good friend of more than three decades on his success in nursing to fruition his idea of a Centre for Public and Business Policy. I have had the privilege of watching as he nursed it along since he left public office earlier in the decade. I have worried for him and his project like supporters are wont to do. When your friend steps into the boxing ring, you feel the blows he receives. For bearing up under pressure, and bringing his idea to
fruition, I salute him. Chu, well done!
The theme of today's Black Redemption sermon is taken from a sentence from a public lecture given by Chu Okongwu, here in Enugu, back in 1985, on the very same subject as this seminar. Lamenting our economic plight at that time, he said, inter alia, that "it might have occurred to us that we have unhelpful notions about ourselves and our environment." In so mildly putting the matter, Chu was being properly polite, as befits a public servant. As a certified and permanent private citizen, I may put the matter quite bluntly. We suffer from quite a few delusions about ourselves and our environment, and these delusions, by fogging up our strategic horizon, are terrible obstacles to our progress and survival. But before I go into all that, a few preliminaries.
As I said before, ideas rule the world. Not only is one generation ruled by ideas from the preceding generation, but some ideas rule for centuries, and some even for millennia. Consider some of the ideas which still rule humanity today, and see how old they are. First, two ideas from Black Africa.
The idea of resurrection and judgement day is a most ancient doctrine in the religion of Black Egypt. It is probably older than the first pharaoh of Egypt, thus it is older than 4500 BC. After 6500 years, it is still going strong and dominating the Black World, though in its Euro-Christian, Arab-Islamic and Judaic adaptations.
The idea of the reincarnation of departed ancestors is probably even older than that of resurrection and judgement day. It is still part of African religion, and a force in our lives. One day, a very old man was asked why he went about planting an orchard of fruit trees. To the questioner the old man answered and said: "I am doing it so that, when I reincarnate, I will find the trees mature and ready for me to eat." So, your future in your next incarnation may well be the one you sow today. Some more recent ideas which, in this century, have been implanted in Africa are the package consisting of the free market, individualism, liberty, progress, egalitarianism, electocracy, and a secular universe stripped of ancestor spirits and gods, and without the civilizing restraints of resurrection, judgement day and reincarnation. These are joint products of the European Bourgeois Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries AD. They are now being sold to the entire world, and are even being imposed by bullets and bombs on those who don't want them. They are ideas which have been injected into other societies to help destroy them, the most recent and spectacular case being post-Soviet Russia.
The other idea is that of a world government. It was developed a century ago by British Prime Minister William Gladstone for use as an instrument and cover for Anglo-American global imperialism. He sold the idea to their American cousins, and Woodrow Wilson tried, but failed, to implement it by way of the League of Nations. Then, under the sponsorship of Roosevelt and Churchill, it became the hidden agenda of the UN. And now, after the Cold War removed the Soviet obstacle to its implementation, Anglo-American hegemony, via the UN, is now being successfully, but surreptitiously, imposed on the world. Thus an idea invented by Gladstone, that great liberal and heir to a fortune built on Black slavery, is what Clinton, from the old slaving state of Arkansas, is finally imposing upon the entire globe.
Ideas rule the world; and like all rulers, ideas can build or wreck. Ideas can help or hurt, clarify or confuse, enlighten or delude, facilitate or impede. We must pay careful attention to them to ensure that we do not blindfold and hang ourselves with the wrong ones.
Unhelpful notions and delusions
If ideas rule the world, then our first stop on the way to social reconstruction of any kind must be at the workshop of ideas. Note that I did not say "the marketplace of ideas," that place where the lazy mind goes to shop for readymade ideas, ideas prepackaged to serve their maker's vested interests. We must begin by deconstructing and reconstructing our idea of our society and of its place in the world. We must, indeed, begin by reconstructing our idea of social reconstruction. Indeed, reconstructing our idea of reconstructing Nigeria is the first task, and that is what I shall concentrate upon today.
In rationally considering reconstruction, we would need to correctly determine what is to be reconstructed and why; the environment in which the new construct will operate; and the goals of the new construct if it is to serve our group interests. We would, specifically, need to find out the following: What is Nigeria, and why should it be reconstructed? What constraints is the world of tomorrow most likely to try to impose on Nigerians? What kind of reconstruction does the survival of Nigerians prescribe? If we have the wrong ideas on these matters, whatever reconstruction we undertake will most probably miscarry or prove counterproductive. In the matter of reconstructing Nigeria, we need to start by ridding ourselves of four delusions which I have singled out for examination today. By doing so, we should be in a better position to appreciate what kind of social reconstruction our strategic situation calls for. But first, let me reflect a bit on my topic: "Social reconstruction in the stabilization of the Nigerian economy." Now, the idea of social reconstruction for survival might make sense to most people. But social reconstruction for economic stabilization? Many might demur, asking, and quite correctly, which exists for the other, the society or the economy?
Does one reconstruct the social supersystem in order to stabilize its economic subsystem? Should it not be the other way round? Not unless the economic subsystem is judged perfect. But when the economy in question is a neocolonial economy; is dominated by a foreign enclave sector; and is tied to foreign dictates by the chains of debt trap imperialism; and when it keeps most of its members impoverished and harassed through economic anarchism - when that is the case, why would its victims want it stabilized?
Why would they go to the trouble of reconstructing their entire society so as to stabilize their economic misfortune? Washington, London and Paris might like to stabilize Nigeria's neocolonial economy, but certainly not the Nigerian people, not unless we are mad, or unbelievably masochistic, or plain suicidal. The only valid reason why the Nigerian people should be interested in stabilizing this neocolonial, anarchist economy is as a necessary preliminary step to reconstructing it out of existence. Sometimes a body arrives in hospital so battered and ill that the doctors will first have to stabilize it in order to begin a full-scale regimen of radical therapy.
It is only on that premise that one would justify social reconstruction as a factor in stabilizing Nigeria's present economy. So, the question is: stabilization for what? Income growth? Industrialization? Development? First, it should be understood that without industrialization, growth is simply bloat and not development. Secondly, if Nigeria's aim is to catch up with China, Japan, the EU or the USA, then it must be understood that it cannot do so without industrializing itself. Having said that, let me now focus on the first part of the topic, namely, the social reconstruction of Nigeria.
Reconstruction for what? Reconstruction for the survival, security, prosperity, power and prestige of the Nigerian people. I submit that that is the minimum objective which would make worthwhile the enormous risks and rigors of social reconstruction.
But why would we want Nigeria reconstructed? What could be fundamentally wrong with this great nation, this giant of Africa, this hope of the Black World? I submit that if Nigeria is not reconstructed, its people will be exterminated during the 21st century. Why? There are some powerful forces in the world who want Africa without the Africans, and the Africans, Nigerians included, are in no position today to prevent them achieving their aim. And why can Nigerians not prevent their own extermination?
It is because, in global strategic terms, Nigeria is in a state of decrepitude and cannot withstand an attack even by tenth rate powers. And why is that? Because Nigeria is not an industrialized society and, even more important, Nigeria is not a nation. If all of that is not obvious, that is largely because of the unhelpful notions or delusions we hold about ourselves and our environment. Which brings me to the four delusions I mentioned earlier. These are the propositions: That Nigeria is a nation or is engaged in nation-building - it is not, I submit. That Nigeria is developing or industrializing - it is not, I submit. That Nigeria is potentially a great power on earth - it is not, I submit. That the global system is Blacks-friendly, and wants us alive and strong and participating as equal members who exercise economic and political self-determination - it does not, I submit. It is actually hostile to us to the point of wanting to castrate and exterminate us as soon as possible. Let us examine the delusions in these popular and conventional propositions.
The first delusion
Regarding the proposition that Nigeria is a nation or is engaged in nation-building, I submit that, though the official rhetoric so claims, Nigeria is not a nation and never has been, nor have Nigerians been engaged in nation-building. If so, what indeed is Nigeria? Nigeria is what some French ethologists, students of animal social behavior, have called a noyau. And what is that? A noyau is a society of inward antagonism, one held together by mutual internal antagonism, one which could not survive if its members had no fellow members to hate. A nation, on the other hand, is a society held together by antagonism toward external enemies and by their defense of a common territory.
The British created a Nigerian state a century ago. In that time, the ethnic groups they forcibly enclosed inside it have created a Nigerian society of sorts, but have failed to create a Nigerian nation. Nigeria simply is a territory, with a state apparatus for internal plunder, and a fountain of petrodollars which together provide a habitat for a multi-ethnic noyau. With between 300 and 400 ethnic groups, and with thousands of autonomous communities which noisily quarrel over the national petrodollar cake; and whose boundary and leadership disputes often lead to mayhem, it is clear that each group's primary identity is its own, and its solidarity is against its visible neighbors within Nigeria. These basic antagonisms are compounded by regional and religious quarrels. One need only recall such conflicts as those of Modakeke, Zango Kataf, Ogoni, Tiv-Idoma, Ijaw-Itshekiri, etc.
Also add to the list the Maitatsine and other fanatical religious riots and the OIC crisis. Add too the AG-NCNC crisis in the old Western Region, the Awolowo-Akintola crisis, the NPC-NCNC alliance-cum-crisis, the NPN-NPP alliance-cum-crisis, and of course the Nigerian Civil War and the June 12 Crisis. However much it may be deplored, the fact is that for each of the constituent peoples of Nigeria, the nation is the ethnic group or clan, not Nigeria. For some, it is the religious community. Attack these and their instincts for territorial defense and external antagonism will be triggered. The ultimate sign of Nigeria's being a noyau is that Nigerians show no sign of having a common external enemy. Not even foreign sanctions would unite Nigerians against the sanctioners. Were Nigerians a nation they would have patched up their June 12 quarrel at the mention of sanctions and united to face the foreign powers.
As a society of inward antagonism, Nigeria has little chance of surviving an attack by another society. Its very instincts will undermine its defensive efforts. This is because a society of inward antagonism, when confronted by crisis, contains no instinctive mechanisms to command the loyalty of its members.
The second delusion
The second proposition is that, for the past four or five decades, Nigeria has been engaged in economic development, and even in industrialization. What Nigeria has been engaged in, actually, is the development of its consumania, using its petrodollar bonanza to feed its appetite for foreign goods and services of every sort. And that, strictly speaking, is maldevelopment: the development of consumania for industrial products without the concomitant development of industrial productive capacity. If indeed Nigeria has been attempting industrialization or development, its failure is stark. After half a century of alleged effort, Nigeria still has no basic industries. In particular, it has failed to build a steel mill despite 30 years and some $10 billion of effort.
It has failed at managing such basic utilities suppliers as NEPA and NITEL. And it has reduced itself to foreignizing the few secondary and tertiary industries that it has Behind this dismal performance lies the criminal wastage of human and financial resources. First of all, foreign contractors build most projects beyond the level of private houses, thus preventing the accumulation of practical experience within the Nigerian population. Secondly, in a quest for quantity without quality, Nigeria expanded and debased the inadequate education system it inherited from the British. As a result, the land is awash with the illiterate, innumerate, indisciplined and amoral products of our so-called universities. Note that I said amoral, not immoral.
If any condition is socially worse than immorality, it is amorality, the failure to even appreciate the concept of morality. As a result, there are today in Nigeria, a disconcerting number of so-called educated adults who have never heard of the Ten Commandments, or heard of any other moral code, and who cannot distinguish between right and wrong. Among them are the networks of campus gangsters who are wrongly called "cultists" - those armed rapists and murderers who routinely terrorize the places of learning. An extraordinary and recent example of amorality was that quite articulate cannibal who believed that killing and eating his fellow citizens was no different from "eating potatoes".
Likewise, in 40 years as an oil exporter, Nigeria has squandered some $500 billion of petrodollar bonanza. Nevertheless, it still begs for a few million dollars of "foreign aid" and "foreign investment", and it is bluffed and insulted for that. Nigeria could have industrialized itself in that time, and with less than one fifth of that bonanza, and with not a single dollar of foreign investment and foreign aid, but its leadership was not so minded. Its leadership conveniently overlooked the fact that, in addition to numeracy and literacy, industrialization needs a puritan ethos, (what Max Weber called the Protestant Ethic), and it needs, particularly in the leadership strata, the spartan discipline of a miser who is allergic to squandermania, and is addicted to making savings and productive investments.
And so, after 40 years of alleged development effort, Nigeria has little to show. Such a monumental wastage of the key inputs of industrialization, namely human and financial resources, is not development. However, the Nigerian elite believes that it has been working hard at development. But then, a child that rubs its belly with water all morning long will claim that it is taking a bath!
The Third Delusion
The third proposition is that Nigeria, by virtue of its size and population, is the giant of Africa, a potential great power on the global arena, and the hope of the Black World. In the days of the oil boom, there used to be glib talk about a Great Nigeria. And even after the oil boom had bust, Nigeria attempted to organize a so-called concert of the medium powers of the world. All that was petrodollar bombast, a farce to help relieve boredom in some quarters.
In actual fact, Nigeria even lacks the profile of a potential great power. Its resource endowment, when compared with those of China, Russia, the EU and the USA, is thin on strategic minerals and plants. Nigeria is not even as richly endowed as South Africa or the former Zaire. And unlike the British or the Japanese, island peoples with few natural resources, Nigerians lack the national power drive to borrow or buy or steal whatever they need from any nook or cranny of the globe. They lazily wait for technology to be transferred to them! Besides, unlike the situation when Britain and Japan became world powers, the resources abroad which Nigeria would need have already been cornered by much stronger powers.
Besides all of that, Nigeria's land is small, and no strategic strength derives from its location. Geostrategically, it is neither a vast transcontinental heartland like Russia, nor an offshore fortress like Britain is to Europe or North America is to Eurasia. Nigeria sits across no geostrategic sea or land or air route, and so lacks the significance and power of a focal ground. It lacks China's regional isolation behind natural barriers of seas, mountains and deserts. And it lacks such natural defences against invaders as the Russian winter.
To make matters worse, Nigerians of the post-colonial era are neither hungry nor greedy nor humiliated enough to exert themselves to become a world power. They are too much addicted to instant and lavish self-enjoyment with little spirit of sacrifice for tomorrow. The great power motivation is sorely lacking in them. On the whole, Nigerians of this era are too soft, too selfish and too naïve for the great power adventure.
All in all, a handful of strategic minerals and plants, a medium sized and poorly located territory, and a realistically estimated population of some 70 million persons who are chronically unmotivated for the rigors and privations of the national power quest: these are not the stuff of which a world power is made in this age.
In summary, what is Nigeria today? It is a noyau and not a nation. It is an unindustrialized, maldeveloped, enclave dominated, neocolonial, anarchist economy controlled by foreign powers through the strings of debt trap imperialism as manipulated by the IMF-WTO-World Bank trinity. It is a strategic nonentity incapable of defending its territory and interests against even the tenth-rate powers of today. If its efforts against Charles Taylor, Foday Sankoh and Bakassi are anything to go by - and they are all we can go by - that must be the honest situation report on Nigeria's capability.
For lack of heavy industries, Nigeria cannot manufacture its own armaments. So, all it would take is an embargo by its arms suppliers for Nigeria to be defeated in any war. And if it is a war between Nigeria and NATO or its surrogates, you can be sure that an arms embargo against Nigeria would be made effective. Nigeria's economic vulnerability is palpable. An economic embargo which withdrew the foreign oil companies and which stopped the importation of rice, spaghetti, champagne, paper, ink, cornflakes, milk, tableware, lace, air conditioners, generators and spare parts would demoralize the Nigerian elite and bring the Nigerian economy to a halt.
It has often been said, by my good friend Dr George Obiozor, the Director-General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), that Nigeria is not a banana republic; indeed it is not; it is something much worse, it is a noyau republic. And that compounds its strategic weakness by making it politically brittle. In fact, Nigeria is what may be called an alewa republic, a sugarcane candy stick republic, all sweetness and brittleness. Hit anything, even a glass pane, with an alewa stick, and the stick is liable to break into pieces. That is an alewa republic for you. I therefore submit that Nigeria is not a potential great power, and therefore is not the hope of the Black World. Nigeria may be the giant of Africa, but it is not one of the giants, actual or potential, of the world. Therefore, if Nigeria is the Black World's hope, then the Black World has no hope.
The fourth delusion
The fourth proposition concerns the attitude and intentions of the overlords of the global system towards Nigeria and Black Africa. The standard view is that, with the end of colonialism, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the rise of globalism, and with the universal promotion of electocracy and the free market ideology, we are now in a new era without imperialism, without white supremacist
notions, without racism, and particularly without Negrophobia. Racism is now supposedly ended and taboo; and the term imperialist has even dropped out of usage and has been replaced by the obscurantist term "the international community". So, all we need do is cooperate with the new system, submit to our mentors in electocracy and free market ways, and we too shall prosper, and we too shall soon arrive at an economic destination that will look like the USA or the EU or Japan. All of that, I submit, is a monumental delusion.
I assume that every normal person is interested in the welfare of its descendants, starting with its children and grandchildren. I would therefore like to share with you my prognosis of what lies ahead for your descendants within the 21st century. The prognosis is bad. Your descendants will most probably be deliberately kept in the prison of national poverty, like the Haitians have been since 1804; or Africans will be driven out of the minerals-rich parts of Africa, like the Cherokee nation was ethnic cleansed out of its homeland in the USA in 1838; or they will be exterminated altogether, like the Tasmanians were in the early 19th century. The reason is that, like the Haitians, the Cherokees and the Tasmanians before them, Black Africans have now arrived at a position of absolute strategic vulnerability. For the first time since the 15th century, the imperialist powers need your valuable land, but they do not need you to work it for them. They will soon have their anti-malaria vaccine, and their vaccine against melanoma, the skin cancer; both of these vaccines will enable them to settle in all parts of Black Africa and to exploit its resources for themselves. So they will get rid of you, unless you can militarily stop them.
During the last five years, whenever I have pointed out this prospect to Nigerians, their usual reaction has been dismissive. Impossible! How can? This is the 20th century! This is the modern world! We live in a global village! The international community will not permit it! World opinion will not allow it! For those who react like that, I can only direct them to the historical record. Ethnic cleansing and extermination have happened before, again and again and again, and they can happen yet again, and they can happen to you. Why not? Do you have what it would take to stop whoever is powerful enough to attempt them on you? Mind you, if NATO proceeds to exterminate you, CNN will not cover it, the New York Times will not see it as news that is fit to print, just as German radio and newspapers did not cover the extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz!
But, what is more, these options have been considered and are already being implemented against us. In the mid 1970s, during the OPEC oil crisis, some American academics, including Henry Kissinger, floated the idea of a Fourth World of basket case economies into which they would spin off the countries which were not vital to the West. That is no longer a project for the future; it has already been accomplished through the SAP programs which the IMF sponsored, and through the WTO and its Uruguay GATT rules. Most African economies, including Nigeria, are now on their way to join Haiti in the permanent poverty of the Fourth World. To make that clear, let us consider the global economic system and your descendants' prospect of catching up if the present status quo is allowed to remain. Some economists have calculated that, if the 1986 growth rates were maintained indefinitely into the future, "the poor countries would achieve the income level of the rich countries in 127 years' time. They would catch up with the rich countries in half a millennium, 497 years to be precise."
(Penang, Malaysia), Mid-September 1992, p. 14>
In other words, if conditions had remained as favorable to the poor countries as they were back in 1986, it would take till the year 2113 for the incomes of the poor countries to reach where those of the rich countries were in 1986! And not till the year 2483 would the poor countries finally catch up with the rich. And, mark you, that was based on figures before SAP flushed the value of the Naira and other African currencies down the drain; and before the Uruguay GATT came into force and the WTO came into being. Needless to say, under WTO rules, the terms of trade have been moved even more sharply against the poor countries.
Under the World Bank-IMF-WTO system of debt trap imperialism, hoping to catch up in income, let alone in economic power, even in 500 years time, is a hopeless delusion. Furthermore, under their system, any country which has not already industrialized would be prevented from doing so.
Also during the 1970s, other American academics, led by Garret Hardin, put forward the twin ideas of lifeboat ethics and triage; and they advocated that the poor countries be exterminated to save for the rich countries the resources of an allegedly overpopulated Lifeboat Earth. In one of the most provocative presentations of the triage idea, Garret Hardin argued against sending famine relief to "overpopulated" countries, saying:
How can we help a foreign country to escape overpopulation? Clearly the worst thing we can do is send food.... Atomic bombs would be kinder. For a few moments the misery would be acute, but it would soon come to an end for most of the people, leaving a few survivors to suffer thereafter".
-Garrett Hardin, The immorality of being soft-hearted.
Stanford Alumni Almanac, Jan 1969.
In other words, bomb and exterminate the poor, hungry brutes and save their resources for the rich, all in the name of civilization. Later, George Bush, former president of the USA, was reported as saying that they want Africa without the Africans. He was articulating a view held in some high level environmentalist quarters, that Africa should be turned into a big game reserve, as well as
another view held in some high level business quarters that Africa should be turned into an economic resource reservoir for the industrialized world. And, subsequent to all of that, it has emerged that Africa did not become the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic by accident. A strong prima facie case has been established that the AIDS virus is an American biological weapons device, and that the AIDS epidemic in Africa is the result of an AIDS bomb unleashed there when the World Health Organization (WHO) vaccinated 97 million persons in seven central African countries in the late 1970s, in a massive immunization program to eradicate smallpox. Thus, by accident or by design, the proposals to exterminate the peoples of the poor and allegedly overpopulated countries, and to remove the Africans from Africa, are already being implemented through the AIDS epidemic.
The third option, ethnic cleansing, was tried in apartheid South Africa under its Bantustan program. The aboriginal Blacks of South Africa were forcibly expelled from the best 87% of their land and confined to the worst 13%, and those were constituted into allegedly independent Bantustans. These were scattered fragments of poor quality lands, without amenities. Despite resistance and protest and publicity, the ethnic cleansing continued. The decision to abandoned apartheid was made in the mid-1970s, only after Black liberation armies, backed by the Soviet Union, had won control of Angola and Mozambique, thereby bringing apartheid South Africa within striking distance of black liberation armies. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s, the project to dismantle apartheid and install a black government controllable by the West and protective of its interest had gone too far to be reversed. Had the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1970s, the western powers would have felt no need to save their investments by helping to dismantle apartheid. But we must be quite clear on one thing: though the ethnic cleansing option has been abandoned in South Africa, along with apartheid, it can be revived in any part of Africa as need arises. The technique has merely been retired, not destroyed.
Given these facts, we must seriously ask ourselves: Is the international community Blacks-friendly? Those who, in the last six centuries, inflicted the slave catching wars and slavery on us; who conquered, colonized and exploited us; who inflicted genocide on some of us, hunting some of us down like wild beasts for their entertainment (as in Namibia and the former Zaire) - can they be properly seen as our friends? Those who, in the last 50 years, have maneuvered us into permanent poverty, who committed ethnic cleansing into Bantustans on some of us, and extermination on some of us by the AIDS bomb- can they be properly seen as anything but our mortal enemies? So much for our delusion on the humane attitudes and benevolent intentions towards us by the overlords of the global system.
The three prospects for your descendants may be summarized as follows:
The Haiti or Fourth World prospect: that is a continuation of the status quo of malign entrapment in the cage of Debt Trap Imperialism, where they will flounder and famish in the false hope of catching up with the industrialized countries sometime in the late Third Millennium.
The Cherokee or Bantustan prospect: that is where those who inhabit lands with specific resources wanted by the imperialists will be treated to ethnic cleansing and, if lucky, will be confined to some impoverished reservations or human zoos.
The Tasmanian or Triage prospect: that is where they will be selectively and instalmentally exterminated, so that the civilized will not be threatened by the resource demands of the over-breeding poor. Should the AIDS bomb fail to finish the job in central Africa, other bombs are there to be used, and other methods are available, including improved versions of the Auschwitz program of the Nazis.
So, all in all, through the AIDS bomb and the World-Bank-IMF-WTO system, Nigerians, and other Black Africans, are quietly being put through two of these three treatments. The third has already been tried on South Africans and abandoned for the time being. So long as the absolute strategic impotency of Black Africans persists, these and other techniques of destruction can be used against them. It is against this threat that Nigeria's reconstruction must be aimed if it is to be worth the bother.
Nigeria or ECOWAS?
Given the hostile global environment which I have just sketched, in order to survive, Nigerians need to build an industrialized nation that is a military power of the order of China and India, at the very least, and preferably of superpower rank, like Russia, the EU and the USA. Nothing less will do. And they need to do that starting yesterday; they need to accomplish it by mid-21st century at the latest. Otherwise, they can kiss the earth goodbye whenever the imperialists, having secured their malaria and melanoma vaccines, move finally against them.
The task of reconstruction may seem an obvious one: take this unindustrialized, neocolonized noyau called Nigeria, and turn it into a nation and industrialize it. Right? Not quite! A strategist must also take a look at the opposition. What needs to be made into a nation and industrialized must have the potential to beat off a NATO assault of any type, for NATO is the military enforcement arm of the
ultimate enemy. Furthermore, as I already pointed out, Nigeria, for all its boasted endowment, has neither the territorial expanse, nor the resource diversity, nor the human population to place it in the league of China, India, Russia, the EU or the USA. So, what is to be done?
Even in the best of circumstances, nation building is a difficult enterprise. Turning a noyau into a nation will be even more so. But Malaysia has done it in the same period (40years) in which Nigerians have refused to attempt it. But Malaysia did it, not absent-mindedly, not by self-deception, but by a conscious program, intelligently and diligently pursued. Similarly, industrialization is an exacting project, even for an already consolidated nation. Japan did it in one generation, under the Meiji. China did it in one generation, under Mao. And Russia, under Stalin, even did it in ten years! The two together, nation-building and industrialization, make a formidable project. So, is the combined challenge worth the bother? If our people's survival is worthwhile to us, then, we have no choice in the matter: the dual project must be undertaken, and carried out in such a way that the projected industrial nation will meet the geostrategic conditions for its survival. There is no point building a paper house when a forest fire is approaching.
There is no point in building a chicken coop when what you need is an aircraft hangar. If Nigerians want to engage in nation building and industrialization at all, they ought to partake in building and industrializing a nation big enough to survive and thrive in the global conditions of tomorrow. And the nearest potentially adequate politico-economic structure that Nigerians could join in building is ECOWAS. If the reconstruction of Nigeria is to make strategic sense, it must extend to the reconstruction of ECOWAS. Nothing less will do.
How to turn ECOWAS into a state, and its peoples into a nation, and how to industrialize it, and develop its strategic might to the level of China's, at the very least? And how to do so in what little time is still available before NATO invades us in a final campaign to evict Africans from Africa by exterminating us? These are the central problems which the strategic reconstruction of Nigeria must solve. However, that is the theme of Project 2060 which I outlined elsewhere
a few years ago and which, hopefully, will be the subject of a future seminar.
Conclusion
I hope all of you here will lend yourselves to the effort to meet this geostrategic challenge. If you are inclined to do nothing, please remember that, by reincarnation, you could be right back here when the Black Africans are sent down their own Trail of Tears to the Black Auschwitz. For those who want to avoid that bitter experience, Black Redemption and the African Renaisssance demand that we bring to the challenge all our talents and experience and courage and
steadfastness. We either succeed or Black Africans will be caused to vanish from the earth like the Tasmanians.
Please feel free to comment and pass on this information to any Pan-African persons, or to publish and reproduce to the Pan-African community, provided you credit the author, do not alter descriptive terms or change any words without written agreement.
For further information please contact:
Chinweizu: sundoor777@hyperia.com
© Chinweizu 2005
My reflection: This is scary stuff, but it rings so true. Serious food for thought. Some things are difficult to swallow. In recent times, Nigeria has been making one headline after another. There is tension in the air already. Football had been the only thing that tended to bind Nigerians together. If the country does not qualify for Germany 2006, waiting another four years for the next stage could be very frustrating. Given recent events up and down the country, anything is possible in-between.
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