Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Segun Ogungbemi
Benjamin Adesanya Maja Adekunle, a hero, a man who loved his country and gave his life for unity and peace of Nigeria. The "Black Scorpion" as he was popularly called who put smiles on our faces at the end of the civil war. A no nonsense warrior of his time. A man of great honor to the Black race.
A man who stood to challenge racists because he believed in equality of all races because all human beings are created equal by God.The country owes him a great honor and it should be given to immortalize him.
May his soul rest in perfect peace as he has joined his ancestors and may the family and friends receive the most generous hands of comfort from the ancestors and that Olodumare grants them the fortitude to bear the irreparable loss of this great hero. Aase.
Segun Ogungbemi Ph.D
Benjamin Adesanya Maja Adekunle, a hero, a man who loved his country and gave his life for unity and peace of Nigeria. The "Black Scorpion" as he was popularly called who put smiles on our faces at the end of the civil war. A no nonsense warrior of his time.A man who stood to challenge racists because he believed in equality of all races because all human beings are created equal by God.The country owes him a great honor and it should be given to immortalize him.
May his soul rest in perfect peace as he has joined his ancestors and may the family and friends receive the most generous hands of comfort from the ancestors and that Olodumare grants them the fortitude to bear the irreparable loss of this great hero. Aase.
Segun Ogungbemi Ph.D
Professor of Philosophy
Adekunle Ajasin University
Akungba-Akoko, Ondo State
Nigeria
Okey Iheduru
"A no nonsense warrior of his time. A man of great honor to the Black race."---PROFESSOR Segun Ogungbemi, 15 September 2014.
Yes, indeed! What better way to honor the Black race than genocide, including shooting at the corpses of dead children and women and proudly admitting it? As long as it's my co-ethnic who did it, it's o.k..
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Salimonu Kadiri
Just as Adolf Hitler was against the Treaty of Versailles the outcome of World War 1 and therefore planned World War II to reverse the Versailles' Treaty, some Nigerians are planning to reverse the outcome of the Nigerian civil war that officially ended in January 1970. Therefore, these elements still talk about their presumed genocide during the Nigerian civil war that occurred between July 6, 1967, and January 15 1970. I don't know which GENOCIDE these elements are talking about.
In the history of warfare, the Federal Military Government led by General Yakubu Gowon at the time in question has been highly commended for inviting International Observer Team to the war fronts to follow and report on the conducts of the Federal troops. The International Observer Team were from the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity (present day African Union), Britain, Canada, Sweden and Poland. The International Observer Team issued its first interim report on October 3, 1968, in which it established that there was "no evidence of any intent by the Federal troops to destroy the Ibo people (as they were then known) or their property, and the use of the term genocide is in no way justified." The Polish representative in the Observer Team, Colonel Alfons Olkiewiez, at a press conference said that the Team had spoken to 'thousands and thousands of Ibos, soldiers, missionaries and relief workers but had found no trace of mass-killings of Ibos.' The Swedish member of the Observer Team, Major-General Arthur Raab, was quoted by Carl Gustav von Rosen, a Biafran sympathiser as having said that after seven months of observations, 'we have still not seen any signs of the mass anihilation which Ojukwu claims is threatened by the Federal side. Ojukwu is deliberately transferring military headquarters to schools, hospitals, churches and so on. In which case, can one call these civilian targets?' Conversion of civilian establishments into military base was confirmed by Chinua Achebe in his Swan song - There Was a Country - when he wrote on page 172 that his ancestral house was forcibly converted into a military base by the Biafran Army and the residents woke up in the middle of the night by artillery exchanges between the Biafran and Nigerian forces.
General Benjamin Adesanya Maja Adekunle was tremendously a hard-working, deligent and proud professional soldier. He understood that the best way to end the suffering of the people in Biafra was a quick military defeat of Ojukwu and his gang. Thus, on the 25th of July 1967, he captured Bonny Island, the only sea terminal for crude oil then, in a sea-borne assault. When the Biafrans invaded the then Mid-West State in August 1967, General Adekunle was recalled from Bonny Island to flush out the Biafrans from the Delta area of the State. The indefatigble General Adekunle soon returned to launch amphibious attack on Calabar and capturing it on October 18, 1967 and from there his troops linked up with the first Division at Ikom near the Cameroon border, thereby surrounding Biafra. In a quick succession after the fall of Calabar, he captured Itu, Uyo and Ikot Ekpene which according to Phillip Effiong hastened the collapse of the Biafran 12th Division and consequently of Biafra. In February 1968 General Adekunle led his troops to capture Afikpo, Ugep, Ediba, Itigidi and Obubra. On May 18, 1968, he demonstrated his military prowess by capturing Port-Harcourt. Thus, he singlehandedly liberated the entire, Rivers State and South East State, thereby paving way for the appointment of Governors with administative headquarters in Uyo and Port-Harcourt. In September 1968 he captured Aba and in defiance of order from Lagos, he attacked and captured Owerri. When the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson visited Nigeria in March 1969 he requested for a visit to Adekunle's headquarter in PortHarcourt. True to his nature, General Adekunle asked Harold Wilson why he was pokenosing in Nigeria when he should have sent British troops to crush Ian Smith's rebellion in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)? General Adekunle was regarded as Malcolm X or Black power advocate who should not be allowed to finish the war. Barely, two months after Wilson's visit, Adekunle was replaced by Obasanjo in May 1969.
In order to know who actually committed genocide during the Nigerian Civil War, let us consider the millitary situation as at the time General Adekunle was removed in May 1969. Ogoja was liberated on July 11, 1967, followed by the fall of Nsukka on the 15th of July 1967. Enugu the capital of Biafra was captured on October 4, 1967 and by April 1969 all the major towns in Biafra were under the control of Federal forces. But all the Igbo towns captured by the Federal forces were forcibly evacuated so that Ojukwu had a large concentration camps of men, women and children he could not feed. When Aba, Owerri and Okigwi fell in the summer of 1968, the military situation demanded that Ojukwu and his gang should capitulate and surrender. Instead, Ojukwu sent a delegate of Biafrans to France to solicit for more arms and econocic aid. Since the French refused to increase their military and economic support for Biafra, the delegate led by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe contacted Ojukwu that time was ripe for negotiated settlement with Nigeria. Angry Ojukwu asked the delegates to return to Biafra immediately and the leader of the delegate, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, absconded to London. At the same time pictures of starving and dying Biafrans began to emerge in the outside world. Yet, while addresing the so called Consultative Assembly at the end of September 1968, Ojukwu said,"Our real victory lies in our ability to prevent the extermination of our people by a heraless enemy. In so far as these aims are concerned, we have not failed (Biafra: Ojukwu's selected Speeches; Vol. 1, p. 353)." General Benjamin Adekunle did not commit any genocide against the Igbo people rather he tried to prevent Ojukwu's suicidal war against the Igbo.
S. Kadiri
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 22:40:30 -0700
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
From: okeyi...@gmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Okey Iheduru
"In this section of the front that I rule, and that is the whole South front from Lagos to the border of Cameroon.I do not want to see the Red Cross, Caritas Aid, World Church delegation, Pope, Missionary, or UN Delegation. I want to prevent even one Ibo (Igbo) from having one piece of food to eat before their capitulation.We shoot at everything that moved, and when our forces move into the center of Igbo territory, we shoot at everything, even at things that did not move."
By "no-nonsense-warrior-of-his-time and A-man-of-great-honor-to-the-Black-race" Lt. Col. Benjamin Maja Adekunle.
Salimonu Kadiri
Ogbuefu Okey Iheduru:
There is nothing to deconstruct in a propagated malicious gossips lacking source of reference. For your enlightenment, the military Governor of - Lagos State at the time in question was Mobolaji Johnson, Western State was Adeyinka Adebayo, and Mid-West State was Samuel Ogbemudia after the Biafran invasion was terminated. In view of the above facts, General Adekunle could not have claimed to be ruling from Lagos to the Camerroon border. Consequently all other statements credited to him on the premise that he ruled from Lagos to the Cameroon border were just Biafra's illogical war propaganda.
I will be very grateful if you can provide evidence of genocide committed by General Adekunle or the Federal forces during the civil war. Contrary to your hallucination of genocide during the war, I wish to refer you to the report of the International Observer Team of 16 October 1968 which categorically stated that behind the Federal lines, there were 30 thousand Igbo people well and alive in Lagos, and half a million in the Mid-West.
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 22:07:29 -0700
Oluwatoyin Adeopoju
Oluwatoyin Adeopoju
toyin
ToyinThanksLike all human actions in delicate situations, his actions will remain controversial, but that does not negate the heroic significance of his leadership.Having praised Salimonu Kadiri's summation of the Nigerian Civil War, I need to state that I see his referring to the leadership of Biafra as "Ojukwu and his gang" as a most inadequate manner of characterising the Biafran leadership.Ojukwu will always be a hero on account of his leadership of a dogged struggle for self determination.
Oluwatoyin Adeopoju
Segun Ogungbemi
Segun Ogungbemi Ph.D
Anunoby, Ogugua
Adekunle’s war crimes are still not justifiable. There was no need for them. That other military commanders did the same do not redeem him. One war crime does not justify another in the same or different war. Wrong is wrong even in war.
Adekunle testified against himself on many occasions. He convicted himself in the public square. He was triumphalist as he did so. Those must be some measures of the arrogance, indiscipline, thoughtlessness, perhaps unsoundness of mind, and entitlement sense of the man.
War is mostly evil. War brings out the worst in evil people. War has its imperatives. Mistakes are made in war. Adekunle’s crimes against children, women, the innocent, and many soldiers under his command, are not and should be any of them. Adekunle never came round to acknowledging that he should have fought the war differently if he knew then, what he knew later. He seemed incapable of a judicious audit of his merciless command role in the war. That alone is a sad testament to the spirit of bitterness, hatred, and rancor in which he participated as a commander in the war. He rejected every opportunity to redeem himself.
Should it surprise anyone that he was for most of his post military life, shunned by his military peers? He became a virtual outcast in public affairs? Is there any more to say? There is no more to say. May he have the mercy that he did not have on others.
oa
Ibukunolu A Babajide
Output was an opportunist who led his people into slaughter in a most thoughtless manner! Zik and Awolowo warned him but he would not listen.
When you send your son to an expensive school and he returns home with failure dub him a hero because of your emotional attachment to him.
No be hero, no Biro!
Cheers.
IBK
Okey Iheduru
Salimonu Kadiri
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 15:17:37 -0700
Anunoby, Ogugua
If verifiable evidence is available and the request is for “authentic” evidence, the suspicion, respectfully, must be that the seeker of the latter evidence might be in some state of self-denial which by the way is the free available choice of the denier.
Many people all over the world do not believe that all is fair, proper, and right in war. There are also many who do. Everyone is free to believe as they please or choose. International law however is clear on the subject hence “war crimes” and war crime trials that follow.
“The truth is that Major Chude Sokei and Lieutenant Oguchi became pacifists only because the person they were supposed to kill, Dr Michael Ihenokura Okpara, was their tribesman.”
Why anyone based on only blunt supposition will be categorically sure that what they claim to be the truth is, and nothing but the truth is beyond me.
It is a historical fact that Archbishop Makarios, Primate of the autocephalous Church of Cyprus and the first President of the Republic of Cyprus was officially visiting Premier Okpara in Enugu after the January 1966 Commonwealth Leaders Conference in Lagos that had just ended. The coup plotters broke into the Premier’s Lodge (Okpara’s official residence as premier) in Enugu as planned on the night of the coup. They found Okpara and Makarios at a meeting. The coup plotters’ break-in at that time of the night in full military assault gear struck terror into Okpara and his honored guest. They left without Okpara because they knew that the Archbishop and President would be a credible witness to Okpara’s abduction and planned assassination except of course they assassinated the Archbishop and President too. This is the late Archbishop and President’s account of the event, at a formal, public, press conference that he addressed in Lagos, before his departure home.
One needs neither inspiration nor education to recognize that the above Sokei and Oguchi claim is most likely an invented narrative that falsely explains Okpara’s escape from Igbo coup plotters given the assassinations in Ibadan, Kaduna and Lagos on the same night. It was most likely masterfully invented to justify the brutal murders of innocent Eastern Nigerians in military barracks, and in homes and streets of the then Northern and western Regions, in the months and years that followed
The events that led to the Nigeria-Biafra war were tragic but avoidable. The war was even more so. Dispassionate and honest conversations must continue to take place so that the events’ lessons are learned and the events are not repeated.
John Mbaku
J.D. (Law), Ph.D. (Economics)
Graduate Certificate in Environmental and Natural Resources Law
Nonresident Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
Attorney & Counselor at Law (Licensed in Utah)
Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor of Economics & Willard L. Eccles Professor of Economics and John S. Hinckley Fellow
Department of Economics
Weber State University
1337 Edvalson Street, Dept. 3807
Ogden, UT 84408-3807, USA
(801) 626-7442 Phone
(801) 626-7423 Fax
Salimonu Kadiri
S. Kadiri
Oluwatoyin Adeopoju
Abdul Salau
Rex Marinus
Obi Nwakanma
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 14:30:15 -0500
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Salimonu Kadiri
From: rexma...@hotmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
John Mbaku
Rex Marinus
Obi Nwakanma
From: ogunl...@hotmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Moses Ebe Ochonu
---Mohandas Gandhi
Segun Ogungbemi
Segun Ogungbemi Ph.D
I have requested the traducers of General Adekunle to provide authentic evidence to prove their claims that General Adekunle committed war crimes or genocide during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970). Instead of acceding to my request, General Adekunle's traducers have been engaged in publishing innuendoes, outright lies and even forgeries just to smear the image of the revered General who advocated that the best way to stop unnecessary sufferings and deaths of our Igbo brethrens was a quick defeat of the rebel forces. Nigeria is a country where ineptitude and mediocrity are always rewarded while the truly talented, honest and patriots, like General Adekunle, are always disdained and disesteemed. Nevertheless, it is indecent and indecorum to fabricate stories out of ones imagination just because of the desire to discredit General Adekunle. General Adekunle did not cause or declare the civil war but as fate would have it he happened to one the three Divisional Commanders. In a war you have to kill and maim or be killed or be maimed. In war there is nothing like equilibrium where reactions is equal to action. This is best illustrated with what Okonkwo tells us in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart that if a man comes and defecates in your compound, the only manly thing to do is to take a stick and break his head. Breaking the head of a compound defecator is out of proportion with defecating. That is how it is in war. I hate war(s) and that is why I can never b in your compound, the only manly thing to do is to take a stick and break his head. Breaking the head of a compound defecator is out of proportion with defecating. That is how it is in war. I hate war(s) and that is why I can never be a sympathiser of war crimes.
.
Segun Ogungbemi
Segun Ogungbemi Ph.D
Oluwatoyin Adeopoju
--
Anunoby, Ogugua
At the meeting of Western Leaders of Thought in Ibadan, May 1, 1967, Obafemi Awolowo said, "If the Eastern Region is allowed, by acts of omission, or commission, to secede from or opt out of Nigeria, then the Federation should be considered to be at an end and the Western Region should also opt out of it."
The above statement does not seem to me to indicate “clear opposition to the disintegration of Nigeria”. Was it a prayer or a threat?
It seems to me to be opportunistic and I understand why. Awolowo was a leader of his people. He was leveraging on the situation.
Was Gowon’s public rejection on his return to Lagos, of the January 1967 Aburi Accord, brokered by Ghana’s Leader General Ankrah, he, Gowon as head of government in Lagos, willingly signed In Ghana, an act of “omission or commission”?
Gowon also rejected a confederation set-up which I might add was not the disintegration of Nigeria.
Why were more acts of “omission and commission” necessary? How many such acts were going to be an optimum set?
Salimonu Kadiri
From: rexma...@hotmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Rex Marinus
The story of Nigerian Civil war as this writers wishes to see it is not only fraught with contradictions, but it also flows from deep unresolved antipathy against Ojukwu and the Igbo. I can tolerate this writer's personal and very subjective view of Ojukwu; it is his prerogative; but to use the excuse of war to justify mass murder or genocide is intolerable. So, Ojukwu caused a war with Nigeria? This is ridiculous revisionism: (a) The East of Nigeria did not broach secession until the Lagos regime began to violate the agreements at Aburi and went a step further to take decisions affecting the East of which the Easterners were not part or privy; (b) the East did not launch war against any part of Nigeria until July 6 1967, when the Gowon regime in Lagos opened a three-front attack on the East from Gakem, Nsukka and from the sea in Bonny. The East and its leadership were forced to take both precautionary and defensive positions. As the federal forces invaded and killed the Eastern population, refugees from these minority "liberated areas" escaped and poured into the Eastern heartland in search of refuge from the federal onslaught, until the population of the displaced overwhelmed the food supply and extended family networks of the East. Ojukwu did not drive over 1 million Easterners to leave the rest of the federation to return to the East by September 1967, thereby complicating the refugee situation of the East even before the first shots were fired. Ojukwu did not force families fleeing from war to relocate into the Igbo heartland in search of refuge. It is therefore mischievous revision to suggest that Ojukwu "forced" Easterners into concentration camps. Displaced refugees in the East who had nowhere else to go were accommodated in Primary school buildings; secondary school halls; church buildings, etc. The federal army routinely bombed these civilian targets, including open markets and hospitals. All these are well documented in incident reports by the Red Cross, Caritas, and even by foreign journalists who were present and were witnesses to some of these war crimes and drew international attention to them. Pursued right into the heart of the land, with a food blockade was enforced to force the Biafra to surrender, the Biafran regime, yes, was overwhelmed by 1968. But rather than allow a food corridor as was agreed in many international negotiations, the Federal government enforced a bloackade to prevent Ojukwu's government from getting food supplies to feed mostly the civilian population at risk. As Chief Awolowo openly said in one of his interviews as justification for the food embargo on a Biafra which he authored, "I knew civilians would suffer, but the soldiers would suffer more." That was the logic behind a very inhuman policy that starved young children, the old, and the sickly to death. Where Benjamin Adekunle's homidal campaign drove people to seek refuge inside Biafra held positions, the strafing of civilian targets from the air, and the food blockade killed off more people from disease and hunger.
Now, should Ojukwu have surrendered in the face of a federal onslaught that, from July 29 1966 made it clear that its aim was to selectively annihilate the Igbo, and did not do anything in the period to reassure the Igbo of their safety in the federation? People do not fight to the death if they glimpsed life at the other end f the conflict. The Igbo are also not people you simply lead by the nose. Ojukwu resisted the call to declare secession and worked to dissuade the agitators. But every step of the way, the federal side, from the very beginning made it clear that the only peace it sought was the peace of the graveyard; a compliant peace; or as Ojukwu once aptly put it, the kind of peace between Jonah and the belly of the whale. You mention Peter Enahoro, I think you should read his two essays on that period, one particularly, "Why I Left Nigeria," published in the Transition magazine of 1968. The excuse that by defending themselves, the Igbo therefore must take responsibility for the war, and the denial of the clear crimes of war perpetrated against them is soulless and wicked. The writer of this piece is the product of a mindset that has continued to circulate self-regarding fiction. But it is all water under the bridge? No. The contradictions of the Biafran war continues to haunt Nigeria. Today, however, my generation of Igbo are resolved about Biafra: it was a war misfought because the Biafran leadership was schooled far more in diplomacy than in warfare. Biafra was surprised by war because it did not prepare for war; and it did not fully realize in those years the depth of the anti-Igbo animosity that is at the core of contemporary Nigerian imagination. The Igbo is the Nigerian unheimlich , because they reflect the visible terror of "otherness" as a result of their pervasive migrancy, boundary-crossing, and resettlement of the new nation. Perhaps it is true, there are many Igbo who are afflicted with the neurosis of unresolved trauma; but there many on the other side of this narrative who are afflicted with the neurosis of unresolved fear and guilt.
Obi Nwakanma
From: ogunl...@hotmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Segun Ogungbemi
Sent from my iPhone
Assensoh, Akwasi B.
Brother Segun:
Since I have always been a Nigerian at heart (as General Dr. Yakubu Gowon once described me at an UK function) but not a bona fide citizen of the great, oil-rich country called Nigeria, I take a brotherly issue with your posting below. By the way, Dr. Gowon, as a postgraduate student at University of Warwick, UK, and I shared Professor James O'Connor (an Irish scholar, who was previously at University of Ibadan) as Advisers: he was the head of my postdoctoral Peace Studies program at University of Bradford, UK, while also serving as Gowon's External Examiner!
As a Historian (and, also, as an ordained Baptist Minister), I wish to "sue" for peace and decorum by urging that we stop calling Elders (or past leaders) names, especially those who are not with us anymore on this "wretched" earth to defend themselves. Please, if possible and also in context, do remember the historicity of Ukpabi Asika-Nnamdi Azikiwe controversy of "I am tired of being ex-this, and ex-that" as well as Asika's "Biafra, Enough is Enough" broadcast!
For example, I lived in Nigeria before and, partly, after the unfortunate civil war broke out. When working for Nigerian newspapers and, also, the then London-based West Africa Magazine, the bitterness of the war, on both sides, was such that Journalists were either disciplined or even dismissed (fired) if they did not put quotation marks around the name of Biafra (i.e. "Biafra") in their news postings or sub-edited work. Those were part of the dark days in African Journalism!
From what I saw happening to certain ethnic groups in Nigeria, including the Igbos, it was like being pushed firmly to as well as against the wall, and still being told: "Kafiri" or "Move on": "Move on" to where? I am sure that the Igbo leaders, who decided on the war, which was embraced by their own people, regardless of how much suffering they all endured in the end, meant well for their kith and kin. For example, when Okonkwo Edem (?) of then "Radio Biafra" quoted the Biafran leader (Ojukwu) as saying that "Gowon is not my superior; academically, he is not, and militarily, he is not", it had a lot of serious implications that true historians knew at the time and still know today!
Maybe, looking today at the outcome of the recent British-Scotland voting, we can issue clarion calls that Nigeria and other nations, which once faced dismemberment (as Nigeria faced in the civil war) should learn from the voting. But, in the heat of things in the late 1960s, no Igbo leader as well as no Hausa leader looked at an electoral referendum to decide the fate of Nigeria. It was: "To keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done!" The closest Nigerian and Biafran leaders came to was the "Aburi Accord", and, again, Radio Biafra did drum up their leader's scream: "On Aburi I stand."
Sadly, that was also the time that legal luminaries on the Nigerian side, including the well-respected Justice T.O. Elias, belatedly, cautioned the Nigerian leader (Gowon) that he had been sold the idea of "Confederacy" at Aburi!
So, the Nigerian side dismissed the "Aburi Accord" like a hot iron in one's hand!
At New York University (NYU), as a graduate student, my biggest fight with my German room-mate was on the day he showed me Nazi currency and, subsequently, tried to sell the idea to me that: "Hitler was a devoted German nationalist, and that without Hitler's able exploits, there won't be Germany today!" I gave him an African beating of Hogan Bassey-Roy Ankrah boxing type and, with the institution's Jewish roots, NYU housing officials sided with me, and asked the "poor" German guy to leave the apartment we were sharing in the Greenwich Village because they found him at fault, as a provocateur!
If Hitler, today, is seen or regarded by some well-educated Germans (including my former German room mate, who earned a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology) as a nationalist, then what should Ojukwu be to his Igbo compatriots? Please, bear in mind that the Biafran leader did not study science at Oxford but history, up to a master's degree level: as "O. Ojukwu, M.A. (Oxon)"! Therefore, he had a sense of history like all of us have today.
Maybe, if Ojukwu and other Nigerian leaders (including Gowon) were to have a second chance today, they would have invited the United Nations, as the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and Togo did in deciding the fate of the Trans-Volta Togoland, which -- by a UN plebiscite -- became Ghana's Volta Region in 1956, shortly before Ghana's independence in 1957.
Brother Segun, you certainly have a right to have your freedom of speech in democratic America but, in mediation, I feel that "name calling" will never end, if others too have to start calling those you respect names; it is like what we learned in colonial elementary school: that those living in glass houses should not start to throw stones at people outside the house!
In VC Aluko's admirable words, I will also say: There you have it!
A.B. Assensoh, Oregon (from my sick bed!).
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2014 5:36 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Ikhide
- Ikhide
Cornelius Hamelberg
It is the period of repentance. Yesterday and today, the Almighty judges who shall live and who shall die this year and the judgement is sealed on Yom Kippur the evening of October3rd through October 4th.
A conference on the Biafra War would open up new wounds there would be more recriminations, especially about the truth/s...
If Boko Haram were to encroach on Igbo territory you would know what I mean...
If Nigeria's ethnic enclaves are given a choice of referendum to stay with or leave Nigeria, there's the possibility that the most resource-rich areas would opt to leave, like an arrow leaves a bow...
It was roughly a year after Robert Faurisson the Holocaust denier had been chased out of where he was going to hold his lecture in Stockholm. In 1994 at the Gymnasium where I worked a visiting German history teacher , a Dr so and so, thinking that I was sympathetic to the Islamic cause took me aside and wanted to talk to me. He started on a certain trajectory and I early anticipated where he wanted to wind up – and so, to avoid doing some of Wofa A. B. Assensoh's Hogan kid Bassey cum Dick Tiger cum DK Poison on him, I just walked away and left him standing there....
There are always two sides to a war and at the end of the war, the victor or winner is the one who usually lives to tell the whole story. Take the second world war for example. From the age of ten till about when I was thirteen years old, I had read dozens of war novels starting with “Two Eggs on My Plate” and packing it up with Cornelius Ryan's “The Longest Day” I had seen a couple of war films too - recorded or interpreted historical facts all from Great Britain and the Allies points of view of course – not to mention the history books and all the gossip they usually contain (history as gossip) – and years later, including all that Hugh Trevor-Roper. Well my step father (a proud Scot) was a decorated war hero (decorated by King George for bravery) but I only got to know the depth of my step father's hatred of the Nazis when Germany equalised with England just minutes before full time at that world cup which England eventually won, 4-2....
So in the Nigeria -Biafra war, who is or was the underdog? Underdog-ship promotes sympathy. At my college there were slightly more Yoruba than Igbo students so there were certain tensions in the air - in the evenings the Igbo students would huddle together to listen to the reassuring Oxford accents of their man Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. They sometimes gave the impression that just the alleged Oxford accent alone was a guarantee of success in the theatre of war – I guess that Emeka Ojukwu was their Sir Winston Churchill. In those days Kenneth Ofodile and I were dating two sisters - Kenneth was dating Winifred Fowler, the younger “Sista” of my girlfriend Ebunolorun, so I would get Kenneth's views not directly from him but through Ebun who got the horse's tail through Winifred (in due time Winifred became Mrs Ofodile and sadly passed away, years later in Sokoto....)
I´ve had a long chat with Mr. Salimonu Kadiri – a veritable goldmine of Yoruba culture and a mine of information about that Biafra war and so too would you if you had been a parachuter....
I forgot to ask him about child soldiers and whether anyone was decorated for bravery. I get nervous when I hear some of my Igbo Brethren talking about the Biafran “Holocaust” - in the shadow of the WW2 Holocaust
Well, we've heard a lot, there's Ojukwu's friend Frederick Forsyth who has written a bit about the Biafra War and a couple of years ago also this:
...From: <a href="mailto:okeyi...@gmail.co
Salimonu Kadiri
From: rexma...@hotmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Rex Marinus
Regarding what you claim above to be a misrepresentation of your intentions in my response, it is either you do not understand the English language well enough to register and recognize your own intentions, or you do not know exactly the nature of your intentions. So, I'll put it plainly again: your intention is to put the responsibility of the suffering in Biafra squarely on Ojukwu and Igbo leadership and to absolve Awo and Adekunle of the responsibilities for war crimes. In doing that, you've taken an extreme view that suggests that the Igbo got what they deserve because they fought a war in which Gowon and his Federal side was blameless. This is how you want to read your own history of the war.
Now, Salimonu Kadiri, I do not know which books you have read, but I do know from your argument that your reading is narrow and fraught with "ill intentions." So, I'll suggest you broaden your readings a little bit more on the Nigerian crisis, and just for starters, I will recommend three books: J.R. Sullivan's Breadless Biafra (1969), Michael Mok's Biafra Journals (1969), and Waugh and Cronje's Biafra: Britain's Shame. When you're done with these three preliminary texts, I'll point you to some more. It'll be a worthwhile project to re-educate you beyond your narrow and pedestrian reading on Biafra, and point you to a vast archive of writings, journalism, and so much more on that war other than familiar party-line narrative you call history. The Biafra war is a very well-documented war.
Ojukwu rightly refused to attend any Council meetings outside the East where his personal security was not guaranteed. He was not averse to meetings; after all he met in Aburi. But with the Federal government already distorting, dismantling, and reneging on the agreements reached in Aburi, there was clearly no good faith on either side. It is also not true that the Federal government was about ratifying all the agreements, when it had in fact refused for example to pay Federal Civil servants of Eastern Nigerian origin who had fled to the East in the pogrom as was agreed in Aburi thus putting significant fiscal pressures on the Eastern government. The Federal government's refusal to remit Eastern Nigeria's tax, particularly the oil tax, was another infraction. The tinkering with emergency powers was also very clearly, a trap for Ojukwu who was undisputably the target of the emergency power clause. So, in fact, talking about the fictionalizing history, I think you need to look steadily in the mirror.
By the way you wrote the following: "Both Ojukwu and Gowon derived their powers from the barrel of the gun and not out of election or plebiscite by Northerners and Easterners respectively. Therefore Ojukwu had no mandate from Easterners to boycott Supreme Military Council meeting especially when his salary was being paid by the Nigerian Army. No matter how we may twist our words, the fact remains that if Ironsi had not stolen the coup of the five revolutionary Majors on January 15, 1966, and converted it to the triumph of his ethnic group over others, the July 29, 1966 coup could not have occurred as well as subsequent civil war."
True, neither Gowon nor Ojukwu derived their powers from the ballot box. In Eastern Nigeria however, unlike the Federal end, there was at least a Consultative Assembly that ratified Ojukwu's mandate. Gowon did not conduct a plebiscite either in Western Nigeria or Midwestern Nigeria, which with the North became the tripartite bastion of his power base and war with the East. It is interesting that you exclude those two regional entities in your assertions. But finally to put this rather pointedly: it amounts to churlish disregard for truth to suggest that the civil war would not have happened if 'Ironsi had not stolen the coup of the five revolutionary Majors... and converted it to the triumph of his ethnic group... ." And there is the simple sum of your intentions. Why not put it this way: the Civil war in Nigeria would not have happened if there was peace in Western Nigeria; if there was no sustained incendiary politics in the West, the escalation of which was one of the central reasons for the January 15 Coup led by Emmanuel Ifeajuna. It is irresponsible to suggest that "Ironsi stole" a coup when, as the General of the Nigerian Army, he was sworn to defend the nation with his life. Ironsi at great personal risk mobilized and quashed the coup of young men who were still wet behind their ears. The excuse for murdering Ironsi was that he wanted to create a "unitary state" and "unify" the Nigerian services. How ironic! Ironsi did his patriotic duty to Nigeria, and so did Ojukwu, and for an alternative, more balanced and sophisticated view of the facts of that history, I will urge you to read Akin Osuntokun's essay on Benjamin Adekunle published in Thisday. That should teach you both the felicity of language and of intentions.
Obi Nwakanma
From: ogunl...@hotmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Ibukunolu A Babajide
I don learn new thing today o! My dinosaur uncle SteveK deploys the Logic of the Aligator!
His case is that of, "Eta ko ni ogbon Ijakumo to je wipe ti o ba nu idi tan ni o ma nsu le!" The ever clean abd always pruning Anteater lacks the wisdom of the Hyena, who cleans its anus before defecating on it.
Go figure!
Cheers.
IBK
Salimonu Kadiri
Ibukunolu A Babajide
Salimonu,
Leave them they are allergic to the TRUTH. They are dogs that will perish with the hunt whose ears are deal to the hunter's whistle!
Cheers.
IBK
Ibukunolu A Babajide
Cornelius Hamelberg
Away with this type of sophistry! Please be a little more respectful to Mr. Kadiri. There is no room for “it is either you do not understand the English language well enough to register and recognize your own intentions, or you do not know exactly the nature of your intentions”
Are you hereby pandering to Pope’s mischievous irony that
“A perfect judge will read each work of wit
With the same spirit that its author writ...”
?
My understanding and the common understanding is that Mr. Kadiri did not say “ This is the story of the Nigerian Civil War as this writer wishes to see it” Did he say that? NO! So, as Mr. Kadiri says so indignantly, you have reframed his sentence to convey your own message.
Please let your message stand on its own legs (not Mr. Kadiri’s) and on your own facts / story / understanding...and yes, as you rightfully (righteously?) say, Mr. Kadiri’s “intention is to put the responsibility of the suffering in Biafra squarely on Ojukwu and Igbo leadership and to absolve Awo and Adekunle of the responsibilities for war crimes.” Mr. Kadiri does not oppose this understanding, so what is all the fuss about? I would have thought that the matter had been brought to a successful conclusion with this paragraph from Mr. Kadiri (faintly reminiscent of Hamas using human shields in Gaza):
“In the history of warfare, the Federal Military Government led by General Yakubu Gowon at the time in question has been highly commended for inviting International Observer Team to the war fronts to follow and report on the conducts of the Federal troops. The International Observer Team were from the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity (present day African Union), Britain, Canada, Sweden and Poland. The International Observer Team issued its first interim report on October 3, 1968, in which it established that there was "no evidence of any intent by the Federal troops to destroy the Ibo people (as they were then known) or their property, and the use of the term genocide is in no way justified." The Polish representative in the Observer Team, Colonel Alfons Olkiewiez, at a press conference said that the Team had spoken to 'thousands and thousands of Ibos, soldiers, missionaries and relief workers but had found no trace of mass-killings of Ibos.' The Swedish member of the Observer Team, Major-General Arthur Raab, was quoted by Carl Gustav von Rosen, a Biafran sympathiser as having said that after seven months of observations, 'we have still not seen any signs of the mass anihilation which Ojukwu claims is threatened by the Federal side. Ojukwu is deliberately transferring military headquarters to schools, hospitals, churches and so on. In which case, can one call these civilian targets?' Conversion of civilian establishments into military base was confirmed by Chinua Achebe in his Swan song - There Was a Country - when he wrote on page 172 that his ancestral house was forcibly converted into a military base by the Biafran Army and the residents woke up in the middle of the night by artillery exchanges between the Biafran and Nigerian forces.”
During the war many of us were not neutral - as we understood it, Biafra had a moral case but the way things were going the best outcome would have been for all hostilities to cease immediately. We were among the first to append our signatures when Professor Eldred Jones was petitioning for Wole Soyinka’s release.
It’s been said that “In war, truth is the first casualty”
With regard to Biafra, is this true or false?
The good the bad and the ugly vs. the beautyful ones are not yet born?
I think of you, I think of the Biafra War, the gravity of what some still call “the Biafran Holocaust” and the verisimilitude of the bildungsroman, of how rapidly one bloody event succeeded the other in the disparate stream of events that culminated in Biafra, the war whether inevitable or not and the loss of Biafra, even if after the tragedy, the dream lives on.
How different is the story of Biafra from the history of Biafra? The difference is surely not that between fact and fiction. Perhaps, it’s the same difference between addressing you in poetry and addressing you in prose? The difference between the national epic/mythopoeia and the cold prose in which is written the history of Hitler...except that in the history of Biafra and in the history of Nigeria there is no Hitler, so there is no need for your Deutsche Dogge attitude towards Brother Salimonu Kadiri about exhorting him to read some second hand books and third rate accounts written by the guys you mentioned (all published in 1969) when, as Ikhide Ikheloa so recently laments in his latest piece, it’s “ most curious and disheartening that the late Chief Ojukwu failed to give us what would have been the most comprehensive account of Biafra.”
There’s a great difference of course between reading those kinds of books and actually being in the thick of it (in action, in the field). Whether it’s about what happened in Ghana on February 24th, 1966, or after the elections in Sierra Leone on March 17, 1967 or indeed with Biafra from May 30th 1967.
Is it any wonder the Junior Jesus / J J Rawlings’ second coming was on 31st December 1981 and Muhammadu Buhari’s coup was on 31st December 1983? Perhaps a good time to strike when everybody is tipsy and a festive ‘appi New Year mood?
There is a domino effect theory – that some of the military officers from former British colonial West Africa were trained at Sandhurst and Aldershot where the camaraderie started, and that’s why we find that a coup in Ghana is followed by a coup in Nigeria, is followed by a coup in Sierra Leone - and when it comes to the latter I don’t need to read Cox’s “Civil-Military Relations in Sierra Leone: A Case Study of African Soldiers in Politics” or W Scott-Thompson’s “Ghana's foreign policy, 1957-1966” (which I finally found in an antiquities bookshop in Cairo of all places) to learn the genesis of those books or to learn exactly what happened, since you are not going to find the essence of exactly what happened in e.g. Cox’s book.
(I guess that it’s the difference between being at the foot of Mt. Sinai at Shavuot - and reading the learned rabbis commentaries and songs about the event a few thousand years later...
C.H.
Rex Marinus
"Further, in the International Observer Team's Report it is stated that observers have encountered difficulties in obtaining access to certain parts of the Port Harcourt Region in Occupied Biafra. The Team wished to go to Elele and other villages near Port Harcourt to investigate a report of mass extermination. They were refused access by the Military Commander on the grounds that he had no instructions to allow them to enter the area and they had to return to Lagos where they took the matter up with the Federal Government. This resulted in their obtaining permission to enter the area two weeks later, and not immediately. This could indicate a deliberate attempt by the Federal Government to cover up incriminating evidence. During my visit, I must say, I did not encounter any such obstruction, but it is obviously in the interest of the Federal Government, subject to genuine requirements of military security, to allow independent observers free access to the occupied areas. Finally, I am of the opinion that in many of the cases cited to me hatred of the Biafrans and a wish to exterminate them was a foremost motivational factor" (31-32).
This report by the International Commission of Jurists clearly raises doubts on the accounts and conclusions of the report of the International Observer Team of 1968, but not in your mind or in Mr. Kadiri's mind. And by the way, if you do not like the accounts of Waugh & Cronje, because they are "third rate" and they are "2nd hand," then read Madiebo, Commander of the Biafran Army, whose first rate account of the war is a classic, and puts to question Salimonu Kadiri's claims. And pleas, sir, stop quoting Pope or some obscure neo-classical or late renaissance poet to me; they "jar my drinking lobes;" I prefer such as Senghor or Okigbo, with the muscular rhythms. I salute you.
Obi Nwakanma
Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 11:19:00 -0700
From: cornelius...@gmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Cornelius Hamelberg
Obi,
It’s half past three in the morning and there you go again! I hope that title Obi is big enough, to cover the aura hanging over your head.
Next you’ll want to give me a reading list from the thousands of books about Biafra and expect me to understand them all. I think that you are talking to the wrong Yoruba man this time. Fortunately for me I know nothing about any Abam Masquerade or Oko Jumbo, so I dunno what you are talking or trying to talk about or if your Oko is standing on its own two hind legs like Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo or if you are transmitting directly from mother tongue Igbo. Obviously you can´t understand my simple prose, but I’m not going to say to you, what you said to Mr. Kadiri that “it is either you do not understand the English language well enough” etc
“for mere mortals like (you?) to grasp its tail not to talk of its head”?
That’s how smart you really are. The monkey (not a mortal) knows the difference between his head and his tail and that is no fault of mine. “It's only that I understand the man that the monkey can leave behind.” (JT)
It’s a popular Jewish prayer, to be the head and not the tail. Perhaps you think that is far, far away from humility?
You are making a big mistake. You are at liberty to repeat your mistake declare a new Biafra and see what happens this time too and then you can compose some Jeremiah-like lamentations about “the responsibility for your own suffering but not those who levied war against you”
Some words - just as “metal on concrete” jars your drink lobes” indeed.
Prodigal, and what about the “watery presence”?
You “don’t know about “common understanding”? Well, common understanding is that water for example is wet, blood is red, birth is the beginning and death is the end, not the beginning of some mumbo jumbo about “eternal life”
Mr. Kadiri mentioned some gradgrindian facts – what happened - (did Jesus die on the cross or not) not the various interpretations of events, or your hermeneutics about signs and wonders. If you want to go anywhere with this issue – you could start by refuting the facts that are documented and commonly accepted by the likes of Achebe, Adichie, Ojukwu himself and other “victims of the war in Biafra ”
Quoting one Dr.Mensah, you say that Mr Kadir should “show some respect to historical truth” He probably is not aware of such a “fact” and the fact is that sometimes one historical truth head-butts another “truth” - yes indeed Dr. Mensah’s report corrects an omission from an earlier report – and you may kindly leave my “mind” out of it - since none of those events depend on my having a “mind” or not.
My heart is not made of stone. I lived with your people for four years you know, so, am I not your Brother? I’ve have met a few Igbo warriors from that war in and out of Nigeria, and after hundreds of hours of discussion I should say that I have a fairly good idea about what happened and that perhaps if I had accepted the invitation to join the Arochukwu society, I would have learned a little more.
As I gathered later, the Biafra cause was very popular in Sweden - in fact when we finally moved to Sweden in October 1971 – I once got a lift on someone’s moped over Västerbrön to Reimersholme where we lived and when we got over the bridge the guy who had given me the lift took me to a kiosk , where he bought me a litre of milk and insisted that I drink up. He told me that he understood that I was from Biafra and that is why I was looking so thin. So I drank up.
In addressing Mr. Kadiri, you could lay more emphasis on this your loaded question: “should Ojukwu have surrendered in the face of a federal onslaught that, from July 29 1966 made it clear that its aim was to selectively annihilate the Igbo, and did not do anything in the period to reassure the Igbo of their safety in the federation?”
And why should I believe Madiebo’s account when pitted against Adekunle’s? (N.B. I’m a sceptic, I don’t even believe in the so called “ Gospels “. You may even prefer Dante’s Inferno for all I care ( I give you permission) - he will be remembered long after Obi Nwakanma and some of his favourite priests are forgotten - and there you have it...
CH.
Rex Marinus
" You are making a big mistake. You are at liberty to repeat your mistake declare a new Biafra and see what happens this time too and then you can compose some Jeremiah-like lamentations about “the responsibility for your own suffering but not those who levied war against you”"
Ah, my brother! You're of course my brother, having lived among "my people" and shared that holy gruel from the palm with others at the rise of the sun in that land. And yes, Ishmael Reed did say something about that Hoodoo man coming from the stock of the "Long juju of the Arno (Aro) in Eastern Nigeria" in Mumbo Jumbo. But sir, it takes great art to understand your "signifying" and for the uninitiated mere mortals like me, it might finally take a visit to Ihu Chukwu N'Aro. I say this with great humility.
And to the above: I do not write to "declare a new Biafra." I have not recovered from the old Biafra yet. I write this rejoinder only in salute to the great wisdom of the Igbo sages who said: "the real problem with the world is when the old see and do not talk, and the young hear, but do not listen." I think you misread my intentions. My true intentions have been to "refute" Salimonu Kadiri's revisionism. It is linear, and I do not mind to say, irresponsible too. There you have too!
Obi Nwakanma
Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 19:06:06 -0700
From: cornelius...@gmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Cornelius Hamelberg
Oba Obi,
Like music to my ears: “Ah, my brother! You're of course my brother, having lived among "my people" and shared that holy gruel from the palm with others at the rise of the sun in that land.”
I miss Nigeria: the Delta Creeks, Nembe, Port Harcourt, Owerri, Aba, Umuahia, and Buguma...
Indeed, the holy gruel from the palm - borei pri hagafen!
Uninitiated my ess! C’mon Papa Doc, you are a sophisticated man, after all that jazz, Joyce, Pound, Yeats, world literature, or must we only engage with the loins of your masculine riddim like Aime Cesaire, Tchicaya U Tam'si, Syl Cheney-Coker? And in the philosophy department, of course Kwame Anthony Appiah and Lewis Ricardo Gordon? Where should stiff upper lip go for comedy?
I guess that Emeka Ojukwu’s version of the Biafra War would have sounded like scripture to you, especially if written posthumously, with a vantage view – maybe quite another perspective after meetings with both Igbo and Federal victims of the Biafra War on the other side. But Biafra is not one of my favourite topics of discussion. I am as morally outraged as you, but I am much better informed about the Second World War and the Holocaust, of which I am reminded each time I go to the library, since I go past this Holocaust Memorial Wall which leads to the front door and I am a voracious reader.
Like all the Holocaust victims whose names are engraved on the wall, I am also mortal – flesh and blood, very much so, and so is everyone in my household, my children, grandchildren, my parents, grandparents, great grandparents and great great grandparents and that’s why I’m puzzled that in your last two posts you keep on harping about being “merely” mortal. Today, you talk about “uninitiated mere mortals like me” and yesterday too it was “mere mortals like me”. I may sometimes sound a little like Benjamin the donkey in Animal Farm but seldom like Bilal ibn Rabah, Islam’s first muezzin who (in his own words) even after liberation from slavery, maybe as an act of humility would keep on referring to himself in the past tense...
“Mere mortal like me”, If it were an Igbo Lady going on like that I would think that she was being coy as in
“Then I think you're playing far too rough
for
a lady who's been to the moon”
Your last posts show me how mortal you are too, especially after listening to you here. You could give me a call sometime so that you can verify how very mortal I am. You could be pleasantly surprised.
By the way (1) Kadiri is a nice chap. He keeps me laughing with all those “chicken growing teeth” Yoruba jokes and he’s a cultural chauvinist of course (he thinks that Soukous is like “Spanish music” not like Apala.... Don’t mind him....
By the way (2) Archbishop Desmond Tutu & his daughter Mpho were also going on about forgiveness in this program ...they leave me wondering how much of that spirit and the insights from Mr. Soyinka’s The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness have been relevant to post- Biafra healing processes.
Salimonu Kadiri
From: rexma...@hotmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Oluwatoyin Adeopoju
Oluwatoyin Adeopoju
Its a mini conference.
toyin
Abolaji Adekeye
I do feel the dude who should have faced the courts is Ojukwu.
He stands condemned for not stockpiling food. He is condemned for leading an unprepared people to war against wise counsel.
An army matches on its belly according to Napoleon and Ojukwu ensured his soldiers were fed fat leaving crumbs for the people he led into war. Is it not naive to expect your enemies in a time of war to feed you?
I do sympathize with the igbo nation. The starvation and deaths were avoidable but Ojukwu would rather have it like that for the sake of propaganda. The fault lies in him (Ojukwu)not Gowon, Awolowo or Adekunle.
Objective Igbo men see through Ikemba. Achebe mentioned some of his flaws in that controversial book. The lack of preparation, the arrogance and stubbornness. (I can't quote because my copy of the book is still doing the rounds)
Rex Marinus
What we can deduct from the reasoning behind this excerpt above from Salimonu Kadiri include: (a) Ojukwu said he caused or declared the war and starved his own people; Awo and Adekunle did not declare war, they fought not to starve, but to save the East, particularly Igbo people; (b) Salimonu does not blame the "Igbo victims of this war" but "Ojukwu and his ilk" - because the "Igbo victims" of the war were mindless, powerless, comatose infants who woke up one day in 1967 and were told 'go to war!' by "Ojukwu and his ilk," and they took up arms and mindlessly went to war in which they became merely innocent "victims." Now, someone should please define the intention of this stance by Mr. Kadiri, because what I sense beyond the infantilization of the "Igbo victims of this war" is left-handed charity that obfuscates on the causes and effects of the Nigerian civil war. It is insult masquerading as charity.
I have gone on this path before, and I'm really reluctant to engage in this debate. I already see its end. We will end up boring people on this forum with Nigeria's petty ethnic narrative, because in the end, it will boil down to that. No matter the wealth of evidence to counter long held positions, we will end up repeating and recycling our positions because they offer us some kind psychological consolation. Then someone or the other will begin to cry and call the other "ethnic supremacist" because they'd have exhausted their argument, and have nothing else to offer as counter but churlish obloquy. Then we will grow silent again until the god of the crossroads awakens someone again from the deep slumber of reason, who will take a new stage name, perhaps Monusali Dikari, and begin again, this cycle of inordinate folly.
All I want to offer in summary will be the following: Salimonu Kadiri's piece is no more than revisionist clap-trap, and it really speaks to the ways that repeated falsehood in a closed circle erases every scintilla of truth. For example: the Igbo union had been formed long before Azikiwe returned from the United States in 1935. Azikiwe led the NCNC as a platform of anti-colonial nationalists intent on freedom from the British colony. Soon after India's independence and the partition, the Action Group and the NPC were both formed and financed with support from the Colonial office; the AG with money, logistical, and organization resources funneled to it through the Yoruba chiefs and businessmen, allies of the British government in 1947, to oppose and undermine the Nationalist movement. Awo, was a card-carrying member of the British Labor party as a student in London in 1945 where he was recruited by the British, offered political prospects, and was introduced to, and inspired by the writings and politics of a Pakistani fascist intellectual and politician, as he makes it known to us in his own biography. His politics was irrendentist, not nationalist. Hugh Foot, who was Awo's minder also brokered the first party alliance between the new AG and the NPC in 1947, the intent being to unite the reactionary factions of the North and South in a coalition that would form Nigeria's independent government against the prospects the nationalist party, the "Socialist NCNC." I will not go into any further details here, but suffice it to say that disagreements by 1951 during the Ibadan conferences between these two interests on who to lead the coalition and the death of Bode Thomas, who was also the lawyer that stood for Ahmadu Rabah when he'd been accused of thievery, and central to it all, led to the eventual collapse of this coalition move.
Awo was not an innocent and scented bystander in Nigerian politics and affairs as most of his later-day acolytes now paint him. When his ambition to lead the federation failed in 1959/60, he organized the first coup to overthrow the elected government of the federation, and was tried and jailed. In his judgment, Justice Sowemimo noted that the weight of evidence before him ties his hands and leaves him no room but to jail Awolowo. All these had come in the wake of his political troubles. His party was enmeshed in an internal crisis. The Coker Commission investigated AG's party finances and malfeasance under Awolowo's leadership; the AG party crisis came from some of the allusions made here by Kadiri, but also from the combustible disagreements between factions of the party which wanted to maintain its original conservative ethos and the "young Turks" like S.G. Ikoku and Bola Ige, who wanted to shift its politics to a more centrist, even socialist ethos. Awo backed the young radicals especially as his agreements with the British had collapsed and yielded not national leadership as was promised him, but opposition which he chose rather than join an all-party national government as was proposed to him in 1960 as Deputy Prime Minister with the Finance Portfolio. Awolowo's inability to manage his party's first real crisis led to the internal divisions and the factionalization of the AG by 1962. With Akintola leading the government of the West and Awolowo suddenly finding himself without a real power base as leader of opposition at the center, he sought to overthrow the government of Nigeria violently. The creation of the Midwest from Western Nigeria all happened in 1963 was while Akintola was premier, but Awoists like Salimonu Kadiri often make it seem as though it was aimed at Awolowo. Yes, the NCNC supported the creation of the Midwest, certainly in part to secure a political advantage. But the Action Group had launched the first "attack" in that direction when it provided aid, campaigned for, and funded Foncha and the Kamerun Independent Party in the plebiscite of 1960/61, to be removed from the Eastern region and be joined to the Cameroons. The loss of the Cameroonian part of the East and the retention in the North of the Adamawa province, gave the Balewa government greater leverage that also led to the crisis of the coalition in the central government. But that central government, was far from an " Igbo and Hausa-Fulani controlled" government. If anyone as much as looks at the structure of the Council of Ministers in Balewa's cabinet from 1957-1965, it will put a pin on the credibility of Salimonu's unfounded claims. That coalition was an NCNC-NPC government which had very solid Yoruba in the national government, but not Yoruba of the AG clique. However, as Akintola increasingly asserted his independence and authority from Awo, and sought to reposition the Yoruba in what was to be the original alliance with the North, and with Awolowo in jail, the politics of the West became even more combustible and anarchic. Salimonu conveniently places all Awo's troubles on the machinations of his Igbo (Zik/Okpara) and "Feudal" Hausa-Fulani adversaries. This is hogwash. From 1961- 1966, Western Nigeria was the most chaotic, most violent, and most unprogressive region of Nigeria, until January 15, 1966 when Ifeajuna's coup put a stop to the slide and its cost in human lives. The West was like the North with its Boko haram today. It had much to do with the combustible politics of the West which has its roots in the historically unresolved issues of the Kiriji wars and the internal dynamics of Yoruba politics which Awo himself addressed in some of his writings.
Ironsi, a target of the January 15 coup, stopped the coup in the South, while Ojukwu staged a defiant holdout in the strategic outpost of Kano, Northwards. Ironsi did not seek power, and was in fact reluctant to assume the emergency authority ceded to him by the Acting President. But it is a strange claim to say that Ironsi "stole" the coup of the Majors and turned it into the "triumph of his ethnic group." There again is the mystifying Salimonuan modishness that blames the Igbo on everything that has gone wrong in Nigeria. But anyone who pays but even a cursory attention to Ironsi's actions and policies and appointments from January to his death in July 1966 will notice that nothing he did favored the Igbo, nor did he run an Igbo government. I therefore challenge Salimonu to show proof of Ironsi's Igbo triumphalism or in the alternative show some decency and retract this hokum, and apologize to the memory of a great General who was sacrificed at the altar of modern Nigeria. As for Awo, by 1966/67 having be granted pardon and released from jail, he suddenly found himself serving under "feudal" northerner, as Vice-President and Minister for finance. Only too happy to serve, and with the Igbo away from Nigeria, Awo put to force his plan for a new Nigeria in which the Igbo would no longer be in the way of his own ambition. Awo was like the dog who was given a morsel to wag his tail, and he did wag that tail. Achebe was clear on Awolowo's politics and his intentions. Anyone who says "starvation is a legitimate instrument of war," speaks from a Nazi rule book. Any war commander who says, "I shoot everything that moves including Children" is a war criminal. It doesn't matter how much or how often the Salimonu Kadiris of this world work to deny it. In fact, it would not matter who caused the war. The conduct of the war remains the issue.
Obi Nwakanma
From: ogunl...@hotmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Anunoby, Ogugua
Anyone who says "starvation is a legitimate instrument of war," speaks from a Nazi rule book. Any war commander who says, "I shoot everything that moves including Children" is a war criminal.
Salimonu Kadiri
From: rexma...@hotmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Rex Marinus
I have excerpted this very opening statement by this writer, to highlight the depth of very self-evident feeling about the Igbo behind which the likes of Salimonu Kadiri find their excuse - exterminate them all! The "Diala" (meaning the Igbo citizen of the land), Salimonu writes, "are "sadists and moral destitutes; they are defined by greed, avarice, peep-hole exhibitionism and gradation of perversity"(sic). This language is so reminiscent of another that have led to quarantines, transporting, and "final solutions." I hope, Mr. Hamelberg, that you take note. The man goes on to talk about "Osu" - of which he knows nothing about - and much else in this long, incoherent, and rebarbative piece of ahistoric junk. I will not insult the intelligence of people on this forum by responding to the details of this ignorant, half-baked junk, mostly also because it flows from a lunatic and incoherent mind that needs serious clinical/ psychiatric help, but also because to continue this insults every rule of good conduct in a clean debate. The evidence is clear in Salimonu's cultural psychology, if the "Diala" is what he thinks of them, for such declarations that led to the Igbo genocide 1966-70, aided and perpetrated by the likes of Kadiri's great heroes and exemplars - Awolowo and Adekunle. There is not much to add, except in the words that Kadiri Salimonu himself utters. And I'll leave it at that.
Obi Nwakanma
From: ogunl...@hotmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Oba Obi,
I have just talked to Mr. Kadiri (about half an hour ago) exhorting him to please accept the invitation to the Stockholm Igbo Yam festival this time. You were once a Biafran and you are now both Nigerians, so what is needed is peace and love, not hatred and misunderstanding, the spirit of reconciliation is much needed, no matter whatever Nigerian fighter battalion or national football team you may find yourselves.
I told him about a little episode in which my Kalabari friend a Mr. Long John (and very tall too) the chairman of the NPN Youth wing drove over in his new jeep to collect me in Buguma. In his wife a beautiful Igbo woman was waiting in the car, we drove in silence past the Kalabari National College, heading towards Degema. He finally broke the silence: Cornelius, this beautiful wife is the treasurer for the NPP. Do you think it is right that I should go on feeding her?” he asked me. I remained neutral.
As I explained to Sali , that’s why in both operations in Gaza (in 2008, 2014), Israel had to conclude the matter as quickly as possible, since most of the food and other necessary supplies come from and through Israel , including fuel and if the war were to be an extended one then the ensuring humanitarian disaster would be compounded by food shortages and in no time at all the whole anti-Semitic world would be lined up along with Satan the accuser, foaming at the mouth at the United Nations, the Arab League, the OIC, and the EU, and accusing Israel of genocide-by-starvation of the poor Palestinians.
As for that idiotic self-hating Igbo psychiatrist whom he quoted I would like to say to him that it was that kind of hateful characterization of the Jewish people as a sub-human, ungodly and degenerate species that paved the way to what the Nazis intended as “The Final Solution “, that is he extermination of all of the Jewish people, and this is where Martin Niemöller and his “ First they came for... and then they came for the Igbos, is wholly relevant.
“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?” (The Merchant of Venice)
Salimonu Kadiri is a good friend and that’s why he is cordially invited to my Better Half’s upcoming birthday party. (She is an admirer of ZIK). Knowing Salimonu Kadiri as I do (it as I who invited him to the Forum) I should like to testify on his behalf that he may be Yoruba Cultural chauvinist (he is) - in the sense in which you are also an extreme exalter of Christopher Okigbo – which in my opinion is not a crime – certainly not a crime against humanity - and in my opinion you yourself are no mean poet.
As far as I understand it - you have to be careful about the way in which you approach Mr Kadiri even when you disagree with him – it would be better to approach him (and me too) respectfully - not to undermine either his integrity or that intelligence which can and has been measured, since no one has a monopoly on Shakespeare’s bawdy. In short, respect begets respect.
And what if his opinion does not deserve respect? Then I give you permission to bomb such opinions incessantly - bomb the opinion but not the man (this Yom Kippur I learned that all my past sins have been forgiven and that means that only my pure soul remains (with some of its old , cherished opinions and positions of course – and that’s what we’ve got to work on since religion and politics and in the case of Nigeria tribalism too, which can get people heated to an unbelievable extent – far beyond the boiling point.
I know the Igbo people, to the extent that I have lived with them for close to four years, there in Nigeria and as observant as I am, I do not recognise any of the traits that that Igbo self-hater has been babbling about which does not mean to say that here are no self-exalters among the Igbos, the Yoruba, and the enemies of Israel too ( the Israel’s national football team cannot play and friendly or international matches in any of the Muslim countries in the Middle East of North Africa – or Iran ---( don’t know about Turkey) since the authorities say that they cannot guarantee their safety in the field or out of the field...
So it’s good that you both take some time out – on this overheated subject of the Biafra War, until you meet again, maybe on another topic....
Sincerely,
Cornelius...
...
Cornelius Hamelberg
...
Salimonu Kadiri
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 15:14:22 -0700
From: cornelius...@gmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Cornelius Hamelberg
The very last time I conversed with Brother Salimonou Kadiri (and that´s the phone call he is referring to) I was certainly not on a peace mission on behalf of myself or anybody else. The Biafra war is over and I was not on a peace mission period. On the contrary, I was full of praise and wonderment at Mr. Kadiri´s command of facts and the ever-ready details at his fingertips. It´s one thing to have some abstract humanitarian principles and to argue from that position - in the real world, it´s quite another matter to support those positions with irrefutable facts --- ( not “revisionist clap-trap”). It´s dishonest to call facts (such as what happened at Hiroshima on 6th of August revisionism (in fact quite unaware of what day it was I got married on Hiroshima Day (6th of August 1969) - and believe it or not the jazz guitarist Charlie Byrd had a concert in Freetown in the evening. About Hiroshima & Nagasaki, My Better Half translated Sadako and the thousand paper cranes into Swedish in 1983 ... it´s a book that should be read in all secondary schools , along with Tell ye your children – so that we do not go down that path again either in Europe, the USA, Japan or Nigeria.
Anti-Semitism has its own definition – sometimes the Arabs say that they are also Semites – as if that absolves anyone –including some of the self-hating Jews from being anti-Semites. I don´t know if the Igbos have yet coined a term that would cover the malignant forms of anti-Igboism (and that would include the self hating Igbos (if there are any) apart from this Dr. Ozodi, the self-hating Igbo psychiatrist who sounds like the prototype of Josef Mengele: first the Nazis demonized the Jews in pretty much the same way that Ozodi begins, in the extended piece that Brother Kadiri quoted. Ozodi must be a sick man. Just like the Serbian psychiatrist Radovan Karadzic who having described Muslims in very pathological terms, going on about their alleged “anal fixation” as people who bow in submission and are beholden, he said, to authority – he, constituting himself as that authority, laid out a justification for the genocide of Bosnian Muslims.
I´m sure that If Dr.Ozodi had said the same things about the Yoruba you would have said that he was an okuru son of a bitch. I do assume that you know all about the Nuremberg Laws
I am certainly not saying “that the Federal Government of Nigeria intentionally prolonged the civil war and are thereby” guilty of genocide by starving the Biafrans to death”
What I said was that in the last two Gaza operations Israel has had to bring matters to a decisive conclusion as quickly as possible otherwise if the war were to be an extended one then the ensuing humanitarian disaster would be compounded by food shortages and in no time at all the whole anti-Semitic world would be lined up led by Satan the accuser, foaming at the mouth at the United Nations, and accusing Israel of genocide-by-starvation of the poor Palestinians.
Whereas the federal Government was not under that kind of pressure (from a united anti-Semitic world led by Satan the accursed...
It´s up to you to decide dear Salman, why the anti-Semitic world led by the accursed Satan did not go to the UN foaming at the mouth and accusing the Federal Government of starving the poor Biafrans.
I´ll stop here for the time being. Your request “Let us rummage a bit into History. The Bible of the NAZIS, MEIN KAMPF” etc will be fulfilled a little later.
Please be patient.
S. Kadiri
...I have excerpted this very opening statement by this writer, to highlight the depth of very self-evident feeling about the Igbo behind which the likes of Salimonu Kadiri&n
Salimonu Kadiri
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 19:36:33 -0700
From: cornelius...@gmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
CC: ogunl...@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tribute: General Benjamin Adekunle
Corrected!
Dear Salimonu,
“The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will
later be past” (Dr. Dylan)
Please forgive my delay in getting back to you as promptly as I would have wished, it’s just that, inspired by Professor Harrow I have been cozying down with some of Mordecai M. Kaplan‘s seminal ideas concerning Judaism as a civilization , starting with this immensely readable introduction to the reconstructionist approach – so, if I’m missing in action for the next six weeks , know that I’m settling down to a thorough investigation of the matter. Reconstructionist – not to be confused, confounded or conflated with revisionism, a term that has surfaced in this post-Biafra War discussion…
You have been my revered teacher for a very long time and I have chosen this public space instead of our usual one-to-one hide-and-speak telephone system, since it is in the same public space that you addressed all of us including Obi Nwakanma and Yours Truly.
There is a cluster of emotions usually evoked by the word Holocaust the mother of all genocides, but we are not talking about comparative Holocausts or are we? Genocide is genocide, whether it’s Rwanda, Pol Pot, King Leopold’s Ghost, or what the Germans did in Namibia or historic or not these various passages in the Bible. I guess that even if it happened on another planet named after Roman idols down here on earth it’s bad enough with man’s inhumanity to man.
You are widely read. Have you read The banality of evil ?
You argue that the death by starvation of a million Igbos towards the end of the Biafra War ought not be conflated with the extermination of two thirds of European Jewry - 6 million Jewish souls murdered in cold blood by the Nazis, because they were Jews – an event at which a conscientized Christian world still reacts to with horror – in spite of which anti-Semitism continues unabated in “the New Europe” and the rest of the world . The difference between the Jewish Holocaust and what happened in Biafra was not only one of dimensions and scale but also, as you painfully set out to argue, the circumstances were not only different, since as you say, sarcastically (but factually) the Igbos are not/ were not Jews and that “Perhaps, Obi is an albino which makes him to think that he is a Jew, but his problem of racial identity would be solved the day he cares to look into the mirror to discover that he is not of a Caucasian but a Negroid race. Next time you impersonate as a Jew, I will sue you for libel and fraud!!”
I understand where you’re coming from. Just the other day I was joking with one of our elders about the security around our synagogue at Yom Kippur – I told him that I know that I look like some of the terrorists – and he protested pointing there are members of the congregation supposedly “darker” than me. This is an aside: I should kindly like to refer you to (a) The colors of Jews and (b) the story of Rabbi Natan Gamedze (C) There´s also Gamache's theory that the Biblical prophet Moses was black. And last but not least, (d) King Solomon who said , "I'm Black and Beautiful.
The Biafra War took place after Nigeria’s independence and your inheritance , the Lugardist colonial structure known as the Federal Republic of Nigerian Brotherhood remains intact just like the former German colonial strongholds still known as Cameroon, Namibia,Togo…
As you may have noticed, not a word from me about Osu. I usually don’t talk about matters that I am not well informed about. I know a lot more about the social stratification of Hindu society from the times when the Law of Manu promulgated the Hindu Caste system – and that there is the warrior caste known as the Kshatriya
Am I to understand that you are in some way support Mr. Hitler’s war on the basis of his search for raw materials? Please tell me it ain’t so. In any case when I continue with this short epistle to you, I’ll address that along with the other issues you raised from Hitler’s Bible, with some friendly fire. I’m amazed that you don’t bring Hitler’s Mufti into the picture. In any case he was not a Nigerian Igbo.
It’s now 4.21 am…
I hope to see you soon.
Yours truly,
On Thursday, 9 October 2014 23:16:22 UTC+2, Salimonu Kadiri wrote:
...
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Salimonu,
I accept your punctuation mark at the end of your last epistle, although in my opinion you should be courteous enough to still leave the door open after making so many scurrilous remarks, which invite engagement and in some cases are deserving of a severe thrashing, fortunately of course not by me.
It must be for similar reasons that poets seldom interpret or give interpretations of their own poetry; How else to understand the paradox of “Let the wise bark and the fools give no answer” ?
No fundamentalist or literalist am I with whatever word. I read Professor Falola's eulogy of Ali Mazrui's various relationships and employment of the word as another key approach to his own A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt
Just for the record, I disagree with your interpretations of my analogies and comparisons. You ought not impose your own personal meaning or understandingly of what someone else says in direct contradiction to a declared intention or meaning despite their insistence being manifestly to the contrary. (My friend Dan was pissed : she ordered iced tea, he told me (this was whilst we were viewing the Vasa) and when the tea was about to be served she wanted to know “ Is it hot?”
In my kind of poetry I can compare x to y (meaningfully)
I can even compare you to the man on the moon (and you don't even have to be an earthling for me to be able to do that) nor do the exterminators Mengele and Eichmann have to be of the same tribe as those they exterminated for me for me to compare them to anyone else.
I don't know if poetry is an element of mathematics but I do believe that poetry , even exalted revealed poetry ( such as “ Christ died for our sins” and like propositions about the structure of reality) should be kept out of strictly logical arguments that are best conducted in bared-boned or if you prefer in bare-arsed prose.
I've been interested in psychology in the same way that you are interested in history – would like to see more of the psychological in African literature, reflecting the damage that colonialism has done to some people in real life, not just Fanon, so that that they are always in dialogue with that phenomenon (colonialism and its ravaging effect) that has succeeded in setting up house in their minds as the most constant source of reference just as some historians divide time between bc and ad...(not to talk about the poetry of the inner man, poetry from the interior, not just about what we see when we look out of the window...
Dr. Peter Paul Heinemann had interesting theories about mobbing and by extension power relations. Oh yes, I have had quite a few similar encounters....
Concerning the ravages of ebola, what would Africa South of the Sahara do today do without the goodwill humanitarian assistance from the West? That was not a rhetorical question.
Peace!
...
Chika Onyeani
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