100 Years of Non-Violence
Gloria Emeagwali
On Apr 10, 2026, at 07:16, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Keeping it short:
Not much unlike One Hundred Years of Solitude, Biko’s is quite a tantalizing piece, in the ideal world, a mesmerising dream with a more mundane, radical, political trinity featuring angel-saints from the Pan-African pantheon encompassing all Africa and Diaspora, same spirit, 1+1+1=3 : Patrice Lumumba ( Congo) Frantz Fanon ( Martinique) and Malcolm X ( The United States ) - a United States which cowboy angel, genocidal warmonger, sicko wannabe imperial majesty emperor Donald J Trump would like to make great “again”
If he liked, the author - Biko, himself a saint, could have added Marcus Garvey ( I never heard anything about him advocating violence) and for good measure he could have added Martin Luther King Jr. and “ I am prepared to die” Madiba Nelson Mandela to that heavenly constellation of African Martyrs presently breaking bread with the ancestors.
Baba Kadiri says that he “feels disgusted when known professional harlots in Nigeria's politics brazenly present themselves to Nigerians as virgins.” I feel a little uncomfortable with the idea that Ubuntu philosophy is at the root of some of these stalwarts' inspiration when we know full well that it’s their Bible and Quran that are regarded as their wellsprings of inspiration and the main sources of their moral guidance with regard to the use and misuse of what is believed to be divinely sanctioned violence (Joshua) and non-violence ( Jesus)
The perennial question is, how do we resist the violence of the violent ?
There’s the extreme cruelty and barbarity some of them call war. Here’s US warhorse Pete Hegseth boasting with this long list of Iran’s top echelons that his military has murdered
Last week I had the good fortune to meet an Indian military historian at a dinner party and after he delivered a brief discourse on Malcolm X - and I was only coyly praising AHIMSA - one of the most attractive aspects of Jainism and Hinduism, when he assured me that yes, the late great Mahatma Gandhi is most wisely associated with Satyagraha but that he himself said that if pushed to the wall and he had no other alternative then he would, of course, have to fight back.
Jimmy Cliff : Stand Up and Fight Back
We should always bear in mind that the Bhagavad Gita begins at the battlefield of Kurukshetra
Whatever our background, the context is always now ,the most recent and the most current reality, saturating both conscience and consciousness. Within that 100 years framework, some of us post-war children (post WW2) have been inordinately influenced by The War Poets since middle school days and developed an aversion to all kinds of violence during all of our lifetime, to date, whether it was the Algerian War of Independence heroically fought by the Algerians, or the stellar Haitian Revolution of which every African in spirit is so proud, or the bloody January 15, 1966 coup in Nigeria, or the death penalty, or the Vietnam War - which produced flower power and many a Dave Dellinger , or the Yom Kippur War of 1973 or the assassination of Olof Palme and all the wars, including liberation wars in Africa and elsewhere, since 1973….
Biko Agozino
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Biko,
You know this song , “Strange Fruit”
I’m sure that you don’t want to remind me of these lines by The Last Poets:
Niggers are players, niggers are players, are players
Niggers play football, baseball, and basketball
While the white man is cutting off their balls
In Gerontion, T.S. Eliot the poet asks,
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"
You on the other hand are distinctly appealing for that extraordinary miracle known as the impossible, already a veritable contradiction in terms : ”to forgive the unforgivable”
How do you do that? Theoretically, humanly possible?
The so-called New Testament said to be the inspired word of God testifies to one such impossibility : blaspheming the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven…
Whatever next !
Should the Holocaust survivors forgive all the perpetrators of the Holocaust?
Should the judgements passed at the Nuremberg trials be rescinded ?
Should Simon Wiesenthal’s good works have all been in vain and the Nazi villains just needed to say a few Hail Marys and toss a few dollars into the collection box for forgiveness, the caveat being that Jesus has already died for their sins?
At the very least, I was expecting some celebratory thunder and lightning from you, concerning Ghana's John Mahama getting the UN General Assembly to adopt the resolution declaring the trafficking and chattel enslavement of Africans "the gravest crime against humanity" - and demanding reparations!
We ( you and I) can’t shake hands over lumping together disparate religions such as Judaism, Christianism and Islam under the same umbrella because of an alleged common legendary ancestor and call them “Abrahamic religions”
To begin with, there are the genocidal passages in the Hebrew Bible - which to this day are not so easily abrogated, never mind this kind of saucy revisionism, and as you know, there’s a lot of holy war and Jihad in the history of al-Islam. There’s certainly these kinds of contemporary manifestations lodged in these archives dubiously dubbed “the religion of peace” ( https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/) and very little of Jesus’ pacifistic teachings about turning the other cheek and loving your enemies, in the praxis of the Nazis .
In Islam there’s also the concept of loving and hating for the sake of Allah
At the risk of not overemphasising Ubuntu, there is Wole Soyinka’s seminal, practical, down to earth, less mythically cluttered The burden of memory, the muse of forgiveness and from an earlier time , Dag Hammarskjöld and much of his written legacy, such as “To speak for the world