My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader

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Abolaji Adekeye

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Jul 15, 2018, 6:49:30 PM7/15/18
to Cornelius Hamelberg

Chielozona Eze

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Jul 15, 2018, 7:53:15 PM7/15/18
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Thank you for posting this, Abolaji Adeleke.
You beat me to the punch. An insightful read. Every African who can read A B C should read this.
Chielozona

Chielozona Eze
Professor, African Literature and Cultural Studies, Northeastern Illinois University; Extraordinary Professor, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
Fellow - Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze
www.Chielozona.com



On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:43 PM, Abolaji Adekeye <blargeo...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Salimonu Kadiri

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Jul 16, 2018, 6:12:47 AM7/16/18
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I expect our distinguished and honourable men, who were foaming from both sides of their mouth over the ÒYÓ Yoruba ELÉSÍN's tradition of dying with the King, to react to Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani's revelation in the link below.

S. Kadiri



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Abolaji Adekeye

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Jul 16, 2018, 6:13:12 AM7/16/18
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You are welcome. It is illuminating read. 

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018, 00:53 Chielozona Eze <chi...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thank you for posting this, Abolaji Adeleke.
You beat me to the punch. An insightful read. Every African who can read A B C should read this.
Chielozona

Chielozona Eze
Professor, African Literature and Cultural Studies, Northeastern Illinois University; Extraordinary Professor, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
Fellow - Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze
www.Chielozona.com



On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:43 PM, Abolaji Adekeye <blargeo...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM

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Jul 16, 2018, 6:14:23 AM7/16/18
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"Sometimes a family would sell off a disgraced relative, a practice that Ijoma Okoro, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, likens to the shipping of British convicts to the penal colonies in Australia: “People would say, ‘Let them go. I don’t want to see them again.’ ”"(Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani).

Another "insane perspective"?

CAO.

Windows Live 2018

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Jul 16, 2018, 11:46:47 AM7/16/18
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Biko.

You must accept by this account that the ranks of the Yoruba Kabiyesi of the past were rather modest in having one Elesin accompanying them to the beyond when an Igbo equivalent had SIX Eleshin in one go!

OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Salimonu Kadiri <ogunl...@hotmail.com>
Date: 16/07/2018 11:16 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader

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I expect our distinguished and honourable men, who were foaming from both sides of their mouth over the ÒYÓ Yoruba ELÉSÍN's tradition of dying with the King, to react to Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani's revelation in the link below.

S. Kadiri



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Skickat: den 16 juli 2018 00:43
Till: Cornelius Hamelberg
Ämne: USA Africa Dialogue Series - My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader
 

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Biko Agozino

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Jul 16, 2018, 12:51:31 PM7/16/18
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Adaobi Nwaubani narrates in the NewYorker the fact that there is hurt in every family that is self-inflicted. Having the humility to confess past wrongs and ask for forgiveness is part of the healing. Having the courage to forgive those who wronged you frees you from the resentment which Mandela called a poison that you take and hope that it kills your enemy. Desmond Tutu teaches that there is nothing that is unforgivable and there is no one who does not have something to be forgiven. Africans have forgiven the unforgivable crimes of 400 years of slavery, 100 years of colonization and 70 years of apartheid but some Africans still find it difficult to ask for forgiveness or to forgive members of their family for past wrongs. What Adaobi described is going on all the time in Igboland where the belief in witchcraft is not as pronounced as in some other cultures. Instead of hunting for witches to blame for your misfortune, the Igbo are encouraged to look inward and see if there are things that need atonement or to ask their Chi for a better deal. Adaobi's family did not kill or exile the adopted child of an enslaved ancestor but forgave him even after he was suspected of plotting to poison a leader of the family. Okonkwo was also told off by Achebe for killing Ikemefuna, a child that called him Papa, just because an oracle told him to do so. The Igbo have no history of raiding their neighbors for slavery or to execute genocide in order to colonize their land. They believe in letting the Eagle perch and letting the kite perch.




Igbo culture, like all cultures, is not perfect. Culture is not defined as a way of life, contrary to colonial anthropology. Culture is defined by Cabral, Ngugi, Hall and James as a struggle between the forces of domination and the forces of liberation. The way poor people live under capitalism, the way women live under patriarchy, and the way that black people live under racism is not the way they chose to live as a way of life but represent the conditions that they did not choose, conditions imposed by law and tradition, under which they struggle to make history. Osu and Ohu emerged among the Igbo as a consequence of 400 years of being raided as prey during the European trans Atlantic slavery that cost an estimated 100 million lives to Africa, according to Du Bois. The Igbo, unlike their neighbors, had no kings and chiefs, nor did they have standing armies to defend them against slave raiders and kidnappers or with which to raid their neighbors; and that was why they were the predominant group of people captured for sale from what Europeans called the slave coast, according to Douglas Chambers, Murder in Montpelier: The Igbo Africans in Virginia. Despite the blight of Ohu and Osu on the egalitarian Igbo system of direct democracy, the fact remains that the Igbo survived the impacts of the slave raids, colonialism, and post-colonial genocide very remarkably. We are survivors, sang Bob Marley and the Wailers.

The question that Adaobi is raising is the old one of how could Africans sell their own into slavery? This was the question that Walter Rodney tackled in his doctoral dissertation on the History of Upper Guinea Coast. He concluded that what happened during the 400 years of the African holocaust was the process of class formation and primitive accumulation. The few chiefs who sold fellow Africans did not regard the war captives as their own people because they belonged to a different class or to a different nation. It was not a trade of the sort where parents put their own children on the shelf to say that these ones are toro-toro, those ones are shishi-shishi, and those other ones are nai-nai pence. It was a long-running war of pillage and the hunting of labor in black skin that Marx condemned in Das Kapital. It is true that some African elites benefited from the enslavement of Africans jst as some African elites continue to benefit from the looting of African resources today but the vast majority of the Igbo and other Africans have always been activists against oppression and the main beneficiaries were Europeans from royal families down to pirates. The fact that the wounds of slavery are slow to heal in Igboland is evidence that the Europeans still owe reparations to the survivors of the European slavery. Adaobi's family is showing the way by apologizing to those they hurt in their family and asking for forgiveness from the ancestors. When will Europeans make atonement for crimes against humanity?

Another Guyanese writer, Evelyn King, posed the same Rodneyian question in her novel, The Hangman's Game, in which a Guyanese professor of linguistics who was married to a Nigerian and who lived under a brutal military dictatorship that was killing fellow Nigerians with impunity, posed the question in the novel: how could Africans sell their own for 400 years? In the novel, her Nigerian husband retorted by asking, how could she write a novel today about a slave rebellion and still make the enslaved lose instead of giving them victory in her fiction? She protested that it was a historical novel but her husband encouraged her to revise the history. The pain of the African Diaspora is real and sometimes I get it from students in the US or in the Caribbean, were you not those who sold us? To which I would answer that I would never have sold anyone, I would have been among the warriors and freedom fighters who did fight back with sticks and stones against guns to try and save us from being captured as Olauda Equiano narrated and as Rodney documented in historical accounts written by even some Europeans. 

Chinweizu, in The West and the Rest of Us, disputes the 419 propaganda by the British that they came to fight against slavery in Arochukwu and that that was why they burnt the Long Juju. Chinweizi said that that was not true because by that time, the slave trade that the British and other Europeans had initiated had come to an end and that the British were only after the trade in palm oil that they wanted to monopolize in order to dictate prices against the interests of the middlemen in the interior. It is true that there are always saboteurs and collaborators in any system of oppression especially one that lasted for more than 400 years but it is not smart to blame the survivors for the massive crimes against humanity committed by Europeans against Africans. Frantz Fanon said that Europe owes massive reparations to people of African descent at home and abroad. Chinweizu also agrees that reparations are due since people of African descent appear to be the only survivors of historic wrongs that have not been offered any form of reparations and not even apologies simply because of racism. 

Adaobi played into this by starting her opinion with a doubt as to whether Africans deserve reparations given that Africans, like all human beings, have also hurt one another. Africans never traveled thousands of miles to enslave others for 400 years and colonize the survivors for another 100 years and ridiculously turn round to say that Africans owe them billions, according to Ekwe-Ekwe in Africa 2001. In Specters of Marx, Derrida agreed that Africans deserve to have the unpayable international debts cancelled. It is time for Europe to start paying back the debts owed to Africa and the Caribbean countries are demanding such reparations from European enslavers. It is high time that the African states joined the demand for reparations even while recognizing that, like all human beings, we have also hurt ourselves in our struggle for survival and we should ask for forgiveness the way that Mathew Kerekou visited an African American church, knelt down and asked for forgiveness for the role of Dahomey in the capture and enslavement of fellow Africans..

The vexing question was posed repeatedly by Henry Louis Gates in his infamous documentary for the BBC, Wonders of the African World, where he asked market women in Ghana what it felt like to meet a descendant of one of those that her ancestors sold into slavery. Gates never asked a similar question to the white BBC crew or to any white person he met, how does it feel to work with the descendant of those that your ancestors enslaved? Many poor whites resent such questions and claim that they did not benefit directly from slavery. Yet it was poor whites who fought the American civil war to keep slavery going and it is poor whites who join the KKK to terrorize the survivors of slavery today in defense of white privilege. Reparations for slavery will not come out of the pockets of poor whites but would be paid as percentages of the GDP which would have gone to corporate welfare and not necessarily to the poor. Europeans and North Americans should follow the example of Adaobi's family and ask for forgiveness from Africans, they should offer reparations too.

Adaobi's family should go beyond the annual singing of Psalms for forgiveness and endow scholarships for the children of their estranged family descendants of the adopted Nwaokonkwo. Education is the key to lifting the poor from poverty. The reason why a widow died and her children died mysteriously could be due to infections in a country where the life expectancy is 50 years. Adaobi's cousin was right that this sounds like the story of the bogeyman with which naughty children are warned to eat their greens or else. Africans should invest more in research to find cures for tropical diseases instead of simply praying for forgiveness for past wrongs. Families that educate their sons and daughters to the highest levels tend to thrive better whether they are Ohu, Osu or Amaala. Education is the key to the healing of the wounds of slavery in Africa. 

With more emphasis on education for which the Igbo are the leading achievers in Nigeria, people like Adaobi will make friends with more school mates irrespective of their family backgrounds and Adaobi may learn the Igbo language enough to understand the meaning of names. Her family name, Nwaubani does not mean someone from the coastal area, it is the name of King Ja Ja of Opobo whose name was really, JoJo Ubani or someone who was wealthy in real estates: Uba is wealth and Ani is land. Similarly, the name of the town that they changed, Umuojameze, does not mean that the oracle is king. On the contrary, it means that the children of the flute, Oja, know no king, Ama eze. It is the Igbo egalitarian philosophy that the Igbo know no king but it is understandable that after the military imposed chiefs on Igbo ommunitiues in 1976, those who wanted to be kings might be embarrassed by a name that said that the Igbo know no king.

Biko


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Chielozona Eze

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Jul 16, 2018, 1:40:06 PM7/16/18
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Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani is doing what Wole Soyinka (Death and King’s Horsemen , 1975), and Buchi Emecheta (The Slave Girl, 1977) did before her, that is, hold the moral feet of their people to the fire. I am happy that she is ushering in a new spirit of moral inquiry in African literature (or discourse).  Every literary work worth its name, and I dare say, every intellectual that has regard for values that last, must engage the human condition of their people. Do I need to say that this is precisely what made Soyinka stand tall?

Chielozona



Chielozona Eze
Professor, African Literature and Cultural Studies, Northeastern Illinois University; Extraordinary Professor, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
Fellow - Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze
www.Chielozona.com



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Biko Agozino

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Jul 16, 2018, 1:45:49 PM7/16/18
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Windows Live 2018

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Jul 16, 2018, 2:34:45 PM7/16/18
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Biko.

This is an engaging, mature, educative  and enlightened long piece. Like you
I have on many occasions encountered the 'you sold  us into slavery'  hostile accusations (particularly when you are dealing with challenged students who wanted you to be lenient on grades with them) from African American students. I did not tell them I would have been among  their liberators. I told them slavery was practiced the world over at a point in time An  African- American professor  colleague told me they were indulged in what Henry Louis Gates described as 'playing the dozen'.

 Racialised slavery emerged due to contingent reasons of the endurance of blacks to hard labour and the need to outdo the Arabs from whom they learned about this fact and plantation (poor whites) politics of control. In classical times 'Europeans 'sold each other too, I explained to my students adding that it didn't make slavery justifiable

I told my students the part you have written about the value of education as lliberator, adding that slavery ended a long time ago and the Civil Rights movement has ensured the benefits are now shared by Blacks as well . So I put in place a system that rewarded diligence inscribed in the syllabus and it worked.

I was on a flight back to London on a semester break seated next to a British gentleman musician who wanted to know my views on reparations. I said if monetary grants could not be made because (As it's often argued) it's too long you don't know who to pay to, multinational projects could be sited in areas where enslavement took place so the projects generate employment and profits go to that community in addition.

But the part that struck me is where we learnt that Igbo communities too have Elesin systems in the past and I would like you to include that in your interpretation of Death and the Kings Horseman.

OAA.


Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: 16/07/2018 18:05 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader

Boxbe This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (usaafric...@googlegroups.com) Add cleanup rule | More info
Adaobi Nwaubani narrates in the NewYorker the fact that there is hurt in every family that is self-inflicted. Having the humility to confess past wrongs and ask for forgiveness is part of the healing. Having the courage to forgive those who wronged you frees you from the resentment which Mandela called a poison that you take and hope that it kills your enemy. Desmond Tutu teaches that there is nothing that is unforgivable and there is no one who does not have something to be forgiven. Africans have forgiven the unforgivable crimes of 400 years of slavery, 100 years of colonization and 70 years of apartheid but some Africans still find it difficult to ask for forgiveness or to forgive members of their family for past wrongs. What Adaobi described is going on all the time in Igboland where the belief in witchcraft is not as pronounced as in some other cultures. Instead of hunting for witches to blame for your misfortune, the Igbo are encouraged to look inward and see if there are things that need atonement or to ask their Chi for a better deal. Adaobi's family did not kill or exile the adopted child of an enslaved ancestor but forgave him even after he was suspected of plotting to poison a leader of the family. Okonkwo was also told off by Achebe for killing Ikemefuna, a child that called him Papa, just because an oracle told him to do so. The Igbo have no history of raiding their neighbors for slavery or to execute genocide in order to colonize their land. They believe in letting the Eagle perch and letting the kite perch.




Igbo culture, like all cultures, is not perfect. Culture is not defined as a way of life, contrary to colonial anthropology. Culture is defined by Cabral, Ngugi, Hall and James as a struggle between the forces of domination and the forces of liberation. The way poor people live under capitalism, the way women live under patriarchy, and the way that black people live under racism is not the way they chose to live as a way of life but represent the conditions that they did not choose, conditions imposed by law and tradition, under which they struggle to make history. Osu and Ohu emerged among the Igbo as a consequence of 400 years of being raided as prey during the European trans Atlantic slavery that cost an estimated 100 million lives to Africa, according to Du Bois. The Igbo, unlike their neighbors, had no kings and chiefs, nor did they have standing armies to defend them against slave raiders and kidnappers or with which to raid their neighbors; and that was why they were the predominant group of people captured for sale from what Europeans called the slave coast, according to Douglas Chambers, Murder in Montpelier: The Igbo Africans in Virginia. Despite the blight of Ohu and Osu on the egalitarian Igbo system of direct democracy, the fact remains that the Igbo survived the impacts of the slave raids, colonialism, and post-colonial genocide very remarkably. We are survivors, sang Bob Marley and the Wailers.

The question that Adaobi is raising is the old one of how could Africans sell their own into slavery? This was the question that Walter Rodney tackled in his doctoral dissertation on the History of Upper Guinea Coast. He concluded that what happened during the 400 years of the African holocaust was the process of class formation and primitive accumulation. The few chiefs who sold fellow Africans did not regard the war captives as their own people because they belonged to a different class or to a different nation. It was not a trade of the sort where parents put their own children on the shelf to say that these ones are toro-toro, those ones are shishi-shishi, and those other ones are nai-nai pence. It was a long-running war of pillage and the hunting of labor in black skin that Marx condemned in Das Kapital. It is true that some African elites benefited from the enslavement of Africans jst as some African elites continue to benefit from the looting of African resources today but the vast majority of the Igbo and other Africans have always been activists against oppression and the main beneficiaries were Europeans from royal families down to pirates. The fact that the wounds of slavery are slow to heal in Igboland is evidence that the Europeans still owe reparations to the survivors of the European slavery. Adaobi's family is showing the way by apologizing to those they hurt in their family and asking for forgiveness from the ancestors. When will Europeans make atonement for crimes against humanity?

Another Guyanese writer, Evelyn King, posed the same Rodneyian question in her novel, The Hangman's Game, in which a Guyanese professor of linguistics who was married to a Nigerian and who lived under a brutal military dictatorship that was killing fellow Nigerians with impunity, posed the question in the novel: how could Africans sell their own for 400 years? In the novel, her Nigerian husband retorted by asking, how could she write a novel today about a slave rebellion and still make the enslaved lose instead of giving them victory in her fiction? She protested that it was a historical novel but her husband encouraged her to revise the history. The pain of the African Diaspora is real and sometimes I get it from students in the US or in the Caribbean, were you not those who sold us? To which I would answer that I would never have sold anyone, I would have been among the warriors and freedom fighters who did fight back with sticks and stones against guns to try and save us from being captured as Olauda Equiano narrated and as Rodney documented in historical accounts written by even some Europeans. 

Chinweizu, in The West and the Rest of Us, disputes the 419 propaganda by the British that they came to fight against slavery in Arochukwu and that that was why they burnt the Long Juju. Chinweizi said that that was not true because by that time, the slave trade that the British and other Europeans had initiated had come to an end and that the British were only after the trade in palm oil that they wanted to monopolize in order to dictate prices against the interests of the middlemen in the interior. It is true that there are always saboteurs and collaborators in any system of oppression especially one that lasted for more than 400 years but it is not smart to blame the survivors for the massive crimes against humanity committed by Europeans against Africans. Frantz Fanon said that Europe owes massive reparations to people of African descent at home and abroad. Chinweizu also agrees that reparations are due since people of African descent appear to be the only survivors of historic wrongs that have not been offered any form of reparations and not even apologies simply because of racism. 

Adaobi played into this by starting her opinion with a doubt as to whether Africans deserve reparations given that Africans, like all human beings, have also hurt one another. Africans never traveled thousands of miles to enslave others for 400 years and colonize the survivors for another 100 years and ridiculously turn round to say that Africans owe them billions, according to Ekwe-Ekwe in Africa 2001. In Specters of Marx, Derrida agreed that Africans deserve to have the unpayable international debts cancelled. It is time for Europe to start paying back the debts owed to Africa and the Caribbean countries are demanding such reparations from European enslavers. It is high time that the African states joined the demand for reparations even while recognizing that, like all human beings, we have also hurt ourselves in our struggle for survival and we should ask for forgiveness the way that Mathew Kerekou visited an African American church, knelt down and asked for forgiveness for the role of Dahomey in the capture and enslavement of fellow Africans..

The vexing question was posed repeatedly by Henry Louis Gates in his infamous documentary for the BBC, Wonders of the African World, where he asked market women in Ghana what it felt like to meet a descendant of one of those that her ancestors sold into slavery. Gates never asked a similar question to the white BBC crew or to any white person he met, how does it feel to work with the descendant of those that your ancestors enslaved? Many poor whites resent such questions and claim that they did not benefit directly from slavery. Yet it was poor whites who fought the American civil war to keep slavery going and it is poor whites who join the KKK to terrorize the survivors of slavery today in defense of white privilege. Reparations for slavery will not come out of the pockets of poor whites but would be paid as percentages of the GDP which would have gone to corporate welfare and not necessarily to the poor. Europeans and North Americans should follow the example of Adaobi's family and ask for forgiveness from Africans, they should offer reparations too.

Adaobi's family should go beyond the annual singing of Psalms for forgiveness and endow scholarships for the children of their estranged family descendants of the adopted Nwaokonkwo. Education is the key to lifting the poor from poverty. The reason why a widow died and her children died mysteriously could be due to infections in a country where the life expectancy is 50 years. Adaobi's cousin was right that this sounds like the story of the bogeyman with which naughty children are warned to eat their greens or else. Africans should invest more in research to find cures for tropical diseases instead of simply praying for forgiveness for past wrongs. Families that educate their sons and daughters to the highest levels tend to thrive better whether they are Ohu, Osu or Amaala. Education is the key to the healing of the wounds of slavery in Africa. 

With more emphasis on education for which the Igbo are the leading achievers in Nigeria, people like Adaobi will make friends with more school mates irrespective of their family backgrounds and Adaobi may learn the Igbo language enough to understand the meaning of names. Her family name, Nwaubani does not mean someone from the coastal area, it is the name of King Ja Ja of Opobo whose name was really, JoJo Ubani or someone who was wealthy in real estates: Uba is wealth and Ani is land. Similarly, the name of the town that they changed, Umuojameze, does not mean that the oracle is king. On the contrary, it means that the children of the flute, Oja, know no king, Ama eze. It is the Igbo egalitarian philosophy that the Igbo know no king but it is understandable that after the military imposed chiefs on Igbo ommunitiues in 1976, those who wanted to be kings might be embarrassed by a name that said that the Igbo know no king.

Biko

On Monday, 16 July 2018, 06:14:23 GMT-4, Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi...@gmail.com> wrote:



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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)

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Jul 16, 2018, 3:05:25 PM7/16/18
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What is really insane about this matter is  that you, Chidi Opara

are actually prepared to risk a hard won  reputation as a  critical poet  and  an analyst,

and flush it all down the toilet........and for what?


Seeking votes from Abia State, the home of Arochukwu?

Remember that  the ancestors  of  many of the people of that  region were

victims of the atrocities. Go gently.







Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Professor of History
History Department
Central Connecticut State University


From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2018 1:43 AM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader
 
"Sometimes a family would sell off a disgraced relative, a practice that Ijoma Okoro, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, likens to the shipping of British convicts to the penal colonies in Australia: “People would say, ‘Let them go. I don’t want to see them again.’ ”"(Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani).

Another "insane perspective"?

CAO.

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Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM

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Jul 16, 2018, 5:01:17 PM7/16/18
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I did not create that "insane perspective", I merely reiterated it. The "go gentle" advice is however, appreciated.

CAO.

Ndubisi Obiorah

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Jul 16, 2018, 5:26:07 PM7/16/18
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" Another Guyanese writer, Evelyn King, posed the same Rodneyian question in her novel, The Hangman's Game, in which a Guyanese professor of linguistics who was married to a Nigerian and who lived under a brutal military dictatorship that was killing fellow Nigerians with impunity..."

Perhaps you had Karen King-Aribisala in mind?

"There are people who dislike you because you do not dislike yourself" - Chimamamda Ngozi Adichie

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office" - Aesop

"In the long run, we are all dead" - J.M. Keynes


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Biko Agozino

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Jul 16, 2018, 5:50:47 PM7/16/18
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Thanks for the correction Obiora. It must be Karen. I will update.

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Salimonu Kadiri

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Jul 17, 2018, 10:46:14 AM7/17/18
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Osu and Ohu emerged among the Igbo as a consequence of 400 years of being raided as prey during the European trans Atlantic slavery ….. The Igbo unlike their neighbours, had no kings and chiefs, nor did they have standing armies to defend them against slave raiders and kidnappers or with which to raid their neighbours … Biko Agozino. 

Contrary to Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani's assertion that her great grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo, was an Igbo slave catcher and trader, Biko Agozino is saying that Osu and Ohu among the Igbo emerged as a consequence of being raided as prey by their neighbours that had kings, chiefs and standing armies. Is Biko Agozino disputing the fact that Nwaubani Ogogo was an Igbo? Who were the neighbours having kings, chiefs and standing armies that raided and kidnapped the defenceless Igbo?


Despite the blight of Ohu and Osu on the egalitarian Igbo system of direct democracy, the fact remains that the Igbo survived the impacts of the slave raids, colonialism, and post-colonial genocide very remarkably. We are survivors… - Biko Agozino

What Biko Agozino has failed to address here is whether Ohu and Osu are no more in practice in Igboland today as Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani has established and confirmed. If Ohu and Osu have ceased being practised in Igboland, as Biko presumably imply, the question then is, when were they abrogated? History records that in a speech delivered in the Eastern House of Assembly on 20 March 1956, while seconding the motion for the second reading of the abolition of the Osu system Bill, Dr. Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe said among many other things that, "This Bill seeks to do three things : to abolish the Osu system and its allied practices including the Oru or Ohu system, to prescribe punishment for their continued practice, and to remove certain social disabilities caused by the enforcement of the Osu and its allied system. …//… According to this Bill, the Osu system includes any social way of living which implies that any person who is deemed to be an Osu or Oru or Ohu is subject to certain prescribed social disability and social stigma. …//… An Osu may be a person who is descended or can be proved to be descended from a slave and that person and his descendants are for ever proscribed as social pariahs. … Mr. Speaker, this Bill offers a challenge to the morality of the Easterners. I submit that it is not morally consistent to condone the Osu or Oru or Ohu system. I submit that it is devilish and most uncharitable to brand any human being with a label of inferiority, due to accidents of history (p. 91-94, ZIK - Selected Speeches of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe)." Although the Bill was passed into law, the practice of Osu or Ohu or Oru has continued till date in Igboland as observed by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani. About ten years ago, Tony Uchenna wrote in the online Nigerian Vanguard, with the title, Osu Caste In Igboland. He wrote, "Osu caste system is an obnoxious practice among the Igbo in South east Nigeria which has refused to go away despite the impact of Christianity, education and civilization, and human rights culture. Traditionally, there are two classes of people in Igboland - the Nwadiala and the Osu. The Nwa-Di-Ala literally meaning Sons of the Soil. They, Nwa-Di-Ala, are masters while the Osu are the people decicated to the gods; so they are regarded as slaves, strangers, outcasts and untouchable. These ugly practices, some of which sadly continue to date in Igboland are major obstacles preventing this otherwise endowed group from attaining any meaningful unity. My disappointment and dismay have been that current Igbos refuse to tackle these ugly practices. The discriminatory Osu practice involves inequality in freedom of movement and choice of residence, inequality in the right of peaceful association, inequality of residence, inequality in the enjoyment of the right to marry and establish a family and inequality in access to public office. That is the crux of the matter with Osu caste in Igboland." Towards the end of June 2016, Daniel Akusobi, titled his own essay : The Igbos, Osus and the Sins of our Forebears. He wrote, "The Osu caste system is Igbos original sin, as sinful or more sinful than the effects of slavery. It's sad that the observance of the practice has somehow continued in some Igbo villages despite the invasion of our psyche by the bible." With the above factual references, how can one understand Biko Agozino's assertion that the Igbo have survive post-colonial genocide despite Ohu and Osu? By post-colonial genocide, Biko is tacitly referring to the Nigerian civil war in which he claimed that genocide was committed against the Igbo and in which the Yoruba, did not only participate but, were cheer leaders.The Igbo, according to Biko and his cohorts, died of starvation under the control of Ojukwu led Biafra and that, in their self-made international law, was genocide. Unfortunately, the federal government of that time declared no victor no vanquished at the end of the war. Therefore, there was no war tribunal or trial of the rebel leaders which could have revealed who actually committed genocide by starvation when, in June 1968, Emeka Ojukwu rejected Gowon's offer to transport relief supplies to civilians in Biafra through internationally supervised land corridors from Nigeria to Biafra. Ojukwu rejected the offer of relief supplies to civilians because those who were dying of starvation in Biafra were, Osu, Ohu or Oru. In his Ahiara Declaration of 1st June 1969, Ojukwu narrated how Nwa-Di-Ala were throwing big parties to entertain their friends and slaughtering cows to Christen their newly born children, in a war torn Biafra, where the designated inferior Igbo were allowed to starve to death. So, if there was any post-colonial genocide of the Igbo, especially the Osu, Oru or Ohu, it was the one perpetrated by the head of the Nwa-Di-Ala, Ojukwu, on those labelled as slaves and inferior human beings, called efulefu or worthless Igbo persons by the great poet, Chidi Anthony Opara.  However, history of the civil war recorded that the International Team of Observers voluntarily invited by the Federal government and led by the United Nations, issued its first and second interim reports in Lagos on 3 and 16 October 1968. The first report stated categorically that there was no evidence of any intent by the Federal troops to destroy the Igbo people or their property, and the use of the term genocide was in no way justified. The second interim report drew attention to the fact that a great number of Igbo people were alive and well behind the Federal lines. In its report dated Lagos, 25 November 1968, the Observer Team stated that the Team had unrestricted freedom of movements at the war fronts during all investigations and visits, and made up its programmes, including last-minute changes and surprise visits. So, if post-colonial genocide against the Igbo was ever committed during the civil war, it must have occurred in Ojukwu's controlled Biafra.

S. Kadiri 




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Windows Live 2018

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Jul 17, 2018, 1:14:53 PM7/17/18
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Again this is one of those posts which one has to keep in ones personal archives for the sake of future recurring disputations.

This time I will not be failing in such duties.

OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Salimonu Kadiri <ogunl...@hotmail.com>
Date: 17/07/2018 15:46 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader

Boxbe This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (ogunl...@hotmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

Osu and Ohu emerged among the Igbo as a consequence of 400 years of being raided as prey during the European trans Atlantic slavery ….. The Igbo unlike their neighbours, had no kings and chiefs, nor did they have standing armies to defend them against slave raiders and kidnappers or with which to raid their neighbours … Biko Agozino. 

Contrary to Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani's assertion that her great grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo, was an Igbo slave catcher and trader, Biko Agozino is saying that Osu and Ohu among the Igbo emerged as a consequence of being raided as prey by their neighbours that had kings, chiefs and standing armies. Is Biko Agozino disputing the fact that Nwaubani Ogogo was an Igbo? Who were the neighbours having kings, chiefs and standing armies that raided and kidnapped the defenceless Igbo?


Despite the blight of Ohu and Osu on the egalitarian Igbo system of direct democracy, the fact remains that the Igbo survived the impacts of the slave raids, colonialism, and post-colonial genocide very remarkably. We are survivors… - Biko Agozino

What Biko Agozino has failed to address here is whether Ohu and Osu are no more in practice in Igboland today as Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani has established and confirmed. If Ohu and Osu have ceased being practised in Igboland, as Biko presumably imply, the question then is, when were they abrogated? History records that in a speech delivered in the Eastern House of Assembly on 20 March 1956, while seconding the motion for the second reading of the abolition of the Osu system Bill, Dr. Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe said among many other things that, "This Bill seeks to do three things : to abolish the Osu system and its allied practices including the Oru or Ohu system, to prescribe punishment for their continued practice, and to remove certain social disabilities caused by the enforcement of the Osu and its allied system. …//… According to this Bill, the Osu system includes any social way of living which implies that any person who is deemed to be an Osu or Oru or Ohu is subject to certain prescribed social disability and social stigma. …//… An Osu may be a person who is descended or can be proved to be descended from a slave and that person and his descendants are for ever proscribed as social pariahs. … Mr. Speaker, this Bill offers a challenge to the morality of the Easterners. I submit that it is not morally consistent to condone the Osu or Oru or Ohu system. I submit that it is devilish and most uncharitable to brand any human being with a label of inferiority, due to accidents of history (p. 91-94, ZIK - Selected Speeches of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe)." Although the Bill was passed into law, the practice of Osu or Ohu or Oru has continued till date in Igboland as observed by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani. About ten years ago, Tony Uchenna wrote in the online Nigerian Vanguard, with the title, Osu Caste In Igboland. He wrote, "Osu caste system is an obnoxious practice among the Igbo in South east Nigeria which has refused to go away despite the impact of Christianity, education and civilization, and human rights culture. Traditionally, there are two classes of people in Igboland - the Nwadiala and the Osu. The Nwa-Di-Ala literally meaning Sons of the Soil. They, Nwa-Di-Ala, are masters while the Osu are the people decicated to the gods; so they are regarded as slaves, strangers, outcasts and untouchable. These ugly practices, some of which sadly continue to date in Igboland are major obstacles preventing this otherwise endowed group from attaining any meaningful unity. My disappointment and dismay have been that current Igbos refuse to tackle these ugly practices. The discriminatory Osu practice involves inequality in freedom of movement and choice of residence, inequality in the right of peaceful association, inequality of residence, inequality in the enjoyment of the right to marry and establish a family and inequality in access to public office. That is the crux of the matter with Osu caste in Igboland." Towards the end of June 2016, Daniel Akusobi, titled his own essay : The Igbos, Osus and the Sins of our Forebears. He wrote, "The Osu caste system is Igbos original sin, as sinful or more sinful than the effects of slavery. It's sad that the observance of the practice has somehow continued in some Igbo villages despite the invasion of our psyche by the bible." With the above factual references, how can one understand Biko Agozino's assertion that the Igbo have survive post-colonial genocide despite Ohu and Osu? By post-colonial genocide, Biko is tacitly referring to the Nigerian civil war in which he claimed that genocide was committed against the Igbo and in which the Yoruba, did not only participate but, were cheer leaders.The Igbo, according to Biko and his cohorts, died of starvation under the control of Ojukwu led Biafra and that, in their self-made international law, was genocide. Unfortunately, the federal government of that time declared no victor no vanquished at the end of the war. Therefore, there was no war tribunal or trial of the rebel leaders which could have revealed who actually committed genocide by starvation when, in June 1968, Emeka Ojukwu rejected Gowon's offer to transport relief supplies to civilians in Biafra through internationally supervised land corridors from Nigeria to Biafra. Ojukwu rejected the offer of relief supplies to civilians because those who were dying of starvation in Biafra were, Osu, Ohu or Oru. In his Ahiara Declaration of 1st June 1969, Ojukwu narrated how Nwa-Di-Ala were throwing big parties to entertain their friends and slaughtering cows to Christen their newly born children, in a war torn Biafra, where the designated inferior Igbo were allowed to starve to death. So, if there was any post-colonial genocide of the Igbo, especially the Osu, Oru or Ohu, it was the one perpetrated by the head of the Nwa-Di-Ala, Ojukwu, on those labelled as slaves and inferior human beings, called efulefu or worthless Igbo persons by the great poet, Chidi Anthony Opara.  However, history of the civil war recorded that the International Team of Observers voluntarily invited by the Federal government and led by the United Nations, issued its first and second interim reports in Lagos on 3 and 16 October 1968. The first report stated categorically that there was no evidence of any intent by the Federal troops to destroy the Igbo people or their property, and the use of the term genocide was in no way justified. The second interim report drew attention to the fact that a great number of Igbo people were alive and well behind the Federal lines. In its report dated Lagos, 25 November 1968, the Observer Team stated that the Team had unrestricted freedom of movements at the war fronts during all investigations and visits, and made up its programmes, including last-minute changes and surprise visits. So, if post-colonial genocide against the Igbo was ever committed during the civil war, it must have occurred in Ojukwu's controlled Biafra.

S. Kadiri 




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Biko Agozino

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Jul 18, 2018, 9:01:09 AM7/18/18
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Just republished

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 5:50 PM, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series

Salimonu Kadiri

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Jul 21, 2018, 8:37:52 AM7/21/18
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I seize the opportunity of this 'Just republished' to supplement the omitted parts of my previous submission on this topic. Narrating the fate of slaves in Igboland in which her great grandfather was a slave raider and seller, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani told us that 'slaves were also sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies or buried alive with their masters to serve them in the next life.' She revealed further that her grandfather, 'Nwaubani Ogogo was so esteemed that, when he died, a leopard was killed and six slaves were buried alive with him.' In comparison with Eleshin, in 'Death and the King's Horsemen,' it must be noted that he, Eleshin, was not a slave and the cultural demand on Eleshin to commit suicide whenever the king died was limited to Oyo and not a culture adhered to generally all over Yorubaland as with slaves being buried alive in Igboland with their dead masters so that they could serve them in the next life. Was Abraham, according to the First Book of Moses, Genesis Chapter 22, not about to slay Isaac (Ismael actually), his son, for sacrificial offer before an Angel instructed him to use ram instead of his son? As everything sacrilegious are being weeded out from our cultures, even where slavery still exists in one form or the other, no slave is being buried alive any longer with his/her dead master in Nigeria. It is, therefore, superfluous to interpret Wole Soyinka play, 'Death and the King's Horsemen,' to Soyinka's indirect discussion of his incarceration for opposing the Nigerian civil war and subsequent horrors. Soyinka was released in 1969 and three years later, he published the 'The Man Died' in 1972, two years after the end of the war. 'The Man Died' is directly related to his experience in prison for opposing the war but not 'Death and the King's Horsemen.' If we are to accept, without any legal or judicial tender, that there was genocide inside Biafra and Awolowo by virtue of his presence in the federal military government and being a Yoruba was liable to be called Yoruba cheerleader of genocide in Biafra, then Samuel Gomsu Ikoku and Ukpabi Asika, two Igbo key players in the government of General Yakubu Gowon during the war were also Igbo cheerleaders of genocide in Biafra.


As indicated by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, slavery in form of Ohu and Osu are still in practice in Igboland today by those who constitute themselves into Nwadiala. The Nwadiala led Biafran secession war and the Ohu/Osu who, according to the poetic Chidi Anthony Opara, were worthless persons were allowed to starve to death or were expended as canon fodder in Biafra while the Nwadiala were throwing weekend parties to entertain friends and slaying cows to Christen their new-born babies as testified to by Ojukwu himself in his June 1, 1969, Ahiara declaration. If mass death of the Ohu/Osu through starvation in Biafra was genocide, the Nwadiala led Biafran government which allowed that to happen should be held responsible and not the federal government of Nigeria.


Her family name, Nwaubani, does not mean someone from the coastal area, it is the name of King Ja Ja of Opobo whose name was really, Jo Jo Ubani or someone who was really wealthy in real estates. Uba is wealth and Ani is land - Biko Agozino.


Tricia indicated that she was in Abuja, Nigeria, and it must have been members of her family that told her the meaning of the name Nwaubani. The famous King Ja Ja of Opobo's real name was Jubo Jubogha which Europeans corrupted to Ja Ja, perhaps to make it easy for them to pronounce. Therefore, Biko's Jo Jo Ubani must be an invented history. Biko later demonstrated his high skill in invented history on kingship in Igboland when he wrote, "It is the Igbo egalitarian philosophy that the Igbo know no King but it is understandable that after the military imposed chiefs on Igbo communities in 1976, those who wanted to be kings might be embarrassed by a name that said that the Igbo know no King." If culturally, the Igbo know no king, why did Biko say the Family name of Adaobi Tricia, Nwaubani, is the name of King Ja Ja of Opobo? Was it after 1976 when the military imposed Chiefs on Igbo communities that Ja Ja became King of Opobo? Is Biko saying that the Nigerian military of 1976 created Warrant Chiefs from which Eze evolved in Igboland? According to the 1959 Constitution, there was House of Chiefs in each Region of the federation working with the regional House of Assembly. The Eastern Region House of Chiefs, like the Western, Northern and Midwestern Regions, was terminated by the military coup of January 1966. From where did Biko get his history that the Igbo knew no King until the military imposed chiefs, which does not really translate to King, on Igbo communities in 1976? Did the existence of Eastern House of Chiefs not precede the military government in Nigeria?

S.Kadiri




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Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM

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Jul 21, 2018, 11:48:26 AM7/21/18
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"The Nwadiala led Biafran secession war and the Ohu/Osu who, according to the poetic Chidi Anthony Opara, were worthless persons......."(Salimonu Kadiri).

This is a misrepresentation of what I said.

I said that: "It was not poverty or greed or wickedness that made our forebear to sell people as slaves, it was a way to get rid of the "efulefus" (worthless persons)."


I can be held responsible for what I say or write, but I cannot be held responsible for what you understand(paraphrasing a popular saying, whose author I could not remember).

CAO.
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