1. "Its nationalist content so as to preserve the dignity of the African, as expressed by the Congress of British West africa when the struggle for national self-determination was at its earlier beginning"...
12. "competent academic staff will be recruited not exclusievely from any particular country or race, but it is intended to cast a net wide over an extensive area, in all continents of the earth, among suitably qualigfied and exprienced English-speaking university teachers, who will be provided the opportunity to maintain contact with intellectuals and academic life in the outside world"
13. 'it will be the first time in the history of higher education in Nigeria, when students will be able to study ancient, modern and African languages up to degree standard."
I've simply selected these three to highlight the basic principle that made it possible for Awo to be invested with the first honors of the Uniersity of Nigeria at its foundational convocation in 1962. It is Zikist cosmopolitanism and bridge-building. I do not deny Awolowo's brilliance, nor should I indeed; but I critique his historical standing purely to challenge the revanchist mythologies of Awoists hell-bent on crass revisionism.
Obi Nwakanma
To: rexmarinus@hotmail.com
CC: naijaintellects@googlegroups.com; NaijaPolitics@yahoogroups.com; OmoOdua@yahoogroups.com; nigerianID@yahoogroups.com; USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com; Raayiriga@yahoogroups.com; ekitipanupo@yahoogroups.com
From: alukome@gmail.com
Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2012 04:36:25 +0100
Subject: [NaijaPolitics] STAR INFORMATION: Chief Obafemi Awolowo Attended the Manchester 1945 Pan-African Conference.....{Re: he Real Story of Nigeria - Nigeria and the Igbo from the very mouths of Obafemi Awolowo }
Western Region and Lagos must also stay out of the Federation. (4) The people of Western Nigeria and Lagos should participate in the ad hoc committee or any similar body only on the basis of absolute equality with the other regions of the Federation.............
In recognition of his intellectual contributions, Awolowo was honoured by the following institutions of learning:
University of Ife, Ile-Ife: D.Sc. (1967)
University of Lagos: D.Litt. (1968)
University of Ibadan: LL.D. (1972)
Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria: LL.D. (1975)
University of Cape Coast, Ghana: LL.D. (1976)
It was at this time that many of the future leaders of the Third World were exposed to Fabian thought, most notably India'sJawaharlal Nehru, who subsequently framed economic policy for India on Fabian socialism lines. After independence from Britain, Nehru's Fabian ideas committed India to an economy in which the state owned, operated and controlled means of production, in particular key heavy industrial sectors such as steel, telecommunications, transportation, electricity generation, mining and real estate development. Private activity, property rights and entrepreneurship were discouraged or regulated through permits, nationalization of economic activity and high taxes were encouraged, rationing, control of individual choices and Mahalanobis model considered by Nehru as a means to implement the Fabian Society version of socialism.[14][15][16] In addition to Nehru, several pre-independence leaders in colonial India such as Annie Besant - Nehru's mentor and later a president of Indian National Congress - were members of the Fabian Society.[17]
Obafemi Awolowo, who later became the premier of Nigeria's defunct Western Region was also a Fabian member in the late 1940s. It was the Fabian ideology that Awolowo used to run the Western Region but was prevented from using it on a national level in Nigeria. It is less known that the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was an avid member of the Fabian Society in the early 1930s. Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore, stated in his memoirs that his initial political philosophy was strongly influenced by the Fabian Society. However, he later altered his views, considering the Fabian ideal of socialism as impractical
UNQUOTE
5. Perhaps more scandalous is your attempt to WHITE-OUT Awolowo's participation in the 1945 Pan-African Conference in London, and WRITE-IN Zik's long-distance participation. You don't attempt to provide any information as to why Zik, who was alive - and according to you took part in the organization of the conference - could not personally participate, while Awolowo, who was then in London, did not (according to you) participate. You leave the impression that Awo was inattentive or inconsequential - or both - while Zik was very consequential. Who knows - could illness have prevented BOTH of them from not being able to participate? Or other pressing matters?
But that is a DEVIL's ADVOCATE question, because the some records shows that Awolowo DID participate in the 1945 Pan-African Conference in Manchester. Please read this OTHER STORY...
QUOTE
http://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/hip/us/hip_us_pearsonhighered/samplechapter/0130918431.pdf
Chapter 5: African Nationalism and the Struggle for Freedom page 168 ff.
Elaborate preparations went into the 1945 Pan-African conference, to be held in Manchester, England. More Africans were involved in it than ever before, London being the center for a very large number of African students studying in Britain at the time. The conference committee was chaired by Dr. Peter Milliard (British Guiana) and T. R. Makonnen (British Guiana) was treasurer; George Padmore (West Indies) and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), political secretaries; Peter Abrahams (South Africa) was publicity secretary and Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya) was conference secretary. For the first time, African political parties, trade unions, youth leagues, and students' associations sent representatives. The roster of attendees included those representing the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), the Labour Party of Grenada (West Indies), the West Indies People's National Party, the Nigerian Youth Movement, the Nyasaland African
Congress (Malawi), the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, and the Gold Coast Farmers' Association. The list of individual participants read like Who is Who of the Black World, and included, besides the conference planners,Wallace Johnson (Sierra Leone), Chief Obafemi Awolowo (Nigeria), Chief H. O. Davies (Nigeria), J. E. Taylor (Ghana), Dr. Hastings Banda (Malawi), Mrs. Amy Ashwood Garvey (then representing Jamaica Women's Movement), and Jaja Wachukwu (Nigeria). Some of these people went on to lead their own countries to independence. In general, the gathering was the largest and the most representative Pan-African conference ever held. It was a crowning achievement for DuBois, then universally acknowledged as the "Father of Pan-Africanism," who flew in from New York to convene it.
=========================================================================================To: naijaobserver@yahoogroups.com
From: Enyimba1ofAba@aol.com
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2012 09:13:30 -0500
Subject: ||NaijaObserver|| The Real Story of Nigeria - Nigeria and the Igbo from the very mouths of Obafemi AwolowoDr. Obi Nwakanma:
The quote below were words from Awolowo, and those words came before he and the Yorubas
tasted the benefits of Igbo exclusions in Nigeria politics. Since after that war, the Yorubas, mostly the
new generation Yorubas after getting drunk with the looting of Nigeria, they do not believe that Igbo men
and women contributed anything to the development of Nigeria and its Independence.Enyimba Himself
enyimba1ofaba@aol.com===========================================================================11:04 AM (6 hours ago)
to naijaobserver, igboworldforum, igboevents, nigerianworldf., RexImages are not displayed. Display images below - Always display images from ibk@usa.netDear Obi Nwakanma,I will not argue with your placing of Nnamdi Azikiwe on a pedestal. I have the highest regard for the man so I want to share your superlatives and encomiums showered on him.I will ignore your attempts to relegate Chief Obafemi Awolowo. My simple question to you is what role Achebe and Ojukwu played in the destruction of the Azikiwe hard work in his pan-African, and Nigerian nation building.Tell us honestly, the way Ojukwu treated Azikiwe and the disdain he suffered in Ojukwu's hands. The ambivalent Igbo psyche will be revealed by your honest appraisal of this point.I await your position.Cheers.IBK------ Original Message ------
Received: 06:15 PM EAT, 11/29/2012
From: Rex Marinus <rexmarinus@hotmail.com>
To: <naijaobserver@yahoogroups.com>, <igboworldforum@yahoo.com>, <igboevents@yahoogroups.com>, <nigerianworldforum@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: RE: ||NaijaObserver|| The Real Story of Nigeria - Nigeria and the Igbo from the very mouths of Obafemi AwolowoYou'd notice that I wrote "mouths" - and it is the way Agwu works:) By indirection. Anyway, I posted this to situate the side of the true story of Nigeria which the documentary generally ignores. A key figure in that story, Awolowo himself knew truth and confessed it. That's the story. There are critical aspects of the documetary that are fundamentally wrong. For example, the picture that Jide attributes as "Adedoyin" actually is Azikiwe leading the the NCNC delegation to London in 1947. It might actually be during or shortly after that visit to London - to demand Nigeria's freedom - that Azikiwe, as the Key speaker at the Socialist International conference in Oxford in 1947 gave his famous and defiant, "Before Us Lies the Open Grave" speech, whose title was taken straight from the poem by one of the Key Harlem renaissance poets, Claude Mackay. These facts for a documentary that is rather at the surface level and angled to tell a different story could not be expected to be easily contextualized.
The second fact which ought to be brought up is its clever attempt to CENTER Awolowo in the discourse of nation and nation-making. This is the project that has gone on by many Awoist intellectuals since 1968, and continues to date. It is tantamount basically to normalizing the Nigerian antinomy. But one clear historical fact is that Awolowo was NOT at the Manchester Conference of the Pan-African Movement in 1945. The key organizers of that critical Manchester conference were George Padmore (formerly known as Malcolm Nurse), Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah who served as the secretary of the conference. Jomo Kenyata, Wachukwu, Banda, etc, were participants in the conference. Although Azikiwe could not attend the conferecnce in 1945 in London, but according to the notes of the conference by its central organizer, George Padmore, Azikiwe was one of its organizers. Awo was not mentioned; was not consequential, and was only not part of the organizing of the Pan-African Conference in London, he DID NOT participate in the conference even though he was in London in 1945 as a student in LSE. Awo identified more, and this is crucial, which the British Labour Party of which he was a member at the time in London.
There are other critical elements in the documentary like the statement about the funding/financing of the NCNC which are blatant fibs, but again, there is this thing we say about the "angle of the camera" - wherever you direct it, that is what it captures. The attempts at erasing Azikiwe from Nigerian history is a long and sustained project; it is a highly organized revisionist agenda. It is because of this that people like me, always heeding Achebe's admonition insist that we cannot allow others to tell our stories. When the Igbo and other Nigerians ignore and undermine Azikiwe, they undermine the vitality of the Nigerian story. For example, today, Ghana projects Nkrumah as the "foremost" political leader of the African continent and the black world, and the organizing spirit of its nation. This image rubs off on Ghana as the epicenter of the black world. It is because Nigeria has refused to tell the heroic story of Azikiwe and his men in the making of modern Africa; in the struggle for African freedom, and in the shaping of the discussions of the Black Atlantic, that Nigeria today is increasingly subsumed to the mythology of Ghana. Nigeria has no organizing myth. Zik gave Nkrumah to Ghana. Zik roused the nationalist movement in Ghana, in Nigeria, in Gambia, in the African world in the inter war years. Indeed as Julius Nyerere himself put it, who was at the Pan-African Conference in 1945, "until my generation of Africans read Renascent Africa and listened to Zik, we did not know that Africa was possible." It was in consideration of this truth that Walter Rodney mentioned to a famous Nigerian historian in 1973, how considering the importance of Azikiwe in the story of the global black revolutionary movement in the 20th century, that he was inclined to doing his political biography, a project his asssination apparently rendered moot. Azikiwe was the embodiment of the true story of the heroic epoch of Nigeria, and he embodies the perfect Nigerian ideal. Until the true story of Nigeria is told, we shall not know where the rain began to beat us, and people like Jide Olarenwaju will continue to exhume the corpse from its feet.
Obi Nwakanma
To: naijaobserver@yahoogroups.com
From: Enyimba1ofAba@aol.com
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2012 09:13:30 -0500
Subject: ||NaijaObserver|| The Real Story of Nigeria - Nigeria and the Igbo from the very mouths of Obafemi Awolowo
Dr. Obi Nwakanma:
The quote below were words from Awolowo, and those words came before he and the Yorubas
tasted the benefits of Igbo exclusions in Nigeria politics. Since after that war, the Yorubas, mostly the
new generation Yorubas after getting drunk with the looting of Nigeria, they do not believe that Igbo men
and women contributed anything to the development of Nigeria and its Independence.
-----Original Message-----
From: Rex Marinus <rexmarinus@hotmail.com>
To: igboevents <igboevents@yahoogroups.com>; nigerianworldforum <nigerianworldforum@yahoogroups.com>; talknigeria <talknigeria@yahoogroups.com>; naijaobserver <naijaobserver@yahoogroups.com>; igboworldforum <igboworldforum@yahoo.com>; naijapolitics <naijapolitics@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thu, Nov 29, 2012 7:40 am
Subject: [IgboEvents:Live] The Real Story of Nigeria - Nigeria and the Igbo from the very mouths of Obafemi Awolowo
"I was a little bit disturbed by the point you made before. I hope you have not taken a final decision on it, that is, that the East will not associate with the North in future. Easterners have fought more than any other group in this country over the years to make Nigeria what it is, or what it was, before the crisis began. I think it will be a pity if they just forget something for which they have laboured for years . Many of the Easterners who fought for "One Nigeria" are no longer with us. It will not be a good tribute to their memory by destroying that"one Nigeria"., Certainly, it is not going to be the same as it used to be. I have taken a stand on that, and I am prepared to drop tribal labels at the moment, but I know in my own mind what sort of thing I have in view for the federation. But I think it will be a great pity and tragedy and disservice to the memories of all those who have gone to disband Nigeria. And here we are not here to criticize anybody, I think it is generally agreed that some units have done more for the unity of Nigeria than others. The East certainly have not yielded first place to anyone in that regard. I would like you to consider that aspect very seriously".
-Chief Awolowo to General Ojukwu, Enugu, May 6, 1967
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