Saturday, December 29, 2018

SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Unfair Asian Critiques of Adichie

​Biko Agozino has finally submitted evidence of genocide against the *IBO* in Nigeria, and authored by his teacher, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, on 25 May 2017. One of his evidence of genocide against the *IBO* in Nigeria was an alleged statement credited to the then Colonel Benjamin Adekunle in The Economist, London, of 24 August 1968. As at August 1968, Adekunle's troops were still consolidating their grips on the Rivers and South East States captured from Biafra where military Governors with civilian administrations were newly set up. Rivers and South East States were mostly populated by the Ibibio and Ijaw people. The *IBO* in those areas had already fled with the retreating Biafran soldiers. It was not until September 1968 that Adekunle's forces captured Aba and Owerri which were real *IBO* territories. The civilian population of the two *IBO* towns had forcibly been evacuated by the retreating Biafran soldiers when the federal forces entered Aba and Owerri. Therefore, there were no civilian *IBO* left in Aba and Owerri to be shot as Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe made Adekunle to do in The Economist of 24 August 1968, a clear one month before entering *IBO* territories of Aba and Owerri. Quoting from the Economist of 24 August 1968, Ekwe-Ekwe claimed that Adekunle had said, "We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces enter into the centre of *IBO* territory, we shoot at everything, even at things that don't move." At best the statement attributed to Adekunle can be rated as statement of intention but the intention was not carried out since the two *IBO* territories were evacuated before the arrival of his soldiers. The statement credited to Adekunle in the Economist of 24 August 1968 implied that his forces were shooting everything that moved in the *IBO* territories they had captured whereas, no *IBO* territory was captured by his forces until the end of September 1968. Ekwe-Ekwe and his student, Biko Agozino, should submit evidence that Adekunle and his troops killed civilians in the *IBO* territories they occupied during the civil war to substantiate their allegation of genocide against the *IBO* people. And since, the *IBO* was annihilated in the civil war it seems to have resurrected, stronger than before, into what is today known as *IGBO.*

​The second evidence of genocide against the *IBO* submitted by Ekwe-Ekwe reads, "On 5 June 1969, ….. Gbadamosi King, of the Nigeria genocidist air force, shot down a clearly marked, incoming relief-carrying International Committee of the Red Cross DC-7 plane near Eket, South Biafra, with the loss of its 3-person crew." 
Despite the fact that the Federal Military government agreed to daylight relief flights to Biafra provided that the planes were checked by the government and followed routes of its choice, according to Geneva Conventions, federal troops at the war front were instructed to turn blind eyes to the illegal night-flying into Biafra for fifteen months, until 5 June 1969. Carl Gustav von Rosen had procured 'minicon'  air planes for Biafra with which he started, in May 1969, to bomb Nigerian troops in Calabar, Uyo, Pot Harcourt and Ughelli. It was no longer possible for the soldiers at the war front to turn blind eyes to the illegal flights into Biafra. Thus, towards nightfall on 5 June 1969, Captain Gbadamosi King observed a DC-7 plane marked with ICRC heading towards Biafra and ordered the Pilot to land either in Port Harcourt or Calabar for inspection before flying further. Despite repeated orders to the Red Cross plane to land for inspection, the pilot refused and the plane was shot down. The Geneva Convention of which Nigeria was a signatory did not permit ICRC to fly relief supplies direct into Biafra without prior inspection by Nigeria. The three crew in the Red Cross plane had nothing to lose by landing in Nigeria for inspection. The Red Cross plane was caught flying in unapproved corridor and at unapproved time. When the plane was shot down, it was exposed for ferrying weapons and ammunition and not relief supplies to civilians in Biafra which was the main reason why the crew refused to land in Nigeria for inspection before flying further to its destination. No normal person would regard shooting down of the ICRC's DC-7 plane under the afore-stated condition as genocide.

The third evidence submitted by Ekwe-Ekwe for genocide against the *IBO* reads, ".....//….. the genocidist air force's carpet bombings of Igbo population centres (especially refugee establishments, churches, shrines, schools, hospitals, markets, homes, farmlands and playgrounds) ….."
In the history of warfare, it was unique that Nigeria permitted International Observer Team, drawn from Britain, Canada, Poland, Sweden, United Nations and the then OAU (Organisation of African Unity) to observe the behaviours of its troops at the war front against the rebels. The International Team of Observer wrote reports collectively and individually. The Swedish Observer in the Team, Major-General Arthur Raab, had the following to say about federal side bombing civilian targets in Biafra, "After seven months, we have still not seen any signs of the mass annihilation which Ojukwu claims is threatened by the Federal side. It looked as though Ojukwu is deliberately transferring military headquarters to schools, hospitals, churches and so on. In which case can one call these civilian targets." (p.90, The World and Nigeria by Suzanne Cronje). Using civilians as  shields to attack federal forces as observed by Major-General Arthur Raab was confirmed by Chinua Achebe thus, "We have all gone to bed on one particular night - my family, Augustine and his family, and Frank and his family. We did not realize that Biafran soldiers had set up their armoury outside my father's house, on the veranda, the porch, and outside in the yard. ..//.. On this particular night we were oblivious of what was going on outside our father's house. While we were sleeping the Biafran army was turning our ancestral home into a military base of sorts. No one asked us for permission. They did not knock to ask or to inform. ….//…. We all were awakened violently from sleep by a loud ka-boom!, followed by the rattling of the house foundation and walls, indeed of the entire house. A number of people who were asleep fell off their beds, violently ushered back into reality by the vibrations, the shock, and the noise of the artillery fire outside. it was awful. The men in the house went outside to find out what was going on. A colonel who was in charge of this exercise explained that they had decided to use our home as a tactical base because it provided them a logistical and strategic advantage as they shelled the encroaching federal troops." (p.172-173, There Was a Country, by Chinua Achebe). The federal forces reserved the right to return fire to anywhere from which they were being shelled and only a fool would have regarded Achebe's ancestral home as a civilian target that should not be bombed by the federal army and would have concluded that shooting at, or bombing, similar targets in Biafra constituted genocide.
S. Kadiri   


Från: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Skickat: den 27 december 2018 15:29
Till: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Ämne: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Unfair Asian Critiques of Adichie
 
It is the season of rhetorical questions with implicit answers. Those who still do not get it should read the interventions of my teacher, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, which you can find on his Rethinking Africa blog or in his Pamvazuka News columns if you have no access to his paradigmatic books. If your eyes are failing you, turn off the Nollywood movies and get someone to read to you. Here is a sample:


Biko


On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 8:54 AM, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
<yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
Biko.

The claim that you are a victim of genocide needs be substantiated. Where were you when the genocide was perpetrated?  By whom?  I was born before the first Nigerian Civil War and witnessed the horror of South westerners  killed by Ogbunigwes in the East.  I reserve the right to claim I'm a victim of genocide by Biafrans.  With regards to the Blitzkreig of London during the second World War Londoners who survived could claim at the Nuremberg trials they were victims of genocide by Hitler and the German state.  They made no such claim because they accepted that is not the normal interpretation of genocide.


You hate genocide; so do I.  But let us not make claims that are generally not true.

OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: 27/12/2018 03:09 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Unfair Asian Critiques of Adichie

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Brer Rabbit, the Rabbi wanna be,

Sleep well, though you may cry in your sleep, not the genocide patch, not the Biafra patch, to subconsciously wish that your possessors would actually cast you there as your favorite turf where you enjoy to nibble on juicy ideas.

You are mistaken in the assumption that hatred is at the back every critique. Internal criticism is a veritable African institution, according to Fanon. Mao also defended the value of internal criticism given that an unwashed face becomes dirty. Similarly, Achebe welcomed the critique from visitors who may see what the household took for granted but he cautioned the visiting critic not to assume superiority over the household members ethnocentrically. 

Those of us who are critical of genocide are not motivated by hatred but by the love of human life. Those who are opposed to the critique of genocide cannot say that they love genocide but only try to justify the unjustifiable or to deny that it took place. When I spoke to an audience of Indigenous People who survived genocide in New Zealand and I shared with them that I too survived genocide in Biafra, you seem irritated but they understood perfectly why I interpreted the play, Death and the King's Horseman in the original way that I did. Many of them urged me to write up that interpretation and I did so while we debated the novel interpretation on this USADialogue series during my trip to New Zealand and Australia. Ken Harrow has cautioned us that the list is 'monitored' but without saying who is monitoring the list and in whose interest? In any case, we are not hiding anything and we are not afraid of criticism.

If you read my work, you will find that I do not obsess about genocide nor about Biafra although opposition to genocide cannot be over-emphasized for it is an ongoing crime against the whole of humanity and not just against the Igbo in Biafra. You may have your reasons why any mention of such huge crimes seems to rile you up and make you suspect, wrongly, that the speaker is motivated by hate. An Asian woman, Arundhati Roy, makes reference to starving Biafra children too but I bet that you will not accuse her of hating you or your lords. I believe that she is motivated by the love of human freedom.



I could have said 'Two Asian Women Attack Adichie Unfairly' to avoid the surprising over-generalization that you appear to read into the clear opinion about two Asian women who did attack Adichie unfairly. My intervention was not motivated by hatred of Asian women but by a call for more voices to join the condemnation of the genocidal crimes that Adichie condemns in her work. I could have qualified that private communication with you by inserting a comma before 'everything she has written', I could have added 'virtually' to 'everything'. But as I told you, the long sentence should not be read out of context. 

Nevertheless, even when Adichie does not use the word genocide, her work almost always goes against mass violence such as femicide which the WHO recognizes to be of genocidal proportions worldwide. The two Asian women who attacked her could have applied her thoughts to combat the epidemic of femicide and genocide that is going on in Asia and around the world. If Asians were being executed in Africa for drugs offences at the rate that Asian countries are executing Africans, you would have heard African writers advocating for penal abolitionism in the interest of all. Mamdani condemned genocide in Uganda and Museveni invited the Asians who were expelled by Idi Amin to return, but he is yet to invite the descendants of enslaved Africans to return.

I write as someone who has also been very critical of aspects of the work of Adichie but without rubbishing her valuable contributions to the defense of human dignity worldwide. Africans have shown the willingness to adopt ideas from Asian writers without unfairly dismissing them as not being committed to human rights. Ghanaian students successfully protested against the statue of Gandhi on their campus partly because of his prejudiced opinions against Africans in his younger years before he was reeducated by the Zulu about nonviolence, according to Gandhi himself in his autobiography. Is there any statue of Nkrumah in India and if not why not? The critique of Gandhi is shared by Indians too and they and Africans embrace some ideas of Gandhi nevertheless. 

The Asian writers who attack Adichie unfairly have not attacked white feminist writers and African women have not attacked Asian feminist writers, to the best of my knowledge. I have questioned the condescending approach to African writers by the likes of Naipaul and Spivak elsewhere without hating all their works and without generalizing their flaws to all Asians. Cultural criticism is not powered by hatred but by the love of culture defined by Ngugi and by Cabral as the struggle for and against domination, not as a way of life.

Do not campaign for Adichie to be awarded the Nobel Prize because, prize or no prize, she will remain an important voice for the whole world to listen to, not just a voice for her generation as you suggested. No matter how her scripted interviews with US First Ladies is perceived, no matter how much two Asian women wish that she would become the mouthpiece for their political slogans, Adichie is not the enemy of the people to be despised. As your Iyawo demonstrates to you, the young bard deserves all the admiration that she can get in her passion for social justice that she narrates with a compelling voice that is hard to ignore. Those who are jealous of her success should go ahead and write the type of books that they wished that she should write for them.

Happy Kwanzaa. Happy Umoja.

Biko


On Wednesday, 26 December 2018, 16:43, Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com> wrote:


I have been looking more closely at Fringe theory
We could take up the alleged Asian envy of "African over-achievers" in a separate discussion. I suppose that the equilibrium of Biko's non-racist mind has been poisoned by the likes of V.S. Naipaul
We've partly been there before :
  • Biko Agozino
    Biko Agozino The Pakistani immigrant dreams of taking the media job of the Naija immigrant. Na jealousy Jealoma. To interview Hilary or Michelle, everyone knows that the questions will be vetted and scripted in advance by the forum. Adichie deserves credit for challenging patriarchy (including getting Hilary to change her web bio that started with the status, wife), racism (getting Michelle to share about the racism she continues to face), and genocide in all her works. Compared to Ms Bhuto who writes about her family and accused her aunt of assassinating her father, Ms Adichie is head and shoulder above her and deserves the big gigs she gets.
  • Cornelius Hamelberg
    Cornelius Hamelberg "and genocide in all her works." Really?
  • Biko Agozino
    Biko Agozino Cornelius Hamelberg long sentence not to be read out of context. Have you read Adichie?
  • Cornelius Hamelberg
    Cornelius Hamelberg Not all her works ( but my Better Half has ( read all her works - and met her )
  • Biko Agozino
    Biko Agozino Cornelius Hamelberg Your Iyawo has good taste.
I take it that yawo - at least in Krio means bride"
Otherwise, all I would like to add is that Adichie's iconic role, what is expected of her is enormous , larger than life as is the role that is often foisted on any hugely successful African writer , the writer as prophet or oracle ( in her case a prophetess – in relation to the future of Nigeria, the future of women, the future of African women, Mother Africa, Mother Nigeria , just as in equal measure Aminatta Forna is sometimes consulted as a prophetess - to show which way the wind is blowing or should blow, in Sierra Leone and in both cases , since they are young women they are also supposedly spokespeople, of the younger generation.
Does Adichie indeed always write about genocide ? What an awful burden to bear. She will soon be referred to as " the conscience" of her generation and it could be quite difficult to extricate herself from that kind of New Testament aura, otherwise it's not such a bad characterisation after all if she's aiming at the Nobel Prize from the Swedish Academy or even the Noble Peace Prize, like Elie Wiesel of which NIGHT is most haunting


Biko does not lose a single golden opportunity when it comes to driving his message home about Biafra , not even in new Zealand where he did not fail to target his audience when given the opportunity to do so . Disbelievers can listen in .Here

Professor Biko Agozino launches our new academic journal Decolonization of Criminology and Justice


Baba Kadiri, more food for thought.  Cheers!


Concerning any good word that he has for Hilary Clinton ( Trump's " lynin' Hillary, " the worst Secretary of State in the history of America" ) I will not get tired of reminding you of Ishmael Reed's words here : ( from "Ma and Pa Clinton Flog Uppity Black Man" :

"As a result of his ability to imitate the black preaching style, Clinton was able to seduce black audiences, who ignored some of his actions that were unfriendly, even hostile to blacks. His interrupting his campaign to get a mentally disabled black man, Ricky Ray Rector executed. (Did Mrs. Clinton tear up about this act?) His humiliation of Jesse Jackson. His humiliation of Jocelyn Elders and Lani Gunier. The welfare reform bill that has left thousands of women black, white, yellow and brown destitute, prompting Robert Scheer to write in the San Francisco Chronicle, "To his everlasting shame as president, Clinton supported and signed welfare legislation that shredded the federal safety net for the poor from which he personally had benefited." (Has Ms. Clinton shed a tear for these women, or did she oppose her husband's endorsement of this legislation?) His administration saw a high rate of black incarceration as a result of Draconian drug laws that occurred during his regime. He advocated trade agreements that sent thousands of jobs overseas. (Did Mrs. Clinton, with misty eyes, beg him to assess how such trade deals would effect the livelihood of thousands of families, black, white, brown, red and yellow?) He refused to intervene to rescue thousands of Rwandans from genocide. (Did Mrs. Clinton tearfully beseech her husband to intervene on behalf of her African sisters; did Ms. Gloria Steinem, whose word is so influential among millions of white women that she can be credited by some for changing the outcome of a primary, and maybe an election, marshal these forces to place pressure upon Congress to rescue these black women and girls?) "


On Tuesday, 25 December 2018 19:58:24 UTC+1, Biko Agozino wrote:
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