Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association
Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2021 1:13 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Watch "Black Axe: Nigeria's Deadliest Cult - BBC Africa Eye documentary" on YouTube
Please be cautious: **External Email**
So no Fulani Herdsmen are involved in this?--
On Tue, Dec 14, 2021 at 08:31 Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
A Speculative Response on Female TraffickingPerhaps because the strongest trafficking networks are there.
If so, why are they there?
Perhaps the socio-economic context is most fertile there
What context could this be?
Perhaps a combination of factors-
A. Poverty.
B. Belief in economic salvation through traveling abroad.
C. Social permissiveness in the face of economic adventurism represented by female traficking, as long as it yields obvious returns.
D. Strong belief in the supernatural used as a means of discipline within trafficking networks and sustained by spiritual practitioners.
Why should all these factors come together in Edo state?
A longer and more speculative story.
D. Benin is one of the most spititually vibrant cities in Nigeria, with the traditional religion in evidence every where at a level perhaps unprecedented elsewhere.
Where you find traditional African religion, you find it's underside of questionable forms of spirituality and magic.
A. There is poverty everywhere in Nigeria but Edo state might be a threshhold of educational achievement which, however, does not translate into economic empowerment, leading to both awareness of better possibilities and inability to actualize them, a general Nigerian problem, but one perhaps particularly acute there.
C. The roots of this reported permissiveness are very controversial. One argument holds that Benin and to some degree, Edo inheritance law does not help, by vesting all or most power over the estate of a deceased father in the hands of the first son, thereby leading some women to accumulate first sons for different men,a situation making female sexuality and fertility into an economic instrument, predisposing to further such commercialisations.
Thanks
Toyin
On Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 14:04 Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com> wrote:
It's quite a colourful name for a criminal organisation or a Black is beautiful Liberation Front with political ambitions, or indeed a terrorist organisation : Black Axe
They are a different kettle of fish compared with Black November, and perhaps, not as bloody as that bag of dynamite known as Black September…
From the tip of the iceberg: You see, not being omnipresent, I'm reacting locally, from my corner of the Diaspora. It would be pretentious, unforgivably pretentious to pretend that I'm a gang member writing from Lagos or a gang member sitting at the Owerri Motor Park observing the sunrise, or that I have some special knowledge which you ordinary mortals don't have, because I'm a member of the CIA , I'm being fed some juicy information by a big secret police chief sitting at the Interpol Headquarters at Lyons in France or I'm being informed about the inner machinations by some of the big people surrounding the President of Nigeria who phone me up day and night to intimate me with what's going on with all that money laundering, about spiritual wickedness in high and low places with Black Axe supporters sitting in the senate and other arms of government such as the police, the military and the judiciary, sounding as helpless as dear Goodluck Jonathan who threw his hands up in the air in despair and cried, "Boko Haram is everywhere !" ( He wanted us to feel sorry for him)
This affects all of us, just being Black one is suspect of being a member of Black Axe, it' doesn't matter if you hail from Kenya or Madagascar, it's enough to be black to warrant some suspicion that you could be one of them. Call it " racism" if you like, but from that paranoid point of view there's no escape if your professor's ass happens to be black.
What are the implications for the Nigerian Embassy in Stockholm?
Just two years ago there was some media outbreak, a real hue and cry over here that the dreaded Black Axe is here in Sweden replete with what I thought at the time was some exotica reporting about gang members, especially the trafficked women having taken oaths of silence on some ju-ju – ( go tell it to the marines) as was explained to what at the time I thought was the naive, innocent and gullible Swedish Police , an idea that I scoffed at but which the BBC's Nigerian investigator who put together this documentary has confirmed.
Whoever you are or may be, it's understandable if you're thinking, rejecting and recoiling along the lines of that old trajectory which begins with the real slave auction history behind Black Friday and continues with the other negatives associated with the colour black, such as Black Market – not to mention the famous Black Maria Police Van once associated with an area in London known as Ladbroke Grove, frequently visited by the aforementioned Black Maria in the 1980s – 1990s. I wonder if Black Axe is now firmly established there and has taken complete control of that area "territory" by now, as the mythologists would like us to believe? And I suppose the Australian Mafioso around Earls Court are feared as "White Axe"?
"The Black Vikings" could be appropriate nomenclature for the local chapters over here in Sweden now that the media fog about the gog and magog is all about gang criminality is Sweden – to the extent that restoring the country to the normalcy of peace and tranquillity is the number one priority issue in the upcoming Sunday, 11 September, 2022 General Elections in Sweden
In the universal neutral mode Donovan sang his song " Colours" which begins " Yellow is the colour" while the always battle-ready Nina Simone ( married to a policeman ) wouldn't do anything else but keep asserting "Black is the colour of my true love's hair"
What remains a mystery - and this has been taken up in this forum before, is why the overwhelming majority of the women trafficked to Europe to work as prostitutes should come from Edo State in Nigeria?
--On Tuesday, 14 December 2021 at 01:47:01 UTC+1 Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:
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