Another enigmatic one-liner from Edo-land's Adepoju, that's supposed to have said it all.
Spokesperson Adepoju is clearly not happy. He says that he is "uncomfortable" and understandably, I daresay peeved that the BBC's exposé documentary by a fellow Nigerian should in any way tarnish "the physical image" of his Alma Mater, the University of Benin.
UB as a hotbed of intrigue?
How dare he and how dare the BBC !
But, it's not as if the sensitive Adepoju had not been duly warned. When I clicked on the link to the BBC documentary the warning was clear enough, the viewer had been advised to proceed at his / her own peril : "The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences. Viewer discretion is advised ", followed by ( not for the faint-hearted) : "I UNDERSTAND AND WISH TO PROCEED." And it was with that understanding that Adepoju proceeded and didn't like what he saw. I didn't either.
The question is, was the BBC misrepresenting the reality - and if so, surely Adepoju is at liberty to correct whatever misrepresentations , even if , alas, the damage is already done?
I was appalled by the squalor of the Makoko slum in Lagos, a slum inhabited by circa 250, 000 Nigerians, Are they registered to vote in Nigeria's democratic elections which elect state governors and presidents?
Understandably too, some people are made to conform to the exact image of their Alma Mater, in your case it's the University of Benin whose alumni includes other stellar intellectuals like you. What to say then about the erstwhile, so-called "The Athens of West Africa " which both physically an spiritually speaking has assuredly seen better days?
Are you remotely suggesting that the University of Benin has only produced artists, scientists, archbishops, and politicians ?
Cheer up !
" Prisons are built with stones of the law
Brothels with the bricks of religion"
( According to William Blake )
I'm uncomfortable with the physical image of my alma mater, the University of Benin, in the BBC film.ThanksToyinOn Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 04:45 Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:Leaving the Fulani Herdsmen alone for just a moment , s'il vous plaît...
There is this unexplored area of motivation being claimed as justification, be it terrorism or other forms of criminality, and I got to thinking about it since a very long time ago, before I set off for Nigeria, when I took Stellan Petterson, now late ( a gifted Swedish artist and at that time an associate professor at Konstfack) to see some very hip African-American Brethren. We were well received but then the brother-in-charge took me aside to a back room where the weapons were stacked and told me, "Brother Cornelius, never you bring a white man here again!"
I told him that Stellan was Sami . He told me that it didn't matter, that they belong to the same tribe, the blue-eyed devil is the blue-eyed devil no matter where in hell he comes from. I was quite surprised because these guys were deep into pssy - white pssy as in
The explanation for that attitude came a little later : "You can never trust whitey". The Brothers coming from what they described as racist America (what was originally the Red Man's land) and now living in Sweden (a white man's land) as contentious objectors. That in racist America there had been slavery, followed by forty acres and a mule, followed by lynchings, followed by more evil: Hitler & the Holocaust, Hiroshima & Nagasaki as the targets on which to test their nuclear bombs. the uphill Civil Rights struggle followed by the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, followed by the assassination of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968 followed by the decimation of the Black Panthers whilst Reagan was Governor of California. You know the whole long history of the African Diaspora over yonder.
Now, there's a lot of talk about Black Axe ( I never tell you finish) and I suppose that that bit where some of them talk about being "freedom fighters" etc. could not be easily differentiated from the so called "freedom fighters" of the corruptly rich political elites who believe themselves to be looting their countries legally with the full co-operation, complicity & compliance of the police, the military. the judiciary and some of the honourable holy men of the clergy (like their role model Elmer Gantry) sometimes said to be in cahoots - the business of looting together in the name of African unity, freedom, postcolonial justice and togetherness.
One of the very few times I've ever listened to Swedish Radio and this was purely accidental in 1985, call it coincidence of synchronicity that at the exact point ( in time) at which I switched on the radio I heard this : " Nigeria, where I was robbed twice between the airport and my arrival at the hotel, first by the military and then by the Police"
I suppose that some international criminal, money-making outfits operating in Europe could give their activities a political dimension - White Slavery and some other forms of racketeering as payback time for colonialism, neo-colonialism etc. et etc.
I suppose that whenever I say " I know some really bad guys" , Whitey thinks that they must be members of the Black Axe Brotherhood. Fact is that I don't know anybody that's a member of Black Axe. The really bad guys that I have in mind are legally baad…
Madilu System - Beau souvenir
--On Wednesday, 15 December 2021 at 09:34:51 UTC+1 Emeagwali, Gloria (History) wrote:TA,To be honest, I appreciated thecool, calm and collected analysis that youprovided on the kidnapping phenomenon.You did not speak about "Bini Kidnapperterrorists"but instead focused on thesocio-economic context without theethnic labeling and the tendency tocriminalize an entire group of people.
Thank you for that.
I have spoken enough for todayand tomorrow.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
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
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2021 1:13 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Watch "Black Axe: Nigeria's Deadliest Cult - BBC Africa Eye documentary" on YouTubePlease be cautious: **External Email**
Thanks Gloria.
Please help us call to order govenors Masari of Katsina and El Rufia of Kaduna, both Fulani, who have been maligning the name of Fulani and Fulani herdsmen in particular by describing renegade Fulani Herdsmen as constituting the bandits/terrorists who have turned the North into a theatre of woe.
How dare they?
Even though they have first hand contact with these figures, with Masari even negotiating with them at one time, have they considered that there are so many criminal groups in Nigeria it's not fair to identify criminal members of their own ethnicity the way they have?
It's also in place to take to task the two arms of Miyetti Allah to for supporting massacres by Fulani herdsmen militia, the lawlessness that birthed the expanded terrorist crisis in the North beyond Boko Haram.
Is it responsible for a scholar to trvialise a reality written in the blood of countless people, numerous shattered families?
Thanks
Toyin
On Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 18:48 Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com> wrote:
So no Fulani Herdsmen are involved in this?--
On Tue, Dec 14, 2021 at 08:31 Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@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 <cornelius...@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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