The Zerai Model of gendered people-centred approach to governance, ICT and social justice

 

The Zerai Model of gendered people-centred approach to governance, ICT and social justice

African Women, ICT and Neoliberal Politics

Biko Agozino

Oct 08, 2019

The author posits that from the perspective of African women, it is impossible to ignore racism and sexism while organising against poverty.

I first met Assata Zerai in 1999 while visiting the family of Horace Campbell in Syracuse University where they were colleagues. It was my first Thanksgiving dinner in the United States. After the dinner, we were chatting when she mentioned that she had a co-authored book manuscript on the nightmares of ‘crack mothers’ who were demonised in the media and repressed by policy makers that wanted to sterilise them. I told her that she had just found a publisher because two years earlier, Ashgate publishers launched the Interdisciplinary Research Series in Ethnic, Gender and Class Relations with my book on Black Women and the Criminal Justice System (republished in 2018 by Routledge) and with me as the Series Editor. I told her that I would be happy to recommend her manuscript for publication in the series. She promptly sent me the proposal and Ashgate accepted my recommendation and published the ground-breaking book that called for harm reduction instead of the racist-sexist war on poor women in the guise of the war on drugs.

I was pleasantly surprised when Zerai accepted an award from the Conference on Black Women in Higher Education at Virginia Tech and she recognised me as one of her mentors whereas I looked up to her as one of my peer mentors. I am pleased and honoured to see that this new book, African Women, ICT and Neoliberal Politics, started by highlighting our celebration of the work of Victor Chikezie Uchendu who was my mentor in Nigeria and whose classic work on The Igbo of Southeast Nigeria turned 50 years in 2015. I had invited three scholars to celebrate the book at Virginia Tech and it was an honour to have had Zerai, who was then the Director of the Centre for African Studies that Uchendu had founded at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne. She was soon to rise in the university administration as Associate Dean, Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion, and Associate Provost while finding the time to complete ground-breaking books.

This new book continues with her track-records in post-positivistic gender-sensitive Africa-centred scholar-activism that all critical scholars and the general public could learn from. I already include her essay on scholar-activism within the classroom and at the grassroots as one of the required readings for my Africana Research Methods graduate class and I am happy to say that the new book elaborates on her original theory that even when you are teaching in the class-room, you can still practice scholar-activism through the exposure of students to the benefits of critical, creative and Africa-centred gender-sensitivity in all aspects of the course. This is an original contribution from an African diaspora scholar because African American scholars tend to focus more on the diaspora and neglect Africa relatively. African male scholars tend to focus mainly on the important struggles against racism while relatively neglecting sexism; and African scholars tend to depend on Eurocentric theories while neglecting contributions by fellow Africans.

The Critical Race Theory came from Kimberley Crenshaw and others to advance knowledge beyond critical legal studies that focused only on class by emphasising the intersectionality of race-class-gender issues. But the proponents of intersectionality rarely apply their theory to African women the way that Stuart Hall exemplified by basing his Cultural Studies theory of articulation, disarticulation and re-articulation on the critique of apartheid racism-sexism-imperialism. Western feminists tend to avoid the need to adopt anti-racist thoughts because they claim that racism is not part of their standpoint experiences though they do not need to experience every form of oppression before they can oppose it. Angela Davis warned that some of the white feminists were actually supporting the use of rape as a racist propaganda for the oppression of black women and black men. Western Marxists tended to focus exclusively on the working class struggles but from the perspective of African women, it will be impossible to ignore racism and sexism while organising against poverty. Here, Zerai demonstrates what is lost by scholars when African women are ignored by theorists and activists given the immense contributions that African women have made towards the advancement of democracy and the innovation of communication technologies along with indigenous knowledge systems.

The book brings Zerai’s Africa-centred gender sensitivity to bear on governance and development studies as a critique of the law and order approach of Worldwide Global Indicators by the World Bank. Zerai dismissed such male-centred indicators as falling short for not taking seriously into consideration, the vital issue of social justice without which government effectiveness and communicative democracy would remain elusive. Unlike most texts in Africana Studies, which tend to be historical, biographical, artistic or sociological, this book breaks new grounds by focusing on access to communicative technology as an indicator of what Walter Rodney identified as increasing freedom, capacity, and material well-being that define development and the reversal of which indicates the underdevelopment of one society by another.

In the Zerai Model of women-centred ICT use, knowledge diffusion and good governance, the access of women to cellphones and Internet technology per 100 people in the population is used as the independent variable with which to explain the levels of access by women to education, healthcare, and school enrolment and with which to explain accountability in governance, women’s participation in government and the effectiveness of governance as dependent variables. The correlation between the independent and dependent variables can be seen in the Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Programme, which shows that African countries that invest less in the access of women to education also tend to have low Human Development Index scores compared to the higher scores across the Caribbean. It is important to note that ICT is being associated by Zerai with the production and diffusion of knowledge and not just for entertainment especially because it is easy for ICT to be misused for video games, bullying, scams, and for watching endless Nollywood movies without emphasising the educational, economic, and political potentials. Zerai is suggesting that women are likely to put the ecology of ICT to better use for the benefit of the entire family and the entire community or entire country.

In Africa, story-telling is dominated by women who entertain their children with moonlight folktales to teach them the morals of their culture. The European colonisers tried to undermine the agency of African women by trying to impose a patriarchal, racist imperialism that saw African women as dependents of the men but African women resisted and deployed their knowledge of communication technologies to resist their disempowerment. Thus, Igbo and Ibibio women declared war on colonialism in 1929 when the British tried to impose chiefs and taxes on them without representation. They rallied and burnt down the homes of the chiefs and the shops of multinational trading companies along with the native courts. Dozens of the unarmed women were shot dead but they won the right not to be taxed without representation and not to have colonial chiefs. Abeokuta women repeated this war in 1945 when they deposed a colonial chief who liked to molest young girls in the guise of assessing them for taxation. Kikuyu women waged a similar struggle against the imposition of forced labour on women and their sexual exploitation that produced unwanted pregnancies when forced to travel far away to work on railroads without pay. South African women rose against the Apartheid Pass Laws and said that those who struck women were striking rocks. Finally, Liberian women organised to ‘Pray the devil back to hell’ in order to end the bloody civil war that the men used as the excuse to rape and terrorise women in their competition over the control of blood diamonds.

The well-known stories of women’s agency among the Igbo in the ‘post-positivistic’ works of Uchendu and Amadiume formed the theoretical framework for the book in support of the hypothesis that neglecting the communication technologies used by women to organise in Africa would be a disservice to scholarship, governance, and social justice. It is rare to find a book written in North America that adopts African thinkers as the theoretical framework! Zerai combined what Uchendu defined in ethnography as the ‘etic’ or outsider view and the ‘emic’ or insider view because she is a woman of African descent doing research on her fellow African women through the perspective of African feminism or Africana womanism.

It is well-known that coltan, the metal that powers the cellphones around the world, comes mostly from the Democratic Republic of Congo where genocidal wars have raged and rape is used as a weapon of war against women by war-lords fighting over the control of the mineral wealth of the country. Despite the exploitation of the mineral wealth of Africa to build the cellphone technology based on an invention by an African American scientist, Henry T. Sampson, the European and North American countries had no intention of extending the benefits of ICT to African women because the products were priced beyond their reach.

A Sudanese investment banker in London, Mo Ibrahim, developed a proposal to set up cellphone towers across Africa to enable Africans to call one another without being charged arms and legs by landline phone companies that were connected to the capital cities of colonising countries but not across the colonial boundaries in Africa. Thus, a call from Nigeria to Cameroun or Benin Republic next door would be routed to Paris and then rerouted back to Nigeria’s neighbours by the landline companies at huge costs to Africans.

Surprisingly, no cellphone provider wanted to support his proposal because they said that Africans were too poor and would not have any need for cellphones. Ibrahim quit his job and took his savings and personal loans to go and set up the cellphone towers across Africa and Africans loved the service. Within a few years, cellphones were selling like hot cakes in Africa and the same cellphone companies that refused to support his proposal came with hostile take-over moves to buy him out. He sold his company, Celtel, for more than three billion dollars and went on to set up the Mo Ibrahim Foundation to support good governance in Africa by awarding US$10 million to any African leader who was voted as a good leader by judges. Sadly, year after year with few exceptions like Ellen Sirleaf of Liberia, no winner was found for the prize among the highly corrupt patriarchal neo-colonial rulers of Africa.

My question to Zerai is whether she has plans for scholar-activism using the findings in a book like this to convince the Mo Ibrahim Foundation to redirect the African Leadership Prize money towards the empowerment of African women through ICT grants, micro credit grants, prizes in story-telling, music, literature, filmmaking, fashion design, hair-dressing, science and technology, cooking, research grants, and start-up costs for women owned businesses and for women politicians across Africa? Similarly, the cellphone companies and Internet providers should be persuaded by readers of this book to consider offering reparative justice to the African women who have been discriminated against and victimised in the scramble for the natural resources with which the phones are built. They too should award huge grants to African women to improve their ICT ecology and thereby, their access to education, knowledge and political participation for the benefit of all.

Ron Eglash, Abdul Karim Bangura, and Horace Campbell have established that the computer engineering algorithms that power the Internet are based on complex African fractal designs that are common in the cornrow hair designs pioneered by African women at home and in the diaspora where it was used to support the litigation for the redistricting of Atlanta for better representation of African Americans who did not settle in straight grids due to racist red-districting and discrimination in housing. European mathematicians shunned such non-lineal fractal designs for centuries as irrational in preference for easy to control Cartesian designs until they discovered that they are powerful tools for communication and self-organisation based on principles of infinity, self-similarity, interconnectivity, fractional dimensions, non-lineal geometry and recursion that are more common in African designs.

Eglash credited Phillip Emeagwali, who was recognised by President Clinton as one the founding fathers of the Internet, with the humble opinion that he learned how to design faster computer connectivity by observing his mother in the kitchen in Nigeria. Campbell observed that Barack Obama deployed the revolutionary principles of African fractals for his successful model of 21st century politics and Bangura found these principles to be common in the complex thoughts of African writers. Henry Louis Gates opined that the Internet is the ‘21st Century talking drum’ (though he did not mention the irony that the talking drum is a primarily male art form in Africa). Olu Oguibe warned against the maintenance of a digital Third World even in the diaspora where millions of people remain unable to access the information super highway.

The question is whether Zerai will set up a non-governmental organisation or lead a mass movement based on the book to advocate for the Internet, ICT and cellphone providers to set aside a portion of their huge profits specifically to give back to African women by funding coding academies, university scholarships, business start-ups, sporting facilities, sanitation and water facilities, and health centres across Africa?

*Doctor Biko Agozino is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Technology University, United States of America.

My Great-Grand Father Fought for Justice

By Biko Agozino

 

Senior colleagues in Africana Studies have been asking me to explain if it is true that Africans sold their own people during the Trans Atlantic slavery as alleged by Henry Louis Gates in his BBC series, Wonders of the African World. This renewed interest follows the historical fiction by a Nigerian writer, Adaobi Tricia Obinne Nwaubani, who published a story in New Yorker, ‘My Great-Grandfather - the Nigerian Slave Trader’ and another on the BBC website, ‘My Nigerian Great-Grand Father Sold Slaves’. The BBC presented her as a ‘journalist’ to legitimize her invented stories but she is better known as a novelist who makes things up. I blogged a response to her New Yorker article but I was told off for going soft on her supposedly because she is a fellow Igbo. Here is my slightly tougher but hopefully shorter response to her imaginary BBC story:

 

For full disclosure, Adaobi advertised on her own website that while growing up in the 1980s, she had the strange saboteur dream of becoming a CIA or KGB agent presumably to work against the interests of Africa. She may still be looking for such jobs by writing eagerly like a character witness for European enslavers of Africans against the pending legal writ for reparative justice by people of African descent. First of all, she keeps calling her notorious great-grandfather a famous Nigerian but he pre-existed the invention of Nigeria by the British. Secondly, Africans were not slaves but kidnapped people being trafficked. She is not a historian, so I will not go hard on her.

 

Adaobi correctly translated the Igbo word, ohu, as slave but being neither a sociologist nor an anthropologist nor a historian, she did not know that the context and contents of igba ohu or slavery in ancient Africa were nothing like chattel slavery. As a matter of fact, there was no slave mode of production in Africa, said Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. That was why Amanyanabo Jo Jo Ubani, King Jaja, could rise to be King of Opobo and Joseph became Prime Minister in Kemet. They were servants or odibo and not slaves or ohu.

 

Adaobi may also be right that some cruel families like hers insisted on burying their dead patriarchs with living human beings but that was never part of Igbo culture. During the World Court case over the disputed Bakassi peninsula that was allegedly ceded to Cameroon earlier by Nigeria to blockade and starve the Igbo in Biafra, a Calabar ruler, Obong of Calabar, was a witness for Nigeria around the year 2005. He told the court that there was a similarity in the culture of the Efik of Nigeria and the Bakassi of Cameroon who were one people, in his view, because they buried their King or Obong with four human heads. Nigeria promptly lost the dispute to Cameroon who may have rebutted that such barbarity was not allowed in Cameroon. Neither is it part of the radically democratic Igbo culture where all heads are equal and the Igbo say that they know no king!

 

I responded in detail when Adaobi displayed ignorance about Igbo language and mistranslated her family name in an earlier version of her historical fiction for the New Yorker. The proverbs that she mistranslated for the BBC would say servants or odibo and not ohu, when referring to the ability of servants to learn from the instruction of sons by fathers. The Igbo may say that a man who owns no servant owns himself since inwe onwe is self-ownership or freedom. Yes, the word slave means ohu in Igbo but the Efik still call civil servants the white man's slave or ntop mbakara while the Igbo call them those who do the white man’s work or ndi olu bekee. Even when the word ohu is used to warn children about slave-traders, everybody knows that Europeans warn their children that there is a monster or bogeyman under every bed ready to devour naughty children but it is the pervert uncles, priests, and parents that the children should beware.

 

If Adaobi’s great-grand father was a slave trader, then he was obviously a lumpen scum bag who must have been shunned by the masses that resisted the kidnappers whom she said that her great-grand father hired to go and kidnap people from distant places for sale by him. That may have been why the colonizers made him their paramount chief and tax collector, a deplorable role that led Igbo women to declare war against colonialism in 1929 and force the abolition of Warrant Chiefs among the Igbo who still believe that all heads are equal and boast that the Igbo know no king.

 

Notice that Adaobi ignorantly reported that her great-grand father did not appear to have an extended family, friends, age-grade members, in-laws, or community supporters that rallied around him when his possessions, including ten wives and slaves, were seized by the colonizers who only returned them when he showed the certificate issued to him as a trader by the Royal Niger Company. He was surely a sad lonely figure in a society that valued people more than wealth and still name their children Nwakaego or Ndukaku meaning, child is greater than money or life is greater than wealth. No wonder his name was also Oriaku – a pejorative title by the Igbo for a parasitic wife who only consumes wealth, a title that Igbo women rejected in preference for Odoziaku or wealth manager.

 

In the New Yorker, Adaobi exposed her motivation for her hagiography when she wondered if Africans deserve reparations given that her great-grandfather was a highway robber and kidnapper. Fallacy of the straw man. She also claimed that her family was facing mysterious disasters attributed to the sins and abominations committed by her great-grandfather, forcing the family to contemplate changing their name, to chant psalms annually and pray for forgiveness, and to destroy some family juju pots, perhaps to attract rich wives and husbands for their beautiful children (the thinly disguised theme of her debut novel about 419 fraud, I did not Come to You by Chance).

 

I advised Adaobi in my earlier blog response to tell her wealthy family to set up scholarship funds for her cousins who descended from those that her great-grandfather oppressed instead of simply praying to be washed as white as snow for as she reported, schooling is a great leveler of social statuses – school children make friends without being constrained by ancient claims to status, wealth or caste.

 

In the BBC story, Adaobi quoted the eminent historian, Adiele Afigbo, to give credibility to her amateur psychoanalysis of her dysfunctional family by suggesting that the residues of the slave trade continued until the 1950s before the British finally ended the crimes against humanity that they themselves initiated and ran for hundreds of years without apology or reparations, charged Chinweizu in The West and the Rest of Us. Not being a historian, Adaobi failed to interpret this riddle from Afigbo who was obviously inviting scrutiny of the fact that Africans were to blame for their inability to mobilize and end the slave raids by themselves for more than 400 years. Look how long! For that, Mathew Kerekou, president of Benin Republic, rightfully took a knee at an African American church and apologized for the despicable roles that some African chiefs were forced to play in the inhumane crimes against humanity but Rodney insists in The History of the Upper Guinea Coast that Africans were mostly warriors against slavery.

 

Afigbo was reminding us that since Africans were conscripted as enslaved people to fight for the British during the European tribal wars as if they were slaves, the British cannot claim to have ended slavery. When unarmed African women demanded not to be taxed without representation in the colonial government, the British massacred dozens of them as if they were homo sacer or slaves whose lives could be taken with impunity, wrote also Afigbo in The Warrant Chiefs. And when coal miners demanded for a living wage in Enugu, the colonizers massacred dozens of them in 1949 to prove that it was never their intention to end slavery in Africa, they only wanted to transform it into colonial slave labor and Africans continued to resist, wrote Du Bois, Azikiwe and Rodney. How can the British claim that they ended slavery and barbarity in Africa when they orchestrated the genocide that took 3.1 million Igbo lives in Biafra?

 

All I know is that my great-grandfather was not a slave trader, he was a resistance warrior for justice quite unlike Thomas Jefferson who raped little African girls and then sold his own children for money. When will Adaobi write about American Founding Fathers who were perverts like her great-grandfather and who raped children and called them his ten wives like Boko Haram? 

Maybe I should write that book in answer to the bewildering question repeatedly posed by African Diaspora colleagues: were you not the ones who sold us? No.

 

The 4th of July to Us

By Biko Agozino

To us the 4th of July is a grave day
Mother’s kindred had bottomless bellies
Gallons of palm wine were emptied
Cartons of beer followed to energize them
Still they demanded a gallon of ogogoro
And packets of okpoko fire smoke
To dig deeper or they would go on strike
Our kindred banned push-me-I-push-you,
We said no to the cancer sticks: no give no take
Cows were led to their silent slaughter
Giant pots cooked and emptied and cooked
Mother’s kin struck rocks and quit the dig
The visiting ogene gong players jumped in
And dug further to six feet on the 4th of July
Our brave mother was laid into the dust

By Father Titus who officially fixed the date
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost
Drinks flowed like our ancestral Omala stream
Bricks of akpu were laid into hollow foundations
And we danced the dance of shamelessness
When you fire shooting stars into the night on 7/4

They scream Uwawa, Mba, Ekwevokwe m, No-No!
Look up and see the twinkle of the Southern Cross
Watching over our homestead from the sky
As we celebrate we also mourn on the 4th

There is no independence from mother earth
Rivers wept for mother never flood the belly 

COVID-19 AND INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS

Novel Conceptual Framework for COVID-19 Responses

BY BIKO AGOZINO

 

As in the Great Plague of 1665-1666, the cure for COVID-19 may not be a magic bullet in the form of a vaccine, herbs or pills because no vaccine is 100% effective and there may be chances of breakthrough infections and the need for booster shots with no end in sight as the virus mutates. 

The search for effective interventions must look beyond vaccines and also consider original methods in the form of indigenous knowledge systems such as fasting that the government declared nationally in England with the belief that the plague was punishment for sin. Science has since proven that fasting is an effective response to viral infections. A national or global day of fasting will cost nothing and is accessible to all. It may just be the simple but effective novel conceptual framework that would prepare the world to prevent similar pandemics in the future at no additional cost. 

Our approaches respond to the challenges facing older people as a result of the pandemic by presenting disruptive ways of thinking about the problems that have evaded solutions, proposing new and paradigm-shifting scientific hypotheses that are testable by all in ways that are undervalued by the scientific community.

 

I read the co-authored paper on the role of Chinese Medicine in the fight against the Corona Virus. I am very impressed by the different institutional affiliations of the authors to show how the Peoples Republic of China takes seriously scientific approaches to indigenous knowledge systems in health. However, like all traditional medicine systems and exactly like pharmacological medicine, treatment tends to suffer from ingestion and injection biases. What if the Chinese experimented with a national day of fasting to help them halt the spread of the disease dramatically? There is evidence that intermittent fasting is widely practiced in TCM. The application of indigenous knowledge systems may be part of the reasons why Africa has defied the predictions of most experts by surviving better than many richer economies so far.

 

The indigenous knowledge system hypothesis in my linked paper here could help the world to prevent and treat the epidemic very quickly. My African hypothesis offers the original and innovative abstention intervention through a 24 hours water only fasting to weaken the virus and strengthen the immune system and produce dramatic recovery.

 

A 90-year old great grandmother, Geneva Wood, in the state of Washington reported that when she was sick with COVID-19, she could not eat for three days, "I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want to do anything,” Wood said. One of the major symptoms of Covid is loss of appetite, a bio-feedback asking us to undergo intermittent fasting with water only.

 

That is probably why she survived while her co-nursing home residents perished by the dozens. The symptoms in many patients include loss of taste and appetite, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, headache, fever, and dry cough - all of which suggest that periodic fasting can help at no cost and even at negative cost of savings on food.

 

I am happy to provide other related hypotheses like desistance from blowing the nose and instead sniffing it in and spitting out to reduce hand contamination and the bruising of the nose that could attract more infections. 

The benefit of ventilating the homes and hospitals cannot be overemphasized because the air inside tends to be two times more polluted than the air outside. 

The controlled experimental design is proposed by having 100 patients with COVID-19 symptoms try the 24 hours fasting with water while another control group continues with conventional treatment to be compared after one week. If X, then Y and if the differences are significant, the intervention will be extended to all patients worldwide and even to healthy populations to promote herd immunity the way indigenous communities must have done to survive past pandemics. 

Of course, you do not need a controlled experiment to tell you that you should open your windows and let fresh air into your buildings daily, not to pick your nose, and to go off food once in a while and drink lots of water. Care Homes, schools and offices with windows that cannot be opened should experiment with all doors pegged open to allow more fresh air from outside and to prevent the need for hundreds of unwashed hands to share the same door knobs daily. Open Doors Policies may help! When you try some or all of the above non-medical recommendations, be observant and record how you feel in a wellness diary. Then compare with before.

 

The Author is Dead: Long Live His Work

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 By Biko Agozino

When literary theorists talk about the death of the author, they do not refer to the death of the physical being but to the symbolic death of the text that the author could no longer keep alive with the addition of new words, sentences, paragraphs, pages and chapters. The published text becomes like a cadaver to be dissected by communities of interpretation and decoded either in line with hegemonic elite perspectives by conservatives, or in agreement with negotiated decoding by reformists, or bold decoding by revolutionaries in counter-hegemonic ways.

Thus, the death of the author actually signifies that the author has attained immortality in the sense that thousands of years to come, readers will continue to decode what is encoded in those books and continue to quote that Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo says this or that as if he is still sitting with us in the Chancery of the Eastern Mandate Union – his home and office that was open to all without security guards and gate-keepers at all hours of the day and with generous supply of food and drinks. Arthur is Dead: Long Live His Body of Works!

Few intellectuals today can lay claim to over 20 books to their credit and even fewer could do that while also publishing thousands of other authors that he sometimes commissioned for his own publishing house. To do all that while being a leading activist, philanthropist, and mentor to younger scholars but without any offer of research grants or professorship by any university in the decidedly anti-intellectual country lusting after filthy lucre is nothing but heroic. Thousands of years to come, we may forget who was the richest Igbo person at the time of the passing of Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo but I bet that the world will keep rediscovering his brave intellectual and moral leadership especially if professors encourage their doctoral students to subject his immense contributions to critical appraisal in their dissertations instead of parroting irrelevant Eurocentric jargon as the privileged theoretical perspectives for explaining African realities.

When I visited his home on January 3^rd 2020 with my High School teacher who mentored me on study skills and who also wrote for the publisher, a submission to the Justice Oputa Commission on Human Rights Violations in Nigeria, we sat outside his Chancery residence and started a seminar on political philosophy. My mentor said that he did not like democracy and would prefer a strong ruler who got things done well. Arthur lighted up and glanced at me. I smiled and said that Churchill also observed that democracy was the worst system of government, except for all the other alternatives. Plato and Aristotle also rejected democracy as mob rule and preferred the philosopher king or the aristocracy, respectively. That was probably why an Oxford educated theologian, C.K. Meek, was dispatched as a colonial anthropologist in 1930 to figure out why Igbo women declared war on colonialism. In his ‘intelligence report’ on Igbo Law, Meek said that the Igbo were ‘politically backward and undeveloped ‘because they were headless or acephalous societies and so could not be subjected to indirect rule like their more ‘advanced’ neighbors who had natural rulers.

Although Meek recommended direct rule under the British District Commissioners for the democratic Igbo, another Oxford anthropologist Margery Perham advised the military dictatorship in 1970 that what made the Igbo rebellious enough to secede (after being subjected to inhumane pogroms and genocide) was because they had no chiefs and were supposedly jealous of their more advanced neighbors with chiefs. To make the Igbo easier to control, the military dictatorship was advised to impose chiefs on them and this was decreed by General Obasanjo in 1976. I concluded that the Igbo should defend their democratic philosophy which says that all heads are equal and that the Igbo know no king because that is the philosophy of government promised by the republican constitution of Nigeria with no role for traditional rulers. In defense of democracy, those traditional rulers should have been abolished and replaced with town mayors and city councils who would be elected on fixed terms for more accountability. Arthur loved the exchange and told us that he was feeling a lot better with the fresh air before he asked us to help him back to his room upstairs.

His sister called me to inform me that her ‘father’ chose the beginning of Black History Month, February 1, to journey to the land of the ancestors with the assurance that his body of work will live on after him. Being in the presence of Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo always felt like having a front row seat in the performance of living history. I visited him in December and twice in January, the last being in hospital on January 8^th where he looked as if he was recovering. It was a shock to learn that he was gone to the next world but the sense of shock quickly gave way to the celebration of his immense achievements as a scholar-activist with enduring contributions to social thought, pro-democracy activism, and institution-building.

In January 2016, I conducted an interview with him about his celebrated Appeal Court case that struck down and deleted the clause of sedition from the Nigerian Criminal Code as being in conflict with the Presidential Constitution which provides for freedom of expression. If that court victory was his only contribution to the advancement of human freedom, it was enough to guarantee his eminence as a historical leader. But he went much farther than winning the court case. Before that case, he had already established himself as a conscience of the nation by writing timely books after books to challenge every dictatorial regime in the country and that was how a civilian administration arrested him and jailed him for a critical book on how his home state was being governed, offering him the chance to make history on appeal. Beyond writing his own books, he established a leading indigenous publishing house to provide the opportunity for thousands of African authors to be published at home. He still went beyond that to become a national leader of a pro-democracy movement, NADECO, that challenged the annulment of the Abiola Presidential election victory in 1993 and thereby earned himself more stints in detention. He went on to found a political organization to advocate for the Eastern region that remained neglected by successive regimes decades after the Nigeria-Biafra war.

After interviewing him in 2016 on his historic victory against sedition laws, he gave me a present of 20 books that he had written. I told him that I would write a book about all his books and he promised me that when I wrote it he would publish it. I wrote the book within two months and he published it instantly in 2016 as Critical, Creative and Centered Scholar-Activism: The Fourth Dimensionalism of Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo. In the book, I summarized and critiqued all his books, fiction and non-fiction. This approach differs from previous reviews about his work that mostly praised his genius without much criticism and they left out his creative writings whereas I took a critical approach and also covered his creative works. As I was writing, he was sending me more photocopies of more books to add to the review. I am sure that when his family goes through his papers, they will discover even more manuscripts that are yet to be published.

When I visited his younger brother, Dr. Ejiofor Benjack Nwankwo, who is now the Managing Director of the now struggling Fourth Dimension Publishing Co, one of the books he gave me in January 2020 was the 2018 fresh publication of his elder brother, Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo – Nigeria and Her Path to Doom. I was hoping to review this book, maybe the planned review essay would be an addition as a chapter to my earlier book about his work, in case a second edition with better copy editing was forthcoming. That review essay may wait but I am now struck by the sense of foreboding by the author who opened the book with the prophetic announcement as follows:

‘This little book is motivated by the fact that I have become an elder statesman; a man in the twilight of his career as well as earthly existence and as is our custom, an elder does not stay in the house and watch the she-goat deliver in her tethers.’ With that proverb, he went on to outline the broad history of how Nigeria was established on a faulty trajectory that would lead to ruin and conclude with a critical appraisal of the Buhari administration and a recommendation for restructuring as the solution to the problems he identified. Personally, I hope that the restructuring will include the democratic option of the United Republic of African States, one of the points that I made earlier in my book about his body of works.

President Buhari and other politicians were quick to offer praise for Nwankwo when his death was announced but I doubt if they have bothered to read his living books. Buhari reportedly recognized Nwankwo as a national leader of NADECO and praised him for supporting the handshake across the Niger. The administration or his well-wishers should endow a research center and professorship in his name to encourage students to read his books and learn from the timely analysis and warning of how to avert the doom that is predictably looming before the people.

I thank the author for touching me personally and rubbing off on me a bit of his leadership gifts. I wish Nwankwo well on his journey to get some rest in the land of the ancestors before he returns with his fellow intellectuals, especially those of the Igbo School – Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chinua Achebe, Mokwugo Okoye, Victor Nwankwo, Hebert Ekwe-Ekwe, Adiele Afigbo, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Chike Obi, Chris Okigbo, Onwuka Dike, Ikenna Nzimiro, Chikezie Uchendu, and many others - to continue the struggle for democracy and social justice throughout Africa. To the family, I say; cherish the memories and celebrate the gift of an avatar that you gave to the world. His name, Agwuncha, means infinity and his works will live forever and ever.