Juneteenth Commemoration in the Interest of All

By Biko Agozino 

 “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935

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 Juneteenth is a commemoration (not a celebration) of the last day that enslaved Africans in Texas were informed by Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger that they had been emancipated following a proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln more than two years earlier without being told by their enslavers. The Order promised ‘absolute equality of personal rights between former masters and slaves’ who should now relate to one another as ‘employer and hired labor.’ 

The emancipated men were advised to ‘remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages’. They were prohibited from flocking to military posts in search of protection from racist mobs intent on lynching them and they were told that ‘they will not be supported in idleness’ anywhere. The language of the June 1, 1865 General Orders, Number 3, is racist and paternalistic. It assumed that the enslavers will exclusively be the employers of labor while the enslaved will quietly work for wages in the homes owned by the former enslavers. 

They were expected to remain on the plantations and continue working for those who enslaved them. Any hints of the demand for reparations were dismissed as the expectations of being ‘supported in idleness’ even though working hard was known as working like a Negro. There was no expectation that people of African descent would ever move away from the plantations to seek better opportunities elsewhere (there is still no Freedom of Movement in the US constitution), nor that they could become employers of labor in their own rights, nor run for office as leaders. 

 Not surprisingly, Frederick Douglas and many former enslaved people did not celebrate June 1 because they preferred to commemorate January 1, 1863, when the Lincoln emancipation proclamation came into force. According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., the ‘celebration’ of June 1 came to be preferred by African Americans perhaps because January 1 is too cold a time compared to June 1 but it may not have been the cold weather as such, it could be the contradictory messages in the General Orders, Number 3. 

 The original emancipation proclamation referred narrowly to people who were enslaved in confederate states, leaving hundreds of thousands enslaved in the border states to remain in captivity until the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 finally stated that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." In other words, penal slavery or convict labor system remains lawful! . 

In June 2021, the US Senate voted unanimously to recognize Juneteenth as a Federal Holiday but 14 Republican Party members of Congress were the only ones in the House of Representatives to vote against the public holiday. Despite the commemoration of Juneteenth as a public holiday, white supremacy continues to be the order of the day in the criminal justice system, housing, healthcare, voting rights, education, and employment but without a significant effort to offer reparative justice to the descendants of the enslaved. 

 Adiele Afigbo published The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southeastern Nigeria: 1885-1950 to show that although the British claimed to have abolished slavery in 1834, they had no intention of doing so in Africa where colonialism assumed the role of plantation slavery. It was only after Igbo and Ibibio women rose up to oppose what Walter Rodney termed the ‘double squeeze’ according to which maximum surpluses were extracted from workers and peasants by the colonizers through the fixing of the prices of imported manufactures as well as the prices of exported raw materials and through forced labor that the British started making serious efforts to end what they called ‘domestic slavery’. The women who declared war against colonialism in 1929 were massacred by the British and the Enugu coal miners who demanded a living wage were also massacred in 1949 to show that colonialism was just another name for slavery in Africa.

 The equivalent of Juneteenth in Africa is May 25, also known as Africa Day, the exact date when George Floyd was murdered by police officers to amplify #BlackLivesMatter protests worldwide. Thanks to the awareness raised by the protesters, computer software companies finally began replacing the master/slave codes in their designs with stem/branch alternatives whereas they resisted this change since 2003 when the Los Angeles County contracting office objected to the original language and refused to do business with companies that retained it. The first such master/slave coding was used in South Africa to design a public clock in 1908. 

 About 100 years earlier, Georg Hegel borrowed from the Haitian revolution, the master/slave dialectic to suggest that only masters who fought for freedom deserved equality. He was wrong because a true slave mentality is a revolutionary mentality focused on the plan to escape or to fight and end slavery. Africans should commemorate Emancipation Day too the way African Caribbeans commemorate August 1, Fus Ah August, as Emancipation Day. 

The day should be marked with the reading of relevant history books in schools and in the community and the demand for the ending of modern slavery and for reparative justice to be paid to people of African descent. Instead, many states and the federal government are banning the teaching of African American history, claiming that it is divisive or offensive, as if it is not part of American history. 

 Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, 540-2317699, agozino@vt.edu

African Americans and Thanksgiving

By Onwubiko Agozino

"The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and even soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God." – Abraham Lincoln, 1863.

Thanksgiving was first proclaimed as a national public holiday by Lincoln in 1863 soon after the emancipation proclamation to end slavery and to mobilize over two hundred thousand African Americans to help defend the Union. Was Lincoln thanking the Africans for helping to save the Union? During the 2024 Thanksgiving Holiday, I asked colleagues if President Abraham Lincoln was paying tribute to the contributions of people of African descent when he proclaimed the first national holiday for Thanksgiving Day in October 1863. 

    One response came from a Political Science Professor who stated: ‘No; I don't think Lincoln used the Thanksgiving proclamation to celebrate Black folks. But it's an interesting thought! ‘. Another from an Emeritus Professor of History said: ‘I think Lincoln was unifying the nation by superseding state Thanksgiving days with a national one. Virginia had a Thanksgiving in 1619, before the Massachusetts one that figures in the US’s historical myth of Thanksgiving. And there were sporadic, impermanent national Thanksgivings in the years between. 

    Many American Indian Natives do not celebrate Thanksgiving Day, they commemorate the Day of Mourning Genocide. Some African Americans and White liberals do not celebrate it either perhaps because of the commercialization of the holiday with Black Friday shopping frenzy. Do African Americans have any reasons to celebrate Thanksgiving Day even while also mourning the millions that were lost? Yes, everyone has something to be thankful for. We are not going back to the evil old days!

     See the transcripts of Lincoln's Thanksgiving Day Proclamation (epigraphed above) archived by the Obama White House. The proclamation came 9 months after the Emancipation Proclamation and after the freed Black men and women  changed the battle of the civil war fought over slavery. 

    The proclamation started by urging Americans to show some gratitude for the sources of the food they took for granted. What were the sources of the food and comforts of Americans? The land of the indigenous American Indians, their food crops and their animals deserve all the gratitude that Americans could express, American Indian Natives have continued to contest the mythology that their ancestors peacefully surrendered their land to the invaders and taught them how to grow food to save them from starving to death and from engaging in cannibalism to survive. The natives did not surrender their land and vanish, they were subjected to genocide by the ungrateful conquistadores. The US has since recognized the rightful owners of the land by reserving land for some of the surviving native tribes and nations while others still fight for recognition. 

    Women deserve thanksgiving too for they also provided, and prepared the bulk of, the food Americans took for granted. One of the early advocates of a national Thanksgiving holiday was the slavery abolitionist feminist writer, Sarah Hale, who allegedly wanted to recognize it as a whites-only holiday, probably to avoid opposition from white-supremacist men and women who wanted freed Africans to 'go back to where they came from'. The emancipated Africans defiantly stated that they and their descendants were here to stay, come what may, no matter what others say. 

     Lincoln made his historic proclamation at a conjuncture in history when the survival of the Union was in doubt due to the pro-slavery rebellion of the confederate states over the so-called ‘state right’ to expand slavery to the whole of the United States to end the dilemma of hunting for run-away enslaved people in the land of the free. Initially, Lincoln refused to allow people of African descent to join the Union army and stated that if he could keep the nation united without emancipating a single person from enslavement, he was prepared to do so. 

    He also proposed to repatriate the emancipated Africans to a colony island near Haiti. Eventually, he was forced by the circumstances of confederate battle victories to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, to weaken the economies of the confederate slave states and he welcomed formerly enslaved Africans to join the union army and help to defeat the confederacy. 

    Nine months later, the bravery of the former enslaved Africans in battle had turned the tide of the Civil War in favor of the Union Army and that was the context of the Thanksgiving Day proclamation. Two years later, in 1865, Lincoln made the Gettysburg Address to honor the troops who were wasted in the battlefield towards the end of the war.

"Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom." Lincoln, 1863.

At the time of the proclamation, the labor of the enslaved Africans and the poor working class Whites was the main source of the food and industry that Americans took for granted. Lincoln did not make this explicit in his proclamation, of course not. He was saying Graces and giving thanks to ‘Providence’ the way you do even when you know that it was your papa and mama that produced and reproduced the food, goods, and services for your survival. 

     It might be a coincidence rather than a causation that X came before Y, Emancipation before Thanksgiving Day Proclamations in the same year during the Civil War, but there is absolutely no reason why Americans would not give thanks for the sacrifices that people of African descent made to build the nation in chains and defend it since then. 

     Every Day is Thanksgiving Day, let all Americans remember the sufferings of people of African descent in the country, say thanks to Providence for providing their livelihood, offer apologies to the descendants of the enslaved for the crimes against humanity that the country visited on them, and offer them a significant package of reparative justice. 

     The Obama White House, by archiving the transcripts of this proclamation by Lincoln, may have been calling for reflections on the centrality of African Americans in Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of 1863. 

    There is no justification for the consensus that erased the African presence from the Thanksgiving narratives by the media, historians, sociologists, and poets. Congress should use every Thanksgiving Day celebration to authorize appropriations for the long overdue Reparations Proclamation and apology to people of African descent for the crimes of hundreds of years of enslavement that built the United States and defended the Union against pro-slavery rebellions.

 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/transcript_for_abraham_lincoln_thanksgiving_proclamation_1863.pdf

Listen to President Joe Biden on 3 December, 2024 at the National Museum of Slavery in Angola as the first US president to visit the country. The US should be encouraged to use their bully pulpit to announce a reparative justice package for people of African descent and invite European states to contribute regarding what Biden called 'the original sin' (it is a crime against humanity and not simply a sin) of the US (and European countries, not the US alone), the enslavement of millions of Africans for hundreds of years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a891uu1dqZA

Otherness in African Cosmology

By Biko Agozino

African’s have always seen the world as multicultural and interdependent. The other is not to be killed or eliminated without harming the self. Chinua Achebe captures this notion with his Igbo saying that when one thing stands, something else stands beside it. One tree does not make a forest. The Igbo take this saying beyond the plant kingdom to say that the eagle should perch and the kite should perch, if one does not want the other to perch, it should show the other where to perch because there are many branches and many trees in the forest. The Igbo also say that there should be life for the fish and life for the river. They also say that all heads are equal and that the Igbo know no king, Igbo ama eze. 

This democratic principle was relatively contradicted by discrimination against women in the inheritance of property and by the divisions of some Igbo communities into Amala or the free-born and those who descended from Ohu (slaves) or from Osu (dedicated to the worship of shrines) beginning with the slave raids. However, the Igbo have used cosmopolitanism to combat such discriminations through equal educational opportunities. Nobody refuses to go to school, hospital, court, church, bank, or to take public transportation, or to watch football matches and Nollywood movies or to listen to music simply because any of the officials came from the prejudicial backgrounds that Azikiwe outlawed in the 1950s. Poor Ghanaians still dedicate their daughters as shrine wives to pay off debts. Soyinka credited Africans with exemplary religious tolerance because Africans never wage war to promote their religions. He also observed that the Igbo are admirable because they have never tried to invade and conquer their neighbors in order to build kingdoms or empires.

The earliest awareness of otherness in African worldview was the emergence of gender differences which demonstrated that men and women are the others of one another to be cherished and protected rather than to be combated and eliminated. Children came along as beloved others, other families emerged, other communities, other languages, other religions, other people’s property, rich people and poor people, insane people and sane people, our people and foreigners, good people and evil ones, the living and the ancestors.

Albinism became a marker for otherness probably with the arrival of Europeans in Africa. Albinos are sometimes referred to jokingly as White people. Perhaps because power and wealth were associated with the colonizers, some ritualists believed that using the body parts of an Albino to make money medicine will bring wealth and fortune to individuals. As a result, many Albinos are killed in different parts of Africa for ritual. Whiteness seduced many others into skin-bleaching and Fela Kuti criticized that with the song, 'Yellow Fever'. Ngugi portrayed this sickness in The Wizard of the Crow with the story of how the elites desired whiteness and how this drove them insane enough to imagine that there is a dollar tree where money grows to be plucked but female freedom fighters campaigned for a better society.

Arab settlers in North and East Africa also developed concepts of light-skinned supremacy in Africa but with emphasis on religion as the marker of insiders and otherness, believers and infidels. Colorism is still dominant here because Black Africans who are Muslims continue to be discriminated against by their fellow lighter skinned Muslims who claim Arabic descent as far south as Somalia.

The introduction of whiteness as a mark of privilege by Europeans also dominated Arabs and Asians in Africa who were treated as if they were dark-skinned compared to Europeans. In South Africa, this evolved into the system of apartheid which unjustly deprived the African majority of rights and presumed that they belonged to other homelands that were separate from the white dominated state. The African majority and their allies insisted that the country belongs to all who live in it.

The concept of Ubuntu or the bundle of humanity is used by Desmond Tutu to capture the African philosophy that I am because we are human as opposed to the Cartesian, I think, therefore I am. According to Tutu, everyone has something for which they should ask to be forgiven and everyone deserves to be forgiven something because there is nothing that is unforgivable. 

Achebe captures this principle of Ubuntu with the Igbo celebratory art form of Mbari through which the entire community comes together to build a miniature mud hut and populate it with the representatives of the community and with the foreigners in their midst as a tolerant prayer for protection from the ancestors and the gods also represented under one roof, following the principle that the sun shines on all without discrimination. 

Martin Luther King Jr. used the metaphor of the World House repeatedly to emphasize that people of African descent regard everyone as the children of one God to the extent that we say that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and so white-supremacy is a threat to all. Rasta refer to such as One Love for all, not just for some.

Other forms of otherness were introduced into Africa by the colonizers in the form of homophobia whereas Africans did not give a damn about who people loved or how they showed the love until European colonizers outlawed homosexuality. The first military coup in Nigeria in 1966 announced that, in addition to fighting corruption, 'homosexuals will be shot'. Major Gideon Orkar echoed this in his April 1990 abortive regional coup announcement when he said that he was out to overthrow a '... corrupt ... homo-sexuality-centered ... administration...' Of the estimated 3.1 million people killed in the genocidal aftermath of the coup, none has been identified as a homosexual, showing that homophobia promotes violence that affects the whole society. Most people did not even know that homosexuality may have been a problem in the military perhaps because the British officers used it to humiliate the African recruits in order to dominate them. Long after the Europeans who imposed both the death penalty and the homophobic laws on Africa abolished both in Europe, the Africans are hysterically retaining such barbaric laws in Africa contrary to the tolerant culture of our ancestors.

No African society banned homosexuality before the colonization of Africa because Africans were more interested in the abilities of individuals to serve their communities and not the ways that consenting adults loved one another in the privacy of their homes. No African military ever had a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell rule for joining the military and no African society ever made a law called the Defense of Marriage Act. Africans always knew that some men liked to dress like women to perform the spirits of female ancestors in Agbomma or Gelede masquerades, for instance. 

Today, dressing like a woman in parts of Nigeria could get a man stoned to death under Islamic law while same-sex couples could be sentenced to 10 years in prison if convicted under the Nigerian criminal code. Critics point out that this is ridiculous given that the military have yet to defeat the Boko Haram militants who kidnap school girls in the busloads in a country that ranks first with the proportion of children out of school and with low human development index.

Similarly, Africans believed that there were people who had the powers of witchcraft but Africans did not go hunting for them to kill them until Europeans came with their interpretation of Christianity to emphasize exorcism or the killing of the other. In medieval Europe, an estimated 9 million people were killed, and most of the victims were women, on the suspicion that they were witches. No such genocidal records existed in Africa in precolonial times but today poor unemployed youth in South Africa and Tanzania often attack and kill poor old grannies on suspicion that they are the ones who use witchcraft to make jobs disappear or they blame it on those Africans who are attacked because their languages are said to sound incomprehensibly like Makwerekwere. In Nigeria, some parents are encouraged by fake pastors to drive six inch nails into the heads of their children because they were suspected to be witches who prevented their parents from becoming wealthy.

In Renascent Africa, Nnamdi Azikiwe (1937) called on Africans to abandon superstitious beliefs and adopt the scientific methods in healthcare and in the struggle for the restoration of independence. Two years later, Obafemi Awolowo published a rebuttal in a Liverpool-based magazine to say that Africans can use Juju as a science with which to kill their enemies from a remote distance by simply saying their names three times. The colonizers must have been shaking in their boots except that the African Juju only killed fellow Africans. For this reason, Fanon stated that the African was more afraid of the powers of ghosts than the powers of the corrupt police that could be bribed. Today, even professors of physics side with Awolowo against Azikiwe in the debate over the efficacy of the scientific method versus Juju. A Nigerian military dictator, Obasanjo, once called for Africans to use Juju to fight against apartheid.

One of the most dangerous otherness promoted by the divide and conquer strategies of Europeans is ethnicity which the Europeans wrongly called tribalism. According to Rodney, to call the genocide against the Igbo in Nigeria a tribal war would be to call Shell BP, the Labour Party Government in the UK, and even the Soviet Union, African tribes because they orchestrated the killing of the Igbo who led the struggle for the restoration of independence in Nigeria. Rodney added that there was no record of the Christianized neighbors of the Christianized Igbo committing genocide against them prior to colonialism. 

The solution is Nkrumah's United Republic of African States with the right to travel, work, and run for office anywhere while relying on federal might to stop oppressive otherness and to empower Africans with the scientific methods advocated by Azikiwe.

My Mandela Day Activity

Mandela Day Reflections on Ekwe-Ekwe’s Discourses
By Biko Agozino

I wrote this on July 18 in response to the call by Baba Mandela that people all over the world should spend 67 minutes to do community work in honour of his 91st birthday. Bayeete aaaah Madiba! I must confess that it took me more than 67 minutes to read Ekwe-Ekwe’s essay and then write this review but that is a good omen that Saint Mandela will be with us much longer and forever continue to inspire the struggle for African national unity from Cape to Cairo. Happy Birthday Baba!

I was a student of Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe at the University of Calabar in the early 1980s when I took his introductory political science class as an elective. I credit him as one of those who helped to sharpen my critical thinking. I would have liked to take more classes with him but he resigned to join the editorial board of a national newspaper and an essay of his in the memorial to Bala Mohammed, published by the Kano State Government, suggests that he also associated in some capacity with the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) led by Mallam Aminu Kano; with S.G. Ikoku as National Vice Chairman and Chinua Achebe as the National Secretary.

Other progressive intellectuals in that party formation included the great Eskor Toyo who was probably my greatest informal teacher at Calabar University; Bala Mohammed who was lynched (supposedly because of his progressive radio broadcasts in Hausa language, the tapes of the broadcasts were burnt) by a mob that the police allegedly described as a ‘cooperative mob’ , according to Yusuf Bala Usman, another radical scholar who served as Secretary to the PRP Kaduna State Government of Balarabe Musa before the governor was impeached.

Something must have happened in that political party to traumatize these progressive scholars because they emerged from the PRP as if from a house on fire and mostly changed course ideologically in puzzling ways apart from Eskor Toyo who remained consistent. Achebe came out from the party and published The Trouble with Nigeria in which he launched into a bewildering critique of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Zik of Africa, the first president of the country, whom he dismissed as a quitter who never saw anything through. That polemical booklet interpreted the trouble with Nigeria mainly as the trouble of discriminating against the Igbo while promoting mediocrity in national leadership.

S.G. Ikoku emerged from PRP and bolted in the opposite ideological direction by joining the National Party of Nigeria, the then federal government ruling bourgeois party. Ekwe-Ekwe himself emerged from that experience with a consuming passion to campaign against the genocide that the Igbo suffered from 1966 to 1970 before and during the Nigerian-Biafran war. Yusuf Bala Usman went back to his teaching at Ahmadu Bello University and was soon fired by the military regime that toppled the second republic but he went to court and won his job back. However, his radical historiography began concentrating on a weird theory of how the oil in the Niger Delta was the product of the sedimentation of centuries of flora and fauna from the northern region and so the oil was actually derived from the north and not from the south. I look forward to reading an internal critique of what happened in that party (PRP) to produce these ideological reactions from eminent progressive intellectuals.

An indirect explanation came in the form of ‘Brazil discourses – Africa, the state, genocide and the future’, the text of ten lectures on Africa delivered by Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe between 13 June and 10 July, 2009, at several Brazilian Universities. Opening with Ekwe-Ekwe’s characteristic incisive thinking, the long essay asserts that, ‘Arms, arming, armies and armed conflicts as well as a deleterious political economy characterize the tragedy of contemporary Africa.’ He goes on to lament that 15 million out of 40 million people killed in wars since the end of the Second World War in 1945 were killed in Africa and added; ‘- notably the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide executed by the Nigerian state and its allies (was) the foundational and most gruesome genocide in Africa to date where 3.1 million Igbo people were murdered…’

Did someone try to raise this issue within the PRP and demand that the party take a position towards advocating reparations (or demanding prosecutions, Ekwe-Ekwe’s preference) but was shouted down and ran out of town by the membership of the northern based progressive party? Ekwe-Ekwe’s Brazil lectures did not raise this question but he may have provided clues when he concluded by calling on his Brazilian audience to campaign against the sale of arms to Africa by the Brazilian military industrial complex because such arms would end up being used to continue the killing of Africans by what he calls repeatedly the genocide states in Africa.

Ekwe-Ekwe bemoans the fact that Africa has the most number of child soldiers in the world today. Africa also transfers more money to the international community than all the foreign aid and foreign direct investments coming into Africa while African émigrés send back more remittance than all the foreign aid. For instance, since 1981, Africa has transferred as debt servicing, ‘US$400 billion to the West – a sum which is in fact four times the size of the original US$100 billion principal of the continent’s “debt” as it stood in 1980 and in excess of the present value of US$350 billion.’ He blames this dilemma mainly on militarization which continues to enjoy the lion’s share (25%) of the GNP of African states at the expense of health (2.1%), education (2.4%), housing, agriculture and infrastructures.

He links the wars in Africa with the struggle to control and exploit the rich natural resources in Africa in the interest of the corrupt local elites and their foreign backers and he indicts British and American governments with being the major gun-runners in Africa because Africa still remains largely incapable of manufacturing small arms. He dismisses the dichotomy between legal arms from the West and illegal arms from Eastern Europe and observes that the consequences are the same since all the arms, legal and illegal, are used to kill Africans en-masse while Africa remains rich in natural and human resources with abundant arable land for agriculture.

He also dismissed the idea that Africa is full of failed states especially in the region that western media analysts like to refer to as Sub-Saharan Africa as if the inhabitants are sub-human. He dismissed such terminology by wondering if the other regions of the world should be renamed sub-this and sub-that in reference to their proximity to major geographical landmarks. According to him, the trouble with Africa is that all the states constructed by European colonizers ignored natural ethnic boundaries and lumped nationalities together under one country without consulting the people. What is to be done is to disarm the neo-colonial states, dissolve them and then reconstitute them along the lines that the people choose by themselves according to their cultural traditions. He concluded by calling on President Obama and African Brazilians to campaign for Africa to be designated an arms-free zone.

Unfortunately, it is true that some of Ekwe-Ekwe’s lines of reasoning have been used by Eurocentric scholars to dismiss African nationalism as inauthentic nationalism on the excuse that African nation states are actually multi-national states because they have competing ethnicities and competing loyalties. The irony is that all modern nation-states are indeed multicultural or multi-ethnic in form except for a few tragic cases in which the ruling groups attempted ethnic cleansing for the purpose of attaining the unattainable goal of homogeneity in a modern national population. The tragedy is that all the states that attempted to constitute a homogeneous population ended up almost completely destroyed by the forces of differentiation.

A few examples will suffice. Can you think of any country today that has only one language and therefore only one ethnicity or that attempted to construct such a fiction? That is right, Germany comes to mind and everyone knows that the country was almost ground into the dust of history as a result of that xenophobia. Japan tried it too but pulled back from the edge of the abyss. But closer home in Africa, the examples of states with only a single language include, surprise-surprise, Rwanda, Somalia, and Bantustans! Do I need to say what happened to them? In Nigeria, the Niger Delta activists are actually killing more Niger Delta people than anyone else in their battle for homogeneous control over oil company crumbs.

On the contrary, the more multicultural a country is today, the more vibrant the more promising it tends to be. For instance, while speaking in the dynamic multicultural country of Brazil, Ekwe-Ekwe never called for the dissolution of the country and its reconstitution along the lines of Amazonian tribes, African Brazilians and European descended people as separate nations. Instead, he simply called on them to campaign against arms sales by their country to Africa but without advocating for those of them, African Brazilians in particular, who still suffer racial discrimination despite the prosperity of their country, who wished to return to a united Africa should be encouraged to campaign for African Unity to enable them to enjoy dual citizenship like the Euro-Brazilians.

It is worth noting that OXFAM and United Nation agencies that Ekwe-Ekwe critiqued for their limited humanitarianism are already campaigning to bring about an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) that would regulate the ‘responsible’ transfer of arms. The call for Africa to be declared an arms-free zone appears impractical given that the arms trade is largely legal as Ekwe-Ekwe admits and that even if arms are banned completely, the weapons used by perpetrators of genocide need not be sophisticated weapons but often crude clubs and machetes as the Rwanda genocide reminds us. It is up to us Africans to refuse to buy weapons of mass destruction and concentrate our resources on socio-economic development.

Ekwe-Ekwe dismissed the call for African Unity under the suspicion that it would give rise to a genocidal state but I believe that he is mistaken. A United Africa would be the antidote to genocide in Africa because no section of the Peoples Republic of Africa United Democratically (PRAUD) would wake up one morning, slap their buttocks (as Ekwe-Ekwe used to say in class in Calabar) and decide to commit genocide against their neighbours without contending with the might of a united Africa to step in and stop it or deter it without waiting for permission from the local state. The savings we would make from avoiding the multiplications of defense expenditures would go to infrastructural development, education, health and industrialization for the prosperity of our people. Our people would be free to move to any part of the Peoples Republic of Africa and settle without undue fear just as the citizens of all powerful countries in the world today.