Trayvon Martin: Articulation or Intersectionality in Control-Freak Societies?

By Dr. Biko Agozino

Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies, Virginia Tech

‘When I heard about the Trayvon Martin case, I thought that the real killer is the media that criminalizes black youth, black men and black people…. No one talks about the media spreading the poison that black people are dangerous to the extent that we do not see people as people but as trouble. Incarceration of the killer is not the solution if we fail to reeducate our people to recognize our common humanity.’ – Mumia Abu-Jamal, Plenary conversation with Angela Davis at the Manning Marable Memorial Conference, St John’s Cathedral, Columbia University, April 2012.

We live in authoritarian societies that are best described as control-freak societies. The control-freak ideology goes beyond the claim to a monopoly of force and violence by the state to include the authoritarianism of ordinary citizens who often internalize what Jacques Derrida (who observed that the word for justice and violence, Gewalt, is the same in German language) called ‘the force of the law’ and take it upon themselves to ‘enforce’ justice with emphasis on a final solution over not only total strangers but also over otherwise beloved family, friends and colleagues. As Mumia implied above, the control-freaks include scholars and journalists who spread the gospel of zero tolerance in otherwise democratic societies where tolerance should be taught more.

The control-freak state cheer-leads the lethal authoritarianism of private individuals and security corporations as ‘natural right’ by reinforcing ancient laws of self-defense that gave people the right to kill others in defense of their private property as if property is more valuable than human life or as if life is only another form of property in a ‘commercial society’: now only a vague ‘feeling’ of being threatened after ‘a series of burglaries’ in a gated community is enough to encourage a vigilante to follow an innocent youth on his way to his father’s residence and gun him down self-righteously. The police appeared to encourage this type of outrage by initially refusing to even arrest and charge the confessed murderer (not killer as the media would have it, he was finally charged with second-degree murder, not with killing) obviously because the life lost was that of a black male homo sacer, a disposable human being, as Zygmunt Bauman put it in Modernity and the Holocaust.

Most commentators on the case of Trayvon Benjamin Martin saw it as a case of the all too familiar fruit (no longer a ‘strange fruit’ with so frequent a recurrence) from the tree of racial profiling but it is much more than racial in character. Stuart Hall will always remind us to look beyond racism in situations like this and understand that it is the result of the articulation on race-class-gender relations in societies structured in dominance. In the US, the preferred theory is that of Kimberley Crenshaw on race-class-gender intersectionality.

The two theories are similar but not identical given that, according to Crenshaw, the intersections of streets or the intersections of circles could be used as metaphors with which to capture race-class-gender intersectionality while Hall prefers to use the analogy of the articulated train or lorry in conjunction with the linguistic concept of giving expression to underscore the fact that the exploitation of cheap black labor in South Africa, for instance, was not simply racist, sexist or classist but an articulation, dis-articulation and re-articulation of all three simultaneously as relations that are never separate, though different.

The analogy of streets or circles intersectionality fails this test of simultaneity because of the assumption that Trayvon Martin may have been walking on the ‘gender’ street (or circle) safely until he came to the point where that street or circle intersected with the ‘race’ and ‘class’ streets or circles whereas the theory of articulation assumes that there is no inch of the street or circle that is not always already racialized, gendered and class-specific; emptiness lies outside the intersectionality. In other words, race-class-gender ‘overlapping’ is closer to the reality of race-class-gender articulation than the mechanical metaphor of the intersection would have us believe.

When George Zimmerman confessed to the murder of Trayvon Martin, he did not go to one police precinct to enjoy the privileges of his masculinity, then to another to celebrate his Hispanic whiteness, before going to a third to perform his respectable middle class-ness in ways that would not hold if it was the truck driver father of Martin that had shot the son of Zimmerman the ex-judge even after the police dispatcher warned him to ‘stand his ground’ and desist from following the youngster. At the very least, a black man who murders an innocent white teenager will be arrested on the spot and asked to save his self-defense excuses for the jury. Respectable white male privilege and an enabling legal environment that devalues poor-black-male lives added insult to this injury. Similarly, when Trayvon was unjustly profiled, his blackness was not seen as threatening on one street before his maleness became an issue on another street and before his walking-rather-than-driving poverty status became an issue on yet another street or at the intersection of all three.

The point here is that authoritarianism is very popular in control-freak societies as is evident in the fact that after a few weeks of appealing for funds online, the confessed murderer raised over $200,000 for his defense and for his ‘personal expenses’ while an online gun shop that offered a shooting target in the image of Trayvon Martin said that the image sold out within two days despite some public outrage. It is this popularity of authoritarianism that encourages families to send their youth to go and kill and be killed in foreign lands just because those in authority asked them to do so and the escalation in street violence frequently correlates with periods of foreign wars and invasions. For instance, the involvement of Norway in the invasion and bombing of the Trayvon Martins in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya probably incited the white-supremacist into massacring 77 people in Oslo and just like Zimmerman, he claimed self-defense for the atrocity. 

This very same bloody control-freak populism encourages parents to brutalize their own children in the name of discipline even when the authoritarian state would hesitate in the cases of babies too young to know any better. Friends and neighbors, lovers, brothers and sisters, employees and employers, students and teachers all buy into this control-freak ideology that is alien to the African philosophy of non-violence which we need to rehabilitate as part of the solution rather than leave it to remain battered and bruised, accursed and ridiculed by imperialist reason.

Angela Davis followed the above epigraphic teaching from Mumia Abu-Jamal during the constantly interrupted 15 minute collect-phone call from a control-freak prison with a highlight of the lesson we can all learn from the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission: A widow was asked by Desmond Tutu if she would ever forgive the police officer who murdered her husband and she responded that she would only forgive him if he will do three things: identify the ground where the corpse was burnt so that she could gather it and bury her husband; accept to become her son; and come and visit her family regularly to understand that the person he killed was a valued human being. On hearing this, the killer collapsed and fainted. Angela concluded by advising against the atomization of Trayvon Martin.

What Mumia and Angela suggest above is that the African philosophy of non-violence which Mahatma Gandhi claimed that he learned from the Zulu during his sojourn in South Africa and which Martin Luther King Junior suggested that he learned from Gandhi, a philosophy that was an essential part of the successful resistance against slavery, colonialism, sexism, class exploitation, and apartheid by people of African descent and their allies and by all those other colored people who adopted this philosophy, should be an essential part of the solution that we seek.

In other words, the injustice done here goes beyond the murdered youth to encompass the murderer who sleeps no more because he has murdered sleep. Racism-sexism-classism as the articulation of injustice is a multiple-edged sword that cuts the aggressor as well as the aggrieved but to different extents. This is probably why a carefully staged apology was volunteered by George Zimmerman to the parents of Trayvon Martin prematurely at the bail bond hearing – a clear indication that he had realized that he ruined his own life too due to the hate and fear that he was raised with when he could have been safer with love in his heart for all. His intolerance is widely condemned by people of all races, classes and genders.

When the Nazis were driven into a genocidal hatred by the control-freak state, little did they know that for each Jew who was killed, at least three Germans would pay with their lives. When the Hutu tried the final solution on their Tutsi brothers and sisters, little did they know that the media broadcasts urging them to kill all the ‘cockroaches’, including the young ones, would result in the Hutus themselves being dehumanized as well and Rwanda has responded mainly with reconciliation and healing rather than the obsession with revenge and Beccarian fantasy of making the punishment fit the crime given that no punishment would ever fit the crime. Responding to the atrocity in Norway, Nils Christie wrote that we should learn to love all and seek to punish less because punitive-mindedness escalates hate and vengeance without being able to heal the original wounds.

In conclusion, while we all must continue to organize for social justice, we should recognize the humanity of the aggressor rather than profile him as a monster. As Mumia suggested in a tone reminiscent of Martin Luther King Jr., we should direct our agitation more at the institutions that normalize the oppression of our people and insist on the transformation of such institutions through the non-violent means of mass protests and ballot measures. We can also challenge the gun lobby with the jurisprudence of big tobacco: when you make a defective product that kills thousands of people annually, the manufacturers and the gun-lobby should be made to pay some reparations to the bereaved.

Since (black) people are increasingly afraid to walk along their own streets, close-circuit television cameras should be installed on streets in neighborhoods that vote to have them and the images should be accessible through a public television channel where we can all see that it is dubious that a dead child banged the head of the aggressor against the sidewalk before being executed in cold blood (CCTV could show that his alleged wounds were self-inflicted after the killing).

Finally, the drug laws that amplify the fear of young black males should be abolished immediately while we use education to get our young people to say no to drugs and use the healthcare system to minimize harm so that no one is going to shoot another poor Black or Hispanic male youth on the pretext that he looked as if he was on drugs and the control-freak justice system would not be allowed to over-incarcerate poor young men on the suspicion that they possessed small quantities of drugs and thereby expel them from school, deny them job opportunities, exclude them from public housing and deny them the right to vote even after serving their sentences  as Michelle Alexander documented in The New Jim Crow.

President Barack Obama has shown courage in coming out in an election season by ending the war in Iraq and by supporting same-sex marriage for citizens who prefer that; it is about time he came out for ending the war on drugs that has escalated the violence on our streets and homes while contaminating otherwise law-abiding youth by sending them to prison where they are likely to be recruited by violent drug gangs. If Trayvon Martin was not suspended from school for alleged marihuana residues found in his school bag, perhaps he would be at home in his mother’s black community of Miami Gardens rather than be found in the red-neck garrison community of his father’s girlfriend in Sanford where he may have been sent by his mother on the mistaken assumption that it might be safer than the black neighborhood. The police autopsy report revealed that he had THC in his blood and urine but we are not told what substances George Zimmerman had in his system to make him so paranoid about a harmless youth on that fateful day.

Let us force the politicians to decriminalize drugs and control guns by sustaining the mass protest that Trayvon Martin’s murder and attempted impunity eventually inspired. Let us take the Occupy Movement beyond Wall Street and Occupy the Prison Industrial Complex with marches, pickets and teach-ins until funding is made available to teach love and tolerance in all schools and until the political prisoners are freed along with the drugs war prisoners. President Obama took a step in this direction by reducing the crack-powder cocaine disparity from 100:1 to 10:1; we need to make him see the logic of his South American colleagues who are calling for an end to the war on drugs that has resulted in the death of 50,000 Mexicans in the few years that they had a drug-war lord for president while implicating US officials in the scandalous shooting of two pregnant women and two men on a boat that was wrongly suspected of transporting drugs in Honduras recently. Only the increased democratization of the entire world via decolonization from imperialist reason in accordance with what Ron Eglash called African Fractals - the fact of the interconnectedness of humanity - would result in more peace and love as Hal Pepinsky argued in The Geometry of Violence and Democracy and as I did in Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason.

Dr Agozino is the Chair of the Social Policy Committee of the Association of Black Sociologists.

Before We Set Sail: A Review

Before We Set Sail:  A Review 

By Biko Agozino

Historical novels come with spoilers because the readers already know how the stories are going to end and yet the genre is popular enough to be read and reviewed like the classic movies and comedy shows that are watched compulsively on television reruns. Such novels are even more compelling than television because they are not simply entertaining but also instructive and interactive even when the subject matter is so painful that the story is one not to be told for fun. In the hands of the gifted story-teller, Dr. Chika Ezeanya, a nightmarish tragedy turns into a finger-licking un-put-down-able treat that leaves readers wishing that there were more pages to turn at the end of the historical narrative given that history never ends.

The Interesting Narratives of Olaudah Equiano is one such captivating story of captivity and sorrow that was an instant best seller when he published it in 1792 but he largely skipped over the culture and life of his people before he was kidnapped with his sister and shipped away into enslavement in the new world. After all these years, Chika has filled this lacuna in our collective memory with a prequel tale of immense beauty clothed with suspense and narrated from the point of view of the young Olaudah.

Chika displays evidence of thorough historical research on what Cheikh Anta Diop theorized as pre-colonial black Africa. The only distinction here to her credit is that Diop painted a Negritude picture of an improbable civilization that appeared so perfect that there were no villains while Ezeanya shocks the reader into accepting the obvious reality that there is no such thing as a perfect civilization in a history characterized by widespread violence and terrorism. Readers who expect to find an un-spoilt innocence in pre-colonial Africa will be disillusioned to find that there were already unscrupulous people driven by greed to seek to profit from the sorrows of their fellows. Similarly, those seeking the heart of darkness in Africa will be shamed to find a thriving civilization in the hinterland.

What Ezeanya presented in this novel is closer to the valid historiography of Walter Rodney in The History of the Upper Guinea Coast according to which it is false propaganda to assert that Africans sold their own children into slavery like commodities. On the contrary, Africans fought bravely against the raiding kidnappers while the slave-trading chiefs of the coastal kingdoms and the fraudulent priests of the hinterland made it clear that they were not enslaving their own people because they preyed on the lower classes of peasants especially in the village democracies that colonial anthropologists dubbed ‘headless societies’ which lacked standing armies that could have more effectively protected their people from the raids by hordes armed with rum and gunpowder from evil European merchants.

The suspicion that one father sold his child was rightly frowned upon in the novel because it was not the norm in a civilization characterized by parental love and affection. This is understandable today in the sense that news of the abuse of children by priests, parents and guardians always come across as unbelievable and shocking but is never accepted as the rule for the society despite the unprecedented levels of greed and immorality in capitalist societies of today. Moreover, those who insist that there was slavery in Africa before the trans Atlantic slavery will discover that what passed for slavery in Africa at that time was partly due to the demand by European merchants and that it was clearly different in contents and context compared to chattel slavery because the enslaved were integrated into the households of the coastal chiefs whom they called their father, Etenyin, and whose wives they called mother, Eka, in the Efik language. The wives worked in the fields with their enslaved ‘children’ and gossiped openly about who was having an affair with whom. The enslaved constantly plotted their escape back to their beloved homeland to the extent that the name of the main merchant port, Calabar, has meaning in neither Efik nor English but translates literally to ‘Let us Go Home’ in the Igbo language of the majority of the enslaved.

In the narrative, Ezeanya abundantly displays one of her scholarly passions – research and advocacy for indigenous technology. For instance, the highly developed science of iron smelting and blacksmithing that the plantations of the New World coveted aggressively is carefully represented in the story against a background of courtship of young maidens who played hard to get but still yearned to be touched by the much admired apprentice blacksmith – apprenticeship being the traditional business school system that is still the mainstay of Igbo commercial competitiveness. The story also indirectly reveals the environmental un-sustainability of the blacksmithing technology that relied on the charcoaling of whole trees without a program of reforestation for future uses or the invention of gas-fired furnaces for the blacksmiths who continue to burn charcoals today.

Another indigenous knowledge system highlighted in the story is that of mental health care. Unlike the oppressive dehumanization of the mentally ill that Freud, Goffman, Fanon, Foucault and others critiqued, the mental patient in pre-colonial black Africa remained a full member of the community whose humanity was never in doubt even while undergoing treatment at the home of the healer-priest and without any obsession about the cost of treatment quite unlike the alienating asylum powered by the profit motive that Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow rejected outright. The husband was allowed to procreate with his wife while she was being treated for a nervous breakdown whereas America recorded the hysterical fascist sterilization of tens of thousands of the poor who were deemed to be burdens on society under the ideology of eugenics. When a man claimed to hear voices and see things that other people did not hear or see, he was not locked up and when he refused to come down from a tree, his family took food and drinks to the tree from which he accurately prophesied the coming holocaust that was slavery. No one would say with Rene Descartes, ‘I think therefore I am’, as if those who did not think exactly like him were not human enough. Those that Soyinka dismissed as Neo-Tarzanists who still believe that Africans lived on tree-tops could see that only a crazy African would try that even in the past while Europeans are the ones more likely to build tree-top houses today to try and save trees from being cut down by capitalist developers.

Similarly, contrary to the white-supremacist ideology propagated by Hume, Hegel, Levis-Strauss and many others that what makes Europeans more civilized than the rest of the supposedly Barbarian cultures of the world was that Europeans had literacy while the rest had oral traditions; Ezeanya correctly demonstrates, as Derrida did in Of Grammatology, that indeed writing in general was invented by Africans and is found in all cultures today. The problem could be that the colonial anthropologist was not literate in the scripts of the other and not that the native was completely illiterate. This is a direct warning against white-supremacy in the sense that any attempt to wipe away the memory of others by wiping away their scripts usually ends with attempts to wipe out their lives as the genocide against American Indian Natives and the holocaust of trans Atlantic slavery against Africans attempted long before the Nazi holocaust followed the same script. The enslaved child who accidentally revealed that he could read the secret sacred texts of Nsibiri was instantly elevated into the elite ranks of the ruling secret societies whereas the plantation owners in the new world deliberately outlawed the learning of reading and writing among the enslaved for obvious reasons.

This Achebesque narrative of Chika Ezeanya is recommended as a treat to all lovers of fascinating tales told by an entrancing artist capable of turning a painful tragedy into a memorable adventure that is guaranteed to intrude into the normal bed times of readers and insist that the pages keep turning compulsively. It is predictable that this novel will join the ranks of modern classics as permanent features on the required reading lists for students at all levels because the language is accessible enough to appeal to the general public. Readers who reach the end with a tantalizing feeling because they want to have more pages to turn and keep reading should be consoled by the fact that the young author of this novel is certainly going to deliver more from where this one came. I can’t wait.

Professor Agozino is the Director of Africana Studies Program at Virginia Tech University, Virginia.

Public Sociology on Death Penalty

By Biko Agozino

You may be interested in reading the press release from New York University about a paper that David Greenberg (NYU) and Biko Agozino (Virginia Tech) published in the British Journal of Criminology. The fun lies in scrolling to the bottom to read the online comments of the readers and feel free to leave your own comments:

Here, Amnesty International twitted the Press Release while some readers disagree with the analysis:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/586082/?sc=rsln

The link below shows an award-winning Sky News crime journalist playing word games with the Press Release:

 http://blogs.news.sky.com/lifeofcrime/Post:0c58a977-13a6-4bd3-93bb-d31b43735f7b

The New Pharaohs (the people of Trinidad and Tobago) appear to have their hearts hardened by the Almighty Law:

 http://www.guardian.co.tt/news/2012-02-25/us-university-professors-death-penalty-won%E2%80%99t-stop-murders-tt

Here, the opinions of a supporter of the death penalty attracted opposing views:

 http://www.futurity.org/society-culture/death-penalty-may-not-impact-murder-rate/

This one is yet to attract comments:

http://www.healthcanal.com/mental-health-behavior/26929-Link-Between-the-Death-Penalty-and-Capital-Crimes-Sociologists-Find-Study-Trinidad-and-Tobago.html

What do you think? Please leave a comment on my www.massliteracy.blogspot.com  site and or on the other sites if you wish.

The Generalization of General Ojukwu

The Generalization of General Ojukwu

By Biko Agozino

 

Generalization is a scholarly concept that implies the abstraction of a significant tendency, principle or observation from a sample and its application to the general population from which the sample was drawn. Can we make abstractions from the life of General Ojukwu, and generalize them to the wider population from which our sample of one was drawn without running the risk of over-generalization or over-determination? Let us attempt this cautiously and bear in mind that every generalization is falsifiable because every sampling involves sampling errors, not to mention the errors of interpretation or flawed inferences due to human error in public discourse, nor the biasing impacts of vested interests.

 The observations that are generalizable from the life history of General Ojukwu include the unbearable burden of colonialism, the value of education as an unqualified human good, the permanent menace of militarism, and the importance of history lessons. Let us take these one at a time and clarify them:

The unbearable burden of colonialism was imposed on General Ojukwu from birth as a witness to the absurdity of imperialist hubris. The tyranny of presumptuous white supremacy and black inferiority complexes had to be shattered by the struggling masses who have never had any need to prove their equality in beauty, intelligence, diligence, morality, sophistication and bravery that remain taken for granted facts of humanity.

The nationalist struggle was by coincidence led by Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the great Zik of Africa, who happened to have been born in the same otherwise unremarkable colonial administrative outpost as General Ojukwu, the now hallowed town of Zungeru that deserves to become a place of pilgrimage in enlightened times, and whose parents originated in close proximity from today’s Anambra State, a place disproportionately home to many giants of our modern history.

In admiration of Azikiwe, Ojukwu as a child of books (nwata akwukwo in Igbo, or simply student in English) led a protest to Occupy his privileged colonial King’s College in protest over the manifestations of white superiority. He was duly suspended but the privilege of having the wealthiest father in ‘British West Africa’ ensured that the young rebel would be bundled to an expensive private college in England which the Orwellian English would call a Public School.

From there he cake-walked into Oxford university to read History rather than the artisan professional field of Law, Medicine or Engineering, perhaps in admiration for Nnamdi Azikiwe who pursued a liberal arts education rather than professional careerism. Like the elites of Oxbridge who were trained specifically to become the administrators of imperialism, Ojukwu returned to Nigeria and shunned the gilded carriage of the family business empire and chose instead to go and serve as a colonial Divisional Officer in his native Igboland and perhaps to learn to speak the language of his people properly for the first time.

We can generalize this observation as the unqualified importance of education on the premise that if Ojukwu had been relatively illiterate like his father, no matter how much money and influence he may have peddled, he would never have been able to play the role that he played in history. We can go further and speculate that the achievements of General Ojukwu in life are all capable of being attained by his millions of compatriots if only they are all accorded the opportunities to develop their intellects in an environment that demanded that the masses dream big dreams and refuse to accept mediocrity, oppression and exploitation as fatalistic conditions. The value of education was instantly demonstrated as the scientific committees set up by General Ojukwu were funded and enabled to produce awesome technologies that could have contributed to the industrialization of Africa had such visionary intellectual leadership been sustained in peace times.

The permanent menace of militarism can obviously be abstracted from the biography of Ojukwu and generalized to demonstrate that the military has remained a wasteful institution throughout history – an institution that has done absolutely nothing for the masses except to destroy them systematically while gloating in genocidal war heroism. For a Master’s degree holder from Oxford in those heady days to enlist as a recruit and submit to drills from complete illiterates who insisted that the safety catch must be called septi ka (ironically to underscore that those are not safety catches anyway but killers indeed) was the symptom of a tragedy of incredible proportions.

The West African Frontier Force that Nigeria inherited was an unpatriotic army of occupation designed to pacify the restless natives and the young historian in Ojukwu rightly divined that such a massive force was destined to play a major role in the political economy of the nation for better and for worse. In a blink of an eye, those well trained killers plunged the country into a genocidal war that cost millions of lives in 30 months, ending only when Ojukwu went into exile in Ivory Coast to give peace a chance that the beardless military youth could have taken to abort the bloody war if the Aburi Accord was followed or even re-negotiated. The allocation of a humongous sum of money for the rehabilitation of the victims of the pogrom rather than the threat of force could have removed the option of cessation from an otherwise fanatically patriotic people of the South East Nigeria.

The successive military regimes failed to bring the hostilities to an end until they handed over to the civilian administration of Shehu Shagari and Alex Ekwueme who soon took the courageous step of allowing Ojukwu to return from exile. He once again plunged into public life by running for office as a senator only for the Igbo who proudly say that they know no king to make him lose his deposits against a relatively unknown rival. The military soon truncated the Second Republic with series of coups and after decades of those interregna, they handed over to the civilianized administration of General Obasanjo. He summoned the courage to pay pensions to officers who fought for Biafra in the war of cessation, a simple restitution that the military administrations were incapable of rendering to their very own comrades from the past.

That policy of reparative justice still remains to be extended to the people of the South East in recognition of the criminal violence that was visited on them during the mass killings across the country and seizure of their properties and savings before, during and after the war and continuing ever since in periodic acts of terrorism that could only be ended when the country demonstrates that it is not enough to seek to punish the perpetrators who tend to escape with impunity anyhow; it is even more urgent to allocate enormous resources as reparations to the wronged, and finally outlaw genocide denialism.

In appreciation of the life of Ojukwu and the dramatic history that he personified, it will be appropriate to expect that the history of the Biafra war will be a prominent module in the Nigerian education system to help future generations resolve that never again must we permit our government to declare war on fellow Nigerians without opposing such a war the way Wole Soyinka did at huge personal risks. 

 

In such history courses, it will be necessary to identify the very human, all too human, mistakes of the dramatic personae with the benefit of hindsight and with foresight. Nice flag, shame about the name: General Ojukwu should not have pulled the name of an obnoxious slave trading kingdom of Biafra out of his history textbooks for the people of the South East who bore the brunt of the scourge of the slave raids. For Ojukwu to choose a macabre song, ‘Finlandia’, from a place that the sun never shines to represent the national anthem, Land of the Rising Sun, was to demonstrate historical naivety because that choice signified to the Soviet Union from which Finland had seceded that Biafra was an unfriendly project. The result was the unholy alliance of the cold-war enemies who ganged up against a besieged people whose leaders shamelessly pimped for support from Apartheid South Africa and racist Rhodesia.

When a declaration of Biafran principles was belatedly made, Ojukwu chose a mad market (Ahiara) as the place to immortalize the struggle rather than the historic Enugu. When General Gowon tried the colonial strategy of divide and conquer by dividing the South East into three states, Ojukwu could have countered by creating 12 states in Biafra and by conducting democratic elections across the South East as is nearly the case today instead of insisting on defending the colonial bureaucratic structure of the Eastern Region as if it were natural law. Finally, instead of executing citizens who were accused of crimes during the war, General Ojukwu could have offered intellectual and moral leadership by abolishing the death penalty for all categories of crime, a task that is yet to be done long after Britain which imposed that barbaric punishment on us has since abolished it in Britain while the brutalizing effects linger with us.