The Case for the Prosecution of the Ekweremadus?

The prosecutor, in the case of the Ekweremadus, opened on February 6, 2023 by saying that the donor must have been coached to call the defendants, cousins, uncles and aunties. Is that all they have got after more than 200 days in detention? 

It is completely normal for all younger people to call all older people uncles, aunties, daddies and mamas; and call one another brothers, sisters, cousins, in Africa and in the African Diaspora. Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton emphasized this point in their classic book, Black Power, to show that people of African descent are unique in the way that we relate to one another communally as family. The only exception is when calling a Black man an 'Uncle Tom', is frowned upon as a derogatory term.

The prosecutor should be forgiven for not knowing this basic cultural fact after months in detention but the lack of this awareness does not count against the defendants. In any case, being called a cousin, uncle, aunt, daddy, or mommy is not an evidence of deception or criminal conspiracy in either England and Wales, or anywhere else. 

Testifying on 02/27/23, Dr. Obeta admitted to his defense attorney that he traveled from Nigeria with his own kidney donor in 2021. He apologized for saying that they were cousins when they were no blood relations. He desperately needed a donor, he said. It is still not a criminal offense to call someone a cousin or son. He said that he treats his donor as a son now and keeps in touch with him. 

Anyone who believes that two African brothers are not related by blood should go ahead and prove the null hypothesis. We are all related by blood, actually. That is why the law does not require blood relationship to qualify as an altruistic donor.

 The prosecutor also said that the defendants had money and power but that justice cannot be bought. In the eyes of the law, the defendants remain innocent until proven guilty. The burden of proof is on the prosecution. 

 The claim that the doctor himself had received a kidney donation recently in the UK and that his donor allegedly recruited the unnamed donor for the Ekweremadus does not prove the defendants guilty of the perfectly legal procedure of organ donation under UK law. Even the prosecutor admitted that any family would do what they could to save a daughter that the prosecutor said had a deteriorating kidney disease. 

 Hence the prosecution avoided charging a case under the organ donation law and chose to charge the defendants with the violation of the understandably more severe modern slavery act. 

The evidence being simply that they bought clothes for the young man (for a colder climate) and gave him pocket money that the prosecutor admitted was small but was a lot of money in Nigeria. Is that all the evidence the prosecution has after all the delays and detention without bail?

The Defense Attorney countered the allegations of the prosecution on 02/08/23 as follows: 

"In Nigerian society there is an expression ‘everyone is each other’s keeper’ and the altruistic donation of organs is not regarded there as such a rare event as it is in this country.

“He will also say he was told (the donor) had offered to altruistically donate a kidney to Sonia.

“He denies he put directly or indirectly any reward to (the donor) or offered to do so and throughout he believed (the donor) was content to do so without reward.”

The prosecution engaged in misconduct on Thursday, 2/16/23, by abusing the enormous powers of search and seizure by the Crown in violation of the privacy rights of the defendants. 

Apparently having no case against the defendants, the prosecution stooped low by trying to use text messages between a father and his daughters on Fathers Day against the father and against one of the daughters who was critically ill. Inadmissible in a criminal court and litigatatable in a civil court.

It is clear to anyone who can read reports of the closing arguments of the prosecution that what the daughters asked for in their Fathers Day messages was not more money but more time with their busy father and the father understandably promised to spare no expenses (of time) with them. What kind of father would answer otherwise? 

The parents arrived London on June 23, 2022, two days after those texts, to spend more time with the children and they were promptly arrested, proclaimed the prosecutor. 

Why did the prosecution try to use those very private and absolutely lawful expressions of love between an African man and his daughters on Fathers Day against the father, the mother, and against their critically ill daughter who needed care, not biased prosecution? 

Was that all the 'evidence' the prosecution had against the defendants for which they detained the father and mother without bail for hundreds of days and counting (in the case of the father), and even during Christmas, Kwanzaas, and New Year celebrations? No case to answer.

Testifying on 2/20/23, the alleged victim said that it was Dr. Obeta who gave him money to travel and that when he went to the London hospital for tests, it was the first time he heard of kidney donation and the first time he heard the name, Ekweremadu. No evidence against Ekweremadu in his testimony. No case submission.

The alleged victim testified that he was told to lie that he and Sonia were cousins to facilitate the organ transplant. Was he told to lie about anything else? The defense counsel for Obeta reminded the court that he had lied about his age to the police to make him look more vulnerable, he also lied that both his parents were dead when they were still alive, and he lied about living on the street when he shared a room with two others in Lagos. 

Whether he was a reliable witness or not, he should be given leave to remain in the UK indefinitely after being used by the Crown to try and criminalize the innocent. Case closed. 

On March 6, 2023, the Distinguished Senator from Nigeria, Dr. Ike Ekweremadu, testified that he paid the expenses of Dr. Obeta who undertook to find a donor for his daughter, having found one for himself in 2021. 

Ekweremadu insisted that he made it clear that the kidney donation must abide by the law, the donor must not be paid or coerced and must be willing to act altruistically, he told his brother who was a class mate of Dr. Obeta. He was hopeful that such an altruistic donor could be found in Nigeria because of the compassionate nature of the society. 

On March 7, Ekweremadu told the court that he was afraid that people were trying to take advantage of his family but he continued the process for the sake of the life of his daughter. 

On March 9, the prosecutor cross-examined Senator Ekweremadu on why he did not get a donor from his family and alleged that he must have preferred to buy one from someone less fortunate. But the defendant said that it was not true, he simply followed the advice of the more knowledgeable doctors. 

Obviously, a family with a history of kidney disease is better off looking for a donor outside the family. In any case, it is not a crime to accept an altruistic donor from outside the family and the law never stipulated that the donor must be a family member. 

On 03/13/23, Dr. Beatrice Ekweremadu testified that she played no role in the search for a kidney donor. She said that, as a mother, she visited her children in the UK regularly while her husband handled the family finances. There is no need for the Ekweremadus to take the witness stand because they have no burden of proof if they are innocent.

No allegation of crime has been proven by the prosecution in the case of Crown v. Ekweremadu. On 03/16/23 the Judge gave final instructions to the jury and stated that no defendant should be convicted for telling a lie because lying is not necessarily proof of guilt. 

On 03/23/23, three of the four defendants were found guilty by the jury while Sonia Ekweremadu was found not guilty. On May 5 2023, the judge sentenced Dr. Obeta to 10 years in prison and sentenced Senator Ekweremadu to 9 years and 8 months in Prison while his wife got 4 years and 6 months.

In my humble layman opinion, the convicts have legal grounds for appeal. Using the innocent expressions of love between father and daughters on Fathers Day to try and incriminate both parents and the critically ill daughter is prosecutorial misconduct. 

The final instruction to the jury by the judge erred in law by misleading the jury into believing that the defendants lied but could still be found not guilty. It is not a lie when Africans call one another cousins and the Organ Donor Act does not require blood relationships to be lawful. 

The case should have been filed under the 2020 Organ Donor Act which allows for a living donor and not under the 2015 Modern Slavery Act which states in section 2 subsection 2 that even if the victim consented to the travel as a child or as an adult, it is still illegal if the travel was intended to facilitate exploitation. Altruistic organ donations are not for the purpose of exploitation or slavery. The inconsistency between the two Acts should be examined by the appeal court in favor of the more recent legislation.

The mother should not have said that she was not involved in the search for a donor but it may be true that the patriarch controlled the family finances and relied on advice from doctors. The Senator should not have denied being wealthy but that does not amount to a crime. 

The defense attorneys should not have put them on the stand since they claimed that they had no case to answer. The smart Nigerian lawyer who represented Sonia did not allow her to testify and she was acquitted. The Royal Free Hospital needs to be investigated for apparently running a scam. The Ekweremadus were obviously victims of a fraud and not the alleged offenders. 

The UK Supreme Court ruled in July 2023 that a bank is not liable for a fraudulent transfer by a customer to a fraudster's account. But the Crown Prosecution Service did not follow up on the civil case with a criminal case against the customer by bringing a chartge of conspiracy for fraud the way the Ekweremadus were prosecuted for being duped while seeking helop for their ill daughter.

The Ekweremadus should appeal their conviction and also pursue litigation in the civil courts for hefty damages against the Crown Prosecution Service for prosecutorial misconduct and against the hospital for the scam.

Dr. Onwubiko Agozino

Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies

Virginia Tech is the author of Black Women and the Criminal Justice System, Routledge, 2018; and of Counter-Colonial Criminology, Pluto, 2003.

Ekweremadus: British Justice System Is Still Racist-Sexist-Imperialist

 By Onwubiko Agozino 

 The detention of Ike Ekweremadu (along with his wife, Beatrice) is a racist-sexist-imperialist act. They are detained on allegations of a conspiracy to traffic a 'minor' for the modern-day slavery plot to harvest the organs of a ‘homeless minor’ for transplant to their own ailing daughter. 

Ekweremadu is the Nigerian Senator representing my home constituency of Enugu West but I am writing as a scholar and not as a political supporter. I express some reasonable doubts about the case.

 This scandal raises the neglected question of whether the legal system in the UK remains institutionally discriminatory, unknown to many in Nigeria who hail the trial uncritically as proof that the British justice system is fair to all contrqary to a UN experts finding that racism is 'structural, institutionalized, and systemic' in the UK criminal justice system. 

Lawyers for the detainees have filed suits in Nigeria to force banks and government agencies to disclose the private details of the registration of the alleged donor to help them to establish their innocence whereas they should know that they have nothing to prove as defendants in a criminal case: the burden of proof lies with the prosecution beyond all reasonable doubts. The UK government should explain why they doubted the age shown on the Nigerian ECOWAS passport in the first place before the young adult allegedly confirmed it to the court as his real age.

 Since the aim of their travel to London was stated in an alleged letter to the High Commission visa officers who could have refused a visa if the donor looked like a minor, or if they suspected that it was a plot against the laws regulating organ donations, it could not have been a 'conspiracy' unless the High Commission staff were co-conspirators, or the Ekweremadus were set up. 

Based on the Common Law principle of the presumption of marital coercion, Section 34 of the Nigerian Criminal Code says that a married couple cannot be charged with conspiracy unless a third party is involved because (e.g., in Canada) matrimony makes a couple one legal personality. US and Australian Courts have allowed prosecution to proceed in serious cases like terrorism or fraud conspiracy.  In the case of the Ekweremadus who openly planned to save a child lawfully with an organ allegedly offered freely by an alleged adult donor, where is the mens rea or criminal mind?

 In the UK, all adults are presumed to be organ donors (Organ Donor Act 2020) when they die unless they opted out while alive, and all in need are registered to wait in a queue to prevent material inducements from the rich to influence poor people to donate organs to the rich. About 7000 patients are waiting for organ transplants in the UK and hundreds die a year while awaiting organ donations. 

Donors can still volunteer to help individuals, especially if they are related, though relatives may not always be the best match. Relatives still need to give approval in the case of harvesting organs from the dead. In the case of living donors, no one is dead but the voluntary donor can withdraw the offer at any time before the surgery. 

 If the young donor lied about his age in order to obtain a passport as an adult, or did not know his age as many births go unrecorded in Nigeria, or lied to the UK police about his age in order to gain asylum, he should now be granted asylum because he may have been used as a bait by the UK to entrap the Ekweremadus. He should not be deported to Nigeria nor trafficked to Rwanda by the government of the UK for 'processing'. 

 The blame lies with conditions in Africa that are forcing many to flee abroad for better chances. This includes rich people who go in search of medical treatments not available in the exploited rich continent. They are often attended to by medical doctors and nurses initially trained with the scarce resources produced by African workers at home before they checked out to provide technical foreign aid to industrialized countries in exchange for huge remittances. 

Ekweremadu has individually tried to improve the lives of some of his constituents through his Ikeoha Foundation NGO that awards university bursaries and scholarships and provides adult literacy programming and free medical services to thousands in the face of government failures. 

He moved the famous motion on the doctrine of necessity to allow the swearing in of Vice President Jonathan as President following the demise of President Yar'adua. He was physically attacked in public in Germany by some of his detractors in 2019. He is not a saint but even a devil deserves his advocate.

 It is understandable that any parents who have a sick child could be taken advantage of by anyone claiming to be a willing organ donor. But if it is discovered that the volunteer is under-age, this should be thoroughly investigated without remanding the Ekweremadus in custody pending weeks of fishy investigations with apparent prejudicial, racist, sexist, and imperialist implications. 

Though rich and powerful, the assumptions of white supremacy and patriarchy may have helped to disarticulate their privileged class relations in this case. If the Ekweremadus were of different skin color or even from different ethnic groups in Nigeria itself, it is unlikely that they would be denied bail, given that they have family in the UK, surrendered their passports, and are recognizable in their own rights. 

 Remanding both of them in custody shows no concern for the care of their sick daughter. Even if the man is proven to have done something wrong, why detain his wife too, why not detain their daughter and the doctor too if it is a ‘conspiracy’? This discrimination deserves to be denounced by all. 

 If the couple had $20,000 on them without declaring the amount, it is within the limits of $10,000 maximum each that can be carried without declaration in some jurisdictions. It is patriarchal for the media to report that the confiscated money was found only on the man. 

 After centuries of imposing modern-day slavery on Africans (not to mention the not so ancient slavery of the Trans Atlantic slavery), no British law-maker has ever been arrested in Africa and denied bail based on an allegation of a conspiracy for human trafficking or for any alleged offense. To do so in Africa would have triggered a major diplomatic row but the neocolonial Nigerian regime is silent about the arrest of a prominent politician because of the assumptions of imperialism and dependency. 

 I published a book on Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towards the Decolonisation of Victimisation in 1997 to show that race-class-gender discrimination is alive and kicking in the UK justice systems. It was republished in 2018. 

Let the investigation into this case include an enquiry into alleged racism-sexism-imperialism by the British legal system to help hold the system accountable.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech.

Marxism in Africana Studies

 

 Special Broadcast on Critical Race Theory, including an interview with me by producers in Northern Michigan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1RQ_tb_hIs

Biko

My Cousin Was Lynched as an alleged Witch

 By Biko Agozino 

 During the time of goodwill towards all, bad news came during the Christmas holidays, on January 2 2022, saying that youths who returned for the holidays from distant cities, accused one of my cousins, Agatha Mgboebuba Nwaba, of being the witch who caused misfortune in their village. She was said to be the evil one who consumed the wealth of her husband who lived in London and who was said to have complained that it was his wife who used witchcraft to stop him from visiting home so that she would not be asked to account for the remittances he had been sending home to build a nonexistent house. He was reported to have told the lynch mob that he was not concerned and that they should do what they liked with her.

It was also alleged that she used witchcraft to kill one of their sons and that the same evil powers prevented her daughter's partner from going to pay the bride price for her daughter after she had four children with the Yoruba man. The daughter allegedly claimed that she found an exercise book in the house where her mother wrote a list of all the people she had killed and the dates that they died. That may be the kind of lists that every family keeps to remind them of those who brought them gifts during ceremonies and who deserve gifts in return when they have ceremonies of their own. The young people were obviously too biased against her and the list of names confirmed the bias. 

They were said to have paraded her around town with a tire hung around her neck to shame her but she showed no shame, perhaps because she was in shock. She was said to have begged one of her cousins who tried to intervene, not to let her in-laws beat her to death but her attackers threatened to attack her cousin too if he did not shut up. They were said to have tried to shame her extended family by asking them to take her back but they allegedly said that she was no longer in the shape she was as a young woman when they came to marry her and one of her uncles feared that she was the witch that killed his wife. Another cousin who believed the allegations like most people in Awgu (a local government headquarters) reported what happened in Awgu dialect as follows:

Mgboebuba lili amosu laegbuishi ndu ibe ayi. Ive ogbulu egbu kalikwalu. Shite la eka ada e nwayi ('Chikwado' la di e) o kelu igbuko ka eshilu chofuta ive o la eme. Ndu Awgu lo daide juwe ive oji egbushi ndu eka va du ucha, ya shi lo ndu ino e ive ya legbu. Eva ndu o kalaeke igbukwe kaligbukwelu. O gbuagakwalu madu, kalegbukwe tufu adaide. Eva mpam la mmam, okeke kele la nwae nwoke, onyebuchi adae nwayi la nwae dukota la ekwukwo ndu o gbugolu egbu. Oo ndu Awgu jikolu eka kpufute la orie Awgu, megbuo akaje, kpuluihia bia la uhumbele ezi nnae lo tigbuo ye, palu ozue ga gbavuo la ejo ovia du la nduegu ululor.

"Ovokwe ndu Uka gbulu e. Oo ndu ime obodo Awgu tigbuli e, maka la oshilu va la ya la ndu otu e la egbukota ote va ha tie ye ive, va lo tizie ye nke oji nwuhu. Onwevokwe onye kpolu ndu uwe ojii."

(Translation: "Mgboebuba ate witchcraft and was killing our people. The number she killed was a lot. Through the efforts of her daughter ('Chikwado' and her husband) whom she was preparing to kill too, that was how it was discovered what she was doing. Awgu people caught her and questioned why she was killing innocent people who have clean hands, she said that her enemies  were the ones that she killed. The names of the people she was preparing to kill were numerous. She had killed too many people and was going to kill more before she was caught. My father and mother, Okeke Kele and his son, Onyebuchi, his daughter and his grandchild were among the names found in the book of the people she had killed. The people of Awgu joined hands to drag her to Orie Awgu market place, mocked her, dragged her to her father's compound in Obugo village and beat her to death, then they carried her corpse and threw it away in the evil forest at the farm settlement of her husband's village, Ululor").

"It was not church people that killed her. It was the people of the inner village of Awgu who beat her to death, because she told them that she and her group will kill all those who beat her, then they beat her so much more that she was left dead. No one called the police."

They should have taken her to hospital to make sure that she was examined by experts if she admitted these things under torture and they should have reported the case to law-enforcement officers. The person narrating this to me emphasized that she was from my extended family. After parading her around the town all day, ‘the next day she was dead’, said the narrator.  Highly educated people strongly believe in witchcraft. But the surviving son of the woman is said to be demanding for his mother to be returned, I heard. There is an urgent need to run grassroots workshops to reeducate the people or else mutual distrust and suspicion will reign.

 They may have killed the poor woman, fearing her as a witch. Lethal witch hunting happened before in the same town a few years ago when some youth returned from the cities, burnt a native priest, Nwamme, to death and destroyed his shrine on allegations that he used his claimed powers to control thunder, Amadioha, to kill someone from the village who lived in a distant city. But our people carry on under thunderstorms with the belief that lightning only kills those whose hands are unclean. The frequent occurrence of misfortunes leads to suspicions that someone is behind everything. Fanon was right that Africans fear spirits more than they fear the police and the army of colonizers, at least they can bribe the police.

I spoke with the husband, Remi Nwankwo, in London by Whatsap and he told me that he suspects his uncle as the instigator because he had been threatening his wife. According to him, the uncle recently sent him a list of dead enemies allegedly compiled by his wife but it was typewritten and so no way to prove that his wife compiled such a list. The uncle then sent another list that was handwritten but it was not in his wife's handwriting. He asked the wife to leave the family home and go and stay in a hotel for a while but she told him that no one runs away from his father's compound. The uncle then phoned and threatened to send 'ndu ogba ozi' or messengers to force her out if she did not leave. He said that someone later sent him a video of how some people broke into his house and dragged his wife out and beat her to death. 

I asked him if he has reported the matter to the police and he said that I must know how the police work in Naija. I do not know what he means by that but I know that it is believed to be an abomination for a family member to invite the police in matters that involve other family members as suspects. He said that he had been ill since he returned from a visit home last year but that he is better now and is working to save for his airfare back home to see what he can do.

 Contrary to popular beliefs, Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik) advised the new Africa of his Renascent Africa to move away from belief in witchcraft and develop the scientific methodology in everything they were doing. His aunt tried to scare him as a child by alleging that the reason why he once fell into a fire and why a dog once bit him was because his grandma was a witch trying to kill him. Zik stated in his autobiography, My Odyssey, that he did not believe the allegation because he said that his grandmother was a loving and caring kind women. According to him, the epidemics that kill lots of people are not caused by witches but by often preventable diseases. If witches kill people by poisoning the air, Zik reasoned, they too would breathe the same air and die for as the Igbo say, dibia la agwo otule, o dowelu ike ye la elu (the sorcerer who is concocting diarrhea, is he keeping his own buttocks in the sky)? Two years after Azikiwe published Renascent Africa in 1937, one of his future rivals, Obafemi Awolowo (Awo) published an academic journal article in 1939 arguing that Juju is an African scientific method that could kill enemies remotely by calling their names three times at crossroads. The colonizers must have been pissing their pants if Africans had such powers.

Awo believed that juju can be used by a detainee to vanish from prison even while chained to the walls. Zik was skeptical and asked for the proof of juju to be demonstrated through the scientific methodology by asking those who claim that they could change from one animal to another or fly on a broomstick to do so under systematic observation. Zik went on to test his own social scientific method of intellectual-activism by training journalists from scratch and appointing them to run his chain of newspapers to successfully campaign for the restoration of independence. 

Although his political party, National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons, allowed membership of Traditional Medicine Practitioners Association to join as a group member, the party did not use witchcraft beliefs to organize (unlike Awolowo’s Action Group that relied on the Ogboni Cult) at a time that people believed that Zik was what Phillip Emeagwali later reproduced from a newspaper report as ‘the Spirit-Man’ that supposedly made him bold enough to lead the fight against colonialism. Zik’s son, Chukwuma, said that his father had no magical powers. 

 Reports of witch hunting are on the rise across Africa at a time of social, security, economic and political crises facing Africans. If we do not end witch hunting in Africa, the disaster that faced medieval Europe may be looming in Africa. During the witch craze, Europeans murdered an estimated nine million people, mostly women, according to Stephen Pfohl. According to Mary Daly, alleged witches were killed by people who claimed to be Christians and they killed them while chanting: ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son’. 

 Today, the Europeans have come out of their dark ages, thanks to millions of Africans that they kidnapped and enslaved without pay for four hundred years. Nothing to do with religion or Obeah, wrote Eric Williams in Capitalism & Slavery (just republished); despite the fact that his high school teacher, CLR James, wrote in the Black Jacobins that the enslaved used Voodoo as the medium to organize their revolution against slavery in Haiti. 

Similarly, the National Church of Nigeria and Cameroons was used by the banned Zikist Movement to support the independence struggle by making Zik and others, living saints of Africa as opposed to European Churches and their saints and the war heroes invoked ancestral spirits of Chimurenga in Zimbabwe while also chanting the Rastafarian songs of resistance. Obasanjo wanted to use juju to fight against apartheid, and the Boers must have been shaking and quaking in their boots.

Max Weber theorized that it was the Protestant Ethic of hard work that first produced the Spirit of Capitalism in England and in the US compared to China, India or Africa; supposedly proving Marx wrong that religion is the opium of the people. WEB Du Bois (the only American Sociologist that Weber invited to contribute to his academic journal)  in Black Reconstruction in America proved Marx right and Martin Luther King Jr. agreed that it was the forced labor of millions for hundreds of years that produced capitalism, not protestantism which people of African descent embrace in their millions but still remain underdeveloped.

Now Europeans celebrate Halloween Day every year by giving sweets to children who knock on their doors at night while dressed as witches. They even allow people who identify as witches to practice their own faith that they call Wicca. At the same time, Africans are killing ‘witches.’ What if a poor child tries to do Trick or Treats during Halloween in Africa?

 When lightning strikes and kills someone from the village in a distant city, it is likely because people go about openly even during a thunder storm and not because of the priest in the village who claimed that he had the power to make rain and invoke thunder and deserved to be burned alive. It is not witchcraft that causes unemployment, poverty, and other misfortunes. When one branch of the extended family is doing relatively better while others are struggling, it is not because the head of that family used juju to tie the hands of the other branches of the extended family. Those who sacrificed to provide education or business startup for their children have seen more success among those children than those who failed to educate their children or train them in a trade and it has nothing to do with witchcraft. 

 African countries are at the bottom of the league tables of the Human Development Index reports of UNDP annually because Africans are denied educational opportunities by African rulers but not because of witches and wizards. Those who believe in spiritual warfare should say prayers but desist from attacking and killing fellow human beings with the bias that they are witches. Those who kill people for money ritual should desist from that and work smarter. 

 Difficult times promote witchcraft beliefs and desperate measures in all societies, according to a controversial academic conference on witchcraft at the University of Nigeria that was opposed by Christians. What distinguished the Igbo among their neighbors in the past was that while the Ibibio, for example, believed in appeasing or eliminating the suspected witch, according to my professor, Daniel Offiong who however failed to compare them with their Igbo neighbors who did not have significant beliefs in witchcraft; nor did he compare the Ibibio with their Tiv neighbors who believed that all their chiefs were witches, according to a brief review of Offiong’s book by G. I. Jones. 

 The current state of insecurity may be contributing to the rise of witchcraft allegations among the Igbo as some news reports indicate, though many more may go unreported, as I analyzed in an article for the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies. Let the youth be trained in scientific methods so that they can invent new technologies to improve life in Africa without blaming misfortunes on innocent people suspected of witchcraft to be lynched by misguided youths. Educate your children or sponsor them to learn a trade. No more witch hunting. 

 Africans must show more love for fellow Africans as the Igbo symbolized with Mbari sculptures where the living and even spirits cohabitate under one roof, according to Chinua Achebe. Stop trying to demonize fellow Africans to justify attacks against them. The fact that intoxicated drivers of vehicles that are not road-worthy but manage to ply on roads that are nor vehicle-worthy and cause many fatalities is not the fault of a poor woman in the village who should not be killed by people who claim to be Christians. If you see mobs attacking anyone as an alleged witch, oppose the attack and advocate for the person being targeted. You can also report it to the organization that is trying to end such violent crimes in Africa: Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW). Google it.

UPDATE:

https://www.premiumtimesng.com/regional/ssouth-east/762404-witch-killing-group-kicks-as-court-discharges-man-charged-with-murder-of-woman.html

 Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.

Review of our video in a Class

 Hey Biko,

I showed your video in my Race, Class, Gender and Sexualities class this semester. Here is what one student wrote on her final exam essay:

"The lecture that most struck me over the course of this semester was, in all honesty, the lecture given on the history of racism and intersectionality on Virginia Tech's campus. Upon entering Virginia Tech in 2017, and up until mid-October of 2021, I had never found any cause to question the written history that is so often presented as hallmarks of the University's foundation and tradition. Figures like Addison Caldwell were staples in my mind, but I had never taken pause to question the reality or historical accuracy of this type of narrative, until our lecture. Watching a video during class about the sordid history of minorities at Virginia Tech was extremely eye opening to the nature of Virginia Tech to "white-wash" history in a sense, allowing for the savory parts of history to shine through, while the unsavory bits are lost to time and historical speculation. I believe this lesson had inherent value, not only to me, but to others who I spoke to after class. Many discussed how the video and lecture had opened their eyes to a historical framework they had never considered to be possible on such a campus as Virginia Tech, but seeing it placed out in front of us, it almost seemed obvious in a way. How could we have not noticed the hidden frameworks and doctrines hidden right before our eyes? If you are to teach this class again, I would make intersectionality at Virginia Tech several lectures (or maybe its own unit), in order to ensure that the issue is being properly discussed and called attention to."

Here's another comment from another student on their final exam essay: "what I recall the most vividly was what I discovered about Virginia Tech's troubling history. Watching the video that listed the racial and gender discrimination and the slavery that was talked about being casually listed as a minor detail when it was a extreme basis of Virginia Tech's origins was rattling to say the least."

Thanks to the colleague and to the students for sharing. Readers can play the video by clicking on the hyperlinked word, video.

Biko

On Amala, Ohu and Osu

By Biko Agozino

In answer to a question raised by colleagues on the USAfricaDialogue Series, I wrote this on December 11, 2020, but recurring questions have led me to repost it on this blog:

 Of course, no one ever said that precolonial Igboland was an Eldorado of mythical absolute equality. There has always been a hierarchy between elders and youth irrespective of gender and wealth as Oyewumi pointed out in The Invention of Women even among the monarchical Yoruba. In any system of equality, there is also respect for achievement and competition for titles... 

The difference in a republican system such as the radical democratic tradition of the Igbo is that your Ozo title does not make you king over anyone and your privileges are mainly in relation to other members of your Ozo society. Your elderly status does not mean that you run a gerontocracy either because an elder could be foolish in some matters to be corrected by a beardless youth. When a youth has learned to wash his/her hands clean, he/she can feast with the elders from the same plate. 

The Oha, or community, still gathers to discuss and vote on choices because the Oha is the Eze of the Igbo. No Igbo person lies down on the floor to greet another human being just because the other is more elderly, richer, wiser or whatever. We do not even kneel down to pray to Chukwu; rather, we sit down and have a chat with the Big God. Soyinka loves this about the Igbo and adopted it by refusing to lie on the floor to greet his elders since no one expects him to do that before God. Yoruba elders must have called him Omo Igbo or literally, bush child.

On Osu and Ohu, Rodney has convincingly argued against the mythology of Fage that slavery was universal and that Africans freely engaged in the slave trade with Europeans. To Rodney, there was no slave mode of production in Africa prior to contact with Arabs and then with Europeans. The Osu, I humbly suggest, arose from people who took refuge at shrines when kidnappers raided their community instead of joining the resistance that Ekwuoanu - Spoken Unheard - (Equiano) described. People may have shouted, Osula!, Osukwanu o, Osu, or it is happening. The people who took refuge in a shrine are untouchable in the sense that they are sacred and cannot be harmed by anyone. Even a goat dedicated to the shrine of Ani or Mother Earth, ewu Ali, is untouchable. Ewu Ali could eat your yam and you dare not strike it. Some say that the Chiefs who survived the Ogoni attack were the ones who took refuge in the shrine of the Voice and could not be touched while they rained curses on their attackers until rescued, and later gave witness against the Ogoni 9. 

There is no evidence in history of mass execution or genocide by the Igbo against the Osu or Ohu. Instead, the democratic Igbo have used modern education and trading based on competition and achievement principles, to tackle the problems of Osu and residues of Ohu that arose from the trans Atlantic holocaust that cry out for reparative justice today. In school, no one wants to know your status because what matters is your position in the class, whether you carry first or last, in examinations. Igbo no dey carry last because we are always in the business of helping our family, community, and country to rise, according to Uchendu in The Igbo of the Southeast Nigeria!

Some communities like mine do not even have anyone who is Osu or Ohu. With the migratory tendency of the Igbo, people buy and sell, seek employment, make friends, play sports, pray and worship together, and listen to music without any concerns about Osu, Ohu, and Amala statuses. Azikiwe made a law on day one as Premier of the Eastern region to abolish the Osu status. It is now revived by some mainly when someone wants to get married and the family wants to know about the family background. However, this is the practice all over the world where families seek to guarantee the happiness of their children in marriage. Osu, Ohu, Amala, or not, once you want to get married, you will find busy bodies telling your potential in-laws that you are too sexy or too ugly for their child, or too educated, not educated enough, too tall, too short, too fat or too thin, too rich or too poor, Catholic or Protestant, Christian or Muslim, Obeah or Maroon, Shooter or Informer, foreigner or native, etc. I lie? Today blood tests are compulsory to rule out sickle cell and HIV.

On Ohu, it is historically known that democratic societies like ancient Greece and modern America co-existed with the institution of slavery because democracy is rarely absolute. In the case of the Igbo, it was not chattel slavery but more like servitude from which an individual like Amanyanabo Jo Jo Ubani rose to be King Jaja of Opobo after rising to become the head of the trading House that 'enslaved' him. The content and context differed from Ohu or slavery. That social mobility is not found among the Greeks nor among the Americans. The Igbo did not have a slave mode of production and there was never genocide against any group of people based on their status as servants or Ohu, nor because they were called Osu. The Igbo have never committed genocide in their history even after they suffered genocidal attacks. Exemplary.

You are right that the Aro and the Asaba Igbo were beginning the process of state formation probably due to their proximity to more monarchical neighbors. Yet they fought the Ekumeku war against colonization for about 30 years, according to Ohadike, and the Aro resisted British attempts to penetrate the interior and take control of the lucrative palm oil trade, according to Chinweizu - The West and the Rest of Us - long after the slave trade had ended. But those who started it and ran it for 400 years used the suppression as the guise for the scramble for Africa. 

Eze Aro and Eze Nri  were chief priests or Eze Muo and not kings or monarchical Eze. Uchendu identified the monarchy as an 'intrusive trait' in Igboland, meaning that it intruded from neighbors. However,  Nzimiro documented that some Igbo are rather proud of their evolving monarchies just as others remain proud of their status as members of a 'royal' family with 'royal blood' today among the more monarchical neighbors of the Igbo. You are mistaken when you asserted that such people are not against democratic equality. They are too. 

That process of state formation was distorted by the slave raids and by colonialism which still found the Igbo resistant against the imposition of feudalism. The Igbo could have evolved a democratic state. Igbo women won the war against warrant chiefs in 1929 and the East was the only region without a House of Chiefs but only had a Legislative Assembly under the McPherson's and Richard's constitutions while the North and the West were bicameral with a House of 'Natural Rulers' each. Zik should have negotiated a second elected chamber of Women, Senators, or Councilors for the East. 

As Soyinka observed in his Nyerere Lecture, the Igbo and the Kikuyu are exceptional in their refusal to build empires by conquering their neighbors. He identified the democratic tradition of the Igbo as a good indigenous model for Africans to study and adapt because that is what post-colonial constitutions promise in principle, though neocolonialism is far from being a system of mythical perfect equality, mind you. 

Rodney also made the same point in Groundings with my Brothers when he warned that it is a mistake to study African history simply from the perspective of kings and queens because such monarchies were found mainly on the coastal fringes of the continent while the vast majority of people in the interior remained in direct democracies to some extent. He specifically identified the Igbo, though he called them Ibo, on page 55, as a good example of indigenous democracy that we should be proud of instead of always clashing and boasting over who should be crowned Calypso Monarch or Reggae King or Dancehall Queen and thing. 

Afigbo offered a similar critique of 'colonialist historiography' of the sort that tries to find evidence of Eze in every family just to prove to the colonizers that we were as advanced as they were since we also had kings and queens. Afigbo said that we should be studying the history of indigenous medicine, textiles, crafts, music, agriculture,..and indigenous democratic tendencies rather than obsess about a minority of  dying monarchical intrusions (see his papers edited by Falola).

On equality, it is obvious that all fingers are not equal, as Oliver de Coque sang. Some fingers are tall, some fingers are short. Yet, no finger ever claims to be the royal, Osu, Ohu, or Amala, finger. All the fingers combine to wash the hands clean, to form a fist when necessary, shake hands, and to wipe the bottom with the left hand or feed the mouth with the right hand. The Igbo are not all the same, some hold doctorates, some hold money, some are great musicians, farmers, traders, athletes, healers, priests, some are tall and some are short but they are all equal because nobody has more than one head. Hence we say that ishi aka ishi, a head is no bigger than a head. All heads are equal. Gbam! Ho-Ha! Period.

This is a radical philosophy that we should not try to belittle. Let us study it and find ways to overcome the contradictions invented mainly by colonialism. For instance, the claim by Simone de Beauvoir that women are always the Second Sex has been challenged by Nkiru Nzegwu, in Family Matters, to show that among the Onicha Igbo and even with the Obi of Onitsha, who is far from being a king, women had equal rights to inherit property from their husband and father until colonialism came to impose the patriarchal principle. Yet Igbo women continued to resist and in 2018 won the Supreme Court ruling that women have equal rights to inherit property. Amadiume also demonstrated that Igbo and Kikuyu women can still marry other women as female husbands or remain unmarried as male daughters even today.

The Igbo who name their daughters, Nneka or Mother is Supreme, as explained to Okonkwo by his maternal uncle, Uchendu, in Things Fall Apart, will never accept the racist-imperialist-patriarchal notion that women are always the Second Sex. That may be why the Igbo lead Nigerians in the equal education of their sons and daughters today. Equality is not sameness because it is something else that stands beside something to claim equality as Achebe put it and as I demonstrated in Black Women and the Criminal Justice System. Equality does not mean that women want to become men, that Africans want to become white, though the poor rightly want to become rich and should enjoy equal opportunities to pursue happiness.

This is from a Facebook post of mine in response to another post:

The problem in No Longer At Ease was never the problem of jargon or the simplicity of expression, Achebe excelled in the simplicity of expression and no one despised him for it. The problem was that of the miseducation of Obi Okonkwo. Here was a brilliant young man who was sponsored by artisans to go and read Law in England in order to be of better use to his community but he chose to switch to English Language without refunding the scholarship money so that another student ready to read law would be sponsored. Achebe also switched from Medicine and gave up his scholarship fund in preference for English Literature but was lucky to have his brother pay for it. In fact, Obi never contributed toro or shishi to the scholarship fund for any other student as expected nor did he use his knowledge of English language to write novels, plays or poetry to narrate the history and culture of Umuofia the way Achebe did. Instead, he got a job working for the colonizers at the scholarship commission and, after initial refusal of bribes, started extorting candidates who had to bribe him to be considered for scholarships. 

What sort of education did he receive in England to make him go and give his mother high blood pressure by telling her that the girl he fell in love with in London and wanted to marry was an Osu, prompting the mother to threaten suicide if he went ahead with it? Achebe was suggesting that as an educated man, it was nobody's business who he chose to marry. When the mother died, probably of hypertension, the efulefu refused to go home and bury her under the pretense that the money for his transportation home would be better used to pay for the funeral. Ewu. And when his girlfriend that he did not have the balls to marry told him that she was pregnant, he forced her to get an abortion but still expected her to keep in touch with him afterwards. Obi Okonkwo was an all round punk upon whom the villagers wasted their scholarship fund and who brought shame to the English university that miseducated him. That was why members of Umuofia Improvement Union were disappointed in him, not because he spoke with 'is and was' like everybody else. Nothing wrong with jargon anyway if put to proper use. Obi Okonkwo failed.