Nchamere Nd'Igbo: The Pogrom, War And Starvation: Evidence Of Anti-Igbo Pogrom

BY Emma Okocha , The Vanguard, Forwarded by Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe “On the grant of the Charter to the company in July 10, 1886, the man to whom Goldie turned to as Chief Justice was Sir James Marshall. The headquarters was at Asaba.’’ — Oluwole, T. S. Elias, Makers of Nigerian Law, Lagos 1963. Also See Gills Geography, Text in use up to 1912, it was clearly stated that Asaba was the capital of Southern Nigeria. “The greatest single massacre occurred in the Ibo town of Asaba where 700 Ibo male were lined up and shot’’ — London Observer, January 21, 1968. “There has been genocide, for example on the occasion of the 1966 massacres…. Two areas have suffered badly …Firstly, the region between Benin and Asaba where only widows and orphans remain. Federal troops having for unknown reasons massacred all the men. Accordingly to eyewitnesses of that massacre the Nigeria commander ordered the execution of every Ibo male over the age of ten years’’ — Monsignor Georges [sent down on a fact -findin...

By Ali Mazrui Ali Mazrui, Africa's most famous political scientist, dissects the history of Nigeria to make comparative statements. Professor Ali Mazrui is the Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies and The Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities, State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the author of over twenty five books, including Towards A Pax Africana. He was author and narrator of the acclaimed nine-part television series, The Africans: A Triple Heritage. He is also a senior scholar in African Studies at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, the A. D. White Professor-At-Large Emeritus at Cornell University, the Albert Luthuli Professor-At-Large, University of Jos, Nigeria,and Chair, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, Washington, D. C. USA. The Path to Nigeria Greatness: Between Exceptionalism and Typicality The cohesion of the United States as one country rests on the roles of two personalities - George Wa...

By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe Text of 10 lectures on Africa delivered between 13 June and 10 July 2009 at the following universities in Brazil: Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Aracaju, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro and Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, São Paulo. I wish to thank Alyxandra Gomes Nunes of the Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, for her excellent planning and coordination of the lecture tour and to Professors Paula Barreto, Eliane Veras Soares, Claudio Pereira, Antonio Mota, Walteir Silva, Hypolite Brice, Luiz Eduardo Oliveira, Marie Teresa Salgado, César Nunes, Fábio Akcelrud Durão, Jose Augusto Alburquerque and Jamie Ginzburg for their stimulating contributions and exchanges during the lively post-lecture question & discussion sessions and for creating the enabling environment in their various universities which made the tour such a resounding inte...

Federal Nigerian troops walk along a road near Ikot Expene, Nigeria, with Biafran forces in this 1968 file photograph. On the roadside are two emaciated Nigerian boys. (Photograph: AP) By Percy Zvomuya The first half-century of black Africa's independence was especially notorious for three reasons: coups, corrupt dictatorships and genocides. Just seven years after Nigeria's independence in 1960, more than a million Igbos died of starvation or were slaughtered in the Biafran war in Nigeria; in the 1980s a million people died of starvation in Ethiopia as the government was busy buying weapons, and more than 20 000 Ndebele were slaughtered by the Zimbabwean army's Fifth Brigade. In 1994, in just three months, a million Tutsis died in Rwanda at the hands of their Hutu compatriots and, more recently, up to four million Congolese people have died as an indirect result of 10 years of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And in the Sudanese provinces of Darfur, massacres...