Memorising on an Inheritance

 

2007 was a crucial year of remembrance and contemplation for the African World. Africans commemorated the 40th anniversary of the death of John Coltrane, one of the most influential and celebrated artistic geniuses of all time. The iconoclastic tenor saxophonist, born in North Carolina in 1926, was one of the five key figures in the 1950s/1960s who transformed the development of jazz, African American classical music, unto that landmark pedestal of intense and continuing individual and collaborative exchange of creativity. Coltrane deployed his music (compositions, interpretations, instrumentation, stylistics) in support of the African liberation movement on both sides of the Atlantic – in the US itself (One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note, Coltrane Jazz, Bye Bye Black Bird, Live at Birdland (especially “Alabama”, “The Promise” and “Afro Blue), The Avant-Garde, Brazilia, Afro Blue Impressions, Impressions, Meditations, A Love Supreme, Live at the Village Vanguard, Transition, Ascension, Cosmic Music (with Alice Coltrane – especially “Reverend King” and “Manifestations”), Selflessness, and the Africa continental homeland (Africa/Brass, “Dial Africa”, “Oomba”, “Gold Coast”, “Tanganyika Strut”, “Dakar”, “Bakai”, “Ogunde”, “Tunji”, “Africa”, “Liberia”, “Dahomey Dance” and Kulu Sé Mama). Coltrane’s legacy endures … His music contributed significantly in mapping out the extraordinary dialogue of contemplation on African renaissance scholarship. This would contend with the convergence of the ongoing work in Africa of his day, especially that represented by Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Onwuka Dike, Walter Rodney, Ladipo Solanke, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo and Flora Nwapa, and the one in the US of the late 1960s/subsequently – particularly the work of Maulana Karenga, Molefi Kete Asante, Jacob Carruthers, Toni Morrison and John Henrik Clarke. This was indeed a phenomenal age of immense African possibilities …

Tragically, as coltraneology busied itself, selflessly, in orchestrating and re-orchestrating the vast repertoire of African renaissance sensibility 40 years ago, a pulverising league of African sergeants and brigadiers and corporals and colonels and majors and troopers and politicians and bureaucrats and the like, 4000 miles away, east of the African Atlantic, in Nigeria, were engrossed in the encirclement and the fire-storming of Igbo towns, cities, villages, everywhere, everything, “everything that moves or doesn’t move” – to quote the outburst of one of the most notorious genocidist commanders at the time: murdering, raping, burning, looting, wasting 3.1 million Igbo lives in 4 long years of genocide not seen in Africa since Belgian King Leopold II’s ravages of the countries of the Congo basin during the 19th century. The British government of the day, led by James Harold Wilson, was centrally involved in the perpetration of this genocide and the personages with the vivid labels of Babaginda, Danjuma, Muhammed, Buhari, Abubakar, Ali, Adekunle, Haruna, Enaharo, Ayida, Awolowo, Obasanjo, Abacha … bore the visage of those haunting insignia of death and desolation in Igboland.

Not Living the Lie

Still on Britain and Africa, 2007 will be remembered for what was clearly not on the original agenda of the construction (and celebration) of conquest history, nor ever envisaged as a likely consequence of such a portrayal. According to this “history”, 2007 was the 200th anniversary of the British “abolition” of its enslavement of Africans in the Western World. The British government, accordingly, organised a “commemoration” (?) of the event, culminating in a church service (“of thanksgiving”? “celebration”? “defiance”? “penance”?) at Westminster Abbey on 27 March 2007. Little research by the Cabinet Office in London would have shown that very few Africans in Britain and across the world recognise this British “account” that emphatically ignores its cardinal role in the pan-African genocide, which cost Africa the forced removal of 150 million of its peoples to the Americas and elsewhere during the course of 400 years. Britain, following its 16th century marginalisation of the hitherto lead-European enslaver states of Portugal and Spain in this crime against humanity, became the principal enslaver of African peoples. As a result of this holocaust, Britain financed its industrial revolution and emerged as a global power where, in its own words of imperial aggrandisement, “the sun never sets”. It is this latter narrative that defines the epoch that the lie of conquest testimony is scared to confront.

So, if Africans do not recognise 1807 and consequently the 2007 event, why did Britain continue in the staging of the latter regardless? Nothing more than to persist to promote the lie of its own narrative. But this was until it was spectacularly interrupted by the dignified, solemn and gracious testimony of Toyin Agbetu during that 27 March 2007 abbey service. As he faced the variegated template of the British establishment, Agbetu rejected the British “account” unequivocally: No! You know, as I know, that your narrative is a lie … I will not be part of this … Africans will not be part of it … 150 million of my lost ancestors are not part of this … You, yourself, should not be part of this … Own up to your crime against Africans, a crime against humanity … Abandon the lie of a narrative that Africans do not accept and will never accept …

Agbetu redefined the priorities of the times for Africans in the abbey and outside, across the world; he questioned the direction of so profoundly a state event geared to mislead, to belittle, to hoodwink. Agbetu’s courageous witness is organically linked to Ralph Uwazurike’s own testimony, 3500 miles to the south, in Nigeria, repudiating the diktat and lie of a genocidal state. Uwazurike has refused adamantly, despite the most brutal and humiliating state detention, to renounce the Igbo people’s inalienable right to independence in the wake of the genocide, itself the focus of the sagacious and exquisite novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, entitled Half of a Yellow Sun. Surely, as 2008 dawns, what the Adichie-Agbetu-Uwazurike trio of a reawakened African generation is saying to Africans and the rest of the world is straightforward indeed: “We will not live anybody’s lies … Don’t be a participant in your subjugation.”

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe