Generals Murtala, Obasanjo and Akinsehinwa Abiyamo
Jimanze Ego-Alowes
The greatest twin tragedy that befell the Igbo, post Biafra is in the completely misguided Obasanjo/Murtala Muhammed dictatorship. One arm of the tragedy is what these men did to the Igbo, believing falsely, they were victors, over the Igbo. The other, is that the Igbo, and this includes their philosophers, historians… poets, became infested accordingly.
The infestation resulted in a split-personality disorder they did not quite know whence it came. Today, nearly all of them are confusing the psychology of defeat with the defeat of psychology. To them, light and truth lie in the ways and shadows of the victor, even if she is a false and forged victor. That is the Igbo scholar is the very compounding of his people’s tragedy, post Biafra. They brilliantly refuse, are unable or are seduced; offices, contracts and all, not to understand. Perhaps they have never heard of David Hilbert. We must know. We will know.
So what did Obasanjo and Muhammed do? Following the Murtala coup, the duo as triumphal co-Caesars marched into Igbo heartland and decided to infest us with a statutorily fixed traditional leadership, as perhaps, is Ogboni and Arewa, unsolicited. Perhaps, to them it was their duty to pass on the civilisation of the victors to the vanquished. It was akin for them, to the duty of Rome unto the barbarians, in Latinising them. And Rome, at least, had a civilisation to convey. But what exactly did a Muhammed and an Obasanjo bring to civilisation? We are personally at a loss to point to any thing. And to worsen matters they papered over things in their newly founded apocrypha; we are one Africa, one people. This was apparently the excuse upon which they staged the political and structural despoliation and robbery of Igbo land; of grafting formal kingdoms onto Igbo root and branch republicanism. That is they legislated into Igbo, their own native ways of the Ogboni and Arewa, on the internal colonialist pretext, we are one Africa, one people and that they won a war. All these of course are false and forged at best.
Yes, there is a historical fog worth clearing. First, the North and the South West did not win any Biafran war. This much, though hidden from the public, is certain and known to those who should know. For purposes of correctness of records, it was the British who won the war. It also was the British that campaigned for and triggered the war, perhaps regretting it and its outcome today.
Factually and with records of proof, the North under Yakubu Gowon had planned, purposed and carried out a generalised mass murder of the Igbo, with a purpose to flee into the autarkist Arewaist kingdom. (The revenge coup it must be put on record was a senseless reaction, to the equally senseless, selective and thuggish murder, of selective others, northerners and westerners, by Nzeogwu and company. Both are condemned and condemnable).
Then the British held the North back and convinced them that this rather is their finest hour. We shall, the British promised, bless you with the blessing of an inheritance, the like of which you couldn’t have imagined. That inheritance is the current state of Nigeria as a rump of the British Empire.
It must be remembered that it was the British that advised, convinced and or bewitched Gowon that Africans were essentially sub-humans, and that it was proper in the cause of re/creating an African state, to kill and maim millions of them, the innocent, the child and the babies included. In fact, the logic of the British, which Gowon bayed for is; if one emptied by mass murder a nation-space of black peoples and secured it as a state, all is well and the world is round. Gowon became a convert and practitioner and even proselytiser. This accounts in part for the disingenuous Awolowo holy quip, that to starve the millions, the babies, the nursing mothers, fellow citizens, as to secure and prosper a mere geographical expression, is a gold standard of nation building, so long as the details are African, and perhaps non-Yoruba. And the British armed them, the coalition to fulfill this mission. And they did.
Meanwhile, it must be understood that by the time the British propped up Gowon to kill seven million, that was the British target by one account, the same British would never tolerate the killing of one European as to secure a border. If seven British citizens died it would have been a world calamity. But of putting millions of black people to death, they encouraged their good black boys? Of course the death of millions of black men and women will help whiten the nations of the world. And Gowon and company were obliging agents.
That is the victory of Gowon or the North and the South West was the victory of agents, was a victory bequeathed to them by the British. This it is worthy to remark explains in part the inability of these victors, so called, to run Nigeria. Their inheritance, despite pretenses, is simply greater than them. It is just similar to the issue of a minor, who in coming into inheritance squanders it all, like he would have his set of toys. Africans are our junior or kindergarten brothers, the white man says and Gowonic-Nigeria looks like a solid proof.
It is this mix-up of agent, as principal, that has colluded with earlier European prejudices to misinterpret Igbo history. Suddenly, grossly uninformed citizens of Nigeria from the North and the South West came about the regrettable lie that Igbo had no empires in the past. It is important that we remark that they were not speaking as if this was fact. No they were speaking as if the fact represented all the truth there is or could be. So their report was not just quantitative, it was a qualitative and judgmental error.
Yes, it was largely people, like Femi Fani-Kayode that told the empty tale of fury and nonsense. And one never bothered, after all these men were legendary for their lack of mental coherence. Additionally, that one won a war does not make one, a man of the superior culture. Genghis Khan overran much of the Islamic/Chinese kingdom of his time and Rome overran both Athens and Jerusalem. Even if this is lost to Igbo historians and poets, we repeat; the throne is not a faculty.
So when winners form a church and set up a chapel deifying power and victory, then the end is nigh. The duty of good men is to roll back the evil church and its preachments. And that is, we must never allow power to philosophize, or the philosopher to be armed in aid of logic.
That was why when we read a columnist, snooper, in whom we are well pleased, go along similar claims we were truly alarmed. Has the philosopher been seduced by induction into his age? He writes almost as elegy; “not known to have built great empires in the immediate past, the Igbo ….” Perhaps, to foreclose on further errors we have to speak out.
Now the question is as follows. Is there an iron law that every society that was well-achieved built empires? Of course, the answer is no. There was no Jewish empire in all their history. And no peoples or nations have bequeathed more to mankind than the Jews and the Greeks. The Greeks too never built an empire. Macedonians were never Attic, or even Greek. At best they were questionable and outlier Greeks, indeed barbarians, or as Yoruba may have said are okes. Being Attic or Greek is an idea and is not just a matter of provenance.
Of course, it is not in any way imaginable that a Diogenes, a Socrates, a Plato would have lent themselves to the self-debasement of being thugs, and of wanting to dominate or rule over others outside their consent. These men were the first cosmopolitans.
It is true Aristotle lent and rented out himself to the thug, Alexander of Macedonia, but this was in direct contradiction to the advice and will of his superior and master Plato. Of course Aristotle is pure Greek. But the same Aristotle is notorious as a careerist. In fact, Plato, we may all recall, foresaw this and dismissed him as a foal, the ingrate who would kick even his mother to death, if only to prosper his least career gain.
It is in this light of centres of scholarship, of cultural fertilities, of the Jerusalem of Christ, of the Athens of Diogenes, that the achievements of the Igbo need to be understood and never be slighted or reported mournfully, as those who allegedly built no empires. Who ever needed an empire, save a Caesar and his court jesters?
That is historically, the Igbo missed nothing and have lost nothing in not allegedly having built an empire or ran tyrannical systems. Our institutional belief in the inherent equality of men before Ofo is and has been before old Europe fled to institute such in America, and become Yankees. It is a global standard everybody is returning to; the nobility first envisioned and practiced by the Igbo. We should be congratulated for our prescience and not belittled. And the best is to expect others, either consciously or otherwise to turn up Yankee Americans or Oru-Igbo whichever of the two synonyms they choose.
We will give one further example of pre-pilgrim fathers, Yankee vision of the Igbo. For many Igbo, the Oru are the Igbo who live by the banks or across the banks. Yet this characterisation is meaningless. In fact, the underlay of Oru in Igbo cosmology is that Oru is a world, the new world which the Igbo constructed as a cultural EPZ.
So Oru was a free land, a kind of America, where peoples unfettered by the burdens of being Igbo, may reach out to new visions and vistas, attend to and interact with brave new others. In that sense, Oru is what America is to the old Europe. Oru was the new but exotic world for high cultural experimentation and re-export, back to the Igbo heartland. Just as America has prospered Europe by the experimentations, that was to be possible only in the new world, Oru was set up by the Igbo to filter in choices that are to prosper and enrich Ndi-Igbo in a new composite world of Oru na Igbo. This is similar to what you have in America/the new world, and Europe/the old world, which together constitute the West or their own Oru na Igbo. That is to say Igbo were Yankees again before Americans.