This month marks the 46th anniversary of the start of the Igbo genocide.
Beginning on 29 May 1966 to 12 January 1970, the composite aggregation of the
Nigeria state – military officers, the police, Hausa-Fulani emirs, muslim
clerics and intellectuals, students, civil servants, alimajiri, journalists,
politicians, other public figures – planned and carried out the Igbo genocide.
This is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. It is also
Africa’s most expansive and devastating genocide of the 20th century. A total of
3.1 million Igbo people, a quarter of this nation’s population at the time, were
murdered during those harrowing 44 months. Most Igbo were slaughtered in their
homes, offices, businesses, schools, colleges, hospitals, markets, churches,
shrines, farmlands, factories/industrial enterprises, children’s playground,
town halls, refugee centres, cars, lorries, and at bus stations, railway
stations, airports and on buses, trains and planes and on foot, or starved to
death – the openly propagated regime-“weapon” to achieve its heinous goal more
speedily. In the end, the Igbo genocide was enforced, devastatingly, by
Nigeria’s simultaneously pursued land, aerial and naval blockade and bombardment
of Igboland, Africa’s highest population density region outside the Nile Delta.
The genocidists also destroyed, sequestrated or looted the multibillion-dollar
Igbo economy, one of the most advanced and enterprising conurbations in Africa
of the era. Africa and the rest of the world largely stood by and watched as the
perpetrators enacted this horror most relentlessly and ruthlessly. Africa and
the world could have stopped this genocide; Africa and the world should have
stopped this genocide. This genocide inaugurated Africa’s current age of
pestilence. During the period, i.e., since January 1970, 12 million additional
Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994),
Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo (variously, since the late 1990s) and
Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004) and in other killings in Liberia,
Ethiopia, Congo Republic, Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire,
Chad, south Sudan, Burundi, Mali.
In memory of the murdered 3.1 million Igbo, this blog will re-issue this notice
each day throughout May until 29th of the month, the day commemorating the
launch of the genocide, when an essay captioned “Igbo people 29 May 1966 –
Genocide, survival, remembrance” will be published.
Ozoemena, Never again.