ix weeks after Robert Mugabe’s electorally inflected coup d’état and his brazen suspension of society in Zimbabwe, no voices of protest or condemnation have been heard from any regime in Africa. If the past is any guide, none is likely in the foreseeable future. This is because morbid silence has always been the preferred choice of response by African regimes to the mal-administration and atrocities perpetrated against the peoples of the continent by any within that degraded assemblage.
No one realistically expects any African head of regime to offer words of disgust on the events in Zimbabwe. This is the case whichever African capital an observer wishes to focus on. In Abuja, for instance, just as it was in Lagos when it served as political capital, it is unlikely that any successive Nigerian regime leadership since 1960 would recognise a free and fair election if presented with one. The British occupation regime (with headquarters in Lagos) had essentially foreclosed such recognition by rigging the crucial 1959 pre-restoration-of-independence countrywide poll in favour of its Hausa-Fulani north region clients. This was a cardinal feature in London’s strategic calculations to perpetuate its pervasive interests in this part of west Africa. Similarly, Britain had earlier on in 1952 rigged Nigeria’s census figures in favour of the north. Hence, elections and censuses in 48 years of “post-conquest” Nigeria would be run and concluded on the unmistakeable imprimatur of these British rigging templates. In effect, this mortally fractured Nigeria state, a failed state, was inaugurated by Britain on the eve of the so-called termination of its occupation of the country in 1960. Barely six years later, the African overseers of this state, with full British complicity, embarked on the perpetration of the Igbo genocide. Three million and one hundred thousand Igbo were murdered during the course of the genocide between May 1966 and January 1970. It is precisely because of this sordid British historical legacy in southeast west Africa, Zimbabwe itself, and elsewhere in Africa, that few are impressed by Britain’s current seemingly “robust” stance on the socioeconomic impasse in Zimbabwe.
It is significant that it is on the subject of the Igbo genocide that Okwudiba Nnoli, the percipient political theorist, chooses to underscore the genesis of the tragic trend of Africa’s silence and apparent indifference to the crimes committed by African regimes against Africans of which Mugabe’s aptly typifies presently. Writing in 1978 on the complete indifference shown to the Igbo victims of this horrendous crime by most Nigerians, regime genocidists and others, Nnoli concluded, most poignantly: “at that time, Nigeria seemed morally anesthesized.” Little did Nnoli know then that his correct reading of that state of moral anaesthesia in Nigeria towards the foundational genocide of (European) “post-conquest” Africa was not just restricted to the country of the perpetrators but was very much a feature across Africa. By not speaking out and acting decisively against the abhorrence of the Igbo genocide of the 1960s/early 1970s, the whole of Africa created the precedence of the amnesiac indifference that has been the hallmark of the continent since in response to the barbaric and brutalising escapades by many an African regime towards their peoples in the Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda, Ethiopia, Republic of Congo, Zaïre/Congo Democratic Republic, Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea Bissau, Chad, Zimbabwe …
This is the Africa that elicited that 1997 haunting reflection from the venerable Aimé Césaire that does capture the tragedy of an age most succinctly: “Just at the moment when Africa is truly born into the world, it is in greater danger than ever of dying unto itself.” And it is indeed in the context of the indefatigable resolve of those Africans determined to avert this cataclysm on their beloved continent that one must celebrate the recent decision by Durban dockworkers in South Africa not to unload the deadly consignment of weapons (3 million rounds of ammunition, 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades, 2,500 mortar rounds) being sent by China to the Mugabe regime via South Africa.
Arms-Free Zone
The Durban dockworkers have no doubt intervened pivotally at the very crux of this tragedy – to deny the typical African regime access to the array of arms it does not produce but appropriates liberally from abroad and employs, so ruthlessly, to murder its own peoples. Lives in Zimbabwe have indeed been saved in the aftermath of the Durban blockade. Relying largely on weapons from overseas (particularly from Britain [leading arms exporter to Africa], collapsed Soviet Union/Russia, former German Democratic Republic, China, North Korea and the Czech Republic), African regimes and their acolytes have murdered a total of 15 million Africans since 1966 – from Igboland to Darfur. As I argue in my book African Literature in Defence of History: An essay on Chinua Achebe (2001), the least contribution that the rest of the world can make to the arduous tasks Africans face presently to dismantle the continent’s pervasive genocide states is to ban all arms sales and transfers to Africa. No African country is exempt from this proposition to ensure an historic outcome: Africa, Arms-Free Zone.
Following the Durban dockworkers’ intervention, European Union foreign ministers, in a meeting in Luxembourg, called for a global arms embargo on Zimbabwe. This is commendable. But why stop at Zimbabwe? Why is Kenya, for instance, not included in this declaration? Was it not in Kenya in December 2007 that the Kibaki regime rigged the presidential polls and hundreds of Africans murdered in the aftermath? No mention of Ethiopia, Uganda, Congo Democratic Republic, Benin, Togo … Most startling, of course, is the absence of Nigeria in this EU arms ban initiative. Why? All elections in Nigeria in the past 49 years have been rigged, including those in 1999, 2003 and 2007. Indeed on the eve of the latter poll, regime head Olusegun Obasanjo imported the following range of weapons used to murder hundreds of people and terrorise the population in a countrywide rigging juggernaut several observers acknowledged was unprecedented in Africa: 40,000 AK-47 rifles with 20 million rounds of 7.62 x 39 mm ammunition, 30,000 K2 rifles with 10 million rounds of 5.5 x 45 ammunition, 10,000 Beretta pistols with 4 million rounds of .9mm ammunition.
If a crucial consideration of the EU foreign ministers’ Zimbabwe arms embargo call is to safeguard African lives in Zimbabwe from the ruthlessness of the state, then surely such a laudable objective must be sought and guaranteed for Africans elsewhere on the continent – African life in Bulawayo, Gweru, Chinhoyi, Mutare and Kadoma, etc., etc., must be safeguarded and allowed to flourish to optimise its vast potentials just as those in Igwe Ocha, Enugwu, Onicha, Owere, Asaba, Oka, Ogwuashi-Ukwu, Osogbo, Ilesa, Ibadan, Ogbomoso, Eldoret, Nakuru, Machakos, Kisumu, Bandudu, Mbandaka, Kolwezi, Kitwit, Mbuji-Maya, Addis Ababa, Mekele, Adwa, Dire Dawa, Cotonou, Djougou, Kandi, Sokode, Kpalime, Lome …
The case for an arms ban on Africa is therefore totally meaningless if it is “selectively” one country-focused and not comprehensively pursued and effectuated across the continent. This is an all too serious subject that must not be fudged. One of the enduring lessons of the Igbo genocide is that the African genocide-state is not equipped internally to launch the devastating carnage of mass slaughtering of its peoples that the world has witnessed since 1966 without its access to the deadly compendium of arms ever streaming into its arsenal from abroad. For those in the world responsible for the manufacture and dispatch of these instruments of murder to Africa, now is the time to seal off the channels – totally and unreservedly.
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