By Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo
Just like the birth pangs of a woman in labour
heralds the innocent cry of a new-born baby; so do the travails and committed
struggles of any oppressed people herald the dawn of their freedom. This is the
natural sequence of events in the integral calculus that create freedom.
History cannot afford me any parallel where a nation has emerged from the womb
of oppression into freedom without bitter struggle and sacrifice. In the entire
history of mankind it has been a constant war between the lord and the serf;
between the oppressed and the oppressor and between death and life. If we bring
home this truism to Africa, when it is not the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya, it will be the Maji-Maji uprising in Tanganyika. In
all these battles for freedom, men have had to die that others will live.
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| *Dr. Arthur Nwankwo |
The fate of Ndigbo
in Nigeria
is not different from the dynamics that signal the end of an era and the birth
of a new dawn. As a people, our lives would be worse than the lives of dogs in
a manger if we fail to rise up and say to the Nigerian establishment “enough is
enough”. If as a people, we should ever fail to pursue our legitimate demands
and condemn the serial atrocities against the Igbo nation, we would cease to
have meaning. The contradictions of the Nigerian state have compelled Ndigbo
into coordinated demand for the state of Biafra
and with each passing day, stakes keep getting higher.
The
emergence of nations like Eritrea,
South Sudan, Croatia, Czech Republic
and the many independent Baltic States
followed this pattern. Even more instructive was the emergence of the State of
Israel in 1948. Time was in the history of Israel
when King David, one of the most outstanding and successful kings of Israel asked a
very rhetorical question. Faced with the conspiracy of the Gentiles David, in
the second chapter of the Book of Psalms, asked: “Why do the heathen rage and
the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the
rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed,
saying: Let us break their bands asunder and cast away their cords from us”. In
verse 4 of the same chapter, David declares the response of such plotters
against the Lord’s people. According to David, “He (God) that sitteth in the
heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them (those plotters) in derision”.
But even after the Holocaust and with renewed anti-Semitism, the State of
Israel had to chose between actions that pull down the Temple of Humanity
itself rather than surrender even a single member of the Jewish family to the
oppressors.
Ndigbo, like the Jews, have risen to say that we
will no longer tolerate the continued cold-blooded murder of harmless and
innocent Igbo sons and daughters by the Nigerian state under any guise or
excuse. From 1966 to 1970, Ndigbo had to endure a genocidal pogrom orchestrated
by hate and jealousy. If any person or group in Nigeria thinks that in 2016, we
will sit idly by and watch a re-enactment of the macabre dance of 1966 in Igboland, that
person or group must have his or their heads examined.
