A New Nigeria Free From Cultism…Do We Have Hope?

First let me apologize for all the ills confraternal clashes have caused in recent time, and certainly bringing its founders as having the genuine course and directions towards formally liberating Africa and Africans, but which was later replaced with juvenile stupidity and society tool in bating and stealing mandate from genuine candidates. Surely Africans have History, and which when practically narrated must replace all the quagmires of the white man in most history textbooks, the Ancestors and the GOD of AFRICA has in our time re-create sons and daughters of Africa with substances and of ideas to re-tell the world a story which has never been told, an archives of its finest type was re-visited and treasures of African traditions, culture and religion was place in the courtyard of global debates; waiting for the white folks to ponder on the tales and folklores. May our brothers and sisters in the defense of Africa’s prestige continue to see the light of the day, and may their days be long ISE!

This election comes at a crucial time in Nigerian, African and world history. In Nigeria the National elections are round the corner. After leading our country through an eight year merry- go- round, the National helms-man has now declared the elections a do or die affair. Like his geriatric near senile contemporary in Zimbabwe, the whole country has been garrisoned preparatory to the declaration of fictitious results and the enthronement of mediocrity in the name of rotational presidency and exclusivity. We still talk of power shift instead of talking about the best candidate for the job. One wonders whether hunger, lack and illness adds to our national burden and polity; respected rotational leadership between near imbeciles has hijack our democracy. Thousands have lost their lives needlessly in the last eight years as a stooge without an agenda was forced on the Nigerian people courtesy of the prince of the Niger and his cohorts who in the last decade have continued to flaunt their ill-gotten wealth in 50 bedroom hilltop mansions, while the impoverished masses die from hunger and preventable diseases. May AMADIOHA! Have his way with them. May SHOPONO descend suddenly on them and their families.

It is painful for me to hear about Nigerians who are finding it difficult to feed their families, due to the non ending economic depression which first started in 1982, when then president Shagari declared austerity measures. There has to be an end to the reign of the mad men who have held the reigns of power in Nigeria since July 1966, after they hijacked the country using mass-murder, terror and shock tactics as their weapons of choice. The past forty years has revealed a country raped, pillaged and ruined by those who declare themselves patriots and revolutionaries. The present national helms-man declared recently that his initial ambition in life was to be a mechanic and that when he got older he decided to be a barman. Those who installed a barman as the president of Nigeria are definitely laughing at the rest of us. In Zimbabwe we see the madness of Mobutu sese-seko and Gnasigbe Eyadema grip Mugabe. Now he has imported militiamen from Angola to deal with his political opponents, as the Zimbabwe police force can no longer cope with the large number of people in rebellion against the unjust system. To imagine that Africa once looked to Robert Mugabe for leadership. Meanwhile the open sore that Darfur in Sudan has become, continues to hemorrhage as the African union prevaricates and the Sudanese Govt plays games with the lives of millions. One commentator mentioned that but for Iraq the world would have been forced to do something in Darfur. On the 25th of march 2007 a day after the conference of African Scholars, who are bent on Africa’s complete liberation which I was present, and of a major stakeholder with delegates making their way back to their various bases, Britain and the world would be marking the 200th year anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. The British prime minister in the last couple of weeks has regretted Britain’s role in one of the most appalling tragedies ever perpetuated in world history I refer here to the African slave trade. Fellow Africans there is no tragedy that shaped human history and race relations in the way that the slave trade did. It was the presence of black men in chains in Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean that made the white man to begin to spin the myth of white racial supremacy. Prior to the slave trade the Black man led the world in state craft, technology, medicine, indeed all spheres of human endeavor, Egypt, Carthage, Ethiopia and the kingdoms of the rain forest bore eloquent testimony to our level of civilization. The coming of the Portuguese to our shores and the discovery of the so-called new world was to have terrible consequences for our people.

Ken Livingstone Mayor of London writing in the Guardian of Wednesday march 21st 2007 declared “next Sunday the 25th March marks the bicentenary of the abolition of one of history’s greatest crimes-the transatlantic slave trade. The British government must formally apologize for it. All attempts to evade this are weasel words. Delay demeans our country”. The question of compensation has largely clouded the question of apologies from Britain the biggest slaver of its time. George bush has already described the trade in Africans as a horror. A number of African countries including Ghana and Senegal are holding ceremonies to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. It is easy to dismiss the question of slavery as one of those things that happened far in the past, but this should not be the case, as no single issue so changed the nature of race relations and the consequences are still here with us.

A lot of confusion in continental Africa and all round the world are directly traceable to the evils of the African slave trade which went on for over 500 years, with mass relocation of entire African populations in the Caribbean and the Americas, destruction of entire nation states with disappearance of cultures and peoples but worse of all it set the stage for the ridiculing of the black-man, for his dehumanization, and the struggle which we all face to day as Black-men to reassert our humanity. We describe the Black-man today only in terms of skin colour in most parts of the world because that was all many were left with in the slavery era. On the plantations the white man changed the names of the Africans, forbade them to speak their languages, stripped them of their culture, dehumanized them and turned them into the human equivalent of the mule or horse indeed a brute beast fit only for the fields and intense manual labour. Marriage as we know it was forbidden, but intense promiscuous sexual activity was permitted as this rapidly increased the black population. Most plantation owners raped the women slaves and the products of such unions were made slaves. The slave trade was one big study in eugenics. In order to justify the brutal inhuman treatment of the Africans, all kinds of dubious scientific and sociological studies were carried out, whose end result was the declaration that the black-man was subhuman. These false conclusions were spread far and wide and this is what led to racism, which we are all battling with today.

How do you convince someone who sees you as a dangerous wild animal that you are also a human being? I could go on and on but the point has been made. Eventually the slavers on the continent of Africa were themselves enslaved, the kingdoms of Ashanti, Abomey, Benin and others lost their independence with the partitioning of Africa at the Berlin conference. The fate of Benin was quite sad as in1897 the capital city was burnt, sacked, looted and the king Ovoranwen debased in a way that could only invite a curse on the land. The African slave trade created BLACKISM for that was all the white-man left us with in the new world. The white man took our language, our names, ethnicity, sense of being,

history, manhood, dignity and all its attributes away from us on the plantations of North, South America and the Caribbean. All we were left with as a reference point was the colour of our skins. In the new world there was no Yoruba or Mandingo or Bantu. We were simply blacks. Black became derogatory as it spoke of inferiority, failure, and all things bad. From this negativity, our forbears in the new world created the positive ideology of BLACKISM. We today speak of NEO-BLACKISM, which is much more than new blackism. Neo-blackism was born as an ideology in 1977 pioneered through Neo Black Movement of Africa (NBM) in part to redress the evil consequences of slavery and colonialism on the psyche of the Blackman to bring into being a new type of Black-man who was to be disciplined, fearless, industrious, focused, the equal of the best of men the other races had to put forward.

Bishop David Oyedepo had this to say recently at the founder’s day event at the Covenant University Nigeria. ” A normal Black man is a victim of slavery, until you become brave you never become free. We are here to enforce a change, change that will write the story of the black man productively, tangibly, technologically on the world map. With GOD we cannot fail. Bravery is a cure for slavery. We are so afraid to be different, always want to be endorsed by the white-man, now white men want to be endorsed by us”. Bishop David Oyedepo spoke the sort of words that ought to be coming out of this convention, the words of a Neo-Blackist. There is therefore no contradiction between Neo-Blackism and Christianity or indeed Islam. If Bishop Oyedepo is seeking to re-write the story of the Black man productively, tangibly, how much more the Neo-Black movement. The Neo-Black movement was conceived as a black militant defense force for the protection of the Black man worldwide. It was militant because the enemy we faced was a very wicked and diabolical one. Racism, racial hatred, neo-colonialism, apartheid, racial violence of the most abhorrent kind. The enemy in South-Africa as seen from the Sharpsville, Soweto and other massacres was hell-bent on exterminating as many Africans as possible, as it became increasingly glaring that black majority rule was an inevitability in that country. The Neo-Black Movement stripped of all paraphernalia and laid bare can be said to be for the defense and protection of the Black-man worldwide. As a Movement it was galvanized by two great ideas.

1.THE SETTING UP OF THE GREATEST BLACK ORGANISATION THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN.
2. THE DEFENCE AND PROTECTION OF THE BLACK-MAN WORLDWIDE.

The Neo-Black Movement -NBM is a movement democratic in its decision making and organization, but militant in its actions, conceived as the last bus-stop for the black man, the last hope for redress, the apex black organization, the black organization of all black organizations, the vanguard for the black man, the movement that would lead the black man to the eldorado of true economic, social, cultural and political independence. There are hundreds if not thousands of black organizations, ditto pan-africanist organisations, but there is only one Neo-Black Movement. The Neo-Blackist (AXE-MAN) in his original incarnation was an ideologue, not a mindless violent brute. Neo-blackism is best described as an exceedingly rewarding and intensely satisfying pursuit for Black-men possessing courage and bravery as personal attributes and with a mindset of the radical, revolutionary and intellectual hue. The Axe itself is symbolic; it is merely wielded by the hand, but issues from the mind. It speaks of mind reconstruction and deeds done from a mind freed from the age old problems that made our ancestors prey to the pecuniary motives prompted by reprobate and lucre crazed Caucasians steeped in mind control and other techniques, designed to reduce otherwise reasonable homosapiens to mere brute beasts.