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Africa is committing suicide

An Open Letter to Martin Luther King

By Philip Emeagwali

Walk with me down memory lane. The time: 1968. In 30 months, one million dead. The setting: a dusty camp in Biafra where survivors waited and hoped for peace. The survivors: Refugees fleeing from the “Dance of Death.” My mentor: One of the refugee camp directors, whom I called “Teacher” out of respect.

“Martin Luther King has been killed,” Teacher said, with a pained voice and vacant eyes. I looked towards Teacher, wondering: “Who is Martin Luther King?” I was a 13-year-old refugee in the west African nation of Nigeria, a land then called Biafra. Martin Luther King. What did that name mean?

Eight out of ten Biafrans were refugees exiled from their own country. Two years earlier, Christian army officers had staged a bloody coup killing Muslim leaders. The Muslims felt the coup was a tribal mutiny of Christian Igbos against their beloved leaders. The aggrieved Muslims went on a killing rampage, chanting: “Igbo, Igbo, Igbo, you are no longer part of Nigeria!” In the days that followed, 50,000 Igbos were killed in street uprisings.

Killing was not new to us in Biafra. I was 13, but I knew much of killing. Widows and orphans were most of the refugees in our camp. They had survived the Igbo “Dance of Death” — a euphemism for the mass executions. One thousand men at gunpoint forced to dance a public dance. Seven hundred were then shot and buried en masse in shallow graves. When told to hurry up and return to his regular duty, one of the murderers said: “The graves are not yet full.”

A few days later, with only the clothes on our backs, we fled from this “Dance of Death.” That was six months before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Teacher and I were eventually conscripted into the Biafran army and sent to the front, two years after our escape.

After the war, Teacher – who had taught me the name of Martin Luther King — was among the one million who had died. I — a child soldier – was one of the fifteen million who survived.

Africa is committing suicide: a two-decade war in Sudan, genocidal killings in Rwanda, scorched-earth conflicts in Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, and Liberia. The wars in modern Africa are the largest global-scale loss of life since the establishment of the Atlantic Slave trade, which uprooted and scattered Africa’s sons and daughters across the United States, Jamaica, and Brazil.

Africa’s wars are steering the continent toward a sea of self-destruction so deep that even the greatest horror writers are unable to fathom its depths. So, given our circumstances, Martin Luther King was a name unknown, a dead man among millions, with a message that never reached the shores of Biafra.

Neither did his message reach the ears of “The Black Scorpion,” Benjamin Adekunle, a tough Nigerian army commander, whose credo of ethnic cleansing knew nothing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s movement: “We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces move into Igbo territory, we even shoot things that do not move.”

As we heed Martin Luther King Jr.’s call, and march together across the world stage, let us never forget that we who have witnessed and survived the injustice of such nonsensical wars are the torchbearers of his legacy of peace for our world, our nation, and our children.

(Transcribed from speech delivered by Philip Emeagwali on April 4, 2008 at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia at the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The entire transcript and video are posted at emeagwali.com.)

One thought on “Africa is committing suicide

  1. Committing suicide or not committing suicide is a matter of perspective.

    Africa is also a sleeping giant sitting on huge mountains of human and natural resources not available anywhere in any other continents. This of course is contemporary facts but even in precolonial times when the west was relatively industrialized and materially but inspite of that led itself to economic, social, political etc. dead end. By then mother Africa with all its abundant human and natural resources saved the then decaying west against itself, though partly by means of brute force and the jungle law of winner takes all approach.

    Ever since, and the infrastructure cunningly built at that time to pump and vacuum human and material resources at an extremely uneqail exchage rates disfavouring mother Africa grossely kept impovershing that mother of all the continents down and out.

    This is keeping it on its knees by the policy of divide and rule that involves constant warfare and violences
    with the help of proxy local warlords whose job is a mercenary job with no regard for Africans and Africanism as such immorality of moral corruption perfectly fits for mercenaries in any case.

    However, mother Africa is till highly favoured by mother nature as it is still sitting on mountains of human and nautural resorces even after centuries of blatant deceptive direct and indirect multifacated exploitations while sheding crocodile tears from all directions. A new century of external onslaught to grab the magnificent African resources is just beggining and that can only be achieved with the help of internal minority traiters as always. Other wise war and conflict may also advance and promote positive economic, social and ploitical developments, though also brings about death and distruction as a by product of forceful social change.

    Even the west is just what it is today because it went through sevral stages short and long wars that removed the old orders and brought about the new and relatively more progessive social orders. :)

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