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Let's step back from the heinous July coup itself and look at the role of leftist, intellectual agency in the path that led, first, to pogroms, to the July coup, to the Civil War, to our today and that, ultimately, leads to our children's future. https://twitter.com/AkintundeAkink6/status/1288373136778461184
Going by:
1. Iloegbunam's biography of Aguiyi-Ironsi
2. Tanko Yakassai's autobiography as well as
3. Feinstein's biography of Mallam Aminu Kano, there's evidence that suggests Mallam Kano was one of the intellectuals who contributed to reframing the January coup as an 'Igbo coup'
1. Iloegbunam's biography of Aguiyi-Ironsi
2. Tanko Yakassai's autobiography as well as
3. Feinstein's biography of Mallam Aminu Kano, there's evidence that suggests Mallam Kano was one of the intellectuals who contributed to reframing the January coup as an 'Igbo coup'
The debate over the problematic framing of the January 1966 coup as an 'Igbo Coup' is loud and long, but the emergence of that framing, itself, is hardly ever historicised and contextualised.
Mallam Aminu Kano seems to have done the legwork to see that his ethnocentric framing became a wreath of tinder on the hot embers of chauvinism that already harped on an ethnic interpretation of the January coup (eg mockery of the murdered Sardauna in song and visual media)
In short, the irony seems to be that even though they were on opposite sides, both leftist intellectuals like Mallam Kano and those among the Igbo population in the city of Kano who were chauvinists saw the January coup exactly the same way.
What I always find curious are the following:
1. You will have to search very hard, today, to find serious and sustained leftist engagement with Mallam Kano's alleged complicity in the pogroms of 1966 and his health portfolio in Gowon's war cabinet.
1. You will have to search very hard, today, to find serious and sustained leftist engagement with Mallam Kano's alleged complicity in the pogroms of 1966 and his health portfolio in Gowon's war cabinet.
2. Although Kano wasn't only Commissioner for Health in same cabinet Awolowo was Commissioner for Finance, Kano was also, allegedly, an accessory to pogrom, in Kano, yet Achebe's treatment of, in his words, 'the incomparable Aminu Kano' is different from his treatment of Awolowo.
Indeed, Achebe (and Chukwumerije) apparently had no qualms working with Mallam Kano in the PRP, during the second republic. Again, contrast the image of 'upright political figures like Mallam Aminu Kano' to the image of Awolowo that emerges in There Was a Country.
3. Even though the discourses that are current today are said to be based on a thorough knowledge of the history and a genuine concern with the crime of genocide:
a. The intellectual who is allegedly complicit in the pre-war pogroms and who had a key role in the administration that oversaw the federal side of the war is not the lightning rod for the discourses that are now current.
b. Except for the Ubagharas, themselves, their children who are scholars of the Civil War and, basically, scholarship of the Civil War from the '90s, the genocide by some Ohafia townspeople and the Biafran Administration against the Ubagharas (Ikun Clan) is never mentioned.
It's especially rich when a certain filmmaker, who's from Ohafia, sets out to educate all of us who are ignorant about the Civil War but evinces no awareness of the Ikun Genocide.
And, let's not be in any doubt, even though the argument of genocide against the Igbo during the Civil War has been running into the wall of dolus specialis under International Criminal Law from the '60s up to today...
... and the folks who are sworn to die on that hill are looking to a redefinition of genocide under structural and/or knowledge-based frameworks...
... Ohafia & the Biafran admin's crime against the Ikun is genocide, whether you view it with International Criminal law as it has been since WW II or under any future structural or knowledge-based framework that might replace the status quo.
Genocide against the Ikun is more grievous than what happened in Asaba, but Ikun being a minority within a minority and since it's not the federals who are to be held accountable have their story ignored, especially by the you-people-don't-know-the-history-of-the-Civil-War crowd.
Like I said of the statue of Tinubu – tear it down, give it a fresh coat of paint – I don't care. What I care about is that we continue to write & talk about our history. Likewise, take Awolowo off the N100 bank note or keep him on, I don't care – write & talk, world without end.
