Catalonia and Biafra: Restoration of independence

Catalonia, a population of 7.5 million situated in the northeast region of Spain, has formally declared its restoration-of-independence. This follows a referendum on 1 October 2017 in which 90.90 per cent of Catalans voted “yes” for restoration-of-independence. Until now, Catalonia has been part of Spain for centuries. Catalonia is the 25th new state to emerge in Europe since 1991. The last one, in 2008, is Kosovo, with a population of 1.8 million, which is less than that of the Fegge district of Onicha, the great market town port on the Oshimili River of southwest Biafra, southwestcentral Africa.

Every people

The right to self-determination is for every people. It is inalienable and is guaranteed by the United Nations. No people, anywhere on earth, is exempt from exercising this right as the Catalans have just demonstrated. This is why the slogan that proclaims such gibberish as “indivisibility”/“indissolubility”/“indestructibility” of a state, any state, is not really worth the paper it is written on except of course it is an embedded code by a slaughtering horde for the plot of the next genocide or the reinforcement of an ongoing genocide – as indeed the world has witnessed most tragically across several regions in Africa since Nigeria’s launch of the Igbo genocide on 29 May 1966 to stop the Igbo from exercising this universal right to self-determination.

The British government, despite the horrendous Jewish genocide which ended 21 years earlier and the 1948 UN convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, supported the Igbo genocide most comprehensively. As this genocide raged in those catastrophic months of the summer of 1968, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was adamant on the British role as he stated explicitly on record that he, Harold Wilson, “would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that is what it took” Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide (Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, London and New York: Quartet Books, 1977: 122). The Anglo-Nigeria allies murdered 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population during the stretch of 44 months of the genocide.

Support for British conquest and occupation of Nigeria indefinitely



It must not be forgotten that the Hausa-Fulani/Islamist-led leadership in Nigeria which ritually trumpets the “ind”-threesome slogan (above) to preface its next planned massacre of the Igbo in occupied Biafra or in Nigeria supported continuing British occupation of the conquest-state called Nigeria during the course of 30 momentous years (1930s-October 1960) by opposing the Igbo-led restoration-of-independence movement for the freeing of the constituent African nations and peoples from the British occupation. There were no comparable examples of such a staggering anti-freedom position anywhere else in the Southern World during the epoch. Britain duly “rewarded” the Islamist leadership perpetual control of Nigeria as a prop to transfer the latter’s retrograde view on freedom and the status of this conquest-state to some “post”-conquest variation on a theme which, in itself, guarantees British suzerainty over Nigeria indefinitely. This is a cardinal feature that constitutes the tragedy called Nigeria today.


As most people probably know, the states that Europe created in Africa, in the aftermath of its November 1884-February 1885 Berlin conqueror-conference on the latter, cannot provide the fundamental needs of Africans.  This “Berlin-state”, with its bumbling ahistorical names (Nigeria, Niger, Guinea, the Sudan, Chad, whatever!) cannot lead Africans to the reconstructive changes they deeply yearn for after the tragic history of centuries of catastrophic occupation. Such change was and never is the mission of this state but an instrument to expropriate and despoil Africa by the conquest. Essentially, the “Berlin-state” still serves the interests of its creators and those of the ruthless cabal of African-overseers which polices the dire straits of existence that is the lot of millions of African peoples across the continent currently.

Not gift

So, as in Berlin and indeed in Madrid, as the Catalans have shown, the state is not a gift from the gods. On the contrary, the state is a relationship painstakingly formulated and constructed by groups of human beings on planet earth to pursue aspirations and interests envisioned by these same human beings within a shared historical and geographical articulation. The African humanity is presently gripped in a grave crisis for survival. Distinctly, it is aware of this emergency and it is now time that it abandoned the murderous “Berlin-state” in order to survive. This state is a bane of African existence. As I have argued variously (see, for instance, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, The Biafra War, Nigeria and the Aftermath, 1990), African constituent nations or peoples, irrespective of their population size or geographical location, remain the basis for the regeneration of Africa’s development. These nations, not the anti-African peoples’ “Berlin states”, are the sites of the continent’s intellectual and other cultural creativity and economic reconstruction.

Peoples endure; states are indeed transient


States, in the end, are transient as the following attests... Whatever happened to Czarist Russia, Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottoman empire, the British empire, French Indo-China, Portuguese empire, Spanish empire and, more latterly, the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Treaty states, Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia? Each of these no longer exists. Gone! Each of them collapsed, somewhere, along their march in history… What happened to the constituent peoples in these states that no longer exist? These constituent peoples exist in innumerable new states with names beginning with and from “A” to “Z”.

Why did the Polish state disappear from the world map for 123 years (yes, one hundred and twenty-three years!) until its reappearance in 1918? Answer: Gobbled up by predator states, chiefly Czarist Russia. What happened to the Polish people during this century and twenty-three years of varying conquest and occupation? The Poles survived, bidding their time for the restoration of their independence. What would happen to the United Kingdom if the Scots vote “yes” in another referendum for independence? The United Kingdom would cease to exist as the world has known it as a “union” incorporating Scotland since 1707 if a simple majority of the 5 million Scottish people decides on such an outcome. 


In history, therefore, states have actually been transient formations. It is to human beings that survival belongs, provided no genocidist hotchpotch plans to wipe out a targeted group of them as Nigeria is geared, presently, in its long-stretched campaign against Igbo people of Biafra…

Surely, the 50 million Biafrans, in their own referendum soon, will join the Catalans in this people’s march of freedom.

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