More than once in this column I have condemned the outrageous commentary by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right French politician who remarked that Ebola could be the best solution to overpopulation in West Africa and to the desperate quest of its youths scrambling to enter Europe. When the Ebola pandemic broke out in our self-same region a few months later, I kept wondering if the old racist xenophobe knew something we did not.
In 1994, the neo-con public intellectual Robert Kaplan wrote a notorious article, The Coming Anarchy, in which he declared that West Africa would be the epicentre of viral diseases, wars, conflict and nightmarish violence. For years, the Americans have prophesied ad nauseum the disintegration of Nigeria by 2015 in line with their New American Century project. Indeed, so sure have they been that they went ahead to create AFRICOM, an emergency intervention force, to forestall the impending chaos in West Africa. For years they tried to find a base for that leprous organisation, but no African nation would oblige them. When Barack Obama decided to send the American military to “help fight Ebola”, the irony of it was lost on them.
Conspiracies are by nature unprovable. But it would be the height of folly to dismiss them entirely. The eminent American historian Carroll Quigley was the greatest intellectual influence on the young future president, William Jefferson Clinton, during his undergraduate days at Georgetown University. Quigley earned his place in world scholarship by showing that conspiracies do exist and can impact the course of civilisation. The medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun similarly enunciated his theory of asabiyya (group feeling) as the secret by which a people can seize and hold on to power.
Slavery, colonialism and other historic crimes against the African people were perpetrated through a combination of conspiracy, violence and perfidy. In Berlin the world powers sat together and shared out our continent as though they had killed an elephant.
Today, the Spirit of Berlin – no insult intended to my German friends – is alive and kicking.
Consider the Congo. Ever since the Portuguese set foot on the palace of King Alphonse of the Bakongo in the 17th century, the people have known no respite. Rape and rapine followed in their wake. They brought with them the Bible, whisky and firearms. They took back slaves, gold, diamonds and ivory. King Leopold of the Belgians later cornered the territory for himself, renaming it The Congo Free State; a case of the tortoise swallowing up the elephant. A country the size of Western Europe became Leopold’s personal property; the people his chattel slaves. Those who refused to work on his rubber plantations had their limbs chopped off. Over 6 million souls perished.
READ ALSO: Paris and Berlin manoeuvre to secure EU top jobs in wake of polls
When reference is made to this dark history, my Belgian friends are quick to point out that Leopold was, of course, a nasty piece of work. True. But then the king could not have committed these horrendous crimes against a defenceless people all by himself. Belgian civil servants, soldiers and advisers participated in that nefarious enterprise. Belgium owes us a huge debt in blood.
Of course, we are not to visit the sins of the fathers upon their children as in the Book of Leviticus. But these infamies have continued up to our day. Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s independence prime minister, was murdered by the Americans in cahoots with Belgian political authorities. François Lumumba, his first son, happens to be a friend of mine. He has continued to mourn his beloved father for decades. Today, the DRC lies comatose while vultures, mercenaries, diamond smugglers and other multinational criminals are bleeding it to death.
As for Nigeria, the global conspirators are scared of our size and untold potentials. Their strategy is to give a dog a bad name in order to hang it. In his latest book, Political Order and Political Decay (Giroux 2014), the political scientist Francis Fukuyama makes some hare-brained disquisitions on Nigeria that say more about him than about our country.
The conspiracy against Nigeria is deeply embedded in the international media. You will notice that CNN never refers to Boko Haram as terrorists. Rather, they are accorded the respectable appellation of “the Nigerian radical group”. The Obama administration has refused to place these murderers on its list of world terror organisations. And this, in spite of the fact that they have murdered over 20,000 – a far more sanguinary exploit than the atrocities committed by the dreaded ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
I have spoken to all sorts of groups in Europe: universities, policy think tanks, NGOs and even churches. I have sadly found out that anti-Nigerian sentiments run deep. Nobody wants to know that Nigerians are actually the most generous and most warm-hearted people on our continent. Instead, we hear about the alleged “heavy-handedness” of the Nigerian military; ignoring the blanket arms embargo that has been imposed on us by the so-called “international community”.
I was lucky to have had late Professor James O’Connell, one of the world’s most eminent political scientists, as my first year undergrad tutor at Ahmadu Bello University. He taught us that the state is that institution which has monopoly over the use of legitimate force. Whenever I remind my international audiences of this Weberian definition of the state, I am greeted with a scowl. What they are really saying is that only they have a claim to bona fide statehood and the rest of us can only aspire to pseudo-states countermanded by foreigners.
Boko Haram is part of a global conspiracy not unconnected with the rumoured reserves of oil and gas in the Lake Chad basin. Wherever there are resources, you will find vultures hovering above. The Spirit of Berlin is anchored on this pernicious axiom that we Africans belong to them and that our patrimony is theirs by right.
Through media propaganda, pseudo-scholarship, foreign aid, wars and deployment of the second oldest profession, they aim to break our spirit, using the international financial institutions and other economic hitmen to enforce policies injurious to our future. A people under siege; we are embattled economically, politically and psychologically.
Make no mistake about it: Nigerians are among the most gifted people in the world by whatever indices you may choose to measure them. They are the only Africans with no complex whatsoever about their heritage and their frightfully beautiful black colour. Our cultures go back to Pharaonic Egypt. A proud and resilient people, we are destined to take our God-ordained place among the great nations of the earth.
OBADIAH MAILAFIA
