Saturday, January 17, 2009

An Open Letter to Martin Luther King

by Philip Emeagwali
emeagwali.com

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.

Philip Emeagwali was inducted into the gallery of history's 70 greatest black achievers by the International Slavery Museum and into the Gallery of Prominent Refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Philip Emeagwali has been called “a father of the Internet” by CNN and TIME; praised as an “unorthodox innovator [who] has pushed back the boundaries of oilfield science” by a leading European oil and gas industry journal; extolled as “one of the great minds of the Information Age” by former US president Bill Clinton, and voted history’s 35th greatest African by New African. He won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, the Nobel Prize of supercomputing.



# # #

1 comment:

SENDMEYOURNEWS said...

From: John Woodford
Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2009 12:32 PM
To: TheBlackList Concerns
Subject: Re: [TheBlackList] [TheBlackList Concerns] An Open Letter to Martin Luther King

I acknowledge the great accomplishments and deep ethics of Philip Emeagwali. But this is not the whole story of the so-called "Biafra." Many of the victims, a disproportionate number, were the Effik, Ijaw and Ibibio peoples (aka the Calabra, Ogoja and Rivers peoples). They were not Igbos, but lived along the coasts where the oil was---and is.


The Igbo secessionists and Western interests who backed them wanted that land. The Ibibios, Efiks and Ijaws were painted over with the name of "Biafrans," hence the use of that term rather than Igboland, as a way to disguise not only the land grab but also many of the starving and brutalized "Biafrans." The members of those minority ethnic groups told me at the time that the Igbos denied them food and freedom, but encouraged Western media to photograph them "starving Biafrans.


As with the Arab-Israeli situation, progress and harmony cannot be achieved until the full measure of the troubles is publicized, admitted and dealt with. These one-sided analyses just won't do. Both sides committed atrocities, but one side followed the imperialists' age-old tactics: to split large countries in the developing world, weaken them and set various groups at one another's throats.

John Woodford