A MUST READ COMPELLING PIECE FROM A TRUE BIAFRAN OF IGBO ANCESTRY FROM ACROSS THE RIVER (ORIMILI) WHICH THE WHITE NAMES NIGER.
EXCERPT........
Dear Diokpa Chukwuma,
Diokpa Chukwuma, i mean, Major Nzeogwu, how have you coped this last few hours in your grave?
Your people, i mean our people, from across the Niger, on the western side of the Igbo nation, have been on social media trying hard to convince all who cares how we are not Igbos.
We bear Igbo names, just like you Chukwuma Nzeogwu and me Okoyele Chukwuemeka, but they say we should not say we are Igbo, even after your coup was mischievously termed an Igbo coup.
Chukwuma, when you fought on the Biafran side and died as their soldier, was it as a mercenary or because you eventually realized that whether or not you claimed not to be Igbo, in that time of adversity, your enemies don't care?
Chukwuma, your Okpanam is only a few minutes drive from my Ibusa and we are even fewer minutes away by car from the capital of a certain Delta State, which was only created some few years ago, far after the war had taken you, Asaba is that capital.
Yes Asaba, the same Igbo town that Murtala Muhammed, Ibrahim Haruna and Ibrahim Taiwo massacred their males from age twelve and above on that cursed October 7th of 1967, sole reason, for being Igbos, though that town's people had come singing "one Nigeria" to welcome Murtala's troops.
You remember we were then in the Mid-west. Were we Mid-west Igbos then?
For ever since, we have always clung and described or defined our Igbo by the Nigerian State we find ourselves, so we've been Bendel Igbo after the war and now Delta Igbo after the separation from Benin(Ben of the Bendel).
Diokpa Chukwuma, your unhidden love for the Hausas made you see your self more as they than Igbo, even christening yourself Kaduna, but when they absolved theirs, Col Katsina from the coup, you bore the brunt of coupist and we know all the atrocities that befell all who were Igbo, be they in present Rivers, Delta or the so-called South-east States.
In that moment, i can imagine how your notion of one Nigeria changed drastically and how you decided to embrace your own and fought gallantly and met death on your feet as a Biafran, an Igbo.
Here convenience is everything, Okowa Ifeanyi, the sitting governor of our state rode to the government house in Asaba as an "Igbo man", but now sitted there, his people say he is now an Ika man.
Diokpa Chukwuma, that's exactly how we've been living on this portion of mother earth's green planet.
We are Igbos without any prefix when it'll be favorable and Igbo with a prefix when we feel the slightest threats to our losing a position, in short, we are Igbos by convenience.
We speak an Igbo dialect, answer Igbo names, practice Igbo cultures, make libations to Igbo gods, but we are not Igbo.
Diokpa Chukwuma, is that stink of folly and ignorance turning you uncomfortably in your grave?
Relax, Diokpa Chukwuma relax, for that is but the least of it.
Our elders, especially we Oshimili, you and i, say our progenitors migrated from the hinterland, that is from the "Igboland" of today, didn't change any of the customs or traditions, yet these same two-faced cowards we have for elders still try sink it in our heads that we aren't Igbos.
Now, you can imagine our frustrations and confusions, we are Igbos by ancestry but not by nomenclature.
Diokpa Chukwuma, i singled you out to vent out my angst, because it was your act of attempting to topple the government of your time that emboldened the anti-igbo rage and hate, for even before 1966, history tells of pogroms against the Igbo, foremost that of Jos in 1945.
However your "effrontery" to try to return Nigeria to work progressively - for now we know it was structured to work exactly this way to suit the Brits and their Hausa-Fulani vassals- was and still is the eternal sin of the Igbos that will never be forgiven.
So Diokpa Chukwuma to see our own kinsmen draw the line and say, "we are not Igbos" beffudles me, for it puts us in that unenviable position of being the sole cause of the death of "innocent" others and would seem to justify the heinous and barbaric act of the Nigerian commanders that ordered and oversaw the Asaba massacres.
I know, I'm just overreacting and overgeneralizing, there still are a million and one sons and daughters of good old Anioma that know and don't deny our ancestry, are proud of it unrepentantly and without remorse shout it on rooftops for the enemies and cowards to hear.
Diokpa Chukwuma Nzeogwu, people like us say, "we are proudly Anioma, proudly Igbo".
N.D.I
Okoyele C Neddy
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