VOICE OF COURAGE: Selected speeches of Obafemi Awolowo (Vol 2)

Broadcast by Chief Obafemi Awolowo as Nigeria’s Commissioner for Finance and Vice-Chairman of the Federal Executive, during the Biafran war. The speech was made on 1st October; 1967.

Continued from last week

I also very warmly congratulate President Boumedienne for the supreme success of the Algiers Summit of the Organisation of African Unity.

This Algiers Summit is unique in more ways than one. At this Summit the OAU has handled a number of delicate issues with unsurpassed maturity, constancy, consistency, and complete freedom from pressures foreign to Africa. Between the Kinshasa and Algiers Summits, our Organisation was visibly threatened by the MONSTER OF DIVISION. monster whose father and mother are, respectively,

Envy and subservience to foreign influence, inimical to African interests.

At this Summit, this monster has been very seriously scorched; but it will be naive to suggest that it has been destroyed. Between now and the next Summit, it will be paramount duty of every Member-State to do all in its power to lay the ghost of this monster, once and for all, in the life of our great Continent. I say this because, wherever you turn, the urgent and imperative need for African unity and solidarity not only stares you in the face, but also cries very loud for the most devoted attention.

Educationally, economically, and technologically, our Continent remains one of the most backward areas of the world. As hitherto, Africans or peoples of African descent continue to be the butt of all manner of inhuman treatment and degradation. To the whites in South Africa and Rhodesia, Africans are nothing but anthropoid apes, as Hitler once contemptuously termed them, The white settlers in South Africa and Rhodesia have forcibly expropriated our peoples of all the larger and richer portions of their lands, and relegated them to the status of permanent subordination and unmitigated drudgery in the political and economic affairs of their own motherlands.

In the USA, the Negro Americans suffer grave Social disabilities, so much so that there are now clear signs that the recent violent rioting by the Negroes may degenerate into civil war between White and Black Americans. The latent colour prejudice which has always existed in Britain, but which has hitherto been cleverly suppressed, is now bubbling to the surface; and there is a real danger of racial violence directed against dark-skinned peoples domiciled in Britain. In the pursuit of their naked self-interests, the developed countries of the world continue to exploit and cheat Africa as well as other underdeveloped countries by means of every contrivance and artifice which man’s ingenuity can invent. With the result that the gap between us and them widens with the years: they are getting rapidly richer, and we are getting steadily and relatively poorer.

To cap it all, the great powers of the world have grouped themselves into two mutually antagonistic ideological camps, and seek feverishly and frantically to entice African States into their respective spheres of influence. To this end, aids are proffered to us in kind and in cash. But our prospective donors always make sure that each aid or loan carries with it a host of humiliating strings and conditions which tend materially to help them more than us, and to undermine our strength and vitality for united and concerted action, by ensuring our permanent economic dependence on them.

In the face of all these disabilities, which are by no means inherent in us or incurable, we need, among other things, the impregnable armour of single-minded unity, solidarity, and fraternity among our different countries.

• The plight of Nigerians

But instead of directing our energies towards this end, what do find? Whilst many of us are truly dedicated and inflexible in our resolution to terminate apartheid. Ian Smithism, and Salazaarimsin Africa, some of us have embraced Vorsterism with reservation, and are even encouraging the disruption and disintegration of Member-States in flagrant violation of some of the provisions of Articles ll and III of the OAU Charter, and in deliberate disregard of some of the resolutions passed by the OAU in pursuance of these provisions. It would appear that the zeal and vision, which animated the founders of the OAU and dominated their hearts, are beginning to depart from some of us. This is a most dangerous and contagious trend. And we owe it as a duty to Africa and to our respective countries to arrest this deterioration and decay before they spread too far to be contained.

In this connection, I would like to express the warm appreciation and profound gratitude of the Government and people of Nigeria to those thirty-three Member-States who voted yesterday for the resolution on Nigeria. By this action, they have shown their unflinching commitment to the principles of national unity and territorial integrity, without which Africa just cannot survive as a viable political and economic entity.

These thirty-three States have also shown deep understanding of the imperialist intrigues at work against Nigeria, as part of the imperialist over-all strategy of continuing the political domination and economic exploitation of Africa. It is clear to these States that the imperialists and neo-colonialists with their abominable techniques of divide and rule, are striving hard to use the Nigerian crisis as a means of driving a wedge among the Member-States of our Organisation. The serious consequences of this dangerous trend for the future of this Organisation should be a matter for serious reflection, and constant vigilance by Member-States.

To be continued