NIGERIA BETRAYED AFRO-AUSTRALIANS

     Australian companies operating in Africa should pay reparations to impoverished and dehumanised Afro-Australiana, argues Okello Oculi

In his first speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations, Nigeria’s Prime Minister, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, blew a war horn with the declaration that Nigeria shall not tolerate the humiliation, discrimination against and exploitation of Black people anywhere in the world.

 It was a bold declaration being made in New York the commercial capital of a country which had fought a Civil War over the fate of imported descendants of African peoples. It was also in the neighbourhood of Harlem, the cultural and intellectual capital of urbanised African-Americans.

It also sent a blunt challenge to centres of oppression of African peoples, notably:  apartheid South Africa and other European immigrants in the two Rhodesias (now Zambia and Zimbabwe); Mozambique; Namibia; Angola, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. The dictatorship in Portugal under Salazar had arrogantly proclaimed that Mozambique, Angola, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde were ‘’Provinces of Portugal Overseas’’.

Australia, India, Brazil and most of South America all the way to PERU on the coast of the Pacific Ocean; the Caribbean islands, Papua New Guinea also felt tremors from Tafawa Balewa’s belligerence.  Algerians fighting French immigrants proclaim ownership of their land and sovereignty.

DRUM (magazine, edited by a white South African critic of racism), reported that South Africa’s president Herrick Vervourde declared Balewa a ‘’Communist’’ for asserting the freedom and dignity of African peoples; and rejected his request to pay a State Visit to South Africa. South African racists may well have collaborated with those who sought to derail Nigeria’s surge into global politics by assassinating Tafawa Balewa and inciting a civil war.

Australia’s leaders pushed back Balewa’s threat by refusing to designate the Black inhabitants of that sub-continent as ‘’Afro-Australians’’. Scholars struggled to trace their genetics to a Polynesian race. The concept of ‘’Aborigene’’ was a form of ‘’Intellectual Genocide’’, to complement the brutal physical destruction of the people. Photographs of British immigrants showing off with groups of Blacks with chains around their necks echoed practices in racist United States of America.

It was obvious that the end of colonialism and racism in Africa 

assumed priority. Winnie Mandela said in Abuja that Balewa’s government gave the African National Congress as much as 20 Million Pounds Sterling for its armed struggle. The priority given to Southern Africa would in the 1970s designate Nigeria as a diplomatic ‘’FRONTLINE STATE; sharing a combat status with TANZANIA and ZAMBIA’ which had geographical proximity to Southern Africa.

In 1976 Africa’s collective diplomacy shook Australia’s neighbourhood by demanding global rebuke of New Zealand for violating sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Africa boycotted Olympics Games hosted by Canada to protest the participation of New Zealand. Similar maltreatment of Black people by Australia remained in a zone of silence.

On 28^th May, 2022 Australia’s national elections was won by a political party whose campaign plank was defeating the hold of producers and exporters of the country’s Coal. Despite horrendous bush fires which destroyed livestock, rare creatures and plants, the outgoing government remained hostage to interests which denied the reality of ‘’Climate Change’’.

Nigeria and the African Union failed to demand the expansion of the boundary of ‘’Climate Change’’ to include a Cultural Climate of Protracted Racism which cripples the humanity of both its Afro-Australian victims and its European immigrants. The suffocating impact of the toxic fumes of anti-Black racism was shown in Government banning replication of ‘’Black Lives Matter’’ protests which had spread from the United States to Europe and South America.

Local voices against Australian prisons disproportionately holding Afro-Australians; their low access to education and funds for investment towards earning higher incomes for households; the promotion of alcoholism and drug addiction among their youths, continue to receive less reporting by local and global media. Toxic fumes over New Delhi and Beijing or Shanghai raise more alarm and rage among Climate Change warriors than engineered impoverishment and dehumanisation of Afro-Australiana.

 Australia enjoys a fantastic landscape, including rift valleys, dense forests, diverse animal and plant species. Focus on the Kangaroo hides this diversity. The promotion of tourists from Africa; journalists interested in ecological diversity, Human Rights agencies – including the United Nations organs –  must expose a conspiracy of silence about this historic wound in Australia’s body politic.

Valuable pressures put on corrupt African leaders; murderous military rulers in Africa, Asia South and North America, is also owed to Australia for the sake of those fighting for social and economic development of Afro-Australian communities.

African writers and film makers in the Diaspora – in Europe and the Americas – bear special responsibility for combating the Climate Terror of historic bondage and destruction of Afro-Australians. They should collaborate with local reformers.

Australian companies operating in Africa should pay Reparations by funding education and industrial processing by Afro-Australian communities. Aluta Continua!