Remembering Black Wednesday, 30 Years After the Great Anti-SAP Revolt

for
all who fell on Black Wednesday, 30 years back
all who lived through it and came to our conclusions
all who have trudged on, at different times, in our vehicle of its aftermath
all who seek, fight, and keep forging on still, even when the skies are dark
all Mayists, Marxists and any who seek the Nigerian revolution that keep hope and struggle alive
*****************************************************************************


The heat and passion crushed
In that hour, the zeal and heroic
Confrontation, snuffed for a while
By bullets and bayonets

....did outlive the deaths and imprisonments:

From Black Wednesday, would a movement
Be born. A critique of critiques and which thus
Did and still must critique itself. The manure compost
Wrought by fascist thugs, does from flutter the flower, we are

Stirrings legacies never die, when they stir would-be stirrers

It seems so long a journey since and yet so near in time
So much distances covered but so few the places of arrival
The brotherhood of steel though, one sees as stronger than
That of blood. The more so when molten steel flows from the furnace

Of ideas, solidarity, sincerity, theory...and a ceaseless, restless quest

Let a thousand flowers bloom as they would, and let ten thousand ideas
Contend. The compost of Black Wednesday, will forever call onto the earth of
All flowers that really do bloom, as only the deep calls to the deep. The flower
Of May, beyond the Mayflower, we hold aloft

.......for unity, for liberation, now and for as long as in this war, we are ensconced


We shall be heroes comrades, or we shall be martyrs
Our cry still remains, like Fidel and Che before us. Like Cabral
And Adaka after them: 'Liberation or Death'

We will stand fighting and if need be; die for what we live for
We shall...for Mayists we are
PostScript:
This poem titled Forging on Still was written to mark 20 years of the Great Anti-SAP Revolt, in 2009 - and remains as apt today, to mark the 30th year of that momentous flash of a revolutionary moment that defined the politics I have since held on to, and will, till my last breath.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trade unionism and trades unions; an introductory perspective

Introduction Trades unions have become key components of most modern societies be such societies democratic or totalitarian, advanced capitalist or backward post-colonial. The nature of trade unions and trade unionisms are however quite different, even in otherwise similar societies. The United Kingdom and the United States for example could be considered as similar as societies could be (being the leading “liberal market economies” in the world), but they have quite different types of trade unions and approaches to trades unionism. Similarly France and Germany, two leading “coordinated market economies” in the West, have clearly different trades unions’ characteristics. Coming closer home; on one hand there are distinct traits that mark the industrial relations systems and trade union practice as heritages of our colonial past i.e. along English-speaking and French-speaking Africa lines. On the other hand, there are specific features of trade unionism and trades unions even in the cl
Read more

On neoliberal globalization 1

Neoliberal Globalization and the Informalization of Work; a Critical Class Analysis of Trade Union Strategies in Nigeria and South Africa Baba Aiyelabola Introduction Thatcher’s emergence in 1979 signalled the beginning of ‘the globalization of neoliberalism’, a hegemonic project of the transnational capitalist class (Sklair, 2001) which has had dire consequences for the working class globally and within countries. We shall utilize a neo-Gramscian perspective for our class analysis of the impact of this neoliberal counterrevolution with its TINA mantra which started in 1973 as “a war” in Chile. This war of a “few winners” against the ever more “precarious popular classes” (Amin, 2007) has entailed the restructuring of work, work relations and the ‘forms of state’; in the interest of capital. Social and economic inequalities have risen like never before in human history, unemployment and under-employment in absolute terms have been on the rise. The “many losers” in the neoliber
Read more

Tools and skills for trade unions’ engagement with the state’s policy cycle process

1.0 Introduction It gives me great pleasure to present this paper for several reasons. NUPENG is definitely one of the most important unions in the country today, due to the strategic place of oil in the economy, nationally and globally. It has also, along with its PENGASSAN sister union which I have had much closer training relations with , played very progressive roles in the trade union movement, and national polity, over the last three decades, in different ways. This is the more reason why the theme of this workshop and the topic I am to speak on is very germane, for which I commend the leadership, and education department of NUPENG. I have taken the liberty of re-phrasing the topic somewhat in two different ways, which have key significance for our discussion. First, I have replaced “government” with “state”. The former is more temporal, as we can talk of the governments of Babangida, Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Jonathan for example, while the latter is the structure that governm
Read more