A moral question
Black revolutionaries like Malcolm X, Steve Biko, Henry Emomotimi Okah, Franz Fanon, Nnamdi Kanu, etc, are consistent on one point: That if, for any reason, the state refuses to protect the black man from internal violence, or finds itself incapable of protecting him, then the black man has his God-given right to defend himself by means no less proportionate. Writing under a highly circumscribed environment where he was censored, Biko never used the word “violence;” what he actually said was that the black man should defend himself “in any manner he deems fit.”
But Martin Luther King Jr and Allen Onyema, Prophets of Non-Violence, disagreed. Their approach to fighting internal violence is dialogue with the hope that the victimizer would change. Young blacks, however, seem to turn their back on King and Onyema while embracing Biko and Okah. This is because non-violence did not factor in hunger, unemployment, drug addiction, alcoholism, resource capture, poverty and crowded/polluted environments as forms of violence; as pointed out by Biko and Okah, in particular.
In the late 1990s, the Nigerian military regime refused to save Igbo traders from hoodlums in Aba. Then Ndigbo formed the dreadful vigilante group called Bakassi Boys that wasted no time stampeding the criminals out of Igboland. Respite came the moment the victims took the law into their own hands. The armed robbers fled to South Africa, where they resumed as drug peddlers; since armed robbery was suicidal as South Africans bear arms.
