Category Archives: Article

From Vietnam to the Caribbean

Revisiting Wasserman’s Laws of War

In the early 1970s, as a student at Tuskegee Institute, I came across a set of mimeograph papers left behind by Professor Louis Wasserman after he departed for UCLA. These treatises on the laws of war have stayed with me among my files ever since.

Wasserman’s thesis was unsettling. He argued that the laws of war should not be treated as morally supreme. He dismantled two common defenses: first, that they embody fundamental moral distinctions; second, that adherence to them produces desirable effects. For Wasserman, both claims were inadequate. Rules alone could not prevent atrocities, nor could they absolve us of deeper moral responsibility. read more

H. Rap Brown in a ’60s Jazz Rhythm

Both Incendiary and Pastoral, Both Prophet and Defendant

He walks in a minor key, a tall silhouette cut against the horn‑light of history — Hubert Gerold “H. Rap” Brown, born October 4, 1943 — a voice that snapped like a cymbal and rolled like a bassline through the streets of the 1960s. His cadence gave life to an art form called “Rap,” which begot Hip-Hop. He takes the stage of SNCC and the movement, and the room listens; in 1967, he becomes a national pulse, a chairman whose rhetoric moves from gospel cadence to a trumpet’s sharp edge. The crowd hears a call for dignity; the state hears a tempo it cannot quite follow between the beats. And if the state can’t follow the rhythm, the trumpeter can’t call the people to movement. read more

Pete Skandalakis and the Tale of Two Politically Charged Cases

Inheritance by Fire

When Pete Skandalakis stepped into the Rayshard Brooks case in 2020, he did not inherit a neutral file. He inherited a fire.

The summer had already scorched Atlanta: Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, was shot in the parking lot of a Wendy’s after a DUI stop escalated into a struggle. Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard, facing reelection, charged officer Garrett Rolfe with felony murder and officer Devin Brosnan with aggravated assault. The charges were sweeping, the city was raw, and the case became a symbol of the national reckoning over policing. read more

The Dog That Hadn’t Barked

Silence, Complicity, and the Politics of Absence

In April 2011, Jeffrey Epstein wrote to Ghislaine Maxwell: “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. [Victim] spent hours at my house with him; he has never once been mentioned.” The metaphor, borrowed from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Silver Blaze, is telling. In that story, Sherlock Holmes solved a mystery by noticing what did not happen: the watchdog failed to bark at the intruder because it recognized him. Silence became the clue. read more

Black Gold and Red Shadows, Part IV

Legacies

By 1970, the Nigerian Civil War had ended, but the struggle over oil was only beginning. The war had revealed oil’s centrality to Nigeria’s survival, and it had also exposed the competing hands that sought to shape its destiny. Britain left behind pipelines, contracts, and corporate entrenchment. The Soviet Union left behind ideas, trained minds, and a critique of dependency. Both legacies continue to reverberate. read more

Black Gold and Red Shadows, Part III

Collision and Continuity

By the late 1960s, Nigeria’s oil was no longer a distant promise—it was a prize. The discovery at Oloibiri in 1956 had matured into a steady flow, and Shell-BP’s derricks dotted the Niger Delta. But as the nation fractured into civil war in 1967, oil became more than an economic resource. It became the engine of survival, the bargaining chip of diplomacy, and the battlefield of competing empires. read more

Black Gold and Red Shadows, Part II

The Soviet Shadow

If Britain built the pipelines, the Soviets sought to shape the minds that would question who those pipelines served. After Nigeria’s independence in 1960, the Soviet Union moved quickly to establish ties—not through oil concessions, which Britain and other Western firms jealously guarded, but through ideas, education, and solidarity. read more

Black Gold and Red Shadows, Part I

Britain’s Grip on Nigeria’s Oil

When the First World War ended in 1918, Britain emerged battered but still clinging to its empire. The war had revealed a new truth: oil was no longer just a commodity; it was the bloodstream of modern power. In Nigeria, still a colonial possession, the story of oil was only beginning. Yet the structures Britain built in the aftermath of the war ensured that when oil did flow, it would do so under imperial control. read more

Introducing Nigerian Black Gold and Red Shadows

A Four-Part Series

Oil is never just oil. In Nigeria, it has been the empire’s prize, the war’s engine, and the people’s paradox. From the First World War onward, Britain tightened its colonial grip on Nigeria’s oil future, laying pipelines of power that still shape the nation today. The Soviet Union, although it never drilled a barrel, cast its own shadow, training minds, seeding ideas, and offering an ideological counterpoint during the Cold War. read more

Nigeria’s Black Gold and Broken Promises

Biafra, the Niger Delta, and the Long War for Sovereignty

In the heart of southeastern Nigeria lies the Niger Delta, a region rich in oil and memory. It was here, in 1967, that the Republic of Biafra declared independence, igniting a civil war that would claim millions of lives and expose the fault lines of a postcolonial nation still tethered to imperial logic. Today, as foreign powers issue ultimatums and eye the region’s resources, the ghosts of Biafra stir once more. read more