ORIGIN OF THE NUPE DAY FESTIVAL

This article is in celebration of the annual

The 26th of June is celebrated every year as the Nupe Day as it marks the only day, in the entire history of imperial Great Britain, on which the almighty British Army was decisively defeated by a native African army.

On the 26th of June 1896 a British Constabulary provocatively wandered off the ‘British Protectorate’ of Lokoja and approached the Bida Army camp at Udi in Ogidi, today’s Kogi State.

In the resulting skirmish the Bida army resoundingly defeated the British Constabulary and seized the Union Jack.

The humiliated British began a campaign of
defaming the Nupe Nation or KinNupe with
virulent slanders and baseless propaganda: that
the Nupe Emirs were bloodthirsty slave-raiders
destroying and depopulating the Niger Valleys.

The result was the Battle of Bida which took
place on the 26th and 27th of January 1897 and
which ended with the British conquest of Bida.

The Battle of Bida was, actually, a cowardly
invasion of Bida by the British who sneaked
across the Niger and bombarded a defenseless
city of Bida at a time when almost the whole of
the Bida Army was stranded across the Niger at
Kabbaland in today’s Kogi State.

The British dethroned Etsu Bubakar but even in exile they were forever scared of him as the only African monarch who dealt the White man a
death blow.

See also: Prince mk _ Kudu survey

Sir George Taubman Goldie’s refusal to become the first Governor General of Nigeria was not unconnected with his fear of Etsu Bubakar’s Asiri spiritual powers.

Lord Lugard the AntiNupe accepted to be the Governor General because he was of a higher-degreed Freemason imbued with extraordinarily formidable Satanism powers. Lord Lugard was a Satanist.

Etsu Bubakar lost the battle in the short run but won the war in the long run because his
unprecedented resistance to British imperialism
became the spark for the rise of international
anti-imperialism which eventually brought an end
to Colonialism after the Two World Wars reduced
Europe to ashes and protracted the Great
Powers into perpetual coma.

Etsu Bubakar should be celebrated as the
greatest figure in history as far as the resistance
to British rule and anti-imperialism are
concerned.

Etsu Bubakar came to power fully prepared for
the fight with the White man. For a whole
decade before he came to power he had
painfully witnessed the double-speak politics of
the Royal Niger Company British imperialists
against the Nupe Nation or KinNupe.

As far back as 1885 Sir George Taubman Goldie had larcenously lied that he had obtained a treaty signed by Etsu Maliki placing the entire
Nupe Nation under the rule of the Royal Niger
Company for the British Government. With this
barefaced lie the Royal Niger Company
treacherously confiscated Lokoja from the Bida
Emirate and illegally declared Lokoja a territory
of the British ‘Protectorate’ in 1888.

When the Bida authorities complained against British larceny Sir George Taubman Goldie personally visited Etsu Maliki in 1891 and gave the Etsu Nupe his words that the British will no more take any Nupe land and will definitely not fight the Bida Emirate.

But the moment the devilishly devious Sir George Taubman Goldie got back to Lokoja he incited the Kabba people of Northern Yorubaland to rebel against Bida Rule. In those days the Kabba people, and all the people of today’s Northern and part of Central Yorubaland were under Nupe rule.

But the devious Sir George Taubman Goldie
used the Royal Niger Company to organize the
Kabba rebels into the Ogidi Alliance and provided
them with weapons to fight the Bida Army.

Etsu Bubakar was a witness to all these
mischievousness of the British and that was why
when he became the Etsu Nupe in 1895, after
the death of Etsu Maliki, his first major action
was to move the Bida Army across the River
Niger to Kabbaland to crush the Ogidi Alliance.
The Bida Army, according to Professor
Smalldone, was the most powerful in the whole
of the pre-Colonial Nigeria of those days and so
it was initially calculated that the Ogidi Alliance
will be crushed by the Bida Army in less than a
month. But the series of the Ogidi battles
gradually dragged on into a war that lasted for
years because the British continued to secretly
supply the Ogidi Alliance with both training and
weapons.

It was while openly infuriating the Bida Army in this manner that the British further sent a
constabulary, made up of two White officers and
45 native soldiers, to go and attack the Bida
Army camped at Udi in Ogidi on the 26th of June
1896.

Of course, and as we narrated right at the outset of this write-up, the Bida Army at Udi completely routed the Royal Niger Company constabulary, injuring, arresting and detaining the British Army for a while.

And what followed was the Battle of Bida.
The Battle of Bida was the greatest battle ever
fought by the British in the history of Nigeria.

It was so great it made headlines in British
newspapers back in England. In those days the
Nupe Nation was the greatest and most powerful
one in pre-Colonial Nigeria – far greater than the
Oyo Kingdom, Benin Kingdom, the Kano Emirate
and even the Sokoto Caliphate.

In those days such was the reputation of the
“dreaded Emir Abubakar” and the “dangerously
large Nupe kingdom” that the British had to take
some six solid months meticulously preparing for
the Battle of Bida in absolute secrecy.

In preparation for the Battle of Bida Sir George Taubman Goldie personally travelled back to England to customize and improved on the

Maxim Gun, the first machine gun in history. It was the first time the Maxim Gun was to be
used for a full-scale war anywhere in the world.

This way, and to this day, the Nupe Nation has etched an everlasting hallmark in all the
museums of European Warfare as the only
African Nation responsible for the full invention
of the first machine gun, the Maxim Gun, in
history.

From England the British secretly brought in
modern and state-of-the-arts weapons including
the Maxim Gun, 7, 9 and 12 Pounder cannons
guided with compasses, electric lamps, barb
wires, etc., etc., all of which were very modern
weapons that have never been used anywhere in
Africa before then.

And despite all these modern weapons the
British only won the Battle of Bida because the
Bida Army was stranded across the Niger and
couldn’t participate in the battle.

The British practically invaded a defenseless Bida city with the very few warriors that Etsu Bubakar was able to muster from Agaie, Lapai, neighbouring settlements and from within Bida itself.

See Also: Prince Mk _ Shegede

Yet, this small army of Nupe warriors was able to put up a stiff and gallant resistance to the
murderous British army thereby making the
Battle of Bida the greatest battle the British ever
fought in pre-Colonial Nigeria.

In any case the Fall of Bida opened a floodgate of several other conquests by the British.

The Benin Kingdom (in 1898), Kano Emirate (in 1903) and even Sokoto the Seat of the Caliphate (in 1903) all fall in rapid succession to the

expansionist larceny of the British imperialists. If the British had not treacherously conquered Bida in 1897 the Northern Protectorate in particular, and Nigeria in general, might not have come into existence.

So, it was the fall of KinNupe that led to the
creation and emergence of Nigeria. The history
of Nigeria will be a hideously mutilated mutant if
it is not told in the context of our modern Nigeria
being nothing but the British transmutation of
the ancient Nupe Empire.

As we can see, therefore, it was the innocuously simple skirmish on that fateful day the 26th of June 1896 that set in motion the cascade of historical events that eventually led to the formation of our Nigeria today.

That is why the Nupe people celebrate the Nupe Day on the 26th of June every year.

Nupe Day is also an occasion for us to
appreciate the profundity of the Nupe culture.

For now, the Nupe people are confused because they have jettisoned their culture ever since the days they accepted Islam in the 11th century and Christianity even further back in the 3rd century AD. For a millennium or so the two world religions of Islam and Christianity have been finding their definitive abodes in KinNupe as their ultimate bastions.

It was Professor Reverend Edward Wilmot Blyden who observed over a century ago that Africa will eventually use Islam, and even Christianity, to rule the world in the far future.

The Nupe man’s incredible obsession with Islam, and Christianity, today is just a step towards that future that William Shakespeare too, speaking with golden joys but hiding behind the voice of his literary character Pistol, said will witness the domination of the world by Africa.

The day the Nupe man rediscovers the profundity of his Nupe culture and add it to his millennium old obsession with Islam and Christianity is the day KinNupe will regain its lost glory of being the greatest and superpower phenomenon of the whole of Africa.

Nupe culture is, according to Professor Leo
Frobenius, so profound it had established a
civilization prototypic to both Atlantis and the
By zantium right here in ancient Nigeria.

The Nupe Day Festival should also let us know that inherent to Nupe culture is the most potent spiritualism in the world. This ancient Nupe spiritualism, called Eba or Ebasan in Nupe and Ifa in Yoruba is the greatest spiritual power in the world.

It is the same that the European explorers like Mungo Park, Captain Hugh Clapperton and the Lander brothers came looking for in KinNupe under the guise of looking for the course of the River Niger.

It is this same world-power Nupe spiritualism of Eba that the Freemasons, the Bilderberg, the
Rothschilds and many other international power-
mongers including even the Vatican are looking
for in KinNupe today under the cover of endless
international NGOs that have invaded Nigeria
today.

Eba or Ifa is already on the rise back to
its ancient global supremacy in the form of the
Ifa spiritualism of Latin and, now, even Central
America.