John Mensah

 “I Was There When the Axemen Began”

(the Neo Black Movement – NBM)

I was just a student at the University of Benin. Hungry for knowledge. Hungry for meaning.

Nigeria in the late 1970s was alive, but restless. We were supposed to be the future but how do you become the future when everything around you still wears the chains of the past?

The lecturers still taught us European thinkers like they were gods. Our own African heroes? A footnote, maybe. We were Black men but treated like we had nothing to be proud of.

So a few of us gathered, quietly at first. In dorm rooms. Under trees. In candle-lit corners of the campus. We talked. We read. We argued about identity, about freedom, about what it means to be a man not just by age, but by purpose.

We wanted more than grades.
We wanted rebirth.
We wanted the Black man to rise again with pride, unity, and vision.

That’s how the Neo Black Movement of Africa was born. Not with blood, not with fear, but with fire. A fire inside. We called ourselves Axemen not to destroy, but to cut through lies, cut through injustice, cut through silence.

It felt like family.
We called each other “brother.”
When you joined, you weren’t alone anymore.

But time changes things.

The streets began to whisper. Other groups rose, copying our structure, our symbols but not our soul. Power, politics, revenge they crept in. Not everyone who called himself an Axeman understood what it meant. Some forgot the purpose. Others used the name for things we never dreamed of.

And then came the labels. Cult. Gang. Violence. Death.

People stopped seeing our roots. They only saw the smoke, not the fire.
And honestly? Some of that smoke we lit it ourselves.

I look back now, older, quieter. I still wear the scars. Some are from battles we fought for dignity. Some are from battles we should never have fought at all.

But here’s what I’ll never forget:

We started as young Black men who wanted to matter. Who believed brotherhood could be sacred. Who believed Africa deserved better. Who believed the axe could heal, not harm.

That was the dream.

And part of me still carries it.

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