On May 25, 2020, Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Department of Police in America’s State of Minnesota, knelt on the neck of African-American George Floyd, who died after nine long minutes.
Despite Floyd’s repeated pleas of, “I can’t breathe,” Chauvin maintained this suffocating position, while his colleague officers, J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane, and “chinko,” Tou Thao, looked on.
Floyd died because of a presumed fake $20 bill, which was later proved to be genuine. Turned out that Floyd and officer Chauvin had worked together in El Nuero Rodeo, a Minneapolis club, where they had crossed swords.
This deathly face-off was the final resolution of their private war. The incident triggered America-wide protests of folks, Black, white, Hispanic, brown, and humanity of other shades of colour and race.
Those who focus only on Floyd’s killing on a Minneapolis street in 2020 should remember the Yoruba proverb that explains why the load that is carried by a man with knocked knees will never sit pretty.
Black people, in Africa and in the Diaspora of the America’s, have been carrying the white man’s burden on their necks from the day some Christian clerics justified racism and slavery with the scriptures. A friend thinks that racism reflects white folks’ inferiority complex.
Those jaundiced clerics argued that Black people were the victims of a curse, “May Canaan be the lowest of servants to his relatives,” placed on descendants of Ham, who beheld the nakedness of a drunken patriarch, Noah. That justified the Spanish Inquisition, set up by Catholic monarchs of the Old World, to purify Catholicism.
Here is a charge to Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of America’s House of Representatives, who is leading the agitation to pull down statutes of 11 confederate figures installed in the US Capitol, with the argument, “Monuments to men who advocated cruelty or barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end are a grotesque affront to (the) ideas” of American democracy and freedom.
Start with the image of cleric Bartholome de Las Casas, engraved in the belfry, or dome, of the rotunda of the Capitol, even if British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and French President, Emmanuel Macron, don’t seem to agree.
It’s been whispered that Las Casas, popularly acclaimed as protector of Red Indians, even though he owned (human) serfs as properties, joined in the justification of slavery with the Christian scripture.
About Africans, who aided and abetted the European slave traders, the following story is apt: A Baghdadi shepherd, slaughtered, skinned, quartered, and was prepared to eat his shepherd dog because British Lt Gen Sir Frederick Maude was prepared to offer him four shillings.
Maude concluded that anyone, like this Baghdadi (or Iraqi), who would sell his most trusted companion, would sell his “country, people, friends, honour, and principle.” Of such is the cloth from which African collaborators of antiquated slave traders and today’s neocolonialists are made.
The point here is that Europeans of the Old World and colonialists of the New World have always conspired to literally and metaphorically stay on the necks of Black folks. Rev Al Sharpton, a Black American civil rights leader, reels a chronicle of injustices to the Negro.
“George Floyd’s story has been the story of Black folks, because ever since 401 years ago, the reason we (African Americans) could never be who we wanted, and dreamed, to be, is you (white folks) kept your knee on our neck. We were smarter than the underfunded school you put us in, but you had your knee on our neck.
“We could run corporations, and not hustle in the streets, but you put your knee on our neck. We had creative skills. We could do whatever anybody else could do. But we couldn’t get your knee off our neck… We couldn’t breathe, not because we had something wrong with our lungs. But that you wouldn’t take your knees off our neck.”
When accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace, America’s civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr, observed, “I am mindful that debilitating poverty afflicts my people, and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder,” in America.
So, even if apologetic American President Donald Trump appoints African-American Gen Charles Brown, Jr., who remembers the “many African Americans that have suffered the same fate as George Floyd,” as the United States Air Force chief, it is probably too little, too late.
And though Brown may be eminently qualified for the appointment, his shine has been stolen by the suspicion of tokenism. In any case, to what extent can the appointment of this one individual affect the systemic wedge riven against African-Americans in America?
Even negroid President Barack Obama couldn’t move the needle to achieve a huge shift in the fortunes of the Black man in America. The best African-Americans got is probably the vicarious satisfaction that slave descendants, Michelle Obama and her mother, slept the nights in the White House.
Which is really no big deal. In the early 1980s, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain turned down President Ronald Reagan’s offer, which she considered infra dig, to spend a night in the White House. She found comfort in the cosy and more ritzy home of Walter Annenberg, publisher of America’s TV Guide.
By foisting the evil neocolonialism on Africa, the Western metropolitan powers, (with the Chinese dragon now in tow), inflicted on Africans, the most unkindest cut, to borrow a double superlative from William Shakespeare.
In what seems to be a sober mood, Prof Oladapo Ashiru, a health and medical columnist in The PUNCH newspaper, recently observed: “In summary, America, the United Kingdom, and Europe, ensure that (Africans) have bad leaders. They loot our countries with the assent of the so-called leaders, who are corrupt and don’t understand anything better.”
His wife, Idowu, has asked Oxford, her old school, to include “Neocolonialism and Economic Hitmen,” in its history curriculum. She reasons, “To understand racism, it’s not only necessary to understand the past, but (also) current events that shape the destiny of the population, which prevents them from digging out of poverty, in spite of having most of the richest resources of the world.”
After the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884, Leopold II, who was King of Belgium between 1865 and 1909, owned what was named, obviously tongue-in-cheek, the Congo Free State, as sovereign, and in his personal capacity.
A report says: “Leopold… ran the Congo, using the mercenary ‘Force Public, ‘ (a gendermerie and military force), which later became Congolese National Army, for his personal gain… He extracted a fortune… by forced labour of the native population… (And) the hands of men, women and children were amputated when the quota of rubber was not met.”
Somebody says that French President Jacques Chirac admitted, on behalf of the West: “We bled Africa for four and half centuries. We looted their raw materials, then we told lies that Africans are good for nothing.”
In his book, “Confession of an Economic Hit Man,” John Jenkins reveals how the West consistently compromised the economies of Africa by placing the knee of dubious debts on African economic neck.
To have a just world, white supremacists, neocolonialists, apartheid practitioners, their apologists, and African collaborators, must remove their knees off Black necks in Africa and the Diaspora.
Twitter @lekansote
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