Continued from Tuesday
Given the intransigent stance of the “Make America great again’’ crooner and current president of the United States, Donald Trump, who invoked the callous ‘‘Law and Order’’ caudillos, the stage appears to be set for a protracted showdown between the state and combative dissidents. This move to appease the most conservative voting elements of the American populace, while appealing to the base sentiments of the average adult white American has some roots in the “Southern strategy.” This act of appealing to racial sentiments is, as the late leader of the Biafra secession, Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegu-Ojukwu, puts it, a case of ‘‘the more empty the leadership, the more reliance on primordial forces.’’ And President Donald Trump probably hopes to ride on the sentiment into his re-election.
However, the antecedent of state reactions to various forms of protests and revolt has been a hard crackdown on participants leading often to deaths and frequently to incarceration. And the American president knows he has the full weight of this culture behind him should he wish to toe that line. In the light of this, it might be too soon to expect a rolling-back of systemic racism, but something has to give if things continue on this path.
The United States police, the institution at the centre of this quagmire, as an instrument of the establishment for the enforcement of a “fabricated” social order has been known to have Ku Klux Klan affiliations dating back to the 1920s. The historian Linda Gordon recounts numerous collaborations between police and these sworn enemies of the African-Americans. Second, Klan founder, William J. Simmons, playing up the group’s commitment to ‘‘Law and order,’’ openly declared that his “organisation” boasted of members from every level of law enforcement. In Anaheim, California, the Ku Klux Klan-dominated city council, allowed police with Klan membership to go on patrol with full Klan regalia. More recently in 2019, a Michigan police officer, Charles Anderson, was terminated after prospective homebuyers found confederate flags and a framed Klan application in his house. This illuminates another possible source of police attitudes towards “blacks” in America.
That the extrajudicial killing of “blacks” by agents of the state keeps rearing its ugly head points to one fact: the life of the average “black” man in America is considered to be of insignificant value. Over the years, the tale of the terror unleashed on “blacks” in America, if transcribed into a Hollywood feature, would make for hours and hours of the most horrific pictures to grace modern cinema. From calculated group attacks like the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 to individual acts of terrorism like the mass shooting at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, “black” people have lost their lives for no apparent reason except that the perpetrators knew they would get away with just a slap on the wrist. Somehow, it seems that the more these individual and group attacks lose momentum, the police pick up the pace.
The following years witnessed more police brutality cases that sparked mass outrage in the form of public protests and rioting. Such cases included the televised Rodney King beating incident where all four officers were acquitted; the fatal shooting of 23-year-old Guinean immigrant, Ahmadou Diallo, shot 19 times in 1994; the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Sanford Florida 2012; the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, Ferguson Missouri 2014; and more recently, George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks. We should not forget the Black women who were also gunned down: Sandra Bland, Charleena Lyles, and Breonna Taylor. These high-profile police shootings of African-Americans gave birth to the “Black Lives Matter” movement. As a movement, it has been able to draw more global attention to the plight of “blacks” in America, carrying on the legacy of the struggle for the equal rights begun by earlier black rights movements. Leveraging the gruesome murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement has been able to capture global attention; within America, it has mobilised (national) black, non-black communities of colour, and indeed, some white anti-racist commitments into public action in a movement for change, enjoying support from the United Nations, scholarly bodies, foreign nations, and other private and public establishments.
A co-originator of the Pan Africa movement, W.E. Burgart Dubois, himself, having been exposed to the inhumanity in the treatment of ‘‘blacks’’ around the globe (in Europe, Africa, America, and the West Indies) spoke of a ‘‘common cause of the darker races against intolerable assumption and insults of Europeans…’’ adding that, ‘‘Most men in this world are coloured. A belief in humanity means a belief in coloured men.’’ The movement against white on black violence in America today echoes in more ways than one what W.E.B. Dubois and his co-Pan-African originators, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta such as Julius Nyerere, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and Sekou Toure, stood for and with the Pan-African movement and fully upheld that “Black Lives Matter.’’
This division of the world along “colour lines,” which has existed through most of the 16th to the 21st century, has been so entrenched and reflected in world affairs, both in the economic and socio-political spheres, that the pioneers of the Pan-African movement thought it necessary and exigent to rally all black peoples around the world to one cause: upholding ‘black” rights, while charting a course towards self-determination.
There is no better time than now. Now that the movement for the recognition of the sanctity of “black” lives is commanding global attention; now that countries and organisations around the world are rising in solidarity to the “black” cause; and now that the call for justice still shrieks from the crimson patch of Rayshard Brooks’ expiration and Gorge Floyd’s last breath yet whispers in our ears. It is time to rally every pro-Africa sentiment around the world to make a stand. It is time for us to look within ourselves, to identify and find ways to bring an end to black-on-black tragedies, the debilitating effects of centuries of oppression that have had us revelling in the role of victims and kept us from many respectful achievements.
Let us, in the Pan-African spirit, find a common ground to launch a “black” offensive against every obstacle that has stood in the way of the peaking of “black” endeavour. Black matters should matter to all Africans. It is when Black lives matter that we begin the long process of regaining our lost mission and rebranding our future vision.
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