“Every African-American in the United
States needs to move their money, family, knowledge (sic) back to
Africa w(h)ere you will be treated like the royalty you are. You don’t
deserve this treatment. This is not your country.” Akon,
Senegalese-American singer on perceived racism over the acquittal of
George Zimmerman for killing a black teenager, Trayvon Martin.
If we stare longer into the global map of racism, we may realise that Africa is responsible for the humiliation of its dark-skinned people and descendants worldwide. If we stare longer into the sociology of Black people, we may realise that racism is perhaps a deserved punishment for our inability to build a single country years after the ideologies of Marcus Garvey, the intellections of W. E. B. Du Bois, the disobedience of Rosa Parks, the protests of Martin Luther King and the agitations of all the provoked black ancestors in post-abolition Americas. We do not need to stare longer to understand that racism is justified by the ostentatious inferiorities we Africans wear in disobedience to Bob Marley’s call—“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery!” Oops, Marley actually inherited those words from Garvey, Garvey who asked his people to move back to the Homeland – Africa!
Of course I’ll understand if you don’t
know Garvey—in present society, history books are reserved for the
misfits! But those who remember a dreamer like Garvey are simply seeking
sympathies and attention to a collective failure; spell it out, any
Blackman who remembers Garvey is destined to end up on the laps of
misery. Garvey was a good guy, in whose memory I always shake my head as
I reflect on the confusions and amnesias that occupy the worlds and
homes of the Blackman today. He understood the need to reconnect with
one’s ancestry, to be in a world in which the colour of justice is in
the shade of the colour of your own skin. Garvey was a social prophet
who died wishing Black Africa had dotted the White Man’s ‘t’ and crossed
his ‘i’.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that the Black
people in Americas refused to heed Garvey’s wish in that phase of our
history. So we may praise that setback for forestalling those
Back-to-Africa campaigns, because there wouldn’t have been many
exceptions today in our attempts to convince the world that not every
African leader corners taxpayers’ money to Switzerland while dependent
citizens pine away, as we witness in our politics from Abuja to
Kinshasha. We must celebrate our convictions, that racist geneticists
could not scientifically prove that absence of intelligence among many
African leaders is genetic. The Mandelas have managed to frustrate that
stereotype even though South Africa is still not a land of privileged
Blackman.
There are exceptions, and there are also enough statistics of
evil white men who wrecked humanity. But no evil would ever be bigger
than conspiring to loot the resources of a nation in need; this is where
the black leaders, especially of this era, lose it. And this is where
they become easy pawns of contempt and racism. If you want to fix
racism, fix yourself, fix your people and fix your country. There is no
shortcut to stopping these humiliations of the dark-skinned race in
Americas, Europe, Asia and Arabia. Racism is a psychologically acquired
prejudice, it’s a feeling that comes with realisations that your own
people, having built what the others couldn’t or haven’t, must indeed be
superior. Common sense!
This acquired prejudice is applied in
our institutions, and our very interactions, where an excelling Blackman
is seen as either lucky or deviant. It’s this same feeling that
inspires even African men to shamelessly refer to the most beautiful of
their women as “African Beauties” or “Black Beauties” – this
depreciatory epithet, we don’t seem to know, gives away that, though
African or Black ladies are largely ugly, some are indeed beautiful. Why
aren’t there European Beauties, Caucasian Beauties, or even White
Beauties in the lexicostatistics of the White race?
These are the reasons I was not
particularly surprised by the verdict of the George Zimmerman –Trayvon
Martin trial. Young Martin was killed in a world where the colour of
justice is still white, and there is little we can do about it. I don’t
know why “resident” Africans suddenly developed sensitivity to
inhumanity when we have celebrated worse evils in our polities. The
Zimmerman trial is not any strange to our people. The acquittal of Major
Hamza Al-Mustapha after almost 15 years in prison is a bigger joke than
Zimmerman’s, for in the case of the latter we know the politics of race
there in which the Blackman is always guilty until proven otherwise.
This is as a result of the unfavourable statistics of Bad Guys among the
black communities. Institutions don’t work with truths, they work with
statistics, and as long as statistics remain the major tools of
interpreting a people, the black people are forever criminals.
To demand to know what subjects the
Black race to this level of moral collapse despite the churches and
mosques seeking to reconstruct the spiritual morals of a people with no
traceable ancestry is a futile mission; our poverty and economic
frustrations fuel our desperate and criminal quest for survival. The
gangster culture, which actually exists among other races, becomes an
escape for the hopeless black youth in America, and the statistics of
this incriminated and killed Trayvon. Yet the exemplary African-American
models that condemned the criminal culture of black inner city
communities are seen as “player-hating” morons. Classic response was one
by rapper Nas to Civil Rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson. “You
ain’t helping nobody in the ‘hood and that’s the bottom line.” Simple!
Now who helps the unfortunate blacks in America’s ghetto-hoods?
Black Africa? Hell, no! Akon’s outrage may be absurd, but it revives
the memory of Garvey and how, about a century later, there is no single
Black African country capable of granting the marginalised blacks a
home. In fact, native Africans are dying to replace Trayvon Martin. It’s
really depressing to think about Garvey in this trying time. May God
save us from us!
Gimba Kakanda
@gimbakakanda (On Twitter)
[Credits Omojuwa.com]
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