Page 53 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 7

FEATURES
Floyd’s murder is that in spite
of its complex and impressive
diversity, America remains a
seductively wobbly democrat-
ic experiment. Kenyan legal
scholar Makau Mutua, rightly
reasons, that this is simply
because democracy in America
still sits on the stilts and fictions
of liberalism, which are based
on pretentious beliefs and
inflexible fictions of equality,
autonomy and freedom.
Freedom of an individual, es-
pecially in a democratic space,
ought to proceed from the
premise of equality. In America,
as I’ve demonstrated else-
where, long after the enactment
of its founding constitution, it is
still common to hear of “all men
are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights that
among these are Life, Liberty,
and the pursuit of Happiness”.
Today, right across the world,
constitutional articles in almost
all ‘functioning democratic’
countries embed the words
‘equal’ and ‘equality’, heavily
drawn from the American docu-
ment as well as, more recently,
the United Nations sponsored
Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, which makes strong ref-
erences to individual liberties.
The irony here is that not only
was America as a country built
by enslaved Africans, but that
it should not be lost on anyone
that above all, the so called
democracy enjoyed by many
Americans, was also built on
black American effort. For
instance, the Civil War was
fought over the enslavement of
blacks. The civil rights move-
ment made significant strides
towards eradicating racial
segregation, exclusion and dis-
crimination. Other movements
for freedom – women’s rights,
www.msingiafrikamagazine.com
anti-war and the Me-Too cam-
paigns have all been predicated
on the tactics of the struggles of
African-Americans.
The fact that the police force
in the US remains the most
ruthless in the world should also
come as no surprise to anyone
who scratches the surface of
America’s black history. This is
because the origins of policing
in the US go back to the ruth-
less slave patrols of plantations
in America. Today’s racial pro-
filing and killing of African Amer- China, the aspiring superpow-
icans by the police and white
vigilantes in a way lives up to
the beastly reputation of Ameri-
can law enforcement agencies,
society, and everyday life.
We Can’t Breathe!
Needless to say, as a commu-
nity we must continue to resist
this barbaric and dehumanizing
state-sponsored police culture.
With such a suffocating histori-
cal background of unfreedoms
that led Floyd to simply cry out
his last “I Can’t Breathe” to his
strangler, what does it all mean
for a black person to be free?
As a community, how can we
become freer? Is freedom a
token that is granted for good-
ness? These questions involve
fundamental ethical assump-
tions and concerns. Like many
who’ve addressed such issues
in the past, I think the use
of virtues such as courage
and forbearance presented
as positive elements of black
conscious in the “Black Lives
Matter’ campaigns are a good
start in explaining what freedom
means, because they reflect a
common notion that freedom
requires moral integrity.
Amidst the present unity
against racial and other forms
of oppression, this is also a
momentous time for progres-
heal . restore . rebirth . Afrika
sive Pan-African movements,
activists, and governments, to
raise the costs of denigration
that continue to destroy the
lives and livelihoods of African
people all around the world,
whether on the continent or
in the Diaspora. The struggle
against racism must be waged
in Europe, the old imperial and
colonial architects of the mod-
ern oppressive world capitalist
system; in the Americas that
sanctified racial capitalism; in
er of the 21st century, with its
own superiority complexes and
anti-African racism recently on
display during the coronavirus
pandemic in which Africans
were targeted; and in the coun-
tries of the global South that
seek to perpetuate, in the 21st
century, the hierarchies and
mythologies of what Dr. Dubois,
a noted black American scholar
once identified as ‘the problem
of the color line’.
Across the Atlantic, British
cultural theorist Paul Gilroy
has articulated that the current
combined climate of amne-
sia, ignorance, denial, guilt,
and shame, provide a unique
political field through which the
black community can move
and organize. In his earlier-
work ‘Postcolonial Melancholia’
(2005), Gilroy developed the
idea of melancholia, which
demonstrated how certain
motifs in Sigmund Freud’s work
were taken up by later German
thinkers, particularly by social
psychologists that were useful
in the period of de-Nazification.
Gilroy explained that Europe-
an nations have been in many
ways unable to get past their
loss of global pre-eminence and
that this inability to get past that
loss has generated pathological
| 53