Democracy papers over the deep hurt of subjugation
“I can’t breathe!” These words from George Floyd, lying face down on the hard asphalt in Minneapolis, US, while a police officer kneels on his neck, will reverberate for eternity.
It will echo in our minds and hearts as perhaps one of the lowest points of the eventful year that was 2020.
This was moments before Floyd died in broad daylight as a result of the cold-blooded actions of people who should have been his protectors.
The global Covid-19 pandemic is cold and heartless, and has killed hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world. However, the murder of Floyd may be the most cold-blooded event and the most disrespectful act towards human life in 2020.
That one loss of life due to the racist attitudes of a murderous police force has overshadowed the more than 107,000 deaths which have tragically occurred in the US due to the pandemic.
Perhaps one of the reasons why this exhibitionist murder has resonated so loudly throughout the world and particularly in Africa is that it is one of many such murders of black men by police in the US.
The US police force has established a clear trend over the years of how keen some of their members are to shoot down and kill black men.
It is a culture that stretches back to the days of slavery when African men and women were sold and owned as private property. This was at a time when it was deemed normal for a European to be a law unto himself, having the power to be owner, judge, jury, and executioner over African life.
The collective psychological wounds of this horrible history perpetuated over centuries have not healed. This is especially true when racism continues to be perpetuated about the world by people who do not have the capacity to understand what it means to be African.
Too often, in SA as in the US, the depth of the hurt of racism and subjugation is unknown and unrecognised.
The veneer of democracy papers over hundreds of years of racially biased economic systems of extraction and benefit at the expense of the African. This skewed economic structure remains largely in place, locking out and choking out vast human potential, wasting talent and decimating wealth in the process.
The default response of anger remains largely inevitable. It is a response which itself is too near, limiting and suffocating, especially to the African. So when Floyd is humiliated, put down, chocked and killed by racist officers, every African is ‘murdered’ a little inside. It is murder by a thousand chokes which is all too familiar, lived and experienced every day. The responding anger which is all too regular, too self-limiting, too self-perpetuating, wastes vast amounts of energy which should go into self-building as we lash out against systems that are ignorant of the African experience.
Who wants to be schooled by the relatively powerless? Who wants to be conscientised by those who have been seen by recent history as the destitute, fit only to be seen as receivers of charity, and becoming the face of crime and corruption in the process?
Yet the value of the African experience is in how it must shape the entire human experience, ensuring that no human being is ever left behind, ignored, devalued and expected to accept this as fate.
No fate requires the kind of wasted human potential we as the human race seem happy to accept.
It may seem like these are legitimate complaints. It must be clear that this is a yearning for a different world where human life is universally valuable instead.
I am yearning, like many in the US whose anger has erupted into the looting and burning which is all too familiar here in SA, for the most basic of our common dreams, a world which celebrates all human life. It is a dream all human beings subscribe to. We all yearn for a meaningful life and deep down we know it is possible.
Perhaps we need to come to terms with the age-old philosophy of ubuntu, often spoken about but little understood. Its timeless precepts require us to recognise that we are human beings tasked with a higher purpose, not animals plagued by ignorance and unrelenting self-preservation.
If we fail to value human life, we cannot value all life and soon we may lose it.
No fate requires the kind of wasted human potential we as the human race seem happy to accept