By Afolabi Akinbola
The foundation was of sorrow, tears and blood for the indigenous so-called American Indians domiciled in the vast continent before the coming of the white man from Europe. It was a tragic tale
of near total annihilation of the people. Their lands were seized
and parcelled out among the newcomers from Europe. The
people were visited with strange diseases like gonorrhoea and
died in their millions. Their leaders were killed off in pitched
battles and the cowered people subjected to dehumanization.
The European Christian religion approved and justified the
genocide enthusiastically. Yet the idealism of the founding
fathers could not be faulted despite the misguided notions of
American Idealism and Exceptionalism. The so-called founding
fathers also slept with their black slave women in their harems
despite their undisguised racism and fervent sense of
entitlement.
Now the chicks have come home to roost. The mob invasion of the
American Capitol was long in the coming. The years of the
African Buffalo Soldiers and the depredations of the Ku Klux
Klan in their impunity of killing Blacks for fun because they
were sub-humans coming to the heart of American much envied
democracy-the Capitol. Blacks were routinely killed for the
smallest or no infractions at all. This abominable act was
rampant long before Emmet Till was brutally murdered in 1953
in Chicago for staring at a white woman. In all cases that went
before a jury heavily loaded against blacks, the perpetrator(s)
were set free or given a slap in the wrist. The internet made
the murder of Floyd Patterson a worldwide event questioning
the very basis of American justice and the routine profiling of
blacks in the country. The few blacks who were fed up with the
‘system’ and confronted the state met with a sorry fate. The
Black Panthers of Huey P Newton, Bobby Seale et al were killed
off judicially or otherwise. George Jackson in his poignantly
emotive ‘Soledad Brother’ which he dedicated to his murdered
junior brother said it all. George Jackson himself was shot to
death in prison. The fiery sole survivor of the 60s black revolt,
Angela Davis is now licking her wounds in unbowed retirement
in her 70s.
There had been many fighters against institutionalized racism in the
land. Some acquired western education to the highest level. It
made no dent in the system. Harriet Stowe Beecher in her
unforgettable ‘Uncle Tom Cabin’ influenced Abraham Lincoln
in ‘emancipating’ blacks from slavery after the American Civil
War but centuries of slavery could not be written off=not even
by blood in the battlefield. Jim Crow made sure that the
lynching continued unabated. Not until Marcus Mosiah Garvey
came up with his Back to Africa with the ‘Black Star Line’ did
the black folks stirred from their slumber. Garvey, a Jamaican
was betrayed and bankrupted and jailed. The man who
betrayed him was a black man! The pertinent question
remained: which Africa are they returning to? The few who
heeded his call then and thereafter were sorely disappointed
with the continent and its seemingly cursed so-called leaders.
In fact, Joe Biden’s predecessor described the continent as a
‘shit hole’ and he was merely expressing the ingrained feelings
of his countrymen. Humiliated blacks in America were
tauntingly told to go back to Africa even at a time when
Africans are fleeing their continent in droves to seek greener
pastures in Europe and America; pastures that were and are
being made green by Africans through a conscious less
exploitation of their minerals and its people. But give the devil
his due. The white man knows how to manage its affairs far
more than other races.
So where do America go from the Capitol debacle? There was
gratuitous glee from the dictators in the world about the
spectacle of a so-called model of democracy’s citadel being
invaded by yokels feeding on conspiracy theories dished out by
a deluded and bigoted man. Do not let us forget that this saw
dust Caesar had more than 70million votes of his countrymen.
Those who did not vote for him I believe were outraged by his
despicable conduct while in office. The question we must ask
ourselves is how did this man get into the White House and
how did he continue to maintain a stranglehold on a vast
majority of Americans? One answer methinks is that this man
was expressing the hopes and aspirations of most of his
people. Alas for him and his ilk, American demography is
heavily skewed against them and the sins of the past is
gradually catching up.
