Opinion: George Floyd lynching – Africa’s voice on racism must now be heard

By Ken Kamoche

There come a time when the oppressed stand shoulder to shoulder and say enough is enough. In the midst of the most frightening pandemic of our generation, when thousands of lives have been lost and economies brought to their knees, the world is finally waking up to a hitherto ignored virus: Racism.

It took the callous police lynching of George Floyd to cast a light on the sheer depth and magnitude of injustice and discrimination not just in America but across the world. The world barely took notice a few months ago when black people were thrown out into the streets in China. Few African leaders had the audacity to go beyond token pronouncements. This was symptomatic of Africa's traditional collective failure to stand up to injustice, consistent with the apparent reluctance to offend more powerful global players for fear of jeopardising economic ties.

If on that occasion Africans chose to remain silent so as not to rock the 'Look East' policy that has left many African countries saddled with debt they have no hope of repaying, what accounts for the perception in the continent that racism is a problem for black people in the West? Interestingly, ordinary Africans are quick to protest against the Floyd murder yet remain silent against everyday injustices by their governments sustained by economically oppressive foreign ties.

What we see is a failure to confront and interrogate history, both in the West and in Africa. And yet, today's events -- the gratuitous murder of black people by rogue police, Black Lives Matter movement, 'white privilege', white female tendency to call the police on black people, tearing down of statues -- are tied to one basic thread: The structures of racism that keep black people subjugated wherever they are.

Eighteen years ago, a British journalist wrote: "The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore." That journalist is UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. And he evidently still believes that the acquisition and control of colonies was not only right but in the interest of 'backward' people who could not manage their own affairs.

Colonialism never really ended; it simply changed from political to economic, where it all began with the Slave Trade centuries earlier. The myth that Britain came out lily-white because it ended the Slave Trade glosses over its role in globalising the inhumanity and building the greatest cities in the US on the backs of slaves.

When the Premier equates the removal of statues and monuments of slave traders to 'editing history', he ignores the fact that British history as taught today is an edited lie, incomplete, misleading and designed to whitewash rather than examine critically and interrogate the past. If you must erect statues to honour men who gave their wealth to build cities, be honest enough to disclose how it was acquired.

The problem is, this history is not taught in British schools. When racists tell black people 'to go back where they came from', they are blissfully unaware that North African soldiers with Roman forces settled in England more than 1,000 years before the British reached Africa.

Those who, like Johnson, choose to glorify the past and ignore the egregious crimes and structures of oppression that are manifest in police brutality, are living in a world of fantasy. In the words of historian David Olusoga, British history is merely 'a place of recreation and comfort', a fairytale. Accomplishments in medicine, engineering and technology and vanquishing Nazi Germany to free the world, not colonial Britain brutally quashing uprisings in Africa and Asia.

Sadly, failure to grasp this history means the risk of repeating it. Africans observing the struggles from a distance should know that the power structures that subjugate black people in the West also work in maintaining inequality between Western and African economies. To remain silent is to be complicit in your oppression.

Prof Kamoche is the author of 'Black Ghosts', a novel about Africans in China.

This article originally appeared in Daily Nation. [Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images/AFP]