On the Murder or George Floyd and Related Matters: Letter to the US Ambassador
Your Excellency Ambassador Carl Paschall,
I have just finished reading the text of your message on George Floyd’s death and I must say that I am not the least impressed. Am I surprised, though? No. You just issued an empty and very hollow, dry message devoid of remorse and completely lacking the requisite ambition to correct more than more than 200 years of injustice and outright brutality towards people of colour in your country, the United States of America.
One thing came quite clear from your statement, you seem to share your President Donald Trump’s cold heartedness. Instead of showing us a sense of resolution to upend the racist machinery that is unleashing terror on people like George Floyd, your very condescending message rather conveys a sense of self-righteousness as you showcase your country’s values of allowing people to protest. What about upending the structural racism that creates the need for these protests? Where in the world are protests an end in themselves?
Your Excellency, the inequality and injustice in your country has deep roots and therefore this problem must neither be downplayed like you attempted to do in your very shallow statement; nor must we allow this critical moment of reckoning ushered in by the death of George Floyd to be trivialised by deceptive utterances like yours and the abhorrent ranting of your delusional President Donald Trump on Twitter.
As I told him in another epistle preceding this one “It falls within the period of your reign that the sons and daughters of the crowd solemnly assembled at the National Monument on that fateful day in 1963, when MLK made that historic speech, stand ready and bold to demand that your federal reserves of justice honour that promissory note and no force on earth can stop this movement.”
The demands being presented by the hundreds of thousands of protesters in America are about the sacred promise penned by your founding fathers through the blessed hand of Thomas Jefferson “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” This is the promise America has reneged on and your government must answer to the demands of the times for you to honour this promise.
That quest cannot be fulfilled by trivial utterances from your high offices prevaricating with distracting statements like this one you made in your statement: “we must all as individuals, and as persons united in our determination, act in our daily lives to put into place a world that realizes true equality and justice.”
Ambassador, the structural racism that is the catalyst for the murder of innocent people like George Floyd was not created by individuals; it was deliberately planned and institutionalised by governments like yours; so we do not need any pontification about our individual roles and responsibilities as global citizens. What we want to hear is what steps your government is going to take to obliterate this cancerous tumour out of the American system once and for all.
It was my good fortune to have visited one of the finest artists that The Gambia can ever boast of, last night, and I found that he had just completed a painting depicting the George Floyd murder and its resultant backlash. This painting clearly takes us back to slave ships which brought George Floyd’s forbears unto your soil and the consequent movements that have progressively pushed your racist nation to make amends for your sins.
From this brilliant piece of art the lesson stands clear: that the police officer’s knees that crushed George Floyd’s neck, is nothing but a duplicate of the very chains that your forebears strung around the necks of Kunta Kinteh and many more Africans to ship them to your plantations. It is a work of art worth studying and I strongly recommend that you visit Njogou Touray’s studio.
Meanwhile, I present to you a few verses of encouragement penned for my brothers and sisters under the yoke of Donald Trump in your country. I would be grateful if you could kindly send it over to America since you are the official representative of all Americans in my country. I bid you good reading as I end this epistle and loook forward to your understanding and cooperation:
Unleash Your Inner Kunta Kinteh
Nurture it; that spirit should never decay
The blood and vibe of the great Kunta Kinteh
True yesterday, S.T’s words remain vital today
The cutting of his toe never kept him under their sway
The spirit soared defiant; remains so up to this day
No one could stop the reverse journey of Alex Haley
The mind rules supreme over all matters surely
That is the message of the great Bob Marley
“We’ve got something they could never take away”
That fire burning everything is the spirit of Kunta Kinteh
It lies there, deep down, in every sentient black soul
It never dwindles, forever kindled, never to be old
Like the potent bowels of the Nymabeni Hills volcano
It awaits the moment of fermentation for explosion
We must unleash our inner Kunta Kinteh
The final revolution for our total redemption.
