Murder of George Floyd! Afrikanist, GAMAL NKRUMAH writes

Murder of George Floyd! GAMAL NKRUMAH writes:
To understand George Floyd's macabre murder and its aftermath once again forces us to ask ourselves two questions that many Americans still don't want to answer. Who systematically exterminated Native Indians? Who captured Blacks in Africa, transported by ships and enslaved on the new continent? For the Europeans the answer is simple: The Europeans who settled in North America committed cruel acts and exterminated the indigenous peoples. Africans were spared only because they served as an enslaved workforce.
The violence of capitalism (which we are still trying to change today) was already at work during colonial America. The first encounter on the new continent was marked by one word: cruelty! The culture of the Indigenous people has been totally eradicated, and socially evaluating two hundred years of abuse is a painful exercise that exists in the heart of every Indigenous and African American.
Fortunately, there are no longer any historical controversies regarding the intentions of the first European settlers: they entrusted the production system of the new lands totally to the resistant capacity and physical strength of enslaved Africans. On the other hand, however, African Americans began to write their history by facing new challenges with heroism and resilience.
Triumph and tragedy of the United States, rights and unspeakable abuses, have gone hand in hand in the last centuries of American history. Slavery had existed since time immemorial, in the West as well as in the East, however, the notion of modern slavery arose in the United States. The redemption of American slaves, the struggle for civil rights, were supposed to clean up centuries of degradation and deprivation, which is why Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and eventually the First African American President of the United States, Barack Obama, emerged. Yet Obama was not technically an African American although symbolically perhaps he was much more. He was the son of a continental African man and a white European woman. On the one hand he finally united African Americans and liberal progressives, and he immediately became acceptable to the racist white elites of the United States. After all, Americans of European descent have always been accommodating to Africans of born in Africa. I wanted to analyse these aspects of the story so that we can better understand President Trump's recent Tweet which glorifies the use of violence against black people in Minneapolis. A gesture that beyond his political judgment, reminds us that America is still deeply divided. Precisely, the burning Minneapolis and the charred buildings remind all Americans that they have not radically changed since the dark night of slavery. The nightmare always remains alive today as then and today as then they are called to deal with their history. A story that in some ways becomes ours too.

GAMAL NKRUMAH
Afrikanist
#BlackLivesMatter