By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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An African man had his breath squeezed out of him on global live television, but it is as if we did not see. There is an organic link between the African-American Diaspora and us that we would instinctively like to deny exists, and I still do not know for sure where that comes from.

Otherwise tell me why Africa has been absent from the whole George Floyd saga which started some three weeks ago when it should be clear that the same forces that have played havoc with our existence and raped our collective conscience were on display in that video performance of Derick Chauvin on the neck of Floyd. How can we keep quiet?

I tried that question on a Dar es Salaam man who normally passes for a knowledgeable person, and his answer was that with John Magufuli’s intolerance for any demonstration, no one would like to risk being clobbered by police simply because they were trying to express solidarity with some American being brutalised by the agents of his country’s state apparatus when those brutalised by their own forces right here were hardly even mentioned.

That is hardly an answer you would expect from someone who has ever thought of the interconnectedness of human struggles and aspirations, the very indivisibility of the issues involved, but it is hardly surprising. We have been beaten into an unthinking wilderness of individuals that cannot summon the simple wisdom that requires you to lessen your weakness by maximising your solidarity.

Unthinking, say I? Yes. I once asked a very highly placed diplomat in Dar es Salaam why our country had not issued a statement on the daily televised Israeli bombardment of Lebanon some ten years ago. Her answer was that as members of the United Nations, our position was the same as that of the organisation.

It is this kind of thinking that has placed our diplomacy so far away from Julius Nyerere’s diplomacy that you would be justified to think that grand old man never set foot here. I do not believe that this is because Nyerere talked over people’s heads, for his expositions in Kiswahili were accessible even to the least erudite of our people. It is just the nonchalance of the individuals given certain responsibilities that exposes our pedestrian qualities as operators and thinkers.

But, maybe there is something else. It is such a long time since we experienced our self-organised associations take to the streets to support this or oppose that other issue that it may be fair to say that we can no longer tell what concerns us from what does not.

So, the racists in America may be crushing the skulls of African people – they are, indeed, kidnapped African people – but it does not matter to us because our sensibilities were calloused and deadened long, long ago.

In addition, having lost the sensibility to recognise such inequities and call them out when they are meted out to our brethren and sisteren, we are incapable of summoning the requisite anger and outrage when we see the same injustices committed against ourselves because we have been socialised into accepting them as the norm.

It is such brutalisation that takes away our humanity, erodes our dignity and crushes our civility. We are not even ashamed when we see the streets of Rome, London and Hamburg full of White people carrying placards reading “Black Lives Matter” when we have relegated ourselves to the station of spectators.

The name we see illustrating our lynching news stories today is Floyd, and others well before him were called Brown, Meadows, Heath, Stanley, Turner, but these were slave names branded on people who should have been named Keita, Seku, Kullibali, Koffi or Jakite, the great, great grandsons and granddaughters of the Fula, Ankan, Soninke, Bambara, Manyema or Manikongo.

Displaced and dehumanised, they were robbed of their very identity. Malcolm X once berated African-Americans for denying their African origins, and asked them: You ask what did I leave in Africa? I tell you, you left your mind in Africa, or something to that effect.

Conversely, what would tell anyone who is asking what he has to do with those black men and women in America?

My answer to such a query would be: Those people who you sold into slavery took a portion of your mind with them to America.

Ulimwengu is chairman of Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]