On the murder of George Floyd and related matters: letter to the US ambassador.
Your Excellency Ambassador Carl Paschall,
I just finished reading the text of your message on the death of George Floyd and I must say I am not the least bit impressed. Am I surprised though? No. You have just delivered a dry, empty, very empty message, with no remorse and no ambition to right over 200 years of injustice and outright brutality towards people of color in your country, the United States of America.
One thing was made quite clear from his statement, he seems to share the cold-heartedness of his President Donald Trump. Instead of showing us a sense of resolve to turn upside down the racist machine that is unleashing terror on people like George Floyd, his very condescending message conveys a sense of self-righteousness by showing his country’s values of allowing people to protest. What about changing 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 should not be minimized as you tried to do in your very superficial statement; nor should we allow this critical moment of reckoning ushered in by the death of George Floyd to be trivialized by misleading statements like yours and the abhorrent rantings of your delusional President Donald Trump on Twitter.
As I told you in another epistle before this: “It falls within the period of your reign that the sons and daughters of the multitude solemnly assembled at the National Monument on that fateful day in 1963, when MLK delivered that historic speech, be ready and bold to demand that their federal reserves of justice honor that promissory note and no force on earth can stop this movement.”
The demands filed by the hundreds of thousands of protesters in the United States refer to the sacred promise written by its 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 that the United States has broken, and your government must respond to the demands of the times so that it can honor this promise.
That quest cannot be fulfilled by trivial statements from your high officials prevaricating with distracting statements like this one you made in your statement: “we must all as individuals, and as people united in our determination, act in our daily lives to set in motion 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 institutionalized by governments like yours; therefore, we do not need any pontification about our individual roles and responsibilities as citizens of the world. What we want to hear is what steps your government will take to remove this cancerous tumor from the American system once and for all.
I was lucky enough to have visited one of the best artists the Gambia can boast of last night, only to discover that he had just finished a painting depicting the murder of George Floyd and the resulting backlash. This painting clearly takes us back to the slave ships that brought George Floyd’s ancestors to their soil and the ensuing movements that have progressively pushed his racist nation to make amends for its sins.
From this brilliant work of art, the lesson is clear: that the knees of the police officer who crushed George Floyd’s neck are nothing more than a duplicate of the same chains that his ancestors placed around the neck of Kunta Kinteh and many others. more Africans to send to their plantations. It is a work of art worth studying and I highly recommend you visit Njogou Touray’s studio.
Meanwhile, I present to you some verses of encouragement written for my brothers and sisters under the yoke of Donald Trump in your country. I would appreciate it if you would kindly send it to the United States, as you are the official representative of all Americans in my country. I wish you a good reading at the end of this epistle and I hope your understanding and cooperation:
Unleash your inner Kunta Kinteh
Take care of him; that spirit must never decay
The blood and vibe of the great Kunta Kinteh
True yesterday, ST’s words are still vital today.
The cut on his toe never kept him under its influence
The spirit rose defiantly; remains so to this day
No one could stop Alex Haley’s reverse journey
The mind rules supreme over all matters surely
That is the message of the great Bob Marley
“We have something that could never be taken from us”
That fire that burns everything is the spirit of Kunta Kinteh
It is there, deep down, in every sensitive black soul.
Never slow down, always on, never get old
Like the mighty entrails of the Nymabeni Hills volcano
Waiting for the moment of fermentation for the explosion
We must unleash our inner Kunta Kinteh
The final revolution for our total redemption.