AYABONGA CAWE: Boot on the neck of blacks is a constant — everywhere

When Daniel Pantaleo got off for killing Eric Garner in 2014 we were at a dead-silent breakfast buffet in Victoria Island, Lagos, getting ready for an interview. Garner’s repeated words of “I can’t breathe” lingered in the thoughts of all at the table, who were dumbfounded by a Richmond jury’s decision not to indict Pantaleo.

I remember thinking that while Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, felt miles away from an America with a black and hunted minority, not even being black in a nation with the largest number of black people in the world shielded one from being a target. Ask Fela Kuti or Ken Saro-Wiwa. The global system of white supremacy has never been short of the pliable and willing among the oppressed. “Barristers” wore fake white wigs and had afternoon tea at 3.45pm in Nairobi decades after the last governor-general left after the Mau Mau uprising.

In all those instances, excuses and caricatures of the killed populated the mainstream imagination: Mgcineni Noki led a shamanistic group of workers high on intelezi; George Floyd was high on drugs; Collins Khoza was a drunk catcaller; and protesters responding to Floyd need to contain the violence. Who “contains” the violence of the armed forces and policemen bent on overpolicing the shacked existence of Khoza or the pavement where Garner sold cigarettes? Even the cameras focused on Rodney King’s beating after a high-speed chase, or the close-range phone camera that could hear Floyd’s last words, fail to end the world as we understand it.

Rather, we try to make sense of the perpetrator — “Dylan Roof sporting a Rhodesian jacket online, was a disturbed young man”. This is the start of the social justification for the condonement for taking life, unnecessarily, wantonly, but undoubtedly in defence of a continuous impulse — extraction from the black body of labour, talent and ultimately life.

The discourse, even in the comments section of this publication, has always focused on deeming invisible the claims for justice, freedom, redistribution and equality by those on the streets, in waiting rooms, boardrooms and stuffy kitchens calling for the right to breathe.

One of these is a political economy with the central role of property rights in the functioning of an economy, while never questioning the underlying value system, let alone the skulls left along the way, that give rise to the right to accumulate. This right, as Cecil John Rhodes said to the houses of parliament in the Cape in 1894, has to be based on the restrictions on the rights of blacks to have three acres and a cow, or four morgen and a commonage right. Our economy is built on this basis and, far from being value-neutral, is on a plane of contested interests and shifting and asymmetric power relations.

The deaths of Floyd and Khoza reveal not only the inner and darkest depths of how our world is organised, but that we do not experience it in ways that are commonly understood. Those whose entire social basis has been based on the (race-based) extraction of value and its distribution for the consumption and exercise of power by a narrow, privileged and white few consider even the slightest restrictions on their movement as apartheid. The effects of that system and even slavery are not something from which black people can conveniently escape when the lockdown ends.

The recurring boot that daily rests on the necks of those who are black, poor and rendered other — from women and migrants to non-binary people and many on the margins of our collective public — continues. This boot is pressed on these necks as much by the trigger-happy soldier as by the evicting landowner and corrupt policeman and politician. That it snuffs out life after nine minutes on an American pavement does not mean the same does not occur in milliseconds of every drawn-out day here, rather than as a momentary development for us to mourn. And then move on along.

• Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist, is MD of Xesibe Holdings and hosts MetroFMTalk on Metro FM.