Last Updated: Saturday, 19 July 2003 ; www.herald.co.zw The Black Gurkha of Anglo-Saxon cause
By Nathaniel Manheru
The US Secretary of State Collin Powell by now must be convinced that its much more than a fable that the angry little black ant felled a whole elephant by a slow creepy march up its mighty nostril.
Twice beaten, more than twice warned by Jack the Straw about the dangers of taking on prickly little Zimbabwe, the General believed too much in the borrowed armour of white America, which he put on barely a week before the Bush visit.
Convinced he was impregnably awesome, he fired a broadside against President Mugabe in the New York Times, hoping for a pale cheer.
But he got more than he had bargained for, and, completely buffeted, he receded into Uncle Tom’s transparent cabin, brooding anguish and too burdened by a sense of shame to speak any more during Bush’s entire African visit.
Instead of using to helpful ends, his own identity as a product of the cruel history of slavery; his powerful office as the first black Secretary of State of the only superpower in the world, and of course in the immediate, the unique opportunity presented by this rare visit to Africa by an American President, he chose to crush Africa, his only seed-pod.
He failed to make a case for a continent for so long so wronged and injured without repair by the white world, both in history and contemporary politics. And his choice of Zimbabwe for attack, was not random.
He chose for a nipping assault the continent’s foremost, in fact the continent’s seminal point of the second wave of anti-colonial resistance.
The noble thoughts we expected from him as a self-conscious African-African American, thoughts which could have used the historically significant Goree Island as a springboard, instead came from a George Bush attacking slavery, in the process projecting a false and fawned love for the man of colour. Powell came too, and left the continent a Blackman who would not be an African-African American.
Regrettably, for a Blackman, the rite of passage into white America is a bleached soul and a readiness to be a black "gurkha" for the Anglo-Saxon cause. You must "smoke out" the Vietnamese, smoke out Iraqis, smoke out Afghans before you can be eligible for a Republican mantle.
Above all, you must fasten the crime tag upon your race, upon your kind, to win approval of, and gain acceptance in the pale world. Powell would have been happier to find us supine human contraband of colonial conquest, meek plantation Africans resigned to sweating and squatting on white settler farms, than to find us a proud black people standing up to, and wrestling our stolen heritage from rapacious Rhodies.
Mitayo Potosi
_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
