His Excellency Ambassador Carl Paschall,
I have just finished reading the text of your message on the death of George Floyd and I must say that I am not in the least impressed. Am I surprised though? No. You 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 on its head the racist machine that is unleashing terror on people like George Floyd, his very condescending message conveys a sense of self-righteousness by showcasing his country’s values of letting people protest. What about changing the structural racism that creates the need for these protests? In what part of 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 initiated by the death of George Floyd to be trivialized by misleading statements like his and the abhorrent rantings of his delusional President Donald Trump on Twitter.
As I told you in another epistle prior to 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 your federal justice reserves honor that promissory note and no force on earth can stop this movement.”
The demands brought 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 America 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 pontifications about our individual roles and responsibilities as citizens of the world. What we want to hear is what steps your administration 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 find 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 his 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 becomes clear: that the knees of the police officer who crushed George Floyd’s neck are nothing more than a duplicate of the very chains his ancestors placed around the neck of Kunta Kinteh and many others. more Africans to send to his plantations. It is a work of art well worth studying and I highly recommend you visit Njogou Touray’s studio.
In the meantime, here are some encouraging verses written for my brothers and sisters under Donald Trump in your country. I would be grateful 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 read at the end of this epistle and hope for your understanding and cooperation:
Unleash your inner Kunta Kinteh
Take care of him; that spirit should never falter
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 the reverse trip of Alex Haley
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.
It never wanes, always on, it will never get old
Like the powerful bowels of the Nymabeni Hills volcano
The moment of fermentation is awaited for the explosion
We must unleash our inner Kunta Kinteh
The final revolution for our total redemption.
