Itai Muzondo
SAKA is a word, which for purposes of this discourse, I will borrow from the Shona language.
Shona is a collective name for many dialects spoken in most parts of Zimbabwe.
We hear there are also some Shona people in Kenya – and by emigration, in a lot of countries around the world now due to various push and pull factors.
SAKA can be used to mean ‘THEREFORE’ or ‘SO WHAT?’ and or simply an emphatic ‘SO!’
Part of this shall be on the young black football player, Bukayo SAKA, who plays for one of the best teams in the world, Arsenal FC in England.
The young man has been a revelation.
He has surely cut across several professional and social strata to get to where he is now, sometimes even against seemingly insurmountable odds.
That racism presents its ugly face in the English and other big leagues of the world is no new occurrence.
We have witnessed how black players have been subjected to serious racial slurs and yet they soldier on like stoics.
Unfortunately, Bukayo SAKA missed a penalty at the last edition of the Euros, and the British fans and media were in a frenzy.
The young man was called some horrendous names, which would take a lot of willpower for any sane person to repeat, worse for a black person like me to utter without feeling shame and anger.
Shame at anyone who can be that shallow-minded and angry about the history and our social institutions which allow such inhumanity to perpetuate.
Why, one wonders, was there no similar anger – if the issue was just about anger at failure – when David Beckham missed a penalty on the world’s biggest football stage, with all his experience?
I dare say the answer is plain – one is black, the other white!
Saka, does it matter to the sane, whether one has more Melanin than the other? It seems so.
The Caucasian seems to think he is sacrosanct because of the inferior Melanin aggregate. No guesses for surmising what I think there.
This is an appallingly prejudiced and fallacious premise for measuring mental aptitude – but then again, most citizens of the world seem to have accepted it as the norm rather than the exception.
SAKA, Bukayo SAKA took it all in his stride at such a young age?
Was it a measure of mental, emotional, and psychological maturity on his part or resignation to fate and ‘just the way it is?’ l suppose only SAKA knows.
The buck doesn’t stop there. Yes, the Queen died….l am an African, and as such it would be uncouth for me to ‘celebrate’ her death, but l still want to ask most – she died…SAKA?
Indeed saying l had tears welling up in my eyes would be great hypocrisy…l felt nothing – perhaps there is a stone where my heart used to be.
I was immediately, as if the two correlate, reminded of why no African Nation has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
May someone please enlighten me and dispel my ignorance? It just comes across to me as ‘legalised’ international hypocrisy. Sadly one reflects on how the whole conqueror and the vanquished status quo persists.
How even our knowledge production factories spew out Eurocentric ideals as the panacea for African and black problems.
How the religions of the West have led to Africans loathing the African way of life as satanic, demonic, and second-rate whilst celebrating and mimicking things European as holy, top-notch, acceptable and sacrosanct.
The level of self-loathing has escalated to the levels where our African politicians, usually in Seville Row suits, abuse state resources and institutions to maintain their stranglehold on power – to what end?
Highly likely to be as wealthy as the erstwhile oppressor, and the cycle continues.
We seem to conveniently forget that the very Christianity, in some cases, we celebrate as the ONLY way to Heaven is directly responsible for the wretched place we find the continent in – and subsequently the African, both historically and currently – as Max Weber postulated in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, some Christian morality still measures God’s favour in line with material success.
SAKA I remember, with some respect, Mugabe’s unwavering standpoint on what he called the white man’s selective dementia on how the West has dealt with Africans over the centuries and particularly now.
So, SAKA and Vinicius Jr seem to be the pawns in the game, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
We need a proper paradigm shift in our approach to race relations as a Black collective.
A deliberate unity of purpose after a close dissection of the issues bedevilling us, then come up with robust, practical solutions.
We owe it to ourselves, people like Sarah Baartman and the many slaves in history; people like SAKA and Vinicius Jr and we owe it, especially to posterity.
