The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
Chauvinism has always been a very dirty word that describes the ideology of “exaggerated patriotism” or “aggressive support” for any cause.
The word came into the dictionary from the life of a French soldier Nicolas Chauvin that retained extreme loyalty to Napolean.
Since then, Chauvinism has been used to describe and call out all shapes and sizes of bigots, nativists and patriotic fundamentalists, including male chauvinists and sexists of all kinds. The very dirty word has probably gained more dirt with one Derek Michael Chauvin, a US police officer, achieving the infamy of suffocating George Floyd to death.
Chauvinism will from now on also refer to all political acts of squeezing out and suffocating other people and causes from existence. Floyd’s dying words “I can’t breathe” also resonated with old protest words of such revolutionary philosophers as Frantz Fanon who in the classic, Wretched of the Earth, said “when we revolt it is not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”
As I write this short piece thousands of black and white people of the United States of America, and many other countries are in massive protests against what they understand as white supremacist chauvinism against black people that can no longer be free or breathe in the world. Political scientists have been quick to note that, possibly, when Donald Trump said he aimed to “make America great again” he meant to take the country back to racial chauvinism.
George Floyd, a random black man has now been redefined as a martyr for the black cause in America and in the entire world. And Trump picks up the mantle of a personification of racist chauvinism. Both Trump and Floyd have been random Americans, one white and another black that may never have dreamt that one day their names or lives will be associated with power, or that they will become metaphors of certain powerful causes.
Trump the metaphor
The real Donald Trump is a random fellow that was lucky to be born into money and there is doubt he could have built himself into a billionaire unaided. Mark Singer wrote a revealing and boring book about him that made the man so angry that he gave a public rant. The poor book became a bestseller, marketed by Trump’s froth and screams. To mock him the journalist wrote a letter of gratitude enclosing a cheque bearing a very small amount of money. Trump got angrier but went on to cash the cheque. Many of us do not know that the man admires strong leaders and enjoys military parades and combat music. He has severally failed to hide his admiration for the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Such statements as the recent “when the looting starts the shooting starts” come from the “little boy inside Trump that imagines himself a powerful army general and field marshal.” It is a free proverb that those that openly celebrate guns and shooting are not and can never be true men of action. Keen observers of minute mannerisms might have by now noticed how on a good day he mimics the soft, measured and deliberately shy but firm Xi Jinping of China. What has made the man a political extremist is a deep desire for attention and for power and presence.
The wish to be noticed as a strongman compels the egoist to say things in excess and exaggeration. It might have been a wish to be understood as a compelling scientist that forced the man to suggest the unimaginable thing that pesticides could be injected by humans to treat the coronavirus. Almost all members of the extended family of tyrants in the world wish to be known as great soldiers, scientists, inventors and philosophers. When Hitler finally expired, we are told, he exclaimed in gasps “what an artist the world has lost in me!” Today Trump is the face of white supremacy that has haunted black and white people in the planet.
George Perry Floyd, the black proverb
The man is a true definition of the black man as always a suspect in the world. He is the hero and face of the previously and the presently disadvantaged of the world, those that had no rich ancestors but slaves of the plantations, the wretched of the earth. Global black consciousness and power has found a proverb and ambassador in the tragically and unjustly murdered George Floyd. His other name was “Big Floyd” for his six feet rugby type bodily frame. He has been called the “gentle giant that was trying to turn his life around.” He played music as a hip-hop band member; the “Screwed up Click” is the name of the lyrical crew.
He was a regular chap whose crime that invited Chauvin and them to his life was trying to buy from a shop using a fake Twenty Dollar note. He was on reform mode after serving a five-year sentence for armed robbery and “house invasion” somewhere in the US. Workmates, among truck drivers and nightclub bouncers, have come out to celebrate the good soul that he was. And from the shadows the pornography industry has also stood up to claim the man who was one of their industrious employees. He is one of those that come from the real underside and darker side of modernity that have structurally and systematically been produced and formed to be there, a victim of power. Autopsy dictated drugs and coronavirus in his body, and doses of common painkillers. The perpetuity of pain and reality of suffering defines such as he.
The knee of a Chauvin
The picture of a white man kneeling murderously on the windpipe of a black man is a compelling metaphor of our world under a suffocating Empire. Chauvin and George worked together as bouncers in a nightclub, they knew each other. Social media analysts are not ruling out personal beefs. And the personal jealousy of a white man that could not stand a gigantic swordsman whose pictures with smiling white girls crack the internet.
For the white supremacist chauvinist, Frantz Fanon told us, the dark man is an infuriating phallic symbol, always. The evil of racist chauvinism and the martyrdom of Floyd have trumped the coronavirus in publicity worldwide. “Racism is the real Pandemic” some of the protesters have said. Trump and Floyd are real metaphors of the condition of the present world. The system that produces Trumps and their Floyds cannot take humanity to any liberated future. Chauvinism in all its varied expressions can only spell a dark planetary future.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina in Pretoria: [email protected].
