Silent killer: Yellow fever

She noted that her pleasure as an acclaimed Hollywood star stands on the back of horrendous pains carried by a black American woman whose humanity was eaten by the barbarism of white slavers. She could not have missed remembering that another Kenyan with ethnic Luo blood like her –one Barack Obama – was living on […]

She noted that her pleasure as an acclaimed Hollywood star stands on the back of horrendous pains carried by a black American woman whose humanity was eaten by the barbarism of white slavers. She could not have missed remembering that another Kenyan with ethnic Luo blood like her –one Barack Obama – was living on similar roots for a political stardom.
The one political hit she must have heard from the womb comes from Franz Fanon’s book: Black Skin: White Mask. Fanon, a medical doctor born in the Caribbean island of Martinique, had denounced the silent killer that white racism becomes in the personality of its Afro-Caribbean victims. It yields self-contempt for many. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon noted how African politicians betray African peoples through a deep hunger to be white by consuming expensive luxury goods. However, they do not struggle to equal the industrial productivity and genius that yields those goods.
Lupita used the moment of her celebrity to brutally recall this matter. Said she: ‘’I got teased and taunted about my skin. My one prayer to God was that I would wake up lighter skinned ….My complexion had always been an obstacle to overcome’’. Her salvation came, not from parents whose colour she inherited, but from the triumph of a Sudanese model Alek Wek, who was ‘’dark as night’’. Seeing her hugged for being beautiful, Lupita said, made a flower ‘’bloom inside of me’’. The depth and spread of similar poison against flowers inside children in Nigeria is part of national culture. A pandemic of women wearing hair sold by poor rural woman in India and Brazil grows daily.  Scorched-earth attacks on skins through bleaching chemicals grow lucratively.
A critic has noted that while Boko Haram shatters bodies of school children, Mnet, Nollywood, Bollywood and Hollywood dry up flowers in black-skinned children all across Africa. A Nigerian television executive has criticised the association of music and show-biz with youth and ‘’yellow skin’’ complexion.  Advertisements which target children’s milk consumption, wave only tiny joyful   ‘’yellow fever’’ legs. The Guardian’s Life magazine (Sunday March 2, 2014) had ‘’Yellow Fever’’ on its front cover and 19 ‘’Yellow Fever’’ faces to one black face in its People Party section. On the same day Daily Trust’s Tambari magazine recalled 8 models in past editions featured. All were ‘’Yellow Fever’’ women.
The Thisday newspa-per’s Children’s Cartoon face carried eight characters. All of them were ‘’Yellow Fever’’. Bill Cosby once launched ‘’Fat Albert’’ cartoon series for African-American children to identify with as their own.  ‘’Fat Albert’ was broadcast on CBS television. Ebony magazine insisted on celebrating ‘’Yellow Fever’’ Negroes. The magazine was caught in a spin of revolution when ‘’Black Power’’ and its ‘’Black is Beautiful’’ militant shouts shook Negro Yellow Feverism’’.  A commercial promotion of skin bleaching through creams code-named ‘’Clear Essence’’ fights on.
One of America’s gifts to world revolution is their insistence that a drop of blackness in a gene stops a person from being classified as racially white.  Intellectual giants like W.E.B. Dubois and Malcolm X; political dreamers like Martin Luther King Jr and Jesse Jackson, found themselves forced to talk for the majority dark-skinned sharecroppers and urban poor. Barrack Obama made the longer journey from a white mother, white grandparents and a lost Kenyan father, to arousing political fight out of poor folks in Chicago’s South Side ghetto.
 In Senegal and Nigeria advertising money-spin-ners appear committed to creating two peoples –the majority black, a minority ‘’Yellow Fever’’. Struggles for control of contempt between returnees from slavery and former local slave merchants have drunk much blood in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
I arrived in Jamaica in 1976 as a research scholar a few months before an election pitching ‘Yellow Fever’ Prime Minister Michael Manley against Eduard Siaga, a Lebanese descendant. Manley was a socialist; a friend of Fidel Castro and liberation movements in Southern Africa. The Americans detested him. Manley’s followers wrote graffiti on walls labelling Siaga as ‘’CIA-GA’’. Manley, a man with a white mother, had launched two little revolutions. He divorced his ‘’Yellow Fever’’ wife for a ‘’black is beautiful’’ Beverly Manley. That infuriated Jamaica’s ‘’Middle Class’’, the local name for the ‘’Yellow Fever’’ tribe.
Another revolution was by appointing P.J. Patterson, a black-skinned man, as Foreign Minister. He was seen as too black to represent Jamaica at the United Nations and at Buckingham Palace. Recently, a Trinidadian politician proclaimed a similar dictum.  This drama hooked me through Field Marshal Idi Amin. He had deported immigrants from India and Pakistan from Uganda in hundreds of thousands. A lecturer from Trinidad with Indian roots decided to hit back by telling the Jamaican police that I must be an agent of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, CIA. A Rockefeller Foundation-funded black African researcher was an Eduard Seaga (CIA-GA)’s black goon to terrorise black voters away from supporting Michael Manley. He gave my blackness a terrorist dignity it did not deserve.
W.E.B. Dubois predicted that the 20th Century would be dominated by a race war by Asiatics and Africans against whites. The 21st century must not see a poisoned ‘’Yellow Fever’’ sabotage of Africa’s renaissance.