BUKENYA: Of violence in corona times: Frankfurt and Minneapolis

Two cities, through which I made brief flight connections on my wanderings around the world, have been on my mind lately. One is Frankfurt, where I stopped for about an hour on my way from Nairobi to Canada in the early 1990s, and the other is Minneapolis, which needs little introduction.

Frankfurt, and Germany generally, struck me because of a chilling report of a church event that ended tragically, reminding us of how far we still have to go before we win the battle against the coronavirus and its ravages. Germany, under the venerable management of Chancellor Angela Markel, has been cautiously lifting the social restrictions placed on it in the struggle against the Covid-19 scourge.

In this process, a church in Frankfurt held a service for its worshippers. They observed all the standard precautions: masks, fumigating and disinfecting the building, installing handwashing and sanitising stands around the place, and mandatory social distancing. Despite all these efforts, and the legendary German efficiency, at least 50 participants in the prayer service soon after contracted Covid-19! What can mere humans do in the face of this?

As of Minneapolis, it is still a white-hot and unfolding story. But to begin with my own story of the place, I am intrigued at how patchy our memories can get with the passing years. Minneapolis means a city in Minnesota, the “polis” part being the Greek reference to city or town (and not to the deplorable “police” force that has set the whole country on fire). The name of the state itself, I understand, comes from one of the native American languages and it means “muddy water”.

Anyway, in my muddy memory, I knew about Minneapolis and its twin city of Saint Paul from the early 1970s, from Mike and Deborah Keenan, my fellow visiting scholars at Stirling University in Scotland, who are natives of those cities.

A later but quite intriguing recollection is that I had, earlier this century, actually made a connecting stop at the ultra-modern Minneapolis Airport and had a snack at one of the many cafes there, where the appearance of the serving staff curiously reminded me of Nairobi’s Eastleigh.

I even remember carelessly losing my plane-boarding pass in that airport, although that was quickly and efficiently sorted out by my airline’s ground staff. But what I just cannot remember now is where I was travelling from or where I was connecting to. Maybe that classic saying about the absent-minded you-know-who can be more than a joke.

Minneapolis, however, leapt back to my mind in 2018 when Ilhan Abdullahi Omar was elected as a representative of one of its districts to the United States Congress, thus becoming the first Somali-American, the first naturalised American from Africa and the first non-white person from Minnesota to serve in that distinguished office. She is also one of the first two Muslim women currently sitting in the US Congress.

I will not hark back on my “Eastleigh” impressions (lest I be misconstrued by the NCIC), but Ms Omar’s election to the US Congress reminded me that there is a significant Somali-American community in Minneapolis. But more encouragingly, I got the impression that that great city is open-minded enough to consider and treat all Americans entirely on grounds of merit, regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion or ancestral origins. After all, Ilhan Omar was not and could not have been elected by only or all voters of Somali origin in Minneapolis.

Sadly, however, big gaping holes have been and are showing through that picture, and that did not start with the killing of George Floyd last week. What has been called the “toxic” racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and insidiously sexist rhetoric has been doing the rounds in America for quite a few years now. Ilhan Omar and her fellow congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, both young women of exceptional intelligence, courage and outspokenness, have been frequent targets of barbs and threats couched in such rhetoric.

I have said before that I do not refrain from or apologise for commenting on American affairs because we all have a real stake in what happens there. Indeed, most of us have our American families or family members at the heart of developments in that great country. Even more importantly, we can always learn useful lessons from the way those so-called developed countries manage, or mismanage, their affairs.

Thus, we see that the brutal and cold-blooded killing of an unarmed man in Minneapolis, which has exploded into the anger, fury and violence that threatens to engulf all of the USA, was not an isolated individual act. Rather, it was the suppuration of the racist, supremacist and xenophobic rant that we mentioned earlier, and the poison and hatred that it breeds. All Americans, including our relatives, must ask themselves what kind of society it is that breeds, raises and hires into public service a cold-blooded killer like the chauvinistic zombie that we saw in the video of George Floyd’s death.

There is also a reminder, in the ongoing violence across American cities, of the “bad cheque”, as Martin Luther King called it, with which African-Americans and other minorities have been stuck ever since the so-called abolition of slavery in the 1860s and the “reforms” following the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. As one 97-year-old Washington, DC, lady wondered, is America back to the 1960s, with only huge doses of violence added to the necessary but largely peaceful protests that Dr King and his colleagues preached?

Incidentally, back to German efficiency, I could have stayed in there forever when I went on a visiting professorship at Bayreuth University in 2009. When I went to the “Rathaus” (as I think they call the city hall), to have my passport endorsed for my stay, the official at the counter stamped in my departure date as the 31st of June.