Was Kayihura a victim of America’s racist history?

When Gen Kale Kayihura, the former Inspector General of Police, fell from the sky, the thud shook Uganda from Kisoro, where he comes from, to Kotido. Then everybody had a field day trashing Kayihura and hailing the economic and immigration sanctions America slapped on him.
But maybe there is another story behind the sanctions against Kayihura. It is a story more sinister, more ominous, and more subtle, yet deeply unsettling. It is the story of racism. Racism is the belief that one race is supreme and all others are inferior.
Gen Kayihura was painted by the US Treasury Department as a dirty cop. But the subtlety of the silent story behind the sanctions America slapped on him is that he may be taking all this heat partly because he was seen as a dirty Black cop.
The operative word here is ‘Black.’ That is a word associated with many negative things – black spot, black market, black magic, black ice, black Monday, black dollars, etc. You may have seen that when some prominent person dies, the front pages of local papers are black. And a child who has bad manners or is an underachiever may be labelled ‘the black sheep of the family.’
It is important for me to put my argument on racism in historical perspective. Way back in the 19th Century, Dr Samuel George Morton, who died in 1851, became one of the best known scientists in America because of his unusual experiments. He collected and measured human skulls from different races. Then he came up with some very interesting conclusions.
He claimed that the people with the biggest brains were Whites of European origin. Next were Asians, then native Americans. And at the bottom of the social ranking were African-Americans. Now, here’s the thing: The bigger the brain, the more intellectually superior (and more desirable) the race was considered!
This was the justification behind the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, which Calvin Coolidge, the 30th President of the US, signed, primarily to shut out Jews who had been ‘found’ to have smaller brains and, therefore, lower IQs. As he signed the racist legislation, Coolidge muttered: “America must be kept American.”
Bear in mind that Donald Trump, the 45th President of the US, was born 21 years after this Act. But it was the basis for his campaign battle cry in 2016: “Make America great again.” Hillary Clinton, Trump’s main challenger, suggested that Trump was appealing to White voters while putting “other people” down. Dig deeper in history and you find that in 1901, Australia passed the Immigration Restriction Act to keep out non-British migrants such as Chinese. Earlier in 1899, New Zealand passed the Immigration Restriction Act, similarly to keep out non-British migrants.
Welcome to the current ‘craziness’ in America. Trump is building an 800-kilometre wall across the US border with Mexico. But this is not an act of a crazy president. It is an affirmation of the warped racist ‘ideology’ about intellectual superiority and acceptable cultural norms.
Since Morton’s ‘experiments,’ blacks in America have been seen as intellectually inferior but, strangely, superior in sports! This explains why, at some point, more than 90 per cent of the top players in America’s elite National Basketball Association (NBA) League, such as Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neil, Magic Johnson, Hakeem Olajuwon and Kobe Bryant were all blacks.
Bear these things in mind before believing that Kayihura is alone in his troubles with the US. If you are black, chances are: America sees you, first and foremost, as some small-brained person not particularly welcome to step onto the hallowed soils of the mighty United States of America.

Dr Akwap is a senior lecturer at Kumi University. [email protected]