Brutally killed but find a more apt idol

IT LOOKS as if the South African cricket authorities are going to axe one of their stars because he refuses to “take the knee” – ie genuflect in reverence to the memory of George Floyd. Which for me triggers a source of puzzlement. That people across the Earth who happen to be black wish to elevate one of their number to the status of icon is both natural and laudable. But why not choose a figure from the past worthy of reverence?

There is a huge repertoire. What is wrong with Martin Luther King and his amazing I Have A Dream speech in Washington? Or Nelson Mandela who after 27 years in jail emerged to leadership and by his personal example unified a nation deemed to be split in perpetuity? Why not Mary Seacole, the black nurse who tended wounded soldiers in the Crimea despite horrendous bigotry 170 years ago?

There was Steve Biko, beaten to death in a police cell in South Africa for standing up for black rights, and Rosa Parks who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in colour-bar Alabama and thus triggered a movement that grew and grew? There have been thinkers, reformers, scholars, writers, towering intellectuals, philanthropists, politicians and statesmen – the choice is vast.

So why pick a career criminal because, among thousands of others over the years, he was brutally murdered in Minneapolis? George Floyd was an example to nobody. Aged 46 when he died, he had racked up nine convictions. Between stints as a truck driver and bouncer, he slipped back into the underworld, either using or trading drugs. In Houston, Texas, he served five years after holding a gun to a woman’s stomach during a house invasion. His multiple convictions were mostly in Texas.

Then he left for Minnesota but reverted to the drug world. On the day he died he was stopped on suspicion of buying cigarettes with a forged $20 bill. Nothing can excuse the brutality of the police officer who knelt on his neck until he died and who has now been sentenced for murder – and quite rightly so. But an idol for everyone who happens to be black? Surely there are a thousand better choices?