If on that occasion Africans chose to remain silent so as not to rock the 'Look East' policy that has left many African countries saddled with debt they have no hope of repaying, what accounts for the perception in the continent that racism is a problem for black people in the West?

And yet, today's events -- the gratuitous murder of black people by rogue police, Black Lives Matter movement, 'white privilege', white female tendency to call the police on black people, tearing down of statues -- are tied to one basic thread: The structures of racism that keep black people subjugated wherever they are.

When the Premier equates the removal of statues and monuments of slave traders to 'editing history', he ignores the fact that British history as taught today is an edited lie, incomplete, misleading and designed to whitewash rather than examine critically and interrogate the past.

When racists tell black people 'to go back where they came from', they are blissfully unaware that North African soldiers with Roman forces settled in England more than 1,000 years before the British reached Africa.

Africans observing the struggles from a distance should know that the power structures that subjugate black people in the West also work in maintaining inequality between Western and African economies.