Nairobi News

A picture has surfaced on social media of Harambee Stars captain Victor Wanyama donning a t-shirt with the controversial confederate flag seen as a symbol of racism and oppression against blacks in America.

The Southampton midfielder is seen all smiles to the camera while shaking hands with a hidden person, wearing a grey body-hugging t-shirt that has confederate battle flag known as the “southern cross”, which has 13 stars to represent defeated states of America.

To be fair to Wanyama, few Kenyans knew the meaning of the flag prior to the recent racist massacre in a South Carolina church in the US that killed nine black parishioners gathered for a Bible study. In fact, the picture has been lying on Wanyama’s social media pages with nobody raising a finger.

The symbolism of the flag came to the fore recently after the church massacre in a South Carolina church after which pictures of the attacker with the confederate flags emerged.

CNN says the flag’s champions argued it’s a symbol of Southern culture, the historic flag of the South while critics say it’s a racist symbol that represents a war to uphold slavery and, later, a battle to oppose civil rights advances.

Here is a short history of the flag and why Americans will not agree on its symbolism as told by http://www.npr.org:

In December 1860, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union just months after Abraham Lincoln, from the anti-slavery Republican Party, was elected president. In April 1861, the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, S.C.

Ten other states would eventually follow South Carolina in secession, forming the Confederate States of America. However, of the three flags the Confederacy would go on to adopt, none are the Confederate flag that is traditionally recognized today.

PRIDE AND HERITAGE

After the war ended, the symbol became a source of Southern pride and heritage, as well as a remembrance of Confederate soldiers who died in battle. But as racism and segregation gripped the nation in the century following, it became a divisive and violent emblem of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist groups.

Now, the flag is a frequent emblem of modern white supremacist groups. The alleged Charleston church shooter, Dylann Storm Roof, was photographed holding the Confederate flag in images on his website.

Not all southerners, who believe the flag should be flown, however, see it as a racist symbol. They see it, instead, as a symbol of southern pride or as a way to remember ancestors who fought in the Civil War.

We wonder how Wanyama sees it.