Tim Blair: The ex-AFL star going back to the future to send us all to sleep

Now a resident of Los Angeles, former AFL star Heritier Lumumba has lost his sense of humour but gained a talent for boring people to sleep with race talk, writes Tim Blair.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, an “independent report” into racism at the Collingwood Football Club found the AFL team was indeed racist, and systemically so.

That’s an inevitable consequence of appointing two race-focused academics to conduct the report. They tend to find racism.

The second great non-shock following the report being leaked to the public was ex-player Heritier Lumumba’s continuing condemnation of his former club, its coach, several teammates and president Eddie McGuire.

Lumumba’s claims of racism during his playing days at Collingwood led to the report’s commissioning.

Ex-Collingwood player Heritier Lumumba has alleged severe racism took place at Collingwood. Picture: Channel 10

Now 34, Lumumba hasn’t softened his views since retiring as an AFL player in 2016.

In fact, he’s now some kind of campaigner not just against Collingwood but the historical wickedness of the white man.

“Australian culture is white culture,” according to Lumumba, who these days can barely bring himself to mention the country.

“Out of respect for First Nations people, I call it ‘So-called Australia’,” he recently told an ABC interviewer.

“Its foundations are rooted in the ongoing genocide of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”

Unlike many who complain about Australian racism, Lumumba at least did the decent thing and fled the place.

In that ABC piece, a 7247-word herogram by Russell Jackson, he explained why.

Collingwood president Eddie McGuire has been under fire since the release of the report. Picture: AAP Image/Stefan Postles

“I understand the strength of belonging to the Bakongo people,” said Lumumba, the son of a Brazilian mother and a Congolese-Angolan father.

“It directly connects me to a 500-year worldwide resistance to white power and oppression.

“My name is a symbol of black power and revolution, and ties me to the spirit of great men such as Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Patrice Lumumba, the father of Congolese independence, who was martyred in the name of Pan-Africanism.”

Perth-raised Lumumba nowadays sounds like a random extract from a 1968 Black Panthers leaflet.

“Central to this, we have all been subjected to centuries of anti-African indoctrination,” the retro racial justice warrior continued.

“When you have Africa inside of you, and you carry and own its power, it‘s common for people to become intimidated or uncomfortable.

“The more I celebrated the greatness of being black and being African, it caused a noticeable reaction from those around me.”

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, two men admired by Hertier Lumumba.

Boredom, probably.

Lumumba perhaps takes himself a little too seriously, as you’ll see from the majestic, defiant poses he strikes throughout that ABC article.

“I was born on the sacred indigenous lands of the Guarani,” he told Jackson (via email, presumably; nobody actually talks like this unless they’re making a maiden speech to parliament).

“I come from a powerful, matrifocal community in Rio de Janeiro, where our cultural tradition, known as Jongo, has been well preserved.”

Well, good for the Jongo.

Anyway, Lumumba a few years ago celebrated the greatness of being black and African by leaving Australia and moving to … Los Angeles.

This shift occurred despite Lumumba’s opinion that “US foreign policy has caused death and destruction to tens of millions of black lives in the Congo”.

You know, Lumumba’s racial activism may be less to do with an awakening to injustice than an exposure to toxic leftism, which is powerfully attractive to rich young people with too much time on their hands.

The Project host Peter Helliar was criticised by Lumumba after the report was released. Picture: AAP Image/Dan Peled

In 2017, Socialist Alternative paper Red Flag admiringly wrote that Lumumba “even attended Socialist Alternative’s Marxism conference”.

There’s your explanation for those one-dimensional lines about a “worldwide resistance to white power and oppression”.

Still, Lumumba could indeed be a victim of the white man – a white man named Karl Marx, whose ideas have caused more devastation in Africa than any US administration.

Other pale folk rank low with Lumumba.

He claims to have been stitched up in an interview with those notorious white pride advocates at Ten’s The Project.

And he had this to say on Twitter about Daniel Andrews after the Victorian Premier approved a highway upgrade that removed a “sacred” tree: “We see you, Daniel Andrews, playing your role as a white-power politician.

“Your mind is clearly plagued by the filth of colonialism.”

(Lumumba’s wife is a leading executive at Netflix. Picture: Alastair Pike/AFP

When even The Project and Dan Andrews aren’t woke enough for you, what chance does a footy team have?

Anyway, “Lumumba is now less consumed by the bitterness of the world he once inhibited” – Jackson’s term – “than he is by the richness of the one he returned to.”

(Lumumba, you see, believes he has returned to the US rather than moved there. This is because his maternal ancestors “are native to the Americas, just like many people in Los Angeles”.)

“On good days,’ the ABC’s Jackson reports, “he wanders down to South Central LA’s own Little Africa with his wife Aja and their son …”

Hold it right there.

This is the only mention in 7247 words of “wife Aja”, who turns out to be a graduate of $97,000-per-year Stanford University.

She is currently the director of business and legal affairs at Netflix – the video-streaming giant with a net worth somewhere beyond $160bn.

Just a theory, but Heritier Lumumba – even putting aside his own substantial earnings from a decade of on-field AFL brilliance – is possibly getting by in reasonable comfort.

Not bad for a bloke who has endured five centuries of white power and oppression.