By Princess Eugene Majuru
Cultural Historian, Archivist, and Sovereign Heritage Advocate
The beautiful game has once again been weaponized into a battleground of ancient, unresolved historical traumas. What should have been a celebration of competitive spirit at the 2026 FIFA World Cup—where France narrowly defeated a resilient Paraguay 1-0 courtesy of a Kylian Mbappé penalty—has instead been eclipsed by the ugly specter of racism, institutional entitlement, and the lingering debris of colonial ideology.
The recent vitriolic outburst by Paraguayan Senator Celeste Amarilla against French national captain Kylian Mbappé is not just an attack on an individual. It is a stark, public manifestation of the deeply rooted ills of colonialism that continue to poison contemporary global society.
Words Steeped in Colonial Arrogance
Following Paraguay’s Round of 16 exit, Senator Amarilla took to social media to unleash a tirade of dehumanizing insults against Mbappé. In a series of posts, she referred to him as a “colonized Cameroonian, desperately trying to pass himself off as French,” while utilizing overt, anti-Black tropes that compared his upbringing and intellect to animals. She went so far as to encourage physical violence, lamenting that her country’s players did not hand him a “full-handed slap” on the pitch.
Mbappé’s response was swift and unyielding. Refusing to be silenced, the France captain fiercely defended his identity and shielded the reputation of the Paraguayan team from their own lawmaker:
”Madame Celeste Amarilla, you are a despicable woman and unworthy of your position. You do not represent Paraguay… Through your recklessness and your brazen racism, the entire world has already forgotten the journey and the historic effort that your players accomplished… I will never allow people like her the freedom to spread their hatred and racism across the world.”
Simultaneously, the French Football Federation (FFF) took a definitive stand, condemning the remarks as “criminal and reprehensible” and officially reporting the matter to the public prosecutor’s office to launch formal legal proceedings.
The Unbroken Thread of Colonial Ills
As a cultural historian, archivist, and traditional custodian, I must emphasize that Senator Amarilla’s vocabulary did not appear in a vacuum. It is drawn directly from the historical lexicon of Western colonialism.
When a public official weaponizes terms like “colonized” as an insult, or relies on subhuman animal comparisons, they are reviving the exact pseudoscientific, racist frameworks used centuries ago to justify the subjugation, enslavement, and cultural erasure of African peoples.
Colonialism sought to strip indigenous people of their sovereignty, their dignity, and their humanity, categorizing them as “brutes” who lacked the capacity for civilization. By hurling these specific slurs from a seat of legislative power, Amarilla exposed how deeply entrenched these colonial hierarchies remain within global political structures. It reveals a profound psychological residue: the inability of the post-colonial world to see a Black man achieve global sovereignty, wealth, and excellence on his own terms without attempting to reduce him to a caricature of the “colonized subject.”
Furthermore, the irony of an elite South American politician—living in a region profoundly shaped and scarred by its own history of European colonial conquest—using the language of the colonizer to attack an African-descended European athlete is a tragic testament to the cyclical nature of colonial trauma. Instead of fostering trans-continental solidarity among nations that survived imperialism, we see the elite mimicking the oppressive rhetoric of the old empires.
Sport has always been a mirror to society. When a modern icon like Mbappé stands up to a state official, he is not just defending a footballing victory; he is drawing a line in the sand against the enduring legacy of colonial subjugation. The world must realize that we cannot fully heal from the ills of our past until the language of the colonizer is entirely stripped of its power in our present.
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