Black Lives Matter: the African response

Written by Annabel Jones

Edited by Diana Ciurezu

The response to Black Lives Matter has been truly ground-breaking in the US and UK. Issues of race and police brutality have never been more topical, and in the UK this has gone a step further as the UK has begun to examine its own colonial past and question the values that we as a society want to immortalise through statues.

While the US BLM movement is characterised by the backlash to the murders of innocent black people such George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain, the UK movement has been focused on the ways that Britain has failed its non-white citizens, from rampant Islamophobia to immortalising slave owners like Edward Colston and Cecil Rhodes. However the response beyond the US and UK has also been hugely encouraging and has demonstrated the racial issues that every state faces.

There have been protests across the globe, from Brussels to Rio de Janeiro, but there have been especially strong reactions from countries in Africa. In Nairobi, Kenya, police brutality is a hugely pressing issue that has only been exacerbated by the dusk until dawn curfew enforced due to the Coronavirus outbreak. Since this curfew was imposed, 15 people have been killed by the police due to “curfew violations”- all of whom were from low income neighbourhoods.

A particularly harrowing case is that of Yasin Mowo, a 13-year-old boy who was shot by the police for playing on his balcony at night. Human rights activist Boniface Mwangi said that in Kenya, people fear the police more than they fear COVID-19. Patrick Gathara made the point that the brutality of the Kenyan police is the result of British colonialism, and that the legacy of British rule is seen through the lack of dignity and rights afforded to Kenyans.

The situation is no better is South Africa, which is notorious for racial issues and inequality. The BLM movement is resonating especially there due to the clearer divide between the richer white class and black lower class. Racism and police brutality often go hand in hand in South Africa, as exemplified by the murder of Colin Khosa in March, who was brutally beaten to death by the South African armed forces. His offence? A half-finished glass of beer in his garden, which was seen as evidence of breaking the rules in place due to Coronavirus.

Mary Kerkula, a student protesting in Liberia, spoke out, saying that “A threat to a black man anywhere is a threat to Africans everywhere and this spirit of solidary must not be the end but we must begin to remind our conscious of how oppressed we have been and every black man has the right to unbend himself from the chin of slavery”.

This appears to underpin the truly global sentiment regarding BLM- police brutality and racial discrimination are not unique to the USA, and it is not simply a national issue, but a global systemic issue.