May 30 — On Wednesday, May 25th, four police officers detained a black man by the name George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States of America.
After the video went viral, all four officers involved were merely fired on May 26 which precipitated public uproar and massive protests.
Chauvin whose knee chiefly snuffed out life from George Floyd was initially charged with third-degree murder on Friday, May 29th. After the result of an independent autopsy ordered by George’s family arrived, the cause of his death was identified as mechanical asphyxia making it a homicide.
Following this revelation, on Wednesday, June 3rd, the three ex-officers, Tou Thao, Thomas Lane, and J. Alexander were charged with aiding and abetting murder based on the criminal complaint filing initiated by the state of Minnesota. Derek Chauvin’s charge was also elevated from third-degree to second-degree murder.
This is just one of the many incidences of police brutality, especially in the US against black people that have always been a subject of controversy. But in all these incidences, African leaders have always muted when even their own nationals face atrocities in western countries. To put things into perspective, many African leaders have put their nations in debt and paying allegiance for foreign aid.
While pinned down by his neck with a knee, Floyd pleaded for his life from the police officer shouting that he couldn’t breathe. He was pronounced dead a few minutes later at a hospital in Minneapolis.
While condemning the killing on Thursday, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on Thursday condemned the killing of George Floyd, an African American man whose death in police custody on Monday was captured on video and has led to serious ongoing protests in Minneapolis.
“This is the latest in a long line of killings of unarmed African Americans by US police officers and members of the public,” Bachelet said. “I am dismayed to have to add George Floyd’s name to that of Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Michael Brown and many other unarmed African Americans who have died over the years at the hands of the police — as well as people such as Ahmaud Arbery and Trayvon Martin who were killed by armed members of the public,” Bachelet said.
“I welcome the fact that the Federal authorities have announced that an investigation will be prioritized,” she said. “But in too many cases in the past, such investigations have led to killings being deemed justified on questionable grounds, or only being addressed by administrative measures.”
This is another classic case as that of Stinney Jr, a black teenage boy who was executed in 1944, accused of killing two white girls in Alcolu, South Carolina. He was later charged and, in a ten-minute jury decision, Stinney was executed by a 2,400-volt surge in an electric chair. 70 years later in 2014, he was found not guilty by a US court. He remains the youngest person to be executed in the US.
Protests have been witnessed in many parts of the United States, mainly in Minneapolis where the killing took place.
Of major concern now is that African leaders and elitists have kept their cool about these killings, not any one of them has come out to condemn the killings and illegal executions of African Americans, not just in the United States of America but elsewhere in the West.
This perhaps is because of the underlying reason for years that African countries have never been really free from their oppressors, always depending on them for foreign aid.
Many countries in Africa have seen police brutality and extrajudicial killings in their day-to-day lives. In Kenya for example, most electioneering periods have witnessed several killings by police, including even the killing of innocent youth, mostly in the slums for “being jobless.” Children have not been spared, too, and the most classic example is the killing of baby Samantha Pendo, a six-month-old baby who was hit and killed by baton-wielding policemen who had laid siege at the baby’s parents at midnight during protests in Kenya’s Kisumu County in August 2017 after President Kenyatta was announced the winner of the last general elections.
With coronavirus disease restrictions being tasked with the police to carry them out, they killed more people than the virus at the time. According to a report by Human Rights Watch last month, “at least six people died from police violence during the first 10 days of Kenya’s dusk-to-dawn curfew, imposed on March 27, 2020 to contain the spread of Covid-19.”
On Monday, the police in Nairobi’s Mathare slums shot and killed a homeless man who lived in the streets, accusing him of breaking the curfew rules. There have been protests in the slum and also online under the hashtag #JusticeForVaite. In the neighboring Huruma slums, police also shot a 13-year-old boy who was playing on their house balcony when a police officer fired a bullet that hit him in the stomach and killed him.
In Central Africa, even bodies like the UN have been accused of killing civilians. Cameroon has also been a place for police killing civilians, as well as Nigeria, South Africa, and many other African countries.
But even in all these, African leaders have kept mum and rarely condemned the killings and ordered investigations and due justice. As in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, their silence on the matter has been too loud.
On Friday, the Chairperson of the African Union Commission Moussa Faki Mahamat, through his spokesperson Ebba Kalondo issued a statement condemning the killings.
“Recalling the historic Organization of Africa Unity (OAU) Resolution on Racial Discrimination in the United States of America made by African Heads of State and Government, at the OAU’s First Assembly Meeting held in Cairo, Egypt from 17 to 24 July 1964, the Chairperson of the African Union Commission firmly reaffirms and reiterates the African Union’s rejection of the continuing discriminatory practices against Black citizens of the United States of America,” the statement read.
But the question of AU leadership and its ability to represent the interests and views of Africa as a whole has always been posed, leaving a lot unanswered.
Its biggest critic, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party in South Africa. It is a Pan-Africanist political party with very strong views on the African continent and its freedom from the West. It was founded by expelled former African National Congress Youth League President Julius Malema, and his allies, in 2013.
Malema is on the record criticizing the AU saying that it is just a club of old people who don’t care. “It’s a group of old people who are protecting each other; they don’t protect the interests of their people. It’s a club; it’s a gentlemen club, they don’t care, they don’t call each other out. And the way out is that the youth must take politics seriously,” he says in a video from last year that has made rounds on social media.
The same day on Friday, Human rights Watch released a 66-page report calling on the U.S government to provide reparations to the survivors and descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
The massacre, said to have lasted for only 24 hours on May 31, 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is said to be one of the most severe incidents of racial violence in U.S. history and is believed to have left somewhere between 30 and 300 people dead, mostly African Americans, even though the exact number remains unknown. It destroyed Tulsa’s prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood, known then as the “Black Wall Street.”
“A search for mass graves, only undertaken in recent years, has been put on hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Those who survived lost their homes, businesses, and livelihoods. Property damage claims from the massacre alone amount to tens of millions in today’s dollars. The massacre’s devastating toll, in terms of lives lost and harms in various ways, can never be fully repaired,” part of the report reads.