This archive report was first published on 10 July 2020.
On the surface, the Black Lives Matter movement appears to be a global phenomenon, with protests and debates raging across the world. However, beneath the surface, a more nuanced reality exists, particularly in Africa.
As biologists point out, human beings are from the same animal bloodline, with variations conditioned by environment and culture. Yet, racists continue to argue that differences between people from various regions are biological.
George Floyd's death in Minneapolis sparked a global outcry, with the media focusing on the spectacle of his death and the subsequent police brutality. However, what has been lost in the protests and debates is the socioeconomic context that led to Floyd's situation.
He was a black, unemployed, and poor man who had lost his job due to COVID-19 and had contracted the disease. His circumstances were compounded by cultural profiling, which is a tragedy that many Kenyans are suffering silently today.
While the media would like Africans and people of African descent to believe that black lives matter everywhere, all the time, Africans must ask themselves if black lives truly matter in Africa. Human rights defenders and civil society organizations would respond that black lives do matter, but do they, really?
Millions of young Kenyans and Africans are born into poverty, spend their childhood scavenging for survival, and either end up in crime or in jail. These are black lives, aren't they? Yet, there are hardly any street protests, keyboard wars, or mass condemnation of the system that has impoverished them.
The media don't do special reports on the indigent in Kenya, with background stories of how they became landless, jobless, and hopeless. They live right next to each one of us, as street children, car parking boys, underpaid helpers, watchmen, and underemployed individuals.
These individuals are in the same race – the race to survive another day in the face of overwhelming privation – as George Floyd. But why do the police violate their rights, most of them simply doing casual work and hawking on the streets of towns?
There is an economic logic to this discrimination. The poor lack economic opportunities to improve their condition, and the economic system isn't set up to share communal resources among all citizens. The prisons system offers opportunities for supply of goods and services, and keeps the poor away from the rest of society.
The police exist to protect the economic interests of the ruling class. Literature and the arts have addressed these questions all the time, reminding us that racial classification was a colonial invention based on the desire for economic differentiation.
Unless the traditional system of economic difference that privileges whites/men/the rich/the rulers is changed, the police will always question, beat, arrest, jail, or kill the poor, whether in America or here.
The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi.
