If anyone who knows me long enough asked where I was on the afternoon of 20/10/20 it is because they know that the person I have always been would have been at the protest ground when the first shots were fired at unarmed protesters.
They would have known that I will be naïve enough to believe that the Nigerian Military will honour a flag-raising surrender. They would have known that I’m too young to know about the Asaba Massacre. About how a people ravaged by a war they didn’t have much say in, yet believing in the rules of war and the efficacy of a white surrender flag were gunned down by a regimen led by a now-national-hero.
They would have known all this and know that they need to check on me. Ensure I am not one of the fatalities accounted and unaccounted for, because they know and always have known that the institutions tasked with ‘protecting’ the citizenry only exist to protect the system.
Here is what my parents – the people who kept calling frantically on 20/10/20 to know where in Lagos I was – understand about the system that I didn’t until that day.
1. Your life is only as useful as the money it could make for your colonial – neo-colonial in this case – overlords.
I know this not because they have said as much, because to them this idea is as modern an invention as the breeding ground of that protest – Twitter.
I know because in listening to my father talk about the Biafra genocide years and their aftermath for years I will come to know a kind of young Nigerian during the #EndSARS protests. The kind that ponders how we could be foolish enough to think we can agitate for good governance as the world’s largest black nation.
How can you demand for better when the foundation of your uniqueness – you blackness, remains vilified from Massachusetts to Madinah?
How can you demand to be treated as human when you are only as valuable as you present yourself to be superhumanly excellent in whatever field you find yourself in?
You are only fully human when you are a Beyoncé – a music industry by herself, contained in a white music industry that can’t even compete with her excellence.
You are only respectable when you are an Adil Al-kalbani who proves that your black parents can come into the heartland of Islam and rise above their station to lead the prayers in the Ka’aba – Islam’s holiest site.
I listened to these skeptics with contempt before the events at Lekki Toll Bridge because I firmly believed the world is better than it was when Beyoncé was just another black child in Texas trying to be seen for their talent. Believing that the word has since improved from what it was before 2008 when Adil Al-kalbani was selected by King Abdallah to lead Tarawih prayers in the holy mosque.
Surely in a world so interconnected, I thought, black bodies aren’t so easily disposable.
Yet, they have proven to be, even despite live streamed footage from exiled Nigerian DJ, Obianuju Catherine Udeh, popularly known as DJ Switch..
Years after the events at Lekki, at the summit of the #EndSARS protest, we still don’t know definitively how many people perished.
We have no officers publically tried for giving the command to shoot, for pulling the trigger notwithstanding their humanity or understanding that the nation trumps any higher-up officer – even if that officer is The Commander in Chief.
We have nothing but mockery and contempt.
And what did our white ‘allies’ do? Not what they would have done in their own countries, and understandably so.
Who are you to be the one telling a people who share skin colour, culture and geographical space how best to interact with one another?
If the Nigerian government is sure the best way to handle its aggrieved citizenry is by killing a handful to deter the rest, surely you can’t do much when your country’s power depends to some extent on Nigeria’s fossil fuel output.
Your priority is your people, and by the Gods I understand that.
It didn’t take me years to see that these skeptics, who like my parents survived the massacre along with the lucky many who left unscathed are the Nigerian core. They will live to tell the tale of Lekki along with the few who were there and came out unscathed.
The few who were there will in time succumb to a larger narrative of the foolhardiness that precipitated a massacre because they refused to listen to their beaten elders
.
Our children will look at and listen to us with contempt about how soft we were against the injustice of bad governance and institutional maltreatment, much like we listened to and looked at our own parents who we tweeted should, “Soro Soke.”
And we can’t tell them about how we hand wrote placards and sweated for days on end, surfing a wave of hope on main streets from Abuja to Lagos, screaming “EndSARS!” at the top of our lungs, only for it to blow up in our face in a wash of blood and violence.
About how our cries, still buoyed by hope that the world cares, went noticed only in that a bunch of our colonial overlords made a show of giving a fuck with a few photo-op engagements with the Nigerian government.
About how our hope that our jet-hopping medical tourist of a president will be hit where it hurts with visa denial kept jet-hopping even as the grief-stricken hearts of many parents who lost children on 20/10/20 shrunk further from the hopelessness of their situation.
We, the generation that said, “Speak up!” will be speechless when that day comes because like our parents we would have succumbed to the fear that comes with being a second-class global citizen in a world dominated by white humanity.
Or maybe we will win our humanity and be able to speak freely to our progeny about our fully human place in a dying world.
Maybe.
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