In Africa, slaying of Floyd stirs protesters
NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenyan and American protesters knelt outside the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, one morning last month, angered by George Floyd’s killing in Minnesota. But they were also furious about police abuses at home, in Kenya.
Protests sprang up all over town. In the large slum of Kibera, in front of a large mural of Floyd, residents chanted, “Stop killing us.” In front of Parliament, youths carried caskets to protest extrajudicial killings.
“The image of George Floyd’s death was so visceral, so violent,” said Lilly Bekele-Piper, an Ethiopian American who lives in Kenya and took her four children to the protests. “People came out because they recognize that violence in their own communities.”
Outrage over Floyd’s death has rippled throughout the continent, with Africans invoking the Black Lives Matter movement to call attention to abuses in their own countries and demand that police be held to account.
The protesters also point to the enduring legacy of European rule. Many African countries’ police forces were established in the colonial era and, analysts say, are still used by governments as an instrument of repression and control.
Sick of killings, torture and beatings meted out, citizens are increasingly trying to push governments to change the abusive institutions they inherited from colonial rulers.
Africans have long feared the violent methods used by police forces on the continent, but their alarm has become more immediate in recent months as the new coronavirus has taken hold and governments have used heavy-handed tactics to enforce lockdowns.
At the onset of Kenya’s overnight curfew in March, officers enforcing the restrictions shot and killed 13-yearold Yassin Moyo while he stood on his family’s balcony. In late June, three people were killed in a small town in Kenya’s Rift Valley after a confrontation with police over masks.
Nigerian police officers enforcing a curfew also fatally shot a teenager, Tina Ezekwe, in May at a bus stop in the West African country’s biggest city, Lagos.
In Uganda, security forces were accused in late March of shooting at construction workers and beating vegetable vendors who had not shut their businesses. Ugandan activists, including prominent academic Stella Nyanzi, were arrested in May while protesting the lack of food being distributed to those in need.
Kenya’s security services have long been accused of carrying out killings, abductions and torture. Human rights organizations documenting disappearances and extrajudicial killings say that 707 people have been killed by police since 2007 — 95 of them this year.
Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi is among those who have placed the abuses against a broader backdrop, calling for police to be “decolonized” and retrained to safeguard people’s rights.
Most African countries gained independence in the 1960s, and their police forces are no longer foreign: Officers, superintendents and inspectors general are all citizens of the countries in which they work.
But successive governments have not changed the colonial-era police structures they inherited, so police cadets in some cases are still taught that members of the public are “enemy No. 1,” said Agatha Ndonga, head of the Kenya office of the International Center for Transitional Justice.
“They did not change the attitude and culture of policing,” she said. “They don’t look at us as persons whom they should protect.”
With many Kenyans calling for justice for Moyo, the 13-year-old killed on his balcony, the case moved exceptionally quickly: An officer was charged with murder and arraigned in court within weeks. In less famous cases, the process can take more than a year.